Tetherd Cow Ahead

That example par excellence of stellar journalistic accomplishment The Melbourne Age, tells us this morning that iPods and iPads are nothing less than the Typhoid Mary of the looming global apocalyptic pandemic. Well, they stop just short of putting it exactly like that, but it is hard to understand why they’re running an article headlined ‘Apple Store Teeming With Germs’, if not to warn good citizens about the looming plague.

Because they surely wouldn’t be doing it just to bash Apple…

The story, if you haven’t guessed, is that demonstration models of the abovementioned devices on display in Apple stores, can transfer germs from one prospective customer to another – a concept that seems to send the journalist responsible for this rubbish (one Asher Moses) ((Well, I guess he’s not entirely responsible. Like pretty much all modern journalism it’s just a story recycled from somewhere else – in this case, The New York Daily News.)) into virtual paroxysms of hand-wringing. The article give us all kinds of ominous facts and figures, with commentary by various and sundry ‘experts’, about how iGadgets in Apple stores (mentioned solely and specifically) are contaminated with various kinds of icky bacteria. It’s all so very ewwwwww. ((It’s hardly surprising that the bacteria mentioned are in evidence – they are among the most common on the planet.))

In a further attempt to give the story credence, Mr Moses happily goes on to conflate a completely separate dataset with his speculation. He breathlessly inform us that Britain’s Which? magazine, in consultation with a ‘hygiene’ expert, examined a sample of 30 (unnamed brand) mobile phones and found that:

…the average handset carries 18 times more potentially harmful germs than a flush handle in a men’s toilet.

O.M.G!

Aside from the fact that a study like that (even if it is executed properly) is completely irrelevant to this story, ((Consider this – the flush handle in a men’s toilet is probably cleaned at least once a day, if not more frequently. It is NOT a good benchmark against which to measure anything except other things that get cleaned as frequently. It’s irrelevant in respect to phones (inasmuch as you could choose ANYTHING which doesn’t get cleaned much with which to compare it – tv remotes, say, or car keys) and it’s certainly meaningless in terms of iPads in Apples stores unless you have some kind of tangible link. This is a journalist using data recklessly and indiscriminately to attempt to add weight to an article that is lighter than The Zero.)) please to note the journalistic weasel word ‘potentially’ in that quote. Let me give you a Tetherd Cow Ahead rephrasing of that:

•Experts find that stairs are potentially life threatening!

•Experts find that water is potentially lethal!

•Experts find that newspapers are potentially dangerous to your mental health! (Oh wait. That’s true no matter how you look at it).

This stupid piece of scare-mongering fluff is a shining example of why I will be happy to see newspapers go the way of the town crier, and hopefully, their owners and editors hauled off by tumbrel. Honestly – what is the point of such a story?

Let me ask you, Mr Moses, why isn’t this piece about the thousands of other things that are touched by human hands in the course of a normal day? Like escalator handrails? Or lift buttons? Or money? Or salt shakers in McDonalds? Or ATMs? Or public phones? Or demonstration products belonging to other electronics goods retailers????

Could it be, perhaps, that the mileage you would get out of that might not be so… convenient… to your purpose of trashing a successful company that makes products that promise to be the biggest threat to your livelihood since the advent of television?

You know those daft motivational posters that have been well-and-truly pwned by Despair.com? Well, a guy named Douwe Osinga, who works for Google, has made a fun web time-waster called Auto Poster that allows you to make your very own inspirational pontifications to send to your friends and colleagues. Just as I am doing for you, dear Acowlytes.

The app draws from Google’s vast cataloguing of the cyberworld for its images. ((Be warned – the images are selected via Google’s Image Search, and the intellectual property is likely to be reserved. Whatever the crap that actually means in this day and age…)) All you need to do is provide the wisdom. Auto Poster even thoughtfully chooses appropriate text colours for you!

Go now. Waste time. Post your efforts back here and make me laugh.

