What I know of immigration

1.

Once upon a time:

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

But now:

 

Lady Liberty on Immigration

2.

Procastination

True commitment is serious and it is powerful. Commitment is not just saying
you’ll do it. Commitment is doing it. True Commitment is not conditional,
for to be committed means to be absolutely committed.

Commitment is more than doing just what is convenient or comfortable.
Commitment is doing what is necessary. Commitment is making the sacrifices
and the tradeoffs that are required to uphold it. Commitment is more than
just wishing for the right conditions. Commitment is working with what you
have.

Commitment is not easy. Commitment does not back down or run away at the
first sign of trouble. Commitment perseveres until the goal is reached.
Commitment does not waste time and effort whining or complaining or seeking
to find blame. Commitment adjusts to reality and moves forward.

Too many people have been deceived for too long, and have come to expect
that they can know fulfillment without the gritty effort of commitment. They
are sadly mistaken. Real, solid commitment is real work. And well worth it.
The evidence is overwhelming — it gets results like nothing else can.

–Ralph Marston

–Back to work now.

Language metaphors and time

Few are convinced that Whorfianism has any credibility to it. The theory’s strongest claim, in basic terms, is that language has the ability to shape thought. Nonetheless, it was found that color perception does not depend on differences in how languages classify color, and that Eskimos do no not have nine ways of conceptualizing snow because their language allows them to do so (That was a hoax, by the way). Hence, it was concluded that Whorf got it all wrong.  Later, with the rise in popularity of UG, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis went into obscurity.

Still, maybe if Whorf framed his theory in lighter terms,  it would not become so discredited.

For example, Matlock, Ramscar, and Borodinsky (2005) found an experiential link between spatial and temporal language. When we use language to refer to abstract things that we can neither see or touch, there is a tendency to rely on experience-based domains. Hence, we sometimes talk about time as if it is coming (the time has come), as if we are having it (I don’t have time to complete the work), as if giving it (give me more time)…you get the picture.

The researchers were primarily interested in whether “thought about fictive motion (FM; as in The road runs along the coast) can influence thought about time.” If FM uses the same structures involved in thinking about actual motion, then it should influence the way people think about time. They performed three experiments to test that. I will go over two of them:

Experiment 1

In this experiment subjects were asked to read a FM sentence, such as the road runs along the coast, and a similar non-FM sentence, such as the road is next to the coast. After that, participants were required to demonstrate their understanding by drawing a picture of what they’ve read.

Fig. 1: Example of drawing from experiment 1

Once they completed the drawing, they were required to answer an ambiguous question:

“Next Wednesday’s meeting had been moved forward two days. What day is the meeting now that it has been rescheduled?”

If you carefully read the sentence, you will notice that it could have two answers since “forward two days” is ambiguous. The answer can be either Friday or Monday. If language has no bearing on how we conceptualize the world, then there would be no difference in the number of responses for Friday and Monday. Nevertheless, there was. Participants who read fictive motion metaphors were more likely to answer Friday (70% of the time), while those who read non-FM sentences showed no preference (51% for Friday). The results suggest that when people think about FM, they apply the motion perspective to their conception of time. Hence the highway runs along the coast primes subjects to think that they move forwards in time.

Experiment 2

The purpose of experiment 2 was to see how much FM metaphors can influence our understanding of time. The layout was similar to that in experiment 1, except that participants were required to read “FM sentences that varied on the number of scan points along a path (e.g., Four versus Eight versus Twenty versus Over eighty pine trees run along the edge of the driveway).” It was predicted that the larger the number of pine trees in the FM sentence, then the number of responses for Friday for the ambiguous Wednesday question would go up. The results matched the predictions for 8 and 20 pine trees (80%, 61% response rate for Friday), but not for 4 and 80 pine trees (55% and 50% response rate for Friday). The reason why participants were more likely to answer Friday for 8 and 20 pine trees and not for 4 and 80 pine trees is because for a very small or a very large number of trees they would not develop a ego-moving concept of time. Imagine that you are told to scan your driveway for the number of trees. Four trees can be scanned almost immediately, while 80 trees are not scanned individually. If you look at the example drawings the subjects made (Fig. 2), it becomes clear that 80 trees are lumped together and are likely scanned as a clump.

