Marc Abrahams's Blog, page 21

Dunning discusses Dunning and Kruger

David Dunning — the Dunning of the Dunning-Kruger Effect — recently discussed the Dunning-Kruger Effect, interviewed by Corey Powell in the Open Mind Podcast.

The 2000 Ig Nobel Psychology Prize was awarded to  David Dunning of Cornell University and Justin Kruger of the University of Illinois, for their modest report, “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments.”

They published that paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 77, no. 6, December 1999, pp. 1121-34.]

Seventeen years later, “The Dunning Kruger song” premiered as part of that year’s Ig Nobel Prize ceremony. Here’s video of that performance:

Nest in mouth, Black hole battery, Non-author authors

This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has three segments. Here are bits of each of them:

Nest in mouth — Curious items lurk unnoticed in large museums. The photo above shows one of them: a bird’s nest seated in the mouth of a large, ancient, carved stone human face. Feedback recently had the joy of accompanying the director of one of the Netherlands’s great natural history museums when he paid a first visit to the National Roman Museum, an archaeology repository that occupies what once were Rome’s great ancient thermal baths. The previous day, a professor from University College London had visited the same site, noticed this unusual object-inside-an-object – and alerted his Dutch colleague….Little big battery — In the spirit of “whatever they can do I can do better”, Espen Gaarder Haug sent us a copy of the study he and Gianfranco Spavieri published in High Energy Density Physics: “The micro black hole cellular battery: The ultimate limits of battery energy density“….Whodunnit? — “Whodunnit?” is a question answered, starkly, in every published research study. The answer is: the authors. The authors dunnit. The authors wrote the study. But a new study tries to answer a jarringly different question: who didn’t do it? How many distinguished persons listed as authors are not, in fact, authors? Scientific Reports published this real-academic-life detective story. The detectives try to ascertain how often academic big shots grab a full share of official authorship credit for research work they did not do….

Telling Narcissists They Are Intelligent

What happens when you tell narcissists that they are intelligent? This study explores that question:

“Telling People They Are Intelligent Correlates with the Feeling of Narcissistic Uniqueness: The Influence of IQ Feedback on Temporary State Narcissism,” Marcin Zajenkowski [pictured here] and Gilles E. Gignac, Intelligence, vol. 89, November–December 2021, 101595. (Thanks to Abel Dean for bringing this to our attention.) The authors are at the University of Warsaw, Poland and the University of Western Australia.

The special ANTS & AUNTS issue

The special ANTS & AUNTS (volume 30, number 3, May/June 2024) issue of the magazine Annals of Improbable Research has just gone out to subscribers. Even if you are not a subscriber you can read several of its articles online free.

Money reunited, Choco bite, Beer glass temp, 237-fold gifting, Ketchup

This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has five segments. Here are bits of each of them:

Money reunited — Chung To Kong found a way, in the spirit of unboiling an egg (Feedback, 10 September 2022), to make banknotes from shredded banknote pieces….The big bite — Highly educated humans are trying to discern what happened in the earliest moments of two momentous events: a bite of chocolate and the birth of the universe. Maria Charalambides at Imperial College London and her team have been beavering at the bite mystery, much as many physicists have been beavering at learning what happened when the universe big-banged into existence….Feasible beer glasses — In the UK, where warm beer is either treasured or tolerated, a study called “Optimizing beer glass shapes to minimize heat transfer during consumption” might raise eyebrows. In Brazil, where warm beer can be mildly dreaded, this is cool research….237-fold gifting — For Mansi Gupta and her team, the existence of gift-giving is itself a gift to be appreciated. And analysed. Gupta is lead author on a study called “A bibliometric analysis on gift giving“…Pivotal ketchup (Nixon) — The discussion of having robots use ketchup as a non-Newtonian fluid suitable for polishing glass surfaces (Feedback, 16 March 2024) prompts us to recall an earlier unexpected use of ketchup. …

Cuteness as Soft Power

Cuteness can be powerful on a national level and also internationally, according to this study:

“Soft Power: ʻCute Culture’, A Persuasive Strategy in Japanese Advertising,” Oana-Maria Bîrlea, TRAMES, A Journal Of The Humanities And Social Sciences, 2023, pp. 311–324. The author [pictured here] explains:

“The article addresses the ways in which soft power is used in Japanese advertising, both domestic and abroad. After the challenges brought by the end of World War II, Japan finds as a means of recovery the export of a new type of culture, focused on values different from the traditional ones and regains its place through cultural diplomacy (soft power)…. The objective of this work is to show through different examples the main reasons why this overwhelmingly cute culture gained rapid popularity in Japan and abroad, going so far as to be used even by the government as part of advertising campaigns.”

