Contributed by Francisco Mauro Salzano, January 2, 2017 (sent for review July 5, 2016; reviewed by Theodore G. Schurr and Anne C. Stone)
Significance
There is much interest in understanding the role of natural selection in shaping physiological adaptations to climate, diet, and diseases in humans. We investigated this issue by analyzing genomic data from Native American populations inhabiting different ecological regions and ancient Native Americans. We found signals of natural selection at the fatty acid desaturases (FADS) genes not only in an Arctic population, as was previously found, but throughout the Americas, suggesting a single and strong adaptive event that occurred in Beringia, before the range expansion of the first Americans within the American continent and Greenland.
Abstract
When humans moved from Asia toward the Americas over 18,000 y ago and eventually peopled the New World they encountered a new environment with extreme climate conditions and distinct dietary resources. These environmental and dietary pressures may have led to instances of genetic adaptation with the potential to influence the phenotypic variation in extant Native American populations. An example of such an event is the evolution of the fatty acid desaturases (FADS) genes, which have been claimed to harbor signals of positive selection in Inuit populations due to adaptation to the cold Greenland Arctic climate and to a protein-rich diet. Because there was evidence of intercontinental variation in this genetic region, with indications of positive selection for its variants, we decided to compare the Inuit findings with other Native American data. Here, we use several lines of evidence to show that the signal of FADS-positive selection is not restricted to the Arctic but instead is broadly observed throughout the Americas. The shared signature of selection among populations living in such a diverse range of environments is likely due to a single and strong instance of local adaptation that took place in the common ancestral population before their entrance into the New World. These first Americans peopled the whole continent and spread this adaptive variant across a diverse set of... ( more at http://www.pnas.org/content/114/9/2195.abstract )
LARCEN, César Gonçalves. Mais uma lacônica viagem no tempo e no espaço: explorando o ciberespaço e liquefazendo fronteiras entre o moderno e o pós-moderno atravessando o campo dos Estudos Culturais [ebook]. / César Gonçalves Larcen - 2. Ed. - Canoas: César Gonçalves Larcen Editor, 2014. 102 p. ebook.: il. COMPRE AQUI:https://www.amazon.com.br/As-musas-terceiro-mil%C3%AAnio-desterro-ebook
LARCEN, César Gonçalves. Mais uma lacônica viagem no tempo e no espaço: explorando o ciberespaço e liquefazendo fronteiras entre o moderno e o pós-moderno atravessando o campo dos Estudos Culturais [ebook]. / César Gonçalves Larcen - 2. Ed. - Canoas: César Gonçalves Larcen Editor, 2014. 102 p. ebook.: il. COMPRE AQUI:https://www.amazon.com.br/musas-acham-terceiro-mil%C3%AAnio-Livro-ebook
LARCEN, César Gonçalves. Mais uma lacônica viagem no tempo e no espaço: explorando o ciberespaço e liquefazendo fronteiras entre o moderno e o pós-moderno atravessando o campo dos Estudos Culturais [ebook]. / César Gonçalves Larcen - 2. Ed. - Canoas: César Gonçalves Larcen Editor, 2014. 102 p. ebook.: il. COMPRE AQUI:http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01AGVB3D0?ref_=pe_2427780_160035660
DOWNLOAD GRATUÍTO. FREEDOWNLOAD.LARCEN, César Gonçalves. Pedagogias Culturais: dos estudos de mídia tradicionais ao estudo do ciberespaço em investigações no âmbito dos Estudos Culturais e da Educação. Porto Alegre: César Gonçalves Larcen Editor, 2013. 120 p.
DOWNLOAD PARCIAL.LARCEN, César Gonçalves. Mais uma lacônica viagem no tempo e no espaço: explorando o ciberespaço e liquefazendo fronteiras entre o moderno e o pós-moderno atravessando o campo dos Estudos Culturais. Porto Alegre: César Gonçalves Larcen Editor, 2011. 144 p. il.
CALLONI, Humberto. LARCEN, César G. Considerações sobre o ensino de Filosofia, sua relação com a educação e a noção de meio ambiente. In: I-Sophia: revista eletrônica de investigações filosófica, científica e tecnológica. Ano I, Volume 1, número 2 (2015) - Assis Chateaubriand: JPJ Editor, 2015. Trimestral. ISSN - 2358-7482. Pg.144-158.
