A lot of birds are quite smart: take crows for example, who can recognize human faces and hold generations-long grudges against them. Or Alex the African grey parrot, who not only learned and used over 100 words in his 30-year lifetime but demonstrated an understanding of basic math.
 
But it’s not just the outliers or superstars who are drawing scientific attention recently. Researchers in Australia have performed an experiment on a whole population of fairy-wrens, in order to find out if they can learn concepts in a different bird “language” from their own.
 
They did this through a sort of immersion, similar to the supposedly best way for humans to learn languages too. The researchers walked through fairy-wren territory with small speakers on their wrists, which played the alarm sound of the non-Australia-native Chestnut-rumped thornbill. Others played a computer-generated buzzing sound. Once the individual birds were familiar with the new sounds, the researchers played them in tandem with sounds the fairy-wrens already knew to represent danger — including the fairy wren’s own alarm call.
 
“After three days, the scientists tested what the birds had learned — and their feathered pupils passed the test.
 
The two sets of fairy-wrens responded to the sound they had been trained on by fleeing for cover but remained indifferent to the other sound.

To put it in human terms, it’s as though a person who only speaks English had learned that ‘Achtung’ means ‘attention’ or ‘danger’ in German simply by listening to people yell phrases with similar meanings in multiple languages at once.”
 
Fairy-wrens had previously been able to learn new sounds for “distress” in tandem with the presence of a predator. This experiment carefully removed the predator aspect, as well as isolated the birds from others whose behaviour they could observe. This means that the fairy-wrens learned “language” as language. Not bad for tiny dinosaurs!

Ever since we watched the garlic episode on the Netflix documentary, Rotten, we made a vow to only use locally sourced garlic in our BBQ sauces (and upcoming new flavour sauce). One of our customers in Perth, ON supplies us with garlic but we are always looking for new suppliers – thus our foray to the Verona Garlic Festival on Saturday. We met with a potential supplier who gave us samples of five different varieties of garlic: Music, French Pink, Mild Marbled Purple, Ivan and Romanian Red. Our favourite is the Romanian Red because it’s the spiciest and strongest in that garlic flavour, however, the most popular variety grown here is Music. And these aren’t the only varieties…who knew?!? So, thanks to Netflix we will never buy the imported garlic again and will continue to enjoy the robustness of local garlic!

I’m a proud grandmother, and one of the coolest aspects of my role is the ringside seat I get, where I watch three little brains learn and grow and establish personalities! But, as a modern grandmother, I’m a little worried about the staggering developments in tech those little brains are going to have to deal with — that neither I nor even my kids had to.
 
One such development is the spread of personal digital assistants, like Amazon’s Alexa. As creepy and invasive as someone like me, born before her debut, might regard her, I at least know how to relate to her — as a search engine with a human voice.
 
Not so with children, says MIT psychologist Shelley Turkle, who was interviewed recently by NBC’s Mach blog. Turkle says that when devices like Alexa (or Jibo, or Cozmo) present a simulacrum of emotions or personalities, they can affect children’s understanding of real human relationships.
 
“If children learn to respond to ‘as if’ empathy, we are not preparing them for the complexity, nuance, negotiations of true empathy, true listening. There are skills of listening, of putting oneself in the place of the other, that are required when two human beings try to deeply understand each other.

Not only can’t you practice relational skills by talking to machines, but you make negative progress. For example, a machine always has a response ready. You never have to wait, to attend to silences or to what one young woman I interviewed called the ‘boring bits’ in conversation. We can forget the kind of listening and the kind of talking about our feelings that real conversation requires.”
 
This effect can be far-reaching, even into adolescent development: Turkle cites a case involving Apple’s digital assistant Siri from her book Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age.
 
“[A] mother, 40, has a 10-year-old, Tara, who tends to be a perfectionist, always the ‘good girl.’ Tara expresses anger to Siri that she doesn’t show to her parents or friends.

Stephanie wonders if this is ‘perhaps a good thing, certainly a more honest conversation’ than Tara is having with the adults in her life. But what Tara is having with Siri is not a conversation at all. No one is listening. My worst fear: If Tara can ‘be herself’ only with a robot, she may grow up believing that only an object can tolerate her truth.”
 
