Philippa Kaur

Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more

Humans 12 August 2020
 

Josie Ford

Blackout drinking
Nobody can deny that for those in the right place at the right time, solar eclipses are awe-inspiring displays of nature’s majesty. Getting to that right place at that right time, however, is often easier said than done.
Most of the eclipses that Feedback can remember were obscured either by cloudy skies, excessive concern for retinal integrity or by being in the wrong country. Sometimes, possibly, all three at once.
That’s why NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory ambassador Tony Rice (@rtphokie on Twitter) is getting his plans for the 2023 annular and 2024 total eclipse lined up early.

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Observing that the paths of the two eclipses intersected at a spot in Vanderpool, Texas, he dug a little deeper and discovered that the location almost exactly matched that of the Lost Maples Winery – an ideal oasis to wait out Earth’s troubles while enjoying the very best that astronomy has to offer.
“Just pointing this out, for planning purposes,” Rice tweeted. Feedback will see you there.
Honk honk
Depending on your interest in such matters, you may or may not have come across Untitled Goose Game, the sleeper video game hit of 2019. The premise is simple enough to explain.
To quote the game itself: “It’s a lovely morning in the village, and you are a horrible goose.”
Over the course of various situations, the player is urged to control a malevolent goose as it causes small but keenly felt irritation to a broad range of local residents.

Feedback was reminded of the game when we read a story in the Mail Online about an electrician who lost his job after accidentally loudly playing the sound of pornography during a council meeting in Worcester, UK.
Modesty forbids us from going too deeply into the details, but suffice it to say that the man in question claimed that the noises originated from a video of a honking goose.
“Council bosses launched an investigation,” reports Mail Online, “but found that no members of staff said it sounded anything like a goose.”
Classic horrible goose behaviour there: making sounds that sound nothing like a goose in order to get somebody into trouble. Disgraceful.
Viva Las Vagus
Feedback is always partial to a good pun. Though let’s be honest, we aren’t averse to a bad pun now and again either, so long as it ups the word count and keeps our editor unhappy.
Which is why we are grateful to those colleagues of ours who sent through a recently published article in the Journal of Physiology all about the functioning of the vagal system and the cranial nerve that gives it its name.
If you would like to find out more about it yourself, look up “What happens in vagus, no longer stays in vagus” by Jordan B. Lee, Lucas J. Omazic and Muhammad Kathia.
Rossy posse
Another week, another chance for some nominative determinism. Come on, we cry, like a desperate parent dragging their child away from their mobile phone for a chance to spend some quality time together. It’ll be fun! Promise!
It’s off to Scotland this time, where football team Ross County has acquired a new player: goalkeeper Ross Doohan, on loan from Celtic. So far, so mildly mirthful. But, as @G4rve points out on Twitter, this isn’t the only goalkeeping Ross County Ross.
Doohan looks set to share the space between the uprights with Rosses Laidlaw and Munro – a 100 per cent Ross rate at the number 1 position.
As if that wasn’t enough, they will be joined by midfielder Ross Draper and striker Ross Stewart. Never mind their on-pitch exploits – as far as Feedback’s concerned, that roster’s going to take some beating.
Where there’s a weed
We couldn’t get through this week’s Feedback without casting an eye over recent appointments in the world of gardening.
Why, you ask? Because we know our readers. If we didn’t stop to mention the fact that the new president of the Royal Horticultural Society is Keith Weed, our inbox would undergo some sort of rupture.
The story, as reported in The Times, is a veritable raised bed of nominative determinism. “My dad was a Weed but my mother was a Hedges,” he said.
What’s more, runs the story, “two years ago the organisation discovered that one in eight of its staff had a name associated with nature, the outdoors or horticulture, such as Heather, Berry, Moss, Gardiner or Shears, and various permutations of Rose”.
It’s hardly surprising to Feedback that the gardening world is such a hotbed of appropriate names: our readers have been pointing this out to us for decades.
Just this week, for example, Peter Slessenger writes in to namecheck Gerard Clover, who is head of plant health at the Royal Horticultural Society, and Dorothy Giacomin points out Guy Shrubsole, a trees campaigner at Friends of the Earth, as well as her old plant sciences lecturer at King’s College London: Pete Moore.
Got a story for Feedback?You can send stories to Feedback by email at feedback@newscientist.com. Please include your home address. This week’s and past Feedbacks can be seen on our website. More

Computers are worse at recognising women and people of colour than white men. Documentary Coded Bias shows that the problems don’t stop there

Technology 12 August 2020
By Vijaysree Venkatraman
Face-recognition AI could only “see” Joy Buolamwini when she wore a white mask
7th Empire Media

Coded Bias
Shalini Kantayya
Ongoing film festival screenings

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IN HER first semester as a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab, Joy Buolamwini encountered a peculiar problem. Commercial face-recognition software, which detected her light-skinned classmates just fine, couldn’t “see” her face. Until, that is, she donned a white plastic mask in frustration.
Coded Bias is a timely, thought-provoking documentary from director Shalini Kantayya. It follows Buolamwini’s journey to uncover racial and sexist bias in face-recognition software and other artificial intelligence systems. Such technology is increasingly used to make important decisions, but many of the algorithms are a black box.
“I hope this will be a kind of Inconvenient Truth of algorithmic justice, a film that explains the science and ethics around an issue of critical importance to the future of humanity,” Kantayya told New Scientist.
The documentary, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, sees a band of articulate scientists, scholars and authors do most of the talking. This cast primarily consists of women of colour, which is fitting because studies, including those by Buolamwini, reveal that face-recognition systems have much lower accuracy rates when identifying female and darker-skinned faces compared with white, male faces.
Recently, there has been a backlash against face recognition. IBM, Amazon and Microsoft have all halted or restricted sales of their technology. US cities, notably Boston and San Francisco, have banned government use of face recognition, recognising problems of racial bias.

People seem to have different experiences with the technology. The documentary shows a bemused pedestrian in London being fined for partially covering his face while passing a police surveillance van. On the streets of Hangzhou, China, we meet a skateboarder who says she appreciates face recognition’s convenience as it is used to grant her entry to train stations and her residential complex.
“If an AI suspects you are a gambler, you could be presented with ads for discount fares to Las Vegas”
The film also explores how decision-making algorithms can be susceptible to bias. In 2014, for example, Amazon developed an experimental tool for screening job applications for technology roles. The tool, which wasn’t designed to be sexist, discounted résumés that mentioned women’s colleges or groups, picking up on the gender imbalance in résumés submitted to the company. The tool was never used to evaluate actual job candidates.
AI systems can also build up a picture of people as they browse the internet, as the documentary investigates. They can suss out things we don’t disclose, says Zeynep Tufekci at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the film. Individuals can then be targeted by online advertisers. For instance, if an AI system suspects you are a compulsive gambler, you could be presented with discount fares to Las Vegas, she says.
In the European Union, the General Data Protection Regulation goes some way to giving people better control over their personal data, but there is no equivalent regulation in the US.
“Data protection is the unfinished work of the civil rights movement,” said Kantayya. The film argues that society should hold the makers of AI software accountable. It advocates a regulatory body to protect the public from its harms and biases.
At the end of the film, Buolamwini testifies in front of the US Congress to press the case for regulation. She wants people to support equity, transparency and accountability in the use of AI that governs our lives. She has now founded a group called the Algorithmic Justice League, which tries to highlight these issues.
Kantayya said she was inspired to make Coded Bias by Buolamwini and other brilliant and badass mathematicians and scientists. It is an eye-opening account of the dangers of invasive surveillance and bias in AI.
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J
Netflix/
Watch
John Was Trying to Contact Aliens tells the story of John Shepherd, who spent 30 years trying to contact extraterrestrials by broadcasting music millions of kilometres into space. On Netflix from 20 August.
Read
The science transforming the way we learn sees Sanjay Sarma, head of open learning at MIT, join fellow researcher Luke Yoquinto to explain how scientific findings in wildly different fields are transforming the way we learn and teach.
Visit
Driverless: who is in control? is an excellent exhibition about autonomous vehicles at London’s Science Museum. The museum reopens on 19 August, and is extending this show until January 2021.
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Playing Superliminal confuses your perception of space, but the trick wears thin quite quickly, says Jacob Aron

Humans 12 August 2020
By Jacob Aron
Superliminal has a creative relationship with perspective
Pillow Castle Games

Superliminal
Pillow Castle
Multiple consoles

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I HAVE been having strange dreams recently. This may be due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic – a survey in March found that people in the UK have been getting more sleep due to lockdown measures, and more sleep can have an effect on your dreams.
Or it might be that I have been playing Superliminal, a first-person game designed to mess with your head and your perception of space. It takes place entirely in dreams, with the unnamed character you play as participating in an experimental form of therapy called Somnasculpt administered by a Dr Glenn Pierce.
The story here is pretty light. As you pass through the game, you hear messages from Pierce and the AI that is running the dream therapy, with both getting increasingly agitated as you become lost in the dreamscape, but that is about it. The plot is essentially a set-up for very clever forced perspective and other optical illusions.
This is demonstrated early in the game, when you pick up a chess piece from a table. Place it down again and it has changed in size to match your perspective. If that sounds confusing, think about the classic tourist photo of people pretending to support the leaning tower of Pisa, and imagine you could actually shrink it down to hold it up for real. You can repeat the trick over and over, making objects tiny or gigantic.
You use this ability to pass through a series of surreal puzzle rooms, placing objects on pressure plates or making a wedge of cheese large enough to use as a ramp to a high door. Later levels add complications, such as needing to stand in a specific spot to transform an image stretched across a wall into an object you can pick up.

Developer Pillow Castle loves to mess with you, changing the “rules” of the game just as you have figured out how something works. But, ultimately, the forced perspective wears thin. Many of the game’s puzzles can be solved by picking up an object, holding it in the air and watching a larger version fall to the ground with a thud. This is fun the first few times – I actually ran out of the way, worrying that I was about to be squished by a giant chess piece – but it doesn’t offer enough variety.
“I actually ran out of the way, worrying that I was about to be squished by a giant chess piece”
The game is obviously inspired by Portal, a 2007 release that kicked off the first-person puzzle genre, in which you also navigate a series of rooms while listening to an AI, in that case, the malevolent GLaDOS, which berates you at every turn. Rather than forced perspective, you use a “portal gun” to solve puzzles. This allows you to connect two surfaces via a wormhole through which you and objects can pass.
In later levels, Superliminal introduces its own version of portals in the form of linked doorways that can be resized, making you grow or shrink as you pass through them. It is a fun idea, but in practice I found it very fiddly. My struggles to line up the doors in the way I wanted left me pining for Portal’s elegance.
It is perhaps unfair to compare Superliminal to one of the greatest games of all time, but it doesn’t help itself by aping Portal so closely. The game does at least have a more optimistic tone than Portal‘s cynicism, ending with a positive message that some people may find to be a genuinely useful takeaway from the experience.
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Greeting neighbours or gossiping with a colleague can boost your health and well-being, but coronavirus lockdowns are putting that in jeopardy. Here’s how to stay connected

Health 12 August 2020
By David Robson
AT THE beginning of the UK lockdown, I woke each morning with a feeling of impending doom. I was scared about covid-19, of course, but also worried about isolation. How would I cope without seeing friends and family? How could I perform my job as a journalist if I couldn’t meet people?
These weren’t baseless fears. In recent decades, a raft of research has shown that individuals with richer social worlds tend to have better mental well-being and lower stress, and to perform better at work. Missing out on our interactions with friends, colleagues and even shopkeepers can have a surprisingly powerful impact on our health.
WhatsApp conversations and Zoom “parties” have helped me to maintain a sense of connection, but these tools can’t replace aspects of interaction – like social touches and impromptu chats by the water cooler – that can boost mood and strengthen relationships.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella suggested as much in a recent interview with The New York Times. Although he felt the shift to digital interactions was going relatively smoothly, he wondered if we were burning through the “social capital” built up over years. He suspected that social bonds might start to evaporate. “What I miss is when you walk into a physical meeting, you are talking to the person that is next to you, you’re able to connect with them for the two minutes before and after,” he said.
“A wealth of studies have shown that high ‘social capital’ enhances our quality of life”
As many of us continue to work remotely, the long-term effects of social distancing could be serious. What can … More

Solving the Conway knot problem took mathematician Lisa Piccirillo on a journey into the fourth dimension. Here’s how she did it

Humans 5 August 2020
By Chelsea Whyte

Rocio Montoya

OVER the course of one week in 2018, Lisa Piccirillo cracked a mathematical problem that had gone unsolved for half a century. Posed by legendary mathematician John Conway in 1970, it concerns a complex geometrical object known as the Conway knot. While an ordinary overhand knot – the kind you would tie at the end of a thread – sees the string cross over itself three times, the Conway knot has 11 crossings. What Conway wanted to know is whether his knot can be formed by cutting a slice out of a more complex four-dimensional knot – or, as mathematicians put it, is it “slice”?
Piccirillo discovered that it isn’t. Her breakthrough came after finding a back door into the problem that could help mathematicians understand other four-dimensional objects. Currently a post-doctoral mathematician at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, solving the Conway knot – along with her other research – has seen her offered a tenure-track position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. New Scientist spoke to her about the week she spent on the problem, her approach to mathematics and why it is time we stopped talking about geniuses.
Chelsea Whyte: How did you first become interested in mathematics?
Lisa Piccirillo: As a kid, I always liked maths and I was good at it in school. I’m from quite a rural area in Maine, and people said “if you like maths, you can become an engineer”. So I thought that’s what you do with maths, become an engineer. I went to a lot of day camps for engineering and made a lot of bridges out of popsicle sticks, and found out that … More

Demelza Kooij
Visit
And Say the Animal Responded? at FACT in Liverpool, UK, from 12 August looks at the world from a non-human perspective. The exhibition will immerse visitors in animal communication through film, art and technology.
Read
Stuck: How vaccine rumors start – and why they don’t go away sees anthropologist Heidi Larson share her radical ideas on how we restore public confidence in vaccines. It is a globe-spanning account of how people perceive risk.
Watch
Project Power is a Netflix blockbuster starring Jamie Foxx and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, available from 14 August. A new pill gives the user a superpower for 5 minutes. All they have to do is work out what it is – and avoid dying.
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