tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-91943786901596983392024-02-19T11:01:39.270-08:00Did a Cat Shit in Here?A journey through the science of scent, the art of search and rescue, and whatever else attracts the attention of a peripatetic, overeducated scientific dilettante.Ken Chiacchiahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04626815789187013583noreply@blogger.comBlogger68125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9194378690159698339.post-39143675374056981062015-05-20T09:24:00.002-07:002015-05-20T09:24:17.945-07:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />Ken Chiacchiahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04626815789187013583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9194378690159698339.post-50673624837471617002010-06-19T08:04:00.000-07:002010-06-19T08:14:41.303-07:00The Problem with Dogs<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I don’t remember what I was trying to figure out. But I do recall getting the name of an expert in finding human remains. Somebody who’d gone to places like Chile, to look for the thousands of people that the dictatorship had murdered.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I called him, I’m sure, to ask a question about human remains detection dogs <span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">— HRD dogs, in the parlance.</span></span></span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">I don’t remember my exact question, but I do remember he didn’t really answer it: instead, he said, “In my experience, dogs are best at detecting the urine of other dogs.”</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Not very many responses you could make to a statement like that; I think he knew I was a dog handler, knew how provocative he was being. I don’t remember whether I offered a defense. In the first place, it really wasn’t my specialty, so I didn’t have a very knowledgeable defense to offer; in the second, it occurred to me that maybe an HRD handler had failed the man badly enough to </span></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">earn</span></i></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"> that attitude.</span></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><sup><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">1</span></span></span></span></sup></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Suffice it to say, we dog handlers sometimes struggle with a perception of our value that is, shall we say, rather deflated compared to what we think we deserve.</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Check <span style="color: navy;"><span lang="zxx"><u><a href="http://www.forensicmag.com/article/labrador-new-alpha-dog-human-remains-detection?page=0,0">this one</a></u></span></span> out.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Heather sent the link to me, flagging the claim that it takes 17 days for a buried body to be detectable <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">—</span> it certainly seems overly long to me, but frankly there are so little good data on what real detection dogs can do in the field that I'm not sure we<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"> could prove otherwise. I vaguely remember a study, but don’t have it at the tip of my keyboard.</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">What </span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>really</i></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"> caught my eye was the statement, </span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">“... i</span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">n other words, it can map the odor plume coming from the ground where the body is buried, which can be a key factor in pinpointing the location of the grave or looking for victims in natural disasters.”</span></span></span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">There are a couple of ways to interpret this. The simplest and more direct is that the guy doesn't think dogs can pinpoint the source of a scent </span></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">—</span></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"> not effectively, at least </span></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">—</span></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"> but that giving a human operator numbers, or maybe graphic representations, corresponding to smell intensity </span></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">can</span></i></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">.</span></span></span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">I find that very difficult to believe.</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">One major misconception that I think lurks in the artificial scent detection world is that so-called </span></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">“detection dogs” do just that — detect a smell. And if you're screening suitcases for bombs, fish for spoilage, or whatever, that may be mainly true. But as any dog handler in search and rescue or human remains detection can tell you, detecting the smell is the </span></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">easy</span></i></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"> part. Most of the work goes into locating the source, and getting the dog to tell you when she’s done it.</span></span></span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Problem One, the “getting them to tell us” part, comes from the balance between what researchers call </span></span></span></span><span style="color: navy;"><span lang="zxx"><u><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_one_error"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">type 1 errors and type 2 errors</span></span></span></a></u></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">. A type 1 error is when you fail to detect something that's there. Type 2 is when you get a false detection of something that isn’t there. The issue is that anything you do to reduce one error type tends to increase your errors of the other type. Worried about missing a signal? You can increase your sensitivity, but that will also increase your rate of false detections. Want a “bomb-proof” indication, with utter certainty that when the dog (or device) says it’s there it really is? Inevitably, you’ll increase your number of total misses.</span></span></span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">I don’t think a device is any more or less “reliable” than a dog on this count — it’s a phenomenon of the physics of detection, independent of the detector. But I will grant you can probably work out the optimal balance more easily on a device — and engineers are probably better at dispassionately working out “I’m willing to accept an X rate of type 1 errors if I can get a Y rate of type 2 errors” than dog handlers, who tend to ignore the issue and try for zero type 2 errors and assume it means zero type 1 errors as well, which it almost always doesn’t.</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Problem Two is that localization issue. And ladies and gentleman, it is one bitch of a problem. The difficulty revolves around the nature of the signal rather than the detector: scent plumes consist of discontinuous clumps of scent that don’t simply or clearly point the way to the source in a snapshot. As often as not, the source lies in the direction of the </span></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">weaker</span></i></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"> scent. </span></span></span></span><span style="color: navy;"><span lang="zxx"><u><a href="http://www.springerlink.com/content/f77j17wg1x78u718/"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Researchers have learned a lot</span></span></span></a></u></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"> about how animals negotiate intermittent scent plumes quickly and efficiently — and surprise, surprise, they don’t try to build an exact map of the plume. They follow these simple but effective rules of engagement:</span></span></span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><ul><li><br />
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<div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">if you detect the scent, dash into the wind</span></span></div></li>
<li><br />
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<div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">if you lose the scent, cast back and forth across the wind in until you detect it again</span></span></div></li>
<li><br />
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<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">if the wind dies down, </span></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">even if you’re detecting scent,</span></i></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"> stop and wait for it to pick up again so you have the directional cue to know which way to go</span></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><sup><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">2</span></span></span></span></sup></span></div></li>
</ul><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">Believe it or not, under conditions of any significant convection, this is all you need to do to find the source. It doesn’t make the job easy — there’s a lot of casting about to be done before you get close enough to the source to make any real headway — but it’s rapid and accurate. (Dog handlers’ search patterns, by the way, are just fancy versions of casting, to make sure that, while searching for the plume, we’re fully covering the area within the artificial boundaries dictated for us by the command staff’s planning.)</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">I think that part of the problem is that the engineers who work on artificial noses understand detection but they don’t know anything about search. Going back to our “pure” detection dog, checking your suitcase to see if you’ve smuggled fruit, there really is no search function. It’s just: is the target scent there, yes or no?</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">For the police dog handler searching a basement for a buried body or a warehouse for a bad guy, the search part is simple enough that the dog pretty much does it unguided. In these circumstances, I think this detector might be able to help because it may be a matter of just walking around until the signal maximizes. I think that’s how dogs search such small areas, and how they work “scent pools” — in other words, find the source when there’s no wind moving the scent and you essentially have a uniform murk, the center of which you need to pinpoint.</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">But we wilderness handlers think in terms of areas of 40 to 160 acres. Certainly, if you’ve got a body that’s truly missing — as opposed to believing it’s in a modest-sized back yard but needing to pinpoint it — the kind of painstaking mapping of intensities that the artificial approach would seem not to be the way to go. You need to find the scent plume in the first place, which brings us back to dashing and casting, at which point the device’s lesser sensitivity would probably put it at a disadvantage compared with the dog.</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">I haven’t even touched the issue — found with bodies under water or under collapsed structures — that the scent doesn’t always come up directly over the body, but can often take a winding route to the surface so it emerges some distance away. That’s an in-built limitation of detection by scent that isn’t going to go away no matter what detector we’re using.</span></span></div><div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">If you’re looking for a punch line, here it is: this </span></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">is</span></i></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"> a short story I wrote, called “A Technical Fix,” which appeared in </span></span></span></span><span style="color: navy;"><span lang="zxx"><u><a href="http://www.cricketmag.com/ProductDetail.asp?pid=11"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Cicada</span></i></span></a></u></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"> magazine. The only cheat when I wrote it was that I knew the technology wasn’t nearly as far-future as the setting I chose for it. Life imitating art imitating science fiction.</span></span></span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">I’ve said it before: We dog handlers </span></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">will</span></i></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"> eventually be put out of business, but it won’t be by artificial noses. It’ll be by something like a Star Trek communicator that immediately calls for help when you’re in trouble and gives a sub-meter-accurate location to the rescue crews looking for you. Our mobile phones are already so close; it may be that what takes the longest is working out the privacy issues of automatically sharing that kind of data with the authorities.</span></span></span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">In the meantime, here’s my fear: that we’ll be replaced by something that isn’t as good, merely because we’ve failed to document our utility to the search effort. Or worse, because somebody screwed up, turning us all into suspected “urine detection dog handlers.” Either way, it’s a matter of the standards — operational standards, yes, but also standards of </span></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">proof</span></i></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"> — to which we hold ourselves.</span></span></span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">It may be more up to us than we realize.</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: black;"><sup><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">1</span></span></span></span></sup></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">Mind you, at that point nobody even knew about <a href="http://cynography.blogspot.com/2010/04/extraordinary-claims-require.html">Sandy Anderson’s</a> fraudulent “dog handler” activities. The man may very well have watched her work and come to certain conclusions long before the law came to the same conclusions.</span></span></span></span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="color: black;"><sup><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">2</span></span></span></span></sup></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">I’m simplifying a bit here. For one thing, different species do seem to riff differently depending on their specific scent mission. For another, even among the species that do employ dash-and-cast, there are different strategies for different atmospheric conditions. Dog</span></span></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> handlers will have seen another pattern, called “weaving,” in which the dog works into the wind in a weaving pattern that gets narrower and narrower until you reach the source. There’s evidence that this behavior results from a superimposition of dashing and casting, a response to a relatively “clean,” low convection scent plume without large gaps of scent. Your major challenges under those conditions — usually at night or on cloudy, windy, or winter days — are to keep track of the edges of the plume so you don’t run out of it, and to keep your nose from desensitizing to the smell.</span></span></span></span></span></div>Ken Chiacchiahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04626815789187013583noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9194378690159698339.post-77814459005433416142010-06-02T22:39:00.000-07:002010-06-02T22:39:00.453-07:00MEanderthal Me!<a href="http://humanorigins.si.edu/resources/whats-hot/meanderthal-mobile-app-0">This app</a>, for Android or iPhone, is too good. (Droid, users, you can find it by searching for "MEanderthal" in the Market.)<br />
<br />
For your amusement, me as a neanderthal:<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOdVLfmsVXgnUcwP6_XKKHdjdmDm6hXzTBjUwq-EYt2IBPQNnueRsfnfzlSnGPvXT4ziXwc6-N0QM4pJWbpaR1PV-Q3oK5SmjiYT5dAUDFOyMJHFWUK4WZ66zejt8g9lpuAuRaTTCEbCfC/s1600/MEanderthal.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOdVLfmsVXgnUcwP6_XKKHdjdmDm6hXzTBjUwq-EYt2IBPQNnueRsfnfzlSnGPvXT4ziXwc6-N0QM4pJWbpaR1PV-Q3oK5SmjiYT5dAUDFOyMJHFWUK4WZ66zejt8g9lpuAuRaTTCEbCfC/s400/MEanderthal.jpg" width="285" /></a></div><br />
