Crystal’s Neighborhood

If you read the comments on yesterday's post, you'll know that today leaves the bonobos in the dust for VOLES!

Voles are a small rodent and are often confused with mice, moles, and rats, and are only found in the northern hemisphere. There are 155 species of voles (although these guys say 124), including pine, water, mountain, etc. They will eat a wide variety of food, from bark to dead animals and insects. They are quite fond of roots and bulbs, often killing the plant before the gardener realizes the animals are even there.

And hey, voles even have their own website! I think they should send one of their own out to design classes, though, to spruce the page up a bit. They're small, they could sneak into class in someone's backpack.

Apparently voles deserve more attention. Purdue University states that they are the fastest evolving mammal and are a bit of a genetic enigma.

Today's final vole lesson is taught in pictures:

Mole not vole

Vole not mole

1 comment

So, who wants to throw out a topic for tomorrow's post?

Nablo1109

Automatic posting from my Twitter Account:

• 22:40 Wonderful ballet program tonite. With the bad weather, it looked like a number of folks didn't make it which is too bad.
• 08:12 Slept in & moving slow. More stormy weather on its way. A good day for soup-making and knitting.
• 08:49 Colonoscopy this week. Researching semi-creative ideas for clear liquid diet (required the day before). Maybe some homemade beef broth.
• 09:29 Going to get back into the swing of #BBA this weekend with bagels. Will bake Monday morning to take to staff meeting, assuming all goes well
• 10:49 It's a dark and stormy.... Saturday morning. Amazing how dark it is. I wanted to plant some mums this weekend - crossing that off the list.
• 16:15 This is a potato-soup-and-cornbread sorta day.
• 16:38 Whenever I'm peeling a batch of potatoes, I feel like I'm on KP duty in one of those old army movies.
• 18:53 Getting ready for symphony - all Russian program tonight if my memory serves me right.

The big debate in teaching primates, among other animals, is that while some say they are learning language, others insist it is merely communication, generally for a reward like food, that the primate has learned. In other words, simply a learned response, no different from a dog learning to sit or roll over for a treat. Are primates just a more trainable subjects?

There's a specific notation that I can't copy the first article I want to point out, so here is the link. It is an opinion piece on an online freelance site. I do not know anything about the author so I can't tell you what her background is.

The next article is long and I don't want to clog up anyone's Neighbourhood view, so here is a link from the New York Times, June 6, 1995 edition. The article is titled "Chimp Talk Debate: Is It Really Language?"

Additional interesting link:

Nova audiovisual slideshow.

Kanzi lexigram

Nablo1109

sometimes i wish i had that magical, twitchy nose like that samantha from bewitched. ah - when t.v. shows were a league of their own. in a good way.

and as much as i wished i had powers to make my closet, or any space in my house, either big or small, become instantly organized and clean in matter of a milli-second, the reality is, of course, that i can't do that. and even if i could, would i really be using my powers just to clean closets?

anyway, this is something i have been wanting to do since september but something always came up. and as we had no plans today, i decided to go for it.

two hours later, i am left with just my cd case and one half of a shelf piled of magazines to go through. and i just can't do anymore. two hours in a closet is enough! i will do that half a shelf and cds another day.

most importantly, i organized all the christmas presents that i bought. yes, that's right. you heard me.

not only do i organize my christmas shopping lists into spreadsheets where there is one spreadsheet for each - my familly, doug's family, doug and chaeli and misc. gift... not only do i create another spreadsheet to correlate with the other four, but this one being by store, either online or off, so i don't end up running all over town, hitting stores more then once... but at some point, i organize my gifts so that all the gifts going to thunderbay are in one or two large shopping bags, and i do the same for presents for chaeli, doug and my own side of the familly.

there is a chaotic period where i shop and just pile everything in the corner of my walk-in closet, still in their bags/boxes.

it was driving me crazy. now, they are all organized. all i need to do is pull them out in the order that they need to be wrapped - doug's family being the front in line.

yup.

i'm psychotic.

Quiet days. Mildly depressed as I always seem to be every November what with a long cold winter ahead of us. 

The canal at night

Automatic posting from my Twitter Account:

• 18:30 Getting ready to go to the ballet on a dark & stormy night.

This is a direct copy of an article by Paul Raffaele for Smithsonian magazine, written in 2006.

To better understand bonobo intelligence, I traveled to Des Moines, Iowa, to meet Kanzi, a 26-year-old male bonobo reputedly able to converse with humans. When Kanzi was an infant, American psychologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh tried to teach his mother, Matata, to communicate using a keyboard labeled with geometric symbols. Matata never really got the hang of it, but Kanzi—who usually played in the background, seemingly oblivious, during his mother’s teaching sessions—picked up the language.

Savage-Rumbaugh and her colleagues kept adding symbols to Kanzi’s keyboard and laminated sheets of paper. First Kanzi used 6 symbols, then 18, finally 348. The symbols refer to familiar objects (yogurt, key, tummy, bowl), favored activities (chase, tickle), and even some concepts considered fairly abstract (now, bad).

Kanzi learned to combine these symbols in regular ways, or in what linguists call"proto-grammar."Once, Savage-Rumbaugh says, on an outing in a forest by the Georgia State University laboratory where he was raised, Kanzi touched the symbols for"marshmallow"and"fire."Given matches and marshmallows, Kanzi snapped twigs for a fire, lit them with the matches and toasted the marshmallows on a stick.

Savage-Rumbaugh claims that in addition to the symbols Kanzi uses, he knows the meaning of up to 3,000 spoken English words. She tests his comprehension in part by having someone in another room pronounce words that Kanzi hears through a set of headphones. Kanzi then points to the appropriate symbol on his keyboard. But Savage-Rumbaugh says Kanzi also understands words that aren’t a part of his keyboard vocabulary; she says he can respond appropriately to commands such as"put the soap in the water"or"carry the TV outdoors."

About a year ago, Kanzi and his sister, mother, nephew and four other bonobos moved into a $10 million, 18-room house and laboratory complex at the Great Ape Trust, North America’s largest great ape sanctuary, five miles from downtown Des Moines. The bonobo compound boasts a 13,000-square-foot lab, drinking fountains, outdoor playgrounds, rooms linked by hydraulic doors that the animals operate themselves by pushing buttons, and a kitchen where they can use a microwave oven and get snacks from a vending machine (pressing the symbols for desired foods).

Kanzi and the other bonobos spend evenings sprawled on the floor, snacking on M & M’s, blueberries, onions and celery, as they watch DVDs they select by pressing buttons on a computer screen. Their favorites star apes and other creatures friendly with humans such as Quest for Fire, Every Which Way But Loose, Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan and Babe.

Through a glass panel, Savage-Rumbaugh asks Kanzi if it’s OK for me to enter his enclosure."The bonobos control who comes into their quarters,"she explains. Kanzi, still the alpha male of this group in his middle age, has the mien of an aging patriarch—he’s balding and paunchy with serious, deep-set eyes. Squealing apparent agreement, he pushes a button, and I walk inside. A wire barrier still separates us."Kanzi can cause you serious damage if he wants,"Savage-Rumbaugh adds.

Kanzi shows me his electronic lexigram touch pad, which is connected to a computer that displays—while a male voice speaks—the words he selects. But Kanzi’s finger slips off the keys."We're trying to solve this problem,"says Savage-Rumbaugh.

She and her colleagues have been testing the bonobos’ ability to express their thoughts vocally, rather than by pushing buttons. In one experiment she described to me, she placed Kanzi and Panbanisha, his sister, in separate rooms where they could hear but not see each other. Through lexigrams, Savage-Rumbaugh explained to Kanzi that he would be given yogurt. He was then asked to communicate this information to Panbanisha."Kanzi vocalized, then Panbanisha vocalized in return and selected ‘yogurt’ on the keyboard in front of her,"Savage-Rumbaugh tells me.

With these and other ape-language experiments, says Savage-Rumbaugh,"the mythology of human uniqueness is coming under challenge. If apes can learn language, which we once thought unique to humans, then it suggests that ability is not innate in just us."

But many linguists argue that these bonobos are simply very skilled at getting what they want, and that their abilities do not constitute language."I do not believe that there has ever been an example anywhere of a nonhuman expressing an opinion, or asking a question. Not ever,"says Geoffrey Pullum, a linguist at the University of California at Santa Cruz."It would be wonderful if animals could say things about the world, as opposed to just signaling a direct emotional state or need. But they just don’t.”

Whatever the dimension of Kanzi’s abilities, he and I did manage to communicate. I’d told Savage-Rumbaugh about some of my adventures, and she invited me to perform a Maori war dance. I beat my chest, slapped my thighs and hollered. The bonobos sat quiet and motionless for a few seconds, then all but Kanzi snapped into a frenzy, the noise deafening as they screamed, bared their teeth and pounded on the walls and floor of their enclosure. Still calm, Kanzi waved an arm at Savage-Rumbaugh, as if asking her to come closer, then let loose with a stream of squeaks and squeals."Kanzi says he knows you're not threatening them," Savage-Rumbaugh said to me," and he'd like you to do it again just for him, in a room out back, so the others won't get upset.”

I’m skeptical, but I follow the researcher through the complex, out of Kanzi's sight. I find him, all alone, standing behind protective bars. Seeing me, he slapped his chest and thighs, mimicking my war dance, as if inviting me to perform an encore. I obliged, of course, and Kanzi joined in with gusto.

Here's a video of Kanzi at the Great Ape Trust, in Iowa, where he lives.

Tomorrow, critics of Kanzi's "learning".

Nablo1109

I just had a wrong number. For Elric.

What is the first thought that goes through your head?

Cos mine was Elric? Fuck! Will he have Stormbringer and call on the Dukes of Hell?

Not good on a Friday evening.