Improbable Research

“I learned the hard way that there’s no bear spray that will stop a bear.” So says Troy Hurtubise in this old video (below) where he demonstrates some of his advanced technology.

Today comes word that a man named David Brown was awarded a 2011 Invention Award for his crime-fighting armored glove. At a glance, it appears that Mr. Brown (inspired by his friend, actor Kevin Costner) has re-invented the technology pioneered by Mr. Hurtubise. See the two videos below, one with each inventor, and see if it’s humanly possible (based only on those videos, which is a fun but not good way to judge) to distinguish who first invented this forearm technology.

Mr. Hurtubise, of course, was awarded the 1998 Ig Nobel Prize in Safety Engineering for an earlier version of his anti-grizzly-bear suit-of-armor. He thereafter continued to innovate, adapting his machines the better to fight terrorists, criminals, and foreign armies. He recently published a book, which we reviewed.

David Brown and his invention [click on the image below, and it will take you to a video embedded in a page on the Popular Science web site]:

Peter Freed, feeling provoked, muses about how he reads a science paper (and in this passage, how he reads a table in a science paper):

Now listen: most non-scientists see a table like this and freak out. They take around 3 seconds to decide they can’t understand it, get scared of feeling stupid in the face of all those numbers, and so they calm down by skipping over it and back to the words.  Scientists have a huge advantage over their non-scientist friends on this front: they don’t expect to understand this table in three seconds. Or even three minutes.  They look at it the way a piano player might look at a Bach score, or an art lover might look at the Mona Lisa.  They look at it for a good long time, lingering with their eyes over the columns of numbers, and getting a visceral feel for it.  The table becomes a living thing for them, with a personality.  And only after they have a little bit of a vibe from the table do they start trying to understand all the column- and row-headings. Do the same.  Allow the numbers to form some vague impressions in your mind.  Do they have decimal endings?  Are they all even or odd?  Are they short or long?  Is there lots of variation between them?

(Thanks to @BoraZ for bringing this article to our attention.)

There’s new, corroborating research that organizations become more efficient when they promote people randomly. The University of Catania team that won the 2010 Ig Nobel Prize in management for the original, mathematical work, has published a new study:

“Efficient Promotion Strategies in Hierarchical Organizations,” Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, Cesare Garofalo, arXiv:1102.2837v2.

“the efficiency of an organization increases significantly if one adopts a random strategy of promotion with respect to a simple meritocratic promotion of the best members. This fact, already shown in our previous [Ig Nobel Prize-winning] paper for a very simple pyramidal model and under a minimum number of assumptions, has proven to be very robust and persistent even in a new hierarchical tree model and under many different kinds of realistic improvements….

“[Our] new results corroborate the fact that one does not need a full random strategy to obtain an increase of efficiency: in many cases a choice of only 50% of agents selected in a random way for promotion results to be enough to obtain a consistent increment in the efficiency. Furthermore, in all cases discussed the random strategy improves consistently the efficiency of the system revealing a very persistent robustness.”

BONUS: The team’s study about the efficiency resulting when politicians are selected randomly.

BONUS: International Science Grid This Week (ISGTW) discusses the team’s work, in an article called “The Good, the Bad, and the Random”

The British Traditional Molecatchers Register offers this as its official perspective on modern molecatching in Britain:

With the withdrawal of Strychnine for mole control the demand for the Traditional Molecatcher has risen and will rise in the future. Many of the pest control companies are abandoning mole control work because trapping is too time consuming for them, and gassing is not totally effective, and can only be used in certain locations, and weather conditions. Not so with the Traditional Molecatcher, these individuals are not fazed by many of the jobs put before them. They are experts at mole catching and are aware of all the associated problems.

BONUS: The next British traditional molecatching training course will be given on June 4 in Haxey, near Doncaster, Yorkshire.

(Thanks to Edible Geography for bringing the traditional molecatchers to our attention.)

Building on her prior research on the aestheticization of the male urinal, Karen Rae Cast examines the male restroom as a visual and material culture-site in her thesis ‘Examining the male restroom as a site of visual and material culture in the twenty-first century’

(Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Art Education in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2009)
The author describes how :

“By combining aesthetic theories with an investigation of male restrooms, I investigate the integration of the aestheticization of the male restroom into everyday life, touch on the relationship between aestheticization of male restrooms and the construction of meaning and identity, and consider the possibility of the patron to these aestheticed spaces as an aesthetic subject.”