Speed-Accuracy

Ok so we all know about the Speed-Accuracy Tradeoff. Science just gives it this fancy name, but it's the well-known concept that as (a human's) speed of performing a task increases, accuracy of the output decreases. It's just a correlation, but we tend to assume causality.

If I'm doing a homework assignment, and i spend about 20 minutes rushing through it, it's going to be less accurate than if I spent 2 hours taking my time and really analyzing the problem.

But isn't there some kind of ceiling affect?

Say you keep increasing speed until accuracy = 0. So you rush through an assignment so fast (say, like 2 minutes) so that the tiny amount of work you have is just one huge ERROR. After that point, if you keep increasing speed, the level of accuracy just stays the same. You can't be more wrong than 100% wrong.

What about the other "ceiling"? You keep decreasing your speed and accuracy keeps increasing, until 100% accuracy (for example, spending 5 hours on an assignment until it's totally correct). After that, decreasing your speed won't change the accuracy, since you can't be more accurate than 100%. You could spend 10 hours on the same assignment and it would still be 100% accurate - can't go up anymore.

So there's a tricky little balancing act that occurs when doing work (example, homework that will be graded by someone on a scale of 0 - 100). Then there's a bunch of other factors like whether you actually have any idea what the task is asking or how to go about doing it.

The balancing act is something we learn in school (secondary/college education) - but it's usually enforced (in this society) that accuracy is more important than speed. We learn that the ideal situation is to spend as much time as possible on a task/problem/assignment until it is correct. But this is relative; for some people, it means spending 6 hours to make it correct, versus another person spending 2 hours until it is correct.

This totally contradicts another value that is instilled in our society: that we need to learn the balancing act in order to succeed in life. Balancing school - work - family - friends - mental health - etc.

The education system focuses (almost) entirely on school (obviously.....since it's education).

What about students who don't have that balancing act well-learned? Students in those ceiling areas? In one area, students who throw away accuracy for speed - there are all kinds programs for getting them "up-to-speed" and spending more time working towards a goal. The other area , or should i say "ceiling" is students who throw away speed for accuracy. They spend too much time making things accurate (perfectionism) and don't keep track of an optimal speed. It's a mostly irrelevant problem in our society (and education system) because 1. it's relatively invisible (output is still 100%) and 2. it matches up with the societal value of accuracy as more important than speed. It's definitely considered the "minor" problem, compared to the other "ceiling" students.

I think it is a major problem, especially in terms of mental health. Maybe it's not anymore solvable than the opposite ceiling effect, but it is much less addressed.

In Google We Trust?

quick note: title of this blog taken from an article in CNET news written by Matt Asay - always good to give credit :)

I admit, I do treat google as if it were God. Anything you need to know, Google is there to give you the answer. Google is unbiased. Google lets people make their own choices, at the same time as they can contribute to these choices. Matt Asay writes in his article that as Google's web dominance grows, the public seems to be losing trust in it, particularly in relation to privacy concerns. Google is all-knowing, but it also knows everything about you. Yet, while trust is dropping, Google is also acknowledging these privacy concerns and "upping its committment to open data policies." While I don't really know what is meant by "upping its committment," I do think that the main source of trust in google is the company's core philosophy of SERVING the public, rather than exploiting or deceiving the public. Or more explicitly, their philosophy to do no evil. Matt also writes: "Is google perfect? No. But it is also not a microsoft-style monopoly. Google competes in the open." And he concludes, most interestingly:

"Have we lost trust in Google simply because it is winning, and we innately suspect the worst of a company at its scale?"

This rings a bell. We do suspect the worst of a company that seems to have taken over. However, with all its open-source projects, it seems that Google has not really taken over. What has taken over is the public's obsession and interest in Google. I never see ads on TV telling people to use Google. Microsoft bombards TV with Bing ads, with almost the opposite effect. People think, perhaps without realizing it, well Google isn't trying this hard to influence people to use it. Google's trying to make people WANT to use it by focusing their energy on projects that give users CHOICE. America's all about free choice, free will, free speech. Google, as a company, gives me more faith in the potential of Corporate America to set its priorities straight.

