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Mechanical Turk
Feedback is the grumpy type, which is why we run a mile when faced with any forced entertainment. Therefore, it is quite possible that we will find it difficult to buy ice cream in Turkey, because it requires pleasure or at least enduring a long joke.
Turkish ice cream sellers tend to play pranks on their customers, such as handing them a cone full of ice cream, only to snatch it out of their hands using sleight of hand. The programs are truly impressive and take years to master. It's just that if Feedback wants ice cream, then we want ice cream, not a close-up magic show.
So we groaned internally when reporter Matthew Sparks alerted us to a new early-stage paper uploaded to the arXiv website in which engineers describe the creation of robot this may imitate the routine of a Turkish ice cream seller. They did this, Matt suggests, “because all the important research had been completed.”
The result is one of those robotic arms that can spin, spin, and generally wobble all over the place. The researchers programmed it using five tricks from a Turkish ice cream seller.
In one, the robot “bounces” the cone from side to side, “creating the illusion that the cone is 'bouncing' away from the user.” In another case, the robot “evades [user’s] hand, drawing a large arcing path as the hand reaches the cone.” And then there's the “dance,” which is a “non-interactive policy designed to tease/taunt users by swinging a cone vertically in a circular motion beyond the users' reach.”
The robot was then tested on real people. Compared to a control condition in which the robot simply passed the ice cream without doing anything, these tricks caused people to rate it as “more deceptive.” Apparently, these stunts also “increased enjoyment-related outcomes (fun, engagement, challenge) and perceived robot competence, but decreased confidence in performance…perceived safety and self-competence.”
In other words: “Playful deception leads to a structured trade-off: it can delight and maintain attention, but at the expense of predictability and trust.” The authors recommend that “in security-critical applications… the associated reduction in trust and security would likely be unacceptable.” Really? You think?
Corresponding abbreviations
When feedback first asked you offers for the best and worst scientific acronyms, we had no idea about flow it was come to us. Our mailbox groans under the weight confusing phrases abbreviated as a sequence 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 “Solway Coast and Marine Project“or SKAMP.
Stewart believes that the creators of the project behaved too restrained. Given the emphasis on “restoring marine life,” he says, couldn't they add another word to make an even more appropriate acronym? Reviews agree: it definitely should have been the Solway Coastal and Marine Conservation Initiative.
On the other side of the world, Jamie Pittock and Jenny Malella from the Australian National University recently received funding for a project to study the management of rivers flowing into the Indian Ocean. They called it “Management of Rivers Flowing into Ocean Dominions (MORDOR).”
However, this is actually a cautionary tale. Jamie writes: “When we advertised for a Research Fellow, Mr. Bilbo Baggins from the Shire applied. Luckily, a much more qualified candidate was available and he was appointed.”
Shakespearean shake-up
Recently Feedback explained that we needs to be rewritten two sonnets by William Shakespeare to remove erroneous references to roses with thorns; these sharp things are actually called spines. Reader James Fredgley has now written that Shakespeare's scientific illiteracy extends far beyond botany into astronomy.
IN Julius Caesaract 3, scene 1, the eponymous dictator boasts: “I am as constant as the northern star / Whose truly motionless and resting quality / There is no fellow in the firmament.” Caesar is referring to the North Star, which is so close to the north pole of the heavens that it barely moves across the sky while other stars revolve around it throughout the year.
Except that, as James says, during the assassination of Caesar in 44 BC. e. “The North Star was not the North Star.” Instead, a star called Kochab or Beta Ursa Minoris was closest to the north celestial pole, but it was never close enough to really be detected, so it was not very useful for navigation.
“Even worse, Polaris is a Cepheid variable,” James says. This means that its brightness is constantly changing, so it doesn't even glow at a constant intensity. “In general,” says James, “I really don’t understand why we worry about Shakespeare.”
Feedback tends to be more forgiving. Our knowledge of astronomical history is not good enough to tell us for sure whether shifting pole stars were known in Europe in Shakespeare's time, but we think he was busy enough to rightly miss it. Meanwhile, Cepheid variables were discovered only 168 years after his death, which seems to us an iron-clad excuse.
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