Twitter--Not sure about it, but it pays off with a new website

After almost a year of planting little bugs in my ear by friends and the occassional student I have spent this weekend exploring and playing around with TWITTER.

This still seems to be like some sort of terrible, addictive drug for someone who tends to obsess about stuff anyway...and I'm not quite sure I'll stick with it for the long term.

But...one of the things that happened is I was very quickly being "followed" by people I don't even know. It sounds pretty ominous when I put it that way...and it seems pretty harmless (as long as I don't release too many specific details.)

Anyway, I digress...although I think I'll eventually just purge the darn program from my desktop, it one of the people that started "following" me visited my website (www.theaudiprof.com) and happened to send me a nice note saying that my research looks interesting.

So, being nice, I figured I should go visit this guy's website and be able to comment on it in my reply. While there, I found this terrific website:

http://freesound.iua.upf.edu/index.php

I have only started poking around there...but it seems fabulous for all those interested in audio.

Check it out.

A Training Session on Media Lab

The weather was terrible. Ice pellets over about an inch of snow. I've never been a fan of creme brulle, but that's what walking on this stuff reminded me of. Even worse, though, was walking on the shovelled walks and plowed streets.

But, that wasn't enough to keep eight grad students from showing up for a tutorial on two great programs we use in the ICR--called Media Lab and Direct RT.

The ICR has a great set of grad students. Since I've been here, there has been a great tradition of the more senior ones teaching the newer ones about the research culture in the lab along with the software and hardware applications. While a lot of that takes place informally, we also periodically have more formal tutorials. Today, even with the bad weather, Sungkyoung Lee and Satoko Kurita gave a great introduction to the programs. And, the event couldn't have happened without the help of ICR Manager Sharon who set up all the equipment and organized everyone's schedules.

Here's some pictures

Scientists like to see EFFECTS--but does that taint our knowledge?

I'm an experimental scientist. I design experiments where I introduce one variable and see if it causes a change in people's response. For a simple example, I could introduce the variable of music into a group of radio ads and see if ads with background music caused people to say they were more likely to say they liked the ad.



And, I'm looking for an EFFECT. I want to see a statistical difference between the responses of those who heard the music ads and those who heard the non-music ads. If I don't find that effect I'm disappointed--and I'm primarily upset because I know that without finding such an effect it is highly unlikely that the manuscript of the study will get published. That's because scientists (and journal editors, and journal reviewers) like to see that their experimental manipulations have effects.



Of course, what I forget...as do other scientists, journal editors & reviewers is that a LACK OF EFFECT is still knowledge that we didn't have before. If theory gives me every reason to expect that music will lead to better liking of the ad...and music in fact doesn't then that should lead me to wonder why? Is there something about the particular music I chose? Or, maybe even more importantly, is there something wrong or imprecise about the theory I've used? This lack of effect is something that other scientists should know about so they can begin wondering about the possible reasons for it. But, without the ability to get the LACK OF EFFECT paper published...no one but my grad students will know about the result. [And, as an aside, they will indirectly learn that it isn't as important as the EFFECT paper].

Now...this bias toward wanting to show that something caused and effect is, arguably, of no harm at all in the study of mass communications. But, consider details of a report I heard on the radio the other day. Apparently, a group of medical doctors have investigated both the reports submitted to the FDA and the manuscripts published associated with 74 studies conducted on the efficacy of 12 antidepressant drugs.

Figure this: Of the 74 studies, the FDA found 38--just about half--that were positive...showing those EFFECTS that scientists love so much. Of those 38, all but one were published.

Now, consider the 36 other studies...the ones that didn't show effects. Only three of those were published as "negative." There were eleven others that, according to the authors of the study, were published as finding "positive" effects...exactly the opposite conclusions arrived at by the FDA.

Now, if you figure that doctors read these journals...and, perhaps, drug companies refer to the conclusions of presented in these journals...then this is a big concern. The conclusion from the article is that this led to an increase in presumed effectiveness of 11-69%!!

Read the whole article here.

New (Relatively) Homepage

I know that I've been lax in the blog-writing department lately. Lots of things I want to write about...just not much time.

And I don't have much time now, either. But, it has dawned on me that I never officially 'unveiled' my new home page...something that I designed around Christmas break.

Check it out here: www.theaudioprof.com

And, one of the things I've been enjoying keeping up with lately is my page devoted to books I've been reading. It was a way of proving to myself that I was doing some reading for pleasure. Check it out here:

http://www.theaudioprof.com/books.html

Happy Reading