Improbable Research

Evann Souza has joined the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists. She says:

In May 2007 I obtained my Masters of Science in Conservation Biology and Environmental Sciences from the University of Hawaii at Hilo. I currently work for the USDA-ARS, doing agricultural insect research primarily with fruit flies. I have attached a picture of myself in Costa Rica where I took a field studies class

Evann Souza, MS, LFHCfS
Tropical Plant Pests Research
Biological Science Technician (Insects)
USDA Agricultural Research Service
Hilo, Hawaii, USA, USA

Can anyone help me identify the metal used in the nails used to make the ladder used by the bearded gentleman in the middle of this photograph? I have been puzzling at this for a long time now, and decided it’s time to ask for help.

Tommy (“Thomas”)

Tompkins Metallurgist,

retired Missoula,

Missouri, USA

(That’s an excerpt from the article “Exhalations from our readers,” published in AIR 14:2.)

“The Emotional Force of Swearwords and Taboo Words in the Speech of Multilinguals,” J.M. Dewaele, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, vol. 25, nos. 2–3, 2004, pp. 204–22 (http://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/62). (Thanks to Cathy Harris-Caldwell for bringing this to our attention.)

This paper investigates the perception of emotional force of swearwords and taboo words (S-T words) among 1039 multilinguals…. Participants who learned their language(s) in a naturalistic or partly naturalistic context gave higher ratings on emotional force of S-T words in that language than instructed language learners.

(That’s an excerpt from the article “How to Write 85,000 Books,” by Chris McManus, published in AIR 14:2.)

Tim Marzullo has joined the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists. He says:

The lovely lady next to me [in the photo] is my girlfriend, a vet student at Michigan State.

Tim Marzullo, LFHCfS
Graduate student in neural engineering
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA

Here are a few of the more than 85,000 (or perhaps more than 200,000) books authored by Professor Philip M. Parker and his book-writing machine.

•The Official Patient’s Sourcebook on SPASMODIC DYSPHONIA •The Official Patient’s Sourcebook on DIARRHEA •FLATULENCE: A Bibliography, Medical Dictionary, and Annotated Research Guide to Internet References HALITOSIS: A Bibliography, Medical Dictionary, and Annotated Research Guide to Internet References

(That’s an excerpt from the article “May We Recommend: Parker Titles,” Published in AIR 14:2.)

Megan McCullen has joined the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists. She says:

I am doing my dissertation research on the archaeology and ethnohistory of migration and community identity. On archaeological digs, and in daily life, I’m known for wearing bandanas to keep my luxuriant flowing hair out of my eyes. I hope to follow in the footsteps of the great anthropologist and recent LFHCfS inductee Margaret Mead.

Megan M. McCullen, LFHCfS
Doctoral Candidate in Anthropology
Michigan State University
East Lansing, Michigan, USA, USA

“Reputation and the Legibility of Doctors’ Handwriting in Situ,” G.A. Cheeseman and N. Boon, Scottish Medical Journal, vol. 46, no. 3, June 2001, pp 79–80. The authors, at the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh, report:

Our study evaluates if doctors deserve their reputation and investigates how legibility is affected by the time taken to write. Sets of in-patient hospital notes were selected at random. The first written entry by a doctor and a nurse in the current admission were analysed. In addition to this, 10 doctors and 10 nurses, unaware of the true nature of the study, wrote out lists of words and the time taken to do the task was recorded. The doctors’ handwriting was significantly less legible and they wrote significantly quicker. However a small minority of the doctors was responsible for the majority of illegible words written by that group.

(That’s an excerpt from the article “Hard Looks at Doctors’ Handwriting,” published in AIR 14:2.)

Until 1997, lost luggage just sat there, ignored, while scholars focused on other subjects. Then Klaus R Scherer and Grazia Ceschi of the University of Geneva went to an airport and took a hard look at the emotions engendered by luggage loss. They used hidden cameras, microphones and survey forms to record people’s reactions to learning that their luggage was lost.Their report, Lost Luggage - A Field Study of Emotion: Antecedent Appraisal, published in the journal Motivation and Emotion, concerns 110 luggage-deprived passengers. It looks at several questions.

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

Is it, in some cases, impossible to say what’s impossible? A related question is: Is the unpublishable unpublishable. The latter question is explored, or at least poked at, by the web site Publishing the Unpublishable.

(Thanks to Stephen Direle for bringing this to our attention.)

“Stylizing Rigor; or, Why Mathematicians Write So Well,” Alex Csiszar, Configurations, vol. 11, no. 2, 2003, pp. 239–68. (http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/configurations/v011/11.2csiszar.html). The author explains that:

Before bothering about whether a mathematician is telling the truth, an audience needs to judge whether it is a truth worth listening to, and indeed, what worth is in the telling at all. Most mathematicians work with ideas that have no point of reference, not even via potential technological application, in most people’s lives. And the claims that mathematicians make are usually not intelligible to anyone but the expert in a particular subfield of mathematics…

(That’s an excerpt from the article “Writing Research Review (A breezy look at research on writing and reading),” published in AIR 14:2.)

Is it always wise to disclose good news? We find that the worst sender with good news has the most incentive to disclose it, so reporting good news can paradoxically make the sender look bad. If the good news is attainable by sufficiently mediocre types, or if the sender is already expected to be of a relatively high type, withholding good news is an equilibrium…. [Our] predictions are tested by examining when economics faculty at different institutions use titles such as “Dr” and “Professor” in voicemail greetings and course syllabi.

So says the study “False Modesty: When Disclosing Good News Looks Bad,” Rick Harbaugh and Dr. Theodore To, 2007. The authors are respectively at Indiana University and at the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

(Thanks to investigator G. Jules Reynolds for bringing this to our attention.)

The April issue of mini-AIR just went out. Topics include: Kluge’s Masterpiece; Great Research Kluges, Journals for Your Life Cycle; Why Bedouin Robes Are Not Gray, Perhaps; Peat-Bog Man’s Intestines Competition; Music Response in a Mental Asylum; etc.

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

Doctors have to suffer jokes about their supposedly horrendous, illegible handwriting. But several studies bolster their reputation for scratchy scribbling.There is illegible handwriting in Australia. We know this from a 1976 study in the Medical Journal of Australia, which tells how the handwriting of “a large number of” doctors and non-doctors was tested and compared. The handwriting was graded, and four different statistical tests were performed on the results. The study’s author, H Goldsmith, reports that “in all of these tests the doctors’ handwriting came out significantly worse. Thus the only conclusion which could be established from these results was that doctors’ handwriting is indeed less legible than others.”

On the other hand, so to speak, there may be moderately legible handwriting in some parts of America….

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

Saving for retirement can be an arduous task. The galactic fountain model predicts that energetic stellar winds and supernovae in OB associations produce superbubbles containing hot gas that breaks out of the galactic disk, cools radiatively as it rises upward, and recombines and returns to the disk ballistically. Time travel has occurred when the separation between the time of departure and the time of arrival does not equal the duration of the journey. Open book management theories include teaching employees the rules of the game, giving them the information needed to play the game, and making sure that they share in the risks and the rewards.

(That’s an excerpt from the article “Writing Research Review,” by Eric Schulman, Eric Schulman, Eric Schulman, and Eric Schulman, published in AIR 14:2.)