Marc Abrahams's Blog, page 34

The Future is Now: Machine Learning Approach for Muscovy Duck Semen

One hundred years ago this study, had it existed, might have been regarded as science fiction:

“Machine Learning Approach for Muscovy Duck (Cairina moschata) Semen Quality Assessment,” Desislava Abadjieva, Boyko Georgiev, Vasko Gerzilov, Ilka Tsvetkova, Paulina Taushanova, Krassimira Todorova, and Soren Hayrabedyan, Animals, vol. 13, no. 10, 2023, article 1596.

Multi-frightening birds; Two more trivial superpowers; AI sheep-counting

This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them:

Multi-scare the birds — …Their report advises that: “At present, there is no bird control technique that provides maximum protection for crops, so it is recommended to use a combination of scaring methods at the same time, namely: acoustics (propane cannons, pyrotechnic cartridges, speakers, etc.), visually (balloons, mirrors, reflective tapes, kites, lasers, drones, etc.) and physical (nets).” …Disturbingly winning — Hazel Russman humbly lays claim to a trivial superpower of staggering worth. This is a potentially controversial addition to Feedback’s expanding catalogue of trivial superpowers. Russman writes: “When I was a small child, I used to guess the winners of horse races for my father… Androids dreaming — Counting imaginary sheep while lying abed helps dozy people bring on sleep, some of them like to say. Counting real sheep in a field or a barn helps wakeful farmers keep track of potential milk and mutton and wool. The problem is how to count those real sheep accurately and efficiently. This being the 2020s, artificial intelligence (broad and vague though the phrase is) comes to the rescue! …Lying and lying — Andy Maloney gives lie, in two senses, to Feedback’s list of trivial superpowers. He says: “Reading in your column about trivial superpowers, I thought I should tell you about my own. I can always tell if someone is lying just by looking at them… I can also tell, just by looking at them, if they are standing up.”

Politicians’ Big (Prize-winning) Influence on Life and Death (new data)

The results in a new medical study bolster the reputations of the nine national leaders who shared the 2020 Ig Nobel Prize for Medical Education.

That prize was awarded to Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, Boris Johnson of the United Kingdom, Narendra Modi of India, Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico, Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, Donald Trump of the USA, Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, Vladimir Putin of Russia, and Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow of Turkmenistan, for using the Covid-19 viral pandemic to teach the world that politicians can have a more immediate effect on life and death than scientists and doctors can.

The new study is: “Excess Death Rates for Republican and Democratic Registered Voters in Florida and Ohio During the COVID-19 Pandemic,” by Jacob Wallace, Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, and Jason L. Schwartz, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, epub 2023. After vaccines became available against Covid-19, most Republican politicians strongly discouraged their voters from getting vaccinated. Most Democratic politicians strongly urged everyone to get the vaccine.

Here are highlights from the study:

Objective  To assess political party affiliation and mortality rates for individuals during the initial 22 months of the COVID-19 pandemic.Results  Between January 1, 2018, and December 31, 2021, there were 538 159 individuals in Ohio and Florida who died at age 25 years or older in the study sample…. After May 1, 2021, when vaccines were available to all adults, the excess death rate gap between Republican and Democratic voters widened from −0.9 percentage point (95% PI, −2.5 to 0.3 percentage points) to 7.7 percentage points (95% PI, 6.0-9.3 percentage points) in the adjusted analysis; the excess death rate among Republican voters was 43% higher than the excess death rate among Democratic voters.An unrelated historical note about Alexander Lukashenko

That 2020 Ig Nobel Prize was the second Ig Nobel Prize awarded to Alexander Lukashenko.

The 2013 Ig Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Alexander Lukashenko, president of Belarus, for making it illegal to applaud in public, AND to the Belarus State Police, for arresting a one-armed man for applauding.

The Seminal Book Question

We invite you to participate in The Seminal Study (also known as “The Seminal Book Question“). The Seminal Study is simple. It asks this one question:

Should libraries and bookstores be required to clearly label every seminal book, with a large, easily-readable label that says “SEMINAL”?

Please note that: (1) there are many seminal books, and (2) we have not informed you as to *how* you can participate in The Seminal Study.

 

“Shut up, shut up, shut up” — mini-AIR July 2023 issue

The July 2023 issue of mini-AIR (the monthly tiny supplement to the magazine Annals of Improbable Research) is about: “Shut up, shut up, shut up!”

