Word: roache
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...opens the door for a possible full-fledged concentration. Additionally, for some years, Harvard’s English department has been trying to draw top names in the study of dramatic arts to Harvard.“We did make an offer to Joe Roach [a Professor of Drama at Yale] some years ago, which alas he declined,” says Leo Damrosch, acting chair of the English Department. Currently, no fully tenured professors specializing in modern drama are on the English department faculty.A position has been offered to Visiting Professor Martin Puchner, from Columbia University, who received...
...observe ordinary roach behavior, Halloy and his colleagues created an enclosure with two "shelters" inside - red-tinted plastic disks mounted so that roaches could scurry underneath to avoid bright light, which they do instinctively. When the insects were dumped into the enclosure, they scrambled around randomly for a while, but eventually all huddled under the same shelter. That they huddled is no surprise, since roaches like to gather in crowds. But since cockroaches don't have enough intelligence to allow for leadership skills or even communication, the fact that they collectively decide on one shelter looks, says Halloy, "like...
...Veteran roach-watchers have a more mundane explanation. Cockroaches, they hypothesize, use just two pieces of information to decide where to go: how dark it is and how many of their friends are there. At first, the roaches will wander arbitrarily into one shelter or the other - but at some point, enough of them will end up under one shelter to reach a critical mass, which then becomes more attractive to the others...
...critical-mass hypothesis has merit, Halloy and his co-workers figured they should be able to trick the roaches into doing something unnatural. To do that, they would need a rogue roach to infiltrate the herd. "One way to get them," Halloy says, "would be to create mutants somehow, with abnormal behavior. But we don't have a genetic institute for cockroaches." Instead, the researchers recruited some engineers to build them roach robots that would slip into the crowd and manipulate it from within. "It turns out," he says, "that roaches aren't very discriminating" - they'll accept anything...
When introduced to the real roaches, the robots fit right in - the gathering behavior of the horde was pretty much unchanged. Researchers then reprogrammed the robots to prefer a less-dark hiding place - unnatural for a roach. The insects and the infiltrators were put back into the enclosure, except this time one of their hiding places was more lightly tinted than the other: It was brighter inside. Again, all the roaches scurried around randomly for a while, but the robots eventually settled under the lighter, less shadowy disk - and the real cockroaches followed. Which means that the hypothesis - that...