Marc Abrahams's Blog, page 406

A psychiatrist reviews a science book for kids about excrement

Interesting perspective, you may think to yourself, if you read this noted psychiatrist‘s review of a book about the science related to excrement:

The book: From Food to Fertilizer, the Role of Excrement in the Life Cycle, Charles C. Dahlberg, Young Scott Books, Reading, Massachusetts, 1973.

The review: “Not So Execrable,” Richard A. Gardner, Contemporary Psychoanalysis , vol. 10, no. 4, 1974, pp. 523-526. Here’s a chunk of the review. It includes the passage “…However, Dr. Dahlberg discusses quite complicated biochemical mechanisms and even though he attempts to reduce these to the most simplified terms, I cannot imagine most prepubertal children beginning to grasp their import.”:

BONUS (possibly related): The Annual of Psychoanalysis explains, in 1992, some of the relationship between the bible and excrement

BONUS (almost completely unrelated): “[Twelve-year-old] Masui’s research has been praised by Prof. Ryo Kobayashi of Hiroshima University, who has won the spoof Ig Nobel Prize for his study of slime molds.“

A study of domestic cat meows, to be presented in Dublin

The world’s ongoing research effort to understand cat meows will center, for a shining moment in May, in Dublin, Ireland.The assembled delegates will there

“A Study of Human Perception of Intonation in Domestic Cat Meows,” Susanne Schötz [pictured here, above] and Joost van de Weijer [pictured here, below], [paper to be presented at the conference] Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Speech Prosody, Dubin, Ireland, May 20-23, 2014. (Thanks to investigator Daniela Müller for bringing this to our attention.) The researchers explain:

“This study examined human listeners’ ability to classify domestic cat vocalisations (meows) recorded in two different contexts; during feeding time (food related meows) and while waiting to visit a veterinarian (vet related meows). A pitch analysis showed a tendency for food related meows to have rising F0 contours, while vet related meows tended to have more falling F0 contours. 30 listeners judged twelve meows (six of each context) in a perception test. Classification accuracy was significantly above chance, and lis- teners who had reported previous experience with cats performed significantly better than inexperienced listeners. Moreover, the two food related meows with the highest classification accuracy showed clear rising F0 contours, while clear falling F0 contours characterised the two vet related meows that received the highest classification accuracy. Listeners also reported that some meows were very easy to classify, while others were more diffcult. Taken together, these results suggest that cats may use different intonation patterns in their vocal interaction with humans, and that humans are able to identify the vocalisations based on intonation.”

Dr. Schötz is renowned, in the cat meow perception research community, for her earlier work on the subject, especially:

“A phonetic pilot study of chirp, chatter, tweet and tweedle in three domestic cats,” Susanne Schötz , in Eklund, R. (Ed.), 2013, (pp. 65-68). Linköping University.

Here are details from that study:

BONUS: At the same session in Dublin, immediately following the cat meow perception presentation, delegates will be treated to an only distantly related research report:

“Observation of so-called “pursed-lip” and “curled-lip” utterances in Japanese, using video and MRI images,” Chunyue Zhu, Toshiyuki Sadanobu.

Karl O’Dwyer joins Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists (LFHCfS)

Karl O’Dwyer has joined the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists (LFHCfS). He says:

I first learned about this esteemed club and its existence from a colleague after he suggested I attempt to join it. I just hope my hair is worthy of such an honour.

Karl O’Dwyer, LFHCfS

Graduate student, computer science

Hamilton Institute

National University of Ireland, Maynooth

Maynooth, Ireland

Assessing the taste of medicine

This study probes in some detail the sentiment that “a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down”:

“The bad taste of medicines: overview of basic research on bitter taste,” Julie A. Mennella [pictured here], Alan C. Spector, Danielle R. Reed, and Susan E. Coldwell, Clinical therapeutics, vol. 35, no. 8 (2013): 1225-1246. The authors, at Monell Chemical Senses Center, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida, and the University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, explain:

“Conclusions: Better-tasting medications may enhance pediatric adherence to drug therapy….”

BONUS:

or, if you prefer your music with historical pharmaceutical images:

Physics of Wrecking Balls: The Viability of a Miley Cyrus Song

Another new basic physics investigation from the University of Leicester:

“The Viability of Coming In Like a Wrecking Ball,” David McDonagh [pictured here], Journal of Interdisciplinary Science Topics, vol. 3, March 2014. (Thanks to @IanVisits for bringing this to our attention.) The author, at the University of Leicester, reports:

” A pop song that made the charts in late 2013 alludes to the idea of entering a given location analogous to a wrecking ball, raising questions over if such a feat is possible. Perhaps more significantly, the singer claims to have impacted both love and ostensibly the walls of someone’s house with similar momentum at some point, providing a somewhat unique case in studying the effects of shock on human beings. Both claims are investigated with a view to their viability, concluding that any human behaving like a wrecking ball would likely result in serious injury.”

Here’s the song, sung by Miley Cyrus, upon which the study is based:

Here’s detail from the study:

BONUS [probably unrelated): “‘Wrecking ball’ dental fractures: report of 2 cases“

“Bleeding wound? Relax and roll a cigarette.”

