This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has three segments. Here are bits of each of them:
- 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 – well, relatively fast – incident, which they describe in a paper called “Sloths strike back: Predation attempt by an ocelot (Leopardus pardalis) on a Linnaeus’s two-toed sloth (Choloepus didactylus) at a mineral lick in Western Amazonia, Ecuador“. The video, they explain, “shows the sloth trying to escape at a considerably high speed (for a sloth)…
- 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 didn’t 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 “A high percentage of malpractice practice claims and practice management problems are caused by communication breakdowns.” …
- In God (and AI) we trust — “Thinking about God increases acceptance of artificial intelligence in decision-making.” That is the title of a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. By Mustafa Karataş 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…
- Weary of ambiguity — Are you Weary of research-titles-that-are-ambiguous fame? If you are Daniel Weary, co-author of the study “Exploring the effect of pain on response to reward loss in calves“, the answer is yes. If you are not Weary, or anyway not that Weary, Feedback poses you this riddle: is Weary’s 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….