SciTechBits – Interesting Bits of Science & Technoglogy Served For You!

What is the exact influence of genes on mate choices of humans? Does it affect males and females differently? Does the affect change based on whether the mate is for a short term relationship or long term relationship?

It is well known that genes located at the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) have a strong influence on human mate choices. The MHC is the densest part of the human genome and plays significant role in the auto immune system of humans. In order to improve the immunity capabilities, the MHC is believed to affect the mate choices, looking out for more a more different/diverse genetic partner, as this brings more new auto immune capabilities to their offspring. However this affect has not been analyzed across different sexes and for different relationship contexts.

Researchers from Australia recruited participants who were told to rate a huge collection of facial photos of the opposite sex for which genetic information was available. The rating was done on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being not attractive at all. The rating was done both for a short-term and a long-term relationship. All of the photos were with neutral facial expression and with hair and rest of the body not shown.

Our behavior online is now a primary focus of researchers. One group of researchers believes that, our online behavior is no different to evolutionary behavior, as explained by evolutionary psychology.

Internet behavior is one of the most researched fields in the recent times. However most of the studies have based their research on traditional psychology models, which are good in determining the proximal causes of our online behavior. Researchers from UK are now proposing that our internet behavior is modeled upon evolutionary psychology and suggesting that, such a model would help learn the distal causes of our internet behavior.

Despite the major differences between face to face communication and computer mediated communication, there exist a lot of similarities. To further their claim and motivate fellow researchers, the researchers have made some interesting similarities between typical online behaviors and evolutionary psychology theories. Given below are few of those observations/suggestions. Further research into each of the following, would help us learn, whether we are following our evolutionary psychological behavior, online as well.

Researchers have developed a very accurate and robust model to classify any given webpage as a blog, newspaper site, forum, FAQ, e-shop, listing, personal home page etc and this would extend the limited search results classification (e.g., Google News) available now.

Search results classified by genre are not something new; however most of the classification is manual. For instance, sites/pages listed in Google News are manually submitted and approved links, rather than auto classification. Manual classification of every single page on the web into several genres is impossible. Such a classification will help users easily access information based on very specific needs.

A group of researchers from Greece have implemented and tested a model, which used textual and structural information. This combination of information has leaded to a very high accuracy (96.5%) on the tests conducted. Previous attempts on this had limited success due to the lack of pre classified list of websites for testing.

The research used two different set of classifications (corpora) named 7Genre and KI-04. 7Genre had seven different genres – blog, e-shop, FAQs, online newspaper frontpage, listing, personal home page and search page, with each group having 200 pages for testing and training of the model. KI-04 had eight genres – article, download, link collection, portrayal-private, discussion, help, portrayal-non private and shop. Both of these corpora were used to auto train the model and then test on the success of the model.

To test the robustness of this method, cross testing was performed as well, where in training was done on one corpora and testing was done on a different corpora. Such a setup helped identify the possibilities of using such a system in a real life situation. This testing also produced significantly accurate results.

This model does not need any manual selection of features that best capture the stylistic properties of text or structure of webpages. This enables adapting to specific properties of either a given general or focused collection of genres. The time taken for training is analogous to the size of the corpus; however the cross check experiments show that training on smaller and different corpora is sufficient enough for training. The auto training enables evolving of the model to the ever changing web and can be used for any language.

RIAA and anti-p2p companies have constantly engaged in various methods to thwart sharing of albums and movies over BitTorrent. Detailed research on one of the popular methods (leecher attack) has proven that, the time and money spent on this method is just a waste. The researchers also suggest methods to completely nullify these attacks.

With law suits against BitTorrent users being very unpopular and legal action against every tracker being impossible, RIAA and record labels have long been using anti-p2p companies such as Media Defender, Safenet and Macrovision to engage in online attacks on various components of the BitTorrent ecosystem.

Of the many attacks used, a few are popular. Seeder attack focuses on attacking the seeder (uploader), in order to prevent the file reaching other users; however this attack needs to initiated at the very early stages of protecting an album or movie from propagating and seeders are usually experienced p2p users. Tracker attack involves flooding the tracker, however most trackers employ high bandwidth servers and many BitTorrent clients have employed other mechanisms such as distributed hash tables and gossips (letting other peers know about the peers discovered by a client). Uploading fake torrents to trackers is one other method used, however this only just frustrates the users but does not prevent or block the sharing of their valued content. Leecher attack is one of the most popular attack, for that it attempts to attack the majority of the BitTorrent ecosystem, the users actively downloading parts of a movie or album. Researchers have paid special attention to leecher attacks, due to this reason.

Physical attractiveness is always associated with mating success; however research has already shown that it also correlates to women’s capability of having kids and men’s semen quality. A recent research has focused on analyzing the number of kids born based on the physical attractiveness of the participants and has interesting results.

Many studies have shown increased mating success with increased physical attractiveness, however this cannot lead to a conclusion that higher physical attractiveness would result in more number of kids. For example, several researchers have shown that when people seek partners to have kids, they do not prefer extremely attractive partners; as such partners are more likely to leave them or have extra marital affairs. This factor shows that, it is not necessary that increased attractiveness leads to more number of kids.

Yearbook photos, fertility and marital history data of 2241 (1244 women and 997 men) people aged 53 to 56 years were collected. Thirty three judges from ages 63 to 97 rated all of the yearbook photos (each picture gets rated 6 times) for their attractiveness, based on face. Upon this ranking, the participants were grouped as not attractive, moderately attractive, attractive and very attractive. The association between attractiveness and years of marriage, parental socioeconomic status & education level was estimated using regression analysis to provide for the necessary adjustment, these factors would contribute to the number of kids. Following which, detailed statistical analysis was performed to study the relationship between the age at which the participants had their first kid, interbirth interval etc and the physical attractiveness.

Researchers have demonstrated that with minimum efforts and skill, teachers can create educational serious games, by just modding existing first person shooter games, which are very popular among students. Students who tested felt that, this could be used in high schools, however male testers reacted different as compared to female testers.

Gaming technology has been heavily focused on “entertainment games”, while the other type of games – “serious games”, are heavily ignored mainly due to the less monetary profit got from them. Educational serious games, whose purpose is to be educative, have been characterized with realistic activities, such as performing experiments in a laboratory or the like. However the games as such do not offer anything interesting (other than education) as compared to the entertainment games, especially first person shooters. First person shooters are very popular among students and are usually very task/mission oriented. Teachers and researchers have been hoping to tap into this interest among students towards the first person shooters, to use them for educative purposes.

However, game development is not an easy task and involves heavy resources, which makes it almost impossible for teachers to handle with. A group of researchers saw this need and decided to try to mod an existing game and test the efficiency. Unreal Tournament is already popular among the research community and has been analyzed for it physics capabilities, suggesting that UnrealEd (the map editor of the game) could be used in classrooms to demonstrate various physics theories and properties.

Online auctions open up opportunities for several types of frauds. A particular type, which facilitates illegal loans, is on the rise in several nations. Researchers have analyzed these cases to find patterns, which could help identify them, including other types of auction frauds.

As the internet reach broadens, more and more people have started to use online auctioning (EBay). Along with this growth, fraud also keeps growing. 2007 alone saw about $14.37M in auction fraud. Misrepresentation of items, fake bids by the seller to drive up the price, adding hidden charges (shipping & handling, insurance), non-delivery of items and offering black market goods are just some of the well known online auction frauds.

A particular type of fraud is very prevalent in Korea and is also found in most other markets – Online Credit Card Phantom Transactions (OCCPT). In this type of fraud, the seller and buyer collude to create a fake transaction, there by resulting in money (loan) got from the credit card company at a relatively very low interest rate, as compared to other options. This fraud is done in situations where, a person is not able to secure any forms of legal loans, interest rate of available loans are very high or cash advance limit on the credit card is very low compared to the purchase limit. Finally, the buyer (the owner of the credit card) could pay or not pay the credit card company.

Researchers have designed a virtual reality based piano, which can be used to train stroke survivor’s finger motion. The piano actively engages the patient and slowly makes them produce more degrees of motion.

Stroke is the largest cause of long term disability in America and affects about 5.7 million people. Only 5% of them are able to regain their hand & finger controls. While some stroke survivors experience hemiplegia – which is the total impairment of one side of their body, some survivors experience hemiparesis – which is weakness in one side of the body. A system designed to produce hand & finger motion, in a continuous and interactive manner and thus making the target skill level progressively higher is proved to avail better and quicker rehabilitation of the hands & fingers.

With these in mind, a group of researchers from New Jersey have designed a “Virtual Piano Trainer” to provider finger motion training for people with hemiparesis. The system comprises of a screen – which shows a first person view of an avatar playing a 64 keys keyboard, a glove fitted over both hands – which can read every fine movement produced in the hands & fingers, an arm tracking device over both the arms and a haptic feedback & exoskeletal device over the dorsum of the hand (on top of the gloves) – which is capable of producing a force on each finger to either cause resistance or motion.