# behav: even more devious than previously thought

<< The common cuckoo, notorious for evading parental duty by hiding her eggs in the nests of other brooding birds, is even more devious than previously thought >>

Scientists expose true extent of cuckoo's cunning. Sept 4, 2017

https://m.phys.org/news/2017-09-scientists-expose-true-extent-cuckoo.html

<< Parasites evolve not only to evade host defences but also to manipulate host behaviour >>

AA << test whether a brood parasitic cuckoo manipulates host perception of predation risk using an acoustic signal—a hawk-like call—that might misdirect host defences and thereby reduce the chance that hosts detect parasitism >>

AA << propose that the female cuckoo chuckle call tricks the hosts into responding vigilantly as if they were exposed to danger from a hawk, instead of from a cuckoo. This would divert host attention from clutch protection to self-protection, and so reduce the chance of the hosts detecting that they have been parasitized >>

Jenny E. York, Nicholas B. Davies. Female cuckoo calls misdirect host defences towards the wrong enemy. Nature Ecology & Evolution. Sept 4, 2017 doi: 10.1038/s41559-017-0279-3

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-017-0279-3

# behav: a kind of pulsatile motivation: believing is right even when it's wrong

<< people generally ignore new information that counters their beliefs, even though doing so costs them financially >>

<< It’s as if you don’t hear the voices in your head telling you that you’re wrong, even if you lose money >> Stefano Palminteri

Jessica Hamzelou. We ignore what doesn’t fit with our biases – even if it costs us. Sept 4, 2017

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2146124-we-ignore-what-doesnt-fit-with-our-biases-even-if-it-costs-us/

<< While the investigation of decision-making biases has a long history in economics and psychology, learning biases have been much less systematically investigated. This is surprising as most of the choices we deal with in everyday life are recurrent, thus allowing learning to occur and therefore influencing future decision-making >>

AA << show that the valence of an outcome biases both factual and counterfactual learning. When considering factual and counterfactual learning together, it appears that people tend to preferentially take into account information that confirms their current choice >>

Palminteri S, Lefebvre G, et al. Confirmation bias in human reinforcement learning: Evidence from counterfactual feedback processing. PLoS Comput Biol 2017; 13(8): e1005684. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005684

http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005684

# evol: the alien track of Trachilos

AA << describe late Miocene tetrapod footprints (tracks) from the Trachilos locality in western Crete (Greece), which show hominin-like characteristics [..] dated to approximately 5.7 Ma (million years) >>

<< The tracks indicate that the trackmaker lacked claws, and was bipedal, plantigrade, pentadactyl and strongly entaxonic >>

Gerard D. Gierlinski, Grzegorz Niedzwiedzki, et al. Possible hominin footprints from the late Miocene (c. 5.7 Ma) of Crete? Proceedings of the Geologists Association. doi: 10.1016/j.pgeola.2017.07.006 Aug 31, 2017
   
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001678781730113X

Matteo Marini. Scoperte a Creta impronte di forma umana risalenti a 5,7 milioni di anni fa. LaRepubblica. 03 Set 2017

http://www.repubblica.it/scienze/2017/09/03/news/orme_umane_su_creta_5_7_milioni_di_anni_fa-174544294/

# acad: oops! sometimes they tend to reject H0 hypothesis instead of ...

<< We advertise interventions as working because statistically we think they're working. But they're actually not working. This is becoming a crisis in the sciences >> John List

Thomas Gaulkin. Scholars take aim at false positives in research. Sept 4, 2017

https://m.phys.org/news/2017-09-scholars-aim-false-positives.html

AA << propose to change the default P-value threshold for statistical significance from 0.05 to 0.005 for claims of new discoveries >>

<< The lack of reproducibility of scientific studies ... >>

Daniel J. Benjamin, James O. Berger, et al.  Redefine statistical significance. Nature Human Behaviour.  2017

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-017-0189-z

FonT

ricordo che gia' negli anni '70 (vale a dire oltre quarant'anni fa) in aggiunta a questa aleggiava  anche un'altra intrigante quaestio, quella relativa all'uso,  diffuso, di test parametrici anziche' altro ...

# zoo: clever but not as clever as humans

<< Apes' intelligence may be entirely misunderstood, because research has so far failed to measure it fairly and accurately >>

<< Hundreds of scientific studies over two decades have told us that apes are clever – just not as clever as us >>

Apes’ abilities misunderstood by decades of poor science. Aug 31, 2017

http://uopnews.port.ac.uk/2017/08/31/apes-abilities-misunderstood-by-decades-of-poor-science/

<< in the last two decades, numerous contemporary researchers in comparative psychology have claimed human superiority over apes in social intelligence, based on two-group comparisons between postindustrial, Western Europeans and captive apes, where the apes have been isolated from European styles of social interaction, and tested with radically different procedures >>

David A. Leavens, Kim A. Bard, William D. Hopkins. The mismeasure of ape social cognition. Animal Cognition. doi: 10.1007/s10071-017-1119-1 Aug 4, 2017

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10071-017-1119-1

also

# s-brain: the question is: Humans vs Woodstock, who is the smarter?  Jun 26, 2016

http://flashontrack.blogspot.it/2016/06/s-brain-question-is-humans-vs-parrots.html

# ai-bot: 352 predictions of when machines will make humans obsolete

researchers at the Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute  << have carried out the largest-ever survey of machine learning experts on the subject >>

they << contacted 1,634 researchers who published papers at the 2015 NIPS and ICML conferences—the two leading machine learning conferences—and asked them to complete a survey on the topic, with 352 researchers responding >>

<< The aggregate forecast was that there is a 50 percent chance that 'unaided machines can accomplish every task better and more cheaply than human workers' within 45 years >>

Edd Gent. When Will AI Be Better Than Humans at Everything? 352 AI Experts Answer. Jul 25, 2017

https://singularityhub.com/2017/07/25/when-will-ai-be-better-than-humans-at-everything-352-ai-experts-answer/

<< Researchers believe there is a 50% chance of AI outperforming humans in all tasks in 45 years and of automating all human jobs in 120 years, with Asian respondents expecting these dates much sooner than North Americans >>

Katja Grace, John Salvatier, et al. When Will AI Exceed Human Performance? Evidence from AI Experts. arXiv:1705.08807 May 30, 2017

https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.08807

FonT

per mia opinione (di non esperto AI) se/quando il calcolo quantistico sara' fisicamente capillare e a basso costo come lo e' attualmente l'architettura x86, nel giro di 10-15 anni (anche prima) qualsiasi attivita' umana in qualsiasi distretto geografico del pianeta sara' riproducibile, a velocita', accuratezza, professionalita', fantasia  sorprendentemente superiori e a costi quasi nulli, tendenti a zero.

Agli umani, per evitare gli usuali  vortici autodistruttivi, servira' "l'adatta stringa" ...

http://flashontrack.blogspot.it/search?q=%22adatta+stringa%22

# music: harmonic resonances from moons and rings of Saturn

<< Wherever there is resonance there is music, and no other place in the solar system is more packed with resonances than Saturn >>. Matt Russo

<< Saturn's magnificent rings act like a sounding board that launches waves at locations that harmonize with the planet's many moons, and some pairs of moons are themselves locked in resonances >>. Dan Tamayo

Astrophysicists convert moons and rings of Saturn into music. Aug 30, 2017

https://m.phys.org/news/2017-08-astrophysicists-moons-saturn-music.html