In 1997, a nurse clinician in Winnipeg, Canada, published a report in the Journal of Obstetric, Gynecologic and Neonatal Nursing called ‘Does Application of Tea Bags to Sore Nipples While Breastfeeding Provide Effective Relief?’ This is a happy story, concluding that ‘warm water or tea bag compresses are an inexpensive, equally effective treatment’ that ‘can prevent further complications such as severe pain, cracking, bleeding, inadequate milk ejection, and, ultimately, premature weaning.’
Seven years later, an American medical team reported a case of drug abuse via teabags. Their paper, called ‘The Fentanyl Tea Bag’, appeared in the journal Veterinary and Human Toxicology. It describes ‘a 21-year-old woman who steeped a fentanyl patch in a cup of hot water and then drank the mixture. Coma and hypoventilation resulted’.
Another group of teabaggers used maggots. A 2009 issue of Turkiye Parazitoloji Dergisi (the Turkish Parasitology Digest) featured a monograph entitled ‘The Treatment of Suppurative Chronic Wounds with Maggot Debridement Therapy’. It tells how ‘sterile maggots, produced in university laboratories and by private industry, are usually applied to the wound either by using a cage-like dressing or a tea bag-like cage’.
More than thirty years before that, a team of biomedical teabaggers took aim at brown dog ticks. Their 1974 study in the Bulletin of Epizootic Diseases of Africa assessed the ‘teabag method’, using a teabag-like structure filled with maggots for ‘testing acaricide susceptibility of the brown dog tick rhipicephalus sanguineus’.
Unlike the other forms of teabagging, which involve an element of exhibitionism, research teabagging is a quiet endeavour, typically conducted in low-key fashion, in laboratories or hospitals.
Of the bunch, it’s the only one that’s typically accompanied and lubricated by many, many cups of actual, teabag-brewed tea.
Kigaye, M. K., and J. G. Matthysse (1974). ‘Testing Acaricide Susceptibility of the Brown Dog Tick Rhipicephalus sanguineus (Latreille, 1806). II Teabag Method.’ Bulletin of Epizootic Diseases of Africa 22 (3): 279–85.
Mumcuoglu, Kosta Y., and Aysegul Taylan Ozkan (2009). ‘The Treatment of Suppurative Chronic Wounds with Maggot Debridement Therapy.’ Turkiye Parazitoloji Dergisi 33 (4): 307–15.
Fukuoka, Yumiko, Hisashi Kudo, Aiko Hatakeyama, Naomi Takahashi, Kayoko Satoh, Naoko Ohsawa, Mayumi Mutoh, Masahiko Fujii, and Hidetada Sasaki (2009). ‘Four-Finger Grip Bag with Tea to Prevent Smell of Contractured Hands and Axilla in Bedridden Patients.’ Geriatrica and Gerontology International 9 (1): 97–99.
Fermin Barrueto, Mary Ann Howland, Robert S. Hoffman, and Lewis S. Nelson (2004). ‘The Fentanyl Tea Bag.’ Veterinary and Human Toxicology 46 (1): 30–31.
Lavergne, Noelie A. (1997). ‘Does Application of Tea Bags to Sore Nipples While Breastfeeding Provide Effective Relief?’ Journal of Obstetric, Gynecologic and Neonatal Nursing 26 (1): 53–58.
Brennan, Mike, Janet Hoek, and Philip Gendall (1998). ‘The Tea Bag Experiment: More Evidence on Incentives in Mail Surveys.’ International Journal of Market Research 40 (4): 347–52.
In Brief
‘Impaction of an Ingested Table Fork in a Patient with a Surgically Restricted Stomach’
by A. Cassaro and M. Daliana (published in the New York State Journal of Medicine, 1992)
Wascally Wabbit Wrapping
There are few peer-reviewed papers on the subject of designing and testing an improved packaging for large hollow chocolate bunnies. Of these articles, the most bouncily thorough is one called ‘Designing and Testing an Improved Packaging for Large Hollow Chocolate Bunnies’. Though just seven pages long, it contains everything a research report ought to have.
The opening section describes the nature of the problem: ‘To test the properties required for the packaging of hollow chocolate Easter bunnies to resist any hazards in the distribution environment.’ The concluding section suggests that more research is needed.
The experiments are described in clear, spare prose, as are the materials (‘The product for our tests was a hollow milk chocolate figure with the shape of an Easter Bunny’), the testing equipment (‘The drop testing machine had two drop leaves controlled with a foot paddle’), and the procedures (‘Each series of nine bunnies per design was divided into three sets each of three packed bunnies’). At the end comes a list of references, one of which is C. M. Harris’s gently moving benchmark ‘Shock and Vibration Handbook’.
The paper is visually informative, with four charts and seven technical renderings. The eye is drawn to Figure 7, a perspective drawing of a chocolate bunny. The bunny is wearing an apron and holding a carrot, and has no legs. The ears point straight up. The facial expression is enigmatically bland, suggesting both Mona Lisa and a mid-career clerk, while resembling neither.
The bunny-packaging scientists, G. M. Greenway and R. E. Garcia Via of the University of Missouri-Rolla’s package sealing laboratory, list their results and discuss their conclusions. Commendably, they identify the study’s limitations, especially the main one, that ‘availability of materials – especially bunnies – was a constraint during this experiment’.
Although there are few peer-reviewed papers on the subject of designing and testing an improved packaging for large hollow chocolate bunnies, there is a considerable body of published research concerning other problems in the discipline of packaging. Want a good introduction to the chemical physics of plastic bags? P. M. Vilela and a colleague at Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, in Lima, published a corker in the European Journal of Physics in 1999. It involves deformation, spaghetti, Boltzmann’s superposition principle, non-linear least-squares fits to the viscous creep, gentle wriggles, and a warmly satisfying title: ‘Viscoelasticity: Why Plastic Bags Give Way When You Are Halfway Home’.
Greenway, G. W., and R. E. Garcia Via (1977). ‘Designing and Testing an Improved Packaging for Large Hollow Chocolate Bunnies.’ TAPPI Journal 80 (8): 133.
Vilela, P. M., and D .Thompson (1999). ‘Viscoelasticity: Why Plastic Bags Give Way When You Are Halfway Home.’ European Journal of Physics 20 (1): 15–20.
Crisp Sounds
Crispness is associated with crunchiness, but your ears make a difference. That’s the takeaway-and-chew-on-it message of an Oxford University study entitled ‘The Role of Auditory Cues in Modulating the Perceived Crispness and Staleness of Potato Chips’.
The authors, experimental psychologists Massimiliano Zampini and Charles Spence, wax distantly poetical: ‘We investigated whether the perception of the crispness and staleness of potato chips can be affected by modifying the sounds produced during the biting action. Participants in our study bit into potato chips with their front teeth while rating either their crispness or freshness using a computer-based visual analog scale.’
They recruited volunteers who were willing to chew, in a highly regulated way, on Pringles potato crisps. Pringles themselves are, as enthusiasts well know, highly regulated. Each crisp is of nearly identical shape, size, and texture, having been carefully manufactured from reconstituted potato goo.
The volunteers were unaware of the true nature of their encounter – that they would be hearing adulterated crunch sounds. But whatever risks this entailed were small. The experiment, Zampini and Spence take pains to say in their report, ‘was performed in accordance with the ethical standards laid down in the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki. Participants were paid £5 for taking part in the study.’
Each volunteer sat in a soundproofed experimental booth, wearing headphones, facing a microphone, and operating a pair of foot pedals.
The headphones delivered Pringles crunch sounds that, though born in the chewer’s mouth, had been captured by the microphone and electronically cooked. At times, the crunch sounds were delivered to the headphones with exacting, lifelike fidelity. At other times, the sounds were magnified. At still other times, only the high frequencies of the crunch were intensified.
The foot pedals were the means by which a volunteer could register his or her judgements as to (a
) the crispness and (b) the freshness of a particular crisp.
Each crisp’s crispness was judged from a single, headphone-enhanced bite delivered with the front teeth. Zampini and Spence adopted this approach for two reasons. It maximized the uniformity of the participant’s contact with each crisp. And previous research, by others, showed that the sound of the first bite is what counts most for judging crispness.
The results? As the report puts it: ‘The potato chips were perceived as being both crisper and fresher when either the overall sound level was increased, or when just the high frequency sounds (in the range of 2 kilohertz–20 kilohertz) were selectively amplified.’
Zampini and Spence say this gives new insight on an old research finding. In 1958, in the Journal of Applied Psychology, G. L. Brown ‘reported that bread was judged as being fresher when wrapped in cellophane than when wrapped in wax paper’. The sound made by wrappers, they hazard, may have unappreciated influence.
