Delightful Cognitive Science Fiction

I just finished the best novel of 2009 ... and while it's early in the year, I am confident this will still be towards the top of the list at the end of the year.

Stephanie Kallos' Sing Them Home is delightful, and also relevant to cognitive science, language, and library science. Here's how:

• Cognitive Science. One of the characters, Larken, is an art history professor who sees people in color. She does this throughout the novel, and I was reminded of synesthetes each time. Here's an example:

"Sometimes Daddy was yellow - not Mommy Yellow (the color of egg yolks in the mixing bowl, prescrambled and paled by lacings of milk, the color of Hope [the mother] when they were reading together at bedtime), but his own special Daddy Yellow: intense, glossy: the pudding-y filling inside lemon bars served at church de bachs; dandelion flowers after a downpour." (p. 93-94)

• Language. The novel takes place in the fictional town of Emlyn Springs, in southeast Nebraska near Lincoln with strong ties to Wales. Many of the characters speak or sing Welsh, and there are many Welsh rituals. Kallos' loving portrayal of the language and rituals, is touching and might be appreciated by those who enjoy language.
  

• Library Science. One small but terrific scene takes place at a library in nearby Beatrice, NE; it nicely illustrates principles of good reference librarianship that I try to instill in my students. Viney, the not-quite stepmother, goes to the library to send an email to a Welsh acquaintance, and she asks for help. Emphasis is mine, with [comments] explaining just why this is such great reference service.
  

" 'I'd be happy to help you,' the librarian says, coming out from behind the information desk. 'Follow me.' This librarian is no pinched, spinsterish matron wearing a cardigan and spectacles. She's a big girl, twentysomething, and she walks like a man. ...

" 'I'm here to write an email letter. Can I do that?'
" 'You bet.' The girl lays her hand on a silver, dinner-roll-sized object on the desk and expertly starts sliding it around. ...
" 'This is called a "mouse,"' Addison remarks. 'Sadly it's the only named part of a computer that has any poetry.' "

Addison the librarian goes on to show Viney how to select a username in gmail and says "'While you work on that, I'll go help those folks at the counter. As soon as you've got something we’ll get you started, okay?' " [librarian gives patron information, lets her work, and goes to help other patrons, promising to return]

Viney thinks and tries several names until she finds one that works. "Addison is back. 'How you comin' along?' she asks." [returning as promised, still helpful.] They figure out a good username for Viney (Addison's is "Sad bison at gee mail dot com;" Viney ultimately selects nutriyogavine) and Addison explains how to write the "email letter:"

" 'Now,' Addison continues, 'We’ll get the cursor moved down to where you need to start writing ... Now you just start typing the way you would on a regular typewriter.' Addison's fingers move with incredible speed." She shows Viney how to send the message when she's ready, and then says " 'You'll do great. I'll be right over there if you have any questions." [Addison is so patient with Viney, and she ends the encounter with good closure, inviting Viney to ask for more help if she needs it.] (pages 290-292)

If I were writing this up for a reference observation paper (which is an assignment I ask my students to complete), I would demonstrate the many ways that Addison meets the ALA /RUSA Guidelines for Behavioral Performance of Reference and Information Service Providers. And does a great job of helping a patron we care about in the novel ... as I know many public librarians do in the Real World.

Kudos to Stephanie Kallos for portraying good library assistance. The novel is good in a lot of other ways as well, but for the purposes of this blog, I recommend it for the cognitive and information science tidbits strewn here and there.

For More Information

• Kallos, Stephanie. Sing Them Home. Atlantic Monthly Press, 2009.
  
• Valby, Karen. Sing Them Home (review). Entertainment Weekly, Jan. 16, 2009.
  

Mind Not on the Road?

If you're driving and talking on a cell phone, your mind isn't on the road. Period.  And the problem isn't the the physical act of dialing, holding the phone, or listening to the person on the other end. The impairment comes from speaking; and in terms of accident risk, the impairment is comparable to driving drunk.

So says David Strayer, psychology professor at the University of Utah. Radio Times' Marty Moss-Coane interviewed Stayer on Monday's show, and it was a fascinating listen.  Some tidbits from the conversation, mostly derived from Strayer's studies in his lab's driving simulator:

• Cell phone conversations are much more distracting than in-car conversations.  While conversation-making is a big drain on attention, if you are talking with someone in the car with you, the other person is paying attention to the road as well. 
• The levels of impairment are essentially the same for hand-held and hands-free devices.
• Text-messaging while driving is, not surprisingly, even more dangerous.
• Listening while driving -- to the radio, to a book on CD, pre-recorded conversations to this interview on Radio Times -- is not nearly as problematic.  It's the generation of communication, according to Strayer, that causes the interference. (phew!)
• Strayer said:  "driving also interferes with your ability to make good decisions while you're on the phone."  Because attention is limited, and because it takes attention to both drive safely and make good decisions, when your attention is divided, both driving and decision-making can suffer.
• Finally, if you do business on your phone while driving, Strayer suggests that you might be putting your company at risk for liability if there is an accident.

The interview is a great listen; callers asked great questions to which Stayer provided fascinating responses.  A logical conclusion would be that talking on cell phones & driving don't mix.

For More Information

• Radio Times interview with David Strayer, January 27, 2009.  (mp3) or find WHYY's Radio Times in iTunes.
  
• Drivers Distracted More by Cell Phones Than by Passengers. University of Utah News Release, November 30th, 2008.
• Drews, Frank A., Monisha Pasupathi, and David Strayer. Passenger and cell phone conversations in simulated driving. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied. 14(4), Dec 2008: 392-400. (Subscription required or @ your library).
• Drivers on Cell Phones Are as Bad as Drunks. University of Utah News Release, June 29th, 2006.
• Strayer, D.L., Drews, F.A., Crouch, D.J. A Comparison of the Cell Phone Driver and the Drunk Driver Human Factors: The Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society. 48(2), Jan. 2006: 381-391. (Subscription required or @ your library)
• Cell Phone Use as Dangerous as Drunken Driving. Alcohol: Problems & Solutions entry provides a nice summary of  Stayer's 2006 article.
• Drivers on Cell Phones Clog Traffic. University of Utah News Release, January 1st, 2008.
  

Interruptions & Watching Television

Apparently, television commercials serve a useful purpose in the enjoyment of television shows. Future Tense's Jon Gordon interviewed Jeff Galak, a doctoral candidate at NYU's Stern School of Business last week regarding Galak's research suggesting that "commercial interruptions make TV shows more enjoyable."

Apparently it's not the commercials themselves that make us enjoy the shows we are watching. Instead, it's the forced break; we get habituated to what we are doing and thus enjoy it less over time. Since the commercials stop the show, when we return to the show, we enjoy it more because we've had a break. From the abstract:

"...[S]tudies demonstrate that, although people preferred to avoid commercial interruptions, these interruptions actually made programs more enjoyable (study 1), regardless of the quality of the commercial (study 2), even when controlling for the mere presence of the ads (study 3), and regardless of the nature of the interruption (study 4)."

The article will be published August.

For More Information

• Gordon, Jon. Study: Interruptions make TV shows more enjoyable. Future Tense, Jan. 20, 2009.
  
• Nelson, Leif D., Tom Meyvis, and Jeff Galak (2009), “Enhancing the Television Viewing Experience through Commercial Interruptions,” in Press at the Journal of Consumer Research, 36 (August). [Paper; subscription required or check @ your library]

Leaving New England ... Moving to North Carolina!

The CogSci Librarian is on the move! I am leaving my position as Electronic Resource Librarian at the University of Connecticut on April 30. I'll be moving to North Carolina to serve as the director of the Park Library at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina starting June 1. I'm really excited about the new position, as newspaper libraries are my first love, and I'm thrilled to be going back to the field of journalism.

This is a great time of year to be thinking about moving out of New England -- we've got several inches of snow on the ground, and it's a wee bit warmer in Chapel Hill.

Once again, I'll be rethinking this blog, which is good for me and for the blog. There are interesting connections between journalism, communication, and library science,and I will be exploring those in some form, in some place. JOMC hosts some fascinating blogs, and I may move over there at some point.

For this semester, things will remain the same: I'll continue to serve the University of Connecticut ELibrary & troubleshooting; the departments of communication and psychology; and I'm teaching reference for Simmons GSLIS. Crazy, but I plan to blog things library science and cognitive science for a while yet.

Web 2.0 for my friends or, a Facebook Frenzy!

In thinking back over 2008, one of the best things about the year was the proliferation of friends, buddies, and acquaintances I met. For the most part, this meeting took place online, through various social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and FriendFeed.  Many of my library colleagues have written about how they use these tools for professional tasks, such as staying connected with distant colleagues, getting ideas, answering professional questions, and even keeping up with their patrons (for a great treatise on using Twitter in a library setting, see Brian Mathews' article "Social Eyes").  I've found these social networking sites to be a great addition to my professional life.

