Marc Abrahams's Blog, page 386

The new Improbable book, reviewed in USA Today, too

Kim Painter did a nice review of the new book, in USA Today today, with the headline “‘Improbable’ studies may make you laugh and think“. Painter also kindly mentions, at the end of her review:

Abrahams’ U.S. book tour this fall will feature “dramatic readings” – by scientists, journalists and others – from some of his favorite studies. The first is at Harvard Book Store in Cambridge at 7 p.m. ET on Sept. 5.

The 24th annual Ig Nobel Prizes (with a food theme) will be live-cast from Harvard University on Sept. 18 at 6 p.m. ET.

The book is, of course, This Is Improbable Too. It’s been getting some attention in other interesting places, too.

You can get the book from Amazon and at most good bookstores.

Crease’s quest: “Has big science killed ‘deep jokes’?”

Robert Crease writes, in Physics World:

…Physics, however, has a tradition of thoughtful joke-telling that uses humorous tales inquisitively – to deepen appreciation of a person, of the world, or of both.

Jokes revealing personal characteristics have covered everything from Albert Einstein’s childlike personality and Niels Bohr’s mystique to Wolfgang Pauli’s famously brutal putdowns. Abraham Pais, for example, heard Paul Dirac enthusiastically tell (on several different occasions) a joke about a priest who is newly appointed to serve a village and is doing the rounds to get to know his parishioners. Calling on one modest home, the priest notices that the woman’s house is full of children, and asks how many children she’s got. “10 – five pairs of twins”, comes the reply. “You mean you always had twins?” asks the astonished priest. “No, Father, sometimes we had nothing.” As Pais put it: “Precision at that level had an immense appeal to Dirac.” …

[And as] Pais, quoting Bohr, once put it, “Some subjects are so serious that one can only joke about them.”

(Thanks to investigator Hugo Hammarberg for bringing part of this to our attention.)

The new Improbable book, and its first American review

My new book — This Is Improbable Too (OneWorld Publications, 2014, ISBN 978-1780743615) — is now available in America (it was published in the UK this past March). The first US review has appeared, by Steven Poole, in The Wall Street Journal:

The éminence grise behind the Ig Nobels is Marc Abrahams, and for those of us who have heard of only the silliest prize winners, his second compilation of results from the wilder fringes of science suggests that the prize is, after all, rather unkindly named. It is not “ignoble” or entirely stupid and humiliating research but rather, as Mr. Abrahams describes it, research that first makes you laugh and then makes you think….

A prominent thread is a kind of mania for measurement. Readers are likely to think that even the gentle modesty of one researcher is an unwarranted exaggeration when he claims: “The sitting height, leg length, and sitting height index of several groups of Old Virginians is of some interest.” Perhaps the craze for measurement—mensuraphilia? metripathy?—runs in families: The son of the man who measured Old Virginians published a study summing up 35 years of measurements of how fast his fingernails grew.

Then there is the baffling wealth of “2D:4D” research, investigating how the ratio between your second and fourth finger predicts attractiveness or braininess. (Not very reliably, it seems.) Happily, at least, some indefatigable measurers have confirmed the notion that your ears never stop growing throughout your life. The lesson to be drawn from all this is, arguably, optimistic. You can’t have world-changing discoveries without allowing apparently pointless research—not only because the latter sometimes turns into (or at least inspires) the former but because there’s no way to tell what will be important before the results are in….

My favorite British review appeared in The Daily Mail. That review, too, was fairly lengthy. But the tone was different. Here’s my very most favorite part: “It’s almost dementedly inconsequential“.

Also this past week, I was interviewed on The Bob Edwards Show. Without intending to, I shocked Bob. At the end of the interview he asked me a very general question, to which I gave a very particular answer. The answer involved a historic duck.

You can get the book from Amazon and at most good bookstores.

