Dazzled


Camouflage gear is widely used in the armed forces and by many hunters.  Many animal species have developed the technique to a very high degree to either escape predators or to hide from prey. Usually the idea is to blend into the surroundings so that you disappear. The problem is that movement destroys the perception and eyes are usually very sensitive to motion.

We are familiar with tiger stripes and zebra stripes. With tigers it makes sense in that we may not notice them lying in wait in the stripy shade of the forest, but what about zebras? Grasslands are not black and white, so although it might help in stands of dead brushwood, the herd would be clearly visible while munching their way across the plain.

A recent paper by Scott-Samuel et al from the U of Bristol (1) addresses the effect of black and white patterns on the perception of speed. Navies in both world wars had used patterns like these. The reasoning was based on the idea that the range, direction and speed of ships would be difficult to estimate. They used stripes and zig-zags. Hi-tech weaponry makes this idea redundant, but how does this relate to zebras?

The experiments of Scott-Samuel et al looked at the effect of black and white stripes, zig-zags and checks on the accuracy of speed estimation of a target. At high speeds the zig-zag and check patterns caused to speeds to be underestimated by almost 10%. Vertical stripes weren’t quite as good.

So, back to our zebras. If they were galloping full tilt, it might be easier to miss with a rifle shot because of their stripes. Our lions, though, are a bit more hi-tech than the hunter with his gun and can turn and home in. However, it would be confusing to pick the initial target out of a fast moving herd running in various directions. That after all is the main reason for living in a large herd ­– hoping that someone else will be chosen to join the lions for dinner instead of you.


  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0020233

Thanks For The Memory


Networks and networking takes up more and more of ourday. Many of us spend more time than we should on our smartphones, chasing tweets, posting photographs on our cyber wall or even liking someone else’s information.

An interesting facet about the bits of information being tweeted and re-tweeted is the length of time that they are ‘remembered’. By remembered I mean actively running around the system and not stored on a desktop or printed out to be stuck in one of the piles of processed tree composting quietly on the tops of our desks.

The tweets going viral and rushing to and fro around the net is somewhat analogous to our short-term memory, which is usually accurate – even if we don’t admit to it. The bits of information haven’t been stored anywhere to be reconstructed later, when the re-assembly can be quite different from the original.

Our biggest and most complex network is the neuronal network in our skulls.  The length of time a memory is ‘fresh in our mind’ of course varies with the subject, but during that time, the information is actively circulating as electrical signals rushing from neuron to neuron, allowing us to feel smug about that compliment on our driving prowess digitally expressed by the other driver who, somehow, ended up on the verge using sign language through his window.

Putting a brain together is a huge challenge. A first step was reported recently (1). In this case the neuronal net was two-dimensional. The base was a glass chip with a ring-shape protein coat on which fetal rat hippocampal cells were cosseted so that they grew into a ring of about 50 interconnected neurons. An electrical pulse stimulated the network and the activity was followed by fluorescence at the synaptic junctions.

The exciting result is that the activity could be followed for 12 seconds – certainly as long as any of us should be feeling smug about our driving, but a single electrical pulse does not a thought make, nor 50 neurons a brain. But it’s a start.

  1. A. Vishwanathan, G-Q. Bi & H. C. Zeringue, Lab Chip, 11, 1081-1088, (2011). 

We Think, We Do!


Small voltage changes on the scalp are due to electrical currents occurring in the brain. Activity in various parts of the brain is associated with particular processes such as vision, motion or language recognition.  The idea of using the external voltage to control prosthetic devices has been hovering around for the last forty years or thereabouts. A brain-computer interface is required and the possibilities are much more exciting today than when the concept was first proposed.

The idea of expanding the brain-computer interface to improve the performance of normal healthy people has been raised by Wang and Jung of U Cal. San Diego (1) who couple it with an elementary form of crowd wisdom. A small group of wired individuals were given visual cues to do things with their fingers – on a touch screen of course. At the same time the voltages over their post-parietal cortex, was monitored. This is the region of the brain where we try and integrate what we see with what we are going to move. These signals were used to predict which of three targets the participants were supposed to poke.

