Decades ago in grad school, I was under my 1969 VW bus doing maintenance. Had a set of combination wrenches at curbside. Ten year old blind kid who lived next door came out and wanted to know in detail what I was doing, and I talked him through what I was doing to get ready to pull the engine to install a new clutch plate & throwout bearing.
I could see the nuts and bolts, and knew what wrench size I needed, but when I'd reach for it, I'd often pick the wrong one (13mm felt pretty much like 12mm, etc.). He asked me to say (only once) the wrench size each time I picked one off the curb. Thereafter, he told me what size I was about to select as soon as I touched it, making it scrape ever so slightly against the concrete. Saved me some time by telling me when I was about to pick up the wrong wrench.
I wasn't surprised, as I'd seen him on his bike in the neighborhood, doing the click echolocation described in This American Life. I was in a neurophysiology program at the time, and was totally impressed with his living demo of neuroplasticity and audio world mapping.
Took me a couple reads to get it, he was identifying the wrench size by the 'ring' the wrench made by scraping it on the concrete? Very cool.
A few years back I figured out that shoving my finger in a wrench is far more accurate than visually identifying the size of the bolt and the appropriate wrench. That and really knowing the bolt sizes on the project you're working on (but on some projects/cars this is tough).
I think this is maybe not the best type of post on HN that I'm about to make but I'll do it anyway... I really liked your story, thank you for sharing it.
Sorry if this is off-topic with respect to the content of the episode, but does anybody know what kind of software NPR uses to create these transcripts? There is a very specific structure to the layout and I'm wondering what the data entry UI looks like, if it's a commercial package, or if they rolled their own. Thanks.
I don't know either, but it looks like the transcripts are initially generated from speech recognition (text dump + timing meta data?) and then hand-edited/annotated by a producer.
They'd add punctuation, sound cues, fix spelling, annotate the speakers (e.g. name + host, subject, or interviewer). Then that data's got to go somewhere...
It looks pretty labor intensive. I sure hope they have great tools!
I am just a casual observer, but how did they narrow it down to the way the rats were touched? Couldn't it have just been the people "running" the experiments instead being more casual about their results? Maybe for a dumb rat you hit your stopwatch a second later or a second faster for a smart rat, for example.
How did they isolate the touch of the experimenters?
I can't speak for that study in particular, but it doesn't really matter if it was the touch so long as it was not a measurement effect. There has been a decent amount of research on the Pygmalion effect in varying contexts; it's opposite, the Golem effect, has had its share of research too. It's not an obscure phenomenon at this point.
Yes I too was interested to know how they eliminated bias. If you were told one rat was smarter than the other, surely there's a risk of influencing the interpretation of results.
One of the things I was hoping I'd hear people comment on here what Miller says towards the end, that perhaps Kish's aversion to physical closeness, perhaps "loving" in general, and a desire to be independent, were mutually exclusive. While, I personally would agree there is an argument that being a helicopter parent does not help build a sense of independence in someone, I'm really curious if it really is true that a desire of closeness to others in general is really the opposite of that.
I guess it makes some sense naively (independence or apartness vs. dependence or together-ness)? But the way I think about it is that a desire to be independent needs to be tempered with a desire to socialize and be close with others. May be they are orthonormal axes in a person's "personality space," but a healthy balance of both will give a person a good norm overall. This seems opposite of what they hint at toward the end, that these two qualities may not be orthogonal but in fact, anti-parallel.
Perhaps Daniel's aversion helped him overcome the enormous odds against him, an entire culture that put that "blind" label on him and would have necessarily pulled him far into that the more "dependent" side--I mean, that was the point on the whole rest of the episode. It was needed for him given the extreme pressure he was under from this culture. Still, I hope that for many other people who do not have this extreme desire for independence that they need not be forced into it just so that the rest of us see them as equal. That certainly is not fair for them if they do not desire it.
I say all this because while I have a close love for a few close friends and family members, I usually like to be independent myself. However, I've learned as I've gotten older that sometimes you need to rely on others even when you think you won't, which isn't easy for me. A healthy balance seems better, as I've reluctantly accepted.
Kish's methods of dealing with blind kids seemed unnecessarily cold and disrespectful. Like making that kid climb to the top of high tree on the first try, when the kid refused for hours. It's like teaching to swim by throwing the kid in the swimming pool. It's possible to encourage exploration and risk at the child's own pace.
I listened to this last week so it's not entirely fresh in my mind, but i remember this particular portion of the story seemed jarring to me and was a disappointing end to the story.
As an educator the whole power of expectation thing probably was more interesting to me than things like the echolocation aspect. I mean yes, we know that students perform better when you expect more of them, but some of the aspects of how that translates into actual performance gains hadn't occurred to me before.
I really enjoyed this episode (and pretty much everything This American Life does). The one fact of the podcast that got me really thinking was how a lot of the blind will naturally turn to clicking in order to help me navigate.
Can we do this computationally? Dokmanic et al say yes in certain situations in their paper "Acoustic Echoes Reveal the Shape of the Room," PNAS, vol. 110, no. 30, 2013. Daniel Kish is mentioned in the paper to motivate the problem. Thaler's work is cited in the commentary by Mark Plumbley.
TAL downloads are only available for a week. This episode has already been pulled (but will be available for streaming). They have a partnership with Audible so downloads are only available on Audible.com after the first week.
I could see the nuts and bolts, and knew what wrench size I needed, but when I'd reach for it, I'd often pick the wrong one (13mm felt pretty much like 12mm, etc.). He asked me to say (only once) the wrench size each time I picked one off the curb. Thereafter, he told me what size I was about to select as soon as I touched it, making it scrape ever so slightly against the concrete. Saved me some time by telling me when I was about to pick up the wrong wrench.
I wasn't surprised, as I'd seen him on his bike in the neighborhood, doing the click echolocation described in This American Life. I was in a neurophysiology program at the time, and was totally impressed with his living demo of neuroplasticity and audio world mapping.