Barking up the wrong tree

Research the car carefully on the internet and decide exactly what you want.

Determine the colour, the extras, everything. Then, call every dealer within, say, a 20-mile radius.

When they answer, tell them exactly the car that you want. Then inform them that you are calling all the dealers in the area and asking about the same car.

You are going to buy the car at 5pm from the dealership offering you the best deal. You will ring back soon and seek a price — the full price, with nothing at all left to be added on later.

The dealer may object that if he gives you a quote over the phone, the next dealer will just come in £50 lower. You simply tell him that, yes, this might indeed happen.

That is why, you explain, he has to give you the very lowest price he humanly can, so as to avoid anyone underbidding with a price the dealer would have been willing to accept.

When the witching hour arrives, you go to the dealer with the best offer, cheque in hand, and pick up your car. If there is any change in the terms, you go to the second-best showroom, although this shouldn’t be necessary.

What has happened here? You have forced the salesman to provide you, in the form of his lowest price, all the information he has about the real cost of the car. The advantage has moved from the dealer to you.

Nearly 73 percent of all American adults use the Internet on a daily basis, according to a 2009 Pew Internet and American Life Project survey. Half of these adults use the Web to find information via search engines, while 38 percent use it to pass the time. In a recent study, University of Missouri researchers found that readers were better able to understand, remember and emotionally respond to material found through "searching" compared to content found while "surfing."

"If, as these data suggest, the cognitive and emotional impact of online content is greatest when acquired by searching, then Web site sponsors might consider increasing their advertising on pages that tend to be accessed via search engines," said Kevin Wise, assistant professor of strategic communication and co-director of the Psychological Research on Information and Media Effects (PRIME) Lab at the University of Missouri.

In the study, the researchers examined how methods for acquiring news — searching for specific content versus surfing a news Web site — affected readers' emotional responses while reading news stories. They monitored participants' heart rate, skin conductance and facial musculature to gauge their emotional responses to unpleasant news. The researchers found that unpleasant content triggered greater emotional responses when readers sought the information by searching rather than surfing. In future studies, Wise will study the effects of acquiring pleasant content on readers' emotional responses.

"How readers acquire messages online has ramifications for their cognitive and emotional response to those messages," Wise said. "Messages that meet readers' existing informational needs elicit stronger emotional reactions."

The researchers also found that information was better understood and remembered when individuals conducted specific searches for information. In a previous study, Wise tested the effects of searching and surfing on readers' responses to images and found similar results.

Track coaches have long claimed that the best sprinters are born, not made. Now, new research on the biomechanics of sprinting suggests that at least part of elite athletes’ impressive speed comes from the natural shape of their foot and ankle bones.

Using ultrasound imaging, researchers compared the feet of 12 top college sprinters with those of 12 mere mortals. Surprisingly, the athletes had particularly short heels and longer-than-average toes — features that actually put them at a mechanical disadvantage when running.

“What we found is that sprinters actually had less mechanical advantage than the non-sprinter subjects that we tested,” said biomechanics researcher Stephen Piazza of Penn State University, co-author of the study published Friday in the Journal of Experimental Biology. “This was surprising to us because we expected that sprinters needed all the help they could get.”

Piazza and his co-author, kinesiology graduate student Sabrina Lee, launched their study after they happened to measure the Achilles’ tendon of a former NFL wide receiver, and were shocked by how little leverage his tendon provided.

“If you think of your foot as being kind of like a wheelbarrow,” Piazza said, “when you grab the handles of the wheelbarrow and pull up, you’re doing what the Achilles tendon does. The longer those handles are, the easier it is going to be to lift up the load. If you had really short handles, you would have poor mechanical advantage.”

Similarly, having a short “lever arm” on your Achilles tendon makes it harder to pull your foot off the ground — which is why the researchers were surprised to find short heels on a professional sprinter. But further research proved the football player wasn’t an aberration: On average, top sprinters had heels that were 25 percent shorter than their non-athlete counterparts, as well as significantly longer toes.

To understand the paradox, the researchers set up a computer model of a sprinter’s push-off. The simulation revealed that despite providing a mechanical disadvantage, the short lever arm of a sprinter’s heel actually produced more force than the longer lever arm of a non-sprinter.

