If you spend your days in a workplace where teamwork is paramount, here’s something to think about: a new study shows that groups of people working together to recall information may actually be compromising that recall. The team behind the study, a collaboration between the University of Liverpool and the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, has dubbed this phenomenon “collaborative inhibition.”
It has everything to do with the mechanism of retrieving memories. Different people usually have different preferred strategies to get their brains to cough up what they’re looking for. And, if that process is interrupted by other people verbalizing their own strategies during group work, recall for everybody in the echo chamber is lowered.
“Several factors were also found to influence the extent to which collaborative inhibition occurs. One of these findings was collaboration is more harmful to larger groups than smaller groups. Another was that friends and family members are more effective at working together than strangers.
[Says Dr. Craig Thorley of the University of Liverpool, study leader]: ‘Smaller groups perform better than larger groups as they contain fewer competing (disruptive) retrieval strategies. Friends and family members perform better than strangers as they tend to develop complementary (and not competing) retrieval strategies.’”
However, in the same study, the team discovered a happy flip side to this phenomenon: individuals who worked in groups to synthesize information for later, on-their-own, recall, have higher rates of memory retention than if they had initially worked alone.
So, if you and your colleagues live on brainstorming sessions, keep at it! But perhaps think twice about studying for those certifications together…
Researchers at the University of Calgary have demonstrated a principle in physics that even Einstein himself called “spooky action at a distance.” They have done so with an experiment of elegant simplicity, even though the concept seems seriously dense to the layperson (i.e. me!).
Basically, the team — headed by Professor Wolfgang Tittel and made up of postdoctoral fellows in the Physics department — has achieved teleportation of the properties of a tiny particle of light, to another particle 6.2 kilometers away, without an object having to move through the space between them.
This is a real world demonstration of a quantum principle — that observing a particle’s quantum state changes it. The team used particles that were “entangled,” that is, connected in such a way that their properties mirror each other.
“The U of C team used a specialized laser to create a pair of entangled photons — elementary particles of light — and sent one to Calgary City Hall via a dedicated fibre-optic line while keeping the other in their lab at the university in the city’s northwest.
At the same time, a third photon was sent to city hall from another location (a data centre in the southeast community of Manchester) so that it would meet and interact with the entangled photon.
‘We had to make sure it arrived at the same time at city hall as the photon that was created at the data centre,’ said Tittel.”
The whole thing was a delicate operation, as the fibre-optic line could be affected by the weather, and even the slightest resulting mis-timing could have sunk the experiment. But it worked, and the team reported their findings in the same issue of Nature Photonics as a team from China, who succeeded in proving the same principle with a different experiment.
For me, the coolest fact is that the fibre-optic line used in the Calgary experiment was actually part of City Hall’s regular infrastructure — they just loaned it to the University for their amazing uses! This means humanity could be on the cusp of a functional “quantum internet,” a hypothetical method of exchanging information that is faster and more secure, and could change the way we live our lives fundamentally. It’s only a matter of time (and space).
One of the many interesting threads that I picked out of the hot economics tome of 2014, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, was that, given that the success of the 20th century was a short-lived economic fluke because of an 
unprecedented confluence of world events, we in the 2000s in the West are seeing a gradual return to the kind of economic inequality that we saw in the 19th century and before. Already, the value of inherited wealth in relation to the economy as a whole is at par with where it was in 1910, and steadily rising.
I thought of this when grappling with this week’s topic, the redevelopment of the “Human Intelligence Task:” a 21st century, Western spin on piece work. We are returning to the 1800s economically in more ways than one, it seems — but there are thinkers out there searching for ways to make this reality work for the workers
In his article “Say Goodbye To Your Highly Skilled Job. It’s Now a Human Intelligence Task” journalist Mark Harris delves deep into the world of “Meatware:” digital crowdworkers who do multiple tiny online tasks from anywhere for a few cents to a buck or two. Most of these tasks are one step above automation — tagging suspected cancer cells in scans of patient tissue, for example, or filling out surveys, or transcribing information from format to format. Companies like CrowdFlower, zCrowd, and others sprouted up in the wake of the industry behemoth, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.
