Search Content

Displaying results 85451 - 85500 of 87950

What your teachers are doing

Almost all of your public school teachers have sex. Most of them enjoy it and do it repeatedly, even. Many of your public school teachers vote for the Democratic party. Some are conservative Republicans. Some are Communists. Some of your public school teachers are atheists. Or Episcopalians. Or Baptists. Or Scientologists. All of your public school teachers go home at the end of the school day and have private lives, where they do things that really aren't at all relevant to your 8 year old daughter, your 15 year old son. That you pay taxes to cover their salaries for doing their jobs during…

Stay Right There, Mendel

Back in March I described a provocative paper that suggested that plants might be able to get around Mendel's laws of heredity. Reed Cartwright, the grad student behind De Rerum Natura, left a comment expressing some deep skepticism. Now he reports that he and Luca Comai of the University of Washington have published a letter in the journal Plant Cell. You can read the letter for free. (There's another paper commenting on it in the journal, but it requires a subscription.) In the original experiment, scientists bred plants, noting which version of a gene called hothead got passed down to new…

Florida--Where The Living Is Still Contradictory

The deja vu is hitting hard. Two years ago a Pennsylvania court was hearing a challenge to introducing intelligent design into a public school in the town of Dover. At the time, I argued that people should look south to understand the stakes of the conflict. Down in Florida the state government seemed to be trying to have it both ways when it came to creationism. The chair of the state House Education Council introduced a bill that would allow students to sue their professors if they didn't consider intelligent in class. Governor Bush refused to comment on whether intelligent design should be…

Francis Collins is Confused

I just don't get it. On one hand, Francis Collins is clearly a bright guy and an established researcher. He headed the Human Genome Project, for cryin' out loud. He's an evangelical Christian, which I personally don't care about one way or the other, as long as his beliefs remain his personal beliefs. An article in the Washington Post, however, has me wondering what he's thinking. Certainly Dr. Collins is one of the more prominent advocates for the compatibility of science and religion. On one hand I admire that. Many of the extreme religious conservative persuasion have set up a…

Two varieities of reinforcement learning: Striatal & Prefrontal/Parietal?

Recent work has leveraged increasingly sophisticated computational models of neural processing as a way of predicting the BOLD response on a trial-by-trial basis. The core idea behind much of this work is that reinforcement learning is a good model for the way the brain learns about its environment; the specific idea is that expectations are compared with outcomes so that a "prediction error" can be calculated and minimized through reshaping expectations and behavior. This simple idea leads to exceedingly powerful insights into the way the brain works, with numerous applications to…

Towards Evidence of Absence: Conjunction Analyses in fMRI

An absence of evidence is not itself evidence for the absence of a particular effect. This simple problem - generally known as the problem of null effects - yields many difficulties in cognitive science, making it relatively easier to parcellate cognitive and neural processes into ever-finer detail than to show when two processes are identical. Recently, this problem has emerged for the wonder child of cognitive science, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The problem in this case is how to determine whether two tasks recruit at least one of the same areas of the brain in the…

"Untraining" The Brain: Meditation and Executive Function

In a fascinating review of the cognitive neuroscience of attention, authors Raz and Buhle note that most research on attention focuses on defining situations in which it is no longer required to perform a task - in other words, the automatization of thought and behavior. Yet relatively few studies focus on whether thought and behavior can be de-automatized - or, as I might call it if I were asking for trouble, deprogrammed. What would count as deprogramming? For example, consider the Stroop task, where subjects must name the ink color of each word in a list of color words (e.g., "red" might…

Beauty in the Brain: Fractal Scene Statistics and Ease of Processing

Neuroesthetics seeks to identify the neural basis of aesthetic experience - how does the brain give rise to the perception of beauty? A new paper in Network indicates that artists consistently create works which contain the same statistical properties as natural scenes, even when the objects being depicted do not themselves contain such statistics when photographed. Redies, Hanisch, Blickhan and Denzler review previous work demonstrating that the "spatial frequencies" of natural scenes (essentially, their spatial complexity) follow a 1/f power spectrum, where increased spatial complexity is…

