Comparing the Effects of Question Framing and Temporal Construal on Prospect Theory

http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dcb379g7_1dszrgf

My Final Paper

I bet these chimps could easily get into Cal!

http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science/12/03/chimp.memory.ap/index.html#cnnSTCOther1

holy cow.

This chimp not only has memorized symbols for numbers, but has done so in order. It has also somehow processed the concept of numerical hierarchy, since it can pick numbers in order even when the numbers are not consecutive. And to top it all off, the chimp is doing so really, really fast and accurately. Faster than I can do it, and certainly faster than a cal kid :)

Apparently, however, this isn't the remarkable part, according to the article. The key experiment showed how the chimp can pick the right sequence of numbers (remember, they have gaps) while the numbers are covered up, and it's only seen the numbers for 2 tenths of a second. Its success rate is 80%, while smart college kids get 20%.

So how does the article explain the chimp's dominance in this test? The evolutionary theory says that as humans evolved, they shunted more brain functions to language development and usage from other tasks, like rapid processing and acute short-term memory. Oh, by the way, the chimp also outperformed on longer memory tasks (say, the letters were covered up for 10 seconds and then the chimp picked the numbers off). This would not seem to support the theory that we learn language through simply generic learning mechanisms - the scientists appear to claim that specific language mechanisms are draining brainpower and cannot be utilized for other functions.

I still think the coolest thing here is that the chimp is conceptualizing sequences. Memorizing symbols is one thing, but putting them in some mental array and then realizing that 5 comes after 2, even though they aren't next to each other (therefore there is no mnemonic for 5 from 2) is incredible. I once thought that sequencing would be only understandable through language, but this disproves it (the chimp doesn't know the language terms that go along with explaining numbers).

he's soo fast...it's scary

hindi as the court language

So currently, court decisions are delivered in English in India (high court decisions, basically the equivalent of circuit courts of app0eals and the Supreme Court in the US). The issue at hand is to make Hindi another language through which to deliver decisions.

So a bunch of MP's from Tamil Nadu, in the South of India (by the way, that's where I'm supposed to be from) are up in arms about this. Some interesting issues are raised here. Tamils are exceedingly proud of their language, because arguably it is from a compeltely different root than Hindi (or Sanksrit for that matter), and therefore, all the languages in India are either related to Tamil or Hindi. So, by making Hindi a court language officially, the MP's feel that it proves some sort of superiority of Hindi.

The paradox is that India, unequivocally, has two legal, official languages - English and Hindi. English is a colonial relic, and Hindi is just spoken by most people. So legally and practically it stands to reason that Hindi would be the court language as well as English...otherwise there are just weird contradictions. So, the protests prove that people are passionate enough to fight this even though it makes logical sense. It proves that regional language is a large enough aspect of cultural pride to make a technicality a fighting point.

Tamil has traditionally been a belligerent language (in my opinion). I'm sure many of you have heard of the Tamil Tigers, a terrorist/freedom fighter group in Sri Lanka. They are unified by their language. That's not to knock the Tamils though - Tamil is justifiably one of the proudest achievements and cultural hallmarks of a historically oppressed Southern India. Almost all the languages down there -Kannada, Malayalam, Telegu - are derived from Tamil, and after centuries (which haven't yet ended) of Northern oppression, indirect and direct, it's another slap in the face to have Tamil again marginalized in favor of Hindi.

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http://www.hindu.com/2007/11/29/stories/2007112959430100.htm

http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/holnus/002200711281541.htm

Roh, roh, roh your boat....out of South Korea

http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/opinon/2007/11/137_14325.html

I found the general concept here to be pretty funny. President Roh of South Korea seems to have a habit of talking too much, or as he puts it, "some of my language is unconstrained." Apparently he's a terrific leader otherwise, responsible for democratic reforms and fair-competition policies in South Korea (after a tradition of dictatorial rulers). And yet, despite his successes, the one thing that has undermined his tenure is his use of language, often improper or vulgar as the korea times op-ed puts it.

