Study finds babies do learn from videos

By Megan McRainey

Children under two years old can learn certain communication skills from a video, such as how to use signs in sign language, and perform similarly in tests when compared to babies taught by their parents, according to a new paper in the journal Child Development.

Led by researchers at Emory, the study is the first to isolate the effects of purportedly educational commercial videos on infant learning. The results contradict previous research, which showed little evidence of learning from video in children under the age of two, or less robust learning than more traditional forms of parent instruction.

Emory’s study found that babies were consistently able to understand the signs and pick out a photo of the corresponding object after watching an instructional video for 15 minutes, four times a week for three weeks. Babies who watched the video performed just as well in tests as babies who had been taught signs by their parents under similar conditions (15 minutes of instruction, four times per week for three weeks) but without a video.

After a week without instruction, babies in all experimental groups were still able to produce the signs — a much more difficult task than simply recognizing them. However, babies in parent-supported groups were able to produce a greater number of signs overall.

Read more about the study here.

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Interstellar: Starting over on a new 'Earth'

The movie Interstellar opens in theaters at a time when Earth is facing major losses of biodiversity and ecosystems, says David Lynn, an Emory professor of biomolecular chemistry.

While humanity is challenged to find out what’s happening to Earth and how to make adjustments, we have also begun to realize that billions of Earth-like planets likely exist in habitable zones around the stars of our galaxy.

“In as little as 10 years, we could know whether we’re alone in the universe, whether there are other living systems,” Lynn says. “That’s an exciting prospect. It’s not clear necessarily that we’ll find out that there is intelligent life or not. That may be a lower probability, but that’s also possible.”

Much of the science in Interstellar is not accurate, and its vision of the future may not come true. And yet, it is still an important film, Lynn says, since its themes resonate today, during a critical time in our history.

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Doing math with movie stars

Emory mathematician Ken Ono, left, coaches actor Dev Patel for his portrayal of the math genius Ramanujan, on the set of "The Man Who Knew Infinity." (Photos by Sam Pressman.)

By Carol Clark

Emory mathematician Ken Ono did not plan for his career to veer into the movie business. Unexpected paths can open, however, when your work involves unraveling the trail of mysteries left by Srinivasa Ramanujan. The Indian math genius had little formal education, but filled notebook after notebook with fantastic formulas that he said were visions from a Hindu goddess.

While British colonialism was still at its height, English mathematician G.H. Hardy helped Ramanujan become a scholar at Cambridge University, where he dazzled and baffled professors. Ramanujan died in 1920 at the age of 32, leaving behind many extraordinary contributions to math, along with big questions about the proofs underlying his work.

The film is based on a 1991 book

Ono is among those who’ve cracked some of these questions: Most notably, the realization in 2011 that partition numbers are fractals, an insight that opened a theoretical window onto “seeing” their infinitely repeating superstructure. Ono’s team also devised the first finite formula for calculating the partitions of any number.

In July, Ono received a request from film director Matt Brown in London to chat over Skype about a biopic he was working on. “The Man Who Knew Infinity,” produced by Stillwater Pictures, will feature Dev Patel as Ramanujan and Jeremy Irons as Hardy.

Ono happily agreed to the Skype session. The next thing he knew, he was flying to London to serve as an on-the-scene consultant during filming at Pinewood Studios.

In the following Q&A, eScienceCommons talks with Ono about what it’s like for a mathematician to get swept up into the production of a major motion picture.

eScienceCommons: What did you and Matt Brown talk about during that Skype session? 

Ken Ono: I had gone to India in 2012 to work on a docu-drama about Ramanujan by an Indian film company. Matt had seen that short movie, and he knew that as part of that project I had gotten to actually hold Ramanujan’s original notebooks and go through them. For his movie, Matt wanted me to advise the art department to ensure the props were accurate. And also to make sure that the script had all the math details right. The problem with the partition numbers raised by Ramanujan is a key part of the script and Matt said he found it fascinating that mathematicians still hadn’t cracked that mystery. I told him, “Actually, I led the team that solved that problem a couple of years ago.”

His response was: “You need to come to England tomorrow, if you can!”

I was already planning to compete in the World Triathlon Championships in Germany in two weeks, so I agreed to just go to Europe early and spend that time in London.

Working with the art department to get every detail right. "All of the math in this movie will be absolutely accurate," Ono says. 

eSC: What was your first day of work like? 

Ono: A driver came and picked me up from my London hotel in a BMW. I’m definitely not accustomed to having my own personal driver! Pinewood Studios is in a rural area. We traveled through pastures with cows grazing in them and then, out of nowhere, you see these gigantic buildings. 

The art department for the film is amazing. They were reproducing artifacts related to Ramanujan in fanatical detail, including 100-year-old issues of mathematical journals and an 11-page letter he wrote to Hardy. One person’s job was to master Ramanujan’s handwriting and replicate it. They had more than 400 photos taken from reconnaissance trips to various places and they asked me what it was like to be in Ramanujan’s home, which I had visited when I was in India.

Kevin McNally, left, is portraying British mathematician Major McMahon. "McNally played Mr. Gibbs in 'Pirates of the Caribbean' and he would do this pirate fist bump," Ono says. "I'm not sure what it means."

eSC: How did you wind up actually working with the actors? 

Ono: The second day when I arrived at the studio Matt Brown said, “We need you to come to rehearsal.” So suddenly I found myself in a room witnessing two world-class actors, Dev Patel and Jeremy Irons, recreating one of the greatest stories of math, and one that has been the basis of my career. It was a huge thrill.

I was the only mathematician present and I was helping to both get the math right and tweak the dialog to maximize the impact of each scene. A big part of the movie is how Ramanujan and Hardy learn to understand each other so they can work together. Their cultures and their methods of doing math are in conflict.

In a scene soon after Ramanujan arrives in England, Hardy is trying to get him to write down a proof to one of his formulas. But Ramanujan received his formulas as complete visions and thought it was a waste of time to write down proofs of things he already knew. I explained to the actors that there is a difference between a claim, or a formula, and a proof. For trained mathematicians, a proof is necessary, it gives value to a statement. Ramanujan eventually realized why it’s important to prove things, that even he can make a mistake.

Taking a break from filming, from left: Producer Ed Pressman, Jeremy Irons, Dev Patel, Ken Ono, Matt Brown and actress Sorel Carradine.

Another key part of the movie is Ramanujan and Hardy working together to find a good approximation for the partition numbers. These numbers grow at an astronomical rate. I described what it’s like for two mathematicians to be working at a board, trying to figure something out. I wanted the actors to know that when you finally are confident that you have a method to find the answer, that’s the “aha” moment, not the dotting of the i’s that comes later. We wanted the audience to really feel what it meant to get closer and closer to a theorem. Ramanujan had an idea and Hardy had the technical expertise required to write it out.

It's pivotal when Hardy realizes that they have found a way to approximate the partition numbers. We needed a line of dialogue to describe his excitement over this insight into these numbers that keep growing so rapidly. We couldn’t use the word “trillions” because it wasn’t part of the British vernacular in the early 18th century.

I suggested the line, “Ramanujan, you are truly the man who knows infinity.” It both makes mathematical sense and it worked the name of the name of the movie into the script.

When we finally got all of the details of the scene right, and Jeremy Irons read that line in his magical voice, the feeling was electric!

A letter from Ramanujan to Hardy is among the many props painstakingly reproduced by the art department for the film.

eSC: What’s your favorite scene of those that you worked on? 