But I realize that my face-to-face (f2f), non-librarian friends are not quite as tech-savvy as my f2f library friends are.  I find that I keep up with my real life friends less now that I spend so much time online - my spouse and I even stay connected on Facebook!  He and I have talked about this, and we decided to hold a Facebook Frenzy.

This weekend, we've invited some of our f2f friends who are not as tech-savvy (or "tech-addicted") as we are over to our house for an afternoon of Facebook, Skype, and hulu.  We have wireless, and we've encouraged our buddies to bring laptops if they have them, and we also have some laptops of our own people can use if they don't have a traveling computer.  It's going to be informal, with us showing the three sites, answering tech questions (two friends have just gotten MacBooks, so I anticipate some questions there), and talking about privacy settings in Facebook.

From my own experience, I know I learn best when a friend shows me something - it happened with Facebook and with Twitter; if I hadn't had friends there, I probably wouldn't have explored them.  I want to take my teaching expertise out of the academy and into my personal life -- and I have an ulterior motive:  I want to hang out with my f2f friends online in addition to, well, face to face. 

About Vision Therapy, II

I get so many hits on my blog for vision therapy, mostly looking for material about Stereo Sue, so I take it for granted that all of my visitors know what vision therapy is. Bad librarian!

It's hard to find a good definition online of vision therapy from a reputable source, in part because it's somewhat controversial.  My impression of it, and this is from my own experience, is that it's a way of retraining the eyes and brain to work together to improve vision.  It's both a personal interest and a professional one, as effective vision therapy relies heavily on the brain's ability to change at any age (also known as brain plasticity).

Vision therapy has been used with people with learning disabilities, with traumatic brain injury, and vision problems like strabismus.  Athletes have used it to improve their hand-eye coordination (useful for baseball players, for instance).  In my case, it was used to correct a convergence insufficiency.  It is generally practiced by behavioral optometrists, whose goal is "to develop or improve fundamental visual skills and abilities" and/or "change how a patient processes or interprets visual information" (College of Optometrists in Vision Development [COVD]).

If you're looking for vision therapy treatment, my eye doctor recommends finding a COVD optometrist. Read what the COVD says about vision therapy; you might also be interested in their information about vision therapy for adults.

For More Information, check out these blog posts about vision therapy

• Stereo Sue and Me, July 1, 2006
• About Vision Therapy, July 13, 2006
• Scholarly Research on Vision Therapy, July 13, 2006
• Links for Vision Therapy, July 28, 2006
• Vision Therapy, a personal perspective, January 5, 2009

Vision Therapy, a personal perspective

My vision buddy Heather has just started blogging about her experiences with vision therapy. She calls it "One Eyed Girl - My Life with Strabismus: [a] Journal of living with monocular vision and learning through Vision Therapy to use both eyes."

I went through a visual revolution several years ago through my own vision therapy, and I appreciate reading someone else's thoughts mid-therapy. I'd read that athletes and children were doing VT to improve their vision, but I didn't know anyone else doing vision therapy at the time -- except for the kids I'd see in my eye doctor's office before or after my appointment. My therapy resulted in a visual revolution -- colors pop, trees have depth, snowflakes are truly three-dimensional -- but I had no one but my eye doctor and vision therapist to tell about these developments. They were happy for me, but it wasn't the same as sharing the milestones with someone who was going through -- or had gone through -- a similar transformation

Heather's visual system is vastly different than mine, and so her rehabilitation is different, but still I like reading her accounts of how her vision is improving. Her descriptions of new visual experiences, large and small, are inspiring, particularly if you have gone through vision therapy. And if you're a vision therapist or behavioral optometrist, it's a nice insight into a patient's experience.

Online Reading List Creation Tool? Not!

I'm teaching reference at Simmons again in the spring, and I am pulling together my reading list. (see the Fall 2007 reading list). That list looked nice and meets most of the criteria I have for a reading list:

• Citations are formatted properly in MLA, and include the name of the database where I got the full-text as well as the date accessed. I am a stickler for good citation style in my classes, and I feel I should model that in the citations I give them.

• The list is sorted on several levels: first by week, then by topic, and then alphabetically by author (or title if there is no author). This is important because I want students to easily know which readings are due when (tho' some find it confusing that you need to read week 2's articles BEFORE week 2's class), and under what topic.

The downside of this kind of list is that it's complex to maintain. It starts with the citation, which I email to myself, paste into a FileMaker database and fix the metadata, and then export with correctly formatted html, and then paste into the html file, which is finally uploaded to the Simmons server. phew! I'm tired just writing all that out!

