john hawks weblog

paleoanthropology, genetics and evolution

technology

  • Ceramics in the Epigravettian of Croatia

    Tue, 2012-07-31 11:19 -- John Hawks

    I've had a paper on my desktop for more than a week expecting to write a comment on it, and now happily I discover that the first author, Becky Farbstein, has described the work in a blog post: "First Epigravettian Ceramics in Europe". The paper [1] describes ceramic figurines from 12,000-15,000 years ago in Croatia -- not the earliest instance of ceramic technology in the world, but one of three very early instances that suggest a pattern:

    There are major implications for the rapidly accumulating body of evidence of both artistic and functional ceramics in pre-Neolithic contexts (remember this post?), but most importantly, we can no longer equate ceramic technologies with sedentary societies. The finds from Vela Spila encourage us to reconsider our ideas about the multiple inventions and diverse roles of ceramics throughout prehistory. Clearly, in lots of different places across Eurasia, throughout the late Palaeolithic, people were experimenting with ceramic materials, intentionally firing them, and developing new artistic traditions associated with their innovations. Ceramics should not necessarily be considered an anachronism (or contamination) when found in Palaeolithic horizons.

    I love it when I can read about work from the authors, and hope more and more people will take up this challenge!

    References

    1. Farbstein R, Radić D, Brajković D, Miracle PT. First Epigravettian Ceramic Figurines from Europe (Vela Spila, Croatia) Petraglia MD. PLoS ONE [Internet]. 2012;7(7):e41437. Available from: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0041437
    Tags: 
    blogging
    technology
    Epigravettian
    Upper Paleolithic
    Europe

  • Online education and Silicon Valley

    Sat, 2012-06-16 10:01 -- John Hawks

    The Wall Street Journal profiles computer scientist and AI researcher Sebastian Thrun. The interview discusses his online education startup, Udacity:

    In the midst of this, there was a slight hitch, Mr. Thrun says. "I had forgotten to tell Stanford about it. There was my authority problem. Stanford said 'If you give the same exams and the same certificate of completion [as Stanford does], then you are really messing with what certificates really are. People are going to go out with the certificates and ask for admission [at the university] and how do we even know who they really are?' And I said: I. Don't. Care."

    The article also discusses his ongoing collaborations with Google on AI projects.

    Tags: 
    online learning
    artificial intelligence
    technology

  • Brittannia rules the waves

    Wed, 2012-03-28 20:03 -- John Hawks

    Ars Technica has an engrossing article by James Grimmelmann about the rise and fall of HavenCo. The firm promised data security and anonymity based on the idea that it was located on the independent nation of Sealand. The problem, of course, was that Sealand isn't really all it's cracked up to be.

    HavenCo's collapse also shows a truly deep irony in its business model. By putting itself outside of other countries' legal systems, it put itself completely at Sealand's mercy. In hindsight, Ryan Lackey explained, "While I could sue HavenCo and/or directors for breach of contract, etc., ... it would presumably lead to a negative resolution of the Sealand sovereignty issue." Sealand is a toy nation with a toy legal system, not a stable business environment. Prince Roy and Prince Regent Michael might be fun to raise a glass with, but they don't inspire the kind of confidence an independent judiciary would. On Sealand, Sean Hastings and Ryan Lackey unwittingly recreated everything that drove them out of Anguilla in the first place.

    It was fun to read about the origin of Sealand in the days of pirate radio and the recurrent attempts to make money off of a very weird situation. Any fan of Cryptonomicon will recognize the plot.

    Tags: 
    history
    computers
    technology

  • Computing past

    Sat, 2012-02-25 19:46 -- John Hawks

    The Guardian has an interview with George Dyson about his new book, Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe. The book reviews the early history of computing, focusing on John von Neumann's role.

    This passage in the interview is interesting:

    JN Another significant moral of the tale is the importance of open publication. The documentation for the IAS machine was all published, which meant that the machine could be cloned elsewhere (and indeed was by commercial companies such as IBM, as well as other research institutes), whereas the guys who built the ENIAC lodged patents, started a company and in due course became enmeshed in litigation. In our time, the computing industry is increasingly enmeshed in the same kinds of patent wars, so maybe there's a lesson here for us. Is there a correlation between openness and innovation?

    GD Yes, indeed. And what is amazing – and would horrify Abraham Flexner [the founding spirit of the IAS] – is that academic institutions are now leading the way in proprietary restriction on the results of scientific research! Of course there are arguments that this will fund more science, but those arguments do not make sense to me. Again, back to the original agreement made between Oppenheimer and the army at Los Alamos: the weapons would be secret, but the science would be open. And the more we backtrack on that agreement (whether with the military or with industry) the more we lose.

    Tags: 
    history
    history of science
    John von Neumann
    technology

  • 3D printing, faster, please

    Wed, 2011-10-12 20:51 -- John Hawks

    Casts!

    Origo is still in the prototype phase, but its creators have openly discussed some of the ultimate specs on their Twitter feed and Facebook page, as well as on their main site. We should expect the 3D printer to have a USB port, wireless connectivity, a price around $800, and it will use 3Dtin as its design software. Peels tells me that the printer will be able to produce objects about the size of a “large mug or medium jar.” Depending on complexity, Origo should be able to give kids a small object (like a ring) in a manner of minutes, but larger objects (like a detailed baseball) could take a few hours. Material costs for 3D printing are high (say $40 to $400 a kilo for plastic!) but Peels really wants to bring this down to something very reasonable.

    Please, please, please, I would gladly go to a license-for-unlimited casts model. Open access would be better. I just want the flexibility to shuffle the major casts into multiple lab stations, build kits to send around to schools, and not worry about things breaking. It's just not quite there, yet, either in price or simplicity.

    Tags: 
    technology
    open access

  • The box isn't nearly as big, either

    Wed, 2011-10-05 23:20 -- John Hawks

    I saw this: "India launches Aakash tablet computer priced at $35" on Slashdot, which notes:

    The Aakash computer runs Android 2.2 (Froyo), has a 7-inch touch screen, 256MB of RAM, 32GB expandable memory slot, two USB ports, and weighs in at only 350 grams.

    I just want to note that 21 years ago I bought my first computer for $1700. It came with 2MB or RAM and 40MB of hard disk, 1 serial and 1 parallel port, and it weighed roughly 35 pounds. I know many readers can tell much scarier ghost stories about early computers, but those stats just struck me.

    Tags: 
    technology
    social

  • Can Watson navigate the medical literature?

    Wed, 2011-09-21 08:30 -- John Hawks

    Last week, Computerworld reported that IBM's famous "Watson" supercomputer is moving to its next challenge: prescribing cancer treatments for the WellPoint health plan.

    For example, Watson's analytics technology, used with Nuance's voice and clinical language understanding software, could help a physician consider all related texts, reference materials, prior cases, and latest knowledge in journals and medical literature when treating an illness. The analysis could quickly help physicians determine the best options for diagnosis and treatment.

    "There are breathtaking advances in medical science and clinical knowledge [but] this clinical information is not always used in the care of patients," said Dr. Sam Nussbaum, WellPoint's Chief Medical Officer, in a statement.

    Looks to me like a first step to removing humans from the decision-making chain. A.I., the ultimate bureaucrat. Plus, it can beat Ken Jennings on Jeopardy!

    It occurs to me that the current medical literature is really poorly suited for AI trawling, in many ways. The data and results are obfuscated in many ways, and there's a strong publication bias toward positive results. Someone asked me just today about why open science is interesting to many of us, and the positive results bias struck me as a really important aspect. When you are keeping an open notebook, the negative results are right there along with the positives. Open notebook science might be better for AI-enhanced treatment plans. In any event, a more standard form of result reporting would be helpful. Why can't anyone run their own meta-analysis anytime she chooses?

    Tags: 
    open science
    artificial intelligence
    health
    technology
    journals
    metascience

  • The new wired physical anthropologists

    Tue, 2011-05-17 08:32 -- John Hawks

    Katy Meyers, graduate student in anthropology at Michigan State, has posted at the Chronicle of Higher Education her experience "hacking" the AAPA meetings in Minneapolis: "Using Twitter and QR Codes at Conferences".

    Prior to the conference even starting, I had been active on the twitter backchannel for the conference found at #aapa2011. About a week before the conference started, a number of more well known physical anthropologists started using this specific hashtag, and I made sure that I was ‘in’ on the conversation. Throughout the conference, those of us who could get access to internet or were lucky enough to have 3G were actively tweeting on the channel about the sessions we were attending, the posters to drop by, and the various activities to check out. At the AAPA, there are about 3 to 5 concurrent presentation sessions and a poster session running throughout. By having this backchannel, those of us attending one are able to get the highlights of the other sessions. While I primarily attended sessions on bioarchaeology and digital databases, I have a general idea of the main discussions that were occurring in the primatology and paleoanthropology talks because of the twitter backchannel.

    She also discusses the QR code on her poster, which led to a good number of people accessing her work online. We tried this with Marc Kissel's poster this year, just putting a PDF version online with a QR code on the poster, and I think it worked quite well. With some more time, we'd have come up with a Prezi version of the poster.

