Keeping up to date

Recently, we've added several methods of keeping up to date on GamesWithWords.org projects (finding out when results of old studies are available, when new studies are posted, etc.). In addition to following this blog, that is.

1. Join the GamesWithWords.org Google Group for occasional (5x/year) email updates.

2. Follow @gameswithwords on Twitter.

3. Like our Facebook page.

Lab Notebook: Social Networking

The problem with websites is they quickly become obsolete. A few years ago, I updated the website to make it easier to share pages, adding buttons for Facebook, Twitter, Digg, and Reddit. A little while ago, I noticed that the Digg button wasn't working anymore. Then the Twitter button disappeared. 

I just updated the website, switching from native buttons for social networking systems to ShareThis. ShareThis has the advantage of incorporating every social networking system you've heard of and a bunch you haven't heard of (I've put Google+, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and email up front, but by clicking on the ShareThis button, users can choose from dozens of networks). 

Fieldofscience (the network this blog is a part of) has been using ShareThis for a couple years. However, it went through several periods where it wasn't working. Periodically, it would have memory failures, and posts that had once had dozens of likes suddenly went to zero. But lately it seems much more stable, so I'm trying it out.

The disadvantage is that every page says that it hasn't been liked by anybody, which isn't great advertising for the website. (*UPDATE* We've got a few shares now on some of the pages.) I hope this changes quickly.

The $64,000 question is, of course, whether this update changes the overall amount of traffic to the website. It's been averaging around 2,000 visitors/month for a couple years now. That's very respectable for a research website. However, many of the experiments now running (like the Mind Reading Quotient and Finding Explanations) require large numbers of participants, and they would really benefit from an uptick in traffic.

Lab Notebook: You know you are writing a paper when

Your "recently added" list in Mendeley is growing at an exponential rate:

(click to expand. note time added.)

Every new paper you read results in downloading at least two more (not unlike the Hounds of Resurrection. Coincidence? I think not).

I don't think I've ever actually finished my reading list for a paper. At some point, I shut down the process before it overwhelms my hard drive.

More on DragonDictate

DragonDictate continues to do a decent job of writing my email, so long as I don't talk about work. For writing papers, etc., it continues to be of limited use.

I was just dictating notes on how children learn to count. In two back-to-back sentences, I mentioned "subset-knowers". The first time, this was transcribed as "subset-members", and the second time, it was "sunset-whores".

DragonDictate

 I have been doing a great deal of writing lately, though obviously not here. I thought that perhaps at some point in graduate school, I should try getting some of the projects I have done published, and I thought that time was now. Since this requires writing them up, I have been writing. I have gotten a lot of writing done, but I noticed that this came with an increased number of hours spent sitting at my computer. Knowing enough  friends who have suffered from repetitive stress injuries, I decided I should take a proactive approach to ergonomics.

One outcome of this process is was that I purchased voice-recognition software, namely Dragon Dictate. This actually complements my preference to pace while I think. My writing style involves a lot of thinking, punctuated by occasional bursts of typing. So being able to write as I pace seemed like a good idea.

I cannot say that this experiment has been an overwhelming success. Based on what I have learned from the documentation, Dragon Dictate seems to place a great deal of faith in transitional probabilities. That is,  the hypotheses it makes about what you are saying are based not only on the sounds that you make but based on what words typically come after one another.

Of course, what words typically follow one another depends a great deal on what you are talking about. I suspect that Dragon Dictate was not trained on a corpus involving a great deal of psycholinguistics papers, but in fact it is psycholinguistics papers that I am writing. Dragon Dictate makes a number of very systematic and very annoying errors. For instance, it is absolutely convinced that, no matter how carefully I say the word “verb”, I could not possibly have meant to say that word, and probably meant "four herbs" or some such. In the general case, this is probably the right conclusion. The word “verb” is so  rarely  spoken, that it is probably a good bet that it even if you think you  heard the word “verb”, what was actually spoken was probably something else. However, since almost all my papers are about verbs, I use that word so often that probably the right hypothesis is that no matter what you think you heard, the word I actually uttered was “verb”.

Needless to say, it doesn't do very well with technical terms from semantic and syntactic theory, either.

