Improbable Research

The July issue of mini-AIR just went out. It features cricket poets, swarming business consultants, and other things.

Get ready for the Second Annual World Naked Gardening Day (WNGD)! People across the globe are encouraged, on Saturday, September 9, 2006 to tend their portion of the world’s garden clothed as nature intended.

So says the official web site for the event.

(Thanks to investigator Bob Frenay for alerting us to the nature of this temperate zone eventuality.)

The Kinsey Institute is seeking volunteers for an apparently abstruse experiment, Jerome Cerny’s Labial Clip Comparison Study. Here are the publicly advertised details:

Clip comparison study

Principle Investigator: Jerome Cerny, PhD

Experimentors: Jenny Finkel, Nicole Prause

Instruments used: labial clip, photoplethysmograph, portapres, pneumotrace, subjective lever, videos (some sexual), questionnaires

Duration of session: 2 hours

Payment: $15 by check approx two weeks later

Prerequisite?: yes, please inquire

An historic meeting, small but memorable, occurred in Harvard Square on July 24, 2006. Helen Fisher — president of The American Nudist Research Library and winner of the 2004 Ig Nobel Literature Prize — met Nobel Laureate William Lipscomb (Nobel Chemistry Prize, 1976) for a cup of coffee.

Fisher had been unable to attend the 2004 Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony because of hurricanes (yes, hurricanes plural) descending on her home in Florida. On that occasion her daughter, Pamela Chestak, came to the ceremony and accepted the prize on behalf of her mother.
The photo shown here documents Fisher’s first visit to Cambridge as an Ig Nobel Prize winner. Lipscomb, who took part in the 2004 ceremony, expressed delight at being able, at long last, to shake hands with the honoree.

Investigator Abigail Tinker writes:

Here is a phrase/acronym that I just learned: DRE. Maybe you are already familiar with this maybe not — either way I think it should come into frequent use.

Let me relate the scene: We are in the conference room talking about a report that we have to submit in exactly one week and that there is about three weeks worth of work to do on it. We are talking about whether to include a price for one item in our financial model. Tom says I think we should at least put $3 per ton in. Fred says okay, fine, but where did that number come from? Tom (who is the most senior person I work with mind you) says oh that was a straight up DRE. When I look quizzical he elaborates what that stands for: Direct Rectal Extraction.

Apparently, while people are watching television rather than walking around, they take fewer steps than they would if they were walking around rather than watching television.

So claims a daring study published yesterday, July 27, 2006, online in the American Journal of Public Health. The report couches things in slightly technical language:

In multivariable analyses, each hour of television viewing on an average day was associated with 144 fewer steps per day and a decreased likelihood of accumulating 10000 steps per day.

A press release issued by the Dana Farber Cancer Institute explains it for laypersons, under the headline “Study suggests TV-watching lowers physical activity.”

(Thanks to investigator Sam Ripley for bringing this to our attention.)

Childbirth can be slow and distressing. Inspired by elephants, a New York City couple designed an electro-mechanical device that accelerates the process. The method is simple: the pregnant woman is strapped on to a circular table; the table is then rotated at high speed….

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

The recipe for a new delicacy — pommes neuf with hint of hay — is revealed in Katharine Sanderson’s interview with Heston Blumenthal (the justly-celebrated chief molecular gastonomical chef), in the May 2005 issue of Chemistry World.

Dennis McClain-Furmanski, a longtime member of the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists, informs us that he and his hair have moved to a new location and have a new title:.

Dennis McClain-Furmanski
Assistant Professor of Psychology
School of Arts and Sciences
Bluefield State College
Bluefield, West Virginia, USA

(Click on the photo to see more detail.)

US patent #7,037,243, granted on May 2, 2006 to Lester J. Clancy of Mansfield, Ohio, is for

An exercise apparatus is provided that simulates the effects of jumping rope, but does not utilize an actual rope. Two handles are provided similar in appearance to jump rope handles. At the end of the handle, where the rope would typically be, a donut-shaped enclosure is provided and mounted to the handle along its symmetrical axis. Inside of each donut-shaped enclosure, a weighted ball that rotates around a circular chamber within the enclosure. When rotated, the weighted balls generate rotational torque to simulate the use of a jump rope.

(Thanks to Mike Kasunic and numerous other investigators for bringing this to our attention.)

Why does some prose flow smoothly, while other prose does not? The answer (or at least the key to this mystery) may lie in Dr. Masaru Emoto’s concept of “Water and how it is influenced by positive and negative words.” The concept is reported in the November 2005 issue of Vibration magazine.

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

“I find earwigs just repugnant,”

confides the author of “The Ultimate Crevice Bug,” who seems shy about confiding her or his name.

How authentic is the Indiana University School of Informatics’ Inauthentic Paper Detector? Is it (as scoffers scoff) an inauthentic detector of paper or (as some detectives detect) an authentic detector of inauthentic paper or papers?

The inventors make a claim that some may find cryptic:

We are trying to detect new, machine written texts that are simply generated not to have any meaning, yet appear to have meaning on the surface.

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

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UPDATE later in the day:

Investigator Tuomas Räsänen writes:

I tried the inauthenthic paper detector by applying it to some example texts found from Project Gutenberg.

The results were staggering: It turns out that Hamilton Wright Mabie, and Thomas Babington Macauley were not human!

The beginning of the first chapter of Mabie’s Books and Culture, as well as the beginning of chapter Hallam’s History from the Critical & Historical Essays were both found fakes.

I wonder if anyone has even suspected before.

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FURTHER UPDATE, still later in the day:

Investigator Arun Giridhar writes:

As a follow-up to your blog post on the Inauthentic Paper Detector, I tried a few further tests on different machine-generated texts:

1. The SciGen-generated paper on Rooter was rated Inauthentic with a 21% chance of being authentic.

2. Alan Sokal’s paper on quantum gravity, itself the reason for a previous Ig Nobel Prize, scored Inauthentic, with a 21% chance on being authentic.

3. Several randomly generated essays from the Postmodernism Essay Generator scored Authentic, with the ratings being 94.7%, 84.8%, 86.6%, 95.4% and 95.8%.

I leave you to draw your own conclusions.

Essential nutrients such as vitamins can act as pheromones to attract the opposite sex — at least in lizards.

Such is the carefully worded conclusion in a July 19, 2006 BBC News report about research by Jose Martin of the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Madrid.

[NOTE: the image at right is from the Museum. Yes, it otherwise has little connection to the substance of the sexiness report.]

(Thanks to investigator Jane Kohner for bringing this to our attention.)

January 1995 was a signal month for the understanding of cheese. Maria N Charalambides and two colleagues, JG Williams and S Chakrabarti, published their master work: A Study of the Influence of Ageing on the Mechanical Properties of Cheddar Cheese. It showed a refined way to do mathematical calculations about cheese….

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