    The interesting thing to watch is the way that this backchannel is emerging, sort of a subculture within the field. The "internetness" of it all isn't really generational -- there are lots of full professors who maintain really active Facebook relationships, for instance. But something about the backchannel definitely is a generational thing. I can't be positive, but I might have been the oldest active tweeter at the meetings. It can be so tremendously useful as a follower of the Twitter feed, because many of the active tweeters are science writers and specialists who are really good at picking out the interesting points from a talk.

    I expect we'll see more QR codes in the future -- I for one am going to start putting them into talks. Conference presentations take too much work to let them expire after a weekend; we should leverage that work into a stronger, more lasting and more interactive form.

    Tags: 
    meetings
    Twitter
    technology

  • Stone age selectivity

    Sat, 2011-05-14 08:30 -- John Hawks

    I'm pointing this morning to a nice recent post by Brigid Gallagher, discussing the importance of raw material and processing steps for stone age technology: "Working With Stone, Connecting the Past".

    She writes from New Zealand, where toolmakers were working with a choice between ground stone and flaking techniques. Here's a short excerpt on wastage:

    An interesting aside to this that I like having witnessed many examples when I worked at the Auckland Museum, is when pounamu adzes break in the making. Instead of being able to quickly turn out a modified artefact, the original tool may be turned into a completely new artefact, such is the desire not to waste the stone This is often evident in the hei tiki. Along the base edge of many historic and prehistoric tiki examples, a short bevelled edge can be seen, where the pounamu was originally intended as an adze. It broke in the making, and was changed from a adze perform to a hei tiki.

    Technology is not merely a series of steps, it is a way of organizing behavior. The flowchart can trigger a totally different cascade of actions than the stereotype or ideal. Flexibility of procedure coupled with a flexible choice of procedures makes the relation of intention and material very complex.

    Tags: 
    technology

  • Monkey numerical distractions

    Fri, 2011-04-15 08:20 -- John Hawks

    This study has been out for a few weeks, and I've been meaning to put up a short comment about it: "Representational format determines numerical competence in monkeys", by Vanessa Schmitt and Julia Fischer [1]. The abstract:

    A range of animal species possess an evolutionarily ancient system for representing number, which provides the foundation for simple arithmetical operations such as addition and numerical comparisons. Surprisingly, non-human primates tested in ecologically, highly valid quantity discrimination tasks using edible items often show a relatively low performance, suggesting that stimulus salience interferes with rational decision making. Here we show that quantity discrimination was indeed significantly enhanced when monkeys were tested with inedible items compared with food items (84 versus 69% correct). More importantly, when monkeys were tested with food, but rewarded with other food items, the accuracy was equally high (86%). The results indicate that the internal representation of the stimuli, not their physical quality, determined performance. Reward replacement apparently facilitated representation of the food items as signifiers for other foods, which in turn supported a higher acuity in decision making.

    This seems so obvious in retrospect. An experimenter has to provide some kind of motivation or there will be no experiment. Providing food rewards in psychology tests on animals will conflate numerical cognition with food, rewards, and motivation. I'm surprised that a simple substitution of inedible items turned out to be so successful in relaxing this cognitive bias.

    As I'm thinking about the "numbers as technology" theme, I keep returning to the idea that most interesting technologies are cobbled together from heterogeneous parts. Cognitive technology is no exception. In this experiment, we see the interference between the food/reward aspects of cognition and the representation of number. To have an effective practice of number as applied to food items, an individual would have to overcome this interference.

    We might tinker with the system in different ways -- for example, we could set up a new system of behavioral rewards or we could change neurotransmitter regulation to decrease food salience. What is the dividing line between technical and natural solutions? Imagine a pill that improves monkey math by inhibiting dopamine receptors. The same inhibition might emerge by mutations to dopamine receptors -- a natural tweak that alters the threshold of technical interventions. A new reward system might seem purely technical -- in the experiment, it worked to substitute different kinds of food treats in different contexts. But then, "different" is itself a function of perception, which can be changed by changing visual and olfactory receptors. "Technical" is a matter of arranging heterogeneous things in such a way that their natural course of action achieves a desired end.

    References

    1. Schmitt V, Fischer J. Representational format determines numerical competence in monkeys. Nature Communications [Internet]. 2011;2:257+. Available from: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ncomms1262
    Tags: 
    technology
    mathematics
    psychology
    cognition
    primates

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Neandertals

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Denisova

From a finger bone of an ancient human came the record of a completely unexpected population. My lab is working on the science of the Denisova genome.

Acceleration

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Malapa

Just outside Johannesburg, the Malapa site is producing some of the most exciting finds in human evolution. This site is the headquarters of the Malapa Soft Tissue Project.