Dancing may be a nearly universal element in human societies everywhere. This video would seem to prove the corollary: that happiness is directly proportional to a society's capacity for silliness.
Enjoy. If this doesn't make you smile, nothing can.
Credit: UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering
The science behind reading faces is fascinating. Sometimes it's obvious when someone is confused, happy, sad, angry, distracted etc. and other times what you can see in someone's face is subtle and hard to read. Distilling facial expressions into mathematical formulas that can be put into a computer program, with the panoply of human emotions we all experience and observe in others, must be really hard.
A computer scientist at UC San Diego is trying to do just that. Jacob Whitehill is hoping to create a facial recognition system that can determine if students understand or are confused by what they are hearing.
The goal is facial recognition software that can tell robotic teachers to slow down or speed up when giving instruction.
There may be a market for robotic teachers someday in some capacities, but I'll always prefer being taught by humans like John Ludgate, who I had for math my sophomore year of high school. He used to stand at the front of the room, bouncing a piece of chalk in his hand as he patiently tried to explain concepts in trigonometry, like the differences between sine and cosine.
Like a lot of teachers, he had to spend far too much time maintaining order in a classroom with about 30 hyperactive, hormonal and at times hyena-like 15-year-old kids. It might have been good training for him: he ended up joining the Peace Corps and going to Africa. I don't know what happened to him from there.
There's more on Whitehill's work here.
As my Science Matters colleague, Dennis O'Brien noted in his earlier post, a banana truck overturned on the I-95 today. Indeed, Dennis regaled us with banana lore from his hometown of Scranton, Penn., and questioned - no, derided - the intelligence of concertgoers who dare request a song of their beloved Harry Chapin.
I would remind Dennis, that this is a science blog, and that bananas are indeed a serious matter.
The yellow bananas found in the truck were most likely of the Dwarf Cavendish variety, a member of the tropical plant genus, Musaceae. It is by far the most popular of the several varieties sold in the United States. The fruits of the plant, commonly knows as "bananas," are more technically known as "fingers" and a bunch of fingers as a "hand."
Bananas are native to Southeast Asia and Australia but were brought to the Americas soon after their discovery. After they are shipped from the tropics, bananas are often ripened using ethylene gas in special ripening rooms where they turn from green to yellow.
Considering it's one of the most important fruits in the world, it's unseemly to make light of the banana. First bananas, Dennis, then what? It's a slippery slope.
Sun photo
Years ago, in a famous public service television ad, a hand cracked an egg and dropped it in a heated skillet. A male voice said, “This is your brain” (see the intact egg) and then “This is your brain on drugs” (see the egg frying, hear the skillet sizzle.) It must have been an effective ad because those of us who have reached a certain age all remember it years later, right?
They don’t show that ad anymore but federally-funded research by the University of Pennsylvania published this week made me think of it.
Unsupervised children are more active and have a better social life than those under constant supervision.
There may be no surprise there -- kids not watched by their parents are bound to have a better time, but they're may also get into more trouble. Researchers at University College London asked 330 8- to 11-year olds how much adult supervision they had, then watched where they go and how they behaved.
When it came to tracking the kids, they didn't fool around: They had them complete questionnaires and keep travel diaries, logged their movements using GPS monitors and had them wear portable motion sensors to measure their speed of travel, changes in direction and the number of 'activity calories' they consumed.
