Improbable Research

The Aer-O-Scope™ is a self-navigating, automatic colonoscopy device that begins at the rectum and proceeds, in a backwards fashion, as far (and around bends!) into the colon as you need it to, according to the manufacturer.

It is a product for people who have deep faith in technology.

Again [see mini-AIR, November 2003, section 03], someone has failed to heed the lesson of an Ig Nobel Prize winner, and has suffered for it. The Sydney Morning Herald reports, on April 30, 2006, that:

ROLLING Stones guitarist Keith Richards is recovering in an Auckland hospital after suffering head injuries when he fell out of a coconut tree at a Fiji resort.

Richards did not heed the warning issued by 2001 Ig Nobel Medicine Prize winner Peter Barss. Dr. Barss won the Ig for his impactful medical report “Injuries Due to Falling Coconuts.” Published in the Journal of Trauma (vol. 24, no. 11, 1984, pp. 990-1), the study explained that:

Falling coconuts can cause injury to the head, back, and shoulders. A 4-year review of trauma admissions to the Provincial Hospital, Alotau, Milne Bay Province, Papua New Guinea, revealed that 2.5% of such admissions were due to being struck by falling coconuts. Since mature coconut palms may have a height of 24 up to 35 meters and an unhusked coconut may weigh 1 to 4 kg, blows to the head of a force exceeding 1 metric ton are possible. Four patients with head injuries due to falling coconuts are described. Two required craniotomy. Two others died instantly in the village after being struck by dropping nuts.

Dr. Barss is now based at United Arab Emirates University.

(Thanks to Investigator William J. Maloney for bringing this to our attention.)

How fuzzy a dose of statistics does it take to generate a clear news headline? Publicity-minded statisticians can delight in the results generated by a study published in the May 2007 issue of the American Journal of Public Health.

The study, which is credited to ten (10) authors, has already inspired a powerful HealthDay report headline, on April 27, 2006:

NYC Teens Drank More After 9/11

New research into the effects of Sept. 11, 2001, suggests that alcohol served as a refuge for some New York City teens who were directly exposed to the terrorist attacks…

Nearly 11 percent said they’d been drinking more since 9/11. The students were 1.8 times more likely to report heavier drinking if they’d been directly exposed to the attacks — if they had been in the World Trade Center area at the time, watched them closely on television or had a family member who was involved…

[Co-author Cristiane] Duarte cautioned that the drinking statistics aren’t as reliable as they could be because the researchers didn’t survey the teens before 9/11.

Jim Hanas took many photographs of people taking photographs of the Chrysler Building in New York City.

Parents Who Fight May Harm Children’s Future Emotional Development.

So says the startling headline on a February 10, 2005 press release issued by the Society for Research in Child Development.

(Thanks to Investigator Kristine Danowski for bringing this to our attention.)

There is a new method for assessing the value of prayer. It was developed by practical people who generously share their tricks-of-the-trade. Their latest work appears in an April 26, 2006 press release from the Christian Communication Network:

Clergy in the Nation’s Capital and Across the Country Pray for Lower Gas Prices

Event planned for Thursday, April 27, 2006 from 12:00 Noon to 2:00PM, on Pennsylvania Avenue between North Carolina Avenue and 4th Street SE, and on Pray Live www.praylive.com, 1-888-PRAYLIVE…. People who have seen God show up in their lives as a result of prayer know that God answers prayer.

The same accounting method was applied recently to people who underwent heart surgery. A formal study summed up the what and how:

“Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer (STEP) in cardiac bypass patients: A multicenter randomized trial of uncertainty and certainty of receiving intercessory prayer,” H. Benson, et al., American Heart Journal, vol. 151, no. 4, 2006, pp. 934-42.

(Thanks to Investigator Christina Broyles for bringing this to our attention.)

How does a lad become a scientist? Perhaps the case of Dr. Gerald Schatten, vice chair for research development and professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences and cell biology and physiology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, is typical. Perhaps not. An August 28, 2003 report about him in The Guardian explains that:

By his own admission, Schatten was an atypical child. Growing up a few streets from New York city’s east river in the 1950s, he spent hours of solitary delight poking around the river’s banks, looking for creatures that had become stranded at low tide. Whatever he came across, he would take home and examine. He’d find giant jellyfish and horseshoe crabs. In the basement of his parents’ house, he learned how to extract their sperm and eggs, which he would study down a brass microscope that sat on a butcher’s block his dad brought back from work one night.” Masturbating a horseshoe crab takes a special technique, but it’s worth learning. The sperm are amazing,” he says….