There exists a Dutch study showing that generally you can judge a book by its cover. I mention it here only for contrast, because the Oxford report implies that maybe you can’t judge the crunch of a crisp by the crackle of its wrapper.
In 2008, Zampini and Spence were awarded the Ig Nobel Prize in the field of nutrition for their efforts to electronically modify crisp sounds to seem crisper and fresher.
Zampini, Massimiliano, and Charles Spence (2004). ‘The Role of Auditory Cues in Modulating the Perceived Crispness and Staleness of Potato Chips.’ Journal of Sensory Studies 19 (5): 347–63.
Brown, G. L. (1958). ‘Wrapper Influence on the Perception of Freshness in Bread.’ Journal of Applied Psychology 42: 257–60.
Piters, Ronald A. M. P., and Mia J. W. Stokmans (2000). ‘Genre Categorization and Its Effect on Preference for Fiction Books.’ Empirical Studies of the Arts 18 (2): 159–66.
Enough Already
‘Had enough?’ This simple query drives Brian Wansink of Cornell University, in New York, to conduct experiment after experiment after experiment. Had enough popcorn? Had enough candy? Had enough rum and Coke? Wansink wants to know.
Most of the other experts on ‘Had enough?’ are nutritionists, mothers, or waiters. They serve up their conclusions in a sandwich of nutritionist, maternal, or waiterly intuition. Professor Wansink is an economist. He presents his thoughts atop beds of freshly harvested data.
Wansink methodically chews at the riddle of what makes a trencherman. He proceeds substance by substance.
As if calibrating his equipment, Wansink began with plain, pure water in bottles, publishing a paper in 1996 called ‘Can Package Size Accelerate Usage Volume?’ The answer, he says, is yes.
Five years later, Wansink and a colleague, the evocatively named graduate student Se-Bum Park, published a report in the journal Food Quality and Preference. It describes the experiment they conducted with patrons at a screening of the film Payback, which stars Mel Gibson. These discriminating cineastes munched free popcorn. The researchers noted that ‘moviegoers who had rated the popcorn as tasting relatively unfavorable ate 61% more popcorn if randomly given a large container than a smaller one’.
The next year, 2002, saw publication of ‘How Visibility and Convenience Influence Candy Consumption’ in the journal Appetite. These candy results were as startling as the earlier popcorn findings. People ate more chocolate drops if the candy jar was kept on a desk rather than somewhere less handy or visible.
A study published in 2004 described a series of relatively complex experiments involving jelly beans and M&Ms. This was an attempt to probe how ‘the structure of an assortment (e.g., organization and symmetry or entropy) moderates the effect of actual variety on perceived variety’.
The jelly beans caused problems. The report says merely that ‘ 23 [people] indicated that they did not like jelly beans and were dropped from the study. Five others were deleted from the analysis because they accidentally spilled the jelly beans or emptied the entire tray onto the table and scooped the jelly beans into their pockets.’
Wansink holds the university’s John S. Dyson chair of marketing and applied economics. The chair was endowed by Robert R. Dyson to honour his brother. John S. Dyson created the ‘I ♥ NY’ tourism campaign, which, for more than three decades now, has not stopped serving up television ads, and magazine ads, and other ads, ad nauseum, to drive the phrase ‘I ♥ NY’ through the eyes and ears and into the brains of billions of human beings round the globe.
Wansink ascended the John S. Dyson chair in 2005, after spending eight years at the University of Illinois, where he held several titles, including that of Julian Simon memorial faculty fellow in marketing. That fellowship was endowed to honour the memory of Julian Simon, an economist who himself had an obsession with ‘Had enough?’ Simon’s former colleagues say he was ‘a man who won an international reputation for his buoyant and often controversial views on the limitless potential of human beings to meet and overcome the challenge of declining resources – views that won him the one-word description of “doomslayer”.’
In Wansink’s later experiments, people slurped rum and Cokes from glasses that were tall and slim or short and stout; munched roasted nuts and a pretzel variety mix from party bowls of various sizes; and spooned soup from bottomless bowls – a challenge of rising resources. The bowls were not literally bottomless – rather, they ‘slowly and imperceptibly refilled as their contents were consumed’. A bottomless soup bowl experiment, in which people showed themselves to be nearly insatiable, earned Professor Wansink an Ig Nobel Prize, awarded in 2007, in the field of nutrition.