When Brain Damage Helps: Solution Spaces Are Constrained by Prefrontal Cortex

Can you move a single matchstick to form a valid mathematical statement equation? No sticks can be discarded, an isolated slanted stick cannot be interpreted as I (one), and a V (five) symbol must always be composed of two slanted sticks. UPDATE: The only valid symbols are Roman numerals and "+", "-" and "=". (Thanks Benjamin!) OK, now try this one: [solutions here] If you had trouble with that last puzzle, fear not - it means your frontal lobe is probably intact! Healthy adults are frequently outperformed by patients with frontal brain damage on that test, according to a 2005 study by…

Synthetic Space: Binding Errors In Synesthesia

Some people experience an intermingling of the senses, known as synaesthesia, in which certain shapes become combined or "bound with" certain colors, or that certain colors are strongly associated with certain sounds. Of course, in healthy normal adults, color and shape become bound together only when visible shapes really are visibly colored - a process which is itself still a mystery of neuroscience. Yet similar mechanisms may be involved in both these kinds of "binding," but are merely more active in synaesthetes than in normal adults. Based on Patient RM, we know that binding between…

Some Things Never Change: Neural Processing and Familiarity

If presented with a novel and a familiar object, infants strongly prefer to touch and look at novel objects. However, if these objects are then obscured - in the dark, or by an occluding screen - infants tend to reach more in the direction of the familiar objects. Some argue that the familiar objects are represented more strongly by neural networks, whereas the relatively weaker representations of novel objects are more likely to decay in the absence of sensory input, and thus less likely to motivate an infant's reach. Similar mechanisms may exist in adults. A review of the literature…

Sensitivity to Frequency: A New Model of Hemispheric Asymmetry

"Imagine that the U.S. is preparing for the outbreak of an unusual Asian disease, which is expected to kill 600 people. Two alternative programs to combat the disease have been proposed." The first program will save 200 people. The second program has a 33% probability of saving all 600 people, but a 67% chance that no one will be saved. Which program would you choose? If you're like most people, you'll pick the first program. However, if these choices had been framed in terms of losses (i.e., 400 people will die in the first program, where the second program has a 33% chance that no one…

Darwinius Is Not a Human Ancestor

      Artist rendering of Darwinius.        Image: Julius T. CsotonyiLast year's publication of the fossil primate Darwinius masillae claimed it to be the oldest haplorhine primate ever discovered and a multimedia blitz campaign touted the find as the ultimate "missing link" (an erroneous term that should forthwith be forbidden to all science journalists). Brian Switek at Laelaps (who has an excellent review of this paper) made headlines for challenging the way that this fossil primate was rushed to market, and it seems that his concerns were more than justified. According to Brian's Op-Ed…

Salmonella--a little background

You've probably read about the current Salmonella outbreak. It's a fine example of what can happen when food is produced and distributed on an industrial scale---even one small contamination event can spread widely in the food supply, and there isn't much of a system in place to follow the trail of contaminants. Others have covered the public health implications of this outbreak, so I'd like to examine some other facts that make this outbreak disturbing. Salmonella likes non-human animals Some species of Salmonella cause typhoid fever. Typhoid fever, a nasty epidemic disease of humans, is…

Meeting an Astronaut

Last week, fresh off the fourth-to-last Shuttle mission, STS-131, NASA astronaut Jim Dutton came to speak at OMSI, my local science museum. When I got the email about this event, I RSVPed immediately -- after all, an astronaut in my town? How urbane. Surely the intelligentsia of Oregon would come in droves to discuss the boggling phenomenological experience of spaceflight and the uncertain future of NASA with one of our nation's "right stuff." As usual, I was wrong; the only adult in the museum unaccompanied by a least one small child, I felt somehow like a pervert, as though the harried…

String Theory, Part Two

The following is the second in a series of essays about the pragmatism of modern physics. It may be the last, because I am tripping out super-hard about this stuff and kind of want to start thinking about the ocean again. Did you see that scientists just discovered the world's smallest fish? Anyways, there has been quite a debate recently about String Theory. According to many, the assumptions upon which it is founded are unreliable. I couldn't even tell you what the exact conversation is, but it has something to do with the "alternate universe" aspects of the theory, and how the vast…

The accidental informaticist

The publisher Information Today runs a good and useful book series for librarians who find themselves with job duties they weren't expecting and don't feel prepared for. There's The Accidental Systems Librarian and The Accidental Library Marketer (that one's new) and a whole raft of other accidents. I suspect "The Accidental Informaticist" would find an audience, and not just among librarians. The long and short of it is, we just don't know who is going to do a lot of the e-research gruntwork at this point. Campus IT at major research institutions is seizing on the fun grid-computing work,…