CALLONI, Humberto. LARCEN, César G. From modern chess to liquid games: an approach based on the cultural studies field to study the modern and the post-modern education on punctual elements. In: CRIAR EDUCAÇÃO Revista do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Educação. UNESC, v. 3, p. 1-19, 2014.
DOWNLOAD GRATUÍTO. FREEDOWNLOAD.AGUIAR, Vitor Hugo Berenhauser de. As regras do Truco Cego. Porto Alegre: César Gonçalves Larcen Editor, 2012. 58 p. il.
Take a moment to look at your emoji keyboard. Scroll through the angry face, ghost, stiletto, doughnut, flashlight and cigarette until you reach the hearts.
There it is: love. Amid the mundane and humorous, those vibrant, colorful little shapes can easily become a rapid-fire display of affection to a friend, parent or partner. But notice, too, the broken and blue hearts, and their restrained reminders of sadness, loneliness or grief.
It turns out that these little characters are more important than we could imagine. Linguists, psychologists and computer scientists are discovering that what we collectively share on social media, and when, can signal information about our mental health. Some of these researchers believe machine learning, algorithms and mathematical analysis can give health care providers tools to help solve one of our most intractable public health epidemics: suicide.
In an underfunded field where saving every at-risk life can feel like an impossible goal, this technology promises to give public health experts and clinicians a novel tool to predict suicide risk. Given the rising rate of suicide in the United States, that kind of prevention can't come quickly enough.
The clues in your tweets
Predicting suicide risk is exactly what Glen Coppersmith, a data scientist and psychologist, has set out to do. That mission, he says, is an urgent one.
Data released in April from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revealed an alarming rise in suicides among both genders and in every age group between 10 and 74. Between 1999 and 2014, the suicide rate in the U.S. increased 24%, to 13 per 100,000 people.
As founder and CEO of the startup mental health analytics company Qntfy, Coppersmith is using machine learning to design algorithms that identify trends in human communication. That concept is well-established science, and it's one you rely on every time you misspell a word and know autocorrect will catch (or worsen) the mistake.
Coppersmith belongs to a small group of researchers who believe this technology can be put in the service of detecting a person's risk of mental illness and suicidal behavior. In his most recent study, published this month at an annual North American Association for Computational Linguistics meeting, he and his co-authors estimated the emotional content of tweets from hundreds of users who had talked openly about a suicide attempt, and tweets from a control group that did not display suicidal thoughts or feelings.
Using a model designed to predict suicide risk in the former group, the researchers discovered their algorithm worked — and picked up on surprising patterns, including one on how those emoji hearts can say more than we'd ever casually expect.
While nearly everyone in their sample included emoji in their tweets, Coppersmith and his co-authors noticed that some in the group that talked about attempting suicide employed a narrow range of emoji representing sadness more frequently, compared to typical users of the same age and gender. They often preferred the blue and broken hearts, but using those characters alone, says Coppersmith, doesn't indicate risk of suicide.
The researchers also noticed an increase in messages conveying sadness prior to a suicide attempt, and then a rise in both sad and angry tweets around an attempt.
While Coppersmith's study doesn't include real tweets in order to protect users' privacy, it does offer examples to demonstrate both anger ("I'm only good for being a verbal punching bag") and sadness ("I'm totally pathetic even the scars from my attempts are pathetic").
"It's not like ... if you say this phrase you're clearly in trouble," Coppersmith says of the algorithm. "It says, 'Let me look at all of the language.' Each word you use shows a tiny fraction of a bit of a clue in terms of who you are, what you're thinking, whether or not you're in some sort of emotional crisis."
Coppersmith believes gleaning such information from social media, as well as other data generated by mobile devices, could be vital to a psychologist looking for subtle hints about a patient's risk of suicide.
Janet Schnell, who lost her brother to suicide in 1995, has worked in the prevention field for two decades and believes this new approach may succeed in pinpointing risk where other efforts have failed.
"Part of the grieving process is that loss survivors go back, reexamine, and look and look to see what they missed," says Schnell, who is the loss division chair at the American Association of Suicidology.
