Speaker 1: Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
Speaker 1: and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
Speaker 1: I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio and how the tech
Speaker 1: are you? So today we are going to continue and
Speaker 1: conclude our journey through past winners of the IG Nobel
Speaker 1: Prize so far, and a quick reminder on what this
Speaker 1: is all about. Over the last few weeks, I've done
Speaker 1: two other episodes about this, but you know, the Nobel
Speaker 1: Prize is all about celebrating human achievements that generally benefit
Speaker 1: all of humanity in some way. That's the idea behind
Speaker 1: those The ig Nobel Prize launched out of a satirical
Speaker 1: science journal, and they continue on today but as an
Speaker 1: offshoot of a different satirical science journal. To learn all
Speaker 1: about that, just find the first part of this series,
Speaker 1: and they acknowledge projects and people who have achieved something
Speaker 1: perhaps maybe at least on the surface, a little less
Speaker 1: lofty than something that benefits all of humankind. The general
Speaker 1: description is that the ignobl is for something that first
Speaker 1: makes you laugh then makes you think. Some of the
Speaker 1: awards celebrate the absurd, some of them are actually more
Speaker 1: of a way to cast shade at people and projects
Speaker 1: that probably deserve it. Now in the line of Ignobel
Speaker 1: Prize as we are up to the year twenty thirteen,
Speaker 1: and that year there was really only one Ignobel Prize
Speaker 1: that was awarded for a category that relates to tech,
Speaker 1: because they give them out for all sorts of different
Speaker 1: categories and technology doesn't factor into all of them. In fact,
Speaker 1: I'm only talking about a very small number of prize
Speaker 1: winners overall, because lots of awards went out to all
Speaker 1: sorts of wacky and weird scientific endeavors. This year it
Speaker 1: was for the field of safety engineering and the award
Speaker 1: went to Gustano Pizzo and the patent that he received,
Speaker 1: which was for an anti hijacking system for aircraft. This
Speaker 1: was not a new patent. I should add the Ignobel
Speaker 1: Prize doesn't necessarily celebrate something that happened in that year.
Speaker 1: Sometimes someone will uncover, you know, a ridiculous thing from
Speaker 1: years and years ago, and then they'll award the Ignobel
Speaker 1: Prize well after the event happened. But the same thing
Speaker 1: is true about the Nobel Prize. So I think it's
Speaker 1: fine anyway. Bitso's initial filing for this patent dated all
Speaker 1: the way back to November second, nineteen seventy two, and
Speaker 1: remember the prize went out in twenty thirteen. The Patent
Speaker 1: Office actually granted his patent on May twenty first, nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy four. So this wasn't just a patent application. The
Speaker 1: US Patent Office actually approved the patent. Now you have
Speaker 1: to understand why was there a patent for an anti
Speaker 1: hijacking device in the first place. Well, in the late
Speaker 1: nineteen sixties and into the early nineteen seventies and beyond,
Speaker 1: actually there were several instances of planes being hijacked or
Speaker 1: attempts at people hijacking planes. There were several that involved
Speaker 1: people hijacking a plane in order to travel to Cuba,
Speaker 1: with the phrase take this plane to Cuba becoming something
Speaker 1: of a meme back in the day. You'll occasionally hear
Speaker 1: that in comedy sketches. I remember there was a comedy
Speaker 1: sketch where a hijacker is not able to get onto
Speaker 1: a plane, and so it gets on a bus and says,
Speaker 1: take this bus to Cuba. The infamous case of dB
Speaker 1: Cooper happened in nineteen seventy one. Now, if you don't
Speaker 1: know about the dB Cooper case just to do a
Speaker 1: web search on D. B. Cooper to read up a
Speaker 1: one of the more outlandish acts of thievery in US history.
Speaker 1: But let's get back to this invent. So what was
Speaker 1: Gustano's solution toward stopping a hijacker from taking over a plane? Well,
Speaker 1: according to the patent quote, a partition or barrier located
Speaker 1: immediately aft of the pilot's cabin is adapted to be raised,
Speaker 1: dividing the aft section longitudinally into port and starboard areas,
Speaker 1: the floors of which are dropped on command to lower
Speaker 1: the hijacker into a capsule in the belly of the plane.
Speaker 1: The capsule is releasable through opened bombay doors, having attached
Speaker 1: there too a parachute for safely returning the hijacker within
Speaker 1: the capsule to earth end quote. So, imagine that you've
Speaker 1: got X ray glasses on, and you're standing in the
Speaker 1: aisle of the plane, and you're looking toward the cockpit.
