Mathematical Parrot Reveals His Genius With Posthumous Paper 111
ananyo writes "Even in death, the world's most accomplished parrot continues to amaze. The final experiments involving Alex – a grey parrot trained to count objects – have just been published (abstract). They show that Alex could accurately add together Arabic numerals to a sum of eight, and correctly add three small sets of objects, putting his mathematical abilities on par with (and maybe beyond) those of chimpanzees and other non-human primates."
Alex is Dead? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Alex is Dead? (Score:5, Funny)
Because some people on Slashdot don't like parroted stories. I see complaints about that frequently.
Bert
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My green-wing Macaw's name is Bert...
Not that it's relevant other than this being a story about a parrot and you signing as Bert.
I was genuinely sad when Alex died. He was an amazing animal.
Re:Alex is Dead? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Alex is Dead? (Score:4, Informative)
Reading the thread for nostalgia purposes, is it weird to be bothered that I didn't notice a post years ago in the discussion on the ethics of bird-keeping someone saying their parrot didn't come from the rain forest because it's Australian? That I missed the chance to inform the nimrod that Australia has extensive rain forests and if not their specific bird then almost certainly the species hailed from those rain forests? That part of the problem with bird ownership is owners' ignorance about birds' natural habitats and behaviors?
That's weird, right?
I'm pretty sure that's weird.
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Fair enough, I cannot say their parrot was from a rain forest, but I can still complain about "it's from Australia so not from a rain forest"
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Re:Alex is Dead? (Score:5, Funny)
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pining for the fiords
Re:Alex is Dead? (Score:5, Funny)
It's an X parrot! "What does X equal, Alex?"
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Didn't he used to be named Bob? I think I saw him in a PC once.
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It got nailed by the foot to its perch and sold to some unsuspecting buyer.
Re:Alex is Dead? (Score:4, Informative)
He's been dead for years. For four years, even.
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He's been dead for years. For four years, even.
For even an even four you say?
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Five is right out.
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IIRC, it was.
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Man that's one pretty smart parrot. I mean, simple arithmetic is one thing, but writing scientific papers is really hard!
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Re:Sea animals? (Score:5, Funny)
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No, it's trinary
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Of course you did not find anything related to octopuses intelligence on Wikipedia. Search for the Necronomicon instead.
Re:Sea animals? (Score:5, Informative)
How do dolphins and octopuses rank? I tried a search w.r.t. octopuses but didn't find anything (and wikipedia has nothing about it).
Octopuses are the smartest invertebrates on Earth. I do sparrow fishing as hobby and they don't stop amazing me, from their ability to deploy decoy legs able to walk alone, annoying ink jets and their fantastic camouflage they are pretty good stealing items too! They should join thepiratebay!
(it's a joke, I know the difference between stealing and copying)
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(it's a joke, I know the difference between stealing and copying)
Octopuses don't. Just the other day one was telling me SOPA was essential to saving Hollywood from all those filthy movie thieves. I have no idea why everyone thinks they're so smart.
I do sparrow fishing as hobby
Sparrow fishing? Is that fishing for sparrows? Fishing with sparrows? Is this live bait fishing? Seems like casting would be difficult but oh-so satisfying if they're House Sparrows.
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The reason why the US is Lacking in Math and Science is most teachers Hate and are Afraid of Math and Science and past that hate of learning to their students.
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I have to wonder if the reason "most teachers Hate and are Afraid of Math and Science" is because we pay them shit and treat them like shit (and, admittedly, often get what we pay for as a result) so the math/science wonks elect for more lucrative STEM careers, instead.
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Teachers certainly teach their kids that teachers are underpaid and treated badly, but it's a bit naive to go on believing that as an adult, don't you think? If we demanded more of our teachers, fewer would want to or be able to do the job, and pay would naturally rise as a result, but overall as a culture we're not interested in that, we just want a place to park the kids till they can be shipped off to college.
Re:Mathematical Parrot Reveals His Genius With Pos (Score:4, Insightful)
Now that 10 hour day is an average that teachers bitch and moan about to me, however from friends who are teachers I usually see them working up to 12 hours some day and 6 - 8 hours the other... So 10 hours seemed fare. Most engineers I know work more then 8 hours a day to but they don't complain about it as much.