Though her brother passed away before the advent of social media, Schnell knows how powerful it would be if researchers could use that data to help explain what often feels like a tragic mystery.
"I was so grateful as a loss survivor that there was a new window that could be opened," she says.
Despite recent advances in this research, it will still take partnership between data scientists and health care professionals, funding, and a few years at minimum to produce research reliable enough so that psychologists could use it in their practice.
For Coppersmith's research to reach that point, he needs many more insights like the ones he's already produced, and deeper analysis of those conclusions.
That's why he's trying to collect data from at least tens of thousands of people, and he's hoping you'll consider donating yours.
Donating your data
In April, Qntfy launched a study called OurDataHelps, which asks people to volunteer social media data from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit and Tumblr. Coppersmith is also asking for Fitbit, Jawbone and Runkeeper data, which should provide insight about people's physical patterns and habits.
Volunteers answer a few questions about their mental health and suicide history; the study invites both people who have and have not experienced mental illness to participate. They give Qntfy permission to anonymize and track their posts through open authentication, a common tool that allows third parties to view your account without requiring a password. (If you've ever synced an app like Candy Crush with your Facebook account, you've used open authentication.)
While the goal is to produce data and research that lead to new treatments for mental health conditions, Coppersmith wants to ultimately save lives by understanding how a person behaves in the days, weeks and months before becoming suicidal, and intervene before they have a chance to attempt suicide. Social media and mobile data provide a new opportunity to make that a reality.
April Foreman, suicide prevention coordinator at the Southeast Louisiana Veterans Health Care System in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, has been involved with OurDataHelps from its inception as an adviser. Describing the project to suicide survivors, she says, prompts a heartbreaking response.
"The look on their faces — it's that moment [when a person recognizes] that out of great tragedy you can salvage something," she says. "There's some precious thing left that makes a difference; a small good that can be pulled out of this horrible tragedy."
Unanswered questions
That tragedy is often traced back to risk factors like a family history of suicide, alcohol or drug addiction, and feelings of hopelessness. But patients with similar life stories routinely have different outcomes, and researchers have long struggled to understand the life-saving difference.
Studies conducted in the past few decades have generated important findings, but experts in the field say that prevention information is frequently vague, outdated or based on ineffective research methods.
Scientists studying suicide may follow the same variables in people's lives over a long period of time. They've even analyzed personal journals, tallying how many times certain words appear in order to understand people's minds in the fog of depression and suicidal thinking. What they haven't been able to do, however, is perform that analysis on a large scale and quickly gather information about people's everyday experiences.
The beauty of the algorithms behind OurDataHelps, Foreman says, is that they can do what she can't: count.
Foreman regularly looks at the medical records of 80 to 120 high-risk veterans, most of whom won't die by suicide. With training and expertise, she knows how to identify patients with serious warning signs, but she also understands the limitations of the human brain.
It can't track and analyze, for instance, speech patterns in real time, show a statistically significant pattern and link that with patients more likely to attempt suicide.
Building the right systems
Kristy Hollingshead, who has co-authored studies with Coppersmith that detect and analyze post-traumatic stress, depression and ADHD on social media, says online communication contains a "very strong, consistent, dependable signal" about a person's mental health.
Machine learning technology allows Hollingshead, a research scientist at the Florida Institute for Human & Machine Cognition, to capture and analyze thousands of public posts from at least several hundred users. In aggregate, those posts can easily become hundreds of thousands of lines of text, which she couldn't possibly scroll through and code manually.
Despite the efficiency of outsourcing these tasks to a computer, the systems Hollingshead and her colleagues are building aren't as accurate as they'd like them to be. They're making educated guesses about their data — estimating, for example, user gender and age. Using samples from small groups of users can also introduce bias.
Hollingshead believes that OurDataHelps can create a gold standard by offering scientists a comprehensive and tested dataset to inform their models and algorithms.
With that kind of accuracy, Hollingshead envisions a world in which mental well-being becomes part of the quantified self; someone who has suicidal feelings, or has attempted suicide in the past, could use software or an app to run an algorithm on their social media feeds for imminent risk that they might not even sense.