The response time of the participants was measured and this provides a baseline for the big experiment – the collaborative one in which the feedback from the group could predict the decision of which target should be poked.

The average time it took for an individual to see the cues and then hit the target was a little under half a second with an average hit accuracy of 65%.  Now, when the brain outputs were averaged, that is the target was voted on, the correct target was identified in 45% of the response time with an accuracy of 70%. That means that an artificial finger could have been used to hit the target faster and with a higher accuracy that a real finger.

All of this sounds very geeky, but poking at a target on a touch screen is not the final objective. With the advances in wireless computing and miniaturization, one can imagine a busload of backseat drivers taking us at faster rate through the busy traffic, but more safely and with never a bad word being shouted or a finger being raised in admonition. This is a close to telepathy that most of us will get.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0020422

Shere Khan Steps Up


Big cats look cuddly when small and beautiful in photographs when large. Lions live in family groups and have lots of film footage making their celeb status secure. We sit in front of our TVs cooing over the cutesy cubs climbing over a tolerant dad or playing with his tail. These images make us forget that when a bigger and more handsome dad moves in and kicks the old one out, that the new guy's first bit of housekeeping is to kill the kits.

Most other big cats live a more solitary life and the dad is normally off courting elsewhere while mum brings the kits up. Adult males are usually bad news and are avoided. Tigers are not easy to follow around and study as they prefer the forest to open plains, but they fit the solitary cat pattern.

A feel-good tiger story popped up this week out of the Ranthambore tiger reserve and was reported by the BBC (1). Tiger mom with the rather terse name T5 had a couple of cubs last year and was doing a good job bringing them up. Unfortunately, early February saw T5’s demise. The pair of young cubs were being kept going by the reserve staff providing lunch.

The jungle is very dangerous for little cubs and it was nice to see that their dad, T25, has stepped up and is looking after them. This is very unusual and heartwarming as male tigers frequently see baby tigers as warm snacks if the see them at all.

The story would make a good Disney movie in the vein of Bambi whose dad took him in hand after his mom went to the venison purveyor in the sky. I hope the ‘Beeb’ will keep us updated on their progress. In an age of unremitting ecological bad news, we need more heartwarmers to keep our spirits up.


  1. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-13598386

Petering Out


Many of us have experience of large organizations. We currently work for them, have worked for them, been ruled by them or seen service in them. A pyramid hierarchy is almost universal with one person at the top and increasing number of people in each layer, all the way from senior executives to lowly worker bees like you or me at the base holding up the whole caboodle with our sterling efforts.

The great dream, of course is that we work hard and our merits will be recognized. This in turn leads to our promotion and we move up steadily through the hierarchy as our talents are appreciated. This model of meritocracy is lauded as the best way to run things and is usually only challenged by privately run institutions, whether companies or countries, in which the control is handed down from magnate to offspring and relatives. Even then, below the upper level, meritocracy is rumored to rule.

There is a major problem with this philosophy as Pluchino, Rapisarda and Garafalo of the U di Catania point out in their paper (1) that will shortly appear in Physics A. The fly in the ointment is the good old Peter Principle. You know the one that states that people are promoted to their level of incompetence. Thus our meritocratic pyramid becomes progressively moribund at the higher management levels.

Much better to let people do jobs that they are competent at and make random promotions. This heresy has shown to be robustly correct by simulations made by Pluchino et al. They show that over a 20-year period with random internal promotions filling positions in the level above due to retirements and dismissals, that the company efficiency is markedly higher. A high percentage of the random promotees show unexpected skills.

Those doing great jobs shouldn’t be overlooked, of course. They can be rewarded with increased pay, responsibility or more flexible working arrangements. The concept has similarities to the concept of swarm wisdom that I posted about last April 27. Of course the wild card in all of this is the management consultant who comes in with a big hatchet. Probably a necessary destabilization if a moribund Peter Pyramid has been built, but could be bad if we have promotion by lottery.

