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The October issue of mini-AIR just went out. Topics include: Ig Nobel winners; Genoa presentation; tongue scraper poets, Delicious Guinea Pigs; Draculaic Disorders; Oddington, Genius, Ghoul; Almond/Dracula; Supersymmetry and Ghosts; etc.

(If you would like to have mini-AIR automatically sent to your email box every month, please subscribe to it. It’s free.)

Here we explain most of the mysteries concerning the brain.

We report the “Cingular Theory of Unification,” which postulates that one brain region — the “cingulate cortex” — is the alpha and omega, responsible for all of humankind’s functions. We believe that this theory not only explains the available data, but also prophesizes exponential growth in cingulate research that will dominate all neuroscience research. We provide humble advice on how to avoid such an apocalyptic future.

(That’s an excerpt from the article “Improbable Research,” by Gregory J. Gage, Hirak Parikh, Timothy C. Marzullo of the University of Michigan, published in AIR 14:3.

Mark Keusenkothen has joined the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists. LFHCfS member Joseph J. Luczkovich, who nominated him, says:

I would like to nominate my grad student (who enthusiastically agreed to be nominated, or else he does not get a PhD).

Mark Keusenkothen, LFHCfS
Diving Safety Officer, and biology graduate student
East Carolina University
Greenville, North Carolina, USA

Dan Ariely, co-winner of the 2008 Ig Nobel Medicine Prize (for discovering that expensive fake medicine is more effective than inexpensive fake medicine) brought a video camera to the ceremony. Later that evening, he interviewed 2006 Ig Nobel Medicine Prize winner Francis Fesmire (who devised a reliable cure for intractable hiccups: digital rectal massage). Here is the result, and below it, Ariely’s description of the interview.

Dan Ariely writes:

Ig Nobel — a dream come true
Last Friday I was honored with the Ig Nobel award in Medicine for a paper that Rebecca Waber, Ziv Carmon, Baba Shiv and I wrote on the effects of discounts on the efficacy of placebo pain medications. We basically showed that when drugs are discounted they just don’t work as well. We also tried to make the point that this basic effect of expectations might also be the reason that people just don’t experience generic drugs to be as effective as brand name medications.

The ceremony, and the whole Ig Nobel experience itself, was great. I first attended this event 12 years ago during my last year as a PhD student and I loved it. That year Robert Matthews won the award in physics for showing why bread always falls with the butter side down. It was a very sophisticated paper on the way objects with uneven weight distribution fall, but the fact that he phrased it in this odd and familiar way was inspiring to me. After seeing this paper, I hoped that one day I would be able to do research that was worthy of this award, and finally after many years of trying I made it!

The funny guy who handed me the award was Francis Fesmire who won the Ig Nobel award in Medicine a few years ago. I am posting an interview with him but be warned—it is almost Rated R.

Investigator Dennis McClain-Furmanski alerts us to two research
projects:

In “Computer languages and facial hair — take two,” the author examines the correlation between kind and amount of facial hair, and the survival rate of persons who develop computer programming languages.

This is a follow up to a previous article from this author, called “Why Microsoft can Blow-Off with C#?.” It examines the correlation between said facial hair and the success of the programming language itself in terms of user satisfaction.

(If the latter fails to load, it can be accessed by a link within the former).

Note that the satisfaction issue is not derived from commercial sales of a compiler, as many are available for free (if not initially, then certainly after failure in the market). Nor is the correlation based strictly on males, as COBOL and its author Admiral Grace Hopper are included.

Here’s episode 108 (”Cake, wrap, calculate”) of the Improbable Research TV series.

To see it, click on the image at right, and you will be whisked to YouTube (where you can subscribe, if you like, to the Improbable Research channel).

These are three-minute videos about research that makes people laugh, then makes them think.

For links about each episode’s content, and an FAQ, see the Improbable TV page.

It’s not often that movie stars and pop singers are given the same celebrity as top scientists. The October 3, 2008 issue of the International Herald Tribune features a stunning conjunction of celebrities: Dr. Deborah J. Anderson of Boston University Medical School and Harvard Medical School, co-winner of the 2008 Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry (for discovering that Coca-Cola is an effective spermicide); movie stars Salma Hayek and James Earl Jones; and singer Tina Turner:

Patent US2007170798 is for a “Device of levitation of an item over an optimized base by means of permanent magnets. The equilibrium is stable along one or two axes by means of these permanent magnets, and along the one or two others by means of a combination of electromagnets of near zero consumption at equilibrium.” Click on the video to see it in action. The invention is reminiscent of the frog-levitating apparatus and theory by Geim and Berry honored with the 2000 Ig Nobel Prize in physics.

