Improbable Research

RAI-3′s Telecamere program interviewed the three random-promotion researchers. Here is the full, glorious interview, in Italian:

The trio — Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, and Cesare Garofalo of the University of Catania, Italy — were awarded the 2010 Ig Nobel Prize in management for demonstrating mathematically that organizations would become more efficient if they promoted people at random.

Their published study (which they followed up with others) is: “The Peter Principle Revisited: A Computational Study,” Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, and Cesare Garofalo, Physica A, vol. 389, no. 3, February 2010, pp. 467-72.

BONUS: The researchers will be part of the upcoming Ig Nobel Tour of Scandinavia, in March.

Politicians are too simple.

Two Ig Nobel Prize winners — both, as it happens, professors at Stanford University — each gives part of the explanation. (As with many simple facts, the explanation is a bit complex.)

Politicians’ simple debates

Professor John Perry, a philosopher, looked at politicians’ televised debates. In an essay for the New York Times (on January 21, 2012), he writes:

Needed: More Political Dimensions

One dimension — left to right — doesn’t suffice to deal with today’s political reality…. We seem to need at least three dimensions… The system I suggest is no doubt quite deficient. But it is not, as the current left-to-right system clearly is, ridiculously deficient. [FOR DETAILS, SEE HIS ENTIRE ESSAY]

(Professor Perry was awarded the 2011 Ig Nobel Prize in literature for his Theory of Structured Procrastination, which says: To be a high achiever, always work on something important, using it as a way to avoid doing something that’s even more important.)

Politicians’ simple personalities

Professor Philip Zimbardo, a psychologist — yes, he is the Zimbardo of the famous Stanford prison experiment — looked at politicians’ personalities.

Zimbardo shared, with Gian Vittorio Caprara and Claudio Barbaranelli of the University of Rome, the 2003 Ig Nobel Prize in psychology. They were honored for their report “Politicians’ Uniquely Simple Personalities” (published in Nature, vol. 385, February 1997, p. 493). They write:

Politicians’ Uniquely Simple Personalities

The complexity of human personality has been reduced to five dimensions, based on factor analyses of judgements of personality traits. Many researchers agree that a five-factor model of personality captures the essential features of all traits that are used to describe personality: energy/ extroversion; agreeableness/friendliness; conscientiousness; emotional stability against neuroticism; and intellect/openness to experience.

But we show here that this common, standard set of five factors does not hold for judgements of famous politicalfigures. We found that, when people judge the personality traits of politicians, they use only two or three factors….

[NOTE: One of the politicians they studied was Silvio Berlusconi, who recently became an ex-politician.]

In 2002, NHK, Japan’s public TV network, made this documentary about the Ig Nobel Prizes. They broadcast it in Japan on Christmas eve, a time when much of the nation stays home, imbibes delicious substances, and watches television. We were told that the broadcast received the largest audience of anything broadcast on NHK during that entire year—a thought we find both delightful and perplexing.

Related info:

• The 2002 Ig Nobel Prize ceremony
• The 2002 winners
• Press clippings from that year

BONUS: A few years later, Young Jump magazine published a two-part manga about the Ig Nobel Prizes. (Here are Part 1 and Part 2.) The year after that, the manga writer gave a talk at the Ig Informal Lectures at MIT. The manga was later published in book form.

The seldom-prim, always pleasingly provocative science blogger known as @SciCurious alerts us to this video in which genetic material is collected from a goose.

We warn you to not watch this video if you do not or should not watch any video in which genetic material is collected from a goose.

BONUS (unrelated): A video called “All about Vodka: How It’s Made and How to Drink It”, an interview with “François Thibault, the maitre de chai who originated the recipe for Grey Goose vodka and serves as its brand’s ambassador.”

Sean O’Neill, in New Scientist, interviews Andre Geim, who has shared (with different collaborators) both an Ig Nobel Prize in physics (for his work on teh substance graphene) and a Nobel Prize in physics. Here’s the final portion of that interview:

From tinkering on the fringes to Nobel glory

… You have worked in many countries. How does the UK compare?

I spent four years in the UK from 1990, before returning in 2000. I like it because it’s a very natural environment. I found the US, the Netherlands and practically everywhere else I have worked a bit artificial and occasionally even hypocritical. There’s an expectation that you have to smile and behave in a certain manner. Despite the differences between Russia, where I was born, and the UK, there is some common sense of humour. British humour – natural and self-deprecating – is very appealing to me.

You won an Ig Nobel award in 2000 for demonstrating an unusual magnetic effect using a levitating frog. Did you know it would generate such a buzz?

It was always the intention. We wanted to get the message across that everything around us is magnetic and needed to find an image with general appeal. We considered putting spiders, lizards, cockroaches and hamsters into the field. A hamster would have done nicely, but the hole into the apparatus was too small, so we ended up with a tiny frog we found in the biology department.

BONUS: “Ig Nobel To Nobel: Creative (And Fun) Science Wins” [NPR]