Category: Science

This is a rechargable electrified tennis-racket for swatting flies
and mosquitos: "Just press on the switch and a live electric current flows
through the inner mesh and the moment a mosquito, bug or fly comes touches it,
it gets a electric shock and gets zapped.

My only question.  Does it work on children?

Thanks to Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing Blog.

Smoking cessation programmes that use text messaging can double the
quit rate in young smokers, according to a clinical trial in New
Zealand.

The
trial led by Anthony Rodgers, director of the Clinical Trials Research
Unit at the University of Auckland, NZ, is the first to test the use of
mobile phones as an aid to giving up smoking.

In
the study, over 850 young smokers who wanted to quit received text
messages, such as: “Write down 4 people who will get a kick outta u
kicking butt. Your mum, dad, m8s?”

The
smokers, whose average age was 25 years old, received five messages a
day for a week before their designated “quit day”, and for the
following four weeks. Then they received three messages a week for a
further five months. They were also given one month of free personal
texting, starting on their quit day, as an incentive.

A
similar group of young smokers received one month free texting six
months after their designated quit day, but no text messages designed
to help them quit.

Six
weeks after quit day, 28% of the group that received the texts claimed
to have quit, compared with 13% of the control group. To check these
self-reported results, the team analysed levels of cotinine, a nicotine
breakdown product, in the saliva of one in 10 of the participants. The
results were the same for both groups – about half of those who claimed
to have given up were actually still smoking. Quit rates appeared to
remain high after six months, although the results are less certain
because many of the participants were lost to follow up.   

   

Repetition does matter; here is the story.

At lunch the other day Robin Hanson offered a perceptive comment on marriage and divorce (I paraphrase).

We tend to remember slights and frustrations more than favors and kindnesses.  So inevitably in a marriage the weight of negative remembrances of thing past comes to exceed that of the positive.  Divorce is the result.

The secret to a good marriage, therefore is selective forgetfulness.  Coincidentally some psychologists have recently come to the same conclusion.  The couples who stay together are the delusional ones – the ones who look at their past with rose-colored glasses.

Psychologists believe that what they are observing in couples who endorse these and similar sentiments are strongly selective memories that ignore inevitable negative events over the course of marital history. Maybe a distorted view of your marriage that emphasises the positive and forgets the negative is crucial to accounting for who stays and who flees when it comes to relationship endurance.

Similarly:

A kindred spirit is someone who appears especially to understand us and uniquely share our experiences, probably because they see the world they way we do and are therefore, in important respects, just like us.

Murray’s group measured marital partners’ personalities, values and day to day feelings and compared these to marital satisfaction. Those in the happiest and most stable marriages were those most likely to believe their partners were most like them – that is, "kindred spirits" – even when objective comparison of personality found that the similarity was much more imagined than real.

Meanwhile Bryan over at EconLog offers some useful ideas on how to remember and how to forget.

…corvids and psittacines [have cognitive powers superior to most apes].  That’s really the culmination of studies beginning in the
1970’s (most famously Irene Pepperberg’s studies on grey parrots and Herrnstein’s on pigeons) and is something that has only just become, I think, mainstream biological thought around now: but it rests on as firm experimental obsrvation as any studies of primates (certainly of orangutans).  Corvids and psittacines simply outperform even chimpanzees in many ways.  …On the other hand, the selective pressures on birds are pretty nasty. Their biochemistry seems a hell of a lot better than ours (witness the longevity of these things).  So perhaps it’s an alternate route to great intelligence: if you know that say four out of five young are going to die anyway you can take the risk of 80% of the offspring being quickly developed morons.  I don’t know enough about the field to validate that but I think it’s an interesting idea.

Christof Koch, in his The Quest for Consciousness, claims that dual strategy beings can outcompete zombies.  Yes parts of the brain are designed for rapid, single purpose use, as you might find in a zombie.  But other more integrative and judgmental parts require more powerful central processing units, namely your conscious mind.  In his view consciousness is not just an epiphenomenal feeling, as in much analytical philosophy, but rather it is a functional set of qualia.  In other words, consciousness helps you interpret "meaning" and thus use information about the natural world more effectively.  Consciousness allows you to summarize the present state of the world in abbreviated fashion and to make plans on that basis.  Consciousness is a sometimes-slow but always flexible strategy. 

