Book Reading #40: Coming of Age in Samoa

Chapter 14: Education for Choice
Summary
In the final chapter of the book, Mead continues to focus on the education of the youth in Samoa and compares it with American education. Mead once again mentions that the kids in Samoa have to make many choices and decisions at a very young age. Despite some differences, there are some similarities in the American and the Samoan culture.

While talking about American culture, Mead says that people have a wrong idea about American society providing limitless choices while actually that's not true.
Mead finally says that a civilization where there are so many choices and so many different ways of doing things, parents must teach their children how to think rather than teaching them what to think. They should let the children make their choices.

Discussion
Mead makes a good point in this chapter by mentioning how education must be imbibed on children by letting them make their choices. She specifically says that we should teach them how to think. However, today, after about 80 years after the book was written this is actually a reality. Most parents today let their kids make their own choices and choose their own careers. Thus, we can see that civilizations take time to mold. They start off as primitive and then there are slow positive changes like forming the constitution, the bill of rights, forming the education and the health care system etc which convert the civilization into a developed and prosperous one. Who knows, after a few centuries, Samoa might have a very developed civilization.

Book Reading #38: Coming of Age in Samoa

Chapter 13
Summary
This chapter compares the Samoan and American youth. Mead discusses the difference in the social environments between the two cultures. She mentions that American children have many more choices as compared to children in Samoa. The Samoan child knows about life, death and sex. She states that no Samoan child is spoiled.

Education

She mentions that American children go to school to pursue their interests and goals. On the other hand Samoan children start assisting the elders in everyday work of the society.

Display of affection:

Samoans do not display their feelings and affection as openly and with the same magnitude as the American youth.

Discussion

I we see carefully, all primitive cultures are more or less the same, while all the developed cultures are pretty much the same. School is a sign of development, and that's why a kid from developed culture like America would could to school to achieve formal education. If the high school and college degrees mark the person's level of education and intelligence then every kid has to go to school. On the other hand, the skills of a Samoan kid are marked by his acumen in fishing, farming, carpentry etc. and so, he starts to get involved in these jobs from a very young age.

Ethnography Results, Week 7

Goal

My goal this week was to log on to second life and teleport to a place where I can find high density of people. Then, make a statement about a controversial topic that will trigger a debate. Make observations about the debate, if it is more technical and educational or if it contains more hate words, negative sentiment and derogatory language.

Methods of Study:

• Teleport to the Newbie Island
• Observe the mood of the people.
• Make a controversial statement to trigger a debate.
• Make observations from what people say about the issue.
• Judge the tone of the debate.

When I got to the newbie island, i noticed that one of the guys was changing his costume very frequently. All the costumes he was wearing were superhero costumes. First, he showed up in the spider-man costume, then superman, then batman and lastly he-man.

A controversial statement I used:

"I think all the superheroes are faggots (gay)!"

Observations:

Initially people interpreted this statement as something against the superheroes. So, they started talking about real life superheroes and they help people and why they are important. One of the good point was that super heroes inspire kids to behave well. Some people remained neutral while some people agreed that super hero costumes usually look pretty stupid and lame.

However, soon the debate switched to the other aspect of the statement - Homosexuality. This is what I was really looking for. Homosexuality is a very controversial topic and I wanted to know people's opinions about the issue.

Most people present at the Newbie Island actually supported homosexuality. Most of them said that they had no issues with people being homosexual. One of them asked me straight up that what was my problems with gay people since I made a controversial statement. I tried to keep the debate going. The debate lasted for about an hour.

Tone of the debate:

The debate did not contain a lot of obscene words or hate words. It was surprisingly quite educational. I think one of the reasons for this is the place where you carry on the debate. At the newbie island, most of the folks who frequent there come from good backgrounds - college students, housewives, professionals etc. Also, when I checked the profiles of the people who were present there, most of them were from California, some from New York and New Jersey region, a few from Washington and a couple from Chicago, Illinois. People from other states formed a minority. Since most people available there were from big cities, especially from the west coast, they had a more liberal attitude.

Overall Experience

The overall experience was very interesting. I did collect a lot of qualitative data. It was interesting to know what people think about the LGBT community. Lot of people on SL actually are intelligent and do make sense opposing to the popular belief that people on SL are time-killing procrastinators and losers. I found a lot of interesting people on SL who are professionals, doing great in their lives.

Ethnography Results, Week 6

Due: March 22

Goal:

This week, myself and Pape decided to log into Second Life(SL) at the same time and meet each other in SL and collect the data together. Until now only one of us were logging in and the other took the notes.