Speaker 1: You would see that beneath the floor right in front
Speaker 1: of the cockpit there are first there's a partitioned wall
Speaker 1: that can come straight up out of the floor and
Speaker 1: thus cut the cockpit into left and right halves, or
Speaker 1: the aisle into left and right halves. On that left
Speaker 1: and right half, you would see underneath the floor there'd
Speaker 1: be a couple of capsules. The patents sketch actually showed
Speaker 1: them as nets as opposed to capsules, and the floor
Speaker 1: itself is just a trap door. So his invention was
Speaker 1: a cartoonish trap door built into the body of a plane,
Speaker 1: two trap doors actually, and it would be hijacker would
Speaker 1: presumably fall through the trap door into the net or
Speaker 1: capsule below. The plane would then open up doors below
Speaker 1: the capsule so on the bottom side of the plane
Speaker 1: to eject the hijacker, and a parachute would deploy so
Speaker 1: that authorities would be able to retrieve. Then ne're do
Speaker 1: well once they landed on the ground. The other part
Speaker 1: of the invention that dividing wall that would move into
Speaker 1: place and bisect the area behind the cockpit. That would
Speaker 1: serve both to nudge the hijacker in the right position,
Speaker 1: because you know, this invention only works if the hijacker's
Speaker 1: actually standing on top of the trap door. I'm reminded
Speaker 1: again of comedy sketches where a villain wants to throw
Speaker 1: a switch and open a trap door under someone, only
Speaker 1: they're not standing on the trap door, so the villain
Speaker 1: keeps on like suggesting, why don't you move just a
Speaker 1: little bit more to the right. It feels kind of
Speaker 1: like that. It also would serve as a barrier to
Speaker 1: prevent hijackers from opening the cockpit door right. It almost
Speaker 1: sects like like an obstacle that way, because it would
Speaker 1: come up right up against the door and keep the
Speaker 1: door secure, and thus the hijackers would not be able
Speaker 1: to gain access to the pilots. I don't know why
Speaker 1: companies like Boeing and Airbust didn't go to the trouble
Speaker 1: of building trap doors and bomb bay doors on commercial
Speaker 1: passenger jets. Clearly this was worthy of an Ignobel prize.
Speaker 1: In twenty fourteen, the Ignobel Prize for Art went to
Speaker 1: a project that includes lasers, Which is why I'm mentioning
Speaker 1: it in this episode because, as it turns out, this
Speaker 1: really isn't that much about tech at all, but lasers
Speaker 1: do play a part, and I love lasers, so tech
Speaker 1: was really just a way to facilitate part of this experiment.
Speaker 1: So the winners of the prize were Marina di Tomasso,
Speaker 1: Michelle Sadaro, and Paolo Livrea for their scientific paper titled
Speaker 1: esthetic value of Paintings affects pain thresholds. So the basic
Speaker 1: hypothesis was that your threshold for pain, or maybe your
Speaker 1: perception of pain, depends in part on circumstances that are
Speaker 1: outside of the actual incident that's causing the pain. So
Speaker 1: in other words, if everything around you is pretty nice
Speaker 1: and you're kind of distracted because of how pretty everything is,
Speaker 1: then if you stub your toe, you might not perceive
Speaker 1: it as painful as if you were in an unpleasant
Speaker 1: or scary situation. I'm kind of reminded did of doctors
Speaker 1: who will distract a child before the child gets a
Speaker 1: shot so that the child doesn't really perceive the pains
Speaker 1: as acutely. So that's kind of what the basic hypothesis was, Well,
Speaker 1: how do you test that? How do you test if
Speaker 1: someone feels pain at a different level based upon what
Speaker 1: they're experiencing. So the researchers gather together a group of
Speaker 1: folks and they had these people look at different paintings,
Speaker 1: and each participant was to give their opinion about which
Speaker 1: paintings they thought were beautiful and which ones they thought
Speaker 1: were unpleasant or ugly. So that's the first step, you know,
Speaker 1: and they would the researchers would write down, okay, you know,
Speaker 1: subject A thinks paintings one, five, nine, twelve, sixteen, and
Speaker 1: twenty are all pretty and all the rest are ugly,
Speaker 1: and they would just keep those as two separate groups
Speaker 1: for the second part of the experiment. And the second
Speaker 1: part was they had the participants stare at the paintings
Speaker 1: they found beautiful and then they hit the back of
Speaker 1: their hand with a laser, a laser that was strong
Speaker 1: enough to create a point of pain by heating it up.
Speaker 1: And they did the same thing with the ugly paintings,
Speaker 1: right or the ones that the particular subject found were ugly.
Speaker 1: And at the end they said, so how bad it
Speaker 1: hurt this time? So, yeah, the laser was just strong
Speaker 1: enough to heat that tiny point on the back of
Speaker 1: the hand without actually causing damage. It caused discomfort and
Speaker 1: then pain, but not it wouldn't, you know, actually hurt
Speaker 1: the person. So they asked how bad was the pain
Speaker 1: when you were looking at the ugly paintings and how
Speaker 1: bad were was the pain when you were looking at
Speaker 1: the pretty paintings. And they concluded that quote pain may
Speaker 1: be modulated at cortical level by the esthetic content of
Speaker 1: the distracting stimuli end quote. So again not super tech heavy,
Speaker 1: but it had lasers in it, so I had to
Speaker 1: talk about it. Next up, we need to go to
Speaker 1: twenty sixteen's Egg Nobel Prizes and the prize in chemistry
Speaker 1: that year covers a topic that we've talked about on
Speaker 1: Old Tech Stuff podcasts, and that is Diesel Gate, aka
Speaker 1: the Volkswagen emissions scandal. All right, So, as I'm sure
Speaker 1: many of you know, in lots of places around the world,
Speaker 1: there are laws that restrict the amount of emissions a
Speaker 1: vehicle can make of certain types of emissions, and if
Speaker 1: a vehicle exceeds that limit, then it's not really legal
Speaker 1: to drive that vehicle on the roads or to sell
Speaker 1: that car in those places. So here in the United States,
Speaker 1: one of the emissions the Environmental Protection Agency looks out
Speaker 1: for is nitrogen oxide, and vehicles that have diesel fueled
Speaker 1: engines can release nitrogen oxide. But as long as those
Speaker 1: emissions are under a legal limit, everything's copasetic, at least
Speaker 1: from a legal standpoint. The searchers found something curious when
Speaker 1: they were testing some Volkswagen vehicles that run on diesel.
Speaker 1: In the lab, the vehicles operated under the legal limit
Speaker 1: for nitrogen oxide emissions. Everything's fine, But then in a
Speaker 1: live road test, some researchers found that two Volkswagen vehicles
Speaker 1: running on diesel were actually exceeding the accepted levels of
Speaker 1: nitrogen oxide emissions. A further investigation found that Volkswagen had
Speaker 1: installed software in their diesel powered vehicles, and that software
Speaker 1: would detect when a car was put into emissions testing
Speaker 1: in a lab and would essentially throttle the vehicle's performance
Speaker 1: so that nitrogen oxide emissions would be below normal. But
Speaker 1: if you were outside of a testing environment, when you
Speaker 1: were actually using the car for its intended purpose to
Speaker 1: take you from place to place, it would switch to
Speaker 1: normal operations, and that meant the engine would be generating
Speaker 1: more power, but also you would get more nitrogen oxide emissions. Essentially,
Speaker 1: Volkswagen was cheating on an environmental test and this was
Speaker 1: a huge scandal, and it led to recalls and fines
Speaker 1: and plenty of other costs. And these were not puny
Speaker 1: little fines either. In the United States alone, the estimation
Speaker 1: was around twenty five billion with a b dollars in fines.
Speaker 1: Volkswagen would later claim it cost the company more than
Speaker 1: thirty one billion euro. So clearly this is a case
Speaker 1: of throwing some shade on an Ignobel winner. The prize
Speaker 1: said it went to Volkswagen quote for solving the problem
Speaker 1: of excessive automobile pollution emissions by automatically electro mechanically producing
Speaker 1: fewer emissions whenever the cars are being tested. End quote. Okay,
Speaker 1: we're gonna take a quick break. When we come back,
Speaker 1: we've got some more Ignobel Prize winners to talk about.
Speaker 1: All right, we're back, and we're up to twenty seventeen.
Speaker 1: We actually have a couple of entrees that Merritt mentioned
Speaker 1: on a technology podcast, although the second one is well,
Speaker 1: it's going to be a challenge for me not to
Speaker 1: make some jokes. Remember, Jonathan, this is a serious business. Okay,
Speaker 1: all right, we'll start with the easy one first, and
Speaker 1: this one went to a brain activity study that used
Speaker 1: fMRI analysis to study a version, particularly in the form
Speaker 1: of food disgusted. And as the researchers point out in
Speaker 1: the abstract of their paper, some people are disgusted by cheese,
Speaker 1: and so in their paper, quote, the neural bases of
Speaker 1: disgust for cheese end quote. The researchers describe how they
Speaker 1: found out that, based on fMRI data, a higher percentage
Speaker 1: of people are disgusted by cheese than by other types
Speaker 1: of food, So that's why they chose cheese out of
Speaker 1: everything else. More importantly, they say that those who have
Speaker 1: no desire to eat cheese, or perhaps even an outright
Speaker 1: aversion to eating cheese, they observed more activity in the
Speaker 1: basal ganglia, which I could have sworn was a nightclub
Speaker 1: I once walked past in San Diego. So the researchers
Speaker 1: were studying how the brain reacts when someone feels discussed. Essentially,
Speaker 1: and I will remind y'all that one of the earlier
Speaker 1: Ignobel prizes went to some researchers who showed that equipment
Speaker 1: meant to study brain activity and the statistical analysis that's
Speaker 1: used along with it, which primarily focuses on fMRI machines.
Speaker 1: Those machines are extremely sensitive and the statistical methods are
Speaker 1: extremely it's easy to insert errors, either intentionally or otherwise.
Speaker 1: Talked about this with David Eagleman recently, and they showed
Speaker 1: that by showing that the fMRI study could be done
Speaker 1: to apparently measure brain activity in a dead salmon, which
Speaker 1: is clearly impossible, right, And the reason I bring that
Speaker 1: up is I now, I'm always worried that perhaps any
Speaker 1: study that uses FMRII fails to follow very strict controls.
Speaker 1: There's no reason to suggest that that's the case here, because,
Speaker 1: as David pointed out, it is entirely possible to get strong, valid,
Speaker 1: reliable results with fMRI, but you have to be very careful,
Speaker 1: which is true about all science. But we can often
Speaker 1: just assume that everyone did everything correctly, and then next
Speaker 1: thing you know, you find out that the conclusions you
Speaker 1: have drawn aren't based on anything anyway. The whole study
Speaker 1: was a pretty amusing way to measure disgust, but it
Speaker 1: wouldn't work on me because I love cheese. Still, I
Speaker 1: thought it was interesting. They thought, we need to figure
Speaker 1: out disgust, But we need to figure out how people
Speaker 1: experience disgusted in the brain without introducing something that is
Speaker 1: genuinely upsetting or dangerous. Right. We don't want to cause
Speaker 1: psychological harm by presenting something that's disgusting and disturbing. So
Speaker 1: where do we find an item that can create the
Speaker 1: feeling of disgust without it actually causing harm and cheese
Speaker 1: was what they settled on, and I just think that's great.
Speaker 1: And now for the other twenty seventeen prize, this one
Speaker 1: was awarded in the field of obstetrics, and it went
Speaker 1: to researchers who published a paper titled and I Am
Speaker 1: not making this up Fetal facial expression in response to
Speaker 1: intra vaginal music emission. So, in other words, the study
Speaker 1: looked at how a fetus reacts in the form of
Speaker 1: the fetus's facial expression when the fetus encountered music coming
Speaker 1: from inside the mother's vagina. Holy cats, y'all, Oh many jokes.
Speaker 1: I mean, the music is coming from inside the vagina
Speaker 1: is just one of them. But I will do my
Speaker 1: best to stop myself from reverting to a juvenile sense
Speaker 1: of humor. So the study compared fetal responses to music
Speaker 1: that was played through quote emitters placed on the mother's
Speaker 1: abdomen end quote which I'm guessing is kind of like,
Speaker 1: you know, having a couple of little speakers that are
Speaker 1: attached to whatever the music device is and putting the
Speaker 1: speakers sort of face down on the mother's abdomen and
Speaker 1: then the baby can listen to music that was sort
Speaker 1: of the control group, and the other was applying musical
Speaker 1: stimuli intravationally. Now I only read the abstract of this paper.
Speaker 1: I did not pay to get access to the full paper,
Speaker 1: so I am not exactly sure how they did that.
Speaker 1: I wasn't really brave enough to read the full study,
Speaker 1: if I'm being totally honest. But I imagine that however
Speaker 1: they did it didn't involve John Cusack in a boombox.
Speaker 1: The researchers then used ultrasound and they captured images of
Speaker 1: the fetus, and they looked for facial movements such as
Speaker 1: mouthing and tonguing, and they observed that a fetus that
Speaker 1: was older than sixteen weeks typically did seem to react
Speaker 1: more to the intravaginal music stimulation than that that was
Speaker 1: coming from outside the mother. And you might be thinking,
Speaker 1: why even study this, Well, the researchers actually had a
Speaker 1: couple of good reasons for it. For one, they found
Speaker 1: that most of the fetuses that they tested this with
Speaker 1: reacted to the intravaginal music more than the alternatives, and
Speaker 1: this in turn suggested that the neural pathways associated with
Speaker 1: hearing and motor responses that are connected to hearing form
Speaker 1: earlier than perhaps we previously believed. So it gives us
Speaker 1: more information on the actual development of a fetus in
Speaker 1: the womb, and that by knowing this we could potentially
Speaker 1: develop new methods for things like prenatal hearing screening, among
Speaker 1: other things. So again, on the surface level, the study
Speaker 1: sounds at least a little bit bizarre, but through that
Speaker 1: bizarre study, we learned things that potentially could have a
Speaker 1: significant impact on people in the future. All right up
Speaker 1: to twenty eighteen, we got our second Ignobel Prize awarded
Speaker 1: to researchers who found a medical application for roller coasters. Now,
Speaker 1: if you've listened to the other episodes I've done about
Speaker 1: the prizes, you might remember that way back in twenty ten,
Speaker 1: some researchers looked at how positive forms of stress, you know,
Speaker 1: like thrilling kinds of stress use stress, in other words,
Speaker 1: can help alleviate symptoms of asthma. Well, in twenty eighteen,
Speaker 1: we had a related idea, except this time it was
Speaker 1: the use of roller coasters as part of an effort
Speaker 1: to help patients pass a kidney stone. Y'all, I've had
Speaker 1: kidney stones twe and it was agonizing both times, and
Speaker 1: I can't even imagine being able to sit still long
Speaker 1: enough to ride to the closest amusement park, which is
Speaker 1: about a half hour drive from where I live, and
Speaker 1: then make my way through the park to the closest
Speaker 1: suitable roller coaster to pursue this kind of treatment. But
Speaker 1: then again, when I'm in the throes of agony, perhaps
Speaker 1: I'd consider trying it anyway, because any relief would be
Speaker 1: more than welcome. The researchers, Mark Mitchell and David Wardinger
Speaker 1: published their findings in a paper has a title that
Speaker 1: includes words that I absolutely cannot pronounce, but essentially a
Speaker 1: validation of a renal model for the evaluation of renal
Speaker 1: calculi passage while writing a roller coaster. And it almost
Speaker 1: feels like they were doing the whole thing as a
Speaker 1: gag right from the start with that kind of title,
Speaker 1: But it does get better. So, first off, the researcher
Speaker 1: has created a simulation to stand in for a patient.
Speaker 1: They needed to have some sort of way to measure this,
Speaker 1: and it would not be practical or ethical to seek
Speaker 1: out people who were in the midst of trying to
Speaker 1: pass a kidney stone to stand in and help out
Speaker 1: with this, so they needed something to simulate a patient
Speaker 1: with a kidney stone, and that makes sense to me.
Speaker 1: The simulations were based off actual medical cases of kidney stones,
Speaker 1: so they relied on tomography that was gathered during various
Speaker 1: patients treatment to determine things like the size of kidney
Speaker 1: stones and where in the renal system they were at
Speaker 1: the time of the patient seeking treatment. So the researchers
Speaker 1: would suspend the stones or calculi in other words, quote
Speaker 1: in urine in the model. End quote you. Then they
Speaker 1: would take this model on a roller coaster ride. So
Speaker 1: you had researchers carrying the simulation of a human renal
Speaker 1: system filled with urine and kidney stones, or a simulation
Speaker 1: of a kidney stone onto a roller coaster, and not
Speaker 1: just any roller coaster, but the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad
Speaker 1: roller coaster at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida. YEA,
Speaker 1: all that happens to be one of the few roller
Speaker 1: coasters that my partner will go on because she does
Speaker 1: not like thrill rides and Big Thunder is just at
Speaker 1: her threshold for thrill rides, so I can't wait to
Speaker 1: entertain her with trivia that the ride has also been
Speaker 1: used in a study about kidney stones with a simulated
Speaker 1: model of a renal system filled with p So what
Speaker 1: did the researchers actually find. Well, it all depends on
Speaker 1: where you sit, I guess, because they saw that when
Speaker 1: they took the model on rides and they sat near
Speaker 1: the front of the train, they observed a passage rate
Speaker 1: of four times out of a total of twenty four rides,
Speaker 1: so they rode twenty four times, and four times of
Speaker 1: the ride they saw that the simulated stone had passed
Speaker 1: at least a little bit further down the renal system,
Speaker 1: and the other twenty times it didn't. But when they
Speaker 1: rolled in the back of the roller coaster, they saw
Speaker 1: a passage rate of twenty three times out of thirty
Speaker 1: six attempts. They also saw that the passage of the
Speaker 1: calculi depended a bit on the calosseal location of the
Speaker 1: stone itself. And I'm sure I'm butchering the pronunciation of
Speaker 1: these things. I ran into so many medical terms and
Speaker 1: I just am not familiar with them. Anyway, think of
Speaker 1: the renal system as having an upper, middle, and lower section.
Speaker 1: The stone would pass through the upper section one hundred
Speaker 1: percent of the time. So if that's where they started
Speaker 1: where they put the kidney stone in the upper part
Speaker 1: of the renal system. It would pass out of the
Speaker 1: upper system, possibly just down into the middle or lower section,
Speaker 1: but it did it every single time. The middle section
Speaker 1: it would pass through fifty five point six percent of
Speaker 1: the time, and the lower section of the renal system
Speaker 1: simulate a renal system forty percent of the time. I
Speaker 1: don't know if that means the model peed itself and
Speaker 1: passed the stone while on the ride. I'd rather not know.
Speaker 1: I will say knowing that some scientists carried a model
Speaker 1: filled with urine on Big Thunder Mountain Railroad at least
Speaker 1: sixty times does make me look at the ride a
Speaker 1: little differently. Now, Okay, we're going to take another quick break.
Speaker 1: When we come back, we've got some more Ignobel Prize
Speaker 1: winners to talk about, and hopefully we're done with the
Speaker 1: pee for now. Okay, we're back. So twenty eighteen saw
Speaker 1: another prize winner wasn't just about kidney stones and riding
Speaker 1: roller coasters. The Ignobel Prize for Literature went to a
Speaker 1: research paper that confirms what I think most of us
Speaker 1: probably innately know or least suspect on a subconscious level.
Speaker 1: The paper is titled life is Too Short to RTFM
Speaker 1: how users relate to documentation and excess features in consumer products. So,
Speaker 1: for those innocent summer children among you who do not
Speaker 1: recognize the initialism RTFM, it stands for read the freakin' manual,
Speaker 1: only most of the time folks will use a more
Speaker 1: vulgar F word in that one. So this paper observes
Speaker 1: that with more complex consumer products, people are less likely
Speaker 1: to bother flipping through the pages of a manual before
Speaker 1: trying to suss out how it works. Which, obviously that's
Speaker 1: like counterproductive, right. You've made a product that is more complicated,
Speaker 1: the person is more likely to need instructions, and yet
Speaker 1: they're less likely to actually read them. And the more
Speaker 1: complicated it gets, the less likely people are to read
Speaker 1: the manual. It seems like a paradox, right, So how
Speaker 1: do you get around this and why is it? Well,
Speaker 1: often it's because the more voluminous and convoluted instructions are,
Speaker 1: the more discouraging it is to try and read them.
Speaker 1: And so if instructions were written in a very straightforward way,
Speaker 1: then perhaps people would be less disinclined to read the
Speaker 1: instructions when they get some new, complicated piece of equipment.
Speaker 1: But I'm sure y'all have all had the experience where
Speaker 1: you get something brand new, it's got lots of different
Speaker 1: features and moving parts or whatever. You open up the
Speaker 1: instruction manual and it might be five or six pages
Speaker 1: before you even start getting to instructions. Everything before that
Speaker 1: are things like warnings and lists of parts and all
Speaker 1: that kind of stuff, and you're just like, I just
Speaker 1: want to use my thing. I just want to I
Speaker 1: got this brand new scientific calculator. I want to do
Speaker 1: some cool stuff. And again, while you might argue that
Speaker 1: the study simply confirms something that a lot of people
Speaker 1: know or at least suspect, you could say it also
Speaker 1: sends a message to inventors and to companies. There is
Speaker 1: a challenge in writing good useful documentation. Companies will do
Speaker 1: everything they can to include in the manual all the
Speaker 1: stuff that could possibly go wrong, usually as a way
Speaker 1: to kind of shift accountability from the company to the user,
Speaker 1: you know, like, oh, no, we told you not to
Speaker 1: do that in the manual, so it's not our fault
Speaker 1: that you didn't read it. But for those companies that
Speaker 1: really want to see consumers using their products, that research
Speaker 1: perhaps suggests that there are ways to create manuals that
Speaker 1: are more engaging and less frustrating, and by extension, more
Speaker 1: useful to the end user. And of course I have
Speaker 1: seen this kind of thing. I'm sure you have to
Speaker 1: where you'll buy a new product and it'll come with
Speaker 1: two things, right, It'll come with a full manual that'll
Speaker 1: list everything, and there'll be like a quick start manual
Speaker 1: so that you can just get things set up and
Speaker 1: get things going. And I think that might in part
Speaker 1: be a reaction to this particular tendency in consumers. Now
Speaker 1: we're in the home stretch. So in twenty nineteen, emman
Speaker 1: Fara Baksh received an Ignobel Prize in Engineering for his patent,
Speaker 1: which was awarded in twenty eighteen for an quote infant
Speaker 1: washer and diaper changer apparatus and method end quote. Now,
Speaker 1: if you're curious about this device, allow me to describe
Speaker 1: some of its features as laid out in the patent.
Speaker 1: It has a quote main chamber, a glass window, a seat,
Speaker 1: a leg holder, a safety belt, a diaper removing arm,
Speaker 1: a sprinkler, and a dryer end quote. I also love
Speaker 1: the sentence from the abstract quote the main chamber is
Speaker 1: configured to receive an infant therein end quote. That just
Speaker 1: tickles me. But I'll say this though, the illustrations make
Speaker 1: the device look like a cross between a microwave oven
Speaker 1: and one of those claw machines you find in amusement
Speaker 1: parks in arcades. Still, the patent points out that the
Speaker 1: quote changing diapers is an art that many parents or
Speaker 1: caregivers may find difficult to acquire or perform conveniently end quote.
Speaker 1: And I don't doubt that for a second. If y'all
Speaker 1: are so inclined to read up on this patent, you
Speaker 1: can find it in a patent search. The patent number
Speaker 1: is ten million, thirty four thousand, five hundred eighty two
Speaker 1: dot B two. So yeah, if you look at the picture,
Speaker 1: you're supposed to lay the baby baby on a seat,
Speaker 1: secure the baby to the seat with a belt, and
Speaker 1: then these robotic arms are meant to remove the diaper,
Speaker 1: and then the sprinkler sprays the baby cleat, and the
Speaker 1: dryer tries the baby. But those arms are what just y'all,
Speaker 1: I just can't imagine using those near a baby. It's
Speaker 1: it kind of goes to like tech avery cartoon territory
Speaker 1: for me, all right, just a few more. In twenty
Speaker 1: twenty two, the Ignobel Prizer Engineering went to a team
Speaker 1: of researchers who studied the most efficient way for people
Speaker 1: to use their fingers when turning a knob. So this
Speaker 1: experiment involved thirty two volunteers. They were told to turn
Speaker 1: a series of knobs clockwise, and the knobs ranged in
Speaker 1: size from seven millimeters on the small side to thirteen
Speaker 1: centimeters on the large side. Now that's not that tech
Speaker 1: oriented yet, and in fact, the researchers contextualize their work
Speaker 1: as a way to create good products that are useful
Speaker 1: to society and easy to operate. In other words, make
Speaker 1: sure your knobs are convenient for people to use. But
Speaker 1: I would also propose this sort of research becomes useful
Speaker 1: in fields like robotics, where you might design a general
Speaker 1: purpose robot that is meant to interact with different types
Speaker 1: of control systems that were designed for humans, and learning
Speaker 1: how humans tend to interact with controls can help inform
Speaker 1: roboticists when it comes to creating robots that are meant
Speaker 1: to do similar things. It doesn't mean that the human
Speaker 1: method will always be the best one, but if you're
Speaker 1: trying to design a robot that can interoperate in a
Speaker 1: human environment, you have to first begin by understanding how
Speaker 1: humans move around in that human environment, and that to
Speaker 1: me makes sense, so I think it counts for the
Speaker 1: purposes on this show. Another Ignobel prize, this one for
Speaker 1: safety engineering, went to a Swedish engineer named Magnus Gens.
Speaker 1: Why because years earlier Gens designed a moose crash test dummy.
Speaker 1: And that does sound a little odd on the face
Speaker 1: of it, but then consider this. Moose are very large animals,
Speaker 1: but they have bodies that have varying density, and as
Speaker 1: large and as heavy as they are, they aren't necessarily
Speaker 1: heavy enough to trigger a car's airbag system to deploy
Speaker 1: in the event of a crash. And in some places,
Speaker 1: like say in the Northern US, in Canada, places like Sweden,
Speaker 1: crashes with large animal like moose or elk isn't unheard of,
Speaker 1: and so Jen's invention helped car companies run tests to
Speaker 1: create vehicles that would keep passengers safer in the unfortunate
Speaker 1: event of a collision with a large animal. So again,
Speaker 1: it's one of those things that seems a bit weird
Speaker 1: at first, but it makes sense as you think about
Speaker 1: it more. And in case you're curious, the dummy consisted
Speaker 1: of a metal frame with large rubber plates that were
Speaker 1: slung over it to represent different parts of the moose's body.
Speaker 1: Now this brings us up to twenty twenty three. So
Speaker 1: this year we got a couple of awards that relate
Speaker 1: to tech stuff, not the podcast, but you know tech
Speaker 1: in general. For example, the award for Mechanical Engineering went
Speaker 1: to a group of researchers who purely by chance, started
Speaker 1: to work with dead spiders. So they saw that when
Speaker 1: spy dye, their little legs curl inward, and that's because
Speaker 1: they have a flexer muscle that contracts the legs. But
Speaker 1: in order to extend the legs, spiders actually use hydraulic pressure.
Speaker 1: So when they die, there's no hydraulic pressure and the
Speaker 1: flexer muscles pull in and so all the legs curl in.
Speaker 1: And that means that the relaxed state for the legs
Speaker 1: is a gripping motion. Eureka, they said, we could use
Speaker 1: dead spiders to grip stuff, or rather, they could create
Speaker 1: a gripping mechanism that they could base off the mechanics
Speaker 1: of a spider's legs and they called it a necrobotic approach.
Speaker 1: And yeah, I can imagine some use cases for a
Speaker 1: mechanism that remains in grip mode until activated to release something, right,
Speaker 1: I can think of some good uses for a gripper
Speaker 1: that its natural state is gripping. So that's pretty cool
Speaker 1: and all because of dead spiders. Then there were a
Speaker 1: pair of Japanese researchers who are looking into how applying
Speaker 1: electrical stimulation to the tongue can change our perception of taste.
