Get A Grip


Depression appears to be on the increase in the western world if the TV ads for antidepressants are an indicator. We rarely hear the phrase “pull yourself together” these days and that must be a good thing. However, in the workplace our depression may not be noticed and the workload is not reduced, but the pressure is often increased in an attempt to produce greater output.

The usual incentive used by the industrial magnates is money and that has proved pretty effective for a long time, but if we are genuinely depressed, do we care? The other incentive that is used by the more enlightened is working conditions and mood enhancing surroundings. The idea being that if we are happy little bunnies we will be very productive and everything will expand and we will have more happy bunnies producing more and more (goods that is.)

But let’s get back to that part of the population suffering from depression. Cléry-Melin et al from Paris have studied the effect of depression of incentive and emotional arousal on the job in hand with a group of 40-somethings  with major depression (1). They were asked to squeeze a handle and were motivated by squeezing for money. They were mood-modified by being shown nice or nasty pictures prior to the task. They also had to rate the amount of effort that they had put in. A control group of vibrant Parisiens of the same age group was also squeezing for cash.

The mood-modifying pictures did nothing for the control group who squeezed harder for cash regardless of the pictures. However, the depressed patients squeezed as instructed but didn’t seem to care if there was more money at stake if they squeezed harder or not. Motivation was passing them by. The nastier the picture, the more effort they thought they had put in and, conversely, the nicer pictures gave them the feeling that things were easier.

Clearly, with healthy people, money is a good incentive in the short term and they can focus on the job in hand regardless of images that have been used to play with their emotions. The study raises more questions, though. Long term, is the same true? Does the lack of mood enhancing conditions result in the depression and failure of effective motivation? Perhaps happy bunnies over the long term with short-term motivational boosts might be best, don’t you think?

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0023178

Rubbish


In spite of our best intentions, we tend to leave a lot of litter around. There is an expectation that there are garbage trucks ready and waiting to collect up and haul the stuff off. The more remote the spot and more difficult it is to get to, the bigger the problem. The lack of a regular garbage pick up has made parts of Antarctica and Mount Everest messy when they should be pristine.

The problems in getting to difficult and dangerous places seem to engender a feeling that we can forget about taking our rubbish home. We now have huge islands of plastic debris in both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans as “seafill depositories” which we pay as little attention to as landfill sites. However, this junk is swishing around slowly. Not so the huge amount of space junk out there in low earth orbit that is flying around at 17,000 miles per hour.
Our junk pile - illustration from NASA 
A strategy for clean up in our local cosmos has been proposed by Castronouvo in Acta Astronautica (1,2) which is currently in press. He is suggesting that we make a start with the forty-one large dead rocket bodies that are cluttering up the place and have no interest to anyone before they bang into each other or other stuff and add more bits to the annual proliferation of junk.

The suggestion is that we launch a satellite with lots of little kamakazi robots which will sidle up to the rocket bodies,  grab hold and then put the brakes on with the result that they will fall and burn up with a nice visual display across the sky.

The plan is modest at 5 to 10 units a year, but the bigger issue isn’t one of efficiency but of international politics. Politicians, as we know well, are not the clearest thinkers on the planet and are worried that if one country starts getting rid of stuff in orbit, then their top-secret stuff might get swept away with it. After all someone else’s space junk may be their spy satellite. So, as usual, the big problem isn’t the technical ability to clean up the place, it’s back to finger pointing and political ill-will.

  1. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0094576511001287
  2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14405118

Take Me To Your Leader


Many animal species cluster together in social groups, some large, some small, but chaos rarely rules and leaders emerge. In some species it’s the “strongman” that ends up ruling the roost, in others it is the wise old matriarch, but what about our caterpillar friends (or enemies)?

The Forest Tent Caterpillar enjoys group living, as does more than 300 other types of butterflies and moths. This was a fact that I had missed and I had clearly mistaken a large group for an infestation of pests. Mistakes that I’ll probably make again in the run-up to the election next year with a larger and more vocal pest whose groups have morphed into SuperPACs.

The question remains: “How do caterpillars elect leaders.” Is it democratic or what? They’re not too vocal and they’re not very aggressive. Also they are differentiated by occupation in the group? McClure et al asked these tantalizing questions in a recent paper (1).

