“One growing area of research involves the study of engagement ring preferences, as a putative cue to male commitment to, and willingness to share resources with, the female recipient.” – explain Ashley Locke, Jessica Desrochers, Danielle Lynch and Steven Arnocky of Nipissing University, Canada, in a 2019 publication of the Human Evolution Laboratory. “We examined […]
Tag: cost
Underplayed redundancy in placebo effect research (on cheap vs costly fake medicine)
A celebrated 2015 research paper makes much the same discovery as a paper that won an Ig Nobel Prize for medicine years earlier. The discovery is about the power of pricing fake medicines. The new paper makes only an indirect, beery allusion to the earlier, Ig Nobel Prize-winning research. That 2008 Ig Nobel Prize for medicine […]
Fluid Dynamics and the Potential Cost of Long Genitalia in Male Guppies
Male guppies with long genitals may swagger, physically in a current, and metaphorically in the grand scheme of reproduction. Or not. This newly published study explores these questions: “A Potential Cost of Long Genitalia in Male Guppies: the Effects of Current Speed on Reproductive Behaviour,” Lucia Kwan, Adam N. Dobkin, F. Helen Rodd, and Locke […]
Old sewer numerical method
Nowadays there are many methods for estimating the approximate cost of sewers. In 1922, this diagram showed the then-state of the art: The diagram appears in the book Sewerage and Sewage Treatment, by Harold Eaton Babbitt (published by John Wiley and Sons, New York,1922).
Pickle juice disposal: Deep wells
This is Part 1 in our Problems with Non-Chinese Pickels series, a companion to our Problems with Chinese Pickels series. A study by R.D. Smith, suggests that deep well disposal is, in some cases, the most feasible method of providing isolation of pickle juice at a reasonable cost. The study is: “BURYING YOUR PICKLE LIQUOR […]
Privacy and the convoluted question
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, […]