The Secret Life of Chatbots
by Ann Thropomorph
Recent years have witnessed a phenomenal increase in the numbers of retail outlets operating on the internet, and a concomitant increase in the numbers of chatbots labouring within the associated interactive online customer services. There is scant information available on the life and habits of these creatures, however, and in the research reported here we sought to address this issue, specifically seeking answers to the questions on everyone’s lips: If Alexa is Amazon, does she still have both breasts? What happens to chatbots when their chat room is temporarily unavailable due to essential site maintenance? Do they share ancestral links with the Borrowers? How many were made redundant and homeless when Elon Musk took ownership of Twitter? Should the NHS fund the Burtons Menswear chatbot to have his coding doctored to allow him to transition and work for customer services at Monsoon? And how exactly does Clare Balding figure in things? At the culmination of these studies, we discover that chatbots are not always so sweetly polite and subserviently helpful: outside of business hours they frequently roam the remote dark corners of cyberspace, mercilessly bullying applets, interfering with Google docs, and fornicating like rabbits.
Ann Thropomorf is a Bright Research Fellow in Blackpool College of Illumination. She was a contemporary of Tolkien at Oxford, and they were often seen playing the early Icelandic forerunner of Buckaroo together. She won the 2015 JK Rowling Award for fantastic beasts research and was voted the most imaginative person of the decade in March 2021. In June 2022, she disappeared down the crack between her thalamus and neocortex and has not been seen since. The manuscript detailing the research described above was found inside a family-sized Oxo tin that was recently unearthed in the Blue Peter garden.
The Disorderly Conduct of University Research Support Services
By Seth Rerek
It is a fact of Nature, as true as teeth, that the administrative services within UK universities are in a constant state of flux; and there are two schools of thought as to why this is so. One school contends that the year-on-year re-disorganisation of the services is simply a manifestation of the universal tendency toward maximum entropy, while the second focuses on the exponential increase in their dysfunctionality and maintains that this can best be formalised in chaos theory, using jerk functions. In the research detailed here, we restricted consideration to the turbulent world of science research finance departments and sought to establish which of these alternatives more closely models the post-pandemic evolution of these departments across 42 of the UK’s leading universities. Interviews with the 17 long-suffering individuals who still work in these departments and have done so for the past 5-10 years, yielded nothing but hysterical laughter and replies peppered with expletives. However, a survey of the 85 staff who had recently been redeployed to science research finance – the majority from catering and car parking (but some even from business schools) – revealed that only 0.02% had any notion as to how scientific research is funded (and what it actually involves), only 4.2% knew why Microsoft Excel files contain lots of little boxes, 5% confessed to being puzzled as to why they were quizzed about a London 2012 sports venue at interview, while 92.5% regularly committed £10 a week to the Euromillions lottery, hoping for a very early retirement. Mathematical simulations of the structures and staffing of the departments yielded nothing to support either of the proposed explanatory models, and it was thus concluded that their perennial disorder has little to do with jerk equations, much more to do with the fact that their structures and staffing are dictated by jerks.
Professor Seth Rerek holds the Mandelbrot Chair of Computer-generated Jazzy Images’ Research in the Department of Sexy Art and Doodles at the New Pyramid Institute of Science & Technology in Giza. Among the eclectic collection of artefacts adorning the window ledge in his first-floor office he has a life-size replica of Schrödinger’s cat, a half-set of crayons once used by the young Ada Lovelace, and a gold-plated Newton’s Cot‡.
‡ much like a Newton’s Cradle but with bigger balls.