Caring Cyber Excitement


Work continues on the human/robot interface in many areas. The efforts are normally directed at human to robot communication to get one or the other to carry out a task, or for the robot to sense the presence of the human so that they can help without hurting the person, by pushing or gripping too firmly for example.

Robots are also available as pets, and these have to respond to touch and speech in an appropriate manner. The concept of robots as surrogates for pets seems an easy one to grasp, but a new surrogacy is finding it’s way into our world. The latest is a robot design to be an affection surrogate for your loved ones when you have to communicate with them at a distance.

This idea is being refined by Hooman Samani from the U Singapore and the Hooman/robot version of the human/robot interface is a responsive kissing machine (1). It consists of a set of lips on a plastic ball. There are sensors and activators connected to the lips via a microprocessor circuit which provides rapid feedback with a connection to your loved one’s robot wirelessly via the Internet.

So you make your voice or video call and greet your loved one by kissing your robot. Your loved one kisses their robot and you both feel the sensation in your lips. This is a family robot, so they behave very properly and don’t indulge in any wild flings, although you would get different responses from your child, your partner or your aunt.

I think that I would have to restrict my use to video calls only as with just a voice call, there is the possibility of getting a wrong number and giving a complete stranger of the wrong sex a long lingering kiss.

Hooman is taking his ideas further and is talking about a future when robots will be kissing humans, but not just to pass the kiss on and, I am still trying to digest this one, robots kissing robots. I can picture a robot delivering a “Kissogram” on Valentine’s Day to a young woman or man. But picture, if you will, a robot delivering a “Kissogram” to the domestic robot of the house. Of such things, movies could be made.

  1. http://robotics.nus.edu.sg/hooman/
  2. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSckuNlzQdM&feature=player_embedded


Thanks to http://www.improbable.com/ for drawing this exciting work to our attention.

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Regulated Consuming


Humans are social animals and one function that encourages social cohesion is taking a meal together. This is part of the socialization process or our children to share food with family, friends or peer group. Of course, it is only part of the socialization process, as those who have had the delight of supervising school meals can attest to.

But what happens when the meal is more intimate. Just two people, especially two who aren’t well known to each other? How does one person’s eating behavior affect the others? Hermans et al may now have the answer and have published it in yesterday’s Public Library of Science (1).

One of the laboratories at Radboud University is in the form of a bar, an innovation that many students at other universities must be eyeing with envy, and 70 pairs of young women were fed and watered while being filmed. Only one pair was fed at a time. It’s not clear why the study was restricted to young women with an average age of 22, but maybe we’ll see other variations in the future.

Well, to the study. The human lab rats were fed a full meal and watched for 20 minutes. Bites were counted (in all, 3888 bites were watched carefully). The important factor was the timing of the bites. When a bite was taken within 5 seconds of the companion's bite, this was marked down as a “mimicked bite”, but if the second bite was more than 5 seconds after the other person's bite, it wasn’t mimicked.

Two important findings were noted. The first is that there was indeed a lot of mimicry going on. When one woman took a bite, there was a strong possibility of the other following suit. We should note that this didn’t accelerate into a competition though. The second observation was that the mimicry was marked for the first 10 minutes of the meal and then fell off.

So apparently we adjust our eating behavior to our companion’s, but why? One suggestion is the mirror neuron idea that the frontal lobes of our brain process what we see someone do and cause us to do the same, such as yawn when we see someone else yawn.

The paper also suggest it may be that its part of an affiliation/ingratiation process as two people get to know each other. The greater mimicry in first 10 minutes would seem to suggest that mechanism, although it may just be that the pairs were paying more attention to what each other was doing.

Oh dear, if we are all mimicking each other, we’re going to be in trouble when there’s lots of those unhealthy snacks sitting around. Perhaps any group should elect a designated eater to set the pace as the stroke would in a rowing eight without the cox. We clearly would have to leave the cox’s seat vacant as the shout of “bite, bite…” would distract us from our TV sports programs or soaps.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0031027



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Band Of Brothers?


