Improbable Research

As an unsupervised young chief trader in Singapore in 1995, Nicholas W. Leeson lost $1.3 billion in frenzied trades in Japanese stock futures and bonds, destroying his employer, the 233-year-old Barings Bank, which had Queen Elizabeth as a customer.Now, Mr. Leeson, having served four years in prison and survived a bout with colon cancer, has managed to turn those money-losing bets into a money-making enterprise — warning bankers of their continuing vulnerability to rogue traders.

The paradox is that he is earning a very good living from a notorious past, getting £5,000 ($9,800) a speech.

So says a December 26, 2006 New York Times report about Nick Leeson. The 1995 Ig Nobel Economics Prize was:

Awarded jointly to Nick Leeson and his superiors at Barings Bank
and to Robert Citron of Orange County, California, for using the
calculus of derivatives to demonstrate that every financial
institution has its limits.

(Thanks to Freakonomics for bringing this to our attention.)

Gauri Nanda — winner of a 2005 Ig Nobel Prize for inventively solving her chronic oversleeping problem — has made good on her promise to help other oversleepers rise and run.

Clocky is the now-famous alarm clock that runs away and hides, repeatedly. The Boston Globe reports, on December 26, 2006, that:

Clocky’s inventor, Gauri Nanda , a 27-year-old entrepreneur who graduated from MIT last year, said she hoped that her small launch last week — only “a couple of thousand” were shipped — marked the start of a big business…. Most of those receiving the first Clockys last week, in time to put them under the Christmas tree, had been on the waiting list for the past year and a half.

Perhaps, just maybe, there are people who are not excited about Ryff’s Six-Factor Model of Well-Being. But for everyone who is excited, there’s news, albeit bad news.

Kristen W. Springer, Robert M. Hauser, and Jeremy Freese are publishing a report called “Bad News Indeed for Ryff’s Six-Factor Model of Well-Being.” It’s in the journal Social Science Research, vol. 35, no. 4, December 2006, pp. 1120–31.

For many scientists, observation is the key skill. An organization called Diaper Free Baby now offers information and training for anyone who wants to develop good observational skills. They say:

Observation is the first step in EC. While observing, there are a few things to look for. One is timing patterns and rhythms. Many babies need to pee.

(Thanks to investigator Ann Denion Hoskins for bringing this to our attention.)

Investigator Hugh Price writes:

Myriad questions present themselves about the two toilet stall studies.

The most obvious: was it a men’s or a women’s lavatory? One would expect that the bathroom behavior of men and women is quite different. Second, neither of the environments selected is at all typical. While an antarctic outhouse might not be as malodorous as a tropical one, the concentration of unpleasant smells might tend to drive users to the outer stalls. Conversely, a public lavatory at the beach might be partially exposed to outside observers.

The time that the user expects to remain may also be a factor. The antarctic facility is more residential, and hence a place where one might seek solitude for reading, whereas this would be much less probable in the California case. [EDITOR'S NOTE, based on an angry note from an entirely different investigator: temperature may contribute opposing effects.]

Finally, I question the measurement technique in both cases. Both methods measure the aggregate utilization, but give only a hazy clue to which stall will be chosen when one or more stalls are occupied.

Clearly this is an area that calls for much more careful research. Perhaps an informal look by Professor Trinkhaus is in order.