Care to Sleep in a 747?

Tuesday, March 31, 2009

What's with the Swedes and their wacko yet very amusing hotel ideas?

First, there was the Ice Hotel, located in Jukkasjärvi, which saw the world's first ice hotel, in 1989. Pretty cool, eh? I suppose that's supposed to be taken in the literal sense of the word. You can actually book a room through their website here.

Then, I found another wacko hotel in Sweden, and that is the Jumbohostel. People have converted a Boeing 747 and parked it near the Stockholm Arlanda Airport, and transformed the interior into dorm rooms, private rooms, and even a cockpit suite. There's also a restaurant and a lounge inside. And yes, you can book a room through their website here.

Wow. I have to say though, that even if I enjoy weird things like these, I do not suppose this would be reason enough for me to take a trip to Sweden. I need more than that. After all, when I travel, I don't spend a lot of time in hotels, I spend my time outdoors.

(Embassy of South Korea, from my Embassy Row Series)

Do I Have Asperger Syndrome?

Saturday, March 28, 2009

Sometimes, finding the greatest common divisor is a pain in the neck. There are multiple phenomena that happen around us every day, and one hopes to find a logic behind those phenomena.

I have noticed that I do things in a way that would make it seem that I have something that is known as Asperger syndrome. Not that I went to a psychiatrist and had myself assessed in the DSM-IV, but looking at the pattern of symptoms seem to suggest that I check off some of them, if not severely, at least mildly.

Now why am I positing this? Am I a hypochondriac? Maybe not, at least, as far as I know, I do not constantly do a self-diagnosis or self-examination, I do not go to physicians all the time worrying that I have a serious illness. I suppose all I want to do is to fit the best fitting curve to the pattern of data that I have and see if that explains the phenomenon. If the R-squared (effect size) of this regression curve is large, then sure, if not, then I will drop it.

Now what is Asperger syndrome all about? According to the Online Asperger Syndrome Information and Support, (i)ndividuals with AS can exhibit a variety of characteristics and the disorder can range from mild to severe. Persons with AS show marked deficiencies in social skills, have difficulties with transitions or changes and prefer sameness. They often have obsessive routines and may be preoccupied with a particular subject of interest. They have a great deal of difficulty reading nonverbal cues (body language) and very often the individual with AS has difficulty determining proper body space. Often overly sensitive to sounds, tastes, smells, and sights, the person with AS may prefer soft clothing, certain foods, and be bothered by sounds or lights no one else seems to hear or see. It's important to remember that the person with AS perceives the world very differently. Therefore, many behaviors that seem odd or unusual are due to those neurological differences and not the result of intentional rudeness or bad behavior, and most certainly not the result of "improper parenting".

So let's see.

Social skills: ah, I exhibit this trait. In fact, I lack social skills to the point that people call me an alien being and not human. Sometimes, I alienate other people and act weird and otherworldly. I tend to push other people's buttons without even knowing that I do so, and fail to detect that I am annoying other people due to the fact that I am bad at reading body language. I don't consider myself an extrovert, and sometimes, the few people I let inside are hurt as well. In fact, one person who I used to talk to actually requested that I not talk to her anymore a couple of weeks ago.

Difficulties with transitions of change: I suppose I have difficulty with this, but have learned to cope, after all, I was brought up in an environment where moving from place to place was essential. After some learning and feedback, I suppose I learned to apply the maxim that I shouldn't plant my roots too deep in a place, since I'll have to uproot them again in a few years or so. And even now, I have voiced pipe dreams here in this blog that I believe I am staying a little too long in Buffalo for comfort.

Obssessive routines: Hmmm, probably not.

Preoccupation with a particular subject of interest: I know quite a lot about travel and airlines. I know the three-letter IATA airport codes that when I see a license plate number with three letters, the first thing that comes to mind is what airport it represents. I know the airline routes around the world and can plan a trip to obscure locations like Timbuktu (the closest airport by the way to Timbuktu is Bamako Senou Airport in Mali, with the code BKO). When I was little, I collected the time tables of the different train companies that were relevant to where we lived, and I had timetables of almost every station of those companies. Now is that a preoccupation or not?

Sensitivity to sounds/smells/sights: Hmm, not really.

