Improbable Research

This is part 4 in our Curing Shyness in Dogs series. Investigator Bill Maloney, whose findings comprised most of parts 1, 2, and 3 (concentrating mainly on gunfire, thunder, and a man wearing striped gloves, respectively), explains: “Seems also that dogs can train humans not to be shy about certain things.” He says this in reference to the following video for Kackel Dackel. Keen observers will notice that the video is in the German language:

Researchers : Piotr Sorokowski (University of Wroclaw, Institute of Psychology), Andrzej Szmajke (University of Wroclaw, Institute of Psychology), Agnieszka Sorokowska (University of Wroclaw, Institute of Psychology), Maryann Borg Cunen (University of Malta), Marharyta Fabrykant (Belarusian State University), Kiumars Zarafshani (Razi University), Manochehr Amiri (Razi University), Saeideh Bazzazian (Islamic Azad University), Biljana Blazevska-Stoilkovska (University “Sts. Cyril and Methodius”), Veronica Casellas (University of Puerto Rico), Hakan Cetinkaya (Izmir University of Economics), Berenice Lopez Coutino (University of Guadalajara), Maria Chavez, Cecilia Cheng (University of Hong Kong), Ioana Cristea (Babes-Bolyai University), Daniel David (Babes-Bolyai University), Seda Dural (Izmir University), Anna Dzięcioł (University of Glasgow), Sofian Fauzee (University Putra Malaysia), Ana Frichand, Evrim Gulbetekin (Izmir University), Ivana Hromatko (University of Zagreb), Tina Javahishvili (Tbilisi State University), Anna Jgenti (Tbilisi State University), Sandi Kartasasmita (Tarumanagara University), Khadijeh Moradi (Razi University), Bojan Musil (University of Maribor), Sonia Nongmaithem (Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati), Ekundayo Oladipo (Tai Solarin University of Education), Ojedokun Oluyinka (Lead City University), Kanak Patil (University of Pune), Wanda Schell (University of Puerto Rico), Hasmig Serpekian (University of Jordan), Borislav Slavchev (South-West University Neofit Rilski) Stanislava Stoyanova (South-West University Neofit Rilski), Meri Tadinac (University of Zagreb), Nachiketa Tripathi (Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati) and Tzu Fang (University in Taiwan) are reporting (in the latest issue of the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology) that photo-silhouettes of individuals with either excessively short or excessively long legs are perceived as less attractive in at least 27 nations. The work compliments previous leg-length and attractiveness research (University of Liverpool) which drew conclusions based on experiments which employed drawings of leggy and stocky stick-figures.

Alan Kennedy’s Color/Language Project lists color idioms in many languages (thanks to Anka Pero for bringing it to our attention). Click on the non-especially-colorful image here to get to the fully-color-filled chart.

“In linguistics, the Gunning fog index is a test designed to measure the readability of a sample of English writing,” says Wikipedia.

Someone named Simon has put a Gunning fog calculator online. This and the preceding paragraph together have a Gunning fog index of 11.47, sayeth the calculator.

What is mathematics? Somebody once said that philosophy is the misuse of a terminology which was invented just for this purpose.* In the same vein, I would say that mathematics is the science of skillful operations with concepts and rules invented just for this purpose.

— from “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences,” Eugene Wigner, Communications in Pure and Applied Mathematics, vol. 13, No. I, February 1960, pp. 1-14.

* Wigner specifies: “This statement is quoted here from W. Dubislav’s Die Philosophie der Mathematik in der Gegenwart (Berlin: Junker and Dunnhaupt Verlag, 1932), p. 1.”