"Language is such a good signal of what's going on in your brain," she says. "Even if you tried to change it so you seemed happy, the algorithms can still pick up on the underlying currents of what's going on."
The path to suicide is not straight
The Department of Defense recently released three studies that show just how promising statistical analysis can be when applied unconventionally to the problem of predicting suicide.
The research, conducted by Craig Bryan, a prominent suicide-prevention researcher, executive director of the National Center for Veterans Studies at The University of Utah and co-investigator on the OurDataHelps initiative, used a mathematical concept known as dynamic systems modeling.
Instead of looking at the classic single data point — when a person died by suicide — the researchers were able to incorporate real-time mood and language prior to their subjects' deaths by scouring publicly available social media posts.
SEE ALSO: 7 initial ways you can be a better mental health ally and advocate
The work began in 2013 when Bryan and his co-authors set out to understand whether a service member's social media data held clues about their suicide risk. In particular, the researchers analyzed Facebook posts from a sample of 700 service members who died by suicide and 700 service members who died from other causes during a two-year-period.
They not only confirmed their original hypothesis, but retrospectively predicted a person's suicide and discovered patterns that challenge our assumptions about how suicide unfolds.
Bryan's research reveals that the pathway to suicide is not linear, contrary to the popular belief that such thoughts and behavior become an unyielding downward spiral. Instead, his study found important fluctuations in each service member's path to suicide.
Those who ended their lives were more likely to post about a stressful life event and then share negative emotions and beliefs; the sequence of those posts was reversed for those in the second group.
Prior to three months before the subjects' deaths by suicide, they tended to post about physical symptoms, emotions and thoughts in close proximity. At the three-month mark, that trend disappeared.
Then, in the month before dying, they often posted about "maladaptive behavior," like social withdrawal and alcohol use, while updates describing their worldview and self-perceptions became more stable.
"What we did in the beginning was look at it like a straight line," Bryan says. "But thinking in ups and downs, like a roller coaster, with much more complex interactions — that significantly improves our ability to detect suicidal individuals, and it provides a possible way to estimate, when are they going to die?"
Skepticism and hope
Sheila Hamilton's husband died by suicide 10 years ago, and she hopes research like Bryan's succeeds. And yet she remains skeptical that data will deliver us from this epidemic.
Hamilton, an advocate and author of All the Things We Never Knew: Chasing the Chaos of Mental Illness, wants the public to hear survivors' stories about both losing someone to suicide and surviving an attempt. Data, she says, isn't a history of childhood trauma or a story about how the health care system fails its most vulnerable patients. Data can't conquer the stigma that keeps people from reaching out for help and treatment.
Some also worry that the kind of technology Coppersmith and his peers are pursuing constitute a significant invasion of privacy. In 2014, a UK suicide prevention nonprofit called Samaritans Radar launched a Twitter app that used an algorithm to search for high-risk key words and then emailed the user with resources for help. Within 10 days of its debut, outrage over privacy concerns led Samaritans Radar to suspend the app.
The best solution for now, Coppersmith believes, is to only analyze data from individuals who opt-in to a service. The most vulnerable might not choose to participate, but an opt-in safeguard would protect a person's civil rights and prevent cases of abuse, like embarrassment or harassment at the hands of a friend who purportedly cares about your mental health.
Despite these challenges, Coppersmith remains hopeful. He believes that digital data can be empowering when used to detect the suffering embedded in our everyday communication; that information has the potential to set people on a path to healing with the right support and treatment.