Teacher have a powerful union behind them (My personal feeling is Unions are holding good teachers back from getting what they deserve but that is too much digressing) that makes sure that they are treated fairly most engineers do not have such protection.
But this anti-Math and Science from teachers starts well before they are teaching. Normally for anyone graduating from High School who is choosing a major a Teaching degree is one of those that you can get that has an obvious career path that doesn't require heavy Math and Science, so they go that route. I went to college I know education majors, I saw the classes they took, I saw their masters classes too... They are joke classes to give them a degree.
The Poor teacher excuse is getting really lame today. For they are a few groups without strong math or science skills who can get a decent middle class job, they are not going to be rich but they will be able to pay their bills and feed a family.
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But this anti-Math and Science from teachers starts well before they are teaching. Normally for anyone graduating from High School who is choosing a major a Teaching degree is one of those that you can get that has an obvious career path that doesn't require heavy Math and Science, so they go that route. I went to college I know education majors, I saw the classes they took, I saw their masters classes too... They are joke classes to give them a degree.
The Poor teacher excuse is getting really lame today. For they are a few groups without strong math or science skills who can get a decent middle class job, they are not going to be rich but they will be able to pay their bills and feed a family.
I think you misunderstand what I meant, because that's pretty much what I was talking about: not that the current crop of teachers are "poor," that's not what I was getting at, but rather that the ones who AREN'T afraid of math or science are going into other fields instead of teaching. And thus the loop feeds into itself, making another set of kids who are afraid of math/science, etc...
as well as poor spelling (Score:2)
Re:Mathematical Parrot Reveals His Genius With Pos (Score:4, Funny)
It also looks like your English teacher Hated and was Afraid of English, and Past that Hate to you.
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I think you mean 'passed', unless you are implying he got over the hate...
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Whoooooosh.
Re:Mathematical Parrot Reveals His Genius With Pos (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes. Back in about 1976 Psychology Today had a pair of articles - one showed that of all professions, teachers had the highest incidence of a 'mental block' against math, and the other showed that they were successful in communicating that to their students. In Grade 3 about 50% of all students liked math. By Grade 5, only about 15% of girls and 30% of boys liked math.
In my own experience, back in the late 1950s my school was one of those working with the experimental 'New Math' from Stanford Research Institute (now SRI international) - the books were stapled together paperbacks. The New Math basically taught math from an algebraic perspective. It worked great, and it probably accelerated my own understanding. Nationwide the New Math failed, and the analysis showed that while it worked great for students the teachers just couldn't hack it. So school systems dropped it, to the lasting detriment of all students for the last four decades.
It's yet one more unfortunate result of the stultified Education establishment, along with phonics, critical thinking and other power learning tools. The system was originally developed (by Dewey's own account) not to teach but to indoctrinate good industrial workers. The entire concept of age-based class cohorts was never efficient, cost effective or productive. It is now a completely obsolete anachronism, where crowd control and logistics comprises between 75% and 85% of a given day, and actual learning the poor relation.
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The big problem with the "new math" was that parents who didn't know algebra (like mine) couldn't help their kids with their homework. Couple that with way too many kids in a classroom and a generation of inumerates was guaranteed.
It was a stupid idea. They should have taught the kids the old way first, then the new way.
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I think it was Niels Bohr who said "Arithmetic is an exotic form of boolean algebra, and should not be taught to children".
Teaching the old way first was counter to the whole idea, which was that it was easier, faster and more effective to teach kids to think algebraically first. Teaching arithmetic first would have been the equivalent of teaching programmers BASIC before they are allowed to learn Java, or C, or whatever.
Having said that (and reviewing the Wikipedia article), I can probably agree that the
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The stamp on the side of the box.
Rain man with wings (Score:1)
Parrots live very long lives, how tantalising to study what may have been a savant from another species that couldn't score with chicks but really great with maths.
"No, no, 'e's uh,...he's resting" (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/~ebarnes/python/dead-parrot.htm [mtholyoke.edu]
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I am shocked it took this many posts to find the link to the parrot sketch. What is up with Slashdot today?
It's resting.
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That's good. But, this, is rich!
http://419eater.com/html/bigman2.htm [419eater.com]
Things that still need to be done (Score:5, Interesting)
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Shall we start using "FOX News fan" in place of parrot in the future?
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Well, it would be more accurate.
Re:Things that still need to be done (Score:5, Interesting)
I dare "blindly" guess Alex was an average African Grey. My mother happens to own one and it is honestly as smart as a very young child. It's hard to explain. He knows what kind of words use for anger, happiness, request food, denote you are eating (without requesting food for himself, and actually rejecting it, just because he noted you are eating does not mean he WANTS some,) dance, sing, laugh at jokes on the TV (i think it’s more a matter of intonation on that one than actually understanding the joke) and even tell the dog to get the hell away from him. That on top of many other tiny behavioral things.
I think their learning is mostly hindered or boosted by their teacher. My mother is an elder woman, though, without much science or math skills to go trying to impart that knowledge on the bird.
I can’t help but smile in amazement every other week for some new thing he reacts to intelligently.
My doubt does not lie on them being able to learn, but instead being able to transfer knowledge to their children. It would take insane decades, but I would love to find a species in this planet we can teach to, that in turn teach their children the same skills.
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Maybe not though.
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We are bird breeders having several pairs of Greys. I've heard (hearsay) that Alex died from stress being pressured in learning tasks. Greys have learning abilities beyond other avian species and vary somewhat individually. This should be a lesson for tiger moms and other overly ambitious parents.
From the title I thought Alex WROTE the paper! (Score:5, Insightful)
That would've been even more impressive than his math abilities.
Dead Parrot Writes his own posthumus paper... (Score:2)
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Braugh! (Score:1)
Meaningless (Score:1)
The bird doesn't have an Erdos number!
Re:The bird doesn't have an Erdos number! (Score:3)
But it has a Kevin Bacon Number of 3.
Alex the Parrot
WorkedWith
Irene Pepperberg
WhoWasIn
"Ripley's Believe It or Not!" (1999) {(#1.5)}
With
Dean Cain
WhoWasIn
"Ellen: The Ellen DeGeneres Show" (2003) {(2003-10-08)}
implication for dinosaurs (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:implication for dinosaurs (Score:5, Funny)
With time, the dinosaurs might have evolved to create civilization.
They actually had an advanced civilization but it collapsed. When the time came to actually DO something about the massive rock heading for the planet, they built a trajectory altering rocket that would land on the asteroid, dig itself in, and then fire its engines to steer the asteroid the necessary fraction of a degree away to save the planet.
Unfortunately they used touch screens for everything (instead of keyboards and mice) to cater to the T-Rex crowd with their short arms. When it was time to launch, they futilely pawed at their dPads but they just couldn't get any actual work done.
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With time, the dinosaurs might have evolved to create civilization.
They actually had an advanced civilization but it collapsed. When the time came to actually DO something about the massive rock heading for the planet, they built a trajectory altering rocket that would land on the asteroid .dig itself in, and then fire its engines to steer the asteroid the necessary fraction of a degree away to save the planet...
+1 informative
Because, I always thought it was the asteroid deniers that blocked funding for the project till it was too late.
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For all we know they might have. They then created nuclear war and global climate change which led to their extinction.
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Alex also solved the Goldbach conjecture (Score:4, Funny)
but only up to 8.
Employment prospects .... (Score:2)
By the sound of things he would have done a better job than some humans Damaged US Passport Chip Strands Travelers [slashdot.org]
Eight numbers (Score:1)
I read somewhere that eight seems to be the limit to the amount of objects that an animal can understand. After that point, it is all many objects. Actually, there seems to be an innate sense of basic arithmetic that even we as humans have. Test yourself on this...
Take an unknown number of small objects such as marbles, quickly look at them and WITHOUT counting, guess how many there were. You will probably find that when there are eight or less objects, your guess is usually pretty good. For more than
On a par with Chimpanzees... (Score:2)
and your average product of Australia's high schools.
Alex and Me (Score:2)
So much for the "bird brain" insult.. (Score:5, Interesting)
That's just great. (Score:2)
Now your grad school adviser can look at your project and comment:
"a dead parrot would have better chances of getting its paper accepted than you."
The parrot wrote a paper? (Score:2)
That was my first thought wen I read the headline, followed by "Publishing standards must be at a new low". That was then followed by "It's no where near April 1st". :)
The I read the write up and realized how confused I was and, once again, how wonderfully ambiguous the English language can be.
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Multi-Parrot Processing (Score:3)
Certainly, this makes him ... (Score:3)
<rimshot/>
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Non-Arabic Arabic Numerals (Score:2)