Berate the refs
There is new evidence that it can pay to scream at referees in sports stadiums. That evidence appears in the study 鈥淰erbal aggressions against Major League Baseball umpires affect their decision making鈥�, by Jo毛l Gu茅rette, Caroline Blais and Daniel Fiset at the University of Quebec in Outaouais, Canada. They published it in the journal Psychological Science.
Gu茅rette, Blais and Fiset probed data from 10 years of major league professional baseball games. These games, they stress, unfold in 鈥渁n ecological environment where excessive criticism is rampant鈥�.
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They detected what they call 鈥渁 two-sided benefit of resorting to verbal abuse鈥�. After being severely criticised, 鈥渉ome-plate umpires were less likely to call strikes to batters from the complaining team and more prone to call strikes to batters on the opposing team鈥�.
B. McGraw (first name unspecified) brought this to Feedback鈥檚 attention, impressed by the deployment of disciplined academic speak when the authors say: 鈥淥ur findings support the hypothesis that, under certain conditions, verbal aggression may offer an advantage to complainants.鈥�
Your ice cream nozzle
Questions arise when things start growing on your nozzle 鈥� questions that grow less pressing if you diligently clean the nozzle after you use it to dispense a serving of ice cream. Because if you don鈥檛 clean a food machine鈥檚 nozzle and other parts, things get a healthy (from the things鈥� point of view) chance to grow on them.
Psychrotrophs are bacteria that can grow at low temperatures 鈥� temperatures that might be found, say, inside refrigerators or freezers.
A study called 鈥溾�� brings up the necessity of nozzle-tending. The discussion aims to forestall horror stories. The authors, at the University of Naples Federico II in Italy, say: 鈥淲e provide evidence of the existence of complex microbial communities overcoming sanitation in an ice cream-producing facility.鈥� Harken, therefore, ice creamer. Tend your nozzle.
Your chocolate nozzle
Unexpected, vaguely related questions can arise when you consider what shape of nozzle to use for, say, 3D printing chocolate. A study in Frontiers in Psychology looks at one question that is surprisingly subtle and complex: how much chocolate is too much chocolate when it comes to matters of taste? The study is called 鈥溾��.
鈥淏ouba鈥� and 鈥渒iki鈥� are concocted words that, some psychological experiments suggest, somehow evoke notions of shape. To many, 鈥渂ouba鈥� seems curvy and 鈥渒iki鈥� seems spiky. The researchers found evidence that bouba can taste subtly sweeter than kiki, but to measure that distinction, they had to restrict the amount of chocolate in a bite.
They write: 鈥淧rior studies found no differences in participants鈥� reports of taste differences following actual consumption of round and angular chocolate pieces. We assumed that the amount of chocolate eaten in this prior study was too large, which caused the actual taste to dominate any effect of perceived shape on taste.鈥�
They engineered a solution: 鈥淲e designed a ring-shaped stimulus that was not filled with chocolate at its center to avoid the need to consume excessive chocolate taste/flavor, while maintaining perceived differences in shape.鈥�
Using sweeter-tasting shapes to reduce chocolate consumption, they say, would benefit even non-chocolate-eaters by reducing the production of chocolate and thus of greenhouse gases. By implication, bouba/kiki-aware chocolate-dispenser nozzle selection can be a not-just-symbolic weapon in the struggle against global warming.
Your bevelled nozzle
Bevel your nozzles, if you insist on equipping your jet aircraft with turbofan engines 鈥� and if quiet is what you seek. Bevel them. That鈥檚 the word from Julien Christophe, Julien de Decker and Christophe Schram at the von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics in Belgium. Writing in Flow, Turbulence and Combustion, they explain why: 鈥淏eveled nozzles achieve a noise reduction for all radiation angles with a maximum decrease up to 2 dB at receiver locations perpendicular to the plate.鈥� For tranquility鈥檚 sake, bevel.
Crypto-emojis
If there is a competition for most jargon-dense research writing about sketchy financial undertakings, maybe put your cryptocurrency on a study called 鈥溾��, by Xiaorui Zuo, Yao-Tsung Chen and Wolfgang Karl H盲rdle.
The word 鈥減ith鈥� is sometimes defined as 鈥渢he spongy white tissue lining the rind of oranges and other citrus fruits鈥�. This study includes a pithy description of itself: 鈥淲e leverage GPT-4 and a fine-tuned transformer-based BERT model for a multimodal sentiment analysis, focusing on the impact of emoji sentiment on cryptocurrency markets.鈥� The paper doesn鈥檛 say what 鈥淏ERT鈥� is. The paper does say: 鈥淪imilar sentiment analysis techniques could be applied to broader financial markets.鈥�
Marc Abrahams created the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony and聽co-founded聽the magazine Annals of Improbable Research. Earlier, he worked on unusual ways to use computers. His website is聽.
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