Thanks to investigator Manaz Ganji, who works with Janick Simeray, the inventor, for bringing this to our attention.)

Scholars like to celebrate the leadership genius of President George Bush - scholars named Carolyn B Thompson, James W Ware, Marvin Olasky and Ken Blanchard.

Thompson and Ware wrote a book called The Leadership Genius of George W Bush: 10 Common Sense Lessons from the Commander-in-Chief. Published during the early years of his presidency, it begins with these words: “George Bush may not hold himself out as a genius, but as the book closed on the 2002 midterm elections, it became abundantly clear that he is a brilliant leader.”

The authors remind us that, before Bush was made US president, political commentators held him in low regard: “In their eyes he was a lightweight worthy of little but scorn and contempt.”

Thompson and Ware say: “Something was wrong with this picture. As authors and consultants in the field of leadership, we were knowledgable about the subject … We asked ourselves: what makes him so effective? How does he do it?”

Their chapter titles highlight the keys to Bush’s brilliance:

· Can I Trust You? Become Credible.

· Bring in the Right People, part 1. Don’t Be Afraid to Hire People Smarter Than You.

· Bring in the Right People, part 2. Leave ‘Em Alone! …

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

Recently we discovered [see cond-mat/0212043] that the majority of citations in scientific papers are simply copied from the lists of references that appear in other papers. Here we show that a model, in which a scientist picks three random papers, cites them, and also copies a quarter of their references accounts quantitatively for empirically observed citation distribution. Simple mathematical probability, not genius, can explain why some papers are cited a lot more than the other.

(That’s an excerpt from the article “Do Copied Citations Create Renowned Papers?,” by M.V. Simkin and V.P. Roychowdhury, published in AIR 11:1.)

Aurelien Mazurie has joined the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists. He says:

Roughly speaking, my goal is to study the cell (and if possible, higher level of organisation like tissues, organisms, populations and … ecosystems) as a entangled set of interacting components, in order to find underlying logic and structures.

Aurelien Mazurie, Ph.D., LFHCfS
Postdoctoral fellow
Institut Pasteur
Paris, Fance

John Troyer, a newly arrived scholar at the University of Bath’s Centre for Death and Society, dug up evidence of a little-unappreciated gap in the law. His study, called Abuse of a Corpse: A Brief History and Re-Theorisation of Necrophilia Laws in the USA, appears in the only-occasionally-ghoulish journal Mortality.

Troyer spotlights an incident that frustrated the police and the courts of one American state. He writes: “In September 2006, Wisconsin police discovered Nicholas Grunke, Alexander Grunke and Dustin Radtke digging into the grave of a recently deceased woman. Upon questioning by police, Alexander Grunke explained that the three men wanted to exhume the body for sexual intercourse. In the Wisconsin state court system, the three men were charged with attempted third-degree sexual assault and attempted theft. None of the men could be charged with attempted necrophilia, since the state of Wisconsin has no law making necrophilia illegal.

“What the Wisconsin case exposed was the following gap in US jurisprudence: many states have no law prohibiting necrophilia.” …

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

The 2008 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded last night at the 18th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony. Click here to see a list of the winners. Recorded video is (or soon will be) posted for your viewing pleasure, displeasure or indifference.

Related event: The new winners will try to explain what they did and why they did it on Saturday, October 4, at the Ig Informal Lectures at MIT. It starts at 1:0 pm. You are invited (and it’s free—but seating is limited, so get there early).

In the photo here, Nobel Laureate William Lipscomb (left) and Benoit Mandelbrot, the inventor of the mathematical concept of fractals, drink Coca-Cola to toast the winners of the Ig Nobel Chemistry Prize. The prize was awarded to two teams of doctors—one team discovered that Coke is an effective spermacide; the other team discovered that it is not. Photo: Kees Moeliker / Annals of Improbable Research.

NOTE: Click here to see Nature News reporter Steve Nadis’s diary of his visit to the ceremony.

Thursday night, October 2, offers two events — one right after the other — that might be surprisingly similar:

• 7:30 pm (US eastern time)—The 18th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony
• 9:00 pm (US eastern time)—The US Vice Presidential Candidates Debate

The Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony will be WEBCAST LIVE here at www.improbable.com. The ceremony happens at Sanders Theatre, Harvard University. Tune in early, about 7:15 pm, to see the special pre-concert by Paul and Storm. (Want to attend in person? The event is nearly sold out, but it’s possible that a tiny number of tickets will become available at the theater, in the hours immediately preceding the ceremony.)

The second event, organized by a different group and held at Washington University, will also be webcast.

