Hail

Thursday, November 05, 2009

No, the next word isn't going to be Mary.

Anyway, the first snow of the season was today. In an atypical fashion, it snowed here in Buffalo after Halloween. People say that it usually snows at least once before Halloween, and for the past few years it has been true, but for this year, it didn't happen. But today, well, the forecast yesterday was that it will snow today, and sure enough, even for a brief period, it did.

I was in my office, and then the sky suddenly became dark. The clouds all came in, and then hail fell. There's these little balls of ice that fell from the sky, and they crowded the window sills. They fell and fell, as if the sky was one giant ice cube maker.

Then it transitioned to snow. The flakes descended, and they coated the ice cubes with this white frosting, but sure enough, for the first snow of the season, it was brief and fleeting, and the sky suddenly turned blue again and there was the sun.

(Lord Ganesh, from my Sackler and Freer Collection Series)

The Ear Blaster

Wednesday, November 04, 2009

Kids these days...

Almost everyone now has some sort of music player that they carry around and plug in their ears with an earphone. I wonder why. Why is it that the modern person has the need to carry around some music and listen to it all the time?

The kids here in campus listen to it while they walk from one building to another. Geez, walking from one end of the campus to the other doesn't even take 10 minutes, does that time frame require a song or two? As if silence is so oppressive that people do everything they can to prevent silence.

Earlier today, while I was in the male restroom, I was standing in front of a urinal relieving myself. Two urinals away was this guy, with his ears plugged. But even I could hear the music that was playing. It was playing that loud that I can actually distinguish the melody of the song. Wow. Why do they need to play it that loud? Are their eardrums malfunctioning that they need to be boomed with that loud of a sound so that the eardrum can effectively transmit the signal to their brain? Or maybe their brain is the one that is malfunctioning, since it may be the case that the brain cannot interpret the sound signals if they are soft, so the brain wants it to be loud? In any case, I find it extremely ludicrous that people listen to music that loud that even though it was playing through the earphones, other people who ARE NOT WEARING IT can hear them too!

Kids these days...

(Big-Breasted God, from my Sackler and Freer Collection Series)

Numbers and Graphs

Tuesday, November 03, 2009

So the past weekend was filled with occasions in which I was sitting in front of the computer, plugging numbers in a spreadsheet, and doing statistical tests on it. And after a battalion of these tests, I printed some numbers and made some graphs. And boy, the results were pretty.

So, last Saturday, I conducted a series of T-tests, because we were comparing the means of two different samples. Ideally, there should not be a difference, because theoretically, we were predicting a null effect. However, there was. And after some thought, of course, given the manipulations that we did, there should be a difference, but it was not the difference that we were interested in.

So, we had to go to Plan B. Good thing though that I designed the experiment in such a way that we can recode the data and rerun a different test without conducting the whole experiment over again. So, some of the conditions that we weren't interested in suddenly became a condition that we were interested in, and it was a good thing that they were not haphazardly designed, and so there was no worry that the design was crap. I just had to make a few tweaks here and there.

Thus, after the tweak, I ran a one-way ANOVA, and after seeing the plots and the graphs, I was happy. The thing that we were trying to investigate was very much supported by our numbers. The comparisons that we were predicting are still there, and our predictions have empirical support.

Earlier, when doing the T-tests, I realized that the data was divided in two ways. There was one group of people that was functioning one way, and another group of people that was functioning another way. The group division was rather large: it wasn't just one or two people in the sample, but a big one-third of the sample was behaving differently. So we deemed that we had to explain this. I re-ran the one-way ANOVA with the split data, and sure enough, the graphs between these two groups are largely different. And this was enough to make me and my co-author happy.

So what did we see? Based on the construction that we were investigating, there seems to be two dialects of the target language. The language that we are investigating seems to vary along the dimension that we were manipulating. And this is an important fact since a lot of theoretical linguists out there claim that there is no such divide.

Unfortunately, I do not feel like describing this in more detail here, since it is not just my research, it is a collaborative one, and I would rather describe it in more detail once this is published. Anyway, we think that we now have material for a conference presentation. We have a month to write an abstract, and hopefully, this gets accepted for a conference in March. I smell another line in my CV...

