Ernie's 3D Pancakes

Sarcasm right. Metaphor left.

From Forbes (see also The Guardian):

For example, actors read phrases such as "don't work too hard" in both a neutral sense (meaning "you're a hard worker") and a sarcastic sense (meaning "you're a real slacker"). Each comment came in proper context as part of a story about, say, a worker who's sleeping or a worker who's grinding away at his job. All the subjects understood the sarcasm except for those with damage to the prefrontal area, which is above the eye sockets and behind the forehead. And among those, people with damage to a specific area known as the ventromedial area had the most trouble deciphering sarcasm.

From Scientific American:

Vilayanur S. Ramachandran of the University of California at San Diego and his colleagues tested four patients who had experienced damage to the left angular gyrus region of their brains. All of the volunteers were fluent in English and otherwise intelligent, mentally lucid and able to engage in normal conversations. But when the researchers presented them with common proverbs and metaphors such as "the grass is always greener on the other side" and "reaching for the stars," the subjects interpreted the sayings literally almost all of the time.

And finally, via Metaphor and Symbol:

Two subtests-Sarcasm Comprehension and Metaphor Comprehension-of Gardner and Brownell's (1986) Right Hemisphere Communication Battery, adapted to Hebrew, were administered to 27 right-brain-damaged (RBD) patients, 31 left-brain-damaged (LBD) patients, and 21 age-matched normal controls. RBD patients tended to score somewhat lower than LBD patients on Sarcasm Comprehension and higher than LBD patients on Metaphor Comprehension. Both patient groups showed a significant impairment in Sarcasm Comprehension relative to normal controls. The difference between RBD patients and normals in Metaphor Comprehension did not reach significance, but there was a significant disadvantage to LBD patients relative to both RBD patients and normal controls. Significant negative correlations between test scores and lesion extent were found for Sarcasm Comprehension in left middle and inferior frontal gyri, and for Metaphor Comprehension in left middle temporal gyrus and the junctional area of the superior temporal and supramarginal gyri on the left. Lesion extent in right hemisphere regions did not correlate with either test performance.

[first few links via Boing boing and MeFi. Last link via the collective memory of all mankind]

Legolas! You've come!

See also the Keebler Elf Intelligence Agency.

Enduring Freedom

Asked by a reporter for the North Carolina News and Observer about the name-change campaign - an idea Mr Jones said at the time came to him by a combination of God's hand and a constituent's request - he replied: "I wish it had never happened."

The Dark Side of the Kettle

“Only the Sith deal in absolutes.”
— Obi-Wan Kenobi

Pikachu! I choose you!

Jay Wood at Toilet Paper with Page Numbers discusses picking your poison thesis advisor, with a handy guide to identifying the various species of computer science chemistry science profs in their native habitat. Classify your colleagues! Identify yourself!

The Micromanager: Usually an eminently respected scientist who is keenly aware of the ponzi scheme that is grad school in experimental science: i.e. there is a huge need for researchers at the graduate student and post-doc level, but the Boomers have all the tenure-track positions locked up until 2017. Is usually a Boomer his or herself.

The Ambitious Geek: Usually a younger professor. Absent tenure, this choice of advisor is fraught with peril, as tenure denial results in having to pack up the lab for another institution [...]. He or she is counting on you to come up with a way to execute hair-brained schemes to get enough results for a publication.

The Creative Genius: An older researcher who, at one point in the past, struck a home-run or two and is now flush with cash. [...] Usually gives students a lot of room to pick their own projects, and has the money to let you develop your ideas. That’s great if you, yourself are creative, but a nightmare of a 7-year Master’s degree if you are not.

The Absentminded Professor: Likely more interested in teaching than most and may be writing an undergraduate textbook. Look out, because you can never get him or her to focus on your project long enough to get a paper out.

The Bitter Fundless Twit: Usually has low-to-no funding because he or she either ran out of ideas post-tenure, or is not politically astute enough to write grant applications that bend with the prevailing winds.

The Political Player: Smooth operator. More interested in policy than science, this one may be an officer in a professional society, and definitely has a role in the NSF / NIH, or other governmental agency. As with the Absentminded Professor, may be hard to reach, but boy-oh-boy will you have connections if you graduate.

The Emeritus-in-Training: Very old professor with a magnificent scientific reputation. Usually is not as picky about quality as he (almost always a he) once was. OK if you want to slide by, but the danger is health and patience. If he gets sick or gets fed up with University politics, he may just retire on you, and you’ll be out begging other professors to take you in. This will probably add years to your Ph.D. and turn you into a bitter alcoholic.

Update (May 30): Okay, so yes, Jay's a chemist, and if you actually read his post you can see that he's describing chemistry profs. But I didn't even notice that the first time I read his post; his classification fit computer science so well that it didn't even occur to me to check his field. So -10 to me for reading comprehension, and +10 to Jay for describing more than he thought.