 

Fig. 2: Example drawings from experiment 2

Conclusion

…is simple. FM metaphors seem to have an influence on how we perceive time.

And in case you are wondering, further experiments done in this area demonstrated that it is not the act of drawing that influenced the connection between FM and perception of time.

Thoughts

Pinker and Chomsky might not like Whorf’s theory, but it is essential to remember that Whorf came up with it when psycholinguistics was largely non-existent and when there was not a lot of data from which one could derive plausible hypotheses. Therefore, it is important to keep a non-judgmental attitude and give Whorf the proper credit for at least asking the question, “Does language influence thought?”.

And, in anticipation, when I think of linguists and psycholinguists in 2050, I imagine that they would also ask themselves, “How the heck did Chomsky come up with his theory when he had so little empirical evidence by his side?”.

Matlock, T., Ramscar, M., & Boroditsky, L. (2005). On the Experiential Link Between Spatial and Temporal Language Cognitive Science, 29 (4), 655-664 DOI: 10.1207/s15516709cog0000_17

Wernicke

As it was mentioned on Language Log, there is a lot of coverage on the on-camera aphasic episode of Serene Branson, a reporter for CBS. There are several videos on Youtube, some of which are hardly sensitive. I know that snickering on reporter’s failures sometimes can be funny, especially in the O’Rilley can’t explain that meme. This is not the case:

My initial reaction was Wernicke’s aphasia, especially when I heard burtation.

Upon seeing an several callous remixes that popped up when I searched the segment, I remembered several shameful things I’ve done in elementary school. I’ve been through four schools in that period, and in some of them I’ve met classmates who had trouble speaking or reading. There was a lot of ridicule and mocking, since for many it was inconceivable how someone in, say, third grade would not be able to read when everyone else was able to. I really wish professors were more perceptive. When children are taught about learning disorders or types of aphasia, I think that there is some attitude change. If a teacher came to me and asked me to read the text below and explained me everything, I am certain I would have shown some understanding. I am so sorry right now.

http://www.dyslexia.org/before_after.shtml

From Top Gear to Documentary Man

In high school I used to watch Top Gear. I still do, occasionally.  I think that Jeremy Clarkson, James May, and Richard Hammond do a great job by keeping the show lively.

Just watch this segment:

But I never, never considered that Richard would go from being a Top Gear to a Documentary Man.  His series on Invisible Worlds is nevertheless amazing. Without any doubt, the best documentary I’ve seen so far.

You will never look at horse manure with the same disinterest again. Just watch, you’ll see for yourself:

 

Jokes and Politics

When you have an untouchable archenemy, who is beyond impeachment and overt criticism, it seems natural to express your schadenfreude through jokes. Such is the case with the corrupt leader Mubarak:

Mubarak and his advisers are on board of his plane over Cairo. Mubarak brings out $1,000 and asks how he could use the money to make Egyptians happy. One adviser suggests throwing it out of the window to make an Egyptian family happy. A second adviser suggests splitting it into two bundles and throwing both out of the window to make two Egyptian families happy. The third adviser suggests that Mubarak puts the money in his pocket and jumps out of the window to make all Egyptians happy. (source)

Since my country went through similar uprisings in April, 2009, where thousands of people went on the streets after it was announced the communists won, for the third time, the general election, I recall that there were plenty of jokes made against the communist leader, Vladimir Voronin. Most people protested because they found it unbelievable that the Communist Party would win a majority. After all, they managed in only two terms to turn Moldova into a country that was rife with corruption and poverty. After some investigation, it was found that on the balloting lists  there were names of the people who, may god rest their souls, died. So this is how the joking began:

A presidential limousine stops in front of a graveyard. Voronin steps out of it with a bundle of pamphlets. The person sitting on guard near the gate of the graveyard approaches him and asks:
“My honorable leader, why is a person with such distinction as you visiting this lowly place?”
Voronin looks at him surprised, “It’s simple, I just came to see my voters.”

