Internet Test Your Mate

Hehehehe. Back in May, I posted a link to a Flickr version of the classic George Crane "Tests for Husbands and Wives". Well, someone's done that one better and turned the hard to read pages of the scans into an Internet test! So, how do you rate? Let me know in comments.

14 As a 1930s husband, I am Very Poor (Failure) Take the test!

Test your mate

Are you a good spouse?

Rate yourself and your mate using these state of the art scales devised by Dr. George W. Crane.

Hammer down

Holy crap. I was born in the wrong era. As a lifetime devotee to Wile E. and all his exploits, I can appreciate the simple beauty of this treatment for depression.

Ah, the good old days.

Picture yourself in a boat on a river...

I started a long post about an interview I have scheduled for Monday morning at my office. We're all to be meeting with a "branding expert". For our unlaunched company with a crappy, crappy name. I'd gone on at length about the inanity of the exercise, but hadn't made it to my thesis. So I'm saving you all the grief of reading my whingeing and cutting to the chase.

BrandMasters Inc.¹ sent an exercise we're supposed to perform before showing up for our interviews. Mine is scheduled for 8am. The email arrived this afternoon.²

And what am I supposed to do before I show up?

Please gather 6 to 8 images/photographs you see as visually expressing your views in answer to the following question — What are your feelings about remainder of question redacted to very slightly protect my company's identity?

With one exception, images you select may be from any source - newspapers, magazines, personal photographs, or other sources. We ask that you NOT select images printed out from the Internet. Take the time to instead look through, for example, a variety of magazines for your selections.

Uh huh.

1. I don't read newspapers or magazines anymore. Internet killed the printing press star.
2. I don't have personal photos. Unusual, but not unheard of.
3. I don't have "feelings" about the ambiguously worded question.
4. I'm a goddamn software engineer.³

When I first read the late-arriving instructions I was a little irritated. But after a few moments of calm reflection I realized I was a lot irritated.⁴

Earlier this very day, I'd read a great, short post over at PsyBlog on the false consensus bias. This exercise is a perfect example of that phenomenon.

I am not a visual person. I'm a language guy. It's all about rhythm and meter and pacing and dialect and accent and...there are a lot of ands. When I read, I hear voices in my head. When I read a script, I hear performances in my head. When I write, the same applies.

So I complain to my coworkers. They are also irritated by the prospect, but only at the short-notice. Turns out they are all far more visual than I.

Then the debates start. Not smart debates. Our web designer - good at his job but not a serious thinker - argues that the web is an inherently visual medium. I point him to Craigslist. "That's visual, too. See, it's laid out on the screen..." He continues by saying books are inherently visual. Oy vey. Sure, I agree, typography and page design enhance a book, but it is primarily linguistic. No no, says he. Totally visual. He sees it all in his head.

Okay, but I don't. I hear it all in my head. He tells me I'm wrong a few times before we talk him down from the ledge.

I ask about a book of poetry. Is that visual as well? (My example was "Sonnets from the Portuguese", a hoary old classic, but definitely not a book of cleverly visual word pictures.) Absolutely says he and his partner. There's really no debating with someone who thinks iambic pentameter is visual.

So back to it: I can't perform this exercise. I'd like to help out and will do the best I can, but any images I did manage to bring in would be lies. I'll do my level best to explain that to Mayor McBrand on Monday, but he is, after all, just a marketing guy. The odds of him understanding complex concepts like: "not everyone reads only picture books"⁵ are pretty slim.

---

1 Name changed to protect the incompetent.
2 (= 4:25MST on Friday.)
3 Yes, I'm also an aspiring writer, but they pay me for the former.
4 That clam's still fresh enough to use, right?
5 Yes. That's right. I do read comic books. And usually I just read comic books and glance at the graphics. I'm not what Shane Smith would call visually illiterate, but it doesn't come naturally or easily to me.

Ladies! Eyes down there! Please?

Hey ladies...if I wore pants with a brightly colored patch over the crotchal areas, would you maybe do me the favor of a glance from time to time? I'm gonna get a complex!

From the Online News Association conference in Toronto, two researchers displayed maps showing website eyetracking. No shock: the top right of any webpage is a deadzone. Small shock: dudes like to check out the competition's packages. Big shock: apparently we also consider dogs competition.

The revelation that the wandering eyes belonged to the males was embarrassing enough for the men in the audience, but researchers Laura Ruel and Nora Paul had a further humiliation in store. They got the same results when they repeated the experiment with pictures on the American Kennel Club site.

Crap. Seriously? It's bad enough I'm genetically hardwired to look at other dudes' johnsons (and puppy peckers,) but girls don't? Really? So why the hell did I spend all that money on that penis pump?

