It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Friday, November 26, 2021
The 'great resignation' is a trend that began before the pandemic, and bosses need to get used to it
Finding good employees has always been a challenge—but these days it's harder than ever. And it is unlikely to improve anytime soon.
The so-called quit rate—the share of workers who voluntarily leave their jobs—hit a new record of 3% in September 2021, according to the latest data available from the Bureau of Labor and Statistics. The rate was highest in the leisure and hospitality sector, where 6.4% of workers quit their jobs in September. In all, 20.2 million workers left their employers from May through September.
Companies are feeling the effects. In August 2021, a survey found that 73% of 380 employers in North America were having difficulty attracting employees—three times the share that said so the previous year. And 70% expect this difficulty to persist into 2022.
As a professor of human resource management, I examine how employment and the work environment have changed over time and the impact this has on organizations and communities. While the current resignation behavior may seem like a new trend, data shows employee turnoverhas been rising steadily for the past decade and may simply be the new normal employers are going to have to get used to.
The economy's seismic shifts
The U.S.—alongside other advanced economies—has been moving away from a focus on productive sectors like manufacturing to a service-based economy for decades.
That change has been seismic for employers. A majority of the jobs in service-based industries require only generalizable occupational skills such as competencies in computing and communications that are often easily transportable across companies. This is true across a wide range of professions, from accountants and engineers to truck drivers and customer services representatives. As a result, in service-based economies, it is relatively easy for employees to move between companies and maintain their productivity.
Thus, the barriers and transition costs employees incur when switching employers have been reduced.
Greater options and lower costs to move mean that employees can be more selective and focus on picking jobs that best fit their personal needs and desires. What people want from work is inherently shaped by their cultural values and life situation. The U.S. labor market is expected to become far more diverse going forward in terms of gender, ethnicity and age. Thus, employers that cannot provide greater flexibility and variety in their working environment will struggle to attract and retain workers.
Employers now have a greater obligation than in the past to convince existing and would-be employees why they should stay or join their organizations. And there is no evidence to suggest this trend will change going forward.
Thus, there is a large incentive for businesses to adapt to the new labor market conditions and develop innovative approaches to keeping workers happy and in their jobs.
A May 2021 survey found that 54% of employees surveyed from around the world would consider leaving their job if they were not afforded some form of flexibility in where and when they work.
Given the heightened priority employees place on finding a job that fits their preferences, companies need to adopt a more holistic approach to the types of rewards they provide. It's also important that they tailor the types of financial, social and developmental incentives and opportunities they provide to individual employees' preferences. It's not just about paying workers more. There are even examples of companies providing employees the choice of simply being paid in a cryptocurrency like bitcoin as an inducement.
While customizing the package of rewards each employees receives may potentially increase an organization's administrative costs, this investment can help retain a highly engaged workforce.
Managing the new normal
Companies should also plan on high employee mobility to be endemic and reframe how they approach managing their workers.
One way to do this is by investing deeply in external relationships that help ensure consistent access to high-quality talent. This can include enhancing the relationships they have with educational institutions and former employees.
For example, many organizations have adopted alumni programs that specifically recruit former employees to rejoin.
These former employees are often less expensive to recruit, bring access to needed human capital and possess both an understanding of an organization's processes and an appreciation of the organization's culture.
The newly published guidelines set best practices for sampling human remains and carrying out scientific analysis. Above, Washington University researchers conducted archaeological excavations of the Bronze Age site complex “Dali.” The ancient DNA collected at Dali showed a significant change in the ancestry of the site’s inhabitants after 2000 BC. Credit: Michael Frachetti
Fueled by technological advancements, ancient DNA research has grown by leaps and bounds over the last decade. From the first full ancient genome published in 2010 to the more than 4,000 analyzed today, the DNA collected from ancient human remains has advanced researchers' understanding of the origins and history of human populations around the world.
However, given the relative infancy of the field and its rapid development, researchers find themselves in a position where they are building the plane while flying, figuratively speaking.
"There are very serious ethical implications to dealing with human remains. These samples are taken from humans who had lives, families, and whose bodies represent the ancestral history of people still living today," said Michael Frachetti, professor of archaeology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis who has used ancient DNA research to study Central and Eastern Eurasia populations.