You’re probably aware that Google has just launched their ‘predictive’ search engine Google Instant – a web version of the kind of ‘pre’ search which has already made its way into many desktop and phone apps. It’s actually pretty impressive. Not really the kind of news I care about airing here on The Cow, but the reason I bring it up is as a result of this quote, made by Google VP (the usually sensible) Marissa Mayer at the press launch in San Francisco: ((She also used the vacuous phrase ‘It’s a quantum leap forward…’))

We are actually predicting what query you are likely to do and giving you results for that. There is actually a psychic element to it.

No there is not, Marissa. There is actually no psychic element to it. It’s a technological element. PLEASE. The loonies don’t need any more encouragement.

If you answered wooooooooooooo… to the title question, then you were entirely correct! Yes that’s right – today’s post features woo and sound, two of my most favourite subjects.

Well, as we all know, it seems that for treatment of their medical ailments, more and more people are turning to ordinary water, coloured water, crystallized water, flower water, needles, colours, smells, lack of food, enemas and just about every other nutty thing under the sun except actual medicine.

It was only a matter of time before someone realised that there was a niche for an ‘alternative’ medical treatment based on sound. Today on The Cow, I will examine one such treatment ((Oh yes, there are many more than just one. Perhaps I will cover Tama-Do at some later stage…)) – something named Human Bioacoustics, the amazing cure-all featured on a site called NutraSounds. ((Oh dear. Already with the dumb.)) Human Bioacoustics was created by a personage named Sharry Edwards™, ((Yes, that’s right, she’s trademarked her name.)) who claims that her process ‘has unlimited health and wellness potential.’ Unlimited! Human Bioacoustics can make you weller than well!

BioAcoustics Voice Spectral Analysis can detect hidden or underlying stresses in the body that are expressed as disease. The vocal print can identify toxins, pathogens and nutritional supplements that are too low or too high. In addition, vocal print can be used to match the most compatible treatment remedy to each client. The introduction of the proper ((If you don’t do it ‘properly’, it won’t work…)) low frequency sound to the body, indicated through voice analysis, has been shown ((By whom?)) to control ((‘Control’? What does that mean?)): pain, body temperature, heart rhythm and blood pressure. It has also been shown to regenerate body tissue ((Body tissue regenerates anyway. This means nothing.)) and alleviate ((Alleviate? In what way?)) the symptoms of many diseases (in some cases, even those considered to be incurable). ((Note the equation of the symptoms with the disease itself – a common ploy of pseudoscentific medicine))

Oh yes, there it is! Gobbledigook piled on balderdash layered on crapola. I’ve given you a helping hand with the shifty language and vague promises. I wonder why the disclaimer that is hidden away at the bottom of the NutraSound pages in very small print isn’t placed in slightly closer proximity to the above paragraph?

Disclaimer: Human BioAcoustics, as originated by Sharry Edwards, M.Ed., does not diagnose or prescribe for medical or psychological conditions nor does it claim to prevent, treat, mitigate or cure such conditions. HBA researchers do not provide diagnosis, care, treatment or rehabilitation of individuals, nor apply medical, mental health or human development principles.

Hmm. On the one hand Human Bioacoustics cures everything and then, somehow, when it comes down to a real-world, write-your-name-here-in-blood guarantee, it doesn’t. Is Ms Edwards a little nervous about getting her ass sued off, one wonders? She certainly isn’t shy of making unsubstantiated claims though. In big bold print on her bio page:

Edwards was named scientist of the year in 2001 for her work in BioAcoustic Biology.