<div class="" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Here I am as a hobbit (southeast Asian variety); something disturbing about this one:</div><div class="" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1CYlx2_fNclnHDyovsKP4UZ0jjRsL2g6IdThdiDejjF6hiiUIHwRYvXvGu4II1yjHnyP31Xc07O5OjSmaDrpYDlR4OSt6XXLaxgOnpyK1yJS8JliZu3AOLbyCmBCWNzyznCi0EGoIHVm2/s1600/MEanderthal+(1).jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1CYlx2_fNclnHDyovsKP4UZ0jjRsL2g6IdThdiDejjF6hiiUIHwRYvXvGu4II1yjHnyP31Xc07O5OjSmaDrpYDlR4OSt6XXLaxgOnpyK1yJS8JliZu3AOLbyCmBCWNzyznCi0EGoIHVm2/s400/MEanderthal+(1).jpg" width="285" /></a></div><div class="" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Or <i>Homo heidelbergensis </i>-- I think it's my favorite:</div><div class="" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><i><br />
</i></div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBd3MhxhHTGlh5Ht7Y9nLZLM7aTbZ1x1nv9hXAXulU2p7ziQWMU10A82FA-eglYLDyZqRIT1hKWhwPmd8LLGzKkUSbjKg3RfnXfwFuSlslpn6aMkua5iZ-LxVFgsRdA26OqXJzYG-90_rd/s1600/MEanderthal+(2).jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBd3MhxhHTGlh5Ht7Y9nLZLM7aTbZ1x1nv9hXAXulU2p7ziQWMU10A82FA-eglYLDyZqRIT1hKWhwPmd8LLGzKkUSbjKg3RfnXfwFuSlslpn6aMkua5iZ-LxVFgsRdA26OqXJzYG-90_rd/s400/MEanderthal+(2).jpg" width="285" /></a>Ken Chiacchiahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04626815789187013583noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9194378690159698339.post-12723059158074291362010-05-20T21:13:00.000-07:002010-05-20T21:13:00.572-07:00About the Moderation ...I've hated to do it, but I've had to start moderating the comments -- not because of anything any of yinz have said, but because I've been getting a steady stream of Chinese-language (I think) "comments" that contain toxic links. So don't take it personally, and I'll approve your comments soon as I can get to them.<br />
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Thanks, as always, for you readership and commentary.Ken Chiacchiahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04626815789187013583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9194378690159698339.post-76839545409985241892010-05-13T21:22:00.000-07:002010-05-13T21:22:00.660-07:00Yo-yosAnd again I see <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/ynews/20100511/ts_ynews/ynews_ts2002">a spot that reduces me to near-speechlessness</a>.<br />
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Here's my question, though: When a "dog hander" shows up in front of the cameras claiming to have made several thousand finds, why don't people apply the same measure of journalistic skepticism?Ken Chiacchiahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04626815789187013583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9194378690159698339.post-663086540991341082010-05-12T19:35:00.000-07:002010-05-12T19:35:00.768-07:00I'm AllergicCheck out <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/12/health/research/12allergies.html?ref=health">this <i>New York Times</i> article</a>.<br />
<br />
Say what? A lot of the food allergies people claim are either misinterpretations of what their docs said -- or outright misdiagnoses?<br />
<br />
How could this be?<br />
<br />
The next thing is they'll be telling me that many of the folks who claim allergies to my dogs are just people with phobias and other psychiatric malfunctions who're just using the suffering that people with real allergies have to live with -- often on a daily basis -- as a screen for their own need to control others!<br />
<br />
Go figure.Ken Chiacchiahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04626815789187013583noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9194378690159698339.post-57715637923702602502010-05-12T19:32:00.000-07:002010-05-12T19:32:00.359-07:00'Nother radio spotSorry for not getting to this last week -- but I've done <a href="http://www.alleghenyfront.org/story.html?storyid=201003311015230.121254">another environmental-commentary radio spot</a> for <a href="http://www.alleghenyfront.org/index.html">The Allegheny Front</a>. This is a fun project!Ken Chiacchiahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04626815789187013583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9194378690159698339.post-40144751763575702802010-04-19T20:57:00.000-07:002010-04-20T09:03:12.924-07:00I Are Radio Personality Big GoodFirst, abundant apologies for neglecting the blog for so long -- assuming any of you are still out there. I intend to get back to it immediately; in the meantime, here's <a href="http://www.alleghenyfront.org/story.html?storyid=201003311328440.701751">my latest project</a>, for <a href="http://www.alleghenyfront.org/index.html">The Allegheny Front</a>, an environmental news program from Pittsburgh's own, the incomparable public radio alternative music station <a href="http://www.wyep.org/">WYEP</a>, 91.3 FM (note you can live stream from the YEP site, which if you don't live in the Pgh area is a worthwhile thing to do).Ken Chiacchiahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04626815789187013583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9194378690159698339.post-61522567181393145512010-03-23T17:25:00.000-07:002010-03-23T17:30:56.627-07:00The London ThingWeeks since I touched my blog, it's lame beyond the telling of it that this has to be the occasion. But no, I wasn't mugged in the UK, and yes, somebody hacked my Yahoo! account. So needless to say, don't send the $^&%$#^%s any money.<div><br /></div><div>Hopefully I'll have something to talk about soon; lots of interesting developments, but nothing I can share right now.</div>Ken Chiacchiahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04626815789187013583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9194378690159698339.post-53823674048539000782010-02-18T21:46:00.000-08:002010-02-19T08:04:01.497-08:00I Wuzzint Doin It RightSo my surgeon's partner is yanking on my toe with a great big frown on his face.<br /><br />“There's less flexibility now than there was last time. I'm going to write you a prescription for physical therapy.”<br /><br />I think I managed not to groan. It isn't that I really mind physical terrorism — I'd done well playing through the pain before the surgery, and doing the same through far less pain afterward. But we're talking about the Little Piggie that Went to Market. I am kind of known at this podiatry practice as the Patient Who Does So Well because He Always Complies; but <em>really</em>.<br /><br />Still, Mister Compliant took the scrip in hand, showed up at physical therapy, and was lectured on how, really, a stiff big toe can completely mess up your gait and your sense of balance.<br /><br />“But I <em>have</em> no sense of balance,” I said, “Never did.”<br /><br />The doc who runs the PT practice overheard, and swooped in for a test. It's actually not uncommon for folks with a hinkey middle ear to do things like ski, mountain bike, and climb — they just (over)compensate using vision and by feeling the floor (proprioception). But we soon found out I was not one of these.<br /><br />While I tried to balance on one foot, the doc observed that I wasn't actually doing badly at all — but I was maintaining my balance too much using my ankles and not enough using my toes.<br /><br />“You have to dig in with the toes to maintain balance,” he said.<br /><br />The man was telling me I'd never learned to stand properly. I felt like a Lolcat poster:<br /><br /><em>Standing still: Yer Not Doin It Right<br /></em><br />Well, maybe there's more than that I haven't been doing right: hence <a href="http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(09)01295-0">today's entry</a>, from Brian Duistermars and Dawnis Chow of Mark Frye's lab at UCLA. Using a wind tunnel, they tested whether fruit flies could turn in the right direction to find a scent source when an antenna on one side or the other was “occluded” with a tiny little glob of glue.<br /><br />I kid you not.<br /><br />This kind of research nearly always truns up a couple of surprises: for one thing, the flies are left handed: blocking the left antenna affected their ability to find the scent more than blocking the right. The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnston">Johnston's organ</a> — the middle part of the insect antenna, which detects motion, unlike the outer part that detects smell — is necessary for proper turning into the scent, though not its detection.<br /><br />But maybe the most amazing part of the experiment was that it worked at all: that flies need two antennae to track the direction of a smell in the wind, and that therefore it's possible to detect a difference of smell between antennae that are <em>less than a millimeter apart</em>.<br /><br />To help me wrap my head around this, I actually emailed Mark Frye to ask him whether that inference was really warranted. He said yes, but threw a further monkey wrench:<br /><br />“If you calculate the mean molecular concentration gradient across the fly antennae it is on the order of thermal flux (noise) ...”<br /><br />So somehow the little bastards are detecting a difference against a noise background that's as loud as the signal.<br /><br />Now, I've been bloviating on the dog lists for some time now about how I'm having trouble seeing how a dog's nostrils, which draw scent from about three inches apart, can detect a usable concentration gradient. I'd say the fly results pretty much put any doubt to rest.<br /><br />Having said that, it occurs to me that what I was tripping over had less to do with <em>whether</em> they could detect a smell difference across that distance than <em>how it would be useful</em>. To see why that's an issue, let me explain how our understanding of what smell looks like has changed since the 1980s, when the scent theory explanation that most dog handlers have read was published.<br /><br />Starting from the idea that, as wind blew scent along, it would diffuse outward and mix with the surrounding air, creating what we call a “scent plume:”<br /><br /><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 187px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5439983348620884802" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjm5ZV9M7BZMgLx1pPemXDieSEpqWem-Q7WXTR8KJyAH-0G6aeMyE9YE_32NSsH3bRB2NHQLJUv_8Ht3JMtCfRA7GVKbFWSUbsxPYoIbxM7VB0cziR3XAqqOAoc-21s5gUq-1Fioz0aWJ3Y/s320/scentclassic.JPG" /><br />If you look at how the scent gradually decreases with downwind distance, there's a very subtle change that would be incredibly difficult to detect.<br /><br />But wait; folks working with smoke in wind tunnels have found out that that old picture of a scent plume is vastly oversimplified. In reality, as the scent mixes with surrounding air, it does it <em>turbulently</em>. Think of how, if you stir a black coffee and then drip cream in, it doesn't mix evenly. Stronger chunks of cream remain visible for a while. Same thing with cigarette smoke, or a smokestack. The real scent plume looks like this (and note you can see a much better drawing, for which I wasn't able to get reprint rights, <a href="http://www.springerlink.com/content/tpj07m7q88771781/">in this paper</a>):<br /><br /><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 187px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5439983352867562770" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5qoFGa-W0G06MMMou6FBJHBPmKmyPu10ImLZs4Rowxwyra1mXePMyDdTRTXh2W4xSzX-8TjnK3ZawlrCwaQ9xaA6zd7bIiqMYSCQ9SXJxMThnanI1Tx7rHVjVyyZfNj5Zbj9LviIIzA7v/s320/scentfilaments.JPG" /><br />So even though I had the correct picture in my head of a filamentous scent plume, with really strong chunks of smell interspersed with increasingly large voids, I wasn't putting it all together: dogs don't have to detect subtle scent gradients — or at least not that subtle — because such gradients essentially don't exist in nature. All the pups need to do is detect the transition from no smell to strong smell and back, as it sweeps past: and for that, a different signal in each nostril actually does provide important information.<br /><br />'Course, it's not as simple as turning toward the stronger scent, like you would in the “old” scent plume. If a filament has just swept by you, that would be the wrong direction. But by checking which nostril got the smell when, and what direction the wind was blowing from, you can develop a more involved strategy, something like the ones seen in <a href="http://www.springerlink.com/content/f77j17wg1x78u718/">insects</a> and <a href="http://www.springerlink.com/content/b22271k221506531/">birds and fish</a> — and unless my own, humble and as-yet-anecdotal observations are way off base, search-and-rescue dogs as well.<br /><br />For the flies, that signal-to-noise problem still stands. But at least, finally, I think I may be on track to “doing it right.”Ken Chiacchiahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04626815789187013583noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9194378690159698339.post-90373213199415249802010-02-09T17:27:00.000-08:002010-02-10T12:06:33.454-08:00Phil Klass, aka William Tenn 1920-2010I made a jackass of myself the first time I interviewed — hell, spoke with — <a href="http://dpsinfo.com/williamtenn/">Phil Klass</a>.<br /><br />“You have no idea who I am, do you?” he asked, frustrated, after I’d posed a few questions over the telephone. I hadn’t yet connected him with his pen name.<br /><br />To be honest, I hadn’t read much <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias=aps&field-keywords=william+tenn">William Tenn</a> at that point, even if I had known he and Phil were one and the same. And as a relative newcomer to Pittsburgh, I didn’t yet have an internal map of the local SF community’s leading lights. It wasn’t until later, when I looked Phil up in the <em>Encyclopedia of Science Fiction</em>, that I tumbled to how badly I’d blown the interview, which the <em>Pittsburgh Post-Gazette</em> had assigned me by way of covering <a href="http://www.parsec-sff.org/confluence/">ConFluence</a>, the city's major SF convention.<br /><br />For all his multicultural sophistication — he went to war as a socialist, Jewish U.S. soldier, the son of a Brit and a Russian — Phil Klass was an American original. He embodied so much of what makes me proud of this country. He had his opinions, and stated them courageously no matter what anybody thought; during the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_McCarthy">McCarthy</a> era, he was one of a few SF authors openly parodying the Red Scare. He claimed no special courage, on the grounds that the folks who would have objected didn't read, and wouldn't have understood, science fiction.<br /><br />Having done some intelligence work on captured Nazis, and despite the fact that he and they were each other's worst nightmares, Phil had utter contempt for torturers and their ultimately craven arguments of “utility.” Yet he told a story about dragging local townspeople in to see what had been happening in the death camp next store to them, belying their claims of “not knowing.”<br /><br />Phil also told a captivating story of a major SF editor of the classic era — I think it may have been <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_W._Campbell">Campbell</a>, but I'm not sure — confiding in him that “Jews probably are <em><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_superior">Homo superior</a></em>” — an embarrassingly common trope of SF in its sophomore years — and how, despite his best attempts, he couldn't get the man to understand why this was so <em>wrong</em>, how it insulted rather than honored the memory of the Holocaust's victims. “I told him I was sorry to hear that, because it meant we'd learned nothing,” Phil said decades later.<br /><br />Phil also was generous in advice, and gave <em>good</em> advice. I wish I could tell you how his tips transformed my SF career — but sadly, the industry is too much of a train wreck for anybody to provide the magic words. Suffice it to say he was bullish on nonfiction, bearish on creative nonfiction, and absolutely gloomy on science fiction. I've seen nothing to indicate that he got anything even slightly wrong in that.<br /><br />Of course, Phil Klass, under pen name William Tenn, was a gifted science fiction author, a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bowie">David-Bowie</a>-like figure who maybe didn't get read as often as the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asimov">Asimovs</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_heinlein">Heinleins</a>, and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Herbert">Herberts</a>, but who was read by, and influenced, just about every subsequent major SF author. He was as honest in his fiction as he was in real life, arguing at a time when SF stories typically had genius inventors creating the first moon rocket in their back yards that it was going to take the finances and physical resources of a large government bureaucracy to reach the moon. It pissed people off to have someone puncture a cherished trope like that, but I note that it was a bloated, inefficient, can't-do-anything government agency called NASA that got the job done, and not private-sector venture capitalists.