The pace of review

One of my manuscripts will shortly enter its 7th month of being under review. Apparently one of the three reviewers keeps promising to send in a review but never does. Now the 4+ months a different manuscript languished under review seems speedy.

Ray Kurzweil is convinced that the pace of science is increasing exponentially and will continue to do so. I think he's neglected one rate-limiting step in the process.

Paper submitted

I just submitted a new paper on pronoun resolution ("Do inferred causes really drive pronoun resolution"), in which I argue that a widely-studied phenomenon called "implicit causality" has been misanalyzed and is in fact at least two different phenomena (as described in this previous post). You can find the paper on my publications page. Comments are welcome.

I always find writing up methods and results relatively easy. The trick is fitting the research into the literature in a way that will make sense and be useful to readers. That is, while the narrow implications are often clear, it's not always obvious which broader implications are most relevant. That is, the paper has clear implications for the few dozen people who study implicit causality, but one would like people beyond that small group to also find the results relevant.

I tried a few different approaches before ultimately settling on a particular introduction and conclusion. I was curious how much the paper had changed from the first draft to the last.

Here's the first draft, according to Wordle:

Here's draft 2:

The most obvious differences is that I hyphenated a lot more in the final draft (I was trying to make the word limit). But it doesn't appear that the changes in theme -- as measured by Wordle -- were all that drastic. That's either a good sign (my paper didn't lose its soul in the process of editing) or a bad sign (I didn't edit it enough).

I guess we'll see when the reviews come back in.

Broken but not yet Dead

I became fairly ill on my last trip to Russia in August. The disease itself was fairly nasty if generally treatable, though it came with a not insignificant chance of developing fatal complications. Meanwhile, it took me a day to convince any of my friends that I was sick enough that I needed to see a doctor (they all wanted me to take various berries or herbs instead). Having gotten one friend on board, it took him a day to find a hospital that was open (one was closed because of a power outage, and several were open but all the doctors were on vacation). I eventually got to a doctor who gave me the necessary meds. Within a few days my fever was low enough I could get around reasonably well, and though I still felt like shit for a few weeks after that, I was able to fly home on schedule.

I was reminded of this story by Dr. Isis's harrowing account of her recent, nasty bout of mosquito-born infection. Her story is much more compelling than mine (one reason I didn't have a full post on mine before) and worth reading in its own right. What I picked up on in particular was the following:

Health care in the United States might be broken, but at least we have health care.  I spent the last two weeks teaching medical school in a country where much of the population doesn't have access to running water and access to fresh food is limited.  41% of children under four are iron deficient.  There are 60 times more low birth weight infants per capita than in the United States.  There is a hospital in the capitol city, but no CT, MRI, or dialysis. It has two intensive care beds. Nine ambulances service the entire country.  Medical record keeping is problematic and there is a shortage of technicians, doctors, and nurses.

That's absolutely true. It's also a reminder, though, that things broken -- if left without repairs too long -- eventually decay away. Right now it is nice that our (American) health care system is still better than that in the developing world ... but it's worrisome that it's not as good as that in the rest of the developed world. If we wait long enough without fixing it we may wake up one day and find that we are no longer in the developed world.

If this seems far-fetched, consider that among developed nations, we're in the middle or back of the pack in health care, primary education, income equality and especially Internet infrastructure. In most of these areas (perhaps not primary education) we've beens steadily losing ground for decades (we're also losing ground in fields where we're still technically ahead, like science). If that continues, we will eventually be left behind.

The military is making telepathic helmets. Sign me up.

It appears researchers at UC-Irvine, University of Maryland and Carnegie Mellon have a DOD grant to investigate the development of "though helmets": 

The devices would harness a person´s brain waves and transmit them as radio waves, where they would be translated into words in the headphones of other soldiers.

I need one of these.


Don't blink -- I'm reading your thoughts


The proposed technology (which they don't expect to be ready for a decade or two) relies on EEG technology -- that is, measuring brain waves. As it happens, this is a method I use to run experiments. It has its limitations.


First off, it only really works if people are sitting still and not moving their eyes. EEG measures electrical activity. Ideally, it measure the brain's electrical activity, but muscles also produce electrical activity and the effects are hundreds of times larger than brain effects. People are working on snazzy new algorithms to factor out the thunderclaps of eye blinks (the huge mountains in this picture are individual blinks).

One-of-a-kind

Another problem is individual variation. While blinks are very easy to see in the raw waveforms, thoughts are hard. For instance, one of the best known EEG effects in language is the N400 -- a broadly-distributed negative deflection around 400 milliseconds after the participant sees a word. Unfortunately, the N400 is so small relative to all the noise in the signal that it's hard to see on a single trial. In a typical experiment, each participant sees 30-40 words (or more), and we average across those trials. Even then, each individual person's N400 looks very different, so we usually have to average across at least a dozen different people to get a good signal.

Thoughts

The bulk of EEG research employs a violation paradigm. We measure the brain's activity when something unexpected happens. For instance, a psycholinguist like myself might compare the two following sentences:

(1) Dog bit the man.

(2) The man bit the dog.

The second sentence is surprising relative to the first, and you can typically see a reasonably large effect in the brain waves (modulo the caveats above). Part of the reason we use violation paradigms is they produce large effects. Trying to compare two perfectly normal sentences is much, much harder.

Other typical effects people can find are differences between function words (e.g., prepositions) and content words (e.g., nouns) -- though, again, this is hard to see on a trial-by-trial basis.

Get me one

There are many, many other obstacles in the way of a mind-reading EEG helmet. That isn't to say that I don't think such a helmet will be built eventually, or that the government is wasting it's money. Technology constantly improves, and setting an on-the-face absurd goal can be excellent motivation.

But I wouldn't start saving up to buy one of your own just yet. Though I'd love one. A helmet that worked that well would make my research go much, much faster.

Are Cyborgs Near?

Raymond Kurzweil, inventor and futurist, predicts that by the 2030s, it will be possible to upload your mind, experience virtual reality through brain implants, have experiences beamed into your mind, and communicate telepathically. Just to name a few predictions.

Kurzweil, as he himself recently noted on On The Media, has a track record of successful predictions over the past three decades. Past performance being the best predictor of future performance, this leads people to at least pay attention to his arguments. Nonetheless, as the mutual funds folk say, past performance is a predictor, not a guarantee.

Exponential Progress

I suspect that Kurzweil is right about many things, but I'm not sure about the telepathy. When I have heard him speak, his primary argument for his predictions is telepathy only seems like a distant achievement because we think technology moves at a linear rate, but in fact knowledge and capability increases exponentially. This has clearly been the case in terms of computing speed.

Fair enough. The problem is that we aren't sure exactly how hard the problems we are facing are. There is a famous anecdote about an early pioneer in Artificial Intelligence assigning "vision" as a summer project. This was many decades ago, and as anyone in the field knows, machine vision is improving rapidly but still not that great.

A more contemporary example: A colleague I work with closely built a computation model of a relatively simple process in human language and tried to simulate some data. However, it took too long to run. When he looked at it more carefully, he realize that his program required more cycles to complete than there are atoms in the known universe. That is, merely waiting for faster computers was not going to help; he needed to re-think his program.

The Distance

In short, even if we grant Kurzweil that computers improve exponentially, somebody still needs to program them. Our ability to program may also be improving exponentially, but I'm unconvinced that we know how far we have to go.

Suppose I wanted to walk to some destination 1,000 miles away. I walk 1 mile the first year. If I keep going at the same rate, it'll take 1000 years. But if my speed doubles each year, it will take less than 14 years. Which is a lot faster!

But we don't know -- or at least I don't know -- how far we have to walk. We may well be walking to the other side of the universe (>900,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles). In which case even if my speed doubles every year, it'll still take almost 80 years. Which granted is pretty quick, but not as fast as the 14 years.

