Would You Like Relish On That, Sir?


As we all try and recycle to produce less waste for landfill, our population grows and our cities swell. Bigger cities mean more human waste to process to keep our rivers clean and the sludge builds up from the processing plants. Tokyo was having a problem with too much sewage sludge and handed the problem to Professor Ikeda of the Okayama Laboratory.

Like all good scientists when handed a sticky problem, he decided to go back to basics and think outside the box. The sludge had gone through the usual aerobic bacterial treatment, so had lots of proteins from the bacteria. Now, a good piece of Kobe beef is about 63% protein, 25% carbs, 9% minerals and 3% lipids. So far, so good.

Now, the Ah–Ha moment and a good bio–lab. The proteins were extracted and beefed up, so to speak, with some GM soy. Then colored red with regular food dye like the butchers use in the supermarkets. Now comes the tricky bit. These were all stirred up with a secret sauce called a reaction enhancer and placed in an exploder to puff it up a little. The result is extruded, as if by magic, in red slabs of neo-steak.

The planned price is aimed at the normal price for red meat. The Kobe beef industry probably won’t have to feel threatened, unless, I wonder, unless the raw materials are collected solely from heavy beer drinkers. The hamburger market is particularly ripe for the introduction of neo-beef as it is low in fat and carbs. This new product will surely be a recommended part of any good slimming diet.

A good microbrew and poop sliders as an appetizer, yummm! I dare anybody to say "this tastes like chicken."

  1. http://www.digitaltrends.com/international/japanese-scientists-creates-meat-out-of-feces/

Cheers!


When we think of France, one common image that comes to mind is of fine wine, fine cheese and great bread. Of course there’s lots of other things, but these three will keep most of us happy for many a sunny evening at a sidewalk café. Strange that if we drive a few miles across the border to Belgium, our choice naturally shifts to choosing from different beers.

We know that 2,500 years ago the Greeks were trading amphorae full of wine around the Mediterranean. Also wine was the drink of choice of the Romans. Outer Gaul was considered rather barbaric by the well brought up Romans (prior to the demise of the republic and the start of the decline, of course) populated as it was by lots of hairy Celts and such. Beer was much more suitable for rip-roaring evenings of tale telling around the fires by larger than life characters, typified by the French cartoon character Asterix.

A recent dig at Roquepertuse has come up with evidence of brewing from the carbonized remains of malted Barley (1).  The brewers were brewing in 5oo B.C. at this house. Roquepertuse is slap bang in the middle of France and was a Celtic religious center where there are statues of seated warriors looking rather relaxed and Buddha-like. Perhaps they had been depicted enjoying the brew.

The Romans destroyed the place in 124 B.C. I guess the beer drinkers moved north rather than drink the Italian wines. The great French vineyards would not be planted then, of course. But it wouldn’t be long before the locals were on a diet of wheat, wine and dormice while their friends who had moved north were still on barley, beef and beer. Personally, I have to confess to being a cross-eater and consuming all of the above but the dormice.

  1. L. Bouby, P. Boisinnot & P. Marinval, Hum. Ecol., 39, 351, (2011)

Your Cheating Heart


Image – Keith Gerstung


Zebra finches are very pretty birds that live happily in large colonies. They are monogamous – well, usually. In the wild, they cheat on their mate occasionally. It is worth noting, though, that when held in a large aviary, the cheating increases markedly. Aviaries are not so exciting as the wider world out there, I suppose.

The “flighty” nature of the females in a large captive colony has been investigated and reported on by Fortsmeier et al (1). Free males and females went through a speed-dating event to gauge the perky nature of the females and the lotharioc nature of the males. The bedroom habits of a subset of pair-bonded individuals were carefully recorded.

The question to be answered here was “was the reason for their infidelity, nature or nurture?” The results showed a strong tendency for daughters of promiscuous males to be promiscuous in turn. So, they couldn’t help it. But that wasn’t the total reason. There were some errant daughters from fine upright males, so a really good line from a particularly good looking and smooth singing young male could overcome the poor young female’s better judgment.

You may think that the private life of zebra finches should be no ones business but theirs, but it confirms some studies on promiscuity among young adult humans (2).  In their study, Garcia et al showed that the dopamine D4 receptor gene was a good indicator of promiscuous tendency. If there are seven or more repeat alleles in their D4’s, then they are likely to be experienced with “one night stands” and  also more likely to dabble in infidelity.

This is bringing us right back to the good feelings we have of sex, drugs and rock and roll, which, of course, we all imagine that we discovered for ourselves and wouldn’t want to think that we inherited it directly from Mom and Dad.

  1. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/06/03/1103195108.full.pdf 
  2. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0014162

Tired Thumbs


We rarely write letters these days, whether by hand or typed. Job applications and sympathy are probably the only ones. Embracing e-mails was easy, but was also accompanied with a loss of innocence. The contact was almost instant and the only effort to mail was the click of a mouse. The content became short and the language terse as these rapid communications flew back and forth, and still do, of course.

The field of computer-mediated communications (CMC) has expanded from e-mail, bulletin boards and our Facebook wall, to our Tweets and texts. The messages are smaller than ever and consequently terser and pithier. They arrive at and leave our devices every few minutes as the beeps, squeals and songs cry out for attention more fervently than our offspring.

The downside of all this is that we communicate with the wider world as if we are joshing with our friends after a few beers in the bar. Most of the relationships are not “joking relationships” but it is easy to slip into that mode when your keeping your character count down, whether to fit the space available or because your thumbs are tired.