Patterns

Moldova, Iran, Basra, Thailand, Bangladesh, Kirghistan, Tunisia, and Egypt are only few of the countries that come to my mind in which there was some major uprising in the past 2-3 years. Most of these revolts came into existence for a variety of reasons. It would be silly to say that they were caused by breakthroughs in social media and communications technology, while discounting economic and social factors. Although Facebook and Twitter provide a good venue for exchanging dislike for corrupt governments or individuals, unemployment and social degeneracy are also important factors that can elucidate why people have the courage to go out on the street and risk getting injured.

A professor in high-school once told an apocryphal story how Lenin, the founder of Communism in Russia, recruited people for his uprising. Lenin went largely to regions populated with people who lived in abject poverty, and not to those that shared an anti-czarist sentiment, as one would assume. So, during his recruitment, he would ask a pheasant:

“Do you own a house?”
“Yes.”
” We can’t take you. Next.”
“Do you own a house?”
“No.”
“Do you have a wife and children?”
“No.”
“Here is your Bolshevik uniform, comrade.”

As I mentioned, the story is likely fictitious and is told only to show that to Lenin it did not matter whether his recruits were actually loyal to communist ideology, because he knew that such things as devotion can easily be  inculcated through demagoguery and propaganda. What he cared about is to have followers who had nothing to lose, for whom it is best to struggle through an uprising than go back to a life that did not have much to offer anyway.

Now, when I read the news about the riots in Egypt, I cannot envision how much change there would be after Mubarak’s departure. He has been a president for about thirty years, who in that time probably managed to gain control over every aspect in Egyptian government. The police, the judiciary, the army, the whole damn administration, from the insignificant clerks to high officials, are all in his hands. Even if a new leader is elected that would hopefully value the principles of democracy, whatever they might be, he would have to face a rigid decapitated system that can very well live on its own. Putting a curtain on a dictator and asking him to step down is not enough. This will only turn him into a prompter that will remind his followers what their role is.

Mubarak's avocation

 

Can religious people be nihilists?

What a silly question, you might ask. When nihilism represents the rejection of any sort of deity or spirituality, when it asserts that morality and law are subjective, it is clear that nihilism and religiosity are incompatible.  Even more, since all nihilists are by necessity atheists, how could a religious person be a nihilist and at the same time an atheist?

The logic does not work both ways, however. Remember that atheists are not necessarily nihilists, and some atheists have some sense of spirituality, but they give credit to the fact that their make-believe is just that, make-believe.

Two videos:

Crazy Watering Can:

Documentary about Deborah, a thirteen-year-old born and educated in a theist family:

Documentary about 13-year-old Deborah Drapper, who — unlike other British teens — has never heard of Britney Spears or Victoria Beckham. She is being been brought up in a deeply Christian family and her parents are trying to make sure she and her ten brothers and sisters have grown up protected from the sins of the outside world.

Deborah is a bright, confident girl who has big ambitions for her life, and the film spends a summer with her as she ventures out into the world to see what life outside her family could be — as she starts putting her beliefs forward to a wider audience.

 

Antisocial Personality Disorder: Wittgenstein’s Beetle

When I am in situations where there is lack of semantic clarity, where two or more speakers have a different set of “pictures” that describe one or a set of propositions, I am reminded of Wittgenstein. Science has specific operational definitions whose purpose it to get rid of lack of semantic clarity and achieve congruity in the perceived meaning of language signs between two or more individuals. That is why when there is a misunderstanding, the speaker or the listener should provide “clues” that would clarify what is meant by a language sign.

In the previous post, I was reminded by two readers that the four criminal profiles that I presented fit into the narrower criteria for psychopathy and not ASPD. It was a fair notice on their part. Although many characteristics between psychopathy and ASPD overlap, there are marked differences between the two. Moreover, the four profiles do not give a fair description of what a psychopath is like, since not all psychopaths engage in criminal behavior.  The confusion stemmed from the fact that I used the criteria found in DSM-IV, and not the one found in PCL-R. Now that the source of misconstruction has been clarified, let’s look what is the distinction between the clinical and scholarly views on psychopathy.

