AUG 09
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" When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained. "
Dr. Samuel Langhorne Clemens
( D.Litt. [Oxford])
Work/fun/work/fun
When is work fun, and when is fun work ? Can the two overlap ? If work is unpaid, and seems like fun, but someone makes money out of it – has it been commercialized ?
Similar questions are posed and partially answered with a new study from Gettysburg College, US - published in the latest issue of ‘ Current Sociology ‘
The author chose ‘ Irish Pubs ‘ as a venue for the research – focussing on the pub-centric musicians who often play for nothing ( other than beer and sandwiches ). The pub owners, however, substantially enhance their turnover via the extra customers who come the hear the free music.
The answers were not 100% clearcut though – as in-depth interviews showed that although the musicians were all very well aware of the possible exploitative facets of the practice, few of them found much wrong with the system.
“ Six years of fieldwork in nine Irish pub sites in Ireland and Chicago, and 50 in-depth interviews with pub session musicians, highlights the complexity of trying to construct conceptual boundaries around fluid human activities. “
31 AUG 09
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Bored
Researchers from George Mason University, the University of North Carolina, the Georgia Institute of Technology and the Naval Research Lab, Washington, DC, USA have between them devised :
‘ A preliminary system for recognizing boredom ‘.
Their research paper – recently published in the Proceedings of the 4th ACM/IEEE international conference on Human robot interaction - describes their system, which uses a remarkably simple way to measure the boredom levels of people watching boring videos – viz. the height of a viewers head as measured over time.
( Their head tends to droop when bored ).
There is more boredom research to do however – particularly with regard to the low number of experimental participants used in the study ( i.e. 1 )
It is hoped that a future fully-fledged Boredom Recognition System may oneday perhaps be incoporated into ' partner robots '.
" Specifically, if a robot can detect a conversational partner’s boredom level, it should be able to adjust its own style for better communication. "
Read the full paper here :
[ Note : The work was supported by the US taxpayers under grant N0001409WX20173. Though the views and conclusions contained in the document should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies of the U. S. Navy ].
Comment from reader Peter K.
' Yes, a robot could say ' Am I boring you ? ' or perhaps respond with a phrase designed to reinforce emotional mutuality : such as ‘ Yes, I know, me too, very bored, very bored indeed – but what can one do, eh ?. Scheeesch ‘. Alternatively, in a more proactive mode, perhaps it could administer a prod, or a mild electric shock ?
28 AUG 09
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Curiosity of the day :
Tenor blackbirds in the Vienna Woods
Cross-cultural bottlenecks - an example
The journal ‘ Advances in Complex Systems ‘ has a multidisciplinary
approach – dealing with biology, physics, engineering, computer sciences,
economics, cognitive science and the social sciences.
As an example, the current issue carries an article which encompasses nearly all the fields – viz. a study of pedestrian bottlenecks.
There have been many computer-assisted studies of pedestrian bottlenecking behaviour before, but this new research is perhaps the first to examine the differences across various two cultures.
The Jülich Supercomputing Centre, Germany, used their expertise with advanced computer modelling techniques coupled with some real-world experiments to find out if there were any differences between German and Indian pedestrians whilst they were trying to navigate through an overcrowded corridor.
There were.
“ It is found that the speed of Indian test persons is less dependent on density than the speed of German test persons. Surprisingly the more unordered behaviour of the Indians is more effective than the ordered behaviour of the Germans. “
[ out italics ]
The findings, which may possibly have multidisciplinary implications far beyond corridor blockages, have yet to be explained in fine detail :
“ . . . more experiments with various cultures and test group combinations are needed. “
Read the full
study here :
27 AUG 09
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Flats for cats
( patent issued today )
Yawning update.
In 2008, researchers from Birkbeck College, London, instigated an unusual experiment.
At the time, the study was the only one to have investigated so-called ‘ Yawn Contagion ‘ between species ( where the species are : human / dog ).
