Marc Abrahams's Blog, page 392

The cost of a phone agent’s smile

Humans who answer the phones in call centers are, in many organizations, requested or even required to smile, smile, smile. A team of researchers at Goethe-University Frankfurt in Germany and the University of Denver ran an experiment to see what this forced smiling does to the forced smilers….

—so begins today’s Improbable Innovation nugget, which appears in its entirety on BetaBoston.

For social scientists: Two advertisements

Anthropologists, psychologists, and other ists can study these two advertisements for clues about the human condition:

1. Do It Yourself Cartoon Kit [background]:

2. PowerPencils (thanks to investigator Vaughn Tan for bringing this to our attention) [background]:

BONUS: Bob Godfrey’s Do-It-Yourself Animation Show: Terry Gilliam

BONUS: Artisanal pencil sharpening

 

Old sewer numerical method

Nowadays there are many methods for estimating the approximate cost of sewers. In 1922, this diagram showed the then-state of the art:

The diagram appears in the book Sewerage and Sewage Treatment, by Harold Eaton Babbitt (published by John Wiley and Sons, New York,1922).

Augmented satiety: Making junk food look bigger

“Recent psychological studies have revealed that the amount of food consumed is influenced by both its actual volume and external factors during eating.”

Therefore, reasoned a research team from the University of Tokyo, if a portion of food seems bigger, maybe diners would eat less of it? Their experimental real-time computer graphic kit creates the illusion that potentially fattening food (e.g. a cookie) looks bigger, whilst a healthy pineapple chunk appears smaller.

Their paper : ‘Augmented Perception of Satiety: Controlling Food Consumption by Changing Apparent Size of Food with Augmented Reality‘ was presented at the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2012.

Bonus: One of the authors, Yuki Ban, maintains a website called DrunkBoarder which links to another project, called ‘Augmented Endurance’ – click the picture for full details.

Note: Although bigger-looking food might prompt diners to feel satiated earlier, larger portions can sometimes have the opposite effect, encouraging overeating. See for example the work of 2007 Ig Nobel prize-winner Brian Wansink of Cornell University, who explored the seemingly boundless appetites of human beings, by feeding them with a self-refilling, bottomless bowl of soup.

Economics of the undead, arise bookishly!

Dismal news: Last year we published a link to a Call for Abstracts about “Economics of the Undead”. Tomorrow the resulting book, Economics of the Undead: Zombies, Vampires, and the Dismal Science, will be published. The authors, who are themselves in a technical sense undead, also birthed a web site.

Cooking up a weapon: Kangri for the angry

Warfare breeds ingenuity of a sort:

“Use of Kangri (A Traditional Firepot) as a Weapon,” Arsalaan F. Rashid, Rifat Fazili, and Akash D. Aggarwal, Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine, 2014. (Thanks to investigator Ivan Oransky for bringing this to our attention.) The authors, at Sher-i-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences Medical College and Govt. Medical College, Patiala, Punjab, India, report:

“Kangri an earthenware firepot has been traditionally used by people of Kashmir for protecting themselves for harsh winter weather. This study done on patients admitted in the burns ward and general emergency ward of a tertiary care hospital, is perhaps the first of its kind. It analyses the use of this very traditional and useful art form as a weapon… Most of the cases (18/20 = 90%) occurred during winter and only 2 cases (10%) were observed in spring. This is in concurrence with the usage pattern of Kangri which peaks during winter and ebbs during spring. Majority of victims were males (13/20 = 65%) which is similar to assaults with conventional weapons like sticks, sharp weapons, firearms etc where males predominate.”

BONUS: Video of a man and his kangri in a non-weaponry situation:

They have revoked the patent for the wheel

I have begun blogging about Improbable Innovation (a very broad category, that!) for the Boston Globe‘s BetaBoston.com web site. My first report there begins:

Re-inventing the wheel: Why not? Many do.

Despite the warning “Don’t re-invent the wheel”, people continue to reinvent the wheel. Some of those people file patent applications. Patent offices even approve some of those applications.

I discovered today that the Australian patent office has — quietly — revoked the patent it granted, in the year 2001, for the wheel. The patent office had awarded Innovation Patent #2001100012 to John Keogh of Hawthorn, Victoria, Australia.…

I plan to link, here on the Improbable Research web site, to my BetaBoston items that are appropriate.

Malpositioned breast implant correction innovation

Unfortunately, breast implants are sometimes positioned wrongly. A new method to correct such problems – using shoelaces – is described by Dr. Daniel C. Mills II, MD, FACS:

of the Aesthetic Plastic Surgical Institute, Laguna Beach, California, in the latest edition of Aesthetic Surgery Journal :

¨Implant malposition after breast augmentation surgery remains a common complication. Several surgical options exist to correct the resultant deformity; however, all involve additional risks, costs, and the increased potential for patient dissatisfaction. In my practice, I have developed a nonsurgical therapy using shoelaces, which, when tied and placed in a certain fashion, can correct this deformity.¨

Ig Nobel Prize winner Deepak Chopra offers a million

Ig Nobel Prize winner Deepak Chopra is offering $1,000,000 (a million dollars) to any critic who can explain — to Dr. Chopra’s satisfaction — why Dr. Chopra’s explanation of quantum phenomena is flawed. Details are in this video, and in an accompanying essay called “Getting Zombies Excited (It Takes a Million-Dollar Challenge)” published  in the Huffington Post.

Dr. Chopra was awarded the 1998 Ig Nobel Prize for physics, for his unique interpretation of quantum physics as it applies to life, liberty, and the pursuit of economic happiness.

BONUS (possibly unrelated): The 2000 Ig Nobel Prize for psychology was awarded to David Dunning of Cornell University and Justin Kruger of the University of Illinois, for their modest report, “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments.” [Published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 77, no. 6, December 1999, pp. 1121-34.]

How to manage women, advisedly, 1944-style [video]

The US Federal Security Office produced this 1944 video about how to manage women. “They’re not naturally familiar with mechanical principles, nor machines,” you will learn:

BONUS [quasi-related]: The Dresden Dolls perform “Coin-Operated Boy”: