Personal spacing at the beach, pseudostupidity, and other things, turn up in this week’s Improbable Research podcast.
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This week, Marc Abrahams tells about:
- Personal Space at the Beach. (“Territorial Spacing on a Beach,” Sociometry, Julian J. Edney and Nancy L. Jordan-Edney, vol. 37, 1974, pp. 92-104. / “Territorial Spacing on a Beach Revisited: A Cross-National Exploration,” H.W. Smith, Social Psychology Quarterly, vol. 44, no. 2, 1981, pp. 132-7. / “Personal Space and Stimulus Intensity at a Southern California Amusement Park,” Paul D. Nesbitt and Girard Steven, Sociometry, vol. 37, no. 1, 1974, pp. 105-15. / “How are Distances Between Individuals of Grazing Cows Explained by a Statistical Model?” Masae Shiyomi, Ecological Modelling, vol. 172, 2004, pp. 87–94. / “How are distances between grazing cows determined: A case study,” Masae Shiyomi, Applied entomology and zoology 39, no. 4 (2004): 575-581. / Islam, Tamanna, Eiki Fukuda, Masae Shiyomi, Molla Rahman Shaibur, Shigenao Kawai, and Mikinori Tsuiki. “Effects of Feces on Spatial Distribution Patterns of Grazed Grassland Communities.” Agricultural Sciences in China 9, no. 1 (2010): 121-129. Featuring dramatic readings by Andrew Berry.) Here’s video of someone else, more recently, intruding on people’s personal space near (though not quite on) a beach:
- French Hairdresser-mathematicians. (Archibald, Raymond Clare (1943). ‘Tables of Trigonometric Functions in Non-Sexagesimal Arguments.’ Mathematical Tables and Other Aids to Computation 1 (2): 33–44. /
Grattan-Guinness, Ivor (1990). ‘Work for the Hairdressers: The Production of de Prony’s Logarithmic and Trigonometric Tables.’ Annals of the History of Computation 12: 177–85. Featuring dramatic readings by Sue Wellington.)
- Personality Makeup of Makeup Users. (“Why Women Use Makeup: Implication of Psychological Traits in Makeup Functions,” Rodolphe Korichi, Delphine Pelle-De-Queral, Germaine Gazano, and Arnaud Aubert, International Journal of Cosmetic Science, vol. 31, no. 2, March–April 2008, pp. 156–7. Featuring dramatic readings by Dan Schreiber.)
- What women find more disgusting than men. (“Disgust Sensitivity and the Sex Difference in Fears to Common Indigenous Animals,” W.A. Arrindell, S. Mulkens, J. Kok, and J. Vollenbroek, Behaviour Research and Therapy, vol. 37, no. 3, March 1999, pp. 273-80. Featuring dramatic readings by Chris Cotsapis.)
- Pseudostupidity. (“Pseudostupidity and Analyzability,” L.S. Cohn, Journal of the American Psychoanalitic Association, vol. 37, no. 1, 1989, pp. 131-45. / “Pseudostupidity: a Study in Masochistic Exhibitionism,” W.N. Evans, Psychoanalitic Review, vol. 61, no. 4, Winter 1974-75, pp. 619-32. Featuring dramatic readings by Jean Berko Gleason.)
- Boys Will Be Boys. (“And Now, a Needle in the Rectum,” Naresh K. Soni, Ashwini Gupta, and Narayan S. Shekhawat, Indian Journal of Gastroenterology, vol. 16, no. 2, April 1997, pp. 77–8. / “Testosterone Concentration in the Seminal Plasma of Cocks,” M. Zeman, J. Kosutzky, and Eugenia Bobakova, British Poultry Science, vol. 27, 1986, pp. 261–6. / “The Nubility Hypothesis,” Frank Marlowe, Human Nature, vol. 9, no. 3, 1998, pp. 263–71. Featuring dramatic readings by Corky White.)
The mysterious John Schedler perhaps did the sound engineering this week.
The Improbable Research podcast is all about research that makes people LAUGH, then THINK — real research, about anything and everything, from everywhere —research that may be good or bad, important or trivial, valuable or worthless. CBS distributes it, both on the new CBS Play.it web site, and on iTunes (and soon, also on Spotify).