Real Pain, Social Pain

We often talk about emotional trouble as painful. We feel hurt by rejection, we smart from hurtful remarks, We get burned by a bad relationship, our hearts ache for company and so on. There's lots of similar expressions in other languages too; bitterness can be expressed as a form of pain in Japanese (苦痛) and your ears will hurt (耳が痛い) from hearing a painful truth. In Swedish, too, rejection and other negative emotions are painful, and experiencing others misfortune can be heart-cutting (hjärtskärande).

Emotional distress as pain is a good, productive metaphor. But — what if it's more than a metaphor? Our experience of pain is a function of our brains after all, just like emotions are. Bodily pain starts with receptors on our skin and elsewhere, but the experience of painfulness definitely happens in the brain itself.

Amputees can experience phantom pain, where the brain is led to believe there's pain in a body part that no longer exists. On the other hand, many pain relievers like morphine or codeine act on the brain pain centers rather than at the source of the pain; I've heard one person describe the effect of a similar drug as "I knew it still hurt a lot; I just no longer cared."

 

Do Pain Relievers Help with Social Pain?

Now, if emotional pain is real pain — if, in other words, "painful" emotions actually use some of the same circuits as physical pain in the brain — then central nervous system pain relievers, such as acetaminophen — commonly known as paracetamol — should work for emotional pain as well. And this is what a group led by Naomi Eisenberger set out to test recently. They published a paper, Acetaminophen reduces social pain: behavioral and neural evidence about this last year.

Unfortunately, the paper is heavily paywalled and I can't get it from the publisher. By current standards of science journalism we'd be going well above and beyond our duty simply by reading the abstract. But fortunately the authors have put up the paper on their own website: you can download the PDF right here¹. And there's another, earlier paper from Eisenberger, Why rejection hurts: a common neural alarm system for physical and social pain², that lays out a lot of the evidence for a common mechanism between physical and social pain.


They recruited two groups of participants — 62 university undergraduates in total. One group took paracetamol twice a day for three weeks, and the other one took a sugar pill, or placebo. The participants rated the amount of social pain they experienced every day. Social pain dropped significantly³ over time among those who took the pain reliever, while the people with the placebo showed no change. The pain reliever seems to lessen the pain of bad social events.

They also did a brain scanning experiment with two smaller groups, 25 people in total. The groups got either paracetamol or a placebo for three weeks. Then they got to play a simple computer ball-tossing game while lying in an fMRI scanner. They thought they played with two other people, but the game was really pre-programmed. The computer "players" gradually ignored the player and refused to toss their ball to them, making them feel rejected and left out.

They found that those who had taken paracetamol for three weeks had much less activity in two brain areas (the anterior insula and anterior cingulate) that we know are involved in the emotional aspect of pain. But there was no difference between the two groups in how painful that ball-game rejection was to them.


So it does seem that long-term doses — note that the effect took a couple of weeks to appear — of some pain relievers really can lessen the pain of social rejection. But the effect is not big, and it doesn't seem consistent. So don't go eat paracetamol on a daily basis to feel socially better — acetaminophen is not good for your liver, and especially so if you also like to drink alcohol.

fMRI scanner. That's me lying there getting ready for a scan. I wasn't ill or anything; I just volunteered as participant in an experiment. It was a fun experience, though difficult to stay awake for the entire experiment. And as a bonus you got confirmation that there's nothing obviously wrong with your brain.

…But There's More!

As it happens, another group led by Tor Wager did a similar experiment just this year (it's Open Access; anyone can read it). They recruited a group of people that had recently been dumped by their partners and stuck them in an fMRI scanner to find out what areas are involved with social rejection. They ran two sets of scans, one to find areas for social pain, and one for physical pain.

To test social pain they showed the volunteers either a picture of their ex-partner and asked them to think about their rejection; or a picture of a friend and asked them to recall a pleasant experience they've had with them. This was repeated multiple times while their brain activity was scanned. This way you can compare the brain activity with and without the bad experience, and the areas that are active only for the bad experience are probably connected to their rejection in some way.

They did the same kind of thing for physical pain: the volunteers either got burned on the arm⁴, or just pleasantly warmed on the same spot. Again, you look for differences between the painful and the non-painful heating in the brain scans. That should show you what brain areas that react specifically to physical pain, rather than to heat or things touching your arm and so on.

