Older blog entries for danstowell (starting at number 38)

Academia and flying

When I started in academia I had no idea how much travel was involved. I started a PhD because I was fascinated by computational possibilities in digital sound, and almost by chance I ended up at one of the world-leading research groups in that area, which just happened to be nearby in London. Throughout my PhD I was lucky enough to get funded travel to conferences in interesting cities like Copenhagen and Helsinki, which was an unexpected plus - not just for the research benefits you get from meeting other researchers worldwide, but just for being able to visit and see those places.

Now, two things we know are that international travel tends to involve flying, and that flying is bad for the environment. Having finished my PhD and now working as an academic researcher, there are still plenty of research conferences around the world that are good to go to: they're specifically good for my project right now, and also for my professional development more generally. On average, research conferences are in other countries. So, is it possible to be an academic researcher and avoid flying? Does that harm your career? Could academia be "rearranged" to make it involve less flying?

Here's an example: I was invited to give a seminar in a European country. A nice invitation, and the organisers agreed to try and arrange to travel by train rather than plane. From the UK, this is tricky, because as an island the options are a little restricted: we have some nice (but slow) ferry services, and we have the Eurostar. It's hard for me to request non-plane transport because it tends to be more expensive for the organisers, and it can be really hard to schedule (since there are fewer schedule options and they take longer). So in the end, this time round we had to go for a compromise: I'm taking a plane one way and a train the other way. We couldn't do better than that.

In environmental terms, we can do better - I could decline the invitation. But academic research is international: the experts who are "next door" in terms of the subject are almost never "next door" geographically. If you want to develop your research you have to have meaningful personal interactions with these experts. Email, phone, videoconferencing are all fine, but if that's all you do then you lose out on the meaningful, full-bandwidth interaction that actually leads to new ideas, future collaborations, real understandings.

(For some research that confirms and discusses the importance of face-to-face collaboration, try this interesting story about lasers: Collins, H.M. "Tacit Knowledge, Trust and the Q of Sapphire" Social Studies of Science p. 71-85 31(1) 2001)

As a whole, is there much that the academic world can do to mitigate the amount of travel needed? Well, I'd still say it's worth encouraging teleconferencing and the like, though as I've noted I don't think it completely scratches the itch. Should we try to focus on local-ish conferencing rather than one global summit? That doesn't strike me as a very fruitful idea, since it would reduce the amount of international mixing if it worked (and thus the amount of productive international collaboration), and I don't think it would work since one "local" conference would probably tend to emerge as the stronger.

And if you're a researcher, aware of the issues involved in heavy use of air travel, you have a balance to strike. How much can/should you turn down interesting opportunities for presenting, networking, collaboration, based on geographic distance? Will it harm your own opportunities, while others jet off to take advantage of them? Personally I know there are specific opportunities I've turned down in the past year or so, because it didn't feel right to jet off to certain places just for a couple of days' meeting. In other cases, I've taken up opportunities only after making sure I make the most of the visit by adding other meetings or holidays into the visit.

Your thoughts would be welcome...

Syndicated 2012-11-20 11:03:15 (Updated 2012-11-20 11:11:40) from Dan Stowell

Happy UK live music day

Happy UK live music day! On the news this morning they announced that one of the regulations removed in the government's so-called "bonfire of the regulations" is the law that you can't have live music in the UK without a specific licence.

This is great news. The licensing was proper onerous - you used to need a licence that covered the exact rooms you had in mind. I remember a few years ago when a new arts centre opened up right next to my house. I was developing some generative musical ideas at the time, and I thought, aha, they have a CD playing in the bar area, I can propose some generative music for them which would be an interesting arty thing.

Unfortunately, the art centre couldn't do it, because they had a music licence that allowed live music only in the theatre, but not in the bar, or the gallery, or...

This has cropped up in other contexts too. The exact rule, if I remember right, was that you could have unaccompanied unamplified singing, but anything more than that (even accompaniment with a single acoustic guitar, etc) was banned except in these licensed rooms, and many many places in the UK couldn't be bothered to apply for licences if it wasn't part of their main line of business.

So. More interesting little bits of musical happening, I hope.

Syndicated 2012-10-01 03:38:49 from Dan Stowell

Lime tabbouleh

This recipe used HFW's "tabula kisir" recipe as a starting point, but I adapted it to approximate a nice tabbouleh I've had in the good lebanese place. As usual, I make no claims to authenticity - but in my opinion there shouldn't be too much wheat (or else it comes across like a boring old couscous), and it should have a nice acid tang - in my version the lime does that really nicely. I didn't have any tomatoes in the house but you could easily add a single diced tomato too. Serves 2, takes about half an hour in total.