—

The current edition of DSM does not have a criteria that specifically addresses psychopathy, although before the publication of DSM-III such a criteria did exist. Currently DSM includes a broader checklist for antisocial personality disorder that addresses specific behavioral patterns.  According to Hare, Hard, & Harpur (1991) the change in clinical diagnosis and the exclusion of  psychopathy from DSM is attributed to the following reasons: a)the desire to increase the congruence and compatibility between the DSM and ICD-10 (International Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems), which does not include psychopathy and b) the desire to simplify the criteria for psychopathy. Even though proponents for retaining the criteria for psychopathy, such as Robert Hare, have tried to persuade the DSM committee to revert back to the previous criteria for psychopathy (with a few changes), they have been unsuccessful. The publication of a new DSM edition has largely been done because there was something lacking or wrong in the previous edition. One of those things that was lacking in previous edition is lack of specificity. When a diagnosis is based largely on observing character traits and making clinical inferences, there could be disagreements among clinicians when deciding if a person is a psychopath or not.  Hence, the DSM-III committee saw the need to come up with a criteria that would increase reliability in diagnosing psychopathy. They changed the criteria and renamed it into antisocial personality disorder. This decision caused some controversy, which continues to the present day. Hare et. al(1991) points out that the addition of long lists of symptoms does not add any clarification and only makes the diagnosis process long and cumbersome, and the focus on behavioral indicators would likely lead to letting clinicians come up with their own idiosyncratic prototypical criteria (e.g., how many acts of deceit is enough to lead us to characterize an individual as deceitful?). In addition, Hare points out that behavioral indicators in diagnosis are not trustworthy especially in the case where there is reliance on self-reports of autobiographical memories.

Now, it is important to point out again that even though ASPD and psychopathy have some characteristics in common, but they are not the same. Psychopathy is usually defined as a disorder of personality, that is, diagnosis is not based only on behavioral patterns, while DSM-IV criteria for ASPD is largely behaviorally based (Ogloff, 2006). If you look at the wording of DSM  and PLC-R, you can probably see what I mean.

DSM-IV-TR (APA, 2000)

Hare Psychopathy Checklist Revised (Hare, 2003)

Evidence of conduct disorder before age 15 years pervasive pattern of disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others since the age of 15 years, as indicated by three or more of the following:  1. Failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors, as indicated by repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest; 2. Deceitfulness, as indicated by repeated lying, use of aliases, or conning others for personal profit or pleasure; 3. Impulsivity or failure to plan ahead; 4. Irritability and aggressiveness, as indicated by repeated physical fights or assaults; 5. Reckless disregard for safety of self or others; 6. Consistent irresponsibility, as indicated by repeated failure to sustain consistent work behavior or honor financial obligations; and 7. Lack of remorse, as indicated by being indifferent to or rationalizing having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another. (Note: For DSM I selected only the criteria that relates to behavioral and personality indicators).

Factor 1; Interpersonal/Affective  Facet 1: Interpersonal -Glibness/superficial charm -Grandiose self-worth -Pathological lying -Conning/Manipulative Facet 2:Affective -Lack of remorse or guilt -Shallow affect -Callous/Lack of Empathy -Failure to accept responsibility for actions Factor 2; Social Deviance Facet 3: Lifestyle -Need for stimulation/ prone to boredom -Parasitic lifestyle -Lack of realistic long-term goals -Impulsivity -Irresponsibility Facet 4: Antisocial -Poor Behavioral controls -Early behavioral problems -Juvenile delinquency -Revocation of condition -Criminal versatility

As you can notice, in the Hare Psychopathy Checklist most traits are treated as open concepts.  In the DSM, on the other hand, clinicians are expected to look at behavioral patterns. Of course, the former looks specifically for psychopathy while the latter for ASPD. In the next edition of DSM there will likely be some changes that would reconcile this divisive issue (Hesse, 2010).

American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders, 4th edn, text revision. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press, 2000.

Hare, R.D. (2003).Manual for the hare psychopathy checklist, 2nd edn, revised. Toronto, ON: Multi-Health Systems.