Of course, notice that by the 79th year I'll be traveling at such a velocity that I'd be able to cross nearly the entire universe in a year (or, 156 billion times the speed of light), which so far as we know is impossible. The growth of our technology may similarly eventually hit hard limits.

That said...

I wouldn't terribly mind being proved wrong. Telepathy sounds neat.

Science's Call to Arms

In case anyone was wondering, I am far from alone in my call for a new science policy in the coming administration. It is the topic of the editorial in the latest issue of Science Magazine America's premier scientific journal:

For the past 7 years, the United States has had a presidential administration where science has had little place at the table. We have had a president opposed to embryonic stem cell research and in favor of teaching intelligent design. We have had an administration that at times has suppressed, rewritten, ignored, or abused scientific research. At a time when scientific opportunity has never been greater, we have had five straight years of inadequate increases for U.S. research agencies, which for some like the National Institutes of Health (NIH) means decreases after inflation.

All of this has been devastating for the scientific community; has undermined the future of our economy, which depends on innovation; and has slowed progress toward better health and greater longevity for people around the world.

Dr. Porter, the editorialist, goes on to ask

So if you are a U.S. scientist, what should you do now?

He offers a number of ideas, most of which are probably not practical for a graduate student like myself ("volunteer to advise ... candidates on science matters and issues.").

The one that is most practical and which anybody can do is to promote ScienceDebate2008.com. He acknowledges that the program's goal -- a presidential debate dedicated to science -- will not be accomplished in 2008, bu the hope is to signal to the media and to politicians that people care about science and science policy.

And who knows? Maybe there will be a science debate is 2012?

Does literacy still matter?

In an intriguing recent article in Science Magazine (subscription required), Douglas Oard of the University of Maryland asks what the cultural consequences of better speech recognition software will be.

He notes that the reason literacy is so important is the "emphemeral nature of speech." Even after audio recording became cheap, print was still necessary because it is easier to store and easier to skim and search.

However, new technology is rapidly shifting the balance, as hardware space becomes cheap and computerized searching of audio material becomes effective. Perhaps the costs of learning to read will soon cease to be justified.

Really?

Oard recognizes there will be resistance to the idea (note that he doesn't actually endorse eliminating reading and writing), but he cautions that we should think with our heads, not our biases:

Our parents complained that our generation relied on calculators rather than learning arithmetic... In Plato's Phaedrus, the Pharaoh Thamus says of writing, "If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls: They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written." ... Our generation will unlock the full potential of the spoken word, but it may fall to our children, and to their children, to learn how best to use that gift.

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D. W. Oard (2008). SOCIAL SCIENCE: Unlocking the Potential of the Spoken Word Science, 321 (5897), 1787-1788 DOI: 10.1126/science.1157353

US science funding stagnates (China charges ahead)

When the New York Times talks about the US falling behind in science -- or when I do -- it's worth looking at what we mean.

The US has long been the world leader in science and technology. In 2003, the US accounted for 30% of all scientific publications, and in 2005 it accounted for 30% of all research expenditures. However, that first number has fallen precipitously (it was 38% in 1992), probably because the second number is also falling.

Adding up the numbers
Probably the two most significant sources of public science funding the US are the National Science Foundation (NSF), which covers most types of foundational research, and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which funds medicine- and health-related research (this is broadly interpreted -- I've done research using NIH funds).

The following chart shows the levels of NIH funding during the Bush administration.



As can be seen, the numbers are pretty flat from 2003 on. In fact, it hasn't even kept up with inflation.

Here are the numbers for NSF, which are similarly flat in recent years:


To compare with the previous administration, NIH's budget increased 44% in the Bush years -- mostly during the first two. In contrast, it grew over 70% during the Clinton years. (I couldn't track down NSF funding levels in 1992.)

Well, at least funding isn't decreasing. That's good, right?

Steady levels of funding are better than falling levels of funding, but only barely. First, research has driven the US economy for a long time, but its importance grows with each year. This means it requires more investment.

