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Baby Meets Big Brother For Science
dylanduck writes "A baby is to be monitored by a network of microphones and video cameras for 14 hours a day, 365 days a year, in an effort to unravel the seemingly miraculous process by which children acquire language. I guess that's what happens when your pop works at MIT's Media Lab. Thankfully his parents can switch off the surveillance for 'private' moments and delete short scenes. All the footage is being classified by algorithms."
Meanwhile, the baby's mother (a hot Brazillian model) is not told about the cameras. The baby's father (the rich MIT geek) is clueless why his buddies picked HIS house to do the experiment.
Funnypics
I wonder if the baby's name is Truman?
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Will they also instill a fear of water into the baby so he doesn't want to leave his island?
If you can't see them, there are 9 fish eye cameras mounted at certain points of the house and a day passes in 30 seconds (a la National Geographic plant blooming or Requiem for a Dream old lady on crack).
Each camera seems to have a round piece of paper ready to flip up and down to cover it (possibly via light switch in the room/area) should the family choose it to be necessary.
I think this is a wonderful and innovative idea, my only concern resides in the child's rights. I'm going to say I don't agree with even releasing these short clips to the public. I believe that this footage should be collected, protected & anonymity of the child enforced until the child is 18--at which point they will be capable of releasing the footage under whatever license (GPL even, lol) they deem appropriate. I understand that the parents have full custody, I only hope this child is in no way taken advantage of like so many prodigious children are by their parents.
My work here is dung.
Details are here.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
2008 will be a leapyear
Suprisingly, the Baby's first words mimick the sounds made by the recording equipment:
"beep"
"zzzzZZZZZZzzz"
"click click click click"
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
Just curious. Most people would.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
the Linux / Windows debate of linguistics. Do we have a language gene, or is the exposure we get to language somehow able to give us all the clues we need to have more or less perfect grammar by the age of about three?
I really wish we could solve this once and for all and just move on, hopefully this can help.
(cue the jokes about how some slashdotters have the grammar skills of a three-year-old etc).
Nyhetsankaret.com -- det bÃsta av Sveriges Nyhetssido
Monroe: It's a special isolation chamber. The subject pulls levers to receive food and water. The floor can become electrified, and showers of icy water randomly fall on the subject. I call it... The Monroe Box!
Grampa: Uh huh. Sounds interesting. How much will it cost to build?
Monroe: Oh, that's the beauty part! It's already built! I need the money to buy a baby to raise in the box until the age of thirty.
Grampa: What are you trying to prove?
Monroe: Well, my theory is that the subject will be socially maladjusted and will harbor a deep resentment towards me.
Grampa: Mm. Interesting.
...is going to be hell.
ed
I'm surprised that they aren't taking weekly or monthly magnetic resonance images (MRI's) of the child's brain to track the growth of Broca's Area, a region of the brain long believed to control and develop speech.
It was this that Carl Sagan wrote of in Broca's Brain when he speculated on our ability to speak and communicate adeptly and sets us apart from animals.
I'd like to see this invetsigated further.
My work here is dung.
4% Pooping
26% Fussiness
8% Crying
18% Eating
21% Drooling
22% Peek a Boo
1% Language Acquisition
There are 01 kinds of cars in the world. The General Lee, and everything else.
Monroe: It's a special isolation chamber. The subject pulls levers to receive food and water. The floor can become electrified, and showers of icy water randomly fall on the subject. I call it... The Monroe Box!
Grampa: Uh huh. Sounds interesting. How much will it cost to build?
Monroe: Oh, that's the beauty part! It's already built! I need the money to buy a baby to raise in the box until the age of thirty.
Grampa: What are you trying to prove?
Monroe: Well, my theory is that the subject will be socially maladjusted and will harbor a deep resentment towards me.
Grampa: Mm. Interesting.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Well, the parents won't have to regret not video taping their kid as a baby later on. They'll have possibly more footage of their baby than any other parents in the world...
The study itself sounds highly fascinating, but like others, I find myself wondering what the child will say in ten or twenty years. However, how many people truly object to the sharing of baby photos and home videos? It's nearly a given that people proudly display these items every chance they get. I don't think this study is going to help much, and it would most likely yield better results if the reserchers used many different babies in other households.