Interview with Roy Glauber about Oppenheimer

Several years ago, Dan Drollette interviewed Roy Glauber. Here’s a portion of that interview, published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:

“Glauber was one of the youngest scientists in the 1,400-person Los Alamos staff, and afterward he went on to a distinguished career in physics… Glauber was known for his sense of humor, such as being the official ‘keeper of the broom’ at an annual mock scientific conference sponsored by what has been called the MAD magazine of science, where his role was to sweep the stage clean of paper airplanes. (It’s become a tradition for members of the audience to throw paper airplanes at the stage to celebrate the end of the night’s proceedings.) In 2005 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics”

Bite mark vagueness; Dr. Lean and Dr. Stout; Duck-swan mutual dining; Knitting

This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has five segments. Here are bits of each of them:

Biting biting remarks — …Bite-mark analysis hoo-ha, so far, mostly applies to identifying human biters. Mostly, but not entirely. Enter a new paper called “Forensic determination of shark species as predators and scavengers of sea turtles in Florida and Alabama, USA“. It reports several cases of bitership (please note and celebrate Feedback’s word coinage) identification of bite marks on turtles. Detectives reportedly “narrowed down” the list of suspected biters to one or perhaps two species of shark. They neglected or failed to identify the individual shark or sharks.He is Lean — Nominative determinism can be a heavy burden for individuals whose life work immediately seems, to everyone who meets them, a fat target for jokes. With that in mind, Feedback expresses sympathy to Michael Lean, professor of human nutrition at the University of Glasgow. Lean has written, in Lean prose, about many subjects that relate either directly or oppositely to leanness….He is Stout — Michael Lean, meet Michael Stout, assistant professor of nutritional sciences at the University of Oklahoma. Stout has done much research related to stoutness….Duck dining — …a curious reciprocal exchange of parasites that almost inevitably happens between certain whooper swans and certain mallard ducks. The whooper/mallard relationship becomes evident to anyone who chances to read two old research reports. Each tells half of the story of the two kinds of bird….Well-knitted superpower — Bryn Glover makes a measured, although slightly deteriorating, contribution to Feedback’s list of trivial superpowers….

INVITATION: Throw paper airplanes in the 2023 Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony

We invite you to throw paper planes in this year’s Ig Nobel Prize ceremony. Seth Gliksman created this brief invitation video. The video tells what and how:

The ceremony — the 33rd First Annual — will happen entirely online, on Thursday evening, September 14, 2023, beginning at 6:0 pm (US eastern time).

DEADLINE for submitting a paper plane video is August 18, 2023. We will select the best videos and include them (or portions of them) in the ceremony. Send your video to .

Madam Van take a bi-lingual educational dive into the Ig Nobel Prizes

Let Madame be your guide:

Catochromatograph, Headaches, Plant Nyctinasty Horror, and 2 Trivial Superpowers

This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has five segments. Here are bits of each of them:

Catochromatograph — Laboratories looking to purchase a highly efficient coiled parallel gas chromatograph could save money by instead adopting and adapting a cat. Perhaps. A study called “Domestic cat nose functions as a highly efficient coiled parallel gas chromatograph” in PLoS Computational Biology explains the capabilities of the cat….Headaches and nations — …Italy does not stand alone. At least 43 other nations have Headache Societies. Four nations have a Headache Association, rather than a Headache Society: Guatemala, Iran, Mexico and the UK. The UK’s is named the British Association for the Study of Headache; it goes by the acronym BASH. Two nations, Kyrgyzstan and Turkey, each have a Headache Chapter….Rosetta stone of plants —Plant nyctinasty (usually pronounced “NICK-ta-nasty”) is one of the squat, ignoring-it-won’t-make-it-go-away mysteries that most scientists ignore. Day after day, night after night, there it is: the rhythmic shape-sloshing of plants as their parts reconfigure in concert with the coming of light and/or darkness. A century ago, the clever polymath Jagadish Chandra Bose rigged up some machinery to amplify and record the gymnastic movements of plants….Middle-ear superpower — Rob Holmes reports a trivial superpower that is both mild and hereditary, thus establishing a new category in Feedback’s catalogue of trivial superpowers….A man of letters  — …”My host’s signature read as follows: BSc (Honors), MASc, PhD, MTMS, MGDMB, MCIM, MSME, MAIST, MISIJ, MSigmaXi, MIFAC, MACS, MASM, MMRS, MACerS, MECS. Could this be a record?” …