Methods of Study:

The methods of study don't change a lot. They remain more or less the same since the only mode of interaction is via IM or VOIP. Observations are crucial, but avatars don't represent the true characteristics of people in real life.

• Teleport to Newbie Island and Help Island. (Since these places always have a lot of people)
• Observe people and their actions.
• Try to initiate conversation with people and judge their tone.
• One new thing that I wanted to study this time was the nature of conversation as friendship on SL strengthens.

Observations:

I observed that people usually don't start conversation with you unless they know you. So, it is usually you who has to take the initiative. One reason behind this is most people you see hanging out on SL have been on SL for some time and are already busy talking with their friends. I started a conversation with a guy. The conversation was short, but interesting. Here it is:

Me: So, who here is from TX?
TK: I’m from north texas….
Me: Where in North texas?
TK: We call it "Oklahoma" but Texans think they own everything.
Me: I'm not sure if they do think that way.... i was not born and raised in TX
TK: It was really a joke
Me: now i am confused...so r u from TX or OK?
TK: Oklahoma
Me: anywho, maybe Texans are indeed very proud about their state. But, on the whole, it’s a pretty good state...and whats wrong in being proud about your home state?
Me: I’ve never been to OK, so i can’t comment :)
TK: It's not bad
Me: i bet it’s not
Me: alright dude, looks like u're getting busy. I’ll get going...was nice talking to u
TK: Take care man
Me: u 2

Towards the end, TK got busy talking to some ladies and started to ignore me, so I took off.

Then I moved on and started talking to my friend - AW. I had a nice time talking to her a couple of weeks ago, so I thought of engaging in a conversation again. Here is the conversation.
Me: hey, how u doin?
AW: sweetheart, sooo good and you
Me: i'm doin fantastic
AW: holy shit…where you been?
AW: um sorry, got surprised
Me: it was a pretty busy week....and i got into a car accident yesterday
AW: oo noo you ok? I’m sorry to hear that
Me: I’m fine....bunch of drunk chicks hit my car....Saturday night, s**t happens.
AW: still that’s bad
Me: hmmm ya, since I don’t drink, I am always safe. The cops filed a report against those gals, i'm off the hook
Me: my car did get damaged from the sides. I’ll will get it fixed soon
AW: damn…but you're ok and your family loves you
Me: omg, i didn’t tell this to my parents, they already have enough to worry about…I don’t want to add to their tensions…
AW: oo they are still in India?? end of wedding season. find you a pretty girl for next year…jk
Me: so, how was your week?
AW: was ok
AW: we had disaster stress test at the bank this Saturday. test environment
AW: it was stressed and a disaster… so thats complete success right?
Me: cool....so do they train u for bank robberies and stuff like that
AW: nooo… i'm not in a branch. i do systems….double thick concrete walls
Me: my bad....i just had that in mind since i saw the movie the town last Friday.
AW: bullet proof glass and double gates. armed guards and double security doors
Me: gosh...that’s tight
AW: no money in the building…just servers. i have almost 10 passwords to work
Me: so what kinda disasters do they train you guys for
AW: everything server failures, logistics failures
Me: hackers?
AW: everything
AW: the easiest one is rotten thinking. Nobody plans for that
AW: everything gets f'd for that. No remedy.
AW: well time for bed here. have fun and be well and drive CAREFULLY
Me: oh, u stay in NY?
AW: nooo, eastcoast yes but not NY……hotlanta
Me: i might be relocating to NY soon…..for grad school
AW: cool, good for you
Me: not sure yet….anyways, i'll talk to u later then....tomorrow's Monday :(
AW: yep almost there….night night
Me: night. sleep tight

Overall Experience:

I think the overall experience was very nice even though we did nothing new this week. I think making friends on SL is similar to the old concept of making pen friends. You don't even know their RL names. You sometimes wonder what their RL names are and what kind of people they are in RL. In general, I observed that as you start making friends on SL, conversations get relaxed, you start talking about your week, your interests and hobbies. Since people are getting lonely in real lives, second life offers an alternative to talk to people and socialize. People even have face book profiles with second life names and have added their second life friends on facebook, who also use their SL names on facebook. Real identity is never revealed. Sometimes, I think this suspense sucks, but maybe it's better that way...because when you start getting to know people well, there is good chance that some of their traits may disappoint you. So, it's a boon in disguise.