  • 1 small handful bulgar wheat
  • 1 spring onion
  • 1 generous handful parsley
  • 1 lime
  • 1 small handful chopped walnut pieces
  • 1 tsp chilli flakes
  • 1/2 tsp cumin
  • 1/2 tsp paprika
  • 1 tbsp tomato puree
  • 2 tbsp olive oil

Put the bulgar wheat into a large bowl (it will look like not very much!), and add just enough boiling water to cover. Put a plate over the top and leave it to steam for 20 minutes. Meanwhile, there are a few other bits you can prepare in parallel:

Wash the spring onion and the parsley and put them to one side.

Put a dry frying pan on a hot hob, and add the walnuts. Toss them around in the pan occasionally until they smell nice and toasty. Then turn off the heat and put them to one side.

Also make up the dressing. Juice the lime into a small dish or glass. Then add the chilli flakes, cumin, paprika, and tomato puree, and whisk it up with a fork. Then add the olive oil and whisk it up again. Finally mix the dressing in with the bulgar wheat, and if it hasn't already cooled completely then leave it a little while more.

Chop the spring onion finely, and the parsley too. Add them to the bulgar wheat, and add the walnuts too. It's also nice to add a little bit of peel from the lime. Mix it all around, and leave it at least a few minutes for the flavours to mix together.

Syndicated 2012-09-30 07:09:26 from Dan Stowell

17 Sep 2012 (updated 18 Sep 2012 at 07:09 UTC) »

How long it takes to get my articles published

Today I remembered about an article I submitted ages ago to a journal, accepted but not out yet. I also realised that since I store all my work in version-control, I can pull out all the exact dates when I started writing things, submitted them, rewrote them, etc.

So here's a visualisation of that data. In the following, a solid straight line is a period where the paper is "in my hands" (writing, rewriting, or whatever), and a dashed arc is where the paper is with someone else (a reviewer or a typesetter):

Each GREEN blob is a moment of official acceptance; a RED blob the moment of official rejection; a YELLOW blob the moment of a journal article actually being publicly available. (I also included some conference papers - the yellow blob is the date of presentation for those.) This only covers things since I got my PhD.

One thing you can see straight away is that often the initial review and/or the final typesetting periods are massive compared against the writing periods. I hadn't realised, but for my journal articles it's pretty much at least 1 year between submission and availability.

People often complain about the peer-review process and how slow it can be, but the thing that's puzzling me right now is why these massive post-acceptance delays, which are nothing to do with reviewing? For someone like me who normally submits LaTeX documents, I can't even guess what work is left to do... yet it seems to take a minimum of 4 months!

This is just my own data - I make no claims to generality.

Syndicated 2012-09-17 17:13:37 (Updated 2012-09-18 03:07:47) from Dan Stowell

Notes from EUSIPCO 2012

Just back from the EUSIPCO 2012 conference in Bucharest. (The conference was held in the opulent Palace of the Parliament - see previous article for some thoughts on the palace and the town.) Here some notes about interesting talks/posters I saw:

Talks/posters

Lots of stuff relevant to recognition in audio scenes, which is handy because that's related to my current work.

  • David Damm's "System for audio summarisation in acoustic monitoring scenarios". Nice approach and demo (with sounds localised around the Frauenhofer campus), though the self-admitted drawback is that it isn't yet particularly scalebale, using full DTW search etc.
  • Sebastien Fenet's "fingerprint-based detection of repeating objects in multimedia streams" - here a very scaleable approach, using fingerprints (as is done in other large-scale systems such as Shazam). In this paper he compared two fingerprint types: a Shazam-like spectral-peaks method (but using constant-Q spectrum); and a shallow Matching Pursuit applied to multiscale STFT. His results seem to favour the former.
  • Xavier Valero's "Gammatone wavelet features for sound classification in surveillance applications" - this multiscale version of gammatone is apparently better for detecting bangs and bumps (which fits with folk knowledge about wavelets...).
  • M. A. Sehili's "Daily sound recognition using a combination of GMM and SVM for home automation" - they used something called a Sequence Classification Kernel which apparently can be used in an SVM to classify sequential data, even different-length sequential data. Have to check that out.
  • Two separate papers - Anansie Zlatintsi's "AM-FM Modulation Features" and Xavier Valero's "Narrow-band Autocorrelation features" - used features which are complementary to the standard Mel energies, by analysing the fine variation within each band. They each found improved results (for different classification tasks). (In my own thesis I looked at band-wise spectral crest features, hoping to achieve something similar. I found that they did provide complementary information [Sec 3.4] but unfortunately were not robust enough to noise/degradation for my purposes [Sec 3.3]. It'll be interesting to see how these different features hold up - they are more interesting than my spectral crests I think.)

