Clarification of an off-hand comment

Josh is taking me to task for a comment I made with regard to a line in a Walter Williams column. From my post:

he [Walter Williams] writes that "We've seen widespread condemnation of alleged atrocities and prisoner mistreatment by the U.S., but how much media condemnation have you seen of beheadings and other gross atrocities by Islamists?" I respond that we, rightly, hold ourselves to higher moral standards than we do the Islamists.

Josh points out, rightly, that the Islamists should be held to the same moral standards as our GIs, and anyone else, for that matter. He writes:

Either a thing is a moral outrage deserving of condemnation or it isn't.... if complaining about conditions at Gitmo is the right thing to do, then I think we have plenty of time left over to criticize beheadings....

I agree. I should have said that the imbalance of criticism is likely based on different expectations, not different moral standards. We expect Islamic extremists to do barbaric things like behead people, while, perhaps incorrectly, we expect our armed forces to not torture prisoners. Both acts deserve condemnation.

There is another component to this debate that neither Josh nor have I touched on yet. Another possible response to Williams' complaint concerning condemnation imbalance would be to lower the standard we hold our armed forces to; we could hold both the Islamists and 'our boys' to a uniformly low standard of moral conduct. Doing so would, of course, lose us whatever moral high-ground we have (or had - the Abu Ghraib torture has surely lost us a good bit already).

The New Look: Awesome

I had some technical problems last night changing the template here (from 'Rounders 3' to 'Simple II' with a few 'margin:1%'s thrown in for good measure). Blogspot stopped responding to my repeated previews and template saves last night, so I saved the html locally halfway through making some minor adjustments. I wasn't able to republish the entire blog until just now.

Josh found out (and posted) about the new look after I began making changes but before I finished, so there was disagreement between the front page and the archives. Everything here on Source-Filter should look the same now (i.e., sleek and sexy, with a touch of sophisticated).

Ultimate Hype!

Tonight's pre-TUF (warning: link goes to obnoxious website with automated talkie) hour on Spike TV is devoted to hyping a fight between Chuck Lidell and Jeremy Horn that happened in August of 2005.

Chuck says: "No one gets in my head like that. I go out and fight, I fight."

It is reminiscent of Igor Zinoviev's heavily accented "I like fight. Fight is win."

[Postscript: An earlier version of this post described tonight's show as hyping a fight scheduled to happen in October of this year. The whole damn show was presented as hype for a fight-to-come, then at the end, they showed about 20 seconds of the fight-that-went, at which point I remembered having seen it. I was getting excited. The hype was working, and I already knew the outcome.]

'Ernesto' se traduce como 'Dick'?

This is one of the funniest t-shirts I've seen in a long time. I might even buy one, and it has been many years since I bought a t-shirt with anything other than a pocket on the front.

¡Viva absurdismo!

(hat-tip to boingboing; link to boingboing post about the shirt)

The Cognitive Lunch Shark Tank

Matt Jones (with a bit more head-hair and quite a lot more beard than in the picture on the linked page) gave a very interesting talk on generalization and categorization at this week's cognitive lunch. He (with Todd Maddox [and others] I assume) has developed some interesting new experimental techniques and accompanying analyses that have, if you buy his arguments, produced some reasonably shocking new results. Not everyone at the talk seemed to buy his arguments.

IU is arguably the best place to study mathematical psychology, particularly if you are interested in categorization. If I'm remembering correctly, Jones cited three of the people attending the talk (John Kruschke, Rob Nosofsky, and Rob Goldstone), and his association with Maddox links him to F. Gregory Ashby, which in turn links him to Jim Townsend (which kind of links him to me, but not in any substantive way).

He didn't cite them to kiss any asses, mind you. He cited them because their names are impossible to avoid if you're going to discuss categorization. Their names are impossible to avoid in no small part because they've each put many years of effort into investigating categorization.

Without going into too much detail, Jones' basic point was that, in a categorization task, you can analyze the effects of the immediately preceding trial on the current trial to investigate the role of inter-stimulus similarity in stimulus generalization and categorization. He discussed the effects of both the preceding stimulus, its structural relationship to the current stimulus, and, briefly, the feedback following the preceding stimulus on the probability of giving a particular response to the current stimulus. In setting things up at the beginning of the talk, he brought up some of the models that (some of) those present had developed. In discussing some of the results late in the talk, he brought up those models again in order to point out that they couldn't account for the data he had observed.

Thus far in my career as a cognitive scientist at IU, I have attended cognitive lunch only intermittently. I do know, however, that moments like these offer the series' most compelling, and, occasionally, most horrifying (to an up-and-coming scholar), moments. The speaker will make a claim, or gloss over an assumption, and before you know it, it's a feeding frenzy. As many of these professors have been working with, and around, each other for many years, they can, on occasion, get pretty snippy with each other. And they do not often hesitate to disagree vociferously with, well, anyone in the room.

Today wasn't bad. I've certainly seen worse. Jones dealt with the interruptions with aplomb (he's seems to be very smart, is certainly well-versed in the field, and elicited a few laughs, although he talked too fast for much of the talk, as he was, in my opinion, a bit over ambitious in planning the presentation [he gets a load of bonus points from me for using a very stripped-down black-on-white slide template]). Criticisms and questions were pointed, but appropriate.

I hope things go as well for me in January. Perhaps the fact that I don't study categorization will thin the herd a bit.

General Recognition Theory

I wrote in my first and second posts that I plan on writing 'science' posts describing research that is relevant to my own. Well, here's my first post doing just that, although I would like to note quickly that this post will not be as technical as some that follow. This post will be about a problem that I've set up for myself and my initial thoughts on how I plan on going about solving it.

First, a bit of background. I am working on a double major PhD in Linguistics and Cognitive Science at Indiana University. I also plan on getting the certificate in modeling in Cognitive Science (pdf link explaining the requirements, if you're interested). The combination of a double major and the certificate has allowed me to take, if I'm not mistaken, exactly zero elective classes. This is fine, though, as my coursework has for the most part been thoroughly enjoyable and extremely well tailored to my interests.

Anyway, my first exposure to the modeling that now consumes so much of my time occurred when I received an email about a reading group described as an "introduction to general recognition theory (GRT). GRT is a general, multi-dimensional signal detection theory of identification and categorization. We will focus on the original theory (Ashby & Townsend, Psy. Rev. 1986), which was applied to perceptual independence of psychological dimensions and features."

I recall thinking that a model that deals with perceptual independence of features was precisely the kind of model I needed to know about. I'm sure that the mention of signal detection theory influenced my decision to participate in the reading group, as well, as a professor I respect greatly said once, in an offhand manner, that signal detection theory was one of the most important ideas he ever learned about. Having now learned about it, I feel confident saying the same.

The bit about features caught my eye, though, because, within linguistics, I tend toward the phonology and phonetics side. Phonology and, to a lesser extent, phonetics are built on a foundation of distinctive features, yet I couldn't recall anyone in either phonology or phonetics ever having addressed the issue of (in)dependence between two (or more) features. Well, here was a reading group addressing the issue directly. So I joined in.

Here's a grossly over-simplified description of GRT. In the simplest case, the experimental task involved the identification of four stimuli. These four stimuli consist of the factorial combination of two features, each with two values. To provide a simple, concrete example, suppose that the two features of the stimuli are two 200 ms pure tones, one at 200 Hz, the other at 500 Hz, and that the two values are 'absent' and 'present'. If '0' indicates absence, '1' indicates presence, and the first position represents the lower frequency tone, the four stimuli are 00, 01, 10, and 11. Now, the stimuli in these sorts of experiments have to be confusable, either because they similar enough that the noise of the perceptual system itself makes it difficult to always identify them correctly, or because they are purposefully embedded in noise. In the present case, it would probably work best to embed them in noise.

Confusable stimuli are important because the data we work with are confusion probabilities. For example, given that the stimulus '01' was presented, we tally the number of times a subject responded '00', '01', '10', and '11'. We then divide each tally by the total number of times that stimulus '01' was presented and find that, say, Pr( response = '10' | stimulus = '01' ) = 0.23. We do this for each stimulus and get a 4x4 confusion matrix (typically arranged so that the columns correspond to responses, rows to stimuli).

It is assumed that each physical stimulus corresponds to a probabilistic distribution in perceptual space and that the distributions corresponding to the four stimuli overlap. In the most general form of the theory, no assumptions about the particular character of these distributions are made. In the most common special case of the general theory, it is assumed that each perceptual distribution is bivariate Gaussian. In any case, the perceptual effect of each stimulus presentation is assumed to be a point in the perceptual space. Because the perceptual representations are overlapping and distributed, the point is ambiguous - there is a non-zero probability that it came from each of the four possible distributions. So, we need the multidimensional analogs of signal detection theory's scalar criterion, which turn out to be decision bounds - curves in the perceptual space that define response regions. If the perceptual effect of a given stimulus presentation falls, say, above the bound separating the 'absence' and 'presence' regions for the 200 Hz tone and below the bound separating the 'absence' and 'presence' regions for the 500 Hz tone, the subject responds '10'.

One of the great strengths of GRT is that it allows us to differentiate a number of different kinds of perceptual independence. To make a long and very interesting story very short, GRT provides three key definitions. Perceptual independence holds for a given stimulus if statistical independence holds in the corresponding perceptual distribution; perceptual separability holds for a feature if the perceptual effect of that feature do not depend on the level of the other feature; and decisional separability holds if the decision bounds are parallel to the coordinate axes in perceptual space.

Perhaps the greatest weakness of the theory, though, is the fact that a 4x4 confusion matrix does not suffice to determine the properties of the underlying perceptual distributions and decision bounds. Some very smart people have put a lot of time and effort into coaxing useful information out of such a matrix, though, so the theory is, in fact, quite useful. Significantly, if failures of independence and separability occur, observed probabilities can be used to demonstrate this fact. Evidence for independence or separability is much harder to come by.

Which brings me to my problem. Maybe the most important aspect of standard signal detection theory is the ability to transform response probabilities into separate measures of sensitivity and response bias. It is well documented that systematically manipulating the frequencies of the stimuli or the payoff values of the responses can induce changes in subjects' response biases without affecting sensitivity. Well, these same kinds of manipulations ought to have the same kinds of effects in the multidimensional generalization of the standard theory. Changing the stimulus frequencies should induce systematic changes in subjects' decision bounds without changing the relative positions or properties of the perceptual distributions.

My problem is to figure out what kinds of manipulations of stimulus frequencies will produce what kinds of usable changes in the observed response probabilities. My intuition tells me that the larger degrees of freedom provided by the additional confusion matrices ought to enable more direct investigation of the underlying distributions. If shifts in stimulus frequencies induce predictable shifts in decision bounds, it ought to be possible to abstract away from the particulars of the decision bounds themselves to more directly get at properties of the perceptual distributions.

So, the first thing I need to do is figure out exactly what decision bound changes I expect when I change stimulus frequencies. Then I need to figure out what, if anything, this buys me in terms of the relationships between the underlying perceptual representations and the observable response statistics. At the very least, the additional data should allow for some Gaussian model fitting, but I would like to produce some respectable analytic results, too.

[Postscript: Okay, so this post was less about my problem and how I plan to solve it than it was a quick and dirty description of GRT. By quick and dirty, of course, I mean terribly incomplete. Among other things, I almost completely avoided explicit mathematical notation. I also mentioned only indirectly two of the many scholars who have developed the theory, without whom I wouldn't be thinking or writing about this stuff at all. I will rectify both of these shortcomings in the future with more complete presentations of a number of particular papers on GRT.

Also, although I am happy that I am, thus far, upholding yesterday's solemn oath, it seems likely that, by committing myself to daily blog posts, I have implicitly committed myself to less careful proof reading. For example, this post turned out to be longer than I expected it to be, and I don't really feel like proofing it again, but I don't want to withhold publication, so caveat lector.]

Promises, promises...

If you're familiar with my archive, you know that I have thus far posted only intermittently. Well, all that's about to change.

I hereby solemnly swear that I will post at least once a day.

It's not like there's a lack of subjects to write about. For example, there's a post on Josh's blog that I intend to respond to. And there's a line in a Walter William's column that I take issue with (he writes that "We've seen widespread condemnation of alleged atrocities and prisoner mistreatment by the U.S., but how much media condemnation have you seen of beheadings and other gross atrocities by Islamists?" I respond that we, rightly, hold ourselves to higher moral standards than we do the Islamists.). And there's what looks to be a good article on the Cato website, but I haven't read it yet.

Okay, so I haven't exactly opened up the floodgates here.

As I mentioned in my second post, part of my motivation to start a blog at all was to give myself a reason to write on a regular basis. Thus far, my posting has been rather irregular (i.e., aperiodic), but having a blog with a readership of unknown size - likely statistically indistinguishable from zero - does seem to give me some measure of motivation.

Why, prior to starting this blog, I almost never wrote rambling, semi-coherent disquisitions about The Ultimate Fighter.

As a quick aside, now is as good a time as any to point out how good was Josh's advice to me regarding topics per blog post. Pretty much the only thing I've written about Ultimate Fighting can be found at the tail end of my August 31 post 'Chasing Josh, Reading Laudan, Watching Fights'. Had I had the sense to write a post solely about the gentlemanly art of fisticuffs instead of appending it as an afterthought to a post about that and two other things, in the preceding paragraph, I could have linked directly to the rambling, semi-incoherent disquition. Instead, my early blogging errors are catching up with me. You can think of this paragraph as a ripple, in the pond that is my blog, caused by the skipped stone of a poorly planned three-topic post.

Um.

Okay.

Given that, in my freshman composition class, the readership was known to be exactly one, it wasn't the promise of fame that had me patiently seated thrice weekly in front of my dedicated word processor. It wasn't fear of bad grades, either, as I recall making all sorts of ludicrous excuses to avoid waking up early enough to make it to class.

Even though I had numerous mildly unpleasant encounters with a freshman-essayist variant of writer's block, I believe now that I was motivated primarily by the joy I felt once the snowball's momentum freed it from my push. I own a haze of indistinct memories, dozens of late afternoons and early evenings of waiting for inspiration to strike me, sitting and looking around my dorm room, pondering the topic-worthiness of my plaid sheets, my trombone, the window, the desk, my word-processor, my hands... until, inevitably, eventually, a thought would follow immediately from a stray antecedent, a third would join in, and I was off to the races. Once I had a topic, however trivial and asinine, the words would arrive more quickly than I could hunt-and-peck them into the 5-by-13 inch screen.

It's interesting to note that this composition class was entirely focused on mechanics. We had free reign to choose any topic. Our essays would be returned with small, neat, red marks accompanied by numbers in the margins indicating which sub-section of the Little, Brown Handbook's section on punctuation and mechanics we had violated. For each error, we were tasked to write the incorrect sentence, the broken rule, and the corrected version of the sentence. I grew very tired indeed of repeating the refrain regarding the use of commas and 'introductory elements'.

By the end of the semester, I was writing error-free essays. It felt quite good to see clear evidence of progress and accomplishment, I had established an invigorating (yet, sadly, short-lived) essay habit, and the professor singled me out for praise (he enjoyed the absurdity of my sense of humor - it was icing on the cake that he looked and kind of sounded like John Lithgow).

Unfortunately, I don't have copies of any of those essays. But I do have a burgeoning essay habit again.

The source, and justification, of rights

I'm a bit late responding, but the Mises blog had an interesting post a couple of days ago on the source of rights. Not surprisingly, then, it's largely about the writer's (Stephan Kinsella) belief about what the source of rights is, but it also touches briefly on the justification of rights.

In the end, Mr. Kinsella argues that, if we must choose a source, it's empathy. This makes sense - rights are inherently tenuous and inherently social. My rights hold insofar as others respect them; they can be violated by the unscrupulous and sociopathic with disurbing ease. The empathetic among us are the most likely to respect the rights of one another, as Mr. Kinsella says, almost by definition.

This is fine if all we want to do is consider the source of rights. But Mr. Kinsella isn't only concerned with the source - he is concerned with their rationale, as well. Actually, he's concerned with the idea that rights have no rationale. He writes

But rights don't really "come from" anything. When it is demonstrated that 2+2=4, this is a truth, a fact. Does it make sense to ask what is the "source" of this "truth"? Where does 2+2=4 "come from"? This is just nonsense. And it is similar with normative propositions--with moral truths.

Putting aside the poor choice of an example of a mathematical axiom, the equation of normative propositions with axioms is, well, just nonsense.

Any statement of the form 'one should do X' - that is, any normative proposition - is implicitly incomplete. A more complete version can be expressed as 'one should do X, because X will further Y.' Even more thoroughly, one could employ the ponderous 'one should do X, because X will further the goal Y, which is a worthy and attainable goal, as evidenced by Z and W, and, furthermore, we have good reason to believe that doing X will actually move us toward Y - see V, U, and T.'

Let's tease this apart a bit.

Any prescribed action X must further a worthy goal Y. Of course, there is no guarantee that anyone, much less everyone, will agree that Y is worthy. For example, I may value the individual's autonomy very highly, and so prescribe actions accordingly, but the mere fact that I - or any number of people - value individual autonomy does not make it a worthy goal for anyone other than me, and it certainly doesn't make it, or the normative statement aimed at furthering it, 'true'. Goals must themselves be justified.

Here's a quick, and probably deeply flawed, stab at justifying this one: individual autonomy is a worthy goal because our existence depends on (some measure of) it. I can't take care of my own needs, or pursue my desires, if I must take care of the needs, or pursue the desires, of (too many) others. I can't take care of my own needs, and pursue my desires, if someone else insists he is responsible for them.

Any prescribed action X must further an attainable goal Y. When stated plainly, this seems very obvious, but it's not at all obvious when left implicit in a typically elliptical normative statement. If we have no hope of attaining a goal, there is no point in attempting to pursue it.

This requirement sheds some light on the 'some measure of' modifier above, as, in this case, absolute individual autonomy is clearly not attainable. Putting aside the obvious exceptions - children, the infirm, etc... - even an otherwise unencumbered adult cannot attain absolute autonomy. If I want to hold onto this goal, it should be rephrased to reflect this fact. I could, for example, recast it in terms of the maximization of individual autonomy.

Given a worthy and attainable goal Y, the action X must actually contribute to the pursuit of Y. If you've got a goal that you value, and that you can justify, it does no good to prescribe action that won't get you any closer to it. If I value individual autonomy, I can't advise you to lie if that lie will, for example, prevent another from making an informed decision.

The point, to reiterate, is that normative statements aren't axioms. The normative proposition enjoining an actor to do X is justified only insofar as X will actually promote Y, and only insofar as Y is a justifiable and attainable goal.

[Postscript: For what it's worth, my thoughts on ethics are hugely influenced by Larry Laudan's model of scientific progress outlined in Science and Values. This despite the fact that he writes, in the preface, that

"...[T]his book is neither about how to make scientists more moral nor about how to make moral theory more scientific, however desirable at least one of those outcomes might be .... [A]lthough it is devoutly to be wished that moral philosophers knew more than they do about science, I would not know how to recognize a scientific ethics I were confronted by one."

I make no claims to have accurately represented Laudan's model of science here, and clearly he doesn't think it applies to ethical issues (at least he didn't in 1984). Nonetheless, his framework for the justification of normative methodological statements in science seems to me to have direct parallels in moral philosophy.

[Post-postscript: while it is very likely that there are incomplete thoughts and problematic philosophical assertions in the above, I must leave now if I am to make it to the free performance of Book I of The Well Tempered Clavier on campus. This kind of thing is one of my favorite aspects of life in a university town, and I loves me some Bach. More later.]]

Some bias with a late night snack

Josh has taken issue with my having taken issue with his taking issue with, um, what was it again?

I bet that if we continue to link to each new salvo in this battle of wits and wisdom, we'll be in the top 40,000,000 or so results of a google search for "liberal media". We used to have these kind of exchanges via longform email, but now that we're bloggers, we offer to the internets on-loggers the opportunity to join in, too.

Since I don't want to get into this liberal media debate, I'll just finish by stating, for the record, that I agree with Josh's comment that it was appropriate for Rumsfeld to bring up a potentially valid historical episode when discussing current events. I also agree that, insofar as Rumsfeld's speech deserved a response at all, it deserved a reasoned response - for example, a response focusing on the differences between our current situation and that of the Allies-to-be prior to World War II. Instead, we got Barbara Boxer's faux outrage and Howard Dean's electoral prognostication.

I wrote above that "I don't want to get into this" half-seriously, because, on the one hand, I felt like giving a half-hearted shot at getting a rise out of Josh, and on the other, I believe that the debate over whether or not there is a liberal (or conservative) media bias is a statistical debate requiring careful, laborious consideration of, among other things, what constitutes bias in one direction or another, how many media outlets must exhibit bias, and how often they must do so to establish bias.

I will certainly concede that Josh believes that there is a liberal media bias (and I'll point out that Josh is not a lazy thinker - he comes by his beliefs the hard way), and I will concede that it's possible that there is, in fact, a liberal media bias. But I won't measure it.

Some bias with breakfast

Josh is upset with media misrepresentation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's August 30 speech to the American Legion. Based on two articles about the speech (this one and that one), Josh concludes that the first article misrepresents Rumsfeld's speech, and that this "subtle character assassination" is due to a liberal bias in the media.

I take issue with this conclusion.

First of all, the first article is about an election year stunt to garner support among the Democrat's base (a strategy that assumes that the concept of a coherent Democratic base is not self-contradictory). The Democrat's are pushing for a resolution requiring the resignation of Rumsfeld. It won't pass, and the Democrats know it (and even if it did pass, I can't imagine it would actually lead to Rumsfeld stepping down), but this kind of thing isn't new in Washington. The article in question only mentions his speech twice, once in the opening paragraph:

A resolution demanding the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld after he compared Iraq war critics to Nazi appeasers has strong support among U.S. Senate Democrats, a senior Democrat said on Sunday.

and once in reference to Senator Barbara Boxer's take on the resolution:

California Democrat Sen. Barbara Boxer (news, bio, voting record) has vowed to offer a resolution calling on Bush to name a new defense secretary, saying she was outraged by Rumsfeld's comments that appeared to compare Iraq war critics to appeasers of Nazi Germany.

Josh takes issue with the fact that Rumsfeld doesn't actually directly compare opponents of the Iraq war to Nazi appeasers, and the fact that Rumsfeld's speech isn't quoted, hiding the first fact from the reader.

Again, though, the article is about the resolution, which, stunt or not, undoubtedly has origins older than this speech. The speech is omitted because it's not central to what's being reported on. Beyond that, though, I am confused by the distinction Josh makes when he says:

...note that the specific charge is that people have not "learned history's lessons." In other words, the accusation is not that people are Chamberlainesque hand-wringers, unable to act. It is simply that they haven't learned the appropriate lessons from history. The charge is one of ignorance, not cowardice.

In reference to the following from Rumsfeld's speech:

I recount this history because once again we face the same kind of challenges in efforts to confront the rising threat of a new type of fascism.

Today, another enemy — a different kind of enemy — has also made clear its intentions — in places like New York, Washington, D.C., Bali, London, Madrid, and Moscow. But it is apparent that many have still not learned history’s lessons.

But what is it ignorance of, if not the dangers of appeasement? Now, either the "many [who] have still not learned history’s lessons" are, in fact, guilty of advocating appeasement, or there is no one who actually advocates appeasement of the new fascists. If the ignorance in question is ignorance of the dangers of appeasement, then in the former case, the charge of ignorance holds some water, but only by relying on an implicit accusation of appeasement, while in the latter case, it's semantically and rhetorically empty, a charge levied at no target at all.

The point is that, although it is undoubtedly factually incorrect to state that Rumsfeld directly accuses opponents of the Iraq war of being equivalent to fascist-appeasers, a construal of his speech under which a someone is being accused of appeasement is entirely reasonable. Continuing directly from Rumsfeld's speech:

We need to face the following questions:

* With the growing lethality and availability of weapons, can we truly afford to believe that somehow vicious extremists can be appeased?
* Can we really continue to think that free countries can negotiate a separate peace with terrorists?
* Can we truly afford the luxury of pretending that the threats today are simply “law enforcement” problems, rather than fundamentally different threats, requiring fundamentally different approaches?
* And can we truly afford to return to the destructive view that America — not the enemy — is the real source of the world’s trouble?

These are central questions of our time. And we must face them.

Again, either someone is advocating appeasement, and Rumsfeld is calling them out, or no one is, in which case it is difficult to see the point of bringing up this particular episode in history. Given that the Bush administration considers the Iraq war the latest battlefield in the "war on terror" -

Iraq is the latest battlefield in this war. Many terrorists who kill innocent men, women, and children on the streets of Baghdad are followers of the same murderous ideology that took the lives of our citizens in New York, in Washington, and Pennsylvania. There is only one course of action against them: to defeat them abroad before they attack us at home.... Our mission in Iraq is clear. We're hunting down the terrorists. We're helping Iraqis build a free nation that is an ally in the war on terror. We're advancing freedom in the broader Middle East. We are removing a source of violence and instability, and laying the foundation of peace for our children and our grandchildren.