It's been 18 months since I taught reference, and I thought there must be a better way. Ideally, I wanted a two-step process to export from the article to the bibliography: 1) find the article and 2) export to bibliography -- while maintaining good MLA citation style and complex sort order. My options seemed infinite, with so many bookmarking and social networking citation sites available. Sadly, none met all my criteria, so I'm back to manually coding my html file.

Here's what I tried. The links go to a few sample articles I wanted to share with my class, along with notes about why each product didn't meet my needs:

RefWorks

• On the plus side:
• It's RefWorks, which I encourage my students to use during their career at Simmons.
• It's incredibly simple to get citations from EBSCO, CSA, etc. into RefWorks.
• It's possible to create shared folders that anyone can view.
• It's very customizable, with 15 user-defined fields and an infinite number of ways to format citations.
• Simmons' RefWorks is OpenURL-enabled, so it's easy for students to get to the full-text of the article, PLUS they get early familiarity with Simmons' ArticleNow!
• On the minus side:
• The default view for RefWorks' shared folders is not customizable. The metadata doesn't display consistently across document types (article, book, web page), and the Standard View doesn't display in any recognized format (APA, Turabian, MLA). I wrote the company and was told that it is not possible to modify the Standard View.
• The inability to easily display instructions for textbook readings in the Standard View (i.e., chapter number, title, and pages for the chapter, along with the book title) was the straw that broke this camel's back.
  

CiteULike

• On the plus side:
  • Easy (theoretically) to add citations with a bookmarklet.
• Citations are online.
• Easy to add tags.
• On the minus side:
• None of the citations I tried to add through their bookmarklet actually loaded. I tried from Scopus, which is on the CiteULike list of "web sites". EBSCO isn't on their list, so I wasn't surprised that EBSCO citations didn't import automatically. That's a deal-breaker, as a large percentage of my citations are in EBSCO's Library, Information Science, and Technology Abstracts (LISTA) database.
• The ads on the interface are distracting and leave little room for viewing citations.

Connotea

• On the plus side:
  • Includes date and time the citation was added to the database. The downside is that it's not in my time zone.
  • The default is to share citations.
• On the minus side:
• Not possible to automatically add from EBSCO or other Simmons databases; only via their bookmarklet.
• The article's metadata is not added automatically via their bookmarklet. The default is to only display the title with a hyperlink to the article. It's possible to add complete citations, but that requires extra steps -- and the point of this exercise is to save time.
• Lots of red on the page is tiring. Page is kind of cluttered.
• Extra features like "related"articles and links to others who've linked to the same citation are not relevant to a class reading list.

2collab.com

• On the plus side:
  • Clean, simple layout with professional colors.
  • Scopus citations imported easily.
  • Nice tagging.
• On the minus side:
• It works best with Elsevier databases. This is a problem for two reasons:
  • I have access to Scopus through my main job at UConn, but not through Simmons. So any citations I find in Scopus that I want to use for class have the UConn / Scopus URL rather than a Simmons-friendly (i.e., proxied) URL for easy access to the full-text. I'd have to copy & paste the URLs from LISTA for citations that are in Scopus.
  • Scopus doesn't index some of the non scholarly journals, so I had to manually add Stephen Abram's terrific Searcher article Evolution to Revolution to Chaos? Reference in Transition.
• Making articles shared was a two-step process: clicking the "group" box AND agreeing to the pop-up that yes, I do want to share this article.
• Finally, it didn't do well with textbook chapters -- too much manual metadata entry.

I also looked briefly at EBSCO's shared folders and Zotero, but neither seemed easily shareable, so I didn't actually test them. Briefly:

• I love EBSCO's folders, but if you want to share them, you have to email everyone with whom you want to share the folder, and with 21 students in the class, that's too much extra work for moi.
• Zotero's got great potential, but as it is now resident only one one browser, it's not ready for a shared class reading list.

I have used a wiki in the past for my source list (which looks a lot like a reading list, since many of the sources are books, and all need to be properly cited). I asked students to annotate each source on the wiki, and that was terrific. However, I still had to format the citations, both in html and wiki style. For next semester, I have put my sources in delicious, and I will use that both as the source list AND the annotation vehicle.

Back to the software under discussion: Please note that I have assessed these tools to be used as a reading list, which is not exactly what they were designed for. I have taught many UConn students and faculty to use RefWorks, and I will continue to do so. It's great for keeping track of citations. Similarly, the other products I've described have great features for researchers and scholars.