Plenty of informed audio source separation was in evidence too. Not my specialism, more that of others in our group who came along... but I caught a couple of them, including Derry Fitzgerald's "User assisted separation using tensor factorisations" and Juan-Jose Bosch's "Score-informed and timbre-independent lead instrument separation in real-world scenarios".

Other papers that were interesting:

  • T Adali, "Use of diversity in independent decompositions" - for indendence-based decompositions, you can use either of two assumptions about the components: non-Gaussianity or time-dependence. The speaker noted that measuring mutual information rate covers both of these properties, so it seems like a neat thing to use. She used it for some tensor decompositions which were a bit beyond me.
  • C Areliano's poster on "Shape model fitting algorithm without point correspondence": simple idea for matching a hand image against a template which has marked points on it (but the query image doesn't): convert both representations into GMMs then find a good registration between the two GMMs. Could be useful, though the registration search is basically brute-force in this paper I think.
  • Y Panagakis prsented "Music structure analysis by subspace modeling" - it makes a lot of sense, intuitively, that music structure such as verse-chorus-verse should be suited to this idea of fitting different feature subspaces to them. The way music is produced and mixed should make it appropriate for this, I imagine (whereas for audio scenes we probably don't hop from subspace to subspace... unless the mic is moving from indoors to outdoors for example...)
  • Y Bar-Yosef's "Discriminative Algorithm for comacting mixture models with application to language recognition". Taking a GMM and approximating it by a smaller one is a general useful technique - here they were using Hershey and Olsen's 2007 "variational approximation" to the KLD between two GMMs. In this paper, their optimisation tries to preserve the discriminative power between two GMMs, rather than simply keeping the best fit independently.
  • I Ari's "Large scale polyphonic music transcription using randomized matrix decompositions" - some elegant tweaks which mean they can handle a very large matrix of data, using a weighted-random atom selection technique which reminds me a little of a kind of randomised Matching Pursuit (though MP is not what they're doing). They reduce the formal complexity of matrix factorisation, both in time and in space, so that it's much more tractable.
  • H Hu's "Sparsity level in a non-negative matrix factorisation based speech strategy in cochlear implants" - I know they do some good work with cochlear implants at Southampton Uni. This was a nice example: not only did they use Sparse NMF for noise reduction, and test it with human subjects in simulated conditions, but they also implemented it on a hardware device as used in cochlear implants. This latter point is important because at first I was dubious whether this fancy processing was efficient enough to run on a cochlear implant - good to see a paper that answers those kind of questions immediately.

Plenaries/tutorials

Christian Jutten gave a plenary talk on source-separation in nonlinear mixtures. Apparently there's a proof from the 1980s by Darmois that if you have multiple sources nonlinearly mixed, then ICA cannot guarantee to separate them, for the following simple reason: ICA works by maximising independence, but Darmois proved that for any set of perfectly independent sources you can always construct a nonlinear mixture that preserves this independence. (Jutten gave an example procedure to do this; I think you could use the inverse-copula of the joint distribution as another way.)

Therefore to do source-separation on nonlinear mixtures you need to add some assumptions, either as constraints or regularisation. Constraining just to "smooth mappings" doesn't work. One set of mixture types which does work is "post-nonlinear mixtures", which means mixtures in which nonlinearities are applied separately to the outputs after linear mixing. (This is a reasonable model, for example, if your mics have nonlinearities but you can assume the sounds linearly mixed in the air before they reached the mics.) You have to use nonlinearities which satisfy a particular additivity constraint (f(u+v) = (f(u)+f(v))/(1+f(u)f(v)) ... tanh satisfies this). Or at least, you have to use those kind of nonlinearities in order to use Jutten's method.

Eric Moulines talked about prediction in sparse additive models. There's a lot of sparsity around at the moment (and there were plenty of sparsity papers here); Moulines' different approach is that when you want to predict new values, rather than to reverse-engineer the input values, you don't want to select a single sparsity pattern but aggregate over the predictions made by all sparsity patterns. He uses a particular weighted aggregation scheme which he calls "exponential aggregation" involving the risk calculated for each "expert" (each function in the dictionary).

Now, we don't want to calculate the result for an exponentially large number of sparsity patterns and merge them all, since that would take forever. Moulines uses an inequality to convert the combinatorial problem to a continuous problem; unfortunately, at the end of it all it's still too much to calculate easily (2^m estimators) so he uses MCMC estimation to get his actual results.