Turkle’s kind of research is very important — we’re only just beginning to learn how the infiltration of technology is affecting all our brains. But the brains of kids are especially vulnerable. It’s up to us savvy old-timers, who remember life before personal computers period, to help the young‘uns through this terribly interesting time in our history.
 

Now, we at DFC have a long history of adoring tiny, highly specified robots. But this new one takes the cake!
 
A team of Cornell University researchers has done a series of experiments on the feasibility of popcorn-driven robots. Yes: robots made of delicious, delicious popcorn. By enclosing unpopped kernels in various configurations, and popping them using heated Nichrome wires, microwaves, and hot air, the team harnessed the resulting kinetic energy in three proofs of concept for soft, compliant, and rigid robots.
 
Have a look at the devices in action here! Warning: it will make you hungry.
 
The Cornell Chronicle goes into greater detail about the truly innovative aspects of the study:
 
“The study is the first to consider powering robots with popcorn, which is inexpensive, readily available, biodegradable and of course, edible. Since kernels can expand rapidly, exerting force and motion when heated, they could potentially power miniature jumping robots. Edible devices could be ingested for medical procedures. The mix of hard, unpopped granules and lighter popped corn could replace fluids in soft robots without the need for air pumps or compressors.”
 
Popcorn power can only be used once, as kernels can’t “un-pop,” but they can be dissolved out of the permanent structures and replaced with fresh kernels. It seems all the assets that make popcorn an excellent snack — lightness, solubility, high expansion volume — are poised to make it an equally excellent robot component. And I am poised to fix a bowl myself, and harness its kinetic energy by putting it in my mouth!
 

As a military mother, I’m always tuned to news that might affect my two older sons. Recently, they’ve have found themselves working on the same base, and have started using that good old sibling rivalry to egg each other on during lunch hour workouts. They use all kinds of apps to keep track of their progress — so I’m going to have to warn them of the new development in the “Strava saga,” that spooked the American military back in the winter.
 
Strava is an app that can be loaded on a smartphone or a device like a Fitbit, that automatically tracks running and cycling routes, and also accepts user-input data. In November of last year, the company released a heat map of every single activity uploaded to the app over two years of operation. This was a pretty cool move: you could look up the most popular exercise routes all over the world for inspiration, for one.
 
However, canny users soon spotted “hot” routes in unexpected places like Afghanistan, Syria, and Djibouti. Military analysts quickly realized that Strava data had been uploaded to the map automatically by servicepersons’ fitness trackers. As they jogged their bright orange routes gave away sensitive information about the location of bases, their configuration, and how many people worked there. 
 
This week, the Pentagon has issued its response: active duty personnel are ordered to restrict their use of route-tracking exercise apps, at the discretion of their commanders. Exercise is critical to the armed forces; it’s important to note they aren’t banning the devices, just cracking down on anything that has geolocation capabilities.
 
“‘It goes back to making sure we’re not giving the enemy an unfair advantage and we’re not showcasing the exact location of our troops worldwide,’ Pentagon spokesman Col Rob Manning told reporters on Monday.

‘Next thing you know there might be contact [lenses] with the same capability, so we want to focus on the feature and not the actual medium.’”
 
Perhaps the Canadian forces will be next to ditch the telltale tech? If so, my sons are going to have to find some other — old-fashioned!— way to get inside each other’s heads at their work gym.

Ah, high summer in Ontario!: The time for ice cream, swimming, and road trips. But, if you’re among the 1/3 of the population who are highly susceptible to motion sickness, that last one might be a lot less fun than the others.

And, you’d know the various treatments by heart: fresh air, scopolamine, that acupressure point on your wrist. But now, French automaker Citroën has thrown its considerable design might behind a new remedy. The company has partnered with Boarding Glasses to create a luxe version of the latter’s currently pre-ordering product.

“Seetroën” glasses boast four hollow rings in place of lenses: two in front, and two at the temples. The rings are filed halfway with blue fluid. When worn, the fluid aligns with gravity, creating a horizon that registers in the wearer’s peripheral vision. Motion sickness is caused by a conflict in motion reported to the brain by the eyes and the inner ears. Having a horizon in view — either real, as through the windshield of a car, or artificial, as with these glasses on a tiny-windowed plane — allows the inputs to correlate.