<br /><br />But I digress.<br /><br />Going over my notes from that first interview with Phil and my subsequent research, I had an inspiration: I would fight my every instinct. Rather than side-step my cluelessness, I would confront it. I opened the article with Phil’s exasperated words. It gave me a perfect entree into talking about the many reasons people come to an SF convention, and the uphill battle those of us with the SF-writing compulsion face.<br /><br />After the piece ran, I ran into Phil at ConFluence, and introduced myself. He said simply, “I read your article, and it was mostly accurate. I was surprised!”<br /><br />Phil, wherever you are, I'm going to take that as an indictment of modern journalism. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.Ken Chiacchiahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04626815789187013583noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9194378690159698339.post-83907115957325111442010-02-07T07:14:00.000-08:002010-02-09T11:24:01.583-08:00ExpectationsLiterally <a href="http://cynography.blogspot.com/2010/02/six-more-weeks-deuce-you-say.html">snowbound</a>, it's hard to come up with excuses not to blog. And I suppose, on a frigid day, it's not too unusual to be put in mind of old flames.<br /><br />Mind you, this wasn't someone I actually dated — more an unrequited torch, before <a href="http://cynography.blogspot.com/">th'wife</a>, even before the Before Time. We're talking what cosmologists call Deep Time, back around the point when God was thinking maybe the neutron might be a good idea.<br /><br />Her name was <a href="http://fds.duke.edu/db/aas/WomensStudies/affiliated/katherine.ewing">Kathy Ewing</a>, and she was my Self, Culture, and Society lecturer at <a href="http://www.uchicago.edu/">Hogwarts</a> [1]. She was young, pretty, and smart as all get-out — and I had a fantastic crush on her, though doubtless she wouldn't remember me at all by now.<br /><br />At least, I hope to God she wouldn't, the reasons being imminently obvious.<br /><br />Required background: Like many of the <a href="https://collegeadmissions.uchicago.edu/academics/commoncore.shtml">common-core courses</a> [2] at the University of Chicago, Self, Culture, and Society had two hour-and-a-half discussion sections each week, in which Kathy and about a dozen of us would discuss, argue, and hash out the course materials — in this case, a “Great Books” [3] mix of psychology, anthropology, and social science.<br /><br />A side-note: the U of C is the intellectual equivalent of someone throwing a knife to you and hollering, “Now, come at me!” It's exactly the kind of place that pussy little right wingers like to bitch about being hostile to their ideas — only they're missing the point: it's hostile to <em>everybody's</em> ideas. It's all about forcing you to defend your beliefs, structure your arguments so that they make sense somewhere else besides the addled interior of your head ...<br /><br />Anyway.<br /><br />I don't remember whether it was every week, every two weeks, or what, but every once in a while all those little discussion sections met in a big hall for a lecture. The professors and lecturers teaching the study sections [4] would rotate this duty, each taking, I suppose, a topic of particular interest or expertise on which to hold forth.<br /><br />So this particular upcoming lecture was Kathy's, and I was determined to sit front and center, nodding sagely at all the appropriate points, impressing her with my interest in her topic — and, strange as it seems now, thereby my interest in <em>her</em>. Not that I had it planned out even that clearly.<br /><br />Only the night before, a good friend who will remain nameless had the latest in a series of fights with her boyfriend, another nameless good friend, and I spent much of the night and next morning sitting in a stairwell offering fantastic advice [5]. Didn't really get any sleep to speak of that night.<br /><br />So picture me the next morning, bleary eyed, too late to get coffee at the dining hall, stumbling into the lecture hall, only just barely conscious enough for a fogged corner of my mind to remember the plan of the previous day.<br /><br />Unfortunately, all it remembered was, “Sit front and center.”<br /><br />I'm sitting there, then, about 10 minutes into Kathy's talk when the realization comes over me that there's no way I'm staying awake. Just can't keep the eyes open. I did my best to hide it — the old, cover-your-forehead-with-your-hand-while-you-look-down-at-your-notebook thing, the hunch-down-over-the-table thing, every trick I could think of. Needless to say, even five minutes afterward it didn't seem likely that I'd had much luck at hiding from Kathy that I was sleeping through her lecture.<br /><br />Dashed expectations are the subject of <a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v463/n7279/abs/nature08711.html">today's entry</a>, a bit from C. Eisenegger and pals at the Institute for Empirical Research in Economics in Zurich and other environs, about testosterone.<br /><br />Now, in the words of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Sapolsky">Robert Sapolsky</a> — of whom I'm an admirer — in his wonderful essay <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Trouble-Testosterone-Essays-Biology-Predicament/dp/0684838915/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1265562911&sr=8-1">The Trouble with Testosterone</a></em>, here's the gist of the results when you inject testosterone into a submissive male monkey:<br /><br />“Take that third-ranking monkey and give him some testosterone. None of this within-the-normal-range stuff. Inject a ton of it, way higher than what you normally see in rhesus monkeys, give him enough testosterone to grow antlers and beard on every neuron in his brain. And, no surprise, when you check the behavioral data, he will probably be participating in more aggressive interactions than before.<br /><br />So even though small fluctuations in the levels of the hormone don't seem to matter much, testosterone still causes aggression, right? Wrong. Check out number 3 more closely. Is he raining aggressive terror on everyone in the group, frothing with indiscriminate violence? Not at all. He's still judiciously kowtowing to numbers 1 and 2 but has become a total bastard to numbers 4 and 5. Testosterone isn't causing aggression, it's exaggerating the aggression that's already there.”<br /><br />So you get the background here: testosterone as a vehicle of aggression, of conflict, if not social dominance.<br /><br />Imagine Herr Eisenegger & Co.'s collective surprise, then, when they gave sublingual testosterone to a bunch of women [6] and then had them play one of those social-strategy games: In this case, they gave one woman $10 [7] and told her that she had to make an offer to another — to give that other woman $5, $3, $2, or nothing. If the second woman refused the offer, nobody got anything. If she accepted, she got what was offered and woman number one kept the rest. So there are two separate motivations: the less woman one offers, the more she gets to keep; but if she doesn't offer enough, woman two can play the spoiler.<br /><br />The expectation, of course, is that testosterone will bring out woman one's inner total bastard, to use Sapolsky's words, and offer less, even at the risk of losing it all.<br /><br />You've probably guessed that it didn't come down that way: in fact, testosterone made woman one offer not less to woman two, but <em>more</em>. On the average, she offered about fifty cents more than when she hadn't been given the testosterone.<br /><br />This isn't necessarily a surprise; some experts the investigators had polled beforehand had actually predicted this result, on the grounds that testosterone would enhance the women's desire to take <em>leadership</em>: and one way to establish leadership is to make a more generous offer that makes the other gal more likely to trust and follow you.<br /><br />But that's not the interesting bit. Eigenegger <em>etc.</em> then took their data, and sorted it differently. Instead of separating the “women one” who'd gotten testosterone vs. those who got a placebo, they separated by which of the two the women <em>thought</em> they'd gotten. And guess what? The women who thought they'd gotten testosterone acted, if not like total bastards, then at least like bastards: on average they offered a dollar less than the women who thought they'd gotten placebo.<br /><br />That's right, the <em>expectation</em> of testosterone was more potent in terms of both size of effect and statistical significance than the <em>real thing was</em>. And it had the opposite effect of the real thing. For all the world, it looks like testosterone's bad rap in popular culture carries more weight than its biological effects in our little brainbones.<br /><br />Deep waters here: did expecting testosterone make gals one a bit on the bitchy side, or did the bitchier girls expect they'd be given testosterone? And since the anti-placebo effect was stronger than the real thing, what thence?<br /><br />Our authors did a bunch of work to control for various complications; you can read more about it in their paper. As always, a single experiment isn't going to be gospel. But it does give us a wallop of a lesson in being careful about our expectations.<br /><br />I don't know what expectations Kathy had of me, if any — for obvious reasons I never had the guts to ask her about that day. But I got a disturbing window on the question a few years later, as a senior, when I ran into a fellow student from Kathy's study section.<br /><br />When we figured out that we'd been in the same class, his eyes first narrowed, a bit angrily. Then the light bulb went on, and he said, “Oh, I remember <em>you</em> — you always asked the stupidest questions!”<br /><br />Oh well; expectations be damned.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">[1] A prospective student I was interviewing for the college put this metaphor into my head. Geeks surrounded by stone: God, yes. At Harvard, Heather may have been a resident tutor at <a href="http://www.eliot.harvard.edu/">Slytherin</a>, but we had Lord Voldemort — I mean, </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Friedman"><span style="font-size:85%;">Milton Friedman</span></a><span style="font-size:85%;">.<br />[2] U of C is one of those liberal-arts-and-a-bit-angry-about-it places — everybody shares the same common core of science, social science, and humanities courses before they get to take their major requirements and electives.<br />[3] Mostly dead white European men, though there were a few chicks in there — </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Douglas"><span style="font-size:85%;">Mary Douglas</span></a><span style="font-size:85%;"> and the like. And I understand they've been broadening it since.<br />[4] And I think most of them actually were lecturers or professors of varying type, and not grad students — that's another thing U of C is serious about to the point of it being a “thing.”<br />[5] I don't know what's harder to believe — that we actually did this, or that anybody would want to hear my advice.<br />[6] This, of course, is a loose end to the study: would the result have been different had you done the experiment with men? It's a quandary, though, since in men there'll be a normal variation between individuals and from day to day, and so, like the monkey, you have to give a snoot-load of it to make sure you're significantly changing what's already there — and then you have to worry about non-natural effects of what amounts to an OD of testosterone. And they won't let you do that with humans anyway. Women, at least, are more of a blank canvas, though you do have the possibility that their brains won't react in the same way that mens' will.<br />[7] Actually, it was “monetary units” — maybe euros — but you get the idea.</span>Ken Chiacchiahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04626815789187013583noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9194378690159698339.post-90880418831512119362010-01-25T18:30:00.000-08:002010-01-26T13:24:35.256-08:00Who You Think You’re Fooling?The excellent <a href="http://smartdogs.wordpress.com/">Smartdogs’ blog</a> has cited an interesting — if ill-advised — new way the government is wasting our money: <a href="http://smartdogs.wordpress.com/2010/01/25/good-luck-with-that/">building robots to train animals</a> without human involvement.<br /><br />Ba-<em>rother</em>.<br /><br />Mind you, I do differ with Janeen in one important way: I’m not so sure you can’t, given the amazing robotics advances on their way in the next 10 to 20 years, build a robot that can train a dog. Given that the Japanese are <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSSP28439620070605">starting to build robots with facial expressions</a>, and even <a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v463/n7278/abs/nature08678.html">pheromone signals are beginning to make sense</a>, I’m not so sure that this task is beyond near-future technology.<br /><br />Now, I agree with Janeen in that the project is hopelessly naïve: at best it will take much, much longer than its creators realize (partly if they waste time with an all-<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning">operant</a> box rather than starting by building a robot that looks and smells like a human trainer) [1]. But one important thing that a robo-trainer can have is <em>perfect timing</em>. Never a cue too late, never one too early. Never tired. Never distracted, pissed off, sinus-infected ...<br /><br />As <a href="http://cynography.blogspot.com/">th’ better half</a> is fond of pointing out, accurate communication with the animal is a fundamental — and good timing of such can produce results in the face of muddy-headed methods, unsavory personality, and much else that’s wrong, wrong, wrong.<br /><br />I think it could work.<br /><br />I’m already a bit off-message: my point today has to do with building a machine that looks and smells like a person, at least to a dog. Before you say “could never happen,” recall the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuckoo">cuckoo</a>.<br /><br />This is the bird that lays its eggs in other birds’ nests, getting free child-rearing in the process (often, the cuckoo chick will kick the lawful denizens of the nest out, so the mama bird is actually losing her babies as she raises the changeling). But it’s all the more amazing in that the cuckoo chick doesn’t look <em>anything</em> like the chicks of the birds it parasitizes: it’s bigger, uglier, just a different, um, bird entirely.<br /><br />How in the hell can mama bird not tell the difference? Could it be that easy to fool dogs as well? Granted, most dogs are smarter than most birds (though consider the amazing intelligence of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corvids">corvids</a> and the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parrot">psittacines</a>, and don’t be too sure of yourself), but this seems to be well within the ability of a bird to sort out.<br /><br />Except if they tried, it would be a <em>disaster</em>.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v463/n7278/abs/nature08655.html">Today’s entry</a>, courtesy Diazaburo Shizuka and Bruce Lyon at UC Santa Cruz, explains why. Not content with basking in the permanent sun we’re told they enjoy out that way, these folks took a look at <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coot">coots</a> — no, not volunteer dog handler/firefighters pushing 50, but the water birds. Coots are a special case because they sometimes parasitize the nests of their <em>own species</em>.<br /><br />What the California Dreamers discovered is that mama coot actually does a fair job of kicking changelings out of her nest, even though they look a lot like her own. How? She uses the first-hatched chick as a template, and boots chicks that don’t look enough like it to the curb.<br /><br />Why does this work? Because, of course, you don’t parasitize an empty nest — you sneak an egg into one that’s already got eggs in it. You therefore start out with a younger egg than the rightful owner’s. And because of that, the first-hatched is likely to be a chick who belongs there, and not an interloper.<br /><br />Why can’t it work for the birds that cuckoos parasitize? Because cuckoos grow fast and big, the better to muscle out the competition. There’s a good chance that the first egg hatched in a cuckoo-parasitized nest will be a changeling — and if mama uses it as a pattern of whom to keep, <em>fewer</em>, not more, of her babies will survive.