L’été des enfants, 2ième partie

Hello Friends,

This post will be in English.

I am finding that I have a lot of time on my hands. As such, I am writing another blog post. This is to give me a break from reading things (including many papers).  Starting with the next paragraph, this blog post reads pretty much like a very bad paper.

As anyone who has worked with kids knows, kids are not adults.  The importance of this, as is relevant to this blog post, is that they are silly and say silly things.  Some of their silliness has been documented by SWHallee in his paper “L’été des enfants, 1^ère partie” (2012).  We will expound upon this silliness in this paper, including by contrasting their abilities to identify stuffed animals and animal toys to the abilities of one of the experimenters to do the same.

In one experiment, children and experimenters are shown two stuffed animals, four animal toys, and one puppet.  At the beginning of the experiment, the child is asked to name each of the animals at least once, prompted with questions such as, “What type of animal is this?”  During the experiment, the experimenter is required to identify each animal several times with very little time in between trials. A trial for the experimenter consists of picking up an animal, and reciting the appropriate dialogue associated with that animal and time point, after tagging the line with the phrase “[Animal name] says.”

In Figures 1 and 2 below, the performances of the children and the experimenter are shown graphically.  A blue box indicates the name of an animal (toy) that is actually presented in the experiment. A red box indicates an animal that is not present. The yellow box represents an answer of “I don’t know.” The arrows in the figure point from the target animal (the presented animal) to the response given.  Each blue box should be assumed to have an arrow originating from and pointing to itself.

Figure 1

Figure 2

Other relevant information includes the following:

• The dog has spots.
• The kangaroo has relatively large, pointed ears that stick up.
• The cow is spotted and has no ears (they have been ripped off).
• The horse is really odd-looking.

From these data, one can conclude the following:

•  It is difficult for some children to name animals that cannot be found on a farm, or do not have distinct onomatopoeia (or animal sounds) attached to them (see: Giraffe and Kangaroo).
•  It is difficult for some children to identify toys that bear little resemblance to the animal that they represent (see: Cow and Horse)
•  It is difficult for the experimenter to go for two hours at a time switching from one animal to another without making some slip-ups.

 I have many more things to write about … so there will hopefully be more posts from me.

In the meantime …

Love and animals,

Shaun

Greetings from Boulder, CO. This is mostly a picture post. Prepare your browsers.

So it started off in Chicago for my sister's graduation. She lives by Millennium Park, which is where the "Cloud Gate" or as the locals call it, "The Bean". Here it is below:

Lots of tourists come by. It's also really weird optically when you're underneath it. 

Also Chicago hotdogs follow the following notice:

They go for peppers, mini pickles, some other pickles and onions, etc. 

She's also really close to this:

which is a really cool place. It's also really close to Lake Michigan as seen below, if you turn left:

The first day we were there I mostly just explored, and past places like this:

And also visited the Planetarium which was free at the time:

If you're curious, the sign says "Welcome to the Universe" which I felt was really fitting for Anna.

We then went to the Aquarium, which was not free, but cheap (I think it was 8 dollars normally, compared to NE which is like 20). It was kind of like the NE Aquarium, with lots of stuff to see, including this manta ray: 

It's creepy looking from below. It looks kind of like that monster guy from Pan's Labyrinth. We also went to the Museum of Science and Industry, which was full of larger than life experiments, including the below which simulated avalanches (ie granular material that behaves chaotically when in large amounts). 

When I said my sister lives close, I meant really close (Millennium Park below): 

We then went on an architecture boat tour, and saw lots of buildings from below, like this one (Sears Tower, very famous for the glass floors that you can step out on at the observation deck at the top). 

But what we did was actually a river architecture + lake tour so we also got to see Chicago from Lake Michigan:

and lighthouses...

And then I explored around Navy Pier, which used to be a training ground until it got retrofitted into kind of an amusement park. Here's me taking an artsy far-away picture of the Ferris wheel in front:

Apparently during the.....something fair, possibly world's fair, not sure, there was a Ferris wheel double the current diameter, and a full ride (two rotations) would take an hour or something. Also something about how Chicago is known as the Windy City not for its wind, but because its politicians were wind bags when trying to convince people to host stuff in Chicago right after the Great Chicago Fire. 