Equipment and data curation

Monado of Science Notes commented on my irreplaceable-data post thusly: It sounds as if the best thing to do in the short term is not throw away the old equipment. And to use the old equipment to copy digital media to newer forms... for which no one ever gets a budget, right? It's such a great comment that I want to unpack it a bit. As we work out our data praxis, this kind of question is exactly what we have to confront. My first question is simple: What equipment are we talking about here? Using what media? Libraries are wearily familiar with this question in (mostly) analog terms. We have…

What should we be teaching CS students about collaboration?

If you read almost any academic blog, or Rate Your Students, or really any site that academics frequent, you'll encounter discussion, debate, and general bitching about students' lack of ability to (a) properly cite sources and (b) avoid plagiarism. Discussions with my academic friends in more writing-intensive disciplines bear out what cyberspace illustrates: students don't, or can't, or won't, properly cite sources. This carries over into computer science, too, though, and that's something that's been on my mind lately: How do we teach students how to properly "cite", and avoid…

Grow More Fat and Improve Metabolic Health: Insights from TZD Treatment

By now, readers of Obesity Panacea have hopefully learned that excess weight is not directly predictive of health risk, and that excess fat mass is not in itself unhealthy. Recall that approximately 30% of individuals who are classified as obese by their body weight turn out to be metabolically healthy, and in fact seem not to get much metabolic benefit (or may even get worse) when they lose weight. Also consider that individuals who have NO fat tissue (e.g. lipodystrophy) have extremely elevated metabolic risk factors, meanwhile others who can apparently indefinitely grow more fat mass (…

Michael Potemra reviews The Bias Against Guns

In the July 14 issue of National Review Michael Potemra has a review of The Bias Against Guns. He writes: Each of us has a favorite part of the Bill of Rights; for me---as for many others---it's the First Amendment. But a good rule of thumb is to consider that particular freedom most important which, at a particular time, is most under attack. And that's why John R. Lott Jr. of the American Enterprise Institute deserves the status of Hero of the Constitution in our time: He stands up for the embattled Second Amendment, the section of the Bill of Rights most hated…

Kleck's DGU numbers

Steve D. Fischer writes: The NCVS is clearly the most lied-to study in the manifold of studies we have available to date. Even your pal, Colin Loftin has accused it of undercounting your "direct family" spousal abuses by a factor of 12 and rapes by a clean factor of 33. I'd call that lying of a pretty massive scale, wouldn't you? The NCVS has been around for long enough for criminologists to be aware of crimes that it undercounts. It is known to significantly undercount non-stranger crimes, but no-one until now has suggested that it massively undercounts stranger crimes like robbery and…

It really is in your nature

Rarely will you see a scientist get more riled up than when thrust into a debate of Nature versus Nurture. While the cliche term covers a lot of different aspects of science, the basic debate centers around exactly how much of who we are lies in our genes. A new study in the Journal of Biopsychiatry gives the edge to Dawkins & Co. They found that boys with behavioral problems actually have different levels of the stress hormone cortisol than normal ones - so they can blame their genes, not their parent's upbringing, for their out-of-control antics. Cortisol, a stress hormone, is generally…

Eco-Pirate Featured in The New Yorker

Since Watson did not have authority, he made use of what he did have: publicity. For those of you who know Paul Watson, founder of Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, you won't be surprised to see this photo and long profile landed a cover story in this week's New Yorker. Not that Paul Watson is not worthy of a long profile. Without a doubt, Paul Watson is one of the (if not the) most energetic and outspoken advocates against the wholesale destruction of the oceans, accompanied by some radical gestures. I first heard Watson speak a decade ago and his dynamism attracted me to his cause. I…

This is not how you do science

There is a myth about how science progresses: great men have a eureka moment, and rush in to the lab to do the definitive experiment, often bravely and with the opposition of the Science Establishment, and single-handedly revolutionize a discipline. It's nonsense. I can't think of a single example of that kind of work that has gotten anywhere -- the closest might be Isaac Newton, who developed some great ideas working privately at his home in Woolsthorpe, but even he was tightly connected to a community of fellow scientists. Science is very much a communal and communicative endeavor, and is…

