Marc Abrahams's Blog, page 390

Banding-together of breeders: Seven sperm abreast

Ig Nobel Prize winner Mahadevan (2007 Ig Nobel physics prize, for studying how sheets become wrinkled) and colleagues have taken an applied-mathematical look at yet another unanswered question. As happens so often with Mahadevan and his merry, varying band of collaborators, a better-than-anyone-had-before answer appeared. Details are in this study:

“The dynamics of sperm cooperation in a competitive environment,” Heidi S. Fisher, Luca Giomi, Hopi E Hoekstra, L. Mahadevan, BioRXiv, 2014. The authors, at Harvard University and the International School for Advanced Studies, Trieste, Italy, report:

“we use fine-scale imaging and a minimal mathematical model to study sperm aggregation in the rodent genus Peromyscus. We demonstrate that as the number of sperm cells in an aggregate increase, the group moves with more persistent linearity but without increasing speed; this benefit, however, is offset in larger aggregates as the geometry of the group forces sperm to swim against one another. The result is a non-monotonic relationship between aggregate size and average velocity with both a theoretically predicted and empirically observed optimum of 6-7 sperm/aggregate.”

Ed Yong, in his Not Exactly Rocket Science blog, has a nice essay about this.

Here’s further detail from the study itself:

BONUS (possibly not strongly related): The 1956 essay “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information“

BONUS (probably unrelated): “Researchers find first sign that tyrannosaurs hunted in packs“

Computational gastronomy – part 2 – ‘Active Odor Cancellation’

The Varshney twins – Dr. Kush Varshney (currently at IBM) and Professor Lav Varshney (previously at IBM) – have authored a series of papers on the theme of computational gastronomy, one of which, on Food Steganography, we looked at recently.

Example 2. Active Odor Cancellation. (IEEE International Workshop on Statistical Signal Processing, Gold Coast, Australia, June-July 2014.)

“Noise cancellation is a traditional problem in statistical signal processing that has not been studied in the olfactory domain for unwanted odors. In this paper, we use the newly discovered olfactory white signal class to formulate optimal active odor cancellation using both nuclear norm-regularized multivariate regression and simultaneous sparsity or group lasso-regularized non-negative regression. As an example, we show the proposed technique on real-world data to cancel the odor of durian, katsuobushi, sauerkraut, and onion.”

Coming soon: Computational gastronomy part 3

Computational gastronomy – part 2 – ‘Active Odor Cancellation’

The Varshney twins – Dr. Kush Varshney (currently at IBM) and Professor Lav Varshney (previously at IBM) – have authored a series of papers on the theme of computational gastronomy, one of which, on Food Steganography, we looked at recently.

Example 2. Active Odor Cancellation. (IEEE International Workshop on Statistical Signal Processing, Gold Coast, Australia, June-July 2014.)

“Noise cancellation is a traditional problem in statistical signal processing that has not been studied in the olfactory domain for unwanted odors. In this paper, we use the newly discovered olfactory white signal class to formulate optimal active odor cancellation using both nuclear norm-regularized multivariate regression and simultaneous sparsity or group lasso-regularized non-negative regression. As an example, we show the proposed technique on real-world data to cancel the odor of durian, katsuobushi, sauerkraut, and onion.”

Coming soon: Computational gastronomy part 3

A searchable database of Ig Nobel Prize winners

Our friends at Silk have put together a searchable database of Ig Nobel Prize winners.

Give it a try!

Lots of famous physicists (videos)

A person named William Kite has been sending us letters—lots of letters— asking that we show more pictures of what he calls “famous physics people”. For the benefit of Mr. Kite (and in truth, merely because of the historical appeal of his name), here are two videos filled with, mostly, moving pictures of famous physicists,  Erwin Schrodinger, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Auguste Piccard, Paul Dirac, Max Born, Wolfgang Pauli, Louis de Broglie, Marie Curie, Hendrik Lorentz, Albert Einstein, Hermann Weyl, Paul Erdos (whom some purists will say was purely a mathematician) and several others:

BONUS: Wellerstein peers at the hair of physicists

Women talk more than men — at least sometimes, sensor study says

Do women talk more than men? A new study used tiny technology to investigate.

Tinier, cheaper, more capable electronics make it possible to sense , record and measure more and more kinds of things. Some sensors are built into conspicuous, please-notice-what-I’m-doing frames — Google Glass is the current great example of that. But tiny sensors can easily be placed where people won’t notice them.

Researchers at Harvard, MIT, and Northeastern had people each wear tiny sensors. (In this case, each of the people involved knew full well that the sensors were there.)…

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

Computational gastronomy – part 1 – ‘Food Steganography’

The Varshney twins – Dr. Kush Varshney (currently at IBM) and Professor Lav Varshney (previously at IBM) – have authored a series of papers on the theme of computational gastronomy.

Example 1 : Food Steganography with Olfactory White. (IEEE International Workshop on Statistical Signal Processing, Gold Coast, Australia, June-July 2014)

“Can one hide an averse food in a flavorful food so that the averse food is not perceptible? Here we take a statistical signal processing approach to show how to optimally design a food additive (either using pure flavor compounds or natural ingredients) to act as a steganographic key for this food steganography problem.”

Coming Soon : Computational gastronomy – part 2

His favorite fraud…

This essay appeared in the September 1, 2008 issue of The Scientist (thanks to investigator Carol Morton for bringing it to our attention):

My Favorite Fraud

A paper I read more than 25 years ago taught me a lesson I’ll never forget.

By Steven Wiley

…I was a member of a weekly journal club that discussed the latest papers in the field of cell signaling and growth control. All presenters were to provide an assessment of the technical rigor as well as the importance of papers. In the summer of 1982, however, we encountered a paper that was far out of the ordinary…. Thankfully, fraud this outlandish is rare in biology.

Read the whole thing in The Scientist.

Jaunty Jargon Recitation: Construal Level

This week’s pick for a chunk of jaunty jargonian text — fun to recite aloud at posh parties and in swanky restaurants — is the abstract of a study just published in the Journal of Consumer Research:

“When Does a Higher Construal Level Increase or Decrease Indulgence? Resolving the Myopia versus Hyperopia Puzzle,” Ravi Mehta [pictured here], Rui (Juliet) Zhu, and Joan Meyers-Levy, Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 41, No. 2 (August 2014), pp. 475-488.

“Existing inquiry on self-control reveals an inconsistency. The mainstream research on myopic behavior suggests that use of a high versus low construal level should lead consumers to exhibit less indulgence. However, more recent work on hyperopia implies the opposite. This article attempts to resolve this discrepancy. In particular, the level at which a consumer construes information (abstract vs. concrete), interacts with his or her self-focus, and both factors jointly determine consumer indulgence level. When the self is not salient, outcomes implied by the myopia literature ensue. But when the self is focal, the opposite outcomes anticipated by the hyperopia literature obtain.”

You might enjoy reciting it aloud now, to whomever happens to be within earshot of you at this moment.

BONUS: From two of the same three co-authors:

“Is Noise Always Bad? Exploring the Effects of Ambient Noise on Creative Cognition,” R. Mehta, R. Zhu, A. Cheema, Journal of Consumer Research, vol. 39, 2012, pp. 784-99

Making computers better at seeing cats. Dogs, too.

Cats and dogs are among the many objects people are pretty good at recognizing, but computers are not. “Look, this is a cat!” and “Look, that’s a dog!” are cries you are more likely to hear from a person than from a silicon-based computer. (In truth, you are not all that likely to hear people shout those exact statements — but you are very unlikely to hear computers spontaneously ejaculate them.)

But many people, like most computers, aren’t all that great at recognizing which kinds of cats and which kinds of dogs they see….

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