BOOK TOUR: I will be doing a book tour of sorts in connection with the new book. For details, see the full schedule of events. If you would like to host an event in Boston, NYC, Washington, or elsewhere, please get in touch with us ASAP.

Some of the highlights:

a launch event at Harvard Bookstore in Cambridge on September 5
TEDMED in Washington the following week
Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s radio program in NYC later in September
talks at several Google offices
and of course, the Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony (and webcast) on September 18, and the Ig Informal Lectures at MIT on September 20

THE FIRST ‘THIS IS IMPROBABLE” BOOK: Don’t forget this book’s older sibling, the almost-new Improbable book:

This Is Improbable, by Marc Abrahams, OneWorld Publications, 2012, ISBN 978-1851689316.

“Rationalism taken to intoxicating extremes“—The Guardian

Buy a copy (or several!) on Amazon.com.

Vi Hart’s Mobius Fruit Foot

Vi Hart plays with mathematics and her food—in this case a treat called Fruit by the Foot:

BONUS: The book Cubed Foot Gardening

BC Prof explores new immortal legal/financial powers of dead people

The United States is a very good place to be dead; better than almost anywhere, legally speaking. Ray Madoff, a professor at Boston College Law School who specializes in trusts and estates, lays out evidence for that in her book called Immortality and the Law: The Rising Power of the American Dead. Other nations have their own strong points, many of which Madoff discusses. But in choosing a place to live when you’re dead, “USA forever” is the slogan for you.

Madoff is a detective on the trail of a curious question…

—so begins another Improbable Innovation nugget, which appears in its entirety on BetaBoston.

Why do we dig the beach (with bucket and spades)?

“The bucket and spade holds more significance than its role as a sandcastle-building tool; seen through the tidal changes and the different angles of photography, and especially through their relational engagement with the beach, the agency of the bucket and spade is revealed.”

- explains Adrian Franklin MA Kent, PhD Brist, (Professor of Sociology at theUniversity of Tasmania, Australia) in a newly published paper for the journal Tourist Studies, entitled: ‘On why we dig the beach: Tracing the subjects and objects of the bucket and spade for a relational materialist theory of the beach‘

With the aid of a series of historical photos documenting bucket-and-spade culture spanning more than 100 years, the author points out that the beach is :

“[...] a place where clear lines between the human and non-human world do not exist, where sensual, muscular and mental engagements are mediated by extensions of the body, the spade and the bucket. It is a choreography of failure for humanity, in which nature, the sea, triumphs every time, even though the child has an opportunity to struggle against it and to reimagine such relation­ships anew.”

Also see: An Improbable short series on ‘Sandcastles in Academia’.

    BONUS (cited in the paper) ‘Castles Made of Sand’ by Jimi Hendrix

Wandhekar’s sleep note

You must get unusual mail, people sometimes remark. Yes, we do. Here’s a note that arrived this past weekend:

what is this? This is a sleeping position. Sleep at this position near about one hour … When asthma people sleep at this position near about one hour then they get more powerful result. Please sleep more asthama people  at this position near about one hour and see reasult. If you get something reasult then tell him to sleep dialy near about 2-3 hour. Near about 4-5 month asthama people cure asthama permanantly more than 80 percent. I am created vishnu wandhekar google profile. I am vishnu eknath wandhekar,

vishnu eknath wandhekar also created this video, in which he demonstrates his unusual perspective:

Extensions of Differences in Differences (statistics) 1985 – 2011

The Difference-in-Differences (DiD) statistical method has now been in use for almost 30 years. see: ‘Using the Longitudinal Structure of Earnings to Estimate the Effect of Training Programs‘ by Orley Ashenfelter; David Card, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 67, No. 4. (Nov., 1985), pp. 648-660. (page 5 in the .pdf).