Here is one good summary of the argument; read this excerpt:

Consider the following situation: You see an outstretched hand, but instead of shaking it immediately, which instinct would dictate, you are required to close your eyes and wait several seconds before doing so. Koch and Crick suspect that without a short-term memory, a zombie could not do this task, or any other in which an artificial delay was imposed between “an input and the associated motor output.” Absence, like presence, has a neurological signature, and Koch imagines a kind of “conscious-ometer” that could be used to measure who and what is consciously aware.

Note also that efficient zombie-like behavior often requires conscious learning in the first place.  Isaac Stern might best play the violin by "letting go," but he first needed many hours of conscious practice to reach this state.  So consciousness and zombie behavior are often complements rather than substitutes.

If you are interested in these issues, this book is the place to start.  Try also this skeptical response.

I was skeptical when my wife handed me a small plastic toy saying, "think of something, after twenty questions it will guess."   But twenty questions later it answered correctly.  Weird and a little freaky.

20Q is featured today in Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools.  He provides some interesting brackground information:

Burned into its 8-bit chip is a neural net that has been learning for 17
years. Inventor Robin Burgener programmed a simple neural net on a DOS machine
1988. He taught it 20 questions about a cat. He than passed the program around
to friends on a floppy and had them challenge the neural net with their yes/no
answers to the object they had in mind. The neural net learns only when it plays
a game; no data is added except for the yes/no answers of visitors. So the more
people who test it, the more they teach it. In 1995 Burgener put the now robust
neural net onto the new web where anyone could play it (that is, train it) 24
hours a day. And they did. Burgener’s genius was to turn the hard tedious work
of training a neural net into a fun game for humans.

Last year, after 1 million rounds of 20 questions online, the neural net had
accumulated 10 million synaptic associations. It has a 73% success rate of
guessing what you thought. Burgener then compressed the 20Q code to run on a
chip, and had the neural net select 2,000 of the most popular 10,000 objects it
then knew about. He then had the neural net select out the most useful 250,000
synaptic connections related to those 2,000 objects, and hard wired that
learning into the chip in the orb….

The toy is remarkable. Because it is so small, so autonomous, its
intelligence is shocking to the unprepared. Most children can’t stump it, and if
you stick to objects it will stump smart adults about 80% of the time with 20
questions and most of the time with an additional 5 questions. I love to watch
people’s reactions when they think of a "hard" thing, and after a seemingly
irrational set of questions you are convinced are dumb, the sly ball tells you
what you had in mind….

right now, for ten bucks, you can get an amazing little artificial
intelligence, about as smart as an insect — but an insect which specializes in
guessing what object you are thinking of. And in that part of the brain, it’s
smarter than you are.

Thanks also to Boing Boing Blog for the link.

Natural evolution has produced the eye, butterfly wings and other wonders that would put any inventor to shame. But who’s to say evolution couldn’t be improved with the help of a little technology?

So argues James Auger in his controversial and sometimes unsettling book, Augmented Animals. A designer and former research associate with MIT Media Lab Europe, Auger envisions animals, birds, reptiles and even fish becoming appreciative techno-geeks, using specially engineered gadgets to help them overcome their evolutionary shortcomings, promote their chances of survival or just simply lead easier and more comfortable lives.

On tap for the future: Rodents zooming around with night-vision survival goggles, squirrels hoarding nuts using GPS locators and fish armed with metal detectors to avoid the angler’s hook…

"To offset the cruelty of factory-farming, routine implants of smart microchips in the pleasure centers may be feasible," says David Pearce, associate editor of the Journal of Evolution and Technology. "Since there is no physiological tolerance to pure pleasure, factory-farmed animals could lead a lifetime of pure bliss instead of misery. Unnatural? Yes, but so is factory farming. Immoral? No, certainly not compared to the terrible suffering we inflict on factory-farmed animals today."

There is more here, and yes Wired is essential reading.

Click through here.  Yes I know most of you don’t look at the links, but this is not to be missed.  Let’s hope it is not too late to save Hubble as a working piece of equipment.

An important new paper, Accelerated telomere shortening in response to life stress, provides some dramatic evidence consistent with the telomere theory of aging.

