September 30, 2011
by dave
16 Comments

Canine Mind Readers

Credit: Evan MacLean

Napoleon is a doggy genius. The 3-year-old, 7-pound Yorkshire Terrier can do something even our closest relative, the chimpanzee, can’t. He can read our thoughts. And he isn’t alone. All dogs, it turns out, are human mind readers.

I met Napoleon during a recent visit to the Duke Canine Cognition Center in Durham, North Carolina. I was doing some research for a chapter in my book on how new scientific discoveries are blurring the line between pet and human, and the head of the center, biological anthropologist Brian Hare agreed to let me come down and observe some of his work. Hare is at the forefront of a canine revolution that began about 15 years ago; in a series of high-profile studies, researchers around the world have shown that dogs are capable of far more than we ever imagined.

Dogs weren’t always popular research subjects, however, at least when it came to probing the secrets of the mind. Though Charles Darwin was a dog lover—and a big believer in the powers of the canine intellect—dogs were canis non grata in the cognition laboratory for much of the 20th century. They aren’t a wild animal, and they’ve lived with us for thousands of years, so most scientists considered them artificial and even tainted. Researchers interested in the animal mind studied chimpanzees and rodents instead.

But things changed when Hare, Adam Miklosi, and other prominent scientists began to notice something remarkable about dogs. I had come to the Duke Canine Cognition Center to see what first piqued their interest. And that’s where I ran into Napoleon.

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September 5, 2011
by dave
8 Comments

How to Turn HootSuite and TweetDeck into RSS Readers

When I began writing my new book, I knew I wanted to build an audience early, even a couple of years before the book came out.  So I launched into social media hot and heavy.  Knowing that it would be a pain to keep track of relevant Twitterers as well as maintain my own feed, I opted to organize my Twitter efforts on HootSuite.  I considered TweetDeck, but I found HootSuite to be more visually appealing and flexible.

HootSuite and TweetDeck have one major problem, however.  You can’t use them to follow RSS feeds.  Sure, you can feed RSS feeds into your Twitter profile, but HootSuite limits you to two feeds, and I didn’t want to bombard my followers with feeds they weren’t interested in.  I just wanted a way to follow my various feeds on HootSuite.  After much web searching, I realized there was no easy way to do this.  The closest I came was this site, which was quite helpful, but the strategy outlined there doesn’t allow you to follow multiple RSS feeds in multiple columns on HootSuite.  It just allows you to dump all of your RSS feeds into a single column.

So, using that site as a guide, I’ve created instructions on how to follow as many RSS feeds as you want in as many columns as you want on HootSuite. This strategy also works for TweetDeck.  There are a lot of steps here, and a lot of accounts to set up, but it works beautifully.  If you’ve come up with a simpler way to do things, please let me know in the comments section!

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July 21, 2011
by dave
5 Comments

Why Cats and Dogs?

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Beagle_and_sleeping_black_and_white_kitty-01.jpg

Source: Wikimedia Commons

First of all, howdy, and welcome to my new website. Thanks to Martyn Green for his help and guidance setting things up. You’ll be hard pressed to find a better guy to work with.

As you follow me here and on Twitter, you’ll notice that I’ll be writing a lot about cats and dogs.  No, I won’t be posting cute pictures of puppies and kittens (though you will see pictures of my own cats from time to time, because, well, they’re adorable).  And no, I won’t be offering up any grooming tips or training advice (though I will say that a water pistol is your best friend if your cat has figured out how to turn on your alarm clock at 5 in the morning).

Instead, I’ll be writing about how cats and dogs are becoming people.

Sure, many of us treat our pets like family.  In the U.S., we spend billions on toys, food, and veterinarians.  We celebrate our pets’ birthdays.  We take them shopping.  We pamper them with kitty condos and doggy day care.

But that’s not what I’m interested in.  Or, at least, that’s just a small part of what I’m interested in.

What I really care about is how new scientific discoveries and legal movements are blurring the line between pet and person. Cats and dogs are beginning to acquire many of the rights once reserved solely for human beings.  And soon the animals we have lived with for thousands of years will no longer be animals.  They will be people.

Don’t believe me?  Consider the following:

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