Being Human

Today's Sally Forth:

Negative polarity items have been extensively studied, but I invite readers to point us to studies on phenomena of the type displayed in the last panel.

[Update — some of the examples of "just croak already" from the web:

So Fidel, please - do us all a favor and just croak already so that Cuba may live again.
I sometimes wish she would just croak already…!
Will you just croak already?
It's his fault I'm in this mess to begin with — is it any wonder sons wish their fathers dead? Why can't he just croak already? (from a translation of Molière's L'avare)
Oh, just croak already, you evil repuglican financier.
Yeah, I was actually hoping Big Boss would just croak already…a few times I thought he was gone.
I wish old Teddy would just croak already!
Amy do us all a favor and just croak already.
Why don?t Cheney just croak already? I have never said that about anyone but he has done enough already to bring this country down.
why can't Kim Jong Il just croak already?
Ultimately, though, the show had me fervently wishing that Floyd would just croak already: not exactly a glowing recommendation.
I'm sorry folks, I just have to say it: When will this guy just croak already??? What a bunch of white bread garbage!!!
Given by the same dull principal (why couldn't he just croak already?), in the same, bland auditorium.

Imperatives and "will you __" constructions; complements of wish, hope, etc.; "why doesn't/couldn't/can't" constructions. Commonly used for political leaders, parents, other authority figures. ]

If I and my friends and colleagues could just have found the strength of will to not talk about Dan Brown's new novel The Lost Symbol, perhaps we could have stopped his march to inevitable victory as the fastest-selling and most renowned novelist in human history, and The Lost Symbol could have just faded away to become his Lost Novel. If only we could just have shut up. And we tried. But we just couldn't resist the temptation to gabble on about the new blockbuster. Sam Anderson at New York Magazine has set up a discussion salon devoted to The Lost Symbol, under the title the Vulture Reading Room, to allow us to tell each other (and you, and the world) what we think about the book. Already Sam's own weakness has become clear: he struggled mightily to avoid doing the obvious — a Dan Brown parody — and of course he failed. His cringingly funny parody is already up on the site (as of about 4 p.m. Eastern time on September 22). Soon my own first post there will be up. I know that Sarah Weinman (the crime reviewer) will not be far behind, and Matt Taibbi (the political journalist) and NYM's own contributing editor Boris Kachka will not be far behind her.

We know we are fueling the eternal flame that keeps the Dan Brown pot boiling. But we just can't help ourselves. We have the willpower of a bunch of butterflies. Stop us, someone, before we write again. Because I'm sure we will.

I've just a read a fantastic New York Times article from last year on the ongoing $1,000,000 Netflix challenge to create an algorithm that will predict what unseen films customers will liked based on their past preferences.

As well as an interesting insight into how companies are trying to guess our shopping preferences it is also a great guide to one of the central problems in scientific psychology: how we can reconcile numerical data with human thought and behaviour.

The Netflix prize teams have a bunch of data from customers who have rated films they've already seen and they have been challenged to write software that predicts future ratings.

Part of this process is hypothesis testing, essentially an experimental approach to find out what might be important in the decision process. For example, a team might guess that women will rate musicals higher than men. They can then test this prediction out on the data, making further predictions based on past conclusions, theories or even just hunches.

The other approach is to use mathematical techniques that look for patterns in the data. To use the jargon, these procedures look for 'higher order properties' - in other words, patterns in the patterns of data.

Think of it like looking at the relationship between different forests rather than thinking of everything as individual trees.

The trouble is, is that these mathematical procedures can sometimes find reliable high level patterns when it isn't obvious to us what they represent. For example, the article discusses the use of a technique called singular value decomposition (SVD) to categorise movies based on their ratings;

There’s a sort of unsettling, alien quality to their computers’ results. When the teams examine the ways that singular value decomposition is slotting movies into categories, sometimes it makes sense to them — as when the computer highlights what appears to be some essence of nerdiness in a bunch of sci-fi movies. But many categorizations are now so obscure that they cannot see the reasoning behind them. Possibly the algorithms are finding connections so deep and subconscious that customers themselves wouldn’t even recognize them.

