Too fast, too furious
The Fast & Furious action movies now have a companion in the world of animal study. A team of biologists videoed a furious and fast ā well, relatively fast ā incident, which they describe in a paper called āā.
The , they explain, āshows the sloth trying to escape at a considerably high speed (for a sloth) by inverted quadrupedal locomotion along a horizontal fallen tree lying across the mineral lick at a height of ~30 cm above the ground. The ocelot tries to bite the slothās hands and slowly follows it on top of the branch.ā
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Spam-filtered lives
An advisory memo for lawyers has made Feedback muse on an unanswerable question: how much have spam filters altered the course(s) of history?
How many meetings didnāt happen because email spam filters swallowed the invitations? How many agreements went unconsummated? How many other kinds of consummation were banjaxed into spam-filtered-interruptus?
The legal advisory, by attorney Barron Henley, explains that āA high percentage of malpractice practice claims and practice management problems are caused by communication breakdowns.ā He warns especially that, āThanks to spam filters, email address auto-complete and various other issues, sending an email is no guarantee that the intended recipient actually received it.ā
The University of Notre Dame, Indiana, published Henleyās paper, giving it the title āCommunication breakdown ā Itās always the same (but itās avoidable)ā. As an unusual introduction to that concept of always-the-same-ness, the top of the paperās very first page says: āDISCLAIMER ā The information and procedures set forth in this practice manual are subject to constant change.ā
One of the many unsolvable questions of recent history is: how many lawyers never saw Henleyās warning about communication breakdowns ā because their spam filters swallowed it?
In God (and AI) we trust
ā.ā That is the title of a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. By Mustafa KarataÅ at Nazarbayev University, Kazakhstan, and Keisha Cutright at Duke University, North Carolina, it reads like a thrill ride, with surprises around every corner.
The study was a series of experiments involving different people, some online from the US or Turkey, others in Turkey in āa mid-sized mosqueā or on a ānearby street without a view of the mosqueā or in a dental clinic. At the beginning of each experiment, some people were asked to write about God, others to write about some other topic (mostly, how they had spent the earlier part of their day).
One experiment asked 405 people if they would prefer getting recommendations ā about movies, romantic partners and 22 other things ā from a human or from an algorithm. Other experiments involved choices between āhit Turkish songsā, āmutual fundsā, āomega-3/fish oil supplementsā, hypothetical āhealthy protein barsā, dental (implant and root canal) treatments or cryptocurrency prizes.
Each choice was between something supposedly recommended by a human or a similar something supposedly recommended by an algorithm. At the end of each experiment, people were asked to indicate āthe extent to which they thought about God while participating in the studyā.
All these (and a few other) things having been considered, KarataÅ and Cutright leave us, their readers, to ponder the lesson they say they have learned. Specifically this: āThoughts of God lead individuals to feel smaller, rendering them more likely to recognize the fallibility of humans. They therefore find it less essential to rely on humans when making decisions and are more accepting of AI-based recommendations.ā
Weary of ambiguity
Are you Weary of research-titles-that-are-ambiguous fame? If you are Daniel Weary, co-author of the study āā, the answer is yes.
If you are not Weary, or anyway not that Weary, Feedback poses you this riddle: is Wearyās calves study about the muscular back part of the lower leg or is it about young cows? Feedback urges you to read the study and decide for yourself, but here is a not very helpful hint. The first two sentences of the paper say: āNegative emotional states are known to interact, potentially aggravating one another. In this study, we used a well validated paradigm (successive negative contrast, SNC) to determine if pain from a common procedure (disbudding) influences responses to a reward downshift.ā
, who is at the University of British Columbia, Canada, co-wrote another study with a challengingly ambiguous title ā ambiguous, that is, if you know or suspect that thick, soft cloth made from a pressed mass of fibres is able to feel emotions. That study, published as a chapter in the book Advances in the Study of Behavior, is called āBehavioral evidence of felt emotions: Approaches, inferences, and refinementsā.
Marc Abrahams created the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony andĀ co-foundedĀ the magazine Annals of Improbable Research. Earlier, he worked on unusual ways to use computers. His website isĀ .
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