Improbable Research

Luckily, Vilumas Malinauskus, winner of the 2001 Ig Nobel Peace Prize for creating the amusement park popularly known as “Stalin World,” in Lithuania was not murdered today.

That fate met Vasily Bukhtiyenko, who set up the Stalin museum in 2005 in Volgograd, previously called Stalingrad. According to a Reuters report he was electrocuted and bludgeoned to death, last Friday.

“In this paper, we consider musical cell-phone ringtones as virtual, communicative and cultural performances.” The paper is entitled ‘The Musical Madeleine: Communication, Performance, and Identity in Musical Ringtones’ and is published in  Popular Music and Society, Volume 33, Issue 1 February 2010.
The authors, at the Department of New Media and Digital Culture Studies of Utrecht University in the Netherlands, point out that that ringtones are “interpreted by variegated and dynamic audiences” and thus “…they establish stages upon which cultural meanings are portrayed.”
Going further, they argue too that

Dr. Michael Spittle, Senior Lecturer in Motor Learning in the School of Exercise and Nutrition Sciences at Deakins University in Geelong, Australia, has a new study involving darts:

“Amount of mental practice and performance of a simple motor task,” Kremer P, Spittle M, McNeil D, Shinners C., Perceptual and Motor Skills. 2009 Oct;109(2):347-56. The authors report:

“Participants, 209 students ages 18 to 44 years , completed a pre- and posttest of dart throwing with the nonpreferred hand… The findings… suggest that small amounts of mental practice may be sufficient for performance improvements, at least for a simple motor skill.”

“Beards, Baldness, and Sweat Secretion,” Michel Cabanac and H. Brinnel, European Journal of Applied Physiology and Occupational Physiology, vol. 58, nos. 1–2, 1988, pp. 39–46. The authors, who are at Université Laval, Quebec, Canada, explain that [AIR 16:1]:

“In 100 clean-shaven men direct measurement of the area of glabrous [in plain language: bald] skin on the forehead and calvaria was found to be proportional to that of the hairy skin on the lips, cheeks, chin and
neck…. [Our] results support the hypothesis that male baldness is a thermoregulatory compensation for the growth of a beard in adults.”

The Boston Globe has done an appreciation of the Museum of Bad Art (MOBA). A characteristic painting from the museum is reproduced here, at right.

BONUS: MOBA’s director will be among the celebrity scholars in this Saturday’s Ig Nobel event at the Cambridge Public Library, for the Cambridge Science Festival.

The rectum of the Bishop of Durham sits on display in London, awaiting your examination. No longer attached to the bishop, it rests alone inside a glass jar in the Hunterian Museum at The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The museum calls it by the formal name: Object RCSHC/P 192.Visitors can casually admire the object’s beauty. Scholars and poets can find unexpected delights in studying and writing up the bishop’s rectum. This apparently humble body part can boast a historic connection to John Hunter, the surgeon whose collection of medical memorabilia eventually grew to become the Hunterian Museum.

The museum officially gives a simple description of Object RCSHC/P 192…

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