"Anthropologists, geneticists, biologists and other researchers have a responsibility to engage in detailed and thoughtful conversations about the ethics of using human remains and to agree on guidelines that might anticipate potentially unforeseen issues that cause direct harm to descendant communities we work with throughout our research," Frachetti said.
Recently, he was one of 64 scholars from 24 countries who collaborated to develop a set of globally applicable best practices for sampling human remains and carrying out scientific analysis. The guidelines were published Oct. 20 in the journal Nature.
According to Frachetti, the guidelines established by the group provide a framework for conducting ethical DNA research that considers complex and sometimes divergent concerns among global communities and researchers, including academic and nonacademic stakeholders. The guidelines include:
Abide by all regulations in the places where they work and from which the human remains originate;
Prepare a detailed plan prior to beginning any study;
Minimize damage to human remains;
Ensure data are made available following publication to allow critical re-examination of scientific findings; and
Engage with other stakeholders and ensure respect and sensitivity to stakeholder perspectives.
Below, Frachetti discusses the process of working with diverse scholars around the world and how this type of collaboration—which crosses regional, disciplinary and identity boundaries—contributes positively to the future of scholarly work.
How did this global collaboration transpire?
The international gathering was hosted by the Reich Lab at Harvard University. David Reich is an accomplished geneticist who, in the last 10 years, has emerged as one of the most prolific, yet sometimes criticized, voices for applying genomic research to ancient populations. His state-of-the-art laboratory has become an epicenter for the combination of archaeology and genetics and has a vast global network of scholars working on a wide range of questions.
The Reich lab called together an informal meeting among global colleagues, firstly to listen to different views on ethics and open a forum to express what each saw as critical or relevant to their own national or Indigenous communities. The aim at the start was just an open discussion, but the spectrum of global input was extremely eye opening. The invitation was open to anyone engaged in this type of work, but started among colleagues. Due to the COVID pandemic, the meeting was held virtually through Zoom.
What made this collaboration unique? How did this shape the team's work?
There were already a host of articles and statements—primarily from a North American perspective—which articulated the complex and important ethical issues surrounding DNA research. These articles, many of which were written by Indigenous scholars, were the gateway for this international conversation. But the views and insights of the diverse participants in our meeting showed that the starting point for ethics in DNA differs widely across the world. This is especially true when considering the different colonial and post-colonial histories of global communities. The important ethical concerns that might be central for say, Indigenous communities in North America, might be less of an issue in countries without similar histories.
The voices of other global participants brought different issues to the surface. Hearing 60 or more people with decades of practical work in this field—including Indigenous communities, academics, museum curators and others—illustrated that a baseline for ethical practice had not yet been adopted in many regions or was quite different in some parts of the world.
Scholars from different disciplines around the world expressed what they saw as the important elements of a globally relevant, ethical approach to genetics sampling. This wasn't just a feel-good meeting. Hard topics emerged and we were communicating across cultural, social and ethnic boundaries in real and equitable ways.
Because the meeting was held virtually, participants had to take turns speaking, which created the opportunity for more conversational consensus. To the credit of everyone who participated, nobody was there to forward a personal agenda. Everybody recognized that they had some expertise to contribute to the conversation, but they were also there to listen and learn.
Ultimately, everyone is working toward the most productive endgame, which is doing research that is first and foremost considerate of the power of human ancestry, which allows for people's voices to be heard, and is done in a way that does not cause conflict or harm.
I think we were able to distill general practices that could be applied—if locally considered and augmented in necessary ways—anywhere in the world.
How will these guidelines impact future ancient DNA research?
There were already a host of articles and statements—primarily from a North American perspective—which articulated the complex and important ethical issues surrounding DNA research. These articles, many of which were written by Indigenous scholars, were the gateway for this international conversation. But the views and insights of the diverse participants in our meeting showed that the starting point for ethics in DNA differs widely across the world. This is especially true when considering the different colonial and post-colonial histories of global communities. The important ethical concerns that might be central for say, Indigenous communities in North America, might be less of an issue in countries without similar histories.
The voices of other global participants brought different issues to the surface. Hearing 60 or more people with decades of practical work in this field—including Indigenous communities, academics, museum curators and others—illustrated that a baseline for ethical practice had not yet been adopted in many regions or was quite different in some parts of the world.
Scholars from different disciplines around the world expressed what they saw as the important elements of a globally relevant, ethical approach to genetics sampling. This wasn't just a feel-good meeting. Hard topics emerged and we were communicating across cultural, social and ethnic boundaries in real and equitable ways.
