Visualizing your online persona

Ever been curious about your online identity? Or, more specifically, how a computer algorithm with all its inherent limitations might perceive your online identity?

Enter Personas, a project by the Social Media Group from the MIT Media Lab:

"[Personas] uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one's aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you.

"Enter your name, and Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person - to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. The computational process is visualized with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile."

Okay, so this doesn't work for me because I am a virtual unknown with no online identity to speak of. I am an Internet Nobody, sad but true.

But I tested this out instead with one of my favorite Internet Somebodies: Richard Feynman (full disclosure: he was my longest lasting imaginary crush through high school). The results are quite funny...


Click the image to enlarge (sorry for the low res).

I have to say, I would never guess this was the online persona for a Nobel Prize winning physicist... The big sports component (yellow on the left) is to me most amusing. Run the algorithm and you'll see that it's due to a misinterpretation of the words "series" (in this case "lecture series" not sports series) and "player" (from the oft-reported fact that Feynman was a "bongo player" - really).

Of course, the smart kids at MIT were aware of this all along:

"Personas demonstrates the computer's uncanny insights and its inadvertent errors, such as the mischaracterizations caused by the inability to separate data from multiple owners of the same name. It is meant for the viewer to reflect on our current and future world, where digital histories are as important if not more important than oral histories, and computational methods of condensing our digital traces are opaque and socially ignorant."

Nifty stuff.

Rorschach paintings: From ink to art

Vesna Jovanovic is perhaps not your typical artist, and her works are most certainly not typical. Once an arts and chemistry double-major, she now draws inspiration for her paintings from nature, science and psychology.

Her most recent works? A series called "Pareidolia," in which she starts with a random ink spill, and then fills in the silhouette with meticulous drawings ranging from the organic to the mechanical: veins and neurons interlaced with glass-work and electronic wiring.


The title itself is genius:

"I eventually titled the series Pareidolia, a term used to describe the psychological phenomenon of recognizing specific, identifiable forms in otherwise random stimuli. Common examples of pareidolia are the recognition of animals in clouds or faces in wood grain, and it is the basis of the Rorschach test, the series of inkblots used by psychologists to gain insight into a patient’s mental state."

Indeed, the creative process itself works like an applied Rorschach test, turning an inkblot and its connotations for the artist into a work art.

Check out Jovanovic's portfolio here.
Via Seed Magazine.

Self-tracking through Twitter

Data data data. Especially, our own.

From Nike shoes that allow you to log your miles on an iPhone app, to that kid on Twitter who feels compelled to tell the world how many laps he swam each morning, self-monitoring seems to be the latest fad. I track, therefore I am.

And while there is no shortage of tools available to our inner OCD, one in particular stands out in my mind: your.flowingdata.

Created by UCLA PhD candidate Nathan Yau as part of his thesis on self-surveillance, your.flowingdata allows users to aggregate personal data through daily tweets, and then visualize it in various different formats, including graphs, treemaps and word clouds.


Obviously, as a closet obsessive-compulsive and data visualization fan, I am more than a little intrigued so I've started tracking one simple aspect of my life: my moods and their intensity during the workday (since that's when I'm mostly on Twitter).

Yes, I realize I have picked perhaps the least objective metric possible, but that's half the fun. I'm curious as much about my moods as to what might affect my perception of and decision to report on them.

More updates on that to come.

In the meantime, you can read more about your.flowingdata here.
Also, here's an older post on visualizing music consumption, another cool thing to track.

Of money and morality

A little while ago I posted about site called YourMorals.org, which uses responses to various quizzes as data for research on moral psychology, and since then I've been taking a bunch of their tests.

This has afforded me such encouraging insights as: I am significantly less satisfied with my life than the average test-taker, I am more likely than average to react to things with disgust, my morality is essentially about avoiding harm and preserving freedom, and I take serious issue against authority and purity. Go figure.

But there's one test in particular that caused me to pause: the "Sacredness Survey".

