A recent workshop entitled ''The Family Name as Socio-Cultural Feature and Genetic Metaphor: From Concepts to Methods" was held in Paris in December 2010, sponsored by the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and by the journal Human Biology. This workshop was intended to foster a debate on questions related to the family names and to compare different multidisciplinary approaches involving geneticists, historians, geographers, sociologists and social anthropologists. This collective paper presents a collection of selected communications.In 1983, Human Biology published a special May issue (volume 55, issue 2) devoted to surnames as tools to evaluate average consanguinity, to assess population isolation and structure, and to estimate the intensity and directionality of migrations. Major contributions written by scholars gave a special relevance to this special issue that remained, for many years, a reference (for a review see Lasker 1985; Colantonio et al. 2011).Since that time, many surname studies have focused on extending knowledge on population structure, isonymy, and migration (for an exhaustive synthesis see Colantonio et al. 2003) been applied to about thirty societies all around the world with a geographic scale that ranges from a household or village, to a whole continent. Further and quite recent research put forward a spectrum of methods to analyze Y-chromosome DNA polymorphisms, thus allowing the examination of the degree of cosegregation of family names and Y-chromosome haplotypes, at least in patrilineal naming practice.The workshop The Family Name as Socio-Cultural Feature and Genetic Metaphor: From Concepts to Methods (Paris, France, 5-6 December, 2010) was organized to go further and, even if some presentations were focused towards more classical research, to pinpoint some particularly innovative aspects of current surname research. This summary article is meant to be a synthesis of the papers presented during the workshop; there are two main strands.The first research direction relies on the use of surname databases that are increasingly exhaustive and easy to analyse thanks to the spread of digital techniques. In this respect, Pablo Mateos, James Cheshire and Paul Longley's UCL Worldnames database (which includes about 6 million surnames registered in 26 different countries, http://worldnames.publicprofiler.org/), constitutes an impressive quantity of information and an exciting tool for future research (Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives in the Spatial Analysis of Names, this article). Unfortunately, this large collection of data comes from different sources, such as national electoral registers or telephone directories, and problems of homogenization and representativeness need to be discussed further as they could not be addressed at the workshop. In the same way, long distance comparisons between stocks of surnames with very different historical and linguistic origins are also a challenge and deserve particular attention. The corpus of family names described by Ka...

The general goal of our research is to develop a personal computer assistant that persuades children to adhere to a healthy lifestyle during daily activities at home. The assistant will be used in three different roles: as companion, educator and motivator. This study investigates whether the effectiveness of the computer assistant with an iCat robot embodiment, can be improved when it expresses emotions (tested for each of the three roles). It shows that emotion expressions can improve the effectiveness of the robot to achieve its role objectives. The improvements that we found are small, however, probably due to a ceiling effect: All subjective measures are rated very positively in the neutral condition, thus leaving little room for improvement. It also showed that the emotional speech was less intelligible, which may limit the robots' effectiveness.

The perception of timbre differences in a vowel sung by eight male and seven female singers has been investigated by means of two types of listening experiments: (1) using the paradigm of the comparison of similarity, and (2) using judgments on 21 semantic bipolar scales. Using INDSCAL analysis for the similarity-comparison data and MDPREF analysis for the semantic-scale judgments, vowel configurations in a multidimensional perceptual space were derived, as well as a space that showed the weighting of perceptual dimensions by individual listeners (INDSCAL). The interpretation of semantic scales was represented by directions in the perceptual space (MDPREF). The perceptual vowel configurations, either based on timbre similarities or semantic scales judgments, were comparable. Broadly, semantic scales clustered into the categories vocal technique, general evaluation, vibrato, clarity, and sharpness. These five clusters were not independent and could be described in two dimensions. Timbre differences could be predicted on the basis of differences in 1/3-oct spectra of the vowels. It showed up that only sharpness had a constant interpretation for the various stimulus sets and was roughly related to the slope of the spectrum. One experiment, using a song phrase, extended the results to a more general domain.