Notes Towards Day 13--Presenting and Interpreting One Another's Data

I. Welcome back!
any relevant stories (about making unconscious choices, say....) over break?

Just in from Peter's Behavioral Endocrinology class: Natural Attraction, "a science based company" that sells human pheromones, marketed both to gay men and to heterosexual men and women (where are the lesbians in this picture....?)

II. Mid-semester evaluations
(missing 4 of these...they are important; please send!)
generally, you seem to feel that we are "both" meeting the class objectives
(sometimes exceeding them, re-thinking how we live our lives...);
overall, you seem to like how we are doing things,
so: we will largely continue business-as-usual....

however, a few suggestions arose (what do you think of them?):
--we don't do much re-reading (but we will w/ the literary texts...)
--What if we started assigning names to the papers read aloud in class? 
--we often do not get enough time to discuss the assigned readings
because we take a long time analyzing papers
--I do feel like some sort of ‘grade’ could be given (even if it didn’t count)
along with the comments just so that it’s easier to tell how you did
[should it be easier?]

For conferences this week (and next), please print off and bring along
w/ you both your survey results and your mid-semester evaluations.

III. Today we're asking you to get up in front
of the screen and "interpret" one another's graphs.

Calála (exercise) <--> Avocado (bellydancing)
ln0691 (transportation) <--> avietgirl (goal changes)
thatcaliforniagirl13  (freshman 15) <--> jtm715 (professor athletes)
Amy (procrastination) <--> jrf (time management)
annagibs (drug abuse)  <--> Emdoscio (drinking & health)
Jessica (habit change) <--> kgrassle (changing study habits)
kdlz (homework) <--> Rabbitbmc (sleep habits)

What can you see in these charts?
What have you learned from looking @ them?
What don't you understand? In other words:
what do you find clear, and what is
ambiguous in the presentation of the data?

What interpretations can clearly be made,
and what seems to you more ambiguous?
Perhaps most importantly: what further questions
(research agendas?!) do these graphs raise for you?

IV. Responses from the makers of the graphs?
How well did you feel that your graph represented your data?
How well did you feel that your graph was interpreted?

How ambiguous (=interpretable?) *should* such a graph be? 
(Or: what differences are there between these graphs and
the ambiguous figures we looked @ a few weeks ago?)

V. This was a bridging exercise from Section II: "Selecting Our Data"
to Section III: "Making Our Interpretations" (from "science" to "humanities").

Central to our discussion of interpreting a literary text will be this question of ambiguity:
how predictable are our interpretations, how much leeway is allowable?
What makes one interpretation better than another one?
Lurking not far away will be the ideas we've been examining over the past few weeks:
how much of this process is conscious, how much inaccessible to consciousness?

To get you going on the new set of thinking-and-writing projects,
here's your next exercise: "Thinking about How You Think"
Find 5 subjects (doesn't matter who: hall mates, old high school friends, your parents....)
Ask each one of them to
1) Name a favorite musical artist.
2) List 5 attributes that you like about the artist's work.
3) Go to http://www.pandora.com/ and select this artist
(in the unlikely case that this artist is not in the archive,
you'll have to repeat questions 1-2 w/ another one).
4) Listen to the first 5 songs that Pandora "thinks" you'll like.
5) How accurate were the predictions? Did you like the songs they chose?
Rank their selections from a scale of 1 (complete disagreement)
to 5 (complete agreement with your preferences).
6) Look @ the reasons Pandora gives for selecting these songs:
on the same 1-5 scale (from complete disagreement to complete agreement),
how well do the musical elements Pandora identifies correspond with those you listed in #2 above?
7) On the same 1-5 scale: how much does it bother you that this company might be able to write an algorithm that predicts your musical taste?
8) On the same 1-5 scale: based on your experience, how willing would you be to invest in this company?

By 5 p.m. on Monday, October 26th (note extension!)
post a a one-paragraph interpretation of the results of your survey on our course forum.
Support your interpretation with a graph of your respondents' answers to ONE (only one!) of your questions.

As preparation for this project, read for Thursday the late-breaking story that lies behind this exercise, yesterday's New York Times Magazine article on "The Song Decoders," featuring my daughter Lena's boyfriend, Sameer Gupta, as the 'expert' on page 3):

Sameer and Lena; Sameer conducting as Katie and Lily play piano.....

[Might we also bring in our laptops and play w/ Pandora together on Thursday?
Is there wireless access in Dalton?]

And/or read also:
Benedict Carey. "While a Magician Works, the Mind Does the Tricks."
The New York Times. August 22, 2008.
Natalie Angier. “Blind to Change, Even as it Stares us in the Face.”
The Science Times. New York Times. April 1, 2008.
(and take the Pop-Art Quiz)