Manic Moves And Drowsy Dreams

Ten years on: people still can’t tell male cats from female cats from the face

Chris Longmore — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 12:53:11 +0000

It’s a little frightening (for me at least) to think that 10 years ago next month (a decade!) I started my MSc in Psychological Research Methods at Exeter University. The course was (and I believe pretty much still is) a load of taught modules combined with a dissertation that was done primarily over the summer term. My project was on identifying the sex of a cat by looking at only its face; both with and without training (essentially a perceptual learning task). I remember quite clearly taking a taxi out to Cats Protection shelter on a snowy January morning to take photos of different cats. Here are two examples of the session:

One of these is male and the other female. Any guesses? (answer is at the bottom of the post).

Over that summer I gave people 40 pictures of cat faces (20 male and 20 female) and asked them to say whether they thought the cat was male or female. Accuracy was 53.94% that whilst somehow turned out to be statistically better than chance (50%), suggests that people really can’t do this very well.

In order to run the experiment I created a program in Visual Basic to present pictures and collect responses from participants. As a sort of training exercise, I tried converting the VB program into a Java applet for web-use. Somehow, not sure how, I managed it and the experiment is still around today (Web Cat Face Experiment) although I’ve long since forgotten how the code works.

Anyway, occasionally data files get emailed to me from the system from where people have attempted the task. I decided to take a quick look at these data files. A total of 31 responses where there. The average performance? 51.13%.

(The cat on the left is female, the one of the right is male).

An EPS meeting – from the perspective I prefer.

Chris Longmore — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 18:15:54 +0000

I’ve spent a few days at the EPS meeting in Bristol. It was good to catch up with colleagues, previous and potentially new collaborators not to mention a few friends. After co-organising the meeting in Hull, it was nice to let others worry about the finer details!

The new version of the screencast webpage is finally up. Took ages to get it to work the way I wanted (and I still have no idea how it looks in IE).

Screencasts – HTML5 style

Chris Longmore — Thu, 05 Jul 2012 20:49:08 +0000

Without a doubt, the most popular things I’ve ever put up on the web are the video tutorials on stats, SPSS and experiment generators. In a typical month around 100- 150GB of data are downloaded from this site, most of which is the videos (the most extreme I’ve seen was 486GB). I originally put them together for teaching purposes whilst I was doing my PhD at the University of York. Rob Stone and myself though that one of the big problems with teaching statistics is that there are two parts to teaching the stats; first, teaching of theory of statistics and second, the teaching of stats packages such as SPSS. The second of these is a particular problem. Sure, you do a demonstration in class but it’s not realistic to expect students who have been stressed enough with some theory to suddenly remember every click you need to make to get something like SPSS to work properly. The result, was a bunch of screencasts (videos made of a computer screen) walking people through examples of how to perform particular stats tests.

Skip forward 6 years some of those videos are still available over at their original home (http://psycfs.york.ac.uk/screencasts/default.htm). Some of those videos now sit on the screencasts webpage here alongside newer videos and some extremely old ones. Throughout all this time though there has been a reliance on Apple’s Quicktime to play them (i.e. people needed Quicktime or a compatible player installed). With the advent of HTML5, with built in support for video, I thought it was time for a change. Over the past few days, my office machine (during the day), and home desktop (by evening) have been recompressing all of the videos into the required formats; MP4 (H.264/AAC), OGG (Theora/Vorbis) and WebM (VP8/Vorbis). The HTML on the webpage has been updated and will be ready to go live soon. Videos will still be available for download (in MP4 format). This revamped page should go live in the next day or so.

The next two big projects for the screencasts include reshooting some of the earlier ones – particularly the introduction to SPSS one. That doesn’t usually take that long (my screencasts take a “warts-and-all” approach). The other big project will take a lot longer. Adding subtitles to all the videos. Yeah, I know I talk to fast and I’ll try to be speak at a slower rate in future, but to aid those who have difficulty understanding me, hopefully subtitles will help.