 The upshot is that I spend so much time correcting DragonDictate's mistakes, that it is not clear that I wouldn't be better off just typing the document begin with (you can correct using voice commands, but it is so cumbersome that I usually type instead). Dragon Dictate has a function where you can feed it various documents. The documentation appears to imply that it can learn the relevant word frequencies and transitional probabilities from these documents. I have been feeding at papers I have written, in the hopes that this will help out. So far there has been limited improvement, but I am not sure just how large a corpus of needs. I will keep you updated.

(Written using DragonDictate plus hand correction.)

Mendeley -- Not quite ready for prime time

Prompted by Prodigal Academic, I decided to give Mendeley a shot. That is, instead of working on a long over-due draft of a paper.

Mendeley is two things. First, it is a PDF library/reader. Second, it is a citation manager.

Currently, I used Papers for the first and Endnote for the second.  Both work well enough -- if not perfectly -- but it is a pain that I have to enter every paper I want to cite into two different programs.

(Don't tell me I could export my Papers citations library to Endnote. First, I'd have to do that every time I update my library, which is annoying. Second, Papers was created by someone who clearly never cites books, book chapters, conference proceedings, etc. So I'd have to fix all of those in Endnote ... every time I export.)

(Also, don't tell me about Zotero. Maybe it's gotten better in the last year since I tried it, but it was seriously feature-deficient and buggy beyond all belief.)

First glance

At first, I was pleasantly surprised. Unlike Papers, Mendeley is free so long as you don't want to use their Cloud functionality much (I don't). Papers is convinced there are people named Marc Hauser, Marc D Hauser, M D Hauser, and M Hauser. Mendeley can be led astray but has some nice options to allow you to collapse two different author records -- or two different keywords.

(On that note, my Papers library has implicit causality, Implicit causality and Implicit Causality all as different keywords. Once Papers has decided the keyword for a paper is, say, Implicit Causality, nothing on G-d's green Earth will convince it to switch to implicit causality. And its searches are case sensitive. Mendeley has none of these "features.")

Also, Mendeley will let you annotate PDFs and export the PDFs with your annotations in a format readable by other PDF viewers (if, for instance, you wanted to share your annotated PDF with someone). That's a nice feature.

These would all be nice additional features if the the core functionality of Mendeley was there. I'm sorry to say that the product just doesn't seem to be ready for prime time.

I typed "prime time" into Flickr, and this is what it gave me. Not sure why.

photo credit here.

Second glance

The first disappointment is that Mendeley does not have smart collections. Like smart playlists in iTunes, smart collections are collections of papers defined by various search terms. If you have a smart collection that indexes all articles with the keywords "implicit causality," "psych verbs" and "to read", then whenever you add a new paper with those keywords, they automatically go into the smart collection. This is very handy, and it's an excellent feature of Papers (except that, as mentioned above, my smart folder for implicit causality searches for the keywords "implicit causality," "Implicit causality" OR "Implicit Causality").

I suspect Mendeley doesn't have smart collections because it doesn't have a serious search function. You can search for papers written by a given author or with a given keyword, but if you want to search for papers written by the conjunction of two authors or any paper on "implicit causality" written by Roger Brown, you're out of luck. Rather, it'll perform the search. It just won't find the right papers.

Third glance

That might be forgivable if the citation function in Mendeley was usable. The idea is that as you write a manuscript, when you want to cite, say, my paper on over-regularization (18 citations and counting!), you would click on a little button that takes you to Mendeley. You find my paper in your PDF library, click another button, and (Hartshorne & Ullman, 2006) appears in your Word document (or NeoOffice or whatever) and the full bibliographic reference appears in your manuscript's bibliography. You can even choose what citation style you're using (e.g., APA).


Sort of. Let's say you want to cite two different papers by Roger Brown and Deborah Fish, both published in 1983 (which, in fact, I did want to do). Here's what it looks like:

Implicit causality effects are found in both English (Brown﹠Fish, 1983) and Mandarin (Brown﹠Fish, 1983)

At least in APA style, those two papers should be listed as (Brown﹠Fish, 1983a) and (Brown﹠Fish, 1983b), because obviously otherwise nobody has any idea which paper you are citing.

This gets worse. Suppose you wrote:

Implicit causality effects have been found in multiple languages (Brown﹠Fish, 1983; Brown﹠Fish, 1983).