Hare, R., Hart, S., & Harpur, T. (1991). Psychopathy and the DSM-IV criteria for antisocial personality disorder. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 100 (3), 391-398 DOI: 10.1037/0021-843X.100.3.391
Ogloff, J. (2006). Psychopathy/antisocial personality disorder conundrum Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 40 (6-7), 519-528 DOI: 10.1111/j.1440-1614.2006.01834.x

Morten Hesse (2010). What should be done with antisocial
personality disorder in the new edition of the diagnostic and statistical
manual of mental disorders (DSM-V)? BMC Medicine : 10.1186/1741-7015-8-66

An aquired taste

If you do not have a penchant for reading literary novels or if you see in poetry nothing but lines of words, utterly abstruse, foolish, and unnecessary, brought together carelessly by naive poets, who might as well speak a foreign language, then you are not likely to care too much about the sequence in which words are used. But if you do like poetry, if you do like novels, then you are very likely to care about the verbal freshness of words that are used to convey meaning. After all, the plot of the Lighthouse might as well be summarized in one page, except that when some of us read it, we look for something more than just a simple story.

Of course, not all of those who spend their days savoring Shakespeare and Hugo do so because they were born with an innate talent to relish on words. The first book that was put into your hands was likely something easy to handle (mentally), and described an interesting, magical tale. But would you consider, as you grow up, that reading literature affects sensitivity to word distributions when reading texts? If the answer is yes, this, at the very least, would explain why an Anglophile abhors Dan Brown’s novels,  while I, an uneducated boor, never got a knack for Shakey.

So, do we really develop an acquired taste to detect skill and beauty in literature? Do we really have the affinity to detect the small incongruities in the words others pick to make sentences, so that later we can point out to ourselves that the writer, with all his talent, must’ve used some other word to please us?  Apparently, yes.

A closely knit group of researchers at the department of psychology at Stanford found that reading habits affect the judgments of writing quality. Their study rests on the premise that language is probabilistic in nature. That is, some words occur together more frequently than others, and we often can finish each others’………………..sentences because we have a preference for some chunk frequencies than others, even though there is no difference in the meaning conveyed. A briefer, yet humorous explanation is provided below:

But it's not all that simple

Yes, things are not all that simple. If you do not put much relevance to the context in which language is used as it is done in the comic strip ( and which you must always do in real life!), and only look at the probabilities that define the preference for certain chunk frequencies rather than others, then you notice that if we defy those probabilities and use a somewhat odd expression, we get the feeling that something doesn’t feel right. The authors of the paper give an example:

In many ways, the idea that we pay attention to how words are used is hardly surprising. It seems obvious, for example, that “a daunting task” sounds more “right,” or more familiar, than “a daunting job.” In fact, although job is a higher frequency word than task, “a daunting task” appears over a hundred times more frequently on Google than “a daunting job.” We are sensitive to the different frequencies of the two chunks and prefer the one with the higher frequency, even though there is no real reason why a job cannot be described as daunting.

With this, Kao et. al set forth to test if “literary readers would be more sensitive to the probabilistic distributions of literary words than nonliterary readers.” They selected four and four excerpts of literary and non-literary writing and manipulated the frequencies of several chunks. They hypothesized that literary readers (those who love reading literary works) are likely to give higher ratings for passages that have higher chunk frequencies of what could be called ‘literary blocks.’ Non-literary readers would prefer reading passages that have been modified to contain non-literary chunk frequencies. Here is an example from the paper:
(a) On the further side of the field – this is the original chunk frequency suited for literary works.
(b) On the further part of the field -this is a modified chunk frequency suited for non-literary works

As you can probably notice, the meaning of both sentences is the same, but for an Anglophile the modified expression would sound odd and would make her give a lower rating. A person who reads non-literary works would likely prefer the modified chunk because he is used to seeing it more often (i.e., has higher frequency in his corpora).

As it was assumed, there was a significant interaction between the subject’s reading preferences and habits. Those who mostly read literary works gave higher ratings to original passages that have higher frequency chunks, while non-literary readers preferred mostly passages with non-literary chunks.  But that is only for literary passages. For non-literary passages,  all subjects preferred the originals.

Kao, J., Ryan, R., Dye, M., & Ramscar,M. (0). An acquired taste: How reading literature affects word distributions when judging literary texts. Not specified