Every new beginning comes from some other beginnings end

Chris Longmore — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 22:01:09 +0000

The EPS meeting is over (actually is was over on Friday 13th April but never mind). Quite a relief that all seemed to go OK (well most of it, I did manage to be late for my own symposium which most would have to admit is pretty good on the cock-up scale!). I had a strange feeling on last Saturday when it was all over – a feeling that is rather like the same feeling you get at the end of a successful Open University summer school; knackered, but through an enjoyable experience. Thanks to all the speakers, delegates and importantly, my co-organiser Dave George for making this a truly memorable meeting.

So, now to look to the future. Earlier this week I headed down to Plymouth to find a house and meet my new colleagues. I managed to find some time to head down to Plymouth Hoe (that’s the seafront area for those not familiar with the region). Spent a fair amount of time trying to avoid the rain (that was pretty severe at times). A moody Instragram picture sums up the weather:

Still, despite the rain both my laptop and my phone survived to fight another day. A few more photos from the trip (mostly of the seafront) are here:

http://www.chrislongmore.co.uk/gallery3/index.php/Plymouth-Apr-2012

Only one other bit of news, but good news. I’ve received an email from Hull University Students Union informing me that I’ve been shortlisted for a student-led teaching award (best feedback). I know that some students drop by here so if you’re one of them (and you voted for me!) then many thanks. It’s nice to know that the effort that goes into teaching is appreciated!

Meeting of the Experimental Psychology Society, 11th – 13th April 2012

Chris Longmore — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 21:03:34 +0000

A meeting of the Experimental Psychology Society (EPS) will take place in the Department of Psychology at the University of Hull between the 11th and 13th April 2012.

~~Submission of abstracts is now open here: http://www.eps.ac.uk/index.php/component/chronocontact/?chronoformname=~~

The submission of abstracts has now closed.

The programme is now available and can be downloaded here:

http://www.chrislongmore.co.uk/documents/EPS-Hull.pdf

Please Note: If you wish to book university accommodation for the meeting, or attend the conference dinner, booking forms are located near the end of the programme.

This meeting will include the 1st Frith Prize Lecture by Kathryn Hopkins, a Festschrift for Professor Geoff Hall organised by Dr. David George and a symposium on Applied Issues in Face Recognition organised by myself.

The local organisers are myself and David George. We hope to see you in Hull over Easter!

From the EPS website:

The EPS was founded in 1946. Its role is to facilitate research in experimental psychology, and scientific communication among experimental psychologists and those working in cognate fields. Based in the UK, it also has many members in mainland Europe and elsewhere overseas.

Edited: 11/01/12 19:57 to include details of the Frith Prize.

Edited: 31/01/12 10:42. The submission portal has now closed.

Edited: 19/03/12 14:11. A link to the meeting programme has been added.

New screencast – Opensesame

Chris Longmore — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 23:17:23 +0000

I’ve uploaded a new screencast, this one looks at the experiment builder Opensesame. There are a few good free options now for running psychological experiments and I though it was time to recognise this but taking a look at a couple of them. In the video, I show how to create a simple experiment (the judgement of gender of a cat from its face). Totally run time is around 37 minutes. Perhaps if I can stop saying “er” it would be shorter. The ending sounds a little odd as I had to perform some editing due to me cocking it up after over half an hour.

Like the other screencasts, it can be viewed here: http://www.chrislongmore.co.uk/screencasts/

Coming soon – a video tutorial demonstrating another free experiment builder – PsychoPy.

