The Thinking Man's Barcode


A large portion of the population is currently living with chronic pain. Average age and lifestyle may be resulting in an increase in particular types of chronic pain, but we are probably better off today than the population was years ago. However, it is still a hard row to hoe and can consume a large fraction of your time and thoughts.

There is increasing evidence that, because of the plasticity of our brains, chronic pain induces measurable changes in local grey matter. Baliki et al have come up with a better way of classifying those changes (1). They had a group of 120 subjects with about a third being healthy young people and three other groups of middle-aged people with one of three chronic pain conditions.

The methodology was to quantify the local morphology of 82 different regions of the brains. The method used was voxel-based morphometry, VBM, which just means estimating the regional volume of material associated with defined activities.

They found that there were significant changes in amounts of grey matter at the 82 regions depending on the type of chronic pain. The differences were sufficient to produce characteristic 82 element barcodes, so the barcode for someone with chronic back pain was easily distinguished from someone with chronic osteoarthritis pain. The clarity of the characteristic barcodes increased with the length of time that the chronic condition had been present and its severity.

It is interesting to speculate where this could go in terms of diagnostic possibilities. The study was careful to exclude anyone suffering from depression, which is a common adjunct to chronic pain, as it might blur the barcode. However, using barcode changes to quantify the effectiveness of treatment could become an effective measure.

The downside? Well, if the insurance companies and their lawyers get hold of it, who knows what might happen to payouts for accidents. Politicians too might start looking at disability classification based on barcodes and their intensity.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0026010

Robot Friends


Companion robots have been with us for a few years now, although the focus has been mainly in Japan. Ifbot was a white plastic guy who could make himself useful and do things like taking photographs. He didn’t seem to be much in demand after the first few weeks in an old folks home. Perhaps R2D2-like bots are better as care-bots than in the companion role.

Animal robots seem to do better. AIBO, the dog-bot and NeCoRo, the cat-bot both seem to be hits with kids. However, the ultimate (at present) companion-bot is PARO, a baby Harp seal robot. It made top spot as the most therapeutic robot in the Guinness World Records collection.

It may be the helpless look with the big “baby” eyes, or its cries, but it always needs a hug and a stroke. It does well as a companion-bot and has worked well in some old folks homes, and now has at least 35 users in North America. Most of these users are institutions.

The numbers of people who have interacted with Paro is quite large as over 1,000 have been sold with about two thirds of these for private use, so he/she is now an establishment figure.

A survey has been conducted by Shibata et al to see how people are getting on with their companion Harp seal robot flopping around in their living space and crying for attention (1). 85 people agreed to give their responses. 61 of these were women and 22 were men and most of the owners were between 30 and 90-years old (95%).

The owners all liked to stroke and hug their robot as well as speak to him/her. The owners liked to say hello when they came home and praise Paro for responding, as well as saying “good night” or “good morning.” Many people who had kept pets previously wanted a brush and a collar to keep their Paro spruced up and well decked out.

That Paro is a cute baby animal that they can’t buy in a pet shop is probably a major part of his/her attraction compared to dog or cat-bots. Also many of the owners could not currently own a pet because of apartment living or some such constraint.

It appears that companion-bots that respond when you hug and stroke them, who look and feel cuddly, and who respond when you speak to them, are welcomed by all ages. What we need now is an fMRI study coupled with measurements of the levels of hormones such as dopamine to compare the therapeutic effectiveness of a companion animal with a companion-bot.

  1. T. Shibata, Y. Kawaguchi and K. Wada, Int. J. Soc. Robotics,                                              DOI 10.1007/s12369-011-0111-1 

Robots in Reception


We have got thoroughly used to phone trees and trawling through automated responses when we phone companies. In the old days dialing “O” usually cut through the trail, but that often doesn’t cut it today. The next routine sorting job that looks set for our robot friends is the “Receptionist.” I can already hear the cries of horror and derision, but robots are already being optimized for the job. (Optimized sounds so much nicer than being trained, don’t you think?)

