Alex & Me: How a Scientist and a Parrot Discovered a Hidden World of Animal Intelligence–and Formed a Deep Bond in the Process

5 Responses to “Alex & Me: How a Scientist and a Parrot Discovered a Hidden World of Animal Intelligence–and Formed a Deep Bond in the Process”

1. Brian Moore says:

   July 6, 2010 at 12:30 pm

   We got “Chosen by a Horse.” We got “Wesley the Owl: The Remarkable Like Tale of an Owl and His Girl.” And now we got “Alex and Me.” Just what’s going on with broads and animals?
   Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
2. C. Wentworth says:

   July 6, 2010 at 3:18 pm

   I permanently rooted for alex and was devastated to hear of his passing, and as a grey owner myself I had hoped that this book would educate me in some way about how to work with my own grey. I was very dissapointed. I got to the middle of the book and I thought, this is not what I thought it might be. It wasn’t even a warm tale about Irene’s relationship with her Alex. I am sorry to admit that the warmth didn’t even show up until the last chapter when he was establish dead. I wish I had read it first at the library, because if I had, I would have saved myself some money.
   Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
3. Alder says:

   July 6, 2010 at 4:07 pm

   Most of the book consisted of the leader complaining about her life and how misunderstood and unsupported her work is. I expected a book about how birds learn. I got a book of whines about how hard it is to make it in academia.
   Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
4. anotherme says:

   July 6, 2010 at 6:23 pm

   I heard the leader discussing Alex on NPR and it was fascinating. She was personable and friendly. But, in this book she sounds stuck-up and even a small stupid (at least self-centered and tone-deaf to the lives of others). It is written at a elementary school reading level and gives a randomly spotty autobiography that is unnecessarily critical of additional people, especially her parents. I establish myself criticizing the book aloud more than enjoying it.

   As an example: Why say “a woman called Jane Goodall” when either “primatologist Jane Goodall” or just unadorned “Jane Goodall” makes so much more sense? It is obviously a woman with the name “Jane” and since that is her name, that is what she is called! This kind of sloppy (dumb) writing continues throughout the book.

   I recommend borrowing this book from the library or listening to the NPR interview. Save your money.
   Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
5. Douglas B. Moran says:

   July 6, 2010 at 6:24 pm

   This is an very unsatisfying book because it spends too small time on the supposed topics (Animal Intelligence and the Bond) and too much on items of interest to only a very limited audience. Although I am in awe of what Alex and Dr. Pepperberg achieved, this book does not do justice to that and hence its low rating.

   I second the suggestion to start reading at page 51: Chapter 1 (24 pages) is an enumeration and acknowledgment of condolence messages and prominent obituaries. The first part of Chapter 2 (the remainder) covers her childhood and adds nothing beyond what should have been brief asides in the remainder of the book. These first pages are just too, too off-putting (an effect you can see in many of the 1- and 2-star reviews).

   The overwhelming part of a book is a rough chronology and acknowledgment of the many, many people involved in their work, interspersed with a few anecdotes about Alex that have small impact or value. The sheer number of these acknowledgments means that all are too brief to have any impact. The leading tone is a flat clinical recitation of events that could be ascribed to her still being numbed with grief. But there are also areas where the emotion seems to be grieving for herself over the loss of Alex.

   The only jolly section is Chapter 7 “Alex Goes Hi-Tech” about their time at the Media Lab at M.I.T. Only at the end of the book (starting in late Chapter does the reader get a sense of the emotional bond between them.

   Throughout the book there are mentions of the difficulties of her career and these are testimony to how resilient she was/is. But, if you are not familiar with literary research, this may well come off as self-pitying. And if you are, these mentions are merely evocative, adding nothing. An assessment of persons difficulties, and how to lower them, could be an appealing book, or long article, but I suspect that she was able to sustain herself by maintaining a level of denial.

   — Highly Discretionary and Long : Context to better know aspects of her career —

   I am a contemporary of hers (2-4 years younger) and worked in a closely related meadow – Artificial Intelligence (AI) – focusing on getting computers to know enough human language for it to be useful in directing various tasks. I read accounts of her work and may have attended a talk by her, but more likely by one of her students.

   Many AI researchers tracked development in Animal Intelligence (including language) for inspirations on how to engineer various levels of intelligence into computer systems. I attended many talks on Animal Intelligence where a significant part of the audience was from AI, with some talks being hosted by AI (not Biology). The 1970s – when she and Alex were starting their work – was a time of particular ferment in this area.

   Sorry to say, many Animal Intelligence researchers had aptitudes and approaches that made it very hard for them to know or appreciate questions from an engineering viewpoint (for the Artificial Intelligence viewpoint). Most were also effective in tiny isolated groups that lacked the critical mass to follow related fields (Yerkes National Primary Research Center was the only group that seemed to have the resources to do outreach). I remember a talk in the late-70s hosted by the computer science department at U.Michigan in which the speaker referred to work by the co-founder of the meadow of AI and the head of the AI Lab at MIT as “a name named Marvin Minsky”. She was surprised by the audience’s result to that axiom, so after the talk, I clarified to her who Minsky was, but she didn’t seem to grasp that a better ID could add weight and credibility to her talk. I also remember in additional talks similar offhanded references to Noam Chomsky (the dominant figure in Proper Linguistics).