I remember on the AP Language test last year (shoutout?) there was a series of articles on the changing face of US politics, and how emphasis had shifted from policy to charisma. The parallel here is obvious, involving President Roh's unavoidable media presence and television's ability to broadcast his language to a large number of people. Regardless of his policy triumphs, his public face, the person that the citizenry relate to, is less dependent on his accomplishments than how he presents himself, and by extension, how he talks. Whether this is a sad truth for politics is up for debate, but it's a truth nonetheless, and evidently one that Roh didn't figure out.

"Just three months after taking office, he startled citizens by saying he feared he could "no longer stand being president.""

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/02/22/news/roh.php

"In December, he mocked critics of his attempts to reduce South Korea's military dependence on the United States as "clinging to the pants of the United States.""

"The same month he said of Japan and China: "In olden days, we Koreans were squeezed between Japan and China. Whenever Japan was unified and strong, they came over here and trampled on our people and ran amok. Whenever a new dynasty emerged in China, the Chinese came over here and wreaked havoc. Now we are strong enough to prevent such things from happening.""

Frankly, I admire the bluntness with which Roh addresses issues head -on, or aptly summarizes a non-pc state of events. But of course, there's a game to be played in politics and he's not playing it. His comments have been so controversial that in February, Roh was forced to leave the majority party...it would be a pity if a diplomatic yet dispassionate and aloof politician took his place.

Roh did show off a clever use of words as he departed from his party though - look at this:

"I know I'm to blame for making myself everyone's favorite target for criticism. But I also consider this a price I have to pay for democracy."

Sneakily, he's managed to tie his departure to the furthering of democracy, making him a very noble figure. It is kind of true though, in the sense that the previous dictatorial presidents would have been able to get away with such remarks easily, but Roh delegated away many presidential powers and safeguards. I guess in this way, the opinionated Roh is trapped in an unfortunate future.

ASL and art

The article that first got my attention was this: http://www.newarkadvocate.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071112/UPDATES01/71112040/1002/

Kids are learning sign language through art, apparently by making tissue paper resemble hand motions or something.The interesting connection, though, is the one between sign language and aesthetics, visual and kind of metaphorically (I'll explain this one later, I just can't think of the word).

It kind of makes sense that sign language would also develop (naturally) an aesthetic component. This is true of pretty much all written language. The Koran is often written in embroidered gold font, and the beauty of the text is meant to complement the message of glory. Fonts, such as Roman letters, were engineered with visual characteristics in mind (in this case, power, expressed through the serif). And cool things have been done through manipulation of writing, like Apollinnaire's picture poetry. On the flip side, oral language also has its aesthetic component. Rhyming, alliteration, meter, are all things that make verbalized langage sound good. The pont here si that language doesn't just convey information, and oftentimes the aesthetic aspects that accompany the information either complement/reinforce the message or comprise an entirely different message themselves.

So along comes ASL, and after thinking about the previous two cases of writtena dn oral langauge, it becoems clear that ASL occupies an interesting niche. It is a visual language, in that you can see the signs, but it's also analogous to oral language because it's not permanent - the signs come and go, mirroring the flow of transient phonemes. Indeed, as this article explains:

http://www.ubu.com/ethno/discourses/bauman_asl.html

ASL (and any other sign language too by inference) combines many of the aesthetic elements of writing and speaking. For example, and this is really cool - you can rhyme in ASL by repeating particular handshapes. Moreover, I guess the cadence, or speed and rhythm of the hand symbols conveys a kind of meter, or lilt. And the style, flourishes, whatever, along with the actual design fo the handshapes contribute to the visually pleasing/aesthetic qualities of ASL. The article seems to make the argument that ASL is like poetry, containing "meter, rhyme, metaphor, simile, and line-breaks.", as well as spatial characteristics. It's kind of like listening to a recitation and reading an artful depiction simultaneously.

More on ASL (and film) by Thursday.

Aping language (i thought that was pretty funny)

http://www.arn.org/blogs/index.php/2/2007/11/06/new_assessment_of_ape_language_skills_is

Very similar to the discussion we had in class. The data presented by the article, namely that apes tend only to use less than 2 words in a sentence and are therefore (for most intents and purposes) incapable of using grammar suggests that they only use language at the most basic level, pure association. I thought about this after class, and it seems to me that association is simply not unique to language. For example, if I point to a piece of cheesecake and think of delicious taste, then I am effectively naming that cheesecake with the sensation of taste. When we define a language, either the most basic element is association, or we leave it out of the definition altogether, since it's so brutally obvious and non-unique. So to judge whether or not these apes know language, they must demonstrate more than the ability to match sounds/signals with objects 1:1.

