Marc Abrahams's Blog, page 191

DNA and “The Elements”, and two birthdays

Three days after James Watson (of eventual molecular-structure-of-DNA fame) was born, Tom Lehrer (eventual author and singer of “The Elements” and much more) was born. Make of that what you will.

This month, each of them becomes 90 years old.

Thesis: “Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow” in Stockholm

A tidy stream of scholarship emerges from this 2017 thesis:

“Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow: Urin i konsten: om tolkning som händelse,” Jens Martin Svendsen, thesis, Faculty of Social Sciences, Stockholm Business School, Marketing, Stockholm University, 2017.

The author writes: “Don’t eat the yellow snow—Urine in art: events of interpretationUrine seams to evoke feelings. Through four different lenses, this bachelor’s thesis examines urine in four different works of art. The works of art are Three Grazes by Sally Mann, Manneken Pis by Hieronymus Duquesnoy the younger, Fideicommissumby Ann-Sofie Sidén and Bad Bad Boy by Tommi Toija, all of which in some way contains urine as part of their motif. The four perspectives are The body as abject, The body as observed, The body as communication and The body as phenomenon. The thesis reaches the conclusion that urine must be regarded as part of a syntagm and this syntagm is interpreted in the light of a culturally conditioned resonance, part of a make-believe culture that can and, as it were, also interpret water as urine. To interpret water as urine depends on where the water is pouring from in an overall body syntagm.Furthermore, depending on what gender the body is interpreted as (male or female) the urine will carry different value connotations.”

BONUS FACT: We put a version of this item on our Facebook page. Facebook almost immediately banned it.

The California-ness of open-mouthed jaw settings (new study)

Looking at the clip above, did you spot any prominent non-verbal actions that might characterize ValleySpeak? A number of academic papers have examined the pronunciation aspects of so-called ValSpeak from California, few however, have focused on one of its characteristic features known as ‘Jaw Setting’ – in this case slack jaw, open mouth (see Fig. 1 below).

A 2017 paper in Language and Society, by Teresa Pratt and Annette D’Onofrio analysed a series of sketch comedy performances called The Californians, as performed on NBC’s late-night comedy show Saturday Night Live (SNL) looking for ‘metalinguistic characterizations’, and finding that open jaw settings were a prominent feature.

“The actors use these open jaw settings in both speaking and nonspeaking contexts, in contrast with performances in other skits, where their mouths are more frequently closed or only slightly open when not speaking. What’s more, they use these stylized jaw settings at moments of heightened attention to their facial organization (i.e. when the camera zooms to one actor’s face), which suggests an idiosyncrasy specific to the portrayal of these California characters. Visual analysis of the performances shows that jaw setting, just like hand gestures, body orientation, or gaze, can encode social meaning by virtue of the persona that is associated with it, as well as the linguistic and extralinguistic features with which it is packaged. We thus argue that these jaw settings are able to index California-ness by virtue of their existing link to California-specific social types (i.e. Valley Girl and Surfer Dude), and that these performances in turn contribute to the ongoing enregisterment of these jaw settings.”

See: ‘Jaw setting and the California Vowel Shift in parodic performance’ Language in Society, Volume 46, Issue 3, June 2017 , pp. 283-312.

Note: The book cited in the study ‘How to Deprogram Your Valley Girl’, by Dr Lillian Glass (‘Body Language Expert and Communications Consultant’) is available here.

Cats and Vagina Music and Lying: Ig Nobel events in Stockholm

The Ig Nobel EuroTour arrives in Stockholm this week:

April 5, Thursday, 3:00 pm—Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden—Berzelius väg 3, in Lecture hall Retzius. Free admission, open to the general public. With:

Marc-Antoine Fardin , Ig Nobel Physics Prize winner (can a cat be both a solid and a liquid?)
Álex García-Faura and Marisa López-Tejón , Ig Nobel Obstetrics Prize winners (effects of intra-vaginally played music on developing fetuses)
Bruno Verschuere , Ig Nobel Psychology Prize winner (asking a thousand liars how often they lie, and deciding whether to believe those answer)


April 6, Friday, 12:30 pm—Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden—in Studenthuset, Galleriet. Free admission, open to the public. With:

Marc-Antoine Fardin
Álex García-Faura and Marisa López-Tejón
Bruno Verschuere

And next week, the Ig Nobel EuroTour will finish up, with two shows in Denmark!

Cuteness Engineering (2017 book)

Are you looking for a “state of the art monograph which presents a unique introduction to thinking about cuteness and its incorporation into modern, especially computer-based, products and services” ? If so, you could consult Cuteness Engineering : Designing Adorable Products and Services (Springer International Publishing, Hardback £61.99 or e-Book £48.99).

Here is an example chapter -: Taxonomy of Cuteness by Aaron Marcus, Masaaki Kurosu, Xiaojuan Ma, and Ayako Hashizume. The authors use the Manga 109 dataset (compiled by the Aizawa Yamasaki Laboratory, Department of Information and Communication Engineering, the Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, the University of Tokyo) to break down ‘cute’ manifestations into a considerable number of distinct taxonomic groups – for example :

Scary cute with facial scar

Awkward (frustrated) cute with squeezed eyes

and

Stupid cute with exaggerated eyes and mouth [illustrated]

The taxonomy is an ongoing project, say the authors :-

“We expect it to expand and differentiate in detail as more examples become well known to students of cuteness engineering/ design and as cuteness expands its role in the ongoing development of products and services.”

Also see : Goo Labs’ search engine for Kawaii, things that are cute

 

Retaliation on a voodoo doll (symbolizing an abusive supervisor) restores justice [new study]

Mistreated by a supervisor at work? Would it make you feel a little bit better if you could, say, torment a voodoo doll?

Professor Lindie Hanyu Liang (at the Lazaridis School of Business and Economics at Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada) and colleagues have investigated such things. In return for a $1 payment, 195 full-time employees living in the US or Canada participated in an experiment in which they were given the opportunity to retaliate (after recalling an abusive workplace scenario) against an online Voodoo Doll, provided by Dumb.com (“Your source for dumb stuff”) * see note below

“[…] we asked the participants to use the materials provided (e.g., pins, pliers, fire) on the doll over the next minute.”

It was found that the doll-tormenting did help (in some degree) to alleviate the negative feelings associated with recalling abusive supervision incidents. What are the practical implications?

“Although it is difficult to offer direct practical implications from our study, given that existing researches are suggestive that abusive supervision has a number of negative consequences (Tepper, 2007), our findings provide several indirect organizational implications for how some of these consequences may be alleviated. In particular, we have proposed and found that subordinate retaliation can directly influence subordinate justice perceptions. These findings suggest that retaliation not only benefits individual victims, but may also benefit the organization as a whole, given that justice perceptions is important for employee performance and well-being (Wright & Cropanzano, 1998; Wright, Cropanzano, & Bonett, 2007).”

See: Righting a wrong: Retaliation on a voodoo doll symbolizing an abusive supervisor restores justice in The Leadership Quarterly, Feb. 2018.

* Note :Those who wish to vent their frustrations by tormenting the Dumb Voodoo Doll may experience further vexation, as it requires Flash® to view/play, and many up-to-date browsers now disable Flash® by default due to security concerns.

Deterring hospital patients from ‘drinking’ from hand sanitizers – Dr. Weiner’s solution

Aside from causing the occasional fire, alcohol-based hand santizers in hospitals have another problem. They’re a handy ‘non-beverage’ source of (jellified) alcohol for those patients who crave intoxication. There are several published formal investigations on the subject – see, for example :

Consumption of alcohol-based hand sanitisers by hospital inpatients The Medical journal of Australia – 2011

Intoxication of a hospitalized patient with an isopropanol-based hand sanitizer N Engl J Med – 2007

Intentional ingestion of ethanol-based hand sanitizer by a hospitalized patient with alcoholism Mayo Clin Proc – 2007

What can be done? Scott G. Weiner, MD, MPH, of Tufts-New England Medical Center, Department of Emergency Medicine, Boston, US, suggests that :

Changing dispensers may prevent intoxication from isopropanol and ethyl alcohol-based hand sanitizers  Annals of Emergency Medicicine – 2007. The newly improved dispenser [pictured] has a security shield that deters patients from drinking the contents (or at least not a whole bottle at one shot).

BONUS assignment [optional] Suggest other (benign) ways to discourage hospital patients from drinking from sanitizers.