(God Statue, from my Sackler and Freer Collection Series)

Book Review: Comfort and Joy by Jim Grimsley

Sunday, November 01, 2009

I suppose after having read a couple of books that took me a full month to read, this is something different. It only took me this weekend to actually finish this novel.

So, what is this novel about? This novel talks about the challenges that a same-sex couple faced, dealing with each other, and also dealing with their families. One is a doctor, coming from a very upper-class family from the southern US, while the other is a hospital administrator, and his family doesn't have a lot of money. The doctor makes a lot of money, while the hospital administrator has health problems. He has hemophilia, and due to that he is HIV positive. Thus, there are plenty of conflicts in this book. And somehow I am surprised that the author was able to pack it all in less than 300 pages.

So, what do I like about this book? Well, style-wise, I like the fact that the story was written in a non-linear fashion. The narrative did not follow temporal order but instead were linked together in thematic order. This placed the burden of linking to the reader, which I liked. This meant that the author trusted the reader to have the intelligence to be able to do this. Aside from this, a lot of importance has been placed with the dialogue. The reader is therefore given the ability to infer the character's emotions by discerning this from the dialogue between each character.

I suppose if I would find something that is negative in this book, is the fact that there are too many conflicts in the story. Yes, there is the issue of same-sex relationships and acceptance, there is the issue of hemophilia and HIV, there is the issue of family relations and parental expectations with respect to their children. I guess I feel that there is too much drama. I rarely read LGBT literature, so I do not know whether this is a trend or not when it comes to this genre, but the only other LGBT novel that I read a couple of years back was similar in structure: there was a lot of emotional turmoil inside. I am not saying that non-LGBT literature has the right amount of drama, but I wish there was more aside from the emotional conflicts that was portrayed in this book.

So, did I enjoy this? Yes. Would I recommend it, perhaps. If one wants a novel that easily swoons one's emotions, and is a page-turner because one's feelings are affected, then this is one such book. However, is this a book that would induce one to ponder about more complex and complicated things? Perhaps not. In that sense, it felt like an airport novel: one doesn't need to engage one's brain power too much in order to understand the various conflicts that the book presents, and the conflict is transparent enough to hold the reader in attention in order for the pages to turn, so by the end of the trip, the novel is finished. After all, I was able to read it in just 3 days.

(Gods, from my Sackler and Freer Collection Series)

Tattoo Girl

Saturday, October 31, 2009

Yesterday, my good friend and I went to see a play produced by the university's Department of Theatre and Dance. The play was entitled Tattoo Girl, written by Naomi Iizuka. And honestly, this is one of the best plays that I have ever seen.

The play was produced in the Blac Box Theatre. This is a theatre in the university that is rather flexible in design, and this is the third play that I have seen in this venue, the previous ones being Spring Awakening and The Shape of Things. And I suppose third time's the charm.

This is a surreal comedy, blending together ideas from the ancient martyr Perpetua, a soldier in the early 20th century, and the gymnast Nadia Comaneci. The stories in this play flow in very different directions, and the storylines are just surreal and non-linear. This play takes a different mind to entertain. While watching this play, I was laughing hard and thinking all the time that this must be stream of consciousness, at least in the theatre mode. I could totally see this play as being a depiction of how my mind would work perhaps.

Anyway, I liked the way the Theatre Department produced this play. The actors were always in their character, and as always, I am impressed at the quality of their performances. Just ten people playing many different characters, even including a talking dog, was just awesome. I love how they nailed the various accents required in the play, from Romanian to French to whatever the accent Marshal Foch had to have, although it seemed he was German rather than French given the accent that he had.

So, overall, I had fun on a quiet Friday night. While the rest of the world is partying in rather bizarre costumes, I had fun in my own way.

(Writing on the Ceiling, from my Sackler and Freer Collection Series)

Book Review: My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk

Friday, October 30, 2009

This is a complicated read. It took me a month to read this, which was somewhat unexpected. So, what is this book about?

My Name is Red is a story about a murder, set in 1600 in Istanbul. An illustrator is found murdered, and the book weaves a story where the reader is kept guessing as to the identity of the murderer. Along with it is woven a story of love and sex, and family relations in the Islamic world.

