Feedback is New Scientist’s popular sideways look at the latest science and technology news. You can submit items you believe may amuse readers to Feedback by emailing feedback@newscientist.com
Mechanical turk
Feedback is a grumpy sort, so we run a mile when faced with any kind of enforced fun. It is possible, therefore, that we would struggle to buy an ice cream in Turkey, because doing so requires enjoying, or at least tolerating, an extended prank.
Turkish ice cream vendors are prone to playing tricks on their customers, like handing them a cone full of ice cream only to whisk it out of their grasp using sleight of hand. The routines are genuinely impressive and take years to master. It’s just that, if Feedback wants an ice cream, we want an ice cream, not a close-up magic show.
So we groaned inwardly when reporter Matthew Sparkes alerted us to a new early-stage paper uploaded to the website arXiv, in which engineers describe building a robot that can mimic the Turkish ice cream vendor routine. They did this, Matt suggests, “because all the important research has been finished”.
The result is one of those robot arms that can twist and rotate and generally swing all over the place. The researchers programmed it with five Turkish ice cream vendor tricks.
In one, the robot “bounces” the cone from side to side, “creating the illusion that the cone is ‘hopping’ away from the user”. In another, the robot “dodges the [user’s] hand by drawing a large, arcing path when the hand reaches the cone”. And then there’s “dancing”, which is “a non- interactive policy that is intended to tease/taunt users by circularly waving the cone upright out of the reachable range of the users.”
The robot was then tested on actual people. Compared with a control condition where the robot just handed over an ice cream without any mucking around, the tricks caused people to rate it as “more deceptive”. Apparently the tricks also “increased enjoyment-related outcomes (pleasure, engagement, challenge) and perceived robot competence, but decreased performance trust… perceived safety, and self-competence”.
In other words: “Playful deception produces a structured tradeoff: it can delight and sustain attention but at the cost of predictability and trust.” The authors recommend that “in safety-critical applications… the associated declines in trust and safety would likely be unacceptable”. Really? You think?
Apposite acronyms
When Feedback first asked for your suggestions for the best and worst scientific acronyms, we had no idea of the torrent that was coming our way. Our inbox groans under the weight of tangled word combinations abbreviated into sequences of capitalised letters.
For instance, Stuart McGlashan notifies us about a conservation project that aims “to rejuvenate the marine and coastal environment of the Solway”: an inlet on the west coast of Great Britain, on the border between England and Scotland. It is called the “Solway Coast And Marine Project“, or SCAMP.
Stuart feels that the creators of the project have been unduly restrained. Given the emphasis on “restoration of sea life”, he says, might they not have appended one more word to achieve an even more apposite acronym? Feedback agrees: it should definitely have been the Solway Coast And Marine Preservation Initiative.
On the other side of the world, Jamie Pittock and Jennie Mallela at the Australian National University recently got funding for a project to study how the rivers flowing into the Indian Ocean are managed. Niftily, they called it “Management Of Rivers Discharging into Ocean Realms (MORDOR)”.
However, this one is actually a cautionary tale. Jamie writes: “When we advertised for a research officer, a Mr Bilbo Baggins from the Shire applied. Fortunately a vastly more qualified candidate was available and has been appointed.”
Shakespeare shake-up
Recently, Feedback explained that we need to rewrite two of William Shakespeare’s sonnets to remove erroneous references to roses having thorns; those sharp things are actually called prickles. Reader James Fradgley has now written in to say that Shakespeare’s scientific illiteracy extends way beyond botany, into astronomy.
In Julius Caesar, act 3, scene 1, the eponymous dictator boasts: “I am constant as the northern star / Of whose true-fix’d and resting quality / There is no fellow in the firmament.” Caesar is referring to Polaris, which is so close to the celestial north pole that it barely moves at all in the sky, while over the course of the year the other stars rotate around it.
Except that, as James says, at the time of Caesar’s assassination in 44 BC, “Polaris was not the northern star”. Instead, a star called Kochab or Beta Ursae Minoris was the closest to the northern celestial pole – but it was never quite close enough to really be fixed, so it wasn’t that useful for navigation.
“Worse, Polaris is a Cepheid variable,” says James. This means its brightness varies on a regular basis, so it doesn’t even shine with a constant intensity. “All in all,” says James, “I really don’t know why we bother with Shakespeare.”
Feedback is inclined to be more forgiving. Our astronomical history knowledge isn’t good enough to tell us reliably whether the shifting pole stars were known in Europe in Shakespeare’s time, but we feel he was busy enough to have justifiably missed out on it. Meanwhile, Cepheid variables weren’t spotted until 168 years after his death, which seems to us to be a cast-iron excuse.
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