This is Improbable Too Page 28
Hutchins, Sean, and Isabelle Peretz (2012). ‘A Frog in Your Throat or in Your Ear?: Searching for the Causes of Poor Singing’. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 141 (1): 76–97.
Nervous calls
Businesses need a way to detect nervousness on the telephone, says a 2011 patent, which offers a computerised means of accomplishing this.
Inventor Valery Petrushin obtained his doctorate in computer science from the Glushkov Institute for Cybernetics, Kiev, and now works in Illinois. His patent is for a method of ‘detecting emotion in voice signals in a call center’.
A simple flow chart illustrates ‘a method for detecting nervousness in a voice in a business environment to prevent fraud’. We see the following three statements, each enclosed in its own box: ‘Receiving voice signals from a person during a business event’; ‘Analyzing the voice signals for determining a level of nervousness of the person during the business event’; ‘Outputting the level of nervousness of the person prior to completion of the business event’. Petrushin recommends his invention also to improve ‘contract negotiation, insurance dealings … in the law enforcement arena as well as in a courtroom environment, etc’. He specifies a few of the many applications in these fields: ‘fear and anxiety could be detected in the voice of a person as he or she is answering questions asked by a customs officer, for example’.
Petrushin assigned his patent rights to Accenture Global Services Ltd, the giant international advice-for-almost-everything consulting company. Accenture sells call-centre-centric services to BSkyB (‘BSkyB increased its customer satisfaction while enhancing its bottom-line performance’, its website once noted) and other high-flying firms.
The patent, in essence, presents a recipe that has missing steps. That’s because scientists have not yet found a reliable mechanical way to identify emotions. But there’s hope (the document implies), in that ‘psychologists have done many experiments and suggested theories’.
The method relies on ‘statistics of human associations of voice parameters with emotions’. These parameters are acoustical – all about the vibrations of the voice, paying no attention to the words those sounds happen to represent. Words can be misleading; if spoken different ways, they might carry different emotions.
This all grew out of, and in a sense headed sideways from, Petrushin’s early research about telephone-borne emotion. Those were the days before fear came to prominence. A study he published in 2000 identified a different emotion as the one to focus on for industrial purposes. Petrushin wrote at that time: ‘It was not a surprise that anger was identified as the most important emotion for call centers.’
After recording one of four sentences: ‘This is not what I expected’; ‘I’ll be right there’; ‘Tomorrow is my birthday’; and ‘I’m getting married next week’. One of the study question posed: ‘Which kinds of emotions are easier/harder to recognize?’ The researchers explain: ‘people better understand how to express/decode anger and sadness than other emotions’.
His experiment back then measured the ability of then-current computer programs to correctly identify different emotions in recorded voices. The patent filing, eleven years later, speaks of improvement in the emotional technology. In the best of several test runs, it says, ‘We can see that the accuracy for fear is higher (25–60%) … The accuracy for sadness and anger is very high: 75–100% for anger and 88–93% for sadness.’
Petrushin, Valery A. (2011). ‘Detecting Emotion in Voice Signals in a Call Center’. US patent no. 7,940,914, 10 May.
— (2000). ‘Emotion Recognition in Speech Signal: Experimental Study, Development, and Application’. Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, Beijing: 222–5.
May we recommend
‘The Personality of Vegetables: Botanical Metaphors for Human Characteristics’
by Robert Sommer (published in Journal of Personality, 1988)
Women’s dirty words
‘Expletives of Lower Working-Class Women’, published in 1992 in the journal Language in Society, is a rare sociolinguistic study of this inherently provocative topic. ‘This article’, wrote author Susan Hughes of the University of Salford, ‘sets out to look at the reality of the swearing used by a group of women from a deprived inner-city area’. Hughes surveyed six women in Ordsall, a part of Salford said to be characterized by ‘social malaise’.