Correct APA 5th Ed. style is, I believe, (Brown﹠Fish, 1983a, 1983b). Actually, I'm not sure what exactly the correct style is, because Endnote always takes care of it for me.

There are other issues. Mendeley doesn't have a mechanism for suppressing the author. So you end up with:

As reported by Brown and Fish (Brown﹠Fish, 1983; Brown﹠Fish, 1983), verbs have causality implicit in their meaning.

instead of

 As reported by Brown and Fish (1983a, 1983b), verbs have causality implicit in their meaning.

Nor does Mendeley know about et al:

Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch (Hauser, Chomsky﹠Fitch, 2001) put forward a new proposal....blah blah blah...as has been reported several times in the literature (Hauser, Chomsky﹠Fish, 2001; Brown﹠Fish, 1983; Brown﹠Fish, 1983).

That is, the second time you cite a paper with more than 2 authors, it doesn't contract to (Hauser et al. 2001). Unfortunately, there is no work-around for any of these problems. In theory, you can edit the citations to make them match APA style. Within a few seconds, a friendly dialog box pops up and asks you if you really want to keep your edited citation. You can click "OK" or click "cancel," but either way it just changes your carefully-edited citation back to its default -- at least it does on my Mac (the forums suggest that this works for some people).

It's possible that people who don't use APA won't have as many of these problems. Numbered citations, for instance, probably work fine. I've never submitted a paper anywhere that used numbered citations, though. So I either need to switch professions or continue using Endnote to write my papers.

Hopefully

One can hope that Mendeley will solve some of these issues. I found discussions on their "suggested features" forum going back many months for each of the problems discussed above, which suggests I may be waiting a while for these fixes. I do understand that Mendeley is technically in beta testing. But it's been in beta testing for over two years, so that's not really an excuse at this point.

Alternatively, maybe Papers will add a good citation feature (and discover books). Or maybe Zotero will confront its own demons. I'm going to have to wait and see.

It makes one appreciate Endnote. Yes, it's a dinosaur. No, it hasn't added any really useable features since I started using it in 2000. But it worked then, and it still works now. There's something to be said for that.

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.

Darn You, Amazon

For a while now, my department has had problems with packages going missing. A suspiciously large number of them were sent by Amazon. A couple weeks ago, our building manager started to get suspicious. He emailed the department:

Today I received what is now the third complaint about problems with shipping of products at Amazon. I don't know which courier they were using, but the packages were left on the [unmanned] security desk in the 1st floor lobby ... In another recent case, the packages were dumped in front of the Center Office door while I was out. Interestingly, tracking showed that they were signed for me at a time that I was attending a meeting ... it's happened a few times. Usually the packages have simply been mis-delivered ... and turn up about a week later.

Figure 1. A prototypical, over-packaged Amazon box.

Some days later, he followed up with more information. Another department denizen noted that Amazon has started using various different couriers. She wrote "The other day I ordered 2 books and one came via FedEx and one came via UPS." The building manager noted that FedEx has started outsourcing delivery to UPS. He continued:

What's odd is that we get shipments via UPS and FedEx all the time. Usually, it's the same drivers ... We know some of them by name.

He concluded that perhaps Amazon (and UPS and FedEx) were starting to use a variety of subcontractors who don't understand how to deliver packages at large buildings (e.g., you can't just leave them in a random corner of the lobby).

Yesterday, we got a follow-up on the story. The building manager ordered a package from Amazon to see what would happen. The building manager was on his way to lunch when he spotted a van marked "package delivery" and an un-uniformed courier. The courier was leaving the building sans package, so the building manager knew the package was incorrectly delivered (he obviously hadn't signed for it)!. He tried to explain to the courier building package policies but

He was very polite, but did not speak much English, so I'm not sure just how much he took away from our little chat.

The building manager -- tired of dealing with lost and mis-delivered packages -- is on a mission to get someone from Amazon to care:

Calling them on the phone was unsatisfactory. Everyone in any position of authority is thoroughly insulated from public accountability.

Perhaps. But that's why blogs exist. Seriously, Amazon, do something about this.

photo: acordova

Lab Notebook: Verb Resources

It's good to be studying language now, and not a few decades ago. There are a number of invaluable resources freely available on the Web.

