Robert Kunzman‘s earnest TEDX talk “Putting Failure In Its Place” does not fail to emphasize the success of the study “Talent vs. Luck: The Role of Randomness in Success and Failure,” which won the the 2022 Ig Nobel Economics Prize for its authors, Alessandro Pluchino, Alessio Emanuele Biondo, and Andrea Rapisarda. Here’s video of Kunzman’s […]
Walking, a lottery, failure, frenzy, the number 97… this study has all of those, and perhaps other things as well: “Failure is Also an Option,” Antoine Amarilli, Marc Beunardeau, and Rémi Géraud, and David Naccache, in The New Codebreakers, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2016, pp. 161-165. The authors report: “The Nijmeegse Vierdaagse is the world’s most […]
Britain continues to be fascinated with parachute jump failure. Here are two examples, one new, one old: “How to survive a parachute failure“—BBC News, 2018. and “Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge: systematic review of randomised controlled trials” —British Medical Journal, 2003. (Thanks to IanVisits for bringing the new […]
Are successful people better than people who did not achieve success—or are they to a large degree lucky? This physics-based analysis looked into that tangled question: “Talent vs Luck: the Role of Randomness in Success and Failure,” Alessandro Pluchino, A. E. Biondo, and Andrea Rapisarda, arXiv:1802.07068v1, February 20, 2018. The authors, at the University of […]
Iced tea can be medically dangerous, if consistently consumed copiously. A new study supplies evidence to that effect: “A Case of Iced-Tea Nephropathy,” Fahd Syed, Alejandra Mena-Gutierrez and Umbar Ghaffar, New England Journal of Medicine, vol. 372, April 2, 2015, pp. 1377-1378. The authors, at Central Arkansas Veterans Healthcare System and the University of Arkansas […]
The conclusion reached in this study seems to rather contradict the study’s headline: “Emotional Intelligence Predicts Success in Medical School,” Nele Libbrecht, Filip Lievens [pictured here], Bernd Carette, Stéphane Côté,” Emotion, epub Nov 11 , 2013. The authors, at Ghent University and the University of Toronto, explain that: “Emotional intelligence did not predict performance on […]
Maggie Koerth-Baker writes in BoingBoing: “How the Refrigerator Got its Hum” is an article written by science historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan [pictured here]. It was published in 1985, in a book called The Social Shaping of Technology. The article traces the development of the refrigerator and the story of why we use electricity, rather than natural […]
To begin, an example. Two friends in their 20s (called ‘L’ who is female, and ‘R’ who is male) are conversing : L: “What did the big cup say to the little cup?” R: (sarcastically) “I’m bigger than you?” L: “No, Nothing. Cups can’t talk”. R: (completely ignoring L) “I can hold more water than […]
Prediction has something to do with the future. The character Criswell in the epic film Plan 9 From Outer Space summed this up masterfully: UPDATE: Well, Criswell did sum it up masterfully. But now he has been silenced, by whoever yanked the video from YouTube. We may never again know what he said, or be […]