Second, research becomes more expensive with time. The Clinton and Bush years witnessed the incredible explosion in neuroimaging, which has revolutionized neuroscience. Neuroimaging is also incredibly expensive. (My off-hand recollection is that it costs about $500/hour to use an fMRI machine.) The number of neuroimaging projects has grown exponentially in the last two decades. That money must come from somewhere.

Also, in terms of the US's relative position with the rest of the world, it's important to point out that other countries are emphatically not dropping the ball. These are China's government science and technology expenditures from 2001 to 2006:



That is much more like it. Chinese research expenditures have been increasing rapidly for the last couple decades, but I graphed only the Bush-era data I could find in order to make it comparable to the charts above.

China is of course not alone. The EU, like China, currently lags far behind the US in terms of research expenditures. However, the EU parliament adopted a plan to increase expenditures (this include private-sector spending) to 3% of the GDP, which would put it slightly ahead of the US in terms of percentage of GDP and well ahead of the US in terms of total expenditures (the EU's GDP is larger than that of the US).

The Road Ahead

Although nobody should be a one-issue voter, I firmly believe that investment in science funding is crucial to America's future. As I pointed out recently, Barack Obama has repeatedly called for substantial increases in US science funding. If John McCain is interested in increasing science funding, I can't find evidence of it.

Science Funding and Presidential Politics

John McCain has just answered a questionnaire by Scientists and Engineers for America (Obama did so several weeks ago).

You should read the answers yourself, but as someone who expects to be involved in American science for the next number of decades, I found McCain's disappointing.

Obama begins his answer to the first question about American innovation this way:

Ensuring that the U.S. continues to lead the world in science and technology will be a central priority for my administration. Our talent for innovation is still the envy of the world, but we face unprecedented challenges that demand new approaches. For example, the U.S. annually imports $53 billion more in advanced technology products than we export. China is now the world’s number one high technology exporter. This competitive situation may only worsen over time because the number of U.S. students pursuing technical careers is declining. The U.S. ranks 17th among developed nations in the proportion of college students receiving degrees in science or engineering; we were in third place thirty years ago.

This reassures me that he understand the problem. McCain, on the other hand, merely says "I have a broad and cohesive vision for the future of American innovation. My policies will provide broad pools of capital, low taxes and incentives for research in America, a commitment to a skilled and educated workforce, and a dedication to opening markets around the world."

Solutions to our Problems.

OK. Maybe McCain isn't as good at setting up the problem as Obama is. What does his broad and cohesive vision look like? Most of his proposals sound nice, but it's hard to tell what exactly he means. For instance, he wants to "utilize the nation's science and technology infrastructure to develop a framework for economic growth both domestically and globally."

Sounds good. How? (One way might be to make the R&D tax credit permanent, something which Obama supports but which McCain strangely neglects to mention.)

Other parts of the boilerplate sound like he is merely suggesting we do what we are already doing. I am refering to points like "Fund basic and applied research in new and emerging fields such as nanotechnology and biotechnology..."

Hmmm. We already do that. Maybe he intends to increase funding for such projects, but he doesn't say.

McCain also says he has supported and will continue to support increasing federal funding for research. However, he doesn't say how much. Federal funding has increased over the last few years. It's just not keeping up with inflation. So hazy talk about "increasing funding" may well be meaningless.

One of the few concrete proposals McCain makes is to "eliminate wasteful earmarks in order to allocate funds for science and technology investments." Sounds good. There are $16 billion of earmarks in the 2008 federal budget. The budget for the National Institutes of Health alone is $28 billion. So even if all the "earmarks savings" were spent on science -- and he has other things he wants to do with that money -- we couldn't even get close to doubling science funding, as Obama has proposed.

Does Obama do any better?

If I find McCain's answers discouraging, Obama's are heartening. Although he uses fewer words than McCain, those words are packed with specific proposals, such as doubling federal funding for basic research over the period of 10 years and making the R&D tax credit permanent.

Within the general increase in science funding, Obama shows again that he, or at least his advisors, actually know something about the state of American science, in that he singles out the need to "increase research grants for early-career researchers to keep young scientists entering these fields."

The problem that he is referring to is that the current average age of a scientist receiving their first NIH grant is over 40 years old. While the truism that scientists do their best work prior to the age of 40 is less true for the biomedical researchers NIH funds than it is for mathematicians and physicists, this funding trend is still worrisome.

While on that topic, out of all NIH 2007 applications in for a new RO1 grant -- the bread-and-butter grant that funds many or most large labs -- only 19% were funded. While we certainly want money to go to the best projects, it's important to remember that when a scientist doesn't get a grant, she doesn't just go back to our day job. Science is her day job. So she has to apply again. With 81% of scientists applying to the NIH failing to get funding each year, that means many, many burdensome reapplications -- taking time and money away from doing actual science.

All that is just another reason that significantly increasing federal funding for research is crucial.

I won't go into detail about Obama's other policies, but I found them similarly encouraging and, frankly, a breath of fresh air.

The Candidate with Vision and Expertise

When Obama first began campaigning, some people wondered what the substance behind his vision was. As I read through his responses to this questionnaire, I was struck time and time again that (1) he seemed to really understand and appreciate what challenges I face in my daily attempts to do science, and (2) he had concrete plans to address those issues.

McCain's, answers, on the other hand, rang hollow and out of touch.

CogLangLab's first published paper!

The first paper to contain data collected at my website (technically, at the old website) has just been published. The experiment in question was The Time Course of Visual Short-Term Memory.

This is the first of hopefully two papers using that data. The second paper will look at individual differences and aging. That paper is still in preparation and will hopefully be submitted in August.

I will explain the results and import of the just-published paper in an upcoming post.

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Hartshorne, J.K. (2008). Visual working memory capacity and proactive interference. Public Library of Science One

Harvard Laboratory of Developmental Studies summer internship program

The summer internship program at the Harvard Laboratory of Developmental Studies began this Monday.

Lots of labs take interns. In fact, if you seem motivated, smart and competent, I suspect pretty much any lab would take you on as a volunteer for the summer. What makes the LDS internship program different is that it's an actual program.

The labs (primarily the Snedeker Lab and the Carey Lab -- Spelke Lab does not participate directly, though there is so much sharing between the three labs they often do so indirectly) take about a dozen undergraduates each summer. Each participant is assigned to a specific research project run by a specific graduate student. The projects are chosen such that there is a good chance they will be completed successfully before the internship program ends, making sure the interns have something to talk about at future job or school interviews. The faculty advisers are very concerned that the interns don't just do busy work but actually learn something, so interns participate in a weekly reading group as well as a weekly lab meeting.

In addition, there are activities such as the twice-monthly barbecue (organized this year, in part, by yours truly). Oh, and many of the summer students get financial support, which is a definite plus.

Anyway, it appears to be a good program. This is my first summer participating (my intern will be studying pronoun use), so we'll see how it goes.

Calling all language learners

I looked at the calendar and realized that I have to present data from an experiment to the lab in a few week and to the department in about a month. I took a look, and I have nowhere near enough participants.

So if you have 5 minutes, please participate in this experiment. I've been running it for a while, so do be sure you haven't already participated. The experiment is called "Learning the names of things," and it involves listening to a person mention different objects. You have to figure out which object he is referring to. It's also the only experiment I've done which involves any sound.

You can find it here.

If you are wondering why I don't have enough participants, the answer is simple. There have actually been several versions of this experiment. The data from each version has been very helpful, but I haven't yet quite answered the question I set out to answer. Unfortunately, each version is similar enough to the older versions that it wouldn't be appropriate to test the same people over and over. If you previously participated and want to see what the new version looks like, you can do so, but do be sure to indicate that you have previously participated in the experiment when asked.