Marc Abrahams's Blog, page 586

Stress Test for Vicars

What's special about vicars? This study, from Bispebjerg University Hospital, Copenhagen, looked into the question:

"Psychosocial stress among Danish vicars," F. Gyntelberg, H. O. Hein and P. Suadicani, Occupational Medicine (2012) 62 (1): 12-16. The authors explain:

"No studies have analysed whether differences in psychosocial workloads between vicars and others explain their higher prevalence of stress-related symptoms. [We conclude that] The higher prevalence of stress-related symptoms among vicars could largely be attributed to high-quantitative work demands."

(Thanks to investigator Janet Rosenbaum for bringing this to our attention.)

BONUS: The clergyman and the tuber

When singers raise eyebrows (and how that's interpreted)

When singers sing high notes, their eyebrows go higher than when they sing low notes. While that may not be an absolute physiological rule, a team of Danish and American researchers discovered that it happens pretty consistently. They lay out the evidence, and explain what it may mean, in a study called Facial Expression and Vocal Pitch Height: Evidence of an Intermodal Association, published in 2009 in the journal, Empirical Musicology Review.

When scientists tackle a new question, they begin with the knowledge that finding the answer – if there is an answer – might entail lengthy, slogging effort. Some questions take years to settle. Some take decades. The eyebrow/high-note evidence comes from "an experiment lasting less than one minute".

Sofia Dahl [pictured here] at Aalborg University Copenhagen, and David Huron and Randolph Johnson at Ohio State University, ran their experiment 44 times, each with a different volunteer….

So begins this week's Improbable Research column in The Guardian.

BONUS: Next week Sofia Dahl will perform in the Ig Nobel tour of Scandinavia, explaining this very topic.

Are motorways rational from slime mould's point of view?

Andy Adamatzky, an innovative writer of scientific reports [see our report about one of his earlier works], has joined with collaborators from many nations to do a new report about the apparently intelligent behavior of slime molds. He has published several papers that derive from the (double!) Ig Nobel Prize winning research of  Toshiyuki Nakagaki and Nakagaki's team. The new paper is:

"Are motorways rational from slime mould's point of view?" Andrew Adamatzky, Selim Akl, Ramon Alonso-Sanz, Wesley van Dessel, Zuwairie Ibrahim, Andrew Ilachinski, Jeff Jones, Anne V. D. M. Kayem, Genaro J. Martinez, Pedro de Oliveira, Mikhail Prokopenko, Theresa Schubert, Peter Sloot, Emanuele Strano, Xin-She Yang, arXiv:1203.2851v1, 13 Mar 2012.  The authors report:

"We analyse the results of our experimental laboratory approximation of motorways networks with slime mould Physarum polycephalum. Motorway networks of fourteen geographical areas are considered: Australia, Africa, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, Iberia, Italy, Malaysia, Mexico, The Netherlands, UK, USA. For each geographical entity we represented major urban areas by oat flakes and inoculated the slime mould in a capital. After slime mould spanned all urban areas with a network of its protoplasmic tubes we extracted a generalised Physarum graph from the network and compared the graphs with an abstract motorway graph using most common measures. The measures employed are the number of independent cycles, cohesion, shortest paths lengths, diameter, the Harary index and the Randic index. We obtained a series of intriguing results, and found that the slime mould approximates best of all the motorway graphs of Belgium, Canada and China, and that for all entities studied the best match between Physarum and motorway graphs is detected by the Randic index (molecular branching index)."

Behold an image from the paper:

(Thanks to investigator Vaughn Tan for bringing this to our attention.)

Ghastliness in mathematics

A good number of very high profile philosophers and mathematicians have drawn attention to what they see as the intrinsic beauty in mathematical solutions. Not so often mentioned, however, is that where there is beauty there can also be ugliness – or worse. For instance, take as an example the paper : 'A GHASTLY GENERALIZED n-MANIFOLD'- by professor Robert J. Daverman and Dr. John J. Walsh (published in the ILLINOIS JOURNAL OF MATHEMATICS, Volume 25, Number 4, Winter 1981)

[Note: The full paper can be accessed by clicking  'Full-text: Open access PDF file' via the link above.]

Our less mathematically gifted readers may not find the ghastliness immediately apparent though, indeed the word 'ghastly' appears only in the title of the paper, and thus at the risk of irritating those who are familiar with 2-ghastly spaces in acyclic manifold cell-like decompositions, and who will no doubt find the inherent ghastliness to be self-evident, we reprint below a concise explanation that Professor Daverman has kindly supplied to Improbable.

