Brain Dumps and Manic Rants: A Blog by Benjamin Munson

One of the smartest things I have done professionally in the last few months is to create a website that I maintain with downloadable versions of manuscripts in progress and recent conference presentations (particularly those that are not yet in manuscript form). One of the sneakiest things I have done is to link it to an account at sitemeter.com. I get to see lots of fun things, like the domain names from which people have accessed my website. There's no ego-boost quite like knowing that someone from Harvard and someone from Yale are looking at my page. (...And there's nothing as humbling as seeing that about 3/4 of the visitors are my friends and family, or people looking for the other Benjamin Munsons out there.) Sitemeter also has a neat feature in that it shows how people arrived at your page. If they arrived from Google, it tells the search terms that they used to get there.

Now, flash-forward to today. There is an assignment due in SLHS 3305W, Speech Science--a class I do not teach. As part of the assignment, the students are reading an article that Peggy Nelson and I wrote in JASA a few years back. This morning, there has been a spike in people arriving at my Web page from Google with search terms like "Summary of Munson and Nelson Phonetic Identification." Hmmmm...can it be that people are looking for Web-based short cuts?

Posted by Benjamin Munson at 2:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This blog entry is linked to my website, and is intended to let my professional colleagues know why I have withdrawn all of my papers (well, not all, see below) from the fall meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in San Antonio, Texas. I was to present or co-present five posters at the meeting. So why the absence? The back-story should be familiar to many of you. I spent approximately two weeks in Buffalo, NY, just before and just after my father died on September 30. This, of course, has affected my work this semester two ways. First, it has put me two weeks behind in everything that I need to get done. Second, it has severely reduced my mental focus. Actually, that's putting it mildly. On my best days I am able to rouse myself to be merely catatonic. On my worst days, well, let's just say I've put on a little weight.

So when it came time to throw some babies from the sleigh, the ASA was an easy target. ASHA might be a target, too, though this fall's crappy weather makes me want to sneak away to New Orleans for a few days and give some presentations. I would hate to have to write a second apology blog in the same semester.

I realize, of course, that people read my blog because they are desperate for updates on my research. After all, a certain class of academics (mercifully few and far between in our field, though not absent altogether) can be quite unforgiving when they perceive a lapse in someone's productivity, and I would hate to give anyone's forked tongue a real to start a-flyin' about why I'm not at a conference. And I have to believe that some folks read my blog because they really want to know what I'm doing. I don't want to disappoint either camps, even in my most-worse-than-catatonic state. So please enjoy this brief update on the five presentations that I was to give, or to be involved with, at the fall ASA meeting.

Babel, M., & Munson, B. Assessing acoustic measures of the spontaneous phonetic imitation of vowels.

• I'll be blunt: Molly and I have a crap-load of data and this presentation would have just been the tip of the iceberg. Hang tight, there will be plenty of presentations in the upcoming months and years on this project.

Munson, B., & Coyne, A. The influence of talker gender, formant-frequency scaling, and presumed sources of variance on the perception of voiceless fricatives in American English.

• If there is a presentation I feel least guilty about missing, it's this, and for a simple reason. The data from this project figured prominently in a presentation in Kobe, Japan, earlier this year. Alexander Coyne (a spectacularly sharp student I worked with a few years ago) and I will publish that in the Journal of the Phonetic Society of Japan. That manuscript is due by year's end, and should be posted on my website for comment.

Munson, B., Kaiser, E., & Crocker, L. The influence of linguistic complexity on the acoustic and perceptual correlates of gender typicality in boys' speech.

• This paper compares single-word and sentence productions of a cohort of boys originally presented by Crocker and Munson back in 2006. I really regret not presenting this, because, too use a little AAE tense marking, they been ready to be presented. Some of you saw those data back in presentations in 2007. But not everyone caught my talks at Ohio State or Stanford. Fortunately, a paper with Munson, Crocker, Kaiser, Pierrehumbert, and Zucker is being prepared and, if I manage to advance beyond catatonia, should be published on my website for comment by year's end. Anyone know the cure for catatonia?

Munson, B., & Marnie, C. Variation and stability in judgments of talker similarity.