It's funny how the article describes the initial enthusiasm for verbal apes and only later criticism of the methods employed and data collected...since, as Descartes said, language is all that separates us from beasts, why are we so keen to see it replicated in monkeys? Maybe we're lonely...

Anyway, the point is that apes don't get any level of grammar - any kind of multiple word strings. Apparently the average number of words per utterance for some famous monkey was 1.15, suggesting a single noun per occurrence of language. Even when multiple words came out, it's very plausible that grammar still didn't exist. See, with a greater number of the words, the possibility for correct grammar decreases logarithmically. So the ape sentences of <3 words (no, not amorous words :)) could be saying many different things and we don't actually know whether they're grasping the concept of grammar (a hit b, as opposed to b hit a). Silly apes, language is for humans.

Chinese + Japanese Text messaging has now been released by Smart Communications, Inc. http://technology.inquirer.net/infotech/infotech/view_article.php?article_id=98986

I'm very uninitiated here, but I don't understand how this works. I believe there is a huge number of characters in Chinese (and Japanese Kanji is the same as Chinese..?) - heck I have trouble enough hitting the number keys three times to access 26 letters, so thousands of characters would be nearly impossible on a 10 digit keypad.

So in doing some research (and talking to my Korean roommate), here's what I've kind of discovered. Chinese people sued to text in pinyin, which is the phonetic equivalent of written Chinese, but it uses English characters. So the fact that the article refers to new "chinese and Japanese language texting" implies that this isn't just pinyin - it actually refers to traditional written characters. Now a couple alternatives exist I believe. One is that the components of each character, like little boxes or squiggly lines are what you find and press to eventually form a composite character the same way you write a word in English. The other possible method of implementing this involves sets of characters assigned to each digit, and by the same logic that w-9 texting fills in the rest of a word, only contextually reasonable sentences get completed?

I'm sure there's someone in the class who actually knows how this works, so I'll just ask in a couple minutes. Incidentally, how are the keyboards structured for Chinese and Japanese?

Bats (aren't bugs! for those c+h fans out there)

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2007/10/31/bat-calls-behavior.html

I remember musing in class on whether the concept of naming (remember this discussion?) and the associated idea of identity were unique to humans, and were therefore the source of our singular consciousness of consciousness (heh...that is to say, we are aware of our consciousness). I still wonder about the second part, but the first claim is easily disproven. This article deals with bat language and identity calls. The only discernible difference between bat calls is the voice of any individual bat, but apparently, twin baby bats sound exactly the same, so by their voices alone are indistinguishable to a mother bat who may need to nurse or feed one or the other. So to uniquely identify themselves, the twins emit different "isolation" calls which are different in the actual pitches of the call. In fact, all pup bats do this isolation thing, suggesting that they are, in essence, naming themselves.

But does this constitute a "name"? The question to ask here is whether the bats know that emitting this call identifies them, or it's just an instinctive thing to do. And then determining whether a bat is aware of its identity could hinge on the answer to that question. Since there's no bidirectionality (i think) of this naming convention - like, the mom doesn't emit the isolation call of some pup to get its attention - then I think the pups aren't aware of the function of their call. They just cry it to get mom's attention. On the other hand, the mom probably knows the function of the call since she associates calls with pups, so to her the call is a name. Therefore, the mom is aware of someone else's identity, so by differentiation would she then be aware of herself in relation to others?

Enough of that, more topical now - clearly the bats have a verbalized language with possibly differentiated "words" (calls for food or nursing)...the anthro question is whether human language develops along the same lines? Because the bats definitely didn't form a committee to create a language, so do humans naturally and instinctively generate language? I always have wondered whether at some point cavemen got together in a town hall (or cave) and decided that cow meant cow, etc., or if somehow over vast geographical expanses the random grunts of different individuals organically took on meaning, syntax, grammar. Anyone know the answer?