I also went to the tutorial on Population Monte Carlo methods (which apparently were introduced by Cappe in 2004). I know about Particle Filters so my learnings are relative to that:

  • Each particle or iteration can have its OWN instrumental distribution, there's no need for it to be common across all particles. In fact the teacher (Petar Djuric) had worked on methods where you have a collection of instrumental distributions, and weighted-sample from all of them, adapting the weights as the iterations progress. This allows it to automatically do the kind of things we might heuristically want: start with broad, heavy-tailed distributions, then focus more on narrow distributions in the final refinement stages.
  • For static MC (i.e. not sequential), you can use the samples from ALL iterations to make your final estimate (though you need to take care to normalise appropriately).
  • Rao-Blackwellisation lets you solve a lower-dimensional problem (approximating a lower-dimensional target distribution) if you can analytically integrate to solve for a subset of the parameters given the other ones. For example, if some parameters are gaussian-distributed when conditioned on the others. This can make your approximation much simpler and faster.
  • It's generally held a good idea to use heavy-tailed distributions, e.g. people use Student's t distribution since heavier-tailed than Gaussian.

Syndicated 2012-09-02 06:02:49 (Updated 2012-09-02 06:12:12) from Dan Stowell

Notes from EUSIPCO 2012

Just back from the EUSIPCO 2012 conference in Bucharest. (The conference was held in the opulent Palace of the Parliament - see previous article for some thoughts on the palace and the town.) Here some notes about interesting talks/posters I saw:

Talks/posters

Lots of stuff relevant to recognition in audio scenes, which is handy because that's related to my current work.

  • David Damm's "System for audio summarisation in acoustic monitoring scenarios". Nice approach and demo (with sounds localised around the Frauenhofer campus), though the self-admitted drawback is that it isn't yet particularly scalebale, using full DTW search etc.
  • Sebastien Fenet's "fingerprint-based detection of repeating objects in multimedia streams" - here a very scaleable approach, using fingerprints (as is done in other large-scale systems such as Shazam). In this paper he compared two fingerprint types: a Shazam-like spectral-peaks method (but using constant-Q spectrum); and a shallow Matching Pursuit applied to multiscale STFT. His results seem to favour the former.
  • Xavier Valero's "Gammatone wavelet features for sound classification in surveillance sapplications" - this multiscale version of gammatone is apparently better for detecting bangs and bumps and things like that.
  • M. A. Sehili's "Daily sound recognition using a combination of GMM and SVM for home automation" - they used something called a "Sequence Classification Kernel" which apparently can be used in an SVM to classify sequential data, even different-length sequential data. Have to check that out.
  • Two separate papers - Anansie Zlatintsi's "AM-FM Modulation Features" and Xavier Valero's "Narrow-band Autocorrelation features" - used features which are complementary to the standard Mel energies, by analysing the fine variation within each band. They each found improved results (for different classification tasks).

Plenty of informed audio source separation was in evidence too. Not my specialism, more that of others in our group who came along... but I caught a couple of them, including Derry Fitzgerald's "User assisted separation using tensor factorisations" and Juan-Jose Bosch's "Score-informed and timbre-independent lead instrument separation in real-world scenarios".

Other papers that were interesting:

  • T Adali, "Use of diversity in independent decompositions" - for indendence-based decompositions, you can use either of two assumptions about the components: non-Gaussianity or time-dependence. The speaker noted that measuring "mutual information rate" covers both of these properties, so it seems like a neat thing to use. She used it for some tensor decompositions which were a bit beyond me.
  • C Areliano's poster on "Shape model fitting algorithm withut point correspondence": simple idea for matching a hand image against a template which has marked points on it (but the query image doesn't): convert both representations into GMMs then find a good registration between the two GMMs. Could be useful, though the registration search is basically brute-force in this paper I think.
  • Y Panagakis prsented "Music structure analysis by subspace modeling" - it makes a lot of sense, intuitively, that music structure such as verse-chorus-verse should be suited to this idea of fitting different feature subspaces to them. The way music is produced and mixed should make it appropriate for this, I imagine (whereas for audio scenes we probably don't hop from subspace to subspace... unless the mic is moving from indoors to outdoors for example...)
  • Y Bar-Yosef's "Discriminative Algorithm for comacting mixture models with application to language recognition". Taking a GMM and approximating it by a smaller one is a general useful technique - here they were using Hershey and Olsen's 2007 "variational approximation" to the KLD between two GMMs. In this paper, their optimisation tries to preserve the discriminative power between two GMMs, rather than simply keeping the best fit independently.
  • I Ari's "Large scale polyphonic music transcription using randomized matrix decompositions" - some elegant tweaks which mean they can handle a very large matrix of data, using a weighted-random atom selection technique which reminds me a little of a kind of randomised Matching Pursuit (though MP is not what they're doing). They reduce the formal complexity of matrix factorisation, both in time and in space, so that it's much more tractable.
  • H Hu's "Sparsity level in a non-negative matrix factorisation based speech strategy in cochlear implants" - I know they do some good work with cochlear implants at Southampton Uni. This was a nice example: not only did they use Sparse NMF for noise reduction, and test it with human subjects in simulated conditions, but they also implemented it on a hardware device as used in cochlear implants. This latter point is important because at first I was dubious whether this fancy processing was efficient enough to run on a cochlear implant - good to see a paper that answers those kind of questions immediately.

