DailyDirt: Animal Brains Aren't So Different...

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

If you watch pets closely enough and for long enough, you might get a sense that animals can understand certain cues from people and that they sometimes try to communicate their wishes to people. Certainly not all pets are intelligent, but it's a common experience for many people. Wild animals aren't so different from their domesticated cousins, so it should maybe not be surprising that various wild animals are intelligent in some ways. Here are just a few links on the growing evidence of advanced animal cognition.

• A bunch of dogs were trained to sit still in a functional magnetic resonance imaging brain scanner, and their brain scans show that dog brains have a special area dedicated to processing voices and meaningful sounds. Dogs and people have remarkably similar brain reactions to happy sounds (eg. baby giggles) and unhappy sounds (eg. coughing) which could partly explain why our species get along so well. [url]
• PBS has a 3-part NOVA series -- Inside Animal Minds -- on the intelligence of animals. The 3-hour series covers tool use, communication skills, emotional intelligence, problem-solving abilities and social behaviors of a variety of wild and domesticated animals. [url]
• Pigeons can learn to categorize various items and exhibit selective attention. Laboratory pigeons were able to distinguish computer-generated images and respond with appropriate pecking on a touchscreen. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: animal cognition, animal intelligence, behavior, biology, brains, fmri, intelligence, mind, pigeons, smart animals

DailyDirt: Anthropomorphizing Animals

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Humans tend to think about other animals in human terms -- which is only natural since we don't really have other frames of reference other than our own experiences. So not surprisingly, it's always interesting when animals seem to enjoy the same activities that people do and seem to be able to solve problems better than we can. Here are just some fairly recent examples.

• Orangutans at a Milwaukee zoo get to play with iPads and even have access to the internet. Pretty soon the zookeepers will have to install internet filtering software so that these orangutans don't try to gamble away their bananas via online casinos. [url]
• The "Monty Hall Dilemma" is a probability problem that most people don't solve correctly by instinct, but some birds seem to? Given "three doors" with mixed grain as a prize, pigeons seem to learn how to optimize their door-choosing strategy better than people. [url]
• People like sledding on snow-covered hills with inner tubes and lunch trays. Crows like to sled down snow-covered rooftops using jar lids. Sledding is just fun, but you'd think that animals that can fly wouldn't be so entertained by sliding along the ground.... [url]
• To discover more interesting biological curiosities, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

Filed Under: animals, crows, intelligence, monty hall problem, orangutans, pigeons, smart animals

Sneakernet, Pigeonet And The Meaninglessness Of Judging Broadband By Silly Stunts

from the so-what? dept

A bunch of folks have been sending in this story about how a carrier pigeon beat a broadband line in transferring 4 gigs of data between two offices 60 miles apart. The problem with such stunts is that they're rather meaningless. All you need to do is pick a storage size for the pigeon that is sufficiently large. The speed of the broadband connection is known in advance, and so you can just pick a file size that is significantly larger. Given the right sizes, I'd imagine that flying across the Atlantic with hard drives full of data is probably faster than some trans-Atlantic fiber cables as well. It doesn't mean that the cable is necessarily slow. The point is that for some things a "sneakernet" or (in this case) "pigeon net" will be faster. It does sound like the DSL connection being used was, in fact, slow, but that can be demonstrated just as easily by, I don't know, noting the actual bandwidth of the connection. I guess, as a publicity stunt, it draws attention, but I can't see how it's really that meaningful.

Filed Under: broadband, pigeons, stunts