‘My observations of these women’, Hughes wrote, ‘showed me that, contrary to some theories, they use a strong vernacular style … These women are proud of their swearing: “We’ve taught men to swear, foreigners what’s come in the pub.” Their general conversation is peppered with fuck, twat, bastard, and so on. Yet they do differentiate between using swearwords in general conversation and using them with venom and/or as an insult.’
That traditional practice of womanly swearing, if it is to survive, must deal with challenges. Fifteen years after the Hughes study was published, a corrupting influence came to town. A home insurance firm announced that Ordsall had attained a place on the company’s Young Affluent Professionals Index. Ordsall, they said, had become a ‘property hotspot’ attracting wealthy young professionals. The newcomers will have something to say about the community’s evolving expletive standards.
Hughes’ study gave scholars a clean picture of those standards prior to yuppie adulteration. She perhaps hinted that tensions would arise if outsiders were to move in. ‘The use of “prestigious” standard English has no merit nor relevance for these [lower working-class] women, it cannot provide any social advantage to them or increase any life chances for them. In fact, the standard norm would isolate them from their own tight-knit community.’
Hughes explicity based her inquiry on an elegant, simple piece of research performed a few years earlier. Barbara Risch, at the University of Cincinnati, published a study called ‘Women’s Derogatory Terms for Men: That’s Right, “Dirty” Words’. Risch surveyed forty-four female, mostly middle-class students, asking each of them to answer the following question:
There are many terms that men use to refer to women which women consider derogatory or sexist (broad, chick … piece of ass, etc.). Can you think of any similar terms or phrases that you or your friends use to refer to males?
Risch reported that: ‘A classification system for the fifty variant terms emerged quite naturally from the data obtained. The responses can be classified under the following headings: references to birth, ass, head, dick, boys, animal, meat, and other.’
She gave advice to future expletive researchers: ‘The importance of female interviewers for the results of this study cannot be overemphasized. It is doubtful whether any response would have been elicited in the presence of male interviewers.’
Recent expletive research uses MRI scanners to try to see what happens physically in someone’s brain when they swear. Typified by 1999’s ‘Expletives: Neurolinguistic and Neurobehavioral Perspectives on Swearing’, these studies owe a debt, at least in spirit, to the cussing women of Ordsall and Cincinnati.
Hughes, Susan E. (1992). ‘Expletives of Lower Working-Class Women’. Language in Society 21 (2): 291–303.
Risch, Barbara (1987). ‘Women’s Derogatory Terms for Men: That’s Right, “Dirty” Words’. Language in Society 16 (3): 353–8.
Van Lancker, Diana, and Jeffrey L. Cummings (1999). ‘Expletives: Neurolinguistic and Neurobehavioral Perspectives on Swearing’. Brain Research Reviews 31 (1): 83–104.
In brief
‘Usage and Origin of Expletives in British English’
by Hana Cechová (thesis, Masaryk University Brno, Czech Republic, 2006)
Party politics gone random
Democracies would be better off if they chose some of their politicians at random. That’s the word, mathematically obtained, from a team of Italian physicists, economists and political analysts. The team includes a trio whose earlier research showed, also mathematically, that bureaucracies would be more efficient if they promoted people at random.
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Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, Cesare Garofalo and two other colleagues at the University of Catania in Sicily published their new study in a physics journal Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications. The study itself is titled ‘Accidental Politicians: How Randomly Selected Legislators Can Improve Parliament Efficiency’.
The scientists made a simple calculation model that mimics the way modern parliaments work, including the effects of particular political parties or coalitions. In the model, individual legislators can cast particular votes that advance either their own interests (one of which is to gain re-election), or the interests of society as a whole. Party discipline comes into play, affecting the votes of officials who got elected with help from their party.
But when some legislators are selected at random – owing no allegiance to any party – the legislature’s overall efficiency improves. That higher efficiency, the scientists explain, comes in ‘both the number of laws passed and the average social welfare obtained’ from those new laws.
