The scourge of ‘Alphabetism’ (new paper from professor Zax)

Professor Zax, who is (amongst other things) an anthroponomastician at the Department of Economics, University of Colorado at Boulder, US, presents (along with co-author Alexander Cauley) a new 48 page working paper which suggests that (males) who have a surname initial which occurs towards the end of the alphabet are more likely to end up […]

Retaliation on a voodoo doll (symbolizing an abusive supervisor) restores justice [new study]

Mistreated by a supervisor at work? Would it make you feel a little bit better if you could, say, torment a voodoo doll? Professor Lindie Hanyu Liang (at the Lazaridis School of Business and Economics at Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada) and colleagues have investigated such things. In return for a $1 payment, 195 full-time employees […]

‘Functional Stupidity’ – updated (new study)

Back in 2013, Improbable reported on the emergence of a new organisational concept – ‘Functional Stupidity’, see  ‘A Stupidity-Based Theory of Organizations’. Now, the idea of ‘Functional Stupidity’ has been refined by Roland Paulsen, who is a researcher at the Department of Business Administration, Lund University, Sweden. “I distinguish 10 ‘stupidity rationales’ emanating from reflective types […]

What the dog ate. What the scientist reported.

A dog at a scientist’s lab work. The scientist then wrote a report about the dog eating the scientist’s lab work. The report is: “Thallium toxicosis in a dog consequent to ingestion of Mycoplasma agar plates,” Birgit Puschner [pictured here], Marguerite M. Basso and Thomas W. Graham, Journal of Veterinary Diagnostic Investigation, vol. 24 no. 1, […]