Because the meeting was held virtually, participants had to take turns speaking, which created the opportunity for more conversational consensus. To the credit of everyone who participated, nobody was there to forward a personal agenda. Everybody recognized that they had some expertise to contribute to the conversation, but they were also there to listen and learn.
Ultimately, everyone is working toward the most productive endgame, which is doing research that is first and foremost considerate of the power of human ancestry, which allows for people's voices to be heard, and is done in a way that does not cause conflict or harm.
I think we were able to distill general practices that could be applied—if locally considered and augmented in necessary ways—anywhere in the world.
This article has been translated into more than 20 languages, so the hope is that people around the world can participate in this conversation in impactful ways. Ultimately, our goal for these guidelines is producing better science, better social responsibility and better dialog among global communications.
What we've seen in the past is that unforeseen consequences can occur from DNA research. The guidelines give researchers a starting protocol to avoid common pitfalls.
India is a really great example of this. The diversity of the Indian population—its history, its regional mosaic and cultural background—is so inherently complex that if you don't engage carefully and different constituencies are unable to weigh in prior to beginning research, research can have serious social and political implications.
Engaging the communities with whom you're working is one of the primary principles outlined in the guidelines. The ideal is that there's a multiscalar engagement and conversation, in which the concerns or issues that are relevant to a range of stakeholders can serve as the driving force behind collaborative research.
Another important aspect of the guidelines is transparency and open access to data, which allows the opportunity for other experts to weigh in. The guidelines make sure you're meeting the benchmarks that you promised, like sharing results with partner communities, and providing stable scientific archives of the data. This demands that scholars consult with relevant Indigenous communities before designing the sampling, the goal being establishing a common mission and goal for the research. Sometimes this means the work won't be done—and that is also an acceptable outcome of these conversations.
Ultimately, our goal for these guidelines is producing better science, better social responsibility and more responsible results. No scientific program is ever going to be perfect—there will always be a need to revise and make modifications—but we should endeavor to sustain human rights and do no harm in our approach to science.
Why was it important for you and WashU to have a seat at the table?
WashU is a major player in so many of these conversations. Our anthropology department is internationally respected, and this rests in part on the individual ethical engagements by our faculty and students. Beyond archaeology and genetics, our department has excellence in global health, primatology and human evolution, domestication sciences and ancient populations here in St. Louis and throughout the Mississippi Valley. As such, we are a part of a wide global community that extends across these regions.
What advice do you have for your WashU colleagues who want to engage in this type of work?
I believe this type of global, collaborative work will become increasingly common across disciplines, if it's not already, because we now have technologies that truly bridge national boundaries in a more inclusive way.
If these types of conversation have not occurred in your field, they likely will in the future. This type of collaboration is beneficial not only in disciplines that deal with contemporary societies, but in any discipline, business or interaction that links local and global communities to serve humanity in positive ways.
From the formation of institutional codes, guidelines and ethical approaches, inclusive participation helps societies recognize and avoid the pitfalls of the past. What was most exciting to me about this experience is that over 60 scholars from various disciplines and countries shaped a collective voice that initiates dialog around these guidelines.Why scholars have created global guidelines for ancient DNA research
More information:Songül Alpaslan-Roodenberg et al, Ethics of DNA research on human remains: five globally applicable guidelines,Nature(2021).DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-04008-x
Sake bottles and mushrooms at a standing bar in Aizuwakamatsu, Fukushima prefecture, in 2018. Credit: Eric Rath.
In Japan, the proverb "Sake wa honshin o arawasu" translates to "sake reveals the true heart."
But that's one of the few things translated when it comes to the country's signature alcoholic beverage.
"Surprisingly, despite the growing interest in sake in the U.S., there's hardly any research about the history of sake in English," said Eric C. Rath, professor of history at the University of Kansas.
"So in my translation and in a book that I'm writing, I want to give readers an understanding of sake's evolution and cultural significance."
His new article, "Sake Journal (Goshu no nikki): Japan's Oldest Guide to Brewing," provides the first English translation of the earliest Japanese manual for brewing sake. It appears in the winter issue of Gastronomica.
"Sake is sometimes translated as 'rice wine,' and that's a mistake since it's made more like beer than wine," he said.
That's not the only thing Westerners tend to misunderstand about the fermented drink.