• My biggest regret in missing the ASA is that this poster won't get presented. Celina Marnie was one of the sharpest and certainly most organized undergraduate students I ever worked with. We did an experiment examining whether listeners who are exposed to talkers voices in multiple phases of an experiment develop clusters of similar-sounding talkers, and whether this tendency is mediated by the kinds of tasks listeners do when they are exposed to talkers. This is a cool project, and Celina (now at Emerson College) more than deserves the exposure and credit for her hard work. Some day.

Syrika, A., Li, F., Edwards, J., Beckman, M.E., & Munson, B. Transitional cues in fricative noise in Greek /s/-stop and stop-/s/ sequences: Children versus adults.

• This one is actually going to happen! In fact, click on this if you want to see the poster. It's a gem. Well done, Mina and team!

Posted by Benjamin Munson at 10:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Four weeks and 1 day after receiving a diagnosis of kidney cancer, my dad died. (Attention teabaggers, this happened in the country with the 'best medical care in the world', by someone with insurance.) The obituary is here . There are two hiakus I want to share. The first is humorous, written by an SLHS 1301 student when she heard the news yesterday.

science of language
canceled because his dad died
who has the right words?

The other is an actual hiaku, written in actual Japanese!

tsui ni yuku
michi to wa kanete
kikishikado
kinou kyou to wa
omawazari shi wo

(Although formerly
I had heard this is a path
all walk finally,
I did not think yesterday
today would be my journey.)

I think they're both nice.

Posted by Benjamin Munson at 2:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My father is battling terminal cancer, and I can't even take paid leave from my job to go to Buffalo to take care of him because I have no sick days, no personal days, and no vacation days (other than University holidays). The Family Medical Leave Act would allow me to get paid if I were to use sick days, personal days, and vacation days, but I have none of these. No professors have these. Only certain classes of staff have these privileges. Does anyone else see a system that is seriously and profoundly broken?

Posted by Benjamin Munson at 9:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

with each passing year
the first day of lecturing gets
harder and harder

Posted by Benjamin Munson at 2:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sitemeter makes me
Wonder who exactly is
viewing my website

Posted by Benjamin Munson at 11:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My father's cancer
Chronic, but can be treated
I'm very grateful

Posted by Benjamin Munson at 6:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As I sit in the JAL Sakura lounge at Narita airport, my mind turns to all things Japanese. To remember this beautiful trip, I would like to spend a month writing a haiku a day about what I am doing that day, in haiku (5-7-5 syllables, though Mary Beckman sent me a detailed response to my recent haiku-based entry suggesting that I need not be so rigid when writing haiku in English).

So, in the spirit of that, here goes:

writing syllabus
physics and biology
of spoken language

Now you know what I'm doing, and now the SLHS 1301W students know that as of August 28 I still haven't finished the syllabus. Waa-waa-waa, I don't even start getting paid until Monday!

Posted by Benjamin Munson at 2:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It has been a stressful few months.

My dad is sick and nobody knows why. He keeps losing weight, he's weak, and we can get a straight answer. Kevin's still out of work, and this recovery appears to be, as promised, a recovery for those who are well invested, not for those who are out of work. Work keeps backing up more and more and more and more, and every message I get about my work is that it's too late or not enough. It hasn't been a fun year, to be honest.

But enough about that. Everybody has hard spells now and then, and I certainly have it much better than many right now, and I'm grateful for that. This blog entry is because I have found the cure for a tough spell: Kyoto. I write this from my hotel overlooking the Higashiyama district in Kyoto. I can see a large Buddha statue and the roofs of many temples from my window. I have spent the last few days walking around that district, going to temples and shrines, drinking something called Aquarius Zero (take that, Pocari Sweat), and buying cat-themed souvenirs (the Japanese love their cats, all of whom look more like Island cat than like Carrie Munson). It has been relaxing and tranquil. More importantly, it has been a time away from hard work (though I still manage to work about 2-3 hours a day, thank you very much, stupid internet).

If only we could all take trips like this when things get hard.

Posted by Benjamin Munson at 9:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The great Facebook purge has made me a much calmer person. It seems to have helped me achieve greater work-life balance. Perhaps as a consequence, suddenly papers seem to be flying off my desk! I might even surpass my publication goals for this year. Very exciting.