LARCEN, César Gonçalves. Mais uma lacônica viagem no tempo e no espaço: explorando o ciberespaço e liquefazendo fronteiras entre o moderno e o pós-moderno atravessando o campo dos Estudos Culturais [ebook]. / César Gonçalves Larcen - 2. Ed. - Canoas: César Gonçalves Larcen Editor, 2014. 102 p. ebook.: il. COMPRE AQUI:https://www.amazon.com.br/As-musas-terceiro-mil%C3%AAnio-desterro-ebook
LARCEN, César Gonçalves. Mais uma lacônica viagem no tempo e no espaço: explorando o ciberespaço e liquefazendo fronteiras entre o moderno e o pós-moderno atravessando o campo dos Estudos Culturais [ebook]. / César Gonçalves Larcen - 2. Ed. - Canoas: César Gonçalves Larcen Editor, 2014. 102 p. ebook.: il. COMPRE AQUI:https://www.amazon.com.br/musas-acham-terceiro-mil%C3%AAnio-Livro-ebook
LARCEN, César Gonçalves. Mais uma lacônica viagem no tempo e no espaço: explorando o ciberespaço e liquefazendo fronteiras entre o moderno e o pós-moderno atravessando o campo dos Estudos Culturais [ebook]. / César Gonçalves Larcen - 2. Ed. - Canoas: César Gonçalves Larcen Editor, 2014. 102 p. ebook.: il. COMPRE AQUI:http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01AGVB3D0?ref_=pe_2427780_160035660
DOWNLOAD GRATUÍTO. FREEDOWNLOAD.LARCEN, César Gonçalves. Pedagogias Culturais: dos estudos de mídia tradicionais ao estudo do ciberespaço em investigações no âmbito dos Estudos Culturais e da Educação. Porto Alegre: César Gonçalves Larcen Editor, 2013. 120 p.
DOWNLOAD PARCIAL.LARCEN, César Gonçalves. Mais uma lacônica viagem no tempo e no espaço: explorando o ciberespaço e liquefazendo fronteiras entre o moderno e o pós-moderno atravessando o campo dos Estudos Culturais. Porto Alegre: César Gonçalves Larcen Editor, 2011. 144 p. il.
CALLONI, Humberto. LARCEN, César G. Considerações sobre o ensino de Filosofia, sua relação com a educação e a noção de meio ambiente. In: I-Sophia: revista eletrônica de investigações filosófica, científica e tecnológica. Ano I, Volume 1, número 2 (2015) - Assis Chateaubriand: JPJ Editor, 2015. Trimestral. ISSN - 2358-7482. Pg.144-158.
CALLONI, Humberto. LARCEN, César G. From modern chess to liquid games: an approach based on the cultural studies field to study the modern and the post-modern education on punctual elements. In: CRIAR EDUCAÇÃO Revista do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Educação. UNESC, v. 3, p. 1-19, 2014.
DOWNLOAD GRATUÍTO. FREEDOWNLOAD.AGUIAR, Vitor Hugo Berenhauser de. As regras do Truco Cego. Porto Alegre: César Gonçalves Larcen Editor, 2012. 58 p. il.
Europe's growing army of robot workers could be classed as "electronic persons" and their owners liable to paying social security for them if the European Union adopts a draft plan to address the realities of a new industrial revolution.
Robots are being deployed in ever-greater numbers in factories and also taking on tasks such as personal care or surgery, raising fears over unemployment, wealth inequality and alienation.
Their growing intelligence, pervasiveness and autonomy requires rethinking everything from taxation to legal liability, a draft European Parliament motion, dated May 31, suggests.
Some robots are even taking on a human form. Visitors to the world's biggest travel show in March were greeted by a lifelike robot developed by Japan's Toshiba (6502.T) and were helped by another made by France's Aldebaran Robotics.
However, Germany's VDMA, which represents companies such as automation giant Siemens (SIEGn.DE) and robot maker Kuka (KU2G.DE), says the proposals are too complicated and too early.
German robotics and automation turnover rose 7 percent to 12.2 billion euros ($13.8 billion) last year and the country is keen to keep its edge in the latest industrial technology. Kuka is the target of a takeover bid by China's Midea (000333.SZ).
The draft motion called on the European Commission to consider "that at least the most sophisticated autonomous robots could be established as having the status of electronic persons with specific rights and obligations".
It also suggested the creation of a register for smart autonomous robots, which would link each one to funds established to cover its legal liabilities.
Patrick Schwarzkopf, managing director of the VDMA's robotic and automation department, said: "That we would create a legal framework with electronic persons - that's something that could happen in 50 years but not in 10 years."
"We think it would be very bureaucratic and would stunt the development of robotics," he told reporters at the Automatica robotics trade fair in Munich, while acknowledging that a legal framework for self-driving cars would be needed soon.
The report added that robotics and artificial intelligence may result in a large part of the work now done by humans being taken over by robots, raising concerns about the future of employment and the viability of social security systems.