<br /><br />Bird-brained indeed. Maybe I was hasty in rejecting <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_(Star_Trek)#Spot">Data’s cat</a>; getting a dog to accept a robot trainer may have less to do with how convincing it is than with picking the right cues, and understanding how dogs think.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">[1] Another thing: as <em>I’m</em> fond of telling people, technology is likely to put us dog handlers out of business, but <em>not</em> by creating a robotic searcher. Why? Because by the time they could develop one, it’ll be too easy to find people in other ways, such as reading the location of their GPS-equipped cell phone. (Though this, too, isn’t quite as easy as you’d think.)</span>Ken Chiacchiahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04626815789187013583noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9194378690159698339.post-34895305283935492292010-01-01T09:26:00.000-08:002010-01-01T09:39:30.915-08:00AssumptionsSo on our way back from Jersey, visiting the Sicilians [1] for the holidays, we decide to take a little detour across the river into New York City to visit my old friend (and co-Best Man at my wedding) Mike Gelfman for an afternoon.<br /><br />We met at the <a href="http://www.metmuseum.org/">Metropolitan Museum of Art</a>, which was my clever way of getting spousal brownie points, hanging with an old buddy from the Before Time, and getting to look at cool old armor and weapons all at the same time.<br /><br />In the event, though, we never got to the Met's amazing medieval arms exhibit because we got sucked into the far earlier pottery and artifacts exhibits from Egypt, Greece, Tuscany [2], and so forth.<br /><br />I didn't feel cheated.<br /><br />Tucked away in a case, one vase among thousands, was this customer [3]:<br /><br /><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 240px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5421825636238590882" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2eNdz1zhKxc6yz2GqjEP1sEh-GWrQlzt5to9ipPtmOUL18oe8TcSdOhyphenhyphenQhfSiJniHZOx-3MtceptXNhcu96N67UT91iL1heHsfS5p5PeCfuRkJpvF8Lm3BAcojyyqimDQHZ66NpeaVlnz/s320/ken+krater+2.jpg" /><br />Heather immediately noticed that the descriptive signage, while full of interesting bits about the religious symbolism, left out an important, if puerile, fact: what seemed obvious to us was about to happen in the depicted scene.<br /><br />We went back and forth over whether the writer was assuming that tidbit would be obvious to museum goers; while we often decry the rather pathetic state of the art in museum signage these days, the fact is the Met's signs mostly date from some time ago, and it seems far mor likely to me that the author, in a Looney Tunes kind of way [4], was presenting information that a proper, if educated and cosmopolitan, city slicker parent can read to a child while “getting” it at a more adult level.<br /><br />'Course, that's an assumption, and assumptions can be dangerous. Leading us to <a href="http://chemse.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/bjn071">today's entry</a>, a study of how the smell-reactive structures of the mouse olfactory epithelium map to the sensations reported by human subjects coming from Yuichi Furudono and pals at, of all places, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Tobacco">Japan Tobacco</a> company's [5] Science Research Center and the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Amagasaki, Japan.<br /><br />They found, interestingly enough, that the patterns of nerve-cell activation in the mouse olfactory epithelium caused by 12 different odorants matches quite well with similarities and differences in the smells experienced by their human subjects when exposed to those odorants. It's a remarkable finding in its own right, in that it's a kind of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_spike">Golden Spike</a> that verifies what we're learning about the brain's encoding of olfactory experience by explicitly connecting a series of events in the nose and brain.<br /><br />But let's take a moment to pick apart exactly what they were doing: they were watching the patterns of nerve-cell activation in the mouse's nose, using that information to figure out how the brain transforms those signals into the smells that we experience — as if we were certain that what happens in the mouse nose reflects perfectly what happens in the human nose, and to some extent brain to brain as well.<br /><br />Now, the authors are careful to point out that this assumption carries some dangers, and discuss the issue at some length in the paper. But what really pops for me isn't that they're making this assumption, but that the odds are so fat that it's likely to be a sound assumption: from everything we know about the remarkable similarities in the sense of smell among vertebrates, I don't think anybody's losing sleep over the formal possibility that something vastly different can be happening in the mouse brain vs. human to produce similar patterns.<br /><br />How far we've come.<br /><br />Anyway, let me wrap up by taking a moment to wish everybody the best New Year Possible — Lord knows, we all could use a better year — and a belated Happy Other Holidays. And please, <a href="http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Appeal/en?utm_source=2009_Jimmy_Appeal9&utm_medium=sitenotice&utm_campaign=fundraiser2009&target=Appeal">consider donating some dough to Wikipedia</a> so that this remarkable resource can be there for us all.<br /><br />[1] Aka my relatives.<br />[2] The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etruscan_civilization">Etruscans</a>, who are a new interest of mine and worth a check-out.<br />[3] It's a krater, not a vase, apparently. Whatever.<br />[4] There's a New Year's Day marathon on today.<br />[5] Check out the link, there's an interesting, if coincidental, connection with the dumpling poisonings in Japan in 2008.Ken Chiacchiahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04626815789187013583noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9194378690159698339.post-51868458240284978062009-12-03T21:13:00.000-08:002009-12-04T07:17:31.967-08:00Let’s Start a FightI’ve bought myself a bit of reprise in doing a blog entry this week by getting <a href="http://www.pittsburghcitypaper.ws/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid:72381">my latest nonfiction project</a> into print: an article about my former town and what it’s been doing to stop the wholesale devouring of its woods. It’s certainly nice to get back on that horse — I’d done a bunch of work for the <em>Pittsburgh City Paper</em> back in the late ’90s and early aughts, but not recently.<br /><br />Seems I’ve been <a href="http://cynography.blogspot.com/2009/12/polishing-turd-that-is-cranberry.html">scooped by th’wife</a> — “Professor Chaos” indeed. Let me say this about anything that might be said on that particular blog: I remember the day she talks about, and will admit I purposely avoided the farm for a long time because I knew I’d react the same way she did. As <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treebeard">Treebeard</a> said:<br /><br />“Many of those trees were my friends, creatures I had known from nut and acorn; many had voices of their own that are lost for ever now. And there are wastes of stump and bramble where once there were singing groves. I have been idle. I have let things slip. It must stop!”<br /><br />The reasons for my unwillingness entirely to condemn the new wave of developers are now a matter of record; I don’t feel it necessary to respond to comments from the Peanut Gallery.Ken Chiacchiahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04626815789187013583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9194378690159698339.post-14221747242093532212009-11-19T20:48:00.000-08:002009-11-20T08:56:29.365-08:00ContextOn a summer day quite a few years ago, <a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/HHoulahan/Lilly#5257606602585316386">Lilly</a> and I were waiting for <a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/HHoulahan/Mel#5257600658407701282">Mel</a> and <a href="http://cynography.blogspot.com/">Heather</a> to find us on a beautiful fallow farm that today is rapidly become a bulldozed memory. Sitting on the lee side of a collapsing barn, I knew they’d have a bit of trouble getting us — scent tends to get trapped on the downwind side of structures — and that therefore Lilly and I had some time to kick back and just enjoy a golden southwest Pennsylvania afternoon.<br /><br />Lilly, as she often did, was chowing down on the tall, broad grass leaves (they were, I found out later, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_grass">timothy</a>) growing around the abandoned farm buildings. Now, usually we humans have a (justified) skepticism about the culinary preferences of someone who finds cat shit an irresistibly crunchy snack; but just that once, I decided to give it a try.<br /><br />I chewed the tough, raspy leaves, and soon got a wonderful note of garlic and green. Very tasty, actually.<br /><br />That day, I got one of many ongoing lessons about giving my dog the benefit of the doubt.<br /><br />Heather gave me minor hell for the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame_story">framing story</a> in <a href="http://blogthatsmells.blogspot.com/2009/10/what-died.html">What Died?</a> — my skeptical account of Lilly apparently detecting 20-year-old graves. Her basic point was, “Why didn’t you just trust your dog, idiot?”<br /><br />I think she missed an important point of context, a point that a lot of dog handlers get chronically wrong: when and how you express your skepticism matters to the level of trust you’re showing your dog. To make it more concrete, handlers tend to build their dogs’ performance in retrospect: pure confusion the day of a search becomes, with the hindsight of knowing the subject’s eventual location, a clear indication that the dog was on the right track. Some dog handlers compound it by historically revising their level of certainty: “I knew Sparkie was onto it.”<br /><br />No, our dogs don’t lie to us: but neither do we always understand what they’re trying to tell us.<br /><br />Though I can’t hold myself forward as any sort of example, I think we need just the opposite approach. In the context of a search task, we need to be respectful of the dog’s abilities but coldly honest: if it had been a real search, the proper report for the potter’s field alert would have been, “I could be wrong, but Lilly sure looked like she was detecting cadaver. I think we need to check it out.” The proper line to take now, nearly 20 years later, is that I don’t really know for sure what she was doing, though the corroborative evidence I’ve seen encourages me to take that alert at face value.<br /><br />It’s a matter of <em>context</em>.<br /><br />Context of a different sort is the gist of <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0005779">today’s entry</a>, care of Jostein Gohli and Göran Högstedt at the University of Bergen, Norway: namely, when does garish coloration make a prey animal <em>safe</em> rather than <em>lunch?<br /></em><br />The classic explanation is that prey critters like the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monarch_butterfly">monarch butterfly</a> use bright colors to warn predators (a strategy called <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aposematism">aposematism</a>) that they taste very bad — short-circuiting the potential problem that tasting bad is a little late to really help you not get killed or seriously hurt by a predator. But that explanation poses its own problem: a bird that tries to eat one monarch won’t try for a second. But that still leaves the first pretty much screwed.<br /><br />The predators could be genetically disposed to avoiding the bright colors — but that argument just moves the issue further back in time, since at some point the first, behaviorally and genetically naïve, predator had to give it a try.<br /><br />Gohli and Högstedt put it extremely well: “When aposematism first evolved, all predators were inexperienced and the population of aposematic prey would have been very small. Sampling (killing) would likely have led to an early extinction of this fragile population.”<br /><br />Word.<br /><br />The explanation, as you may have guessed from the context that I’m talking about it, hinges on smell. If a bad-tasting prey animal also smelled bad, that smell would double down with the bright colors to warn even a truly naive predator off. Both individual associative learning and evolution of the population would strengthen the predators’ reluctance to take the first bite.<br /><br />But why bother with the color when you already smell bad? While you could argue a number of ways that you get from camouflaged and stinky to neon-bright and stinky, the Norsemen have provided a compelling explanation via mathematical modeling: the stink may actually have <em>driven</em> the evolutionary change in color.<br /><br />In their computer model, bright colors only tended to get you killed more often, up until a certain level of stink — at that point, the e-animals with subdued coloring tended to get munched more often. And once that potential is there, the small variations generated by genetic drift will inevitably start to push you toward brighter and brighter colors.<br /><br />It all hinges on the idea that a garish prey animal makes a predator stop and assess rather than jump in to feed, giving it a chance to notice the bad smell. This makes sense; I’ve seen videos of divers chasing after fleeing <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_white_shark">great white sharks</a> in clear water — while I wouldn’t think this is a bright thing to try in any case, nobody would venture it in murky water, where the fish are known to bite first and ask questions later.<br /><br />Predation is, after all, an extremely dangerous lifestyle; it pays for a predator to be a bit conservative. Prey fights back, so if you see something you don’t already know is tasty and relatively easy to catch, it makes sense to stop and think rather than risk tangling with something that may seriously injure you (or, in the case of aposematism, poison you).<br /><br />The theoretical argument even pays itself back. The Viking Veracitators note that, to work on completely naive predators, you need to excrete your stink continuously, even though almost no insects with chemical defenses do this today: they use it only when they need it. The authors’ suggestion: as the heavy lifting shifted from smell to color, continual stink became less necessary to ward the predators off. While they haven’t reported that calculation, it would be nice to see, in future work, whether the bright coloration, once it comes, eases the pressure on the animal to expend the metabolic cost of permanent funk.<br /><br />Of course, computer modeling ain’t the real world. The experimentalists will need to take this model and run with it, see if it plays out in the field. But it’s a nicely self-consistent argument that seems more than worthy of the experimental verification.<br /><br />In the context of plausible ideas, it’s a winner.Ken Chiacchiahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04626815789187013583noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9194378690159698339.post-36422005744318732022009-11-07T05:02:00.000-08:002009-11-07T05:11:29.761-08:00Still TickingDoing well on surgery +5, now on one crutch -- huge in terms of improved mobility, I can climb stairs and sleep in the bed instead of downstairs like another of the dogs. Hopefully the stitches will come out next Friday, but we'll see.<div><br /></div><div>Heather and Pip are in Virginia, helping look for a kid who went missing after a Metallica concert in October. Sucks for a lot of reasons, but there's always the hope that they'll find something that helps the family -- mainly, evidence that the kid just ran away and will be calling home sometime.<br /><div><br /></div><div>Right now I have some writing to do -- stay tuned for a post on a freelance project that hopefully will be web-posted so I can send yinz there.</div><div><br /></div><div>Thanks for all the well wishes -- hoping I'll be back on something like a normal routine shortly.</div><div><br /></div><div>By the way, anybody know how to take your own picture using that @$#%^$ little camera at the top of the Mac screen? I can't find anything in iPhoto that refers to it, and the search function in Macs always seems to miss the point for me ...</div></div>Ken Chiacchiahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04626815789187013583noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9194378690159698339.post-45200535317096717762009-11-02T02:03:00.001-08:002009-11-02T02:04:54.735-08:00Is Roof!