La la la... I'm not listing to reason today...
Call me crazy but my wife and I just had a baby and the last thing I would want is for for her to become an experiment.
How do they know that this type of intervention/interference at such an impressionable age won't have life altering reprocussions? There are just some things that should be left well enough alone and this is one of them.
Maybe it's just me though.
I love the smell of Karma in the morning
There is not much more for a camera to record here (of the baby).
The baby will make sounds constantly. More and more sounds as time progresses.
The parents (video camera operators?) will from time to time notice sounds that sound like sounds they understand and respond very positively to these sounds.
OH MY!!!!! I just heard the baby say XX OR XX OR XX OR XX (all references to daddy).
All these will be thought to be something profound concerning the babies actions.
But not due to the baby saying them, but because the baby's reaction to the parent who understands them and makes a HUGE ordeal of them.
My daughter had 3 such moments. The first time she said the baby sounds for daddy each of the 3 languages my wife and I speak.
We noticed and more importantly, the baby (our daughter) noticed we noticed.
Babies make sounds all the time (some say of all languages), but parents largely define the importance of those sounds for the babies. The babies merely respond because they like the attention, especially positive, of parents who's faces they see all the time.
I cant help but think this will teach these researchers more about how babies learn to accept new faces or events or actions as normal rather than how they learn languages.
My major is in Computational Linguistics. This sounds like a good idea as far a research goes, but the sad fact is that this will not be enough. We already know a LOT about the developmental stages in which children begin to acquire language and the relationships between the mental dictionary lookup and the rule applying mechanisms that compete with one another to produce the fastest possible production of intelligible sentences. What we don't understand is how it happens. This study will not let us know that.
What would be better is to develop algorithms that try and mimic the learning process we already have observed in native language acquisition and then continue to refine our algorithms until we have perfected that process. We will only know we have it right when you can take those same algorithms, put them to use by exposing it to a different language and have it still learn it right.
Let's play video games with mailmanZERO
It worked out well for Ender
I wonder if the baby's name is Truman [imdb.com]?
The real interesting part is if Big Brother later decides that he needs to extend the monitoring due to !insert Big Brother Logic here! which would actually make it like The Truman Show in real life.
FTA: If successful, Roy says the project could lead to better strategies for diagnosing and treating language disorders. It could even spawn computer programs that can learn to how to speak for themselves, he adds.
Uh huh, this could be edging close to the The Matrix also...
when my own child was born. Back then I was working in artificial intelligence (for a commercial application, and I'm no MIT graduate) and I spend the first couple years taking meticulous notes, video, audio recordings and similar. I also worked with a few other children but not as deeply.
What I found is that the sample size was way too small. Almost every child has vastly different development patterns and to see the big picture you need a bigger sample than one kid. We're talking about a huge effort to collect that much data on many children but I think that is what will be required to even begin to understand how it works.
The ratio of people to cake is too big
Me and my brother are named after the characters in Bonanza. Adam and Ben Cartwright.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonanza
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
This family will take home the prize on all the "Funniest Home Videos" shows every time. The funniest moments with my kids always happen when we're not using the camcorder.
This is really kind of funny but the vast majority of people teach their children how to speak yet we don't know how they they teach their children how to speak?
Just like it is easy to write a program that can calculate sin but really hard to write one that can follow verbal directions as well as a a four year old?
In other words it is easy to teach a machine what is taught in school.
It is very hard to teach a machine what is taught by parents.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I hope the kid's first words are something to be proud of.
I once saw a Mother eating some take-out fast food with her gurgling offspring. The kid was very vocal but couldn't say anything more than "goo" and "ga ga." The mother was doing the traditional "say Mommy, say Mommmmeeeee" thing when the kid pointed at the logo on the paper cup and said, very clearly, "McDonalds."
The mother did not look pleased.
Life is like a web application. Sometime you need cookies just to get by.
I don't really see how this impacts the child at all. He/she is zero years old - what possible privacy concerns can you have at that point?
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
Thinking of B.F. Skinner and the Skinner Box
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
... when it was called "The Truman Show".