I once did an IQ test once, and it came out to be 141. The average IQ of the human population is said to be 100, with a standard deviation of 15. That means I am 3 standard deviations away from the average. Unlike autistics, Asperger syndrome patients can have normal IQ and normal language use. However, what is different is that Asperger patients may have deficits in language use such as prosody and pragmatics. Now that I tick off. People around me can simply attest to how I mutate language and use it weirdly. In fact, this is one of the reasons why some people think I am eccentric. They say that Asperger patients can be extremely literal, and guess what? I cannot get sarcasm.

Don't get me wrong. I am not trying to be an Asperger patient if I am not. I am also a pragmatist. If the DSM-IV tells me that I lack enough points to be classified as an Asperger patient, then so be it.

I just want an explanation.

(Embassy of Zambia, from my Embassy Row Series)

The Failed Mission Concerning a Pie

Friday, March 27, 2009

So I was tagged by Priyank to have something to do with a pie when Pi Day comes around. Granted, I was on the road when March 14 came and went, so I took a rain check. I figured, hey, if I were to make a pie, I'd make it different.

I failed.

Well, let me tell you what I meant to make. I wanted to make a pie that is not dessert-related. In other words, this pie should not be sweet. It should not be eaten as a dessert. So I searched for recipes for pies that have meat in them.

Now, we all know that I seldom use my oven, right? There is a reason for this, and the following story is one.

So I decided to make a pie that has Italian sausage, salami, mozzarella and Parmesan cheeses in it, which is actually somehow a quiche or a tart. It also calls for 4 eggs, milk, and nutmeg. This picture shows all the ingredients.



It has eggs, pie crust, nutmeg, Italian sausage, salami, two kinds of cheese, basil, and milk. It also calls for a tart pan with a removable bottom. Now what do I know about removable bottoms? My only experience with removable bottoms involve those spring pans, so I borrowed my friend's 9-inch spring pan with a removable bottom. It is actually included there in the picture. Little did I know that this would be the recipe for disaster.

I then prepared the pie crust, baking it for 15 minutes in the pan. In the meantime, I prepared the filling by sauteing the Italian sausage, and mixing it with the salami and the cheeses. This is a picture.



Here, you can see in the bowl the meat, the cheeses, and the basil. This then went on top of the crust, once the crust was done, as you can see on the next picture.



The final step is to beat the four eggs, together with the milk and nutmeg, and pour it on top of the filling. Then, one has to bake it for 30 minutes until the egg-milk mixture has settled.



The picture above shows the eggs and milk before beating it. What follows is the disaster.

Due to the fact that spring pans have removable bottoms, it leaked when I poured the mixture into the pan. My eggs, they were leaking!

As an interim solution, I placed the spring pan into the oven with a flat baking sheet underneath, which caused the leak to be burnt a little bit. This resulted in the pie being a little thin, due to the escaped tart material. So much about making a pie that's different. I don't even want to show a photo of my pathetic meat pie. In fact, it looked so pathetic that I didn't even take a photo of it.

As a consolation, however, it was still edible and quite tasty. But I don't think I will be using my oven again in the near future.

I want a real pie. I guess I will head to a bakery and buy one.

(Ambassade de Côte d'Ivoire, from my Embassy Row Series)

5 Weeks to Go

Monday, March 23, 2009

There are five remaining weeks in the semester. Amazing isn't it? It seems as if the semester has just started, but no, it is more than half-way done. And things are still busy.

I have started recruiting people for the experiment that I am running in behalf of a professor here. I have people scheduled to come and meet with me in different times of the day, so that they can run the experiment that we have designed. Hopefully, that goes smoothly. And hopefully, that goes smoothly enough that we can perhaps draft an abstract for a conference and present the results for it.

I also need to make another draft for a human subjects protocol as well. This is for my own experiment now, not for someone else. I am starting to design the experiments that are needed for my dissertation, and I need to start running them soon. The goal is to have a draft of a proposal ready by the beginning of May, and have it defended soon so that I can fully do the research starting next academic year. That then hopefully places me to an expected graduation date of Summer 2010.

Hmmm, maybe that is too optimistic, but I don't know. I hope that would be true though, since I am starting to get sick of school. I am also starting to get sick of the scenery, and I think I need a scenery change in the near future.

In other topics, the weather is starting to be better. The sun is starting to show off its face, and sometimes the shine is so hot that I feel like I am a braised chicken.

(Ambassade van Nederland, from my Embassy Row Series)

Appalachian Fever

Saturday, March 21, 2009

Time to write a trip report, boys!

I am indeed back in town, and I have quite a few obligations to do. I need to bake a pie, I need to post pictures, I need to finish writing my trip report for Spring Break. Wow, I suppose that shows my priorities. No mention of anything academic?

No, perhaps academic obligations are already a given, so why bother mentioning them?

Anyway, the last time I mentioned my Spring Break road trip was when I blogged about Mammoth Caves. By the way, by going to Mammoth Caves, I fulfilled one of the sites in which I mentioned in this post. Yes, Mammoth Caves happen to be one of the places that I mentioned in my Itchy Feet wishlist.

Anyway, so we went to West Virginia after Kentucky. Did I mention that we were running away from a tornado zone when we were driving out of Kentucky? Yeah, the weather was fine, until it started to rain. And then the sky just turned dark, and the radio was interrupted by a weather announcement. They mentioned county names, and we didn't know which county we were in, until we saw a sign, and we looked back which county we just got out of, and thirty seconds later, we heard a tornado warning for that exact same county. Freaky.

Anyway, I am here to talk about what happened in West Virginia. We stayed for one night in Charleston, and the next day, we decided to wander around the State Capitol complex. We took a tour of the state capitol, and perhaps I learned more about that building than any other tourist in the area.



This is the Governor's Mansion. We took a guided tour of this house together with some eight-graders on a field trip. The interior was wonderful as well, and yes, I took pictures inside.



This is the library, and I like the way the light shines in the room. All the books are by West Virginian authors or about West Virginia.



This is the Governor's dining room. They actually are about to have lunch when we visited, so it was being prepared by people from the kitchen.

Of course, we visited the Capitol building, but the interior was very busy with people, and I cannot get a good shot of things. I tried my best though, so let me show you a picture of the dome from the inside.



I actually like the way the dome is painted. The colors actually are impressive and original in my opinion.

One thing that strikes me about this visit is that there wasn't any security at all. One can just enter the capitol building without passing to any metal detectors or security guards. The state was very laid back.

So there, after visiting the Capitol complex, we had lunch in a mall, and then proceeded to Pittsburgh, which was about 3 hours away from Charleston. I will see you then.

Hot and Cold

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

No, this is not about Katie Perry's song.

It's more about the different feelings and emotions that people experience, and sure enough, I have these as well. This past week has been an example of these, with good experiences and bad experiences happening side by side.

For the bad experience, a friend of mine decided that this person's life would be better if I were not in the picture. Frankly, I do not understand why this person decided that I was detrimental to this person's health, but heck, humans have free will. I was told that I did nothing wrong, that I was just being myself, but still, that my presence in this person's life was apparently causing some adverse reaction. It bothers me because I don't know what I am doing to actually cause this. However, I don't want to force my way into someone else's, so I guess I have nothing I can do about it.

For the good experience, remember when I blogged about a hard test that I had to take for a class? I got the results back. Apparently, the highest was 95 and the letter grades corresponded to an A to a B minus. And when I got my blue book back, I got a 94.5! Sweet! All that numb wrist pains paid off.

I am dreading this Friday. The thing is, I will be so busy from 9:00 all the way to 5:00. Tuesdays and Fridays are my busiest days. For Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday, I have no classes. I just go to my office to do work and research. I sometimes meet with people, such as my adviser, but otherwise, I don't have stuff to attend to regularly. Tuesdays have my three-hour class from 9:00, and I have a three-hour lab duty from 2:00. That leaves me 12:00-2:00, a two-hour break that I use to have lunch and attend to small errands.

But this Friday, oh boy, it's gonna be hell. I have a three-hour class that is supposed to start at 9:30, but we are making up a missed session so we will begin at 9:00, and this ends at 12:00. I am also a guest at a lab that is run by another professor, so I am attending their meeting, which is from 12:00-1:30. I do not usually attend this lab, in fact, this is the first time I am attending this one, simply because they will be looking at some eye-tracking visual-world paradigm data on sentence processing with subjects that speak Yucatec Mayan. There is a possibility in the future that I would run experiments using the same methodology, and so the professor invited me to sit-in for this session. After that, I have a 30-minute break. Then, at 2:00, I have a lab meeting in the Psychology department, which is the one I usually attend. This lasts until 3:30, where we will be discussing current lab affairs and we will also be reading a paper. Then, there will be a Linguistics Department Colloquium, where a guest from another university, this time, from U Toronto, is giving a talk. This lasts until 5:00.

