Berate the refs
There is new evidence that it can pay to scream at referees in sports stadiums. That evidence appears in the study āVerbal aggressions against Major League Baseball umpires affect their decision makingā, by JoĆ«l GuĆ©rette, Caroline Blais and Daniel Fiset at the University of Quebec in Outaouais, Canada. They published it in the journal Psychological Science.
GuĆ©rette, Blais and Fiset probed data from 10 years of major league professional baseball games. These games, they stress, unfold in āan ecological environment where excessive criticism is rampantā.
Advertisement
They detected what they call āa two-sided benefit of resorting to verbal abuseā. After being severely criticised, āhome-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 teamā.
B. McGraw (first name unspecified) brought this to Feedbackās attention, impressed by the deployment of disciplined academic speak when the authors say: āOur findings support the hypothesis that, under certain conditions, verbal aggression may offer an advantage to complainants.ā
Your ice cream nozzle
Questions arise when things start growing on your nozzle ā 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 donāt clean a food machineās nozzle and other parts, things get a healthy (from the thingsā point of view) chance to grow on them.
Psychrotrophs are bacteria that can grow at low temperatures ā temperatures that might be found, say, inside refrigerators or freezers.
A study called āā 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: āWe provide evidence of the existence of complex microbial communities overcoming sanitation in an ice cream-producing facility.ā 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 āā.
āBoubaā and ākikiā are concocted words that, some psychological experiments suggest, somehow evoke notions of shape. To many, āboubaā seems curvy and ākikiā 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: āPrior studies found no differences in participantsā 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.ā
They engineered a solution: āWe 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.ā
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 ā and if quiet is what you seek. Bevel them. Thatās 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: āBeveled nozzles achieve a noise reduction for all radiation angles with a maximum decrease up to 2 dB at receiver locations perpendicular to the plate.ā For tranquilityās 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 āā, by Xiaorui Zuo, Yao-Tsung Chen and Wolfgang Karl HƤrdle.
The word āpithā is sometimes defined as āthe spongy white tissue lining the rind of oranges and other citrus fruitsā. This study includes a pithy description of itself: āWe 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.ā The paper doesnāt say what āBERTā is. The paper does say: āSimilar sentiment analysis techniques could be applied to broader financial markets.ā
Marc Abrahams created the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony andĀ co-foundedĀ the magazine Annals of Improbable Research. Earlier, he worked on unusual ways to use computers. His website isĀ .
Got a story for Feedback?
You can send stories to Feedback by email at feedback@newscientist.com. Please include your home address. This weekās and past Feedbacks can be seen on our website.