For the tycoons amongst us who wish to check out their company, there is a simulation that they can do assigning the number of staff at each management layer along with their levels of competence (2).


  1.  arXiv:1102.2837v2 [physics.soc-ph]
  2. http://oldweb.ct.infn.it/cactus/peter_principle.html

Take Time To Smell The Flowers


With the start of summer, we have the hiking season well underway in the temperate rain forest of the Pacific Northwest. Our familiarity with the Spartan restroom facilities at the parks and trailheads is being renewed, and the Forest Service is to be commended for their efforts to make us comfortable. However, after browsing Karen Cast’s thesis (1), I began to wonder what delights might be awaiting us in future seasons.

I had missed the trend in contemporary culture to make the male restroom a center of sculptural utilitarianism fused with a baroque whimsy. The now well known nudge approach to improving male erraticism employed at Schipol Airport and elsewhere, of an imprinted image of a fly, which is irresistible to any red-blooded male, pales into insignificance compared to the floral designs of a Sorenson or Clark, let alone a brass tuba.

A common reaction to gentlemen who rush into such establishments to be faced with an array of brightly colored orchids which are thirty inches across, is not to water the flowers, but to rush out and drag their wives in to enjoy the floral display. The video links at the endnotes of Ms. Cast’s thesis demonstrate the enjoyment and awe the sights produce.

The aestheticization movement is occurring world-wide and is now clearly out of the closet. There is “The Toilet Bowl Restaurant” in Taipei where the seats are toilet bowls and the plates are miniature squashed toilets. For the more sporty amongst us, there are urinals with soccer goal posts and a ball or even ones with computer games for the addicts.

Advertising agencies have not missed the opportunity either. It is possible to advertise your wares with a picture backed with flashing lights and musical accompaniment in an interactive mode. More exciting, but less interactive, is the Japanese closet where you find yourself sitting on the edge of a virtual ski jump. I suspect the fear factor is supposed to aid you in your endeavors.

A PDF of Ms. Cast’s thesis can be downloaded via a link at the J. Improbable Res. (2) and photographs of Mr. Clark’s beautiful and practical artwork can be found on his website (3).

  1. K. R. Cast, “Examining the Male Restroom as a Site of Visual and Material Culture in the Twenty-First Century,” MA Thesis, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, 2009
  2. http://improbable.com/
  3. http://www.clarkmade.com/urinals.html

Campus Caffeine Junkies


I was greatly encouraged to read (1) that it is not only you or I that need our shot of caffeine to survive the day. A little new beastie, who goes by the name of Pseudomonas putida CBB5, was caught lurking in the flowerbeds of the U of Iowa and living off caffeine. A good mulch of coffee grounds on the grounds are grounds for complaint if new bacteria are going to pop up all over the place without a formal acceptance of admission.

However, this freshman microbe is no java-snob. It will also bite the methyl groups off theobromine, so a tea-leaf mulch is also perfectly acceptable fodder for the little guy. Now that it is well established on campus, it is all set to play an important part in the life of the University.

The laboratories are becoming its new focus, where it is letting the molecular biologists explore its genes. It has in its pockets four new enzymes that it is using to turn coffee and tea waste into its lunch and dinner. With the help of its molecular biologist coworkers, it has lent its genes to some tame E. coli who rushed off to make large quantities of the enzymes.

Once these little guys get working round the clock, they should learn to produce enough of these enzymes to turn coffee, tea and chocolate waste into animal food. The downside is that formaldehyde is produced at the same time, with the danger that the animals may become to well preserved for us to eat. If the animals are too fussy to try something new, plan B is to turn the waste into fuel instead.

  1. Summers et al., Paper 2794, Session 236, 111 Gen. Meet. American Soc. Microbiol. (2011).