Improbable Research

In reference to your Bozo item:

A few years ago at the Australian National University in Canberra, the School of Biological Sciences was created, or reorganised (or something!). Several departments were brought together and then split up in a slightly different way. When it came to naming each new Division, there emerged 1) Botany & Zoology, 2) Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, and 3) Psychology. Yep — BoZo, BaMBi and Psycho. To be fair, I don’t think Psychology was ever widely referred to as Psycho, but BoZo and BaMBi are still around and still go by those names).

Yet more recently they have again reorganised (who would have guessed?) and now in the College of Science is School of BoZo, School of BaMBi and School of Psychology. Apparently School of BoZo is not a clown school. Here is a clown school: http://www.artmedia.com.au/Clown.htm

So writes investigator Wendy Cooper (graduate of BaMBi, married to staff member of BoZo)

Perverse incentives in drug development, research, marketing and clinical usage can be illustrated by considering the example of the so- called ‘atypical’ neuroleptics which have grown to become a standard – indeed expanding - part of psychiatric practice despite their probable inferiority to older sedative agents. There is now ample evidence to suggest that neuroleptics (aka. anti-psychotics and major tranquillizers) are dangerous drugs, and patients’ exposure to them should be minimized wherever possible.

so says the study “If ‘atypical’ neuroleptics did not exist, it wouldn’t be necessary to invent them: perverse incentives in drug development, research, marketing and clinical practice,” Bruce G. Charlton, Medical Hypotheses, vol. 6, 2005, pp. 1005-9. The author is at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne.

This subtly complex photograph shows a conference between the Improbable Research main office in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA and the European Bureau in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, involving Skype, two Macintosh computers, two editors, a kiwi bird, a dog and a camera. Photo: Kees Moeliker.

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.)

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.)

Educator Naomi Johnson concludes that the Improbable.com website — and in particular a statistics article called “Who Will Win the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election?”, written by Eric Schulman and Daniel Debowy — is “unreliable, bias[sic] and has no authenticity.”

Johnson says “We do not know who the authors are.” Eric Schulman, unknown author, is surprised and impressed. In an inspired-by-Johnson essay he concludes:

My advice to educators using the web is to be careful in evaluating the information you find. Some pages that look reliable are not. And others that look strange may end up, upon closer look, being reliable, unbiased, and authentic.

To read Naomi Johnson’s colorful critique, click on the image of it, below:

Chris Gorski of the American Institute of Physics gathered scientists insights about certain fairy tales. Gorski writes:

In the Brothers Grimm story of Rapunzel, a witch holds a beautiful young woman captive in a tower. Rapunzel is blessed with a lovely singing voice and long, long blond hair. One day, her voice enchants a prince passing through a nearby forest. They fall in love, and Rapunzel lets down her hair so that the prince may use it to climb the tower to meet her. This chain of events begs readers to ask a question. Can human hair support the weight of another person? … Nathan Harshman, Assistant Professor of Physics at American University in Washington, DC, suggests Rapunzel would be safer and more secure if she tied her hair around something before lowering it. “The whole idea is that you can use the friction of the hair against itself in the knot, and whatever it is tied around will support the weight of the prince.” That is a much better idea than making Rapunzel’s scalp the anchor point.

(Thanks to investigator Ron Josephson for bringing this to our attention.)

This new series looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 426,000 cell phones retired every day. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs.

So writes artist/ statistician Chris Jordan. The image reproduced in miniature here “depicts two million plastic beverage bottles, the number used in the US every five minutes.”

Antibiotics can be the key to your future health. Medicine fully came of age only with the invention and use of antibiotic drugs. Our new ExtraAntibiotics™ program is based on the ancient principle that one can never get enough of a good thing. In place of your normal food intake, you will substitute liquid and solid antibiotics. Within days, you’ll notice a marked difference in the way you feel!

(That’s an infomertianal excerpt from “HMO-NO News” published in AIR 14:1.)