At one point, Chabbert showed me a list of movies that his algorithm had discovered share some ineffable similarity; it includes a historical movie, “Joan of Arc,” a wrestling video, “W.W.E.: SummerSlam 2004,” the comedy “It Had to Be You” and a version of Charles Dickens’s “Bleak House.” For the life of me, I can’t figure out what possible connection they have, but Chabbert assures me that this singular value decomposition scored 4 percent higher than Cinematch — so it must be doing something right. As Volinsky surmised, “They’re able to tease out all of these things that we would never, ever think of ourselves.” The machine may be understanding something about us that we do not understand ourselves.

In these cases, it's tempting to think there's some deeply psychological property of the film that's been captured by the analysis. Maybe all trigger a wistful nostalgia, or perhaps each represents the same unconscious fantasy.

It could also be that each is under 90 minutes, or comes with free popcorn. It could even be that the grouping is entirely spurious and represents nothing significant. Importantly, the answer to these questions is not in the data to be discovered, we have to make the interpretation ourselves.

Experimental methods go from meaning to data, while exploratory methods go from data to meaning. Somewhere in the middle is our mind.

The Netflix challenge is this problem on steroids and the NYT piece brilliantly explores the practical problems in making sense of it all.

Link to NYT piece 'If You Liked This, You’re Sure to Love That'

I've just found a curious historical article discussing the early debates over whether anaesthesia could trigger sexual dreams in patients. As this was Britain in the 1800s, much of the fuss was centred on whether the Victorian lady was actually capable of such things:

In January, 1849, a discussion of “Chloroform in Midwifery” occurred during a meeting of the Westminster Medical Society in England. One of the physicians, Dr. G. T. Gream (Obstetrician, Queen Charlotte’s Lying-In Hospital, London, England) enumerated several reasons why he did not think that chloroform was appropriate for obstetric use, and in so doing, he “alluded to several cases in which women had, under the influence of chloroform, made use of obscene and disgusting language. This latter fact alone he considered sufficient to prevent the use of chloroform in English women”...

In a subsequent issue of The Lancet, notes from the Medico-Chirurgical Society of Edinburgh of February 7, 1849, were published. Sir James Young Simpson (Obstetrician, Edinburgh, Scotland, developer of chloroform anesthesia, and President of the Royal College of Physicians in 1849; 1811–1870) stated that after 15 months of use in thousands of cases, “he had never seen, nor had he ever heard of any other person having seen, any manifestation of sexual excitement result from the exhibition of chloroform…. The excitement, he was inclined to think, existed not in the individuals anesthetized, but was the result of impressions harbored in the minds of the practitioners, not in the minds of the chloroformed.”

Of course, there are some cases of criminal clinicians who have used sedation to attack their patients, but we now know that some modern anaesthetics, particularly midazolam and propofol, really do seem to be involved in causing sexual hallucinations and imagery in patients.

As far as I know, the reason why certain anaesthetics spark sexual imagery is still a mystery.

As we discussed earlier this year, the introduction of anaesthesia was controversial, partly because of the belief that pain was useful in keeping people alive and partly because experiencing pain was considered morally virtuous.

Link to PubMed entry for paper.

The next-to-latest xkcd:

There must have been many SF stories based on the premise that searchers for ET signaling Just Don't Get It, but I can't think of any.

Probably related: I can't think of any scientifically-plausible way to cash that premise in, other than dull things like really slow-moving sentients using nanohertz-range modulation of a spectrally prominent carrier.

No doubt some readers can remedy these deficiencies of memory and imagination.

[Update — I didn't mean stories about how ETs might actively prevent us from seeing their signals, or the signals of others; nor stories about how ETs might be so alien that communication would be impossible, so that even when we find their signals, we can't make sense of them, or perhaps completely misunderstand them. Those are both good themes, found in lots of stories that I can think of, and no doubt many more that I don't know.

What I had in mind was something more strictly analogous to the plight of the ants, who have looked carefully for chemical signals, but (presumably) have failed to consider the intrinsically implausible hypothesis that an intelligent and social species might make use of frequency-and-amplitude modulation of air-pressure variation at time scales of a hundred microseconds to 10 seconds or so.]