<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFns320JZ_mqsKXsHFX-PpO5V9lAGIDYL6pFTHIZqUZo33aNvyD1SpjuDyqJAL5obcItBe_ZKNnZ4Z3BJVgJonOplrtZ4CW6ki5o-TTXJgSEii3sKZjUkKWIH8SZ_P43KuJufFMiRvljvR/s1600-h/barn.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFns320JZ_mqsKXsHFX-PpO5V9lAGIDYL6pFTHIZqUZo33aNvyD1SpjuDyqJAL5obcItBe_ZKNnZ4Z3BJVgJonOplrtZ4CW6ki5o-TTXJgSEii3sKZjUkKWIH8SZ_P43KuJufFMiRvljvR/s320/barn.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5399444957282658914" /></a><br /><div>It was even more of a squeaker than it looks -- sundown came moments afterward.</div><div><br /></div><div>Anyhow, next stop is the hospital -- I'll post subsequently, but at least that's done!</div>Ken Chiacchiahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04626815789187013583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9194378690159698339.post-52728813800694357492009-10-31T06:55:00.000-07:002009-10-31T07:01:25.937-07:00We Who Are about to Be Butterflied IIWell, I've been remiss again, but have a good reason. In addition to the desperate attempt to re-roof our barn by the drop-deadline, I have the reason for that deadline: left-foot surgery this Monday.<div><br /></div><div>So. "Low risk" surgery aside, petitions to the appropriate deities, wooden fetishes, and beneficent secular concepts are appreciated -- under the circumstances, I'm not fussy. In the next two weeks of my convalescence I will, hopefully, have some time to do an entry or two ...</div>Ken Chiacchiahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04626815789187013583noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9194378690159698339.post-78489220549800706682009-10-19T19:54:00.000-07:002009-10-19T20:28:41.839-07:00What Died?<div style="text-align: left;">One day, in the Before Time, Heather, I, and our beloved Lilly were out taking a walk on the grounds of a certain defunct Massachusetts mental hospital. The state had abandoned the place decades earlier, and though the buildings stood ominous and dilapidated, the surrounding woods — themselves adjacent to a community park called <a href="http://www.town.belmont.ma.us/Public_Documents/BelmontMA_BComm/rmeadow">Rock Meadow</a> — were a wonderful place to train for SAR, ski, ride bikes, or just play.</div><div><br />I think that day we were doing the latter: just walking around, enjoying a beautiful New England autumn day. Lilly was little more than a puppy; Heather and I were little more than children. I’m not much given to wistful reflection on times past, but I think that the three of us were pretty damned happy with each other that day.<br /><br />Anyhow, we were walking across a clearing alongside the old, unpaved road that ran back from the rear of the facility when Lilly’s body went taut, her tail came up, and she began frantically sniffing at the ground.<br /><br />Curious as to what she was scenting, I walked behind her, looking at the ground. I saw a puzzling series of rectangular stones set flush with the earth, inscribed with mysterious numbers: P-17; P-33; P-48. Then the numbers changed: C-54; C-22; C-12. Like that.<br /><br />It wasn’t until I approached a stone dais bearing only the bottom of a crumbled statue that the penny dropped for me: all that remained was the feet, but they were unmistakable: emerging from under a dress or robes, they stood upon a snake.<br /><br />This Sicilian boy didn’t need to be reminded of his iconography: this had been a statue of the Virgin Mary [1]. And the numbers now made sense: Protestant number 17; Catholic number 22.<br /><br />We were in a graveyard — the place where the hospital had buried patients who had died without family to take their remains. And though it took me about five minutes to piece that together, Lilly had known almost instantly.<br /><br />I can’t be sure, either then or today, whether that last statement is actually true. After 18 years of working and training with search dogs, even I have trouble believing what I saw that day: Heather checked later, that graveyard hadn’t had a new tenant in the 20 years since the facility had closed.<br /><br />Like most wilderness SAR handlers, we had cross-trained our dog to find human remains. But we’d been thinking in terms of finding a fresh, whole body for those tragic but inevitable times when we arrived too late — not detecting the bare bones of a two-decade-old Potter’s Field. I still don’t really know for sure, wonder if my eyes had tricked me somehow.<br /><br />Well, <a href="http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/119392894/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0">today’s offering</a> speaks to this question in a fairly direct way: Arpad Vass and homeys, from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the FBI’s Laboratory Division, were able to detect 478 unique decomposition-associated gasses from over human graves at the University of Tennessee Anthropological Research Facility. Even more interesting, they observed this nasty bouquet beyond 18,000 “burial accumulated degree days” — the number of days the body was buried times the average daily temperature in that location. Since that part of Tennessee gets 5,234 BADD per year, that means that at least some of the smelly compounds are still going strong three and a half years after burial, and after all the soft tissues are gone.<br /><br />Pretty amazing, really.<br /><br />The researchers did a couple of things that puzzled me. They ranked 30 of the compounds they found by “perceived importance,” but don’t seem to define that term in this paper. It appears that an earlier paper from 2004 sampled gases from a decomposing exposed body and ranked them somehow, but I haven’t been able to get hold of it yet. My guess is somebody smelled the test tubes and the rankings correspond with each compound’s contribution to the stink, but I need to get hold of that paper to be sure.<br /><br />The guys also had a puzzling series of pie charts that show “differences in bone odor composition” in dogs, humans, deer, and pigs — but instead of the intuitive series of a pie chart for each animal showing the percent of aldehydes, amides, alcohols, and ketones in that beast, a la:<br /><br /></div><div><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNwK06bAHLmMKBkb0_tuk4HnSviGKLhscqQB0nvgAW_4yS7XGoDZRd75Tm3gsbCjLWX3Z1YRyON0H0swFzu4TU_22MKY8eUzu4aUrjeRYOacu0CZdd7imX_NYfma-jw-c9LCjjQCt80yau/s320/dogs.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5394517985078461778" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 247px; " />they have one chart for each chemical compound with percentages for each animal, thusly:<br /><br /></div><div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZNEKDcWgColCQuqpTlD18gkdxdjjGnWgzfq9XeLLi7ZZtjfCn2_pVTBdsOqDTyhfOb1PAkqDRrpy-aSSZEoCD_85o9btdGDDvIDbNX18eqYZAdvnxWDqe2_VjzUoCIrOkx8-xMEx4s_3i/s1600-h/chemgroups.jpg" style="text-decoration: none;"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZNEKDcWgColCQuqpTlD18gkdxdjjGnWgzfq9XeLLi7ZZtjfCn2_pVTBdsOqDTyhfOb1PAkqDRrpy-aSSZEoCD_85o9btdGDDvIDbNX18eqYZAdvnxWDqe2_VjzUoCIrOkx8-xMEx4s_3i/s320/chemgroups.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5394517978217589250" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 247px; " /></a>It shows amply that the four critters have major differences even at this broad level, I suppose, but I’m stumped as to what each percentage means in the latter — they don’t add to 100, for each animal, between graphs. May just be relative proportions reduced to percentages, but I find that a bit confusing.<br /><br />Anyhow, they pick up only 19 of the 30 gases from cadavers on the surface. They don’t know whether the missing compounds, only seen in buried bodies, are the product of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaerobic_decomposition">anaerobic decomposition</a> that can’t take place on the surface, or are products of the interaction between the scent gases and the dirt and its microbes, so that’s a question for another day. They also identified 12 of the 30 that emanate from human bones.<br /><br />This paper pokes a hole in a couple of old dog handlers’ tales: One, that pigs are chemically similar enough to humans to stand in for us as “training materials” for cadaver dogs: the pigs showed profoundly different scent signatures. The other — a rumor circulating among us scent wonks, if not the general dog-handler community — was that <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyamine">polyamines</a> such as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadaverine">cadaverine</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putrescine">putrescine</a> would prove central to “death smell,” and were pretty much the whole sum of certain commercial artificial scents. As I’d understood that these compounds were pretty much characteristic of decomposition, their total absence was a bit of a stunner for me. Gotta get hold of that earlier paper, because it might cast a different light, but right now the only thing even reminiscent of a polyamine on the list is <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methenamine">methenamine</a>, at number 28, and as a cyclic it isn’t really the same thing. Other expected stinkies, like the sulfur-containing compounds — dimethyl disulfide and –trisulfide, sulfur dioxide, carbon disulfide, etc. — are present and accounted for.<br /><br />Again, I need that earlier paper to find out what the rankings actually mean — either the polyamines aren’t as important as I’d thought, or they’re present in a body at the surface but not underground. The latter would be remarkable, given that polyamines are the products of the kind of anaerobic decomposition you’d expect from a buried body especially. So I’ve got more work to do in understanding this one.<br /><br />While the authors trot out the old trope of the “robotic scent detector” — one that doesn’t really impress me, as a wilderness handler, because the localization problem in my field is far more difficult than the detection problem — but also come down on the side of the angels in that they’re interested in producing standard, verified, published scent tools [2] that can be used to train and verify cadaver dogs. While I remain not-yet-entranced by the idea of artificial scents — you’d better be damned sure you’re giving the dogs something that really is representative of the target scent to train them, or you’re screwed — I recognize that real “training aids” suffer from a huge amount of quality variation [3]. I’m skeptical, but more than willing to see where the research leads.<br /><br />Most amazing, though, is how this study really leaves the door open for how long these scents persist. I hope the researchers left their apparatus in place, and intend to come back in 10 years or so and see what’s coming out of these graves.<br /><br />I still don’t know for sure that Lilly had been scenting 20-year-old graves. But I certainly can’t rule it out.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">[1] I just love the poetry of this one: the saint whose bywords are nurture, forgiveness, gentleness is the only one who treads Satan below unprotected feet.<br />[2] Hear that, you companies with proprietary mixes who won’t even release data on how you verified their efficacy? We really aren’t too dumb to understand this stuff, you can keep your secrets but just tell us why you think it works.<br />[3] Very reminiscent of herbal medicines.</span></div>Ken Chiacchiahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04626815789187013583noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9194378690159698339.post-40104167153127259172009-09-30T23:30:00.000-07:002009-10-02T11:08:24.444-07:00ConnectedEvery culture has its own comfort foods; every family samples from that culture; everyone has his own personal favorites, connected to a million intimate family memories.<br /><br />For me, comfort foods stem from a little finished basement in South Hackensack, New Jersey. Several folks had a claim to sovereignty over that space: for example my grandfather, Salvatore Gulino, who owned the house; my great-grandfather, Melchiorre Occhipinti, who presided as a kind of family elder statesman over everything we did.<br /><br />A quick word about my great-grandfather, my “Nannu” — that’s not a misspelling of the Italian, by the way, it’s Sicilian dialect for “grandpa” [1] — or as he was known by my mother’s generation, “Pop.” My mom and her sisters were terrified of him; I mean, this man was a holy terror in his day. My great-uncle, Pete Occhipinti, told a story about facing down union organizers in Pop’s small factory [2]: Uncle Pete told me about how he was yelling at the union rep, trying to scare him off, and that the guy started to get real pale, looked worried. “I thought I was scaring him real good,” my uncle said. “Then I turned around, and saw Pop standing behind me with a big lead pipe in his hand.” The other story was about Pop throwing a guy through a window because he didn’t like the way the guy was dancing with my great-grandmother.<br /><br />We Sicilians can be an intense people. Very few of us are as placid and pleasant as yours truly.<br /><br />By the time I came ’round, though, Pop was this kindly, gentle 90-something who, whenever I came by, would give me a dollar bill and a 7-Up and set me to drawing pictures on the vine-covered back porch of his house, next door to my grandparents’.<br /><br />Man oh man, is it good to be the first grandson in a Sicilian family. I recommend it highly. But I digress.<br /><br />Arguably, that big, second-kitchen, one-family events center in the basement of my grandparents’ house belonged most of all to my grandmother, Margherita Gulino. If my grandfather Sam was the strength of the family, quiet and gentle and protective, my grandmother, his profoundly beloved “Marge,” was the emotional center. We read the opening to Corinthians 13 at her funeral — a rare reading for a funeral — because it was just, so, <i>her</i>:<br /><br /><br /><blockquote>If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, enough to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions and hand over my body to be burnt but do not have love, I gain nothing. Love is patient and kind. Love is not envious, boastful, arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way. Love is not irritable or resentful. Love does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. Now faith, hope and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love [3].</blockquote><br />Among many cherished memories, I remember, and try to emulate, my grandmother’s cooking. Variations on simple pasta are a mainstay in my house to this day [4]; I recently reproduced a promising, if not-quite-there, cauliflower pie; one of these days I’ll have to try to re-create her tomato-covered mackerel, which was amazing.<br /><br />But if there’s one thing I remember most fondly of all, it was her ravioli. She’d make them from scratch, of course, rolling out a sheet of pasta dough, spooning out the cheese — her secret ingredient was a little sugar, and sometimes some cinnamon [5] — and then covering it with a second sheet, using a little tool I’ve got to get hold of to cut and crimp at the same time …<br /><br />To this day, ravioli conjures up a flood of connected memories, partly because <a href="http://chemse.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/20/5/517">memory is so intrinsically linked to the sense of smell</a>. I swear, if somebody exhumes the rotting carcass of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madeleine_(cake)">Proust’s Madeleine passage </a>one more frigging time, I’ll puke [6] — but the guy got it right nevertheless.<br /><br />Today, however, we’re going to go a bit farther afield than the, in evolutionary retrospect, unsurprising idea that the structures in the brain that govern memory are connected to those that govern smell. We’re going to talk about the link between metabolic state and smell (as well as taste).<br /><br />Submitted for your approval: Mssrs. Bronwen Martin & Co.’s <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=PublicationURL&_tockey=%23TOC%234949%25">review of connections between the metabolic hormones and the olfactory and gustatory systems</a>.<br /><br />I remember a lecture in a college endocrinology class, when the professor told us a harrowing story of a toddler with a fatal kidney dysfunction who would eat handfuls of salt. Somehow, the kid knew what he needed, even if it couldn’t save him … Then there are the women who become nauseated at the drop of a hat when they’re pregnant — maybe, their bodies are making them avoid any hint of toxin to protect the baby …<br /><br />Well, today’s paper surveys what we know about how the body’s metabolic state modifies our sense of smell and taste to point us toward what we <i>need</i>.