Reading Four Letter Words


We are adept at recognizing patterns and other primates are too. Survival for monkey or man  is dependent on such observations. One of the most difficult patterns that we work with everyday is writing, perhaps we could say that this is our crowning achievement.

When we’re young we’re taught to read by whatever method is fashionable at the time.  But we should remember that our methodology isn’t unique.  Hieroglyphs and Chinese characters are two systems that require recognizing patterns for complete words as opposing building them up from a variety of building blocks.

So what about our primate cousins? The BBC report on some research by Grainger and Fagot with baboons (1).  The baboons had to recognize words on a touch screen so that they could touch a cross or an oval to indicate if the letters were a word or not in order to get a goodie.

The researchers were tireless in that they showed their participants 61k different combinations of letters. Our baboon friends became quite adept at recognizing four letter words. The top performer, Dan, was good for at least 300. No mention was made of any understanding beyond that the pattern meant ‘goodie.’

To me, this doesn’t seem to surprising as being shut in a compound with nothing much else to do. Punching a computer screen for treats would seem to be a pastime that might be worth trying. After all, in the wild, rapid pattern recognition is a survival skill.

  1. http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/17676129


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The Scent Of A Creative Solution


Some of us think of ourselves as ‘morning people’ while others would choose ‘night owls’ as their descriptor for when their creative juices are flowing at their peak. Nevertheless, we still have to sleep.  Sometimes that helps to improve our ideas, sometimes it doesn’t.

Assuming that our problem isn’t going to prevent us from sleeping, wouldn’t it be nice if we could use that sleep time to good effect. Instead of allowing our brains free rein to wander at will, keeping it on track to gather odd thoughts or half forgotten facts that are relevant to our problem would allow us to hit the track at full speed when we wake up.

Now a team from Radboud University with some input from the Harvard Business School has devised a way to make our sleep time more productive (1). Their solution? Get on the scent of a creative solution to being creative.

They split their participating people into three groups. Everybody was handed a problem that required a creative solution and, in the time honored fashion for knotty problems, were told to go away and sleep on it. But there was a twist.

The first group was set up with their problem with a scent diffuser wafting a particular scent through the room. When sent off to bed, the same scent accompanied their sleep. A second group had a different scent to go to bed with, while the control group was scentless all the way through.

It turned out that the first group, those with the same scent throughout, were not only more creative, but also better able to choose the most creative solution – a striking result compared to the other groups that just put in an average performance.

So it appears that to maximize our creativity, we have to choose our aromatherapy wisely and keep it going all night. The next step will be to home in on which scent is the best smell of success.

  1. S. M. Ritter,M. Strick, M. W. Bos, R.C.Van Baarten & A. Dijksterhuis, J. Sleep Res. (2012), DOI:10.1111/j.1365-2869.2012.01006.x


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Cogeneration – The New Solution


As oil prices climb inexorably higher our interest in alternative sources of energy grows in proportion. Solar energy looks like a good candidate to tap into as we can expect the sun to keep burning longer than Wall Street is burning through our savings.

For my fellow dinosaurs, you will recall that in the  ’70’s we had a self-sufficiency jag and homemade solar water heating panels were all the rage. Of course, only the purists relied totally on these for hot water. Most of us compromised and had showers in between the bright sunny spells with conventional water heating, but we meant well.

For several years now, the emphasis has shifted to photovoltaic cells. China seems to be taking that market to its bosom and solar cells are coming down in price. But even this is in danger of becoming ‘so last century.’

The word is now cogeneration. This means that we use the sun to produce both hot water and electricity simultaneously. (When we can see enough of it of course.) Conegra Solar is doing it for big companies and Naked Energy has started to do it for the 99% like you and me according to a report in Discovery News (1).

 Naked Energy’s system is an array of evacuated tubes with solar cells in them, which sit on your roof. Now solar cells become increasingly inefficient as their temperature increases, which of course they will do with the sun beating down on them all day. So Naked Energy has come up with the solution of pushing water through the tubes to keep the solar cells temperature down to the optimum.

This new hybrid is a win–win–win as the systems produce electricity and hot water, but also the performance is improved by the temperature control of the cells.

Naked Energy is based in Guildford in the South-East of England and if they can get it to work there, they have a great chance of it working in a large part of the energy hungry world. We can only wish them well.

http://news.discovery.com/tech/naked-energy-tubular-solar-120411.html

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Out Of This World


A good malt whisky is one of life’s little luxuries. But what makes a fine malt? Well, the barley must be important, as must the malting processes, and then there is the fermentation. After all that is done comes the fermentation, but then comes the real art form – the blending and aging of the distilled spirit.

The aging takes place in oak barrels over many years with the range of molecules carried over with the distillate reacting with the wood. Over time some of the volatiles are lost by evaporation through the wood. This loss is known as the angel’s share, but the angels would have to be pretty tough as the alcohol content of what is evaporating is very high.

However, not satisfied with this traditional old and mysterious process, NanoRacks LLC are taking an Islay malt from the Ardbeg distillery to new heights by maturing it for two years in the international space station (1). Of course we can expect this sample to have a flavor that is out of this world and hope that it comes back without too much going to the angels.

With the transport to and from the space station being outsourced by NASA to private industry, perhaps we will see regular cargoes of whisky zooming off into space. Then the price may come down to earth so we can all enjoy it. Will the Russians be aging premium vodka in space soon?

  1. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-17657804  



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A Random Income Game?


Social scientists and psychologists love to have us playing economic games. They usually give us lots of opportunity to look after our own interests. With games like the ‘Prisoner’s Dilemma’ we set ourselves against an individual, but in the ‘Random Income Game,’ RIG, we play in a group although we make the decisions individually.

The RIG has a group who are randomly assigned an income, but the distribution may be varied.  As group members can see what their colleagues are getting, the may opt to even things up. With multiple rounds, group composition changes so a bad reputation doesn’t stick.

Dawes et al have got a group to play the RIG while sticking their heads in the big magnet to get fMRI scans of which parts of their brains are working when they are making the decisions (1,2). The subjects showed an admirable tendency towards an egalitarian distribution of wealth. They also had some questions to answer that were aimed at their thoughts on society and how they would split cash with someone else.

All this allowed the researchers to focus down on the insular cortex as being the seat of egalitarianism. The insular cortex is thought to be where we are self-aware and where we judge levels of pain. But, importantly in the context of this study, it is where our feelings of empathy arise.

As the US presidential campaign starts to get into serious mode we are due to hear a lot about fairness and taxes and one can hope that there will be a lot of insular cortex activity with both the candidates and the voters by November.

  1. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/04/120409164307.htm
  2. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/04/05/1118653109.abstract



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