Improbable Research

Dr Martin Voracek is a shoes-and-ships-and-sealing-wax sort of specialist. His expertise ranges from romance and jealousy to the “accuracy of volume measurement in human cadaver kidneys”, plus the effects of solar eclipses on suicide, and also politics, intelligence, and much else.

This man of many degrees (DSc, PhD, MSc and MPh) is a research resident in the department of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy at the University of Vienna medical school. His work is known best to, yes, specialists. But once or twice he has come to wider public attention.

His 2002 study in the British Medical Journal, Shapely Centrefolds? Temporal Change in Body Measures: Trend Analysis, written with Maryanne Fisher, of Canada’s York University, is an exercise in statistical voyeurism….

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

The purpose of this investigation was to determine if there is a difference in the delectability and visibility, by human observers, of clothing made from solid orange vs. camouflage orange cloth.

Results: For detectability, 79% found solid orange more detectable that camouflage orange…. It remains to be determined if this finding is true over a wide variety of hunting environments and situations.

So says the report “Detectability and Visibility of Solid Hunter Orange Vs.
Camouflage Hunter Orange To Human Observers” by Kelly Olson and Todd Childs of the Southern California College of Optometry.

(Thanks to investigator Ken Belcher for bringing this to our attention.)

Like most things in life, when the smoking ban comes in force in England on July 1, it will have unintended consequences. So who and what are the unexpected winners and losers? …

More smokers choose to stay at home and have a puff, exposing their children to second-hand fumes, says a report from the International Epidemiological Association.

You’re down the pub, all your mates have nipped out for a cigarette, you don’t smoke but don’t want to sit on your own - what do you do? Join them. For some, standing outside while mates smoke has resulted in them taking up the habit.

Scottish pubs have seen a 10% drop in sales and a 14% drop in custom since the ban. But cigarette sales went up by almost 5% in the six months after the ban, according to figures from the Scottish Grocers Federation.

So says a May 23, 2007 BBC report.

(Thanks to investigator Adrian Smith for bringing this to our attention.)

The May issue of mini-AIR just went out. Topics include: Whether Fish is Foul; Nix on the Double-Dons; the Triumphant Return of Theoharis Theoharis; The Non-Returnable James James; A Pasta Prep Standard; The Russian Ig Book; Orienteer-Trampling Poets; Rhomboid Intramembrane Protease Competition; New Hair Club Member Profusion; Opera — Encore from the Stomach; Boring, Chicken, Girth, Death; and Where/How Toad Egg. (If you would like to have mini-AIR automatically sent to your email box every month, please subscribe to it. It’s free.)

“It is a nice prize, the highest form of recognition you can get in tropical medicine in the Netherlands.”

Medical entomologist Bart Knols sounded excited, and he had good reason. Yesterday, he and his colleague Willem Takken of Wageningen University were awarded the Eijkman Medal 2007 for their combined 20 years of research into insects that transfer tropical infectious diseases, like malaria. According to the press release issued by the Royal [Dutch] Tropical Institute, ‘especially their work on the attraction of the African malaria mosquito to the smell of human feet and Limburger cheese was groundbreaking’.

Less than a year ago, in October 2006, the very same research brought Bart Knols and another colleague, Ruurd de Jong, an international, yet different kind of recognition: the 2006 Ig Nobel biology prize — for showing that the female malaria mosquito Anopheles gambiae is attracted equally to the smell of limburger cheese and to the smell of human feet.

The Eijkman Medal, awarded 45 times since 1927, is named in honour of Christiaan Eijkman, professor of vitamin-studies and recipient of the 1929 Nobel Prize in the field of Medicine and/or Physiology.

Congratulations to the board of the Eijkman Medal Fund, to Willem Takken and to Ig Nobel prize winner Bart Knols.

So I decided to check out what was going on this date 100 years ago. I selected The Washington Times because it was a newspaper name I recognized, even though it is different from the current Washington Times, which was founded in 1982. I had been expecting some weighty discourse on, I don’t know, maybe industrialism or America’s nascent role as a world power. Instead what I got was this: William Howard Taft, the secretary of war who would go on to win the presidency the following year, is “not so large as rumored.”

So writes the author of the Library of Congress Blog.

Mathematics teachers, and art teachers, can use this photograph to teach estimation and calculation skills related to circumference and volume.

If departments really wanted to help would-be graduate students find a good place to earn a Ph.D., they would publish a new set of rankings: on the crotchetiness of each faculty member. So said Timothy Burke, an associate professor of history at Swarthmore College, in a discussion of how departments could be more transparent about the experience of graduate students…

In conversations after the presentation, graduate students who were present praised just about every idea discussed, several saying that they wished they had known more before enrolling in their current programs. But in a sign that the crotchetiness factor is very much alive in graduate programs, several graduate students approached about being quoted in this article offered variations of: “I work with Professor X. Are you crazy?”

So says a January 9, 2007 InsideHigherEd report by Scott Jaschik.

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

An essay by an unnamed person explains how to calculate the value of pi by throwing frozen hot dogs.

(Thanks to investigator Krisme Cosh and several others for bringing this to our attention.)

My name is Ding Ding and I am a PhD candidate in economics at the Department of Economics, Cornell University.

So says Ding Ding, who, should he continue on the path of academic high achievement and one day become a professor, will join the ranks of the professor-professors.

Many of man’s early attempts to conquer the sky ended in tragedy. So did the experiment of the Austrian tailor Franz Reichelt, one of the the last of the birdmen. He combined his urge to fly and his workmanship in a garment to serve as both an overcoat and a parachute. In 1911 he decided to test his invention and jumped from the first observation platform of the Eiffel Tower. His suit failed and the brave flyer plumeted some 60 meters to his death. He expected onlookers would measure the duration of his flight. Instead they measured the depth of his crater.

His fatal drop was documented by a short silent movie and a remarkable photograph in the the April 1912 issue of ‘Popular Mechanics‘, but sadly no measurements were given. Franz Reichelt’s final flight took about five seconds.

(Thanks to investigators Sander Blom and Mels van Zutphen for bringing the movie to my attention.)

When a stranger says he wants to dig up a corpse that might be buried beneath the pews of your church, should you let him? Would it help if he explains that: (a) he recently dug up a corpse on the other side of an ocean; and (b) he’s not certain who that foreign corpse is, but he thinks it might be a relative of the corpse that might be buried in your church; and (c) he’s doing this to bring attention to a man who played an early role in a small, miserable failure four centuries ago?

American historian William M Kelso thinks you should. Kelso’s book, Jamestown - The Buried Truth, tells how (a) he persuaded two British churches to let him poke into their bowels; and (b) he also persuaded the Church of England to, for the first time in its history, give permission for such poking; and (c) the digging did not proceed smoothly; and (d) the church corpses turned out to be, probably, not the ones he was looking for….

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

The Russian edition of the first Ig Nobel Prizes book has just been published. Its ISBN is 5-17-030356-4. The publisher is AST.

Chicken Chicken Chicken Chicken (the academic study), published in the Annals of Improbable Research, vol. 12, no. 5, September-October 2006, led to Chicken Chicken Chicken Chicken (the lecture).

Doug Zongker distilled his research into a five minute presentation, which he presented at the Improbable Research session of the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting this past February. Yoram Bauman, author of the seminal study “Mankiw’s Ten Principles of Economics, Translated,” videorecorded the talk. Dr. Bauman also recorded his own talk, itself five minutes long, at that same session.

Mary Baker has joined the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists. Kim Keeton, who nominated her, says:

Mary received a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1994. Her research interests include distributed systems, networks, mobile systems, security, and digital preservation. Before coming to HP Labs she was on the faculty of the computer science department at Stanford University. Mary has a broad range of interests, including karate and gardening. She is especially proud of her grape propulsion study “Vitis Propulsion: Theory and Practice“.

Mary Baker, Ph.D., LFHCfS
Senior Research Scientist
HP Labs, Palo Alto, California, USA

(Click on the photo to see more detail.)

Kim Keeton has joined the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists. Mary Baker, who nominated her, says:

Kim received a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1999. Her research interests include the design, implementation and analysis of data-intensive computing systems, both in local and distributed environments. In particular, she is interested in self-managing storage systems, the design of highly-available systems, and workload characterization. When she’s not researching those topics, and not sampling new haircare products, Kim sings in the Pacific Mozart Ensemble, a 40-voice choir that has been nominated for a Grammy and has performed at Carnegie Hall in NYC.

Kim Keeton, Ph.D., LFHCfS
Senior Research Scientist
HP Labs, Palo Alto, California, USA

(Click on the photo to see more detail.)