Outlook? Rosy!


A recent study indicates that about 80% of us are optimists and that our optimism interferes with our acceptance of reality (1,2). My first reaction was “Nonsense!” but then I realized that I was being optimistic and not accepting reality. Before my dilemma sends me into an infinite loop, here is a brief outline of the work by Sharot, Korn and Dolan.

A small group (a total of about 40 young adult ‘lab-rats’ in three groups) were ‘trained’ on estimating the probability of something bad happening to them such as getting PTSD or dying before 90.

The big test came with a huge list of nasties that could happen from getting their bike stolen, through getting divorced to dying of cancer. fMRI scans were included when the candidates were then given the statistical risks that we all face. They were again asked to rate their probability of experiencing the personal disasters.

With such a long list, their memories would have to have been much better than normal to be accurate of course. As mentioned above, most people were optimists. With conditions that they had heard that they had lower chances of being at the receiving end, they updated their estimates markedly in that direction. However, when the reverse was the case, their correction to their estimate was much less.

Well, of course, most of us are optimists, but the stats are out there. Were they not listening? The fMRI scans showed that they weren’t doing sufficient processing. The scans showed low activity in the part of the brain by your right front temple. This is the part that controls your risk aversion. So, the optimistic participants were reckoning that they would beat the odds – the stats were for the rest of us.

I guess most of the lemmings must think that they are out for a pleasant cross-country run! Maybe not the best survival strategy.

  1. http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nn.2949
  2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-15214080

Weathermen


Climate change is now well established as a constant background debate along with most of us feeling guilty about our contribution to pollution in general. The world climate has fluctuated previously, but detailed records of temperature and social events are lacking as soon as we look back further than a few hundred years.

Zhang et al in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science have turned their attention to the “Little Ice Age” and the “General Crisis of the 17th Century” (1). The Little Ice Age was a period of low temperatures that lasted from 1560 to 1660 and the General Crisis refers to the mess that Europe made of its socio-political organization with revolution and war all over the place.

The authors poured over the records of the times for the period 1500 to 1800 and plotted their data for temperature, grain yields, wars, plagues, and famines and crunched the numbers in a truly heroic fashion looking for Granger causal relations.

Many of us would rather watch paint dry, or wait for politicians to make a good economic decisions, rather than get deep into statistics, but Granger got his Nobel Prize for trying to show with statistical trends how one economic factor causes another, so we need to listen, while remembering that fitting the Granger condition doesn’t, necessarily, mean that there isn’t another cause playing in the game.

To cut to the chase, the record is that as the climate got worse, grain yields got bad, people got hungry and restive. They migrated, rebelled, fought wars and in the poor conditions typhoid, dysentery and plague spread. The authors computers stirred this big mix and came up with climate fluctuation satisfying the Granger causality conditions for the good times and bad.

To put it simply, if the sun is shining and the population is well fed and content, they are less likely to run around and fight with their neighbor for their piece of bread. Not a good prospect for the coming century, I fear.

  1. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/09/29/1104268108

Starting Young


People, in general, tend to be cooperative creatures and that is one of the major reasons for our success in the big scheme of things. The received wisdom is that traits such as fairness, altruism, and empathy make high levels of cooperation possible.

An interesting question is when do these traits become apparent? Do we have to be well into our childhood before we play fair? Well, some researchers have suggested this, but Schmidt and Sommerville have the results of a new study that suggests that this is not the case (1). These workers studied the responses of forty-seven 15-month old girls and boys to two basic situations.

The toddlers watched some videos where two people requested cookies or milk from a third person. In some cases the handouts were equal and in some they were clearly unequal. The young observers stared significantly longer at either the unfair division video picture or the fair division one, indicating their expected result. If an unfair division wasn’t what they expected from an adult, they stared longer – it was in violation of their expectation, VOE.

