Speaking Crow


 Crows don’t have many friends amongst us humans. We see them as raucous black birds that are predatory and aren’t very crop friendly. That pretty well gives them three strikes against them.

However, they do have their supporters, or at least people who take the time to study them. They have been shown to be very intelligent and not just squawking nuisances.

They can be quite skilled in tool use and also have excellent memories for faces. If they see you messing about with one of their nests, they not only remember what you look like and start a commotion whenever they see you, but they also teach their offspring to get on your case too.

To most of us a crow squawking sounds like any other crow squawking, but is this also true of crows? Wascher et al decided to check out their voice recognition capabilities with a group of 8 crows housed in an aviary with the odd jackdaw around to confuse the unwary (1, 2).

Firstly the people issue. As they were in an aviary, the crows were fed regularly by people. The first job was to train the feeders to say “Hey” to the crows. The big experiment came when the researchers recorded 5 feeders saying “Hey” and 5 people who hadn’t been introduced to the crows also saying “Hey”.

Hey doesn’t say much, but if the person who feeds you says it, you might expect it to get your attention. This was not the case with the crows, though. The strange voices saying “Hey” got their attention, with them looking up to stare in the direction of the voice. Seems that crows are pretty suspicious of the motives of people shouting at them.

Now the same thing was done with the jackdaws and with jackdaws who were strangers. It seems that the crows responded favorably to their friends who were jackdaws when they heard their contact calls. Apparently they have particular friends with whom they like to hang out with and others who can just go hang.

The next step I guess for the team is to learn how to start speaking crow like the jackdaws so they can have a more meaningful conversation that just “hey”.

  1. Wascher et al, J. Animal Cognition, (2012). DOI: 10.1007/s10071-012-0508-8
  2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/18025926


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Medical Queue Jumping


A major advantage of living in the developed world is that there is access to health care, but an increasing worry surrounds the current debate as how to pay for it as the technology improves and becomes more expensive. The age demographic of many populations is bringing this into sharper focus.

Before we get to decisions on rationing, there are questions on prioritizing or putting people to the back of the queue, that is posteriorizing them. Diederich et al decided to ask 1915 German citizens for their preferences should the costs of health care force changes. Their results are in the current issue of the Public Library of Science (1).

The good citizens were given two sets of criteria onwhich to base their prioritization or not as the case may be. The first set were health-based issues such as acute illness, life threatening conditions, chronic conditions, age etc.

The second set was the patient’s socio-economic status with issues such as high income, social responsibility, working age, professional responsibility, etc.

In general, serious illness and children were accepted as priority cases, whilst things like having a high income or being socially active were certainly not reasons to be given priority. These are views that most of us would espouse in public, but there was a lot more granularity when the participants were grouped in terms of having a healthy lifestyle, their socio-economic status, age or current health status.

For example the lower socio-economic group were coupled with those living a healthy life style in that they were keener on giving priority to seniors, children and people with children. The old codgers were less happy with priority to children or to people with children. The young people were more likely to support priority for people with mental handicaps.

When you start digging it looks like medical queue jumping won’t be generally popular, but would be tolerated for the very sick and maybe some kids, but even then there would be some muttering. Clearly, the size of your bank balance should not influence the triage. It appears that we need to find better solutions – could there be solutions via our smartphones and robots?


  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0036824


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Don't Believe All You Read


 We all like a good story and when it comes stories about politics and our world in general, we love it when we can identify with the “good guys” and clamor for more of the same. Often we don’t seem to care if the story is fact or fiction, we respond.

This leads us straight to the question of how easy is it to influence us with a carefully crafted piece of prose. This doesn’t have to be intentional propaganda apparently, but just a piece of fiction in which we can identify with the protagonist. Kaufman and Libby put this to the test with groups of undergrads at Ohio State were they ran six studies which they reported in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1,2).

The students were given reading assignments with stories with protagonists whom they could readily associate with, and their subsequent opinions and behavior was recorded. For example, after they had mopped up a story where the protagonist had battled against all odds so that they could cast their democratic vote, the readers were all inspired to vote in the coming election at a higher rate than the students who hadn’t had the reading assignment.

On the one hand, this sounds like their awareness of their responsibilities was triggered by their reading – a good thing most of us would say. But could it be that they were a little more malleable than we would like to imagine we are?

