Improbable Research

20% of the church-going female participants struggle with looking at pornography on an ongoing basis.

So says an August 7, 2006 press release from ChristiaNet.com, which describes itself as “the world’s most visited Christian website.” Boasting the headline “ChristiaNet Poll Finds That Evangelicals Are Addicted to Porn,” the press release discusses vice-grip clutches.

Professor-professors are professors whose first and last names are identical. Here are some of the professor-professors who are currently making a name for themselves….

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

Researchers who study rat behavior sometimes come to love their furry colleagues. This photograph shows Philip Zimbardo with one of his rats in the 1950s. Zimbardo went on to world renown. His “Stanford Prison Experiment” is one of the great achievements in the field of psychology. Zimabardo also won the 2003 Ig Nobel Psychology Prize for the discerning report “Politicians’ Uniquely Simple Personalities.”

We would enjoy receiving good quality photographs of other noted researchers with their favorite rats.

An eminent mathematics professor writes:

The following is true. Only the arithmetic has been changed.

I don’t deal with soccer moms. I teach math in college. I get to deal with algebra moms.

“Look at all the work she did. Why didn’t you give her any points!” This was not meant as a question.

“It’s wrong,” I said. “She did a lot of work but it’s wrong and it has nothing to do with the question.”

“Look at all the work she did!” I obediently stared at the page the woman’s hand slapped. “What about this?” she gloated.

I looked at the line scrawled sideways on the page near the right edge. “6 - 4 = 2,” I read. “Yes, that’s right.”

I paused. “However,” I continued. “If you read the problem, you’ll see there is no six and no four in it — and the problem doesn’t require any subtraction.”

I stared in the woman’s eyes and felt defeated. We were only on the first page of that final exam.

Before I continue this story, I want to ask you, the reader, a question. “Who is missing from the above?”

Let me summarize the phone call that started it all.

The woman’s daughter had failed the course. But, said the mother, the daughter should have gotten a B. It was obvious, she said, that I hadn’t given all the partial credit on the final exam that I was obligated to give.

“I’m here all week,” I replied. “I can meet with your daughter any time she wants to go over the final exam.”

“My daughter works. She can’t take off from work. Are you going to pay her salary if she takes off?”

“I can stay late and meet her after work,” I replied.

“My daughter has a very busy social life. You don’t really expect her to come in after work.”

Believe it or not, I hadn’t see this coming. I gave the woman my office hours and told her to have her daughter drop by whenever it was convenient.

Ps: I assume you want to know if I changed the grade. The answer is no. The woman is going over my head to see the chair of the department. With any luck, I’ll be fired. Then I can get a job coaching soccer.

“This study has tremendous implications,” said Robert H. DuRant, professor and vice chair of pediatrics at Wake Forest University School of Medicine and an author of the study.

So says an April 2001 press release reported by many press outlets, some giving it the headline “Watching Wrestling Positively Associated with Date Fighting.”

According to the press release, that study was “presented at the Pediatric Academic
Societies Meeting.” To our knowledge, it has not yet been formally published.

Train a fish to play soccer or jump through hoops? Dean and Kyle Pomerleau suggest how to do it, and they’ve got videos.

(Note: Others have tried — without much success — to link fish and soccer medically.)

Paris Hilton’s facial expression doesn’t change, according to pictorial evidence amassed by some fairly anonymous researcher.

On Friday (August 25, 2006) watch the webcast of the mini-opera “Atom and Eve” live from the Alpbach Technology Forum in Alpbach, Austria. To see the webcast, click on one of these links:
in German
in English

It begins at 7:00 pm, Austria time (6:00 pm in London; 1:00 pm in New York; 10 am in Los Angeles; other times in other places, of course).

The performance stars Nobel Laureate Frank Wilczek (in his operatic singing debut!) as Atom, the little oxygen atom, and Diane Shooman as Eve, the lovely scientist who falls in love with him.

The mini-opera premiered at the 2003 Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony. It has a new ending, written specially for tonight’s performance.

The mini-opera will be part of a on-hour show hosted by Improbable Research editor Marc Abrahams, and also starring Ig Nobel Prize winner Karl Schwärzler (who shared his prize with the tiny nation of Liechtenstein, for making it possible to rent the entire country for weddings, bar mitzvahs, and corporate parties).

The performance, in turn, is part of the 3-day-long Alpbach Technology Forum.

Click here to see a downloadable, printable booklet of the libretto in English, German and Chinese.

Alexander Tse-Yan Lee - or, as he generally identifies himself, Alexander Tse-Yan Lee, B H Sci; Dip Prof Counsel; MAIPC; Maca - has been in the news lately, albeit tangentially. The internet has been a-twitter with fleeting mentions of Dr. Lee’s study called Hair Soy Sauce: A Revolting Alternative to the Conventional. Published in the Internet Journal of Toxicology, it is filled with grim delights….

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

Consider the following statement, which appears in a June 2, 2006 BBC report:

“As psychologist Ilona Boniwell of Oxford Brookes University points out in her article, the formula fails to take account of contentment.”

Why is the statement remarkable? Because it can be applied to nearly every formula, mathematical or otherwise.

(Thanks to investigator Scott Langill for bringing the report to our attention.)

I would like to adduce the late H.C. Brown as a shining example. Who, during the 1970s and 80s, did not groan on seeing yet another paper from Professor Brown? Variation after variation on his boron reagents poured forth, each with slightly different characteristics and reactivity, later superseded by other variations in the endless series. And the thing is, there are a number of real advances in there - the man didn’t get the Nobel for nothing. But there’s an awful lot of work that has, to put it kindly, not stood the test of time. Not everything he and his group did was worth being published.

So writes chemist Derek Lowe.

Jon Daniel Davey has joined the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists. He says:

Historians can spend eons wrestling what’s called “he largest permanent archive of apartment wrestling images from the 70’s and 80’s.”

(Thanks to investigators Susan O’Hanlon, Lani Durkins and Traci Chaplin-Ellis for bringing this to our attention.)

Investigator John Splettstoesser discusses a research question posed (in “The Friendship Letter,” No. 50, 2006) by his friend Michael Cooney:

Observations of groups of horses standing freely in a field have led to an intriguing question about their behavior in fly season, when flies attack them with vigor.

Quite often horses stand side by side but head to tail, so each horse can brush flies away from the other horse’s face with its tail. Whether they stand this way deliberately and for that reason is only speculation, but on long-term scrutiny (normally done by graduate students), the question to be looked at is whether they switch their tails at random, or whether the horse is reacting only when the adjacent horse is emitting some kind of signal to inform the other horse that “flies are about my face, please switch your tail.”

It is also possible that a horse switches its tail when a fly is bothering its own face, although the tail is on the wrong end of the horse to be effective in that case. A horse might switch its tail as a result of flies bothering its posterior, which has some merit, although irrelevant in a case of mutual switching for its neighbor.

It would seem that the position of side by side and head to tail has merit in the fly situation, but is it also valid when it is colder and flies are not a problem? Observation of horses in winter conditions also shows the same configuration, however, so the matter of mutual assistance between horses does not seem to apply for the sake of flies (or other insects). Because an observer must be concentrating on only one end of the horse, the field study requires two graduate students, one for each end of the horse, although it has been noted since historical times that there often seem to be more rear ends of horses than there are horses.

Horses that have their tails wrapped up in a ‘bun’, such as draft horses groomed for display, are at an extreme disadvantage in the case of insect pests, as one imagine, and have little alternative but to hope for windy days.

Nothing could be better for a prostate on a hot summer day than a nice piece of cold watermelon.

So say Stephen Reucroft and John Swain in a July 13, 2000 Boston Globe report. The report does not specify a best route for transporting the watermelon to the prostate.