   The book mentions the many times that she was lacking funding for her research and papers that were rejected. This appears to be a combination of her not having adequate mentoring on how to play the game, the severe problems linked with “effective outside the box” and the inherent vagaries of literary research.

   “Proper Science”: Pepperberg alludes to lack of sympathy from traditional natural biologists. This was very real and to some extent understandable: Her work did not lend itself to reliable repeatability within the preferred hard paradigm, but the impression is that the standards were not adapted to the constraints of her work. “Inspection” – which comes before “trailblazing” – provides glimpses of tantalizing research areas and promising paths to achieve levelheaded results and is usually done as hidden parts of larger, customary research programs, thereby building it simple to forget about support for individuals – such as Pepperberg – focusing on such “inspection.”

   Bureaucratic science can limit itself to questions where the results can easily be validated, excluding vital questions. Recent personal example: The local flood control agency encourages schools to become involved with the creeks. Through my civic activities, I had relations to the agency, to the local schools and to biologists at local universities. I thought that a win-win situation would be for the researchers to harness students spread over multiple schools on each of several creeks in exchange for presentations on their research. But, this was a non-starter: I was told that biologists would reject data collected by non-professionals as unreliable. I was shocked because so many science and engineering disciplines routinely produce high-confidence results from networks of low-confidence components. Another example: I was one of many civilian data gatherers in a study of Argentine ants by Stanford Professor Deborah Gordon. At the thank-you reception, she revealed that there had been distress getting the results published for this very reason. By being dismissive of citizen-supported science, a range of appealing questions become too expensive to be practically pursued.

   An literary researcher needs success in both grants and publications, but both are highly dependent on who is selected to review the submission. Most people I know linked with the process acknowledges that too many reviews are partisan, incompetent, and even dishonest (my meadow had a reputation for being particularly terrible). But, the prominent people in the meadow who could combat this have become isolated from this effect and dismiss complaints adage that having multiple reviewers (sometimes only 2) effectively eliminates this problem (despite data to the contrary). Example: faculty members assign reviews to junior graduate students who don’t have the needed breadth and maturity and then submits them under the professor’s name and lacking any quality control. There are faculty members who are infamous throughout their meadow for doing this, but year-in/year-out they continue to get papers and proposals to review (which adds to their resumes). Example: Researchers who are so partisan about their approach that they trash additional approaches, no matter how well customary. Example: Reviewers who reject papers based upon fake “facts.” Personal: My group made an approach work where others had failed. Being aware that readers, including the reviewers, might misremember persons attempts as having been successful, we cited that work _in_the_introduction_ with the reminder that they had failed. None-the-less, our paper was rejected by a reviewer citing that precise work (Could he have read anything beyond the title and abstract?). No matter how egregious the misconduct of the reviewer, there is no appeal. Get hit with this a very few times and your literary career is over, or if you are made of strong stuff such as Dr. Pepperberg, you become an itinerant with constantly dwindling chances of getting a stable position.

   The book mentions multiple times when Pepperberg was lacking funding for her research. This can be bearable if all you need is small more than paper and pencil (for example, non-computer-helped theoretical math). But, for a research project such as hers, especially one that involves grad students, you need to be able to give enough of them enough financial support to allow them to spend enough time on the project to make progress towards their degrees plus you need to be able to send them (in addition to yourself) to conferences to see others’ work, to get broader feedback on their work, and to start apt known. The book slides lightly through these gaps, mentioning only personal sacrifices (such as subsisting on tofu), but I suspect that there was a lot more.

   Aside: Funding gaps are sorry to say common and there are many causes, for example, your funding agency gets de-funded by its funders or be overly optimistic about it budget (as happened to Pepperberg several time). Some organizations are prepared for this; others are less “understanding.” Personal example: A proposal took two years to get funded – one year for the normal cycle and one year for their misplacing some red tape. After two years of work, our system achieved results competitive with systems that had been under continuous development for over 10 years. In briefings to its funders and up its organizational chain, our immediate funder highlighted our system as one of its significant achievements. But, our proposal for extend that work was rejected despite a highly favorable preview by the funder – The funder had chose – after submissions – on a very different emphasis, leaving us stranded. I had been through several funding gaps on various projects and had hurt my health keeping this project going during its first funding gap. The upcoming funding gap forced me to walk away from my career in research (I went into an early-stage start-up as more stable and predictable). People who haven’t been there underestimate the psychological burden of letting “your baby” atrophy/die and of failing the people on your research team, putting their careers/jobs at risk.

   Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5