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.)