The potential is just unimaginable

For a device like this — called jerk-o-meter, which belongs to a class called sociometer:

Say you’re on a first date. Your eyes glaze a bit as the guy you’re with drones on about his ex-girlfriend’s mean-as-a-snake personality, about his garage’s sporty contents, about the dead-boring novel he’s reading (alas, one of your favorites). He’s cute, and there was a hint of chemistry between you over the antipasto, but as the entrée portion of the evening wears on, you see he’s way too self-absorbed. This dance you’ve danced before, and to no good end; preferable to dancing it again would be a solo evening with a book, Ben, and Jerry.

All at once, though, something shifts; you notice a new patterning to your date’s word flow and a stilling of his body. He looks right at you and asks to hear more about your love of all things Italy. Better yet, he listens actively as your answer, with an openness that’s winning you over. He smiles, and you smile, and all at once there’s hope for the dessert course.

What just happened? Cute Guy was jerk-o-metered. That is, he had been wired for your date — wired to a device that sent feedback on his social-signaling behavior, and that helped him make a mid-course correction (one that netted you some overdue attention).

As Alexander Pentland writes in Honest Signals, the jerk-o-meter is real, just one example of a class of devices called sociometers. Pentland, who heads the Human Dynamics Lab at MIT, thinks that sociometers will revolutionize our understanding of human communication.

You might even be able to demand, in some future date, that all your audience are wired before they show up for your lecture

Most beguiling work of literary criticism

I read the piece yesterday, and was thinking of leaving a note here; but, with all the end semester exams, correction of answer scripts and grading (tentative — to be finalised after the students go through their answer scripts and agree with me on the marks), I totally forgot. Hat tip to, the Literary Saloon pointer for reminding me — and, here is the piece by Pradeep Sebastian:

The critic offers three possibilities: 1) N had no idea of Lichberg’s Lolita, and it was one of those mysterious coincidences. 2) N had read it but then forgot about it, a case of literary ‘cryptoamnesia’ (Maar will tell us more about that soon). And 3) N knew it, consciously cribbed from it, but in the fashion of a quotation: taking light literature and making deep literature out of it. Now, the first possibility of pure contingency. Maar asks: “Why should it not simply be a splendid, mysterious and even faintly comical example of the way life displays patterns that look deliberate yet are only the caprices of coincidence? In a certain sense that would be a classic Nabokovian theme,’ But the critic dismisses it and moves on to the second.

2. N could have come across the story, seen that it was very much like what he was fashioning and so forgot about it entirely. ‘The history of literature’, he notes, ‘is not without examples of this phenomenon called ‘cryptomnesia.’ Apparently Nabokov would read two or three books a day and forget them. The plot of Lolita had prefigured in his work several times. There is a pre-Lolita character in his ‘A Nursery Tale’ (1926). He had created a child-woman here, narrated by an old poet – a prefiguration of Humbert. In his Gift, a secondary character actually discusses the plot of Lolita. And in The Enchanter, the story is fully present, in a shortened form. Thus Lichberg’s story was buried deep in his literary psyche, manifesting itself in various forms until it became the novel we know now so well.

But no. Interesting, but no. What interests Michael Maar is the third tale in the Lolita labyrinth. N knew the tale well, admired it and used the plot as a quotation. This wasn’t plagiarism (though Thomas Mann called it ‘higher cribbing’): you take from a lower source and turn it into something else. Maar then takes us through a series of revelations that qualify as top-notch literary detective footnote work. Like some literary Dan Brown, Nabokov had placed several veiled references to the original source – what Maar terms as the Ur- Lolita- in his life and work. Maar’s literary sleuthing led him to the clues that reveal the way this Ur-text and its obscure author pop up in N’s work.