The studies got more subtle with the last two stories. One dealt with an African-American and his hard life. It came in two versions. The first declared his ethnicity up front and the other late in the story. The readers of the latter variation were more sympathetic.

The other study used a story of a gay character, but one story delayed the discovery of his sexual preference until late and again, a greater understanding of his problems was evident with the readers than the group who were aware from the beginning of the story.

So it seems that if we get to connect with the protagonist of a story, we tend to get into character. I wait with baited breath to see a similar study with movies and see if the effect is stronger. Perhaps, though, we should just be careful and not believe all we read.


  1. G. F. Kaufman & L. K. Libby,  J. Person. Soc. Psych., 2012. DOI: 10.1037/a0027525
  2. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2012/may/09/fictional-character-take-over


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Falling? – There's An App For That (Shortly).


As we get older a big worry we have is falling over. When we’re young we bounce and a Bandaid and a hug is often sufficient to restore peace and harmony, but as we get past our three score years and ten falling can be a lot more serious. Our bones can get a lot more fragile and Hidalgo has set up a clinical trial to see if stuffing us full of vitamin D and calcium will make falling about less hazardous (1).

It seems that the future is looking brighter. Albert and his colleagues from Northwestern U have started to come up with an app for falling about (2). This means that we can fall about in private and our actions will be noted. By whom is not mentioned as this is a proof of principle and not a market opportunity (yet).

The idea is that our smartphones have accelerometers in them so that they know which way is up, which is a very fine thing when we are looking at websites, graphs etc. However, it is a relatively simple question to ask your smartphone which way up are you. Of course, if you’ve slipped quietly under the table through too much indulgence, you’re on your own.

If, on the other hand you take a tumble through no fault of your own except Father Time, your smartphone will know what you did – fall flat on your face, your backside or your right or left side. It is smart enough to call out the paramedics who will set you up to your neck in plaster provided that you have downloaded the appropriate App.

Your phone’s sensors gave excellent results with a group of 15 people who were asked to fall about wearing accelerometers and Android phones. No-one was hurt, but once the App is written, an ambulance can come charging to the rescue.

Now this may seem like a problem if a large number of binge drinkers download the app, but we should recall the stats. Half of the nursing home residents in the US fall over in a year with most of them falling over multiple times. Hips get fragile when you’re 75+ and hospitals are not your vacation choice. As a result many lives are blighted by a fear of falling and the consequences so an App for falling could be a winner.


  1. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3267804/?tool=pubmed
  2. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0036556


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But Did They Taste Like Chicken?


The temperature of the earth has had its ups and downs in its history. At the moment it is beginning a rapid rise, which we blame emissions from cars, but also emissions from cows that is due in large part to our love of hamburgers.

Cows in our idyllic picture wander at large munching grass and putting to work hordes of bacteria in their multiple fermentation vats converting the cellulose into useful sugars. A by-product of the fermentation process is methane, which is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Now we can’t eat grass but we can eat cows so I don’t anticipate the problem disappearing any time soon.

Herbivores have been around for quite awhile and back in the Mesozoic huge sauropods wandered about doing what their parents taught them and munching on their greens. Wilkinson et al started to wonder about whether they suffered from greenhouse gas as a result and sat down, exercised their computer and wrote a letter to Current Biology (1,2).

The fun started with estimating the weight of dinosaur per square kilometer. Their estimates came out at a weight of 0.2 to 0.7 million kg/km2. This is a pretty high stocking rate if we compare it to today’s mammalian species in the wild.

But we move on to the next assumption, which is the bacterial fermentation is pretty much the same whether it takes place in the stomach of a Hereford or a Brontosaurus. The greenhouse gas output from either end gives (liters/day of methane) ~ 0.18 x (body weight in kg). So our Brontosaurus would have burped and farted approximately 2.7 kL each day.

The even bigger news is that when all this flatulence is added up, the annual output of methane is pretty close to what we produce today, which might have accounted for the 10°C higher temperature in those days.

That just leaves my big question that has been worrying me for years and that is what did they taste like? Did they taste like chicken? After all chickens are rumored to be relatives.

  1. http://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(12)00329-6
  2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/17953792 

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