Really? Scientist of the Year! Very impressive! That’s not something you could just make up! Let’s see what teh internets have to say about that! Oh, right, here it is. The award was presented to her by a body called the International Association of New Science. Funny… all those links are either dead or seem to point back to organizations with which Sharry Edwards™ has affiliations. She was given the award by her pals! ((Searching on International Association of New Science turns up some frightening crosslinks. The IANS appears to have been concocted by Dr Brian O’Leary a UFO ‘expert’ and Cleve Backster, who is quite famous for writing books about communicating with plants. The frightening part is that the IANS name also appears in conjunction with legitimate research into climate change. These people are being given government money for their idiotic beliefs… If you follow the links even further, it’s worse – there are ties to the whole anti-vaccination hoodoo and a whole other world of medical stupidity.)) Elsewhere she claims that all her work is peer reviewed. I think she is (obviously purposely) conflating the concept of scientific peer review (which is a strenuous intellectual process designed to weed out errors and bad science) with the idea that you get a few of your ‘peers’ to peruse what you’re doing and give you the thumbs up. ((This is what really gets my goat with these kinds of people – they shamelessly trade on the credentials that genuine science affords, while simultaneously bashing all its accomplishments as worthless. If you adopt science, you adopt science. Play properly by its rules, not by some airy fairy ones that you make up yourself! Otherwise, stay off its turf and name yourselves as the magic peddlers that you really are.))

(By this logic, you, my Faithful Cowpokes, could all agree that I was Scientist of the Year and I could boast that on Tetherd Cow! In fact, what a good idea – I need a few endorsements so that I too can plaster it across my banner! Feel free to wax lyrical!)

The phenomenal power of Human Bioacoustics is completely free to all and sundry in the form of the nanoVoice™ ((Yep, Ms Edwards has her whole racket trademarked up the wazoo.)) program, software which is, sadly, only available for PC. ((Well, technically it could be installed under Virtual PC on my Mac, apparently, but I ain’t running VPC just for this piece of crap.)) Of course, you can only freely download the ‘micro’ version – you have to pay (surprise) for the real deal. ((Curious, when the organization that produces it boasts that it is ‘non profit’…)) nanoVoice ‘uses frequency-based biomarkers within the frequencies of your voice to allow you an enlightening peek into your Secret Self.’

I bet you didn’t even know you had ‘frequencey-based biomarkers’ hidden inside your voice. I certainly didn’t and I’ve been working as a professional sound person for thirty years.

This is how it works, as near as I can make out from reading about it: you load a recording of your voice into the program and it analyzes the ‘frequencies’ ((There are those goddamned frequencies again. Teh woo just loves the vibrations and the frequencies!)) and spits out a bar graph in a rainbow of colours. Here’s what the colours supposedly mean (click to get the full chart):

Gee, now what do all those vague waffly non-specific phrases remind me of… oh, that’s it – the local paper’s astrology section! There are some classic howlers:

Yellow (E): ‘uses words first to convey messages and meaning’

Oh yeah, like that’s not going to apply to everyone except mute people.

Green/Blue (G): ‘likes to mix and manage the physical aspects of life’

What? That could mean just about ANYTHING.

Blue (G#): ‘wants to make a difference’

Oh please.

The colours are also arbitrarily tied to various kinds of organs and body parts. When I say ‘arbitrarily’ I mean that there is absolutely no scientific substantiation to say that, for example, the colour green has anything to do with your kidneys, or that the colour blue ‘retrieves nutrients from your bowel’. This is just utter, unmitigated hogwash. And Sharry Edwards™ knows it, or else she wouldn’t have put the comprehensive disclaimer on her site. ((I’m sure she justifies the disclaimer by saying that she ‘was forced to do it’ by the ‘system’ which ‘persecutes her for her beliefs’. A song that we’ve heard many times before.))

For an example of nanoVoice’s extraordinary powers of deduction, you can amuse yourself by visiting an analysis of Mr Mel Gibson’s phone ‘conversation’ with his estranged wife Oksana Grigoreiva, in which he uses bad language, racist terms and is generally an obnoxious prat. I want to say two thing here: first of all, the pages of unbelievable rubbish that you will find here could be attributed to just about anyone, viz:

You have an unusual sense of time. Not having all the information needed to make a decision stresses you. Your reputation is very important to you. You will go to great lengths to protect it. It is important to you that spirituality be a part of everyday life. You think that feeding the mind is just as important as feeding the body. You are aware of how painful thoughtless words can be. You push yourself and others to finish the job. You love new ideas that mean you can have a project to work on. A sense of belonging is important to you.

… and secondly, these ‘frequency’ analyses were made from a telephone recording. To someone like me who knows anything about sound, this constitutes the epitome of ridiculousness. Telephones severely restrict the frequencies of voices, in order to squeeze intelligibility down the lines. Ms Edwards is asking us to believe that her software uses inherent voice ‘frequencies’ to make its divinations, but is simultaneously independent of frequency restrictions. It is the utmost peak of buffoonery. Not only that, it demonstrates without any equivocation, that Sharry Edwards is completely ignorant about how sound works. ((Oh, I’m sure she’d come up with some piece of silliness to ‘explain’ how she can get readings from a telephone conversation – I’d be disappointed if she couldn’t!))

Like many similar pseudoscientific concepts, Human Bioacoustics uses as its basic modus operandi the general ignorance of most people in a specific field of expertise. Few people understand how sound works, but to someone like me who does, Human Bioacoustics, nanoVoice, ‘vocal profiling’ and the ‘Institute of Bioacoustic Biology’ look about as convincing as a pig in a tuxedo.

What is is with techy people when they come across robots? It seems that a machine merely has to bat a servo-driven eyelid for normally sane, balanced geeks to completely drop their brains on the floor.

Take this recent article over at the usually-sensible Engadget.

The photo you see above is of Bina48, one of the most advanced humanoid robots around. Bina48 resides at the Terasem Movement Foundation in Bristol, Vermont, and while she doesn’t exactly excel at conversation, she’s far more coherent than many we’ve spied… her existence and nearly constant evolution is pretty impressive and we’re going to keep our eye on her as we move toward the future.

In case you couldn’t figure it out, Bina is the one on the left. I know, I know, the astonishing human likeness makes it tricky to pick the robot from the New York Times reporter, but you’ll have to take my word for it. The spastic wobbling head on a plinth is in fact a machine.

Engadget’s acknowledgement that Bina ‘doesn’t exactly excel at conversation’ is somewhat of an understatement. The New York Times reporter attempted to ‘interview’ Bina and the effect is less of a conversation than something like an attempt to interpret the ravings of a simpleton on peyote.

I encourage you to watch the video of the interview now, to experience the full effect of Bina’s striking humanness.

I fail to see how this is in any way more impressive than the numerous other ‘realistic’ robots we’ve examined previously on The Cow. Engadget really needs to get out more. Perhaps on a date with Aiko or Roxxxy, who, even if not as ‘anatomically correct’ as their makers would have everyone believe, at least have bodies.

The New York Times reporter starts out bravely with Bina, but realises in two sentences that she’s been sent out on one of those stories that has little salvaging.

“Hi Bina,” she says, cheerily.

“Er… so where were we?” asks Bina, like a junkie being roused from an opium dream.

“I’m Amy. I’m a reporter,” says the NYT girl, with the sinking feeling that she’d have been better off doing the kitten-stuck-up-a-tree story.

“There is probably more to you than just that,” interrupts Bina, with a sneer. ((Seriously – we are SO attuned to facial gestures that, in my opinion, it’s way better to just forget them than to take the risk that they will be inappropriate. Watch someone closely next time you have a conversation, and see how much of the intent is carried by facial movement. You may be surprised.))

Poor Amy cuts her losses by having the story go to a voiceover:

I had lofty goals for my interview with the Bina48 robot. I imagined me, the intrepid New York Times correspondent, communing on camera with a new kind of intelligent silicon species.

Yes, dear Amy, and I bet that’s just how your editor sold it to you. Well, you’ve learned your lesson about robots haven’t you? You could have saved yourself a lot of grief if you’d been a constant reader of The Cow. We’ve covered all this in depth on numerous occasions.

Amy persists, to her detriment. She asks Bina several times if she’s ready for a conversation while the robot wobbles its badly-wigged head around, doing an uncanny impression of Parkinson’s patient trying to get out of a straight jacket. It finally decides on the well-worn AI strategy of rephrasing the question, which Amy takes as an affirmation.

“Cool!” says Amy.

