Improbable Research

One of the curses of my new job is having to commute from Cambridge into London two or three (or four or five …) days a week. Commuting must be good for something. One of the things I find it good for is primate behaviour research. I have found, for example, than commuters do not read books.

This started with an observation last November - lots of people on the tube were starting books. Lots of them, reading the first few pages of books. None of them reading the end. Surely just coincidence?

Think again.

I started collecting statistics. I observed all the people on the trains that I saw reading books, and wrote down how far someone was through a book. I could not tell whether they were on page 276 out of 327, but I could estimate what proportion of the book they had read - 30%, 70% etc. Only real books count - manuals and computer books don’t, as people do not read them linearly. Magazines etc. don’t count, mainly because it is impossible to tell whether someone is on page 7 out of 13, or page 9. But a meaty bit of Tom Clancy or Dostoevsky or molecular biology or something, I got quite good at estimating how far on the readers had got. Of course, I had to note all the books being read in a carriage, to get a valid sample. This
lead to much craning and staring, and in any other country in the world I would probably have been shot. In England, of course, no-one comments.

Anyway, here are some numbers,…

So writes William Bains, in a Trinkaus-like study called “Why commuters do not read.”

The cost of privacy is, or raises, or is part of a convoluted question, implies this study:

“The Cost of Reading Privacy Policies,” Aleecia M. McDonald [pictured here] and Lorrie Faith Cranor, I/S: A Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society, 2008 Privacy Year in Review issue. The authors, at Carnegie Mellon University, report:

“Companies collect personally identifiable information that website visitors are not always comfortable sharing. One proposed remedy is to use economics rather than legislation to address privacy risks by creating a market place for privacy where website visitors would choose to accept or reject offers for small payments in exchange for loss of privacy. The notion of micropayments for privacy has not been realized in practice, perhaps because advertisers might be willing to pay a penny per name and IP address, yet few people would sell their contact information for only a penny.1 In this paper we contend that the time to read privacy policies is, in and of itself, a form of payment. Instead of receiving payments to reveal information, website visitors must pay with their time to research policies in order to retain their privacy. We pose the question: if website users were to read the privacy policy for each site they visit just once a year, what would their time be worth?”

(Thanks to investigator Erik Pasternak for bringing this to our attention.)

A March 26, 2009 press release by the Optimum Population Trust explains:

SEX IS MAIN CAUSE OF POPULATION GROWTH

Sex, not religious or cultural beliefs or the quest for economic security, is what increases family size and drives world population growth, according to one of the UK’s leading authorities on family planning.

Conventional economic wisdom, which says that couples in poorer societies actively plan to have large families to compensate for high child mortality, to provide labour, and to care for parents in their old age, is wrong, Professor John Guillebaud will tell a conference on sustainable population today.

Economists overlook the fact that sexual intercourse is more frequent than the minimum needed for intentional conceptions…

(Thanks to investigator Martin Gardiner for bringing this to our attention.)

Première conférence internationale sur le bâillement
First International Conference on Yawning
Paris, 24 - 25 juin 2010

We are proud to announce the First International Conference on Yawning. These two days meetings bring together leading international speakers to review both emerging information and its convergence with current understanding. Join leaders in the field on June 24 & 25, 2010 in Paris….

Yawning is a very common and phylogenetically old behavioural event that occurs in vertebrates under different conditions. Yawning appeared very early in vertebrate history, with contagiousness evolving much later.

Yawning has many consequences, including opening of the eustachian tube, tearing, inflating the lungs, stretching and signaling drowsiness, but these may be incidental to its primal function which may something as unanticipated as sculpting the articulation of the gaping jaw during embryonic development.

Selecting a single function from the many options may be an unrealistic goal. However, reviewing the disparate facts, we may be impressed that yawning is associated with the change of behavioral state wakefulness to sleep, sleep to wakefulness, alertness to boredom, threshold of attack, sexual arousal, switching from one kind of activity to another.

The speakers list includes Wolter Seuntjens, who spent more than two decades in graduate school studying yawning, and who has participated in Improbable Research tours of the UK and the Netherlands.

(Thanks to investigator Wim Crusio for bringing this to our attention.)

Eliminate the false clues on pages 9, 10 and 14 of the flyer, and the answer becomes obvious: only the one on the right has a cigar.

(That’s an excerpt from the article “Puzzling Solutions,” published in AIR 14:4.)