The book is written in a post-modern style, and after reading this, I understand why the author garnered a Nobel Prize for this book. Every chapter has a different narrator, so the story is told through various points of view. Even atypical narrators are utilized in this story, including a gold coin, a corpse, a picture of a horse, and so on. With that I am impressed with the creativity of the author.

However, it took me a long time before I grew to like this book. Several factors came into play, for this to be the case. First of all, I am not at all familiar with the cultural references that the book has with respect to Istanbul and the Islamic World in the Middle Ages. The fact that there are several narrators also made things complicated, since I had a little bit of difficulty keeping track of who was who in the stream of events. It was after I finished half of the book that I started liking this novel, when the possible murderers were narrowed down to three.

No matter how I do not like the story, however, praise should be given to the structure. This is not just a simple airport novel. This is literature. I had to make full use of my brain when I was reading this. This was no simple read, and it required me to analyze and exercise some critical thinking in order to understand this novel.

All in all, I believe this is a very mature novel. People who only want some swooning mystery or romance will not find this enjoyable. Only people who want something that stimulates the brain will find this a great read. If you're one of those people, then by all means pick this book up.

(Women Statues, from my Sackler and Freer Collection Series)

Feel Good

Thursday, October 29, 2009

Earlier today I had a conversation with a former student. And that was just a feel good moment.

See, this former student of mine took my 100-level class two years ago. It was a class that basically introduced the different languages that are found around the world, and how they are similar and different when it comes to structure. Basically, this was a class that a trivia person would dig.

So, I bumped into this former student of mine, and he told me that he is now a minor in Linguistics, and that it was after taking my class that he got interested in the whole field and decided to do a minor in it. Wow. I didn't realize that I can have an effect in other people too.

See, the thing is, I have taught this class for about three times now. He happened to have been a student when I taught it for the third time. I have this idea that I basically turned away a lot of people when I taught it the very first time. I looked back and saw my syllabus for that class, and I was so over the top. I required tons of stuff, considering this was a 100-level class. So when I got to teach it again, I revised a lot of stuff, and so when I taught it the third time, I myself enjoyed it.

So there, I saw people who were majors in Linguistics when I taught the class the very first time, but ceased to be a major, perhaps due to me, but now I learned that I am also capable of the other way, of inspiring people to take up a field simply because they found my class interesting.

I felt good.

(Fertile Woman, from my Sackler and Freer Collection Series)

Categorical Likes and Dislikes

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

When you like a song, do you like the song because you like the singer? Because you like what the song is about? The voice quality? The whole band? Same thing when you dislike a song. Do you not like the song because it is a certain band that is singing it, or because of the voice quality, or because of the topic of the song?

The thing is, I have a few bands that I like most, if not all of their songs. Bands like The Cranberries, Chevelle, 30 Seconds to Mars, Garbage, Smashing Pumpkins, and so on.

My good friend on the other hand dislikes several acts categorically, and by this, she means that she dislikes whatever song these acts sing, such as Lady Gaga and Katy Perry.

Which is fine, I don't have a problem with that. The thing that we disagree however is whether one can categorically like or dislike a singer. My friend believes that one categorically dislike songs by virtue of who sings it, but one cannot categorically like a song just because a certain singer sings it. I on the other hand believe that it is both possible to categorically like or dislike a song based on who is singing it.

The thing is, one argument for being able to categorically disliking a song due to the singer is that if one really dislikes the way a certain singer sings, then no matter what song the singer sings, then it will turn out bad. The content of the song is variable, but the quality of the singer's voice and style is assumed to be constant in this view. Now, according to this view, the reason why it is not possible to categorically like a song due to the singer is that one is never sure what the content of the song is going to be. Thus, if there is a very crappy song by its content, no matter how good it is sung by the singer, it will still be disliked.

I believe otherwise. For me, everything is variable. Voice quality is variable, so is style and content. However, my model is a statistically sound model, by integrating previous data points and then using these data points as predictors of whether future songs from this singer will be liked or disliked.

