Improbable Research

There is an Improbable Event coming at Erasmus University Rotterdam (the Netherlands): on Tuesday, April 1 (16.00-17.30h), Ig Nobel prize winner and European Bureau Chief of Improbable Research Kees Moeliker will give the 2008 ‘Lof der Zotheid-lecture’ titled ‘Is there life after a dead duck?’. In fluent Dutch, Moeliker will speak about ‘Onwaarschijnlijk Onderzoek en de Ig Nobel prijzen’, highlighting the achievement that won him an Ig Nobel prize and his recent quest to acquire specimens of the rapidly declining pubic louse. As a supporting act, medical ethicist Erwin Kompanje will reveal his discovery, in the 16th century medical literature, of a remarkable but forgotten ‘urological’ device.

Click here for general information.
Location: Woudestein Campus, Zaal B-3, Burg. Oudlaan 50, Rotterdam. Entrance free. Here is a map.

Dawn Parker has joined the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists. She says:

I interviewed for my current highly interdisciplinary position at George Mason on a 95 degree day in April, on which my luxuriant flowing tresses were nothing short of Medusa-like, meeting with the Provost and deans of three colleges as part of the interview process. The university subsequently made me a very attractive offer well tailored to my diverse strengths and activities. I accepted the job with confidence, knowing that if my hair were acceptable to the broader university community, my ideas as a whole were likely to be as well. My research on agent-based models of land-use and land-cover change resides at the ecotone between economics and geography.

Dawn Cassandra Parker, PhD, LFHCfS
Assistant Professor, Department of Computational Social Science, Kransnow Institute for Advanced Study
Affiliate, Departments of Environmental Science and Policy, Geography, and Geoinformation and Earth Systems Science, College of Science
George Mason University
Fairfax, Virginia, USA

Research on the effects of thick versus thin bar glasses on injuries incurred in bar fights has paid off big for Professor Jonathan Shepherd of Cardiff University. The university notes:

Professor Jonathan Shepherd, Professor of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery and Director of the University’s Violence and Society Research Group, has been appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for his services to healthcare and the criminal justice system…. Professor Shepherd conducted the first field research comparing injuries from toughened glasses used in bar and nightclub fights to those of glass which becomes sharp-edged. His work prompted many bars to switch to tougher glass in the late 1990s, leading to a fall in injuries. [His work] was recently recognised with the 2008 Stockholm Prize in Criminology, an international prize recognising outstanding achievement in the field of criminological research and its application.

(Thanks to investigator Betsy Devine for bringing this to our attention.)

David H. North has joined the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists. Carol Lucier, who nominated him, says:

In addition to having luxuriant flowing long hair, David is an analytical chemist for the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, working in the Dartmouth Laboratory in Nova Scotia on the analysis of antibiotic drug residues in fish. The picture shows David at work, surrounded by the millions of dollars worth of equipment he uses. His hair is even more luxuriant and flowing today.

David H North, MS, LFHCfS
Chemist
Canadian Food Inspection Agency
Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, Canada

Siegfried Peer has joined the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists. He says:

I have got luxurious flowing hair in general, but I have luxuriously flowing hair only once or twice a week. I am Professor of Radiology at the Innsbruck Medical University Department of Radiology, where I am the section head of the sections for diagnostic and interventional sonography and general radiology. When I am not scratching at the sound barrier, filling intestines with various types of sticky contrast material or reporting on piles of X-rays, I am also a semiprofessional Tango Argentino dancer and teacher.

Siegfried Peer, MD, LFHCfS
Professor of Radiology
Innsbruck Medical University, Department of Radiology
Innsbruck, Austria

Why would a scientist talk 11 other scientists into eating tadpoles? To answer a scientific mystery, of course; and also because he could. The incident resulted in a 1971 study called On the Comparative Palatability of Some Dry-Season Tadpoles from Costa Rica.

Tadpoles come in a wild variety of patterns and colours. Most blend in with their surroundings. But some have gaudy patterns or bright colours or both. The question was: Why don’t predators wolf down all of these fetchingly packaged snacks? How can they not have gone extinct?

The leading theory said that the eye-catching tadpoles must taste terrible to predators, so yucky as to be spurned. But it was, as they say, “just a theory” - until Richard Wassersug, of the University of California, Berkeley, put it to the test.

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

How much flatulence does a cowboy produce? A brief Spanish-language video shows, measures, and tells. The video is derived from a BBC production, which says:

Which one of our cowboys expelled the most gas after 24 hours? Well, both Laura and Kyle expelled over 3 litres of gas, above average for human gas production.

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

In early 2004, we glanced at Professor Lester’s then-approximately 1500 published studies (see “Way to Go, David Lester,” AIR 10:2). Later, we looked at a few of his several hundred publications from the years 2005 and 2006 (see “Lester’s Latest: 2005 & 2006,” “The Economic Art of Suicide,” “Tips from a Master,” and “A Rivalry is Joined: Lester vs. Voracek,” all in AIR 13:3). Since then, in this series called “Lester’s Latest,” we have been attempting to keep up with at least some of his subsequent work.

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

Martin Schiavenato has joined the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists. He says:

I do pediatric pain research, particularly facial expressions and their role in the communication of pain. This partially explains my inability to form a decent smile; too self-conscious. Also, I have a rather inborn inability to form a decent smile. Alas, I rub elbows (split ends?) with Brian May

Martin Schiavenato, PhD, RN, LFHCfS
Assistant Professor
University of Rochester School of Nursing
Rochester, New York, USA

Solution to Last Month’s Puzzler

Once you have completed the instructions given in the puzzler, it is a simple matter to complete the transformation of Robert Hooke’s drawing of a flea into a working replica of James Watt’s steam engine.

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

It’s shameful when valuable data goes unused, especially when that data was produced at great public expense.

In October of the year 2000, we presented an Ig Nobel Prize to the authors of a study called “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments“. Almost exactly a month later, in November 2000, the United States began an experiment — a very expensive experiment — that has been running now for seven years.

I’ll tell you briefly about the study, and then I’ll tell you about the ongoing experiment.

The study was done by two psychologists, David Dunning and Justin Kruger, at Cornell University [Kruger has since moved to New York University]. They begin their report by telling this story:

In 1995, McArthur Wheeler walked into two Pittsburgh banks and robbed them in broad daylight, with no visible attempt at disguise. He was arrested later that night, less than an hour after videotapes of him taken from surveillance cameras were broadcast on the 11 o’clock news. When police later showed him the surveillance tapes, Mr. Wheeler stared in incredulity. “But I wore the juice,” he mumbled. Apparently, Mr. Wheeler was under the impression that rubbing one’s face with lemon juice rendered it invisible to videotape cameras.

Dunning and Kruger then recount how they tested people on various skills — mostly logic and grammar. They discovered that people who are incompetent simply don’t recognize that they are incompetent.

Dunning and Kruger did their experiment on college students.

The seven-year experiment I mentioned is on a whole different level.
It’s producing data about high-level government officials.

Throughout the upper strata of the U.S. government, thousands of competent executives and managers have been systematically replaced with incompetent people — people who have little or no experience, skill or ability at their jobs. (It has been documented in numerous places. If you’re curious, one good place to look is the web site
talkingpointsmemo.com)

These managers and executives are hard at work, every day, diligently applying their incompetence. It would be a scientific privilege to interview them — to observe them closely under what’s known as “naturalistic conditions”. Direct observation is more accurate than second hand accounts.

Psychologists and anthropologists have only a few months left to gather this mother lode of data. Come January 2009, many of these appointees will exit left, pursued metaphorically by bears.

If these observations go unmade, future social scientists will curse their 2008 predecessors for laying abed while so much incompetence was lying in the fields, waiting for harvest.

The data is there, right now, ripening and rotting. Let’s collect it, and study it, and see what we can learn from it. And let’s put it on display. Otherwise, our descendants will dismiss it as just myth and legend.

[NOTE: This first appeared as part of the Nature podcast on March 20, 2008.]

David Weinberger reviews a popular Copanhagic play about physicists:

We saw Michael Frayn’s Tony-award-winning play, “Copenhagen,” last night. Disappointing.

It’s about the mysterious meeting between Bohr and Heisenberg in 1941 in Newark, NJ. (Nope. In Copenhagen. Just kidding. Haha.) The play goes over various “drafts” of the meeting, trying out possible explanations of why Heisenberg, a loyal German (or is he??), would seek out his former mentor, a half-Jewish Dane living in Nazi-occupied Denmark. Heisenberg was the head of the German effort to create an atomic bomb (or was he??), and Bohr snuck out of Denmark and joined the Manhattan project (or did he?? … well, yes, he did). … But it’s over-written and, worse, depends upon a stupid pun: Y’see, Heisenberg is famous for his Uncertainty Principle, and all of human understanding is also uncertain, so since both use the word “uncertainty,” they’ve got to be the same thing, right? So, let’s make a play about it.

Yech.

Say, I have an idea! Let’s write a play called “Croton” about Pythagoras. It will draw a dramatic parallel (so to speak) between Pythagoras’ theorom about right angles and his own uprightness. “It is all a matter of finding and living the right angle,” he will say. “After all, aren’t we all a hypoteneuse?”

Poets, by tradition, imagine themselves likely to die young. But that’s not a matter of imagination, says Associate Professor James C Kaufman, of California State University at San Bernardino. It’s a simple fact.

Kaufman looked at the lives and deaths of 1,987 deceased writers from four different cultures: American, Chinese, Turkish and eastern European. His 2003 study, The Cost of the Muse: Poets Die Young, paints a mathematically ghoulish picture. Poets drop off earliest, Kaufman explains, but authors in general are not a long-lived bunch….

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

E. Edward Bozoyan received US patent #2929336, issued in March 1960, for a “valve structure.”

Alas for Mr. Bozoyan, search engines now identify him as “Bozo Van”.

As for Bozo (not Mr. Bozoyan), his history appears to be a muddle. To dip into the saga, begin with a report called “The Unusual History of Bozo the Clown - unraveling who did what when in the creation of Bozo.” Here is its beginning:

Most clowns are created and performed by one individual. There are exceptions, of course, such as the Harlequin, a character from the Comedia del Arte. A more contemporary exception is Bozo the Clown, who is owned, copywritten, and trademarked property of Larry Harmon. But although Mr. Harmon has done an admirable job of marketing Bozo the Clown worldwide, the story of Bozo does not begin with him. Instead, it begins at Capitol Records, in 1946….

U.S. patent #6782847 granted August 31, 2004 to David Shemesh and Dan Forman, both based in Israel, for an “automated surveillance monitor of non-humans in real time.” The patent contains a sequence of three drawings—reproduced here—that, by themselves, pretty much explain the inventors’ thinking.

In this technical drawing, two of the sensor-bearing dogs are alarmed by a passing terrorist. Both dogs say “WOOF WOOF WOOF.” Shemesh and Forman write that “FIG. 1B illustrates a situation wherein the amplitude and perhaps also the frequency of the barking of a dog indicates an alarm situation.”

(That’s an excerpt from the article “Plucked from Obscurity: Technology + Animals,” published in AIR 14:1.)