The resource I use the most -- and without which much of my research would have been impossible -- is Martha Palmer & co.'s VerbNet, which is a meticulous semantic analysis of some several thousand English verbs. This is invaluable when choosing verbs for stimuli, as you can choose verbs that are similar to or differ from one another along particular dimensions. It's also useful for finding polysemous and nonpolysemous verbs where polysemy is defined in a very rigorous way.

Meichun Liu and her students at NCTU in Taiwan have been working on a similar project in Mandarin, Mandarin VerbNet. This resource has proved extremely valuable as I've been writing up some work I've been doing in Mandarin, and I only wish I had known about it when I constructed my stimuli.

I bring this up in case these resources are of use to anyone else. Mandarin VerbNet is particularly hard to find. I personally spent several months looking for it.

Tables, Charts & Figures

APA format (required for most journals I read/publish in) stipulates that figures and tables should not be included in the parts of the manuscript in which you actually talk about them, but rather they should all come at the end of the manuscript. I understand how this might be of use to the type-setter, but I find it a pain when actually trying to read a manuscript. I know I'm not the only one, because in some of the manuscripts I've submitted for review before I actually violated APA format and put the figures in-line, and the reviewers actually thanked me in their review and suggested that this should become journal policy. (The idea is that after acceptance, you resubmit with the figures and tables in APA format, but that during the review process, you put them in-line.)

With that in mind, I left my figures in situ in my last journal submission. The staff at the journal promptly returned the manuscript without review, saying that they couldn't/wouldn't review a paper that didn't follow APA guidelines on tables and figures.

Obviously I reformatted and resubmitted (the customer/journal is always right), but I put this out to the blogosphere: does anyone actually like having the figures at the end of the manuscript?

Games with Words in Taiwan

I've been in Taiwan for two weeks, and further posts of the Tutorial will probably wait until I get back next week.

I had an excellent two-day visit to Prof. Su Yi-ching's lab at Tsing Hua University (Qinghua for you pinyin-readers), where I was able to collect an absurd amount of data due to the generosity of Prof. Su and her students (over 110 participants in two written studies, plus three in an eye-tracking study). I also had a great time at Prof. Lee Chia-Ying's very lively lab at Academia Sinica, where I got to observe a kid ERP experiment (something I've never actually seen, though I'm in the process of planning one of my own) and also test several more participants in the eye-tracking study. I also visited Prof. Chueng Hintat at National Taiwan University. I was mildly surprised to discover I actually can discuss my research in Mandarin when necessary, though with most people it was possible to use English (thankfully).

I wasn't at all sure how this trip was going to go when I planned it, as at the time I didn't actually know any psycholinguists in Taiwan. It turns out that there's actually a pretty substantial group of developmental psycholinguists working on interesting problems. Su and Cheung are both in the process of releasing much-needed new child corpora, with Su focusing on (if I remember correctly) optional infinitives (to the extent such can be recognized in a language with no inflectional morphology) and lexical tone, and Cheung focusing on argument structure alternations. Lee's lab is producing some really well-considered studies of character-reading (for instance, looking at how phonetic and semantic radicals are processed). I also heard of several other faculty doing exciting work but whom I didn't have time to visit.

And, of course, I got a lot of data, which is good since Harvard partly funded this trip on the expectation I would run some experiments. The experiments I was running are all similar to the Pronoun Sleuth project -- that is, looking at factors that affect what people think a pronoun means, and trying to replicate some of my findings in English.

Lab Notebook: Building a Better Eyetracker

Many of my experiments in the lab use eye-tracking. Eye-tracking is a fantastic method for studying language comprehension, developed mainly by Michael Tanenhaus and his colleagues. People tend to look at whatever is being talked about, and we can use that fact to measure what people think is being talked about.

For instance, in the eyetracking experiments related to the Pronoun Sleuth experiment  have online, I have people look at a picture with a couple characters on it while they listen to a story about the characters. My interest is in what happens when they hear a pronoun: who do they look at?

This has two advantages over just asking (which is what I do in Pronoun Sleuth): first, it's an implicit measure, so I don't have to worry about people just telling me what they think I want to hear. More importantly, the measure is sensitive to time: people only look at who they think is being talked about when they decide who's being talked about. So I can get a measure of how long it takes to understand a pronoun in different conditions.