Case in point: I like the band Chevelle a lot. I discovered their music back in 2001, while watching a show in MTV where they were featuring rock music for the whole hour. I like their extraordinary use of guitar, and the way Pete Loeffler sings. I have a copy of all their albums. And so based on the impression that I get from their songs, chances are, if they come up with a new album, I will also like them. See, what I am doing is making a predictive and probabilistic model of whether I would like a song or not. I have always liked the voice quality of Pete Loeffler, not as a stipulation, but based on evaluating every song I have heard that is sung by him. I always liked the topic of their songs, again, not as a stipulation, but by evaluating the topic every time a Chevelle song would play. And thus, these factors all increase the probability that whenever I hear another Chevelle song, I would like them. Thus, I can confidently say that statistically speaking, I can like a Chevelle song, whatever the song may be. I can therefore claim that I can categorically like Chevelle music.

Let's take another example: Colbie Caillat. This is a singer that I feel ambivalent about. She has two songs that I didn't like: the one that talks about toes and picking your nose (aka Bubbly), and another one that featured a very repetitive word, "realize" (which is titled the same way). I hated the first song for being silly, and I hated the second song for using that word over and over again. However, I saw a video of her singing a rendition of the song Don't Cha by the Pussycat Dolls. This is a song that I didn't like at all, but when Caillat sang it, it was transformed into this very beautiful song. Another song that I liked that Caillat sang was Fallin' For You. It is being played in the radio nowadays.

So, what is Colbie Caillat's track record when it comes to me liking her? Well, sometimes I like her, sometimes I don't. So statistically speaking, liking her is not a reliable phenomenon. Thus, I cannot say that I can categorically like Colbie Caillat's music.

So, what do you think? Can you categorically like or dislike music?

(Dramatic Mask, from my Sackler and Freer Collection Series)

Comparing Two Means

Monday, October 26, 2009

So I finally got to make SPSS to work. Well, not really, but I was able to do it in a round-about way.

The thing is, the experiment that I am currently running and is about to finish involves asking people about their grammaticality judgments. I presented them with sentences that are manipulated using various factors, and I ask them whether they think it is a good sentence or not. Of course, I do not directly ask them, instead, I use a technique called magnitude estimation. This requires people to assign numbers to sentences, and the numbers reflect how good or how bad they think the sentences are.

Now there are a few assumptions that this paradigm makes. This assumes that grammaticality is not a binary function. It is not the case that the goodness or badness of a sentence can be a yes or no response. Instead, it takes the view that grammaticality is a graded variable. By using numbers (and therefore a scalar variable), one can say that one sentence is good, another sentence is slightly bad, and another one be very bad. It is not always the case that sentences are bad just because they violate some prescriptive assumption.

Anyway, the experimental design that I made involved four different types of filler items, and each of these fillers had a good version and a bad version. Each of these four filler types correspond to different syntactic constructions. The sentences were either good or bad because they would be violating some syntactic constraint, for example, subject-verb agreement or number agreement. These two agreement types are uncontroversial in the literature: if there is a disagreement, then the sentence becomes wrong.

Now, why do I have these fillers? Well, they serve a purpose. One purpose is that it hides as much as it can the real items in the experiment. The thing is, if the person realizes that there is a pattern in the items, then one can possibly strategize in one's responses and so the response isn't automatic anymore: the response isn't done on the fly. So there are fillers that are designed to distract the participant from finding out which items are the real test items.

Another purpose of the fillers that I had was to make sure that people are paying attention. The thing is, they are being paid a small amount of money in the experiment, and they might as well come in with a could-care-less attitude and then just plug in random numbers without even thinking about the directions. Thus, if they respond to the filler items the same way, regardless if they were good or bad fillers, then that means that they were not paying attention to the task.

So, I had to compare the means of the good and bad fillers. I had to conduct four different T-tests for every participant, since there are four filler types. If they come out as significant in at least 3 out of 4 filler types, then I will retain the participant. If they only come out as significant in just 2 types or less, then I will drop the participant and discard the data garnered from that participant. That is a way in checking whether the participant is actually doing what you want them to do or not.

So yeah, comparing the means involves executing T-tests, but last weekend, I was not able to make the software package to read my data. Weird. But now, I got help from someone, and I was able to make it work. Due to that, we're dropping a few people from the study, about 4, since they didn't show evidence that they were actually paying attention to the task.