Dyslexia

Rrgh, I still don't have my account back.

Today's post will deal with dyslexia and phonology.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071020083954.htm

Briefly, the article is a critique of dyslexia research because of the vagueness of terms thrown around to diagnose the disorder, and the circular reasoning often employed by researchers. Apparently, researchers often cite phonology (translation of sounds into letters, or just processing of sounds) as the cause of dyslexia (basically poor phonology causes it), but then they also call this the effect (dyslexia causes bad phonology). Heck, nobody really knows what phonology means [the article seems to claim].

I did some background research on dyslexia (read: wikipedia), and I think there's a more interesting concept at play here. See, many people think that phonology is innate; for example, some figure named Gwen Slaughter (who had a great Google Pagerank, so I'm assuming she's famous...) said there's a "phoneme module" in the brain dedicated to this translation between sounds and writing. Now we talked about how this isn't necessarily a correct theory since language may not have a specialized neurological mechanism and instead be learned through general learning processes. But the innate, specialized theory seems to fit the evidence here - dyslexia affects people in a very localized manner, people who are intelligent in all other respects.

So we talked about this in class (i only wrote half of this before class) and we learned about the research showing different connections between the aural and visual cortexes of the brain. So that would suggest that it's not really some module that's broken, it's just that some people are wired so that incidentally, writing is difficult. But I wonder if this is an empty definition...what I mean is that if there's no other deficit between the aural and visual processing, then the wonky neural pathways must be really a specialized bunch between the aural and visual areas of the brain, and we might as well call that a "module." Like, it would prove the point that phoneme to writing translation doesn't have a module if in addition to dyslexia, someone couldn't match sounds to a visible object, or like sight singing music was very difficult, but no such correlations exist (actually I wonder about the sight singing - does anybody know about this?). Anyway, it just seems to suggest that something in the brain is specialized for writing. Or, writing may just be one of those near-limit activities for humans, becaus 16% seems awfully high for a disorder occurrence (a failure of this module).

Last point. I hate to say this, Nikola, but I talked to my mom today (she's a speech therapist) and she basically echoed what Steve said in class, that stuttering is a motor problem, and failure to recall words is different altogether (not aphasia, but anomia).

uhoh

Hi everybody, this will be my temporary blog for as long as it takes to reconquer my email address. It was hacked into last Thursday, and since Blogger is linked to Gmail, I've lost control of the old blog.

Anyway, today's entry will deal with language extinction.

http://www.thejakartapost.com/detaileditorial.asp?fileid=20071027.E02&irec=1

(interestingly, the jakarta post shows up disproportionately on my news alert. anyone else?) In Indonesia, over 700 languages exist, and I guess they mean "languages" in a stronger way than dialects. Skipping most of the details, the article goes on to say that a couple regions are densely populated with languages, but with speaker counts as low as 10 people. The minimum threshold for language preservation is 100,000 people, so these languages are headed for extinction. The main forces contributing to extinction involve "linguicide" which basically is an effect of oppression or genocide, the dominant language taking over, and socio-political forces (of assimilation?).

So after this, the article makes, in my opinion, the huge logical leap of positing a solution to the problem (this isn't the leap) and then declaring that the Indonesian government has a moral responsibility to implement the solution. I'm still left scratching my head, wondering why this is a problem, and how this article decided that it's important for " endangered indigenous languages -- a nation's precious cultural heritage -- be maintained and conserved in this globalized world." There are lots of concrete advantages to having a dominant language that unites a country, but how much cultural heritage and identity can you need within your own country? Because, I agree that language is central to culture, so the individual trademarks of some Indonesian island will disappear after you take away their little language, but who cares? From the standpoint of prosperity, they'll be better able to integrate with the rest of the country and horizons will open up. Now, let's assume for a second that it is important for Indonesian culture to survive in a "globalized world." Is an Indonesian culture that consists of the dominant language and traditions any worse of an identity than Indonesia composed of many different subcultures (and languages)? The advantages of diverse-er culture would probably be very indirect, and I'd like to find out what they are - I do not however agree with the commonly thrown-around statement that culture is intrinsically good simply because it's rich or beautiful or any of those other empty adjectives.