
This American Life: Batman - noobermin
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/544/transcript
======
ridgeguy
Decades ago in grad school, I was under my 1969 VW bus doing maintenance. Had
a set of combination wrenches at curbside. Ten year old blind kid who lived
next door came out and wanted to know in detail what I was doing, and I talked
him through what I was doing to get ready to pull the engine to install a new
clutch plate & throwout bearing.

I could see the nuts and bolts, and knew what wrench size I needed, but when
I'd reach for it, I'd often pick the wrong one (13mm felt pretty much like
12mm, etc.). He asked me to say (only once) the wrench size each time I picked
one off the curb. Thereafter, he told me what size I was about to select as
soon as I touched it, making it scrape ever so slightly against the concrete.
Saved me some time by telling me when I was about to pick up the wrong wrench.

I wasn't surprised, as I'd seen him on his bike in the neighborhood, doing the
click echolocation described in This American Life. I was in a neurophysiology
program at the time, and was totally impressed with his living demo of
neuroplasticity and audio world mapping.

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furyg3
Took me a couple reads to get it, he was identifying the wrench size by the
'ring' the wrench made by scraping it on the concrete? Very cool.

A few years back I figured out that shoving my finger in a wrench is far more
accurate than visually identifying the size of the bolt and the appropriate
wrench. That and really knowing the bolt sizes on the project you're working
on (but on some projects/cars this is tough).

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randlet
"Running into a pole is a drag. But never being allowed to run into a pole is
a disaster."

Wonderful quote.

~~~
dionidium
The less polite version:

"A sprained ankle heals in two weeks, but being a pussy is a life sentence."
\-- Adam Carolla on letting kids play sports

I think it's interesting how two very different shows made the same point in
their own characteristic way.

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teleclimber
Sorry if this is off-topic with respect to the content of the episode, but
does anybody know what kind of software NPR uses to create these transcripts?
There is a very specific structure to the layout and I'm wondering what the
data entry UI looks like, if it's a commercial package, or if they rolled
their own. Thanks.

~~~
shlorn
I don't know for sure but the transcripts are so good and for a show like TAL
I imagine that they could probably have someone do them by hand.

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woebtz
I don't know either, but it looks like the transcripts are initially generated
from speech recognition (text dump + timing meta data?) and then hand-
edited/annotated by a producer.

They'd add punctuation, sound cues, fix spelling, annotate the speakers (e.g.
name + host, subject, or interviewer). Then that data's got to go somewhere...

It looks pretty labor intensive. I sure hope they have great tools!

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diminoten
I am just a casual observer, but how did they narrow it down to the way the
rats were touched? Couldn't it have just been the people "running" the
experiments instead being more casual about their results? Maybe for a dumb
rat you hit your stopwatch a second later or a second faster for a smart rat,
for example.

How did they isolate the _touch_ of the experimenters?

~~~
maxerickson
The results are apparently discussed here:

[http://cranepsych.edublogs.org/files/2009/06/Dull_rats_brigh...](http://cranepsych.edublogs.org/files/2009/06/Dull_rats_bright_rats.pdf)

The time difference is many seconds (almost minutes).

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noobermin
One of the things I was hoping I'd hear people comment on here what Miller
says towards the end, that perhaps Kish's aversion to physical closeness,
perhaps "loving" in general, and a desire to be independent, were mutually
exclusive. While, I personally would agree there is an argument that being a
helicopter parent does not help build a sense of independence in someone, I'm
really curious if it really is true that a desire of closeness to others in
general is really the opposite of that.

I guess it makes some sense naively (independence or apartness vs. dependence
or together-ness)? But the way I think about it is that a desire to be
independent needs to be tempered with a desire to socialize and be close with
others. May be they are orthonormal axes in a person's "personality space,"
but a healthy balance of both will give a person a good norm overall. This
seems opposite of what they hint at toward the end, that these two qualities
may not be orthogonal but in fact, anti-parallel.

Perhaps Daniel's aversion helped him overcome the enormous odds against him,
an entire culture that put that "blind" label on him and would have
necessarily pulled him far into that the more "dependent" side--I mean, that
was the point on the whole rest of the episode. It was needed for him given
the extreme pressure he was under from this culture. Still, I hope that for
many other people who do not have this extreme desire for independence that
they need not be forced into it just so that the rest of us see them as equal.
That certainly is not fair for them if they do not desire it.

I say all this because while I have a close love for a few close friends and
family members, I usually like to be independent myself. However, I've learned
as I've gotten older that sometimes you need to rely on others even when you
think you won't, which isn't easy for me. A healthy balance seems better, as
I've reluctantly accepted.

~~~
kirsebaer
Kish's methods of dealing with blind kids seemed unnecessarily cold and
disrespectful. Like making that kid climb to the top of high tree on the first
try, when the kid refused for hours. It's like teaching to swim by throwing
the kid in the swimming pool. It's possible to encourage exploration and risk
at the child's own pace.

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yitchelle
Further details about batman at
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Kish](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Kish)

~~~
achr2
Not really 'further' detail - there is actually more info in the podcast than
his wikipedia entry.

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zarify
As an educator the whole power of expectation thing probably was more
interesting to me than things like the echolocation aspect. I mean yes, we
know that students perform better when you expect more of them, but some of
the aspects of how that translates into actual performance gains hadn't
occurred to me before.

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niix
I really enjoyed this episode (and pretty much everything This American Life
does). The one fact of the podcast that got me really thinking was how a lot
of the blind will naturally turn to clicking in order to help me navigate.

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shas3
Can we do this computationally? Dokmanic et al say yes in certain situations
in their paper "Acoustic Echoes Reveal the Shape of the Room," PNAS, vol. 110,
no. 30, 2013. Daniel Kish is mentioned in the paper to motivate the problem.
Thaler's work is cited in the commentary by Mark Plumbley.

Here's a more accessible commentary: Mark Plumbley, "Hearing the Shape of a
Room," PNAS, vol. 110, no. 30, 2013.
[http://www.pnas.org/content/110/30/12162.full](http://www.pnas.org/content/110/30/12162.full)

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mintplant
For those who want a downloadable version, youtube-dl can pull it from
SoundCloud:

[https://soundcloud.com/this-american-
life/544-batman](https://soundcloud.com/this-american-life/544-batman)

~~~
yitchelle
or just download the podcast...

~~~
luma
TAL downloads are only available for a week. This episode has already been
pulled (but will be available for streaming). They have a partnership with
Audible so downloads are only available on Audible.com after the first week.

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stickhandle
Read about him a year or 2 ago in National Geographic ... bothered me then as
now that he was referred to as "Batman". He's clearly Daredevil.