(Warrior with Wooden Penis, from my Sackler and Freer Collection Series)

Evening in Beirut

Saturday, October 24, 2009

Tonight will be one of the rare times in which I will exhibit my hopefully still-working cooking skills to others. The only other time I have done this so far is when the department has its annual welcome party, and everyone is encouraged to bring a dish to share. Every time for the past five years, someone has asked me for a recipe of the dish that I have made for the occasion.

Anyway, tonight, I am co-hosting a Middle-Eastern dinner party with a friend. She has the kasbah, I have the cooking skills. And we invited a few of our close friends for the occasion.

So, what's in store for the night? I am making hummus with spinach, which includes tahini, garlic, kosher salt, olive oil, and lemon juice. This will be served beforehand, with Middle-Eastern pita breads to accompany it. The main dish would be a tagine of chicken with chickpeas and mint. This involves simmering the chicken in a pot full of exotic spices such as cumin, turmeric, coriander, and cinnamon. Fresh mint would provide the contrast needed from the spices. This is served with couscous with dried apricots and coriander seeds.

Now the dessert, well, I am not too good when it comes to making desserts. So I will let my co-host plan that. After all, she's better in baking and in desserts in general than me.

What else? I have a few CDs of Middle Eastern electronica, featuring bands from underground clubs in Beirut, Paris, Montpellier, Marrakesh, and so on. This should be fun. The only thing missing are the belly dancers.

(African Shield, from my Sackler and Freer Collection Series)

Occupied

Thursday, October 22, 2009

This week has been very hectic, and it seems that I have had stuff to do for every hour or minute of it.

Anyway, in the realm of my dissertation, I have been told by my adviser to think about the deep shit. What this meant was that I had to step back a little and think about the most basic of the basic principles when it comes to what I am working on. I have been working on discourse coherence, and so I had to think what exactly are the basic mechanisms that I need for this to happen. Until now, I have been thinking about the architecture of the models that I am proposing, and so I had to step back and see the bigger and more basic picture.

I also had meetings every day with people relevant to my dissertation. It's getting hectic than ever. I met with my adviser on Monday, and I met with another professor in the department on Tuesday. On Wednesday, I met with my adviser and this other professor jointly. Today was supposed to be a meeting with another member of my committee from the Psychology Department, but she canceled at the last minute due to student obligations, so we are moving it to Tuesday. And tomorrow, I meet with my adviser again, at 8:00 AM.

My blackboard in my office is full of my diagrams contrasting the opposing views that my dissertation is tackling. Now the critical point in my dissertation progress is actually coming up with a set of experiments that would contrast and test these two opposing views.

I have also been conducting tons of experimental sessions with human participants lately. I guess we just have had good fortune when it comes to recruitment this time around. This afternoon, I will be seeing five people, which brings us closer to our cap for this experiment. Then after this, I will have to do the statistics and perform some tests, and see whether our hypotheses are true or not. This means that I need to spend some time with my best friend, none other than SPSS. Once this current experiment comes to a close, there is another experiment that I will be running, but for a different project with different collaborators. Hopefully, I will get a few publications for this year and the next.

This coming Saturday, my good friend and I are hosting a few friends for an Arabian-inspired dinner. We figured that it would be a good way to unwind, by relaxing and spending a good time with some friends from school, and sharing dinner with them. My friend will be opening her kasbah for us, while I will be in charge of the kitchen. I am planning a tagine of chicken with spices and fresh mint, coupled with some couscous with dried apricot. Before that, we'll have two types of hummus accompanied by good Middle Eastern bread. Regarding the dessert, I don't really have a good expertise when it comes to dessert, so I will leave that to my sidekick. I also have some good Middle Eastern music to accompany the whole evening.

So yeah, I have been occupied lately and therefore aren't prolific with my blogging as I used to. Anyway, before I close this post, I would like to point out the new photo series I have. The pictures I have been showing here since last Friday were taken during my December 2007 visit to Washington DC, and two museums that I really enjoyed were the Sackler and Freer Museums, which are part of the Smithsonian Museums in the National Mall.

(Mask, from my Sackler and Freer Collection Series)

Theft in the Office

Monday, October 19, 2009

My office was the scene of a theft this past weekend. I lost some cash.

