Improbable Research

A recent study at the Delft University of Technology, in The Netherlands, determined that in some cases, some people would prefer that service robots are not talkative [see: The agreeableness of robotic vacuum cleaners]. If they were to be, however, what kind of accent should they have? Dr. Elizabeth Broadbent and colleagues at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, investigated whether a notional future robotic healthcare worker (programmed to measure patients’ blood pressure) would be more (or less) appreciated depending on its robot voice accent. Three male robot voices were generated: British (UK), American (US), and New Zealand (NZ). Experimental participants listened through headphones to a recorded script repeated in the three different accents – then they rated the nationality, roboticness, and overall impression of each voice, and chose their preferred accent.

“There was no difference in impression ratings of each voice, but the US accent was rated as more robotic than the NZ accent, and the UK accent was preferred to the US accent.”

“These results suggest that the employment of a less robotic voice with a local accent may positively affect user perceptions of robots.”

- say the research team.
Their paper, The Effects of Synthesized Voice Accents on User Perceptions of Robots, will be published in a future issue of the International Journal of Social Robotics

University of Tel Aviv astronomer Alon Retter alerts us to his provocative paper positing a mathematical similarity between astronomical objects and human children.

Retter’s monography is another example of the spectacular nature of many research papers in the small, new viXra depository (profiled here recently; see “Alternate everything: the joy of viXra“) as compared to many of the holdings in the vast, more traditional arXiv depository.

Retter wrote both a long version and a short version of his paper. The abstract of the long version begins:

This paper presents a remarkable analogy between the human society and Astronomy. Please keep an open mind as the resemblance is not only qualitative but also quantitative. We point out many similarities between stars and people, such as properties of grouping – single stars vs. singles, binary stars vs. couples, cities vs. clusters, countries vs. galaxies, etc. Men and women are linked with cool and hot stars. We match planets with children and attribute the two genders to gas and solid planets.

Is this ichthyology’s most salacious study?

“Female mouthbrooders in control of pre- and postmating sexual selection,” Marcel P. Haesler, Charlotte M. Lindeyer, Oliver Otti, Danielle Bonfils, Dik Heg and Michael Taborsky, Behavioral Ecology, epub June 14, 2011. (Thanks to investigator Charles Oppenheim for bringing this to our attention.) The authors, at various institutions in Switzerland, The Netherlands, and the UK, explain:

“Here, we show that in the maternal mouthbrooder Ophthalmotilapia ventralis, females collect sperm from different males in their mouth, and males can successfully fertilize eggs even if the female did not lay eggs with them…. A mate choice experiment revealed that females prefer to spawn with males possessing strongly elongated pelvic fins, a conspicuous secondary sexual character of males in this cichlid. Additionally, the body length of males partly explained their success in sperm competition within the females’ mouth, a factor without apparent influence on female choice of partners with which to lay eggs. Hence, successful sires are determined by a 2-step process that is largely under female control; females select which males to spawn with and from which males they collect additional ejaculates for the subsequent sperm competition in their mouth.”

Frances Glessner Lee, the giant astride the world of miniature crime scenes, died nearly 50 years ago. Lee built a collection of what she called “nutshell studies“, each a tiny, high-precision recreation of a room in which a murder had been committed.

Each featured a little victim, in or on whom the wee murder weapon was embedded or enwrapped. The many lavishly grim elements of each diorama were, mostly, copped and composited from stories of real crimes.

Lee and her nutshell studies have a context. She endowed an entire, entirely new programme at Harvard Medical School: the department of legal medicine. The concocted crime scenes served as its mesmerising centre of activity.

The authorities know that Lee manufactured her evidence from whole cloth, sliced wallpaper, glass, wood, paint, and other materials. They know that she bankrolled the entire operation. They know that…

So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.

BONUS: A documentary film being prepared about the Nutshell Studies:

“The Importance of Stupidity in Scientific Research,” Martin A. Schwartz, Journal of Cell Science, June 2008, vol. 1, no. 121, pt. 11, p. 1771.  (Thanks to investigator Betsy Devine for bringing this to our attention.) The author, at the University of Virginia, explains: