How far are ordinary people's imagination trapped by their experience

The British Psychological Society Research Bulletin this week has an article entitled New evidence that the "Chaotic Mind" of ADHD brings creative advantages based on a paper Thinking Outside the Box: Unconstrained Creative Generation in Adults with Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder. Students (some with ADHD) were asked to draw alien fruits that did not resemble any fruits that they knew - and the above was the result.

While the size and nature of the group tested may make generalizations about the average ADHD suffer unreliable my reaction is that the experiment confirms how difficult it is for the average person to think outside the box formed by their experiences.

How Homeopathy can help reduce the plastic mountain

About 25 years ago I purchased a bottle of Harrogate Spa Water. 

When it was nearly empty I decided to test out the principles of homeopathy - which claims that the properties of something are preserved when you dilute it. so when the bottle was nearly empty I topped it up with tap water and put the bottle back in the fridge. If homeopathy is true the contents are still effectively Harrogate Spa Water - as it clearly still said on the label. 

Nearly every night since then I have taken the bottle from the fridge and poured a glass of cold Harrogate Spa Water for a final drink before I go to bed.- topping the bottle up every time it is nearly empty. 

So far the water has been diluted 10-fold on about a thousand occasions and I guess that not one of the original molecules of Harrogate Water remains in the bottle - but each night I still enjoy a lovely cool drink. By now not one atom of the original contents remain ... 

Perhaps I should write a review saying how wonderful Harrogate Spa Water is and how its excellence has lasted 25 years - and perhaps my review would be republished as a recommendation from a satisfied customer in an advert .

But wait. The label is starting to disintegrate. Perhaps the bottle is embarrassed and is trying to tell me that homeopathy does not work, and it no longer wants to be seen carrying a misleading "Harrogate Spa" label.  

But do I care what the bottle thinks about the effectiveness of homeopathy?  Of course not. By repeatedly diluting the original water I have avoided having to throw away 999 plastic bottles (and saved myself a lot of money).

So if you want to help save the planet may I suggest that everyone should start drinking homeopathic water - just buy one bottle and keep it topped up from the tap.

Captured by the Camera - Relaxing Ripples

Relaxing Ripples at College Lake

Home affairs have been rather busy recently, and to give a flavour of the problems just one of the distractions from posting here has been the need to try and get a stair lift installed by Christmas. In such circumstances one of my top priorities has been to spend some time relaxing at College Lake, or one of the many other rural spots a few minutes drive from home.

One of the pleasures this year has been that the resident pair of swans have succeeded in rearing two cygnets - when in previous years they have been unsuccessful - possibly due to predation by mink.

An Evolutionary Model of Human Intelligence

I have just posted a summary of a paper "An Evolutionary Model of Human Intelligence"  together with some notes on future research plans, which will normally be reported on my new blog - although key updates will be cross-reported here.

Will robots outsmart us? by the late Stephen Hawkins

There is a interesting article, "Will robots outsmart us?" in today's Sunday Times Magazine. While I don't accept all Stephen's predictions I was most interested to read:

When an artificial intelligence (AI) becomes better than humans at AI design, so that it can recursively improve itself without human help, we may face an intelligence explosion that ultimately results in machines whose intelligence exceeds ours by more than ours exceeds that of snails. When that happens, we will need to ensure that the computers have goals aligned with ours.

Later he says:

In short, the advent of super-intelligent AI would be either the best or the worst thing ever to happen to humanity. The real risk with AI isn’t malice, but competence. A super-intelligent AI will be extremely good at accomplishing its goals, and if those goals aren’t aligned with ours we’re in trouble. You’re probably not an evil ant-hater who steps on ants out of malice, but if you’re in charge of a hydroelectric green-energy project and there’s an anthill in the region to be flooded, too bad for the ants. Let’s not place humanity in the position of those ants. 

Of course we know what happened last time a super-intelligence came into existence. About half a million years ago the Earth was populated by a great variety of animals of a comparatively low intelligence. All the higher animals had brains that worked in roughly the same way, and how much they could learn was limited because everything they learnt was lost when they died. Then one species, which we call Homo sapiens, discovered a way to recursively increase its own intelligence. It was already good at making tools but for several million years the cost of trail and error learning had limited what it could do. But then it invented a tool to boost intelligence, which we call language.  Language not only made it possible to make better tools, but also it made it possible to recursively build a better language generation by generation. So some 5000 generations later the Earth is home to a super-intelligent species ...

And are the goals of this species aligned with the the goals of the millions of other species? Of course not. Billions of animals are kept as slaves to be killed and eaten, while the homes of countless more have been, or are being, destroyed. 

If we invent a super-intelligent AI system why should it treat us with more respect than we have  shown for our animal relatives.

A new book "Brief Answers to the Big Questions," by Stephen Hawkins is published later this week

For the background to my observation see 

An Evolutionary Model of Human Intelligence

How plans for a user-friendly computer were rubbished 50 years ago

In 1968 David Caminer and John Pinkerton (who were responsible for the world's first business computer, the LEO I, and who were directors of English Electric Computer) decided to fund research into a project to build inherently user-friendly computers and it was estimated that the market for such systems would be several hundred million pounds a year.

However, as a result of the government inspired merger to make the UK computer industry more competitive, ICL was created, and the project was closed down with no serious attempt to assess the successful research into CODIL which had already been carried out.

This was, of course, about 10 years before the first personal computers, and it is interesting to speculate what might have happened if the research had not been so rudely interrupted. Perhap the UK based idea would have been successful and the first personal computers would have been inherently friendly. This would have meant that there would have been no need for the hard to use MS-DOS operating system - and no one would have heard of Microsoft.

An account of what happened has been prepared for the archives of the LEO Computer Society

The EEC ICL Story

To see how the idea of a user-friendly computer originated read

The Unlikely Origins of my current Evolutionary Research

In fact the research was restarted on an unfunded basis for a number of years and a recent reassessment suggests that the original proposal was actually modelling how the human brain works. For more inrormation see:

An Evolutionary Model of Human Intelligence

Captured by the Camera - A Real Nut Case

Three Conkers in bed together

Are computers making too many decisions about us?

In today's Times Edward Lucus writes "Tech Giants must come clean with us - Too many decisions  about our careers, love-lives and credit-worthiness are being made by secretive online algorithms."

He is right to point out that the use of computers, particularly by very large of powerful companies, to make decisions which affect our lives needs watching - but on the online comments page I have pointed out that decisions made by humans may not be any more reliable. I wrote:

But are humans any more reliable? We all have biases and make generalizations which have little or no foundation in reality.

To give an example. Before I retired I worked in a university teaching Computer Science on a sandwich course basis - which meant that the department regularly had to find about 90 placements for students for "on the job" training with mainly local firms. Almost invariably the last 10 or 20 to be placed included a disproportionate number of students who either had foreign-sounding surnames or were not white anglo-saxon in appearance - irrespective of how well they were doing on the course.

One of my personal first year tutees, who had just failed an interview for a job working with a computer in a sales department with a small firm, asked me whether there might have been racial discrimination. What seems to have happened in the interview was that the computer manager realised that the student was no familiar with commercial English (for example the difference between "invoice" and "statement") - and probably assumed (wrongly) that as he looked foreign he did not understand English. While of course the manager might have been directly discriminating on the grounds of race it was far more likely that he had not realised how little the average 18 year old knew of commercial jargon, and jumped to an inappropriate conclusion.

A very different example, where I nearly acted on an inappropriate "racist" assumption. 50 years ago we lived in a small town where the population was almost exclusively white. We went to a family wedding in London, taking with us our 2 year old daughter. We took it for granted that on one side of the aisle nearly everyone would be of european origin - and on the other side nearly everyone would be of asian origin. As everyone was waiting for the bride (who was five minutes late) my daughter suddenly stood up in the pew and pointed towards the people on the other side of the aisle and shouted "Look Mummy, look." I looked to see where she was pointing to see what she had seen to make her get excited. All I could see was the crowd of asians and before I could grab her and put my hands over her mouth to stop her making a raciest comment she shouted out "There's Mary with baby Jesus." What was new and exciting to her was that she had never been in a Roman Catholic church before!

While I am concerned with "Black box" computers making decisions it is likely that those decisions reflect the biases of the programmers who designed the system OR are based on the statistical analysis of "Big Data" and are likely to be more reliable than a human. As I see it the problem is that the computer systems making the decisions are "black boxes" and cannot explain what it is doing in a way that those can understand.

(In any case, if someone make a racist comment to you - would you ask them why they said it - and would you really expect an honest reply in every case.)

