An anonymous reader quotes a report from ScienceAlert: A team of scientists has shown that crows can 'count' out loud -- producing a specific and deliberate number of caws in response to visual and auditory cues. While other animals such as honeybees have shown an ability to understand numbers, this specific manifestation of numeric literacy has not yet been observed in any other non-human species. "Producing a specific number of vocalizations with purpose requires a sophisticated combination of numerical abilities and vocal control," writes the team of researchers led by neuroscientist Diana Liao of the University of Tubingen in Germany. "Whether this capacity exists in animals other than humans is yet unknown. We show that crows can flexibly produce variable numbers of one to four vocalizations in response to arbitrary cues associated with numerical values." The ability to count aloud is distinct from understanding numbers. It requires not only that understanding, but purposeful vocal control with the aim of communication. Humans are known to use speech to count numbers and communicate quantities, an ability taught young. [...] "Our results demonstrate that crows can flexibly and deliberately produce an instructed number of vocalizations by using the 'approximate number system', a non-symbolic number estimation system shared by humans and animals," the researchers write in their paper. "This competency in crows also mirrors toddlers' enumeration skills before they learn to understand cardinal number words and may therefore constitute an evolutionary precursor of true counting where numbers are part of a combinatorial symbol system." The findings have been published in the journal Science.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Atlantic: In October 2003, Mark Zuckerberg created his first viral site: not Facebook, but FaceMash. Then a college freshman, he hacked into Harvard's online dorm directories, gathered a massive collection of students' headshots, and used them to create a website on which Harvard students could rate classmates by their attractiveness, literally and figuratively head-to-head. The site, a mean-spirited prank recounted in the opening scene of The Social Network, got so much traction so quickly that Harvard shut down his internet access within hours. The math that powered FaceMash -- and, by extension, set Zuckerberg on the path to building the world's dominant social-media empire -- was reportedly, of all things, a formula for ranking chess players: the Elo system. Fundamentally, what an Elo rating does is predict the outcome of chess matches by assigning every player a number that fluctuates based purely on performance. If you beat a slightly higher-ranked player, your rating goes up a little, but if you beat a much higher-ranked player, your rating goes up a lot (and theirs, conversely, goes down a lot). The higher the rating, the more matches you should win. That is what Elo was designed for, at least. FaceMash and Zuckerberg aside, people have deployed Elo ratings for many sports -- soccer, football, basketball -- and for domains as varied as dating, finance, and primatology. If something can be turned into a competition, it has probably been Elo-ed. Somehow, a simple chess algorithm has become an all-purpose tool for rating everything. In other words, when it comes to the preferred way to rate things, Elo ratings have the highest Elo rating. [...] Elo ratings don't inherently have anything to do with chess. They're based on a simple mathematical formula that works just as well for any one-on-one, zero-sum competition -- which is to say, pretty much all sports. In 1997, a statistician named Bob Runyan adapted the formula to rank national soccer teams -- a project so successful that FIFA eventually adopted an Elo system for its official rankings. Not long after, the statistician Jeff Sagarin applied Elo to rank NFL teams outside their official league standings. Things really took off when the new ESPN-owned version of Nate Silver's 538 launched in 2014 and began making Elo ratings for many different sports. Some sports proved trickier than others. NBA basketball in particular exposed some of the system's shortcomings, Neil Paine, a stats-focused sportswriter who used to work at 538, told me. It consistently underrated heavyweight teams, for example, in large part because it struggled to account for the meaninglessness of much of the regular season and the fact that either team might not be trying all that hard to win a given game. The system assumed uniform motivation across every team and every game. Pretty much anything, it turns out, can be framed as a one-on-one, zero-sum game. Arpad Emmerich Elo, creator of the Elo rating system, understood the limitations of his invention. "It is a measuring tool, not a device of reward or punishment," he once remarked. "It is a means to compare performances, assess relative strength, not a carrot waved before a rabbit, or a piece of candy given to a child for good behavior."

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O'Reilly's "Tech Trends" newsletter included an interesting item this month: Want your own Klein Bottle? Made by Cliff Stoll, author of the cybersecurity classic The Cuckoo's Egg, who will autograph your bottle for you (and may include other surprises). First described in 1882 by the mathematician Felix Klein, a Klein bottle (like a Mobius strip) has a one-side surface. ("Need a zero-volume bottle...?" asks Stoll's web site. "Want the ultimate in non-orientability...? A mathematician's delight, handcrafted in glass.") But how the legendary cyberbreach detective started the company is explained in this 2016 article from a U.C. Berkeley alumni magazine. Its headline? "How a Berkeley Eccentric Beat the Russians — and Then Made Useless, Wondrous Objects." The reward for his cloak-and-dagger wizardry? A certificate of appreciation from the CIA, which is stashed somewhere in his attic... Stoll published a best-selling book, The Cuckoo's Egg, about his investigation. PBS followed it with a NOVA episode entitled "The KGB, the Computer, and Me," a docudrama starring Stoll playing himself and stepping through the "fourth wall" to double as narrator. Stoll had stepped through another wall, as well, into the numinous realm of fame, as the burgeoning tech world went wild with adulation... He was more famous than he ever could have dreamed, and he hated it. "After a few months, you realize how thin fame is, and how shallow. I'm not a software jockey; I'm an astronomer. But all people cared about was my computing." Stoll's disenchantment also arose from what he perceived as the false religion of the Internet... Stoll articulated his disenchantment in his next book, Silicon Snake Oil, published in 1995, which urged readers to get out from behind their computer screens and get a life. "I was asking what I thought were reasonable questions: Is the electronic classroom an improvement? Does a computer help a student learn? Yes, but what it teaches you is to go to the computer whenever you have a question, rather than relying on yourself. Suppose I was an evil person and wanted to eliminate the curiosity of children. Give the kid a diet of Google, and pretty soon the child learns that every question he has is answered instantly. The coolest thing about being human is to learn, but you don't learn things by looking it up; you learn by figuring it out." It was not a popular message in the rise of the dot-com era, as Stoll soon learned... Being a Voice in the Wilderness doesn't pay well, however, and by this time Stoll had taken his own advice and gotten a life; namely, marrying and having two children. So he looked around for a way to make some money. That ushered in his third — and current — career as President and Chief Bottle Washer of the aforementioned Acme Klein Bottle company... At first, Stoll had a hard time finding someone to make Klein bottles. He tried a bong peddler on Telegraph Avenue, but the guy took Cliff's money and disappeared. "I realized that the trouble with bong makers is that they're also bong users." Then in 1994, two friends of his, Tom Adams and George Chittenden, opened a shop in West Berkeley that made glassware for science labs. "They needed help with their computer program and wanted to pay me," Stoll recalls. "I said, 'Nah, let's make Klein bottles instead.' And that's how Acme Klein Bottles was born." UPDATE: Turns out Stoll is also a long-time Slashdot reader, and shared comments this weekend on everything from watching the eclipse to his VIP parking pass for CIA headquarters and "this CIA guy's rubber-stamp collection." "I am honored by the attention and kindness of fellow nerds and online friends," Stoll added Saturday. "When I first started on that chase in 1986, I had no idea wrhere it would lead me... To all my friends: May you burdens be light and your purpose high. Stay curious!"

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An anonymous reader shares a report: According to the Ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras, 'consonance' -- a pleasant-sounding combination of notes -- is produced by special relationships between simple numbers such as 3 and 4. More recently, scholars have tried to find psychological explanations, but these 'integer ratios' are still credited with making a chord sound beautiful, and deviation from them is thought to make music 'dissonant,' unpleasant sounding. But researchers from the University of Cambridge, Princeton and the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, have now discovered two key ways in which Pythagoras was wrong. Their study, published in Nature Communications, shows that in normal listening contexts, we do not actually prefer chords to be perfectly in these mathematical ratios. "We prefer slight amounts of deviation. We like a little imperfection because this gives life to the sounds, and that is attractive to us," said co-author, Dr Peter Harrison, from Cambridge's Faculty of Music and Director of its Centre for Music and Science. The researchers also found that the role played by these mathematical relationships disappears when you consider certain musical instruments that are less familiar to Western musicians, audiences and scholars. These instruments tend to be bells, gongs, types of xylophones and other kinds of pitched percussion instruments. In particular, they studied the 'bonang,' an instrument from the Javanese gamelan built from a collection of small gongs.

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