Scary headline aside, Harris investigates the current state of the market, where tasks can run the gamut from interesting and well-paid, to too complicated and not worth it. Until recently, crowdworking companies have been mostly content to connect tasker and task, without thinking of the quality of life this working style affords. But, industry development is now looking further into the future:
“‘The very ephemeral, very shallow kind of work on Mechanical Turk is going to generate some economic activity, but is generally not sustainable in the very long term,” [Praveen Paritosh, Google research scientist in human and machine intelligence] says. ‘What is sustainable is moving crowdworking further along the computational spectrum, where there is room for more skill, more education, more training.’”
Crowdworking companies are starting to realize that this “room,” and the engagement it brings, should result in more contented, higher paid workers — and therefore, productivity above and beyond that which results from the current, simple, dangling-carrot arrangement.
“[Isaac Nichols, founder of zCrowd] believes that workers will ultimately prefer an environment where they feel part of the larger business. […] ‘Look at any company structure and there’s a ladder to climb where people get paid more as they move up. There’s a similar structure to be built on top of the crowd,’ he says. ‘I’d love to see the day where someone can have a career in crowdworking: to work whenever they want, wherever they want, and get paid more for their experience.”
It will be really interesting to see where this trend towards higher quality of working life takes us. Even as we careen back towards 19th century economic conditions, what we know about the possibilities of technology will ensure our future will always be unique!
My dogs Jill and Samson have never been shy about telling me what they think about what I’m saying to them – either through vocalizing or cocking an expressive eyebrow. But now researchers at Eotvos Lorand University have quantified exactly how the brains of dogs in general respond to language – and have found an interesting parallel with how humans respond to language too.
In the study, a group of dogs were trained to enter an MRI scanner — a feat in itself! — and stay still while technicians imaged their brains responding to positive words of praise, as well as neutral words. As an added twist, the team also observed the dogs’ brains while both types of words were spoken in positive and neutral tones of voice. The researchers discovered that, like humans, dogs use different parts of their brains simultaneously to respond to both content and tone. And the reward systems of the dogs in the study lit up the most when positive words were matched with a cheery voice!
“For dog owners […] the findings mean that the dogs are paying attention to meaning, and that you should, too.
[…] In terms of evolution of language, the results suggest that the capacity to process meaning and emotion in different parts of the brain and tie them together is not uniquely human. […] Brian Hare, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University who was not involved in the study, said he thought the experiment was well done and suggested that specialization of right and left hemispheres in processing information began to evolve well before human language. But, he said, it was still possible that dogs had independently evolved a similar brain organization.”
And while I’m glad to hear that the well trained dogs were free to leave the MRI tube at any time, I’m gladder they toughed it out, and helped facilitate this research. I will happily continue in my belief that Jill and Samson know exactly what I’m talking about — because science is now backing me up!
I’m sure anyone with a phone in their pocket nowadays has stuffed it full (or had it come out of the box stuffed full) of apps. From Twitter and Google Maps, to Rocket Man and Instagram, apps are the route by which a staggering amount of information in our world is mediated and packaged for our use.
But having a phone in your pocket with instant access fosters an intimate relationship with the apps in your life. Emotions come into play — we have apps that reassure us that we’re not lost, that we’re ever closer to becoming fluent in Dutch, that everyone around us is trying to catch Pokémon too, so we must be cool. Jesse Barron of Real Lifehas analyzed this heretofore uncomplicated intimacy, in a piece that takes Silicon Valley to task for the infantilizing virtual relationship with our most closely trusted apps.
Barron’s analysis begins as a screed against Seamless, which rolled out a New-York-City-specific ad campaign that used a “cool babysitter” tone to convince users to basically abandon their autonomy and social relationships, in favour of using their app to order restaurant food for delivery. Barron then began to see a tonal trend in other apps, like Yelp, Lyft, and Uber, where the modus operandi favoured the cutesy over the slick, the brightly coloured over the sleek monochrome, and the mascot-laden over the utilitarian.
On first assessment, this trend towards soothingly cute app experiences can be seen as a “demand-side” phenomenon: in today’s uncertain times, nervous users just want to be coddled and made to feel as secure as they were when they were children.
But Barron does not believe this theory holds water. He posits that the power in this relationship emanates from the Silicon Valley development offices where these apps are born, and it is wielded to a very specific purpose — to eventually make the giving up of personal information for the purposes of monetization so innocuous-seeming that it becomes unremarkable.
