Ah, research, I love it. Like today’s inbox – if you’re a teen girl who is on the internet too much and drink alcohol, it adversely influences your health! Or maybe you’d like to check out some punk-rock robots who pogo for science?
“The robot brain, for want of a better word, was played lots of punk, reggae, disco and classical and over a period of time the robot has learned to recognise and appreciate the patterns of sound in punk music,” he said.
The neural network understands the music in a similar way to a human brain, breaking down the sound into a series of frequency bands.
Programmer Jons Jones Morris said: “Breaking down the sound produces a map of the audio over time which is turned into an image. That image is submitted to one of the neural networks.”
Punk fans can dance alongside the pogoing robots.
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Using this “adaptive resonance theory”, the neural networks begin to build up a history of different patterns relating to different sounds.
…The robot reacts to the level of “punk” in the song.
The more punk it believes the song is, the more it pogos in a “happy and frenzied way”, said Professor McOwan.
But the last big broo-har that got everyone pogo-ing in a different way was one I personally witnessed over the reporting of research on TV. This happened when I was at the Australian Skeptics special convention at Wagga Wagga in April, where quite a few fellow attendees had some words to say to Dr Paul Willis about this televised report:
One of the changes sweeping through our society this century is that women are having fewer children, later in life. That may explain why the use of IVF to assist pregnancy is growing by up to 15% a year in Australia.
But experts say that science and technology has reached a plateau, and improvements in the success of these fertility treatments may only come from entirely different medical traditions – like acupuncture.
Mark Horstman travels to Beijing and Adelaide to find out.
You can read the transcript or watch the entire ep from the link. And if you’re interested in what research has been done before on acupuncture, I wrote about it here.
Apparently it was the MOST complained-about ep of the popular Science show ‘Catalyst’ they ever got. And Willis had nothing to do with it, I assure you! In fact, the poor guy had to assure a lot of people at the convention, people kept coming up to grumble about the small sample they did, what the controls were, just how reputable the study was… and then, today, in BBC news:
There is no evidence acupuncture improves the success of IVF treatment, scientists say.
The complementary therapy has been used for centuries in China to aid female fertility and it is now available privately via some NHS clinics.
But the London-based researchers told a European fertility conference an analysis of 13 trials covering almost 2,500 women did not show any benefits.
…The experts from Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Trust carried out an extensive evaluation of the research carried out over the last 50 years.
Five of the trials analysed by the team looked at the effect of acupuncture at the time of egg retrieval, while the other eight examined the benefits of giving it at the time of embryo implantation.
There was some evidence patients undergoing egg retrieval did need less pain relief if they had acupuncture, they told the European Society for Human Reproduction and Embryology meeting in Barcelona.
However, neither group of studies showed any difference in pregnancy rates between those given true acupuncture, those given a sham version and those given nothing.
Yes, more research gets done… But I hope Catalyst gets into this story too, in order to clear a few things up. Or at least stop people getting peeved at Dr Willis…
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
“This study has shown that there’s no proof that acupuncture can help – so that suggests that there should be lots more studies to examine the question.” – Paul Robin chairman the Acupuncture Society
I really don’t follow this logic. If a meta-analysis of high quality studies show that acupuncture doesn’t help, why should there be done more studies?
(of course you cannot judge something based on one meta-analysis only, but you should still consider the results of it, when talking about funding further research)
Dear Mr. Paul Robin, just because you don’t like the results, or because reality conflicts with your anecdotal experience, does not mean that we should waste anymore research money in this area.
That’s the one big flaw in evidenced-based medicine – it doesn’t consider plausibility.
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