The next experimental set was designed to test their altruism. After being allowed to play with two toys and showing a preference for one, they were asked by an unfamiliar observer if they could have one. Here we have an interesting result. 32% of the toddlers ignored the request, 37% handed over their least preferred toy, while 32% handed over their preferred toy. These latter toddlers were classified as “altruistic sharers” as opposed to “selfish sharers” (the 37%) or “non-responders”.

Now the analysis becomes more interesting when the VOE preferences are tied in with the sharing behaviors. Our altruistic sharers were very heavily in the group staring in disbelief at the unfair cookie handout, while our selfish sharers were equally heavily glaring at the fair division. The non-responders had VOE preferences split between the two, but they weren’t interested in sharing with strangers anyway.

So what are we going to make of all this? Firstly Schmidt and Sommerville point out that altruism and fairness are already there at 15-months. But wouldn’t it be interesting to fast forward 50 years and see which ones had become lawyers, politicians, or aid workers?

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0023223

Facing Up To Things


From a very early age we learn to recognize faces and the significance of particular expressions. The signals take just a few milliseconds to read. Our dogs are very good at this too. They read us sufficiently accurately to convince us that “they understand every word I say” even when we really know that we’re not speaking dog.

Of course, we say (maybe), that such recognition skills are critical for survival and that we’d have never made it this far without them, but at the same time we can also scare ourselves on dark nights in the woods by seeing faces in vague, moving bushes. Seeing faces in the clouds moving across the sky or in the patterns on tiles on the bathroom floor are much more relaxing, of course. The question arises, though, what are the critical features of the pattern that causes us to think, “face”?

Immediately after that thought, comes the one about how to train one’s computerized camera to recognize faces. Currently the fastest algorithm for electronic face recognition is the ‘Viola-Jones’ algorithm developed by Paul Viola and Michael Jones ten years ago. The accuracy of face recognition is now good enough for the process to be found in digital cameras.

A current paper by Hart et al from Phillips U at Marburg explores the similarity for patterns, which are not faces, being seen as faces by both people and machines (1). The humans were two-dozen young students who were permitted a glance at a series of blurry pictures. Some were of faces and some weren’t. There was only one machine in the experiment. Machines, of course, don’t come with individual preferences, only algorithms (don’t they?)

It turned out that people and the machine were quite good at picking a real face when paired with an illusory face. Not perfect, but no surprises there.

If the images are partially obstructed by vertical bars, then the mistakes increase significantly. Could be good pointers here for camouflage experts and those putting on war paint. Of course, this wasn’t the discussion point of the paper, rather the authors suggest that our brains use a similar analysis tree in deciding on a face being a face.

So next time you’re scared by something lurking in the bushes on that dark stormy night, take a picture and see if your camera is correcting for ‘red-eye’. If it is, run! It’s always good to have a second opinion.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0025373

Flushed With Success


For all of who have read Kenneth Grahame’s ‘wind in the Willows” (or seen the movie), we fondly remember Mr. Toad’s discovery of the automobile after one had driven his new caravan off the road. Recall, he just sat in the road quietly murmuring “Poop, poop.”

He was more far seeing than I thought when I first read the story. Now the Japanese company TOTO has unveiled it new ultra green motor tricycle that any Mr. Toad would be proud to own. Ultra green? Which fuel? Human waste, so riders can go “poop, poop all the way down the High street.

It is equipped with a bio-digesting toilet as the seat so one can poop–and–go with the minimum of delay. No longer will you need to take your mother sage advice “to go before you go.”

The inaugural journey is a 600 mile marathon starting at Kyoto and pooping their way through Kobe to end up at Tokyo, pooped out I would guess. The machine is call the Toilet Bike Neo and just in case one might feel a little isolated riding one’s new Neo, it will talk to one and play music. I’m unsure when it will talk or play music, but it would make sense if it is sensitive to your performance at the time. After all, there is a time for a friendly chat and there is a time for loud background music.

  1. http://www.treehugger.com/files/2011/10/poop-powered-toilet-bike-toto-japan.php
  2. http://tototalk.jp/top.html