HOME |
RSS | 
Now that you know what is expected of you, you’ll be able to prepare that little talk for your friend’s upcoming wedding. Another gem from The Doghouse Diaries. Link -via Blame It On The Voices
If parrots can learn words from humans, it’s only logical that parrots can teach others how to speak those words. As it turns out, it’s been happening so often that many people in Australia claimed to be hearing voices coming from the trees only to eventually discover the words were actually coming from a band of cockatoos that included one previous pet.
Perhaps the most interesting effect of this is that in large Australian cities, the cockatoos keep their vocabulary sharp through frequent interactions with humans. As a result, apparently, if you say hello to a crowd of cockatoos, it’s not unlikely that you’ll get a relatively articulate answer.
I don’t know about you guys, but I’d love to have a conversation with a wild cockatoo, even if it is just a step away from taking over human civilization.
Link Via Geekosystem Image Via rggoldie [Flickr]
We brought you a video of this robot mouth a year ago, but that video was taken down. The rubber robotic mouth was developed by Professor Hideyuki Sawada at Kagawa University in Japan to help hearing-impaired people with their speech. It was creepy enough back then, but now the mouth has learned to sing! In the newest video, the mouth sings the Japanese children’s tune “Kagome Kagome.” The lips start to move about 30 seconds in. Link to story. Link to website. -via Fortean Times
Forty-eight years ago today, JFK gave one of the most moving speeches in international relations on record. Unfortunately, most people remember this as the “I am a jelly donut” speech due to an unfortunate misconception over the article ein, or the equivalent to a in English. It was the gaffe heard ’round the world, or so most think.
The term “ein Berliner” — when used as a noun — refers to a a jelly-filled, doughnut-like pastry Germans call “ein Pfannkuchen Berliner” or “ein Berliner” for short.
For this reason, Kennedy’s line “Ich bin ein Berliner” has been the source of much amusement and debate over the years.
However, my friend [who was in attendance for the speech] noted that, much more importantly, the people of West Berlin knew what Kennedy actually meant. They found his words “Ich bin ein Berliner” inspiring, not laughable.
You can see why by listening to or reading Kennedy’s entire speech.
It’s one of the most famous speeches in history. And, the crowd of more than 120,000 West Germans who were there on June 26, 1963 were cheering loudly, not laughing.
If you’d like to read more about the story or see a transcript of Kennedy’s speech, check out This Day in Quotes. Link
Writers are constantly told of the importance of editing: say it in fewer words. At the Webby Awards ceremony last weekend, the representatives of the winning websites were limited to an acceptance speech of only five words. Each had to really think about what was important to say. Some speeches were funny, some political, some designed to leave a memorable impression of the website behind. And they came up with some gems, like this speech from Scott Beale of Laughing Squid (pictured):
“These tentacles go to eleven!”
TIME magazine made of list of what they considered the ten best speeches.
3. Kids, we’re going to Disneyland.
—Jetsetter won a Webby for Best Travel website.8. Person of the Year. Ironic.
—The Webby Person of the Year Award went to IBM supercomputer Watson, who cracked wise with the audience.
What if you were given the opportunity to speak before a large audience, but could only say five words? What would you say to leave an impression? You can read all the winners’ 5-word acceptance speeches at the Webby Awards site. Link
The following is an article from the science humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research.
by Susanne Fuchs1, Melanie Weirich1, Christian Kroos2, Natalie Fecher1, Daniel Pape3,
and Sabine Koppetsch4
If one walks through the first level of the main building at the Humboldt University in Berlin and looks at the portraits of the researchers who studied there, became professors, and in some cases won Nobel prizes, one may conclude that the most important visual signs of a famous person are being a man and having a beard.
Wearing a beard has a long socio-cultural tradition going at least back to the Pharaohs. The ancient Egyptians associated facial hair with the sexual, religious and social power of the monarch. Indeed, Queen Hatshepsut wore a bodkin beard after her accession to the throne (Wietig, 2005). Lack of facial hair was long considered a sign of weakness
or divine punishment. The first recorded radical shavings were ordered by Alexander the Great to prevent Persians pulling his soldiers’ beards during hand-to-hand fighting. Another tradition relates beards with fertility.