I’ll leave it to you to discover for yourself what those are from The Two Lolitas. What seems of final interest in this twisty literary mystery is that in both cases, the narrators are, by the end of their encounters with their respective Lolitas, initiated into art. ‘The great novel’s famous ending: he who survives Lolita becomes through her an artist’, Maar reminds us. So, too, in Lichberg’s story: the professor-narrator becomes a poet in his retelling of his erotic compulsions with ‘this immortal daemon disguised as a female child’. Michael Maar’s The Two Lolitas is the most beguiling work of literary criticism I have read in a long, long time.

Looks like a book that I would like!

Watson-Crick and what favours scientific discoveries

The following (rather extensive) quotes from Francis Crick’s What Mad Pursuit are not only of intrinsic interest for what they reveal about the process of scientific discovery and some of the discoverers, but also for convincing those of you who haven’t read the book that it is well worth your time and efforts!

An even odder incident happened when Jim came back to work at Cambridge in 1955. I was going into the Cavendish one day and found myself walking along with Neville Mott, the new Cavendish professor (Bragg had gone on to the Royal Institution in London). “I’d like to introduce you to Watson,” I said, “since he is working in your lab.” He looked at me in surprise. “Watson?” he said, “Watson? I thought your name was Watson-Crick.”

…

It was because we passionately wanted to know the details of the structure.

This, then, was a powerful force in our favor. I believe there were at least two others. Neither Jim nor I felt any pressure to get on with the problem. This meant that we could approach it intensively for a period and then leave it alone for a bit. Our other advantage was that we had evolved unstated but fruitful methods of collaboration, something that was quite missing in the London group. If either of us suggested a new idea the other, while taking it seriously, would attempt to demolish it in a candid but nonhostile manner. This turned out to be quite crucial.

In solving scientific problems of this type, it is almost impossible to avoid falling into error. … The advantage of intellectual collaboration is that it helps jolt one out of false assumptions.

…

What, then, do Jim Watson and I deserve credit for? If we deserve any credit at all, it is for persistence and the willingness to discard ideas when they became untenable.

…

We could not at all see what the answer was, but we considered it so important that we were determined to think about it long and hard, from any relevant point of view. Practically nobody else was prepared to make such an intellectual investment, since it involved not only studying genetics, biochemistry, chemistry, and physical chemistry (including X-ray diffraction–and who was prepared to learn that?) but also sorting out the essential gold from the dross. Such discussions, since they tend to go interminably, are very demanding and sometimes intellectually exhausting. Nobody without an overwhelming interest in the problem could sustain them.

Then there is the question of what would have happened if Watson and I had not put forward the DNA structure. … Had Jim and I not succeeded, I doubt whether the ditscovery of the double helix could have been delayed for more than two or three years.

… This is that if Watson and I had not discovered the structure, instead of being revealed with a flourish it would have trickled out and that its impact would have been far less.

…
But what I think is overlooked in such arguments is the intrinsic beauty of the DNA double helix.

HowTo: be a genius

The latest research suggests a more prosaic, democratic, even puritanical view of the world. The key factor separating geniuses from the merely accomplished is not a divine spark. It’s not I.Q., a generally bad predictor of success, even in realms like chess. Instead, it’s deliberate practice. Top performers spend more hours (many more hours) rigorously practicing their craft.

…

Public discussion is smitten by genetics and what we’re “hard-wired” to do. And it’s true that genes place a leash on our capacities. But the brain is also phenomenally plastic. We construct ourselves through behavior. As Coyle observes, it’s not who you are, it’s what you do.

From this Op-Ed piece of David Brooks (which also got published in the Hindu today — though I see it in the hard copy, I am not able to locate the same online — Hindu is also going the way of some of the other online newspapers where the jungle of links is impenetrable!)

Models and data

Jim was a little bit more brash, stating that no good model ever accounted for all the facts, since some data was bound to be misleading if not plain wrong. A theory that did fit all the data would have been “carpentered” to do this and would thus be open to suspicion.

– Francis Crick, What Mad Pursuit — a personal view of scientific discovery

Story of an ideal collaboration

Doug at Nanoscale views — a very positive, and elevating story to start your morning with.