So, here's the back story to it. I have a small amount of cash, which is not mine. This is actually the department's money that I have in small amounts at a time so that I can pay participants whenever they come in for an experiment. It is usually kept in an envelope hidden from view, and most of the time, the amount doesn't go over 50 USD.

Anyway, last Thursday, I conducted my last experiment for the week, and I didn't have anybody scheduled for Friday. I remember having about 25 USD in the envelope, since I asked the principal investigator for more money because I knew that 25 USD would not suffice for the participants I have for this week. I did not touch the envelope at all last Friday since there weren't any participants, and it wasn't until Saturday that I found out the missing 25 USD.

Saturday afternoon, I wanted to listen to music without disturbing my office mate, so I opened the drawer where the envelope was hidden, in order to get my headphones. But alas, the envelope was still there, albeit moved, and the money was missing.

I have my suspicions. It must be one of the people who have key access to the office. There are three occupants in the office, and I have no reason to suspect my office mates, so there can only be one other suspicion, the cleaners. They have master keys to all offices since they need to get in in order to clean the place.

Now the bizarre thing is, I usually leave my laptop in the office, and yet that wasn't taken. I have a USB-attachable mouse and yet it was still there. Of course, they took the cash because cash is untraceable. But the thing is, I always put the garbage can outside of the office so the cleaners will have no reason to get inside, and yet someone got inside. And I find it interesting that they went through the drawers to find an envelope of money. If they found the money in the drawer, then it is safe to assume that they went through the other drawers too and checked what must be inside.

The thing I hate is that I am forced to suspect the cleaners. I know that it is in a certain level, wrong to just typify people of a certain class, such as the working class, and claim that they are good for nothing. I don't want that to happen. And yet, instances like these force me to make these stereotypes. I know that there are honest people out there, even in the working class, but being the pessimist that I am, what would I think?

Anyway, I have changed my modus operandi. I am making things more secure, so hopefully things like this petty theft doesn't happen again.

(African Collection, from my Sackler and Freer Collection Series)

Lepidoptera

Sunday, October 18, 2009

What does one do when one's pituitary gland and hypothalamus produces opioid polypeptide compounds? Is this what one gets when one decides to have a paradigm shift? Lepidopterae in ventris?

(Interesting Statues, from my Sackler and Freer Collection Series)

Linguistic Factoid No. 14: Language Families

Friday, October 16, 2009

There are about 6,000 languages around the world. Some of these are spoken by a huge amount of people, while some of these are spoken by just a small handful of people that are predicted to die within the next century. These languages are in a way related to each other, and if one had the time and effort, then one can simply sit down and figure out how languages relate to each other and which languages are close to each other or not.

Once upon a time, a linguist realized that English and Sanskrit were very much related. There were similar words across the two languages, and upon further scrutiny, it was found that English and Sanskrit are related. Thus, the world realized that there is one such language family called Indo-European. This language family extends from the Celtic languages in Ireland and Great Britain to the languages found in the Indian sub-continent.

How does one establish a language family? Well, people can examine how similar or different each languages' vocabulary is. People can examine a core vocabulary and see how much they vary. The words in this core vocabulary should be words that are thought to be highly resistant to borrowing, such as kin terms and body parts. One can also examine the syntax or word order of the languages. The more similar things are, the easier it is for people to establish the existence of a common language family across the languages.

So, what is the largest language family? Well, there is this language family called Niger-Congo, found in sub-Saharan Africa. This language family contains about 1,400 languages, extending from Senegal to South Africa. The second-largest language family is the Austronesian language family, which is posited to have originated in the island of Taiwan, and is now found along a wide swath of area, from Madagascar in the Indian Ocean to Easter Island in the South Pacific. There are 1,200 languages in this family, but the area coverage is very large.

Of course, there are language families that are smaller than these two. And there are also languages that do not belong to any language family. Theorists have claimed that Japanese is one such language, but this is not firmly established yet. Other languages, such as Basque (found in Spain and France) and Burushaski (found in Pakistan) are clearer to be language isolates, since they are clearly very unrelated to the languages that surround them.

(Atrium, from my Sackler and Freer Collection Series)