They do look… a bit doofy. (See them in action in this video) So, it’s a good thing that

“ […] passengers don’t need to wear the Seetroën glasses for their entire trip. Once they put them on and stare at an unmoving object, like a smartphone or a book, it takes about 10 to 12 minutes for the brain to resolve its feeling of confusion and nausea. For roughly 95 percent of the population, that should be all that’s needed to eliminate motion sickness until the next time they climb into a vehicle.”

Or, if you’re anything like me, the sweet, sweet relief could override your concern that you’re coming off like a Batman villain in seat 21C!

The history of work is full of great duos: Banting and Best, Reiner and Brooks, Fay and Poehler. But, as a music fan, my favourite team would have to be Beatles John Lennon and Paul McCartney!
 
Like any genius creative pair, John and Paul had evenly matched, but complementary, working styles. Their legal songwriting credit, Lennon/McCartney, was testament to how closely knit their identities were. But, one or the other often contributed more to individual songs. While a many of those are well documented (“Can’t Buy Me Love” is Paul all over; “Ticket to Ride” is totally John), actual authorship of others is disputed — sometimes by Lennon and McCartney themselves.
 
Enter science and math! Mathematicians (and Beatles fans) Mark Glickman of Harvard and Jason Brown of Dalhousie have developed a method of gleaning statistics from Lennon/McCartney songs of clear authorship and applying them to a particularly murky case. “In My Life”, off 1965’s Rubber Soul, was remembered by both Lennon and McCartney as chiefly their own song, with minimal contribution from the other. Both can’t be right.
 
So Glickman and Brown “decomposed” all original Beatles songs from 1962-1966 into 149 individual components that occur frequently. Using their math skills they then organized those components into five categories with a focus on how the melodies behave. Melody is a key marker in the Beatles’ case, as McCartney wrote with more variation than Lennon.
 
“‘Consider the Lennon song, “Help!”’ says Glickman. ‘It basically goes, “When I was younger, so much younger than today,” where the pitch doesn’t change very much. It stays at the same note repeatedly, and only changes in short steps. Whereas with Paul McCartney, you take a song like “Michelle,” and it goes, “Michelle, ma belle. Sont les mots qui vont très bien ensemble.” In terms of pitch, it’s all over the place.’”
 
Using the extraordinary amount of data they pulled, Glickman and Brown determined the probability of McCartney having written “In My Life” is 0.18 — meaning Lennon’ story checks out. So, a new working duo has solved a mystery about one of history’s greatest… A testament to the enduring power of the pair!

We at DFC are notorious fans of work-life balance. As a trend in both business and private life, mindfulness meditation caught our eye early on, and it remains a hot topic today.
 
In (very!) short, mindfulness meditation involves paying close attention to the present moment, without judgment. It helps increase a practitioner’s sense of their presence in the world, and may uncover what is true to them, and therefore actually important for their contentment.
 
This has great benefits for the private citizen, and we’ve seen that mindfulness can have a positive impact at work too — from decreasing stress to increasing self confidence, to boosting working memory. But a new study on the connection between workers’ mindfulness meditation practices and their motivation on the job shows that there might be too much of a good thing — at least from a “boss’s” perspective.
 
Behavioural scientists Dr. Kathleen D. Vohs and Dr. Andrew C Hafenbrack conducted five experiments on groups of workers, some of whom meditated and others, as controls, journaled or daydreamed. The researchers then instructed their subjects to complete several business tasks, like editing memos. They then quizzed each subject on how motivated they were to complete this busy-work and found that those who had meditated mindfully were on average less inclined to do it. From the New York Times:
 
“Those people didn’t feel as much like working on the assignments, nor did they want to spend as much time or effort to complete them. Meditation was correlated with reduced thoughts about the future and greater feelings of calm and serenity — states seemingly not conducive to wanting to tackle a work project.

Then we tracked everyone’s actual performance on the tasks. Here we found that on average, having meditated neither benefited nor detracted from a participant’s quality of work. This was bad news for proponents of meditation in the workplace: After all, previous studies have found that meditation increases mental focus, suggesting that those in our studies who performed the mindfulness exercise should have performed better on the tasks. Their lower levels of motivation, however, seemed to cancel out that benefit.”
 