Now the findings have been replicated by a new study – just published in the journal Animal Cognition [ full paper available here ]
– which used video footage of humans and dogs yawning ( or just with open mouths ) to determine if dogs would ‘ catch ‘ the yawns via the LCD screen display.
They did – but at a considerably lower rate than might have been predicted by the previous study - thus
“ There is a need for further experimentation on this issue “ say the authors.
Nevertheless, it's perhaps worth pointing out that the results are exactly in line with the conclusions drawn from the first experiment at Birkbeck – which found :
‘ . . . human yawns are possibly contagious to domestic dogs ‘.
25 AUG 09
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Goosebumps under the microscope.
The Institute of Music Physiology and Musicians' Medicine and the Institute for Research in Music Education, at Hanover University of Music and Drama, Hannover, Germany are perhaps two of the undisputed centres of excellence when it comes to the shivers.
Back in 2008 they published
Psychoacoustical correlates of musically induced chills
which quantified ‘ chill responses ‘ to music – and particularly inducement of goosebumps.
And now the research has been refined with a new study, published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences which suggests that chills and bumps are ‘ a reliable indicator of individual emotional peaks ‘.
( Read the full paper
here )
But more goosebump research is currently underway at the university – and is now expanding into other areas – linking chills not just with goosebumps, but with Frisson in general.
The paper :
' Chills in different sensory domains - Frisson elicited by acoustical, visual, tactile and gustatory stimuli. '
will be published in a future
issue of the journal Psychology of Music.
Comment from Peter K
Is this the first time that ' gustatory stimuli ' will have been discussed in the Psychology of Music journal ?
[ Haven't you heard of ' musical taste ' ? Ed. ]
24 AUG 09
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And The Word Is :
‘ Qualictivity ‘
It doesn’t seem to have made its way into the dictionaries as yet.
It first (?) appeared in 2007 - in a paper entitled :
‘ Subjects, Subjectivity, and Subjectification in Call Center
Work. The Doings of Doings ‘
It can perhaps best be understood in diagrammatic form. Here is a simplified version :
[ The original can be found on page 12 of the paper above ]
As the author of the paper points out in a newly published paper ( which uses exactly the same diagram )
“ This surprisingly simple but robust actant called qualictivity facilitates practices by which a particular organizational reality exists and becomes ongoingly refreshed in the face of a continual flow of recursively self-referencing individuals through the workplace every day. “
Given its simplicity, and its obvious applicability in a wide range of fields, it’s surprising perhaps that the word doesn’t seem to have ‘ arrived ‘ as yet . . . how have management consultants, financial gurus and political spin-meisters managed without it ?
[ Oddly perhaps, the other, less elegant, option ‘ Produquality ‘ already seems to have taken root ]
21 AUG 09
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A new Kind of Searchengine
Question Answering by Searching Large Corpora with Linguistic Methods
The QASLCLM QuALiM searchengine from the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.
• How does it work ? Details
here :
• Does it work ? Details here :
20 AUG 09 ( midday edition )
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A retrospective and mysterious something for the weekend
Sadly, only a very few pop songs have lyrics constructed around scientific figures. There are exceptions though. Take for example microwave pioneer* and plant sentience visionary Jagadish Chandra Bose whose work was covered in 1979 by no lesser artist than Stevie Wonder.
“ For most felt it was mad to conceive
That plants thought, felt, and moved quite like we
But with instruments Bose would devise
Would take science itself by a surprise, so . . . [ chorus ] “
Perhaps most pop singers would struggle to make such lyrics sound wonderful – but not Stevie.
Wonder wrote and produced the musical soundtrack for the entire 96 minute film ' The Secret Life of Plants ' from which the track is taken - and which is available in full here.
Highly recommended viewing and listening. [ note: low level audio at the beginning ]
* Incredible though it may seem, Bose was sending and receiving millimeter-range microwave signals over a distance of a kilometre or more as far back as 1895.
