Why you should always yell at the ref – according to science

Berate the refs

There is new evidence that it can pay to scream at referees in sports stadiums. That evidence appears in the study “Verbal aggressions against Major League Baseball umpires affect their decision making”, by Joël Guérette, Caroline Blais and Daniel Fiset at the University of Quebec in Outaouais, Canada. They published it in the journal Psychological Science.

Guérette, Blais and Fiset probed data from 10 years of major league professional baseball games. These games, they stress, unfold in “an ecological environment where excessive criticism is rampant”.

They detected what they call “a two-sided benefit of resorting to verbal abuse”. After being severely criticised, “home-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”.

B. McGraw (first name unspecified) brought this to Feedback’s attention, impressed by the deployment of disciplined academic speak when the authors say: “Our findings support the hypothesis that, under certain conditions, verbal aggression may offer an advantage to complainants.”

Your ice cream nozzle

Questions arise when things start growing on your nozzle – 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’t clean a food machine’s nozzle and other parts, things get a healthy (from the things’ point of view) chance to grow on them.

Psychrotrophs are bacteria that can grow at low temperatures – temperatures that might be found, say, inside refrigerators or freezers.

A study called “Psychrotrophic bacteria equipped with virulence and colonization traits populate the ice cream manufacturing environment” 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: “We provide evidence of the existence of complex microbial communities overcoming sanitation in an ice cream-producing facility.” 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 “The influence of bouba- and kiki-like shape on perceived taste of chocolate pieces“.

“Bouba” and “kiki” are concocted words that, some psychological experiments suggest, somehow evoke notions of shape. To many, “bouba” seems curvy and “kiki” 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: “Prior studies found no differences in participants’ 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.”

They engineered a solution: “We 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.”

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 – and if quiet is what you seek. Bevel them. That’s 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: “Beveled nozzles achieve a noise reduction for all radiation angles with a maximum decrease up to 2 dB at receiver locations perpendicular to the plate.” For tranquility’s 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 “Emoji driven crypto assets market reactions“, by Xiaorui Zuo, Yao-Tsung Chen and Wolfgang Karl Härdle.

The word “pith” is sometimes defined as “the spongy white tissue lining the rind of oranges and other citrus fruits”. This study includes a pithy description of itself: “We 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.” The paper doesn’t say what “BERT” is. The paper does say: “Similar sentiment analysis techniques could be applied to broader financial markets.”

Marc Abrahams created the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony and co-founded the magazine Annals of Improbable Research. Earlier, he worked on unusual ways to use computers. His website is improbable.com.

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