A New Group Of Technophiles


Whenever I take a break and get out my iPad or iPhone, I find that I’m expecting to get a free WiFi connection. It seems to becoming the norm in coffee shops, books stores and bars as well as bigger places like airports. Being stuck with 3 or 4G is certainly ‘so last year’ if not last century.

It’s difficult to know what to do between sips of latte if we can’t poke and swipe our tablets or phones. Our Apps are an integral part of our lives now. But it seems tablets are set to be even more ubiquitous than predicted by the late Mr. Jobs. The BBC reports that Orangutan Outreach is piloting an educational program at Milwaukee Zoo (1).

Mr. Zimmerman had his OO clients started out on Doodle Buddy and they quickly moved on to watching David Attenborough wildlife movies. Apparently, developers are lining up to develop more orang-friendly apps.

Currently the search for a robust case is on so that they can have them in the cages with them and not poke and swipe through the bars.  Ultimately, when the zoos get as up to date as the coffee shops, free WiFi will be available and with the iPad3 in a robust case, the inmates will be having video calls with inmates all over the place.

Although they really love their iPads, maybe some will demand Kindle Fires or Nooks in addition. The possibility of them listening to bedtime stories read to them by their Kindle’s text-to-speech software creates a rather charming picture. David Attenborough’s voice can be quite soothing, but the visuals of their wild relatives might be too exciting for bedtime viewing.

It makes one wonder what will they post on their Facebook pages.

  1. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16354093


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Do Not Disturb


The last leaves are still clinging to some of the trees, although its looks more of an act of desperation than bravado. Hence, the noise of the leaf blowers is still with us. Even the lawn mowers are buzzing, giving us a regular reminder of the local enthusiasm for lawn care. Leaf blowing and lawn mowing in the rain smacks of more enthusiasm than is strictly necessary.

            Now the king – Elvis of course – in the Aussie Reptile Park is a bit of a curmudgeon, even for a large male saltwater crocodile, and took great offense when the lawnmower barged in to his compound. According to the BBC report (1) he lost his cool.

            He decided to put a stop to this mowing nonsense and rushed out and bit the mower, dragging into his pool to drown it. He lay there beside it, waiting for it to rot and become tender until the keepers asked if they could have their mower back. All they got was a gappy grin as the battle with the mower pulled out two of his front teeth.

Eventually he was teased with bits of kangaroo and the keepers grabbed the mower. There is no news as to whether the mower has recovered or is still in intensive care.

Elvis was caught trying to play rough games with fishing boats in the harbor at Darwin and was sent to do hard time in the rough and tumble of a crocodile farm, but this didn’t go well. He reportedly ate two girlfriends and was sent into solitary at the high security Reptile Park.

He has made his point now and hopefully he’ll have more peace and quiet.

  1.  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-16343288


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Towards Quieter Weekend Weather


The weekends are a part of the week that we look forward to. The Thank Goodness It’s Friday phrase is one that must be almost as common as good morning in many offices. Although we often pack the weekends with activities, they are really a time that we should take it easy.

My attention was drawn by improbable.com to a recent paper indicating that the forces of nature relax a little at weekends. Rosenfeld and Bell checked the weather records for the summertimes on the eastern States of the US from 1995 through 2009 (1). Their data indicated a weekly variation in activity, which their statistics indicated was significant.

Summer storms releasing hail and tornados tended to be a mid-week activity with an easing around the weekends. It appears that we are the problem during the week. It’s not a special dispensation for the weekends to allow more golf and cycling.

Once our weeks get under way, the air pollution increases, generating a great volume of aerosols that drift up into the atmosphere. The aerosol particles nucleate the water vapor in the clouds and invigorate the active convective clouds. This in turn, encourages hail formation and tornados.

At the weekends, we take it easy, let the large diesel engines rest and do less polluting things. So the weather cuts us some slack and doesn’t throw so much in the way of large hailstones down on our heads.

As the authors note, though, the pollution only modulates the activity and isn’t the cause, so it will still pay to check the forecast before you toss your clubs in the trunk. Golf ball size hail while you’re out on a golf course could be very confusing.

  1. D. Rosenfeld & T.L. Bell, J. Geophys. Res., 116, 14, (2011)


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The Home Field Advantage


          It will soon be back to the college football games in the US and the fans will be working hard to maximize their home field advantage. Animal groups too show that there is a big advantage in defending their home territory. This is often still true when a smaller group is defending their home.