The authors sat and mulled over the possibilities in their lab in Concordia U and then decided to raise groups of young caterpillars, which were studied after different molts. Food, a nourishing wheat germ mix instead of those dull aspen leaves, was the motivating factor for action. The action being to cross a bridge over water. A caterpillar that got its body length ahead of the throng was rewarded with a paint job on one of its segments. The experiment was repeated with multiple groups for multiple times and the numbers crunched.  The results showed that leaders weren’t born, but anyone could lead if they so desired.

Next item on the menu was their motivation to lead the way to the food stash. The hungriest were, of course, the most motivated, but that says nothing about the group dynamic. A single hungry caterpillar does not a leader make.

If less than an eighth of the group were hungry, everybody hung around and shot the breeze in their caterpillar way and refused to go foraging. If seven eighths of them were hungry and well motivated, they tried to go off in all directions at once and chaos ensued. In this case, an overwhelming majority did not lead to successful leadership.

Consensus was more rapidly arrived at if there were large percentages of highly motivated individuals in the group who were prepared to lead, but not to many as this resulted in an uncoordinated rabble. Leaders were happy to hand over their role if another caterpillar arrived to pick up the ball. No sex bias or egos were involved, just a consensus on the general need. Do you suppose that we might learn something from Forest Tent Caterpillars?

  1. M. McClure, M. Ralph and E. Despland, Behav. Ecol. Sociobiol. 65, 1573, (2011).

The Value Of Nature


One of the jewels of the US is the State Park system. There are 2 billion acres that were established between 1975 and 2007. We love them but can we afford them? Do they provide good value for the money spent on maintaining them? Or should we be exploiting the land so that we can all pay less tax and drink more tea?

The problem is one of setting a value for their use. Siikamäki has just done this in a paper to the National Academy of Sciences (1). Apparently, in all our State Parks we spend nearly 10 hours each, wandering around enjoying nature, or in a few cases, damaging it. On average, we get down and dirty with nature for another 19 hours per year each in other locations, but we’re not going to delve into that here.

If we now take our naturalist’s or our fun lover’s hats off and replace them with our Earl Grey slurping bean counter’s hat, the cost is $2.3bn/year. I can hear the sharp intake of breath as we struggle to divide that among the total population; wallets are rushing to find a dark closet to hide in.

But before we get bent out of shape we need to think what the value is to each of us with our almost 10 hours per year of wandering free in the park. The big brains in the business have a formula. That is, of course, why they are paid the big bucks. They say that the value of recreation time is worth 33% of good old fashioned working time. (I am already re-writing my epitaph to say “Damn, I should have spent more time at the office.”)

Of course, the big brains with the big hats don’t use their hourly rate. They use our average rate, which comes out as $19 per hour. Even so, the value of our State Park time comes to $14 bn per year. With a 600% profit margin, I think that we can all switch to drinking lattes and leave the Earl Grey to moulder in the boxes in the harbor.

  1. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/08/08/1108688108.full.pdf+html

A Fishy Idea, But Stay Downwind


It is always nice when you come across a scientific result that is counter intuitive, and works better than expected. This latest one is all about wind farms. Dabiri from CalTech has published a nice paper on a new arrangement of turbines for wind farms in the J of Renewable and Sustainable Energy (1). In the BBC interview, the author said that the design uses the same fluid dynamics that is found in the movement of shoals of fish (2).

A conventional wind farm has large propeller blades which are built high up in the air to capture higher wind speeds and have to be spaced about 5 blade diameters apart so that the flow from one windmill doesn’t interfere with its neighbors. The result is acres of eyesores that can be seen for miles and miles yet only produce about 2 watts/square meter when there is a good breeze blowing. For the number crunchers among us, recall that it takes 5 billion watts to power New York City.

Now, there are other turbine designs out there. There is the vertical axis wind turbine which has a long skinny cylinder mounted on end with the blades going up the cylinder. The counter-intuitive development (to me at least) is that they are more efficient when crowded together in pairs which contra-rotate. The vortices work together to give more than twice as much power as two isolated ones. Even better, the ones downwind lose very little from the upwind disturbance.

The result is that a nicely packed vertical turbine system can produce 10 times as much output per square meter as the now old fashioned sort that we have all over the place. Even better is that they do this at a tenth of the height so that they are about 10 meters high instead of 100 meters.

