Improbable Research

A supervisor at a motivational coaching business in Provo is accused of waterboarding an employee in front of his sales team to demonstrate that they should work as hard on sales as the employee had worked to breathe.

In a lawsuit filed last month, former Prosper, Inc. salesman Chad Hudgens alleges his managers also allowed the supervisor to draw mustaches on employees’ faces, take away their chairs and beat on their desks with a wooden paddle “because it resulted in increased revenues for the company.” …

[Prosper president] Dave Ellis said the exercise was a dramatization of a story in which a young man asks Socrates to become his teacher. Socrates responds by plunging the student’s head underwater and telling him he will learn once his desire for knowledge is as great as his desire to breathe.

So reports the Salt Lake Tribune (Salt Lake City, Utah) on February 28, 2008. The company explains:

Our mission is to provide our students with the education and hands-on experiences they need to achieve their personal and professional goals. We strive to make the road to personal achievement meaningful, rewarding, and enjoyable.

Epic Meeting

“Modelling of Interaction Between a Spatula and a Human Brain,” Kim V. Hansen, Lars Brix, Christian F. Pedersen, Jens P. Haase and Ole V. Larsen, Medical Image Analysis, vol. 8, 2004, pp. 23–33. (Thanks to Kristine Danowski for bringing this to our attention.) The authors, who are at Aalborg University, Denmark, explain that: The idea is to provide surgeons with a tool which can teach them the correlation between deformation and applied force.

That’s an excerpt from the “Improbable Research Review,” column published in AIR 13:5.

The March issue of mini-AIR just went out. Topics include: How to Drastically Reduce Crime; Dekay, an Emblematic Man; Self and Fruits and Vegetables; Yet Another S-Kitty Question; Side-Scan Steep-Slope Sonographs Poet; Baking by the Dead; Cognitive Head-Itch, Laid-on Sense; etc.

(If you would like to have mini-AIR automatically sent to your email box every month, please subscribe to it. It’s free.)

To keep old people from falling down so much, says Dr Frederick R Carrick, play them songs sung by someone special. But Dr Carrick cautions that this is a musical power distinct from the mundane sort that shatters glass or eardrums or a listener’s complacency.

So rare is this potency that only one singer - 25-year-old French pop star Nolwenn Leroy - is known to possess it.

Dr Carrick conducted three clinical trials to prove it. He registered these experiments with the US National Institutes of Health (documentation is available to the general public at http://clinicaltrials.gov). One is called Fall Prevention in a Geriatric Nursing Home Setting Using the Music of Nolwenn Leroy….

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

Mel in Barcelona, Correction Yadda

I am so sorry. Once again, I must ask you to publish a correction. Surely this sets some record; many people make long series of errors, but almost none of them discuss it in public. So here is the fourth or so in the series of corrections I have been forced to make to the photograph from our archives that shows Mel (the little bearded man who keeps appearing, albeit posthumously, in your letters column) during his brief visit to the city of Barcelona in 1929, My colleagues have furnished convincing evidence that the man indicated in my last letter as being Mel is not Mel but is someone other than Mel. I have indicated on this corrected version what I now believe to be the true location of Mel as best we are able to determine. As I wrote in my previous letters, “Unfortunately he is not facing directly the camera, so the identification cannot be 100 percent.” I hope you can print this corrected corrected corrected corrected corrected photograph.

Ramon Corbut

Senior Archivist

Archives of the Brothers of

Historical Institute

Barcelona, Spain

The biologist known as MissPrism reports having disproved the theory that “You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar”:

The Condimentary Preferences of Drosophila

In a small-scale survey of the dietary preferences of kitchen Drosophila (species unknown), we find, contrary to received wisdom, that you catch significantly more flies with vinegar than with honey. However, no condiment tested was sufficiently attractive or lethal to comprise a promising direction for future pest control strategies. Further analysis of drosophilan gastronomic leanings suggests they may be middle class.

(Thanks to investigator Judy Lai for bringing this to our attention.)

G.G.-Grandma’s Hand, As It Really Was

Here is a corrected version of my great-great grandmother’s hand. Not only is the drawing corrected (one of the fingers was backwards—don’t know how that happened) but more important, so is the information. This was a model 24-C, the kind she usually supplied to scientists and heads of state. The fork was removable in the heads-ofstate version. Thank you for running this corrected version.

A.K. Masterson

Birmingham, UK

That’s an excerpt from the “AIR Vents” column published in AIR 13:5.