Analysis of gunpowder in Frankfurt

Last week, in the midst of the Ig Nobel EuroTour, we encounter this item—item #1— on a menu in a restaurant in Frankfurt, Germany:

Our colleague Merry (“Corky”) White, a food anthropologist based at Boston University, tracked down an explanation of the most colorful named ingredient—gunpowder. The explanation, written by Priyadarshini Nanda, appeared in the NDTV Food blog, on June 12, 2015:

South India’s Spice Hero: How to Make the Famous Gunpowder

…The famous kandi podi from Andhra Pradesh or ‘gunpowder’ is made with equal measures (about half a cup each) of toor dal, moong dal, and chana dal, 10 red chillies, and one teaspoon of cumin seeds. All the ingredients are again dry roasted separately, and brought down to room temperature. Once cooled, it’s ground coarsely so that the textures of each of the ingredients remain distinct. It’s best served with a pouring of hot ghee atop steamed rice….

Gunpowder is normally eaten with rice and ghee. If it’s used with dosas and idlies, it’s usually mixed with oil. It can also be eaten with rotis and chapatis too. Chutney podi/pudi can be eaten with all of the above, and is used to tweak dishes as well. For instance, if you’re making tawa vegetables, you can sprinkle podi made with peanuts over it for added flavour. Some people even eat it on toast, smearing a bit of ghee and sprinkling some sugar along with it.

Skipping on the Moon – fun maybe, but is it efficient?

History has shown* that astronauts, or more accurately lunarnauts, often like to skip about when they’re on the Moon. But, fun though it might seem, is skipping (in reduced gravity situations) an efficient way to get around?

Research teams from the Laboratory of Physiomechanics of Locomotion, Department of Pathophysiology and Transplantation, University of Milan, Italy, and PDU Biomechanics, Centro Universitario de Paysandú, Universidad de la República, Uruguay, have – for the first time – performed experiments to find out.

In the absence of a convenient low-gravity environment, they instead used earthbound skippers who were supported by bungee-jumping rubber cords to see how this “almost dismissed gait” stacked up against more everyday gaits such as walking and running.

“From a metabolic perspective, our results show that bouncing gaits benefit in low gravity more than walking, and that skipping reports the highest gain in cost reduction, reaching values for terrestrial walking. This could partly explain astronauts’ choice during Apollo 14 and 17 missions of skipping gait while moving on the Moon.”

The researchers predict that skipping will be useful if lunarnauts ever return to the Moon.

“It is likely that skipping will be used also for steering and moving in circles on the lunar surface, as it is an asymmetrical gait that quadrupeds deterministically use to turn (in the direction of the leading limb of the front pair first, then followed by the hindlimbs), as observable in show jumping competition.”

See: Skipping vs. running as the bipedal gait of choice in hypogravity in the Journal of Applied Physiology, Volume 119, Issue 1, 2015

* Notes:

[1] A supplementary video, from which the still above is taken, is available here in .mov format.

[2] One of the co-authors of this new study, Alberto E. Minetti, co-won the 2013 Ig Nobel Physics Prize for a paper about running on water on the Moon:

[3] And another winner of the same prize, Nadia Dominici, will be discussing aspects of the running-on-water-on-the-Moon project at the Ig Nobel show next week at EPLF, in Lausanne, Switzerland (March 27th, 2018).

Does leg length play a determinative role for success in ballet? [research study]

A unique 2009 research project quantified (for the first time) the changes in elevation angles of ballet dancers’ legs between 1946 and 2004. Now a new study has examined (again for the first time) leg-length in relation to selected ballet performance indicators.

“The aim of the present study was to investigate the relationships between leg length and selected dance movements representative of power, dexterity, and range motion, in a sample of female ballet dancers ranging from recreational to professional standards.”

The researchers found that long legs (when thought of as long levers) :

“[…] are advantageous only when the associated muscles are strong enough to bring about their maximum function.”

Furthermore :

“A shorter leg can cope with inertia better than a longer one, as the later requires greater muscular strength in order to move.”

Thus, in conclusion :

“We found no clear evidence that leg length plays a determinative role for success in ballet.”

See: Leg-Length in Relation to Selected Ballet Performance Indicators in Medical Problems of Performing Artists: Volume 32 Number 3: Page 165 (September 2017).

Also See: Attractiveness of Leg Length (updated)

The photo shows ballerinas Pierina Legnani as Medora (right) and Olga Preobrajenskaya as Gulnare (left) in the scene Le jardin animé from the ballet Le Corsaire, 1899.