I've Got My Beady Eye On You


When we see something new, we stare at it. But given a small magnifying glass, which eye do you use. I tend use my right eye, which means the left side of my brain is given the job of processing the image. The left hemisphere is where the analytical approach is dominant and where the job of putting things into categories by evaluating differences is done. The right side being more freewheeling and creative, where we look for patterns and the like.

The pressing question for today is: “do striped dolphins have a right or left eye bias?” Humpback whales feeding at the bottom of the sea favor their right eye for the job. Does that mean that they are being carefully analytical about what they gulp down? Whales and dolphins favor their left eye when getting friendly with their kin, which seems to fit in with a freewheeling, creative thinking.

However, back to our striped friends. Siniscalchi et al from the U of Bari “Aldo Moro” have presented their study of Stenella coeruleoalba in the wild in this week's PLoSONE (1). The investigators dangled objects in front of cavorting dolphins and recorded which eye they used to check the objects out.  They tried a striped soft ball, a cuddly large-mouse toy and a life size plastic blue fish.

The obliging dolphins got down and dirty with the plastic fish giving it the eye with their left. Dolphins in the wild rarely come across striped balls or large brightly colored cuddly mice and these toys were scrutinized with the other eye that is, the right one.

All this makes perfect sense to us mammals with the right side checking out what the object looks like when compared to similar things and the left being used to process novel things such as dangling cuddly mice in the middle of the ocean. But this doesn’t seem to be the same with fish and birds who have the opposite brain-side activities. Of course, we mammals don’t have feathers or scales either. We went our own way a long time ago.
  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0030001



Hot Hands


For those of us amateurs that struggle from week to week with our bowling scores, wondering why this week strikes are elusive when last week our hand was hot and the pins fell like drunken sailors, we may be groping towards an answer.

When it’s our week to be on a roll, our confidence grows as we roll one strike and then another. The next frame should give us that turkey, shouldn’t it? Our team members would, of course agree, but what are the casual observers saying who are viewing your rolling more like tossing a coin than appreciating your skill?

The problem of whether a sportsman does periodically go through a hot hand phase has been studied in the past. From the sportsman side, a certain amount of superstition appears on the scene with lucky mascots, clothes etc. The subject has now been re-opened by tossing the results from almost half a million frames rolled by 100 top rank professional bowlers into a large computer at Yale U (1). The work has been written up by Yaari and David and published in this week’s Public Library of Science.

The stats were elegantly handled and the results were clear and contradict earlier studies. There is indeed a hot hand effect in that we get runs of high scores. Hooray! All we need to do is schedule them back-to-back, maybe?

The bad news for us dodos is that they are only temporal clusters in probability and we are not getting it all together and that we are feeding back skill-based information to our next throw.

So we’re back to putting in our 10,000 hours of practice and hope that we do have some talent to build on, but more importantly, that our joints will hold out.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0030112




What Are You Looking At?


Who do you take notice of? Anybody who you think has spotted something interesting. If you see someone staring up into a tree, as I did this week, I had no choice but stop and look up too. A quick glance around and I saw there were six of us staring. At what? One of our local Ospreys, minding its own business sitting at the top of the tree. It was busy staring across the stretch of water at its mate perched at the top of another tree.  Please  read more @ http://jimgoodwinbooks.com/

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