iVended Ice Tea


As a dedicated tea drinker, I am always interested in new serving possibilities. BOS produce cans of ice tea for their vending machines in South Africa. They specialize in their local rooibos or red-bush tea, which is particularly good for you apparently.

With no caffeine and low tannin, but with lots of antioxidants, flavanones and the like we should all be thinking about sipping some. It’s not just good for us, though. The Slimbridge Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust on the Severn Estuary of the UK fed it to their tadpoles.

Not ordinary tadpoles mind you, but tadpoles of both yellow and green banded poison dart frogs from the Amazon, which were reared in pint glasses (there is a local hostelry not far away) and did very well, growing up fungus-free (1). This was in 2010 and perhaps we’d better keep our coat collars turned up and hats pulled down to avoid any dart attacks from breaking the rules.

Clearly this tea is not to be sneezed at and BOS are pioneering a new vending scheme that has the blogosphere in a hubbub although not seemingly all of a twitter (1, 2).

BOS have installed chatty vending machines which are called “Bev” and these are for iVending in that you have to tweet to Bev that you are ready 4T and she will deliver a cold can with a friendly bit of chat in exchange for your Twitter address.

Currently, there aren’t too many Bevs about although there are plans a foot to clone her in a big way and spread her service wide and far so soon many more of us will be drinking iVended ice tea. Maybe the concept will spread to other goods locked away in vending machines.

Can you see the golden future? Your local vending machine will have learned your needs and preferences and as you travel, the machines will communicate and, like a good butler, make sure your needs are available at your pit stops and final destination. The twittering classes will not know if they are here or in Valhalla.


  1. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10252907
  2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18535165
  3. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzUXa6JThVQ&feature=player_embedded



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New Police Chicks


 As the red list of species seriously endangered grows year-by-year efforts are being made to save some of these from extinction. We have our favorites and are more ready to put our hands in our pockets for these species. It is interesting that many of the most popular species are predators such as big cats or hawks and falcons.

The big problem for so many species is the loss of their habitat to some form of human exploitation.  A good example is the New Zealand Falcon, which is that country’s only endemic raptor and is running out of habitat. But it also has a particular problem in that it nests on the ground, so its young are vulnerable to hungry cats, dogs, possums and stoats.

It feeds on small birds and that has inspired New Zealand to fund the ‘Falcons for Grapes’ program since 2005, in which they have been trying to encourage falcons to live in the vineyards to stop the smaller birds gorging themselves on grapes.

The falcon police have worked out well for the vineyard owners but the question remains is this life good for the falcons? Kross et al from the U o Canterbury have attempted to answer that question with their paper in PLoS ONE (1). In short the answer is yes.

The mums and dads feed their falcon chicks more and better quality food than falcons studied in wilder non-agricultural regions. Now they do get some food supplementation as pay for the policing job, but even when allowance is made for that the feeding is better. They even take more trouble infood preparation by pre-plucking before it is offered to these pampered chicks.

It seems that the program is win-win with healthier, brawnier, new police chicks ready to keep the grape pilferers out with the threat of capital punishment.


  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0038679


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A Bit Cheesy


Our hunter-gatherer roots are something that still has a lingering attraction to many as it seems to signify independence. However, in the early days of our development it required a deal of cooperation if we think about the hunting part. But sometime after about 10,000years ago we began  (slowly) to see the light.

Farming became a job opportunity. Organizing crops? Well, yes, but the big advance was domesticating animals. Now one could have Sunday Brunch walking around outside your hovel. Clearly one needed more than one and from there to the herd with the next understanding that the babies were more tender than the oldies, so now there is a quandary.

Farmers of all those thousands of years ago, like farmers today, seem to come with a ‘careful’ streak. So what to do with the milk after the babies were eaten, whether of cows, sheep, goats, or horses? You see all those thousands of years ago, adult humans were all lactose intolerant.

But of course technology came to their aid about 9,000 years ago in parts of Turkey, a little bit later in North Africa ending up in Britain about 6,000 years ago. The milk was fermented to make yogurt and cheese which made farming a really successful way of life (1, 2).

The most recent evidence comes from digs in Libya where bits of pottery had milk fat products remaining, and after 8,000 year they are a bit cheesy. Cheese is a great way to store your protein and fats and is easy to take with you on little excursions to your favorite cave to complete your rock art showing pastoral scenes of cows and people with pots tending the herds (2).

  1. http://news.discovery.com/history/milk-ancient-africans-120620.html
  2. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v486/n7403/full/nature11186.html


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Hitching A Ride On A Darwinian Music Engine


Humans like noise, but have a discriminatory ability, which leads them to music. Different cultures have produced different musical traditions and by definition, a tradition is something that is passed on generationally, but the question arises as to how it started, developed, and ended up sounding different as it’s an aesthetic choice and not essential for direct communication as is the spoken word.

In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science by MacCallum et al, there is a description of how the vox populi drive the evolution of noise to music with sound produced by a Darwinian music engine hidden inside a computer (1). The computer was seeded with 100 8s loops of randomized sound by the Big Designer looking down at his computer and deciding it was good.

Now each loop had is own polyphonic ‘DNA’ tree and almost 7000 people made up the vox pop that would give thumbs up or thumbs down. 20 loops made up a breeding loop group and the highest rated 10 loops were allowed to pair up to breed 2 daughters for each loop. Needless to say, the thumbs down 10 were sent immediately to the delete button in the sky, while the breeding pairs followed after their offspring were extant.