A Better Eyetracker

In the lab, we use an automated eyetracker (the Tobii T60), which can record in real time what people are looking at. This is a fantastic time-saver. Unfortunately, it's also really expensive and really heavy, so it's mostly good for use in the lab. I'll be going to Taiwan to run some experiments in March, and I won't be taking the Tobii with me.

A cheap eyetracker can be built by other means, though. Our lab traditionally used what we affectionately call the "poor man's eyetracker," which is just a video camera. In a typical experiment, participants see four physical objects and hear information about the objects. The four objects are arranged in a square, and right in the center of the square is the video camera, pointed back at the participant. From the recording, then, we can work out whether the participant is looking at the object in the top left, bottom left, top right or bottom right.

This is a slower method than using the Tobii, because you have to code where the participant is looking frame-by-frame in each video (Tobii does all that automatically). And it has much less resolution that Tobii, which can record where a participant is looking down to an inch or so, whereas with Poor Man's we can only get quadrants of a screen. But it's a lot cheaper.

Although members of the lab have traveled with such a setup before, it's less portable than it could be. These experiments involve many objects, so you end up having a huge box of supplies to cart around.

Enter Laptop

Many laptops -- and all Mac laptops -- come with cameras built into their screens. One of my research assistants and a grad student at MIT and I have been trying to turn our MacBooks into portable eyetrackers. My experiments usually only involve stories about two characters, one on the left-hand side of the screen and one on the right-hand side.

We show the pictures on the screen, and by use the built-in camera plus iMovie to record the participant. Based on testing, the camera records a frame 20 times per second, which is slower than the Tobii T60 (60 times per second), but is enough for the relatively slow effects I study. This is incredibly portable, since all that is required is the laptop.

Except

There has only been one problem so far. As I said, I'm interested in where people look when they hear a pronoun. So I need to know exactly when they heard the pronoun, down to about 1/20 or at the worst 1/10 of a second. The software that I use to code eye-movements doesn't play the sound while you're coding, so there's no way of using it to determine the beginning of the pronoun.

What researchers have often done is have two cameras working simultaneously: one recording the participant and one recording the screen. These video streams can be spliced together so that you can see both simultaneously when coding. If you know, for instance, that the pronoun is spoken exactly 14,345 milliseconds after the picture appears on the screen, you just measure forwards 14,345 ms after the picture appeared on the screen. This however, requires additional equipment (the camera, not to mention the apparatus that combines the video signals).

Another trick people will use is to have a mirror behind the participant. You can then see what the participant is looking at in the mirror. Our current plan is to adopt this method, except since the whole thing needs to be portable, we're using a very small (compact makeup) mirror, which is mounted on a 9-inch make-shift tripod. This can be placed in front of the laptop, but slightly off to the side so it doesn't block the participant's view.

With any luck, this will work. We're currently running a few pilot participants.

Head-Mounted Eyetrackers

I should point out that there are also head-mounted eyetrackers, which the participant actually has to wear. These will give you a video of the scene in front of the subject, with a little cross-hair over the exact spot the participant is focusing on. These are the most flexible, since participants can turn their heads and walk around (not possible in any of the set-ups above), but they still require frame-by-frame coding (the eyetracker can't recognize objects; it doesn't know if the participant was looking at a chair or a cat -- you have to code this yourself) and they aren't great for working with kids, since they are usually too heavy for young kids to wear.

Lab Notebook: Shopping Period

Harvard and Yale, in their infinite wisdom and love of tradition, do not register students for classes until the second week of the semester. The first week, called "Shopping Period," in theory gives students a chance to try out different classes. Undergraduates seem to like it.

Shopping Period has several consequences. One is that no schedules can be set in stone until the second -- or often third -- week of the semester. Since nobody knows how many students are going to take a class, much less which students, graduate student-led course sections can't be scheduled until the second week. This makes it difficult for undergraduate research assistants to set their lab schedules until the second or third week of the semester. The same goes for any regular meetings that graduate students and/or undergraduate students attend. Also, one can't reserve rooms for those meetings until after all the courses have rooms assigned and all the sections have rooms assigned. I have a mandatory meeting for my undergraduate research assistants. As should be clear from above, it's not always clear whether an undergraduate will be able to attend that meeting until the third week of the semester.