20 AUG 09 ( weekend edition )
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[ Obs. Some sharp-eyed readers have noticed that it's not the weekend yet. Our apologies. Ed. ]
Designing for Ineffectiveness
The July issue of the journal ‘ Developmental Biology ‘ has an unusual article entitled :
‘ Designing an ineffective poster: How to obscure your message‘
by Professor Kathryn Tosney, Chair of Biology at the University of Miami.
Non subscribers will have to pay US $ 31.50 to view the article, but the professor has made available some free-to-view webpages on the same subject.
The ideas are primarily aimed at researchers constructing their displays for ‘ poster sessions ’ at professional conferences etc – but many of the tips could equally apply to those writing academic papers in general.
Pointers include :
“ Use long sentences, long paragraphs, and avoid topic sentences; the more topics in each paragraph, the better. “
“ Use many abbreviations--the more the merrier-- but kindly provide a (very LONG) list of definitions that people can consult, and put the list in an inaccessible place. “
“ Avoid committing yourself to any strong statement. In the conclusion section, instead of interpreting your data, merely repeat the results. “
The full list of ineffective ideas can
be found here : ( along with the antidotes of course ! )
19 AUG 09 ( late edition )
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Charm with less danger
“ Dress up or made up is very important in social life to give impression to other people. Especially for young ladies of twenties and thirties or even forties, dress up is critical to find their mates. Some young ladies even take risks of doing plastic surgeries to their body if she can make ‘ the one ’ as her mate. For them, shoes, cloths, jewelry, and adornments are less dangerous means to get attraction from ‘ the one ‘. "
" Shoes, especially high heels, have some special functions. It makes a wearer look taller than the real height of the wearer. Therefore, many young ladies, who want to be looked taller, wear high heel with very tall heel. The other function of high heels is that it has strong attraction power for some male adult. “
So reads an extract from US patent 7,574,819 B2 which was granted yesterday.
The invention offers a considerable advantage over standard high-heeled shoes, which, as the inventor points out are not a 100% risk-free item -
“ If a young lady wears a high heel that is very tall and the heel shape is narrow, she can easily dislocate her ankle. It may be charming but dangerous. “
The invention, as can be seen in the accompanying drawing increases the number of heels by a factor of two, and in so doing -
“ . . . reduces dislocation of wearer's ankle though the heels are narrow and long. “
full
patent here ( click on Full Text to read the text in full
)
19 AUG 09
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Research paper of the day . . .
From the BBC today - we couldn't have written it better ourselves - well, perhaps we could, by providing a link to the original . . .
Comment from reader David P.
' Note their conclusion in the caption to fig. 2:
" The case of no zombies ... this equilibrium is unstable."
Be afraid. Be very afraid.'
All the world’s a stage ( revisited ) . . .
Turn to the latest edition of the journal ‘ Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts ’ for an unusual article on the -
Psychological perspectives on acting.
As the author points out :
“ Despite its obvious popularity, we know shockingly little about the cognitive and affective underpinnings of acting. “
As a start on the road towards revealing the underpinnings , researchers conducted interviews with 11 professional actors and, as a control, 10 lawyers.
Overall the results showed a marked difference – especially with regard to memories of early childhood play-acting activities – not one of the lawyers had these memories.
And, counterintuitively perhaps, even on such questions such as :
“ Did you daydream a lot ? ”
“ Did you like to dress up in costumes ? ”
the lawyers did not score highly.
To sum up, and to encapsulate the scale of the problem, the author ends with an illustrative real-world example :
“ . . . in its first 4 weeks in the theater, the movie Batman: The Dark Knight made $441,628,497. Yet, we still do not know how the actors created their portrayals or why the audience paid to see it. “
Read the full article here :
؟ ؟ ؟
Notes :
This research was performed while the author was on appointment as a U.S.
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Fellow under the DHS Scholarship
and Fellowship Program . . .
