Beachcombing in Academia

Many may jump to the conclusion that ‘Uninformative Advertising’
simply provides a route by which a manufacturing corporation can ‘burn
its money’ – but this may not always be the case, as explained in a recent
paper from the Yale School of Management. Professors Dina Mayzlin and Jiwoong Shin
have identified ways in which advertising that is deliberately devoid
of any attribute information can (sometimes) help to promote sales.

• The problem – How to tell if a banana is senescent (old).
• The solution – Apply fractal Fourier analysis to the banana spots.
The
computational method was jointly developed by the Department of Science
and Food Technology, Universidad de Los Lagos, Chile, along with the
Department of Chemical Engineering and Bioprocesses, Pontificia
Universidad Católica de Chile, and the Departamento de Graduados e
Investigación en Alimentos, Escuela Nacional de Ciencias Biológicas,
Instituto Politécnico Nacional, Mexico.

In order to clear any doubts regarding the comparative growth rates of the whiskers of harbor seals (Phoca vitulina) and Steller sea lions (Eumetopias jubatus),

researchers at the Institute of Marine Science, University of Alaska

Fairbanks, and the Mystic Aquarium, CT, U.S.A. performed a series of

experiments in 2001. The whiskers of participant seals and sea lions

were stable-isotope-labeled with Carbon 13 and Nitrogen 15, and whisker

growth rates were measured over a period of  more than two years.

The results:

Cross-disciplinary  academic progress in vagueness has recently been augmented  with a paper from Prof. PhDr. Jarmila Tárnyiková CSc.

at Palacký University, in Olomouc, Czech Republic. The professor has

authored one of the very few papers to examine and compare English and

Czech Non-numerical Vague Quantifiers (also known as Vague Non-numerical

Quantifiers – VnQs).

Some examples from the paper :

• Piles of

• Oodles of

• Mountains of

• A Smidgen of

• A Dash of

• A Pinch of

“…there is no authoritative definition of the sense of humor, and it is also not yet clear what ‘laughing at oneself’ is, or if it even actually occurs in people’s everyday behavior.”

Dr. Timothy Elbert Wise 
is not only a joint-program leader of both the Popular Music and

Recording and Popular Musicology degrees at the University of Salford,

UK, but is also one of the world’s foremost authorities on the history

and physiology of yodeling. He has published a number of scholarly

papers on the subject, (full publications list here). Take for example Yodel Species: A Typology of Falsetto Effects in Popular Music Vocal Styles (published in the journal Radial Musicology, Volume 2, 2007)

Martin A. Schwartz is Professor of Microbiology and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Virginia. The professor draws attention to the importance of stupidity in scientific research in his recent article for Seismological Research Letters – January/February 2011; v. 82; no. 1; p. 3-4. Entitled :

Professor Shigeru Watanabe,
presently Project Leader for Keio University’s Centre for Advanced Research on Logic and Sensibility has extended the study of avian art appreciation with his participation in a project probing pictorial preferences of Padda oryzivora – a.k.a. the Java Sparrow.  The birds used in the study were all complete artistic novices – enabling the following question to be experimentally tested : Do Java sparrows naturally
prefer Cubism, Impressionism or traditional Japanese-style artworks?

What are the functions of smiling, specifically, the functions of smiling in relation to laughter? Dr. Markku Haakana
[pictured here, not smiling], from the Department of Finnish,
Finno-Ugrian and Scandinavian Studies, at the University of Helsinki,
Finland, explains:
“(i) Smiling can be used as a pre-laughing device:
laughing together can be entered step-wise, and smiling is a common
device for paving the way to the laughter. (ii) Smiling can be used as a
response to laughter in the previous turn.”

It seems that the first US patent for an internal-combustion powered ‘Pogo’ stick was issued to inventor R.J. Mays
back in 1950. The jumping machine was intended to run on gasoline, and,
according its creator was “…highly efficient and amusing in operation.”
It’s not altogether clear whether May’s power-stick ever went into
production, but a similar(ish) device,
which was granted a US patent ten years later, did. According its
inventor Mr. G.

The Signal Analysis and Interpretation Laboratory (SAIL)
has attempted construction of a ‘Synthetic Laughter Generator’ – which
could be of use as a responder to their ‘Automatic Sarcasm Recognizer’
previously described.

The Signal Analysis and Interpretation Laboratory (SAIL) at the University of Southern California, US, is one of the few, perhaps the only human-centered information processing lab to have built and tested an ‘Automatic Sarcasm Recognizer’.