Whew.

My sister was wishing a magic wand to make things disappear, and was also thinking of cloning herself. Sometimes, my Fridays make me want to do the same.

Anyway, time for some good thoughts again. To end this post, I saw this article from Yahoo! about the 20 Best Views in the World. So far, I have seen four of them, numbers 4, 8, 9, and 17. And yes, they are indeed amazing. Any ideas about the rest?

(Embassy of Mauritania, from my Embassy Row Series)

Back in Town

Monday, March 16, 2009

So, I am back in town. After a week's worth of silence, I am blogging again.

I am here, sitting in my office, and taking a little break. After this entry, I will have lunch, perhaps, and then go back to work. After all, another person in the department who came into the program the same time as I did is already defending her dissertation proposal this week, so I must catch up.

Time to shovel extra coal into the locomotive, boys!

Anyway, I should talk a little about my trip, which just ended yesterday. We were on the road for nine days. The last time I blogged about it, I was in Charleston, West Virginia. We spent a day there, where we toured the Governor's Mansion, and the State Capitol as well. One impressive thing about this state is that people seem to be so relaxed about security. There wasn't a single metal detector that one will pass upon entering the capitol building. One can simply waltz inside the building and that's it!

Anyway, we were there for just one day, and later we proceeded to Pittsburgh, where we stayed for 3 nights. My friend has family there. Pittsburgh is a nice city, but with lots of hills. After that, we were on the road again and passed through Gettysburg, where we drove around the battlefield. This part of the country happened to be a very important battlefield back in the civil war. Then we spent three nights in Reading, where we stayed in a friend's house. We drove to Philadelphia and saw the great art museum, and then we also hung out with our friend's kids, doing nothing, watching a couple of movies, and playing origami.

So, that was my Spring Break. I am now back here in my office and in need of work. I have a pile waiting for me to read, and I also have a proposal to compose.

Pictures of the trip will be posted later.

(Embassy of the Lao People's Democratic Republic, from my Embassy Row Series)

Spending a Day in the Underworld

Sunday, March 08, 2009

I suppose some people may be wondering where in the planet is Linguist-in-Waiting? I mentioned casually a couple of posts behind that I will be out of town during Spring Break. So yes, right now, I am not in Buffalo. I am in and around Appalachia.

A good friend of mine and I are currently taking a road trip, and right now, we are in Charleston, West Virginia. This happens to be the second of four locales we are visiting. I am right now on top of a bed in a little hotel, accessing the wireless Internet connection. I just crossed a state boundary earlier today, and almost encountered a tornado while on the highway.

So let me clarify. Yesterday, we just drove for ten hours, from Buffalo, NY to Cave City, KY. Yup, that's Kentucky, home of the horses. However, we didn't cross three state borders to see the horses. Instead, we went to Kentucky to see the longest cave system in the world, none other than Mammoth Caves National Park. So what we did was just drive all day yesterday, and after that, we plopped in a hotel and slept.

The next day (today), we went to the national park and took a guided tour. We booked the Grand Avenue Tour, which is the longest guided tour that doesn't require crawling or rappelling down crevices and holes. It lasted for four and a half hours. It was strenuous, it was slippery, but it was fun. It was also a good workout for my goal of mountain-climbing in Borneo. I got sweaty, but I didn't lose my breath. I saw plenty of rocks, I saw gypsum flowers, I saw stalactites and stalagmites, and I also experienced darkness. There were a few times in which the park rangers would turn the lights off, and there was practically no light, just a dark and gloomy place.

Interestingly enough, I hadn't made much use of my camera inside. I did take a few photos, but in relation to other places that I took photos of, I wasn't taking copious pictures in the four and a half hours I was underneath the earth. Perhaps it was because I was busy holding to the handrails and making sure I wasn't slipping.



The above photo is the usual scene inside. Mammoth Cave is mostly a rock cave. There aren't a lot of dripping water inside. There are plenty of slot canyons, where one has to practically go single file inside.



This is a prettier picture perhaps. This is near the Frozen Niagara Room, which is filled with stuff that look like these. This reminds me of when I went to central Czech Republic and saw Konepruske Jeskyne (Koneprusy Caves), which was the largest cave system in Central Europe.