 I can imagine that the local bird life could get confused if they fly into the array of windmills. The vortices will spin them around in a variety of directions and they will probably call that farm the ‘funny farm’ in bird language. The author points out that the design is also applicable to underwater turbines and perhaps the small fish will be able to cope better than the birds as the shoals are already used to going round and round in random circles.

  1. http://dabiri.caltech.edu/publications/Da_JRSE11.pdf
  2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14452133

Playing For Keeps


From an early age we learn to play and cooperate in groups. The practice stays with us into the workplace. Along with the group play comes the competitive play between groups. That competition can become severe and be to the detriment of a company if the employees are siloed into strongly competing groups. The apparent cure is to be inclusive, but does this really work?



Here we move into the realm of game theory and Public Good Games, PGG. This type of game has groups of people with individual budgets and they can choose to put some money into their group(s) pot or not. That is they are a cooperator or a defector. A multiplier is then announced for the round and the pot is split evenly among the group members. An individual’s resources increase most if he/she freeloads and lets other people risk their investment. Investments are anonymous, of course. It would be impolite to look at what your neighbor is doing with his/her cash, wouldn’t it?

Inclusiveness in these groups is not a very good idea as the freeloaders will gradually encourage everyone to freeload so, after a few rounds, no one is investing in the group. Carrots or sticks can be introduced to make people more cooperative but still the big banner of inclusiveness is flying high. We know that the philosophy is politically correct but is it financially and fiducially wise? Clearly not.

Smaldino and Lubell of UCal Davis have set the game up with a variation of a capacity constraint on top of the normal budget constraint. This allows players to join a table if there is a vacant seat and they can join more than one group. The big constraint is that each player’s investment decision is the same for each table that he/she is claiming a seat at for any particular round. Hedge fund managers would clearly not be welcome as they would clearly want to bet more cash on winners and against losers. Also players can leave a table and join a different one if a seat is available so the network is dynamic and can evolve.

The result, which I find extremely interesting, is that the evolution went to eliminating freeloading and encouraging cooperation. So putting the capacity or size limitation on the group leads towards the evolution of high performing groups with less freeloading than with a fully inclusive model. A somewhat scary thought when we turn our thoughts to the democratic process.

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0023019

I Want The Real Thing, Baby!


Given the opportunity most of us choose the ‘real thing’ as opposed to an imitation. Of course, we will compromise if forced to by cost. If the imitation is very poor we may even decide to eschew the opportunity of ownership. Even the evolution of our favorite things is a reason for deep nostalgic complaint by the fogies amongst us. Remember that in this fast evolving age, anyone of 30+ is a fogey, so even fogies aren’t what they used to be. But coke ‘Classic’ is still available, although ‘Classic’ refers to that golden age of about 20 years ago, which is about where everyone puts the end of their ‘good old days.’

Along with our desire for the ‘real thing’ goes our tendency to value something that is ‘natural.’ Now, nine times out of ten we will choose to sit in an ‘un-natural’ chair with it’s deep polyurethane foam cushions covered in suede-like microfiber instead of the ‘natural’ one with it’s cold leather cover and stuffed with hard horse-hair. We might decorate our homes with natural ones because they look chic and our guests won’t overstay.

In some cases we will pay through the nose for the real thing and have that natural wood-flooring put down in our homes when a laminate look-alike might be even more practical. The dogs and kids run in and out with muddy feet with all those small sharp stones that are destined to destroy the expensive polished wood surface faster than that of the cheaper laminate which requires less buffing.

Well, of course, we prefer the look and feel of the natural material. Enter the psychologists. Do we really know that, and how do we know that we know that, they ask? Because it looks and feels natural we cry. But how do you know that they persist? And of course they have to test it and now we have a weighty tome of learned origin to study (1).

The experiments described involved 14 different wood chunks and 16 chunks of imitation wood. The lab rats were all between 17 and 37, so there was a delicate seasoning of fogey in the group, which consisted of 24 females and 8 males. What assumptions are at the root of this bias? Could floors and kitchen cabinets be a more female interest? We’ll leave the question to hang out there in the breeze like washing on the line.

Of course, all the good lab practices were used and the numbers were crunched with the usual software, but it’s the results that we are all agog to see. Firstly, the participants were “quite good” at deciding if the wood was natural wood. The big conclusion was that “both vision and touch are highly correlated predictors of visuo-tactile perception of naturalness”. Wow!


  1. K.E. Overvliet and S. Soto-Faraco, Acta Psychologica, 136, 95, (2011).