tools
dr. dolittle | November 10, 2012Check out this picture of a captive cockatoo (Cacatua goffiniana) in the Department of Cognitive Biology at the University of Vienna using a tool:
Image from: Scientific American
Figaro (shown above) was observed by a student using a piece of bamboo to try to retrieve a dropped pebble. This was the first documented evidence of a Goffin's cockatoo attempting to use a tool so the researchers decided to try a little experiment. They placed a cashew just outside of Figaro's cage and observed as Figaro attempted to retrieve it using a stick he found on the floor of the aviary. When that was…
carlyo | January 25, 2012The USA Science & Engineering Festival hosted by Lockheed Martin offers a special appeal for budding entrepreneurs, inventors, engineers and programmers who will find the ideas, tools and resources to help them make their dreams a reality.
"The Festival is a fantastic place for technical experts of all kinds to learn about the amazing advances that have been made in technology to help them make product prototypes from 3D printers, find designs online for parts and components, and meet an array of experts to help them bring their product ideas to life," said Larry Bock, serial…
laelaps | March 1, 2010
An adult chimpanzee in Bossou, Guinea uses hammer and anvil stones to crack nuts as younger individuals look on. From Haslam et al., 2009.
Before 1859 the idea that humans lived alongside the mammoths, ground sloths, and saber-toothed cats of the not-too-distant past was almost heretical. Not only was there no irrefutable evidence that our species stretched so far back in time, but the very notion that we could have survived alongside such imposing Pleistocene mammals strained credulity. Contrary to what might be immediately expected, however, it was not Darwin's famous abstract On the…
rallain | November 23, 2009Everyone knows, or should know how much I like MythBusters. Here is the problem. Below is a picture of Adam analyzing the motion of a an exploding water heater.
Actually, I applaud Adam for his creative use of the vernier caliper. Really, it is an example of "making things work". However, in this case there is a very nice alternative - Tracker Video Analysis. So, here is what I am going to do. This will be a short tutorial on using Tracker. I will use the same video from the episode of the exploding water heater. The goal - how fast and how high did the water heater go. Or as the…
rallain | August 7, 2009I have previously compared Tracker Video Analysis and Logger Pro - check that out here. Really, the only advantage Logger Pro has over Tracker is that maybe it is easier to use for simple things and maybe students are already familiar with it from other analysis.
There are other video analysis programs out there. There is VideoPoint - but this is not free and I don't think it has been updated in quite some time. Also, don't forget Video Graph. A great program for it's time, but that time was 1997.
So, this post is really about Tracker and its feature of calibration point pairs. What is…
neurophilosophy | August 6, 2009NOT so long ago, the idea that birds might possess some form of what we call intelligence seemed quite ridiculous. Yet this view has changed dramatically in recent years, with numerous studies showing that some bird species are capable of complex cognition. Members of one family of birds in particular - the Corvidae, which includes crows, rooks and ravens - have an ability to make and use tools which is at least as sophisticated as that of chimpanzees.
Two new studies, published this week, provide yet more demonstrations of the remarkable cognitive abilities of this group of birds. One shows…
edyong | August 6, 2009Aesop's fable "The Crow and the Pitcher" has been confirmed in a wonderful experiment. In the classic tale, a thirsty crow uses stones to raise the level of water in a pitcher until it rises within reach of its beak. This is no mere fiction - rooks, close relatives of crows, have the brains to actually do this.
The aptly named Chris Bird, along with Nathan Emery, gave four captive rooks (Cook, Fry, Connelly and Monroe) a chance to reach a small worm floating in a cylinder of water, with nothing but a small pile of stones sitting on the side. All of them solved the task, and Cook and Fry…
rallain | January 12, 2009I am not going to try and even surprise you with this. Notice the "tools:". This post is not about physics really, but something used in physics. When I get enough of these, I will put them together in a "tools" page - or you can just use the tools-tag.
Suppose you have some data. You want to plot that data and turn it in with your lab report. Your instructor (me) told you to be sure and include error bars on your graph.
What are error bars?
How do you add error bars - whatever they are?
Error bars are a way to graphically represent the uncertainty in a data point. Every time you take…