I guess I'll just convert it into a bong.

via Deadspin

No one's depressed when doing a polka

Should I be concerned that I spend two or three hours at a time perfectly still, then move for a moment or two before going back to stasis? Glad there's a power law governing the way I move. "In this week's Physical Review Letters, Yoshiharu Yamamoto of the University of Tokyo and his colleagues explain how the movements of people suffering from clinical depression can be described by a power law—and how this law is so different from that of healthy people that it looks truly diagnostic."

The curves produced by plotting the lengths of low-activity periods against their frequency were strikingly different in healthy and depressed people. This reflects not inactivity by the depressed (though they were, indeed, less active) but a difference in the way that the healthy and the depressed spread their resting periods over the day. Depressed people experience longer resting periods more frequently and shorter ones less frequently than healthy people do.

So...if this is correct than what would happen flipping this on its head? Let's assume for a moment that the depression and movement curves are merely correlated. Is it a one-way street, or is it a feedback loop that can be affected by changing resting periods. Suppose a therapy, the sole purpose of which is to force the patient to move/rest in accordance with the "healthy" power law curve. Would that be efficacious?

Or, there is a purely causal relationship, in which case the altered movement curve is solely useful for objective diagnosis. If that's the case, it's at least a huge leap forward in diagnosis.

Personally, I don't believe in many purely causal relationships in biology. The systems are so complex that the interactions tend to feedback, either directly or through related channels. Given that, I hope someone takes this research in hand and tries studying the effects of my proposed treatment.

Here's a link to the paper.

Also, via MindHacks

Damn that Batman!

I haven't been forced to take a Myers-Briggs in years. And that wasn't even my fault, I swear. Some people had trouble dealing with my manager, so we had to do some group dynamics crap for two or three days. Mind you, I got along great with my manager. He was a competent, brash, insensitive MIT grad. That team need much more brutality from above, crying from below.

Anyway, I believe the last time I took the M-B I came out as an INTP. I retook one online this morning to see if I've changed. I haven't. Then I checked my results against The REAL Myers-Briggs Personality Types Made Relevant:

The Egghead

The typical INTP is a logical, abstract thinker whose intellect is ideally suited to understanding pure mathematics, linguistics, formal logic theory, and other pursuits unsuited to making a real living. The INTP can often understand even the most subtle nuances of lattice quantum chromodynamics, but cannot perform more concrete tasks such as dressing himself, operating a motor vehicle, or opening a door. An INTP may be able to tell you how to construct a nuclear reactor from a coconut and two pieces of string, but may be completely incapable of fixing a hole in a boat.

While I'm pretty strongly typed as INT, I only weakly express a preference between Perceiving/Judging. So if one more of you bastids pisses me off, I'm likely to become the outside contractor and build that damn Death Star.

via Mind Hacks

Queen Amygdala strikes!

As if Natalie Portman weren't already the greatest (and hottest) geek girl ever...

Natalie: cognitive neuroscientist.

Something light and frothy for a Friday

Here are some cool auditory illusions. I especially like the Shepard's Paradox.

Is that a...penis in your pocket?

Here's an interesting paper on disfluency and a quick rundown by Chris at the Mixing Memory blog.

Everyday speech is littered with disfluency, often correlated with the production of less predictable words (e.g., Beattie & Butterworth, 1979). But what are the effects of disfluency on listeners? In an ERP experiment which compared fluent to disfluent utterances, we established an N400 effect for unpredictable compared to predictable words. This effect, reflecting the difference in ease of integrating words into their contexts, was reduced in cases where the target words were preceded by a hesitation marked by the word er. Moreover, a subsequent recognition memory test showed that words preceded by disfluency were more likely to be remembered. The study demonstrates that hesitation affects the way in which listeners process spoken language, and that these changes are associated with longer-term consequences for the representation of the message.

Chris closes his summary by wondering about the effects and role of disfluency in comedy, which is exactly what I was thinking while reading about the study. I can think of three ways this comes into play in comic delivery.

1. Exaggerating disfluency before an unpredictable word. This is the most common usage, where an unexpected twist comes at the end of the joke. An extended pause lets the clever listener know something is coming.
2. The opposite of above, specifically avoiding disfluency before an unpredictable word. This is a stylistic choice which works well for deadpan comics. The listener is always running 400ms behind the comedian, but if she's good, the delayed laughter doesn't effect her setup of the subsequent joke.
   
3. Intentionally using disfluency before predictable words. Pausing or "um"-ing sets up the tension; the mundane word causes the release. This isn't good for a big laugh, but creates a little listener anxiety which can be exploited through repetition and then a quick switch. Think of this like a meta-variation on a normal joke's pattern, where the twist at the end - a full joke unto itself - also varies because of the odd deliveries that preceded it.