While the researchers’ Times article gently warns bosses “you don’t want your employees to meditate,” BoingBoing’s Cory Doctorow claims that what “bosses” want is not motivation, but blindness to personal potential. Doctorow sees a correlation between this pooh-poohing of meditation and the criminalization of “mind-expanding” substances back in the ’60’s, when “the boss class realized that people who could perceive greater truths would be unshackled from meaningless materialism and the need to work to attain status goods.”
 
There is a powerful connection between meditation and personal fulfilment. But there seems to be a darker flip side — where existential anxiety spurs willingness to do work meaningless to oneself in aid of someone else’s goal. The former is great for the quality of life: the latter great for business. I wonder, as capitalism begins to falter and all the old rules fly out the window, which will fail first?
 

This week, I find myself in Hamburg, Germany, visiting my youngest son, who works here as a chef. It’s been a while since I’ve visited northern Europe, and I am struck afresh by the many small differences between Canadian daily life and life here. Delicious, strange berries! The coffee culture!
 
Also, people here are a lot more relaxed about city biking. It’s lovely to see collaboration and friendliness (well, a German level of friendliness) between cyclists and drivers, especially coming from a country where that relationship can get a bit… intense.
 
Dutch design student George Barratt-Jones has taken the eminently reasonable European pastime of peacefully riding a bike, and turned it into something even cooler — a gadget! Inspired by a cold day waiting for a train and Einhoven station, Barratt-Jones envisioned a stationary bike that powered a loom, which, with five minutes of exercise, would spit out a knitted scarf. So, he built it. From his project description:
 
“Imagine [it’s] the midst of winter. You are cold and [bored] waiting for your train at the station. This pedal powered machine gets you warm by moving, you are making something while you wait and in the end you are left with a free scarf! That you can decide to keep yourself or give to someone who needs it more… [It’s] all about spreading joy and making those boring moments more fun.”
 
Check out the video of the Cyclo Knitter in action here!
 
I love how this designer found a little niche of unused time and turned it into something productive for his fellow passengers. And I love how bicycles are involved! Now, if only we could bring this spirit of collaboration to Canadian biking — though, with our winters, I feel like we’d have to generate snowsuits, not scarves.

We at DFC consider ourselves enormously lucky that we get to be our own bosses. This is for the usual reasons: We set our own goals  are thoroughly invested in every aspect of our company, and do our work while surrounded by natural beauty of the Frontenac Arch! But there’s a new reason why we’re glad no one’s in charge of us coming down the pipes…
 
Three professors have taken it upon themselves to attempt to prove the “Peter Principle;” a formulation first presented semi-facetiously by Dr. Laurence J. Peter in 1968, that states: “In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.” The researchers — Danielle Li (MIT), Kelly Shue (Yale), and Alan Benson (Uminn) — crunched the performance-related numbers from a staggering 53,035 sales reps at 214 different American companies over six years. They did so to see if subjects followed the Peter Principle trajectory: doing well in a position and being promoted as a result, until they hit the failure point of landing in a position they cannot meet the demands of, and can therefore not be promoted up from. Bingo: managerial incompetence.
 
During the experiment, 1,531 of the best sales reps were promoted to managers, where the numbers quickly showed they began performing poorly. The researchers found a trend of repeated promotions for excellent salespeople, without consideration that their skills — that they were excellent at — might not transfer to management. This led to periods of instability not just for the promoted person, who took a productivity hit while they learned their new job, but for the entire team under them. From Forbes:
 
“A company that relies too heavily on sales as a criterion for promotion pays twice for the mistake. Removing a high-performing sales associate from the line potentially upsets her client relationships and puts the revenue of those accounts in jeopardy. The team newly under her direction is at greater risk of under-performing as she struggles in a role that demands quite different abilities. […]

The starkness of the results took Dr Benson by surprise. “I expected that the best salespeople would become merely-good managers: some skills translate to management and others don’t,’ he said. ‘To see that the best salespeople were becoming the worst sales managers was surprising.’”
 
The conclusion standard companies can draw from this new proof of the Peter Principle is that promotions are not as easy as they might seem, and can cost a lot of productivity if candidates are not accurately assessed for their real skills, rather than a demonstrated level of amorphously defined “success.” The conclusion that non-standard companies (like DFC!) can draw? Maybe it’s better to be your own manager — because if your manager is incompetent, you have no one to blame but yoursel