It works like this:
You are presented with various hypothetical acts (burning your country's flag, pricking a child's hand...) that might violate notions you hold "sacred" and you are asked what it would take for you to engage in these acts. Your response options are the following:

• $0 (I'd do it for free)
• $10
• $100
• $1,000
• $10,000
• $100,000
• A million dollars
• Never for any amount of money

So, at risk of revealing myself as the freak that I am, here were my results -- and it should be noted that this applies only to the acts that I said I would do: it excludes things I wouldn't do for any sum of money.

• It would take an average of $0 to get you to violate the HARM foundation.
• It would take an average of $5000 to get you to violate the FAIRNESS foundation.
• It would take an average of $33333.333333333 to get you to violate the INGROUP foundation.
• It would take an average of $0 to get you to violate the AUTHORITY foundation.
• It would take an average of $0 to get you to violate the PURITY foundation.

Creepy right? I sound like a cheap psychopath.

But this is where I think the study is flawed, or at least very ill-suited to my personal brand of morality...

When it comes to morality and "sacredness", if there's something that doesn't bother me, then I need no financial compensation to do it. In fact, I will gladly break a taboo just for laughs.

One that tickled me from the survey: Sign a piece of paper that says "I hereby sell my soul, after my death, to whoever has this piece of paper." Sure, I'll do that for free for the sheer irony of it.

However, when it comes to things I won't do, like pricking a child's hand (back to my harm-based personal morality), then typically no amount of money will convince me to do it, not because I'm so honest I can't be bought, but because getting paid for doing something bad makes it worse, not better. I may regret harming a child, but getting paid to harm a child is something I might never be able to live down. And the greater the fee the more immoral the act.

Who knows... I guess it's my relationship with money that's coming into play. I have no problem getting paid for work done or services rendered (heck, I have a job after all!), but getting paid to do something bad is a whole other story. So basically, I think my personal financial hang-ups are creating "noise" in my responses to that survey, confusing the results.

I my mind, the major flaw with this survey is that is assumes a commensurability between money and morality, as if the costs of one could be compensated by the benefits of the other. However, money itself has huge moral connotations for most people and it's wrong to think one could introduce that into the equation without fundamentally changing the game.

Quizzes for a cause

Ever been curious about the fundamental underpinnings of your personal moral code? Or how you stack up against others in the moral spectrum? Or how morality affects your daily behaviors?

Take the quizzes offered on YourMorals.org and your answers will be added to the body of knowledge informing current research on moral psychology.

Plus, the tests are wonderfully addictive.

Mad science?

While many people's reaction to this is likely to be outrage at the money we're wasting, In This Economy, researching pipe-dream theories... this is actually the sort of thing I love.

Wired Magazine outlines six of the most out-there fields being studied today.

My three favorites?

1. Precognition (Daryl Bem, Professor Emeritus of Psychology, Cornell University)
2. Disembodied Consciousness (Edward Kelly, Research Professor of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences, University of Virginia)
3. Telekinesis (Garret Moddel, Professor of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering, University of Colorado at Boulder)

Seriously, if there's a future out there where these notions become reality, sign me up!

Check out the article here.

Individuality?

A wise person once said, "There are only about 100 people in the world. The rest are just mirrors."

If this rings true or at least interesting, then check out this photography site.

"They call their series Exactitudes: a contraction of exact and attitude. By registering their subjects in an identical framework, with similar poses and a strictly observed dress code, Versluis and Uyttenbroek provide an almost scientific, anthropological record of people's attempts to distinguish themselves from others by assuming a group identity."

If you've ever questioned the fundamental premise of a group culture based on individual originality, this one's worth checking out.

Smile! Your future marriage might benefit!

A recent study, excerpted in The Economist, draws a possible connection between high school yearbook photos and divorce rates. As it turns out, the less people smile in their yearbook photos, the more likely they are to divorce later in life.

So... happy kids end up in happy marriages?