The draft motion, drawn up by the European parliament's committee on legal affairs also said organizations should have to declare savings they made in social security contributions by using robotics instead of people, for tax purposes.
Schwarzkopf said there was no proven correlation between increasing robot density and unemployment, pointing out that the number of employees in the German automotive industry rose by 13 percent between 2010 and 2015, while industrial robot stock in the industry rose 17 percent in the same period.
DOWNLOAD PARCIAL.LARCEN, César Gonçalves. Mais uma lacônica viagem no tempo e no espaço: explorando o ciberespaço e liquefazendo fronteiras entre o moderno e o pós-moderno atravessando o campo dos Estudos Culturais. Porto Alegre: César Gonçalves Larcen Editor, 2011. 144 p. il.
DOWNLOAD GRATUÍTO. FREE DOWNLOAD. AGUIAR, Vitor Hugo Berenhauser de. As regras do Truco Cego. Porto Alegre: César Gonçalves Larcen Editor, 2012. 58 p. il.
Livro 2013. Clusterização. DOWNLOAD GRATUÍTO. FREE DOWNLOAD. LINCK, Ricardo Ramos. LORENZI, Fabiana. Clusterização: utilizando Inteligência Artificial para agrupar pessoas. Porto Alegre: César Gonçalves Larcen Editor, 2013. 120p. il.
Livro 2013. Pedagogias Culturais. DOWNLOAD GRATUÍTO. FREE DOWNLOAD. LARCEN, César Gonçalves. Pedagogias Culturais: dos estudos de mídia tradicionais ao estudo do ciberespaço em investigações no âmbito dos Estudos Culturais e da Educação. Porto Alegre: César Gonçalves Larcen Editor, 2013. 120 p.
Livro 2015. Tecnologia da informação e educação contemporânea. DOWNLOAD GRATUÍTO. FREE DOWNLOAD. FIALHO, Arivelto Bustamante. QUADROS, Augusto Wagner Farias de. CARVALHO, Nilton Cezar. Tecnologia da informação e educação contemporânea. Porto Alegre: César Gonçalves Larcen Editor, 2015. 65p. il.
CALLONI, H.; LARCEN, C. G. From modern chess to liquid games: an approach based on the cultural studies field to study the modern and the post-modern education on punctual elements. CRIAR EDUCAÇÃO Revista do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Educação UNESC, v. 3, p. 1-19, 2014. http://periodicos.unesc.net/index.php/criaredu/article/view/1437
How do you quantify something as complex and personal as humour? University of Alberta researchers have developed a mathematical method of doing just that—and it might not be quite as personal as we think.
"This really is the first paper that's ever had a quantifiable theory of humour," says U of A psychology professor Chris Westbury, lead author of the recent study. "There's quite a small amount of experimental work that's been done on humour."
The idea for the study was born from earlier research in which test subjects with aphasia were asked to review letter strings and determine whether they were real words or not. Westbury began to notice a trend: participants would laugh when they heard some of the made-up non-words, like snunkoople.
It raised the question—how can a made-up word be inherently funny?
The snunkoople effect
Westbury hypothesized that the answer lay in the word's entropy—a mathematical measure of how ordered or predictable it is. Non-words like finglam, with uncommon letter combinations, are lower in entropy than other non-words like clester, which have more probable combinations of letters and therefore higher entropy.
"We did show, for example, that Dr. Seuss—who makes funny non-words—made non-words that were predictably lower in entropy. He was intuitively making lower-entropy words when he was making his non-words," says Westbury. "It essentially comes down to the probability of the individual letters. So if you look at a Seuss word like yuzz-a-ma-tuzz and calculate its entropy, you would find it is a low-entropy word because it has improbable letters like Z."
Inspired by the reactions to snunkoople, Westbury set out to determine whether it was possible to predict what words people would find funny, using entropy as a yardstick.
For the first part of the study, test subjects were asked to compare two non-words and select the option they considered to be more humorous. In the second part, they were shown a single non-word and rated how humorous they found it on a scale from 1 to 100.
