Political Excitement


Three days into Fall and the campaigning for next election for the US President is now well under way. Many of us will be hunkering down for a long winter. The Web will keep us well informed, presumably, with a cacophony of Tweets. The parties, candidates and a plethora of ragtag organizations will be wooing us for votes and cash – the political dating web-sites will be open for business.

Many relationships start from Internet dating sites these days. With almost $1bn in revenue, it is a lucrative business sector. It is also a useful sector for social science geeks who are interested in data mining. Why? Because the profiles that daters have submitted are useful fodder for the number crunchers with the statistics programs.

Klofstad et al have started to wonder if daters have politics in mind in the mate–attraction process (1). They start by noting that the idea that our behavior and attitude is no longer considered to be just due to our environment and how we were brought up, but that genetic profile has a part to play in terms of predisposition. (Of course, a DNA profile won’t tell us who will vote Republican or Democrat, or at least I haven’t heard that to be the case.) Hence their question ‘Do we see our prospective mates through political eyes?’

They did their data mining and number crunching as best they could. Their major problem was that daters weren’t eager to flaunt the color of their political underwear. They were then forced to go the well-trodden route of assuming that the correlation between education and civic engagement reflect political views, and this showed that their initial assumption, that mate selection was actually along political lines was correct, even though it did not initially appear that way.

Mmmm… I’m sure the computers were churning hard and the statistical parameters looked good, but perhaps the dater’s political views are the result of all of their other characteristics and it is these that are matching. The vision their suggestion conjures up for me is one of heated political debates going on in the subdued lights of the boudoir as the culmination of a hot date.

  1. C.A.Klofstad, R.McDermot and P.K.Hatemi, J. Evolution Anim. Behav., (2011), doi:10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2011.06.002

Heroic Printouts


The Winnipeg Art Gallery has recently hosted this year’s TED Conference. It is organized by a non-profit to disseminate ideas “Worth Spreading”.  TED = Technology, Entertainment, Design. One of the eye and ear catching presentations was from KorEcoLogic on their exciting hybrid car (1). The BBC was there and has published a detailed report (2).

Just in concept, the car is exciting as a two-seater with a 200mpg fuel consumption figure from its combination of batteries and small bio-ethanol engine used to recharge the batteries in addition to solar cells. Speeds of 60 – 70 mph are sufficient for non-freeway use. With a light stainless steel chassis, it should last a long time, and the acceleration might be quite exhilarating.

All that is interesting, but the “just one last thing” piece is that the beautifully streamlined body is printed out on a 3D-printer!

Printing something the size of a sports car is exciting and is the future of a lot of manufacturing. Only the number of units needed for a particular production run have to be printed at the time. Changes can also be made simply by downloading the new design, so re-tooling is minimized. Perhaps, I should make it clear that it is body panels that are printed and not a whole body.

The current plan in Manitoba is to be selling these cars in 2014 at between $10k to $50k. Let’s hope they succeed and get to the lower end of the price range. It will make going to the store a pleasure. I can hardly wait.

  1. http://www.urbee.net/vision/
  2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15007018

Teamwork


Chimpanzees are our nearest animal relative, according to their and our DNA profiles. That makes them a tempting model for behavioral studies, although much more expensive than mice. They, like us, live in social groups, show violence to other social groups, and have an internal group hierarchy.

Although they form alliances and have some empathy for their particular “friends”, do they really like being team players? Bullinger, Melis and Tomasello of the Max Planck have published the results of a study to see (1). They employed the well-used technique of the subjects pulling a platform towards themselves to get access to food, or a tool, as the experimental methodology. Of course, they had to start off with pairs who were compatible otherwise, well, who knows, nothing might have got done – rather like Congress discussing the debt ceiling.

The study showed that the chimps preferred to work on their own except when there was a distinctly higher payoff for cooperation. The authors concluded that the chimps were happy to use their colleague as a “social tool” and didn’t find teamwork a reward in itself.

The comparison with us was made and the conclusion was that they don’t share our human motivation towards finding teamwork a satisfying experience for its own sake even when there is no reward for collaboration.

I suspect that conclusion has been too easily reached. Most of us work in a group to benefit in multiple ways. If there is no perceived benefit at all, most of us will go our own way with a “me first” attitude only ameliorated by remembering our manners as taught to us while young. Too often, our failure to cooperate lets us down unnecessarily.

  1. Bullinger et al, Animal Behaviour, doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.201108.008

Chatting To Machines


More and more often, when we call a service provider in frustration because something isn’t working as it should and used to, we go through a phone tree. Most of these are prerecorded human speech. However, in many circumstances we find that we are talking to a computer.

How do we know if the reply is from a human or not? Well, we’re good at listening to the responses and can’t be fooled, can we? The aim of the robot designers is to get their robot to pass the Turing Test. Not heard of it? It’s a simple test that a judge looks at text responses from a human and a machine. If the judge is fooled, the robot graduates.

Bad news; to date none have graduated. For some years there has been a contest for The Loebner Prize for someone to build a robot terminal that cannot be distinguished from humans by a panel of judges. Data from the past ten years has been analyzed by Lortie and Guitton from Laval U in an attempt to understand why judges judge as they do (1). You see, some humans were judged to be robots after a conversation with the judges.

Most of the effort of the IT brigade has been to build on what makes a robot appear to be human. The authors came up with the thought that fresh light might be shed on the problem by looking at why some humans seemed to be robots.

So what makes a judge decide on whether they are talking to a human or a machine? First of all they like to hear lots of chat with personal questions and lots of polysyllabic words. Machines are, after all, known to be brief up to the level of brusque if not rude. Not too much laughter or cheerfulness though, that’s not good. We humans wouldn’t be so casual.

Setting things up to get the judge to ask lots of questions was a sure-fire winner. Judges, like the rest of us, like to think that the entity that we are communicating with is actually interested in us, and what we have to say. Hence the conclusion that the judges' predujices play a major role in their "impartial" judgments.

It would seem valuable to use this research for training some customer service personnel rather than programming more companiable robots

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0025085