Momentary Lapses


Leaving aside the Theory of Relativity (Special or General), most of us experience time as an elastic dimension. We have all, at one time or another, presented ourselves at a reception desk and been told “just a moment, sir/madam/ miss/ sonny or some such epithet”. But that moment is never properly defined.

It is the same when a family member has purloined you favorite gadget. You ask how long they will be using it for and you get the reply “how long is a piece of string?” Well, if someone hands me a piece of string, I know exactly how long it is, but your sibling is dissembling. What they really are saying is “how long is a piece of stretchy elastic?” A very different thing and the situation will often end badly.

Telephone robots are particularly good at handing you the flexible moment. “Please continue to hold, your call is very important to us” and then the same boring musak is pumped into your ear, is a common experience for most of us as we desperately wait for help from a technical service guru.

Let us now turn that situation around and look at the quandary from a robot’s point of view.

Don’t be unsympathetic, now. 

This can be a real problem for a service-bot. With aging populations in many countries, the future is for more of us to have home helps in the form of robots. Visualize the situation when our care-bot is about to serve our dinner and we tell it to “wait a moment” as we shuffle off to the bathroom. How long should it wait before it decides that there is a problem? Kennedy and Trafton of the Naval Research lab. address this  in a new paper (1).

Your care-bot has to substitute calculation for common sense. In the above example, it would have to know your shuffle rate, what you were up to in the bathroom and how long that should take. I can imagine that your magazines and crossword puzzles would disappear from that room in the house!

The algorithm is clearly complex with a decision tree so the care-bot just waits, puts your dinner back in the oven, in the refrigerator or into the dog while it goes on the back porch for a sulk. Or, finally, should it drop everything and rush to break down the door and shock you back into the real world?

  1. W.G.Kennedy & J.G.Trafton, Int. J. Soc. Robot. DOI: 10.1007/s12369-011-0098-7

To The Point

Telling our dog where the ball is after we’ve thrown it and it is still standing there with its tongue hanging out, looking at us with adoring and expectant eyes like we had magical powers to conjure it back into our hand, is one of the joys of communing with animals. It is only equaled when the dog delivers it back, well chewed and slippery for us to throw it away again.

After a frustrating morning of such doggy responses when we have had to retrieve half the balls ourselves, we go home and explain to our next visitor that our pet understands every word we say. But what does our average dog think when you point and say fetch or seek? Scheider et al have set out to seek an answer to this big question or something close to it. They studied dogs responses to pointing gestures and the tone of instructions in looking for hidden treats.

Forty-eight dogs took part and were asked to find food in a room. The tester pointed to where there should be food and told the dog “there” either in a high pitch friendly voice or a deeper bossy voice. As a control dogs were told with no pointing.

Results? If dogs had found a treat in the room previously, they searched diligently in the direction of the pointing finger. If there was no pointing, they just looked and waited for the tester to get their act together. They also worked harder when the friendly voice was used – don’t we all.

The interesting control was that the dogs that hadn’t had treats in the test room, didn’t think too much about the pointing. They just looked at the mad scientist and waited for the little black van to come and collect them. Before a dog will go running off in the direction of a pointing finger, it expects to know why – don’t we all.

Of course, you have to be consistent. If it expects food and all it finds is a soggy ball, it may instigate the call for the little black van. A dog does after all have its expectations as well a sense of entitlement.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0021676

Put Your Thinking Cap On


Running around and doing what we like is what we associate with free will. What on earth were you thinking about when you did that is a question that we are sometimes faced with afterwards. Mostly, we don't have any idea. It all went with the moment.

Then as we sit like gods on Mount Olympus watching our lab mice or rats run about in our mazes trying to solve problems, we ask the same question: "what are they thinking?" We can make a start on this quest if we know which parts of their tiny minds are flashing electric pulses from neuron to neuron. The conventional solution is to stick electrodes into the brain and wire the beasties up to computers. However, running around and behaving normally must be hard to do with thick heavy cables hanging off your head.

A new solution is now available. A large multinational team have come up with mouse and rat-sized thinking caps (1). The electrodes are still obligatory, but the hats have multi-channel radio transmitters kitted out with re-chargeable batteries. So after a day or so of running around, the mouse or rat is simply plugged into the lab electricity supply for a while and they're all ready to go on the next set of experiments.

The hats are used to follow the brain activity of, to quote the authors, "freely behaving mice and rats." I'm not sure how freely behaving I would be if I was trying to solve problems with a big hat containing a radio transmitter and battery of the same relative size as their mice are wearing. I would be terribly self-conscious and feeling definitely geeky if not a tad exploited. Certainly, my compensation would have to be increased if I were to play ball.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0022033

Robotic Dribbling


World Cup football, that is soccer, is back in the news. The tournament, with all its drama, with its tears of joy or disappointment, is being played out in Istanbul. It is time for the World RoboCup.

Disaster for the UK, though. They were knocked out during the early stages and didn’t make it into the final series. The good news is that the manager won’t be sacked. I would venture a thought. The team were all French nationals. They were in heavy training in Edinburgh, but nevertheless one might question their loyalty just a smidge.