Software Wars
As for speech, I believe the learning curve for babies to talk depends on how they are spoken to. If you GooGoo and GaaGaa at them all day in gibberish baby talk, they aren't going to learn how to speak very easily. But if you talk to them as you would talk to a young child, they are more apt to speak early themselves.
Click Click Bloody Click PANCAKES!
Think of the children!
(Someone had to say it...)
--GrouchoMarx
Card-carrying member of the EFF, FSF, and ACLU. Are you?
Nix. Numerous 'feral children' have acquired (limited) language skills (most famously, Genie) - they provide an extremely poor study group for looking at language and social skills learning because a. they may have been abandoned because they were (or were percieved to be) subnormal, b. they tend to be significantly traumatised, either simply by circumstances, or by abuse (again, Genie). c. Case studies are a bugger.
(Feral children covers a broad spectrum - we are not just talking about 'raised by wolves' here)
Regarding the main topic - this has characteristics uncomfortably like the Forbidden Experiment (bring up a child in a totally controlled, isolated environment - see what happens), and making the footage publically available worries me - did they cut a deal with Fox for the funding?
fortune -o
Is this realy Big Brother? or is it science? What is it with these headlines?
GENERATION 25: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation. Social exper
Agreed to a point. This seems pretty harmless. It's a little more personal than baby photos and home videos since it's constant, but probably no more exciting to anyone. It doesn't sound like there is any intent to keep recording data beyond the age of 2 or 3 anyways.
This is going to yield a huge dataset! I imagine a couple CS majors could make a good senior project out of writing the sorting algorithms. I'd be kind of interesting to see a follow-up on how they're going to go about that. The kind of data analysis I typically do, even when I'm looking at a few hundred megs of data, I can typically sort down to peak or rate values very quickly with simple software. Even high energy physics research that can generate terrabytes of data per experiment I suspect can be broken down the same way with a decent amount of raw processing power. This research, however, will be sifting through a huge set of similar data and looking for subtle effects.
The overall experiment reminds me much more of The Final Cut than The Truman Show like others have suggested. Obviously that movie was far more personal in its intrusion, but it was basically about privacy versus (somewhat public) memory. The writers obviously recognized the scale of the data generated, too. They introduced a special computer called a Guillotine that seperated a persons life into clips by category.
Ha! Just imagine what an algorithm would say when it fills its nappy: "Core dump - segfault at location @r$e."
bang goes my karma... again...
First baby thows out an early prototype. eg "Ga-ga". This is praised
however some constructive critism by the clients (parents) is offered - eg "Da-da". Baby then adapts the first prototype and re-demos it for the users and clients. And so on.
By the time version 3 (years) is reached baby is still in the iterative refinement design and development mode. For example: "I eated dinner". The user-clients offer "I ate dinner" as a correction that is a new feature in version 3.5.
Next time, if it's a girl they could name it Jenni.
Wait a second....call it Jenni, or call her Jenni. There is a very big difference!
Sure there are some ethical questions surrounding this, but he is making a huge personal sacrifice in the name of science and has insured that reasonable safeguards are in place. This could provide incredible insights into the language acquisition process.
The father and mothers friends, family, and neighbors will stop returning their calls after the second time they hear "come see the video of everything junior did today!"
Junior's first girlfriend will die of starvation after 36 straight hours of family videos.
Junior will spend the second 5 years of his live watching what he did for the first 5 years of his life. That 5 year event will be recorded and used to determine how people learn by watching videos of themselves learning.
...Ye gods, this must be where Hilton sisters come from!!
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Here's a better one: Republicans don't make bad laws, corporations do. Through Republicans.
I've got a moral objection to a child being used for research like this. Aside from growing up fixated on cameras, has anyone given thought to how this child will feel as an adult knowing that mommy and daddy allowed him (her?) to be watched for more than half the hours in a year for research purposes? "Yeah, my parents sold my babyhood for science. I was a labrat!" When a camera is aimed, the behavior of those present tends to change, so this will also affect the interactions between parents and baby. I can only hope the money made will be put into an interest-bearing fund for the child's future therapy or college education rather than the parents getting the money.