So that was today. We are spending the night here in West Virginia, and the plan is to see this city tomorrow morning, and be on the road again so by tomorrow night, we'll be in a different state.

Book Review: Human Love by Andrei Makine

Saturday, March 07, 2009

Recently, there has been this trend within my little circle of friends to think that I am not human. Instead, they think that I am an alien being spying against the earthlings, and my cover is that I am a quiet little graduate student. And perhaps I do not blame them for thinking this way, even though this is just a long running joke.

The thing is, there are times in which I wanted humans to make sense, and yet I seem to think that they don't. I usually make comments along the lines of Humans are so hard to read..., always prefacing my statements with Humans are... as if I am not one of them.

There are also times in which I do not show the "proper" human emotion and analyze things mechanically instead. A couple of weeks ago, we watched Schindler's List, and some of my friends commented that it was the only movie that made them cry. My comment about the movie instead was that the movie was a good biographical movie. It did its purpose in depicting human nature of evil trying to dominate other people. It also depicted one human's attempt at altruism. In the end, I believe that the movie was successful at tapping at the human aspect of things, and thus it did make plenty of people cry. I however, did not.

Anyway, there are plenty of those moments around my being. Now why am I mentioning this? Because this is relevant for the latest book that I read. This book is entitled Human Love by Andrei Makine. Makine is a Russian author, but he writes in French. However, I do not read French, so I read the English translation. This is about Elias, an Angolan man, whose life story the reader follows from when he was a toddler, until when he dies in the Somali insurgency. He grows up in 1960's Angola, where his father is part of the revolutionary army, and then he goes to Cuba and later on to Russia to train as a Communist operative. In the meantime, he meets Anna, a Russian woman going to the university. They love each other, but they meet each other at the wrong place at the wrong time. They end up living separate lives, with Elias traveling here and there all over Africa and the rest of the world as an operative, while Anna marries a man she doesn't love and becomes part of the Soviet diplomatic corps, living in different African countries.

They see each other here and there, every few years, in different capitals. In the end, the last time they see each other was in Mogadishu, when the government collapsed and chaos reigned in the city. Anna and her husband were being evacuated through the American embassy but they forgot a very important briefcase. Elias went and retrieved it, but he died in the process.

I am floored by this book. It shows how things that cannot be governed by reason, such as love, can endure, and that it can last for decades, even when the two people involved eventually grow old, and walk their separate ways. One can see that even after the years that have passed between them, one can still keep love lingering, and ultimately sacrifice one's life for the person one loves. This is a good book indeed, and it makes me think whether there would come a time in which I would feel the same way towards another person.

The thing is, as much as I want things to make sense, as much as I want things to be predictable, there are still things that I cannot model. Even if the effect size of my model can be pretty large, there are still some human aspects that my model does not account for. Perhaps one of the things it does not account for is this type of human behavior.

(Veleposlanstvo Republike Hrvatske, from my Embassy Row Series)

Weird Wednesday

Thursday, March 05, 2009

Yesterday was a very weird day. It involved an interrupted meeting and a copy-paste sequence done 2000 times.

So I was coding this HTML page. This is for an experiment that I am doing, not for my research, but for the professor who I am the research assistant to. We are doing an experiment, which involves people judging how good or bad a certain sentence is, with several factors that we manipulated. In order to be paperless, we decided that the participants could do this experiment by sitting down in front of a computer, and then they would simply be filling up the form using an HTML sheet. This HTML page will then have a Send button at the very bottom, and that would then send a text file to me via e-mail, which then I could process using spreadsheet and statistical software. In that way, we don't have to produce paper copies of the experiment and hand-code the responses.

That is a neat thing to do, except that the experiment is a ten-list experiment (we have 2 factors, one has 5 levels and the other has 2, resulting in a 5x2 design, which explains the ten-list study), which means that there are ten HTML pages all in all that I have to make. And the fact that it is presented at random, means that I cannot just copy and paste sentences in blocks. Item Number 1 in one list is not the same Item Number 1 in another list. So in the end, I ended up handcoding all these, doing 2000 repetitions of a copy-paste sequence.

But, by late afternoon, I had my nice collection of HTML pages. And when I tried to do the experiment myself, it worked! It produced the output that I wanted, and so I am happy.