Tired digits or no, we have slipped into a very plain form of CMCing that is visible to most of our contacts. Politeness Research (1) recently devoted a whole issue to the problem of how this plain-speak can easily be offensive or hurtful.

To date, I haven’t heard of anyone being told “you’re fired” on Twitter but I may be well behind the times. Even having your boss post it on your Facebook wall with your “friends” clicking the “Like” or “Dislike” symbols could make a bad experience worse.


  1. Journal of Politeness Research, 6, issue 1, (2010)

A Satisfied Mind


The use of focus groups is widely used by commercial and governmental organizations to decide if we will welcome the latest new thing with open arms and, more importantly, with open wallets. The wisdom of the crowd of choice should give the choice of the crowd as the correct answer. That is the received wisdom at the moment.

The problem is that the focus groups aren’t genuine crowds. They are interactive groups. With interactive groups, wiser heads can prevail. Even crowds can be swayed if the rhetoric is strong enough. Where should we go from here if we really want to know what people really, really want? Heavy duty technology has the answer. It can winkle it out of our little grey cells, whether we want it to or not.

Berns and Moore from Emory U have clearly cracked it. A quick glance at their paper in J Consumer Psych. (1,2) will knock your socks off with one of those “Ah-Ha” moments. Remember the big magnet can see all! They used Functional MRI (fMRI) to tease out of the brains of adolescents which pop music they truly preferred and showed that this correlated with the numbers of units sold over the preceding three year period. Good correlations were obtained and they predicted a third of the big sellers. Pretty good for kids who don’t usually know their own minds!

The part of the brain yielding up the information to the big magnet was the ventral striatum in this pop music experiment. This is where aspects of your emotional and motivational behavior lurk. For example, your addictive behavior has excited signals playing around here, even if the addiction is only to tea.

Clearly, fMRI scans should more successful in predictions than the responses that someone of indeterminate age with a clipboard would get on approaching a group of adolescents on a street corner. But the idea is much more powerful than that. If it’s diddling with your addictive center, the marketing/product idea could be progressively optimized so the alternatives wouldn’t get a look in.

Can you visualize the new world order where we have all got our hearts desire and won’t regret our choices of goodies or governments? Neuroeconomics is clearly the next big thing.

  1. doi:10.1016/j.jcps.2011.05.001
  2. http://improbable.com/ 

In The Blink Of An Eye


While delving around in the literature on the Brain–Computer Interface (BCI), I tripped over a paper from last year on the Human–Computer Interface (HCI). Initially, I missed the differentiation indicated by change in name of the interface.

The BCI responds to electrical signals sensed through the scalp. The more the merrier, as the need is to pinpoint brain activity. The equipment is complex and expensive, although prices would fall if we all had one. The HCI responds to electrical signals measured by five facial electrodes and responds to eye movement. Costs are a factor of ten lower, but in the current research of Usakil et al (1), the signals are used to work a virtual keyboard. Of course, any other system of icons could be used.

The interest for both the BCI and HCI work is to help people with major motion and speech problems. A question that came to mind was would the advances be faster if the computer gaming industry picked up on the possibilities? Their deep pockets and numbers of engineers could make a huge difference. Extra fast inputs to game control that would give our overworked thumbs a rest would be very welcome.

The standard games controller looks so last century to me. The more active inputs where you hold a bat or dance around are much more this century. The thought that you could just give knowing glances and winks to your computer to make it do what you want sounds fun to me.

  1. http://www.hindawi.com/journals/cin/2010/135629/

Garbling Guardedly


The English language can be very precise with a lot of subtle choices of words to give that delicate nuance that the writer has being striving to work into his or her piece of prose while attempting to survive in a lonely garret on the crumbs from the rich publishers table. Meanwhile, hoards of scribblers are churning out impenetrable agreements, conditions of use, assembly instructions, instruction manuals and reports from the hydra-like bureaucracies from around the globe. Some of these works of art have been penned in other than English first and then been fuzzied-up further in translation.

I had better ‘fess up here. I have just taken liberties with the word “fuzzy.”  The temptation to get ahead of myself was too great. 

We are coming up to the first anniversary of the publication of “The Index of Garbledness,” IG, (1). You see the authors are all mathematicians with a skill in Fuzzy Set Theory. The aim of applying their algebraic manipulations was not to give a numerical value to the IG  of the instruction manual that came with your latest delivery of flatpack furniture. No, the ultimate aim was to crack codes.

Pairs of letters, with or without spaces make up the components of the fuzzy sets. The challenge was to select those fuzzy sets that are characteristic of English. These are called Feature Fuzzy Sets. Now 10 of these were chosen, and through the wonders of algebra, a series of texts were put to the test.

Spaces between words were dumped for the tests, as no self-respecting spy would help the opposition by separating the words. Three texts were used. The first had 10 to 50% of the words garbled, the second had 50 to 90% of the words garbled and the last was totally garbled. The IG values for the three cases were 9.75, 22.67 and 28.85.

Many of us who have had notes from offspring at college explaining why the cash you just sent was insufficient for their purposes will have a good feel for what an IG~10 means. The instructions for filling in most government forms can sometimes match that, but my guesstimate for the small print for loans is more like an 15<IG <20. How much longer, I wonder, before we can download an App from the Cloud to scan our Docs to give them an IG value? You developers out there – we need it and we need it now!

  1. P.K. Saxena, P. Yadav,. And G. Mishra, Defence Science Journal, 60, 415, (2010)