This is four-a-side football and most are bipedal. There is a class for robots with wheels, but although it results in a faster game, it doesn’t quite have the magic of one biped shoving another over or diving to save a goal. They weren’t supposed to shove each other over any more than their human copycats are, and they are heavily penalized for it.

So far the kicking is fairly gentlemanly. In due course this will increase. It may take some time before they will “bend it like Beckam.” They have until 2050. That is THE DATE when the plan is for a team of robots to beat a FIFA people team. No money will be changing hands of course.

When I picture a team of robots trotting out onto the hallowed turf at Wembley and beating the pants off England, I feel the carpet moving. I think that we’ll need to focus on cricket. The laws of cricket (ah, you had forgotten that cricket has laws and not little things like rules) will confuse the robotic players. Also when they break for tea, they will have no end of trouble with the strawberry jam and Devonshire cream on their scones.

  1. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14103537

This Won't Hurt A Bit


A visit to the dentist’s surgery is one of our activities that is usually at the bottom of our ‘favorites list.’ So far I haven’t met the dentist who was the model for the dentist in “The Little Shop of Horrors,” but the adrenaline is released in quantity as I sit watching the tropical fish. So far none of the surgery tanks have been populated with piranhas, which is strange as they all have such good teeth and would thus represent a good advertisement.

I vividly recall when a young guy and in pain, that the usual end result was a trip to the local dental hospital to be sorted out by students – under supervision of course. There always seemed to be a plethora of hot female aspiring dentists, which provided some distraction. I have never been able to work out where they went to as all the dental surgeries that I’ve visited since have been staffed by muscular male dentists.

Dental training is about to move into the 21st century as reported in the New Scientist (1).  Showa U in Japan has set up a collaboration with Orient Industries to produce a robot with teeth problems. Her name is Hanako 2 and she is a very pretty young woman. As she should be, of course, as Orient are Japan's premier sex doll manufacturers.

The trainee dentists will have to be careful with her as she will cough and gag on them if their heavy handed. She will shake her head and sneeze too, just to keep them on their toes. I don’t think she has bitten anybody yet, though she will shut her mouth when she’s had enough and her jaw is starting to ache.

You have to watch he wagging tongue. Both while you’re trying to drill and afterwards, as she can talk and gives feedback on your performance. This latter innovative technological skill probably won’t be incorporated in Orient’s sex doll robots any time soon.

  1. http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2011/06/dental-robot-flinches-just-lik.html

Shaken And Stirred


When we feel depressed and anxious, we tend to take a pessimistic view of life and our decisions reflect that negative emotional state. Other animal species also show the “glass half empty” attitude when they are teed-off by their treatment.

Dogs, horse and birds have all been shown to show a pessimistic cognitive bias when they are anxious. The big question, then, is how universal is pessimism when you’re not too happy with your situation? Wright et al at Newcastle U set out to answer that with some diligent workers (1).

They selected some honeybees, cooled them down and fitted them out in little plastic straightjackets. Then the training began. They were given an odor to sniff and then offered a drink. One drink was a reward in the form of a sucrose solution. The other odor they were taught to associate with punishment as the drink was a nasty, bitter quinine solution. Little tongues were retracted as soon as they smelt the odor representing quinine.

Now they were ready for the great experiment. They were divided up into two groups. One group were strapped to a laboratory shaker and the bejesus shaken out of them for a minute, while the other group were used as the control. Next they were all asked to sniff 5 odors, 3 of which were new.  The anxious, shaken up group were reluctant to stick their tongues out for anything but sucrose. They weren’t going to trust those lab guys. But the unshaken group weren’t stirred up. They were much more adventurous and little tongues were stuck out to try the new drinks. Clearly not expecting punishment and seeing the world as a “glass half full.”

The experiment didn’t end well for any of the participating workers, though their expectations weren’t recorded. They all went into the meat grinder and had their hemolymph (the nearest thing that they’ve got to blood) analyzed. The shaken up ones had lower levels of those hormonal indicators of positive thinking, dopamine and serotonin, than the “happy” group had.

One is left to wonder how pessimistic the colony gets when they are just hunkering down for winter and we snatch nearly all their hard worked for stores and offer them a bland sugar solution as wages?

  1. M.Bateson, S.Desire, S.E.Gartside and G.A.Wright, J.Curr. Biol., 21, 1070, (2011).

Ah, The Broth Of A Bear!



Way back, before St. Patrick banished the snakes from the Emerald Isle, brown bears roamed from bog to bog and had a rare old time. Climate fluctuations brought changes in neighbors and all sorts of opportunities for shenanigans.

Just like today, that shining white, pillar of society, Ursus maritimus, was stamping his image across country. A study covering the last 120,000 years by a huge international team is published in the early edition of the Journal of Current Biology (1). They have been ferreting out the truth through the matriarchal lines using analysis of mitochondrial DNA.

Like so many of our US presidents, our current population of polar bears have Irish ancestors. With their liking for seals and cold weather, they left the Emerald Isle for where? – well Greenland, of course.

Currently, they are having to move south and are bumping into Grizzlie neighbors in Northwest Canada, where they have been getting up to their old Don Juan-like tricks. Some Grolars have been spotted wandering about the place.

  1. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2011.05.058