Plenaries/tutorials

Christian Jutten gave a plenary talk on source-separation in nonlinear mixtures. Apparently there's a proof from the 1980s by Darmois that if you have multiple sources nonlinearly mixed, then ICA cannot guarantee to separate them, for the following simple reason: ICA works by maximising independence, but Darmois proved that for any set of perfectly independent sources you can always construct a nonlinear mixture that preserves this independence. (Jutten gave an example procedure to do this; I think you could use the inverse-copula of the joint distribution as another way.)

Therefore to do source-separation on nonlinear mixtures you need to add some assumptions, either as constraints or regularisation. Constraining just to "smooth mappings" doesn't work. One set of mixture types which does work is "post-nonlinear mixtures", which means nonlinearities are applied separately to the outputs after linear mixing. (This is a reasonable model, for example, if your mics have nonlinearities but you can assume the sounds linearly mixed in the air before they reached the mics.) You have to use nonlinearities which satisfy a particular additivity constraint (f(u+v) = (f(u)+f(v))/(1+f(u)f(v)) ... tanh satisfies this).

Eric Moulines talked about prediction in sparse additive models. There's a lot of sparsity around at the moment (and there were plenty of sparsity papers here); Moulines' different approach is that when you want to predict new values, rather than to reverse-engineer the input values, you don't want to select a single sparsity pattern but aggregate over the predictions made by all sparsity patterns. He uses a particular weighted aggregation scheme which he calls "exponential aggregation" involving the risk calculated for each "expert" (each function in the dictionary).

Now, we don't want to calculate the result for an exponentially large number of sparsity patterns and merge them all, since that would take forever. Moulines uses an inequality to convert the combinatorial problem to a continuous problem; unfortunately, at the end of it all it's still too much to calculate easily (2^m estimators) so he uses MCMC estimation to get his actual results.

I also went to the tutorial on Population Monte Carlo methods (which apparently were introduced by Cappe in 2004). I know about Particle Filters so my learnings are relative to that:

  • Each particle or iteration can have its OWN instrumental distribution, there's no need for it to be common across all particles. In fact the teacher (Petar Djuric) had worked on methods where you have a collection of instrumental distributions, and weighted-sample from all of them, adapting the weights as the iterations progress. This allows it to automatically do the kind of things we might heuristically want: start with broad, heavy-tailed distributions, then focus more on narrow distributions in the final refinement stages.
  • For static MC (i.e. not sequential), you can use the samples from ALL iterations to make your final estimate (though you ned to take care to normalise appropriately).
  • Rao-Blackwellisation lets you solve a lower-dimensional problem (approximating a lower-dimensional target distribution) if you can analytically integrate to solve for a subset of the parameters given the other ones. For example, if some parameters are gaussian-distributed when conditioned on the others. This can make your approximation much simpler and faster.
  • It's generally held a good idea to use heavy-tailed distributions, e.g. people use Student's t distribution since heavier-tailed than Gaussian.

Syndicated 2012-09-02 05:50:57 from Dan Stowell

2 Sep 2012 (updated 2 Sep 2012 at 10:13 UTC) »

Bucharest's buildings and Ceauşescu's balcony

Untitled Untitled

I hope all Romanians have had the chance to stand on what was Ceauşescu's balcony and look down the humungous boulevard. When you see the ridiculous opulent excess of the palace, a vast building visible from many other parts of town, and the two-mile boulevard carved through the city to provide a view from the balcony, it's no wonder they had a bloody revolution.

The palace looks like it's on a hill, but it's not. It's twelve storeys tall, so big that on three sides the earth is banked up so that you have to go up through the steeply-sloped gardens to get to the entrance. The scale of what was done to the city is amazing, apparently referred to as Ceauşima ("Ceauşescu"+"Hiroshima").

UntitledUntitled Elsewhere, Bucharest is a beautiful city, but even with my superficial awareness it's clear that part of the beauty comes from its tumultuous and inequitable recent history. Picturesque pre-communist buildings sit side by side with bold Stalinist and brutalist buildings - and the contrasts between the different styles enhance each other's impact. Lots of old chapels nestling in the shadows of utilitarian housing blocks. Whatever the type of building, many seem unkempt, and occasionally there's a modern glass-and-plastic thing, plus of course the decidedly un-socialist polished pomp of the palace.

Bucharest has some lovely parks, and well-used by the locals - notable examples of large-scale civic planning done well. I don't know what era they're from, but they provide some great open spaces right near the middle of town.

Untitled Less perfect are the pavements... and the phone cabling, very often provided by a crazy mass of separate black wires slung from post to post, often sagging down below head height.

