Marc Abrahams's Blog, page 279

Researchers named Fish who study fish [Podcast 55]

Fish, and scientists named Fish, dominate this week’s Improbable Research podcast.

SUBSCRIBE on Play.it, iTunes, or Spotify to get a new episode every week, free.

This week, Marc Abrahams  —with dramatic readings by Daniel Rosenberg — tells about:

Professor Frank Fish — A list of his publications.
Structured Procrastination —, “Structured Procrastination,” by John Perry. The work was honored with the 2011 Ig Nobel Prize for philosophy.

The mysterious John Schedler or the shadowy Bruce Petschek perhaps did the sound engineering this week.

The Improbable Research podcast is all about research that makes people LAUGH, then THINK — real research, about anything and everything, from everywhere —research that may be good or bad, important or trivial, valuable or worthless. CBS distributes it, on the CBS Play.it web site, and on iTunes and Spotify).

How to telephone from every room in a residence

There is a way you can telephone from every room in a residence, explains the May 1905 issue of Popular Mechanics magazine:

https://books.google.com/books?id=oN8DAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA491&pg=PA502#v=onepage&q&f=false

How to escape by throwing yourself into a hole

With the proper preparation, in some circumstances, you can escape by throwing yourself into a hole, like this:

Sarah Laskow writes about this and its history, for Atlas Obscura. Her report begins:

HOW TO ESCAPE A BUILDING BY DROPPING THROUGH A FABRIC ESOPHAGUS

The opening to an escape chute isn’t exactly inviting. Mostly used on industrial rigs or in buildings when other emergency exits are unsafe, the chute, at its entrance, looks something like the maw of a blood-sucking lamprey (except without the teeth) or, if we’re being honest, sort of like the terminal end of your digestive tract.

To use the chute, which is made of concentric tubes of fabric, you must entrust your body to this orifice.

“If we get a job that’s a reasonable size, we turn up with a scaffold, with an escape chute about five meters high,” says Eric Hooper, the owner of Escape Chute Systems. (Five meters is just about 16 and a half feet, or two short stories high.) “We train people to go through, and if they’re going to too fast we can slow them down. Then we take up them up to the roof. It could be between 40 meters and 80 meters”—between about 130 feet and 260 feet—”high, and there’s a mental thing then. They know they’ve got an 80 meter drop.”…

Here are other examples:

 

Classical music: has it been ‘weaponized’?

“Classical music was first used as a deterrent by 7-Eleven convenience stores in British Colombia, Canada. In 1985, branch managers began piping classical music into the stores’ parking lots in order to prevent teenagers from congregating there.”

– explains Dr Marie Thompson who is a lecturer at Lincoln School of Film & Media, Lincoln University, UK. Dr Thompson is pointing out that although classical music has been celebrated as a pinnacle of human achievement, with the capacity to enlighten, move and even (some say) enhance mental ability, that has not prevented some from deciding that it could also be used as a weapon. Indeed it’s already been deployed – not only in Canada, but also in the US and the UK.

Those who believe in such applications are of the opinion that “yobs”, “thugs”, ”hooligans”, “hoodies” and other “undesirables” are unlikely to appreciate the sophistication of classical music, to the extent that they will be actively repelled by it. Dr Thompson reminds us that the use of music (or sound) as a deterrent has a long history, going back (at least) as far as the so-called ‘Rough Music‘ events prevalent in 18th and 19th century Britain (also see: Charivari etc)

“The weaponised use of classical music might be thought of as a contemporary manifestation of rough music — or, perhaps more accurately »rough muzak.« As an audio-affective deterrent, classical music is used to irritate, annoy, and subsequently displace those who are suspected of threatening the moral and socio-economic orders of contemporary capitalism.”

See: ‘Rough Muzak: affect and the weaponised use of classical music’ – published on the occasion of Un Tune CTM Festival 16th Edition, 23rd January – 1st February 2015, Berlin. There are further details on Everyday Sonic Warfare here.

Also see: A BBC report from 2006 documenting the weapon’s effectiveness on the London Underground.

Image: Detail from Charivari qui pend à l’oreille de Messieurs Guiz[ot], Dup[in], Thier[s], et tutti quanti Et il entendit comme un bruit de harpes mélodieuses qui chantaient ses louanges (Cantique d’Ezéchiel) : [estampe] Auteur : Grandville (1803-1847) courtesy Bibliotèque national de France. (Presented in the paper).

Related: Howard Stapleton of Merthyr Tydfil, Wales, was awarded the 2006 Ig Nobel Peace Prize for inventing an electromechanical teenager repellant — a device that makes annoying high-pitched noise designed to be audible to teenagers but not to adults; and for later using that same technology to make telephone ringtones that are audible to teenagers but probably not to their teachers.

Many thanks: to Dr Thomson for assistance with this post.

Question [optional]: Would some classical music works perform better as weapons than others? If so, which?

 

Down, down in the dregs of academic publishing

Derek Lowe, writing in the In the Pipeline blog, find joys in the depths:

Scam, Scam, Scam, Scam, Scammity Scam, Wonderful Scam

You know, it’s really hard to explain just how ridiculous the bottom end of the scientific publishing world is. I’ve mentioned formerly reputable journals that now want you to wire money to a bank account in the Turks and Caicos Islands and long lists of people who will “review” and “publish” outright gibberish as long as the checks clear. Note that the money is the only real thing in that transaction, but note also that some reputable publishers have fallen for random nonsense under the traditional publishing model as well. And there are people who will add your name to a paper for a fee, or even whip up some reasonable-looking data and write the whole thing up, for a somewhat larger fee. Don’t have a journal to send it to? They’ll fake one up for you. It’s just an endless garbage heap….

So that leaves us with a journal-rating website, itself apparently a scam, which rates piles of obscure journals, many of them scams of their own. And it in turn has been infected by still more scamsters. It’s a long way down, that’s for sure, and the bottom is nowhere to be seen.

(Thanks to Yoko Tahara for bringing this to our attention.)

Optimality with Respect to Blips

Blips? Respect? Optimality? It, or rather they, are all there, together, in a single study. This study:

“Optimality with Respect to Blips,” Jan C. Willems and Maria Elena Valcher [pictured here], Decision and Control, 2005 and 2005 European Control Conference. CDC-ECC’05. 44th IEEE Conference on, pp. 2905-2910. IEEE, 2005. The authors, at the University of Leuven and the Universita di Padova, report:

“We consider local minimality with respect to short duration variations, called ‘blips’. It is shown that for quadratic differential integrals either there are no such optimal trajectories, or that all stationary trajectories are local minima with respect to blips.”

Printing on rodents’ tails (new patent)

“Animals have been marked for identification purposes for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.” – explains a new US patent awarded to Somark Innovations, Inc. of San Diego, California.

The firm’s invention (marketed under the name Labstamp ® ) relates to the marking, for ID purposes, of animals, where the animal might be, say, a mouse or rat, and whereby it could be marked or printed, say, on its tail, with for example, a number or a barcode.

See: ‘Animal marking devices, transfer assemblies, and useful restraints‘, February 9, 2016

Also see: From The New York Times, July 2005, “Tattooed Fruit Is on Way” (partially corrected version)

Question [optional]: Might the invention be scaled so as to accommodate other animals? If so which? And if so why?

Tobacco Pipes as Dry Powder Asthma Inhalers – a feasibility study

In the absence of a purpose-made dry powder inhaler device (e.g. Spinhaler®) could asthma sufferers use a pipe? Researchers Tan Suwandecha, Kirksak Assawadarakorn and Teerapol Srichana of the Drug Delivery System Excellence Center and Department of Pharmaceutical Technology, Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Prince of Songkla University, Thailand, undertook a study in 2012 to assess the viability of such an idea. Practical experiments with a pressure-drop determining apparatus, three grades of specially formulated dry powder (with Mass Median Aerodynamic Diameters [MMADs] of 4-6 µm), three commercially produced inhalers and two tobacco pipes (straight and curved) showed that :

“The formulation containing the carrier size ranges of 30-71 μm provided the greatest percent FPF [Fine Particle Fraction].

When considering the device resistance, it was found that the tobacco pipes provided a higher device resistance than the Inhalator®.”

Thus the team recommend further research to optimise the pipes :

“[…] they still need some modification to the mouthpiece part by increasing the diameter of the pipes outlet to reduce the drug loss via inertial impaction and decrease the device resistance for ease of inhalation.”

See:’Feasibility studies of using a tobacco pipe as a dry powder inhaler device’ Thai J. Pharm. Sci. 36 (2012) 1-1.

Note: Yes, Improbable did think of titling this article “Ceci n’est pas un inhalateur pour l’asthme” but resisted the temptation.

 

Ig Nobel Thursday night at U Copenhagen

Join us tonight for the Ig Nobel show at the University of Copenhagen:

UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN , Denmark, in the Festsalen, Frue Plads 4 — Thursday, March 10, 7:00 pm. TICKETS. Featuring: Marc Abrahams;Elizabeth Oberzaucher; Mark Dingemanse; Michael Smith.

The newspaper University Post has a preview.

This is part of the 2016 Ig Nobel EuroTour. Tomorrow (Friday) there’s a show at the Technical University of Denmark, in Lyngby. Then on Saturday and Sunday there are shows in Stockholm. After that the tour moves on to the UK, and then to Switzerland.

A note on genital de-flipflopping

Make of this what you will, this fine study:

“A note on genital de-flipflopping. with an apology to Tsou boki,” PauI K. Benedict, Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area, vol. 17, no.. 2,  Fall 1994. The author begins:

“The commission of errors or booboos I can be counted an occupational hazard for comparativists and I have made at least my share of them. I’d like to ascribe them all to my juvenilia but for those after age 50 or 60 this becomes disingenuous. My very worst, in fact. dates only from 1975 (Austro-Thai: Language and Culture (ATLC)): it was adoptecl by Matisoff in 1978 (Variational Semantics in Tibeto-Burman) and further promoted in my 1979 “A note on Karen genital flipflop” (LTBA 5.1 :21-35). For me as, I suspect, for most linguists, words and roots tend to have lives of their own and one must cringe to see tbem amputated, eviscerated or otherwise mutilated or mistreated. I owe an apology to Tsou boki, as will be evident from the following….”

BONUS: A Memorium for Paul K. Benedict