Marc Abrahams's Blog, page 383

Breakthroughs in boredom

People who design apps — or, for that matter, design startup companies — want their creations to elicit excitement. They (usually) design to avoid creating boredom. A fairly recent Canadian study offers exciting insights into the nature of boredom.

Designers take heed!

The study is “The Unengaged Mind: Defining Boredom in Terms of Attention,” John D. Eastwood, Alexandra Frischen, Mark J. Fenske and Daniel Smilek, Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2012….

—so begins another Improbable Innovation nugget, which appears in its entirety on BetaBoston.

People who squirm when seeing squirming or non-squirming eel

A description of the behaviour and general demeanour of eels might well include the word ‘squirm‘. But it’s not just eels which squirm, humans do too, sometimes when observing eels. Dr Alex Rhys-Taylor BSc, MA, PhD, PGCert, of Goldsmith’s College, London, describes such a scenario in ‘Disgust and Distinction: The case of the jellied eel.’ The Sociological Review, 61(2), pp. 227-246, May 2013.

His ethnological research, carried out while “hanging around at a seafood stand in east London”, explores customers’ and bystanders’ reactions to seeing copious quantities of eels – jellied and otherwise.

“First, it must be noted that on a general level, any favour or smell has the potential to turn the stomach. Smells and tastes by their very nature, smudge a very important taxonomic division disturbing, by way of bodily orifces, a simultaneously psychic and physical sense of corporeal ‘inside’ and ‘out’ (Grosz 1994, 192-198). It is perhaps because smells and food necessarily disrupts this foundational boundary that Kristeva claims that ‘food loathing is … the most elementary form of abjection’

(1982, 4). Yet we know that not all food induces gut-wrenching squirms. Rather, only the movement of certain tastes and textures into the mouth, or smells through the nose, result in the convulsion that ripples from stomach to lips and across the face. The distribution of these squirms, I will argue below, is partially predicated on the particular classifcatory systems through which we sort our every day sensory experiences.”

Further reading : ‘Eels and Humans‘ (Springer Verlag, Japan, 2014)

BONUS: ‘Jellied Eels’  (by Lionel Bart – performed by Joe Brown and the Bruvvers, 1960, Decca Records)

 

Spiraling difficulty of reliably interpreting scans of people’s brains

This new study suggests that some people’s personalities make it more difficult to get accurate MRI (and fMRI) pictures of their heads:

“Individual Differences in Impulsivity Predict Head Motion during Magnetic Resonance Imaging,” Kong X-z, Zhen Z, Li X, Lu H-h, Wang R, et al., (2014) PLoS ONE, 9(8): e104989. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0104989. The authors are at Beijing Normal University and Hangzhou Normal University.

WHY THIS MIGHT MATTER: Many psychologists enjoy using fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) to correlate (a favorite word among many researchers!) electrochemical activity in particular brains with the personalities of the particular people whose heads contain those brains.

Taking the MRI pictures is the straightforward, press-a-button part of this research. Understanding what the pictures mean is not so straightforward.

WHAT THIS MIGHT MEAN:  If this new study is correct, then many of those fMRI studies from the past may have produced misleading results. The researchers announce this with a grandly worded phrase: “in-scanner head motion introduces systematic and spurious biases.” This new possible complication adds to the long list of ways in which fMRI studies can produce misleading (or, in non-technical language: “crappy”) results.

WHY PHILOSOPHERS MIGHT ENJOY THIS: If people with some kinds of personalities are especially unreliable to fMRI-analyze, then… fMRI studies that try to identify personality-related brain activity are, or may be, toast. Technologically speaking, the whole effort may be, kinda sorta, in a spiraling decay.

BONUS (possibly related, in a quasi-parallel way): The Ig Nobel Prize-winning fMRI study that found brain activity in a dead salmon.

German veterinary scientists deploy sauerkraut

This study explores the effects of saurkraut juice, and other substances, on cows:

“Oral Application of Charcoal and Humic acids to Dairy Cows Influences Clostridium botulinum Blood Serum Antibody Level and Glyphosate Excretion in Urine,” H.A. Gerlach, Gerlach, W. Schrödl, B. Schottdorf, and S. Haufe, Journal of Clinical Toxicology, vol. 4, no. 186 (2014): 2161-0495. (Thanks to investigator Tony Tweedale for bringing this to our attention.) The authors, at several institutions in Germany and Egypt, report:

The present study was initiated to investigate the influence of oral application of charcoal, sauerkraut juice and humic acids on chronic botulism in dairy cows. A total of 380 Schleswig Holstein cows suffering from chronic botulism were fed daily with 400 g/animal charcoal for 4 weeks (1-4 weeks of study), 200 g/animal charcoal (5-10 weeks of study), 120 g/animal humic acid (11-14s week of study), 200g charcoal and 500 ml Sauerkraut juice/animal (13-16 weeks of study), 200 g charcoal and 100 mL Aquahumin/animal (15-18s week of study), 100 g charcoal and 50 mL Aquahumin (19-22 weeks of study) followed by 4 weeks without any supplementation…. In conclusion, a charcoal-sauerkraut juice combination and humic acids could be used to control chronic botulism and glyphosate damage in cattle.

BACKGROUND READING: Here is a history of sauerkraut, written by Olaf Peters, disseminated by the Goethe Institute.

