Improbable Research

Following our Improbable article on ‘Laughter at the Supreme Court‘, we turn now to the implications of ‘Filled Pauses’ at the same institution. A Filled Pause (FP) can be uhm, ah, uh, &etc. The questions are: how often do they crop up, and which of the court’s Justices make the most use of them? And, perhaps more importantly, is there a relation between the number of uhms (&etc) and the final decision of the Justice in the case?

These questions have been answered in a report from researchers at Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra, Slovakia, in association with The Institute of Informatics, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava, Slovakia and with support from the Department of Computer Science at Columbia University, US. The team examined recorded audio data from the 2001 sessions of the US Supreme Court. A chart was produced (above) which graphically displayed the uh-rate, the ah-rate, the eh-rate the um-rate (and the total Filled Pause rate) for each of nine Justices during their conversations with lawyers. (As can be seen, Justice Kennedy had the highest FP score, and Justice Ginsburg the lowest). But did the FP content affect the outcomes of the case?

“ [the] mean difference between adjacent filled pauses was smaller in those Justice-lawyer pairs in which the Justice gave a favorable vote than in those pairs in which the Justice gave a non-favorable vote.”

Perhaps future work may provide explanations for the found effect?

See :

‘Entrainment in spontaneous speech: the case of filled pauses in Supreme Court hearings’ Proceedings of the 3rd IEEE Conference on Cognitive Infocommunications 2012.

Also don’t miss : ‘The many meaning(s) of “Uh(m)”s‘

“At a social insect conference, the whole room broke into laughter,” writes Myrmecos about the moment someone displayed this chart:

Myrmecos explains: “Pachycondyla, among the most common ants in tropical regions worldwide, turns out to be a motley assortment of unrelated species. While the taxonomy of the world’s 12,000 or so ant species is obviously still a work on progress, I don’t think any of us had seen a case where ant names showed such a non-relationship to their genealogy. We knew before that Pachycondyla wasn’t really a natural group. But this? This was bad…. [here for further details]”

Society needs a tool for removing stubborn nuts. And thanks to William R. Lamphere, society has one. Here’s the patent:

“Tool for Removing Stubborn Nuts,” William R. Lamphere, US patent #4446622, issued May 8, 1984.

This study explains gambling in a way no other study has managed. We believe this paper features the first appearance — anywhere, ever — of the phrase “an analysis of the foot wager of the Sphinx“:

“Souls/Soles of Signs — Tell Totems and the Sphinx Wager,” Darryl A. Smith [pictured here], University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Center for Gaming Research Occasional Paper Series #13, January 2012. The paper identifies its author in these words: “Darryl A. Smith, M.Div., Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Pomona College and Affiliate of the Intercollegiate Department of Africa.”

The paper begins with this summary of itself:

“ABSTRACT: This paper develops a philosophy of play through an analysis of the foot wager of the Sphinx. Applying a construction of the cosmology of Plato along with a Socratic etymology of her riddle’s answer, it provides a reading of Sphingian contestation consistent with contemporary practices of deception found in modern games like poker. I argue that such deception is constitutive of the excessive illumination of signaling tells in games and that such excess, in turn, is indicative in allied political contexts of a covetous and acquisitive obsession with light. This theory makes use also of Ralph Ellison’s refiguring of Oedipal play as a theory of tyranny and serves as a riposte to the psychoanalytic idea of the Oedipus complex.”

The groundwork for research into the occurrence of laughter at the US Supreme Court was initially provided by Professor Jay D. Wexler (of Buffalo University) in his 2005 article for Green Bag (second series, Volume 9, number 1) entitled : “Laugh Track”. The professor had made the decision to quantify the laughter content because :

“In the 2004–2005 term [...] for the first time, the Court Reporter started revealing the names of the speaking Justices. Because the Court Reporter also indicates, with the notation ‘(Laughter),’ when the courtroom has reached a certain level of mirth, it is now possible to determine how many times during the term any particular Justice’s comments induced a substantial amount of laughter.”

The professor searched the records and kept track of the number of times that each Justice caused ‘hoots and snickers’ to erupt in the courtroom. He then calculated each Justice’s ‘Laughter Episodes Instigated Per Argument Average’ (LEIPAA), representing the total number of laughter episodes instigated over the term divided by the number of oral arguments attended over the course of the term. The data revealed the following results :

“Justice Scalia won the competition by a landslide, instigating 77 laughing episodes, while Justice Thomas instigated zero laughing episodes, putting him all alone in last place among the Justices.”

A year on, the Supreme Court Laughter Research Project was considerably extended by Jason Wojciechowski,