- is it so unreasonable to see a link betwen Rumsfeld's criticism of those who would appease the "islamo-fascists" to those who criticize the Iraq war?

I am not defending Schumer or Boxer's personal feelings of insult, nor am I saying that Rumsfeld was in fact accusing them personally (or anyone else in particular) of seeking to appease latter-day fascists. I am simply pointing out what I see as a flaw in Josh's argument for liberal bias in the media. In the single article presented as evidence of liberal media bias, one mention of Rumsfeld's speech regards only a particular politician's personal feelings about the speech - and says that it "appeared to compare Iraq war critics to appeasers of Nazi Germany." (my emphasis) - and the other makes a fairly reasonable inference based on the speech and the Bush administration's standard line on the role of the Iraq war in the "war on terror."

Josh finishes by writing:

The article linked above fails to quote Rumsfeld because it is attempting to mislead.

As should be clear by now, I don't agree with this inference. He continues:

I grow increasingly tired of people who continue to believe that there is no liberal bias in the media. I'm really not sure what else could explain the necessity of such a subtle character assasination.

I think that Josh's own biases play an important role in his take on this. Let me be clear, though, that I don't think this is a bad thing. Josh has made the case to me, and I agree, that a certain degree of bias - in whatever direction - gives reporting more punch. I've even heard Josh make more convincing arguments than this one for a general liberal media bias. Furthermore, I share many of Josh's biases, so I'm not arguing against him out of general disagreement or dislike for his politics.

I've tried to present at least one possible, and plausible, alternative explanation for this "subtle character assassination" that got Josh worked up. One data point doesn't make a slam-dunk case for liberal media bias. Granted, this meme is all over the place since Rumsfeld's speech, as a simple google search quickly reveals, but this seems to me to be stronger evidence of lazy journalism than liberal bias. "The media" is - sorry, are - anything but monolithic. If there is any single, overriding bias in the media, surely it's a bias toward sensationalizing everything, and surely this can, and does, cut in any direction on the political spectrum.

The only winning advice

Josh made a good point about my third blog post. It seems obvious in retrospect, of course, but he pointed out that that one post should have been three individual posts.

Two things should have tipped me off. First, it has a tripartite title. Second, it has two hand-typed dividers separating the three bits the title refers to. The dividers were hand-typed when these disparate portions of prose should have been separated by a chasm of dotted lines, an off-color rectangle, a time, a date, the number of comments (0 and counting!), and the previous post's, um, unipartite title. Thus is the graphical profundity of the thematic fissure that the blogspot template bestows upon the worthy.

This problem isn't unique to my third post. In fact, I am presently struggling, valiantly, against the urge to write about something other than my urge to write about something other than writing about this urge, yet there is no accompanying urge to transition smoothly from the urge to, say, an impassioned defense of Pluto's demotion to mere dwarfhood. A quick perusal of the Source-Filter archive shows that this behavior spans a full two-thirds of my blogging history, so I expect it will be something of a hurdle for me to overcome. Note, for example, that this paragraph discusses both my tendency to leap ungracefully from topic to topic and my heartfelt belief that Pluto is no better than 2003 UB 313, Sedna, Pluton, Mjesec, or Zemlja.

There's nothing as beautiful as a full 2003 UB 313 shining down as the Mjesec slinks behind the Zemlja's agreeably convex horizon.

Keep your eyes peeled for a newer, sleeker posting style here on Source-Filter.

Chasing Josh, Reading Laudan, Watching Fights

Looks like Josh is out-posting me pretty thoroughly so far. Well, he's more opinionated than me, and he's got less nuclear family to not neglect (one cat and some beer vs. a 6-month pregnant wife, 4.5 year old daughter, and some beer and wine), so, ipso facto, he has more blog posts than me.

I've also helped Josh by commenting on two of his posts, so not only does his blog have more original content, it has more readers, too.

Unfortunately, unlike Josh, I've been busy with non-class stuff that would take more time than I'm willing to spend blogging about. Either that or it would end up not doing to topic justice, as I would have to skimp on the details. Animal language, innumeracy, gaiety, bilingualism, alleged Mexican vote fraud,... Josh's got it all. Me? I've got an initial explanatory post, this meandering, self-absorbed silliness, and a mediocre political piece that has already been corrected and improved upon by none other than Josh, the bastard. He did say I made a good point (the bit near the end of my post wherein I spake unkindly of public school), though, so give me some credit.

Now I'm improving his google cachet by linking to all but one of his posts. Well, I don't like to do things half-assed, so: the only other post.

Josh, you're welcome.

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Some non-horribly derivative (though still entirely derivative) content: I'm currently reading Truth, Error, and Criminal Law, by Larry Laudan (the "famous" philosopher and historian of science), and, strangely enough, its subject matter overlaps somewhat with my own professional interests, in this case, signal detection theory (link goes to a site of unknown quality that includes a java applet SDT tutorial that looks nifty). The book concerns the extent to which, and manner in which, criminal law functions as a truth-finding system. In laying out the basis for his investigation into criminal law's epistemic bona fides, Laudan distinguishes between material and probatory innocence and guilt. Material guilt and innocence are matters of fact, whereas probatory guilt and innocence (findings of guilt and innocence) are matters of inference from evidence.

Laudan argues, correctly it seems to me, that, insofar as criminal law functions to find the truth with regard to a criminal case, error reduction and and error distribution are central to the issue. Errors here are cases in which material guilt is paired with probatory innocence and cases in which material innocence is paired with probatory guilt.

On reading the early section describing this general schema, I immediately thought of signal detection theory. If you followed the SDT link above (or if you already know about it), you can see where I'm going with this. In the simplest signal detection task, each trial in a perception experiment either has a physical signal present or not, and the subject has two response options - signal present or signal absent. Errors here are cases in which the physical presence of a signal is paired with the signal-absent response and cases in which the physical absence of a signal is paired with the signal-present response. In SDT lingo, these are called misses and false alarms, respectively (non-errors are called hits and correct rejections).

In a simple perception task using, say, a pure tone signal, all of the relevant probabilities are either determined by the experimenter

Pr(signal) = 1 - Pr(no signal)

or readily calculated conditional probabilities

Pr("signal-present" | signal) = Pr(hit)

Pr("signal-absent" | signal) = Pr(miss)

Pr("signal-present" | no signal) = Pr(false alarm)

Pr("signal-absent" | no signal) = Pr(correct rejection)

where

Pr(A | B) = Pr(A & B) / Pr(B)

Now, the utility of a signal detection analysis depends, in no small part, on the fact that Pr(signal) and Pr(no signal) are determined a priori. The associated probabilities in Laudan's analysis of criminal law are Pr(material guilt) and Pr(material innocence), which are clearly not known, much less conciously determined, a priori (at least let's hope they're not).

The utility of signal detection theory is that these probabilities can tell us about sensitivity independent of decision bias and decision bias independent of sensitivity. Without the baseline stimulus frequencies, though, SDT is a much more limited tool.

It will be interesting to see what Laudan does with his SDT-like schema given the limitations the subject matter places on his data. Based on the Abbreviations and Acronyms Used page, he will be employing two ratios:

m = true acquittals / false convictions

and

n = false acquittals / false convictions

It seems reasonably likely that whatever numbers Laudan uses as estimates of the number of true/false acquittals/convictions will be biased, though, since we don't know the truth of a case - we only know what a jury (or judge, depending on the legal tradition) decides about a case. Okay, we don't only know what a judge or jury says. It's possible that we may be confident of someone's guil but, for a variety of reasons, the case doesn't make it to trial. In any case, who knows how good the numbers are?

As I said, it will be interesting to see what he does. More later, when I find out.

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I started this post before UFC Unleashed started on the TV (that's TEE-vee) this evening. Progress on these last couple paragraphs has been halting and irregular. The tally tonight, as of 9:39 Eastern Standard Time (actually, Indiana Stupid Time), is two guillotine chokes, one rear naked choke, and one bloody face (no victor yet, though it's looking pretty lopsided [update: round two, though fairly close, likely went for bloody-faced Georges St. Pierre, so it's not as lopsided as I thought it would be {update 2: bloody-face had a good third round, and BJ Penn looked pretty tired at the end, so... the decision goes to St. Pierre, which surprised me, as the next pay-per-view has, as its main draw, BJ Penn vs. Matt Hughes, and the "prize" for winning the Penn-St. Pierre fight was a (rematch) fight with Matt Hughes. Sounds like a mystery. More later...]).

Among the reasons I love the UFC is the eloquence of those involved. Just now, one of the announcers (I think it was Joe Rogan) described the bloody-face fighter as "wincing his eye." Some months ago, during the third season of The Ultimate Fighter, Tito Ortiz said, in describing the mental aspect of the fight game, that "it's like chest."

They pays 'em to fight, not to talk. The fighters anyway. I don't know what Rogan's problem is.

Regular Writing, Political Regulation, and An Irregular Preview

The only way I'm going to manage to post on a regular basis is by simply forcing myself to post on a regular basis, whether or not I have much of anything to say. I know this because I had a fantastic composition teacher as a freshman at Warren Wilson College who instructed me to write single page (or longer) non-fiction essays on topics of my choosing for every single class (and who, sadly, is nowhere to be found on the website (and, I am ashamed to admit, I can't remember his name, so I can't even mention his name in a display of appreciation)). It came to be very easy for me, but it was tough to begin with, and it has been tough ever since, to write on a regular basis. Somehow, I have the feeling that posting to my very own blog can provide the motivation I need to start writing on a regular basis again. We'll see.

I should point out that, as an academic, I do write quite a bit on an irregular basis.

Anyway, here goes.

