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Mathematical Parrot Reveals His Genius With Posthumous Paper
ananyo writes "Even in death, the world's most accomplished parrot continues to amaze. The final experiments involving Alex – a grey parrot trained to count objects – have just been published (abstract). They show that Alex could accurately add together Arabic numerals to a sum of eight, and correctly add three small sets of objects, putting his mathematical abilities on par with (and maybe beyond) those of chimpanzees and other non-human primates."
Why wasn't that on Slashdot?
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
How do dolphins and octopuses rank? I tried a search w.r.t. octopuses but didn't find anything (and wikipedia has nothing about it).
"putting his mathematical abilities on par with (and maybe beyond) those of chimpanzees and other non-human primates" ...and most US grade school students...
Parrots live very long lives, how tantalising to study what may have been a savant from another species that couldn't score with chicks but really great with maths.
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/~ebarnes/python/dead-parrot.htm
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Alex was clearly pretty smart. However, it is as yet still unclear if Alex was actually a representative parrot or was smarter than other parrots. A lot of the current work being done will help answer that. There's also some concern that some of the early experiments with Alex didn't adequately handle the Clever Hahns problem- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans where an animal rather than give actual answers uses subtle cues from the examiner on how to answer correctly. The more recent experiments help address that. It seems clear at this point that Alex's intelligence, and that of the other African Greys, is genuine, but what the average is like is still unclear. One thing is certain though: the use of the word "parrot" to mean mindlessly repeat is deeply unfair.
That would've been even more impressive than his math abilities.
Polly wants a polynomial!
And Most US grade school teachers.
The reason why the US is Lacking in Math and Science is most teachers Hate and are Afraid of Math and Science and past that hate of learning to their students.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The bird doesn't have an Erdos number!
With time, the dinosaurs might have evolved to create civilization.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
...that IS genius!!!
I have to wonder if the reason "most teachers Hate and are Afraid of Math and Science" is because we pay them shit and treat them like shit (and, admittedly, often get what we pay for as a result) so the math/science wonks elect for more lucrative STEM careers, instead.
but only up to 8.
By the sound of things he would have done a better job than some humans Damaged US Passport Chip Strands Travelers
"putting his mathematical abilities on par with (and maybe beyond) those of chimpanzees and other non-human primates" ...and most US grad school students...
There, FYFY
As parent demonstrates...
I read somewhere that eight seems to be the limit to the amount of objects that an animal can understand. After that point, it is all many objects. Actually, there seems to be an innate sense of basic arithmetic that even we as humans have. Test yourself on this...
Take an unknown number of small objects such as marbles, quickly look at them and WITHOUT counting, guess how many there were. You will probably find that when there are eight or less objects, your guess is usually pretty good. For more than eight objects, your accuracy probably will decline. Maybe we are accessing our (animal) innate ability in arithmetic? I don't know for sure.
It also looks like your English teacher Hated and was Afraid of English, and Past that Hate to you.
But it has a Kevin Bacon Number of 3.
Alex the Parrot
WorkedWith
Irene Pepperberg
WhoWasIn
"Ripley's Believe It or Not!" (1999) {(#1.5)}
With
Dean Cain
WhoWasIn
"Ellen: The Ellen DeGeneres Show" (2003) {(2003-10-08)}
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
and your average product of Australia's high schools.
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
Just finished reading the book. http://books.google.com/books?id=I0xiJfwPukUC&printsec=frontcover&dq=alex+and+me&hl=en&sa=X&ei=awhET92BCYm22gXK15GaCA&ved=0CDcQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=alex%20and%20me&f=false
Teachers certainly teach their kids that teachers are underpaid and treated badly, but it's a bit naive to go on believing that as an adult, don't you think? If we demanded more of our teachers, fewer would want to or be able to do the job, and pay would naturally rise as a result, but overall as a culture we're not interested in that, we just want a place to park the kids till they can be shipped off to college.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I did a calculation a while back that compared a middle grade teachers salary with an engineers. I took into account the normal days off from holidays+summer vacation that teachers normally get, compared them to the Holidays and standard vacation time an engineer gets. With a standard 8 hour day from an engineer and a 10 hour day from a teacher. It worked out that the engineer was only getting paid a small amount more. I think 1 dollar an hour difference.
Now that 10 hour day is an average that teachers bitch and moan about to me, however from friends who are teachers I usually see them working up to 12 hours some day and 6 - 8 hours the other... So 10 hours seemed fare. Most engineers I know work more then 8 hours a day to but they don't complain about it as much.
Teacher have a powerful union behind them (My personal feeling is Unions are holding good teachers back from getting what they deserve but that is too much digressing) that makes sure that they are treated fairly most engineers do not have such protection.
But this anti-Math and Science from teachers starts well before they are teaching. Normally for anyone graduating from High School who is choosing a major a Teaching degree is one of those that you can get that has an obvious career path that doesn't require heavy Math and Science, so they go that route. I went to college I know education majors, I saw the classes they took, I saw their masters classes too... They are joke classes to give them a degree.
The Poor teacher excuse is getting really lame today. For they are a few groups without strong math or science skills who can get a decent middle class job, they are not going to be rich but they will be able to pay their bills and feed a family.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
There, FYFY
Working on your doctorate?
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
Corvids are as, or may even be more, intelligent. There's the classic story of the Caledonian crow who custom fashioned it's own tool to get at grubs, a trait previously only known to primates, to cite one example. Others abound, but I'm feeling too lazy right now to go hunt them down. Heckle and Jeckle would've outsmarted Wiley E. Coyote any day of the week.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
Sometimes it sure seems like that.
What exactly makes a school student "US grade"?
Polygon?
When did Polly go?
Now your grad school adviser can look at your project and comment:
"a dead parrot would have better chances of getting its paper accepted than you."
I think you mean 'passed', unless you are implying he got over the hate...
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
But this anti-Math and Science from teachers starts well before they are teaching. Normally for anyone graduating from High School who is choosing a major a Teaching degree is one of those that you can get that has an obvious career path that doesn't require heavy Math and Science, so they go that route. I went to college I know education majors, I saw the classes they took, I saw their masters classes too... They are joke classes to give them a degree.
The Poor teacher excuse is getting really lame today. For they are a few groups without strong math or science skills who can get a decent middle class job, they are not going to be rich but they will be able to pay their bills and feed a family.
I think you misunderstand what I meant, because that's pretty much what I was talking about: not that the current crop of teachers are "poor," that's not what I was getting at, but rather that the ones who AREN'T afraid of math or science are going into other fields instead of teaching. And thus the loop feeds into itself, making another set of kids who are afraid of math/science, etc...
I went to college I know education majors
It's rather difficult to take your post seriously, as it contains a large number of grammatical errors. Did you study English in college? I'm a professional programmer with strong respect for mathematics and science, but I also happen to hold the belief that grammatically correct written communications are extremely important. Sadly, many people in my line of work, along with those employed in various engineering disciplines, seem to maintain a rather elitist attitude that mysteriously includes a strong disdain for anything other than mathematics or science.
I have never taught professionally, but I do immensely enjoy teaching in an informal capacity. Whenever the opportunity presents itself, I try to stress the importance of a balanced approach to education. That said, most people are naturally better at some things than others. Perhaps this is something you might wish to consider before making any more heavily biased statements.
The stamp on the side of the box.
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
When my wife first bought her current African Grey parrot, Lolo, I thought it would be funny if she learned something from me. So, I started whistling. I started by whistling a few things like final fantasy fanfares and r2d2-like noises and eventually whistled my own (probably not very good) versions of full length songs. She has yet to pick up the fanfare but she picks up certain notes directly from it and has used those for communication. However, the really fun stuff is when she decided to whistle a random tune she's made up. They are nothing like anything I've ever whistled to her. They definitely have a music feel to them, though. I keep meaning to record her. When she wants my acknowledgement, she has a certain whistled phrase she sings to me. When I sing (not whistle, but sing.. again badly and offkey) she will start whistling her own tune.
My mother-in-law takes care of another Grey who I whistled for only a couple times when I first met him 5 years ago. Now, sometimes when I'm there he'll start whistling. My mother-in-law says it's only when I'm there.
Finally, my wife also has a Military Macaw that sings when people sing around him. He likes to hide when he's talking like that.. but it's definitely a humming, human voice like sound.
Is music as impressive as math? maybe not... but it's still impressive. Lolo amazes me every day with her beautiful, creative whistling.
That was my first thought wen I read the headline, followed by "Publishing standards must be at a new low". That was then followed by "It's no where near April 1st". :)
The I read the write up and realized how confused I was and, once again, how wonderfully ambiguous the English language can be.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Well, Alex can do sums up to 8 and so if we had 8 Alex's and an Meta-Alex that counted just Alex's and so on then you can see that we could build a quite complex Parrot Processor. This will come in handy in the post-apocalyptic world where there is no electricity but plenty of parrots because we will be able to construct vast turing machines that require nothing more than thousands of parrots and bird seed for power.
if your life is such a big joke then why should I care?
<rimshot/>
Have gnu, will travel.
While I agree on the one hand, on the other hand, go look at the administrators the average teacher has to put up with. During my 2.5 years of high school (before I did an equivalency and dropped out) we had like 3-4 new guard (ie under 30) teachers drop out, all in large part due to administrative politics, had chances for full-campus internet access dropped because of politicking over who should get to set up the system and administrate it (hint: they'd rather have 'friends' who were getting paid to do it with questionable credentials rather than professionals offering to volunteer their time to get it done.), and a student recieve an administrative parking space after being thrown out of his previous private school for being involved in a cheating ring (the parking space was later revoked, but since it was campus/district security that enforced it he continued parking there without ever being towed. Despite other students having cars towed for similiar circumstances!
And as a final example for my particular ex-school district, they closed down a former elementary school (having closed the intervening high school years before) and turned it into ADMINISTRATIVE OFFICES for the district office, while cutting salary and teaching positions across the district.
So in the defense of less competent teachers everywhere: It's practically a job requirement to be a career bureaucrat if you want to keep your sanity in the average middle-american school district. And from what I've heard and see at lower and upper division colleges similiar bullshit goes on there. Including hurting students over turf wars between departments and professors over the categorization of classes in order to allow professors to improve their pay by stealing away classes that had historically been in other departments for many years before the professors in question even knew of, nevermind applied at those schools.
Whoooooosh.
Yes. Back in about 1976 Psychology Today had a pair of articles - one showed that of all professions, teachers had the highest incidence of a 'mental block' against math, and the other showed that they were successful in communicating that to their students. In Grade 3 about 50% of all students liked math. By Grade 5, only about 15% of girls and 30% of boys liked math.
In my own experience, back in the late 1950s my school was one of those working with the experimental 'New Math' from Stanford Research Institute (now SRI international) - the books were stapled together paperbacks. The New Math basically taught math from an algebraic perspective. It worked great, and it probably accelerated my own understanding. Nationwide the New Math failed, and the analysis showed that while it worked great for students the teachers just couldn't hack it. So school systems dropped it, to the lasting detriment of all students for the last four decades.
It's yet one more unfortunate result of the stultified Education establishment, along with phonics, critical thinking and other power learning tools. The system was originally developed (by Dewey's own account) not to teach but to indoctrinate good industrial workers. The entire concept of age-based class cohorts was never efficient, cost effective or productive. It is now a completely obsolete anachronism, where crowd control and logistics comprises between 75% and 85% of a given day, and actual learning the poor relation.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
Has anyone wondered why the Arabs don't use 'Arabic Numerals'?
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
What was Alex's Erods Number?
The big problem with the "new math" was that parents who didn't know algebra (like mine) couldn't help their kids with their homework. Couple that with way too many kids in a classroom and a generation of inumerates was guaranteed.
It was a stupid idea. They should have taught the kids the old way first, then the new way.
Free Martian Whores!
I think it was Niels Bohr who said "Arithmetic is an exotic form of boolean algebra, and should not be taught to children".
Teaching the old way first was counter to the whole idea, which was that it was easier, faster and more effective to teach kids to think algebraically first. Teaching arithmetic first would have been the equivalent of teaching programmers BASIC before they are allowed to learn Java, or C, or whatever.
Having said that (and reviewing the Wikipedia article), I can probably agree that the original New Math may have gone too far, too fast, and perhaps too formal (though I don't recall those being issues when I was taking it as a youngster). But I would argue that the basic idea of using an algebraic approach, simple set theory, etc. is far better than the traditional system that has been proved to be a horrific disaster for most children - as this thread discusses.
It really just started out as a 'balancing' thing (which is the essence of algebra) - putting things at different places on two sides, and figuring out what the unknown thing had to be so that balance was maintained. I don't recall any examples of the work on sets, but I think it gave me a good early understanding of sets that was beneficial ever since.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/