Parliamentary voting behaviour echoes, in a surprisingly detailed mathematical sense, something economist Carlo M. Cipolla sketched in his 1976 essay published in book form, The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (see page 9). Cipolla gave an insulting, yet possibly accurate, description of any human group: ‘human beings fall into four basic categories: the helpless, the intelligent, the bandit and the stupid’. Pluchino, Rapisarda, Garofalo and their colleagues base their mathematical model partly on this fourfold distinction.
The maths indicate that parliaments work best when some – but not all – of the members have been chosen at random. The study explains how a country, subject to the quirks of its own system, can figure out what mix will give the best results.
Random selection may feel like a mathematician’s wild-eyed dream. It’s not. The practice was common in ancient Greece, when democracy was young. The study tells how, in Athens, citizens’ names were placed into a randomisation device called a kleroterion.
Later on, legislators were selected randomly in other places, too. In Bologna, Parma, Vicenza, San Marino, Barcelona and bits of Switzerland, say the scientists, and ‘in Florence in the 13th and 14th century and in Venice from 1268 until the fall of the Venetian Republic in 1797, providing opportunities to minorities and resistance to corruption’.
Athens, way back when, used random selection to people its juries. So, still, does much of the world.
And it’s not just juries. Iceland, having survived a financial collapse in the first decade of the twenty-first century, set about devising a new constitution. For advice on that, the nation assembled a committee of 950 citizens chosen at random.
In 2010, Pluchino et al. were awarded an Ig Nobel Prize in management for demonstrating mathematically that organizations would become more efficient if they promoted people at random.
Pluchino, Alessandro, Cesare Garofalo, Andrea Rapisarda, Salvatore Spagano and Maurizio Caserta (2011). ‘Accidental Politicians: How Randomly Selected Legislators Can Improve Parliament Efficiency’. Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications 390 (21/22): 3944–54.
Pluchino, Alessandro, Caesar Garofalo and Andrea Rapisarda (2010). ‘The Peter Principle Revisited: A Computational Study’. Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications 389 (3): 467–72.
Cipolla, Carlo M. (1976). The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity. Bologna: The Mad Millers/Il Mulino.
Great adventures in accounting
The supposedly staid, unglamorous field of accounting is in fact packed, to some degree, with exciting adventures. But accountants rarely divulge this fact to persons outside the profession. Three monographs, all produced in Australia, document some of the adventure – and even some of the excitement.
In 1967, a paper by Professor R.J. Chambers of the University of Sydney, called ‘Prospective Adventures in Accounting Ideas’, appeared in the journal Accounting Review. Looking both backwards and forwards, Chambers enthuses ruefully: ‘These fifty years have seen quite a few potentially fruitful ideas, with wide implications, brought to notice, noticed scarcely at all and almost abandoned … Some 43 years ago, [accounting scholar Henry Rand] Hatfield said “Let us boldly raise the question whether accounting, the late claimant for recognition as a profession, is not entitled to some respect, or must it consort with crystal-gazing … and palmreading?” I wonder what Hatfield would think today, to see how far some would have us go in the direction of crystal-gazing. I leave you to think about what I am referring to.’
Decades of accounting adventures later, Lee D. Parker of the University of Adelaide penned a thirty-one-page study, ‘Historiography for the New Millennium: Adventures in Accounting and Management’, for a rival journal. Parker explains, almost giddily, that ‘we stand on the threshold of the new millennium, facing, on one hand, an academy avowedly presentist and futurist in its research orientation, but, on the other hand, signs of a society rediscovering its past with upsurges of interest in heritage building and artefacts preservation, cinema audiences attracted to the plots of Thomas Hardy and Jane Austen and a host of historical periods and events, historical tourism, thriving antique furniture markets and so on.’
Parker comes to a barely restrained conclusion: ‘While we owe the twentieth century founders of accounting and management history a considerable debt, there remains much for us to learn and even more to discover. Let us begin.’
