REDMOND: A Microsoft Research crack team working on anal retentive behaviour was able to predict to 96.3% accuracy if people had behavioral shortcomings based on impulse-reactions to MSN instant messenger alert tones. The research is marks a landmark in both natural language processing and cognitive science, as it is the first that conclusively infers tautologically that people who think they hear more "r" and "d" sounds than others are more likely to be tactless pests than others. It also concludes that men who habitually think they hear more humane letters of the alphabet such as 'k' and 's' are more likely to shampoo their hair, and grow it, than those who did not.

The study was done by getting people into what they thought were silent computer meditation rooms, filled with actors who pretended to meditate in front of computers, typing ultra-softly in with soothing pitter-patter finger/keyboard connect patterns. Then the people who were on test were unwittingly seated on PCs without being warned about the approximate loudness of their internal speakers. This was followed by an individual with a calm and yogic posture requesting in an incredibly soft voice, that the subject sign onto MSN messenger, which the subject did. Then distractions were created to make the subject forget about the MSN situation.

Suddenly, a few minutes in, there were ringing thunderous twitters of the annoying instant messenger (IM) alerts, with a wholesale flurry of random people signing in and insisting on conversation. The actors had been instructed to turn around with annoyed demeanor, reprimanding the user for his or her close-mindedness to their meditation. Before the traumatized user can manage to fumble through the volume controls over which the mouse was deliberately made to dysfunction, more cantankerous dummy alert messages were set off, accompanied by infuriated rebukes by the actors, eventually ending rather abruptly.

This test would apparently end a few minutes later, and the people would be escorted out into separate rooms where all were asked to sit and wait. Restful music was played in these rooms, and a television set with pictures of tourist spots in lush pre-war Europe were shown in an air-conditioned atmosphere. Later, a researcher would join the subject, and request them to say out the sound heard during the MSN messenger sign-on. Even later, the same individuals would be asked to spell in the English alphabet the sound they thought they had heard, and repeated.

"We found momentous variation in what people perceived as the IM alert sound, but some clear patterns emerge among the types of sounds people think they hear, and the kind of people they really are," said Abhiskek Malewar of Chennai, MSR's natural language processing guru. "The most common answers were that it sounded like 'trrrrt', 'pooooo', 'drrrmt', 'kimmmph', or 'zzzzzuppop'. This leads us to two rather important conclusions - first that there is indeed much diversity in this world, and second, that people hear only that which they want to. We were able to ascertain this from drawing personality types based on the sounds, which showed clearly that people who heard some types of sounds had problems adjusting with reasonable society. Patterns such as frequent outbursts of emotional activity, lack of hygienic consciousness, and irreverence towards authority were all statistically patterned towards certain types of sounds. "We found for instance that everyone who thought the MSN sounded like 'zzzzzuppop' showed imbecilic traits, whereas those that thought the sound was 'drrrmt' were outright bastards.

Secondly, the study also found that peoples' ability to reproduce in writing what they think they have heard is preciously low. "Now science has conclusive evidence that people are unable to discern in letter what they hear. Clearly, people who said the sound was 'trrrrt' tended to spell it as 'pfffft' whereas those who thought it was a 'kimmmph' tended to spell it with an inordinate number of g's such as 'grrrrpp' or 'goooooollp' - although it was unmistakable when one heard them that the sound they claimed was indeed the 'kimmmph' variety. Only those who thought the sound was 'pooooo' tended to spell it right, though these were also those closest to medical deafness," interjected Debika Pal of the Monterey Institute of International Studies, an ethnographic researcher in advanced oral psychology.

MSN has in the meantime copyrighted the "prprpr-tut" sound which it claims is the real sound of the alert.




Janghia Prufrock