What I Learned Today

After nine months of violin lessons (and practice!), it’s satisfying to be able to see actual improvement. I can play some basic minuets, my scales keep improving, and my general intonation also sounds better. I’m working on controlled staccato bowing and being able to execute 16th notes (so fast!), thankfully not at the same time. But lately it’s been, well, feeling a bit dull.

Not so any more! I asked my teacher if I could learn some fiddle technique, since she also plays fiddle music. She immediately recommended “the only fiddle book you’ll ever need,” which turned out to be “The Craig Duncan Master Fiddle Solo Collection.”

Fiddling is done on a violin, but with a different style and some different techniques. My first fiddle tune is “Cripple Creek,” which is so simple that I was able to sight-read and play it for the first time during the lesson with only a couple of mistakes. It still astonishes me every time my teacher presents me with music I’ve never seen and apparently expects me to read and play it in real time, like this is the most normal thing in the world, even though we’ve never actually talked about or worked on sight-reading. It’s always an adrenaline rush and one of those surprise-myself things when I manage it.

But ah! After this simple tune comes some variations, one of which has two “slides” (which my teacher insists are not glissando, but I don’t know the difference yet). To play a slide, you start on one note and slide into the second. It sounds, and it is, fun! (Some of the fun is because it feels like you’re breaking a rule. On the violin, you’re taught to avoid sliding into your pitches, as you’d rather hit them correctly on contact.)

Once I master the tune, the next step is to add a “drone.” This seems to be where you play everything in double-stops: the bow touches the string you’re playing on and a neighboring string… ON PURPOSE! Another rule to break! The result is a series of chords instead of single notes, and it sounds really neat and fiddle-y when done right. When done wrong, it sounds awful. Like so many things.

I couldn’t resist trying out some more tunes in this book (there are 150 total). I found “Star of the County Down,” thinking it was one of my favorite Emerald Rose songs (which actually doesn’t feature a violin, which should have been a clue). Instead, it is this haunting and beautiful waltz. I’ve also started playing “Turkey in the Straw,” because really, who doesn’t like that song?

My conclusion: fiddle tunes are just FUN! Violin practice has now become the treat I reward myself with after getting chores done, instead of a chore itself. :)

How must it have felt to open up your newspaper and find this headline:

That’s just what must have happened on Friday, May 7, 1915. I came across this newspaper today while working my way through old newspapers on microfilm at the library. This article has more the feel of rumor than news; the sinking had probably happened only hours before they went to print, and as they note, casualty reports are conflicting, “one dispatch saying that many were drowned, another that all were saved.” In reality, 1,198 of the almost 1,959 people onboard were lost.

It is one thing to read about historical events and analyze them though the misty depths of decades (or even a near-century). Lusitania’s demise, which counted 123 Americans amongst its dead, was a pivotal event that helped drag the U.S. into World War I. But it is strange how much more present, and visceral, the event seems in this snapshot, the then-dim understanding frozen in time.

I hadn’t realized that there were several warnings issued before the Lusitania’s departure, via telegrams to individuals and advertisements to the public in New York newspapers. 1,265 passengers disregarded or were ignorant of these warnings. The ship took “precautions,” but they did not avail against the German U-boat that dealt the fatal blow.

Also, this ship was freakin’ ginormous, and could almost be forgiven for feeling rather invulnerable given its superior speed (25 knots), despite the Titanic’s demise three years earlier.

Adding to the sense of surreal historical creepiness, the Monrovia Daily News article is immediately followed by this notice: “Tennis: The Monrovia high school tennis team will meet the covina team on the high school court tomorrow morning at 9 o’clock.” Other neighboring headlines are similarly mundane and local. Despite the event’s top billing on page one, I wonder how long it took for its significance to sink in. As I work my way through later papers in May 1915, I may find out.

Woe, Twitter, IM-speak, dumbing down of young brains.

You’ve heard it before, but you probably haven’t heard it like this. Dr. Maryanne Wolf writes about what we’ve learned about the neurobiology of reading, what the brain is doing during the process of learning to read and the act of reading itself. In Our ‘Deep Reading’ Brain: Its Digital Evolution Poses Questions, she shares her worries about how today’s digital push for faster, skimmier reading encourages us to disable our ability to read deeply, reflect, and go beyond what’s in the text.

“We need to understand the value of what we may be losing when we skim text so rapidly that we skip the precious milliseconds of deep reading processes. For it is within these moments—and these processes in our brains—that we might reach our own important insights and breakthroughs.”

We all do this. I bet you skimmed part of this article, which is itself a condensation of her article (which I encourage you to read in full!). But hey, after two or three paragraphs, we’re getting it, we’re agreeing, we want to move on, encounter something new! Right?

“We need to find the ability to pause and pull back from what seems to be developing into an incessant need to fill every millisecond with new information.”

Amen to that. Smartphones are the killer information device. I never need fear downtime or long waits at the doctor’s office again. I have Slashdot and blogs and Kindle books galore. But now I find in any waiting time, no matter how short, I itch to pull out my phone. Unlock the thing and snack at the information buffet, cruising through Slashdot blurbs in search of the one or two items about which I actually want to read more details. What am I doing?!

Asked whether Internet reading might aid speed reading, Dr. Wolf replied, “Yes, but speed and its counterpart—assumed efficiency—are not always desirable for deep thought.”

I think that is one of the reasons I continue to post to this blog. There is a part of me that believes that being forced to slow down and write about what I’ve encountered (often, by reading) will help me to think a bit deeper on what it all means.

What do you think? Did you read this far?

What is your future impact?

Researchers Acuna, Allesina, and Kording decided to use machine learning to find out. They recently published a Nature article, “Future impact: Predicting scientific success,” that describes their method and findings.

Their goal was to predict a scientist’s future h-index given his or her current bibliographic data. I wrote about discovering the h-index two years ago. Nowadays, Google scholar will calculate this value for you. It’s a measure of research impact, characterized as the number h of your papers that have at least h citations.

Acuna et al. collected data on 3,085 neuroscientists and performed a linear regression on these features:

• n: number of papers written
• h: current h-index
• y: years since publishing first article
• j: number of distinct journals published in
• q: number of articles in Nature, Science, Nature Neuroscience, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Neuron

They found that this five-factor prediction did better at predicting the future h-index than just using the current h-index itself. Their R² value for predicting h-index one year into the future was 0.92; five years out, 0.67; and ten years out, 0.48. Their conclusion was that raw h-index numbers were not as predictive as also capturing the scientist’s “breadth” (in j) and the quality of the publication venues (in q).

You can try out their model on your own data, although they note that it is “probably reasonably precise for life scientists, but likely to be less meaningful for the other sciences.” Also, you’ll have to wait the specific number of years to see if it comes true. Or you can plug in your data from a few years ago and see how the predictions match the present. Using my data from two years ago (h-index 12), their system predicts that my h-index this year should reach 19. Google scholar pegs it at 17 right now, so either I am not reaching my proper potential, or their model is wrong. ;)

There’s more than recreational fun going on here. The authors note that h-index values may be used in tenure decisions. In that context, the ability to predict a candidate’s h-index five years into the future could have even more impact—if it were sufficiently reliable. As usual, we can hope that such decisions are made with more than just these impoverished metrics in mind!

Bored? Sleepy? Lack of oxygen? Who knows?

The Library of Congress posted an interesting analysis of this question in Everyday Mysteries: Why do we yawn? They conclude that it may serve a social function and/or a physiological one, which leaves the door pretty wide open.

The article claims that “generally speaking, we cannot yawn on command.” I find that I can yawn whenever I choose to, which is handy on airplanes. Do others find that they lack conscious control over yawning? (Stifling a yawn, however, is really difficult!)

Apparently 42-55% of non-autistic adults find yawning contagious. I’m surprised that the percentage isn’t higher. Do you find that the picture of the man yawning above makes you want to yawn? Try doing a google image search on “yawn” and see if you can escape the power!

As a bonus, I learned two nifty new words while reading this article:

• pandiculation: yawning and stretching the body on waking up or getting sleepy
• oscitation: yawning (“the involuntary opening of the mouth with respiration, breathing first inward, then outward”)