Did public demand to watch moss grow overwhelm the 'Mosscam'?

Moss excitement

“It’s not every day you can watch moss grow!” says a press release from the University of Wollongong (UOW), Australia. Too true.

The details in the press release lead to an invitation. The details: “In a world first, a team led by UOW researchers has developed a webcam (MossCam) and smart sensor system in Antarctica to remotely monitor moss beds, providing scientists with invaluable and continuous images and data about the Antarctic environment… The UOW team co-designed an Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) platform.” The invitation: “You can view the MossCam and data the smart sensors are collecting at: https://uow.to/mosscam“.

Feedback has made many attempts to view the MossCam and data. But no joy. No moss. The link produced only the message “This site can’t be reached”. Maybe the press release was too effective. The public demand to watch moss grow overwhelmed the technology, maybe.

Academic theft

University of Sydney astronomer Charlie Sharpe takes time (and space) in a new study to thank the New South Wales police “for ensuring a swift return of his belongings, including his laptop, after having them burgled from his house a few weeks before this paper’s submission”.

Sharpe also thanks his “neighbour, Gary, who spotted the burglar and, rather than simply phoning the police and staying put, decided to yell ‘you better run fast mate’ before chasing the man down the street, tackling him, pinning him to the ground, and then calling the police, all while still in his pyjamas and a sleepy daze”.

Sharpe’s paper, co-written with two colleagues, is called “On cosmological low entropy after the big bang: Universal expansion and nucleosynthesis”. It asks “What light do the fundamental laws of nature shed on the arrow of time?”

Some years ago, Chris Trayner at the University of Leeds in the UK looked at a commonly used anti-burglar technology, asked what light it shines on astronomy, got riled at the answer and proposed to do something about it. It being security lighting that is triggered by motion outside a building.

Trayner explained the problem in a short entry in the Journal of the British Astronomical Association, and proposed a solution. His view of the issue: “At least two criticisms are levelled at these lamps: (1) they pollute the night sky with light; (2) no-one takes any notice of them turning on, so they merely save burglars the cost of torches.”

Trayner’s solution: get the movement sensor to turn on a light inside, rather than outside, the building. “If a burglar triggers it, it gives the impression that a householder is up and about… [and] since the indoor bulb is of moderate brightness, little light pollution results.”

Here we go again

The phrase “Knowing Me, Knowing You” appears in the title of many scholarly publications, and also a song by a Swedish singing group.

One of the newest research reports to do this is called “‘Knowing me, knowing you’: Personalized explanations for a music recommender system”. It shares little – except those four words in its title – with a study called “Knowing me, knowing you: Self and non-self recognition in plant immunity”.

There are “Knowing me, knowing you” reports on many topics. One is about whether artificial intelligence is aware that people have minds. At least one report looks knowing-me-knowing-you-ingly at how the anal gland secretion of European badgers relates to their membership in social groups. A University College London team published an 11-pager titled “Knowing me, knowing you: The role of trust, locus of control and privacy concern in acceptance of domestic electricity demand-side response”.

Well more than 200 scholarly publications, so far, have the six consecutive syllables know, ing, me, know, ing and you as part of their title. As for the song: it was released as a single way back in 1977. The academic versions all came later.

Priority for putting the phrase in a title pretty clearly belongs to Agnetha Fältskog, Björn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson and Anni-Frid Lyngstad, who made a name for themselves with that song, and earlier by cobbling together the initials of their first names.

Tandoori safety

There are no sure things in life, probably. Food technology experts, like other kinds of experts, find ways to express the certainty that something is probably certain. The National Institute of Food Technology Entrepreneurship and Management, in Sonipat, Haryana, India, supplies a new example, with the concluding assertion that “the consumption of tandoori chicken may be considered as safe”. Nineteen pages of details accompany that simple declaration, all of it published in the journal Risk Analysis.

The report ends with a neighbourly caution about its reliability. The certainty of it – of its conclusion – pertains to people whose diet is entirely and exclusively chicken. “This,” say the researchers, “is a major limitation which needs to be addressed in future studies.”

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