Battle over a library’s use of an Ig Nobel Prize-winning teenager-repellant

People are displeased that a Welsh town’s library installed an Ig Nobel Prize-winning device designed to repel teenagers.

BACKGROUND: The 2006 Ig Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Howard Stapleton of Merthyr Tydfil, Wales, 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. The invention is sold under the brand name “The Mosquito.”

BACKGROUND: Stapleton’s company, Compound Security, also developed a version of that same technology for a sort-of opposite purpose — for teenagers to use against older people. This alternate product is a telephone ring tone so high-pitched that elders (schoolteachers, for example) probably cannot hear teenagers receiving telephone calls (in classrooms, in that same example). Compound Security thus became like the great armaments manufacturers of old, selling arms to both sides.

Now, the Milford & West Wales Mercury, reports:

A LOCAL campaigner is hoping a meeting this Friday (August 15) will result in a controversial anti-teen alarm being removed from outside Milford Haven Library.

Gareth Bromhall, from Milford Haven, is meeting with building owners the Port of Milford Haven at the site, to discuss the future of the ‘Mosquito’ alarm currently in place there.

The alarm was installed by the Port in 2012, following ‘thousands of pounds worth of damage to its property’ and complaints by tenants and members of the public about anti-social behaviour….

Details of the oust-the-mosquito-from-the-library campaign are online. Here’s the possibly-affiliated Facebook page.

The Milford Haven Library [pictured here] is having what it calls a “Summer Reading Challenge 2014“.

Here’s a TV report about The Mosquito, broadcast on the American “Nightline” Program in 2009:

Here’s a British report of roughly that same vintage:

It’s a long story… (from the Archives of Sexual Behavior)

Behold the start (or perhaps the middle) of a twisted tale:

“Be Careful that Your Snark Is Not a Boojum,” Kim Wallen, Archives of Sexual Behavior, vol. 36, no. 3, 2007, pp. 335-336. The author begins:

“I write to correct a striking inaccuracy in Puts’(2006) response to my critique (Wallen, 2006) of his review of Lloyd’s (2005) book, The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution, regarding the incidence of female orgasm during intercourse without…”

BONUS: Questions, questions, questions

Elizabeth A. Lloyd, author of the book at the center (or perhaps other location) of the argument

A pilot study for coffee enema enthusiasts

Coffee enemas are endlessly fascinating to people who are fascinated, endlessly, by coffee enemas. Here’s a new study on the topic:

“Coffee Enema for Preparation for Small Bowel Video Capsule Endoscopy: A Pilot Study,” Eun Sun Kim, Hoon Jai Chun, Bora Keum, Yeon Seok Seo, Yoon Tae Jeen, Hong Sik Lee, Soon Ho Um, Chang Duck Kim and Ho Sang Ryu, Clinical Nutrition Research, vol. 3, 2014, pp. 134-141. The authors are at Korea University College of Medicine, Seoul, Korea.

Further insights on coffee enemas and the people who partake of or dispense them:

Self-serviced coffee enemas
Downside to coffee enemas, free
S.A. Wilson’s Therapy Blend Enema Coffee
What’s up with Max Gerson?

The smell of macaroni [part 3]

“While vision did play an important role in the understanding of both the macaroni as a phenomenon and the pleasure garden as a space, to focus on vision, to the exclusion of other senses and embodiment, is to miss an important means of understanding both macaronis and pleasure gardens. We must understand the pleasure gardens and macaronis as multi-sensory. In particular, I show that olfaction was a crucial means of understanding the macaroni’s place within the pleasure gardens. Pleasure gardens were a place of sensory pleasures and dangers where one was expected to, and attempted to, cultivate one’s senses in particular ways. Macaronis were frequently described in terms of their perfumes and essences, and yet none of the extensive work on macaronis has interrogated this.”

The Macaroni’s ‘Ambrosial Essences’: Perfume, Identity and Public Space in Eighteenth-Century England. TULLETT, W. (2014), is awaiting publication in the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

Further info: on Macaroni here at Wikipedia.

Note: “The place or exact nature of the ‘Macaroni Club’, which Horace Walpole first described in February 1764, has been the subject of much speculation but has yielded no firm evidence or answers.”

Also see: Heidegger meets Macaroni in New York State (which came first, the macaroni or the hole?)

Previous article: The smell of macaroni [part 2]

This concludes our short series on the smell of macaroni.

Teaser for the 24th first annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony

Al Crockett and Daniel Rosenberg (Al is in back of the camera, you see Daniel in front of it here) made this brief food-related teaser for the 24th first annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony. The theme of this year’s ceremony (though not necessarily of the things that will win prizes) is FOOD.

The ceremony will happen on Thursday evening, September 18, at Harvard’s Sanders Theatre.

It will, as usual, be webcast live. (Tickets to physically attend the ceremony in Sanders Theatre have been sold out for a while now.)

Perhaps you would like to organize a webcast-watching party?

BONUS: Daniel and Al’s teasers for previous Ig Nobel ceremonies

Cessation of Rumination. Say: “I? Aye!”

One needn’t ruminate more than one wants or need to, suggests this study:

“The Cessation of Rumination Through Self-Affirmation,” Sander L. Koole, Karianne Smeets, Ad van Knippenberg, and Ap Dijksterhuis, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1999, Vol. 77, No. 1, 111-25. The authors affirm that they are at the University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands.