Beachcombing in Academia

… asks Peter C. Sundt, BSc. in the June 2010) of the journal Elevator World (page 114). Although the article is ‘subscribers only’, an earlier essay by the same author on broadly the same subject (with the same title) is available online here, via The Structural Engineer.“Most agree that the Great Pyramid at Giza, the last remaining Wonder of the Ancient World, was an amazing job of construction. It’s a great pity, though, that the Egyptians left little or no records of how they did it.”

How might real dogs react to robotic dogs?  The Sony Corporation has been investigating. Researchers at its Computer Science Laboratory in Paris, which “… engages in fundamental research in cutting edge areas of science that are relevant for pushing the state of the art in computing.” tested the ground by exposing real dogs to AIBO – their now-famous computer-controlled semi-autonomous dog-bot.

Is ‘a pair’ big enough to be called ‘a group’? The tricky subject of dyads has recently been causing considerable professorial debate in the journal ‘Small Group Research’. (Note: the word ‘dyad ‘ is derived from the Greek ‘dýo’, meaning ‘two’.)

“…what happens if a person who prefers to kiss with the head turned to the right attempts to kiss a person who prefers to kiss with the head turned to the left.“?This potentially awkward social situation is the subject of a new scientific analysis from researchers at the MOVE Research Institute based at Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, in the Netherlands.

Although boredom very rarely escapes the notice of those suffering from it, constructing a purely technical instrument for reliably recognising boredom in humans is currently rated as a non-trivial task. But recently, a team from George Mason University, the University of North Carolina, the Georgia Institute of Technology and the Naval Research Lab, Washington, DC have between them devised a provisional system for doing just that.

“The practice of having Ph.D. graduates employed by the university that trained them, commonly called ‘academic inbreeding’ has long been suspected to be damaging to scholarly practices and achievement ” says a 2010 report in the journal Management Science.

Perhaps it was the title: ‘Acquired preferences for piquant foods by chimpanzees.’ but whatever the reason, Paul Rozin, Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, found it very difficult to get his research paper published. The work had been inspired by observations the professor had made whilst in Mexico, when he noticed that -“…virtually everyone in a Mexican village over 5 or 6 years of age liked the burn of chili pepper, but that none of the animals in the village showed a preference for it, even though they ate the pepper daily as they consumed the leftovers of the day in the garbage”

The word 'Shirk' normally carries quite pronounced negative connotations. But are there circumstances when shirking might have beneficial effects? For example in the efficient operation of teams?Shirk : verb ‘To avoid work, duties or responsibilities, especially if they are difficult or unpleasant.’ [source: Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary ]According to new research from Tadashi Sekiguchi associate professor of Game Theory at Osaka Prefecture University, and colleagues from Wakayama University and Kyoto University in Japan the answer is yes.

There are new clues in the quest for a fully coherent theory of the perception and neural representation of size-variant human vowels in the Mongolian gerbil.Previous investigations in the US (see: Science 2.0, Beachcombing in Academia, February 15th 2012) found that Mongolian gerbils can easily be trained to recognise vowel sounds in human speech.

Of all the available publications on 'Aircraft Nose Art', very few have investigated its psychological undercurrents. An exception is ‘Aircraft Nose Art: From World War I to Today’ (1991). Chapter 1 of which was authored by the late George R. Klare, who was Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Ohio University.

Mathematical theory describing the problem of four-legged wobbly tables stretches back at least as far as 2005, when a paper on the subject of  “The Intuitive Table ‘Theorem’ “, was published in the math journal Viniculum.

Should robots behave politely? Because, to some, it’s a given that in the not-too-distant future large numbers of people will be interacting with robots (domestic, public, corporate and perhaps even law-enforcement/military) on a frequent basis.