This raises the question: why? It isn’t obvious why a small group should be effectively tenacious against a larger invading group, although we’re not surprised because we know it happens. Attachment to territory can be very strong, even when the loss would not be crucial to survival.

In this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Crofoot and Gilby used a recording of invading Capuchin monkeys to simulate the challenge to various size capuchin groups (1).

They uncovered two interesting findings. The first was that some monkeys were reluctant fighters and would screech a lot and then make a run for it. The more monkeys in the band, the more likely a monkey was to avoid a fight. In detail they found that an increase of one more monkey to the relative group size increased the flight risk by 25%. 

The second finding was also enlightening. The monkeys on the periphery of a band were more likely to decide it wasn’t really their concern and leave than those in the middle. Everything else being equal, a capuchin in the center was 91% less likely to ease themselves out of the conflict. 

Hence, a small group doing their thing on their own patch will be very effective at defending it against a larger group drifting into their territory as a large fraction of the incomers will be at the periphery and not in the contact zone.  Hopefully most of the clashes are limited to screeching at each other with very little teeth being involved. Rather like we hope for the fans at the football games.

  1. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1115937109  (2011)


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Gaming With Efficient Networks


            In the last few days of the holiday season, we are still in game playing mode. Our social science friends like to test collaborative aspects of solving complex problems. Often computers are involved, rather than people, as they do what their told. That may not always be a good thing. Real people sometimes do the unexpected.

            The latest game to be reported on is Wildcat Wells, which Mason and Watts used to look at how networks worked in exploring a virtual desert for hidden oilfields (1). The aim was to find as much oil as possible in the game period. Players could drill close to neighbors or move away and explore new regions. So getting the most oil out of the desert meant minimizing dead wells and maximizing long term output – not too many wells in one field.

The participants were recruited via a web crowdsourcing program (Amazon’s Mechanical Turk) and were assembled into networks of one of eight topologies which varied the contact efficiency, that is some networks were more efficient that others. 232 games were played and most players only played a few games.

Efficient networks were found to give the best results. If a field was found, it could be quickly exploited. An efficient network meant less copying so giving a better chance of bringing in “the big one”.

 Real players were more adventurous than computers (or their programmers) in exploring further afield to find “the big one” compared to simulations run by previous investigators. Search strategies were also variable with real players, while simulations had formal rules.

It seems that good information flow and encouraging human ingenuity is still king in problem solving. Yeeha! we're not mushrooms.
  1. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/12/13/1110069108.full.pdf


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Gaming The Population


            There is a good chance that over the holiday period many of us will have indulged in one or more games with our relatives and friends. The aim of the standard board games or card games is normally to be the sole winner, although some games require cooperation such as Save the Whales, Pandemic or Max.

The game theorists are into other sorts of games, which delve more into our psyche. One of their favorites is the Prisoners Dilemma game in its iterative version. In case you’ve forgotten the game, it’s very simply the situation beloved of the writer’s of police dramas. There are two prisoners. Each has the choice of sticking to a prior agreement to say nothing, in which case they both get one month in jail. If one defects and rats out the other, he/she walk free and the other gets a year inside.

We should note that if each rats on the other, they both get three months in jail. The logic goes that during iterative play, the players both become defectors and cooperation is an unstable condition.

Those with large computers to hand don’t have to troll round their police stations or student bars to find real players, but can do this with simulations of large populations. Wang, Han and Han at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing are among the most recent to try a variation (1).

Their simulation used a large population in which everybody could interact, but any pair only play each other once. They showed that a population that started out with 50% of the population trying to be cooperative rapidly turned into one with only about 15% trying to be cooperative. This was the baseline.

The fun began when they stuffed stooges into the mix who were instructed to cooperate if the other players record indicates that they are probable cooperators, otherwise they defect. The governors of the game only make the opting records of the players available to their stooges.

The addition of stooges was termed “soft control” and if there were a significant number of stooges in the population, more cooperation was the result. The amount of cooperation was a function of the number of stooges, though a large number are required to make a large difference.

Other variants have been reported with additions to the population of agents who can add feedback, or teaching, to the population, but this would be a form of “hard control”. Soft control is taking place without the population realizing it in the case studied here and, of course, our Ad Agencies are already aware of its effectiveness.


  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0029182

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