“There is no better example of cuteness applied in the service of power-concealment than Pokémon Go, which is a large data-collection and surveillance network devised by the former Google Earth engineers at Niantic and then candy-coated with Nintendo IP. The privacy policy — unlocking the door to your profile information, geodata, camera, and in some cases emails — is so disturbing that it has set off alarms even in the tech world. […]
I would bet that Pokémon and similar games will ultimately allow corporations to collect real-time photographic data on almost anything they want, anywhere in the world. An investment bank wants to put money into McDonald’s, but the rumor is that third-quarter earnings will be weak. Ten thousand Pikachus appear in ten thousand restaurants, luring customers in to serve as unwitting spies on the success of the entire chain in real time. The privacy agreement allows Niantic Labs to snap a photo of what the user thinks is a Pikachu but Niantic knows is $500,000 worth of market research. Now imagine the client is a police chief, or the Department of Homeland Security.”
The philosophical and moral position this puts us in as users is deeply interesting — not only have we internalized the fallacy that it is our needs driving the sickly-sweetening of our online lives, but that anyone who objects to it is against fun, openness, and joy — which is what these apps purport to foster. Can we continue to live online lives where an app’s cheery helpfulness is what makes it suspect?
This week, scientists are looking to the sea and its citizens again for a new human tech innovation.
We recently investigated the new invention of self-repairing fabric, which uses a polymer derived from squid sucker teeth to “heal” torn fabric without sewing. Now, a team out of the University of Connecticut has turned to squid and jellyfish skin for inspiration, developing a material that could obscure secret messages — and self-destruct after reading!
The researchers used man-made materials to mimic what happens when squid and jellyfish do to their skin to scare predators: Jellyfish wrinkle their skin to become opaque; and squid contract the muscles around their chromatophores (that is, the pigment sacs in the skin), revealing colours that may shock their predators into losing their appetite.
“Skin was replicated by placing a thin film of polyvinyl alcohol on a rubbery base of polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS). If it was wrinkled, for example, it would be opaque. When it was flattened out or if moisture was added, it would become transparent and expose a message.
Researchers added that the degree of crosslinking between polymer chains in the film could indicate whether the wrinkling was reversible. When there’s little or no crosslinking, it can only be smoothed out once, which can ‘self-destruct’ a message after reading.”
There could be other, non-spycraft-related applications for this innovation: if the crosslinking is to such a degree that the wrinkles can never be unwrinkled, a small patch of the material inside, say, a cellphone, could act as a “tell” to a vendor that a customer dropped the phone into a puddle — thus voiding the warranty.
It’s the result of our unfortunate bias as land animals that we have only begun to understand the wonderful functions of the humble squid, so I’m looking forward to “collaborations” between our species to come. I only hope we can offer something — being a human seems much less impressive now…!
Now, I’m as suspicious as anyone of the chip-in-our-brain future we seem to be careening towards. But I’m still fascinated by the wealth of applications of this new innovation from UC Berkeley: “neural dust.” While definitely not chips, these incredibly tiny, battery-less sensors could be implanted deep within the body, to transmit information about nerves, muscles, and other components. At the moment, researchers have tested the concept in rats, and are very excited about the huge leap represented by this technology, which is:
“unique in that ultrasound is used both to power and read out the measurements. Ultrasound technology is already well-developed for hospital use, and ultrasound vibrations can penetrate nearly anywhere in the body, unlike radio waves, the researchers say.
‘I think the long-term prospects for neural dust are not only within nerves and the brain, but much broader,’ said Michel Maharbiz, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences and one of the study’s two main authors. ‘Having access to in-body telemetry has never been possible because there has been no way to put something supertiny superdeep. But now I can take a speck of nothing and park it next to a nerve or organ, your GI tract or a muscle, and read out the data.’”
Having something that low profile in our healthcare arsenal could mean greater accessibility for untold amounts of information and therapies. Once the technology is miniaturized enough, neural dust could be used to control prosthetics, suppress appetite, or even monitor hormone levels. (“Neural dust” does sound a little mystical too — thus proving Arthur C. Clarke’s third law?
Scientists have made yet another real-world connection between human physical health and the state of the microbes that live in and on our bodies, and tag along for the ride our entire lives.
This time, a team out of the University of Chicago sought to investigate why the Amish population in the United States experiences half the national average rates of asthma. As a comparison, they also studied culturally and genetically similar Hutterite communities, where asthma is 75% more prevalent than in the Amish.
The primary difference between the Amish and their more asthmatic counterparts was found to be the presence of cows. While the greater US population, as well as the Hutterite communities, has moved towards machines for their transport and farming use, the Amish still rely on draft animals — oxen, and horses. This means that Amish babies and children are exposed to a unique combination of microbes in their daily lives, which lead them to become asthma-resistant adults. The researchers proved this with the help of another animal: mice!
