SEP 08
“ It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into“
Jonathan Swift
Ig Nobel 2008
This year's Ig Nobel prizes are shortly to be announced ! The winners will be flocking to Harvard University on October 2 where they will be showered with applause and paper airplanes.
The award ceremony will be webcast live. Full details here.
Traditionally, the winners' names are a closely guarded secret until the very last minute, so Really Magazine can't give any firm tips.
We can however, list a number of research projects to which we have drawn attention over the last year - and can bet with some confidence that some, all, or none of them may well be walking away with an Ig Nobel this year.
Click the links for more info on the latest academic research into -
• Which days of the week people prefer
• Whether folding one's arms speeds up anagram solving
• If attaching weights to an actor's ankles would restrict their ability to jump
• The business benefits of creating artifical shortages.
• The possibilities offered by a monumental rubbish pyramid
• Stuff* as distinct from ordinary stuff
• Whether golf is a game of life and death
• If viewing bikinis might increase impatience in ( male) students
• The complex mathematics behind celebrity burnout
• Psychoanalyzing the financial markets
• Whether men and women prefer looking at certain human-body areas ( and if so which )
• If severe risk of flooding reduces a property's value
• The possibilities offered by a virtual orchestral conductor
• Whether zig-zag paths help hill walkers
• How closely a computer resembles an animal's digestive system
• How closely a computer resembles a compost heap
• Whether Sgt. Pepper was really lonely
• The territoriality of park benches
• If one can achieve jouissance simply by watching TV
• A spoken-vowel identification procedure for gerbils
• Which is best : “ buy one, get one free ” or “ buy two, get 50% off ”
We'll score our list later in the week.
Update :
Score : 0 out of 10
29 SEP 08
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Eight legs bad.
Free-thinking and farsighted as Aristotle was, nowadays, some of his pronouncements seem suspect to say the least. Particularly his assessment of women - which he called " incomplete males ".
Recently, however, a re-examination of Aristotle's works have trawled up another fundamental misjudgment which, until now, has not perhaps received the academic focus which it deserves.
For Ermanno Bencivenga, Professor of Philosophy at the School of Humanities, University of California, Irvine has identified another group of creatures which came in for very unfair Aristotlean criticism.
Specifically, the Octopus.
In fact, according to the professor, " No other natural kind receives as much abuse in the Aristotelian corpus as the octopus . . ."
Read ' THE TROUBLE WITH CEPHALOPODA ' in the latest issue of the journal ' Common Knowledge '
26 SEP 08
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Memory
Anyone who has difficulty in remembering new facts could turn to the penultimate issue of the journal Emotion for details of a newly-found psychological effect which might be of help.
A research team from the Warsaw School of Social Psychology have discovered that adopting an appropriate facial expression whilst learning a fact helps with later recall.
In other words, artificially holding a forced ' surprised ' facial expression helps with remembering ' surprising ' facts, a sad expression helps with sad facts, and a happy one with happy facts, etc etc.
see :
Well, slap my thigh: Expression of surprise facilitates memory of surprising material.
Although it's not specifically mentioned in the research paper, Really
Magazine wonders if this technique could assist learners with the
most difficult-to-retain category of all facts - the truly tedious ones.
Perhaps
a bored expression
might help ?
Reader Paul H reminds us that :
' Riskind (1984) showed that standing upright
and
smiling speeds up the retrieval of pleasant memories but not unpleasant
ones. '
25 SEP 08
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Amusing research.
Although many papers published in scientific journals have very straight-to-the-point
dry titles, some authors opt instead for the ' humorous title ' option.
The question arises : Will articles with a humorous titles be more successful
( in terms of the number of citations they receive ?)
The question has now been ( partially ) answered by researchers at the Israel Institute of Technology - and the results are published in the latest issue of the Journal of Information Science.
They trawled through titles in two longstanding psychology journals - Psychological Bulletin and Psychological Review - and a team of subjects analysed the papers' titles for their inherent amusement levels.
The results may come as a surprise ( or not, depending on one's point of view ) to dry and humorous titlers alike.
For the papers with amusing titles were less likely to become successful.
Intriguing though the research is, Really Magazine found the contents of the paper itself fittingly comical.
Firstly, the number of experimental subjects used to judge the titles was on the low side - only four in fact. If future research could up this number by a factor of say 100, or even 1000, the results could become 100 or 1000 times more convincing.
Secondly, since all the titles ( in this study at least ) were in English, it might help considerably if the judges were native English speakers. We conject that spotting subtle wordplay, double-entendres, and ironic undertones may be considerably more tricky if English isn't one's first language.
Thirdly - and perhaps must frustratingly of all, the paper doesn't give any examples !