Rath said, "Sake also has a higher alcohol content than wine. Unlike most other alcoholic beverages, sake can be enjoyed at a variety of temperatures. Cooling or heating the same sake yields remarkable changes in the taste. And sake goes well with a lot more than just Asian food. It's meant to be savored, not thrown into beer to make a 'sake bomb.'"
The original "Goshu no nikki" was a secret manuscript that was strictly safeguarded, its information kept primarily through oral tradition. It represented the earliest guide to brewing sake and one of the most significant sources for understanding its history in medieval Japan (1192–1600). Rath's article includes several translated recipes for sake, along with the directions for pasteurization.
"Back in the 14th century, brewers relied on ambient yeasts, and they had not yet perfected the best ways to ferment sake and maintain the alcohol content. They also used brown rice, which with the wild yeasts would have given it a gamier taste, far from the premium sake today that uses highly polished specialty rice and tends to be lighter, finely grained and leans toward having a melon bouquet," he said.
A curious amount of folklore surrounds the origins and processes around the beverage. One story asserts it began with the custom of virginal women chewing grains and using their saliva to render the sugars in the starch. Rath notes how modern sake brand names include words such as "maiden," "daughter" and "beauty," which can be construed as intentionally sexualizing the drink.
"Similar types of (chewed) sake were produced in Okinawa until very recently," he said. "At some point, though, this type of sake came to be associated with young women in Japan, perhaps because when the story was retold, the idea of virgin girls chewing and spitting was more appealing to older male sake drinkers."
Rath's first taste of sake came in high school, when he and some friends realized they could be served alcohol at Japanese restaurants in his hometown of Chicago.
"I recall having sake one of the times we went out for sushi. I remember that the taste was like warm rubber cement, the type of clear glue that's sold with the brush inside the lid. I was never a fan until I went to Japan and discovered there was a lot more variety to sake than the two brands I was familiar with in the U.S.," he said.
Rath recently published "Oishii: The History of Sushi" (Reaktion Books/University of Chicago Press, 2021), the first comprehensive chronicle of sushi written in English. He is also the author of the books "Japan's Cuisines: Food, Place and Identity," "Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Japan" and "Japanese Foodways, Past and Present" (with Stephanie Assmann).Mutation threatening high-quality brewing yeast identified
This comic depicts the Bhamla Lab research in an exciting and engaging way - all pointing back to curiosity-driven science and how it can impact scientific research. Credit: Lindsey Leigh for Georgia Tech
The snapping of a finger was first depicted in ancient Greek art around 300 B.C. Today, that same snap initiates evil forces for the villain Thanos in Marvel's latest Avengers movie. Both media inspired a group of researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology to study the physics of a finger snap and determine how friction plays a critical role.
Using an intermediate amount of friction, not too high and not too low, a snap of the finger produces the highest rotational accelerations observed in humans, even faster than the arm of a professional baseball pitcher. The results were published Nov. 17 in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.
The research was led by an undergraduate student at Georgia Tech, Raghav Acharya, as well as doctoral student Elio Challita, Assistant Professor Saad Bhamla of the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and Assistant Professor Mark Ilton of Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California.
Their results might one day inform the design of prosthetics meant to imitate the wide-ranging capabilities of the human hand. Bhamla said the project is also a prime example of what he calls curiosity-driven science, where everyday occurrences and biological behaviors can serve as data sources for new discoveries.
"For the past few years, I've been fascinated with how we can snap our fingers," Bhamla said. "It's really an extraordinary physics puzzle right at our fingertips that hasn't been investigated closely."
In earlier work, Bhamla, Ilton, and other colleagues had developed a general framework for explaining the surprisingly powerful and ultrafast motions observed in living organisms. The framework seemed to naturally apply to the snap. It posits that organisms depend on the use of a spring and latching mechanism to store up energy, which they can then quickly release.
Acharya and Bhamla felt a particular push to apply this framework to a finger snap after seeing the movie Avengers: Infinity War, released in April 2018 and produced by Marvel Studios. In it, Thanos, a villainous character, seeks to obtain six special stones and place them into his metal gauntlet. After collecting them all, he snaps his fingers and triggers universe-wide consequences.
But would it be possible to snap at all while wearing an armor gauntlet, the researchers asked? In the case of a finger snap, they suspected that skin friction played a more important role compared to other spring and latch systems. With the frictional properties of a metal gauntlet, they imagined it might be impossible.