Untitled The "Casa Radio" just North of the river is a massive building, never completed I think, impressively decaying and ginormous. It was going to be a museum of communism. Now, Wikipedia tells me that it's intended to become a kind of monument of capitalism, in the sense that an international company intended to turn it into a huge shopping mall and hotel. That idea too is on hold, so for now we have twice over a monument to our own overreaching hubris.

One of the cutest historical references is in the park in front of the palace. There's a children's playground with a mini climbing palace in it, very obviously echoing the huge palace behind it:

I wonder, do the children play on it and play-act little Ceauşescus and little revolutionaries?

Syndicated 2012-09-02 04:53:20 (Updated 2012-09-02 05:33:48) from Dan Stowell

17 Aug 2012 (updated 17 Aug 2012 at 15:09 UTC) »

Comment on 'Seeing women as objects: The sexual body part recognition bias'

PREFACE: There's a risk that I might come across here as dismissing the research, and doing so for an odd reason. I'd like to be clear that I think this is an interesting study, and I'm not an expert in cognitive psychology but I'm writing because I'm interested in seeing these issues teased apart in more detail. See also the comments section.

Interesting article someone pointed out in European Journal of Social Psychology: Seeing women as objects: The sexual body part recognition bias. The basic idea is to use a psychophysics-type perceptual experiment to explore whether people looking at men and at women process them differently. If perceiving people "as objects" makes a difference to the cognitive processes involved, then that should be detectable.

There's plenty of evidence about our society's exaggerated emphasis on female body image, and the consequences of such objectification. What the researchers do here is use an experiment in which participants are shown images of men and women (either complete or partial images), and ask them to do a kind of spot-the-difference task. They find people get different percentage-correct scores depending on whether it's an image of a man or a woman one is looking at.

The researchers discuss this result as relating to objectification of women, and I think that's broadly OK, but there's an extra hop that I think is glossed over. A tweet summarised the research as "People perceive men using global processing, but women with local processing" but it would be more correct to say "People perceive images of men using global processing, but images of women with local processing". (It's not just the 140-character limit at fault here, the research paper itself makes the leap.)

The point is that the participants were reacting to 2D images, rather than real physical presences of men or women. Now, you might think, is that an important difference, or just quibbling? I'm not claiming that the results are wrong, and I'm not even claiming that the results don't tell us something about objectification of women. But the difference between looking-at-people and looking-at-images is important here since it relates closely to the claims being made - and this highlights the complexity of making measurements of socially-embedded cognitive processing.

Here's why I think it's a difference: In our everyday lives we see "3D" men and women. We also see "2D" images of men and women. So there are four pertinent categories here: 3D men, 3D women, 2D men-images and 2D women-images. We have absorbed general impressions about these four categories from out experiences so far (whether those "categories" are categories we use ourselves is beside the point). It's well known that there are more and different images of women than men, used in advertising and other media. As a person develops they see examples of all four categories around them, and they might learn similarities and differences, things that the categories have in common or not.

[Edit: Maybe a better way of putting it is inanimate-vs-animate, not 2D-vs-3D - see comments]

So, it's reasonable to expect that an average person in Western society is more familiar with objectified images of women around than of men. (Note that I do not claim this state of affairs is OK! I just claim that it's the average person's developmental environment.) It's easier to deal with familiar categories than unfamiliar ones. So we'd expect people to have better processing when presented with 2D body-part-images of women - and it probably correlates with their visual processing of real-life people, but that's not certain and it needs to be tested.

Am I claiming that the research should not be trusted? No. It looks like a decent and interesting experimental result. But the authors make a slight leap, which we should treat with caution: they imply that their statistically significant result on how people visually process 2D-images-of-men and 2D-images-of-women transfers directly to how people visually process men and women in the flesh. Personally I would expect that people's perception of "3D" men and women probably partly generalises from the image perception and partly doesn't. (There might be existing research on that; comments welcome.)

And obviously it's much harder to conduct large experiments by showing people "glimpses of real live men/women" rather than images, so there's a good reason why such research hasn't yet been done.

But that's good news right? - more research needed ;)

Syndicated 2012-08-17 08:45:03 (Updated 2012-08-17 10:57:04) from Dan Stowell

12 Aug 2012 (updated 12 Aug 2012 at 20:10 UTC) »

The Olympics can be both successful AND unjust ...lessons for Rio?

There was a lot of negative press in the run-up to the Olympics, with the G4S security cockup, the ever-inflating costs, and the Zil lanes. But after a spectacular opening ceremony, nice weather and some lovely stories of Olympics winners, the mood has swung really positive.

This has led to a major anti-whingeing press offensive. For example this Independent article described "a great festival of pre-emptive whingeing followed by people having a surprisingly good time" and concluded "It is time for the country to put its doubts to one side." Of course Boris Johnson put it more pithily when he wrote in The Sun "Oh come off it, everybody - enough whimpering."

The main argument of the anti-whingeing offensive is to point out how well it's all gone: no public transport problems, no security calamities, and so on. (Let's put aside for now the fact that all London businesses outside the olympic venues have had a surprising drought of business, which is a bit of a fail that I guess the London organisers could have helped prevent.) But there's an unfortunate problem with this: most of the nay-sayers did not say the Olympics would fail, they said that the Olympics was a bad deal, in both the moral and the financial senses.

Not every criticism has equal weight. Personally, I don't think it's particularly awful that some commuter routes and cycle routes are disrupted, or that police are brought in from the counties to help police the event, for example. We need to take a balanced view of things: we recognise that London changes a bit when the world's biggest sport festival is happening here.

But that doesn't mean that we should sacrifice our civil liberties on the altar of the event. We have British values such as liberty, decency and fair-mindedness, which we believe are reflected in the way we run our policing etc. If we don't make sure the Olympics lives up to these values when it's here, what chance do we have of helping it behave that way when it's in other countries?

So yes, it's good that lots of people are enjoying a smooth-running Olympics, and the British medal success has made it a particularly jolly affair for the country. But the end does not justify the means, and for the purposes of memory I'd like to summarise three types of unpleasantness that were completely unneccessary to build into the the Olympics:

  1. The sponsors' dictatorship and the militant denial of small businesses' / communities' participation
  2. Security clampdowns and chilling effects on civil liberties
  3. Financial weaselings

But the most important thing right at this moment is what lessons can we pass on to Rio, which I'll consider at the end of this post.

1: The sponsors' dictatorship

The sponsors' dictatorship has been extensively covered in the press. For example, an Oxfordshire farm supplying local produce is not only banned from mentioning its association with the Olympics, but banned from doing it for the next ten years. (Source). (Similarly for the UK plastics industry apparently and they're not happy about it either.)

Butchers have been banned from displaying Olympic rings made of sausages, pubs warned they can't advertise the fact that they're showing the Olympics on telly, and cafes banned from selling a "flaming torch breakfast baguette" (source). This is all supposed to be to protect the sponsors' investment - but the rather extreme policing is completely out of proportion to the following fact:

The money from sponsorship covered a tiny fragment of the costs of the Olympics: around 7%.
(Data sources: Parliametary Accounts Committee, Sponsors list at Guardian)

The suppression of UK businesses' benefiting from the Olympics in perfectly ordinary ways is a refusal to recognise this balance. The amount of money coming from UK taxpaying businesses is comparable with the amount of money coming from the official sponsors (since around 12% of UK tax income is directly from businesses). So this heavy-handedness should not be tolerated. The sponsors, maybe their participation is fine (though some argue they're not even needed - that the 7% could have been trimmed or come from elsewhere, and of course the brand-policing costs would have evaporated immediately). But assuming that we don't mind sponsorship, we should accept it without trampling over local businesses' ordinary grassroots involvement.

Incidentally, Jeremy Hunt (the government minister for the Olympics) has made very different pronouncements on the importance of the sponsors: "the sponsors are actually paying for about half of the cost of hosting the Olympics." This is a direct quote from him speaking on Radio 4 (2012-07-23 13:32, World At One), but it is so clearly out of line with the known figures that I can't think of any explanation other than it's propaganda designed to blunt opposition to the olympic brand police, which was the issue under discussion at the time.

A large cause of the branding strictness is because of ambush marketing, where rival non-sponsors essentially embarrass the sponsors by smuggling their own branding opportunities into the event. So the IOC introduced rules (as did FIFA and other such bodies) to try and prevent this. Unfortunately the consequences have swung far too far in the sponsors' favour.

One thing that seems crazy to me is that you're not allowed to use non-Visa cards to buy Olympic tickets, and ATMs have been forced to close, replaced with a (smaller) number of Visa-only machines. This is actually very different from sponsorship - it means that you cannot be a spectator at the games without signing up with Visa. You can keep out of the McDonalds, you can frown at Dow Chemicals, but you simply won't be allowed in without a Visa card. Why hasn't this been mentioned more often in the media? It's an abusive monopoly.


2: Security clampdowns and chilling effects on civil liberties

There are already "chilling effects" described above in the sponsor/logo ridiculousness: for example, the police wasted time emptying their crisps into clear plastic bags in case they ired the sponsors. But much worse than this is the chilling effect on free speech and other civil rights.

Very notable has been the intimidation and disruption of photographers. Many different people have reported that G4S and sometimes the police have stopped journalists taking pictures in a public place, using fairly vague ideas about it being a security issue. The Guardian has a video of it happening.

