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.)