Ah, there also was the interrupted meeting. I had a meeting with my adviser yesterday, scheduled for 5:00 PM. It turned out to be 5:30, and yet there were interruptions. One was due to one professor, and the other was due to the department chair, who apologized, and the third one was due to another professor who was coerced by the first interruptor to interrupt, just for the sake of completion. Interesting.

Anyway, that meeting was still fruitful. I am happy that my adviser doesn't think that my ideas are bogus and not worthy of a dissertation. Now I am moving to the next step, and that is, thinking what exactly is the hypothesis that I would be working with, and what are the experiments that I will need to design in order to address the hypotheses. I have one experiment lined up already, all I need to do is to get permission from the lab director to run it in her lab, and to get IRB approval for that, since my last IRB protocol expired a year ago.

I cannot wait for next week. Spring Break is coming up, that means I get to breathe some fresh air and not worry for academics in the meantime. I have things to do, but I suppose I am forcing myself not to do it for the moment, by getting out of town.

(Ambassade du Cameroun, from my Embassy Row Series)

Photo Tag in Sextuples

Wednesday, March 04, 2009

I would take this blog post as a brief break from my Embassy Row Series, due to the fact that I am tagged by Priyank. Apparently, the directions involve posting a photo revolving around the number six. Here's the directions.

1. Pick the 6th picture in the 6th picture folder.
2. Write the story behind it.
3. Pass it on to 6 other people.

So, let's see how this turns out.

Step 1: The Photo

Now this is the hard part. I don't know which photo album collection. My hard drive? My Facebook photo album? Oh, I have an idea. Based on my website, I can select the appropriate photo. It is arranged by country, and the sixth country happened to be Ecuador. Within Ecuador, the sixth photo album is La Basilica del Voto Nacional. And within that album, this is the sixth picture.



Step 2: The Story

In May of 2007, I decided to do a practice vacation. This happened to be the first time I went somewhere for a vacation on my own. My father told me not to go to South America due to the fact that I might be kidnapped. I wanted to go to Machu Picchu, but that destination was rather complicated. So I figured I should practice on an easier destination, so I picked Ecuador instead. I thought, if I get out of Ecuador alive, then I could do Peru later. Which indeed, it happened. I went to Peru to climb Machu Picchu a year later.

But anyway, this photo was taken inside the Basilica del Voto Nacional. This is a rather new church, new relatively, compared to the other churches that were already there centuries earlier. The picture here depicts the massive concrete vaults that dominate the whole structure.

This church is also the site where I got trapped into an elevator for 3 hours. I wanted to ascend to the bell tower, and there was a staircase and an elevator. I happened to be alone, and nobody else was joining me to go to the top. I pressed the elevator button, the elevator came and opened, I pressed the button for the top floor, and it closed. It didn't move. The lights turned off. I was trapped. I knocked. Mechanics came in. They were trying to repair and open the elevator. In the meantime, I was in there, sitting down in the dark, knocking from time to time, and they were telling to me please remain calm. Good thing I wasn't claustrophobic. Three hours later, they were able to open it, and I got out, and climbed the structure instead by the stairs.

Step 3: The Part Where You Infect Others

Hmm, this is the hard part. I'll probably pass this opportunity. The thing is, I don't think I can think of six other people to tag. I suppose it shows my small cyber-circle. But, if you guys want to do this, let me know so I can see what you got.

Purged

Tuesday, March 03, 2009

Have you ever had that feeling, where you really felt full and bloated, and that you cannot wait until you get to the nearest toilet, so you can strip down your pants, sit on the bowl, and take a huge dump? And when it finally happens, when you feel all that voluminous by-product pass your bowels and empty into the pool of water waiting underneath, you feel this enormous amount of relief?

I had that feeling this morning. But not because I took a huge dump. After all, you have no business knowing how big my shit is.

Instead, I am referring to my test, which I took this morning. I have this class that only meets every Tuesday for three hours. And today was the mid-term exam. For this test, I reviewed for multiple times, even forming study groups with multiple people in the class and meeting for three times the week before, bouncing ideas and questions against each other, testing each other. This resulted in me and the rest of the people knowing the material in and out, and I could argue for and against the different models that were competing for attention. It even affected by blogging habits. Why do you think I blogged about the organization of the mind for the post before this?