It's a girl!
It is if the NSA has tapped in and is watching...
but what about those who are deaf, how do they go about aquiring language without audio?
and let's not forget the autistic who at 13 years old swear they only woke up to the world around them when a keyboard was placed in front of them.
Donald Ray Moore Jr. (mindrape)
Suspected Terrorist
What if the short scenes are the dramatic moments that have the most impact on the child's development? Perhaps nothing has quite the attention getting impact as Mommy and Daddy verbally abusing each other, for example. Maybe nothing makes an impression like what Mama says in response to the ultimate cathartic moment: letting a bomb loose after not pooping for three/four days in a row (a very common occurance, for those diconnected from this kind of thing).
Personally, I'm more than a little dubious that a mere video camera will make more insightful observations than billions of doting mothers and fathers have over many millenia. I'm filing this in the 'stupid science' category.
Why not?
I wish I could remember where I read about this... it was decades and decades ago... but there was a case of a child who was brought to a psychiatrist because he had suddenly and completely stopped talking. The psychiatrist was asking the parents for details, and they said, beamingly, "Oh, here are our notebooks." They brought out an enormous stack of notebooks in which they had written down everything the child had said.
At some point, the child became disturbed by this and simply stopped talking.
The psychiatrist told the parents to stop writing down what the child said, and in due course he made a full recovery.
Moral: The observation process affects what is being observed.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
... as long as nobody puts baby in a corner.
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
I'd like to see them come close to the footage my wife takes!
Hell, her still photos could be used as a flipbook.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
It's been done before. Back in the '60s or early '70s or so.
A language-acquisition researcher recorded her daughter's waking activities continuously for several years as she developed language.
One interesting thing to come out of this was that, as one point (I think about the three-word utterance stage) the kid started using this word that sounded something like "ehWIDdeh". (I don't recall exactly how the researcher spelled it but that's about what it sounded like.) It was never really clear what she meant by it, but she seemed to understand it and use it consistently herself. Eventually she stopped using it.
Interestingly, after the experiment was over, momma showed the films to daughter and asked her if she knew what she had meant back then. Daughter had no clue, either.
(Last I heard the leading speculation was that it was a placeholder, for when kid knew she wanted to emit a particular syntax but didn't have the word she wanted to put in that place yet. But everybody knows they're just guessing.)
Doing the experiment again with another kid, better equipment, and computer aid should be valuable. In fact, doing it several times would be even more valuable. But let's not treat it like it's something brand new.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Human brain maturation procedure during the speech learning period recorded for the first time by Spanish researchers:
http://www.astroseti.org/vernew.php?codigo=13
Faith does not move mountains, but drills can go through it.
Do you have any idea where your child might have learned about Chairman Mao? Perhaps your babysitter is a pinko.
If you go to their house and they offer to show you "a couple of" baby movies, for God's sake say "NO."
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
I thought this kind of study wasn't allowed anymore.
Doesn't the ability to cease data collection invalidate any insight that might be provided?
--- Do you believe in the day?
I hate to burst your bubble, but Babies sleep a lot of the time. Certainly more than zero percent.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
I'm no scientist, but I recall that just by observing something, you are inherently changing it. While it may be subtle and unnoticable ("hidden" cameras on a beach or home that no one notices), but things are not unchanged.
Just the fact that the parents know there is recording going on is going to modify things. The extra time they take to deal with it and delete things is going to modify how the child learns.
I'm not saying it's not cool, but it's not without some effects (even if small) on the child. Sine the parents know about the taping and have control of it, it's going to be a bigger change that if not.
'How Nerds Form'
Some of them really go segfault / kernel panic and cannot be rebooted. A massive study why this happens could be interesting.
When our kids where quite young - pre-school age, just learning their ABC's, we were driving through the city and it was scary how many logos / corporate signs the kids were 'reading'! And not just McDonalds (known for being kid friendly), but also BeaverLumber, Safeway, Royal Bank!
The weird part was, they were about 2 & 4 and we had _just_ got a TV, so it wasn't like they had years of commercials as an excuse.
I'm in my right mind and I have the answer to everything!