technology

Most people know that hunter-gatherer men hunt meat. Fewer people know the major secondary target for male foraging in many hunter-gatherer societies: honey. The resource is so highly valued that some men spend as much effort foraging for honey as they do hunting.

Chimpanzees also forage for honey. The use of tools to dig for, bash into, and dip honey out of bee nests or hives has long been known from many chimpanzee field sites. For example, Craig Stanford and colleagues (2000) described how chimpanzees in Bwindi-Impenetrable National Park, Uganda, use small sticks to forage for honey from the small nests of stingless bees, while they use much bigger sticks to get honey out of honeybee nests.

Two papers from this year have illustrated a new appreciation for the complexity of chimpanzee toolkits used for honey raiding. Crickette Sanz and David Morgan (2009) describe honey gathering by chimpanzees at the Goualougo, Congo field site, while Christophe Boesch and colleagues (2009) describe the technology used by chimpanzees at Loango, Gabon. Both are relatively new field sites, in which researchers have arrived recently or are still habituating the chimpanzees to their presence. Thus, the variations in chimpanzee behaviors at these sites are still being recognized and just starting to be reported.

Loango National Park is a relatively new field site. As the researchers there continue to habituate the chimpanzees, they have been gathering a series of observations on behaviors that occur differently in Loango compared to other field sites. According to Boesch et al. (2009:2), chimpanzees at the Loango field site do not crack nuts despite a local abundance of them. But far from being simpler in their material culture than other chimpanzees that do crack nuts, the Loango chimps make up for their lack of nutcracking with a complex package of tools for honey extraction:

Gathering honey from underground hives, similar to underground termite fishing in Goualougo, is special in the sense that chimpanzees cannot see where the resource is hidden and use the first tool, the perforator, as an exploratory tool to “feel” where the resource is located underground. In both cases, external indirect signs of food sources are visible (e.g., large termite mounds or small fragile Melipone-made tubes), but the nest itself is not visible and its exact location cannot be inferred. Therefore, chimpanzees have to investigate the soil in order to locate food that can be, in the case of Melipone underground nests, as much as 1 m deep and 70 cm lateral to the visible tube. Locating the underground chamber can take a human between 20 to 40 minutes (Boesch, pers. obs.). The successful locating of honey is apparent from honey sticking to the ends of perforators. To extract honey, a tunnel needs to be dug sideways so as to reach the underground chamber and prevent soil from getting mixed with the honey once the membrane of the chamber is broken (in general, the intact upper membrane of the chamber in the emptied hole can be felt). We think that such tunnels are dug with the help of perforators to loosen the soil. These tunnels are sometimes barely large enough to let a human arm through, and therefore indicate that chimpanzees know exactly where they are aiming. This cannot be done by simply following the bee tube, as it is much too fragile to resist the tool-assisted digging process. Thus, an elaborate understanding of unseen nest structure, combined with a clear appreciation that tools permit the location of unseen resources, and a precise three-dimensional sense of geometry for reaching the honey chamber from the correct angle, is demonstrated by the chimpanzees when extracting underground honey. It has been proposed that an elaborate understanding of causal relationships between external objects is required for flexible tool use to evolve (Boesch and Boesch-Achermann, 2000), and the fact that such exploratory tools are only seen in chimpanzees and humans supports this proposition (Boesch et al. 2009).

I liked the authors' description of how they defined tool types and categorized objects on the basis of signs of use. WIth quite a simple technology, this differentiation appears nevertheless to be of a similar extent to the stone toolkits used by early Homo. What is different is the complexity of manufacture of (some of) the elements of the toolkit.

That topic of basic manufacturing method versus within-toolkit differentiation is addressed by a new study by Thibaud Gruber and colleagues (2009):

Here, we present the results of a field experiment [20] and [21] that compared the performance of chimpanzees (P. t. schweinfurthii) from two Ugandan communities, Kanyawara and Sonso, on an identical task in the physical domain—extracting honey from holes drilled into horizontal logs. Kanyawara chimpanzees, who occasionally use sticks to acquire honey [4], spontaneously manufactured sticks to extract the experimentally provided honey. In contrast, Sonso chimpanzees, who possess a considerable leaf technology but no food-related stick use [4] and [22], relied on their fingers, but some also produced leaf sponges to access the honey. Our results indicate that, when genetic and environmental factors are controlled, wild chimpanzees rely on their cultural knowledge to solve a novel task.

