Improbable Research

Here are two projects by investigator Adrian Cheok

1. How to make your pet chicken feel loved even when you are 2000 miles away.

2. How to enjoy quality time with your pet hamster in a virtual reality game

(Thanks to investigators Elaine Chew and Alex Francois for bringing this to our attention.)

Professor C. Marc Breedlove has sent us another letter (click here to read about his first letter). Professor Breedlove measures the lengths of people’s fingers. His two letters refer to the graph at right, of which we originally wrote:

In 2000, his study, Finger-length Ratios and Sexual Orientation, appeared in the journal Nature. It features a handy graph. The reader can see that, on average, gay and straight women have distinctly different finger ratios — and gay and straight men have differing ratios, too.

Professor Breedlove explains that the second sentence is wildly inaccurate and misleading, because it fails to include the word “significant” — and to use that word in the technical sense with which statisticians use it.

So here is a corrected version of that sentence, with boldface type indicating the changes:

In 2000, his study, Finger-length Ratios and Sexual Orientation, appeared in the journal Nature. It features a handy graph. The reader can see that, on average, gay and straight women have distinctly different (to a statistically significant degree, says Professor Breedlove) finger ratios — and gay and straight men have differing (but not to a statistically significant degree, says Professor Breedlove) ratios, too.

***
Here’s the background to this, in case you’re of a mind to read a mildly convoluted history.
It began with a quick mention of Professor Breedlove’s finger-work (147 words of a 460-word column about famous finger-length researchers. This was the second of two columns about finger-length research; click here to read the first column). That column included an unclear, poorly-written sentence (”These distinctions, curiously, are true of the right hand or of the left, but not of both”) for which we apologize. That unclear sentence is not the main thing Professor Breedlove is complaining about.

Professor Breedlove then sent us a longish letter (click here to see a description of that), in which he said:

Apparently you looked at the graph and maybe you thought you saw a difference, but scientists use statistics to determine whether a difference is likely to be due to chance alone. We concluded that the difference you think you see in the graph was indeed likely due to chance alone.

We then wrote about his letter (click here to see that).

Professor Breedlove then sent us this new letter, with the headline “Wrong Again.” The letter says says:

your sloppy disregard for facts seems quite consistent. You got it wrong again in your new twist you AGAIN fail to distinguish between men and women (did your Mom put you in dresses a lot while you were growing up or something?). As I said quite clearly in my email to you, the difference between gay and straight MEN was not significant, as we reported (and contrary to what your original post said). I assume you failed to mention this distinction in your newest posting either because you still fail to notice the difference between men and women (think of the naughty bits), or because you realized your mistake but didn’t really want to fess up that you messed up and so chose to suggest that *I* was inconsistent instead. Likewise, my previous email said quite clearly that I felt sure the difference we actually reported, the one between gay and straight WOMEN, would stand the test of time. But your latest post glosses over that distinction between the sexes, too.

Simply put: BABES is The Bay Area Bug Eating Society.

The annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony radio broadcast happens today — Friday, November 23. This is the specially edited version of the ceremony. In most (but not all) places that have an NPR station, it begins at 3 pm eastern time. To check times — or to listen over the web — see the Science Friday web site listing.

NOTE: If you are in Boston — where WBUR does not carry the second hour of Science Friday — we suggest you listen over the net to WOSU-AM in Columbus, Ohio. Click here for their windows stream, and here for their real stream.

NOTE: The Nov. 23 Boston Globe has a report about the post-Ig party for the ceremony participants.

ALSO NOTE: 2007 Ig Nobel Nutrition Prize winner Brian Wansink (he of the bottomless soup bowl) has just been appointed executive director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion.

Professor C. Marc Breedlove, who measures the lengths of people’s fingers, and who was mentioned in one of our recent Guardian columns, sent us a letter. He says that:

1. We were probably wrong to call him “a giant” in that field.

2. We got the facts of one of his studies wrong: “Apparently you looked at the graph and maybe you thought you saw a difference, but scientists use statistics to determine whether a difference is likely to be due to chance alone. We concluded that the difference you think you see in the graph was indeed likely due to chance alone.” [Note: The graph is reproduced here. Click it to read the entire study.]
3. His conclusions “will stand the test of time.”

4. “This entertaining tidbit of yours is not helping our society move forward.”