Improbable Research

I told my story in Federal Court in Boston sufficiently well that counsel for the manufacturer asked me to work for that company in any further cases. I found it a bit amusing that the request was made in the men’s lavatory. Sometime later I told the story to a woman lawyer who took umbrage. Her remark was, “There are entirely too many deals going down in men’s rooms.” She had a point, but redress may be difficult. Female professionals have fairly well eliminated the men-only clubs and restaurants where business was once discussed in their absence. Men-only lavatories represent a bit trickier problem.

So writes Ken Russell, MIT professor emeritus of Metallurgy and Nuclear Engineering, in “The Case of the Acrobatic Airplane”

“Are Women Really More Talkative Than Men?”, Matthias R. Mehl, Simine Vazire, Nairán Ramírez-Esparza, Richard B. Slatcher and James W. Pennebaker, Science, vol. 317, no. 5834, 2007, p. 82
(http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1139940).
The authors, who are variously at the University of Arizona, at Washington University and at the University of Texas, report that:

Women are generally assumed to be more talkative than men. Data were analyzed from 396 participants who wore a voice recorder that sampled ambient sounds for several days. Participants’ daily word use was extrapolated from the number of recorded words. Women and men both spoke about 16,000 words per day.

(That’s an excerpt from the article “Improbable Research Review,” published in AIR 14:4.)

Frequently, the UCE [Under Cover Employee]‘s feeling of alienation results from the distorted perceptions associated with highly stressful situations, although, sometimes, a factual basis exists. Fellow employees may resent UCEs because they get special attention. Co-workers observe what appears to be UCEs’ living the good life: staying out all night, wearing expensive or exotic clothes and jewelry, spending large amounts of someone else’s money, driving great cars or motorcycles, and seemingly working fewer hours than everyone else.

So says the study “Managing Undercover Stress—The Supervisor’s Role,” by Stephen R. Band, Ph.D., and Donald C. Sheehan, M.A., P.M.C., Law Enforcement Bulletin, February 1999. The issue features numerous photographs, mostly of men, about half of whom are mustachioed. It includes photographs of Stephen R. Band and Donald C. Sheehan, neither of whom is shown with a mustache.

Tonight is Ig Nobel night at the Genoa Science Festival.

The event starts at 9:00 pm. at the Ducal Palace. AIR editor Marc Abrahams will introduce several Ig Nobel Prize winners, and will present the prizes to several of the new winners (Italian winner Massimiliano Zampini and French winners Marie-Christine Cadiurges and Christel Joubert) who were not able to attend the October 2 Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony that was held at Harvard.

When one’s feet smell unpleasant, it’s polite to wonder why. But six scientists at the Shiseido Research Centre in Yokohama, Japan, pursued this interest more thoroughly than mere politeness alone would dictate.

The pioneering research study, Elucidation of Chemical Compounds Responsible for Foot Malodour, by F Kanda, E Yagi, M Fukuda, K Nakajima, T Ohta and O Nakata, appeared in 1990 in the British Journal of Dermatology.

The investigation had three phases. In Phase 1, they assembled a panel of 10 non-professional sniffers. The scientists mixed eight different potions, each containing chemicals of which they were suspicious – chemicals known to often lurk in other fragrant body parts: armpits, vaginas and scalps. After the sniffers sniffed each potion, the scientists asked them if the smell was familiar and, if it was, to say whether it resembled foot odour, armpit odour or something else. The sniffers all agreed that the potions smelled more or less like foot or armpit, but disagreed as to which, and how closely.

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