Altruistic behavior (eusociality) gave Darwin reason to tug at his beard when penning his survival of the fittest concept as the there didn’t seem to be much benefit to altruistic behavior as a common occurrence. When we look across species, it is pretty common.

The cost/benefit analysis was put into nice a nice mathematical expression by Hamilton as
rb-c > 0  where c = cost, b = benefit and r is relatedness.
So this means for a sibling r = ½, for a cousin r = ⅛. The consequence is that your altruism grows with closeness of kinship. This seems to work with computer simulations with hungry robots and some insect colonies. Many students diligently take note of this and include it in their term papers.

            However, all is not quiet and cozy in the recent literature. Nowak et al are strong proponents of using group formation and benefit rather than familial ties as the basis (1). Our armies for example work hard to establish a strong esprit de corps from unrelated people rather than trying to recruit extended families.

            A staunch defense of the original Hamiltonian has been launched by Bourke who defends family ties to the last man standing (2). Again, insects, ants in particular, feature strongly.

As we stand on the sidelines while this ding-dong worthy of Tweedledum and Tweedledee is raging, a curve ball has been tossed into the mix. Kurzban et al have pushed Kant forward to face off with Hamilton (3). So how does nepotistic altruism stack up against Kant’s concept of moral rules derived from common sense ideas of maximizing welfare?

This of course, had to be tested and Kurzban et al set 1290 people the problem of killing one person to save five others. (Note: other options such as waterboarding weren’t a choice.) The relationship of the sacrificial lamb to the test person was varied and their willingness to save the five was recorded.

The results? Are you sure you want them? The researchers found that the participants were more willing to ice a brother or a friend than a stranger to save the five. Clearly, the moral cognition of the 1290 isn’t explained by family ties, or reciprocity, so where does that leave us?

Carrying a big stick, perhaps? I am left with one question: what would a Bonobo do?

  1. M.A. Nowak, C.E. Tarnita & E.O. Wilson, Nature, 1057, 466, (20210).
  2. A.F.G. Bourke, Proc. Roy. Soc. B, (2011) doi: 10.1098/rspb2011.1465
  3. R. Kurzban, P. DeScioli & D. Fein, J. Evolution & Human Behavior http://www.ehbonline.org/article/S1090-5138(11)00117-6/abstract



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The Early Years


The early years of our children’s lives are of great importance in getting them off to a “good start”, whatever that means. Is this just getting them into good habits, socializing them and making sure they're well fed? It turns out that nurture is a lot more than that, but we had a suspicion that it was all along, didn’t we?

Luby et al from Washington U have carried out a study lasting several years of a group of children from their pre-school years up to an age maximum of 13. A total of 92 children were in the study, which is reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (1).

Some of these little boys and girls were suffering from depression at the pre-school stage. Two things were under scrutiny. The first was the volume of the hippocampus as measured by MRI and the second was a measure of the maternal support that the children received.

Maternal support was estimated from studying the mother and child when the child was given a wrapped present and had to wait while the mother filled in a questionnaire. This scenario produced mild stress for both mother and child.

The results gave a correlation between hippocampal volume, maternal support and depression severity. Specifically, the largest volume was found with children with high levels of maternal support and low levels of depression. Next came high maternal support and high levels of depression. Lower volumes were found with children who had low levels of depression and also low maternal support. Lowest of all was for highly depressed children with mothers offering low levels of support.

Clearly, nurture is not just keeping them well fed, clothed and behaved, but the cuddles, sympathy and encouragement are crucial. The hippocampus, remember, is associated with both memory tasks and stress responses.

It is interesting to note that this data is new for children, but studies of rodents has shown the same result quite a long time ago.

  1. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/01/24/1118003109.full.pdf


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I Didn't Quite Hear That


There are lots of studies that show we need a very short time to look at a face and make an assessment. When we see faces with an expression of anger, fear, happiness, or just blank like our kids when we ask them where they are going, our eyes spend more time on a fearful face. Clearly this makes sense as maybe we too should be fearful.

Now we don’t just look, we also listen and that introduces an interesting question. What happens when we hear a snatch of sound that also depicts an emotion if it is, or is not in synch with the visual glimpse?  In this week’s Public Library of Science, Rigoulot and Pell from McGill U have reported on a study to clarify this for us (1).

They dragooned 34 24-year old men and women who happened to be wandering around the campus and needed some excitement to glimpse a series of photos with fearful, angry, happy or blank faces just after they heard actors speak words which didn’t carry any sense, but were spoken with true emotion.

When the audible emotions clues fitted the visual, not surprisingly, the response was enhanced. The interesting part of the experiment was to see what happens when the visual and audible clues are out of synch. The staring at the pictures was detected electronically using a video camera and the pictures were shown after the voice was heard.

When the audible and visual clues were in synch, fear then happiness grabbed the most attention, but when out of synch, the staring time was less except when a blank face was presented with an emotional utterance.

Conclusion? We pay attention to what we hear and if we hear something out of synch with what we see, we look elsewhere for the frightened or happy person. Unless we see a poker face with a happy or angry voice, and then we get suspicious. Perhaps those students have spent too many evenings at the card tables.

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0030740

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A Shocking Answer To Your Weight Problem


Weight gain is a battle that many of us have to fight. Ofttimes not too successful, but we keep trying, especially at this time of the year as our New Year resolutions are beginning to crumble under the pressure of our daily grind. New diet books don’t help too much either, it’s practical help we need.

The problem seems to lie deep within our brains in the hypothalamus. The side regions of this part of our brain shout, “feed me” like Audrey II in ‘Little Shop Of Horrors’. The middle part is supposed to tell us to stop – we are satiated. It does, however, seem to say it quietly and is sometimes easy to ignore as parts of our reward and pleasure systems take over.

Now Melega et al from U Cal. Los Angeles are asking the question can sticking wires deep into your brain and connecting you to a power supply provide that control (1)? To check this out they chose a group of Göttingen mini-pigs, which are popular models for people, only easier to handle being quite small.

When offered a great deal of food, they will pig out and over time get used to overeating and end up with an obesity problem. 8 pigs were wired up and half of these were used as controls and the other half had their brains deeply stimulated. They were all offered twice as much to eat as they had been given previously when they were holding their fighting weights.

The results were interesting. All four who enjoyed brain tingling daily maintained their optimal weights. The other four on average gained weight steadily. I stress on average as one of our unstimulated brave girls also maintained her weight at the optimal level in the face of abundance.

Perhaps we’ll see clinics springing up in Tinseltown and its environs offering electrode implants and smartphone apps to provide the stimulation level dependent on a complex algorithm based on weight, stress levels, and desirability of menu items.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0030672

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All In The Family


We’re well into the beginning of the year and high school kids will soon be worrying about their test scores and college choices, that is if they can face the mountain of debt that they’ll be building up to get their degree. Most will have decided on their majors, often succumbing to parental pressure while the lucky ones will be following their dream.

Can you hear some saying “you must be mad to opt for that major”? But what governs our choices at what you become good at?  Teachers you get on well with of course, but things go deeper than that. What predisposition does your genetics and environment play in all this?

 Apparently, our intellectual interests are markedly influenced by the history of particular types of neuropsychiatric disorders within our close families, according to a study published by Campbell and Wang in Thursday’s issue of the Public Library of Science (1).

The correlations were uncovered by quizzing some 1077 new Princeton students, so we are dealing with high achievers. Students opting for the technical/hard sciences had a significant chance of a sibling with an autism spectrum disorder. The suggestion is that autism is a sort of super systematizing condition and that adherence to logic and detail arising from this could be an inheritable factor.

On the other hand, the humanities aspirants had a higher incidence of major depression, bipolar or substance abuse disorders. All conditions displayed by popular literary stereotypes for creative writers, artists or musicians.

As mentioned earlier, this study was of high achievers, which by definition leaves out the majority of us who are bumbling along trying to do our best in an unforgiving economy. When we look at our close familial links, we will have an explanation. What neuropsychiatric disorder among my relations would have predisposed me to be a party animal rather than a high achiever, I wonder?

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0030405


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