Category: Science&Technology

This probably sounds familiar. Does your dog jump every time you come home? Does he jump when you tell him it’s time for a walk and you pick up his leash? Does he even jump when you’re about to throw him a ball. Yes, this behavior in our pets is something we encounter every day and most of us take for granted. But is it really that?

Why do dogs jump when they’re excited?

Dogs jump to greet people because it’s a natural behavior for their species. When four-legged friends meet outside, they sniff each other and may even lick their faces. Well, your furry friend wants to do the same with you… except you’re a lot taller! And to reach you, the animal has to jump to get your attention.

In addition to greeting, dogs also jump out of pure excitement. Our pets experience a variety of emotions, which they sometimes channel into the gesture of jumping: happiness at seeing their favorite toy, a new bone, their leash in your hand (a signal that it’s time for a walk).

Sometimes dogs jump to assert their place in the pack. Being taller (at least as tall as) their human can be a way to demonstrate authority and status in the hierarchy. On the other hand, licking your face while jumping can also be interpreted as a sign of submission. A behavior inherited from your pet’s wolf ancestors. Puppies lick their mother’s muzzle out of affection and respect.

Another reason why dogs jump is because it can give them a sense of control in unsettling situations, such as a stranger walking through the door. Your pet may not be happy to see this new person and may jump out of fear and/or nervousness in response to their appearance. Yes, there are indeed many valid (from the dog’s perspective!) reasons for jumping!

Encouraging the behavior – why shouldn’t we do it?

It is not advisable to encourage your pet’s jumping behavior for many reasons: danger of scratches, muddy paws, injury to small children and more. Sometimes you may be rewarding it without even realizing it! Think about it: if you shower your jumping dog with kisses and attention when you come in the door, he will think that everything is in order and will continue to do the same thing whenever you come home. Instead, try to ignore (as much as you can) your dog – moan motionlessly and cross your arms, saying nothing until he calms down.

It may take some time and practice, but eventually your pet will understand. It is also important to recognize and encourage the moments when your pet is calm. Keep treats on hand and give them to your dog every time he greets you calmly.

Illustrative Photo by Pixabay: https://www.pexels.com/photo/white-dog-terrier-jumping-near-grass-field-during-daytime-159692/

Researchers at the California Institute of Technology are trying to calculate the speed of human thought. And the number they come up with is a slightly disconcerting 10 bits of information per second.

But what are we talking about here? Your mind might (surprisingly slowly, it turns out) assume that we are talking about “bits” like computer ones. In computer language, a bit can have one of two values, often represented by a binary digit—1 or 0. But that doesn’t correspond to the amount of information being transmitted, sometimes called a “shannon,” after Claude Shannon, who in turn is called the “father of information theory.”

“To understand the concept of information, it is essential to distinguish it from that of data. Here is an example. We have a friend who has just given birth, and we send her a message to ask her about the sex of the newborn. From our perspective, there is an equal chance that the baby will be a boy or a girl. Therefore, her response will send us exactly 1 shannon. To respond, she will probably send us a sentence made up of several characters, each represented by several bits. We will therefore receive several dozen bits of data for 1 shannon,” explains Vincent Gripon, associate professor at Télécom Bretagne.

“Our brain is used to this fact. It has been estimated that one hundred million bits of data per second are transmitted from the visual cortex to the deep regions of our neocortex. Most of this data is completely useless to us and, moreover, carries very little information.”

Scientists studying information theory have tried to quantify the information of various systems, including how much information is transmitted in each syllable of language and how much information there is in the entire observable universe. In doing so, they stumbled upon a little mystery: Our brains are constantly bombarded with sensory data at an incredible rate, estimated at 109 bits per second, yet our conscious thoughts process information at a much slower rate.

As you might expect, human thought is difficult to quantify. In an attempt to do so, the authors of a new study looked at the tasks people perform and the amount of information they process during them. One such task is manual text typing.

“A good typist can type up to 120 words per minute. If each word is considered to be 5 characters, this typing speed corresponds to 10 keystrokes per second. How many bits of information does that represent? We considered counting the keys on the keyboard and taking the logarithm of that number to get the entropy of a single character, but that would be a bit of a stretch,” the team wrote in their paper.

“The English language contains ordered internal structures that make the stream of characters highly predictable. In fact, the entropy of the English language is only ∼1 bit per character. Expert typists rely on all this redundancy to type faster: If they were forced to type a random sequence of characters, their speed would drop sharply.”

Based on this, they were able to calculate that the speed of thought that a typist is working with when typing a random sequence of characters is about… 10 bits per second. Looking at other tasks—from playing Tetris to solving a Rubik’s Cube under controlled conditions to listening to English—the team estimated that most of these tasks are performed at a similarly, surprisingly low speed.

“That’s an extremely low number,” says Markus Meister, a co-author of the paper. “At any given moment, we extract only 10 bits of the trillions that our senses take in, and we use them to perceive the world around us and make decisions. This raises a paradox: what does the brain do to filter all this information?”

While our brains are dealing with the avalanche of sensory data, our conscious thoughts seem to operate at a much slower speed. The team notes that this could have implications for, for example, the creation of brain-computer interfaces. While brain-computer interfaces may one day emerge that can speed up human brain activity, we may be limited by the speed of our own cognitive capacity.

More generally, this raises a number of questions, such as why our nervous system can process thousands of elements in parallel, while our conscious thought moves at such a slow pace.

“How can humans cope with only 10 bits/sec? The intuitive answer here is that cognition at such a slow rate is sufficient for survival,” the team writes. “More precisely, our ancestors chose an ecological niche in which the world was slow enough to make survival possible. In fact, the 10 bits/sec are only needed in the worst-case scenarios, and most of the time our environment changes at a much slower rate.”