The power of iSteve

Chris Longmore — Sun, 04 Sep 2011 15:40:02 +0000

Several years ago (I think it would be late 2003 or early 2004), near the start of my PhD, a few friends of mine showed me their brand new Apple iPod’s. I was still using a Sony MiniDisc player at the time and hence went around the country carrying an assortment of MiniDisc’s with me. I even bought a Sony MDS-JE470 for my home hi-fi system such was my investment in the product. The key issue I had with the iPod, and for that matter, all Apple gear was cost. ”I’ll never buy an Apple product – too damn expensive” was a common quote of mine at the time. Let’s jump forward to the present day. My Apple arsenal includes:

iPod (5th generation) x 2
iPod nano (2nd generation)
iPhone 3G
iPhone 4
iMac
Mac Mini
Macbook
Apple 24″ Cinema Display
iPad 2
and of course, not to mention more dongles than you could possibly imagine.

That, by anyone’s standard, is pretty good going on the hypocrisy scale. iHypocrite – the new product from Apple – is actually all of us that swore never to buy Apple but ended up becoming devotees. I must stress though that I don’t agree with everything Apple does – I’m certainly not an Apple fanboy (I was a Commodore Amiga fanboy back in my youth. For all the fanboyism that took place, the fate of the Amiga proves that you can have all the fanboy’s in the world, if you haven’t got a good marketing strategy and a product that everyone wants then you’re screwed).

This desire for Apple products is pretty much down to one man – Steve Jobs. Since the recent announcement that Steve was resigning his position at CEO of Apple put the level of my change of stance firmly in my mind, I thought it was a good time to review what it was that made me such a convert. It was largely due to three things. First, the change in my portable music player. During the mid-2000′s, it was becoming apparent that there was only one portable music player really worth having. Sure, there were other players on the market, an the iPod was certainly not the first of its kind. It was the first though that looked stylish (remember when you saw someone with the white headphone cord they instantly looked cooler?) with a user experience to match. I only had one issue with the design – it took ages to figure out how to turn the thing off. Everything else was intuitive and very easy. To use such a portable plater, you need to synchronise it with you computer. iTunes (back then at least, unlike todays behemoth) was a half-decent music player and library management system. I was quite happy to use iTunes to manage all my digital music, unlike the horrendous SonicStage that was required to transfer music the Minidisc player. In true Apple philosophy, it “just worked”.

Once I was truly converted to the iPod I remember looking around the web at these keynote speeches that Jobs was giving. Being a Windows user at the time I had never paid attention to Jobs presentation style, yet once I viewed my first keynote of his (I think it was the launch of OS X 10.4 Tiger) the man’s sheer stage presence was obvious. Now that we know that we’ll no longer see a Jobs keynote, I think of the one keynote of his that stuck in my mind. Bizarrely, it wasn’t one of the big ones (e.g. MacWorld, WWDC) but rather a smaller one at the Apple Campus:

I think there’s several reasons why it appeals to me so much. That white ploy carbonate shell was later to become iconic – possibly more so than the aluminium or titanium look of the PowerBook. I’m still sad the the iBook’s replacement, the MacBook, no longer exists (for consumer purchase) in its white poly carbonate shell form. Secondly, the room that the presentation is taking place. At the time when I first saw the video, I was well on my way to becoming an educator. The look of the lecture theatre was something “I got”. Finally, the content was also appealing, speaking directly to the teacher in me. Apple would care less about all this though, they key thing for them is that I wanted one as a result. I never owned an iBook though. I still couldn’t quite break through the price issue. Instead I opted for a much cheaper HP laptop (incidental note – this laptop, bought in the spring of 2004, is still running well and is my sister and brother-in-law’s laptop at home). An Apple laptop would not appear in my hands for at least another 3 years.

Despite my continuing reluctance on the computer side of things, another two iPod’s appeared (a second 5G iPod and a second generation iPod nano – the latter appearing to supplant my new running habit). Then, Jobs gave a keynote speech in which it was announced that Apple was moving away from the PowerPC processors they had been using the previous decade to Intel chips. The ramifications went beyond simply what type of processor was in your laptop. It opened a new possibility – the running of the Mac OS on standard PC hardware. Sometime in mid-2007 I came across a copy of OS X 10.4.8 Tiger, specially set up to run on the type of PC hardware I had (not even an Intel CPU but rather one of AMD’s CPU’s). It installed like a charm and I got my first long time play with OS X. Instantly, my memories of the Amiga came back to me. The menubar at the top of the screen as opposed to being attached to every individual applications window (a la Windows), the fact that you insert a disc, an icon appears on the desktop and so on was quite familiar. I though to myself that if the Amiga had survived, perhaps this is what it would look like today.