Mission Statement

We are all, both individually and as a society, trapped by boxes - some physical, some mental. Some of these boxes are built from our childhood experiences, some from the customs and beliefs of the society in which we live, some are imposed by the technology we use, and ultimately we cannot escape the planet on which we live. 

The aim of this site is to look creatively at some of the issues involved and present them in an educational and educational way. So I will include posts about ways that technology (and particularly computers) affect our lives and also the social and political issues that limit our actions. In addition I plan to continue my Science Limericks and post pictures I find attractive or thought provoking under the heading "Trapped by the Camera."

The big change is that in future posts relevant to the evolution on human intelligence, and the computer language CODIL, will be posted on the blog "A Evolutionary Model of Human Intelligence"

Trapped by the Camera

Laying a new gravel path in Wendover Woods.

.I was attracted by the black and white pattern (faintly touched with colour) that was created as a new path between the trees was being constructed in Wendover Woods, near Chesham, Bucks.

[Significant changes are taking place in the central area in Wendover Woods. A large new car park has been opened, and the existing "Cafe in the Woods" is to be replaced with a much bigger cafe with a striking view over part of the Chiltern Hills.]

For pictures of the changes see my photographs on Geograph.

We live in a Wonderful World.

Libby Purves writes an article in today's Times "Aggressive Atheism denies Culture and History" and this attracted a lot of comments. My contributions included my reply to the idea that that if you didn't believe in god it took all the mystery out of life. I responded:

Recently I was walking in some National Trust woodland and decided to sit down and admire the view. I turned to someone sitting nearby and said how wonderful it was to be there and observe nature at work.

He replied "It's wonderful and its all Gods' work" and it was clear he had no idea how wonderful it really is, when seen by an atheist who understands science. To me nature is fully of partly explored mysteries and there is alway room for creative imagination in trying to understand the underlying science - and the evolutionary implications.

The ideas of looking at the wonders of nature and having only one answer "God did it" would seem boring, boring, boring to me. To him there was no mystery and no need to think creatively - one meaningless and unsupportable answer and you can sit back and let your mind stagnate.

Religious people who hide their lack of imaginative thinking behind a screen of ancient myths may find it satisfying - I am more interested in actively exploring the wonders of the real world."

Keep young by learning

Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at 20 or 80.

Anyone who keeps learning

is young

Henry Ford

I have just started on the FutureLearn course "Psychology and Mental Health" being run by the University of Liverpool and decided I would mention it on this blog - because not only is it interesting - but I find it personally invigorating to be in a learning situation interacting with lots of other students, of very different backgrounds.



The first thing I did was to select the above quotation - and almost immediately I got a new email - it was the British Psychological Society Research Digest.

And what was the headline article - a blog post "Do people with a high IQ age more slowly." The blog relates to a paper behind a pay wall which I can't access entitled "Higher IQ in adolescence is related to a younger subjective age in later life: Findings from the Wisconsin Longditudinal Study."

I particularly like the observation "Perhaps a higher IQ, which helps us to process complex information more easily, also increases our curiosity about the world, and it’s that sense of wonder and excitement that can make us feel more youthful."

This really sums up why I enjoy doing FutureLearn courses and while, at 80, I am still actively interested in research. If I ever loose my sense of curiosity  or fail to get excited when I learn something new I am sure I would loose the will to live.

In prison for being mentally ill?

An article "Research into the Mental Health of prisoners, digested" in today's British Psychological Society Research Bulletin interested me because it is clear that many people in prison have mental health problems and there is a real danger that if someone who is mentally ill is put in prison punishing them it will not help anyone if they are treated in a way that makes their mental illness worse.

 

The subject interests me because there is a link to the picture in the heading of this blog which shows someone trapped behind the screen of a laptop trying to break out. It is meant to represent the way that we are all becoming trapped, in one way or another, by the way that computers control the way that society works. However it also is a personal reminder of what happened to my daughter Lucy, In 1984 she spent some time as a patient in a psychiatric hospital. Shortly after her discharge, but still an outpatient, she became hyperactive, and was asked to stop attending the rehabilitation class as she was disturbing the others, Shortly afterwards her behaviour became so extreme that it came (rightly) to the attention of the police, Because a doctor ruled she was "not mentally ill" she ended up on remand in "The Muppet House" in Holloway prison. She was transferred to a psychiatric hospital, badly damaged by the experience, shortly after the Court of Appeal had ruled, in the case of the young mentally ill lady in the next cell, that the NHS should not use prisons as a dumping ground to save money. Lucy killed herself a year after her arrest thinking that she must be really wicked to have ended up being treated so abominably. I was shattered by these events - and my post traumatic stress disorder was one of the main reasons why I abandoned my CODIL research.