' The DHS Scholarship and Fellowship Program is intended for students interested in pursuing the basic science and technology innovations that can be applied to the DHS mission. ' [ source ]
And as the secretary of the DHS himself points out :
' We must protect the homeland while also being prudent stewards of the resources provided by the American taxpayer.' [ source ]
18 AUG 09
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Cow side study
Considering that an average dairy cow spends around half of its life lying down, it’s odd perhaps that so little scientific attention has focussed on this behaviour.
Researchers from the Dept of Animal Science at University of
California Davis have decided redress this balance with a full-scale experimental study
of lying cows.
One clearcut factor emerged from the extensive study :
“ . . . during the first 10 min of a lying bout, the probability of standing up was only 5% but climbed to approximately 25% when the bout lasted 80 min or more. “
In other words - once a cow has decided to lay down it’s unlikely to get up for an hour or more.
But there was another facet to the research - do cows prefer to lay down on the right side or the left side – and what factors – if any – might influence the choice ?
Unfortunately the results for the laterality were less clearcut.
In conclusion :
“ . . . overall laterality in lying behaviour is shifted to the left in some groups but not others. “
The study ; Laterality of lying behaviour in dairy cattle will be published in a future edition of the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science.
Reader Peter K. comments :
• I am writing a thesis : ' Chirality in Cheeses - a Preliminary Review ' would you be interested ?
[ Naturally. Ed. ]
Reader Marco McC comments :
• In the early Oh-Ohs Juanita had a job about
half-an-hour's drive through hilly farm country. Cows would often concentrate
in a particular place on
the side of a hill down to the highway, and sometimes they were all lying
down. Juanita kept track. It never failed; whenever the cows were lying down,
it rained later that day. I figured that they could tell it was going to
rain (using some sort of real-world and not psychic cowish sense), and they
wanted to get in some lying-down time to rest for standing later once the
ground was wet.
[ An opportunity for an entirely new field of research ? Ed. ]
Update : 19 AUG 09
Oregon State University points us towards a specially made electronic device which may well be of use in future lying cow research. viz. an -
' Israeli-made ankle bracelet that senses when a cow is lying down by determining the angle of her leg to the ground. '
17 AUG 09
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Danger in the domicile ! ? !
Hazard in the home ! Your residence could be housing radioactive items !
In your own living room !
Maybe not even your pet is 100% safe to go about its normal business !
And, if you think that the very food you eat is nuke-free - then think again !
This shocking list of potential radiation sources comes not from some conspiracy-theory gloom-and-doom wingnut-blogger – but from none other than ORAU ( Oak Ridge Associated Universities ) !
“ Providing innovative solutions to strengthen and secure America is what we do. “
And of course Oak Ridge should know what they’re talking about when it comes to nukes ! [1]
Why not act now to rid your home of potential N-dangers ! ( Geiger counters available here )
And don’t just think about yourself / family / friends ! Think what
might happen if these sources of ionizing radiation fell into the wrong
hands !
The radioactive clock is ticking !
We suggest that you can contact the relevant local authorities for information on risk-levels and safe disposal of any items of concern. ( SFARP [2] )
Notes :
[1] Oak Ridge National Laboratory no longer manufactures plutonium-239 for use in WMDs - there is no need, as a nuclear weapon only requires a few kilos, and there now are several hundred tonnes available from stockpiles )
[2] ‘ So Far As is Reasonably Practicable ‘
[3] Federal Civil Defense Adminstration infomercial here
Comment from reader Carmelita
Shortly before the summer season started here [ in Canada ] ( third or fourth weekend in May, depending on which side of the 49th parallel you live ), a notice went out to travelers from the U.S. that cat litter can emit radioactivity and trip detectors. Since there are many American summer visitors to cottages in this area who normally bring everything up with them, this year's warning led to a cat litter shortage at the local grocery store on the first long weekend of the summer . . .
14 AUG 09
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Deflackerizing
An unusual study regarding the innate morality of PR professionals has just been published in the Journal of Public Relations Research.
The authors administered the Defining Issues Test to no less than 84 professional PR workers, and the results were compared with previous results obtained from other social groups and professions.
