Courtesy of LiveScience

By Tia Ghose
LiveScience

Novices, take heart! Amateurs placing bets in their March Madness office pool may have just as good a shot at winning as sports fanatics who know all the minutia, new research suggests.

"Sports gamblers seem to believe themselves the cleverest of all gamblers. They think that with experience and knowledge — such as player's statistics, manager's habits, weather conditions and stadium capacity — they can predict the outcome of a game better than the average person," study co-author Pinhas Dannon, a psychiatrist at Tel Aviv University in Israel, said in a statement.

But in reality, people with no prior knowledge of a sport like perform just as well as sports buffs when placing bets on soccer games, according to a study published this month in the journal Psychopathology.

Strategic gambling
Most people know that casino games like slot machines are all about luck (and that the house always wins). But sports gamblers often believe their success comes down to skill or knowledge of the sport itself.

To see whether that was the case, Dannon asked 165 people to guess the final score in 16 soccer matches in the Champion's League, which is organized by the Union of European Football Associations. Of those, 53 were professional sports gamblers, 34 were soccer fans that didn't gamble, and 78 knew little about soccer and had never gambled.

Soccer knowledge had little bearing on the outcome of the bets. Whereas inexperience didn't necessarily help, knowing the ins and outs of the game didn't improve the odds of winning either.

In fact, the two players who performed the best, correctly guessing seven out of the 16 scores, had never been fans of the game.

The findings suggest that in addition to perhaps holding back on smugness during the office pool for the March Madness basketball tournament, savvy sports gamblers may not do well in standard therapy for gambling addiction.

"Casino gamblers are more appropriately characterized as obsessives, because they have less belief in themselves, and know that they will lose sooner or later. But they gamble anyway because they feel they need to," Dannon said in a statement.

By contrast, sports gamblers may need tailored cognitive therapy that rids them of the belief that they have more control over the outcome than they really do.

Follow Tia Ghose on Twitter @tiaghose. Follow LiveScience @livescience, Facebook and Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com

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If your job involves tasks such as sorting springs and screws or unloading dishwashers, a robot replacement may soon be on the way.

For now, the granular-gripper robot demonstrated in the video above is perhaps best suited as a sidekick for bar games you might play while trying to grab the attention of a potential flesh-and-bone soul mate.

That is, assuming the potential mate doesn't fall for the robot instead. After all, its barroom athleticism is tough to beat — able to sink mini-basketball shots with uncanny accuracy and hit the bull's eye on the dartboard time and time again.

The tossing ability of jamming robot gripper is a new trick from roboticists working on the grasping technology at Cornell University and the University of Chicago. 

The gripper itself is essentially a balloon filled with granular material, in this case coffee grounds. This squishy balloon hand conforms to whatever object it touches. When the air is sucked out of the balloon, a tight grip is created. To toss the object, the gripper is rapidly re-inflated with air. 

While this all seems simple, anyone who's tried to consistently sink baskets on the court or in a bar knows that picking up balls and tossing them repeatedly through the hoop isn't nearly as easy as it seems.

From the roboticists' perspective, the technology is an improvement over other throwing robots.

"Certainly throwing has been demonstrated with robot arms before, but the momentum for throwing is typically provided by the arm motion while the gripper simply releases the object at the optimum time," the researchers write in a FAQ accompanying their paper to appear in IEEE Transactions on Robotics.

"Here, the entirety of the shooting function is provided by the gripper."

While the shooting skill of the robot isn't good enough for it to go to work tossing together electronic components, which requires higher precision, it is good enough to pick up trash after a good house party.

Other potential applications, the team notes, include picking up and quickly disposing of improvised explosive devices (IEDs). After all, the research is supported by DARPA.

— Via IEEE

More on throwing robots and the robotic workforce:

• Robot to throw first pitch at Phillies game
• Robot folds, throws paper plane
• Tosser bot: Dog's best friend?
• Duke grad builds beer-tossing fridge
• More work for robots in China
• Nine jobs that humans may lose to robots
• Underwater robots at work in Japan