The problems of textual provenance begin at the first sentence, which describes a 12,000-year-old painting in the Grotte des Combarelles in the Dordogne showing “a man and a woman having sex - with his penis covered”. Perhaps indeed “archaeologists and historians have debated (whether the couple) were actually practicing safe sex”, but the debate has yet to emerge anywhere that I can find on the internet. The Rough Guide doesn’t usually miss a trick, but neither it nor any other travel guide mentions this remarkable painting, and there is no photo in the present book.

So says Chris McManus’s review, in the Times Higher Education Supplement, of the book “The Humble Little Condom: A History,” Aine Collier, Prometheus Books, 371 pages, ISBN 9781591025566.

A scientific novelty can be found in The 2007-2012 World Outlook for Frozen and Liquid Whole Eggs (it was news to me, an ornithologist, that whole eggs can be liquid), not to be mistaken for the detailed survey The 2007-2012 Outlook for Frozen or Liquid Mixed Eggs in India. Undoubtedly of equal importance is The 2007-2012 Outlook for Whole and Parts of Egg-Producing Hens and Fowl in India, and the corresponding volume dealing with whole and parts of egg-producing hens and fowl in Poland.

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

This video shows a swimming pool demonstration, symbolically, anyway, of the basic biological process of mitosis. It doesn’t quite show how the children double in number before separation, but what it does show is graphic in the old, commendable sense of that word. The synchronized swimmers are based, primarily for other reasons, at the University of California, San Diego.

(Thanks to investigator Amanda C de C Williams for bringing it to our attention.)

“It isn’t the Pillsbury Doughboy, but it’s almost as weird,” writes investigator Genevieve Reynolds, probing though the instant detritus of modern commercial culture.

The “it” she refers to is ” Verizon’s Style Book For Deploying ‘Can You Hear Me Now’ Guy.”

In a street name like Sesame Street, let us (just for clarity) refer to the more distinctive part (Sesame) as the forename, and the classificatory word part (Street) as the classname…. In Edinburgh, the city to which I moved a few days ago, things are very different. Nobody leaves off the classname here. It would be a ticket to confusion and madness. Let me explain…. Did your hasty notes on a beer coaster say that you promised last night to pick up your hot date this Friday at a flat on Craigmount? You will find there are many ways to lose your lover: you might be looking for Craigmount Approach, Craigmount Avenue, Craigmount Avenue North, Craigmount Bank, Craigmount Bank West, Craigmount Brae, Craigmount Crescent, Craigmount Court, Craigmount Drive, Craigmount Gardens, Craigmount Green, Craigmount Green North, Craigmount Hill, Craigmount Loan, Craigmount Park, Craigmount Place, Craigmount Terrace, Craigmount View, or perhaps Craigmount Way. Lots of luck with arriving on time for that date. Next time get a phone number too. As Andrew Durdin has pointed out to me, Buckstone is a particularly promiscuous forename. Street atlases list all of these: Buckstone Avenue Buckstone Bank Buckstone Circle Buckstone Close Buckstone Court Buckstone Crescent Buckstone Crook Buckstone Dell Buckstone Drive Buckstone Gardens Buckstone Gate Buckstone Green Buckstone Grove Buckstone Hill Buckstone Lea Buckstone Loan Buckstone Loan East Buckstone Neuk Buckstone Place Buckstone Rise Buckstone Road Buckstone Row Buckstone Shaw Buckstone Terrace Buckstone View Buckstone Way Buckstone Wood Buckstone Wynd That’s 28 different Buckstone streets. And for good measure there is also one that has no classname, just an attributive premodifier of the forename: High Buckstone.

So writes linguist Geoffrey K. Pullum.

Fergus Ray Murray has joined the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists. He says:

I’m a PhD candidate at the University of the West of Scotland, where my official topic is currently ‘Biologically-Inspired Reaction-Diffusion Networks’. It’s in the School of Computing, but it could probably have been in just about any science-related school. I’ve had increasingly long hair since I was about nine.

The best photo ever taken of my hair is almost certainly this one. But if you prefer to be able to see my face as well, you could go with this one or one of my self portraits.

Fergus Ray Murray, LFHCfS
PhD candidate, School of Computing
University of the West of Scotland