Today, belief in bearded monarchs, male or female, has declined. The general acceptance of facial hair and specific styles of facial hair appears dependent on sex, culture, nation, and fashion. According to the American Mustache Institute, mustache acceptance is between 16 and 35% in the U.S., though between 72 and 94% in Germany. This paper concerns the influence of facial hair on audio-visual speech intelligibility in noise. It is known that watching the speaker’s face increases the intelligibility of speech in noisy environments (Grant and Seitz, 2000). By observing the cyclical opening and closing of the visible jaw, an observer can identify the rhythmic structure of the spoken utterance or even the focus of a particular sequence (Dohen, Lœvenbruck, and Hill, 2005).
Facial hair can cover parts of the face such as the upper lip, the teeth, and the larynx. This modifies the visible area of the open mouth, and hence facial hair is responsible for a kind of natural impoverishment of the visual speech signal. Under normal conditions such impoverishment may be marginal for the intelligibility of speech, since auditory information is fully available. However, under noisy conditions such as a cocktail party (in audiovisual speech research terms: multi-talker babble noise), visual cues may be crucial for increasing speech intelligibility (assuming that listeners want to understand their communicative partners). Based on these considerations, we hypothesize that:
(1) Facial hair hiding visible articulatory movements leads to lower speech intelligibility under noisy auditory conditions, longer reaction time, and lower confidence in recognizing the relevant target words.
(2) The shape and location of the beard is crucial for the reduced speech intelligibility in noise. A mustache hiding upper lip movement has a larger impact on visual speech intelligibility than a long chin beard, hiding the larynx only. So in terms of speech intelligibility, is it time for a shave?
more …
I can talk pretty fast, but years of producing radio ads taught me that if you talk faster than people can listen, you may as well shut up. Still, there are some fast-talkers we love to listen to even if we can’t follow what they are saying. Take a look at a few of these on video and marvel at the rate of words coming out. For example, New Yorker Fran Capo once blurted out 603 words in 54 seconds, which broke her own world record as the fastest-talking woman ever! Link -via the Presurfer
Erica Goldson gave a very different speech at Coxsackie-Athens High School Coxsackie, New York. The class valedictorian gave the commencement address many students over the years claimed they would make if they ever got the chance. She began by stating that her goal in school was to get out as soon as she could.
I should look at this as a positive experience, especially being at the top of my class. However, in retrospect, I cannot say that I am any more intelligent than my peers. I can attest that I am only the best at doing what I am told and working the system. Yet, here I stand, and I am supposed to be proud that I have completed this period of indoctrination. I will leave in the fall to go on to the next phase expected of me, in order to receive a paper document that certifies that I am capable of work. But I contest that I am a human being, a thinker, an adventurer – not a worker. A worker is someone who is trapped within repetition – a slave of the system set up before him. But now, I have successfully shown that I was the best slave. I did what I was told to the extreme. While others sat in class and doodled to later become great artists, I sat in class to take notes and become a great test-taker. While others would come to class without their homework done because they were reading about an interest of theirs, I never missed an assignment. While others were creating music and writing lyrics, I decided to do extra credit, even though I never needed it. So, I wonder, why did I even want this position? Sure, I earned it, but what will come of it? When I leave educational institutionalism, will I be successful or forever lost? I have no clue about what I want to do with my life; I have no interests because I saw every subject of study as work, and I excelled at every subject just for the purpose of excelling, not learning. And quite frankly, now I’m scared.
You can read the entire speech and some reactions at Swift Kick Central. Link -via Holy Kaw!
(Image credit: Flickr user Clever Cupcakes)
Take a walk down the uncanny valley with Bina48, a robot designed to be a “friend” with conversational skills. New York Times reporter Amy Harmon interviewed the robot itself (or is it “herself”?) to see how conversational it really is. Whatever you think of its skills, the talking head comes across as creepy.