On readers' behalf then, Really Magazine has tried to find some amusing titles in the two journals - which both stretch back for more than 100 years.
Our best shots so far are :
On Blowing Trumpets to the Tulips: To Prove or Not to Prove the Null Hypothesis--Comment on Bösch, Steinkamp, and Boller (2006).
The biological basis of speech: What to infer from talking to the animals. ( by Professor Tout )
Review
of Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic.
23 SEP 08
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Patent Upending
Despite almost literally hundreds of years of painstaking research, the exact cause(s) of baldness are still unknown.
As of this month, however, there is a new theory.
Which is published in the latest issue of the journal Medical Hypotheses.
Simply put :
" According to the new theory the pressure created by the weight of the scalp is the cause of the baldness. "
In other words, it might be provoked by the interaction of the scalp with the mass of the Earth - via gravity.
The author is confident that :
" . . . the new theory is able to explain every feature of male and female pattern baldness and agrees completely with all scientifically established facts and produced data."
The author of the scientific paper is also an inventor, and he is in the process of seeking a patent which will delay - or perhaps even reverse the effects of MPB and FPB.
Unfortunately, Really Magazine has been unable to track down an online version of the patent application - but speculates that it may employ methods of gravity-reduction in the scalp region.
Which would not necessarily involve expensive trips into space - but could be achieved by a much simpler method. That is to say, standing on one's head.
19 SEP 08
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Product of the day
17 SEP 08 ( late edition )
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Elementary my dear Bonzo.
A new article, from the department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick in the UK, sheds a new light on the enigmatic success of Sherlock Holmes.
Think : Dogs.
" Using Donna Haraway's recent theorization of dogs
as 'companion species' in her manifesto on otherness, the article will suggest
that the Victorians regarded
Holmes' sleuthing fame as inseparable from his respect for animal otherness,
one with which he is identified throughout Conan Doyle's stories. In this respect,
I argue, Holmes is a hudographical detective, his crime-solving powers rooted
in his relationship with and to dogs. "
See the latest issue of the International Journal of Cultural Studies for details.
Though Hudography ( the interpersonal relationship between humans and dogs and other friendly companion species ) has been greatly neglected in the academic literature ( the word doesn't even appear in most dictionaries ) there is one blog dedicated entirely to the subject.
Which by an astonishing coincidence ( given the relative obscurity of hudographic studies ) is located in the very same town as the article's author . . .
Leading Really Magazine to wonder if perhaps Emma and Grover could be one and the same ?
" When all other avenues have been exhausted, whatever remains, however unlikely, is the answer ".
17 SEP 08
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There's still plenty of room at the bottom
There are now more than 500 products based on nanoscale technologies.
But to date, almost all of them are based on nanofilm coatings - which are far easier to produce than, say, the self-powered nano-bots which have been copiously described in journals, newspapers, magazines, websites, and even in feature films.
Some are so straightforward, in fact, that a hobby-nanotechnologist can easily make them for him/herself. A drop of oil on a wet tarmac forms a nanofilm.
Many have discovered, however, that the inclusion of the word ' Nano ' in a research proposal is quite efficient at attracting R&D cash.
The facts are that despite nearly three decades of research, there are very
few [*] commercially applied applications of nanotech devices.
Many thanks then to the University
of Antwerp, Belgium which has recently coined a new phrase which
accurately sums up the current situation.
[ * Anyone know of any ? Ed. ]
10 SEP 08
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Complex Deixis Unravelled
Deixology ( the study of pointing ) has been sadly neglected in the academic literature. Until now.
A new and comprehensive study, entitled " Is pointing ' just ' pointing? " is published in the latest issue of the journal Gesture.
The article not only identifies several ( previously overlooked ? ) sub-categories of pointing - but also de-bunks some widely held assumptions ;
" . . . there are no grounds to support the idea that the orientation/directionality of all pointings is always interpreted as a direct instructions to follow that direction for identifying the intended referent. "
And, concluding,
" Rather, ' it all depends ' . . . . "
Read the full article here
08 SEP 08
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Determinism still not determined.
Professor Jason Zimba , from the Departments of Physics and Mathematics Bennington College Bennington, VT, USA, was wondering, during a car journey,
"
Suppose all of the particles in the universe should happen to come to rest
at the same time, in positions so arranged that all of the forces on every
particle balance to zero at that time. What would happen next? "
A complex mathematical analysis followed, but sadly, could not come to a definite conclusion - which has just been published in the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science
04 SEP 08
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The Origins of the Geeks
Here at Really Mag, we foolishly thought that Geeks had emerged from the cyber-underworld only fairly recently.
We were wrong.
The excellent ' wordorigins '
site tells the full story. And reveals that geeks have existed for several
hundred years.
And presumably will last a few hundred more.
01 SEP 08
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