Another added benefit is that I can write a long blog entry. I could potentially write one on a controversial topic, as I have enough time to write, edit for tact, clarity, etc., and re-write. But what to write on? I have a sketch in my head of a piece on racism, classism, and homophobia that relates recent events at my YMCA with the Gates arrest in Cambridge. My worry about that one is that the Gates arrest has already been done to death elsewhere in the media, and the parts about the YMCA relate as much or more to my bitterness about the disconnect between different communities. Insomuch as I have a loyal following of readers, let me ask you, what do you like reading about in blogs like this?

Posted by Benjamin Munson at 4:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On Monday, I had 465 Facebook friends. Today I have 270 Facebook friends. In between, I had a bit of a "Tuesday-night massacre" in which I reconfigured my Facebook friends to be 465-270 less than I had previously. My motives were simple: to enforce a larger divide between my work-life and my private life, and to surround myself (such as it is) with people I feel comfortable talking about controversial topics with. Most of the people who I unfriended fell into this category, though some others fell into a third category, people I don't know terribly well. If you were unfriended, please don't take it personally. In fact, I invite you to be a bigger person than I was when someone unfriended me earlier this year, likely for many of the same motives that I just cited.

Being a professor is for me at least a 24/7 job, and it's putting me in an early grave without really giving me much to put on the tombstone*. It's time to put a big fat wall between work and home, both so that I can get more work done, and so that I can let home be home. A friend in the philosophy department (Naomi Scheman) once warned against over-zealous efforts to separate work from home life because it enforces the alienation of labor--the Capitalist process whereby a worker is reduced to a wealth-building agent for the capitalists who earn money from their labor. I get it, and my eyes are wide open to the fact that I have let myself become an agent for someone to make money, but for now it is a survival mechanism to divorce my work-self from my home-self. The fact that a person who used to write prolifically and teach with relish is prematurely bitter (and as fat as I was back in late 2000) says that something is very, very wrong. Sorry, people, the phone is off the hook. Your call will be answered during regular business hours.

And if you're wondering whose money I am building, well the answer to that might just shock and offend you. That's a private conversation.

*(Actually, I want an eco-friendly burial at sea. At least if sharks eat me I know they won't be eating something that has lots of mercury accumulated in my muscles. In fact, the shark that eats me is going to be nice and fatty after that!)

Posted by Benjamin Munson at 2:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If your summer 2009 were a story, what would the themes be? Mine might be the following:

1. Where does the time go?
2. I sure do like sleeping until 7:30!
3. I'm so happy I get time to do my research!
4. I will never, ever, ever live in apartment without a balcony or a porch, ever, period. I live on the little 12 x 3 foot balcony outside of my apartment.
5. Kiyoko's coming to visit when? Please let my cat not attack her viciously.

Looking bask, none of these seem like themes. Sister Karen Shaver always used to make us find the themes in our short stories, and they were ALWAYS "we tend to champion the underdog." But this summer everyone is an underdog. Everyone is out of work, everyone is unsure about the future, and everyone is working far harder than they should for no money, including me. And I don't think anyone's championing anything, honestly. I have never seen people be so mean in their lives. It's as if everyone has realized that there is a finite set of resources, and the pot is shrinking. Instead of rallying together and making sure that we all get our share, I see people getting meaner, more competitive, sneakier, more underhanded. Even at the YMCA, a place I used to enjoy going, everyone seems at each other's throats. Even the panhandlers are getting meaner!

What are your summer 2009 themes?

Posted by Benjamin Munson at 2:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My recent blog entry received quite a bit of chatter on my Facebook page. I'm sharing some of it here, de-identified.

A friend of mine wrote

"when someone who is in a position of responsibility asks you to do something, you politely do it and you don't give them guff". Come on, is this a real Munson quote??? I always thought lack of respect for authority was one of the most important qualities in a scientist.

To which I replied (edited for the blogosphere)

I didn't say a position of authority, I said a position of responsibility. (I struggled with this wording because I didn't want to give the impression that you got). There is no political stand to be made by defying the rules regarding when electronic devices can be used on an airplane. All it shows is that this person thought her own desire to... Read More check E-Mail was more important than participating in our collective responsibility to get the plane ready for departure.