“Ambiguous,” replies Bina, in an astonishingly embarrassing 1950s ‘does-not-compute’ kind of way. “Cold weather or cold sickness?”

Oh dear. That’s a big fat ‘F’ for you on the Turing Test, Bina. ((Lesson Number 2: Make sure your robot knows the difference between literalness and colloquialism. My first question to a being who I suspected of masquerading as a human would be something like ‘How’s it hangin’ dawg?’))

After an hour of ‘exhausting’ rapport with Bina, Amy calls it quits. Bina has lolled her head around, ((Maybe if they programmed her to drool? It would complement the overall effect, that’s for sure.)) interrupted the conversation with baffling observations, misinterpreted questions, and advanced her ‘opinions’ on artificial intelligence in a completely unconvincing manner, all the while effectively demonstrating that she is anything BUT intelligent. Eventually, she attempts to explain her poor performance away on ‘having a bad software day’.

“You know how that is,” she pleads. ((The programmers are obviously going for wit here, but succeed only in bathos.)) NO WE DON’T, Bina. We are humans. We don’t have ‘bad software’ days. ((That excuse is going to go down really well when the first robot babysitter to drown someone’s child in the bath tries to blame it on ‘a bad software day’.))

As I see it, every day is a bad software day for Bina. I’m perplexed when things like this get wheeled out time and time again as evidence of how the robotic future is just over the horizon. Bina is really nothing more that a mechanical appendage of software routines that have been around for decades. There are a few ‘physical’ additions (Such as Bina’s attempts to smile which are so creepy that I think makers of horror movies would do well to take notes) but all in all Bina is no more impressive than Fake Captain Kirk or Eliza. Obviously Engadget has a very different idea to me of what the future with robots ought to be like.

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Thanks to Atlas for providing more robot-spotting fun.

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In the United States of America, around 30 kilograms (66lb) of beef is eaten per capita every year. ((According to the Guardian article linked here. A search around the web mostly gives numbers higher than that.)) That’s over 9 million metric tons of cow meat. ((Or more than 10 million ‘short’, or US, tons.))

That’s a lot of cows. And a lot of cows take up a lot of space and use up a lot of feed. The Guardian reports this morning that Professor Richard Gradwohl of Washington state has come up with a solution to this problem by spearheading a drive for miniature cattle. Gradwohl’s farm boasts 18 breeds of miniature cows, including ‘microminiature’ varieties that stand just over a meter (one yard) tall. He claims that 10 miniature cows can be raised on the same amount of land as two full size cows, using just one third the feed and producing half the amount of methane. Sheer genius. Not only that, the tinier the cow, the better it tastes, according to the Guardian article.

Of course, here at the Tetherd Cow Ahead laboratories, the boffins were quick to see the potential of this scheme. “Why stop at merely ‘miniature’ cows?” asked the Head Boffin, “Surely if you make the cows even smaller you can make even greater savings and get even tastier beef!”

That’s why he earns the big bucks! To this end, I have set the laboratories to work creating the first nano cows. By my calculations, using the savings in feedstock and land that Gradwhol’s reductions in size have achieved, the shrinking of cows to nanoscale should mean that a million cows could fit on one square centimeter of farmland and would only need a blade of grass per year. On the five acre pasture that Gradwohl uses to raise ten mini cows, TCA Labs can raise trillions of cows, producing a billionth of the methane of conventional cows and yielding enough beef for one thousand billion billion McDonalds’ all-beef patties every month. ((Quoted statistics may or may not be entirely accurate – strange things happen at subatomic levels.))

I also have the labs investigating what happens when the miniaturization process ‘goes homeopathic’ (as we say in the science business). What this means is that once the cattle are shrunk past a certain size, Gilbert Einstein’s famous equation E=M¾ kicks in and the cows become ethereal. The beef yield simultaneously becomes infinite. Needless to say, the taste of flame-grilled steaks also improves immeasurably via this process.

Here in the Land of Shoo!TAG, I don’t see how I can possibly fail to get some investment interest.