Is our criminals learning? A new study called Mentors and Criminal Achievement tries to find out.

The study is a natural follow-on to the question famously raised by George Bush during his first campaign to become president of the US. On January 11 2000, looking down at a select audience in the city of Florence, South Carolina, where the crime rate is 3.4 times the national average, Bush asked: “Is our children learning?”

For Bush, learning is a lifelong challenge….

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

Dr. Ava Cadell, who is a loveologist, has a certificate from the American College of Sexologists, which has stringent membership requirements.

Investigator Michael Steiner, of the Institute of Clinical Chemistry & Laboratory Medicine at Rostock University, writes:

Consider bringing these two remarkable Analytica Chimica Acta 2006 papers how bad some of my fellow European chemist are doing. They seem to fear that they are being paid either cocaine-contaminated banknotes or faked ones alltogether. The citations are:

“Determination of cocaine contamination on banknotes using tandem mass spectrometry and pattern recognition,” Sarah J. Dixon, et al., Analytica Chimica Acta, vol. 559, no. 1, 10 February 2006, pp. 54-63.

“Development of a fast and non-destructive procedure for characterizing and distinguishing original and fake euro notes,” A. Vila, et al., Analytica Chimica Acta, vol. 559, no. 1,16 February 2006, pp. 257-63.

Question: Recently I read something about “powdered water.” I wonder whether you have information regarding its use on a golf course.
…P. W., CALIFORNIA

Answer: It seems that the National Cash Register Company has been successful in producing powdered water for industrial use. The powder is manufactured by coating tiny particles of water with gelatin. Although dry to the touch, the powder can easily be crushed or dissolved to a liquid state. The producer is adapting the technique to coat bank deposit slips and other forms - so that carbon copies can be made without the use of carbon paper. Science has indeed made some unusual advances in recent years. However, thq practical use of “powdered water” on the golf course
seems to be many years away if it is in the future at all.

This exchange appeared in the July 1963 issue of the USGA Green Section Record.

Investigator Michael Storch alerts us to an upcoming seminar:

SPACE-TIME GEOMETRY, RANDOM MATRICES, AND AIRPLANE BOARDING

We analyse airplane boarding times. We attach to the boarding process a Lorentzian metric defined on the unit square which depends on parameters of the boarding process such as airline boarding policy, distance between rows, number of passengers per row and average aisle length occupied by passenger. … The model describes the asymptotics for an infinite number of passengers while realistic numbers are 100-200 passengers per aisle. … When passengers become a bit thicker there is another transition in which previously good airline policies become bad and vice versa. As it turns out, airline policies are implicitly designed for cardboard thin passengers while actual passengers are on the other side of the phase transition.

The lecturer is Dr. Eitan Bachmat, who is the world’s worst storage systems researcher. It all happens Tuesday, April 25, 2006 at 13:00 at the Department of Computer Science, Ben Gurion University. And there’s a nifty downloadable, er, flier.

“Regional Patterns of Salt Lake Morphology in the Lower Yarra Yarra Drainage System of Western Australia,” by D.A. Boggs, G.S. Boggs, I. Eliot, B. Knott, Journal of Arid Environments, vol. 64, 2006, pp. 97–115.

Author D.A. Boggs resides in Humpty Doo, N.T., Australia.

(Thanks to investigator Tom Gill for bringing this to our attention.)

“Who would not be just a bit curious about the identity of one’s reviewers, whether kind or cruel?” said Gail L. Shivel, a lecturer in English at the University of Miami and associate editor of Menckeniana, in an e-mail interview. She said that many people will soon be “opening up old reviews they have received, especially negative ones, to see if they can find out who wrote them.

How do you penetrate the secret? Details are in an April 21, 2006 Chronicle of Higher Education article called “Microsoft Word’s Hidden Tags Reveal Once-Anonymous Peer Reviewers.”

Yes, yes, yes, you can judge a book by its cover, argue Ronald AMP Piters and Mia JW Stokmans of Tilburg University, in the Netherlands. This is not just an opinion. Piters and Stokmans performed an experiment. Their results showed that “77% of all covers were classified correctly”….

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