Fast Plasticity

Among the many wonders of neuroscience -- and central to the discipline -- is the brain's plasticity, its ability to rework synapses and networks to respond to new challenges and experiences. In this dynamic lies the physical explanation of the fluid nature of experience, thought, and consciousness. This is why I find so fascinating the work of those who proposed and discovered the mechanisms underlying this plasticity, such as Ramon y Cajal, Donald Hebb, and Eric Kandel. These and other researchers showed the fundamentals of how changing synapses allow our brains to learn new lessons and…

Ooooo - BUSTED! Alcohol doesn't impair a guy's ability to determine age

Many accused of statutory rape claim two things - 1) that the girl consented and 2) that they thought she was older. The first is unimportant - if the girl is underage, it's still rape. But in the US, there is a special defense clause which allows defendents leiniency if there is reasonable evidence they "mistook" a younger girl for one of consenting age. Many times lawyers claim that a girl's makeup or guy's consumption of alcohol impaired the offender's judgement of her age. As an excuse, it's pretty common among men charged with all varieties of sex with a minor. Well, researchers wanted…

Women think drunk is sexy - even though men don't.

If you've ever spent a night or two in a college dorm room in the past twenty years, you're bound to see one thing: drunk college students. They invent amazing methods of intoxication, from throwing ping pong balls into cups of beer to funneling alcohol off of someone's shoe. Nearly 1/3 of college students admit to missing at least one class due to alcohol or drug intoxication. And it doesn't just take a toll on their bodies: college students spend, on average, $900 a year on alcohol - that's twice what they spend on their text books. So why do students drink so heavily? Research, published…

That answers nothing

Here's an interesting exercise for you: summarize the Bible in one sentence. A bunch of theologians and pastors took a stab at it, and failed to escape their preconceptions and say anything that made any sense. The statements all vary in their length and their floweriness, but I picked this one example because it's fairly clear and representative. This is a one-sentence summary of the Bible by a Christian pastor: A holy God sends his righteous Son to die for unrighteous sinners so we can be holy and live happily with God forever. That is an empty statement, one that explains nothing and…

David Vitter and Congressional Pay: This Time, He's Actually Right.

If you hadn't figured it out by now, Senator David Vitter (R-LA) is not my favorite member of Congress. If asked for my personal ranking of Senators, I'd probably place him somewhere in the bottom 2%. That said, I really can't claim that he's always wrong. Every now and then, he proposes something that is completely reasonable - even if his motives aren't all that pure. Last week, he proposed an amendment to the big spending bill that would have eliminated the automatic cost-of-living pay increase that Congress gives itself every year. The amendment was shot down, ostensibly because it…

PRUUUUUUDES!

Jacqulyn Levin, a high school health education teacher, had a simple lesson plan to help students understand the anatomy of the female reproductive tract. "She stood in front of the students," district spokesman Jeff Puma said. "If you can picture a body builder flexing his arms and having his hands [above head level] out to the side, my hands would be the ovaries, my arms would be the fallopian tubes, and so on." That sounds perfectly reasonable to me — it's a way to get the layout of the structures clear in students' heads. I'll be teaching human physiology this term, and I'll just…

"Holds" on NOAA Administrator & Science Advisor Confirmations. Call Senators Now.

UPDATE: 4 Mar 09 There are now reports that Senator Menendez is not the only Senator holding up these nominations. I've got a new post up with the updated information and new suggestions for ways you can help. The Washington Post is reporting that Senate votes to confirm Jane Lubchenco as NOAA Administrator and John Holdren as Science Advisor are currently being obstructed by a Democratic Senator. Quoting multiple unnamed sources, the Post says that New Jersey Democrat Robert Menendez has placed an "anonymous hold" on the nominations in order to try to gain leverage for some issues related…

Sexual Metaphors at Hacker Camp

In the past it's not been my practice to read the business section of the newspaper but lately I've been paying more attention to it. Sunday, the Philadelphia Inquirer's business section featured an article I just couldn't resist: Hacker Camp: Computer programmers get to play attacker in order to learn how to do security better. Early in the article we learn that all the "campers" are men. This is discouraging. I don't know how attendees were recruited or selected but I'm guessing there wasn't a lot of outreach to women. This is the part of the article that really woke me up, however:…

Explaining (Away) Women Geeks

Liz Henry's delightful, insightful skewering of the sexism deployed in an article about Google VP Marissa Mayer provides a very recent example of a pattern noted by Ruth Oldenziel in Making Technology Masculine: Women who love technology require an explanation; men who love technology are just being masculine. Oldenziel notes: Whenever women enter computer rooms and construction sites as designers, hackers, and engineers...they need to be accounted for and explained. For decades scores of newspapers have reported, commented, and elaborated on the many "first" women who trespassed the…

We are not Geoffrey Beene's Kids!

Jerry Lewis, the comedian, hosts a yearly telethon to raise money for children with muscular dystrophy. I find it entirely unwatchable, because it comes across as patronizing and condescending, and seeing Jerry Lewis mug for the camera and present himself as the loving, maudlin hero trying to save these pathetic, pitiful wretches makes me want to kick him in the balls. I think he means well and he does want to raise money for a worthy charity, but by turning the ill into their disease he diminishes them. And by talking down to them and referring to people with muscular dystrophy as "Jerry's…

Compare and Contrast: Wide Sacrifice and Supporting the Troops.

One of my favorite teaching tools has always been the "compare and contrast" assignment. If you've gone through enough school to be able to read this post, you know what I'm talking about. Take two books, or essays, or sets of facts, compare them to each other, and talk about what's the same, what's different, and what the similarities and differences mean. It's a great assignment, because it forces you to not only examine a set of facts, but to look at them in the context of other data. Today, I found myself doing a compare and contrast between an old Presidential address and some recent…

Distinguishing Political Speech from Stupidity: A quick field guide.

I took a stroll over to the Campus Center here at UH Manoa a couple of hours ago, and was treated to an interesting sight. UH has been engaged in discussions with the Navy for a couple of years now about the possibility of getting Manoa designated as one of the Navy's University Affiliated Research Centers (UARC). There are a fair number of people on campus who are very much opposed to the idea, mostly because of concerns over the possibility of weapons research and/or classified research programs being conducted here. Personally, I'm not sure where I stand on the issue. I'm not a huge fan…

Chaplains in Australian schools

The conservative government of John Howard is proposing to offer $20,000 to any school to employ a "religious person" as a chaplain for students. This isn't blurring the line of separation between church and state, he says. It's just "common sense". Right. [Updated, so moved up to the top] I wonder how well it would go if an unbeliever tried to apply for this funding? How would Howard feel about my being employed to give counsel to young kids, say, between 12 and 16, on how to live without requiring religion as a prop to cope with social pressures? If I would fail, and let's face it, I would…

Sex and face recognition: Are male and female faces processed completely separately?

Take a look at these photos of Jim and Nora: They've clearly been distorted (using the "spherize" filter in Photoshop), but in opposite directions. Jim's been "expanded" to make more spherical, while Nora has been "contracted" to look more concave. If you look at these photos for a while, you might have difficulty recognizing how Jim and Nora look normally. This is an aftereffect. Aftereffects can be experienced in a number of ways, with dizziness being perhaps the most frequently observed -- spin around a few times with your eyes open and the room will appear to be spinning in the opposite…

Even non-musicians can express musical intentions with just one note

Last year Nora and I went on a hike in the remote Pasayten Wilderness in northern Washington state. Parts of the hike were extremely grueling, while other parts were quite easy and fun. I made this short video to try to capture the differences: The music was added as an afterthought, but in the end I think it's what makes the video so charming: without it, it would just be an ordinary walk in the woods. For each section of the trail, I chose a music clip that I thought expressed our feelings as we made our way along. Most people who watch the video agree: the music is totally appropriate to…

When are highly-anxious women most anxious? When you least expect it

Take a group of 18- and 19-year-old women, college freshmen and sophomores. Then test them to find out who has the most social anxiety: who's most nervous about dealing with other people, particularly in public situations. What would be the most difficult thing you could ask these high-social-anxiety women to do? How about this: I would like you to prepare and deliver a four-minute talk. This talk will be videotaped and viewed later by several professors and graduate students.... It is extremely important that you do the best job that you can with this talk.... Your talk should be about the…

Weather is not a pest

A few months ago, I attended a conference called Writing Home, Science, Literature, and the Aesthetics of Place, which had a nice byline written by Gary Geddes. It read: "Philosophy," Novalis said, "is really homesickness, it is the urge to be at home everywhere." The home-place assumes many different guises. A physicist or mathematician may sometimes feel at home amongst, and speak of the beauty or elegance of, ideas, concepts, formulas, even shapes such as the ellipse. Writers, too, have always struggled with the problem of place and its literary evocation, even after Oscar Wilde declared…

The language of sacrifice

Fellow Scienceblogger Sharon "Casaubon's Book" Astyk warns us that the latest thinking on proximity to climate tipping points supports the premise that we can't make the transition to a post-carbon economy without surrendering some of that oh-so-sacred American way of life. At least, that the message I get from this: I have argued for many years that we are going to, in the end, have to turn to the language of sacrifice and selflessness, of unity in the face of potential disaster -- even potential failure -- and that we are better off (because we then achieve at least honesty) choosing that…

Bacteria boasts tiny genome, is codependent

Scientists have discovered a bacteria the survives with an incredibly small number of genes: The tiniest genomes ever found belong to two types of bacteria that live inside insects, researchers have announced. One of these types of bacteria, Carsonella ruddii, is so small that it could perhaps be considered an organelle within the cells of the bugs. But both microbe species face the threat of extinction because of their small genome size, experts say. C. ruddii has the fewest genes of any cell known in the world - a mere 182, according to the new results. Humans, by comparison boast…

Not your normal Myers-Briggs

You've taken a Myers-Briggs personality inventory before right? They are usually strings of yes-or-no questions that give you a result like INTJ or ENTP. These kinds of tests populate the internet, and for what they are worth they are fun time-wasters and moderately gratifying. This one is just funny. It reframes the descriptions of the resulting personality types. For example, I usually get classified as a INTJ -- under most classifications it is called a Mastermind. Under this classification here is my description: INTJ: The outside contractor INTJs are solid, competent personalities…

Ronald Bailey at Reason analyzes a new anti-GM argument

Ronald Bailey from Reason Magazine has an article covering one of the more pernicious arguments against genetically modified foods: Long time anti-biotech activist Jeremy Rifkin has come out in favor of a biotechnology technique. Should beleaguered biotechnologists break out the champagne and start celebrating? Not hardly. Earlier this week, Rifkin wrote an op/ed in the Washington Post in which he declared his support for marker assisted selection (MAS) for use in plant breeding. So far, so good. MAS is a molecular technique in which researchers identify sections of DNA in a plant or animal…

Casual Fridays: Most citizens don't pass the citizenship test

Last week we wondered how thorough news reporters were being when they conducted "person on the street" interviews with questions from the U.S. citizenship test. We decided to administer the test a bit more systematically (but still not scientifically). Over 680 people responded to our study, allowing us to get some pretty solid results. The headline is what we stated above: Most U.S. citizens didn't get a passing grade on the test -- even though we were very generous in grading the tests. We didn't even count off for spelling errors and accepted answers that were only partially correct. But…

What's the best way to praise a child? Be specific.

In 1999, Melissa Kamins and Carol Dweck made a striking discovery about the best way to praise children. When you are helping a child learn to read, saying "you are a smart girl" as opposed to "you did a good job reading" results in very different behavior when she has trouble reading in the future. Children who have received praise about their abilities ("you're smart") rather than specific praise about a task ("you did a good job ___") are more likely to exhibit "helpless" behavior when they encounter problems. Even though they were praised in both cases, telling kids they are "smart" just…

If only our kids smiled more, we'd buy them more T-shirts (but probably not vodka)

On our recent trip to Europe, we had a hard time getting the kids to smile for pictures. Most of our pictures of Nora ended up looking something like this (actually this one's a self portrait, but you get the idea): Here her expression is basically neutral, and if it wasn't such a dramatic shot, it would be a bit boring. When we could get her to smile, often the smile was inauthentic -- posed, or even sarcastic, like in this shot: Here she's expressing mock excitement over her parents' excitement about the figure depicted in the statue: Leonardo Fibonacci, the great mathematician (click…

Can mirror neurons tell us if something is alive?

Take a look at this movie (QuickTime Required): The moving object is exactly the same in each picture, but the background is different. If you're like most people, you'll see one object as an ice skater, and the other as a spinning top. This puts the objects in two different classes -- animate (something that can move by itself: a human, animal, robot, and so on) and inanimate (something that requires an external force to move). Do we perceive the two objects differently? Arguably, it's important that we do: if an object can move by itself, it's much more likely to be a threat to us than…