Using high-speed imaging, automated image processing, and dynamic force sensors, the researchers analyzed a variety of finger snaps. They explored the role of friction by covering fingers with different materials, including metallic thimbles to simulate the effects of trying to snap while wearing a metallic gauntlet, much like Thanos.
For an ordinary snap with bare fingers, the researchers measured maximal rotational velocities of 7,800 degrees per second and rotational accelerations of 1.6 million degrees per second squared. The rotational velocity is less than that measured for the fastest rotational motions observed in humans, which come from the arms of professional baseball players during the act of pitching. However, the snap acceleration is the fastest human angular acceleration yet measured, almost three times faster than the rotational acceleration of a professional baseball pitcher's arm.
"When I first saw the data, I jumped out of my chair," said Bhamla, who studies ultrafast motions in a variety of living systems, from single cells to insects. "The finger snap occurs in only seven milliseconds, more than twenty times faster than the blink of an eye, which takes more than 150 milliseconds."
When the fingertips of the subjects were covered with metal thimbles, their maximal rotational velocities decreased dramatically, confirming the researchers' intuitions.
Saad Bhamla snapping. Credit: Georgia Tech
"Our results suggest that Thanos could not have snapped because of his metal armored fingers," said Acharya, first author of the study. "So, it's probably the Hollywood special effects, rather than actual physics, at play! Sorry for the spoiler."
They explained this decrease by considering the diminished contact area that exists between thimble-covered fingers.
"The compression of the skin makes the system a little bit more fault tolerant," said Challita, a coauthor on the work. "Reducing both the compressibility and friction of the skin make it a lot harder to build up enough force in your fingers to actually snap."
Surprisingly, increasing the friction of the fingertips with rubber coverings also reduced speed and acceleration. The researchers concluded that a Goldilocks zone of friction was necessary—too little friction and not enough energy was stored to power the snap, and too much friction led to energy dissipation as the fingers took longer to slide past each other, wasting the stored energy into heat.
The researchers experimented with a variety of mathematical models of the snapping process to explain their observations. They found that a model including a spring and a soft friction contact-latch could reproduce the qualitative features of their results.
"We included soft frictional contact into our mathematical model, and the results reinforced the central role played by friction in achieving ultrafast motions," Ilton said. "This model can now help us understand how other animals such as termites and ants snap their mandibles, as well as rationally bioinspired actuators for engineering applications."
Ancient Greek vase depicting a finger snap. Credit: Wikicommons
John Long, a program director in the National Science Foundation's Division of Integrative Organismal Systems, oversees research in the Physiological Mechanisms and Biomechanics Program, which currently funds Bhamla's investigations into ultrafast behaviors in animals.
"This research is a great example of what we can learn with clever experiments and insightful computational modeling," he said. "By showing that varying degrees of friction between the fingers alters the elastic performance of a snap, these scientists have opened the door to discovering the principles operating in other organisms, and to putting this mechanism to work in engineered systems such as bioinspired robots."
John Long, program director in the Directorate for Biological Sciences at the National Science Foundation, oversees research in the Physiological Mechanisms and Biomechanics Program, which currently funds Bhamla's investigations into ultrafast behaviors in animals.
"The research of Dr. Bhamla and his colleagues is a great example of what we can learn with clever experiments and insightful computational modeling," he said. "By showing that varying degrees of friction between the fingers alters the elastic performance of the snap, they've opened the door for discovering these principles operating in other organisms and for putting this soft, sophisticated, and adjustable mechanism to work in engineered systems such as bioinspired robots."
The researchers believe that the results open a variety of opportunities for future study, including understanding why humans snap at all, and if humans are the only primates to have evolved this physical ability.
"Based on ancient Greek art from 300 B.C., humans may very well have been snapping their fingers for hundreds of thousands of years before that, yet we are only now beginning to scientifically study it," Bhamla said. "This is the only scientific project in my lab in which we could snap our fingers and get data."New law of physics helps humans and robots grasp the friction of touch
When you hear a melody, your perception is formed by the shapes and movements you associate with it.
When you hear Beyoncé sing, how long does it take before you visualize her dancing across the stage? Or when Jimi Hendrix's guitar solos are pounding out of the speakers—can you see Hendrix posing with his guitar?