Speaker 1: They wrote a paper that was titled Augmented Gestation using Electricity.
Speaker 1: In the paper, they say that quote, we change and
Speaker 1: amplify the taste of soup by stimulating the tongue electrically.
Speaker 1: Humans can feel electric taste at the moment of electrical
Speaker 1: tongue stimulation. Electric taste includes metal taste, saltiness, sourness, and bitterness.
Speaker 1: They claim that through this stimulation they can amplify certain
Speaker 1: tastes and totally alter others. Whether this means you're gonna
Speaker 1: need to plug in your chopsticks or your straws in
Speaker 1: order to charge them before you eat and drink, I
Speaker 1: can't say. And lastly, doctor Sung Min Park received the
Speaker 1: Ignobel Prize for Public Health in twenty twenty three I
Speaker 1: for inventing the Stanford toilet. Now I should add that
Speaker 1: Park was just one of several people who worked on
Speaker 1: this project. Doctor Sanjeev Gambier, doctor David Wan, and doctor
Speaker 1: Brian Lee also worked on it. So what's so special
Speaker 1: about this toilet? Well, as the ig Nobel Prize committee
Speaker 1: put it, the Stanford toilet is quote a device that
Speaker 1: uses a variety of technologies including a uranalysis dipstick test strip,
Speaker 1: a computer vision system for defecation analysis, an anal print
Speaker 1: sensor paired with an identification camera, and a telecommunications link
Speaker 1: to monitor and quickly analyze the substances that humans excrete
Speaker 1: end quote. So it's a toilet that can perform tests
Speaker 1: on the stuff what you put in the toilet. In
Speaker 1: other words, Now, if you've ever watched Scrubs, the musical
Speaker 1: episode in particular, do you know that everything comes down
Speaker 1: to pooh. It's not totally accurate, but analyzing the stuff
Speaker 1: we excreet can tell doctors a lot about what's going
Speaker 1: on inside us and helped narrow down parameters before anyone
Speaker 1: has to do some sort of like invasive exploratory surgery,
Speaker 1: So this toilet can check for disease markers associated with
Speaker 1: everything from certain types of cancer to irritable bowel syndrome
Speaker 1: to kidney failure. What's more, the toilet itself is a
Speaker 1: perfectly ordinary toilet. The team just found ways to incorporate
Speaker 1: or invent various tools that could then be fitted inside
Speaker 1: a standard toilet and thus perform these tests. So you
Speaker 1: don't even have to build an entirely new toilet to
Speaker 1: do this. You can just incorporate this technology in existing ones.
Speaker 1: And the telecommunications link means the toilet can send results
Speaker 1: to a secure cloud based system so that doctors can
Speaker 1: access it and then start drawing conclusions. So doctor Park
Speaker 1: attended the Ignobel Prize Sarah Money. Often the researchers who
Speaker 1: win these prizes do attend, whether in person or virtually.
Speaker 1: I assume that doctor Park was flush with excitement. For
Speaker 1: more potty humor, you should probably check out the Old
Speaker 1: Tech Stuff episode I did about toilets stuff you should
Speaker 1: knows Josh Clark was my co host for that one.
Speaker 1: So if you want to hear Josh and myself, do
Speaker 1: you want to hear us like make terrible toilet jokes.
Speaker 1: That's that's the place to go. And that gets us
Speaker 1: up to date with the Ignobel Prize winners whose work
Speaker 1: relied at least in part on technology. There are plenty
Speaker 1: of other winners who did really weird stuff, but since
Speaker 1: their work wasn't really related to tech, not even like tangentially,
Speaker 1: I skipped them. But I do recommend checking out the
Speaker 1: list of winners. Sometime occasionally it feels like someone was
Speaker 1: asked a question by a three year old and then
Speaker 1: they decided to do a whole scientific study on the thing,
Speaker 1: you know, like do people have the same number of
Speaker 1: nosehirs in each nostril? Like huh, I don't know. Let's
Speaker 1: get a whole bunch of people together and count nosehares
Speaker 1: and figure that out. And yes, one of the Ignobel
Speaker 1: Prizes did go to a study that looked into that.
Speaker 1: All right, that's it. Thank you for joining me on
Speaker 1: this three part journey through the Ignobel Prize winners that
Speaker 1: relate to technology. It was fun to do this. I
Speaker 1: like looking at weird scientific studies that perhaps on the
Speaker 1: surface seem completely ludicrous, but upon further reflection, you think, well,
Speaker 1: not completely just a little kind of like me. No,
Speaker 1: I know, I'm totally ludicrous. It's fine. I hope you
Speaker 1: are all well, and I will talk to you again
Speaker 1: really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more
Speaker 1: podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
Speaker 1: wherever you listen to your favorite shows.