Recently in Science and Technology Category

I was reading the book The First Word by Christine Keneally about the origins and evolution of human speech when I came upon this passage. Primate researcher Janette Wallis...

 

used hidden cameras to capture evidence of a baboon gesture she calls the muzzle wipe—a quick pass across the bridge of the nose with the hand. The muzzle wipe typically occurs in situations in which a baboon may be nervous or conflicted for some reason.

…Humans do put the hand to their face when nervous, and indeed, as she pointed out, psychiatrists and law enforcement officials often interpret a hand-to-face gesture as evidence of uncertainty or even deception.

Once Wallis convinced the audience that the muzzle wipe existed, she showed a video of George H.W. Bush. The ex-president was speaking at a press conference about his son the president of the United States. He discussed what was at the time headline news—George W. Bush’s having been arrested in his youth on a drunk-driving charge. “Unlike some,” said the older Bush in a tone of complete confidence, “he accepts responsibility.” He then raised his hand to the bridge of his nose and scratched it.

 

There are a lot of reasons to be hopeful for the new administration, but given my values, the emphasis on science is one of the most important.

Yes, we can!

Oprah Winfrey is an extremely stupid person.

Fascinating interview with Don Tapscott, author of Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World, on the latest net@night podcast.

The discussion ranges over Obama's use of the Internet, the educational system in the USA, and the current young generation and how they interact with technology.

It's a great discussion. If you only listen to one podcast this year, make it this one!.

Paul Krugman is now giving his Nobel lecture on “New trade”, “new geography”, and the troubles of manufacturing.

I guess this is big brain week.

The latest episode of the Brain Science Podcast has an interview with Gary Lynch discussing his book Big Brain: The Origins and Future of Human Intelligence.

A very accessible discussion of, among other things, how the human brain evolved to be so big. His position is that there was no natural selection pressure in favor of greater intelligence (even today, many, many people do just fine with very limited intelligence. Just look at Sarah Palin!).

Rather, when our distant ancestors became bipedal, the size of the birth canal increased, and this led to larger-brained babies.

Intelligence was just an accidental side effect.

This is actually something that I had wondered about.

Since the human birth canal puts a limit on the size of babies' heads, could the availability of Cesarean sections cause humans to evolve to have larger brains?

Turns out the answer might be yes:

Babies have very big heads that squeeze with only great difficulty through a relatively narrow pelvis, so the relationship in size between head diameter and the diameter of the pelvic opening has been a limitation on human evolution. We know this had to be a factor in our evolution: the average newborn mammal has a cranial capacity that is roughly 50% of the adult size, chimpanzee babies have heads about 40% of the adult size, but human babies have crania that are only 23% of what they will be in adults. While our brains have gotten larger over evolutionary time, they have not gotten proportionally larger in utero, because large-headed babies increase the difficulty of labor and cause increased mortality in childbirth. If childbirth could bypass the pelvic bottleneck, that would allow for fetal heads to grow larger without increasing the risk of killing mother and/or child.

Read the rest of PZ Myers's post on Will the availability of C-sections give humans bigger brains?

Mark Liberman discusses how hard it is to count a language's active vocabulary:

Consider the counting problem with respect to the text of your question. Your note uses the strings language, languages, language's. The word-count tool in MS Word will (sensibly enough) count each of these as one "word". But how many different vocabulary items -- word types -- are they? Are these three items, just as written? Or should we count the noun language plus the plural marker -s and the possessive 's? Or should we just count one item language, which happens to occur in three forms?

Your question also includes the strings am, are, be, is, was -- are these five distinct vocabulary items, or five forms of the one verb be? How about the strings weeks, weekly, day, daily? Is weekly the same vocabulary item as an adjective ("on a weekly basis") and an adverb ("published weekly")? If we analyze weekly as week + -ly and significantly as significant + -ly, are those (sometimes or always) the same -ly?

What about the noun use (in "daily use") and the participle used ("used on a daily basis"). Are those different words, or different forms of the same word? Is the participle used the same item, as a whole or in parts, as the preterite used?

Should we unpack 90% as "ninety percent" (two words) or "ninety per cent" (three words)? And is percentage a completely different vocabulary item, or is it percent (or per + cent) + -age?

Depending on the answers to these five easy questions about 17 character strings, we might count as many as 18 vocabulary items or as few as 10. And as we scan more text, this spread will grow, without any obvious bounds.

The whole article is worth a look.