Top of the list came squeaky-clean ‘ seminarians and philosophers ‘
Bottom were sadly-lacklustre ‘ junior high school students ‘
And somewhere in the middle ( below dental students but above nurses ) came the PR pros.
“ This should be good news to public relations practitioners trying to shed the image of ‘ flackery ’ while claiming a seat in the management boardrooms of many corporations “
You can read the full study courtesy of the Authur W. Page Center for Integrity in Public Communication ( which paid for it ) here :
؟ ؟ ؟
More recent PR news . . .
[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]
[9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15]
13 AUG 09
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Man Ties Conkers
At last ‘ The Man's Book: The Essential Guide for the Modern Man ‘ is available in the US. ( Hardback )
The book is conveniently organised into 87 separate sections offering practical advice on a very wide range of manly pursuits. Such as ‘ How to start smoking ‘ ‘ Polishing shoes ‘ ‘ Shaving ‘ ‘ Chivalry ‘ ' Poker ' and ‘ Treehouses ‘.
preview chapter here : ( on Drinking )
Author Dr. Thomas Fink, who is a physicist at the Curie Institute/CNRS and the London Institute for Mathematical Sciences, also bought us :
' Tie Knots, Random Walks and Topology '
Physica A, 276, 109 (2000). A mathematical examination of the 85 knots
which may be tied with a conventional necktie.
Notes :
• Also see ( from the same author ) The Mathematics of Conkers
• A 1950’s Van Heusen magazine ad which somehow seems to bring the two subjects together.
• The Big Tie Shop
12 AUG 09
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Enhancing Our World . . .
If you happen to be in or around Washington later this month, why not drop in at the combined U.S. WIN and WiN Global 2009 Conference.
The US Women In Nuclear and the Global WIN agendum this year is :
‘ Enhancing Our World Through Nuclear Technology ‘
As well as presentations on ‘ Community Outreach Best Practices ‘ , Expanding the Global Nuclear Supplier Base ‘, and a session on ' Leadership Courage * ' there will also be a visit to Peach Bottom Atomic Power Station.
The four day conference is sponsored by the Nuclear Energy Institute, who squarely position themselves on the issue with this animated presentation.
؟ ؟ ؟
Also
see ( from Russia ) :
* Note : Despite the focus on the need for courage, the conference agenda noticeably shies away from mentioning the number-one unsolved uber-problem facing the entire nuclear industry worldwide – waste disposal.
11 AUG 09 ( late edition )
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The W1zdm of Cr0wdz
Francis Galton conducted one of his less un-PC experiments back in 1907.
He monitored results as 787 people tried to guess the weight of an ox at a competition. Although the guesses varied wildly, he found that the estimates falling in the middle of the list of results ( i.e. the median - not the average as is often mis-reported ) was astonishingly close to the truth – with an error of just 0.8%. ( results here )
Scroll on 100 years.
Now the Institut fur Programmstrukturen und Datenorganisation (IPD) at the Universitat Karlsruhe (TH), Germany and the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering Concordia University, Montreal, Canada are in the process of creating their ‘ Fuzzy Believer ‘.
“ The goal of our fuzzy believer system . . . is to extract and analyze statements of opinion from newspaper articles. “
“ It is based on the extraction of reported speech, which is subsequently converted into a fuzzy theory-based representation of single statements. A domain analysis then assigns statements to topics. A number of fuzzy set operators, including fuzzy belief revision, are applied to model different belief strategies. "
" At the end, our system holds certain beliefs while rejecting others. “
Of course the system can ‘ read ‘ any electronically
presented text base – the larger the better – think newspapers,
blogs, chatrooms, TXTing-streams, Twitter ™ etc etc etc.
The project has attracted the attention of the US Govt. National Institute of Standards and Technology which will hold its Text Analisys Conference later this year.