"The results show that the bigger the difference in the entropy between the two words, the more likely the subjects were to choose the way we expected them to," says Westbury, noting that the most accurate subject chose correctly 92 per cent of the time. "To be able to predict with that level of accuracy is amazing. You hardly ever get that in psychology, where you get to predict what someone will choose 92 per cent of the time."
People are funny that way
This nearly universal response says a lot about the nature of humour and its role in human evolution. Westbury refers to a well-known 1929 linguistics study by Wolfgang Köhler in which test subjects were presented with two shapes, one spiky and one round, and were asked to identify which was a baluba and which was a takete. Almost all the respondents intuited that takete was the spiky object, suggesting a common mapping between speech sounds and the visual shape of objects.
The reasons for this may be evolutionary. "We think that humour is personal, but evolutionary psychologists have talked about humour as being a message-sending device. So if you laugh, you let someone else know that something is not dangerous," says Westbury.
He uses the example of a person at home believing they see an intruder in their backyard. This person might then laugh when they discover the intruder is simply a cat instead of a cat burglar. "If you laugh, you're sending a message to whomever's around that you thought you saw something dangerous, but it turns out it wasn't dangerous after all. It's adaptive."
Just as expected (or not)
The idea of entropy as a predictor of humour aligns with a 19th-century theory from the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, who proposed that humour is a result of an expectation violation, as opposed to a previously held theory that humour is based simply on improbability. When it comes to humour, expectations can be violated in various ways.
In non-words, expectations are phonological (we expect them to be pronounced a certain way), whereas in puns, the expectations are semantic. "One reason puns are funny is that they violate our expectation that a word has one meaning," says Westbury. Consider the following joke: Why did the golfer wear two sets of pants? Because he got a hole in one. "When you hear the golfer joke, you laugh because you've done something unexpected—you expect the phrase 'hole in one' to mean something different, and that expectation has been violated."
The study may not be about to change the game for stand-up comedians—after all, a silly word is hardly the pinnacle of comedy—but the findings may be useful in commercial applications such as in product naming.
"I would be interested in looking at the relationship between product names and the seriousness of the product," notes Westbury. "For example, people might be averse to buying a funny-named medication for a serious illness—or it could go the other way around."
The findings were published in the Journal of Memory and Language.
More information: Chris Westbury et al. Telling the world's least funny jokes: On the quantification of humor as entropy, Journal of Memory and Language (2016). DOI: 10.1016/j.jml.2015.09.001
DOWNLOAD PARCIAL.LARCEN, César Gonçalves. Mais uma lacônica viagem no tempo e no espaço: explorando o ciberespaço e liquefazendo fronteiras entre o moderno e o pós-moderno atravessando o campo dos Estudos Culturais. Porto Alegre: César Gonçalves Larcen Editor, 2011. 144 p. il.
DOWNLOAD GRATUÍTO. FREE DOWNLOAD. AGUIAR, Vitor Hugo Berenhauser de. As regras do Truco Cego. Porto Alegre: César Gonçalves Larcen Editor, 2012. 58 p. il.
DOWNLOAD GRATUÍTO. FREE DOWNLOAD. LARCEN, César Gonçalves. Pedagogias Culturais: dos estudos de mídia tradicionais ao estudo do ciberespaço em investigações no âmbito dos Estudos Culturais e da Educação. Porto Alegre: César Gonçalves Larcen Editor, 2013. 120 p.
LARCEN, César Gonçalves. Mais uma lacônica viagem no tempo e no espaço: explorando o ciberespaço e liquefazendo fronteiras entre o moderno e o pós-moderno atravessando o campo dos Estudos Culturais [ebook]. / César Gonçalves Larcen - 2. Ed. - Canoas: César Gonçalves Larcen Editor, 2014. 102 p. ebook.: il.COMPRE AQUI:https://agbook.com.br/book/175936--MAIS_UMA_LACONICA_VIAGEM_NO_TEMPO_E_NO_ESPACO
CALLONI, H.; LARCEN, C. G. From modern chess to liquid games: an approach based on the cultural studies field to study the modern and the post-modern education on punctual elements. CRIAR EDUCAÇÃO Revista do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Educação UNESC, v. 3, p. 1-19, 2014. http://periodicos.unesc.net/index.php/criaredu/article/view/1437
