Siri's strange phonotactics

Colin Wilson recently gave a talk here at Penn about why speakers don't necessarily say words in a foreign language the way foreign language speakers do. For example, the capital of Georgia (the country) is Tbilisi, which an initial [tb] onset cluster. Here, listen to pronunciation on Wikipedia: Tbilisi, then say it back out loud. That's basically the experiment Colin was talking about.

So, I'm guessing that if you didn't manage to say Tbilisi exactly like the recording did, you probably said something like [tɨbilisi], adding in an extra vowel between the [t] and [b]. There are a few different explanations for why you might have added in that extra sound.

• You hallucinated, and thought you heard [tɨbilisi].
• You accurately heard [tbilisi], but then when you tried to say it, it came out [tɨbilisi].

Colin is pursuing another kind of analysis, where the way a Georgian speaker says /tbilisi/ sounds more like the way you would say /tɨbilisi/ in English, than the way you would say /tbilisi/ in English (if you were ever to say such a thing).

It's pretty cool stuff, and strangely reminded me of a similar repetition experiment I inadvertently performed with my iPhone. Here's a video re-enactment:

How weird is that! Siri heard me say [ʃəvan], but for some reason repeated it back [sajobən]!

Ok, I guess I really know what's going on here, and it's not phonotactics, but it's fun to pretend. Clearly, the transcription with the highest probability given my speech was the Irish spelling "Siobhan": P(transcription | audio).  But, given the text, the text to speech (P(audio | transcription)) produces [sajobən].

It still strikes me weird that Siri has some kind of dictionary lookup to give me "Siobhan" for [ʃəvan], but then does a procedural text-to-speech.

P.S. I think that I have an intrusive /l/ after "how" the second time I say "How do you spell Siobhan?".

Academia and Innovation?

Quick post today (the academic year is here, hence my recent silence).

Robert A. Muenchen is maintaining a report here on the popularity of R, a programming environment for statistics.

He's got a bunch of measures, but these really caught my eye. A site called Rexter Analytics did a survey in 2010 asking respondents which pieces of software they used in 2009. These were the results:

So, R is at the top of the list. KDnuggets did a similar poll, and returned very similar results.

The take away message so far is that a lot of people who do data analysis use R. The plurality even. That is the zeitgeist.

Now we come the the results that worry me. Muenchen also did an analysis of Google Scholar citations of software packages, and produced this graph.

Clearly R has a pretty sharply rising slope, but it still comes in fourth after a bunch of software that, frankly, only academics can use because they get institutional licenses.

I'm not worried because I think academics should be using R (even though I do). It has more to do with the fact that people in academia like to think of themselves as the forward thinkers, and the innovators of new ideas. But in this regard they are clearly following behind the trend that everyone else is setting. Maybe it's fitting that the SPSS curve looks not unlike what I'd imagine an ivory tower to be.

Battlestar Galactica: InvoVis

I recently re-watched Battlestar Galactica (the re-imagined series). I had never watched the end after the season 4 mid-season break. Over all, I liked the series a lot, but wasn't a big fan of the decidedly anti-modernity finale. Do you know what is great? Medicine, and good odds of not dying in your 40s. You know what's even better? Space ships and faster-than-light travel.

Anyway, I don't want to give away spoilers (even thought that wouldn't ruin it for you, so says science). My point of posting is this cool medical display from season 4 (and maybe earlier, I just noticed it in season 4).

I like this display a lot, because it fits in with the general BSG style of keeping things close to current reality, ish. Sure, they have humanoid robots, but they also still use nukes, not photon torpedoes.

I could almost imagine seeing this display today, maybe in a tech company's speculative design video. It appears to incorporate some contemporary data display ideas, like sparklines. My feeling is that in a lot of sci-fi, data displays like this are a lot more cryptic, and hardly seem practical from the view of an analyst. This display, while definitely looking futuristic, also looks like it's all about practicality.

The element that gets the most screen space is the EKG, which animates and bleeps just like in any medical drama.

Then, there are these little widgets.

I believe the larger number is the current heart rate. It updates fairly regularly, going up or down a few beats-per-minute (I missed a whole bunch of dialogue staring at this in the background). The little blue light above the heart rate blinks with every heart beat, or at least every time the display beeps. I don't know what the smaller number represents. I didn't see it update, so it might not represent dynamic data.

Then, there's these three panels, probably small-multiples of some kind.

They're largely static, except they redraw themselves every few seconds. So maybe they could be density distributions over a time interval, or maybe frequency analyses.

Then there are these bars.

This is maybe the most vexing element on the display for me. At first I thought that they might display blood sugar or oxygen relative to some baseline, but you'll notice that at some points, there are bars that go both above and below the baseline. So, they have to be two kinds of measures that are usually in a complementary distribution, but not always. Either way, it seems to clearly be a time series at a relatively large granularity, since it never redraws itself during a scene.

Lastly, there's this strip at the bottom.

It's relatively understated compared to everything else in the display, meaning it can't be any sort of really vital statistic. It looks like maybe a spectral analysis of some kind, or maybe another time series (sleeping and waking time?). This also remains static during scenes.

There are also a lot of elements of the user interface which are very contemporary. Take these boxes for instance.

I think we all know that if you were to press on the screen on one of those triangles, these little boxes would expand to show more information, or contract and hide the information they're currently displaying. This is definitely something that wouldn't have been incorporated into speculative UI designs 20 years ago.