Sadly, though, none is robust enough to serve as the reading list for my upcoming class. I am keeping the list in the "cloud" though, using dropbox for its easy, everywhere access. Take a look at the Spring 2009 reading list -- it's in flux, but you might find something fun to read!

Favorite Songs 2008

One of my usual end-of-year projects is to create a CD of my favorite songs which came out in the past year.  This year, thanks to cool technology, I was able to upload mp3s of the songs to 8tracks.com and I can share them with you all!

Here's the full song list, in order on the CD:

1. Post It 4:02 The Aluminum Group Little Happyness
   
2. Horizon 4:23 Ashby The Best of Marina Records
   
3. Birthday 3:30 The Bird And The Bee One Too Many Hearts
   
4. The Motorbike Song 4:23 Justin Jude 
   
5. Beautiful Eyes 3:54 The Aluminum Group Little Happyness
   
6. El Fusilado 2:32 Chumbawamba The Boy Bands Have Won
   
7. Far Away 3:50 The Hampdens The Last Party
   
8. Librarian 4:16 My Morning Jacket Evil Urges
   
9. Je Suis Un Parisien 3:41 Jean-paul Elysee Pourtant
   
10. Oxford Comma 3:16 Vampire Weekend Vampire Weekend
    
11. Quotidien 2:57 Sandrine Kiberlain Putumayo Presents Acoustic France
    
12. Walcott 3:42 Vampire Weekend Vampire Weekend
    
13. Unstoppable 3:33 Santogold Santogold
    
14. This Is The Life 3:05 Amy Macdonald This Is The Life
    
15. How Am I To Be 3:05 The Watson Twins Fire Songs
    
16. All This Beauty 3:20 The Weepies Hideaway
    
17. You Don’t Love Me Yet 3:52 Winterpills Central Chambers
    
18. Add Me 3:28 Chumbawamba The Boy Bands Have Won
    
19. Secret Blue Thread 4:23 Winterpills Central Chambers
    
20. One Fine Day 4:55 David Byrne & Brian Eno Everything That Happens Will Happen Today
    
21. Lovely Day 3:26 The Aluminum Group Little Happyness
    

Notes 

• Due to licensing restrictions, I could only include 2 songs by each artist.  I'd only chosen 2 Winterpills songs, so they were safe, but I had to deselect something from the Aluminum Group; you can see their Beautiful Eyes video below.
  
• I can only listen to 30-second clips from each song in my mix -- hope they sound ok to you!
• If you like any of these songs or artists, please consider buying their CD!

The Aluminum Group - Beautiful Eyes from epb21 on Vimeo.

Short Takes

Here are a few of my recent favorite things, for your Thanksgiving (U.S.) browsing pleasure:

Bora posts a great article on New and Exciting in PLoS ONE: an article entitled Whole Body Mechanics of Stealthy Walking in Cats and he asks for LOLCat submissions to illustrate the articles. I'd like to see that too!

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I just bought the library a terrific book called Head First Statistics (O'Reilly, 2008), which I like for several reasons:

1. It explains a bunch of statistics in a lot of different ways; and, quoting O'Reilly:  "brings this typically dry subject to life, teaching statistics through engaging, interactive, and thought-provoking material, full of puzzles, stories, quizzes, visual aids, and real-world examples."
2. It's a great example of how books can be designed to effectively -- and professionally -- teach complex concepts.  (O'Reilly says the book "satisfies the requirements for passing the College Board's Advanced Placement (AP) Statistics Exam" so it's clearly no slouch!). I'd might even call it a 2.0 book?!
3. I got some good ideas of how to present study tips to my LIS students from page xxxiii entitled "Here's what YOU can do to bend your brain into submission," using tips like "Slow down" ... "Talk about it. Out loud" ... "Do the exercises. Write your own notes."  Interactivity improves learning.

Check out the book ... either to learn statistics, or to get ideas on how to make reading tough concepts manageable.

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Heard some interesting (but not uplifting) brain science stories on the News Hour:

• Misdiagnosing Dementia (Nov. 12 2008):  "About 5 million Americans suffer from dementia -- about half of those from suspected Alzheimer's disease -- according to official estimates. Now, researchers are looking for new treatments in a field that hasn't seen a major advance since the 1960s."  
• Military, VA Confront Rising Suicide Rates Among Troops (Nov. 10 2008)  "The Army says that suicides among active duty personnel have doubled in recent years, and multiple deployments might contribute to that increase."
  

Read the transcript, download the audio, or watch the video on the News Hour site.  (Note to the News Hour: nice way to keep your content vibrant in this multimedia age!)