Information about the establishment, recording your details, and contacting the person that you’re visiting are all straightforward tasks that the computer in any self-respecting robot could handle without difficulty. But a good receptionist does more than that – they make the visitor feel at ease and appear to be interested in them, that is, listening to them and paying attention to what they say.

Here is the challenge, then. How does a robot show that they are paying attention to someone and are therefore interested in what they have to say? Holthaus et al from Bielefeld U have set out to solve that problem.

They chose a rather plain lady-like robot for their experiments with 111 people coming up to her desk. Her responsiveness was programmed on the basis of proximity. “She” would pay more attention to those who were close compared to those who were a long distance away. That all makes sense to me. We all like to stand in line so the guy at the back of the line gets attended to last.

People said that they felt better about her attention to them when she wasn’t giving them her full attention. If she turned at random, not just her head, but her upper body, and came back to them, they felt that she was more aware of their presence and was in charge of what was going on.

This seems to be counterintuitive, but then nobody ever listens to me with consistent rapt attention. They fidget, look around and some will have successfully spotted somewhere to scuttle off to, so, I guess, a robot doing the same thing would make me think it was just like a real person.

  1. P. Holthaus, K. Pitsch and S. Wachsmuth, Int. J. Soc. Robotics, (2011),                          DOI 10.1007/s12369-011-0108-9

Cat's Cradle


The big cats are always popular species in zoos or programs on television. We seem to be drawn to predators at the top of the food chain. It’s pretty much like a “big boys club” where we all have similar proclivities. Unfortunately, the big cats are under increasing survival pressures and some may not be with us much longer.

Tigers are one species that is struggling to survive and few of us want to see it disappear, but how old is the tiger? The pantherine species stretches back about 1.5 M years, but boiling them up and looking at their molecules you have left in the vat indicate that the tiger could have diverged as a separate species as recently as 100k years.

Mazák, Christiansen and Kitchener, have been busy with their picks and shovels in the Gansu province of China (1). Gansu is central-north China next to Inner Mongolia and a long way from Beijing – it’s a place with lots of Tibetan monasteries. Well, they have dug up a fossil skull which looks very much like that of our tiger buddy’s. A little smaller, but in most other ways similar.

It has been given the name P. zdanskyi and is the closest relative of P. tigris. It is more than 2 M years old, so tigers are an older species than we thought. This new family member is called the Longdan tiger. It was smaller than the current species, but the suggestion is that the food now comes in bigger parcels than it did in those days so the current family members are larger.

It seems a pity that a neighbor who has been around for more than 2M years should be looking at a lack of accommodation in the near future. Surely we can find space for such a beautiful creature.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0025483

Stock Answer


The digging up collections of old bones excites most archaeologists and, if the bones are human, their day is complete. However, that is only the start of their work, as they now have to take hours to pour over them to decide what has happened to them.

In these days of labs with large instruments, we can now look carefully at the structure of the bones. In the box of Neolithic bones of Bosch et al, they found that the texture of some of the bones was different from others (1).

Intriguing question: what could have occurred to cause the chemical redistribution that a textural change would require? Knowing that the Neolithic guys had a different set of priorities, the questions that popped up were “had they had their neighbor for dinner, and did the cooking alter the bone texture?

The only thing to do then is to check it out. Well, of course, one has to abide by the local rules, so no one was eaten. However, modern human bones were boiled for various times.

Modern recipes for a good white stock suggest simmering the beef or veal bones for 5 hours with a mix of vegetables and herbs. (Brown stock recipes require the bones to be roasted first.)

Comparison of the simmered human bones with the Neolithic ones showed that structural modifications of two of the bones matched up with the modifications shown to occur by boiling the modern human ones. The migration of material indicated that the boiling had been less than 6 hours. Looks like the neighbor got himself into a stew!

  1. P. Bosch, I. Alemán, C. Morena-Castella and M. Botella, J. Archaeol. Sci., 38, 2561, (2011).