Note that I didn't say that if the Joint Chiefs of Staff came on the plane and asked us to pony up $10 to cover unexpected costs in [an illegal and unjust war], we should all do so. I said that this person should do her part in our collective responsibility as passengers on an airplane to obey the rules and regulations that allow the ground crew and the flight crew to get the plane ready for departure. Does that clarify?

To which the original poster replied:

After your two eloquent paragraphs everything is crystal clear, but I still think you're too serious. Have a mojito. I'm buying.

And while he was writing that, I wrote this additional justification:

I am not saying that when a university administrator blithely circulates a memo saying that the entire graduate school is to be dissolved that we should go along with it to be polite and because the administrator has the authority to do so, because the original request is ill-conceived. Rather, I'm saying that when a person from Facilities Management comes to our office to change the light bulb, we don't fly off the handle and berate him/her about how bad his/her timing is because we have such important work to be doing and how dare they etc. etc. Instead, we realize that this person's responsibility is to change the light bulb, so we suck it up, let them change the light bulb, and thank them for doing so.

Posted by Benjamin Munson at 2:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Please forgive the inelegant prose, but I really want to write this story down on my blog before it gets stale, and I don't have time to edit too much.

I'm flying back from Portland last Friday and this woman sits next to me and pulls out her PDA. She's checking E-Mail, as is allowed when the plane is boarding. Then the flight attendants come over the PA system and say that people should turn off electronic devices. She doesn't turn it off. Every time a flight attendant walks by she hides it. Then they say it again--ditto. A third time--DITTO. So now I'm ticked off. Well then they shut the door to the plane and say that now that the door is shut, devices need to be turned off. Homegirl is STILL checking her PDA. So I take it upon myself to act as an agent of civilized society and let her know how disgusted I am at how disrespectful she is being to the flight attendants and that all they asked her to do was to turn off her PDA. I point out that flight attendants are responsible for our safety, and that (most of all), they work a hard job in which they have huge responsibility and for which they don't get a lot of respect or very high pay. All they ask from people on the plane is to behave in a civilized manner so that we can get from point A to point B safely and quickly. Well, she launches into this big defensive rant about how she's one of the most polite and respectful people she knows and how I am off-base. She says that the rule is that you turn off your PDA after the door is shut. (Then why were you hiding it every time a flight attendant passed?) I turn to her and say that the rules in a civilized society are that when someone who is in a position of responsibility asks you to do something, you politely do it and you don't give them guff. She then tells me I need to 'not sweat the little things'. I respond to her that incivility in society begins when people stop attending to the 'little things' that form the foundation of collective good behavior.

Well, that's pretty much the end of it. I felt like I was on top of the world. I wish I could convey how much I commanded the exchange. I turned on the 'lecturing to the 10th row' orator voice and dropped my larynx as far as I could.

From this exchange I have learned the following things:

(1) Speaking your mind to a person behaving badly in public is a very cathartic experience. After I spoke my mind I felt like the most relaxed person on the planet. It was just so cleansing.
(2) The phrase 'don't sweat the little things' is by and large misleading. In many cases, the so-called little things are really important. If following the basic rule that you respect someone in a position of responsibility by honoring their perfectly sane and reasonable request is indeed a 'little thing' that can easily be ignored by those who 'don't sweat the little things', then we are in great trouble indeed.

All in all, it was a great flight.

Posted by Benjamin Munson at 1:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

After noticing that my blog is now the #5 hit for the name "Benjamin Munson" I was forced to ask myself "Is a blog really the best thing for a person whose fantasy is to live under a rock, in a cave, on Mars?" The person who falls asleep dreaming of escape. The person whose happiest day was spent on an atoll in the South Pacific that nobody has ever heard of (Aitutaki), who knows how to drive from here to the very end of the very last dirt road as far north as a person can go (Yellowknife is only the northern edge of paved roads. You can get far beyond there if you have the right vehicle.) Is a blog really the right medium for me?

Too late now. The ASA has posted a draft version of the layperson's summary of one of the four posters at the spring meeting on which I am an author. I'm pretty dang proud of the text (written with two of the world's most awesome collaborators and friends, E. Allyn Smith and Kathleen Hall), and I invite you to take a gander
by clicking here. Maybe it will become another top "Benjamin Munson" hit.

Posted by Benjamin Munson at 2:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)