Or, considering the misery of high school for so many of us, is grinning for the camera just an indicator of one's ability to smile through the pain?

I am in a cynical mood today.

Hearing sights, seeing music

I wish I had synesthesia!

It's a neurological "condition" (minus the negative connotations), affecting about 4% of the population, in which cognitive and sensory pathways "cross over" one another, leading to an unusual "blending" of perceptions.

Sight gets mixed in with hearing, hearing with taste and so on... One might experience blue as not just a color, but also as a taste; or the sound of a cello as inherently "green", not simply as a metaphor, but because the visual experience of "green" accompanies the auditory experience of the sound in a very real and literal way.

It's fascinating stuff and truly makes one wonder about the possible differences among people's perception of the world.

So if this has sparked your interest, here are two interesting articles on synesthesia:

In this interview, neuroscientist David Eagleman talks about the synesthesia gene and the The Synesthesia Battery, a free online test for synesthesia aimed at promoting scientific progress in the field.

Even more fascinating: consider synesthesia from the perspective of art. Artist and synesthete Marcia Smilack creates photographs and videos to recreate some of her visual-auditory sensations for non-synesthetes. You can read about her in this Seed Magazine article, The Most Beautiful Painting You've Ever Heard.

Also, check out Smilack's portfolio here.

Sleep: simplifying synapses?

A recent study seems to support the controversial theory that sleep preserves brain function by weakening or even severing connections between brain cells.

Counter-intuitive, at the very least.

Scientist theorize that this weakening in synapses serves to "save resources ... and boost the signal of important memories over the noise of unneeded connections." It basically clears up the brain for new thoughts and memories.

The findings are by no means certain - indeed there have been past studies suggesting the precise opposite: that sleep strengthens rather than weakens synapses. However, it's still and interesting thought.

It also echoes a similar and equally surprising finding in urban planning: that removing roads and traffic lights actually speeds up traffic. Whether you buy into the roads/synapses analogy, it's a fun article to read: touching upon all sorts of topics from mathematics to economics to game theory.

For more on sleep and synapses, check out this digest on Discover Magazine's blog.

Trauma and the spotless mind

Seems like selective memory deletion is really the hot topic of debate nowadays, and obviously I am fascinated. This recent article, on Wired Magazine, touches upon the possibility of using memory editing drugs to treat post-traumatic stress disorders (PTSD) in soldiers.

The moral and ethical issues related to memory-editing drugs of course are numerous, and I've touched on a few of them before. My question here is a more practical/functional one...

On a very simplistic level, the case for using memory deletion to treat PTSD is that absent the negative memories from which they originate, the stress symptoms will subside. However, I wonder if there are cases in which knowing and dealing with the source of one's anxiety might in fact be the best way to cure it... Exposure therapy, for example, has proven fairly effective in treating PTSD.

Consider also this article in Scientific American, which suggests that PTSD is over-diagnosed among soldiers, when depression or social and reintegration problems might be equally to blame. In these situations it's hard to imagine that memory editing could possibly be a solution.

Movies worth seeing

This week my Netflix queue bestowed upon me two very unusual French films: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and La Moustache. One thing I like about Netflix is that, since I tend to set up my queue on a whim, when the DVDs finally arrive in my mail I am almost always surprised (and, on occasion, appalled by my own lack of taste). And often, as in this case, they are films I know very little about.

On this occasion, it turns out that I was entirely unprepared for what was to come.


The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is the story of Jean-Dominique Bauby, once an editor of Elle Magazine, who suffered a serious stroke and found himself not only fully paralyzed save for his left eye, but a victim of "locked-in syndrome." He could hear and see as normal but was incapable of speaking, gesturing, or communicating with the outside world in any way other than by blinking his one functioning eyelid. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is the book he wrote about his experience living life as a prisoner in his own body. To do this he had to painstakingly dictate the entire text one letter at a time to a transcriber who would say the alphabet until Bauby blinked, indicating what letter he wanted.

