The message recipients’ success rate at understanding the tone of the message was significantly higher verbally than via email.

This doesn't surprise me, but it doesn't say anything about the likelihood of misunderstanding an email -- just that it's more likely than misunderstanding a phone call. I'd be interested in reading the actual study, to see if they have any stats on what percentage of emails are misinterpreted because of tone.

There is a camel loose in Washington, DC: [link]

whistles innocently

I read that article twice, trying to figure out what was irritating. It's just seemed like a Reuters piece about a chick with a mildly interesting job. I don't think the tone suggested "She is the only person in the world with this job" or "This article is the definitive history of science illustration." What made it read that way to you?

Oh, man, that the corner my office was when I lived in DC. I want to see a camel, dammit!

My friends work at 19th and K, so I sent them a heads up.

I can't get to the actual study, but here is an article that discusses it in more depth:

In one experiment, the researchers tested 30 pairs of undergraduate students. Each participant received a list of 20 statements about topics like campus food or the weather.

One member of each pair read their statements into a tape recorder–taking either a sarcastic or serious tone–while the other member e-mailed the statements. The participants also noted whether they thought their partners would correctly interpret each statement's tone.

The participants then listened to or read their partners' statements, guessed the intended tone and indicated how confident they were in their answers.

Both the e-mailers and those who recorded their messages were highly confident that their partners would correctly detect their tone–both groups predicted about a 78 percent success rate. The speakers weren't too far off–their partners got the tone correct about 75 percent of the time. The partners who read the statements over e-mail, though, had only a 56 percent success rate–not much better than chance.

What I'm *really* curious about now is whether the participants were allowed to reword the statements when they sent them in email, and if so, how much. (I'd also be curious to know if any studies have been done on internet communications that take pre-existing relationships into account -- I tend to assume that my friends are going to be better at picking up on tone than people I don't know, and I phrase my emails/posts accordingly. A post here, where I assume most people are familiar with my verbal patterns, is going to be phrased differently than a post on an LJ community where I mostly lurk. And so on.)

[eta: Oh hey! The guy who did this study is the same guy who did the "Stupid People Don't Know They're Stupid" study way back when!]

Ms. Dinoire described how she awoke to discover her horrible disfigurement after her black Labrador chewed off the lower part of her face while she was unconscious from taking sleeping pills

Was the dog trying to wake her? Did he think she was meat?

Although, my cat does bite me while I sleep-- so reading that she had taken sleeping pills does help me be less scared that my cat will mutilate me while I am sleeping,

Strega, the tone reads to me like the what ifs are new what ifs, as opposed to common currency in a not-small genre.

And, okay, the opening sentence "What if ET isn't cute?" just made me sprain my eyes.

Also her "this is not science fiction" made me roll my eyes too. She's making stuff up. It is science fiction the minute an alien appears in her pictures, if not sooner. There can be science in science fiction, after all.

How freaking weird:

Hollywood star Minnie Driver and British comedian Eddie Izzard will play the husband and wife lead roles in a new US drama called Lowlife. The show - produced by the creators of surgical drama Nip/Tuck, sees Oscar-nominee Driver and Izzard as Dahlia and Wayne, a couple of traveling con-artists on a splurge through America. FX Networks president John Landgraf says, "It's a very complicated marriage, and both characters are really strong, so we needed two actors who are perfectly matched up and can hold their own." Production is due to start in early March.

Also, "Grandpa Munster" (Al Lewis) has died at age 95.