“A Shadow on Meritocracy” is a documentary film about the ongoing research springing from the Ig Nobel Prize-winning work of Alessandro Pluchino and Andrea Rapisarda, physicists at the University of Catania. The film is in Italian; this version has English subtitles: Background: The 2010 Ig Nobel Prize for management was awarded to Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, […]
Tag: luck
Talent vs Luck: the Role of Randomness in Success and Failure [research study]
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 […]
A round-up of American hole-in-one jurisprudence
Of all the curious things one can get insurance cover for – the golfing fraternity’s ‘hole-in-one-insurance’ is surely one of the curiouser. Why would one want insurance against a hole-in-one? The answer lies in the substantial cash bonus prizes which (some) golf clubs offer to those players who manage to get one. From the club’s […]
‘Friday the 13th: The Empirics of Bad Luck’ (study)
Bearing in mind that today is Friday the 13th, what better time to examine the question of whether the socio-economic outcomes of people born on the 13th day of the month, and of those born on Friday the 13th, differ from the outcomes of people born on more auspicious days? Investigators Dr. Jan Fidrmuc and […]
Beijing traffic jams and the number 4
Excessively polluting and timewasting heavy traffic congestion in central Beijing causes significant distress to drivers and residents alike. In a drive to identify root causes, researchers have put two and two together and come up with an improbable answer – the number ‘4‘. “In this work we estimate the effects of traffic congestion on subjective […]
Anti-Luck : the debate continues
“Sam walks by Big Ben at three o’clock, looks up at its face, and thinks, ‘It is now three o’clock’. However, unbeknownst to Sam, Big Ben malfunctioned and stopped precisely twelve hours ago.” So maybe Sam just got lucky? But what would have happened if he’d passed by at 12:55? Such happenstances are examined in […]
Anti-Luck
“On my way down to the elevator I release a trash bag down the chute from my high rise condo. Presumably, I know my bag will soon be in the basement. But what if, having been released, it still (incredibly) were not to arrive there? That presumably would be because it had been snagged somehow […]