“It turns out that there’s a trade-off that we think is going on,” Piazza said. “The larger the lever arm of the Achilles tendon, the more the tendon has to travel up when you point your toes. What that means is that the calf muscles have to shorten more rapidly, and muscle that is shortening more rapidly can’t generate much force.”

In other words, sprinters sacrifice the mechanical advantage of a long lever for the benefit of a stronger push-off. Since quick acceleration over a short distance is the key to winning a short race, Piazza says the trade-off makes sense for sprinters. “He has to be able to generate a lot of force, but he also needs that leverage,” he said. “It turns out that by giving up some leverage, you actually gain more in terms of force generation and get a net benefit.”

According to the computer simulation, having long toes also makes sprinters speedier, by extending the time that a runner’s foot makes contact with the ground. “Early in the race, the only way you have to speed up is through interaction with the ground,” Piazza said. “If you want to speed up quickly, you need to have some meaningful interaction with the ground.”

But like short heels, long toes come with a cost. Earlier this year, a group of anthropologists reported that long toes are less energetically economical for long-distance running. Led by evolution researcher Campbell Rolian of the University of Calgary, the group found that modern humans have much shorter toes than their early hominid ancestors, suggesting that the need for endurance probably superseded the need for speed and acceleration in our ancient relatives.

“The two studies are actually nicely complementary, and show that long toes provide more power for propulsion, but that this comes at a cost of greater muscle effort,” Rolian wrote in an e-mail to Wired.com. “So there may be an optimal length at which you can get both a capacity to push off and some muscle economy.”

Hat tip: @geekstats

I enjoyed this story:

Kelly has taken this task one step further. When people drop paper into the water she hides it under a rock at the bottom of the pool. The next time a trainer passes, she goes down to the rock and tears off a piece of paper to give to the trainer. After a fish reward, she goes back down, tears off another piece of paper, gets another fish, and so on. This behaviour is interesting because it shows that Kelly has a sense of the future and delays gratification. She has realised that a big piece of paper gets the same reward as a small piece and so delivers only small pieces to keep the extra food coming. She has, in effect, trained the humans.

Her cunning has not stopped there. One day, when a gull flew into her pool, she grabbed it, waited for the trainers and then gave it to them. It was a large bird and so the trainers gave her lots of fish. This seemed to give Kelly a new idea. The next time she was fed, instead of eating the last fish, she took it to the bottom of the pool and hid it under the rock where she had been hiding the paper. When no trainers were present, she brought the fish to the surface and used it to lure the gulls, which she would catch to get even more fish. After mastering this lucrative strategy, she taught her calf, who taught other calves, and so gull-baiting has become a hot game among the dolphins.

Here is the full article and I thank David Curran for the pointer.

So how would dolphin bimetallism work?  I think we know!

Blue Ice. There are several known cases of houses being struck by frozen airplane-lavatory waste, euphemistically known as “blue ice.” The ice can form when a plane’s lavatory develops an external leak; frozen at high altitude, the waste warms and dislodges as a plane descends. Luckily, there are no known instances of people being struck by blue ice.

Suicide Jumpers. At least one case exists in which a person has been struck and killed by another (falling) person: just this year, a Ukrainian man was crushed and killed in Barcelona by a 45-year-old woman who had thrown herself out of her 8th-story window in an act of apparent suicide.

Pennies. Empire State Building + dropped penny = fatality, or so the myth goes. In reality, there are no recorded instances of a falling penny (or any coin, for that matter) injuring/killing a pedestrian. The popular science show Mythbusters disproved this urban legend based on a penny’s light weight and low terminal velocity (64 mph), going so far as to fire a penny at a co-host’s hand at the correct velocity. It merely left a welt.

Coconuts. They do not, as occasionally claimed, “kill around 150 people worldwide each year” (see the Straight Dope’s thorough debunking of this claim), but coconut-related injuries are reported every year. A report by the ANZ Journal of Surgery states that, in 5 years, 19 people were admitted to the Solomon Islands’ Central Referral Hospital with falling-coconut-related injuries: “16 patients had a coconut fruit fall on them,” and a further “three patients had a coconut palm [i.e. the whole tree] fall on them.”

“The message of our work is really simple,” although not agreeable to hear, Melanson said. “It all comes down to energy balance,” or, as you might have guessed, calories in and calories out. People “are only burning 200 or 300 calories” in a typical 30-minute exercise session, Melanson points out. “You replace that with one bottle of Gatorade.”