Improbable Research

Quand la Science Fair Rire, a television program about the Ig Nobel Prizes and Ig Nobel Prize winners, premieres on France 5, on Friday night, September 28.

Produced by Frederic Lepage and directed by Roland Portiche for Paris-based FL Concepts, this and subsequent episodes will later also be shown on public television networks in other countries (in other languages). The series features many Ig winners, as well as Marc Abrahams, founder of the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, and other Iggy persons around the world.

Episode 1 features French, Dutch, Swedish and American Ig Nobel Prize winners in their natural habitats, and an Ig Nobel visit to the Nobel Museum in Stockholm.

The image below shows Basile Audoly and Sebastien Neukirch of the Université Pierre et Marie Curie, in Paris. Audoly and Neukirch shared the 2006 Ig Nobel Physics Prize for their insights into why, when you bend dry spaghetti, it often breaks into more than two pieces.

If we recognize people’s faces, much of that recognition comes from seeing their hair. That’s the gist of a discovery made years ago at MIT. These two studies explain, and give examples. The examples are reproduced below. Each shows a set of two people — an American Vice President and President. In one case, Al Gore and Bill Clinton; in the other, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush. Within each pair, you may not immediately realize that both faces have the same features, thanks to some nifty image manipulation. Here are the citations, and a chunk of each study:

“United we stand, the role of head structure in face recognition”, P. Sinha and T. Poggio, Perception 131-133., 2002.

“I think I know that face…,”  Sinha, P. & Poggio, T. (1996). Nature, Vol. 384, No. 6608, pp. 404.

Migraine is the subject of a report by Dr Katherine Foxhall [pictured here] in the Wellcome Library blog:

Houseleeks and Garden Worms

… Since I began researching the history of migraine three years ago, I have been just as intrigued by the recipe books in the Wellcome Library’s manuscript collections… Jane Jackson’s book is a great example. She carefully compiled her Method of Phisicke and Chirurgery just as Civil War began in England in 1642, and included hundreds of carefully written recipes dealing with everything from common aches, wounds and agues to plague…. her book reveals a lot about early-modern migraine knowledge. Jackson’s first recipe (p.4b) instructs the reader to take ‘houseleeke and garden worms’, stamped together and mixed with fine flour to make a plaster…

Watching the clip above, featuring David Brent (a.k.a. Ricky Gervais) formerly the manager of The Office (UK original series), you might ask yourself the question ‘Is management humor an asset or liability?’

Not such an easy question to answer – in fact, a recent academic paper on the subject, Management humor : asset or liability? (Organizational Psychology Review, November 2011 vol. 1 no. 4 pp. 316-338 ) which is based around analyses of the communication process and models of cognitive and affective processing dynamics in social cognitive theory, took no less than 22 pages of in-depth examination to reach a conclusion. One which the authors save for the very last paragraph – some might even say in the form of a ‘punchline’.

“We conclude that humor can be either an asset or a liability for a manager.“

adding :

“This is one of the many features of humor in organizations that makes it worthy of further study.”