Despite what you may have heard, acoustical analysis suggests that (1) most people are not horrible singers, and (2) most horrible singers are not tone deaf – they’re just horrible singers. In 2007, Isabelle Peretz and Jean-François Giguère of the University of Montreal, and Simone Dalla Bella, of the University of Finance and Management in […]
Tag: bad
Vampirical science (Freese!)
The word “vampirical” used as an un-admiring description of a scientific claim, has been credited to Jeremy Freese [pictured here], who wrote: “Part of what makes the Trivers-Willard hypothesis perhaps more ‘vampirical’ than ’empirical’—unable to be killed by mere evidence—is that the hypothesis seems so logically compelling that it becomes easy to presume that it must […]
Academic Stress May Lead to Bad Teeth
A new study builds, in a sense, on the work of 1996 Ig Nobel economics prize winner Dr. Robert Genco [pictured here] of the University of Buffalo. Dr. Genco was honored then for his discovery that “financial strain is a risk indicator for destructive periodontal disease.” The new study is: “Academic stress as a risk […]
A new standard way to measure the threshold of personal tragedy
Some skilled psychologists see big consequences aborning in seemingly trivial things. Here’s an example. This particular seemingly trivial thing happens — or doesn’t happen — at online dating sites. The researchers describe it in a quick phrase: “as indicated by fewer first visits to their dating profiles“. This is big: a newly-recognized threshold for assessing personal […]