Improbable Research

Scholars like to celebrate the leadership genius of President George Bush - scholars named Carolyn B Thompson, James W Ware, Marvin Olasky and Ken Blanchard.

Thompson and Ware wrote a book called The Leadership Genius of George W Bush: 10 Common Sense Lessons from the Commander-in-Chief. Published during the early years of his presidency, it begins with these words: “George Bush may not hold himself out as a genius, but as the book closed on the 2002 midterm elections, it became abundantly clear that he is a brilliant leader.”

The authors remind us that, before Bush was made US president, political commentators held him in low regard: “In their eyes he was a lightweight worthy of little but scorn and contempt.”

Thompson and Ware say: “Something was wrong with this picture. As authors and consultants in the field of leadership, we were knowledgable about the subject … We asked ourselves: what makes him so effective? How does he do it?”

Their chapter titles highlight the keys to Bush’s brilliance:

· Can I Trust You? Become Credible.

· Bring in the Right People, part 1. Don’t Be Afraid to Hire People Smarter Than You.

· Bring in the Right People, part 2. Leave ‘Em Alone! …

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

Recently we discovered [see cond-mat/0212043] that the majority of citations in scientific papers are simply copied from the lists of references that appear in other papers. Here we show that a model, in which a scientist picks three random papers, cites them, and also copies a quarter of their references accounts quantitatively for empirically observed citation distribution. Simple mathematical probability, not genius, can explain why some papers are cited a lot more than the other.

(That’s an excerpt from the article “Do Copied Citations Create Renowned Papers?,” by M.V. Simkin and V.P. Roychowdhury, published in AIR 11:1.)

Aurelien Mazurie has joined the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists. He says:

Roughly speaking, my goal is to study the cell (and if possible, higher level of organisation like tissues, organisms, populations and … ecosystems) as a entangled set of interacting components, in order to find underlying logic and structures.

Aurelien Mazurie, Ph.D., LFHCfS
Postdoctoral fellow
Institut Pasteur
Paris, Fance

John Troyer, a newly arrived scholar at the University of Bath’s Centre for Death and Society, dug up evidence of a little-unappreciated gap in the law. His study, called Abuse of a Corpse: A Brief History and Re-Theorisation of Necrophilia Laws in the USA, appears in the only-occasionally-ghoulish journal Mortality.

Troyer spotlights an incident that frustrated the police and the courts of one American state. He writes: “In September 2006, Wisconsin police discovered Nicholas Grunke, Alexander Grunke and Dustin Radtke digging into the grave of a recently deceased woman. Upon questioning by police, Alexander Grunke explained that the three men wanted to exhume the body for sexual intercourse. In the Wisconsin state court system, the three men were charged with attempted third-degree sexual assault and attempted theft. None of the men could be charged with attempted necrophilia, since the state of Wisconsin has no law making necrophilia illegal.

“What the Wisconsin case exposed was the following gap in US jurisprudence: many states have no law prohibiting necrophilia.” …

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

The 2008 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded last night at the 18th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony. Click here to see a list of the winners. Recorded video is (or soon will be) posted for your viewing pleasure, displeasure or indifference.

Related event: The new winners will try to explain what they did and why they did it on Saturday, October 4, at the Ig Informal Lectures at MIT. It starts at 1:0 pm. You are invited (and it’s free—but seating is limited, so get there early).

In the photo here, Nobel Laureate William Lipscomb (left) and Benoit Mandelbrot, the inventor of the mathematical concept of fractals, drink Coca-Cola to toast the winners of the Ig Nobel Chemistry Prize. The prize was awarded to two teams of doctors—one team discovered that Coke is an effective spermacide; the other team discovered that it is not. Photo: Kees Moeliker / Annals of Improbable Research.

NOTE: Click here to see Nature News reporter Steve Nadis’s diary of his visit to the ceremony.