Ono: One scene that I am quite fond of shows Ramanujan sitting in a class of students at Cambridge looking absolutely bored as a professor discusses a math problem. The professor resents having this lowly Indian in his class. And Ramanujan is not even taking notes, which is infuriating to him. So he challenges Ramanujan to complete a formula. Ramanujan walks to the board and instantly writes it out. 

My job was to come up with a formula for the scene that makes sense in terms of the topic of the class. It also had to be complex enough to be impressive, but simple enough so that it would not be too difficult for Dev Patel to easily remember it and write it down quickly.

I chose a special decimal expansion for Pi, which involves having the odd numbers in order by means of a special fraction that Ramanujan knew. Ramanujan saw beautiful patterns in numbers and I wanted the math for the scene to reflect that. The formula had to look pleasing to the eye, so whether you were an expert or not you could sense this beautiful symmetry that represents Ramanujan’s talent.

Between takes: "Jeremy Irons' attention to detail is amazing," Ono says.

eSC: How did the actors react to having a mathematician working with them? 

Ono: I was referred to as “the guy who cracked partitions” all over the set. Dev Patel did a hilarious, over-the-top impression of me talking about math. I didn’t realize I got so excited.

He is only 24, very humble and super smart, although he’ll tell you that he’s bad at math. He’s a great actor and fun person. Someone took a video of he and I running across a campus green, and then kept playing it backwards.

It was mostly, however, very serious hard work and really long days. The actors were really down-to-earth and focused.

Jeremy Irons’ attention to detail is amazing. He now knows that Pi(x) is not always less than Li(x). We discussed partitions, Skewe’s number, PNT and the Old English ways of pronouncing huge numbers. 

For one scene, Hardy barges into the vice chancellor of the university’s office, to tell him that he must not reject Ramanujan for a Royal Society fellowship. Irons was wearing a top coat and a hat and before each take for this 15-second scene he would walk fast in a circle about 20 times. Then he knocks on the door.

When I asked why he did that, he explained that walking in circles changed his face slightly and said, “Acting angry is the easy part. Convincing the audience that I just ran across campus in a huff is much harder.”

Irons even practiced Hardy’s handwriting using a 1930s-era fountain pen. The movie opens with Hardy writing this very special speech about Ramanujan that he delivered at Harvard: “I’m charged with the task today of telling you one of the most romantic and peculiar stories in the history of math.”

I almost cried when we were filming that. I knew the speech well and, on top of that, to hear it spoken in Jeremy Irons’ voice was incredible.

eSC: Now that you have your own IMDb page, will you be leaving math for the movies? 

Ono: I’ll definitely be sticking to math. Making movies is a lot harder! It’s grueling work but I also had a wonderful time. I signed some autographs one night just because I was sitting next to Dev Patel and Jeremy Irons in a swanky restaurant. I still can’t believe that they are making this movie and that I got to be involved. It’s so awesome that math is now hip!

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Math formula gives new glimpse into the magical mind of Ramanujan

'I first became a scientist in my backyard'

That’s me, climbing a flagpole just outside my house when I was about seven years old, circa 1967. The rest of my family was standing below watching, cheering me on, and documenting the event. Little did I know at the time that other kids were told they couldn’t climb flagpoles, let alone make it to the top. Yes, that’s a metaphor.

By Anthony Martin

Emory paleontologist Anthony Martin wrote a moving, personal piece about his path from poverty to a PhD for his blog "Life Traces of the Georgia Coast." Below is an excerpt from Martin's article:

"I first became a scientist in my backyard. This path to life-long inquiry began when I was four years old, as soon as my family moved to a larger house, and one with a larger yard. This small, outdoor patch of land with a few large trees, bushes, and grass soon became my field area, laboratory, classroom, and all-purpose place for conducting experiments in nature. Even better, my proclivity for observing this world outside of myself was encouraged – or at least tolerated – by my mother and father.

"At the time, I had no idea just how important of a role this backyard and parental support would play in my scientific career. Yet now I look back on it with a mix of gratitude and wistfulness, especially as both of my parents have departed this earth I have studied for most of my life. ...

"For about nine months of any given year during my childhood, starting in the spring, I could step out the back door of my house and watch ants, bees, wasps, butterflies, moths, spiders, and praying mantises. Plant-insect interactions in particular – such as pollination, herbivory, and wound responses in plants – drew me in, teaching me those ecological principles long before I ever heard the words 'pollination,' 'herbivory, and 'wound response.'"

Read the whole article on "Life Traces of the Georgia Coast." It's an amazing story.

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Patterns etched in sound

“I’m into beautiful melodies and catchy harmonies,” says Robert Schneider, the co-founder of The Elephant 6 Recording Company and lead singer and songwriter in the band The Apples in Stereo. “As a producer, I’m also interested in surrounding my pop songs with experimental sounds. These sorts of things are very appealing to me.”

In a recent TEDxEmory talk, Schneider explains how music led him to become a Woodruff Graduate Fellow in Emory’s Department of Mathematics and Computer Science. His research focuses mainly on analytic number theory, but he also has created music compositions based on mathematics.

“I found as I started to study mathematics that there were all these beautiful patterns that were lying there,” he says. “It was like music that was silent, just waiting to be written out and used for compositions.”

Watch the video to learn more, and listen to some of Schneider’s mathematical compositions.

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Neuro-Interventions and the Law: Experts to explore ethics and efficacy

Atlanta's Neuro-Interventions and the Law Conference will grapple with thorny issues facing today's legal system. The case of British computer scientist Alan Turing, who submitted to chemical castration in 1952 to avoid imprisonment for homosexuality, exemplifies why a judicial system should take the long view before resorting to drugs or other medical means to alter a person's behavior and biology. Benedict Cumberbatch, above, portrays Turing in the upcoming movie "The Imitation Game."

By Carol Clark

Alan Turing was a hero. He was a mathematician who played a key role in the development of computer science and artificial intelligence and, during World War II, he led Britain’s German code-breaking team, cracking secret messages that gave the Allies an edge in critical battles against the Nazis.

Turing was also a homosexual. In 1952 he was prosecuted for having a sexual relationship with another man, a crime at that time in the United Kingdom. In order to avoid prison, Turing underwent chemical castration: Injections of a drug that took away his libido, while also causing him to have enlarged breasts. His death two years later from cyanide poisoning was ruled a suicide.

The Turing tragedy is just one of many examples of a legal neuro-intervention: The use of a drug or other medical means to change someone’s behavior – sometimes permanently. Despite a problematic past record, a range of such interventions are poised to expand within the legal system and could even become routine.

The conference Neruo-Interventions and the Law: Regulating Human Mental Capacity will gather leading legal scholars, judges, ethicists, neuroscientists and psychologists at Georgia State University September 12-14 to grapple with some of the thorny legal issues being spurred by advances in neuroscience. Registration is free, but there is limited seating.

“Techniques to diagnose and manipulate human behavior and the brain are becoming increasingly sophisticated,” says Paul Root Wolpe, a bioethicist and director of the Emory Center for Ethics, who will give the introductory remarks for the conference. “We need to develop processes and regulations for how we’re going to use these techniques because they are not going away. In fact, many of them are already in use in criminal proceedings.”

The conference is the first major event of the Atlanta Neuroethics Consortium. The Emory Center for Ethics spearheaded the formation of the consortium, which brings together a range of resources from metro-Atlanta’s universities, biotechnology sector and non-profit organizations to explore the implications as neuroscience is set to transform every aspect of our lives, from medicine, to law and civil society.

At least nine U.S. states, including Georgia, have incorporated versions of chemical castration into their laws for those convicted of child sex crimes. While pedophilia is an extreme taboo, critics of chemical castration have called it “cruel and unusual punishment.”

Even if convicted sex offenders are given a voluntary option of a drug treatment in lieu of imprisonment, the ethics are problematic, Wolpe says. “From a government perspective, it would be infinitely cheaper to use drugs instead of incarceration to fix a criminal problem. That kind of incentive would add to the risk of abuse of the power to drug people.”

Another problematic area that Wolpe cites: The practice of drugging criminal defendants suffering from schizophrenia or other mental illnesses so that they achieve a “synthetic competency” to stand trial and, if convicted, perhaps even be executed.

Attorneys are increasingly calling for brain scans as evidence in criminal trials. Traumatic brain injury, or TBI, for instance, is associated with impulsiveness, anger and aggression. Should people diagnosed with TBI receive special consideration if they commit a violent criminal offense?

About 12 percent of U.S. veterans returning from combat in Iraq and Afghanistan suffer from at least mild TBI, according to the Department of Defense. Should vets accused of violent acts be treated differently than other defendants with similar brain injuries?

These questions and dozens of others will be brought up in the conference talks, papers and panel discussions.

It’s important to involve a range of expertise to sort through the complicated neuroethics involved in all of these issues, Wolpe says. “History shows that, over and over again, society has allowed moral suppositions to infiltrate scientific thinking. Years from now, we don’t want to be looking back and saying, ‘How could they have done that?’”

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Physicists eye neural fly data, find formula for Zipf's law

The Zipf's law mechanism was verified with neural data of blowflies reacting to changes in visual signals.

By Carol Clark

Physicists have identified a mechanism that may help explain Zipf’s law – a unique pattern of behavior found in disparate systems, including complex biological ones. The journal Physical Review Letters is publishing their mathematical models, which demonstrate how Zipf’s law naturally arises when a sufficient number of units react to a hidden variable in a system.

“We’ve discovered a method that produces Zipf’s law without fine-tuning and with very few assumptions,” says Ilya Nemenman, a biophysicist at Emory University and one of the authors of the research.

The paper’s co-authors include biophysicists David Schwab of Princeton and Pankaj Mehta of Boston University. “I don’t think any one of us would have made this insight alone,” Nemenman says. “We were trying to solve an unrelated problem when we hit upon it. It was serendipity and the combination of all our varied experience and knowledge.”

Their findings, verified with neural data of blowflies reacting to changes in visual signals, may have universal applications. “It’s a simple mechanism,” Nemenman says. “If a system has some hidden variable, and many units, such as 40 or 50 neurons, are adapted and responding to the variable, then Zipf’s law will kick in.”

That insight could aid in the understanding of how biological systems process stimuli. For instance, in order to pinpoint a malfunction in neural activity, it would be useful to know what data recorded from a normally functioning brain would be expected to look like. “If you observed a deviation from the Zipf’s law mechanism that we’ve identified, that would likely be a good place to investigate,” Nemenman says.

“Letters and words in language are sequences that encode a description of something that is changing over time, like the plot line in a story,” Nemenman says.

Zipf’s law is a mysterious mathematical principle that was noticed as far back as the 19th century, but was named for 20th-century linguist George Zipf. He found that if you rank words in a language in order of their popularity, a strange pattern emerges: The most popular word is used twice as often as the second most popular, and three times as much as the third-ranked word, and so on. This same rank vs. frequency rule was also found to apply to many other social systems, including income distribution among individuals and the size of cities, with a few exceptions.

More recently, laboratory experiments suggest that Zipf’s power-law structure also applies to a range of natural systems, from the protein sequences of immune receptors in cells to the intensity of solar flares from the sun.

“It’s interesting when you see the same phenomenon in systems that are so diverse. It makes you wonder,” Nemenman says.

Scientists have pondered the mystery of Zipf’s law for decades. Some studies have managed to reveal how a feature of a particular system makes it Zipfian, while others have come up with broad mechanisms that generate similar power laws but need some fine-tuning to generate the exact Zipf’s law.

“Our method is the only one that I know of that covers both of these areas,” Nemenman says. “It’s broad enough to cover many different systems and you don’t have to fine tune it: It doesn’t require you to set some parameters at exactly the right value.”

Neurons turn visual stimuli into units of information.

The blowfly data came from experiments led by biophysicist Rob de Ruyter that Nemenman worked on as a graduate student. Flies were turned on a rotor as they watched the world go by, hundreds of times. The moving scenes that the flies repeatedly experienced simulated their natural flight patterns. The researchers recorded when neurons associated with vision spiked, or fired. All sets of the data largely matched within a few hundred microseconds, showing that the flies’ neurons were not randomly spiking, but instead operating like precise coding machines.

If you think of a neuron firing as a “1” and a neuron not firing as a “0,” then the neural activity can be thought of as words, made up of 1s and 0s. When these “words,” or units, are strung together over time, they become “sentences.”

The neurons are turning visual stimuli into units of information, Nemenman explains. “The data is a way for us to read the sentences the fly’s vision neurons are conveying to the rest of the brain.”

Nemenman and his co-authors took a fresh look at this fly data for the new paper in Physical Review Letters. “We were trying to understand if there is a relationship between ideas of universality, or criticality, in physical systems and neural examples of how animals learn,” he says.

The physicists are now researching whether they can bring their work full circle, by showing that the mechanism they identified applies to Zipf’s law in language.

In order to navigate in flight, the flies’ visual neurons adapt to changes in the visual signal, such as velocity. When the world moves faster in front of a fly, these sensitive neurons adapt and rescale. These adaptions enable the flies to adjust to new environments, just as our own eyes adapt and rescale when we move from a darkened theater to a brightly lit room.

“We showed mathematically that the system becomes Zipfian when you’re recording the activity of many units, such as neurons, and all of the units are responding to the same variable,” Nemenman says. “The fact that Zipf’s law will occur in a system with just 40 or 50 such units shows that biological units are in some sense special – they must be adapted to the outside world.”

The researchers provide mathematical simulations to back up their theory. “Not only can we predict that Zipf’s law is going to emerge in any system which consists of many units responding to variable outside signals,” Nemenman says, “we can also tell you how many units you need to develop Zipf’s law, given how variable the response is of a single unit.”

They are now researching whether they can bring their work full circle, by showing that the mechanism they identified applies to Zipf’s law in language.

“Letters and words in language are sequences that encode a description of something that is changing over time, like the plot line in a story,” Nemenman says. “I expect to find a pattern similar to how vision neurons fire as a fly moves through the world and the scenery changes.”

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Biology may not be so complex after all 

Photos: iStockphoto.com

Lucy: Debunking the 10 percent brain myth

"It is estimated most human beings use only 10 percent of the brain’s capacity.” Morgan Freeman pronounced it in his God-like voice so it must be true, right?

Definitely not, says Emory neurologist Krish Sathian. The premise of the new sci-fi movie “Lucy,” starring Freeman and Scarlett Johansson, is based on a widespread, lingering myth that we tap into only a tiny fraction of our neurons.

“We are probably using all of our brain much of the time, and much of our brain all of the time,” Sathian says. “Even when you’re engaged in a task, and some neurons are engaged in that task, the rest of your brain is occupied doing other things. That’s why, for example, the solution to a problem can emerge after you haven’t been thinking about it for a while, or after a night’s sleep. That’s because your brain’s constantly active.”