Wansink has revisited the popcorn question, and more recently, in the BMJ, the booze.
The long and short of bartenders’ pours
Fans can hope that one day he will revisit the soup. In a press release some years ago, Wansink said, ‘We thought it would be interesting to examine personality types based on strongly expressed soup preferences.’ However, he has yet to publish on this topic in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.
Wansink, Brian (1996). ‘Can Package Size Accelerate Usage Volume.’ Journal of Marketing 60: 1–14.
–– (2002). ‘Changing Eating Habits on the Home Front: Lost Lessons from World War II Research.’ Journal of Public Policy & Marketing 21 (1): 90–99.
Kahn, Barbara E., and Brian Wansink, (2004). ‘The Influence of Assortment Structure on Perceived Variety and Consumption Quantities.’ Journal of Consumer Research 30: 519–33.
Wansink, Brian, and Koert van Ittersum (2003). ‘Bottoms Up! The Influence of Elongation on Pouring and Consumption Volume.’ Journal of Consumer Research 30: 455–63.
–– (2005). ‘Shape of Glass and Amount of Alcohol Poured: Comparative Study of Effect of Practice and Concentration.’ BMJ 331: 1512–14.
Wansink, Brian, and Junyong Kim (2005). ‘Bad Popcorn in Big Buckets: Portion Size Can Influence Intake as Much as Taste.’ Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior 37 (5): 242–45.
Wansink, Brian, and Se-Bum Park (2000). ‘Accounting for Taste: Prototypes that Predict Preference.’ Journal of Database Marketing 7: 308–20.
–– (2001). ‘At the Movies: How External Cues and Perceived Taste Impact Consumption Volume.’ Food Quality and Preference 12 (1): 69–74.
Wansink, Brian, James E. Painter, and Jill North (2005). ‘Bottomless Bowls: Why Visual Cues of Portion Size May Influence Intake.’ Obesity Research 13 (1): 93–100.
Painter, James E., Brian Wansink, and Julie B. Hieggelke (2002). ‘How Visibility and Convenience Influence Candy Consumption.’ Appetite 38 (3): 237–38.
Wansink, Brian, and Matthew M. Cheney (2005). ‘Serving Bowls, Serving Size, and Food Consumption: A Randomized Controlled Trial.’ JAMA – Journal of the American Medical Association 293 (14): 1727–28.
Six
Money Can Be Valuable
In Brief
‘How High Can a Dead Cat Bounce?: Metaphor and the Hong Kong Stock Market’
by Geoff P. Smith (published
in Linguistics and Language Teaching, 1995)
Some of what’s in this chapter: Money destruction in your skull • The lure of piracy, for economists • 2127 rounds of rock, paper, scissors per day • A careful look inside Russian underwear • Foucault and footie • The shapely heads of CEOs • Griffiths, slot-machine psychologist • Perfume for the poor • Author, author, author, author, author, author, author, author, author, author • $100,000,000,000,000 • Corporate tiers of a clown
All Torn Up
If you have never watched someone rip up large amounts of cash, you may be unsure as to how the different parts of your brain would respond in the event that you did see someone tearing valuable banknotes into tiny, worthless shreds. A new study may help you predict what would happen.
The study is called ‘How the Brain Responds to the Destruction of Money’. It tells how the brains of twenty Danish persons, all of them adults with no history of psychiatric or neurological disease, responded as they watched videos of somebody destroying lots of Danish money.
If you are not Danish, you might now expect that your brain would respond in rather the same way, were this to involve your own native currency (pounds, euros, dollars, or whatever). The study – performed by Uta Frith and Chris Frith of University College London, together with Joshua Skewes, Torben Lund, and Andreas Roepstorff of Aarhus University, Denmark, and Cristina Becchio of the University of Turin, Italy – makes no specific claims for non-Danish brains or money, however.
Here, in the scientists’ words, is what the volunteers saw: ‘A series of videos in which different actions were performed on actual banknotes with a value of either 100 Kroner (approximately 13 euro/18 US dollar) or 500 Kroner (approximately 67 euro/91 US dollar), or on valueless pieces of paper of the same size ... We contrasted actions that were appropriate to money (folding or looking at valuable notes or valueless paper) and actions that were inappropriate (tearing or cutting notes or paper).’
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