I was washing some dishes earlier and listening to 'Marketplace' on the local NPR affiliate and thought about responding to this bit by Marcellus Andrews on the immorality of capitalism and how it's to blame for the Katrina tragedy. I suppose that's as good a topic as any, so here are some selected quotes from the piece, which appear in italics, interspersed with my thoughts.

Katrina claimed so many because the people of Louisiana and the good ole US of A pretended that safety is a private good instead of a public good.

In this country, safety is just one more thing for sale if you have the bucks.

Craziness seduced us into thinking that way, despite the fact that no one of us is rich enough to buy a functioning levee system for a city of half a million people.

Is safety a 'good' at all? I suppose in relation to dangers like natural disasters, you could make the case that it is, but whatever problems arise from this are irrelevant to the failure of the levee system in New Orleans. In fact, the levees protecting New Orleans were designed to withstand a category three storm, and Katrina was category five. Someone(s), somewhere(s), made a (series of) decision(s) about precisely how to build the levees, and they simply were not built for a storm like the one that hit. It has nothing (directly) to do with philosophical considerations of economics and public vs. private safety.

Levees, schools, hospitals, police and highways are public goods that we buy together with our taxes because we use them together.

It's not the case that everyone agrees that these are public goods that should be paid for collectively, and they certainly aren't used equally by everyone, nor should they be.

We killed New Orleans when we turned our backs on the fundamental definition of economics as the accumulation of wealth in the service of freedom. A truly moral economy provides freedom from fear as well as freedom from nature's wrath.

It's delusional to think that 'freedom from fear as well as freedom from nature's wrath' are attainable. Also, it's not at all clear to me what Mr. Andrews believes 'moral' means, nor why something like an economy should, or how it even could, be 'moral.'

Katrina also taught us that some things, like safety, community, and decency, can only be bought in bulk.

This goes against the premise laid out earlier in the commentary, it seems to me. Either safety can only be 'bought in bulk,' or it's available selectively to those with the money to buy it individually. It can't be both.

Clearly, Mr. Andrews is a proponent of plentiful social spending. He states as simple, unargued fact that schools, among other things, are a public good. I can't help wondering, though, if more of New Orleans poor had had the opportunity to avoid the pointlessness of so much of public school by, say, getting more or less immediately marketable vocational training, would they have had the money to get out when the storm hit?

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A preview of what's (likely) to come:

- ruminations on how studying math (calculus, probability theory, differential and difference equations, linear algebra) has changed the way I look at the world, and how odd it has been to be more or less fully aware of those changes as they took (and continue to take) place

- weekly commentary on Spike TV's awesome The Ultimate Fighter. Best. Reality show. Ever.

- continued attempts to keep this from being some kind of god-awful personal journal

- music commentary, discussions of music old and new, foreign and domestic, strange and disturbing

- political commentary and, probably, rantings as I continue to slide into the netherworld of classical liberalism (I like to laugh at myself as much as at anyone else, so why not?)

- 'science' posts, as indicated in my first post, wherein I present to the uninitiated that which I find so interesting about what I study. These will not be limited to hot-off-the-presses research, as I think some of the most interesting papers in my field (and likely in any field) are old ones. Foundational literature often has a sort of timelessness, and can provide new insights on repeated readings, so expect a discussions of a wide variety of old and new ideas regarding language, speech, percep ... ah, read the earlier post (or the blog subtitle) and you'll see what they'll be about.

- thoughts on the history and philosophy of science

- commentary on books I read, as I read them, which will, in all likelihood, have much in common with the 'to come' items presented in the previous two bullet points

- corrections of things posted earlier. Like this:

When I wrote "spilling copious e-ink", I should have written "spilling copious amounts of e-ink". And it should have said "Okay, that's probably plenty of links to pharyngula."

That's all for now.

Initial Post, Including Inspiration Citation

Inspired, in part, by blogs like pharyngula (which I don't actually read anymore) and my (possibly incorrect) assumption that someone, somewhere wants to read my thoughts on language, speech, perception, and an assortment of other topics, I hereby add my giant octopus to the katamari that is the world of personal weblogs.

The biology posts drew me to pharyngula (and their infrequency drove me away), so when I say that that blog inspired me to start a blog about my academic discipline, I mean that I began entertaining thoughts of posting erudite pieces on the cutting edge of language, speech, perception, and mathematical modeling of all of the above, not that I planned on spilling copious e-ink countering the claims of wrathful dispersion crowd, a la PZ Myer's endless battle against creationism.

Okay, that's probably enough links to pharyngula.

The name of this blog comes from source-filter model of speech production, although, as indicated, the blog will not only be about speech. The name may also be employed as a metaphor for the nature of blogging in general. Malcolm Gladwell points out (correctly, in my opinion) that blogs are intrinsically derivative. Thus, the 'source' for a blog post here may be a hot new paper from the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, a post on, say, the Cato institute's blog, or just a thought that occurs to me as I ambulate, which I do quite a bit of. The filter is, naturally, me.

No promises regarding frequency (or quality) of posts. I created this blog about seven months before I actually got around to writing this post, and I'll be busy conducting ground-breaking new research over the next year, so we'll see what I do with a 'new' blog.