Improbable Research

The September issue of mini-AIR just went out. Topics include: More Sex From A. Slob; Regge Pole Poet; Ultrasonic Velocity Measurements in Frozen Model Food Solutions; etc.

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“Burned Popcorn and Broken Crystal Balls: Beware of False Prophets Bearing Food,” Ed Chung, Hiroshi Nakamura and Amy Spielbauer, in Proceedings: Marketing Management Association Spring Conference 1999. R. Green, D.Varble and G. Wunder, eds.. Chicago, 1999. . The authors, at St. Norbert College, Wisconsin, report:

“In the late 1980’s, Faith Popcorn forecasted the trends of the 1990’s, and published her Popcorn Report. While her forecasts were (and still are) eagerly swallowed by the uninitiated, serious students of business should be skeptical of conclusions drawn on no more than opinions. The purposes of this paper are to inspect her forecasts on The Popcorn Report and to attempt to debunk the myths that The Popcorn Report promulgates with the use of evidence to the contrary…. The paper is not meant as an attack on Popcorn, but as a reminder to business people (practitioners and academics alike) that fortune telling is not a science and should be used with care.”

(That’s an excerpt from the article “Burnt Food Research Review,” published in AIR 14:4.)

Here’s episode 107.5 (”Incompetence, claw, claw”) of the Improbable Research TV series.

To see it, click on the image at right, and you will be whisked to YouTube (where you can subscribe, if you like, to the Improbable Research channel). Improbable TV can also be seen on MySpace and elsewhere.

These are three-minute videos about research that makes people laugh, then makes them think.

For links about each episode’s content, and an FAQ, see the Improbable TV page.

For deathly economy of wording, nothing much beats a pamphlet published by the Federal Bureau of Investigation entitled: WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION (WMD); A Pocket Guide. On this single sheet of paper, America’s celebrated crime-fighting organisation tells you everything you might want to know, if you didn’t want to know much, about weapons of mass destruction.

The second section is all business. It gives the basic information: what is a weapon of mass destruction. The top half of this section says, in a very few words printed in a rather large font, that WMDs come in four varieties. That’s all it says.

The bottom half of the section shows three symbols:

1. A yellow-and-black radiation hazard logo.

2. An orange-and-black biohazard logo.

3. A tilted square composed of four smaller squares, each a different colour, each with its own label: combustible; non-flammable gas; explosives and flammable solid.

A carefully phrased instruction focuses our attention on these icons. It says: “Recognise these universally accepted symbols but do not expect to see them on a WMD device“…

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

NOTE: Click on either image to download a PDF of the entire FBI Pocket Guide to WMDs.

The accidental death at home, by hanging, whilst wearing a tutu, of the 13th Earl of Gurney, strikes some people as being both absurd and, if you’ll pardon the expression, a one-off.

True, that particular death is fictional (it occurred near the beginning of the 1972 film The Ruling Class). True, absurdity can be difficult to measure. But, say the authors of a new study called “Accidental Death in Autoerotic Maneuvers,” published in the American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology, the incidence of “such practices are underestimated and are only the tip of the iceberg since they do not represent the cases that are never reported due to successful practice.”

The study details a case—actual, not imagined—of unsuccessful practice. The hope is that readers will come to understand, at least a little, the bigger picture. And that picture, the authors tell us, is surprisingly big:

“After analyzing statistics, the results show the highest number of cases reported in Germany, followed by the USA and Canada where incidents of autoerotic asphyxiation death occur between 250 and 1000 cases per year, which equals 1 to 2 deaths per year for one million habitants. In Sweden, cases are reported at 0.1 cases per year based on one million habitants while in Scandinavia between 0.5 and 1 case per year based on one million habitants. Latin countries like Italy result the lowest number of reported accidental autoerotic death cases.”

The authors, Martina Focardi, Barbara Gualco and GianAristide Norelli, are Italian, based at the University of Florence, in the Department.”

(That’s an excerpt from the article “Improbable Research Review,”