Whether you're miming in front of the mirror and using your hairbrush as a microphone or listening with one ear while cleaning the house, the movements you associate with the music play a role in what you actually hear.
That's because music is more than a good lyric or melody. Music is the interplay between everything you sense.
"Just think about how you feel when someone is singing really high notes," says music researcher Tejaswinee Kelkar, and continues:
"What we actually notice is the effort being made by the singer. We recognize it because it's physical. We don't even need to see the singer, because we are so fine-tuned to interpreting nuances in the voice—which, for example, tells us about the singer's feelings."
Kelkar studies the shapes we associate with music and has investigated this by studying what gestures people make when listening to music. Facial expressions and the position of one's legs are just a few of the things that she believes affect one's listening experience.
When singing, you also use your arms
Tejaswinee Kelkar is herself a performing singer, and her interest in gestures developed when she became aware that there is a difference between how we use our hands when singing Western and Indian music.
"As a child, I learned to sing North Indian music. It is common there to use hand gestures in order to help children when they are learning to sing. When you're on stage, you should sing in the same way as you do when you rehearse. You focus on the song as being sung between you and the room, instead of thinking about the audience."
When she was later trained in Western classical singing, she began using similar hand gestures.
"But I was told quite firmly that that was not how it was done."
She became curious: What did the hand gestures really mean?
"You might think that these movements provide you some kind of anatomical assistance, or that they shape how you use your voice. In that case some hand gestures may be suitable for Indian music and not for Western music."
To Kelkar, the different rules that applied to gestures also served as proof of something else: in order to understand music, you need to think about how it fills the space in a room.
Melodies can have different shapes
Music plays on all our senses because it is multimodal—it takes place in different modes. For Kelkar, the main mode is spatiality. She refers to the mathematician René Thom who says: "In order to understand something, we need to understand the geometry of it."
"I believe he's right: everything has a spatiality. Time, which is important in music, is a good example. We relate the past and future to our bodies—that something lies in front of or behind us."
In order to understand more about how music is perceived spatially, Kelkar has conducted several experiments. In one of these, she asked the participants to listen to the same piece of music several times and draw or explain what they were visualizing in their minds.
"People often perceive specific shapes or use movement metaphors. Several of the participants described or drew the music as a wave that was passing by them—like sound waves or ECG (electrocardiography)," she explains.
"While others visualized a circle, especially if they noticed that one motif in the melody kept recurring."
In another experiment, she asked participants to move their arms in a way that they felt matched the music. She documented everything by using motion capture tracking technology in order to search for patterns.
"Several tried to draw the contours of the music going up or down. This reflected the pitch, but also other characteristics of the music, such as timbre, motifs and patterns."
Facial expressions affect the sounds we hear
The fact that our brains make a connection between what we see and what we hear is something that has already been studied by language researchers.
"This has been observed as linguistic phenomena, including one called the McGurk effect," says Kelkar.
The McGurk effect describes how we can listen to a sound while observing a face that expresses a different sound and hear something which is sort of in between. A classic example of this is when we hear a B pronounced while seeing a face expressing a G, we will end up hearing a D.
Kelkar recently conducted a study with her colleagues Bruno Laeng and Sarjo Kuyateh which was designed to see if the same thing happens when we sing:
"We actually found signs to indicate that what the singer does with his or her face affects how people perceive a melody. The interval between two tones may sound different if the singer's mimicry varies."
Shazam for movement
Just as melody and rhythm allows us to recognize music, the shapes that we associate with a melody can help us with the same thing. In her research, Tejaswinee Kelkar has fed artificial intelligence with documentation of the different movements derived from her experiments, thus allowing the technology to use the movements to recognize music. This type of technology can be used for developing new tools.
"Imagine a technology similar to the music-recognition app 'Shazam' but imagine it scanning movements instead of sounds. If you were to make gestures that would be match 'Happy Birthday,' such an app might be able to find the song for you."
Although this technology is relatively new, searching for melodies based on contours is an old idea. In 1975, Denys Parsons published his "The Directory of Tunes and Musical Themes" in which he cataloged about 15,000 classical pieces based on their melodic contours—how the pitch moves up and down. The identification of music based on its contours is thus called the "Parsons Code."
Kelkar's method is also similar to other tools that are available online.
"For example, today we have musipedia.org which allows you to search for music based on its contours," she says.