The selection pressure was the vox pop and over the generations the loops were more ‘musical’, that is in terms of rhythmicity and chordality standards of a Western undergraduate vox pop. As in any replicatory evolutionary process, replication is not always perfect and in the end transmission imperfections resulted in leveling off of perceived quality. Evolution had come to a halt after 400 to 500 generations although the process was watched out to 2500 in the first case.

Nowadays, of course, we write things down and have our music archived in the Library of Congress so our genetic drift (musically naturally) isn’t due to transmission errors, but the wallets of the vox pop is still presumably the major selection pressure. For Darwin music engine buffs example outputs are available to drool over (2).

  1. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/06/12/1203182109.full.pdf
  2. http://soundcloud.com/uncoolbob/sets/darwintunes/



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Teaching Your Robot To Talk


When (and not if) robots are going to be a regular feature helping us out, as we need some looking after, we need them to communicate efficiently. Now that doesn’t mean pre-programmed responses, but means that they have good voice recognition and can come up with useful replies rather like a super-Siri in Apple speak.

The golden chalice would be for your robot to actually learn the language so it could use the correct grammar, understand and pronounce words correctly. Thus teaching your robot to talk then becomes like teaching a young child to speak. For a robot to master that skill with language would mean that it could interpret nuances and be of much more use as you personal friend and helper.

A step in this direction has been reported in last week’s issue of PLoS ONE by Lyon et al from U o Hertfordshire (1). They chose to work on iCub, an open source robot project run out of Italy that combines the efforts of 18 EU academic establishments with the U o Illinois (2).

The experiment involved a group of 34 participants who had to teach the iCub going under the nom de guerre “DeeChee” about colors and patterns. DeeChee babbled away like a young child while the teachers taught, or did their best. They congratulated him (apparently they all decided he was a boy with no physical evidence whatsoever) when he managed an appropriate word sound. He did like to be told “well done.”

There were some problems. Some teachers weren’t as good as other, some spoke over the top of him, but others did quite well. In their 8 minute slots DeeChee managed to learn some one syllable words. I hasten to say that none of these were the four letter words that you might teach to your parrot to shock the neighbors.

Clearly you wouldn’t want to teach your robot to talk individually. One would hope that you would only have to do it with one or two who could then telepathically pass it on via their Bluetooth.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0038236#pone.0038236
  2. http://www.icub.org/ 


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Taking Risks


The psychologists amongst us are always keen on games to assess our behavior and risk-taking is one that they like to check us out on. The latest game to hit the streets is the Social Balloon Analogue Risk Task. The new twist is the “social” part.

The Balloon Game is one where the participant pumps up his/her balloon and earns cash with each pump. If the balloon pops, so goes the accumulated cash. So the idea is to take the pumping to the limit and it is a test of nerve to get the balloon to the edge of destruction, then stop, grab the cash and run.

Now, the “social” part is that the participant is doing this with and for a partner. Partners came as male, female or a child in Fischer and Hills experiment reported in the latest issue of Evolution and Human Behavior (1) and the partners share equally in the spoils, if any.

Women were happy to take risks when paired with either women or men, but got a lot more careful when paired with a child. Men were only fairly careful when with a woman or a child, but stick them with another young man and the old testosterone got the better of them and they made very risky plays.

Perhaps we could have guessed at these results as we don’t expect women to be taking risks when taking care of babies and as for a young man well, how else could he interact when paired with another? Maybe they should have tried it with different age groups, or even more exciting, with members of different political parties.

  1. http://www.ehbonline.org/article/S1090-5138(12)00016-5/abstract


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Flying Robots


Flying around the room can be a hazardous business, to which anyone who has stepped out of the shower to find that they are sharing their bathroom with a cockchafer will attest. That is just one of the delights of Europe which has become rare in recent years, although now that the pesticides are getting closer to being under control, their numbers are starting to recover.

Insects, like cockchafers, flies and ladybirds fly around at quite high speeds with eyesight that has a short range. They lack the sophisticated sensors and complex fast algorithms that we endeavor to build into our flying robots, note that is robots not drones so they have to fend for themselves. The result is that insects have a high collision frequency, albeit mitigated by rapid deceleration just prior to impact.

Now, Klaptocz et al from Lausanne have decided to try the bug approach to the bugbear of robotic flying – it’s a sort of crash and bounce philosophy so that the robot can pick itself up, dust itself off and start over just as the cockchafer does. They have a video on Phys.Org (1) and have a full paper in the IEEE Trans. Robotics (2).

Insects have a light, bouncy, robust exo-skeleton with legs and things to get them back to an even keel. This is the approach that the Lausanne group have taken. They have framed a rotorcraft-flying robot with a light carbon fiber cage and an artificial leg with which it can poke itself upright after an inadvertent collision with a wall or window. (It is unlikely to find itself in a bathroom, so you may step out of your Swiss shower with a modicum of confidence that it won’t think it’s a cockchafer.)

Before we dismiss this research direction as odd, think about many of the situations where you might want a robot hunting you down. A cave or mine accident would have very poor light conditions, as might part of a collapsed building, so flying robots that can bounce back, keep calm and carry on would be the way to go.

  1. http://phys.org/news/2012-06-insect-like-robots-self-recover-video.html
  2. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?arnumber=6213136 

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