“Hiphuggers’ Tingly Thighs,” Malvinder S. Parmar, Canadian Medical Association Journal, vol. 168, no. 1, January 7, 2003, p. 168. (Thanks to Maddalena Feliciello for bringing this to our attention.) The author, who is at Timmins and District Hospital, Timmins, Ontario, explains:

I recently saw 3 mildly obese young women between the ages of 22 and 35, who had worn tight “low-rise” trousers (also called hiphuggers) over the previous 6 to 8 months. All presented with symptoms of tingling or a burning sensation on the lateral aspect of the thigh (bilateral in one case). The results of a physical examination were unremarkable, except for mild local tenderness at the anterior superior iliac spine in 2 patients…. One of the women was concerned about multiple sclerosis and requested MRI but was reassured by my explanation of the origin of her symptoms. In all 3 patients, the symptoms resolved after 4 to 6 weeks of avoiding hiphuggers and wearing loose-fitting dresses.

(That’s an excerpt from the article “Improbable Medical Review,” published in AIR 14:1.)

Arm-Wrestling and the Man (and the Machine)

“Fracture of Humerus During Use of an Arm Wrestling Machine,” R.H. Helm and P. Stuart, British Medical Journal (Clinical research edition), vol. 293, December 20–27, 1986, p. 6562.

That’s an excerpt from the article “Improbable Medical Review,” published in AIR 13:5.

Menstrual Joy

The Curse: A Cultural History of Menstruation, J. Delaney, M. Lupton and E. Toth, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988. This is the book that contains the Menstrual Joy Questionnaire.

That’s an excerpt from the article “Menstrual Joy,” published in AIR 13:5.

Only recently did people learn how much pressure it takes to rouse a sleeping penguin. Gérard Dewasmes and Frédéric Telliez, of l’Université de Picardie Jules Verne in Amiens, lay claim to the discovery.

Dewasmes and Telliez went to the Antarctic, where they tiptoed up to nearly a dozen dozing King penguins. Their study, published in the Journal of Sleep Research, is an eye-opener for anyone who dreams of becoming expert in the fine details of bird arousal.

Very few scientists had even ventured to prod penguins, measuring how much or little pain or noise would induce a rise-and-shine response. Dewasmes and Telliez sought a subtler kind of knowledge, and took a gingerly approach….

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

My feet stink. I have over the past 43 years conducted a series of experiments to establish that this is true, and to delineate the limits within which it is true. I would place a test subject in close proximity to my feet, and observe their consequent behavior. I have done this with more than 4300 test subjects. These include: rats; cats; mice; dormice; ferrets; sheep; bees; ants; gnats; dingos; a llama; pigeons; ducks; geese; cows; aphids; shrews; a salmon. hedgehogs; foxes; ermine; earthworms; and human beings. All test subjects, with certain exceptions that I will detail in a separate letter, displayed aversive behavior. In layman’s terms: they fled.

Would you be interested in publishing a formal account of my experiments if I were to write it up? (I enclose a photograph of the American Civil War Rear Admiral Andrew H. Foote, whose name and—more to the point—whose own lengthy personal discovery of the power of smelly feet I have adopted as a mildly jocund inspiration. The photograph does not show Admiral Foote’s foot, an omission which I am sure I do not need to explain to you.)

Thomas P. D’Arcy, MD

Clive, Cumbria, UK

(That’s an excerpt from the article “Air Vents (Exhalations from our readers),” published in AIR 14:1.)

Science journalists at the just-concluded AAAS annual meeting were notably unimpressed by things that others might consider big news. A colleague tells us what happened at a press conference about the dire state of skipjack and bluefin tuna:

An Italian-born expert pointed out that in the Mediterranean the Mafia - the real Mafia, he said, not some lobby group - had taken control of the trade and were routinely threatening tuna conservation researchers. The startling news that European ichthyologists had been warned they would sleep with the fishes aroused not a flicker on interest. A reporter put his hand up and asked if there was any new science in all this.

Peter Hurd, Seeker of Hockey Players and Depressed Men

Peter Hurd is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Alberta. He is a prolific finger-length researcher. A March 3, 2005 press release from the university says:

Hurd is conducting ongoing research in this area, including a study that involves measuring hockey players’ finger lengths and crossreferencing the results with each player’s penalty minutes.

That’s an excerpt from the article “Finger Celebrities,” published in AIR 13:5.

The web site for the American Cranberry Company contains some hackle-raising punctuation. The frequent use of quotation marks may imply that all is not as it appears. Here is an excerpt:

2. How are cranberries grown? Cranberries are grown in “bogs.” A bog is an area of wet, spongy ground with soil made up of decaying vegetative matter. For cranberries, you also need very sandy, acidic soil. The bogs are traditionally surrounded by “dams” to aid irrigation, flooding and harvesting.

3. How do cranberries grow?

Cranberries grow on “vines” that travel along the ground, called “runners” and with shoots, called “uprights.” The vines get very thick in the bogs and “choke” almost all other plants so that the bogs are almost all cranberry vines. The vines produce a “bud set” where the actual berry is produced.

(Thanks to investigator Karen Hopkin for bringing this to our attention.)