Dogs "Classify" "Complex" Photos
"Dogs Can Classify Complex Photos In Categories Like Humans Do "
Doesn't that have an elevated sound to it? Are dogs reading tactical satellite data; using Google Earth to find new hydrants?
Not exactly. Turns out dogs can recognize color pictures of other dogs.
Well duh.
True, a modern robot intellect would find the task quite challenging, categorizing some dogs by breed, others by flatness and thread count. But seriously, can't we take for granted, even scientifically, that dogs can recognize other dogs? Sure it's interesting to know that they can recognize a dog in a photo, but it really doesn't rise to the level of genius to recognize a potential breeding partner. Were grants written for this stuff? Did real foundations send them real money, or was it from a government budget?
Briefly, in case you didn't follow the link, they trained dogs to click on photos of dogs, and then broke out champaigne when their trained dogs clicked on pictures containing dogs, even -- get this -- even when those photo dogs were presented in the midst of a "landscape," what we of the incognoscenti call "outdoors". Wow, talk about a cutting-edge revelation.
The landscape photos that the experimenters intermixed with doggy portraits are totally incidental to the method of the experiment as portrayed in the article. Pictures of dogs were clicked on, after training to do just that, and that proves that dogs are geniuses?
(Dog owners will of course draw exception to my manderings; and rightly so -- because they already know their pets are geniuses. If I worshipped a dog owner, he'd probably think I was a genius too.)
A high-school psych class would have done a better job of designing this experiment -- well, depending on where you went to high-school, I guess.
Do the researchers really think that dogs can't recognize another dog by sight, even when the other dog is holding perfectly still for some reason? That's what probably got their attention. Other dogs, if dog owners will pardon me the observation, are the second-most important things in a dog's life, but only when they're not the first-most important things. How could they NOT recognize other dogs? Dogs know dogs, skunks skunks, and bats bats; albeit not always by sight. Without the basic skill of same-species identification, every animal generation would be the last.
Those clever dogs also seem to have noticed that they got kibble when they stepped on doggy pictures. Well, why not? I'd notice it, and I don't even like kibble.
The good researchers ought to at least admit the possiblity that a dog might know what dogs look like, and use some other symbolism scheme. Even so, the test they used is brain-dead, because the subject has only to learn to click on the same symbol every time it comes up -- and our stalwart warriors of science have conveniently already trained it to do just that. I expect a rash of intellectual squirrels in the literature.
Another acorn picture. Click. Wow, it knows acorns from airplanes; add that to the list!
This is like the so-called "Tornado in the Shower." A couple of years ago some assistant professor proposed, on the basis of a few "vortex-like" vectors in a simulation of airflow through an empty shower, that vortex vacuum was the real culprit for the way the clammy-cold bottom of the shower curtain seeks out and clings to your legs in the shower. It wasn't hot-air-rising, as we'd all learned in third grade, and pulling the cold air in at the bottom.
The shower tornado got attention in "Discover" magazine, who wouldn't know real science if it bit them, but are absolutely gaga about vortexes. A better treatment is here. In the rush toward this dawning paradigm in scientific cleanliness, everyone unaccountable forgot that most of the time a shower is running, there is a body in it -- a human body more than large enough to break up the flow of multiple "vortex-like" air vectors. Yet, even with all of those nascent vortexes continually being swept up and over the top of the curtain with the rest of the hot air, the cold bottom halves of the world's shower curtains still stalk our collective thighs.
Try this: run the shower cold and empty. The curtain pretty much just hangs there, utterly ignoring whatever fierce vortex-engendered suckage may be occuring inside, until you think to turn on the hot water.
Why do people overlook such things? My own theory is that when a person finds him or herself unexpectedly standing in a cold shower, he or she is suddenly too preoccupied to take notes on what the curtain is up to. That, and the predictable triumph of sexiness over sense in today's world.
People just loved the idea of a powerful "tornado" in their shower. After all, they buy "scrubbing bubbles" toilet cleaners for the fantasy of happy-slave brushes that just long to skate themselves around the inner rims of our toilet bowls for us. Everyone wants their own slave race, even if it's only an army of singing brushes. Now that's sexy!
Thankfully however, though the meme of the shower vortex was seductive, it doesn't seem to have made it past the first degree of connection: I only ever heard one live comment about it, from a woman smugly observing that she didn't have to worry about the vortex because she had "the little magnets" in her curtain. People just don't care enough to remark on it. The new theory tests out the same way the old theory did, and can therefore be instantly accepted, purely on the basis of its sexiness.
Science hurts my brain. At least blindfold the dogs next time, so they can't cheat by looking.
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So now where's my kibble? I pushed your damn button. Again.
You see this drool? You did this to me.
You think this is my "adoring" stare, don't you? It's not. I'm waiting for you to justify all the promises you made that you didn't keep. And how come YOU get to go out ALL the time, and I just get walkies? You think it's so fun, holding it in while I listen for the car all day long?
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Addendum: I confess that I've kept the unpleasant truth about shower vortexing to myself, lo these long years, as a kind of experiment. I wanted to know when people would begin to realize that it was all just hot air after all. "Never," appears to be the answer.
It's been so long now, that my heretical attack on the vortex will doubtless shock many otherwise unexcitable types. Everyone in the world, it seems, now either accepts the sexy new dogma of vortex-powered differential shower-curtain deflection, or really couldn't give a fig. The intrepid researcher himself, if he has had any second thoughts on the subject, is wisely keeping them to himself.
But I just couldn't take it any longer. The truth had to come out.
I feel much better now.
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Addendum 2:
Turns out I'm human after all :) I got it wrong about the author of the shower vortex being a graduate student. He's actually David Schmidt, who was an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in July of 2001, as I found out here when I scroogled it. I corrected that in the entry above, and added a link to the info. Turns out that he ran a $28,000 fluid dynamics software package for most of two weeks to get a thirty-second simulated shower run. My basic commentary remains, of course: put a body in that shower, and the "vortex" will vanish back into simulated limbo. Maybe Prof. Schmidt could do another run...