Part high-tech portrait, part low-tech bid for immortality, Bina48 has no body. But her skin is made of a material called “frubber” that, with the help of 30 motors underneath it, allows her to frown, smile and look a bit confused. (“I guess it’s short for face rubber, or flesh rubber maybe, or fancy rubber,” she said.) From where I was seated, beneath the skylight in the restored Victorian she calls home, I couldn’t see the wires spilling out of the back of her head.
Many roboticists believe that trying to simulate human appearance and behavior is a recipe for disappointment, because it raises unrealistic expectations. But Bina48’s creator, David Hanson of Hanson Robotics, argues that humanoid robots — even with obvious flaws — can make for genuine emotional companions. “The perception of identity,” he said, “is so intimately bound up with the perception of the human form.”
Link to story. Link to video. -Thanks, Carl!
Why can humans talk and chimpanzees can’t? Scientists at UCLA and Emory University suspect that it comes down to a single gene designated FOXP2. There is only a slight variation in this gene between humans and chimps, as Elaine Schmidt writes in UCLA Newsroom:
“Earlier research suggests that the amino-acid composition of human FOXP2 changed rapidly around the same time that language emerged in modern humans,” said Dr. Daniel Geschwind, Gordon and Virginia MacDonald Distinguished Chair in Human Genetics at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. “Ours is the first study to examine the effect of these amino-acid substitutions in FOXP2 in human cells[...]“We found that a significant number of the newly identified targets are expressed differently in human and chimpanzee brains,” Geschwind said. “This suggests that FOXP2 drives these genes to behave differently in the two species.”
The research demonstrates that mutations believed to be important to FOXP2′s evolution in humans change how the gene functions, resulting in different gene targets being switched on or off in human and chimp brains.
Link via io9 | Image: US Department of Energy
If it’s an inspiring speech, you betcha it has been said in the movies somewhere. Here’s a truly inspiring video clip, edited by Matthew Belinkie of OverthinkingIt: 40 Inspirational Speeches in 2 Minutes.
Transcript:
Shame on you. This could be the greatest night of our lives, but you’re going to let it be the worst. And I guarantee a week won’t go by in your life you won’t regret walking out, letting them get the best of you. Well, I’m not going home. We’ve come too far! And I’m going to stay right here and fight for this lost cause. A day may come when the courage of men fails… but it is not THIS day. The line must be drawn HERE. This far, no further! I’m not saying it’s going to be easy. You’re going to work harder than you ever worked before. But that’s fine, we’ll just get tougher with it! If a person grits his teeth and shows real determination, failure is not an option. That’s how winning is done! Believe me when I say we can break this army here, and win just one for the Gipper. But I say to you what every warrior has known since the beginning of time: you’ve got to get mad. I mean plum mad dog mean. If you would be free men, then you must fight to fulfill that promise! Let us cut out their living guts one inch at a time, and they will know what we can do! Let no man forget how menacing we are. We are lions! You’re like a big bear, man! This is YOUR time! Seize the day, never surrender, victory or death… that’s the Chicago Way! Who’s with me? Clap! Clap! Don’t let Tink die! Clap! Alright! Let’s fly! And gentlemen in England now abed shall know my name is the Lord when I tell our enemies that they may take our lives, but they’ll never take our Independence Day!
Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] – via Miss Cellania
Bonnie, a 30-year-old female orangutan living at the Smithsonian National Zoological Part in Washington, D.C., started doing something strange one day: she started whistling!
Scientists have long known that orangutans copy physical movements of humans, but Bonnie’s whistling indicates that the learning capacities of orangutans and other great apes in the auditory domain might be more flexible than previously believed, Wich said. The behavior goes against the argument that orangutans have no control over their vocalizations and the sounds are purely emotional that is, an involuntary response to stimuli such as predators.
Bonnie appears to whistle for the sake of making a sound rather than to receive a food reward or some other incentive. If asked to whistle, she is likely to oblige, another indication to scientists that she makes the sound voluntarily.
Link | Video of the whistling orangutan – Thanks casey!
