Improbable Research

The October issue  of mini-AIR
just went out. It has brief discussions of the new Ig Nobel Prize winners; surfing and politics; hare, squirrel and schnozz; and a few other things.

New Scientist magazine often has memorable quotations. Here’s one from the May 14, 2005 issue:

Box jellyfish, or cubozoans, are bizarre, highly poisonous predators. "These are fantastic creatures with 24 eyes, four parallel brains and 60 arseholes," says Dan Nilsson, a vision expert from the University of Lund in Sweden.

(Thanks to Sid Rodrigues for bringing this to our attention.)

The new Ig Nobel  Literature Prize co-winners — the Internet Intrepreneurs of Nigeria — have been difficult for us to reach, perhaps because of the magnitude of their celebrity and the consequent overwhelming demand on their time and attention. But now, at last, one of them has sent us a message. We are proud and honored, and will consider doing all in our power to assist her and her son. We will also urge her and her co-winners to travel to Harvard University next year, and take a bow during the 2006 Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony. Here is her complete letter:

X-Originating-IP: [80.179.242.232]
X-Originating-Email: [maryamabacha02@msn.com]
From: "maryam abacha" <maryamabacha02@msn.com>
Subject: Can you please assist me?
Date: Sun, 23 Oct 2005 14:20:51 +0000
To: undisclosed-recipients: ;

Dear Friend,

How are you today and business in your country? I am Mrs.Maryam Abacha Wife to the late military head of state of Nigeria General Sani Abacha.I would respectfully request that you keep the contents of this mail confidential and respect the integrity of the information you come by as a result of this mail.I would like to intimate you with certain informations that I believe would be of interest to you. I know you would be wondering why I am writing you with a request such as this but I only urge you to read on.

Due to a travel embargo and security network placed on my family we cannot travel abroad,and the funds i want to talk to you about is deposited in Europe. My late husband before he died deposited $30.3 million US dollars in a security firm which name is withheld for now,until we open communication and you confirm that you are willing to assist us.I will be gratefull if  you could represent us at the security company and collect the funds. This arrangement is known to my son Mustapha alone.We offer you 15% of the entire funds if you accept our proposal.

Upon your response, if favourable, we shall then provide you with more details and relevant information that will help you get full understanding of the transaction. I will appreciate it if you send us your full names and address, confidential telephone for easier communication.And  consider carefully if you really want to assist a widow and her son.Please respond through my alternate email address: goldenchildtrust01@yahoo.co.uk

Sincerely yours,

Mrs. Maryam Abacha

"Artificial Insemination Produces Killer Whales" is the newest entry in our Intriguingly Misleading Research Headlines competition. This particular headline appears on a June 18, 2004 article on the Smithsonian National Zoological Park’s web site.

David Kessler of MIT informs us of an unplanned experiment with a candy bowl:

MIT Sloan School has lots of candy sitting around on the various desks.  I work in a cube where all the students and administrators come to drop off forms, ask questions, get guidance on a range of B-school miscellany.  On the reception desk for them is a bowl of candy.  It used to brim with a variety of candies but has slowly been whittled down to the one kind of candy that no one seems to like — banana flavored Laffy Taffy.  The bowl was too big for it’s space, so someone took it away and left the Banana Laffy Taffy in a small pile where the bowl was.  No one touched the Banana Laffy Taffy.  Some people even commented that it was so sad how no one liked this candy — and they didn’t take it either.

Today, Brian Pope, one of the students, arranged the Banana Laffy Taffy in 2 neat columns, and over the past hour since I’ve seen at least 4 people take one.  Yup,  a candy that no one has taken for a couple of weeks has suddenly started going like gangbusters because it is set out in orderly rows.

This comes on the heels of other candy bowl research news. An Associated Press report explains:

Scientists studying candy-jar psychology have confirmed what most of us know instinctively: Out of sight is out of mind.

Secretaries who were given Hershey kisses ate more of them when the
jars were clear or on their desks than when the chocolates were in
opaque containers or placed a short distance away….
The study was led by Brian Wansink, a Cornell University food marketing and eating behavior expert….

The robot sheep shearing project at the University of Western Australia may be designed partly to eliminate the need to deal with the problems addressed in the report "An Analysis of the Forces Required to Drag Sheep over Various Surfaces," whose co-authors were awarded the 2003 Ig Nobel Physics Prize.

