Hugs are great

A study from the Department of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, published this week in PLOS ONE, looked at the social interactions of more than 400 people over two weeks. A summary of their daily activities, moods, and physical interactions revealed a causal link between emotional states, conflicts, and the number of hugs a person gave or received.

"Results indicated that there was an interaction between hug receipt and conflict exposure such that receiving a hug was associated with a smaller conflict-related decrease in positive affect and a smaller conflict-related increase in negative affect when assessed concurrently," the study reads. In plainer English, hugging helped people feel less poorly after some kind of conflict or negative event during their day.
"This effect was seen across all genders and ages in the study, although women reported more hugs than men. Our results are consistent with the conclusion that both men and women may benefit equally from being hugged on days when conflict occurs," the study found.

It did not seem to matter if the huggers were in a romantic relationship at the time of a hug, the mood-related benefits still stood. The study was authored by Michael Murphy, a postdoctoral research associate at the Department of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon.

In the study, he says the research could be improved upon by pinpointing exactly what kind of social relationships were involved in a hug, such as a stranger or someone you were arguing with as opposed to a lover or an a embrace from mom. "The lack of specificity regarding from whom individuals received hugs also restricted our ability to identify whether hugs from specific types of social partners were more effective than those from others," Murphy wrote.

Moravec's Paradox

Hans Moravec, adjunct faculty member at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, pointed out that machine technology mimicked a savant infant. Machines can do long math equations instantly and beat humans in chess, but they can't answer a simple question or walk up a flight of stairs (until recently). He, along with many others has been working to solve that paradox and help computers evolve on their own.

Early artificial intelligence (AI) researchers believed intelligence was characterized as the things that highly educated scientists found challenging, such as chess, symbolic integration, and solving complicated word algebra problems. They thought, if those could be done so easily by computers, things that children of four or five years could do effortlessly, such as visually distinguishing between a coffee cup and a chair, or walking around on two legs, or responding to words would be infinitely easier for computers to learn.

Computers/robots are finally beginning to move and think like people. Narrative Science can write earnings summaries that are indistinguishable from wire reports. We can ask our phones, 'I'm lost, help.' and our phones can tell us how to get home. (The smartphone was introduced in 2007, just seven years ago.)

Computers that can drive cars were never supposed to happen and ten years ago, many engineers said it was impossible. Navigating a crowded street requires a combination of spacial awareness, soft focus, and constant anticipation. Yet, today we have Google's self-driving cars and they have been approved by some states as allowable on city streets. Ten years from impossible to common.

IBM, working with Memorial Sloan-Kettering cancer information is using its computers to diagnose diseases and the Cleveland Clinic to help train aspiring physicians. It just invested a billion dollars to set up 'Watson' into a separate business unit for medical and other complex decision making activities.

Bottom line, we are experiencing solutions to the paradox and it is very exciting, although I am not sure machines will ever replace the following or that we will ever want to.