Again, the students seem to like Shopping Period, so it clearly has its benefits, but it makes the beginning of the semester very busy -- it's a little like packing your bags while you're already on the way to the airport. I am also giving a talk next Thursday and submitting a paper to the Cognitive Science Society annual meeting next Saturday.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/chavals/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Using Google Wave

I admit I'm pretty excited about Google Wave. I am currently involved in a fairly large collaboration. It's large in

• the scale of phenomena we're trying to understand (essentially, argument realization)
• the number of experiments (literally, dozens)
• the number of people involved (two faculty, three grad students, and a rotating cast of research assistants, all spread across three universities)

One problem is keeping everybody up-to-date and on the same page, but an even more serious problem is that's difficult to keep track of everything we've discovered. In the last few weeks, we've moved much of our discussion into Wave, and I think already I have a better sense of some of the issues we've been dealing with.

Collaborative Editing?

If you are interested in Wave, the best thing is to simply check out their website or one of the many other websites describing out to use it. The main idea behind it is to enable collaborative document editing -- that is, a document that can be edited by a group of people simultaneously.

Anyone who has worked on a group project is familiar with the following problem: only one person can work on a document at a given time. For instance, if I send a paper to a co-author for editing, I can't work on the paper in the meantime or risk a real headache when trying to merge the separate edits later.

Google Docs and similar services have allowed real-time collaborative editing for a while, but although these services allow real-time collaborations, they weren't really designed for real-time collaborations. For instance, it's difficult to record who made what changes. Similarly, it doesn't allow comments (for instance, sometimes you don't want to change the text, you just want to say you don't understand it). If one person makes a change and you want to undo it, good luck. Google Wave has these and other features.

Using the Wave

Currently, we're using Wave as a collective notebook, where we record everything we've learned in the course of our research. This keeps everyone up-to-date. It also allows us to discuss issues without requiring meetings (a good thing, since we're at different universities).

For instance, recently I read a claim that a certain grammatical structure that is impossible in English happens to be possible in Japanese. I noted this in a section of our document, and attached a comment: "Yasu, Miki: can you check this?" As it happens, two members of our project are native Japanese speakers. In a series of nested comments, they discussed the issue, came to a conclusion (that the paper I had read was wrong), and then we finally deleted the comments and replaced the whole section with a summary of the discussion and conclusions.

In other sections, we've included the methods for experiments that we're designing, commenting on and ultimately editing the methods until everyone agrees.

Needed Improvements

At the moment, Wave is very much in beta testing and is underpowered. Although you can embed files and websites, there's no way to embed, say, a spreadsheet -- a major inconvenience for us, since much of our work involves making lists of verbs and their properties. Whenever I want the most updated list, I need to email whoever was working on it last, which isn't ideal.

Of course, we could use Google Docs, but it has the problems listed above (no way of commenting, no track-changes, no archive in case we decide to undo a change). It's assumed that these kinds of features will be added in the future.

Mini monitors

A few years ago, I read a study claiming that the larger the screen on your computer, the more productive you are. I believe it. I frequently edit one paper while having several others open, and it's convenient to have them all open simultaneously. I write my experiments in Flash, which is almost impossible to use without two screens, due to all the various floating toolbars.

This is fine if I'm in the Lab, as there I have an iMac with an attached 20 inch screen, and also another 24 inch screen I attach to my MacBook Pro. Unfortunately, I'm not always in my office. I'm sometimes at Tufts, where I am collaborating on some ERP work, and sometimes I work from home. But I don't have a bunch of extra monitors at home, and even if I did, I don't have anywhere to put them.

Enter Mimo USB monitors. This 7-inch monitors weigh less than a pound and can pack flat, so they're easy to get out of the way when you aren't using them. 7 inches is just about the right size to fit some -- though not all -- of my extraneous toolbars.

Which isn't to say it's a perfect solution. The screen is too small to host a second document window. In order to fit more, everything is annoyingly small -- and I like small font. The brightness and contrast can't be meaningfully adjusted. Those drawbacks make it annoying to use Flash or Dreamweaver ... annoying but possible. Prior to getting my Mimo, I pretty much refused to work on Flash or Dreamweaver if I couldn't do it in my office.

Of course, what I really want is a virtual monitor that could be projected onto any space (such as my glasses). In the meantime, Mimo works pretty well.

Publishing scientific results: a timeline

A couple months ago, I talked about the slow rate of publication. I find the sloth-speed process irritating not so much because I am impatient -- though I am -- but because I would like to release the results of studies to my participants while they still remember they were in the study.