Which aims to
“ . . . augment an existing knowledge representation with information about entities that is discovered from a collection of documents. “
Readers may be wondering why the US govt. might be interested in auto-gisting the now unmanageably gargantuan swathe of public-domain text-based info and then Automatically Evaluating Summaries Of Peers ( AESOP ) in order to find the fuzzy median.
As Galton put it at the time :
“ In these democratic days, any investigation into the trustworthiness and peculiarities of popular judgements is of interest. “
Throw in enough computing-power and tax-dollars and we might eventually be able to distil-down all human knowledge and belief to just one phrase – perhaps even one word.
[ readers’ guesses welcome of course , Ed. ].
؟ ؟ ؟
Read a Fuzzy Believer research paper here
11 AUG 09
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Amused, Polite, and Embarrassed / Nervous
A good deal of scientific research has been performed in order to understand the almost uniquely human procedure know as smiling.
Now a recent study from the Affect Analysis Group at the University of Pittsburgh , US has investigated :
“ the correspondence between observer judgments of smiles and the morphological and dynamic characteristics of the smiles that map onto those meanings. “
Interestingly – or some might say disappointingly – the study only looked at the way observers perceived the smiles – but not at what non-verbal message the smiles’ owners actually intended to convey.
Pointing out that :
“The veridicality of facial expressions is an issue that is of long standing in the emotion literature and is beyond the scope of the current study. “
The authors clarify the mechanics behind smile meanings in the last paragraph :
“. . . more often than not they can only be inferred from expressive behavior. Our findings speak to what information is available in facial behavior to guide those inferences. “
• Full study here : ( Journal of Nonverbal Behavior )
• A selection of smiles ( exact intentions unknown ) here
10 AUG 09
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Dance | Dense | Dunce
Over the last few decades many have wondered ‘ Why do so many British Pop Music artists choose to sing with a fake American accent ? ‘
[ example ]
Back in 1983 P. Trudgill gave a plausible answer in his work ‘ The sociolinguistics of British pop-song pronunciation ‘
“ . . . it is appropriate to sound like an American when performing what is predominantly an American activity . . .”
Things have moved on since then though – and the latest issue of the Journal of English Linguistics features an article by professor of linguistics at The School of English, Sheffield University UK highlighting the fact that some current British bands – especially ‘ Indie ‘ bands – shun transatlanticism, and choose instead to sing with their local accents.
The band chosen for analysis is [s/b 'are' ? Ed.] ‘ The Arctic Monkeys ‘ ( also from Sheffield ).
“ A qualitative analysis of an Arctic Monkeys performance is carried out to determine the extent to which features of northern and/or more specifically Sheffield English are used by Arctic Monkeys. “
Then, looked at, or rather listened to, in a language-ideological framework, it is shown that :
“. . . the Arctic Monkeys are drawing on 'local' features of accent and dialect to index 'authenticity' and independence from the 'corporate machine’ . . . “
The research article is ‘ subscribers only ’ – but due to the enigmas presented by the very long timelines associated with academic publishing, it is possible to read a later research ( referencing the study above ) but which was published earlier, back in 2008 . . .
This
time, researchers
from the University of Duisburg-Essen and the University of
Giessen in Germany examined
not only the Arctic Monkey’s accents but also those of Babyshambles,
Hard-fi, Little Man Tate, Maximo Park, The Kooks, The Maccabees and The
Wombats.
Examining how they pronounce specific keywords :
| Better | Dance | Girl | Life | Love | Body |
and coming up with comparable results :
“ . . . it seems that Indie rock bands have emancipated from the transatlantic pronunciation rulebook . . . “
There is evidently plenty more research work to be done however . . .
“ Other salient features such as plosive lention and the retention of /g/ in the final cluster <ng> in The Wombats , or GOOSE-fronting in The Kooks are found fairly frequently, but have not yet been analysed systematically. “
Many thanks to reader Simeon who draws our attention to Spoon - an American indie rock band from Austin, Texas - who some say exhibit a rare example of Reversed Transatlanticism - with a restrained but nevertheless distinguishable UK-English vocal twang. Video here.
07 AUG 09
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A minor update
to our Matchless page . . .
Nihilistic link of the day :
via YouTube
First Order Counterfactuals finally pinned down ?
The origin of ‘ Donkey Sentences ‘ can ( at least in modern times ) be traced back to 1962. Since then, they have remained obstinately mysterious, but has the nut finally cracked ?
؟ ؟ ؟
The prime example appeared in Peter Geach’s work ‘ Reference and Generality ‘
‘ Every farmer who owns a donkey beats it ‘
As the wikipedia entry puts it :
‘ There is nothing "wrong" with donkey sentences. They are grammatically "correct", they are well-formed, their syntax is regular. They are also logically meaningful, they have well-defined truth conditions, their semantics is [sic ? Ed.] unambiguous. It is precisely this that makes them interesting. ‘
Over the next forty years or so this interest was strongly maintained, and reinvigorated with a now famous update ( 2006 ) which took the idea a step further and introduced the concept of ‘ Counterfactual Donkey Sentences ‘
Now, in the latest edition of the journal ‘ Semantics ‘ – we have what may prove to be the final analysis of ‘ Counterfactual Donkey Sentences ‘ jointly provided by the Institute of Logic and Cognition, Sun Yat-sen University, China, and the Institute of Logic, Language and Computation, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands.
The maths is not for the fainthearted – but the highly complex logical analysis finally boils down to a manageable ‘ dynamic ‘ formula which may at last present a solution to the enigma :
“ Our dynamic interpretation can be used as a unified way to account for first-order counterfactuals, especially the donkey ones “.
06 AUG 09
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They’re S++ and they move . . .
Over the last decade or so a good deal of research effort has gone into investigating WHRs ( Waist Hip Ratios ) - especially the WHRs of female humans.
Current theory holds that a high WHR is often regarded as ' attractive '.
But most studies have only investigated WHRs as shown in static photographs - what if the WHR is in motion ?
Recent research – published in the Journal of Social, Evolutionary
and Cultural Psychology – addresses this question.
Could it be that :
“ . . . WHRs in motion represent S++, or ‘ supernormal stimuli ‘, in behavior. “
To find out, a 28 year-old female model with a WHR of 0.70 was asked to walk ‘ normally ', and then with an exaggerated ‘ runway swing ' – photos were taken.
Would the WHR vary during the walk ?
Analysis of the results showed that the WHR varies markedly depending on the angle from which the model is viewed.
Thus, in a sideways-on view, the WHR is considerably different than in a frontal or rear view.
The finding will no doubt be of use to future WHR researchers – and perhaps even suggest the need for a re-evaluation of previous studies ?
“ The author believes that a wider range of actual WHRs in motion, both lower and particularly higher than .07, could create alternating left-right WHRs that are supernormal stimuli in behavior, which includes a wider range of female body shapes that are attractive to men. “
View the research paper here [s.f.w.]
05 AUG 09
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Small false ones in Lubbock
As many choir directors will know, assisting male students through the voice-changing
process can be a tricky operation.
For the question sometimes arises :
“ Is the boy’s voice unchanged, or has it changed and the boy is singing in falsetto? “
New research conducted at the Texas Tech University has made an attempt to quantify the problem with a carefully arranged experiment.
Recordings were made of 8 boys singing in their natural ( i.e. unchanged-from-childhood ) voice – and 8 more whose voice had changed but who were actually singing in falsetto.
Would Pre-Service Music Educators be able to tell the difference ?
Results :
“ pre-service music educators were able to correctly
identify unchanged voices with significantly greater accuracy than falsetto
voices “
They particularly rated the falsetto singing as ‘ cracking, airy
and throaty ‘ and a surprising percentage also pinpointed what
they called a ‘ Mickey Mouse ™ tone ‘.
To sum up then :
“ The research, and data gathered through this study is important to the advancement of the identification of similarities and differences of the falsetto and unchanged voice “
• Read the full
paper here :
• A well known example of falsetto.
04 AUG 09
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