But it's not just photographers:

  • People who had done nothing wrong at all were arrested, had their homes raided & forbidden to use public transport. These were ex-graffiti artists arrested just-in-case. Unfortunately, this pre-emptive rounding up of people who "might" cause trouble was recently supported by the High Court, who dismissed complaints about police arresting various people who had done nothing wrong just in case they caused controversy during the day of the royal wedding. It's difficult for the police to respond to modern phenomena such as flashmobs but this sounds like plain injustice to me: people who have done nothing wrong detained on the basis of their political beliefs. There's a delicate balance needed here, to protect people's democratic rights.
  • Groups of two or more people (or young people at night) are banned from the Stratford area under specific regulations which I guess must have quite an impact on people who live in Stratford. "A Met spokesman admitted that previous dispersal orders in the area had transferred problems to other areas, but said the force hoped it would not happen this time."
  • A woman received a police warning for a Facebook joke about squirting the Olympic flame with a water pistol.
  • A man in Surrey was arrested (later freed without charge) "based on his manner, his state of dress and his proximity to the [cycling] course". The press summarised it as arrested in Leatherhead for 'not smiling'.

This kind of heavy-handedness is used not only to reduce the chance of flashmobs and other disruption, but also to suppress dissent. The absolute peak of this: police even arrested three protestors for pouring custard over their own heads in Trafalgar Square. As a distilled example of the British spirit right now - critical awareness and up-yours spirit paired with the chilling effects of policing heavy-handedness - I don't know how anyone can top this.


3: Financial weaselings

I don't need to reinforce the fact that the costs of the Olympics ballooned beyond original estimates. That's almost inevitable. And no, no-one expects that money to come back in increased tourism and business - it hasn't done that in the past and that was never the point.

I just want to mention some of the smaller-scale unfairnesses that sneaked under the radar a little:

There's also an issue of the land used for Olympic developments is being developed with public money, and ending up in private hands. The Olympic Park will turn into the "Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park", but it will not be a Royal Park (not managed by the Royal Parks Agency), and I'm not entirely clear on how the ownership is managed but a lot of it will be technically private (source). And the Olympic village has already been sold to a company which will use it for private rental housing, apparently at a loss to the taxpayer. Hm. (The loss-making side of this venture is at least in part a consequence of the economic crash.)


What lessons can we pass on to Rio?

The Olympics is a strange travelling carnival, but it's one that has unprecedented power: it can reroute an entire capital city, it can force countries to pass new laws, and it can consume billions of pounds from the taxpayer.

But because it is travelling, it is largely unaccountable. Having learnt from our experiences, we Londoners and our elected representatives are in no position to change the way the Olympics works - for example to rebalance the sponsorship barminess.

Rio is the site for the next games. I guess they've already undertaken to pass a bizarre olympic logos-and-words-and-sponsors law. But can the citizens of Rio learn from us? Would we British not have said anything, if we'd noticed when a law was being passed that banned small businesses from offering an "olympic breakfast" or using the words "Summer" and "Gold" in promotional material? And will the number of gold medals we won really make us forget the heavy-handed and half-competent security clampdown we've been through, with its chilling effects on journalism, free speech, local business and civil liberties?

(I should acknowledge that there's no reason to think the 2012 Olympics have been particularly "worse" than, say, the 2008 Olympics. I don't know much about the Beijing organisation, but there are stories of communities being moved wholesale out of their homes etc.)

It would be a big shame if the lesson for Rio is "don't worry about any criticism - as long as you can pull it off no-one minds how you do it." How can we help Rio, and future olympic venues, to have an enjoyable games without compromising their values to the unaccountable juggernaut that carries it along?

Syndicated 2012-08-12 09:46:51 (Updated 2012-08-12 15:44:50) from Dan Stowell

Installing Cyanogenmod 7 on HTC Tattoo

Just notes for posterity: I am installing Cyanogenmod on my HTC Tattoo Android phone.

There are instructions here which are perfectly understandable if you're comfortable with a command-line. But the instructions are incomplete. As has been discussed here I needed to install "tattoo-hack.ko" in order to get the procedure to complete (at the flash_image step I got "illegal instruction" error). Someone on the wiki argues that you don't need that instruction if you're upgrading from stock Tattoo - but I'm upgrading from stock Tattoo and I needed it.

In the end, as advised in the forum thread linked above I followed bits of these instructions and used tattoo-hack.ko as well as the different versions of "su" and "flash_image" linked from that forum thread, NOT the versions in the wiki.

Also, there's an instruction in the wiki that says "reboot into recovery mode". It would have been nice if it had spelt that out for me. The command to run is

         adb reboot recovery

Syndicated 2012-08-08 18:11:14 from Dan Stowell

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