Anyway, so 9:00 AM came today, and I scanned the whole exam first. Yup, yup, yup, and yup. I figured I knew the answers to all of the questions. So I do think that it was a fair test. However, the coverage is just enormous, and so it took me the whole three hours to finish. I was sitting there, and writing and writing until I thought my right arm was about to fall off. There were times in which I was grasping the pen and I felt like I lost control of my fingers so I was moving my whole arm instead of just my hands in order to continue writing.

Before the test started, I wished to get this test over with, since I have this material in my head, and I just wanted to unload it. And in the end, I did unload this information from my head on to paper. I hope I did well.

So there, that was a good feeling. My working memory has free space again.

(Ambassade de Madagascar, from my Embassy Row Series)

Cerebral Organization

Sunday, March 01, 2009

I suppose it makes me wonder, how the human brain is wired, and what the different connections are inside the four different lobes spread across the two different hemispheres. I have a mid-term for my Psycholinguistics class this coming Tuesday, and I have been pre-occupied with models and theories of cognition lately.

For every psycholinguistic phenomenon, there is at least two theories competing for attention. And most of these theories usually span the divide between modular and connectionist viewpoints.

Basically, the difference lies in whether you see different parts of the brain being able to do multiple different tasks, or whether you believe in certain parts of the brain being dedicated to do one thing and just one thing. If you believe in the former, then you can be a connectionist, and if you believe in the latter, then chances are you believe in modular theories of the mind.

I believe I am in a good position to compare these two, given the fact that I took a class on Neurolinguistics last semester, and the professor (who is from the Linguistics Department) was very strongly inclined towards modularity. This semester on the other hand, I am taking a Psycholinguistics class and the professor (who is from the Psychology Department) is very strongly inclined towards connectionism.

The good thing about modularity is that every component of whatever model they describe seems to have a purpose. Take the Dual-Route Model of written word recognition, for example, pioneered by Max Coltheart and his colleagues. They posit a two-route model that would account for how the human being reads and recognizes words. There is the lexical route, which passes through a mental dictionary called the lexicon, and there is also the grapheme-to-phoneme conversion (GPC) route, which is just a collection of rules on how to translate certain letters to sounds. They posit this architecture due to the fact that there are certain types of disabilities such as different versions of dyslexias where people can only read words but not non-words (implying that the lexical route is intact, but the GPC route is damaged), and there are other people that can read words and non-words, but not irregular words (implying that the lexical route is damaged, but the GPC route is intact).

Then, there is the connectionist way of modeling things, such as the Parallel Distributed Processing Model which is pushed forward by James McClelland. One thing that initially intimidated me regarding the connectionist architecture is the fact that it seemed to be so mystical, and there wasn't a concrete distribution of work, since activation is not modular, but a pattern that is spread across the entire network. In word recognition for example, there are three main sections of the network: the orthographic, the phonological, and the semantic section. A word is recognized by having activation spread over the entire network, not just some all-or-nothing access through a lexicon.

If one were studying brain imaging, and say, for example, looking at brain damaged people and studying where their lesion site is, chances are one would prefer the modular view of cerebral organization. One could simply see what the common denominator is. One can simply look at the lesions, overlay the scans of each patient, and see what is the site that is commonly damaged between the different patients. That site should be the locus of the common damage that is exhibited by the patients. Aphasia studies normally are like these.

However, not everyone agrees to this view. Connectionists would retort: Do you really believe that there is just one neuron that is responsible for the representation of one lexical entry?

Over time, I tended to be sympathetic with the connectionist theories over the modular theories. In terms of parsimony for example, the architecture is unified, and they posit the same architecture for every phenomenon to be explained, whether it is speech perception, spoken word recognition, written word recognition, and possibly even discourse processing. I do think that it is a good system that would have the ability to handle the different phenomena that human language and cognition exhibits.

Another good ability that connectionist theories have is the fact that their models have been implemented. There have been countless numbers of Monte Carlo simulations and other computational implementations that these models have seen, which somehow makes the belief in these models stronger. If the numbers show the predictions, then all the better.

Now this brings me to my current task: I need to pick a theory to account for discourse processing in the context of my dissertation. That's why I have been harvesting these papers and seeing what is out there so that I can model what I think is the way the human mind works.

(Embassy of Kyrgyzstan, from my Embassy Row Series)