How language colors perception

Posted on by igor

Can you tell which aliens are good and which are evil, the Smoothheads or the Bumpyheads, based on whether they are called “leebish” or “grecious”? If so, you’re a good candidate for testing at Carnegie Mellon, where researchers have shown that naming things with labels creates mental categories, helping people learn faster. So reports today’s New York Times, in the article, When Language Can Hold the Answer:

The finding may not seem surprising, but it is fodder for one side in a traditional debate about language and perception, including the thinking that creates and names groups.

In stark form, the debate was: Does language shape what we perceive, a position associated with the late Benjamin Lee Whorf, or are our perceptions pure sensory impressions, immune to the arbitrary ways that language carves up the world?

The latest research changes the framework, perhaps the language of the debate, suggesting that language clearly affects some thinking as a special device added to an ancient mental skill set. Just as adding features to a cellphone or camera can backfire, language is not always helpful. For the most part, it enhances thinking. But it can trip us up, too.

The gist is that language “greases the wheels of perception.” However, after that initial greasing, it can then get in the way:

In another experiment, Dr. Lupyan showed subjects a series of chairs and tables using pictures from the Ikea catalog. Some subjects were asked to press a button indicating that the picture was of a table or a chair. Other subjects pressed a button to make a nonverbal judgment about the pictures, for example, to indicate whether they liked them or not. Dr. Lupyan found that the subjects who used words to label the objects had more trouble remembering whether they’d seen a specific chair before than subjects who had only pressed a button in a nonverbal task.

Language helps us learn novel categories, and it licenses our unusual ability to operate on an abstract plane, Dr. Lupyan said. The problem is that after a category has been learned, it can distort the memory of specific objects, getting between us and the rest of the nonabstract world.

Igor’s latest naming work is a Gogo

Posted on by igor

Via today’s New York Times:

The Web’s last unconquered frontier – the airplane – is about to be invaded yet again.

This spring, Aircell, a 16-year-old company that sells air to ground telecommunications equipment to airlines, will launch a broadband wireless service for twitchy airplane passengers who need their Internet fix at 40,000 feet.

Two years ago, Aircell, based in Itasca, Ill., and Louisville, Colo., paid $31 million to the federal government for a batch of air-to-ground spectrum that was originally used for in-flight seat-back phones –- an expensive service that passengers largely ignored.

Aircell has since built 92 EVDO cell sites across the United States and pointed them at the sky, where they will bring 3.1-megabit-per-second Internet access to airplanes traveling thousands of feet above the ground at hundreds of miles per hour. The company’s on-board technology will magnify that signal and split it into separate Wi-Fi streams, offering speeds equivalent to a home D.S.L. connection to any passenger who wants to log on with his or her wireless device.

Aircell will start the service, called GoGo, with American Airlines this spring and then expand it with Virgin America over the summer.

If GoGo gets off the ground, it will fulfill the long-held promise of bringing Internet access to airplane passengers. Boeing tried it, somewhat disastrously, earlier this decade with its Connexion in-flight satellite service. Boeing signed up carriers such as Lufthansa, Japan Airlines and Singapore Airlines but the effort was eventually undone by belt-tightening after 9/11. The aircraft maker had to write off $320 million on what was widely reported to be a $1 billion investment.

Jack Blumenstein, Aircell’s chief executive, said GoGo is different in several ways. Airplanes can be retrofitted with the technology overnight, and the in-flight servers and antennas weigh less than 50 pounds, considerably less than Boeing’s bulky satellite receivers. Broadband wireless technology is now faster overall as well, while the array of Wi-Fi equipped consumer devices — from iPhones to laptops — has blossomed.

GoGo’s pricing plans will vary, but access during a cross-country flight should cost around $13. GoGo will also serve up-on-demand television and films from on-board, TiVo-like servers.

Mr. Blumenstein expects other airlines to come on board quickly. “Passengers want freedom and the ability to get back in control of their life and be productive,” he said. “All the data suggests passengers will change planes if one airline offers it and another doesn’t. The airlines will fight to the death over a 1 percent market share shift,” he said.

Readers, please discuss. This is clearly inevitable. Is anyone bothered that the last environment for unwired thinking and old-media-reading is about to be tethered to the grid? I’m ambivalent. Of course, I’ll also be among the first to log on.

Did we mention Gogo was named by Igor? Right, that’s what is most important here.

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From very low

Posted on by igor

The misnamed “From on High” website makes fun of my friend Sue Daniels’, who was a peace activist and advocate for the poor, and who had been murdered shortly before the asshat that “writes” FOH posted this:

I have been following the story of the murder of Sue Daniels since it hit the local papers in November. The titillating story surrounding her relationship with the man who stalked and killed her, Niklan Jones-Lezama (who subsequently committed suicide himself), was only part of the saga that attracted me to her. Sue Daniels was a political activist. She was also a research associate at Virginia Tech, working on a PHD in biology.

I would categorize her political activities as being on the far left; as far left as one can recede before picking up a weapon and calling for the revolution of the proletariat. The “power to the people” kind of crowd. Here is what was written about her “activism” prior to her reporting to federal prison in November after having been found guilty of trespassing on government property (at Ft. Benning) during a protest of America’s involvement in Central and South America…

Sue and I lived together for four amazing years. There’s more, if you can stomach it, here.