* SL: second life

* RL: Real life

Paper reading #15: TurKit: human computation algorithms on mechanical turk

Reference Information:

Title: TurKit: Human Computation Algorithms on Mechanical Turk

Authors: Greg Little, Lydia B. Chilton, Max Goldman, Robert C, Miller

Conference: UIST '10 Proceedings of the 23nd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology

Summary:

Mechanical Turk (MTurk) provides an on-demand source of human computation. This provides a tremendous opportunity to explore algorithms which incorporate human computation as a function call. Amazon uses such a mechanical turk in which users are paid small amounts of money for completing the human intelligence tasks (HITS) like writing product reviews. However, various systems challenges make this difficult in practice, and most uses of MTurk post large numbers of independent tasks. TurKit provides an API written in JavaScript for accomplishing MTurk Tasks. TurKit is a toolkit for prototyping and exploring algorithmic human computation, while maintaining a straight-forward imperative programming style. The authors present the crash-and-rerun programming model that makes TurKit possible, along with a variety of applications for human computation algorithms. The authors also present case studies of TurKit used for real experiments across different fields. The crash-and-rerun model favors usability over efficiency, but does so at an inherent cost in scalability. So, one of the major limitations of this system is expensive space complexity.

Discussion:

Companies like Amazon.com, ebay, other e-commerce companies and companies that rely on customer ratings have been using mechanical turks for quite some time now. They have to stick to this procedure since these tasks require human intelligence and can not be achieved using computer algorithms. These systems have a drawback when it comes to scalability, but with modern processors and cheap storage solutions, that doesn't quite seem to be an issue.

The name Mechanical Turk comes from "The Turk," a chess-playing automaton of the 18th century, which was made by Wolfgang von Kempelen

Paper reading #14: A framework for robust and flexible handling of inputs with uncertainty

Reference Information:

Title: A Framework for Robust and Flexible Handling of Inputs with Uncertainty

Authors: Julia Schwarz, Scott E. Hudson, Jennifer Mankoff, Andrew D. Wilson

Conference: UIST '10 Proceedings of the 23nd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology

Summary:

New input technologies like touch, recognition based input such as pen gestures and next generation interactions all provide for more natural user interfaces. However, these techniques all create inputs with some uncertainty. Conventional infrastructure lacks a method for easily handling uncertainty, and as a result input produced by these technologies is often converted to conventional events as quickly as possible, leading to a stunted interactive experience. The authors present a framework for handling input with uncertainty in a systematic, extensible, and easy to manipulate fashion.

Using the various touch inputs from the user, a probabilistic finite state machine can be developed and used to solve the ambiguity in certain inputs. These inputs include scenarios when the user touch the area half-way between the two options/buttons. In this case, probabilistic finite state machine can be used to resolve the conflicting inputs.

To illustrate this framework, they present several traditional interactors which have been extended to provide feedback about uncertain inputs and to allow for the possibility that in the end that input will be judged wrong or end up going to a different interactor. The six demonstrations conducted by the researchers included tiny buttons that were manipulable using touch input, a text box that could handle multiple interpretations of spoken input, a scrollbar that could respond to inexactly placed input, and buttons which were easier to click for people with motor impairments. The framework supports all of these interactions by carrying uncertainty forward all the way through selection of possible target interactors, interpretation by interactors, generation of uncertain candidate actions to take, and a mediation process that decides in a lazy fashion which actions should become final.

Discussion:

The paper talks about an excellent idea that's now being put to use. Today, more and more devices have touch screens. Soon, hardware buttons and controls will be replaced by touch screens on all the devices. When the primary method of interaction is touch, it becomes vital to resolve such annoying issues. This research has already been incorporated in many vitual keyboards. On iphones and iPads, when the user types words, he/she often makes mistakes since the letters are placed very close to each other. However, the algorithm computes the probabilities and displays the character that is most often times that character that the user intended to use.

Book Reading #35: Coming of Age in Samoa

Chapter 12: Maturity and Old Age

Summary
In this chapter Mead talks about the everyday activities of the older men and women in the village. She also talks about how choosing whether to live in the his own house or or in the wife’s family’s house has an important effect on the husband. Mead describes the married women of the village of age twenty to thirty. Mead also explains how there are almost none or a few minor conflicts between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law or father-in-law and son-in-law. The elders are treated with great respect. The men are described as striving for power, titles and acquiring reputations. When a man is old enough and reaches the age of fifty-five or sixty, his title is taken from him and given to another younger man.

Discussion
I find a great similarity between the primitive stages of developed cultures and the Samoan cultures. Women were denied a lot of rights a century ago even in the developed nations. Values like respecting elders - not by choice but pretty much as a law are examples of other things that are found more evident in the primitive stages of the developed civilizations.