“The study […] recruited 30 Amish children from Indiana, [and] 30 Hutterite children from South Dakota. […]
[R]esearchers descended on both communities, taking blood tests, sampling the air and drawing up detailed maps of the microbes in both Hutterite and Amish homes.
The first clue was blood tests showing that the Amish children had much more robust immune systems than the Hutterites. For instance, the Amish carried a higher rate of neutrophils, a type of disease-fighting white blood cell.
Then, researchers gathered dust from Hutterite and Amish homes and exposed it to lab mice.
The mice hit with Hutterite dust were relatively unaffected, but the Amish-dusted mice soon became noticeably resilient to allergens.”
The researchers hope to harness (no pun intended!) the healthful effect that cow microbes have on mice and humans, to create an inoculation for those unlucky enough to live away from our bovine friends. I, however, will continue to try to lure my neighbours over to the fence for a quick hit of microbes every once in a while.
With Vogue’s much-storied September issue hitting newsstands right now, I have been inspired to pay more attention to the art of fashion. It’s hard to do way out in the glorious woods where we at DFC live and work; out here, with the ticks and the flies
The neat thing about this is that the fabric itself is not some kind of space-age material: the researchers developed a polyelectrolyte coating that can be applied to any fiber, thus keeping costs low. When that fiber is dipped in water, the coating activates, and torn pieces can simply be pressed together to effect the repair.
And, enzymes can be impregnated into the coating as well. This would protect the wearer from pesticides, biological weapons, or toxic spills, depending on the enzymes used. The garment thus becomes a protective suit!
“Many toxic substances can be absorbed through the skin. Organophosphates, for example, which are used as herbicides and insecticides are absorbed through the skin and can be lethal. Some of these chemicals have also been used as nerve agents. A garment coated with a self-healing film containing an organophosphate hydrolase, an enzyme that breaks down the toxic material, could limit exposure. The squid ring teeth polymer is self-healing in the presence of water, so laundering would repair micro and macro defects in the coating, making the garments rewearable and reusable.”
In addition to making workplaces safer, and fashion more durable, this technology could find applications in the medical field, assisting with wound healing processes. The folks at Penn State will keep working on this innovation; until then, I look forward to the day I will never have to go clothes shopping again!
Over the past several years, 3D printing has gone from theory, to fun novelty, to possible threat. Now, the concept is being used as a medical game changer – helping several patients with unique facial prosthetic needs.
The first such patient was Shirley Anderson, an Indiana man who lost his jaw and Adam’s apple to treatment for an aggressive tongue cancer. Living life without a chin was difficult; an attempt by Dr. Travis Bellicchi, of the Indiana University School of Dentistry, to reconstruct his jaw using his own tissue didn’t take, and traditional prosthetics proved too heavy and unrealistic-looking.
Enter Professor Zebulun Wood, an IU coworker of Dr. Bellicchi’s at the School of Informatics and Computing, specializing in, among other subjects, 3D printing. Prof. Wood saw a way to use technology to not only create a lighter, more streamlined facial prosthesis for Shirley Anderson, but to avoid the labour and wait times required by traditional sculpting.
“For Shirley’s new prosthesis, instead of the uncomfortable impression process, they created what they call a ‘virtual patient’ — a digital model of Shirley’s face using CT scan data to capture bone detail, overlaid with a 3D facial scan. Dr. Bellicchi watched in amazement as Cade Jacobs, an IU student, designed a prosthesis in ZBrush 3D sculpting software in a fraction of the time it would have taken to sculpt it in clay.
The team used Formlabs 3D printers to turn the digital sculpt into a 3D printed mold, ready to cast for the final prosthesis. […]
The new 3D printed mold has a number of improvements on the original. It looks more realistic and is much lighter and more breathable so that Shirley feels comfortable wearing it for a longer period of time. The new prosthesis also has a ‘feather-edge margin’ around the outside, a tapered silicone edge that creates a more natural break.”
Shirley now has a new prosthesis that allows him to go about his public life seamlessly and in comfort, and IU has the bragging rights for having invented a faster, more helpful method for creating these important medical devices! It has been dubbed “The Shirley Technique” in dedication; the team has already expanded their patient pool to several others, and is actively seeking more.