While it’s an interesting estimate of the speed of information in human thought, the team emphasizes that it raises more of a question and, rather than providing answers, offering an opportunity for further research in the future.

“In particular, our peripheral nervous system is capable of absorbing information from the environment at a much higher rate, on the order of gigabits/sec,” the team writes. “This defines a paradox: the vast gap between the tiny information throughput of human behavior and the vast information inputs on which that behavior is based. This enormous ratio—about 100,000,000—remains largely unexplained.”

Illustrative Photo by Pixabay: https://www.pexels.com/photo/light-trails-on-highway-at-night-315938/

We’re not far from seeing AI that can feel a range of emotions

The alleged suicide of a robot in the workplace earlier this year has scientists wondering whether the tech element can feel emotions.

In June, there were concerns that a South Korean government robot had committed suicide by throwing itself down a flight of stairs. The cyborg, which looked like a white bin with a screen on the side, was designed to deliver documents to office workers.

The case has puzzled technologists, philosophers and academics, because for a robot to intentionally kill itself, it would have to be intelligent.

While emotionally sensitive robots have long been the stuff of science fiction, the concept of an “ambiguously sensitive” AI is a relatively new idea.

Professor Jonathan Birch, an academic in philosophy at LSE and author of The Edge of Sentience: Risk and Precaution in Humans, Other Animals, and AI, believes we are not far from seeing AI that can experience a range of emotions.

“By ‘ambiguously sentient’ I mean that some people will be absolutely convinced that their AI companion is an intelligent being with a rich inner life and will get angry when others deny this,” he told the Independent. “Meanwhile, others will be equally convinced that these AI companions feel absolutely nothing. It will not be possible to say who is right because our scientific understanding of consciousness is not yet mature enough for that. And that has the potential to lead to very serious social divisions.”

Illustrative Photo by InstaWalli: https://www.pexels.com/photo/brown-cardboard-robot-artwork-176842/

Physicist Dr. Anxo Biasi of the Galician Institute for High Energy Physics believes he has discovered something almost as elusive to his discipline as quantum phenomena: the equation of cat motion. Or, more precisely, how cats behave in the presence of a human.

Erwin Schrödinger made two major contributions to physics – the wave equation and a quantum cat in superposition. Felis catus has been inextricably linked to advanced physics ever since (though some argue that the connection goes back much further, to our collective fascination with the nimble way cats always land on their feet).

It seemed that this connection might have reached its zenith with the awarding of the Ig Nobel Prize for the discovery that cats can be both liquid and solid. However, Biasi believes that there is still more to be done on the subject. “This article aims to make physics accessible to non-specialists by offering a pleasant example through which it is possible to understand several concepts of classical mechanics,” he wrote in a statement. “To this end, I have constructed an equation that models the behavior of a cat in the presence of a human, the former being considered as a point particle moving in a potential induced by the human.”

Although he sought help from friends familiar with feline behavior, the work is based primarily on observations of a single cat, Emme, who shares a home with Biasi. He begins with the hypothesis: “Cats behave as if they perceive a force around a human,” then identifies seven patterns in Emme’s movements that he describes.

However, the researcher presumptuously places the human at the center of the modeling, defining his location as x=0 and the cat’s position as x. If m is the mass of the cat and ϵ is the drag coefficient of the cat’s fatigue, Biasi starts with the basic formula:

md2x/dt2 = – dV(δ)cat(x)/dx – ϵdx/dt.

From there, he used his observations of Emmet’s models to add complicating factors to the formula, such as purring and nocturnal energy bursts.

Biasi says, “It started as a playful idea for April Fools’ Day […] But I soon realized that the equation I had created could be of great use to physics students.”

The cat’s purring provides an opportunity to demonstrate the physics of a self-reinforcing system, for example, with Biasi claiming, “It is hypothesized that when a cat is petted and starts purring, people tend to feel an impulse to continue petting it, thereby reinforcing the stability of the process.” Who knows how many people have been delayed from important tasks—perhaps even from major breakthroughs in physics—by the morally if not physically unshakeable pull of a purring cat on their lap?

Biasi believes that lap sitting and five other behaviors—including not answering calls, absent-mindedness, and head-banging—fall into the low-energy range. However, nocturnal bursts (also known as periods of frenetic random activity, or PFSA) involve a higher energy state. PFSA can only be modeled by introducing a random function, because, let’s face it, even a cat doesn’t know what’s going to happen. Biasi adds an extra term, σf(t), to account for this, treating the movements of an enlarged cat as a stochastic process, using the Euler-Maruyama method, which is also used to model Brownian motion.

There are a few things about the work that are worth noting, though.

For one thing, Biasi is listed as the sole author of the paper. Where’s Aimé? Even the acknowledgments read, “The author is grateful to his cat for being a source of inspiration,” which is a bit of an unfortunate throwback to the days when authors would thank their wives for their work without mentioning them by name.

More significantly, Biasi notes that his modeling is entirely classical, with the cat considered as “a point particle obeying Newtonian mechanics.” And given the established quantum behavior of cats, this seems a serious simplification, even in the unlikely event that a cat would obey anyone’s laws, including Newton’s. To be fair, Biasi acknowledges that his equations “are not universal, and some cats may exhibit a weaker version of some of them.” He also claims that his work can “reproduce characteristic cat behavior,” so that those who are able to understand his equations and have a cat to observe can judge their accuracy for themselves.

Illustrative Photo by Pixabay: https://www.pexels.com/photo/white-and-grey-kitten-on-brown-and-black-leopard-print-textile-45201/