Here is the abstract:

Numerous studies demonstrate links between chronic stress and
indices of poor health, including risk factors for cardiovascular
disease and poorer immune function. Nevertheless, the exact
mechanisms of how stress gets ”under the skin” remain elusive.
We investigated the hypothesis that stress impacts health by
modulating the rate of cellular aging. Here we provide evidence
that psychological stress–both perceived stress and chronicity of
stress–is significantly associated with higher oxidative stress,
lower telomerase activity, and shorter telomere length, which are
known determinants of cell senescence and longevity, in peripheral
blood mononuclear cells from healthy premenopausal women.
Women with the highest levels of perceived stress have telomeres
shorter on average by the equivalent of at least one decade of
additional aging compared to low stress women. These findings
have implications for understanding how, at the cellular level,
stress may promote earlier onset of age-related diseases.

…a raft of experiments by Mr. Csányi’s team and another led by Michael Tomasello of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Leipzig, Germany, showed that dogs were far more skilled then either chimps or wolves at using human social cues to find food. Those results left researchers with this question: If dogs can pick up on human cues, do they turn the tables and put out cues for humans to understand?

To find out, Mr. Csányi and Réka Polgárdi, a graduate student, went to the homes of Budapest’s many dog owners. After introducing the researchers to the dogs, the owners would leave the room. Then the dogs would watch Mr. Csányi hide a piece of food somewhere inaccessible to them. When the owners returned, the dogs would run or glance back and forth from master to hiding place, clearly signaling its location. More-recent experiments substituted nonfood objects and had similar results, which suggests the dogs may be placing themselves in their owner’s shoes, and realizing that the humans are ignorant of the object’s location.

The Hungarian researchers also discovered that dogs excel at imitating humans. In one of the laboratories down the hall from Mr. Csányi’s office, Zsófia Virányi, a post-doctoral researcher, demonstrates with Tódor, an enthusiastic little mutt that she hand-raised to serve as a member of a control group for another experiment. Tódor sits attentively as Ms. Virányi spins around in a circle and comes to a stop. "Csinal!" or "you do it!" she says, at which Tódor does a little 360 on the tiled floor and lets out an enthusiastic bark. He easily imitates Ms. Virányi’s bowing and lifting an arm (or paw, in his case).

Here is the full story, which contains much, much more.

The title of the post is not an oxymoron.  The Amish have been enthusiastic adopters of genetically modified crops.  Ironically, the higher productivity of the crop substitutes for the fact that the Amish harvest it by hand.  Less ironically the GM crops use fewer pesticides and herbicides.

Amish scholars say genetically enhanced
crops are not inconsistent with the simple life that is central to Amish
beliefs because it helps them continue their ties
to agriculture, allowing families to
work together.

Hat tip to Stewart Brand’s recent essay Environmental Heresies which also contains this insight on a question that has long bothered me.

Why was water fluoridization rejected by the political right and
“frankenfood” by the political left? The answer, I suspect, is that
fluoridization came from government and genetically modified (GM) crops
from corporations. If the origins had been reversed–as they could have
been–the positions would be reversed, too.

Seth Roberts is a psychologist at Berkeley who for the past twelve years has obsessively kept data on himself in an effort to generate and test new ideas.  In a recent paper in Behavioral and Brain Sciences he explains some of his methods and findings (a number of comments, most of which I think are blah, blah, blah are also included).

Roberts, for example, drank 5 liters (!) of water every day for 4 months to test a theory of weight loss (he lost weight but he couldn’t keep up the drinking!).  He also began standing for more than 8 hours a day, initially to test the affect on weight loss but instead he found that standing, especially 10 hours or more a day, dramatically improved his sleep.  Eventually, he did find a novel form of weight loss involving fructose water (read the paper).  Some of his findings seem bizarre, such as watching faces on tv in the morning improved his mood the next day but lowered it that night. 

It’s tempting to dismiss all of this (especially before reading the paper and looking at the care with which Roberts kept his data) and clearly, I wouldn’t take any experiment with 1 subject as definitive.  Roberts, however, is making the case that careful measurement of self-response is a way of generating new ideas.  Roberts, for example, did not set out to test the idea that viewing faces improved mood this was a surprising discovery. 

A virtue of self-experimentation is that it doesn’t take a million dollar lab and a bevy of graduate students, with some willpower and a willingness to carefully document and measure results, anyone can do cutting-edge science.   

Here is one attempted answer to the dark energy puzzle; it implies that black holes do not exist, vindicating an old view of Einstein’s.