"It is ghastly because it contains no cuber of dimension 2, 3 …, or  n-1, where  N  is the dimension of the ghastly object."

History of Mathematics in 100 seconds

Behold the history of mathematics in 100 seconds, or, as they say in the original Danish, Matematikkens historie på 100 sekunder:

BONUS: The History of the Universe in Sixty Seconds

Odd bite mark presentation

Looking for an odd slide show (presumably to accompany a talk) about bite marks? Try this one. (The image here, from the slide show, features an impressively crowded heap of text, reminiscent perhaps of the crowded teeth that can be seen in some people's mouths.)

The slide show is mostly about using bite marks as legal evidence. Many, perhaps most, modern scientists who have examined the reliability of bitemark forensic analysis, though, are skeptical as to whether anyone should trust it.

Gormless? Teens in London, examined

If you're not a teenager in London and it's not the late 1990s, and if you're wondering about the use and usage of certain intensifiers who those where were teenagers in London in the late 1990s, here's a study to consult:

"He was really gormless–She's bloody crap: Girls, boys and intensifiers," Anna-Brita-Stenstrom, in Out of corpora: studies in honour of Stig Johansson (edited by Stig Johansson, Hilde Hasselgård, Signe Oksefjell), 1999. The author, at the University of Bergen, reports:

"This paper reports on the intensifiers in teenager talk, the aim of which has been to find out whether girls and boys in London today use the same or different sets of intensifiers."

A genteel squabble about serial-killer statistics

Everyone loves a good-natured statistics squabble (however, many statisticians would squabble with the statistic stated in the first part of this sentence). The Three-Toed Sloth blog entered into a squabble recently, beginning with this assertion:

Because my so-called friends like to torment me, several of them made sure that I knew a remarkably idiotic paper about power laws was making the rounds, promoted by the ignorant and credulous, with assistance from the credulous and ignorant, supported by capitalist tools:

M. V. Simkin and V. P. Roychowdhury, "Stochastic modeling of a serial killer", arxiv:1201.2458 …

(Thanks to investigator Stephanie Wilson for bringing this to our attention.)

Gin is Not Always the Tonic for What Ails

Gin. Beware of gin. This report from St. Luke's Hospital, Guildford, Surrey, UK, explains:

"LUNCHTIME GIN AND TONIC A CAUSE OF REACTIVE HYPOGLYCÆMIA", Stephen J.D. O'Keefe [pictured here — his is now in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania] , Vincent Marks, The Lancet, Volume 309, Issue 8025, 18 June 1977, Pages 128-8. The authors write:

"10 healthy young subjects drank, on three separate occasions, the equivalent of three gin and tonics containing 50 g alcohol and 60 g sucrose, gin and 'Slimline' tonic containing 50 g alcohol and 0·5 g sucrose, or tonic alone containing 60 g sucrose. Their behaviour, symptoms, blood-glucose, and plasma-insulin were monitored for 5 hours. Both of the alcohol-containing drinks caused mild-to-moderate inebriation, but gin and slimline tonic had no significant effect on either blood-glucose or plasma-insulin levels. Gin and tonic provoked a greater insulinæmia and more profound reactive hypoglycæmic response than tonic alone, and in 3 of the subjects this was associated with the appearance of neuroglycopenic symptoms."

BONUS: A similar message, delivered in song:

The further Ig Nobel adventures of Steve Colgan

Steve Colgan was game for further adventures when the Ig Nobel Tour of the UK bounced back into London for a day  (between the Bristol show and the upcoming shows in Scotland. [See his writeup of the shows in London and Teddington, and related goings-on.) His diary entry for yesterday begins:

Another fascinating day today starting at the Science Museum in London where I met up with Marc Abrahams – the brains behind the Ig Nobel Prizes – biologist Faraz Mainul Alam and Roger Highfield, author, broadcaster and former editor of New Scientist magazine and now the museum's head of PR.

We were there to meet inventors (and Ig Nobel winners) Makoto Imai and Hideaki Goto who had travelled over from Japan to meet various people and to present an example of their Wasabi Fire Alarm to the museum. Their research into 'what smells will wake you up' led to the discovery that a potent aerosol made from the pungent Japanese horseradish will irritate the mucus membranes to such a degree that you have no choice but to wake up. The practical application of this is a fire alarm for the deaf….

From the museum we went on to a couple of photo ops at a Wasabi chain restuarant and at Knightsbridge Fire Station where Tom Whipple, science writer for The Times, foolishly asked for a demonstration of the wasabi spray's potency….

For further details and subsequent doings of the day, see Steve's full writeup.