[via TDM]

Where CS faculty got their degrees, again

Cristian Estan has posted a comprehensive study of where faculty in top-10 CS faculty get their degrees, significantly expanding and refining the chart than John Iacono and I threw together. Christian's study includes a chart that excludes full professors, which may give a better picture of recent activity. Most notably, Cristian's scripts and raw data are available, so you can split up the data in other ways if you like. Well done!

One of my colleagues at UIUC broke the news to me about a month ago:

Your table is famous! I was up at UW-Madison giving a talk, and the moment I mentioned the table and your name, everyone was laughing.

Heh. Yeah. Great.

Intercrossmultimetadisciplinarianicityhoodishness

Ah, if only it were that easy.

La la la I am not listening

John Hart recently sent the following email to the faculty in my department in response to a BusinessWeek article about shifts in DARPA funding. I've emphasized a few key sentences and added some links.

I'm just returning from a meeting of the DARPA/NSF CARGO PI's meeting. At the end of the meeting we had a general discussion with the program managers there from NSF and DARPA and I asked them about the situation. The DARPA program manager was finishing his rotation up, but said that within DARPA they didn't believe they were actively reducing academic funding, but it does appear to be happening due to a desire to fund shorter term applied research (with 12 month deliverables), along with the increased security clearances. He did recommend that there was an art to specifying the deliverables, and one could do reasonable long term basic research by specifying the deliverables appropriately.

Both the NSF and DARPA program managers expressed a desperate need for new program managers. The DARPA manager was in "computational geometry" (in the loose sense) and said after he left there was no one slated to replace him, and that all it took was someone to step up for us to get a better share of the available funds. Unfortunately, we didn't have a lot of volunteers. Denis Zorin mentioned to me later that Courant would "appoint" people from what later became his institute at NYU to serve as program directors. John Sullivan further mentioned that since at the time they were leading the way in applied mathematics, this made a lot of strategic sense for the institute, and being appointed by the institute director might have allieved any fears about departmental support upon return.

So it seems the solution to this problem might be a more proactive stance from the academic community in volunteering to be program managers at DARPA and NSF. I think this is a great solution (so long as it isn't me). I wonder if there's anything academia can do to sweeten the pot? I'm chair of SIGGRAPH's service award right now and perhaps it might be a good time to recognize some who helped fund computer graphics, and perhaps the same is true in the rest of computer science, as a way to encourage others to serve.

It's rather shocking to hear that DAPRA doesn't think it has reduced academic funding, when the acadmic community, the National Academies, the press, congressional committees, and even the Defense Science Board believe it has. (All these links are from CRA's excellent Computing Research Policy Blog.) Here, for example, is an except from a press release by the Science Committee of the US House of Representatives, discussing a recent committee meeting on the future of American computer science research.

[Committee chairman] Boehlert and the non-governmental witnesses particularly expressed concern about the balance between short- and long-term research at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). [...] In his opening statement, Boehlert said, "We cannot have a situation where university researchers can point to sharp declines in DARPA funding, reviews of research results that reflect telescoped time horizons, and increased classification. We cannot have a situation where proposal approval rates at the National Science Foundation drop by half in just a few years. We cannot have a situation where a Presidential advisory council declares that our information technology infrastructure is 'highly vulnerable' and that there is 'relatively little support for fundamental research to address the larger security vulnerabilities.' We cannot have a situation where a Pentagon advisory board similarly expresses deep concern over the lack of long-term computing research."

The other two points that John raises are equally important: (1) funding acencies are desperate for qualified program managers, but (2) there is little cultural or institutional incentive for researchers to become program managers. It's hard enough convincing people to take on heavy but necessary administrative duties within the university: department chairs, directors of graduate studies, assistant deans, etc. Who wants to give up 1-4 years of active research, move to Washington DC, and disappoint most of their colleagues for a living?

A Post Graduate School for Academic Donors

From The Unpopular Review, Vol II, No. 3, July-September 1914:

On the whole the results of our first seminary exercise were satisfactory. One student immediately drew a considerable check for the salary fund, another, who had been planning to give a hockey rink, said he would think things over. Still a third deposited forty pairs of slightly worn trousers with the university treasurer, “for whom it might concern.” Only one accepted the demonstration contentedly. He admitted that low pay and extra work were hard on the Professors, but he also felt that these outside activities advertised the university and were good business. Of course you wore out some professors in the process, but you could always get others.

Snakes! Why did it have to be snakes?

It is hard to rely on a college executive composed of three chimpanzees, a scorpion, a pit viper, and a coma patient.

— Cary Nelson and Stephen Watt
“Tenure and Promotion Goes Crazy”