Just for fun, I thought I would outline the chronology of my upcoming paper in PLoS One.

Winter 2006-2007 Began data collection.

June 2007 Data collection complete

September 11, 2007 Paper submitted to Experimental Psychology

October 11, 2007 Paper rejected by Experimental Psychology

...Several months spent thinking about how to improve the paper...

March 22, 2008 New paper submitted to PLoS One. Told to expect a reply within a few weeks.

June 3, 2008 PLoS One asks for some minor revisions

June 16, 2008 Revision sumbitted

June 20, 2008 Paper accepted

July 23, 2008 Paper will be published online

................

It is worth noting that both Experimental Psychology and PLoS One are extraordinarily fast. That's part of why I submitted to those two journals. I submitted another paper in late January to a more traditional journal. I am still waiting for a reply.

    

This week at the cognition and language lab

I just finished watching several episodes of Scrubs. If you watch enough TV, you get a sense of what it's like to be a doctor or a lobbyist or a policeman or a Mafioso. Some of these shows are more accurate, some are less. But it's very hard to get even an inaccurate sense of what it's like to be a working scientist by watching TV. Even if we go to movies, all that comes to mind is Brent Spiner or Dennis Quaid .

I have no idea what it's like to be a xenobiologist or a paleoglaciologist (though I did once spend a couple days hitchhiking with a pair of paleoglaciologist on Sakhalin, taking tree cores), but I can open a window on a week in the life of a psychology graduate student.

My first year proposal was due Tuesday. I spent last weekend reading papers in preparation to write about my work on pronoun resolution. The purpose of that project was/is to determine whether a particular odd linguistic phenomenon generalized to a large number of words in English, or if it was specific to just a relatively small number of famous examples. That didn't seem like enough to propose as a year-long project, but beyond that I didn't have any particular hypotheses.

Sunday morning I finally thought of something, but at 8pm, I decided I didn't like what I had written, gave up and wrote about a different project instead. Monday morning, I sent the project proposal to my advisor and spent most of the day extending that essay into my final paper for my developmental proseminar class. Monday night, I began our take-home final for the developmental proseminar.

I worked on the final for most of Tuesday as well, finishing in the evening. Having spent all day on a frustrating exam, I wanted to do something fun...which for me meant analyze data. I downloaded the results from the Birth Order survey. Over 2,500 people participated, and the data were the stuff of dreams -- much better than I hoped. So I archived that survey. I don't need any more data, and I'd rather people who visit the site do one of the new experiments.

Wednesday and Thursday were spent writing and testing the code for a new pilot study on a particular type of linguistic inference. There are three versions of that experiment, and I ran all three on myself (one of them more than once) until I was satisfied. I also had two coworkers give it a run-through.

On Friday, I ran 13 subjects on that pilot study. It's the end of the semester, and many of the undergraduate psych students waited to the last minute to participate in the required number of experiments in order to get credit in their classes. This is always a good time to find subjects.

Since my experiments are all computer-based, running subjects is fairly dull. I greet the participant when s/he shows up, explain the procedure, have him/her sign the consent form, and then get the program up and running. When the participant finishes, I give him/her a debriefing form and answer any questions. I spent the time while waiting reading papers about birth order effects, working on the blog, answering email, and working on the one final project of the week I haven't yet mentioned.

The results of the Video Experiment were much more interesting than expected. I don't want to say anything about it, because we may have to run more conditions in the future, but basically, we were doing what was supposed to be a confirmatory study, proving something everybody already knew. Psychologists often get criticized for spending all their time proving the obvious (people who like to eat tend to eat more, for instance), but the Video Experiment was an example of why we run these studies: we found exactly the opposite of what we and I suppose everybody else would have predicted.

My co-author is in charge of writing the paper, but he has been shooting me emails all week asking for additional analyses. I've also read and commented on several drafts. It is looking pretty good -- much better than if I had written it -- but the senior author hasn't read it yet. We'll see what she says. After she's satisfied (if she's satisfied), we'll send it off to a journal, where the reviewers will tear it to shreds and reject it. We'll rewrite it (after perhaps running another experiment or two) and then resubmit it. It's a long process.

And that was one week in the life of a psychology graduate student. There's definitely a TV show in there somewhere!