Four articles for the month of May 2013. One of them however is about a story in the realm of mathematics so arguably isn’t much of a science article at all.
Older computer users will probably remember the ELIZA chat bot written in the 1960s. It was created only as a early demonstration of natural language processing but many people took it seriously as a virtual psychotherapist. This article from the BBC talks about a real attempt at creating a virtual therapist to help real humans. As such it goes much farther than just printing text output onto a screen. It has an onscreen avatar which it can control, can verbalize its responses, can listen to patients’ voices and observer their body language and so forth.
So many claims of success at achieving cold fusion have been refuted over the years that many people now think it is impossible. This article from ExtremeTech covers the latest such claim and given the secrecy involved, it seems likely that it is just another scam. In this case however, a number of scientists from reputable European universities have been allowed to study the device, though they are still being kept in the dark about how exactly it works, and their preliminary, non-peer reviewed, finding is that it works as advertised. Given the potency of cold fusion as a power source, which would allow it to completely supplant our currently fossil-fuel based energy economy, this is something that deserves a lot of attention.
The next article from the so-called smart rifle. It comes with a color graphics display that allows the user to lock on to a target. The rifle then uses its own suite of sensors to determine when exactly to open fire, taking into account factors such as wind and distance, to ensure a hit. It even comes with Wi-Fi so the data for every shot can be shared online.
Finally here’s an extensive article describing the excitement in the mathematical community surrounding the release of a series of papers by a Japanese mathematician in August 2012. The mathematician in question Shinichi Mochizuki posted the papers onto the Internet claiming that it was a proof of the ABC Conjecture, a number theory problem that has important ramifications for mathematicians, and for all intents and purposes simply walked away, refusing all media interviews and requests to field questions. Other mathematicians of course delved eagerly into the papers, but there are 512 pages in total, and those were filled with new mathematical concepts and constructs that Mochizuki had seemingly invented himself. This meant that no other mathematician has so far been able to verify the correctness of his proof and so many months later the entire community is still waiting with bated breath to see if the proof is correct.
Late this month due to an extended stay in Kuala Lumpur for the Malaysian general elections. Here are the three articles I’ve managed to glean from around the web in April.
This article from the Pacific Standard magazine covers a paper whose authors examined the obituaries of over 1,000 famous people published in The New York Times to determine if there are any patterns in them. They found that the famous people who died earliest were athletes, performers and non-performers who worked in creative fields. The famous people who died later were politicians, businessmen and military officers. The tentative conclusion is that people who work in sports and the performing arts incur psychological and physical costs that curtail their lifespan.
Here’s a link to a paper claiming that vervet monkeys were able to solve a multiplayer coordination “game” in which a captive monkey was trained to open a container holding a large amount of food, but only if the dominant monkeys of a wild troop stayed outside of an imaginary circle away from the food. The wild monkeys were able to infer the correct behavior by observing the trained monkey and receiving feedback from the trained monkey without the intervention of humans.
The Economist has an article talking about the tells that give players away when playing say a game of poker. Most people instinctively believe that the key to not giving away information about the hand you’re holding to other players is in keeping a straight face. As it turns out, experiments show that observers achieve a much higher success rate at correctly predicting the quality of a hand of cards held by another person not by looking at the player’s face but by looking at the player’s hands. This is sure to be a result that will revolutionize poker playing strategies.
I’ve been busy with programming stuff since Algorithms II just started up. The first assignment involved processing WordNet graphs. The second assignment involved implementing seam carving, also known as content-aware resizing. Anyway that’s why I’ve been browsing less lately and so have fewer articles. Here we go:
IBM’s Watson supercomputer made the news in 2011 when it won a special Jeopardy! tournament against human champions. This article covers some of the first commercial applications it is being used for, helping doctors to diagnose diseases in various hospitals in the United States. It also talks about how its size has since shrunk from that of a bedroom to that of a bathroom and how it could eventually be a handheld device. Cool note: Watson uses Princeton’s WordNet to help it parse and understand the English language.
In other computer news, the next big thing in computing is supposed to be quantum computers, and it has been for a while now but actual implementations have proved as elusive as nuclear fusion. This article talks about just such an implementation. It will be used by Lockheed Martin to “create and test complex radar, space and aircraft systems“, i.e. make weapons and works at temperatures close to absolute zero.
The next article is about Russian scientists discovering completely unknown forms of bacterial life deep under the Antarctic ice. The samples come from the underground Lake Vostok, a body of water that lies 3,700 meters under the ice and is thought to have been isolated from the rest of the planet for millions of years. Needless to say the Internet is waiting to see if they have awakened Cthulhu or dug up The Thing.
Finally we have an article about research into whether or not smiling before matches in the Ultimate Fighting Championships affects the chances of the martial artists’ success. Pre-match photographs of the two combatants were analyzed for the presence and intensity of smiles and matched with the results of each fight. The researches found that as expected, fighters who smile and smile more intensely, lose more often. There are various plausible explanations though none are proven. It could be that smiles are an involuntary sign of submission, or that smiling fighters simply aren’t as aggressive.
Due to the Chinese New Year festivities in February, I had less time to browse around for science articles so only three of them this month:
This article in The New York Times covers some very preliminary work on how brain signals can be transferred from one laboratory rat to stimulate another rat to perform an action intended by the original rat. It’s as if the original rat were remote-controlling the other rat, in this case made even more impressive by the fact that the signals were encoded and transmitted over the Internet from one rat to another. As the article goes on to note it is very simplistic and the responses were correct only slightly more often than random chance, but it’s still a step in an intriguing direction.
The next one is from Wired which discusses how dolphins may have personal names of their own, called signature whistles, and may address each other by these names. This suggests that dolphins are able to learn specific signals, as opposed to intuitive ones, and use them to communicate, all without the intervention or guidance of human handlers.
Finally this last one from The Atlantic comes with a video must be seen to be believed. It pulls the wraps off DARPA’s 1.8 Gigapixel video camera that can cover pretty much the entire area of a medium-sized city with enough resolution to spot a person waving their arms on the ground. That’s some serious Big Brother surveillance capability there.
The first month of 2013 has been particularly fruitful so we have a mixed bag of various science related articles. Here goes:
We’ll start with the most important piece of news that made the rounds this month, though more often in editorial than science circles. This Mother Jonesarticle, one of many on the topic, talks about a new explanation of the perplexing rise in America’s crime rate in the 1960s to 1970s and its equally perplexing fall in the 1990s. The answer apparently lies in the use of lead in ordinary petrol. Childhood exposure to lead when it was a common component of petrol in the 1940s and 1950s caused brain damage that subsequently led to increased crime when these children grew up twenty years later. The subsequent shift to unleaded petrol resulted in a new generation who were never exposed, hence the fall in crime rates.
Similarly the next article isn’t so much news from scientists as a recent topic of discussion among economists. In the face of much talk about whether or not innovation has slowed down compared to the past, the blog Sociological Speculationproposes one obvious low-hanging fruit that could dramatically improve human productivity: a way to reduce or entirely eliminate the human need to sleep. The article is more about the effects of such a revolution rather than any specific technology but it does mention Modafinil. A quick check on Malaysia’s own Lowyet.net forums reveals that even Malaysians are asking about its availability, meaning that there is genuine interest in using technological means to wrest more hours out each day.
Next a couple of lighter articles on psychology. First is an article from the BPS Research Digest about how people who are more easily digusted really do have a heightened ability to spot dirt, even if the said dirt is nothing but simulated grey shades on a white background.
Then this article from the New York Times covers a cognitive bias that upon introspection seems quite odd, called the end of history illusion. People readily look back upon their past selves and admit how different they were from how they are now. Yet when asked how they expect their future selves to be, they seem to think that it will be more or less like what they are currently. In other words, it seems as if people lock-in their present states and project that into the future, regardless how old they currently are. Yet the evidence is that people never stop changing and your future self is likely to be as different from what you are currently as you are now different from your past self.
We end this post with a couple of links to just plain cool stuff. This piece of news talks about a military laser recently tested by a German company. It was capable of slicing through 15 mm steel from a kilometer away and accurate enough to shoot down drones that were falling at 50 meters per second from two kilometers away. And remember for every bit of this type of news that makes it out to the general public, you can be sure that there are plenty more that are kept under wraps.
Finally this article from NBC covers what is billed as the largest structure in the universe. It is a structure composed of 73 quasars with supermassive black holes at its centre and is 4 billion light years across at its widest point. Our own Milky Way galaxy is only about 100,000 light years wide.
Just four articles for the last month of December 2012 and one of them isn’t a science article at all but is a retrospective on the year with a perspective that I hope more people would share.
The first one is on a subject that Hiew actually forwarded to me earlier in the month. It’s about how it may be possible to know whether or not the universe that we currently exist in is actually a simulation run on some unimaginably powerful computer. The idea is that if our universe is simulated using an evenly-spaced three-dimensional lattice then the structure of that lattice itself imposes fundamental limits on the energy levels that any particles within the system can possess. And according to the team behind the paper, our universe does indeed have this kind of cut off in the spectrum of high energy particles. Personally I’m leery about this approach because it makes unfounded assumptions about the structure of the simulation. For example, instead of a fixed, regularly-spaced lattice, one could easily imagine a flexible system which could be as dense or as sparse as required to track the particles that are present locally. In any case, for a look at a fictional scenario of this, check out the novella True Names by Benjamin Rosenbaum and Cory Doctorow.
The next link is not an article but rather a letter written in response to an earlier article. The original thesis made two complementary claims: 1) that humanity as a species is becoming less intelligent over time due to the accumulation of mutations that have deleterious effects on intelligence and 2) that if this is so the question of why we managed to evolve intelligence at all in the first place is because modern society shelter humans from the full effects of natural selection. Hunter-gatherer societies it is claimed have greater use for intelligence while in our time even relatively stupid people may thrive and live long enough to procreate. This letter argues against these conclusions stating that mutations occur in individuals and not the entire population as a whole while intelligence is correlated with the number of surviving children in modern societies.
Then we have this article from Smithsonian.com about why humans blink so frequently. As the article states, some blinking is obviously necessary to lubricate the eyeballs, but we seem to blink more often than necessary for these basic functions. It turns out that another reason for blinking is to temporarily shut out the world to give ourselves a moment for introspective thinking. In effect, our minds shift to an altered mental state more conducive to thought at the moment when we blink.
Finally our non-science article is this optimisticretrospective of 2012 from The Spectator. One of my personal pet peeves is people being unreasonably pessimistic about the present and like to view the past through rose-tinted glasses. But as this article reminds us 2012 has really been the best year ever for humanity as a whole. Poverty has never been lower. On a global scale, inequality is down too. Far fewer people die from violence or disease. And despite doomsayers’ repeated proclamations of peak oil, we live in an age of energy abundance not scarcity. So here’s looking forward to 2013 being an even better year!
Majorly late with this one, I know. I’ve been in Kuala Lumpur for extended period lately. But better late than never and I’m determined to keep this blog alive if updates now are less frequent. So let’s get on with it.
This first one is a bit trite and still a truth worth keeping in mind. It’s from the BPS Research Digest and talks about how people tend to think of their own names as being rarer, and therefore more special, than they really are. Also connected is the finding that people with genuinely rare names tend to be happier with their names, further confirming the observation like to be special. But I think people should be careful about going too far and end up choosing names that are just plain ridiculous.
The next article from the website MNT and covers the subject of how people might be able to solve mathematical problems unconsciously. The study in questioned distracted the participants with another stimuli while an arithmetic equation or a verbal expression was displayed. The result, to no one’s surprise, is that the so-called unconscious stimuli primed participants to be more likely to respond with the correct answer. Personally I find this particular piece of research to be fairly dubious. The mathematically problem given as an example seems to simple that it should be solvable by reflex so it’s not clear to me what the news here is.
Next up is a feature from The New Yorker which talks about the world’s grandest computer simulation of a brain. The initial target is to simulate the brain of a macaque monkey on a collection of ninety-six of the world’s fastest computers. It’s more of an overview of this area of research than this particular project since we have only the announcement and not much else to go on. Count me in as one of the skeptics on this one. I have a feeling that brain computation involves more than just neurons and ignoring the rest of the complex biochemistry going on is a mistake.