We received two letters today that appear to be related. One is from a psychology teacher who forwarded this note from a colleague in Daytona Beach, Florida:

My cell phone policy went into effect last week. Whenever a student’s cell rings in class, I answer it.

The other is from a student, also in Daytona Beach:

One of my friends has a teacher who has a clever policy about cell phones. Whenever a student’s telephone rings in class, this teacher answers the student’s phone. This teacher is really proud of his policy. I try to help my friend out by phoning her several times whenever she has that class. Others in the class have friends who help them out the same way. My friend calculates that the teacher spends at least 20% of his teaching time answering telephones and bragging about it to the students. My friend says they are covering about 20% less material in class every week since the policy began, and also having a lot less homework assigned. Cell phones are changing the world.

"Bone-eating snot-flower" is the answer to a question. The question is the Shakespearean "What’s in a name?" The name is Osedax mucofloris, which can be said aloud with a sigh as "O. mucofloris!" and which can be translated as, yes, "bone-eating snot-flower."

Osedax mucofloris is a newly discovered species of sea worm that an October 18 BBC News report describes laconically as "zombie worms" that live on whale carcasses on the sea floor.

The discoverers,  Adrian G. Glover, Björn Källström, Craig R. Smith and Thomas G. Dahlgren, give their somewhat drier version of the story in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

"What are burpless cucumbers?" This apparently simple question is perplexing to many of the people who produce and sell the green, oblong salad items. Todd C Wehner, a professor of horticultural science at North Carolina State University, tried to clarify the matter by conducting an experiment. He fed burpless cucumbers to both burpable and burpless judges, then published his results….

So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian

You don’t need to understand the Dutch language to appreciate last Sunday’s television interviews with Ig Nobel Prize-winner Kees Moeliker and his duck, on Talpa TV.

[In 2003, Moeliker was awarded the Ig Nobel Biology Prize "for documenting the first scientifically recorded case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck."]

This week’s Research Team of the Week is Schurr, Tits and O’Leary.

Schurr, Tits and O’Leary’s  "Universal Duality in Conic Convex Optimization," (Technical Report, June 2004, revised April 2005. Computer Science Department Report CS-TR-4594, University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies Report UMIACS-2004-37.)

(Thanks to Gwen Barnes for too-insistently bringing this to our attention.)

The Glaucoma Hymn is almost beyond beautiful. You can hear it performed by soprano Melanie Greve in a recording hosted by the Association of International Glaucoma Societies,  accompanied by Glaucoma Society bobbing heads. The piece was composed by Erik Grieve. The words are visionary:

Glaucoma, Glaucoma, Glaucoma
Constricting vision slowly
Halted by progress of science
Vision of a world united
Beyond all science knowing

(Thanks to John Hoyland for bringing this to our attention.)

"An Appraisal of the Utility of a Chocolate Teapot" is exactly that, more or less.

(Thanks to John Hoyland for bringing this to our attention.)

Today the news is filled with reports about the new Ig Nobel Literature Prize-winners — the Internet Intrepreneurs of Nigeria. We first heard about this from, appropriately, an anonymous email message that said:

It sounds like the Ig Nobel Prize for Literature has had some immediate results.

Here is a news report from The Guardian (on October 14):

NIGERIA SET TO CRIMINALIZE SPAMMING
Nigeria is considering making spamming a criminal offence for which senders of unsolicited emails could be imprisoned for at least three years. The proposed law identifies use of computers for spamming, fraud, identity theft, child pornography, and terrorism as criminal offences punishable by jail terms and fines….

Here, to give but one of many other reports, is one from the BBC (October 14):

Nigerian e-mail frauds targeted
Nigeria is blamed for most of the e-mail scams

Microsoft and the government of Nigeria have joined forces to crack down on e-mail scams, many of which are known to originate from the African country. In the most common type of fraud, e-mail recipients are asked to pay a fee in return for a much larger sum of money - which they never receive. The new agreement involves training and sharing information. Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) is currently investigating hundreds of suspects….

"Alice’s Adventures Underground" — handwritten and hand-drawn by Lewis Carroll — is online, thanks to the British Library.

(Thanks to Maynard Wharton for bringing this to our attention.)