Another artsy picture of Chicago from Navy Pier this time:

And here are my parents at The Bean at sunset:

So when I finally went into the Art Institute of Chicago, I found a couple goodies like the following (Erin, pay attention):

1. Goodie One

2. Goodie Two (a piece found in the temporary R. Lichtenstein exhibit)

3. Goodie Three

4. Goodie Four

5. Goodie Five

Now another picture from the roof deck of the apartment building:

And then take a 2 hour flight to Denver and you can see this in the area between Boulder and Denver:

I actually then went to Denver after spending a while in Boulder (few days). Here's the Colorado State Capital below (from below):

And then at the same time, participated in an Equalist rally (like in Legend of Korra, except not). Just kidding, it was actually Denver PrideFest. Here's a more.....controlled/reserved picture:

On my way back, I found Rory (see arms for tallies, although kind of look more like stitch marks):

So something about Boulder/Colorado/etc is that there are lots of prairie dogs. Here are some on my way to work:

There's a scout dog that then emits a high pitched squeak when danger is observed, alerting the others to go back into their holes. The ground is filled with holes. Here's another picture from the area where I work:

The clouds around the bottom may be caused by the Colorado wild fires going on right now. Not sure if they're in the right direction or not, but it looks like the white clouds stuff is actually coming from the ground.

Finally food. I felt kind of proud of this NY strip steak, potatoes, and mixed greens with yellow bell pepper I made below:

And the below picture doesn't really do the baguettes I made quite enough justice because I had to put them in the microwave to keep them high enough to not get eaten by the 3 (now 4) dogs, 2 cats and 1 kitten that are also in the house I'm in.

Also work is good. Lots of office supplies, my computer finally arrived (nice laptop and two monitors at work). Getting used to industry-lifestyle is in process. Very different compared to the sacrifice-everything way of Academia I feel.  Hi.

An expedition through the High Sierra

Two weeks ago my sister Emily, Marathon Matt, and I left our homes, families, and jobs to explore the wild forests and dizzy mountains near Yosemite for five days and four nights.

Some of you know that bears are my deepest, oldest, and most probably irrational (at least in California but don't ever take me to Montana or Alaska) fear.  In Yosemite, backpackers who don't want to stay at the bear- and people-infested campgrounds where there are built-in lockers are required to carry these approximately 3-lb, stool-sized (giggle) cylinders to put their food in.  We each had one.  I was fully prepared to see a bear sometime on this trip.  I was especially alert when it was dark out.

We didn't see any bears.  We saw tracks though.  Also a young rattlesnake, deer, and the probably famous much-too-friendly coyote of Cloud's Rest. 

There were several days on which we saw more deer than people.  This was probably because we saw no people, except ourselves for about 48 hours.  I think Yosemite is the most visited national park ever or something. (It should be.  The only other ones it might be have man-eating bears or unpleasant daytime weather.)  You would never know it off-trail in the high country.  

So we had a couple of adventures.  The first one was Vogelsang Peak, which at 11000 something feet was enough to give us some altitude sickness.  Nevertheless, I signed my first summit register, and we all butt slid down a nice north-facing snow slope.  Winter school techniques came in handy.

Vogelsang ended up being the elevational high point of the trip, as our foray up a taller nearby mountain was stopped short by a realistic assessment of the conditions, our abilities, and lack of technical gear.  That adventure involved a rather longer snow slope descent, but no photos were taken.  

After scrambling down from our campsite 400 feet above the trail to get water the last night, Emily and I ran into a herd of confused and tired boy scout leaders and their boy scouts.  We told them where the water was and where to camp.  We felt seasoned.  

John Muir, in his unbounded joy over spending his first summer in the Yosemite, called the Sierra Nevada the range of light.  We saw a lot of beautiful places.  I'm going to put pictures on Facebook, so I won't overwhelm you here, but I will leave you with this, which is of our campsite the last night, where we slept on an isolated ridge with a perfect view of the sunset and the sunrise before hiking down to the valley.

in which sometimes things are sad

(Be calm if you think this is going to be terrible it's not.  It's just the cat.)

So I'm about to post on my trip to the Yosemite, but I thought I'd sneak this in first.  Remember this guy?  He died.  

(picture is of cat.  if picture does not load, do not panic unduly)

I like to think that you guys kind of liked Blackie because I sent you all a picture of him telling you to clean up your stuff or else.

Also I was thinking also about how probably plenty of you have sick or dying pets or grandparents or parents or something.  Or maybe you're off by yourself in some city and lonely, or maybe you have to put up with difficult people or whatever.  Because there's lots of you and probability and stuff; you can't all be having fun.  Dead cats are just the easiest to blog about.  It's getting late and I don't really remember where I was going with this, but I think it was to tell you all to keep in touch and ask people how they are doing because that is how you show them that you care, and sometimes during the summer people need to be reminded about that.  And all the time.  

Also don't freak out guys, I liked the cat and I miss having him around, but this was pretty much a peace + love public service announcement, not a pity-me facebooky deal. Greetings from Berkeley.