If you have the M C 4 R gene

When you grow you'll be fat and not lean
A drug li_rag_glu_tide
Your excess weight will hide
And you'll eat much less food as a teen

 

The Melanocortin 4 Receptor (MC4R) is a key regulator of body weight. People with genetic mutations tend to gain weight from early childhood. The main clinical feature in MC4R deficiency is hyperphagia (an increased drive to eat) as well as impaired satiety (not feeling full after a meal).

Trapped by the Banks - How accessible is your money?

We are becoming increasingly dependent on online banking. In the small town where I live there were three banks three years ago. HSBC was the first to close and the building is now a restaurant. Barclays closed their bank last year and the building is still empty. In a couple of weeks time NatWest closes its doors for the last time. While there will be cash machines at the local supermarket and the Post Office (with its already long queues) is likely to remain, anyone wanting a bank will have to travel at least 5 miles or be forced to go online.

 

Of course, when everything is working smoothly, online banking can be very convenient, and using credit and debit cards means you rarely need cash, except for the most trivial purchases. But of course the real world is a complex place and things do not always work as planned.

 

Yesterday there was a problem with Visa cards all across Europe - where attempted payments were being refused. As one hungry customer complained on twitter "Just had my card declined at McDonald. Went out fuming like a  panda only to be turned down by KFC too. Who knew that Visa had so much control on our hard earned cash." At supermarkets customers with a full trolley of goods were having to leave empty-handed - but it was the retailer who had the real problems at restaurants and petrol stations as the customer had already got the goods before it was discovered they were unable to pay. There were also problems at the Severn Bridge where drivers were unable to pay the toll fees. Another complication was that cash machines were still working and so many people rushed to get cash that many of the machines ran out of money.

 

Visa processes most of the debit cards for a wide range of banks, and it seems that the cause of the fault was comparatively simple. When a customer wants to make a payment the retailer's machine send a message to a Visa computer to check that the  payment is valid and then send a message back. Due to a hardware fault the message was not being sent back correctly so the retailer's machine rejected the transaction. What is not clear to me is whether the money transaction went through - and the customer was charged and retailer paid before the corrupted "transaction OK" message was sent out. I am sure we will hear more of this ...

 

The TSB problem is very different. Basically TSB continued to use (and pay for) Lloyds Bank online system since it was purchased by its current owner, the Spanish bank Sabadell.  It would appear that TSB planned to bring in new software to provide their own system and to make the changeover from the old to the new overnight. However modern banking systems are very complicated and the major problem is in testing any such a major changeover to ensure that there are no serious bugs, As I know from my own experiences 50 years ago this is no trivial matter if you are running batch applications, where the same transactions can be run through the old and new systems to spot any problems. It is very much harder with online systems, particularly when something starts to go wrong and thousands of angry customers try every damned option to try and get their transaction to go through - or to report problems via the phone when there is a long queue of other angry customers.  In fact the continuing problems seem to suggest a number of very different failures - some of which, relating to security, may be design errors which cannot be quickly fixed. 

 

I am sure we will be hearing more about the causes of the TSB problems - but it will undoubtedly raise a general problem associated with computers and software - which I face in a very much smaller and unimportant way myself. My Genealogy in Hertfordshire web site is maintained using the Microsoft package Frontpage - and Microsoft support ended for this package in about 2004 and it will not run under Windows 10. It would be very nice to migrate my web site to use other much more up-to-date software but the cost of moving it makes such an upgrade prohibitive. The problem TSB had was orders or magnitude greater than the one I face but is one which will be faced by more and more large companies who are currently relying on old and out-of-date software that works but which really needs a major upgrade or total replacement. Many such companies will look at what the current problems are costing TSB and seriously wondering whether they can run the risk of introducing completely new and, in theory, better systems.

 

 

 

Bonobo Midwives

They have noticed the bonobo's girth
And they know what a friendship is worth
So the midwives come round
Good advice they expound
And they help, with great care, at the birth

 

My research means I am always interested in the social life of animals and how it relates to how our own species behaves.  This week's limerick is based on the behaviour of bonobos when one of them is giving birth. Birth is clearly a social event where female attendants provide protection and support for the mother-to-be, including manual gestures directed at holding the infant as it is born.

