
MIT scientist captures 90,000 hours of video of his son's first words, graphs it - canistr
http://www.fastcompany.com/1733627/mit-scientist-captures-his-sons-first-90000-hours-on-video
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nhebb
" _applies these same high-powered analytics to relate [...] events broadcast
on TV to conversations taking place in social media_ "

So, if you use Twitter, you're someone's lab rat. I know that when I tweet,
it's open for all the world to see, but I can't shake the feeling that this is
really creepy.

Beyond that, I'm trying to envision how this data could be used. I imagine
three scenarios:

1\. Leverage it to sell more TV advertising. If a show is getting buzz on
twitter, maybe this could be a viable alternative to Nielsen ratings. (Which
leads to the question of whether Blue Fin can discern positive buzz from
negative buzz).

2\. If step 1 is analysis, could step 2 be manipulation? Can buzz be jump
started or boosted at key inflection points by sock puppet marketing?

3\. C-level eye candy - interesting visualizations that TV exec's buy for
their egos, but ultimately can't do anything actionable with the information.

~~~
samstave
I think that it will be used in more sinister ways. They will provide
information on how to make political speeches and propaganda more influential
and how to get main stream media stories to be better believed.

There has already been a statement on the particular psychological tricks
Obama uses in his speeches - I can only see this being used to strengthen
that.

~~~
radicaldreamer
Haven't politicians, leaders, and many others in positions of authority been
doing this for millennia? People have been studying this (rhetoric) since
ancient Greece.

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olalonde
Here's the TED talk:
[http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/deb_roy_the_birth_of_a_word...](http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/deb_roy_the_birth_of_a_word.html)

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jaylevitt
So the language acquisition stuff could be an n=1 just-so story, but
meanwhile:

Deb Roy and Phil Decamp just invented a way to efficiently browse _days_ of
multiple video streams - on _paper_ , if you want:

[http://video.fastcompany.com/plugins/player.swf?v=2014e22b27...](http://video.fastcompany.com/plugins/player.swf?v=2014e22b27618&p=fc_social)

Their work on "time worms" is astounding; unfortunately, the video ends before
zooming out to the next step: multitrack timeworms with hundreds of cameras;
broadband recordings of ALL THE CHANNELS.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RE4ce4mexrU&t=11m56s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RE4ce4mexrU&t=11m56s)

We can put off the hard problem of CV-driven video search; we can solve the
much easier problem of "leverage people's brains to recognize patterns".
Visualizations are the new algorithm.

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cpunks
I think a better summary would by "MIT professor collects 90,000 hours of
video of his son's first words, gets tenure based on that, does nothing with
the data. With tenure safe in hand, leaves his students in a lurch as he heads
off to do a start-up."

It's a great corpus he collected. Wish he either had a longer attention span,
or at least bothered to share the data.

~~~
siavosh
I had a similar reaction. I think it speaks to the time, that some of the
greatest minds of our generation are 'seizing the opportunity' of a startup to
develop social analytics around the 'jersey shore'. I can't help to think the
great linguistic scholars (ex. his fellow MIT faculty member, Chomsky) doing
the same things in the 50's. Can you image the loss to humanity if each one,
after giving a TED talk, abondons his research in their 30's or 40's to make
an advertising platform? This made me sad.

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jacobr
I keep a git repository[1] of my son's (1,5 years old) keyboard hammering. He
"types" until he accidentally leaves insert mode in Vim or leaves the
computer, and then I commit it.

In 5-10 years time I hope to be able to do some real-time visualization with
milestones like "first real word", "first use of _complicated word_ ", etc. If
he's interested I might track his first code there as well.

1: <https://github.com/jacobrask/Ivar>

~~~
evincarofautumn
Out of curiosity, why did you choose to give a kid a modal editor?

~~~
jacobr
I didn't really choose, I was busy coding one day and his mom had to do
something quick, so I had him in my lap. He wanted to type like I did, so I
just opened a split in Vim and let him type a few characters, he could barely
press down a key anyway. When he later wanted to go to the computer even when
I wasn't sitting there, I just continued in Vim.

I'll probably switch to something else now that's he's actually starting to
understand the connection between the monitor and the keyboard better.
Previously he mostly liked right-clicking with the mouse as it gave a big box
on the screen..

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benbjohnson
The MIT project sounds awesome and I love the visualization. I was
underwhelmed by the offshoot company called Bluefin Labs. For such awesome
research at MIT, it seems like Bluefin is basically Twitter trending for TV
shows.

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jayzee
I was disappointed.

The graphics/visualization is breathtaking but what they learned from all of
that analysis seems very limited: Apparently, when caregivers discover that a
child is learning a word they simplify their use of that word till the child
grasps it and then revert back to normal usage once the child can use the
word.

It could very well be that their regular usage of the word that the child is
learning is unaffected, but in addition they use the word more often in simple
sentences around the child, and once the child understand the word revert back
to regular usage patterns/frequency. That would explain the results and does
not seem that interesting.

~~~
ma2rten
I am studying Natural Language Processing, so I have been interested in how
humans learn language, in order to understand if the process can be replicated
such that a computer can learn a human language. I think we would have to read
the actual paper to really understand their findings, but the main thing I
took away from this is: in order for a child to learn a language the parents
apparently subconsciously alter the way they speak (whether it is just to or
also around the child), language learning appears to be tied to psychical
locations and children seem to rely heavy on feedback by their care takers.

That would be an indication that there is a limit to what computers can learn
about human language by analyzing textual data (like e.g. Google Translate
does). This is related to the poverty of the stimulus argument in linguistics.
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_of_the_stimulus>)

~~~
agumonkey
If only teachers were taught to do the same at school.

</troll>

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evanlong
This is probably one of the coolest projects. The people working on this
project are doing and figuring out some amazing things.

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theabram
Has the poor child ever got outside the house?

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brainless
Not related to his project, but I feel very proud in a distant way. My last
startup's office (in Kolkata, India) was at his father's house. Don't know why
I wrote that, just felt...

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NameNickHN
I liked the example with the president's speech. It won't be long before
politicians will adjust their speeches during the speech according to the
reactions from viewers.

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kbronson
...then public dies of ennui.