It's a tragic but fascinating film, well worth watching and all the more incredible considering what it must have been to live with such a condition. Bauby passed away just days after the book was published.


La Moustache is an altogether different story, in which a man who sported a mustache all his life finally decides to get rid of it, only to discover that nobody can tell the difference. In fact, everyone seems to believe that he never even had a mustache in the first place, sending him into a serious crisis of identity. Things get even stranger as more of his beliefs about himself and his life are called into question, causing him to doubt his own sanity and his life to rapidly unravel.

The tone feels very much like Kafka, with the angst that comes from feeling trapped in a dysfunctional world where everything seems to make sense to everybody except you.

So, though perhaps not the best cure for cubicle-induced cabin fever (unless schadenfreude is your cup of tea), both film are nonetheless highly worth seeing.

Robots, Love, Babies

Kenji, a third-generation humanoid robot, was originally programmed to emulate the human emotion of love, but ended up emulating dependence and fear of abandonment instead.

"After some limited environmental conditioning, Kenji first demonstrated love by bonding with a a stuffed doll in his enclosure, which he would embrace for hours at a time... Researchers attributed this behavior to his programmed qualities of devotion and empathy and called the experiment a success.

...

"The trouble all started when a young female intern began to spend several hours each day with Kenji, testing his systems and loading new software routines. When it came time to leave one evening, however, Kenji refused to let her out of his lab enclosure and used his bulky mechanical body to block her exit and hug her repeatedly."

Nope, looks like Kenji wasn't displaying devotion and empathy at all.

Interestingly, his behavior is surprisingly similar to the first steps of social-emotional development in babies. At around 8-10 months, babies begin to show signs of human attachment, mostly in the form of separation anxiety, and only later do they acquire the capacity of empathy and an understanding of social rules.

So maybe Kenji just needs to grow up?

The story gets funnier:

"The intern was only able to escape after she had frantically phoned two senior staff members to come and temporarily de-activate Kenji."

Would have loved to see that. You can read more about Kenji here.

The Spotless Mind

Believe it or not, Dutch scientists have conducted a research study suggesting that a common heart medicine, beta-blockers, might actually help people banish painful memories.

The researchers induced negative memories on a group of subjects by exposing them to images of spiders accompanied by mild electric shocks. The next day half of the subjects were given a dose of beta-blockers while the others received a placebo pill. When exposed once again to the same spider-shock combo, those subjects who had taken the beta-blockers showed less fear than the control group, even after the effects of the meds had worn off.

They had not forgotten the spiders or electric shocks of the previous day, but somehow the negative aspects of their memories had diminished.

How is this possible? One hypothesis rests on the intricate process by which we recall memories:

"Each time a memory is recalled it changes a little, and the new version is recorded in the long-term memory stash via brain chemical fluctuations in a process called reconsolidation. The beta-blockers could interfere with [certain other] brain chemicals, blocking reconsolidation of the emotional component of the memory, but leaving the rest of the memory intact."

So, in a sense, no memory is truly being erased -- though sensationalism sells, as do parallels to Gondry movies starring Kate Winslet. But then again, what's left when we erase the content of our memories? A bunch of empty facts that, stripped of their emotional relevance, will likely be truly forgotten soon after.

For more on these experiments, check out these articles from BBC News and Discovery Magazine.

The Uncanny Valley

The uncanny valley is a hypothesis that as a robot is made more humanlike, the emotional response from a human to the robot becomes increasingly positive, until a point of human-likeness is reached beyond which the response quickly becomes that of strong repulsion.

The phenomenon can be explained by the notion that, if an entity is sufficiently non-human, then the humanlike characteristics tend to stand out, generating empathy. But if the entity is "almost human", then the non-human characteristics will be the ones that stand out, leading to a feeling of "strangeness" in the human viewer.

Check out the wikipedia entry here.

The uncanny valley is one of my favorite theories. And this blog is about my own uncanny valley: that place between the common and uncommon, where things strike me as both interesting as strange.