 

I was alerted to this in an article in this week's New Scientist based on the paper "Is birth attendance a uniquely human feature? New evidence suggests that Bonobo females protect and support the parturient" by Elisa Demumu et al in Evolution & Human Behaviour.

Tides will get bigger over the next 10 million years

This week's New Scientist has an article "Tides will rise for the next million years" and I was moved to write another science-oriented limerick.

The Altantic's three thousand miles wide
And America westward will slide
And I have to divulge
That the size of the bulge
Will result in a much higher tide.

Several very different things are involved.

The science of continental drift tells us that the North Atlantic is getting wider by just over a centimetre a year.
The tides are caused as a result of the gravitational pull of the moon. This means that the part of the sea nearest to the moon is attracted by the moon to form a bulge. One the other side of the Earth the Earth is pulled away from sea, creating a matching bulge.

Because the Earth rotates the bulges move round the world once a day, causing the tides. This bulge can be considered to be a wave moving across the Atlantic and it has a particular wave length.

Resonance then comes into play - rather like a huge musical instrument whene the there is a relationship between the wavelength of the note and the length of the string or pipe generating the sound. The tidle bulge has a wave length and the size of the tides (equivalent to the loudness of the note) depends on the size of the boxslowly gets wider tha amplicifcation of the tides due to resonance will get bigger. However when the Atlantic gets even wider the resonance will decrease and the height of the tide will fall.

Is there a significant difference between the way human and animal brains work?

 

The following essay was written as a follow up to an article by Micheal Marshall quoted in the Futurelearn Course "Introducing Humanism"

"Ultimately, the human brain is capable of some remarkable achievements; it is also capable of a quite remarkable level of self deception. By questioning even the facts we want to be true, by striving to look for the bigger picture, and by making use of methods like tests and trials to remove as much of our bias and motivated reasoning as we can, we can find out what’s really going on. "

Michael Marshall

So let us question a deeply held belief and see where the questioning leads.

 

Surely everyone knows that we are more intelligent than animals. Universities all round the world have scientists studying different aspects of the human brain with more and more powerful tools to try and find out what it is - perhaps a very unusual gene - which is the source of our great intelligence. Even Michael Marshall seems to support the idea that there is something special when he says that "the human brain is capable of some remarkable achievements."

 

Bats, Insects and Climate Change

 

Say thanks to the small free-tailed bat
Who consumes both the earworm and gnat
But the climate is warming
Too soon they are swarming
And the crops in the fields will fall flat

 

 

The Scientific American has an article "Bats are migrating earlier, and it could wreck havoc on Farming" which relates to the way climate change is affecting the Mexican free-tailed bats that migrate to Bracken Cave, Texas, in vast numbers, and which eat many of the insects which are agricultural pests.

 

Bats are not so significant in the UK, and an article in a Devon newspaper, The Moorlander, this week, reminds me that my interest in bats dating back about 60 years. The Devon Greater Horseshoe Project is conducting a survey this summer using bat detectors to count bats as they hunt for insects. About 60 years ago I spent time actively recording and ringing hibernating Greater Horseshoe Bats in Devon - for the pioneer bat ringer, John Hooper, One of my activities involved checking some of the smaller caves and mines in the area between Buckfastleigh and Chudleigh. While I no longer live in Devon, I do visit occasionally and will be most interested to see the results of the survey.

Man's contribution to life on the planet???

Afrocartoons

In the past, coming from the abyss.
There emerged, on four legs, a small fish.
Then came ape, and then man,
Plastic pot, and tin can,
And then piles, and more piles of rubbish.

See also
Plastic patch in Pacific Ocean growing rapidly, study shows

By Helen Briggs BBC News

• 22 March 2018

Image copyright The Ocean Cleanup

Image caption Discarded fishing nets were part of the haul

A collection of plastic afloat in the Pacific Ocean is growing rapidly, according to a new scientific estimate.

Captured by the Camera

A Winter View at College Lake, near Tring

Things have not gone as planned over the last few months and my top priority is to keep fit and relax - and what better place to do so than College Lake - and this year I will try and include some more relaxing "Captured by the Camera" shots - and forget about the horrors of Brexit and Trump.