 

Low-gravity blood spatter, Thinking inside the box, Stick to Fruit, Genital glow

This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them:

Blood spatter on high — “Be prepared!” This enduring motto of the Scout movement will come to mind for many readers of a paper called “Bloodstain pattern dynamics in microgravity: Observations of a pilot study in the next frontier of forensic science”. Reader Sara Rosenbaum alerted Feedback to the explicitly stated first purpose of the research: “the investigation of eventual violent criminal acts that occur outside of Earth’s environment”. This is forensic science at its most future-is-almost-here-istic. And at its most efficiently British-American collaborative-crime-investigation-istic….Thinking: inside the box — … Sholei Croom, Hanbei Zhou and Chaz Firestone, all at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, explain in the journal PNAS how they tried to answer the question “Can one person tell, just by observing another person’s movements, what they are trying to learn?” They filmed volunteers who “shook an opaque box and attempted to determine i) the number of objects hidden inside, or ii) the shape of the objects inside”. They then had other people watch the videos and try to determine “who was shaking for number and who was shaking for shape”….Stick to fruit — Many scientists would be unable to say whether metal sticks to fruit. It does, generally speaking, if properly coaxed. News of this comes in a study called “Reversibly sticking metals and graphite to hydrogels and tissues”…Accidental genital glow — Faraz Alam sent us a study that he and colleagues at Imperial College London published in 2013 in the journal PLoS One, saying: “Here is the paper where I accidentally made genitalia glow in the dark.” …

Unexpected 23-fold depths of an autopsy

“I once performed an autopsy on a deceased pedestrian who had been wearing 23 layers of clothing. It took us longer to undress him than to perform the autopsy.”

—from the book Risking Life for Death, by Ryan Blumenthal (Jonathan Ball Publishers, Johannesburg, 2023).

Here is a brief video of the author describing a different kind of case — someone struck by lightning:

Boxing, Walls, Surfing value, Car jeers and cheers, Dead ant repellant

This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has five segments. Here are bits of each of them:

Boxing: thinking outside — From time to time, the sport of boxing changes its rules. But for the most part, it still requires that each participant in a match be both human and alive. (Exceptions do occasionally pop up – kangaroos are the heavyweight exemplars.) Joseph Lee at Flinders University in Australia has explored a way to expand boxing’s rigid traditions. He outlines his thinking in a study in the journal Ethics and Philosophy called “Thinking outside the ring of concussive punches: Reimagining boxing“….Classified walls — … Feedback learns, thanks to reader Dave Brooks, that there is a taxonomy of stone walls, outlined in “Taxonomy and nomenclature for the stone domain in New England“. Are there good taxonomies of stone walls in other places?Economics of surfing — What is the value of surfing, if you express it as money? …Car jeers and cheers — … Roots went on to found Lysander Spooner University in Montana, an institution that, though little known (it is unclear whether the university has any students), modestly boasts that it is “dedicated to truth and free inquiry, and to educating the politically and socially estranged. We are low cost and high quality. The world’s first truly antigovernment university.” Of all the world’s universities, it may be the most fervently driven to theory.Dead ant repellant — Visits to a cemetery may occasion a lively conversation for entomologists and exterminators who read a recent study by Thomas Wagner and Tomer Czaczkes at the University of Regensburg, Germany. The study in question is called “Corpse-associated odours elicit avoidance in invasive ants“.

PowerPoint Co-Inventor’s Appreciation of Chicken Chicken Chicken

Robert Gaskins, co-inventor or PowerPoint, highlights Doug Zongker‘s “Chicken Chicken Chicken” as one of his favorite ever PowerPoint presentations.

This a videorecording of Doug Zongker’s talk in the Improbable Research session at the February 2008 AAAS meeting, in San Francisco: