Category: Science
Papers about robot vacuum cleaner personalities
There are some, and they are important:
In this paper we report our study on the user experience of robot vacuum cleaner behavior. How do people want to experience this new type of cleaning appliance? Interviews were conducted to elicit a desired robot vacuum cleaner personality. With this knowledge in mind, behavior was designed for a future robot vacuum cleaner. A video prototype was used to evaluate how people experienced the behavior of this robot vacuum cleaner. The results indicate that people recognized the intended personality in the robot behavior. We recommend using a personality model as a tool for developing robot behavior.
A summary discussion is here, interesting throughout. From this paper you can surmise a bit about the origins of religion, the seen and the unseen, and the demand for conspiracy theories, in addition to robot vacuum cleaners.
There is No Great Stagnation
Greenhouses lined with genetically modified marijuana sit on a mountainside just an hour ride from Cali, Colombia, where farmers say the enhanced plants are more powerful and profitable.
One greenhouse owner said she can sell the modified marijuana for 100,000 pesos ($54) per kilo (2.2 pounds), which is nearly 10 times more than the price she can get for ordinary marijuana.
Here is more and for the pointer I thank MT.
*Unnatural Selection*
The author is Mara Hvistendahl, and the subtitle is Choosing Boys over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men. It will make my best books of 2011 list, excerpt:
A recent paper in the journal Reproductive Health Matters states, “For women attempting to have a son and experiencing pressure to fulfill their ‘womanly duty’ by having a male child, sex-selective abortion can be extremely empowering.” The other, more tragic factor…is that women know best just how difficult it is to be female.
…Liao Li also tells me she prefers daughters. “Girls are very good,” she says. “They’re soft. And they take care of you when you’re older.” But she aborted two female fetuses, she intimates, because having a son is crucial to keeping up appearances: “If you don’t have a boy, you lose face.”
Women have become, in a sense, their own worst enemies. Development, remember, was supposed to improve the lot of women — and in many areas it does. But when it comes to reproduction, the opposite happens: women use their increased autonomy to select for sons.
Here is one good review. I also learned from this book how prevalent the sex imbalance problem is becoming in some parts of the Balkans.
Electric Cars in Israel
In 2009 Shai Agassi made a splash at TED with his plans for electic cars. Agassi’s innovative idea was to make the batteries swappable; swappable batteries and swap-station infrastructure mean that electric cars are as mobile as gas. Even more importantly, it makes possible a pure electric 
car which is much cheaper to make than a hybrid. The news out of Israel is that Agassi’s company BetterPlace is within months of rolling this out in Israel and in Denmark just months after that. Indeed, you can see charge stations like this around Jerusalem.
In addition, some gas stations are geared up to be swap stations. A swap is entirely automatic and takes 3 minutes, less than the time to fill up. Without swapping you can travel 100 miles, so for most people on most days they won’t even need a swap since they will charge at home and and at work.
I am told that there are already 90,000 pre-orders for the vehicles, a huge number for Israel. Are Israeli’s super-green? No, the big selling point is that the cars are not expensive to buy and, of course, cheap to run.
Here is the battery swap in action:
I learned some of this talking with a betterplace executive so take it with a grain of salt. Nevertheless, I expect this will be big news a few months from now.
Police dogs can distinguish identical twins
Being an identical twin might seem like a great way to fool a DNA test and get away with the perfect crime. But furry forensic experts can make sure justice is served. In a new study, researchers instructed a group of children, including two sets of identical twins and two sets of fraternal twins, to swab the insides of their cheeks and place the swabs in glass jars. Working with ten police German shepherds and their handlers from the Czech Republic police, the researchers then ran a mock crime scene investigation. The handler presented one twin’s scent to the dog and then told it to go find the matching scent in a lineup of seven jars, which included the other twin’s scent. In twelve trials per dog, none of them ever identified the wrong twin as a match, the researchers report online this week in PLoS ONE, even though the children lived in the same home, ate the same food, and had identical DNA. No word yet on whether these dogs will be getting their own CSI spinoff.
The story is here and the paper is here, for the pointer I thank Michelle Dawson.
“Agitated honeybees exhibit pessimistic cognitive bias”
Via Michelle Dawson, here is a new paper by Melissa Bateson, et.al.:
Whether animals experience human-like emotions is controversial and of immense societal concern [1,2,3]. Because animals cannot provide subjective reports of how they feel, emotional state can only be inferred using physiological, cognitive, and behavioral measures [4,5,6,7,8]. In humans, negative feelings are reliably correlated with pessimistic cognitive biases, defined as the increased expectation of bad outcomes [9,10,11]. Recently, mammals [12,13,14,15,16] and birds [17,18,19,20] with poor welfare have also been found to display pessimistic-like decision making, but cognitive biases have not thus far been explored in invertebrates. Here, we ask whether honeybees display a pessimistic cognitive bias when they are subjected to an anxiety-like state induced by vigorous shaking designed to simulate a predatory attack. We show for the first time that agitated bees are more likely to classify ambiguous stimuli as predicting punishment. Shaken bees also have lower levels of hemolymph dopamine, octopamine, and serotonin. In demonstrating state-dependent modulation of categorization in bees, and thereby a cognitive component of emotion, we show that the bees’ response to a negatively valenced event has more in common with that of vertebrates than previously thought. This finding reinforces the use of cognitive bias as a measure of negative emotional states across species and suggests that honeybees could be regarded as exhibiting emotions.
China at the frontier
Following previous efforts (http://www.genomics.cn/en/news_show.php?type=show&id=644 and http://www.genomics.cn/en/news_show.php?type=show&id=647), BGI, based in Shenzhen, China, and its collaborators at the University Medical Centre Hamburg-Eppendorf, as well as a growing number of researchers around the world “crowdsourcing” this data, are exploring in-depth the European disease outbreak helping trace the origin and spread of the lethal E. coli strain. Different sources have reported that two strains, 01-09591 from Germany isolated in 2001 and 55989 from Central Africa in 2002, are highly similar to the 2011 outbreak strain. Based on the most recently curated assembly publically released by BGI yesterday (ftp://ftp.genomics.org.cn/pub/Ecoli_TY-2482), these strains have an identical Multi Locus Sequence Typing (ST678) based on analysis of seven important “housekeeping” genes*.
BGI (formerly known as Beijing Genomics Institute) was founded in 1999 and has become the largest genomic organization in the world. With a focus on research and applications in the healthcare, agriculture, conservation and bio-energy fields, BGI has a proven track record of innovative, high-profile research which has generated over 178 publications in top-tier journals such as Nature and Science.
Does this technique reliably increase your fluid intelligence?
I am passing this along without endorsing it (travel prevents me from going through the research):
The n-back task involves presenting a series of visual and/or auditory cues to a subject and asking the subject to respond if that cue has occurred, to start with, one time back. If the subject scores well, the number of times back is increased each round. The task can be done with dual auditory and visual cues, or with just one or the other.
A few years ago, Jonides and his colleagues Martin Buschkuehl, Susanne Jaeggi, and Walter Perrig demonstrated that dual n-back training increased performance on tests of fluid intelligence. But the current work extends that finding in several ways.
“These new studies demonstrate that the more training people have on the dual n-back task, the greater the improvement in fluid intelligence,” Jonides said. “It’s actually a dose-response effect. And we also demonstrate that the much simpler single n-back training using spatial cues has the same positive effect.”
In the so-called real world, who actually gets this kind of training?:
According to Jonides, the n-back task taps into a crucial brain function known as working memory—the ability to maintain information in an active, easily retrieved state, especially under conditions of distraction or interference. Working memory goes beyond mere storage to include processing information.
For the pointer I thank MR commentator JamieNYC.
Caplan citing Harford
* Harford’s own footnote: “Donald Green, Professor of Political Science at Yale, tells me that one question in the social sciences has been thoroughly tested with field experiments: how to get out the vote. So politicians can use rigorous evaluation methods when it suits them.”
The link is here.
The Brazil-Bolivia border
Who thinks of that region as having been important for the technological progression of mankind? Yet it was, as Charles Mann explains:
Agricultural geneticists have long argued that the area around the railroad route — the Brazil-Bolivia border — was the development ground for peanuts, Brazilian broad beans…, and two species of chili pepper… But in recent years evidence has accumulated that the area was also the domestication site for tobacco, chocolate, peach palm (Bactris gasipaes, a major Amazonian tree crop), and most important, the worldwide staple manioc (Manihot esculenta, also known as cassava or yuca).
That is from Mann’s forthcoming book 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, reviewed enthusiastically here.
The wisdom of Josh Barro
Unfortunately, it’s also possible (as many other voices on Wall Street are warning) that a default would permanently raise Treasury spreads, drive investors to find alternative safe havens, cause a double-dip recession, and unleash various other evils. So, if they are willing to create the possibility of a default, Republicans in Congress are willing to expose America to severe downside risk.
It’s important to step back and consider the stakes here. Republicans say it is important, above all else, to rein in federal government spending. But the risk with excessive spending is not that government will literally become unaffordable or that we will be unable to service our debts. The United States has tremendous available fiscal capacity, as demonstrated by significantly higher tax burdens in most other first-world countries. The real risk of elevated spending is that we’ll adopt a permanently higher level of taxation.
That is a risk, but not a catastrophic one. While there is a link between government spending and economic growth, it is not as strong as conservatives like to believe. For example, Mueller and Stratmann find that a one percentage point rise in government spending as a share of GDP will tend to reduce annual GDP growth by a bit under one-twentieth of a percentage point. If we take Simpson-Bowles as an example of the sort of deficit deal that might be achieved in the medium term without the need to flirt with a bond default, then we’re talking about a difference of one to two points of GDP in government spending compared to an all-Republican plan.
There is also nothing special about government spending as a share of GDP as opposed to other determinants of economic growth, such as rule of law, freedom of contract, immigration policy, free trade and the structure of the tax code—not to mention policies on infrastructure, land use and education. Basically, we could make up a sub-0.1 percentage point hit to long term GDP growth with policy improvements elsewhere.
Which is to say, it does not make sense to create a risk that U.S. Treasuries will be dislodged as the world’s safe-haven investment as a strategy to shift the size of government by a percentage point of GDP or two. Winning this fight is not so important that it makes sense to throw caution to the wind, but that is what Republicans in Congress appear willing to do. The gamble looks even worse when you consider that a debt-limit-impasse-gone-wrong would not necessarily lead to Republicans getting their way on the long-term fiscal adjustment.
The full post is here.
Star Children: Return to Home
DARPA, believe it or not, has a request for information on what they call the 100 YEAR STARSHIP™ STUDY.
Neither the vagaries of the modern fiscal cycle, nor net-present-value calculations over reasonably foreseeable futures, have lent themselves to the kinds of century-long patronage and persistence needed to definitively transform mankind into a space-faring species.
The 100 Year Starship™ Study is a project seeded by DARPA to develop a viable and sustainable model for persistent, long-term, private-sector investment into the myriad of disciplines needed to make long-distance space travel practicable and feasible….
We are seeking ideas for an organization, business model and approach appropriate for a self-sustaining investment vehicle. The respondent must focus on flexible yet robust mechanisms by which an endowment can be created and sustained, wholly devoid of government subsidy or control, and by which worthwhile undertakings—in the sciences, engineering, humanities, or the arts—may be awarded in pursuit of the vision of interstellar flight….
Responses should describe the:
• Organizational structure;
• Governance mechanism;
• Investment strategy and criteria; and
• Business model for long-term self-sustainment.
The best model we have of such an organization is a religion. Business organizations such as the Hudson’s Bay Company have occasionally lasted hundreds of years but more by accident than by design. Universities have lasted hundreds of years, although often with government support and vague missions. A few foundations have lasted for a long period of time but often with big mission changes.
Many religions, however, have maintained themselves more or less intact for over a thousand years. Even in the modern age, new religions appear to be quite capable of forming and maintaining themselves for long periods of time. Mormonism has been on-going for nearly two centuries, the Unification Church and Scientology (n.b. started by a science-fiction writer) have been on-going for over half a century. A religion with a million or so adherents can easily last for hundreds of years while generating substantial revenues and while maintaining focus.
Humanity was born of the stars, our very atoms forged in the heart of a million suns. It is in the stars that we lost travelers will find our true home and our true destiny. The twinkling lights of the yawning sky gently call to us each night to return to the place of our birth. We must answer that call. Star-children, return to home.
(See what I mean? This could work. )
Hat tip: Daniel Kuehn.
What I’ve been reading
Science-Mart: Privatizing American Science, by Philip Mirowski.
Electric Roads
Here is an interesting idea.
…what if the energy storage burden was shifted from our overworked cars to the road?
…Electric vehicles, or EVs, could pick up small amounts of electricity as they drive over charging pads buried under the asphalt and connected to the electrical grid. Researchers say that a continuously available power supply would allow EVs to cut battery size as much as 80 percent, drastically reducing vehicle cost.
“Basically you get power directly from the grid to the motors as the car moves,” said Hunter Wu, a Utah State researcher who was recruited from The University of Auckland in New Zealand, where the technology was pioneered, to further develop the concept. “You can travel from the West Coast to the East Coast continuously without charging.”…
Natural Gas
The graph is from Peter Tertzakian who notes:
To put this in perspective, 1,000 Tcf of natural gas contains the equivalent energy to 166 billion barrels of oil – a staggering amount considering that the discovery of 10 billion barrels of conventional oil these days is a rare occurrence, worthy of many headlines…
Estimates of recoverable shale gas have doubled in just the past year and shale gas is only part of the supply with the total being 2,552 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) of potential natural gas resources in the U.S. alone. Per unit of electricity, burning natural gas results in significantly fewer carbon dioxide emissions than coal. It is possible, however, that fracking may leak more methane to the atmosphere so the net climate benefit is unclear, at least given current methods of development.
Hat tip: Paul Kedrosky.