Network World, gearing themselves to absorb tomorrow night’s Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony and webcast,  prepared a grand look back (and forth) at several past Ig Nobel Prize winners. Click on the image below (taken from their report) to see details and lots of photos.

There are many ways to deliver criticism effectively, but emitting a loud startling noise at a person who is in the middle of a life-threatening procedure is not one of them.

So writes Miss Conduct about a predicament faced recently by 2007 Ig Nobel Medicine Prize co-winner Dan Meyer.

NOTE: Dan Meyer is coming to participate—to take a bow, and perhaps then some—at the 2008 Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, which happens tomorrow night: October 2, 2008.

Ig Nobel Prize winner Jim Gundlach, co-author of the study “The Effects of Country Music on Suicide,” in Upper Oddington, England, during the 2008 Ig Nobel Tour of the UK. The tour is part of the UK’s National Science Week.

Photo: Carol Gundlach.

(That’s an excerpt from AIR 14:4. A glorious large version of the photo appears on the magazine’s back cover.)

On his way to the Ig Nobel prize ceremony, 2003 biology prize winner Kees Moeliker will stop over in New York for a public talk in the Museum of Sex. Tuesday, September 30th at 1 and 4 pm, he will take part in a gallery chat in the exhibition ‘The Sex Lives of Animals‘. MoS curator Sarah Jacobs (see photo) will introduce the philosophy of the exhibit and Kees Moeliker will elaborate on homosexual necrophilia, in the mallard duck and other animals.

The tale of the duck that won Moeliker his Ig Nobel prize in 2003 is part of the exhibition now featuring in the Museum of Sex. The duck has his own little wall: the wall of the mallard.

The Museum of Sex is at 233 Fifth Avenue, New York. With a ticket to the museum (18+ only) the gallery chat is free of charge.

The sturgeon the man is holding in the photograph sent in by Dr. Grossi (AIR Vents 13:6) is a juvenile of either Acipenser fulvescens, the lake sturgeon, or Acipenser oxyrhynchus, the Atlantic sturgeon. (I am leaning toward the latter.) I am fairly certain of this identification based on the color of the scutes relative to the skin, shape of the snout, and relative position of the dorsal and anal fins. I cannot tell you much about the identification of the man. He appears to be wearing a cap with an “R” embroidered on it; this resembles very much the logo for Rutgers University. This man may be a fan of the Rutgers Scarlet Knights sports teams, and he is therefore probably from New Jersey, like most fans of that school. The range of the Atlantic sturgeon happens to include New Jersey. The U.S. Dept. of State may be looking for information on this man because sturgeon fishing is prohibited in New Jersey. Unfortunately the street sign in the background of the photograph is obscured by the tail of the fish and the lettering on the side of the trailer is obscured by the man’s waders. Good luck with the remainder of your investigation.

Prosanta Chakrabarty, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Fellow Department of Ichthyology
American Museum of Natural History
New York, NY

(That’s an excerpt from the article “Air Vents,” Published in AIR 14:3.)

A court in Mumbai, India has achieved, indeed far surpassed, the decades-long dream of “going paperless” — of eliminating paper and paperwork, replacing it with electronic technology. According to a July 21st, 2008 report in the Times of India:

MUMBAI: The state police can now bank on a forensic tool to achieve speedy convictions. For the first time in Maharashtra, life sentences were meted out to the accused based on the findings of Brain Electrical Oscillation Signature (BEOS) profiling. Reports of these tests, conducted at the state forensic lab in Kalina, were held admissible in sessions courts in two brutal cases of murder….

During BEOS profiling, an accused is asked not to give answers verbally; experiential knowledge is retrieved from his brain. Experiential knowledge is acquired only through participation in an event, leading the person to have an experience of that activity. The technique detects and differentiates whether the accused was actually involved in committing a crime or only learnt of it. It helps in the reconstruction of events.

“BEOS involves the application of electro-encephalogram. Electrodes are attached to different parts of the brain to detect electrical activation in the brain. The accused is asked to wear a cap with 32 electrodes, of which two are placed on each earlobe and rest on various parts of the brain. Probes (short questions) are recorded in a computer and presented to an accused. He is asked to sit with eyes closed and listen to the probes,” director of the state forensic lab, Rukmani Krishnamurthy, told TOI.

This may also have the side effect of reducing the cost of future legal proceedings.

Nearly every scientific test of this technology (and of nearly all lie-detector technology) has found it to be unreliable. Having now decided that the scientific community is simply wrong about the tests being wrong, the court can now eliminate the time and expense that would come from asking scientists to testify, about anything, in future court cases of any kind. Court cases can be conducted automatically, more or less, leading to just decidions, more or less.