<br /><br />Maybe the best-understood actor in this context is <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glucagon-like_peptide-1">glucagon-like peptide 1</a>, or GLP-1. It’s a key actor in the body’s system for sensing satiety — when your stomach says, “enough.” GLP-1 release by the intestines signals that the body has taken up a load of glucose, and that it’s time to ratchet up insulin production — which itself is a signal for cells to take up and store the sugar from the blood— and ratchet down glucagon, which has the opposite effects to insulin.<br /><br />Turns out that GLP-1 is also produced in the taste cells of the tongue, and in the glomerular layer of the olfactory bulb that receives signals from the smell-sensing neurons in the olfactory epithelium. More interesting, GLP has the ability to shift the sense of taste, reducing sensitivity to sweetness and increasing sensitivity to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umami">umami</a>, that meaty “fifth flavor” [7] that Westerners didn’t know about until relatively recently, because, well, we’re barbarians. That’s right, the same hormone that tells the body that we have enough sugar on board makes us hanker less for sweets [8]. Its role in smell isn’t as clear, but we know it’s there.<br /><br />Martin’s crew talk about a number of hormonal actors: for example <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cholecystokinin">cholecystokinin</a>, another intestinal signal that encourages digestion of fat and proteins, somehow affects social memory. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuropeptide_Y">Neuropeptide Y</a>, a potent natural appetite stimulant/sedative with effects not unlike a good <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_stick">Thai stick</a>, is a major affector of smell as well, encouraging the generation of new olfactory neurons — a process necessary for long-term reprogramming of the nose’s sensitivity to various smells.<br /><br />Most topical, perhaps, was the mention of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leptin">leptin</a>, a hormone produced in fatty tissues and whose absence has recently been linked to obesity. Mice who have mutations that make them unable to produce leptin have increased preference for sweets (and also swell up like balloons). Harder to fit into the picture, but as provocative as it is interesting, is the fact that high serum leptin levels are associated with superior odor-discrimination ability in men — but <i>low</i> capacity for odor discrimination by women.<br /><br />At one level, these connections are almost predictable: of <i>course</i> there are direct links between the body’s systems for digesting food and those that help us find, make us want, to eat more — and what to eat. Of <i>course</i> problems with maintaining healthy body weight are going to involve breakdowns in these signals. Hell, they haven’t even completely nailed all these connections down yet, but it seems a safe bet that, somehow, it will all connect up eventually.<br /><br />But a step back, and the mind reels with the delicate intricacy of the signals and counter-signals. Everything is connected; from the simple <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quorum_sensing#Bacteria">quorum-sensing molecules</a> that bacteria use to communicate with each other nature has developed a rich, complex dance of molecules and electric impulses that make it all work.<br /><br />Connections.<br /><br />One more food/connections story about, or rather from, the basement on Leuning Street: it’s from a day when Heather was a brand-new girlfriend, come down to meet my family maybe for the first time. My aunt Dorothy was still alive, and my aunt Barbara and my mother were still talking to each other. The discussion came down to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braciola">braciola</a>, a southern Italian specialty of flank steak, pounded flat, and rolled up with spices and pine nuts in tomato sauce — if you do it right, there’s a hard-boiled egg in the center. But not everybody does it right [8].<br /><br />My aunt Dee was trying to remind my mother of a neighbor they’d had, decades before. “He lived in that brick house,” Aunt Dee said, and I wondered, from the way she’d said it, if the house even existed any more. Certainly, it wasn’t spurring any memories for Mom.<br /><br />Dee thought for a moment, then brightened, and said, holding up a fork, “He choked to death on a braciola string.”<br /><br />That did it: Mom had it now; everybody nodded, and went back to the meal.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">[1] Note that many folks believe that </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sicilian_language"><span style="font-size:85%;">Sicilian deserves status as a language in its own right</span></a><span style="font-size:85%;">, separate from Italian.<br />[2] What can I say: we were rare, for the period, Italian-American Republicans. I actually worked in that building one summer, for a machine shop that was leasing it from Uncle Pete. I’ll have to post on it sometime, but let’s just say if it hadn’t been for who my uncle was they’d have fired my clumbsy ass.<br />[3] Say what you want about Paul; I defy you to argue he didn’t get this one right.<br />[4] I consider myself no slouch. Maybe my best dish is cacciatore, which I admit I tinkered with for years to duplicate not my grandmother’s recipe, but </span><a href="http://www.michelesrestaurant.com/milan/home.asp"><span style="font-size:85%;">Michelle’s Restaurant’s</span></a><span style="font-size:85%;">, in Garfield, which now seems to have become a banquet hall. Not the same thing; you really can’t go home.<br />[5] I know it sounds a bit weird. But it works.<br />[6] Which I just did. Blaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaugh.<br />[7] Add it to sour, salty, sweet, and bitter, the four “classical” flavors. Everything else in flavor comes from the aroma, not the actual taste.<br />[8] Until I looked up the Wikipedia entry, I didn’t know the name braciola was a misnomer common to Italian-Americans. How ’bout that.</span>Ken Chiacchiahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04626815789187013583noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9194378690159698339.post-68950332248607141102009-09-19T09:32:00.000-07:002009-09-19T09:41:36.252-07:00MultitaskingIt was an ugly scenario, I’ll give you that.<br /><br />We’d gotten the call on a Friday night, I think, for a Saturday morning response — someone had left a note in a small West Virginia state park saying he’d murdered two women and stashed the bodies at the park. Who knows how seriously the authorities would have taken that note, if it weren’t for the fact that two local teens were unaccounted for. They had to assume the worst.<br /><br />By the time we got there, though, the picture had muddied. The teens had shown up, safe and sound, and the authorities were beginning to believe the note was a hoax. But they had a tiger by the tail — they’d initiated a search, and now didn’t know how to stop it. If they kept going and somebody got hurt looking for bodies that weren’t there, they’d have a legal problem on their hands; if they called the search off and somebody’s grandma found two women’s bodies two weeks later, it would be even worse.<br /><br />Fortunately, one of the services that volunteer SAR teams with good incident-command training can offer is a set of mechanisms for deciding when and how to wind a search down, ethically and by the book. In some ways, when we roll up on a search like this we’re even bigger heroes to the local authorities than when we actually find somebody.<br /><br />In this case, we had a number of clues of uncertain significance to follow up on, and a few bald spots in the previous search efforts to cover, before we could suspend.<br /><br />Before I left for the search, I got a call from our incident commander, <a href="http://dascelza.us/">Don Scelza</a>, who said, “Bring your caving gear.”<br /><br />At the time, <a href="http://www.amrg.info/">AMRG</a> wasn’t a cave rescue team. But a number of us were cavers, and had taken at least the introductory <a href="http://www.caves.org/ncrc/national/">National Cave Rescue Commission</a> rescue class. In this case, Don had something very specific in mind. A dog of unknown quality had alerted near a maze of rocks — essentially, a little cave system that had lost its roof — and Don wanted me to explore the maze thoroughly to rule out any, well, dead people being in there.<br /><br />What I did <em>not</em> bring, and this is going to become poignantly relevant, was a dog. With <a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/HHoulahan/HoulahanSBrandywineMoe#5306927653781033810">Moe’s</a> untimely and still-frustrating medical discharge [1], we’d gotten caught with only one operational dog — and <a href="http://cynography.blogspot.com/">Heather</a> and <a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/HHoulahan/Pip#5138703681016877170">Pip</a>, along with our teammate Bill Evans, had gone to Mississippi, as part of the post-Katrina response, duly deputized by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania [2].<br /><br />When I rolled up on the search scene, I had something else to do before I did any caving. At the time, before our team had its trailer, our gear had a habit of dispersing among the officers. Since I was then communications officer, I had our radios in my car and needed to set up our communications net as job one.<br /><br />The base radio was a challenge. We had no electric power in the picnic shelter that served as a command post; I tried plugging the radio into a car cigarette-lighter inverter I had, only to find that, between the power loss at the plug, the inverter itself, and the power supply, we didn’t have enough juice to run the radio.<br /><br />“You know, the radio runs on 12-volt DC,” Don said, looking over my shoulder, and I felt a little dim. I pulled the power supply off the radio, hooked the damned radio up directly to my car battery, and voila, we had a communications net. I wasn’t absolutely sure I’d be going home without a jump, but I had cables.<br /><br />So I put my helmet, kneepads, and gloves on over my uniform, slung my gas-mask-bag cave pack over one shoulder, and hiked up to the grotto.<br /><br />Normally you don’t do SAR tasks alone; and you never do cave tasks by yourself. But this wasn’t exactly a cave, and a grid team was covering an area right next to me, within easy shouting distance. So I dove in, starting at a big opening and working my way around counter-clockwise, crawling into every crack, every opening I could find.<br /><br />The task was utterly uneventful until I was nearly back where I started from, at the far side of that big opening. Standing there, I had to admit that something smelled dead.<br /><br />I thought, “Think like a dog.” Knowing the scent would likely rise in the daytime, I moved into the big opening and started climbing. From the top, I was able to move down into the smell, finding, eventually, the dead fox that was its source.<br /><br />Can’t tell you what a relief <em>that</em> was. But I felt I had a good explanation of what the dog had alerted on — and that somebody needed to go back and do some remedial training.<br /><br />I drew two other tasks that day; one, the field team leader’s nightmare, was to lead a team made up of park rangers, state troopers, and local firefighters in the day’s last area-search task.<br /><br />I said to myself, “If you screw up, these guys will turn on you in a second.” We did have a difficult moment, when a rose thicket broke our line like the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Round_Top#Battle">20th Maine broke the Alabamians on Little Round Top</a>. But I guess I handled it all right, because despite a little grumbling about how thoroughly I was making them perform a task that we all knew was pro forma, we had no major mutinies.<br /><br />Earlier, though, I’d been making my way out to my last solo task of the day — a culvert leading from the reservoir that another dog had alerted on — and reflected on how utterly, totally cool I was. I was Joe SAR. I could do <em>anything</em> the incident required.<br /><br />Multitasking? Bring it on, thought I …<br /><br />Cruelly abandoned to hold down the farm on my own <a href="http://cynography.blogspot.com/2009/09/barking-bus.html">while th’wife was masterminding adoptions for nearly 250 rescued dogs in Montana</a> — a different but still difficult multitasking mission — I’d been a little too busy to do a full entry recently. Instead I thought I’d give a quick smattering of stuff that caught my eye recently, but that has piled up way too fast for me to blog — or whatever it is I do in these pages — on them. In the event, this post got delayed by the timely <a href="http://blogthatsmells.blogspot.com/2009/09/experts-and-testimony.html">capital punishment/high school reunion issue</a>, but here goes now:<br /><br />First, in my Fortnight of Multitasking, <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090825/ap_on_sc/us_sci_multitasking_mayhem">something I was already suspecting</a> — namely, let’s not kid ourselves about what great multitaskers we are. The people who multitask the most, apparently, suck at it the most. I think that multitasking gives the subjective impression of productivity without actually producing all that much.<br /><br />A surprisingly sympathetic — and harrowing — <a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v460/n7255/full/460555c.html">story about what happens to cockroaches when deprived of social interactions</a>. Answer: the poor little buggers get clinical depression.<br /><br />Finally, and maybe most importantly, there’s <a href="http://www.pnas.org/content/100/5/2604.abstract">this item</a> about the movement behaviors of white blood cells. A bit of context first: you may recall me <a href="http://blogthatsmells.blogspot.com/2009/04/there-she-be.html">getting into a bit of a twist</a> trying to understand how having more receptors on one side of the cell would help one of these cells find the source of a chemical gradient, given that the difference in concentration of that chemical at each end of the cell has to be negligible. Then I saw <a href="http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090729/full/460568a.html?s=news_rss">this piece in Nature</a> about a new method for observing individual cells in a living animal, <em>through its intact skin.</em> Turned out that not too long ago, folks used this technique to see that white blood cells moving toward an infection don’t move in a uniform front. They bob and weave, in apparent random motion.<br /><br />Well, I’ve got an alternative explanation: they’re casting for scent, just like a <a href="http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/119970591/abstract">moth trying to regain a pheromone plume</a> he’s lost — or, maybe, a SAR dog trying to zero in on a search subject in difficult scent conditions.<br /><br />Be that as it may, I had my own little epiphany about searching — and the limitations to multitasking — as I was crawling up that culvert, green slime dripping on my back [3]. It struck me that I’d never had to crawl up a culvert like that before, and I realized immediately why — normally, I’d have sent my dog.<br /><br />And that’s when it hit me: I had no dog, but they’d given me all the dog tasks anyway. I really was just a dog’s sidekick.<br /><br />Humbled, and again relieved at once again finding nothing, I trudged back to base to report.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">[1] Happy ending: Moe has today found fulfillment and gainful employment as head of homeland security for </span><a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/HHoulahan/BrandywineFarm#5211264428717089394"><span style="font-size:85%;">our little farm</span></a><span style="font-size:85%;">.<br />[2] This is literally true. Soon after they left, I learned that the text of the mutual aid agreement between Pennsylvania and Mississippi that governed the response had been hastily scraped over, word for word, from the one that sent Pennsylvania state troopers down there, and included full police powers (remember, this was post-Katrina, and everybody was scrambling). For reasons that would be obvious to anybody who knows Bill or Heather, we didn’t tell either of them until they got back.<br />[3] Ruined my @$%#^$ uniform shirt.</span>Ken Chiacchiahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04626815789187013583noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9194378690159698339.post-38663396139184095292009-09-09T21:43:00.000-07:002009-09-15T06:03:00.664-07:00Experts and TestimonyLord, but the Real World has a way of hijacking — or, perhaps less dramatically, riffing on — this space. <a href="http://blogthatsmells.blogspot.com/2009/07/oops.html">A recent post</a> was a fairly “insider’s” view of the professionalism issues facing the search-and-rescue dog-handling community, and as such I was a bit concerned about whether it would be of interest to all of <em>DACSIH</em>’s readers.