When they compared the two sets of differences, they found that the brain areas that deal with the emotional aspects of pain — the "feeling bad about it" — are activated by both emotional and physical pain. That's the same areas that Eisenbergers group found, and it's exactly what we'd expect. But they also found common activity in areas that deal specifically with physical pain. The emotional rejection activates areas that normally only react to bodily injury, in other words. This is surprising, and previous experiments have not found this.


One major reason, Wager's group notes, may be the level of pain. In Eisenbergers fMRI experiment, people played a simple computer game with strangers who weren't being fair to them. Not nice, but not exactly a major life crisis either.

In this experiment, on the other hand, people that have just been dumped get the picture of their traitorous ex-partner shoved into their face, and are asked to please really think through the whole sordid series of events that ended with them being thrown on the curb like yesterday's garbage. It's a whole different world of hurt, and I can imagine it took a bit of explanation to get this approved by the ethics committee.

So it may simply be that social rejection needs to be strong to actually qualify as pain. Our pain centers don't light up for every touch either; they need a minimum level of hurt to react at all. This could explain the puzzling result from Eisenbergers group, where the pain reliever seemed to have an effect for the students that reported daily social pain, but not when students were scanned. We probably encounter much worse social experiences in our daily lives than the computer ball-game they used for their fMRI scan. The pain reliever would lessen the impact of strong, but not weak, social rejection, just like it has an effect on a real skin bruise or cut but doesn't numb us to touch or slight discomfort.

…As This Is Getting Too Long Already…

The takeaway message is, I think, that the difference between our mental experiences and the physical reality is quite blurred in our brains. Paper cut or hurtful word — by the time it reaches the brain it's all just nerve inputs. There is nothing intrinsically more painful about the signals coming from your skin than from your ears. The difference is only in how our brains treat those signals.

Evolution is ultimately pragmatic. If it is useful to treat strong social rejection as physical pain then it will. It doesn't matter if it doesn't make sense from a design point of view, if it makes for a messy, untidy system, or if it will cause unintended side effects and problems for some distant descendant. The brain is full of opportunistic shortcuts, multiple-use mechanisms and exaptations which makes for a very interesting task trying to untangle it all.

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#1 Are they breaking copyright by making their paper available like this? Maybe, and maybe not. A lot of journals do allow authors to make "draft" versions available; the difference to the published version is usually little more than the addition of magazine logos and page numbers. And depending on the legal residence of the researcher and of the journal, and on the exact wording of the contract, the researchers may retain the right — explicitly or though fair-use provisions — to disseminate their own paper.

On a more practical level, any journal that tries to sue its (unpaid, and frequently paying) contributors for passing out their own work is probably going to find themselves in a bad public relations debacle, with far worse consequences than the possibility of having lost fifty or a hundred dollars in revenue.

#2 If you're not familiar with the research world, you may not know why Dr. Eisenberger is the last author in the current paper, but the first in this earlier one. Very simplified, the first author is typically the one who did most of the actual research. The last author is their supervisor, or research leader or PI (principal investigator). They may have done parts of the actual work, but more likely provided guidance, original ideas, money and other resources.

Dr.Eisenberger, we can infer, probably did this earlier paper as a post-doc in Dr. Lieberman's lab, then managed to secure funding for her own lab, where she apparently continues her line of research but now as a leader of a group of young researchers.

#3 That is the science meaning of "unlikely to be due to chance", not the everyday meaning of "sort-of important". If you think about it, though, the meanings do overlap quite a bit.

#4 There's ways of using low heat to create intense burning sensation without any actual damage. Still, pain is not something you'd use lightly in experiments.

It's Monday Morning…

A few Monday morning notes, in no particular order:

• I know paper reviews are simply reviewing your paper, not your work or yourself. That's what I do when I review other peoples papers after all. I know and appreciate that negative reviews are really helpful and we'll have a much better paper in the end. I know all this but I still take the criticism and the rejections personally.
  
  Most researchers I know are perennial — even pathological — optimists. You have to be, in order to deal with constant failure, uncertain funding and all the other stresses of research. I'm not an optimist at heart so I'm not emotionally cut out for this job.



• My life would be measurably less stressful if it didn't currently include learning the standard kanji and several hundred obscure Japanese grammar points.



• The election of the next DPJ leader, and thus Japanese prime minister is this afternoon. Get MTC's excellent take on the race here, and a voting analysis by sigma1 here.
  
  I'll write a few words about it once it's over, but I belong firmly in the "who wins doesn't really matter" camp, so I haven't found the energy or time to really cover this in any detail. MTC and the others do a much better job anyhow.



