Predicting the stock market from photographs in the financial-press (new study)

If you’re inclined to make bets on the stock market, you’ll be at a considerable disadvantage if you don’t have a tight grip on so called ‘investor sentiment’ – in other words a reliable way of being able to judge the current ‘mood’ of the market. But, in practice, it’s notoriously difficult to gauge accurately. […]

Nude Photos of College Students, for Research or Other Purposes

Many people like to study the nude bodies of other people. This study studied some of those students of student bodies: “Using the student body: College and university students as research subjects in the United States during the twentieth century,” Heather Munro Prescott, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, vol. 57, no. […]

Mathematicians who (or that) scare him

Daniel Look [pictured here], now an assistant professor of mathematics at St. Lawrence University, once created a web page called “Mathematicians That Scare Me“. (A non-mathematician might have phrased it differently: “Mathematicians Who Scare Me”. The link is now dead, alas — was it too scary? Perhaps someone will ask Professor Look to resurrect it. […]

Parade of bearded scientists

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) took lots of good photos of the Improbable Research show, a featured event of the AAAS’s recent annual meeting, held in Washington, DC. The photographer captured, among many other things, the historic moment when a parade of bearded scientists went up to shake hands with Ig […]