In the late 90's, when I was in middle school, we were taught that searching the internet was potentially harmful - that you can't believe what you read on the internet and must always be skeptical because "any idiot can post anything they want on the internet." My mom still holds this old-fashioned view, that you must have the mindset to be skeptical of what you find on the internet. However, with the power of Google and other web-revolutionalizing technology, the internet IS knowledge. Not only that, but Google is knowledge based on public majority. Google tracks what people are searching, what they are using, what they are typing and saving, what they are reading, and incorporates this information to let users know what is most popular or most common among millions of other users. In this way it is unbiased towards information. If everyone on the planet suddenly starts searching for "the truth about the man in the moon" (totally hypothetical) and posting all their thoughts, research, information, and opinions about it, and Google can organize this to show which information is most cited/searched/read, then it gives us a pretty good idea of what's credible and what's not. It also gives us amazing insight into how humans think and behave. Google's corpus data is something like a sociological revolution.

But anyway, my point is that being skeptical of what you see on the internet is a given, but now there is so much information that we are free to decide what we accept or reject as good information. My mother's viewpoint is that when a professional gives you advice on a particular subject (like a doctor, educator, etc.), that advice is more sound and fool-proof than what you read on the internet. But Google gives you thousands of pieces of advice, from both professionals and lay-people, on every subject you could imagine. Perhaps I am biased, but I'm way more skeptical of one person's educated (and probably biased) professional advice than of a thousand pieces of advice (from which all the different biases basically cancel each other out). Everyone is biased in their opinion, but if you lump all the information together, assume they all have biases of some kind, and still find a strong popular consensus, then that is more trustworthy to me (in my own biased opinion...:D lolz)

On another note, I am probably more skeptical of healthcare professionals than the average person. I find it very difficult to trust what a healthcare professional tells me. It's not that I believe that doctors are lying sacks of shit who don't give a crap about their patients. There are plenty of caring, smart (smart, caring? my next post is gonna be about the order of english adjectives, just so you know) doctors, and also plenty of non-caring, non-smart (lol) doctors. The thing is, doctors don't know EVERYTHING. I think that many people have a skewed idea of doctors, almost that the doctor's word is like god's word. If the doctor said I should do it, then that's all I need to know. I tend to see the doctor's word as a recommendation, from the best of their knowledge of the situation. This means that there are also other recommendations out there, if the first one doesn't work. It doesn't mean that if one doctor recommends something and it doesn't seem to work, that there is probably nothing you can do about it. You can always do something about a healthcare issue, as long as you keep at it. Keep looking, ask other professionals, get other opinions.

To end on a random note, what's all this hype about Cloud Computing?

Frustration

God, I love xkcd.com. Makes me feel better when things seem crappy. Or possibly makes me realize that dry sarcasm makes me feel better when things seem crappy.

Frustration:

In science, coming up with numbers on spss that are all a LOT bigger than .05 reminds me of how some boys must feel when faced with the above image. Frustration and frantic thoughts of "wait, maybe if I try it this way...maybe if I can angle it this way...there's something I'm not getting right here...ARG!"

The difference being that with stats, you get real excited when those numbers look much smaller than you'd hoped. And with bras, well, you get a lot more excited when they're bigger than you'd hoped.

GarageBand

GarageBand cracks me up.

I mean, playing music and playing video games just seem like two totally opposite activities. It's a weird feeling, when you haven't seen a full garage band in action before, to walk into a room and see 4 people standing stock-still in a semi circle each playing an instrument and staring at the TV screen with that glazed-over look. It's just funny. Maybe I'm biased because I am really bad at video games, so it's hard for me to get into them. If it doesn't catch my interest within 30 seconds, I will play one game and then can't focus on it anymore. Same thing happens with beer pong actually. I kind of suspect that the real reason is I can't do activities that involve my body doing one thing and my eyes focusing on something else. For example,

Soccer: you're supposed to look up as much as possible, not down at your feet. That was a disaster for me.

Video games: hands are moving around pressing buttons, but it's hard for me to do that while paying attention to a screen at the same time.

...I can't think of any more examples. But anyways, GarageBand is a funny concept to me. I get why it's fun, but it also reminds me how much the world is getting digitalized. Music used to be sound coming directly out of the instrument. You have total bodily control over what it produces. Then, speakers came around, and you still control the instrument, but the sound gets altered and comes out of a different piece of equipment. Then we got MIDI, which takes recordings of instruments making different sounds, breaks it all up into smaller segments and incorporates it into a software program. The music you create then is computer manipulation of different sounds previously recorded, with the physical instrument completely removed from the process. And garageband, now we've come back to the instrument (because it's fun to hold and utilize), except that it's really a representation of the real thing, and the game system controls the way all music sounds. And the point is not really to make music at all, it's to play a game.

Yayy technology, for making real-life situations as abstract as possible!

Mono-America

Conversation means having a dialogue right? "di" referencing two people, "logue" referencing speech.

thesaurus.com's first synonym for conversation IS dialogue. There's even a visual thesaurus (pretty cool) that maps how close words are in meaning to each other. "Language" is a central node, and "communication" and "conversation" are closely connected, only one node off. "Monologue" is farther away on the map, referencing one person's speech. It is the antonym of "dialogue."

How, then, would we categorize TWO monologues??

I mean, conversation is a dialogue, not two monologues. The overlap of monologue and dialogue is...speech (picture the venn diagram). Speech is very broad. Speech isn't the same thing as communication.
Two monologues, then, is an oxymoron.

Having two monologues doesn't get you any closer to a dialogue than two wrongs get you closer to a right. It's faulty thinking.

So why does this happen so much? People struggling to have a dialogue and not seeing that what is really occurring is two overlapping monologues? Maybe it's partly a function of our culture. America - mono-America. One person, each to his own, one and only. (I'm starting to see a sociolinguistic study in my head of frequency of words like "one" compared to "all")
We are each so separate from the whole, independent and "mono"-driven, considering ourselves, as a singular person, more important than ourselves IN CONJUNCTION with others.
I'm not saying this mentality means that Americans don't see how groups are important. It's that we see groups as a compilation of separate individuals, with each individual contributing their particular strength (their own "monologue"), rather than considering how each individual is shaped and strengthened within the group itself.
We don't grow separately. We are not islands. We interact; this is how people learn.
Monologues are lonely. Two monologues are twice as lonely. And a whole team of monologues is really not a great place to be.


(sorry for the pessimism this morning, I will try to post something more uplifting later )

wugs - an explanation

First, I should probably explain the name of my blog.

A wug is an imaginary animal, used in language acquisition research to test children's acquisition of the english plural morpheme.

Then the kid should answer "wugs!"

Urban dictionary definition #9 says that a Wug is "white thug, who thinks he is gangster and hard." #12 says: "a wanna-be thug", and #13: Acronym for Wow You're Gay.

While I do actually think i'm a white thug, this is not what the title means. When i first met my boyfriend and was telling him about my love for linguistics I described the whole Wug test (which he probably was not listening to but just laughing in his head at the word wug - I would have done the same), anyways it became kind of a joke about my extreme nerdiness when it comes to language and science. So when we both were at that point where we wanted to say those three little words but didn't quite want to just say it out loud yet, he sent me a text that just said: "i wug you".

It pretty much melted my heart, and the line became a real hit. (note- i wouldn't suggest using this line on other girls, but it worked on me). So wug came to mean love/affection/adorableness/hugs and all that other mushy stuff. It's our little code, so nobody else has to know we are being mushy, and instead think we are just being super weird.

So the title is just that: Love and Language (and a pre-emtive warning about the nerdiness/absurdity of this blog in general and the posts to come)

On another note, I've also deemed this blog the place where I will put all my ponderings musings and thoughts that are probably not appropriate to talk to people about on a daily basis (especially when they didn't ask) but that I still have to get them out into the world somehow (!) so very little censoring will happen here. People censor themselves all the time in every social situation, and that is necessary. But sometimes I have so much to say that it needs to go somewhere (!) Freud's description of the Ego makes sense in this situation, and named properly. In kindergarten they call it the Golden Rule, modern science blames it on the prefrontal cortex, and my mother just calls it "stop before you think, think before you talk."

But the point is, I need to talk, and the internet likes to listen :)