From the British paper The Observer comes this story, the second on our blog about dolphins and Katrina:
Press
How women are learning to control their men: operant conditioning!
By Miranda Hersey Helin on 09/19/2005From The Independent:
"Bring Your Husband to Heel is a new [BBC] six-part series which deals with a variety of problems such as how to motivate a man to do the washing up or pay more attention to you." Read the full article at:
Animals Get The Giggles Too
By Miranda Hersey Helin on 09/15/2005"Tickled rats emit supersonic chirps. Chimpanzees pant during play. These expressions of animal joy, according to a new study, demonstrate that laughter evolved very early in the mammalian brain. In 2003, Jaak Panksepp of Bowling Green State University, Ohio, reported that rats let out squeaks of joy when tickled by human fingers. The rats not only tried to elicit play sessions, but also began chirping when their handlers wiggled fingers at them. Panksepp likened the response to children who begin giggling even before a tickling finger touches them. The fact that both rats and humans emit sounds of joy, Panksepp reports in the journal Science, suggests the brain circuits involved in laughter are very ancient. The last common ancestor of rats and primates lived about 75 million years ago. Human laughter certainly appears similar to the giggles of romping chimps, who make pant-pant sounds that imitate the heavy breathing of exercise." (California Wild This Week)
Getting yourself in the news
By Bill Peña on 09/14/2005This month's letter from Karen Pryor to the clicker training community - Minneapolis, Money, Oprah and More - is part of an ongoing effort to get clicker training into the news. Karen's view is that we should all mobilize to get clicker training into the local news, local papers, local TV, and that word will spread upwords to the national media from there. Read the whole letter for her full insight.
Training a puppy ... on a Nintendo!
By Bill Peña on 09/14/2005Nintendo has released an incredibly cute game named Nintendogs for their touch-screen enabled portable, Nintendo DS. In this game, you can train your dog or dogs to do everything from learn their name to compete in agility! And though I haven't played the game (yet!), from a newly-released video it looks like all the training is done through operant conditioning; dogs are given cues and reinforced with praise, petting and treats when they get the behavior right, and when they have learned the behavior, a light bulb goes off over their heads.