Listeners change the music
Sound, text and space are some of the modes included in the music. The same applies to actions, or simply thinking about them.
"If you visualize dancing, the music you hear will probably sound different to how it would if you didn't."
The music researcher also highlights how we experience concerts, something which has changed a lot over the years.
"We have musical genres where people sit still and listen respectfully, but that's something new, because many of our classical composers created music for dancing. We now play mazurkas and minuets in concert halls while the audience sits there watching respectfully. The same applies to jazz, which was a club music genre that was intended for people to dance to."
She points out that this says something fundamental about the multimodality of music.
Bruno Laeng et al, Substituting facial movements in singers changes the sounds of musical intervals,Scientific Reports(2021).DOI: 10.1038/s41598-021-01797-z
The "bouba/kiki effect." Credit: University of Birmingham
Most people around the world agree that the made-up word 'bouba' sounds round in shape, and the made-up word 'kiki' sounds pointy—a discovery that may help to explain how spoken languages develop, according to a new study.
Language scientists have discovered that this effect exists independently of the language that a person speaks or the writing system that they use, and it could be a clue to the origins of spoken words.
The research breakthrough came from exploring the 'bouba/kiki effect,' where the majority of people, mostly Westerners in previous studies, intuitively match the shape on the left to the neologism 'bouba' and the form on the right to 'kiki.'
An international research team has conducted the largest cross-cultural test of the effect, surveying 917 speakers of 25 different languages representing nine language families and ten writing systems—discovering that the effect occurs in societies around the world.
Publishing their findings today in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, the team, led by experts from the University of Birmingham and the Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics (ZAS), Berlin, says that such iconic vocalizations may form a global basis for the creation of new words.
Co-author Dr. Marcus Perlman, Lecturer in English Language and Linguistics at the University of Birmingham, commented: "Our findings suggest that most people around the world exhibit the bouba/kiki effect, including people who speak various languages, and regardless of the writing system they use."
"Our ancestors could have used links between speech sounds and visual properties to create some of the first spoken words—and today, many thousands of years later, the perceived roundness of the English word 'balloon' may not be just a coincidence, after all."
The 'bouba/kiki effect' is thought to derive from phonetic and articulatory features of the words, for example, the rounded lips of the 'b' and the stressed vowel in 'bouba,' and the intermittent stopping and starting of air in pronouncing 'kiki.'
To find out how widespread the bouba/kiki effect is across human populations, the researchers conducted an online test with participants who spoke a wide range of languages, including, for example, Hungarian, Japanese, Farsi, Georgian, and Zulu.
The results showed that the majority of participants, independent of their language and writing system, showed the effect, matching 'bouba' with the rounded shape and 'kiki' with the spiky one.
Co-author Dr. Bodo Winter, Senior Lecturer in Cognitive Linguistics at the University of Birmingham, commented: "New words that are perceived to resemble the object or concept they refer to are more likely to be understood and adopted by a wider community of speakers. Sound-symbolic mappings such as in bouba/kiki may play an important ongoing role in the development of spoken language vocabularies."
Iconicity—the resemblance between form and meaning—had been thought to be largely confined to onomatopoeic words such as 'bang' and 'peep,' which imitate the sounds they denote. However, the team's research suggests that iconicity can shape the vocabularies of spoken languages far beyond the example of onomatopoeias.
The researchers note that the potential for bouba/kiki to play a role in language evolution is confirmed by the evidence they collected. It shows that the effect stems from a deeply rooted human capacity to connect speech sound to visual properties, and is not just a quirk of speaking English.
More information:Aleksandra Ćwiek et al, The bouba/kiki effect is robust across cultures and writing systems,Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences(2021).DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2020.0390
Many people think that mathematics is a human invention. To this way of thinking, mathematics is like a language: it may describe real things in the world, but it doesn't "exist" outside the minds of the people who use it.
But the Pythagorean school of thought in ancient Greece held a different view. Its proponents believed reality is fundamentally mathematical.
More than 2,000 years later, philosophers and physicists are starting to take this idea seriously.
As I argue in a new paper, mathematics is an essential component of nature that gives structure to the physical world.
Honeybees and hexagons
Bees in hives produce hexagonal honeycomb. Why?
According to the "honeycomb conjecture" in mathematics, hexagons are the most efficient shape for tiling the plane. If you want to fully cover a surface using tiles of a uniform shape and size, while keeping the total length of the perimeter to a minimum, hexagons are the shape to use.
