Improbable Research

?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.

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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.)