Improbable Research

Perhaps prompted by the extensive academic investigations into the prevalence of ennui amongst Chinese librarians, (see: Improbable Research 2012/02/06/) authors XIANG Yi-wen,WANG Hai-ying of the School of Economics and Management,Shenyang University of Science and Technology,Shenyang China draw attention to the Organizational Elements of the Happy Work

“In modern society, competition is more and more intensive day by day. Life rhythm is more and more quick, we are all facing with great working pressure. Most employees have the same feeling that they are doing their work unhappily, and this feeling affect their body and mind health and life state. The organizational elements have the direct impact on the happy work. So we should cnange [sic] the work way, pay attention to the employees’ improvement, strengthern [sic] the stimulation system, respect the communication and then create the happy situation.”

And yet more advice comes from researcher ZHANG Kang-kang, who maybe in a good position to have had first hand experience of ennui, being based at the Library, Mianyang Normal University, China.

“Through analyzing the Librarian job burnout, and all sorts of Librarian job burnout, the paper has put forward the method of librarian happy work, for the reference by librarians.”

See: Learn to Work Happily to Free from the Slough of Librarian Job Burnout

BONUS: Notes regarding Slough.

The race is on to make and market a defibrillator for the brain!

Here are some of the contestants.

1. This:

“Stroke thrombolysis: Is tissue plasminogen activator a defibrillator for the brain?” A M Buchan and T E Feasby, Canadian Medical Association Journal, 2000 January 11; 162(1): 47–48. The authors are at the Department of Clinical Neurosciences, University of Calgary.

2. This:

NeuroNexus Technologies, a six-year-old U-M spin-off, is doubling its physical footprint and hiring as many as eight new employees as it works to produce the next generation of deep-brain stimulators for clinical use…. The company’s deep-brain stimulation system… won’t be on the market for several years, he said. But it promises to provide a much more targeted source of stimulation than products currently on the market, which NeuroNexus Director of New Technologies Rio Vetter described as essentially a defibrillator for the brain.

3. This:

“Imagine a device like an automatic external defibrillator except for the brain,” said first author Yusuf Tufail, who is now a postdoctoral associate at the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences. Published in the September issue of Nature Protocols, the article, “Ultrasonic Neuromodulation by Brain Stimulation with Transcranial Ultrasound,” provides a guide for the further development and clinical application of ultrasonic neuromodulation.

BONUS: Video of the Umpqua Community College Bighorn Jazz combined with the Roseburg High Jazz band to perform the song “The Defibrillator”:

BONUS: T.J. performs a different song of the same name, with words:

As the heavens inevitably cover every mountain peak with snow, so do pigeons unstoppably deposit a protective white layer atop every outdoor statue – or so people believed. Yukio Hirose shocked and delighted the world by disproving one of these two supposedly eternal truths. He used arsenic to do it.

Chemistry provides a way to communicate certain messages to birds. Yukio Hirose figured this out after he noticed that something, some mysterious who-knows-what, had consistently attracted the attention of one particular group of pigeons.

In the Kenroku garden in the city of Kanazawa, Japan, stands a statue of the legendary hero Yamato Takeru no Mikoto. There are many things to admire about the statue, but, as a scientist, Professor Hirose was fascinated by how pristine the figure is. Birds rarely visit it, and seldom bestow the kind of personal gifts they often lavish on statuary….

So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.

BONUS: Professor Hirose was awarded the 2003 Ig Nobel Prize in chemistry for this research.

BONUS: Tom Lehrer’s at-least-partially-pertinent song “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park”:

Rotary milking parlors for cows are just what the name says they are. This video (HT Bug Girl) shows one in action. The action heats up soon after the 1:50 mark, with faster music, and a few sights that verge on milking porn.

Below it is a technical drawing from one of the several rotary milking parlor patent applications on file with the US Patent Office. (This particular one is application #US 2011/0214612 A1, filed on October 28, 2009.)

Filmmaker/writer Errol Morris interviews Ig Nobel Prize winner (prize for psychology, 2000, for his and Justin Kruger’s report  ”Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments“) David Dunning, in the New York Times. The interview begins:

The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong but You’ll Never Know What It Is

I called David Dunning at his offices at Cornell:

DAVID DUNNING:  Well, my specialty is decision-making.  How well do people make the decisions they have to make in life?  And I became very interested in judgments about the self, simply because, well, people tend to say things, whether it be in everyday life or in the lab, that just couldn’t possibly be true.  And I became fascinated with that.  Not just that people said these positive things about themselves, but they really, really believed them.  Which led to my observation: if you’re incompetent, you can’t know you’re incompetent.

ERROL MORRIS:  Why not?

DAVID DUNNING:  If you knew it, you’d say, “Wait a minute.  The decision I just made does not make much sense.  I had better go and get some independent advice.”   But when you’re incompetent, the skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is.  In logical reasoning, in parenting, in management, problem solving, the skills you use to produce the right answer are exactly the same skills you use to evaluate the answer.  And so we went on to see if this could possibly be true in many other areas.  And to our astonishment, it was very, very true….

Dunning and Kruger’s study: