Month: June 2021

Enlarge / A Eurasian jay takes a skeptical view of magic. (credit: Luc Viatour)

Most magic tricks require a fairly sophisticated understanding of how humans perceive the world. To fall for a trick, people have to see things they perceive as important and ignore things that are actually important. Understanding why magic works can tell us important things about how humans direct their attention and form expectations.

At some point, behavioral scientists realized they could take this idea and apply it to animals. If animals are also fooled by magic tricks, we can identify where our cognitive skills overlap. If the trick fails, we can identify points where our understandings of the world diverge. Unsurprisingly, most early experiments were done with other primates, as they would likely have a lot of overlap with us. But a new study attempts magic with birds and finds that many tricks just don't work with them.

Not easily fooled

The birds in the study were Eurasian jays, who are part of a family (corvids) known to be unusually intelligent. Many species of jays cache food (if you've ever found that oak trees have been seeded in your flower pots, jays are probably why) and often engage in elaborate deceptions to keep their fellow jays from stealing their caches. So it's not a stretch to think that magic might be something birds could comprehend.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

After Apple shook up the advertising industry by requiring users to opt-in to ad tracking in iOS 14.5, Google—the world's biggest ad company—is announcing a small concession for advertising on Android. Starting in late 2021, Google will begin to roll out a feature that makes Android's years-old advertising opt-out checkbox less likely to be bypassed by apps.

Android has offered an advertising opt-out option for years, and the interface doesn't seem to be changing. Buried in the settings (System Settings -> Google -> Ads) is a checkbox allowing you to "opt out of ads personalization."

Checking the box would "instruct apps not to use your advertising ID," but with this new change, the checkbox will stop asking apps to not use the advertising ID and will instead show apps "a string of zeros" if they try to access it. The rollout will start affecting apps running on Android 12 devices in late 2021 and will expand to all Google Play services in early 2022.