Watch the above video, part of the Emory Looks at Hollywood series, to learn more.

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Apes vs. humans: Finding common ground

Is war ever truly inevitable?

That question is central to “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes,” opening this weekend. The movie is the latest in the “Apes” drama series featuring a character named Caesar, an ape raised by humans who leads a simian rebellion against the human race.

Fear and misunderstanding can easily lead to violence, says Emory political scientist Shawn Ramirez, an expert on conflict resolution. In this video, Ramirez considers the plot to “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes” as a mirror to real-life situations.

“I think it’s really hard when one side sees the other as a lesser – a lesser species or a lesser race or a lesser ethnicity or religion,” Ramirez says. “It’s very hard to overcome that.”

What can one side do when they face that issue?

“I think Hollywood captures this, actually,” Ramirez says, “because usually it’s some central characters that move over to the other side and they start communicating to the other side and realize that there is something more valuable there.”

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Anatomy of an economic meltdown

The 2007-2008 crisis wasn't due to "immoral, greedy bankers who created toxic assets for which they got inflated ratings and sold to stupid investors," Gorton said. "If banker greed causes crises, we'd have one every week." (Photo by Wilford Harewood.)

By Leslie King, Emory Report

What caused the financial crisis that began in 2007, that time of cutbacks, job losses and housing foreclosures? And how can another crisis be prevented?

Yale professor Gary Gorton discussed causes and effects of recessions in a workshop on financial and monetary history held May 21 at Goizueta Business School.

Gorton came to national attention in September 2010 when then-U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, testifying before a national commission on the fiscal crisis, referenced Gorton's work as recommended reading for understanding the crisis.

One small factor that set off the panic in 2007 was the news media, Gorton said.

"The press didn't really do a very good job of explaining what was happening. But it's hard to blame them. They called economists and economists had no idea. If you call the experts and the experts don't know, how are you supposed to know? And the press — they're never going to get it right because the people who know aren't going to talk and the people who talk don't know," he explained.

"And in Congress, these people have nine million things they have to be experts on; they can't be experts on everything. In a lot of ways, it was a failure of the economics profession to explain things apparently in a way that the public could understand and that will lead to good policy."

Read more of Gorton's analysis in Emory Report.

Gorton recommends Franklin Roosevelt's first radio address, in March 1933, to learn some of the mechanics behind both the Great Recession and the 2007-2008 crisis. Click on the YouTube video below to listen: 

Godzilla: King of the tracemakers

Still taken from original 1954 Godzilla (Gojira), showing a bipedal trackway going from a terrestrial to marine environment. But also check out the prominent groove in the middle of the trackway, caused by a tail dragging behind it, and four forward-pointing toes on each foot.

Emory paleontologist Anthony Martin, who studies tracks, burrows and other traces of life, has written an ichnology review of the new movie “Godzilla” for his blog, “Life Traces of the Georgia Coast.” Below is an excerpt.

"Upon learning that Godzilla would be making its way back onto movie screens this summer, my first thought was not about whether it would it would serve as a powerful allegory exploring the consequences of nuclear power. Nor did I wonder if it would be a metaphor of nature cleansing the world’s ecological ills through the deliberate destruction of humanity. Surprisingly, I didn’t even ponder whether the director of this version (Gareth Edwards) would have our hero incinerate Matthew Broderick with a radioactively fueled exhalation as cinematic penance for the 1998 version of Godzilla.

"Instead, my first thought was, 'Wow, I’ll bet Godzilla will leave some awesome tracks!' My second thought was, 'Wow, I’ll bet Godzilla will leave some awesome bite and claw marks!' My third thought was, 'Wow, I’ll bet Godzilla will leave some awesome feces!' All of these musings could be summarized as, 'Wow, I’ll bet Godzilla will leave awesome traces, no matter what!'

"So as an ichnologist who is deeply concerned that movie monsters make plenty of tracks and other traces whilst rampaging, I am happy to report that yes, this Godzilla and its kaiju compatriots did indeed make some grand traces. Could they have made traces worthy of ichnological appraisal, ones that could be readily compared to trace fossils made by Godzilla’s ancestors? Yes, but these traces could have been better, and let me explain why."

Read the entire review on Martin’s blog.


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The art and physics of falling fluid

Pouring layers of paint, of different colors, produces “the most magical fantasies and forms that the human mind can imagine,” wrote Mexican painter David Alfaro Siqueiros.

It turns out that Siqueiros and Jackson Pollock, two iconic artists of Abstract Expressionism, were also experimentalists of fluid mechanics.

“Physical analysis illuminates the ways that both artists used a natural effect – fluids falling under gravity – to produce their works,” writes Emory physicist Sidney Perkowitz, in a recent issue of Physics World.

The video above demonstrates that the patterns produced by Siqueiros, who described his technique as “accidental painting,” result from a Rayleigh-Taylor instability of a viscous gravity current.

You can read Perkowitz’s article in the April issue of Physics World.

Mathematicians trace source of Rogers-Ramanujan identities, find algebraic gold

Nautilus shell spirals are among the many forms in nature that can be related to the golden ratio, the most famous algebraic number of them all. Now mathematicians have discovered a new treasure trove of algebraic numbers and formulas to access them.

By Carol Clark

Mathematicians have found a framework for the celebrated Rogers-Ramanujan identities and their arithmetic properties, solving another long-standing mystery stemming from the work of Indian math genius Srinivasa Ramanujan.

The findings, by mathematicians at Emory University and the University of Queensland, yield a treasure trove of algebraic numbers and formulas to access them.

“Algebraic numbers are among the first numbers you encounter in mathematics,” says Ken Ono, a number theorist at Emory “And yet, it’s surprisingly difficult to find functions that return them as values in a uniform and systematic way.”

Ono is the co-author of the new findings, along with S. Ole Warnaar of the University of Queensland and Michael Griffin, an Emory graduate student.

Ono announced the findings in April as a plenary speaker at the Applications of Automorphic Forms in Number Theory and Combinatorics conference at Louisiana State University. He will also present them as a plenary speaker at the 2015 Joint Mathematics Meetings, the largest mathematics meeting in the world, set for January in San Antonio. Warnaar, Griffin and others will give additional talks on the findings during an invited special session to accompany Ono’s plenary address.

Ramanujan had "a Midas touch."

The most famous algebraic number of all is the golden ratio, also known by the Greek letter phi. Many great works of architecture and art, such as the Parthenon, are said to embody the pleasing proportions of the golden ratio, which is also seen in beautiful forms in nature. Mathematicians, artists and scientists, from ancient times to today have pondered the qualities of phi, which is approximately equal to 1.618, although its digits just keep on going, with no apparent pattern.

“People studied the golden ratio before there was a real theory of algebra,” Ono says. “It was a kind of prototype for algebraic numbers.”

Although no other algebraic units are as famous as the golden ratio, they are of central importance to algebra. “A fundamental problem in mathematics is to find functions whose values are always algebraic numbers,” Ono says. “The famous Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler made some progress on this problem in the 18th century. His theory of continued fractions, where one successively divides numbers in a systematic way, produces some very special algebraic numbers like the golden ratio. But his theory cannot produce algebraic numbers which go beyond the stuff of the quadratic formula that one encounters in high school algebra.”

Ramanujan, however, could produce such numbers, and he made it look easy.

“Ramanujan has a very special, almost mythic, status in mathematics,” says Edward Frenkel, a mathematician at the University of California, Berkeley. “He had a sort of Midas touch that seemed to magically turn everything into gold.”

And the Rogers-Ramanujan identities are considered among Ramanujan’s greatest legacies, adds Frenkel, a leading expert on the identities.

“They are two of the most remarkable and important results in the theory of q-series, or special functions,” says Warnaar, who began studying the Rogers-Ramanujan identities shortly after he encountered them while working on his PhD in statistical mechanics about 20 years ago.

Although originally discovered by L. J. Rogers in 1894, the identities became famous through the work of Ramanujan, who was largely self-taught and worked instinctively.

The Rogers-Ramanujan identities are among Ramanujan's greatest legacies.

In 1913, Ramanujan sent a letter from his native India to the British mathematician G. H. Hardy that included the two identities that Rogers discovered and a third formula that showed these identities are essentially modular functions and their quotient has the special property that its singular values are algebraic integral units. That result came to be known as the Rogers-Ramanujan continued fraction. 

Hardy was astonished when he saw the formulas. “I had never seen anything in the least like this before,” Hardy wrote. “A single look at them is enough to show they could only be written down by a mathematician of the highest class. They must be true because no one would have the imagination to invent them.”

“Ramanujan seemed to produce this result out of thin air,” Ono says.

Ramanujan died in 1920 before he could explain how he conjured up the formulas. “They have been cited hundreds of times by mathematicians,” Ono says. “They are used in statistical mathematics, conformal field theory and number theory. And yet no one knew whether Ramanujan just stumbled onto the power of these two identities or whether they were fragments of a larger theory.”

For nearly a century, many great mathematicians have worked on solving the mystery of where Ramanujan’s formulas came from and why they should be true.

"Ramanujan has a very special, almost mythic, status among mathematicians," says Frenkel. Above is a still photo from an upcoming film, "Ramanujan," a biography of the math genius by Camphor Cinema.

Ono uses the analogy of going for a walk in a creek bed and discovering a piece of gold. Had Ramanujan accidentally found a random nugget? Or was he drawn to that area because he knew of a rich seam of gold nearby?

Warnaar was among those who pondered these questions. “Just like digging for gold, in mathematics it’s not always obvious where to look for a solution,” he says. “It takes time and effort, with no guarantee of success, but it helps if you develop a lot of intuition about where to look.”

Finally, after 15 years of focusing almost entirely on the Rogers-Ramanujan identities, Warnaar found a way to embed them into a much larger class of similar identities using something known as representation theory.

“Ole found the mother lode of identities,” Ono says.

When Ono saw Warnaar’s work posted last November on arXiv.org, a mathematics-physics archive, his eyes lit up.

“It just clicked,” Ono recalls. “Ole found this huge vein of gold, and we then figured out a way to mine the gold. We went to work and showed how to come full circle and make use of the formulas. Now we can extract infinitely many functions whose values are these beautiful algebraic numbers.” 

“Historically, the Rogers-Ramanujan identities have tantalized mathematicians,” says George Andrews, a mathematician at Penn State and another top authority on the identities. “They have played an almost magical role in many areas of math, statistical mechanics and physics.”

The collaboration of Warnaar, Ono and Griffin “has given us a big picture of the general setting for these identities, and deepened our theoretical understanding for many of the breakthroughs in this area of mathematics during the past 100 years,” Andrews says. “They’ve given us a whole new set of tools to be able to attack new problems.”

“It’s incredibly exciting to solve any problem related to Ramanujan, he’s such an important figure in mathematics,” Warnaar says. “Now we can move on to more questions that we don’t understand. Math is limitless, and that’s fantastic.”

Related:
Math formula gives new glimpse into the magical mind of Ramanujan
New theories reveal the nature of numbers
How a hike in the woods led to a math 'Eureka!'

Image credits: Top, iStockphoto.com; center, Wikipedia Commons; bottom, Camphor Cinema

For the love of lemurs and Madagascar

The IMAX movie “Island of Lemurs: Madagascar” opens nationwide on April 4, including Atlanta's Fernbank Museum of Natural History. Mouse lemurs, above, are among those featured in the film about the island, a bio-diversity hotspot.  (Photo by Frank Vassen)

By Carol Clark

“I smell props,” says Sarah Zohdy, a biologist in Emory’s Department of Environmental Sciences and the Rollins School of Public Health. She looks skyward, scanning a tangle of thick Tarzan vines, tree branches and leaves that weave the dense rainforest canopy 100 feet above.

“Do you smell that?” Zohdy asks a new arrival to Madagascar’s Ranomafana National Park. “They have a scent like maple syrup.”

Then, whoosh! A wide-eyed, fur-covered acrobat, mostly arms, legs and tail, leaps out of one clump of leaves and disappears into another.

“Props!” Zohdy confirms, smiling at the comical effect of the creature. “Their legs are crazy long for their bodies.”

Propithecus edwardsi

Propithecus edwardsi, more commonly known as a sifaka, is one of nearly a hundred species of lemurs. These primitive primates, with large, round eyes and wet, dog-like noses, are unique to Madagascar, an island in the Indian Ocean, off the southeast coast of Africa.

Lemur ancestors arrived in Madagascar some 65 million years ago, perhaps floating over from mainland Africa on mats of vegetation. Isolated on the island, the Earth’s fourth largest, lemurs evolved independently from other primates, diverging into a striking cast of characters: From the teddy-bear cute black-and-white ruffed lemur to the creepy, bat-like aye-aye.

Zohdy’s favorite is the mouse lemur, the smallest primate in the world. “The adults weigh about as much as a fun-sized package of M&Ms and can fit into the palm of your hand,” she says. “The babies are no bigger than a Ping-Pong ball and, basically, all eyeballs.”

A new IMAX movie “Island of Lemurs: Madagascar,” opening nationwide on April 4, features the work in Ranomafana of famed primatologist Patricia Wright, one of Zohdy’s mentors. “The imagery in the film is so rich, it tugs on my heartstrings,” Zohdy says. “I hope the film makes more people around the world aware of the dire ecological situation in Madagascar.”

Watch the trailer for the IMAX movie:


Zohdy has been researching lemurs in Madagascar for seven years. Last summer, she broadened her focus and led an Emory infectious disease field team in Ranomafana, made up of students from a range of specialties. The Emory team is gathering baseline data for an ambitious “one health” intervention. The goal is to bolster the health of the rural poor around Ranomafana, who are struggling to stay fed, sheltered and alive, while also conserving the ecosystem of the World Heritage site.

Zohdy’s rubber boots make loud sucking sounds as she trudges through thick mud towards a wooden suspension bridge spanning the Namorona River, roaring and rushing over its rocky bed even during the dry season.

“Check out that spider web,” she says, as she leads the way across the bridge. She points up at gossamer threads hanging above the water, leading out of the forest on one side of the river and stretching 40 feet to connect with the trees on the opposite bank. The recently discovered Darwin’s bark spider, she notes, spins the largest webs in the world, and its silk is the toughest biological material ever studied, more than 10 times tougher than Kevlar.

Crested drongos – large black birds sporting what look like elegant coattails and fancy feather headdresses – chatter in the trees alongside the slick forest trail, which is now leading steeply up a lush hillside.

Zohdy pauses when she hears breaking leaves in the canopy and catches a whiff of a musky, zoo-like smell. “Golden bamboo lemurs. They are right above us,” she says softly. “Don’t open your mouth when you look up,” she quickly adds. “People have been peed on.”

A golden bamboo lemur, photographed in Ranomafana by Sarah Zohdy.

The dusky-gold creatures, which look like a cross between a Koala bear and a raccoon, are critically endangered. They are one of three species of lemurs in the park that subsist almost entirely on the tender leaves and shoots of bamboo.

The greater bamboo lemur is the rarest of them all. Just two remain in the 160-square-mile Ranomafana National Park – a father and his daughter – and only about 60 survive in the wild. Like the giant panda, the greater bamboo lemur has molars capable of slicing and crushing the tough trunk of bamboo.

“It’s a fascinating evolutionary adaption,” Zohdy says, that allows them to survive during the dry season, when the more tender bamboo shoots and leaves are not as readily available. Loss of habitat and shifts in climate, however, have lengthened the dry season. “That means the greater bamboo lemurs have to chew on the tough trunks longer, which wears down their teeth,” Zohdy says. “When their teeth go bad, they starve. It’s not like they can go to a bamboo lemur dentist and get dentures.”

Since humans began settling on the island, only about 2,000 years ago, bringing a rice-growing culture with them, much of the natural habitat and its wildlife has disappeared, including at least 17 species of lemurs.

“When I first came to Madagascar, I thought the whole island would look like a BBC nature special,” Zohdy recalls. Instead she was stunned during the ten-hour drive from the capital of Antananarivo to Ranomafana to see a largely treeless landscape of terraced rice paddies and the occasional smoke from slash-and-burn agriculture.

Watch a video about an Emory "one-health" project in Madagascar:


In the steep landscape of Ranomafana, the homes of villagers and their food crops and livestock bump up against the remaining patches of primordial wilderness. The crowding puts both people and animals at risk. “When you have humans encroaching on wildlife habitat you have huge potential for zoonotic diseases, and the emergence of new diseases,” Zohdy says. Pneumonic plague and virulent strains of flu are examples of deadly outbreaks that have occurred in Madagascar in recent years.

The “one health” approach of the Emory infectious disease team may be key to solving some of the complex problems facing the Malagasy people and the fragile Ranomafana ecosystem. “To really understand human health, animal health, and environmental health, you have to study all three at once,” Zohdy says.

During the summers, going back to 2011, Emory student-researchers have collected fecal samples of lemurs, people and their livestock. These samples, along with mosquitos and ticks the team is collecting, are sent back to Atlanta for analysis of pathogens they may contain.

The project is part of a large-scale effort of conservation and global health being coordinated by Thomas Gillespie, an Emory professor of Environmental Sciences and Environmental Health. The data the students are gathering will help guide a health care improvement effort through a new non-profit agency called PIVOT.

Madagascar is home to half the world's chameleon species. Photo by Sarah Zohdy.

One evening, Zohdy leads students on the team on a night hike up the side of a mountain. The forest is eerily silent. A thick mist snakes along the ground and drifts up through the silhouettes of trees.

The researchers’ headlamps slice like lasers across the understory, occasionally striking treasure. An iridescent green and blue chameleon looks like a jeweled dragon clinging to the branch of a sapling. A golden moth the size of a small bird fans its wings across a clump of eucalyptus leaves.

“Do you hear that high-pitched trill, like a tiny, far-away bell?” Zohdy asks. “That’s a mouse lemur.”

Tiny pairs of glowing eyes pop out of the darkness. Mouse lemurs are nocturnal, and their eyes shine due to the reflective effects of sensitive night vision. The eyes appear, then vanish in a flash, as the shy creatures dart amid the branches of small trees.

Zohdy instructs everyone to switch their headlamps from white light to red, so the lemurs don’t get blinded.

Seen in well-lit photographs, the brown mouse lemurs populating Ranomafana are charming. They have a beguiling gaze and tiny, elegant hands that look more human than animal, complete with delicate fingernails.

Moving through the dark forest, however, these miniature primates become like lemures, Latin for ghosts and the origin of the word lemurs. They flit through the trees alongside the trail, watching the humans with wide, curious eyes that reflect the red glow of the curious humans watching them back.

 Watch a video about the making of the IMAX movie:


Related:
In Madagascar: A health crisis of people and their ecosystem

If Carl Sagan had been a dancer

Theater Emory and the Emory Dance Program premiere their first collaboration, "Free/Fall: Explorations of Inner and Outer Space," on April 3 in the Mary Gray Munroe Theater.

"When astronomers talk about the cosmos, you often hear words or phrases that describe behaviors, moods, relationships, even arcs and journeys and sudden eruptions of 'emotion,'" says director Janice Akers, explaining the inspiration behind the production. "The language also has highly physical imagery: rotation, orbiting, colliding, intersecting, floating, coming towards, flying away."

Read more about the production here.

Atlanta Science Festival to launch on March 22

Via Emory Alumni Association

Get in touch with your inner scientist at the Atlanta Science Festival (ASF), a weeklong celebration of local science and technology.

"From March 22-29 at more than 100 events throughout metro Atlanta, visitors will experience scientific innovation and transform their perspective on how science impacts nearly everything we do," says Sarah Peterson, a co-founder of the ASF and program coordinator for Laney Graduate School. 

Emory has been a partner in ASF from its beginning and is collaborating with more than 80 community partners on the interactive festival.

A variety of events will take place on and around the Emory campus including lab tours, panel discussions, film screenings, an opportunity to see the sun through a solar telescope, a celebration of the science of beer, and much more. Click here to see the complete list of Emory events, times and locations.

The festival will culminate Saturday, March 29 at Centennial Olympic Park with an Exploration Expo featuring family activities, experiments, pop-up interactive exhibits and games, including faculty, staff and students from Emory's science and math departments. The Exploration Expo will be from 11a.m. to 4 p.m., and admission is free.

"Whether you're a self-proclaimed science-lover or simply fascinated by the how the world works, we invite you to share in this celebration of 'the curious' in all of us," says Jordan Rose, associate director at the Emory College Center for Science Education. "There's something for everyone: comedy, art, poetry, food, lasers, stars, gardens, dinosaurs and more."

Photo courtesy San Diego Science and Engineering Festival.

Bringing to life 'Dinosaurs Without Bones'

Tony Martin investigates an outcrop in Australia. Photo by Ruth Schowalter.

Emory ichnologist Anthony Martin wants to shake up your view of dinosaurs by letting you follow them in their tracks. (Warning: Watch where you step.)

Martin is on a mission to bring ichnology to the masses. Long overshadowed by the bone specialists of paleontology, paleoichnologists focus on the fossils of tracks, nests, burrows, dung and other traces of life.

Martin’s new book, “Dinosaurs Without Bones: Dinosaur Lives Revealed by Their Trace Fossils” is published by Pegasus Books. In a review, Publisher’s Weekly says Martin’s writing “bubbles over with the joy of scientific discovery as he shares his natural enthusiasm for the blend of sleuthing and imagination that he brings to the field of ichnology.”

Martin also drew all of the illustrations for the book, and took most of the photos.

eScienceCommons interviewed the author in his office in Emory’s Department of Environmental Sciences.

eScienceCommons: Your previous five books have been geared more towards academics. Why did you decide to write this one for a general audience? 

Tony Martin: One of my goals is to help turn the term “ichnology” into a household word. And I want to help people see dinosaurs in a new way: Not just as skeletons in a museum, but with muscles and flesh, moving and making traces.

eSC: What sort of readers do you think will enjoy this book?

TM: Anyone who loves dinosaurs. But also people who love detective stories, which often involve the scientific method. Sherlock Holmes, who was a nerd long before it was hip, is making a comeback as a TV series. A lot of people enjoy watching him solve problems by making careful observations, and then forming hypotheses on the basis of those observations.

I’m writing about mysteries that, in some cases, go back more than 100 million years. Dinosaurs left behind many observable clues about what they did while they were alive.

You see a deserted plain. Here's what an ichnologist sees. Drawing by Tony Martin.

eSC: You open the book with a thrilling scene, of two big, male Triceratops charging across a floodplain, creating havoc among a group of feathered theropods and a flock of toothed birds and pterosaurs. It’s a bit like Jurassic Park without the humans. 

TM: Almost everything that happens in that opening scenario is based on real evidence. It’s creative non-fiction, describing behaviors as they may have happened, based on trace-fossil records. There is a lot of action in the book. It’s not just a mystery – it’s also a thriller.

eSC: I love it that one of your favorite trace fossils is of a dinosaur butt. 

TM: It is rare to see a dinosaur-resting trace. One of the best examples is from a small theropod, discovered in Utah. It’s intriguing to me to think of a dinosaur sitting down and leaving an impression. Why did it sit down? To digest a big meal? To survey a scene? Dinosaurs don’t always have to be running, eating machines.

eSC: You also write about dinosaurs belching, breaking wind, peeing, pooping and even puking. You seem almost shameless in your quest to appeal to the masses. 

TM: If there is anything that will get me on The Colbert Report, it’s my diagram of a Brachiosaurus projectile vomiting (see above), including the estimated impact velocity of the stream and the associated crater. I checked with (Emory physicist) Jed Brody to make sure I got the physics right. It’s a fantasy trace fossil – no one has found an undoubted trace fossil of dinosaur vomit yet – but that doesn’t mean they aren’t out there.

eSC: And, of course, you have included dinosaur violence and sex. 

TM: Trace fossils of fighting can tell you a lot about dinosaur behavior. For instance, we have evidence of a Tyrannosaurus taking a chunk out of the tail of an Edmontosaurus, which survived the damage. The trace fossil marks of the teeth row on the skeleton are more than a foot across, which narrows down the list of perpetrators to a tyrannosaur closely related to Tyrannosaurus rex, or T. rex itself.

Part of my inspiration for writing about dinosaur sex comes from a section in the book “My Beloved Brontosaurus,” by Brian Switek. He described the spikes on the tails of stegosaurs, and pondered how the males might have gotten past those.

I thought I’d take that idea a step further and imagine what kind of trace fossils dinosaurs might have made while mating.

"A cassowary really looks like something out of Jurassic Park," says Martin. Photo by Paul IJsendoorn/Wikipedia Commons. 

eSC: Your book chapters have some dynamite opening sentences. One of my favorites is, “The large theropod tracks were fresh, and so was its scat.” 

TM: We can observe dinosaur behavior by studying and tracking the traces of birds, which are living theropods. Those particular tracks were from a cassowary encounter I had during a field trip with Emory students in Queensland, Australia.

The sunlight was coming across this giant bird as it was crossing a stream. It was an amazing sight. Cassowaries can grow to more than six-feet tall. They’re among the tallest, heaviest birds alive. They are covered with black feathers, and their head is topped with a tall, bladed crest that looks as if it can saw through flesh. A cassowary really looks like something out of Jurassic Park.

eSC: How long did it take you to write this book? 

TM: In terms of experience, the book took 30 years of work in ichnology and geology. It took a while for me to develop the right combination of field experience, knowledge and writing ability to put it all together into something a reader would enjoy.

The actual writing of the book took just a little more than a year. It really flowed out of me. It was fun to write because I got to blend my scientific expertise with pop culture and other human-interest topics to tell a story that uses ichnology as a central theme.

Here in the United States we like to bemoan how we have a scientifically illiterate public, but people are interested in good science stories. I would encourage more scientists to think about writing in ways that are approachable to general audiences.

eSC: Who are your favorite science writers who appeal to general audiences?

TM: There are so many good science writers now. To name just a few that I enjoy: David Quammen, Virginia Hughes, Ed Yong, Brian Switek, Carl Zimmer, Virginia Morell and Annalee Newitz.

Related:
Dinosaur burrows yield clues to climate change
Polar dinosaur tracks open new trail to past
Lake-bed trails tell ancient fish story 
Tell-tale toes point to fossilized bird tracks

A sea lion that bops to a musical beat

Kate Lanau reported for Maclean’s on a panel at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in Chicago, about how studies of animals may help us understand the evolution of our own musical capacity. Below is an excerpt:

“One of the biggest surprises has come from a California sea lion named Ronan, a species that doesn’t seem to be capable of complex vocal learning; although this sea lion can, it turns out, bop along to a beat.

"'We thought, let’s find an animal that’s not closely related to humans, and not vocally flexible,’ says Peter Cook, who was then at the University of California, Santa Cruz and is now at Emory University. ‘Sea lions are extremely charismatic and very adaptive,’ he continues; they also eat a lot, providing plenty of opportunities to train them with snacks. And while primates might push back against overly formal exercises, sea lions seem to thrive on it. ‘They’re kind of type A, I guess.’ Initially, Ronan wasn’t able to synchronize with a beat, but after months of training, she could transfer between a range of tempos. This is a key difference between Ronan’s behavior and what we might see in a circus animal, Cook says: those may be responding to visual cues, or performing a preordained dance routine. Ronan was responding directly to music. He says, ‘it was just her and the beat.’

Read the whole article on the Maclean’s web site.

Related:
Birdsong study pecks theory that music is uniquely human
Notes on the musical brain

The art and science of causal illusions

Hadar Naftalovich studies how causal illusions form. The aim is to prevent these illusions from getting out of hand, "as can sometimes occur in people with paranoia, obsessive-compulsive disorder or depression," she says. Photo by Kay Hinton.

Emory senior Hadar Naftalovich is majoring in psychology and minoring in visual arts. She has combined both to conduct experiments in causal illusions for the Mind and Language Lab of Emory psychologist Phillip Wolf.  Naftalovich wrote about her research in the current issue of Emory Magazine:

Imagine that your friend asks you if you got the job you recently interviewed for. You respond that you hope so, and quickly knock on wood to prevent any bad luck that could arise from that statement. Do you truly believe that knocking on wood prevented the bad luck?

Causal illusions are situations in which a causal relationship is inferred when there is no possible mechanism to validate that relationship. In order to study the formation and characteristics of causal illusions, we needed to provide participants with situations analogous to real-life scenarios and measure their false cause-effect beliefs.

We created two sets of animations, one focusing on a tray filled with water and the other focusing on a watch on a chain. With these animations, we manipulated contact, direction, and motion to create situations where a causal relationship was clearly present (such as a hand hitting a tray with water and a ripple occurring on the same side that the hand made contact on) and ones where the causal relationship was false (such as the hand failing to hit the tray and a ripple still emerging, but from the opposite side from which the hand moved).

We predicted that causal illusions are formed when people infer forces, even when the forces are illegitimate. If our hypothesis is correct, the ratings of causation would be strongest when contact, movement, and direction matched and weakest with no movement. Also, if there were sufficient evidence for a causal connection (such as movement) but no mechanism to validate that connection (no contact) there will be a stronger rating of causation when direction matched. Our results supported our hypothesis for both sets of animations.

Through my research I hope to better understand the processes that allow causal illusions to form and find ways to apply that knowledge to preventing these illusions from getting out of hand, as can sometimes occur in people with paranoia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, or depression. My favorite part about doing this research is that I am able to use my art skills to advance my knowledge of psychology and use my pursuit of knowledge in psychology to advance my art skills.

You can read about more research projects of Emory undergraduates in Emory Magazine.

A close look at tourism's impact in rural China

Women in Upper Jidao village, Guizhou, wear their festival attire and perform Miao songs and dances for tourists. Photo by Jenny Chio.

By Carol Clark

While most of the world has been dazzled by the transformation of China’s cities in recent years, Emory anthropologist Jenny Chio has been quietly recording changes in the rural way of life. Her documentary film “农家乐 Peasant Family Happiness” explores the impact of tourism in China, from the perspective of residents of two rural villages where urbanites go to seek a “country” experience.

The film, which won the 2013 David Plath Media Prize from the Society for East Asian Anthropology, is getting good reviews as it makes the rounds of conferences and festivals. In May, Chio has a book coming out, “A Landscape of Travel: The Work of Tourism in Rural Ethnic China,” which will give more details about the impact of touristic desires on village life, while also delving into the visual politics of tourism and photography.

“I’m fascinated by tourism and I think it’s an important topic,” Chio says, “but I don’t study tourists. I made a decision early on to focus instead on the people who are actually doing the work to create an enjoyable, cultural experience for the tourists.”

Watch a BBC interview with Jenny Chio:


Chio was born in the United States, to parents who immigrated from Taiwan in the early 1970s. She was raised in the Midwest and California and speaks Mandarin Chinese.

As an undergraduate majoring in anthropology at Brown University she became interested in museums, particularly those run by Native Americans, and how they are used to address historical trauma and promote revitalization of cultural heritage.

After graduation, she spent a year teaching English in Beijing. “That’s when I realized that everything that I thought I knew about China was inadequate,” Chio says. “It was like, ‘Wow! I have so much to learn about this place.’”

The crowds of people, cars and non-stop construction can feel overwhelming to a first-time visitor to a city in China, she says. “Beijing is much louder than an American city. There is this energy that comes from the fact that life in China has changed so dramatically, so quickly. The buildings are so new and so shiny and modern.”

She cites a running joke: Reports of Chinese tourists going to Europe and the United States and being disappointed that the cities look so old and decrepit in comparison.

Chio went to Goldsmiths College, University of London, for a masters degree in visual anthropology. For her thesis, she created a digital video on the representation of ethnic minorities in Chinese ethnographic films from the 1950s and 1960s, titled “Film the People.”

In this still image from "Peasant Family Happiness" a village woman muses whether she should maintain an "ethnic" look while doing her household chores.

While “visual anthropology” is fairly new as a term and as a sub-discipline, “anthropologists have been using still photos and film cameras since their invention,” Chio says. “But many in the field have considered imagery as too slippery for communicating research because you can’t control how people interpret it. My take is that images are obviously important, but they have to be used very consciously, with an awareness of what they can and cannot do. Film speaks to us in one way and text in another. I’m interested in how they may work together.”

Chio began filming the villages in “农家乐 Peasant Family Happiness” in 2006 as part of her thesis for a PhD in socio-cultural anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Domestic tourism is booming in China. As the middle class has blossomed in cities, the government has promoted tourism in the countryside, to help address the vast economic disparities between the urban and rural populations. The term “peasant family happiness,” or nong jia le, became a catch-all phrase to describe the phenomenon of homestays and guesthouses where “city slickers” can unwind while enjoying local food and activities.

Chio turned her camera on two ethnic minority villages cultivating tourism in their largely agricultural and wage-labor economies. The first, an ethnic Zhuang village called Ping’an in the terraced rice fields of mountainous Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, has been on the tourist map since the 1980s, due to its dramatic scenery. The second, Upper Jidao Village in Guizhou Province, is an ethnic Miao community with a quieter beauty. Set at the foot of a hillside in front of a river, Upper Jidao was just beginning to transform itself into a tourist destination when Chio started filming.

A villager at work in a rice field. Photo by Jenny Chio.

Here’s an excerpt of a review of  Chio's documentary, published by the journal American Anthropologist:

“The film opens with some striking footage of tourists being carried up steep slopes in colorful canopied bamboo sedan chairs. Ping’an men keep tallies on whose turn it is to carry the next passenger at the sedan chair boarding station. From an observation point, a tour guide in ethnic dress armed with a microphone rallies the tour group, consisting of urban Chinese tourists, to admire the rural landscape.” 

“It’s fascinating to me all the types of labor involved in creating and maintaining tourism in these villages,” Chio says. “The visitors must be fed and entertained. And the villagers have to learn how to re-visualize their living spaces and environments. Jeans and t-shirts, for example, may be cheaper, but the tourists expect to see villagers in ethnic dress.”

The tourists may want to have a cultural experience, but they don’t necessarily want it to include strong smells. In order to create a guesthouse, village families must consider whether they need to move their pigs away from their traditional location, beneath homes, to pens further away.

A flush toilet and indoor plumbing, uncommon luxuries in many villages, are basic essentials for city folk. Windows may need to be screened, and a balcony added to a room to make it more desirable. A concrete house may be more practical, and less of a fire hazard, but a wooden home is more picturesque.

One of Chio’s favorite scenes from the film shows about two dozen men from Ping’an strapping a 2,000-kilogram electrical transformer to two tree trunks, then hefting the trunks to their shoulders and carrying the transformer up a steep slope. “I don’t actually explain what’s going on to the viewers,” Chio says, “but, of course, if you’re going to bring more electrical capacity to an 800-meter-high village with only footpaths and one narrow road, then you are going to have to pack in a larger transformer. When the men finally arrive at the place where they can set it down, you hear this collective groan and cheer that sounds so tired and full of relief. It was a pretty amazing, joyous moment for the village.”

Residents of Upper Jidao and Jenny Chio pose with "minority models" for a souvenir photograph in Ping'an.

A major benefit of tourism is that it can allow families to stay in ancestral villages and keep their home and land. “I’m very much a product of the American suburbs,” Chio says, “but in rural China people have really strong ties to their land. The young adults of a family may go into the city and work, but many of them return for holidays and they talk about wanting to come back to their villages permanently.”

As more village youth graduate from college, rural tourism gives them an opportunity to return and run a hotel or other business. “They may help their parents create web sites for a guesthouse and build networks with travel companies,” Chio says.

Among the negative effects of tourism are environmental problems. “Tourism uses a lot of resources, like water and energy,” Chio notes. “It also makes village residents much more aware of the inequities between rural and urban parts of the country.”

China’s population recently tipped for the first time into a predominantly semi-urban-to-urban one, but 49 percent of the country remains rural.

“Rural China sits at the heart of a lot of key issues that the government has to deal with,” Chio says, including political instability at the local level, the critical need for food security, population mobility and tensions between the “haves” and “have nots.” The rapid urbanization of China has put more pressure on the government to help the countryside catch up.

Chio’s next project is focused on the digital technology and media practices of rural China. In some areas, non-governmental agencies have been training villagers in video production. The videos appear to have varying aims, from fostering awareness of social issues and environmental problems to simply offering glimpses of local festivals and other events.

“Making short, home-movie-style videos of local ethnic life is becoming a part of everyday life in rural China,” Chio says. “People are selling some of these videos at street stalls and in shops. I want to learn more about what these videos portray, who is making them, and who is buying them.”