Charles Darwin reasoned that bees have evolved to use this shape because it produces the largest cells to store honey for the smallest input of energy to produce wax.
The honeycomb conjecture was first proposed in ancient times, but was only proved in 1999 by mathematician Thomas Hales.
The hexagonal pattern of honeycomb is the most efficient way to cover a space in identical tiles. Credit: Sam Baron, Author providedCicadas and prime numbers
Here's another example. There are two subspecies of North American periodical cicadas that live most of their lives in the ground. Then, every 13 or 17 years (depending on the subspecies), the cicadas emerge in great swarms for a period of around two weeks.
Why is it 13 and 17 years? Why not 12 and 14? Or 16 and 18?
One explanation appeals to the fact that 13 and 17 are prime numbers.
Imagine the cicadas have a range of predators that also spend most of their lives in the ground. The cicadas need to come out of the ground when their predators are lying dormant.
Suppose there are predators with life cycles of two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight and nine years. What is the best way to avoid them all?
Well, compare a 13-year life cycle and a 12-year life cycle. When a cicada with a 12-year life cycle comes out of the ground, the 2-year, 3-year and 4-year predators will also be out of the ground, because two, three and four all divide evenly into 12.
When a cicada with a 13-year life cycle comes out of the ground, none of its predators will be out of the ground, because none of two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight or nine years divides evenly into 13. The same is true for 17.
Some cicadas have evolved to emerge from the ground at intervals of a prime number of years, possibly to avoid predators with life cycles of different lengths. Credit: Michael Kropiewnicki / Pixels
Creation or discovery?
Once we start looking, it is easy to find other examples. From the shape of soap films, to gear design in engines, to the location and size of the gaps in the rings of Saturn, mathematics is everywhere.
If mathematics explains so many things we see around us, then it is unlikely that mathematics is something we've created. The alternative is that mathematical facts are discovered: not just by humans, but by insects, soap bubbles, combustion engines and planets.
What did Plato think?
But if we are discovering something, what is it?
The ancient Greek philosopher Plato had an answer. He thought mathematics describes objects that really exist.
For Plato, these objects included numbers and geometric shapes. Today, we might add more complicated mathematical objects such as groups, categories, functions, fields and rings to the list.
Plato also maintained that mathematical objects exist outside of space and time. But such a view only deepens the mystery of how mathematics explains anything.
Explanation involves showing how one thing in the world depends on another. If mathematical objects exist in a realm apart from the world we live in, they don't seem capable of relating to anything physical.
P1–P9 represent cycling predators. The number-line represents years. The highlighted gaps show how 13 and 17-year cicadas manage to avoid their predators. Credit: Sam Baron, Author provided
Enter Pythagoreanism
The ancient Pythagoreans agreed with Plato that mathematics describes a world of objects. But, unlike Plato, they didn't think mathematical objects exist beyond space and time.
Instead, they believed physical reality is made of mathematical objects in the same way matter is made of atoms.
If reality is made of mathematical objects, it's easy to see how mathematics might play a role in explaining the world around us.
In the past decade, two physicists have mounted significant defenses of the Pythagorean position: Swedish-US cosmologist Max Tegmark and Australian physicist-philosopher Jane McDonnell.
Tegmark argues reality just is one big mathematical object. If that seems weird, think about the idea that reality is a simulation. A simulation is a computer program, which is a kind of mathematical object.
McDonnell's view is more radical. She thinks reality is made of mathematical objects and minds. Mathematics is how the Universe, which is conscious, comes to know itself.
I defend a different view: the world has two parts, mathematics and matter. Mathematics gives matter its form, and matter gives mathematics its substance.
Mathematical objects provide a structural framework for the physical world.
Pythagorean pie: the world is made of mathematics plus matter. Credit: Sam Baron, Author provided
The future of mathematics
It makes sense that Pythagoreanism is being rediscovered in physics.
In the past century physics has become more and more mathematical, turning to seemingly abstract fields of inquiry such as group theory and differential geometry in an effort to explain the physical world.
As the boundary between physics and mathematics blurs, it becomes harder to say which parts of the world are physical and which are mathematical.
But it is strange that Pythagoreanism has been neglected by philosophers for so long.
I believe that is about to change. The time has arrived for a Pythagorean revolution, one that promises to radically alter our understanding of reality.