<br /><br />Huh. The state of Texas, it turned out, had other plans. But I get ahead of myself.<br /><br />So there I was, at the <a href="http://www1.hilton.com/en_US/hi/hotel/WODHIHF-Hilton-Woodcliff-Lake-New-Jersey/index.do">Woodcliff Lake Hilton</a>, New Jersey, built literally on the corpse of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tice_Farms">the farm stand</a> where I used to get cider and cinnamon doughnuts as a boy. But we won’t dwell on the evils of suburban sprawl, because it was a happy occasion: my 30th reunion, <a href="http://www.pascack.k12.nj.us/pascackhhs/site/default.asp">Pascack Hills High School</a> Class of 1979.<br /><br />Heather had pulled a muscle in her back from the fucking smoker’s cough she’d brought back from <a href="http://cynography.blogspot.com/2009/08/sentencing-day.html">her Billings adventure</a>, and of course this really wasn’t her thing anyway, so she spent much of the evening on a couch outside the meeting room. That turned out to be perfect for me, because the experience, while enjoyable, was also a bit intense: I’d spend half an hour reminiscing with people, walk out, hang with Heather for a while, and go back in once I’d de-intensified for a little while.<br /><br />Much of what we did was tell stories about getting into trouble when we were at school together. I had a particularly interesting talk with Greg Bunce, who’d been first-chair trombone when I was second-chair trumpet. As band geeks, we’d spent an incredible time together; virtually every moment we weren’t in class, we were in the band room, playing or shooting the bull.<br /><br />On the date of note, however, we weren’t doing any of that — I think that we may have already graduated, in fact. But in any case, Greg tells me a story I knew well:<br /><br />“I remember that time that I rear-ended you — you were driving that old Mustang of yours, weren’t you? I tell my kids about that even now.”<br /><br />Which came as a surprise to me, because I had good reason to remember it differently. I’m fairly certain of my facts, because I have far more details and because I vividly remember being dragged into the insurance agent’s office for the talk about teen drivers letting their attentions wander. Which was all bullshit, of course, because although none of the adults knew it, the accident had been a direct effect of egregiously and willfully dangerous horseplay.<br /><br /><em>I’d</em> been driving, and not my <a href="http://imagecache2.allposters.com/images/PTGPOD/231823.jpg">1967 candy-apple red squareback Mustang</a> — I think it may already have died by then — but my mother’s <a href="http://www.adealsauto.com/sitebuilder/images/68_Pontiac_14-420x309.jpg">late-60s Pontiac Le Mans</a>, which she’d bought second-hand from her sister. The other car was Doug “Beaner” Weinstein’s, a little Mazda roadster that he pampered as his baby.<br /><br />Heh. The Le Mans and I had different plans.<br /><br />I don’t remember what we were coming back from, but we were on our way home on a fairly lonely stretch of road that included a causeway across a local reservoir. I was in front, my car full of wiseasses — including Greg, of course. Doug was driving behind us, and I think his car was empty because he was going a different way back.<br /><br />I stopped at a light; behind me, the gentlest bump.<br /><br />I look in the rearview; Doug’s grinning at me like he just ate a turd sandwich. Asshole.<br /><br />At a stop sign, the same thing; I stop, he bumps me. Now he’s laughing.<br /><br />At this point we hit a short four-lane stretch, and I slow down. Doug makes the <em>amazing</em> mistake of passing me.<br /><br />Perhaps you can see where this is going; but you probably haven’t got the full picture yet.<br /><br />At the next intersection, Doug encounters a red light. Who could have known the levies would fail, but as it so happens when I pull in behind him I give him a bit of a bump. But I don’t stop there: having made contact, I gently ease my foot onto the gas.<br /><br />A Glory Days, unapologetic American V8 purrs to life, the raw power even at low revs starting to push the little Mazda forward, into the intersection.<br /><br />Kids, I can’t stress this enough — don’t try this at home.<br /><br />Doug tries his foot brake. Tries the hand break. Tries putting it into reverse — as <em>if</em>; the little rotary engine whines in impotent truculence, but that little car is still headed into the intersection, red light or no. Big daddy says forward, and at this point Detroit is still capable of bitch-slapping Hiroshima [1].<br /><br />In my defense, I do have a carful of little shitheads howling with laughter and egging me on. Which, of course, made it all right …<br /><br />Allow me to break frame for a moment, and tell you what neither I nor Doug nor our demonstrably unsympathetic fellows knew. In fact, the Le Mans’ bumper had almost no overlap with the much-lower Mazda’s. At this moment what was pushing Doug forward was about an inch of intersection between his bumper and my Mom’s.<br /><br />Or rather, the <em>torpedo nose</em> in the front center of the Le Mans’ bumper.<br /><br />The impact, when it happened, was almost gentle. Just the slightest shock, and from the feel I wouldn’t have even known it — Doug certainly didn’t, because when the light changed he just drove off.<br /><br />Those of us behind him, however, had the awful evidence before us: a huge dent in his trunk, shaped exactly like the Le Mans’ torpedo nose (which didn’t, of course, have so much as a scratch).<br /><br />For a moment, we all sat there in utter, awful silence. Then I hit the gas, tried to come alongside Doug and motion him to pull over. He just drove faster — thought I was trying to drag.<br /><br />Eventually we managed to motion him over. He got out of his car, that big old grin still on his face until he rounded the rear and saw. The smile, and all the color, drained from his face.<br /><br />That’s when we all huddled and got our story straight. We were smart kids, developed a short but believable scenario that would minimize the shit-storm I’d be in when my old man found out. I was going to have to take the fall; that was so obvious it didn’t need to be stated — but true friends are ones who help you construct an alibi that will soften the blow.<br /><br />The punch line, though, is a phone conversation I had with our first-chair trumpet, <a href="http://www.facebook.com/seth.rivkin">Seth Rivkin</a>, soon afterward — Seth hadn’t made it to the reunion, so I told him about Greg telling me the slightly revised story.<br /><br />“Wasn’t <em>I</em> driving that day?” Seth asked.<br /><br />I’ll be damned. Well, there’s your reliability of eyewitness testimony.<br /><br />Which brings me to that earlier post — about how bogus scent-dog evidence seems to have helped convict a couple of innocent people in Texas — and today’s post — about how, in a grim finding no one could consider any kind of victory, anti-capital-punishment activists may have finally gotten what they were warning us was coming: evidence that a man was executed for a crime he did not commit.<br /><br />Texas, again [2].<br /><br />The particulars you can find in <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/09/07/090907fa_fact_grann?currentPage=1">the excellent <em>New Yorker</em> article</a>. But here’s the recap. A man named Cameron Todd Willingham was executed in Texas in 2004 for setting fire to his house and killing his children. Much of the case was made by expert testimony saying that the fire couldn’t have been accidental. Unfortunately, the case began to unravel almost immediately after the conviction:<br /><br />• The “expert testimony” from the fire marshal that pretty much made the case that a man had burned his family to death turned out to be little more than folklore-based.<br />• Research available <em>well before the man was executed</em> showed that the “evidence” investigators found for arson can happen naturally in any house fire, robbing us of the “it was OK by the standards of the time” argument.<br />• The Texas board responsible for clemency judgments seems to have willfully ignored a brief from one of the nation’s foremost researchers on fire forensics that pretty much established the state’s case didn’t hold up, and that the fire appeared to have been accidentally caused by a space heater or faulty wiring.<br />• Many of the witnesses who testified in court about the man’s “unnatural calm” while his kids burned up had originally described him as frantically trying to get back into the house to save them — but remembered the day differently after they found out the authorities had accused the man of a monstrous crime. Again, so much for eyewitnesses, which I’m beginning to think are a vastly overrated mode of evidence.<br />• The other “damning” evidence came from a jailhouse stoolie who, years later, offered this reassuring addendum (from the <em>New Yorker</em> article):<br />“After I pressed him, he said, ‘It’s very possible I misunderstood what he said.’ Since the trial, Webb has been given an additional diagnosis, bipolar disorder. ‘Being locked up in that little cell makes you kind of crazy,’ he said. ‘My memory is in bits and pieces. I was on a lot of medication at the time. Everyone knew that.’ He paused, then said, ‘The statute of limitations has run out on perjury, hasn’t it?’”<br /><br />One might ask if I have an agenda, where I stand on the issue. Fair enough. I tend against the death penalty for two reasons: first, I don’t believe in perfection, and so I can’t get around the irrevocability if you find out your guy was innocent. Second, I don’t like giving the state any more right to take its citizens’ lives than absolutely necessary — a cop defending himself or a bystander, that’s fine; but nobody should have the right to kill citizens in cold blood, the government the <em>least</em> of all. Even when the son of a bitch <em>deserves</em> it.<br /><br />I say “deserve,” because what I will <em>not</em> do is waste a tear over the pieces of crap who <em>are</em> guilty of murder. They probably <em>do</em> have it coming [3].<br /><br />More to the point today, I have a bug up my ass about a few words, particularly when people apply them to themselves. A “perfectionist” is someone who makes huge mistakes because he’s so obsessed with trivial detail. A “<em>paisano</em>” is, as my Dad once told me, a fellow Italian-American who’s about to put his hand in your pocket. And an “expert” is someone who’s been around for long enough that he feels nobody should ever be allowed contradict him again.<br /><br />We’ve got a lot of this kind of “expert” in the dog handling community. God forgive me if I ever start to call myself an expert.<br /><br />There <em>are</em> real experts in this world, although you’d have a hell of a time getting many of them to admit to it. My mother for example: all her life she’s been humble about her own smarts; but on more than one occasion she was able to see through walls, as the saying goes.<br /><br />The incident with the Le Mans and the Mazda was no exception. As I’d said, we were careful to build a story and stick to it; and to my knowledge, none of the adults ever pierced the construct.<br /><br />Um. My mother, it seemed, had different plans.<br /><br />In a quiet moment, when nobody else was around, she grabbed my arm, and said, “Now I want you to be honest with me. Just between us. You were screwing around, weren’t you?”<br /><br />No flies on Mom.<br /><br />For my part, when Mom’s instincts I ’fessed up. Takes a pretty low character to lie to his <em>mother</em>.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">[1] That sounds awful, but in fact this is where Mazda was founded.<br />[2] I like Texas. I like Texans. Texas women, in particular, kick ass. But let’s face it, yinz have got a blind spot a mile wide when it comes to the death penalty.<br />[3] I still think <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._R._R._Tolkien">Tolkien</a> got this exactly right. If you read <a href="http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/27755.html">Gandalf’s take on the death penalty</a> — or watch it in the movie, it was portrayed faithfully to the text — it doesn’t deny that some people deserve death, and doesn’t really say the death penalty is never warranted. What it does do is make us question why we want to see it applied — and whether it’s truly out of a sense of justice, or out of fear and malice. </span>Ken Chiacchiahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04626815789187013583noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9194378690159698339.post-9855545397427945992009-08-15T08:35:00.000-07:002009-08-15T08:54:57.058-07:00Love GogglesI like to tell the story of how I proposed to <a href="http://cynography.blogspot.com/">th’wife</a>, partly because, at its most shallow level, it’s exactly what people would have expected of us — I popped the question on a mountaintop, with a stunning panorama surrounding us.<br /><br />Even better, at a deeper level, it’s even more apt. You see, I proposed to Heather about two or three days behind schedule. And it was nobody’s fault but her own.<br /><br />Every backpacker has one trip that is the gold standard, against which every other trip is measured. For me, that’s the trough-hike Heather and I made of <a href="http://www.nps.gov/isro/">Isle Royale National Park</a>.<br /><br />Isle Royale is the largest island in Lake Superior, just off Thunder Bay in Canada but for historical reasons a part of Michigan. It gets sometimes ferocious weather, including winters so severe that they practically originated the terrifying Algonquin <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windigo">Windigo</a> legends, and summers so wet that people have transited the island’s roughly 45-mile length without once seeing the sun (though we had an unprecedented run of 11 days without rain when we were there that June).<br /><br />Having said that, its unique climate and natural history — it has species you won’t find on any other island in the lake, including a famous population of <a href="http://www.isleroyalewolf.org/wolfhome/home.html">wolves</a> — and rugged remoteness make it a great place to spend the better part of two weeks alone. Or alone with somebody special.<br /><br />Which kind of gets us to the “nobody’s fault but her own” part (I can feel my comments section heating up even now, in anticipation of the rebuttal). Heather is better than special — she’s unique. Perhaps one of her best qualities, admired from afar, can be her most irritating up close, though: she has a child’s sense of wonder at the world around her. Getting her moving in the woods can sometimes be a trial; every berry [1], every piece of wolf scat, every lizard is worthy of stopping for intense examination.<br /><br />Which, given N days planned to walk from one end of the island to the other, and N+1 days of food, was an issue for me.<br /><br />OK, maybe it was partly my fault — I’ve learned to be a little less goal oriented in the outdoors since then, we were both in our 20s — but the upshot was I hadn’t yet learned how to pace myself for hiking with Heather. When I was in the lead she’d lag behind, and bitch about not getting as long to rest as me when I’d stop for her to catch up; when I was behind her, I’d be nearly bumping up behind her, pissing her off and making the progress even more agonizing for me. (I’m one of those folks who gets through the painful stretches of trail by putting my head down and barreling through; Heather, not so much.)<br /><br />Upshot being, by the time we bagged our first summit — just a hill, really, but in Isle Royale’s harsh climate, above the treeline nevertheless — I was too pissed off at the girl to propose to her. And the second. And maybe the third.<br /><br />We settled into a rhythm, finally, and the urge to give just the gentlest little push as she started down a steep bit waned and even turned into something like the warm glow I’d had before. But by then, the weight of our packs and the rockiness and steepness of the trail had worn us to a nub.<br /><br />Mount Desor, Isle Royale, was the setting — the high point of the island, according to the sources I find today, though I could swear our trail guides at the time said the tops was Sugar Mountain, a forested round-top to the southeast offering little by way of a view. We’d plodded a good three quarters of the island, northeast to southwest, and emerged from the rim of slim, white-barked beech trees that marked the treeline into the open, rocky, grassy summit, to collapse on a nice, cool boulder. I finally figured it was time. But neither of us had much energy to commit to the business. Our conversation, amidst decidedly unromantic panting, went something like:<br /><br />“So you wanna get married?”