The turn of the century brought a new openness to, maybe even nostalgia and yearning for, accounting adventure, symbolized by the publication of a jaunty paper by Lorne Cummings and Mark Valentine St. Leon of Macquarie University in the journal Accounting History.
Table 1 from ‘Jugglers, Clowns and Showmen: The Use of Accounting Information in Circus in Australia’. The authors state: ‘Bemoaning the liquidation of his Wild West and circus enterprise in Melbourne in 1913, the American showman Bud Atkinson said that “about 8,300 pounds [was] put into the show”, a figure which probably includes the cost of shipping personnel from the west coast of the United States, as well as the purchase, or construction, and shipment of its American-built wagons.’
Called ‘Juggling the Books: The Use of Accounting Information in Circus in Australia’, it savours the accounting practices of Australian circuses during the period from 1847 to 1963. ‘Responding to the call for an increased historical narrative in accounting’, write Cummings and St. Leon, ‘we have studied the literature, documentation and personal memoirs concerning circus in Australia … We have established that, despite elementary levels of education, many circus people exhibited an intuitive grasp of fundamental accounting principles, albeit in a rudimentary form. Nevertheless, since financial and management reporting practises were typically unsystematic, and even non-existent, in all but the largest circus enterprises, Australian circus management may not have been optimized.’
Chambers, R.J. (1967). ‘Prospective Adventures in Accounting Ideas’. Accounting Review 42 (2): 241–53.
Parker, Lee D. (1999). ‘Historiography for the New Millennium: Adventures in Accounting and Management’. Accounting History 4 (2): 11–42.
Cummings, Lorne, and Mark Valentine St. Leon (2009). ‘Juggling the Books: The Use of Accounting Information in Circus in Australia’. Accounting History 14 (1-2): 11–33.
May we recommend
‘Vagueness: An Exercise in Logical Analysis’
by Max Black (published in Philosophy of Science, 1937)
Shepherds and hunters and butchers, oh my
When you hobnob with Slovakian shepherds, don’t mention wolves. A new study called ‘Mitigating Carnivore-Livestock Conflict in Europe: Lessons from Slovakia’, says: ‘Compared to other sectors of society shepherds had the most negative attitudes, particularly towards wolves.’
Wolves are again roaming the forests of Slovakia. They were almost wiped out in the mid-twentieth century, then reappeared thanks to a thirty-year moratorium on hunting. Now the small-but-growing wolf population has restored its tradition o
f helping local livestock go missing or get mauled.
The researchers, Robin Rigg and Maria Wechselberger at the Slovak Wildlife Society, Slavomír Findo at the Carpathian Wildlife Society, Martyn Gorman at the University of Aberdeen, and Claudio Sillero-Zubiri and David Macdonald at the University of Oxford, published their work in the journal Oryx.
They found that, mostly, wolves grab sheep near the edge of a forest, especially if the shepherds employ what the scientists call ‘ineffective methods (chained dogs and inadequate electric fencing)’. Experimenting, the team identified two effective methods: unchained guard dogs and adequate fencing. As with much research, the obvious was apparently not obvious beforehand to all who needed to know about it.
Appreciating carnivore-livestock conflict
That’s the story with shepherds. Now, for people who kill lots of animals: hunters and butchers. A study by an Austrian/British/Malaysian team probes the psychological differences between them.
The monograph, ‘Multi-method Personality Assessment of Butchers and Hunters: Beliefs and Reality’, appeared last year in the journal Personality and Individual Differences. The authors, Martin Voracek (the one and same, mentioned elsewhere in this volume), Stefan Stieger and Viren Swami, learned, through direct questioning, that 102 Austrian university students feel hunters and butchers have ‘higher aggressiveness and masculinity’. The students also seem to believe that hunters – but not butchers – possess unusually high self-esteem.
The researchers then studied twenty-five hunters and twenty-three butchers from rural Lower Austria, and compared them with forty-eight persons who neither hunt nor butcher.