• We'll be off to Sweden in another few weeks to see relatives. Central Sweden at the end of September promises to be cold, wet and dark. Right now I can't wait. And with any luck the worst of the summer here will be over by the time we come back.
  
  Really, we're almost ten million people here in Osaka ­— we could each pick up one piece of the city and move the whole thing to the north coast of Hokkaido. We'd have the same great city as now, but with cooler summers, no typhoons, skiing in the winter and the best seafood in the country!

My New Homepage

I got myself a new homepage landing page right here on Google sites. It's not pretty or anything - you can't alter the page format very much - and I can't really do anything except keep a static page and a few files, but it's good enough for now.

The idea is just to have some kind of landing page for work-related use. This blog is where I have most of my online self, but it's not really related to my professional¹ life. People looking for a research paper of mine don't really need or want to hear about old film cameras, the travails of Japanese politics or where I and Ritsuko had dinner last week.

Now I can link to this page to give people an idea of who I am and what I do, and I can offer the occasional paper and perhaps bits of code as well. If you happen to have a research-related link for me to this blog on some page then you may want to change it to the new landing page above.

#1 I'm over forty and still a post-doc living on temporary funding. "Professional" is very much a relative term here.

Saving Data for Posterity

Research generates data. Sometimes lots of data - the LHC accellerator at CERN generates petabytes even after heavy filtering - and sometimes less. All of that data has to be processed and analysed. Analysis leads to results. Results lead to papers. And papers lead to funding which leads to money for more research as well as food, shelter and clothing for the researcher¹.

But once the paper is published and the project is over the data remains. And not just the data, but also the source code for simulation models or analysis tools, hardware specifications for one-off lab equipment, customized reagents and so on. And keeping that data, source code and other material around is important. We need to keep the data so that other researchers can compare results and replicate the work. We need the data so we can resolve any discrepancies from different labs. We need the data so we can use new, better analysis tools to wring out more information when they become available in the future. Data retention can even become political as with the climate research data controversy at University of West Anglia².

Keeping research data is hard, much harder than it may seem at first glance. Ars Technica is running a really intresting series on the issue of data retention in science; here's part 1 and part 2. But a major problem is only hinted at so far: whose responsibility is it to store data over long time frames - years and decades - and who pays for this?

 
I built a model in a previous project, ran it against some inputs, and ended up with a journal paper. The model, the inputs and the resulting data is about, oh, one Gb in all. If anybody wants to build on our work that code and data would be quite useful. A Gb isn't that much today; you can comfortably store it on a DVD or memory stick, or put on a webserver somewhere. But whose DVD, and whose webserver? In our current project both the model and the analysis is a lot more complicated, and the resulting data sets are larger. Where to we park this data so that it'll still be publicly available in five years? Ten years? Thirty years?

The individual researcher - me and my colleagues - can't really have sole responsibility. Your departmental web pages and file stores are only good for as long as you work there. When you leave you lose your access rights so you can no longer maintain the data. I've switched projects and workplaces often enough that I don't even bother setting up a local web page.

We bring our data and code with us when we move of course - I have a copy of my own of everything important - but that's not very reliable over the long term. I don't have the discipline or the will to pay for decades of off-site backups of multiple gigabytes of simulation data that nobody is ever likely to ask for, so I have only a local backup. One house fire or earthquake could wipe it all out. When people leave research altogether they may no longer want to keep all that old data around, and when we die our relatives are very unlikely to keep any data or personal online repositories any longer. Besides, even if researchers keep their data, actually finding them years or decades after the publication can be very difficult.


Putting responsibility on the department or lab is no better. Active researchers can keep their project data around, but web pages and data sets from old projects by long-gone people tend to disappear over time since nobody has an active interest in it. Lab-level servers are usually maintained by a busy graduate student or faculty member and are none too reliable as a result. Servers die or move, backups fail or get misplaced and when nobody feels ownership over that old data it just never gets restored or propagated properly over time. Entire departments and labs can disappear, taking any local data with it into oblivion.


Universities can (and should, perhaps) set up a central data repository. They have research libraries and often already have a publication repository so they have the know-how. But there are a number of obstacles to make a university-wide repository work.

One major problem is to make researchers actually use such a repository. Our universities already have publication repositories and other such services, and unfortunately most researchers simply don't use them. It takes time and it takes effort, and unless you have a way to compel people it'll go unused. That means making it mandatory, easy to use and be completely data agnostic, and resources (money and manpower) must be available to help, prod and force researchers to use it properly.

It also takes a good deal of money, money that needs to come from somewhere. Using some of the cut universities take from research grants³ is an obvious solution, but that money is already spoken for so you'd have some ugly fights ahead of you to make that happen. And any university with a large collection of potentially valuable research data will be sorely tempted to lock it in to exploit the money-making opportunities rather than make it open and accessible, making this a non-solution to the original problem. Also, published research happens at other places than universities so this would not solve the data retention problem in general.


The public funding agencies would be natural for keeping a data repository. They are paying for the data in the first place after all, and have the clout to specify every aspect of a project already. They typically require extensive reports and documentation at the end of a project; it would be just another small step to require a documented data and source code dump as well. Funding agencies typically don't have a direct commercial interest in the results and don't have the same incentives as universities to keep the data to themselves. Of course, not all research is funded this way, so again, it would not be a general solution.


Lastly, the journals themselves should do this. They are the ones publishing the papers based on the data after all, and have an interest in making the data available for analysis and control. Many journals already charge high fees from researchers for publishing their papers⁴, and they already have a content repository system for all their published papers and supplementary materials. They could add a data dump to the system, and require authors to submit relevant data sets and source code as a precondition for publication. Data and source code would be a legitimate use of supplemental material - more so than the annoying trend among some journals to have the printed paper only be an introduction, with most actual details in the supplementary online section (a topic best left for another post).


So, the journals and the funding agencies should be the primary stakeholders for research data retention. That doesn't let the rest of us off the hook though; I feel we still have a personal obligation to make data, source and papers available to others as best we can, within the legal and other limits that apply. You can't disclose raw data that would identify patients or experimental subjects for instance, and you have no obligation to send off a sample of a bacterial strain to somebody that doesn't have the facilities to make use of it. But the default assumption should be one of openness - we should keep and disclose our data unless we have specific reasons not to do so. Not the other way around.

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#1 Never underestimate basic necessities and security as motivation for people. There are those who seem to think science should be a calling; a noble intellectual pursuit for truth and the betterment of humanity far removed from any grubby considerations of money. Those people either are not scientists themselves, they have tenure or they are independently wealthy. The rest of us have a perfectly sensible interest in seeing that we and our loved ones have food to eat, a home to eat it in and savings to fall back on once we're too old to get funded any longer.

#2 Just to make it crystal clear: the controversy is purely political. There was no fraud or deception, just some sloppy data retention and private emails never meant for a wide audience.

And there really is no doubt any longer that man-made climate change is very real; any scientific debate is about the magnitude, the mechanisms and the nature and distribution of effects over time. If you're opposed to climate change for political reasons then sorry - reality doesn't care about what we want to be true. Holding your ears and shouting "lalalalalala" won't make it go away.

#3 As little as 35% or as much as 50% of the awarded grant money. It goes to pay for lab and office space, secretary and admininstrative services and so on. Data storage and retention would fit right in. However, at most universities the external science research funds are an extra income; the cut they take is larger than needed to pay for the research-related costs - you pay this whether you actually use any services or not - and so research actually subsidizes education. Cutting research would, for many universities, mean losing money, not saving it.

#4 Yes, you pay the journal to publish your work. You volunteer to review submitted papers for journals, without pay. If you're a high-level researcher you may get invited to serve as editor - gratis - for an issue of the journal. Then your university library pays dearly for a yearly subscription so other people can read about the research you've done. Journal publishing is a serious moneymaker.

Zotero Lawsuit

A bit late on this: I wrote a good long while ago about Zotero, an open source reference management tool, and how Thomson Reuters, makers of EndNote, the most widely used (or at least most heavily advertised) such tool was suing GMU, where Zotero is developed, in court. Their grievance was that Zotero included a filter to convert citation format definitions from the EndNote file format and they claimed this was a copyright violation. This was a preposterous lawsuit, made even more so as these format definition files weren't even created by Thomson Reuters at all but by their users.

This lawsuit finally reached the court a couple of weeks ago, and the court promptly threw the whole thing out.

I use Zotero myself nowadays, and while it's far from perfect (the user interface is rather frustrating on a small screen), it is certainly good enough for real-world use. If you need a citation manager I advice you to take a good look at Zotero or other alternatives before locking your own citation and bibliography data up in EndNote. Thomson Reuters have after all shown that they're willing to go to court to prevent you from leaving them once they got you.

New Job

I don't normally cover work-related things on this blog - I write it as a diversion from work after all - but occasionally work and private life will intersect. The project at ATR I've been working at is ending, and the department is moving into different directions in the coming year. As a result I am leaving ATR and joining a new project. Friday was my last day at ATR.

This is not a sudden development of course; neither is it unusual - project positions are inherently temporary and unstable, and research groups usually change constantly as people join and leave. At ATR for instance, more than half of the people in the group when I first visited almost three years ago are no longer there today. This instability has a lot of consequences - positive and negative - for research groups and people alike, by the way, but that's a subject better covered in a separate post.

My new position will be at NAIST - Nara Institute of Science and Technology - at the Theoretical Life-Science Lab, though I'll be an employee of Kyoto University as the project funding comes through them. The two-year project is briefly to create a neural simulation framework for early vision processes - the optic tectum and oculomotor areas, more or less. Our intention is to integrate this with models of the retina and other areas by other groups and get a complete early perception-action loop implemented. Two years is an ambitious schedule for this sort of thing - I leave ATR early to get a head start - but we'll manage it, I believe.

 
NAIST is fairly close to ATR, conveniently right on the same train line I already use. It's just one train stop earlier and a little closer to the station so my commute - and my study time - will be about the same as now, at slightly over an hour one-way. I've only visited once, but NAIST seems to be a pretty spacious, well-equipped facility. It's substantially larger than ATR so it has a better library and other shared facilities. The cafeteria seems like a distinct improvement from ATR too; there's just about nothing else around so that's actually pretty important.

Anyway, with a new job I may have my hands full until I get settled a bit; if posting is light in the coming weeks you now know why.

H.M. Has Passed Away

In the news today, H.M. has passed away. "H.M.", well known by anyone who has ever studied brain science or neuroscience, are the initials for a patient who had radical surgery in 1953 in order to stop his debilitating epilepsy seizures. The surgery involved removing both Hippocampus and Amygdala on both sides.

This did indeed stop the seizures, but it also gave him profound anterogade amnesia - he could no longer form new memories. He could remember most things up until a few days before his surgery, but could not form any new long-term memories after this point. Think about it: every morning he woke up believing it was still 1953 and he was still 27. Doctors and nurses that had seen him for years had to introduce themselves to him if they left his side for a few hours.

He became one of the most studied people in modern medicine, and his tragic case taught us an enormous amount about how memory actually works. Generations of brain researchers know about him and the research his case has spawned. It is through him, for instance, that we know that semantic, or episodic memory - remembering events, for instance - is different and distinct from short-term memory and procedural memory. You can learn to do something without ever remembering having learned it.

At one time a researcher brought H.M. a Tower of Hanoi puzzle. H.M. cheerfully admitted to never having heard of the puzzle in his life. He worked on the puzzle until he somehow managed to solve it, after which the researcher left, taking the puzzle with him. The next day the researcher returned. For H.M. this was all new again: he had never heard of the puzzle (or the researcher) in his life. He worked on the puzzle until he solved it, and the researcher left.

This went on for some days. And every day, H.M. would manage to solve the puzzle faster and better until he clearly had "got" the way you solve it. But while he clearly had learned the optimal solution to the puzzle - procedural memory - he still had no recollection of ever having heard of the puzzle. Procedural memory and declarative memory are different systems in the brain.

In 2002 Nature Neuroscience published a review article (PDF) that summarizes half a century of research with H.M. and his life during that period. It's well worth reading.

Henry G. Molaison, now no longer anonymous, passed away at age 82. In accordance with his wishes, a detailed autopsy will be performed on his brain.

EndNote sues Zotero

Citations power
your research

When researchers write a paper, we need to give references to any other paper from which we've used an idea, or any paper that is related to your own work in some way. Those references are cited in the text, then collected at the end of the paper, always in some very tightly specified format. This reference list is not some afterthought; the references are almost as important as the paper itself. So we tend to spend an inordinate amount of time collecting, sorting and generally dealing with references in some way or another.

There's several pieces of software that can help you handle this task. I use BibTeX and some related tools myself; another popular software is EndNote. It'll help you keep a database of references with links to the actual paper, your notes and so on, and can let you share your reference lists with others. Like BibTeX, EndNote also has a large collection of style files for various journals and conferences that will format your reference list in the appropriate way. It's worth noting that both reference lists and style files are generally created by the users - us - not by the software developers.

 
Enter Zotero. It's a paper and citation organization tool, as a Firefox plugin. It's completely free and open-source, and is more at home on the web than any of the earlier tools. I've tried it previously and while it hasn't displaced my current tools yet (old habits are hard to break) it does look very, very promising, and it's steadily becoming more and more popular among academics.

So promising, in fact, that Thomson Reuters (owners of EndNote and a lot of other academic-related property) is suing the makers of Zotero for allowing its users to convert EndNote style files and citation files into Zotero format. Files, worth noting, that were contributed by their users in the first place. More from Crooked Timber

This is exceedingly stupid. Or desperate - EndNote may be losing market share to open tools much faster than people realize. The stupid part is, they are antagonizing their own customer base - they're suing part of it. People whose livelihood depends in part on their citation databases are naturally a little wary about keeping them in a closed format like EndNote's, and now Thomson have given them ample reason to be anxious. They are stating, in effect, that they will do anything they can to prevent people from moving their own data away from the EndNote system. EndNote is an intellectual roach motel - your data enters but it can't leave.

The legal case itself seems to be on very shaky ground even in the US and it certainly has no merit at all in much of Europe (where reverse-engineering for interoperability is expressly legal). But that is beside the point. There is possibly not one single thing they could have done to damage their own product and promote Zotero further than by suing them in court.

This is the same Thomson Reuters that is one of the giants in scientific publishing that are already seen with some suspicion and hostility by the community itself due to their antagonistic stance on open access. If you ever needed a reason not to consider EndNote for your own work, this is it. And take a good look at Zotero; it may be everything you need and more already.

This just in: Researchers also Stupid

In further proof that a) scientists are no smarter than anyone else outside their own field; and b) nobody really understands all the research funding rules any longer, Tokyo university researchers in engineering and medicine have been caught falsifying their accounting in order to keep unused research funds to use the next year. The sad thing is, the funding rules would have allowed them to keep the unused funds without resorting to false accounting had anyone bothered to check....

Pay to Work

GlobalTalk 21 has an enlightening post about election financing in Japan. As it turns out, candidates for major parties are expected to shoulder most of the election and campaign costs - tens of millions of yen - personally. As Okumura-san points out, this means that the parties have real problems actually finding willing candidates in all electoral districts; it also means it is very difficult for ordinary people to break into politics. You need to be independently wealthy or come from a political dynasty where most of the groundwork has already been done for you in order to stand as candidate.

Another aspect, though: the candidates are effectively expected to pay for the privilege to stand election for a party. At first this looks preposterous; in what professional field would people be expected to finance their own salary and expenses for the privilege of working long hours for an organization? Well, academic research comes to mind, actually. It used to be that established researchers would receive a salary and most of their research funds from their university, supplemented by external funds for expensive equipment, travel and so on. Today external financing is increasingly the main or sole funding source for research projects, and I've lately even seen an ad for a research and teaching position at a Swedish university where the applicant is expected to not only bring their own research financing, but the funds for their own teaching salary as well.

 
The university is transformed from a long-term employer to little more than a research hotel offering its name (necessary for many applications), lab space and administrative services in exchange for a hefty cut - 40-50% is common - of the research grant. Good for the university, of course; they can attract researchers that bring in funds and prestige, and avoid having to keep unproductive people around for many years. They can quickly shift the focus of their research labs when new, exciting results vitalize a field of research and dump a field the moment it starts looking stagnant.

But as a result, researchers - especially the top talents that can attract large grants - have little attachment or loyalty to any university any more. It's quite common now to hear about research leaders that get recruited and leave their former "employer" mid-project, taking their funds, their post-docs and assistants along, and leave the university with an empty lab, expensive equipment, stranded students and some red faces. At times, the same name crops up again a year or two later as they leave their new university for still greener pastures elsewhere.

And longer term, of course, the question is to what degree these researchers and their projects really need a university any more. Lab and office space and management services can be had on the open market, and for quite a bit less than the large cut many universities take. You do need an affiliation to a research organization to be eligible for grant applications in many cases, but nothing says it needs to be a university, or that you physically need to be located at the organization. I could well imagine a private research institute branching out to offer affiliation to independent researchers for a small cut or yearly fee. he research group gets the necessary affiliation, and the institute gets some high-profile research to its name without the expense and headache of actually hosting it.

If we return to politics, the situation shares some similarities and there is a clear possibility of a similar dissolution of loyalty between lawmakers and their parties. More and more of pre- and post-election resources are tied to the politician personally, and come from sources other than their party. A party of course offers their name - political branding - and a party affiliation is often necessary to partake in the give-and-take of parliamentary work (you need party support for juicy positions, just like you need a research affiliate for grants), but again, there is no real reason to stay with one particular party at any cost. The more an election costs the less beholden is the candidate. A veteran lawmaker (or dynastic scion) comes with his own district-wide name recognition, his well-tested local organization and a stable cadre of financial donors (legal or not; improper political donations are a leading cause of indictments here). An established politician may in fact need his party quite a bit less than the party needs him.

Lawmakers do shop around in Japanese politics; a not inconsiderate number of lawmakers have switched parties, sometimes several times, during their careers. And you can argue that the same mechanism is at play among internal party factions in the LDP, with individuals changing their allegiance in return for a cabinet post or committee membership. This, by the way, happens very rarely in Sweden, as most election costs are borne by the parties, not the representative. As internal cohesion weakens and parties become little more than amorphous blobs discussion clubs for mutual backing (the ideological range within both the LDP and DPJ almost beggars belief), the next step would be to dispense with party affiliation as a major criteria for case by case cooperation altogether.

Seen from that perspective, and disregarding their ideology, the tiny "People's New Party" or the one-man party of "New Party Daichi" could be seen not as failures but as a sign of possible things to come. These are tiny parties started by disaffected lawmakers in an effort to break free from the main parties. As political movements they are clearly failures, but as vehicles for their founders' political future they are not. With your own personal party you get most of the benefits of party membership with few of its disadvantages. And once in the city council, prefectural assembly or diet you can enter into more or less formal and long-lasting coalitions with other small parties to push a common agenda, or attach yourself lamprey-like to one of the major parties for an election cycle in return for committee influence.

This is highly improbable, I know, but in a way not very far from the current de-facto situation. For a number of representatives (at all levels of government) it would really just formalize their current ambiguous relationship with their party and make it easier for lawmakers with commonalities of interest to find each other across the party divides.

..and exhale.

Deadlines are necessary. They're unavoidable. They are even beneficial - I would not get half as much done if I wasn't occasionally pinned in a corner like a rabid rat by a looming deadline. The feeling of beating a deadline, of handing in the work finished and on time, is wonderful. But the actual bit when you struggle to make recalcitrant hardware and software behave as intended as the clock creeps towards the end is, well, not so much.

This deadline was for a conference to be held in Osaka this summer, and I managed to submit the paper on time. Actually, I lie. I was late, very late - but then, so was most everybody else. What happened was a deadline extension. The actual deadline was two weeks ago, a deadline that got extended to yesterday evening. And since I knew the deadline would most likely be extended I wasn't even close to finished with my submission for the original deadline - the system was still not working and the paper was little more than a vague outline. The original deadline came and went with me not even trying to meet it.

So how did I know there'd be an extension? Did I perhaps know one of the organizers, or did I send an army of tiny robotic cockroaches to spy on my behalf? Not at all. Every scientific conference has a deadline extension. It used to be that conferences had a deadline and if you missed it, well good luck next year. But then, in extrardinary circumstances - you couldn't get you submission typed out on time perhaps, or the postal service fell down on the job - you could ask for a few extra days. But gradually, as more and more people asked for extra time, conferences began granting extra time to everyone so that some people would not have that extra edge.

And now, of course, every conference does it. They have no choice; most people just never submit anything for the original deadline, knowing that there'll be an extension anyway. Not granting an extension would be tantamount to canceling the conference. This it is bad for everybody. You used to know exactly when your paper was due. Now the deadline is in some fuzzy time period of between a week to a month after the posted time, and you won't find out exactly when until just before the original deadline. And it's bad for the organizers that have to plan around a "real" deadline as well as a later one (you need to line up reviewers and make sure they're available for instance).

But nobody can really do anything about it. It's a very neat game-theoretic trap: no conference can skip the extension because people know all other conferences grant them so they'd be severely hurt. And since they grant extensions, so, in turn, must everybody else. Instead, some conferences have begun granting second extensions; there's still people with legitimate reasons to be late, after all, and not giving them a bit of extra time would be churlish. Expect to see a second extension become standard within he next ten-fifteen years. Of course, the time needed to process submissions is much less than it used to be so no real harm done I guess. I look forward to the day when you can show up on the opening day of a conference, paper in hand, and have it reviewed by on-site reviewers, revised and accepted as a poster before the day ends.

i-1 In the News

Our robot, i-1, is in the news again. A pretty good, accessible piece in New Scientist, with links to a video demonstrating the balancing capabilities. Robot Watch has a good piece with pictures as well. Enjoy.

i-1

The reason for my relative silence the past month or so has been due not only to the Open House at ATR last week. The i-1 robot - アイワン in Japanese - our humanoid robot, has also at last been unveiled, with press events, very important visitors, demonstrations and its own web page.

The i-1 in its full glory. It can readily balance by itself, so we have it freestanding for these pictures; normally we do keep a tether on it just to be safe. We can't just go down to Den-den town and buy a new one if it breaks after all.

The robot is human proportioned; it's human sized, with weight, power and joint movement angles and speed similar to humans. On the sensory side we have two eyes, with two cameras each (one wide-angle and one telephoto, to mimic our own visual capabilities to some degree), and we have stereo microphones for audio. The body is of course riddled with force and angle sensors. The aim is a system that can be comparable to human capabilities.

Projects include human-like balancing and walking (current bipedal robots do not really walk or balance the same way humans do and it shows),reaching, manipulation and gesticulating. I'm involved on the sensory side, doing early visual and auditory attention. Other people are working on object segmentation and recognition. And most everybody is interested in how to get the robot to learn new capabilities by itself or by example.

So why a humanoid robot? Aren't we pretty good at producing new humans already? That's perfectly true of course. And as a "robot", or worker (the original meaning), this creation would make little sense. Anything i-1 does can be done faster, safer and more reliably by your average 8-year old, and he wouldn't need half a dozen support people standing by every moment.

i-1 striking an explicatory pose. Body expressiveness doesn't just look cool; it's a communication channel. And as anyone learning a foreign language knows, when that channel disappears - talking over the phone rather than in person, for instance - communication becomes much more difficult, sometimes impossible.

Replacing a human is not the goal, of course. What we aim for is a system that can interact with us in a natural way and help us understand our own, human capabilities. To do so, we need the robot to have human-like capabilities, and that means having human weaknesses and deficiences as well as our strengths. We could have a robot with wheels instead of legs, for instance, since that is much easier and more stable, but that would not teach us anything about how human walking is done, or learn anything new about the perspective get from being walking, rather than rolling, creatures.

We're also not just looking at perception in general - we're interested in human-like capabilities specifically. If we had a whole array of microphones we could pinpoint sound source location quite accurately, and with laser rangefinders we'd have no problem getting the distance of things around us. But we humans have only two ears, not dozens, and not a single laser anywhere, so we have just the two microphones, two eyes, and we embrace the resulting loss of precision - the same lack of precision humans have.

i-1 examining an object. Probably my favourite picture.

Now, for natural human-machine interfacing it's certainly not critical that we have the exact same abilities. We humans vary quite a bit from each other after all, and we can interact well enough even with someone as different from ourselves as a dog. We do have some design leeway, in other words, and do not need to make it completely identical to get useful results.

But dogs and humans interact well in part because we've coevolved over time; dogs are by now innately very good at reading human intentions and expressions on one hand, and signaling their intentions to us on the other. Wolves or other wild relatives to dogs are not at all good at it, on the other hand, which strongly suggests dogs have acquired these abilities through breeding along with the other specifics of dogdom. So we may not need the exact same perceptual and motor capabilites on an interactive robot, but the more we diverge our abilities, the more we need to compensate for it with sensor and motor behavior that can help close that gap.

To understand human abilities on the other hand, we do want to be as close as we possibly can. Understanding humans and human abilities is of course an important goal in, but we also need that understanding so we can create the kind of reciprocal empathy and communication abilities that can close the ability gap between humans and machines.

In a way, if you want to make simple robots - machines that are very different from humans - you first need to understand how to make a very complex human-like system like i-1 in order to find out how to cross the communication gap. As long as we don't know how, we'll be stuck in our current situation where human-robot communication is not natural and fluid at all, but stilted, formal and slow. We communicate only by tightly restricted explicit commands and receive only a limited set of canned responses, with little of the immediacy and effortless understanding of body language, attention display and emotional expression.

It's a really fun project, with lots of fascinating areas to work on. Doing this as my day-job almost feels like cheating.

There's my teddy!