<br /><br />“OK.”<br /><br />And thus, in a most romantic location but with rather unromantic style, began a pairing that, while maybe not the stuff of legend, then at least, I hope, was the cause for more than one person to say, after we’ve left the room, “Who <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: italic;">was</span> that awful couple?”<br /><br />Romance is quite literally in the air with our <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=PublicationURL&_tockey=%23TOC%236819%232009%23999449997%23878084%23FLA%23&_cdi=6819&_pubType=J&_auth=y&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=c81d0e4833060c5dcd66b3dadd192de1">current entry</a>: a study of how romantic, passionate love affects a woman’s ability to smell human body odors.<br /><br />Now, a finding that women prefer the smell of their mate to that of others would not be much of a eureka moment: <a href="http://blogthatsmells.blogspot.com/2009/06/what-we-know-for-sure.html">that’s fairly well established</a>. But Johan Lundström and Marilyn Jones-Gotman of the ubiquitous (in smell research) <a href="http://www.monell.org/">Monell Chemical Senses Center</a> in Philadelphia have done something cleverer than that: they’ve asked whether love is, olfactorily, blind. And it turns out that it kind of is.<br /><br />The City of That Other Kind of Love (No, Not That One) team employed a tool called the Passionate Love Scale — a 30-statement psychological test that gauges just how much a girl’s current partner glows her plug by asking her to one-to-10 rate statements like “In the presence of my boyfriend, I yearn to touch and be touched.” Chick shit like that. They then measured each volunteer’s ability to identify the body odor of their Main Squeeze, a female friend, and a male friend of no stated romantic interest.<br /><br />The result may not be exactly what you’d expect: romance seemed not to have much effect on the women’s (reasonably accurate) identification of either their boy toys’ or their gal pals’ scents. But accuracy of identification plunged for their “just friends” guys’ scent as the romantic involvement increased: fully 40 percent of these women’s ability to identify a Platonic male friend’s scent tracked negatively with how much they stood by their men. Which by psychology standards is, like, huge [2].<br /><br />The four most besotted gals, with Luv Scores crossing the 240-out-of-300 Rubicon, were bumping up against zero percent accuracy with their guy pals. Even more interesting, two of these four, whose accuracy with male friends was truly pathetic, were among the best at identifying Mr. Right or She-Homey [3].<br /><br />So there you have your Love Goggles: love doesn’t give a girl an unerring ability to sniff out the object of her affection; but it makes her a lot less observant, at somewhere between the “Smells like team spirit” and scent-receptor levels, of the smell of other men.<br /><br />Love is, surprisingly, scent-blind; just not in the sense of the aphroism.<br /><br />There is a bit of a sequel to my proposal story, by the way: a few minutes after the exchange above, when some iodiney water and PBJs had brought us both back into the land of the living, Heather shattered my plans for a leisurely betrothal by saying, “We need to set a date for the wedding; maybe in a year. If we don’t, nobody will take it seriously.” Seeing that the game was up, I agreed, albeit with a bit of a gulp.<br /><br />Obviously, she was talking about our relatives and friends.<br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:small;">[1] She’ll call me on this if I don’t admit that I was eating the berries. Red-green insensitivity, folks!<br />[2] How can I put this without offending? We have to employ slightly different standards with our quantitatively challenged friends in the behavioral sciences. Boy, is that one likely to come back to haunt me, or what?<br />[3] Different two for each, but still …</span>Ken Chiacchiahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04626815789187013583noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9194378690159698339.post-8839500824764188082009-07-30T17:01:00.000-07:002009-07-30T17:21:06.056-07:00Crowded HouseHer name was Janet, and she had impossibly long, brown hair. Cute as all get-out, and smart to boot: she was one of the pack of new graduate students that year at my biochemistry and biophysics program [1]. More importantly, she seemed possibly interested in me — so I asked her out.<br /><br />That Friday night, I came by her lab — she was doing a rotation with the biophysics group, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystallography">a cool subspecialty</a> in which people used x-rays to create patterns of dots that computers helped them decode into the shapes and structures of protein molecules [2] — to pick her up. The plan was dinner, maybe a coffee afterward.<br /><br />But a lab mate of hers invited himself along.<br /><br />“I can drive,” he said. I can’t remember whether he was a grad student or a postdoctoral fellow, only that he was older than both of us; but since he had the car, I’m thinking postdoc.<br /><br />I was pissed off. I was also seriously uncertain of the terrain: was he truly trying to horn in? Did anybody have that kind of gall? Or cluelessness? Or had she set it up, to “de-date” the situation? She certainly hadn’t said she didn’t want him along, which didn’t bode well for my prospects. Still, as a matter of philosophy, my ire centered on this guy [3] — <em>competition</em>, OK; but I draw the line at <em>interference</em>.<br /><br />So we have our “three’s a crowd” date, with increasing comprehension that I wasn’t going to get anywhere here. But lacking a graceful way of bowing out early, I had to follow through, as if everything were cool, with the whole God-damned dinner. I had my pride [4].<br /><br />Finally, we’re done; we took her home first. I can’t remember why — I may have left my bike there — but I asked him to drop me off back at the lab. He pulls up to the building, and as I open the door and step out, I allow one crack in my “it’s all good” demeanor of the evening [5].<br /><br />I asked, “Aren’t you going to walk me to the door?”<br /><br />He turned away for a moment, couldn’t look me in the eye; and for the first time that evening, I found something to like about the guy — at least he had a sense of shame.<br /><br />As crowded as that date was, it was considerably less so than the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vomeronasal_organ">vomeronasal organ</a> is turning out to be. This “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pheromone">pheromone</a> sensor” is sometimes in the roof of the mouth, sometimes in the nasal cavity of vertebrates; but it’s absent in humans and great apes.<br /><br />In the beginning, the concept of the VNO, also known as the Jacobson’s organ, was simple.<br />We already knew — because we had one — that the olfactory organ conveyed a sense of conscious smell, a flexible and rapid sensor for whatever chemical cues the environment cared to throw at us, which we then could use to craft a flexible, highly situation-specific, and even individualized response.<br /><br />The VNO, on the other hand, was supposed to be the sensor for a kind of molecular secret code — a species-specific series of chemical communications that were far more specialized, and which elicited hormonal and reflexive actions that didn’t require conscious sensation of the signal.<br />This picture developed from the situation in insects, in which these chemical signals, called pheromones, were first discovered and studied. One insect creates a pheromone, another member of its species receives it, and that reception causes a characteristic response — whether to court and mate, show aggression, horde up, whatever [6]. Same pheromone, same response, every time.<br /><br />Mother Nature, though, finds human beings’ need to classify to be utterly and hopelessly quaint. From the beginning, scientists warned us that it might not be that simple in higher organisms. They were right.<br /><br />For one thing, and I’ll repeat myself here, mammals don’t do anything for just one reason — pheromone signals seem to enter a kind of voting process that takes in a lot of input and tries to create the best possible response. For another, when the lab geeks started picking apart the receptor proteins that served as the chemical sensors of the system, they rapidly found a diversity that hinted at a much more complicated situation.<br /><br /><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vomeronasal_organ#Sensory_epithelium_and_receptors">The first “pheromone receptors,”</a> it turned out, could be split into two families; interestingly, one of them is predominant in one part of the VNO, the other family in the other part. One immediate possibility was that the two parts of the organ essentially fractionated the pheromone molecules, with one set of sensors responding to one type, maybe those that volatilized into the air efficiently, while the other responded to those that didn’t volatilize well and had to enter the organ in a water solution or other liquid form. Without more to go on, a number of other possibilities fit the bill as well.<br /><br />Then came the news that the VNO also contained receptors that, for all the world, looked like <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olfactory_receptor">the ones in the olfactory organ</a>. Was the VNO contributing to the conscious sense of smell? Or were the olfactory receptors in the organ allowing molecules that normally acted as conscious odorants convey a reflexive, pheromone-type signal as well? Investigators also discovered a fourth family of receptors, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trace_amine-associated_receptor">trace amine-associated receptors</a>, which sense volatile amines — a toxic family of molecules that contribute to the smells of decomposition, old fish, ammonia, and urine, among others. Maybe conveying reflexive aversion to toxins?<br /><br />As if four weren’t enough of a crowd, <a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v459/n7246/abs/nature08029.html">today’s paper</a>, from Mssr. Stéphane Rivière at the University of Geneva and buds, reports the discovery of yet another receptor family in the VNO: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formyl_peptide_receptor">formyl peptide receptor</a>-like proteins.<br /><br />Formyl peptide receptors play a very interesting role elsewhere in the body. They help guide white blood cells to the site of an infection, using chemicals associated with pathogens and tissue damage as the cue. The City of Peace Posse tested that idea out, and found out that the genes for these VNO receptors were able to convey the ability to respond to these cues to nerve cells and that the VNO tissues themselves are sensitive to them.<br /><br />The connections between smell and immunity, once suggested by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Thomas">Lewis Thomas</a> as the scientific equivalent of a “spitball” idea, are getting harder and harder to ignore. Thomas’ pure concept, that the body may have co-opted the immune system to create a sense of smell (or, more likely, the other way around) mostly isn’t true; not only are most of the molecular actors in immunity and smell different, but they generally are different types of molecules with very different mechanisms [7].<br /><br />Still, the parallels are striking. As we better understand olfactory receptors, they seem less the pat, lock-and-key, one-odorant/one-receptor, enzyme-like sensors we might have expected (though the “original” VNO receptors are, for a number of reasons, exactly that kind of beast) and <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?holding=upittlib&db=pubmed&cmd=Search&term=Probability%20model%20for%20molecular%20recognition%20in%20biological%20receptor%20repertoires%3A%20significance%20to%20the%20olfactory%20system.">more like a cloud of molecular recognition</a> hovering in wait of the next odorant, old or novel, to come along. No one receptor “belongs” to, say, the acetic acid molecule that gives vinegar much of its smell; rather, all share varying responsibility for the acid, with a small number vastly better than others. Dogs’ larger repertoire of receptors than humans’ may help give the former a more acute sense of smell not because it detect more odorants per se, but because it’s got more overlapping ability to sense the same potential swarm of odorants, and so tends to do the same job with more sensitivity. That sounds a lot less like enzymes and a lot more like antibodies, the immune system’s way of doing a similar job.<br /><br />The discovery of the formyl peptide receptors in the VNO immediately suggests two different but very important possible new roles for the organ.<br /><br />Rodents (the study was in mice) are good at detecting and declining tainted food; rats are legendary in their ability to evade attempts to poison them. The formyl peptide receptors in the VNO could be playing an active role in subverting the animal’s appetite when food is dangerous (along with the trace amine-associated receptors, see above). On the other hand, the chemicals that these receptors detect can be found in a number of secretions, including urine: this may be a system for identifying infected animals of your own species, so you can avoid them.<br /><br />Which brings us, again, to dogs. Any owner of a pack of them has probably seen how, when one is sick or somehow “not right,” the others may, shattering our boy-scouts-in-fur-coats anthropomorphization, gang up on it and harass it. Well, it now seems very possible that setting up an antagonistic stance toward a sick pack mate is a role of the VNO [8]. Along those same lines, this could be the receptor responsible for the amazing ability of dogs to detect cancerous tissues in humans — an ability whose proponents tend to forget hasn’t been proved to be any more accurate or cost-effective than standard diagnostic methods, but which nevertheless seems real.<br /><br />’Course, the “all of the above” and “none of the above” possibilities remain in play. The VNO began its conceptual life as a pure mystery; in the absence of data, some folks attributed to it an almost supernatural character. The reality, now that we have the data, is a bit more prosaic, but no less mysterious, and in some ways far more majestic in scope: we have only begun to understand the large number of important functions that this organ plays in social interactions, speciation, and survival.<br /><br />The naked ape, also, stands awkwardly in the room: we and our close relatives don’t appear to have a VNO, but we do have VNO-like receptors in our olfactory organs. Are any or all of the above playing roles in our unconscious behaviors?<br /><br />Stay tuned. Sometimes, a crowded house is a good thing.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">[1] Long before th’ better half entered the scene. Not that I'm worried about frying pans.<br />[2] On a topical note, one project they were working on at the time was an ongoing study of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_hemagglutinin">hemagglutinin</a> molecule, the grappling hook that the flu virus uses to gain entry into human cells.<br />[3] Lest you think I was attributing the worst intent to a well-intentioned but clumsy attempt to cover for a friend who was too timid to say “no,” he did wind up dating her afterward — so the vibe I was getting, that he wasn’t being altruistic, had merit.<br />[4] Married for 17 years as of last month, I have no further use for pride.<br />[5] OK, it’s just possible that I was glowering throughout the evening. I attempted the closest I could manage to cool, anyway.<br />[6] A little more complicated than that, because classically there were “releasing” pheromones, which cause responses, and “primer” pheromones, which set you up for later responses — in the current Wikipedia article, that list has grown to 10 types, plus an “other” category. But the classic view was it was always the same response, and required no more consciousness than is available to a fly.<br />[7] One important exception: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_histocompatibility_complex#MHC_and_sexual_selection">the same proteins that help identify fragments of invading pathogens</a> may also help cherry-pick the odorants that make up our individual body odors.<br />[8] Again, nothing for just one reason — doubtless visual and behavioral clues play a role as well.</span>Ken Chiacchiahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04626815789187013583noreply@blogger.com3