All that jazz

A bulletin from the Psychonomics Society 50th annual meeting in Boston, MA.


The Psychonomics Society conference is pretty big and covers many topics relating to human and animal cognition. Almost every year something fairly novel catches my eye. This year, it was a talk by Michael Schober and Michelle Levine (presented by the former), concerning the relationship between onstage coordination and improvisational quality in jazz musicians.

Now, this brief account is necessarily sketchy as I didn't manage to note every single detail, but I think the basic finding here is very interesting. In jazz, the improviser has to make a series of musical choices in relation to what the other players are doing. There is apparently a whole lore about coordination in jazz, with an emphasis on the necessity to coordinate section changes, but also the need for players to focus and concentrate whilst improvising a solo.

The study reported here recruited 30 experienced jazz and saxophone duos, and asked them to play a specially composed piece which included two improvised solos of 20 bars each. After an opportunity to rehearse the duos played in one of three conditions: (a) together - the face-to-face condition, (b) in separate spaces but with a video and audio connection, and (c) in separate spaces with only an audio connection. Audio recordings of their performances were rated on several criteria by three professional performing musicians, each with over thirty years' playing experience and previous experience of sitting on musical juries.

On a post-performance questionnaire, the face-to-face players reported being better able to concentrate than did the players in the other conditions. However, their improvisations were given the lowest ratings by the judges (who, remember, were blind to the conditions). The most highly-rated performances were those in the audio condition.

Among the other findings was that the sax players improved with practice whereas the pianists did not. However, the performance of the saxophonists was highly dependent on the pianists, who clearly laid the foundation that enabled the sax players to shine.

Top 10 learning tools for 2009

Jane Hart, a social learning consultant, compiles an annual list of popular learning technologies, as voted for by other learning professionals. The top 100 tools for 2008 can be found here. My own top 10 for 2009 (below) is slightly embarrassing because of the emphasis on Google products.  I have in fact made some use of the Zoho suite of applications, but there is a terrific level of convenience in having iGoogle set up as my web page, with the other Google products embedded within, many of which synchronise with my phone (an HTC Magic). I can hardly believe that GMail has been squeezed out of my top 10, not to mention YouTube (to which I sometimes upload screencasts that are recorded in Screentoaster), or Google Sites.

1. Blogger. My final year students have each set up blogs where they regularly record their thoughts about the material we cover. I also use blogger to record occasional research updates that might be of interest to readers of my textbook, and with a view to incorporating these into a future edition. 
2. Google search.
3. Google calendar. This is particularly useful because it synchs with my Google Android phone and sends reminders to my phone.
4. Screentoaster.
5. Google Docs.
6. Googer Reader.
7. iGoogle. This is an excellent way of organising your desktop.
8. Twitter.
9. Google Android.
10. MacBook Air - this is about half the weight of the regular laptops I have previously had and offers the speed of operation that Apple products have become known for. Particularly useful is the facility to record screencasts that is built into the operating system. This could possibly challenge my use of Screentoaster, which I have mostly used up until now.

Measuring utility

This posting is for the benefit of the students taking my class  "Judgment and Decision Making". I set the exercise of measuring your utility function for a certain range of monetary values, using two different methods: The Certainty Equivalence Method and the Probability Equivalence Method. Of key interest is whether the two functions look the same when plotted graphically. I did this exercise myself and the results are shown above.

When you do this, I'd like you to insert the graphs into your blog and include some commentary - especially if you find that the two curves look different. The website for plotting the graph is here. Select the option for coordinates plotting. Say you want to enter 5 coordinates, and then select . On the page that appears enter the monetary amounts in the column for X and the utility values in the column for Y. From the menu options to the right enter a short title in the