This Hackintosh, as they were christened, ran for years. Despite the grief that came with every update it ended up as a 10.4.11 machine and was only decommissioned early summer 2011. Admittedly, it’s last year or so of work was only as a media server to my serve up my iTunes content to my Xbox 360. By the summer of 2009 an iMac was my standard desktop machine but the “big box” PC unit seemed more suited to acting as a server. The experience of using the Hackintosh for this length led to me finally purchasing my first real Mac – a Macbook in the summer of 2007 with the aforementioned iMac arriving a year later. The iMac was located at home and since there was no chance of getting work (at the time the University of Exeter) to buy me a Mac for the office I splashed out on a Mac Mini another year later (note: I don’t blame them – I was near the end of my fixed term contract – I wouldn’t have sanctioned the purchase!).

By this time, as you can probably tell, I was sold on Apple products. Steve, his vision and his products had converted me from a complete dismisser to a total supporter. That’s not to say (as mentioned earlier) that I agree with everything Apple under Steve has done. The endless stream of patent lawsuits are becoming tiresome. I’m also not that much of a fan of the “iOS-ifying” of the Mac. For the uninitiated, iOS is the OS that power the portable Apple devices (iPod touch, iPhone, iPad) as well as the current version of the Apple TV box. I like OS X (the Mac’s OS) because of its UNIX core and it current user interface. I certainly want to keep things that way – I’m not about to think about running psychology experiments, computational modelling or even write an academic paper on an iOS device. These are (at the moment) small distractions though, but I hope that Jobs had not planned to have iOS take over completely.

Which brings me onto the man himself. He saved Apple from near certain bankruptcy, and turn it into one of the most (and according to some measures) the richest company in the world. His vision changed the way many people think of computing. In fact, many people don’t seem to realise that an iPod touch and iPhone are computers. Alex Lindsay, of the Pixel Corps, worked on the CGI for Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace. Remember all those computer generated scenes? He was responsible for those. He once quipped that the iPhone in his pocket had more processing power than the computers he rendered the scenes for Star Wars on. Makes you think as to how things have changed in 15 years. Back to Steve. He’s resigned his role as Apple CEO due to health issues. His health problems (cancer) have been well documented – a Google search will quickly reveal all. You cannot help but think that he would not leave the company he founded, and turned into one of the most successful companies ever, easily and that it is almost certainly due to deteriorating health. Assuming this is true, I hope people now leave the guy alone. He’s changed the world already. Isn’t that enough?

Well, must be my longest post ever. There are probably many typos and grammar mistakes up there!

On the conference trail

Chris Longmore — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 18:56:15 +0000

Been a while since the last update but then there have been a few things going on! First, it’s the summer conference season. Last month (can’t believe I didn’t manage a single post in July) I attended the Experimental Psychology Society (EPS) conference at the University of Nottingham and today I returned from two days at the International Conference on Memory (ICOM) at the University of York. Both trips were productive. We (i.e. Hull) have a meeting of the EPS in April next year and I got the chance to sort out some possible speakers for it. I gave a talk at ICOM as part of a symposium on face recognition and got some new ideas for future work. So all in all, rather good.

I’ve also been trying to sort out a paper revision that I need to do (when I say revision, I mean a quite substantial re-write) as well as think about another paper that needs to be submitted before the students return in September. Speaking of students, I also have all my teaching in semester 1 next year (i.e. September to December) and will need to ensure that everything is ready to go in the next few weeks.

Absolutely shattered this evening though. Let’s just say that the couple in the hotel room next to me for the past two nights were rather, amorous. Never had that problem before, I hope I never have it again.

Talking the talk.

Chris Longmore — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 20:34:47 +0000

I’ve not given a talk at a conference for a while. I think the last one was probably in Aberdeen in 2007. There’s been a host of departmental seminars both at home (i.e. internal seminars) and out on the road (University of Swansea and Canterbury Christ Church University ring a bell) but not at a conference. Last Friday I got back into the swing of things with a talk to the Yorkshire Vision Network. A talk, lasting 30 minutes about a mix of things – some old and some new. All in all a good fun day (even if I did end up with the train journey(s) from hell). More about that in a moment but in case anyone is interested (or seriously, seriously bored) here are the slides I used for this one:

Now then, the train journeys. There is a direct train from Hull to York at just after 7am which gets to York at 8:21. Too early really so I decided to bite the bullet and go via Doncaster catching the 8:03 from Hull. It did mean leaving home at just after 7am, and as anyone who knows me knows, I don’t do morning (not well anyhow). Still managed to make it on time only for the train to be late. C’est La Vie. So, off to Doncaster. The train I really wanted to catch from Doncaster to York was the 9:00 and we arrived outside Donny at 8:53 – this is possible I thought. Then we sit outside the station for 5-6 mins. Typical. Thankfully, whatever was holding us up was also holding the 9:00 up and it was only across the platform for it so I made it and off to York on time. Arrive in York at 9:24. Head over for registration about 10 minutes later – lovely.

York: I’ve been there a few times since finishing my PhD in 2006. The strange thing is I lived there for three years and I’m starting to think I didn’t appreciate it enough. Kinda wish I was living there now. The old streets and shops and pubs are ace and even the tourists wouldn’t bother me today. I think it’s true to say that I definitely see it now as a different time of life. The world was very different between 2003 and 2006 (for me at least).

The talk went OK. The room was small with a small (thankfully low) stage. I say “thankfully low” because when I’m talking I’m a pacer. I’ve got used to presenting but I certainly had to learn how to do it – I definitely not a natural. Being a pacer is fine, except when you’re on a stage with no room. Most of it was filled up with a table and a couple of chairs, one of which looked more like a throne. Net result, move – where? – forward – oh dear – almost fell off the stage in front of about 50 people. Whoops.

Going home should’ve been fine. I was planning on catching one of the few direct trains to Hull but due to one reason or another I manage to miss that one. To cut a long story short I ended up having to go to Leeds first and then back to Hull. So that’s three major towns I managed to visit in one day (even if I was only on the train station for two of them). Got back home after a 14 hour day. Man I slept well that night.

These light evenings are screwing with my head. 9:30ish and still broad daylight. I need to have my dinner…

650,000 words, not out.

Chris Longmore — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 00:14:32 +0000

The marking is coming to a slow, gradual end. My total amount of marking this year has amounted to approximately 650,000 words (although I suspect it’s larger than that since student tend to go over the word limit!). There have been some highlights, for example, the best first year practical report method section I’ve ever read. The final year projects this year were fun too (although they usually tend to be OK). Won’t mention the lows though!

This time next week I’ll soon be heading off to give a talk at the Yorkshire Vision Network meeting in York. It’s going to feel a little odd to be getting back into research mode after (what feels like) a ton of time teaching. Got another talk to give at another conference in August (oddly enough in York again – despite the fact I lived there for three years I’m actually rather indifferent to the place!). Next year, it’s all rather different for me as all my teaching is in semester 1 before Christmas (bar the final year projects of course which run both semesters). Also got both 1st and 2nd years next year instead of just 1st years.

Haven’t seen much TV since the marking require a lot of evening work too. Still cracking up at Les Gibson’s (impressionist on Britain’s Got Talent) impression of Corrie’s Kevin Webster though. Of all the voices you expect to hear an impressionist do, this is not one of them! Can’t get the video to embed in here but here’s the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMNKpGNf9Bk