Improbable Research

Swordswallower Dan Meyer, co-winner of the 2007 Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine (for the BMJ study “Swordwallowing and Its Side Effects“) accidentally replicated the findings of an earlier Ig Nobel Prize-winning study that involved a gorilla. This video shows it happening:

The video was filmed during the 2010 Ig Nobel Tour of the UK (for the UK’s National Science & Engineering Week). The action happens in Liverpool, in front of the Cavern Club, where The Beatles rose to fame.

A single statistic, in isolation, sometimes suggests a misleading part of a larger story. A February 12, 2008 Mongabay report supplies an example. We have highlighted the pertinent passages:

23 tigers were killed to supply parts seen in retail outlets surveyed during 2006 in 28 cities and towns across Sumatra, an island in Indonesia.

“This is down from an estimate of 52 killed per year in 1999-2002,” said Julia Ng, program officer with TRAFFIC Southeast Asia and lead author on The Tiger Trade Revisited in Sumatra, Indonesia. “Sadly, the decline in availability appears to be due to the dwindling number of tigers left in the wild.”

Something doesn’t add up, as they say, with the Rhine River. Earth Times reports:

Reports of Rhine’s length exaggerated and erroneous, academic finds

Cologne, Germany – Most of the world’s encyclopaedias and textbooks are misstating the length of Europe’s Rhine river after somebody accidentally added 90 kilometres about half a century ago, an observant academic has discovered.

Instead of checking the data with an authoritative source, all the books have copied one another, according to Bruno Kremer, a biologist at Cologne University quoted Saturday by the newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung. Most current textbooks say the river is 1,320 kilometres long, but in the first half of the 20th century, books said it was 1,230 kilometres long. “It was a probably just a stupid garble,” said Kremer.

A news source (Fox News) famed for its reliability, reprinting news from another news source (The Sun) famed for its reliability, applies this headline:

Terrorists Could Use Explosives in Breast Implants to Crash Planes, Experts Warn

The Sun accompanies its report with the image reproduced here.

Thus does vital knowledge get spread to the general public.

Alex Pluccino and colleagues at Universita di Catania, Italy, computed how the Peter Principle probably produces pathetic pathologies in large organizations. Details are in their study:

“The Peter Principle Revisited: A Computational Study,” Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda and Cesare Garofalo, arXiv:0907.0455v1, July 2, 2009, and Physica A 389 (2010) 467-472. The authors explain:

“In the late sixties the Canadian psychologist Laurence J. Peter advanced the apparently paradoxical principle, named since then after him, which can be summarized as follows: ‘Every new member in a hierarchical organization climbs the hierarchy until he/she reaches his/her level of maximum incompetence’. Despite its apparent unreasonableness, such a principle would realistically act in any organization where