Month: March 2013

Human Misjudgement

so many human defects all in one place.

  1. Under-recognition of the power of what psychologists call ‘reinforcement’ and economists call ‘incentives.’
  2. Psychological denial.
  3. Incentive-cause bias, both in one’s own mind and that of ones trusted advisor, where it creates what economists call ‘agency costs.’
  4. Bias from consistency and commitment tendency, including the tendency to avoid or promptly resolve cognitive dissonance. Includes the self-confirmation tendency of all conclusions, particularly expressed conclusions, and with a special persistence for conclusions that are hard-won.
  5. Bias from Pavlovian association, misconstruing past correlation as a reliable basis for decision-making.
  6. Bias from reciprocation tendency, including the tendency of one on a roll to act as other persons expect.
  7. Bias from over-influence by social proof — that is, the conclusions of others, particularly under conditions of natural uncertainty and stress.
  8. What made these economists love the efficient market theory is the math was so elegant.
  9. Bias from contrast-caused distortions of sensation, perception and cognition.
  10. Bias from over-influence by authority.
  11. Bias from deprival super-reaction syndrome, including bias caused by present or threatened scarcity, including threatened removal of something almost possessed, but never possessed.
  12. Bias from envy/jealousy
  13. Bias from chemical dependency.
  14. Bias from mis-gambling compulsion
  15. Bias from liking distortion, including the tendency to especially like oneself, one’s own kind and one’s own idea structures, and the tendency to be especially susceptible to being misled by someone liked. Disliking distortion, bias from that, the reciprocal of liking distortion and the tendency not to learn appropriately from someone disliked.
  16. Bias from the non-mathematical nature of the human brain in its natural state as it deal with probabilities employing crude heuristics, and is often misled by mere contrast, a tendency to overweigh conveniently available information and other psychologically misrouted thinking tendencies on this list.
  17. Bias from over-influence by extra-vivid evidence
  18. Mental confusion caused by information not arrayed in the mind and theory structures, creating sound generalizations developed in response to the question “Why?” Also, mis-influence from information that apparently but not really answers the question “Why?” Also, failure to obtain deserved influence caused by not properly explaining why.
  19. Other normal limitations of sensation, memory, cognition and knowledge
  20. Stress-induced mental changes, small and large, temporary and permanent
  21. other common mental illnesses and declines, temporary and permanent, including the tendency to lose ability through disuse
  22. Development and organizational confusion from say-something syndrome.

Inflatable robots

We can build a much wider range of machines with 1000x less material by building them soft. We can create materials and actuators that are soft – that act more like muscles and tissues found in nature that can exert tremendous forces while being flexible and low weight.

Interspecies communication

Bonobo understanding several 1000s words in English. Some of the candidate species with enough consciousness do not have the right vocal cords, so touch-based UIs might be the way forward for 2-way communication.

2014-01-25: Various species

A recent workshop on Analyzing Animal Vocal Sequences provided some illuminating views of what we know and what we don’t know about animal communication. In particular one notes the increased use of Machine Learning algorithms that are currently used to make sense of human interactions on the web. Talks at the workshop included:Unraveling dolphin communication complexity, Singing isn’t just for the birds, Automated identification of bird individuals using machine learning, A receiver’s perspective on analyzing animal vocal sequences, Animal communication sequence analysis using information theory, Machine learning for the classification of animal vocalizations and Information theoretic principles of human language and animal behavior

2015-05-23: Birds and Squirrels

squirrels understand ‘bird-ese,’ and birds understand ‘squirrel-ese.’ When red squirrels hear a call announcing a dangerous raptor in the air, or they see such a raptor, they will give calls that are acoustically “almost identical” to the birds

2019-11-07: Dog talk

Stella, an 18-month-old dog, can use a sound board to communicate using the 29 words she knows in short phrases and has been learning to ‘talk’ by pressing on buttons since she was 8 weeks old.

People.com interviewed Christina about Stella and how she can put words together to make simple sentences.

Using nose-activated vests and touchscreens, our canine pals are being trained to summon help for their handlers—and much more.

2023-01-31: Great apes (and humans?) share sign language. The research is plausible but the reported results hover around 57.3 ± 11.9%, so not very conclusive

All the great apes – chimps and bonobos – have an overlap of about 95% of the gestures they use to communicate. “So we already had a suspicion that this was a shared gesturing ability that might have been present in our last shared ancestor. But we’re quite confident now that our ancestors would have started off gesturing, and that this was co-opted into language.” The great apes use a whole “lexicon” of 80 gestures, each conveying a message to another member of their group. Messages like “groom me” are communicated with a long scratching motion; a mouth stroke means “give me that food” and tearing strips from a leaf with teeth is a chimpanzee gesture of flirtation.
Volunteers watched videos of the chimps and bonobos gesturing, then selected from a multiple choice list of translations. The participants performed significantly better than expected by chance, correctly interpreting the meaning of chimpanzee and bonobo gestures over 50% of the time.


2023-04-21: Sperm whales

We detail a scientific roadmap for advancing the understanding of communication of whales that can be built further upon as a template to decipher other forms of animal and non-human communication. Sperm whales, with their highly-developed neuroanatomical features, cognitive abilities, social structures, and discrete click-based encoding make for an excellent model for advanced tools that can be applied to other animals in the future. We outline the key elements required for the collection and processing of massive datasets, detecting basic communication units and language-like higher-level structures, and validating models through interactive playback experiments. The technological capabilities developed by such an undertaking hold potential for cross-applications in broader communities investigating non-human communication and behavioral research.


2023-04-22: Parrot video calls

A group of domesticated birds were taught to call one another on tablets and smartphones. The birds engaged in most calls for the maximum allowed time. They formed strong preferences—in the preliminary pilot study. Ellie, a Goffin’s cockatoo, became fast friends with a California-based African grey named Cookie. “It’s been over a year and they still talk”. The types of vocalizations the birds used suggested they were mirroring the call and response nature they engage in in the wild—“hello, I’m here!” in parrot-speak. The most popular parrots were also the ones who initiated the most calls, suggesting a reciprocal dynamic similar to human socialization. And while, in large part, the birds seemed to enjoy the activity itself, the human participants played a big part in that. Some parrots relished the extra attention they were getting from their humans, while others formed attachments for the humans on the other side of the screen.

DNA precursors in space

Consider this: we have the capability to detect the presence of very specific molecules from 25k light years away. This is just mind-boggling.

Researchers have discovered prebiotic (pre-life) molecules in interstellar space that may have formed on dusty ice grains floating between the stars. The molecules were detected near the center of our Milky Way Galaxy — specifically, the star-forming region Sagittarius(Sgr) B2(N), which is the richest interstellar chemical environment currently known. 1 of the newly-discovered molecules, called E-cyanomethanimine (E-HNCHCN) is one step in the process that chemists believe produces adenine, 1 of the 4 nucleobases of DNA. The other molecule, called ethanamine, is thought to play a role in forming alanine, 1 of the 20 amino acids in the genetic code.

2014-10-03: Isopropyl cyanide, needed for life

Astronomers have detected radio waves within a giant gas cloud in interstellar space corresponding to an unusual carbon-based molecule called isopropyl cyanide, needed for life. Organic molecules usually found in these star-forming regions consist of a single “backbone” of carbon atoms arranged in a straight chain. But the carbon structure of isopropyl cyanide branches off, making this the first interstellar detection of such a molecule


2014-12-02: DNA itself can also survive in space. This makes Panspermia (and contamination of the seas of europa by humanity’s probes) more likely.

Surviving space flight, 1000°C temperatures, re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere, and landing, 35% of the DNA retained its full biological function

2022-03-13: Peptides can form on cosmic dust

Without any of the enzymes that biochemistry provides, the production of peptides is an inefficient 2-step process that involves first making amino acids and then removing water as the amino acids link up into chains in a process called polymerization. Both steps have a high energy barrier, so they occur only if large amounts of energy are available to help kick-start the reaction.

Because of these requirements, most theories about the origin of proteins have either centered on scenarios in extreme environments, such as near hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor, or assumed the presence of molecules like RNA with catalytic properties that could lower the energy barrier enough to push the reactions forward. And even under those circumstances, “special conditions” would be needed to concentrate the amino acids enough for polymerization. Though there have been many proposals, it isn’t clear how and where those conditions could have arisen on the primordial Earth.

But now a group of astrobiologists showed that peptides, the molecular subunits of proteins, can spontaneously form on the solid, frozen particles of cosmic dust drifting through the universe. Those peptides could in theory have traveled inside comets and meteorites to the young Earth — and to other worlds — to become some of the starting materials for life.