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Mechanical Turk
The comments are pretty cranky, so we run a mile in the face of any kind of forced fun. So we may find it difficult to buy ice cream in Türkiye, because doing so requires enjoying, or at least tolerating, a prolonged stuffing.
Turkish ice cream sellers tend to play tricks on their customers, such as handing them a cone filled with ice cream and then snatching it from them with a sleight of hand. The routines are truly impressive and take years to master. It’s just that if Feedback wants ice cream, we want ice cream, not a close-up magic show.
So we groaned inwardly when journalist Matthew Sparkes alerted us to a new paper published on the website arXiv, in which engineers describe building a robot that can mimic the routine of a Turkish ice cream vendor. They did it, Matt suggests, “because all the important research is done.”
The result is one of those robotic arms that can twist and turn and generally swing all over the place. The researchers programmed it with five tips from Turkish ice cream sellers.
In one, the robot “bounces” the cone from side to side, “creating the illusion that the cone is moving away from the user.” In another, the robot “dodges the [user’s] hand by tracing a wide arcing path as the hand reaches the cone”. And then there is “dancing”, which is “a non-interactive policy intended to tease/taunt users by circularly waving the cone upwards out of users’ reach”.
The robot was then tested on real people. Compared to a control condition in which the robot just handed over an ice cream without doing anything, the tricks led people to rate it as “more deceptive.” Apparently, the tricks “also increased enjoyment-related outcomes (enjoyment, engagement, challenge) and perceived robot competence, but decreased confidence in performance…perceived safety and self-competence.”
In other words: “Playful deception produces a structured compromise: it can delight and maintain attention, but at the expense of predictability and trust. » The authors recommend that “in security-critical applications…the associated declines in trust and security would likely be unacceptable.” Really? Do you think?
Relevant acronyms
When Feedback first asked for your suggestions on the best and worst scientific acronyms, we had no idea the torrent that was coming our way. Our inbox groans under the weight of tangled word combinations abbreviated to sequences of capital letters.
For example, Stuart McGlashan tells us about a conservation project that aims to “rejuvenate the marine and coastal environment of the Solway”: a cove on the west coast of Great Britain, on the border between England and Scotland. It’s called the Solway Coast And Marine Project, or SCAMP.
Stuart believes the project’s creators were unduly restricted. Given the emphasis on “restoring marine life,” he said, wouldn’t they have added one more word to make an acronym even more relevant? The comments agree: it certainly should have been the Solway Coast And Marine Preservation Initiative.
On the other side of the world, Jamie Pittock and Jennie Mallela of the Australian National University recently secured funding for a project to study the management of rivers that flow into the Indian Ocean. Luckily, they called it “Management of the Rivers Flowing into the Oceanic Realms (MORDOR)”.
However, this one is actually a warning. Jamie writes: “When we applied for a search agent, a Mr. Bilbo Baggins from the Shire applied. Fortunately, a much more qualified candidate was available and was appointed.”
Shakespeare’s upheaval
Recently, Feedback explained that we had to rewrite two sonnets by William Shakespeare to remove erroneous references to roses having thorns; these pointy things are actually called quills. Reader James Fradgley wrote to say that Shakespeare’s scientific illiteracy extended far beyond botany, to astronomy.
In Julius Caesaract 3, scene 1, the eponymous dictator boasts: “I am constant as the northern star / Whose quality truly fixed and restful / There is no one in the firmament.” » Caesar is referring to Polaris, which is so close to the north celestial pole that it barely moves in the sky, while throughout the year the other stars revolve around it.
Except, as James says, at the time of Caesar’s assassination in 44 BC, “Polaris was not the north star.” Instead, a star called Kochab or Beta Ursae Minoris was closest to the north celestial pole – but it was never close enough to really pin down, so it wasn’t very useful for navigation.
“Even worse, Polaris is a Cepheid variable,” explains James. This means that its brightness varies regularly, so it doesn’t even shine with constant intensity. “All in all,” James says, “I really don’t know why we bother with Shakespeare.”
Comments tend to be more lenient. Our knowledge of astronomical history is not good enough to tell us reliably whether the changing pole stars were known in Europe in Shakespeare’s time, but we think he was busy enough to have rightly missed this discovery. Meanwhile, the Cepheid variables weren’t spotted until 168 years after his death, which seems like a solid excuse to us.
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