And the Difference-in-Differences (DiD) method was extended, in 1994, with the addition of the the Difference-in-Difference-in-Differences (DiDiD) technique. See: Jonathan Gruber : ‘The Incidence of mandated Maternity benefits’ The American Economic Review, Vol. 84, No. 3 (Jun., 1994), pp. 622-641 (page 7 in the .pdf)

Improbable will of course attempt to inform readers if and when the Difference-in-Difference-in-Difference-in-Differences method makes an appearance.

Further extensions of the Did and DiDiD : In 1998, the Difference-in-Differences (DiD) method was extended by Heckman, J., Ichimura, H., Smith, J. and Todd, P. ‘Characterizing selection bias using experimental data’, Econometrica, Vol. 66, pp. 1017–1098. (page 25 in the .pdf) to include the Conditional Difference-in-Differences (CDiD) method.

And in 2011 the Difference-in-Difference-in-Differences (DiDiD) method, like the Difference-in-Differences (DiD) method before it, also received a conditional extension, the Conditional Difference-in-Difference-in-Differences (CDiDiD) paradigm. see: Buscha, F., Maurel, A., Page, L. and Speckesser, S. (2012), ‘The Effect of Employment while in High School on Educational Attainment: A Conditional Difference-in-Differences Approach.‘ Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, 74: 380–396. (page 7 in the .pdf).

Note: Statistically speaking, not everyone is 100% convinced of the accuracy of some DiD applications. See: from 2003, Bertrand, M.; Duflo, E.; Mullainathan, S. ‘How Much Should We Trust Differences-in-Differences Estimates?‘. Quarterly Journal of Economics 119 (1): 249–275 (page 18 in the .pdf)

“Our study suggests that, because of serial correlation, conventional DD standard errors may grossly understate the standard deviation of the estimated treatment effects, leading to serious over-estimation of t-statistics and significance levels. Since a large fraction of the published DD papers we surveyed report t-statistics around 2, our results suggest that some of these findings may not be as significant as previously thought if the outcome variables under study are serially correlated. In other words, it is possible that too many false rejections of the null hypothesis of no effect have taken place.”

BONUS: ‘Difference in Indifference’ in: ‘Intermediacy: extracting vitality from intersecting borderlines’ (page 11 in the .pdf)

“Ordinary is ordinary. Indifferent is indifferent. Too many differences are likely to turn into indifference. Minute difference in indifference is far more extra-different than exhaustive extra-ordinary.”

Music to sooth the savage customer? Don’t count on it

Companies that run call centers — responding to complaints and requests from vocal customers — know that the job will always be done imperfectly. A new study suggests that one particular technique is likely to fail big time.

Karen Niven, a lecturer in organizational Psychology at the Univeristy of Manchester (UK)’s business school, looked at (and listened to) the music that callers hear while they are waiting to talk to a call agent. Niven’s study is called “Can music with prosocial lyrics heal the working world? A field intervention in a call center” [published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, epub July 23, 2014]. Niven writes…

—so begins another Improbable Innovation nugget, which appears in its entirety on BetaBoston.

A favorite Ig Nobel moment: The prize for inventing karaoke

Here’s a look back to one of our favorite moments from the first 23 Ig Nobel Prize ceremonies: The awarding, in the year 2004, of the Ig Nobel Peace Prize to Daisuke Inoue, of Hyogo, Japan.

Mr.  Inoue was honored for inventing karaoke, thereby providing an entirely new way for people to learn to tolerate each other.

Here’s video of that prize announcement, and Mr. Inoue’s acceptance speech, and what happened immediately after that.

Later, Mr Inoue looked back at that moment, in an interview republished last year in The Appendix (which came to wider attention via an appreciation in The New Yorker).

This year’s Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, the 24th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, will happen on Thursday evening, September 18, at the usual location: Harvard University’s Sanders Theatre. We hope you will join us, either in person at the theater or via the live webcast.

NOTE: Tickets for Sanders Theater are sold out. There’s a chance that a very few seats will become available shortly before the ceremony. If that happens, we will announce it via the @ImprobResearch twitter stream and on the Improbable Research Facebook page.