Cigarettes have become less popular for use by doctors on the job, but they still serve, on occasion, as inspiration. Here is one cigarette-inspired idea:

“Bleeding wound? Relax and roll a cigarette,” Stuart G. Williams and Cara Connolly, Injury Extra, epub April 30, 2014. The authors, at Raigmore Hospital, Inverness, Scotland and Springfield Hospital, Essex, England, report:

“A profusely bleeding wound may cause distraction and alarm. A technique that can provide fast and effective haemostasis allows the clinician to continue their assessment. We present a novel technique where gauze swabs are rolled into cigarette shapes and control bleeding by mimicking digital pressure to the wound. We have found this technique to be effective in clinical practice and present 3 cases where it was effectively used.”

Here’s detail from the study:

Other-name calling by scientists

Scientists are a fractious lot. Near the end of a long discussion (in his study “Retinal ganglion cells responding selectively to direction and speed of image motion in the rabbit,” Horace B. Barlow, R.M. Hill, and W.R. Levick, The Journal of Physiology, vol. 173, no. 3, 1964, pp. 377-407.), Horace Barlow writes:

“Much of this discussion is in close agreement with the ideas of Lettvin and his co-workers but we do not feel happy with the names they give their units.”

Barlow was referring to the ideas reported in the earlier study  “What the frog’s eye tells the frog’s brain,” Jerry Y. Lettvin, Humberto R. Maturana, Warren S. McCulloch, and Walter H. Pitts, Proceedings of the IRE 47, no. 11 (1959): 1940-1951.

For a discussion of some recent developments, growths from those ideas, see Mo Costandi’s “Crowdsourcing the retina’s motion detection mechanism” in The Guardian.

BONUS: More about Jerry Lettvin (pictured here in a photo from about 1960, when the “Frog’s Eye” paper was new, and things were hopping.)

BONUS: Still more, about interesting twists

 

Study: “Pippa Middleton, her derrière and celebrity”

In 2009, shortly before the launch of the scholarly journal Celebrity Studies, I took a quick look at the academic field of celebrity studies. Now, five years later, the journal is serving up scholarship that virtually defines that field. One of its finest studies centers on a British citizen named Pippa Middleton:

“And bringing up the rear: Pippa Middleton, her derrière and celebrity as feminine ideal,” Janet McCabe [pictured here], Celebrity Studies, vol. 2, no. 3, 2011. The author, at Birkbeck, University of London, UK, explains:

“The celebrity of the Middleton curves has something important to tell us about celebrating the feminine ideal, which is compelling enough to psychically entangle us and from which we are not entirely able to free ourselves. Intoxicatingly presented, persuasively offered as about modern feminine accomplishment, her image is embedded in and through prevailing norms of the feminine self: not only her body (slender, fashionable, attractive), but also her lifestyle choices (health and fitness, leisure and work, social ambition and fashionable restaurants, consumerism and eligibility for marriage).”

Here is an image of the beginning of the study:

BONUS: A scholarly television news report about Pippa Middleton:

Predicting Crowdsourced Decisions on Toxic Behavior in Online Games

A reported advance in the game of predicting what mobs will decide about yobs who run riot in online games:

“STFU NOOB! Predicting Crowdsourced Decisions on Toxic Behavior in Online Games,” Jeremy Blackburn and Haewoon Kwak, arXiv:1404.5905, epub April 23, 2014. (Thanks to investigator Evie Tsing for bringing this to our attention.) The authors, at University of South Florida, USA and Telefonica Research, Barcelona, Spain, explain:

“One problem facing players of competitive games is negative, or toxic, behavior. League of Legends, the largest eSport game, uses a crowdsourcing platform called the Tribunal to judge whether a reported toxic player should be punished or not. The Tribunal is a two stage system requiring reports from those players that directly observe toxic behavior, and human experts that review aggregated reports…. [This]system… naturally requires tremendous cost, time, and human efforts. In this paper, we propose a supervised learning approach for predicting crowdsourced decisions on toxic behavior with large-scale labeled data collections; over 10 million user reports involved in 1.46 million toxic players and corresponding crowdsourced decisions. Our result shows good performance in detecting overwhelmingly majority cases and predicting crowdsourced decisions on them.”

Admirable smiles, legally and psychologically

One is not required to — but one may be advised to — admire the smiles of certain persons.

Here are the smiles of four directors of the Dental Law Partnership, in Britain, where some citizens devote much thought and worry to the appearance of their teeth:

BONUS MATHEMATICAL EXERCISE: A web site called BestMastersInPsychology has published photographs of the “30 Most Influential Psychologists Working Today.” Look at the 30 photographs. Count how many of the influential psychologists working today are smiling, and how many are not.

BONUS TO THE BONUS: Determine how many of those 30 Most Influential Psychologists Working Today have a Nobel Prize, how many have an Ig Nobel Prize, how many are members of the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists, and how many are members of the Luxuriant Former Hair Club for Scientists, and how many are (or were) a boxer.