The finer points of tool use lie atop a technological substrate. For one group of chimpanzees, this substrate may be sticks, for another stones (in nutcracking), for another leaves. Social learning may tend to associate some raw materials with manipulatory processes -- a chaïne operatoire, at a very simple level. The complexity of the honey-extraction kits appears to show that, at least for highly valued purposes, chimpanzees can bring together distinct elements into a single technological solution. It's nothing that a three-year-old human can't do, but it's another point in favor of Wynn and McGrew's "Ape's view of the Oldowan" argument.

References:

Boesch C, Head J, Robbins MM. 2009. Complex tool sets for honey extraction among chimpanzees in Loango National Park, Gabon. J Hum Evol 56:560-569. doi:10.1016/j.jhevol.2009.04.001

Gruber T, Muller MN, Strimling P, Wrangham R, Zuberbühler K. 2009. Wild chimpanzees rely on cultural knowledge to solve an experimental honey acquisition task. Curr Biol (in press) doi:10.1016/j.cub.2009.08.060

Sanz CM, Morgan DB. 2009. Flexible and persistent tool-using strategies in honey-gathering by wild chimpanzees. Int J Primatol 30:411-427. doi:10.1007/s10764-009-9350-5

Stanford CB, Gambaneza C, Nkurunungi JB, Goldsmith ML. 2000. Chimpanzees in Bwindi-Impenetrable National Park, Uganda, Use different tools to obtain different types of honey. Primates 41:337-341.

I read Chris Anderson's book because it was, well, "Free". The book's thesis is simple: Sometimes people profit by giving things away.

I have been, for several years now, making scientific knowledge available for no cost to any readers who care to come by my site. In academic circles, this practice is ordinarily considered to be insane. Therefore, whenever I come across anything explaining why blogging isn't such a stupid idea, I put it right into my files. That's for Luddites on future promotion committees.

How do I review the book without making points like a Slashdot comment thread?

Somewhere in the book, Anderson wrote his plan for making money from Free: Get businesses to pay for the Chris Anderson "Free" seminar. The short business profiles and catchy anecdotes in the book were pretty well crafted as advertisements for the seminar. But beneath the chrome, there are some interesting -- sometimes wacky -- ideas about the nature of human economic interactions.

The paper about the flax fibers found by Eliso Kvavadze and colleagues in Dzudzuana Cave, Republic of Georgia, is a one-pager. The good kind of one-pager -- the kind where you can understand the whole thing. If I didn't hate the misuse of supporting online material so much, I think I might wish that every paper were required to have a one-page synopsis like this. The press accounts about the paper would have been better if they'd just quoted the whole thing!

I find this paper very exciting. Here, in one very clear set of observations, we get a glimpse of a whole human activity pattern. Before this, we knew only hints about fiber processing, later in time and from only one site. Nowadays, most people don't think much about the technology in their T-shirts and jeans. If you're not a fiber artist or knitter, you may not have a concept of just how much work went into clothing and other fiber objects before the Industrial Revolution.

Here, in these little clay samples, is a clear picture of hours upon hours of work. You don't get a variety of color dyes, systematic flax gathering and twisted threads without a sustained tradition. This was technology that contributed directly to survival -- keeping people warm, and helping them fit into their families, clans or tribes. Calories saved by clothing, mats, or padding were calories that did not have to be hunted or gathered. Few technologies could contribute so directly to social status as the kind and quality of clothing. We aren't seeing the beginning of that technology at Dzudzuana, we're seeing it already in a highly developed state.

Flax fibers by themselves would not be newsworthy. Humans gathered plant materials long before 30,000 years ago. Several caves show good evidence of many species of gathered grasses and forbs. We assume that these people, including Neandertals, were using plants as bedding or floor covering materials.

What makes the Dzuzuana fibers different is the evidence that they were incorporated into textiles:

A few of the fibers are colored and appear to have been dyed. A wide range of natural pigments was available to the Upper Paleolithic occupants of the cave, including roots and other plant parts (5). The color range includes yellow, red, blue, violet, black, brown, green, and khaki.

It's like Old Navy! More:

All 27 clay samples from unit D produced fibers of flax (N = 488) (table S2); some were spun (N = 13) and dyed (N = 58), the colors are mostly black-to-gray and turquoise. One of the threads is twisted. The complete fibers are long (>200-m) and composed of segments of smaller lengths. Individual fibers are linear with thin and translucent walls. Several ends of both complete and disbanded fibers were cut across (Fig. 1, 1 to 7).

On the whole, it's very convincing evidence of fabrics. Michael Balter's accompanying news piece was able to dig up some doubters about the extent of dyeing, and maybe a more careful study of the chemical pigments will be possible.

The paper also includes a hint about other fiber processing at the site:

The combination of flax fibers, some tur hair, and microremains of skin beetles (fig. S2) and moth can be interpreted as an evidence for processing of fur, skin, and cloth. This conclusion is supported by the presence of spores of the Chaetomium fungus (fig. S2), usually growing on clothes and other textiles and unfortunately destroying them (6).

How early does it go? Is this a novel invention with the Upper Paleolithic, as has often been suggested of string, nets, and other fiber creations? Were fabrics utilized outside the northern latitudes earlier in time?

Possibly, the fungal evidence might be found at even earlier sites, maybe even by using metagenomic techniques. It's reasonable to think that Neandertals and other early people made extensive use of skin and hair. Woven or knotted fabric is different, but possibly there is a continuum between natural animal fibers and plant fibers that connects them.

References:

Balter M. 2009. Clothes make the (hu)man. Science 325:1329. doi:10.1126/science.325_1329a

Kvavadze E, Bar-Yosef O, Belfer-Cohen A, Boaretto E, Jakeli N, Matskevich Z, Meshviliani T. 2009. 30,000-year-old wild flax fibers. Science 325:1359. doi:10.1126/science.1175404

Yesterday's post on MIT OpenCourseware touched on some of the difficulties of independent study using online tools. Three barriers stand in the way -- one practical, two structural.

On the practical side, it's hard to get help without paying for it. If you understand the materials well, you ought to learn as easily from them as any undergraduate taking the class on campus. But if you hit a snag, you might be stuck a long time trying to work through it yourself. That's what professors, teaching assistants and tutors are for: getting you around the snag, so that you can keep progressing.

On the structural side, colleges use every means at their disposal to defend their role as credentialing institutions. Getting a degree -- a certification -- means paying somebody. And one tool in their arsenal is copyright -- they may give you their lectures and notes for free, but they can't distribute the textbooks, graphics, or images that have been drawn from other sources. Sad but true -- I show photos of fossils and sites routinely in my classes, as well as graphics from published articles. Those don't go into free online content -- hence again, personal is better.

Kevin Carey writes in Washington Monthly, "College for $99 a Month", focusing on a new player in the transfer-credit business, StraighterLine. It's one of several outfits trying to make a business out of online education. The article's title draws attention to the unique pricing scheme -- for 99 dollars a month, you can take as many courses as you want. It's like Netflix for college classes:

In recent years, Americans have grown accustomed to living amid the smoking wreckage of various once-proud industries—automakers bankrupt, brand-name Wall Street banks in ruins, newspapers dying by the dozen. It’s tempting in such circumstances to take comfort in the seeming permanency of our colleges and universities, in the notion that our world-beating higher education system will reliably produce research and knowledge workers for decades to come. But this is an illusion. Colleges are caught in the same kind of debt-fueled price spiral that just blew up the real estate market. They’re also in the information business in a time when technology is driving down the cost of selling information to record, destabilizing lows.

The company (and others) makes a business out of low-cost information by offering low-cost services. The parent company, Smarthinking, offers 24-hour tutoring by Internet whiteboard along with purely online tutorials developed in partnership with universities and textbook publishers. Some universities have outsourced their on-campus tutoring to the company, I suppose trading better service for work-study dollars.

Carey's article covers some of the challenges facing StraighterLine -- I was interested in the part describing how Fort Hays State University (in Western Kansas) had evaluated some of the company's courses as transfer credits, only to invoke the ire of the North Central accreditation board and professors. It illustrates the guild system that protects the universities' credentialing market, for the time being.

The underlying issue for colleges is that upper-level specialized courses are money-losers. They take up a large fraction of expensive faculty teaching time, but they have low enrollments -- making them better for students. Colleges cover these costs in part by offering big lecture classes to underclassmen. If students could take 10 of these classes in four months with StraighterLine, they'd spend $400, compared to the many thousands that the same credits would run on campus.

Bob Cringely's current column ("Burn baby, burn") touches on the same problem:

Education, which — along with health care — seems to exist in an alternate economic universe, ought to be subject to the same economic realities as anything else.  We should have a marketplace for insight.  Take a variety of experts (both professors and lay specialists) and make them available over the Internet by video conference.  Each expert charges by the minute with those charges adjusting over time until a real market value is reached.  The whole setup would run like iTunes and sessions would be recorded for later review.

Remember, all lectures are also available online for free. What costs is the personal touch.

Say a particularly good professor wants to make $200,000 per year by working no more than 20 hours per week or about 1000 hours per year.  That gives them a billing rate of $200 per hour.

That's an interesting business model -- make every professor into a paid consultant. Many already make substantial income in that way, particularly those verging into industry-dominated fields like engineering and medicine. But it's hard to see many English or history professors making $200 per billable hour. Cringely points out that the deal would substantially improve the deal for students:

Now look back at your university career.  How much one-on-one time did you actually get with the professors who really influenced your life?  I did the calculation and came up with about two hours per week, max.  Imagine a four-year undergraduate career running 30 weeks per year — 120 total weeks of school — times two hours of insight per week for a total of 240 hours.  At $200 per hour the cost comes to $48,000 or $12,000 per year.

That’s a huge savings compared to the $200,000+ an MIT-level education would cost today.

The difference in cost is facilities and administration. Some of those facilities are necessary for an MIT-level education -- lab work can't all be virtual.

But, there are a lot of ways to involve undergraduates in research, and $200 an hour for direct tutoring in research methods plus subsidizing publication in the university-run open access journal -- that might well be a better (and more practical) advanced education than a faculty-led seminar. It's like music lessons, except for science.

Or students could pool their money to have the professor attend their seminar weekly -- get enough people together who want a Milton seminar, and then hire the Milton scholar. Or two, on alternate weeks. Take what was once passive and make it active.

Well, there are some perspectives on the future of education. Who knows how they'll turn out?

John Zogby polled Americans on whether they'd like to become cyborgs. Some of the questions are about brain implants for health, others for information or "entertainment".

--If you could have the Internet wired directly into your brain, would you do so?
Yes: 13%
No: 82%
Not sure: 5%.

By comparison, around 10 percent of Americans have been prescribed antidepressants of some kind. I can imagine the idea of brain tinkering might be marketed in a similar way. Certainly, when you see actual research on microchip-neuron interfaces now, it's pitched as a way to directly influence pain networks, or rehabilitate lost tissue or nerve connections. In other words, medical utility.

Seems to me, that there's a lot of money people spend on expensive colleges that might be spent on technology instead, if it could enable the same opportunities. Microsoft Encarta destroyed the market for paper encyclopedias; Wikipedia killed the market for Encarta. Could a microchip kill the market for Harvard?

Anyway, you can count me in the 82 percent. It seems to me that Brain Internet has only one really practical use: the Matrix will use your brain to do character recognition. You know, like ReCaptcha.

Which pretty much makes the wetware brain a complicated way of gold farming.

Ray Kurzweil, Larry Page, and Peter Diamantis are teaming up with NASA to bring us the next step in graduate and postgraduate education:

Singularity University, which will be housed on the NASA Ames base near Mountain View and begin classes in June, is the brainchild of Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis. The two world-renowned scientists were expected to unveil their plans at the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference beginning in Long Beach today.

The school hopes to attract students from a cross section of emerging disciplines - including nanotechnology, biotechnology and information technology - to tackle huge issues facing humanity. Pandemics and global health care concerns would be typical in scope and import.

This seems to be a growing trend -- the idea that if you get infotech, biotech, and nanotech people together, great things will happen. Every day on my way to work, I pass by a massive construction site that is going to be the University of Wisconsin's version of this idea. Called the "Wisconsin Institute for Discovery", it has a lot of private and state money, with the idea that they are going to house info, bio, and nano in one big, well-endowed building.

Here's a good catchphrase, which I think I'll use myself:

"Disruptive innovation usually comes about when you mash together different disciplines," said Ismail, who will be the hands-on manager of Singularity U.

"Disruptive innovation" is a good name for our mashup of anthropology and evolutionary genetics. Heck, "mashup" is a better term than "interdisciplinary".

One of the advantages of putting a bunch of people together and calling it a "university" is that it puts your institution on a very favorable grounding for patents. I could imagine great things coming from such collaborations, if they get the right combination of people. It could be a present-day answer to the Bell Labs of the 1940's.

Or, with a bunch of "world-famous" egos, it could turn into a major fiasco. What's interesting about the Singularity University is its interesting economic model:

Unlike a traditional university, Singularity will consist of a single, nine-week course of study every summer, during which 120 students from a cross-section of disciplines will mix together to tackle weighty issues. Tuition will be $25,000. Candidates will be chosen mostly from graduate and post-graduate programs around the world.

Will it be worth it? Depends who they attract, I guess. Sounds like students are paying for face time, not necessarily information.