Improbable Research

Hunting for sex? This study finds that one purported hunting ground may be less well-stocked than its reputation suggests:

“Sleeping with the Enemy: Recent Scholarship on Sexuality in the Book of Judges,” Serge Frolov [pictured below], Currents in Biblical Research, June 2013 vol. 11 no. 3, pp. 308-327. The author, at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, explain:

“Reviewing the publications of the last three decades, this article demonstrates that the period in question has been predictably marked by sharply increased attention to the sexual aspects of the book of Judges, and especially by sustained attempts to discover sexuality in the texts that had been commonly read with little to no reference to it. Refreshing as it is in many respects, this trend suffers from multiple vulnerabilities, including the exegetes’ tendency to stretch semantics of the biblical lexemes, ignore the syntactic layout and context of the discussed fragments, rely on problematic sexual symbolism, and produce interpretations that are less than edifying for contemporary Western audiences. As a result, much, although by no means all, of the recent quest for sexuality in Judges is unsustainable, as far as both the text and the reader are concerned.”

(Thanks to Dan Vergano for bringing this to our attention.)

Professor Frolov, author of the study.

BONUS: A dissenting view

A mere eleven years after the inventors of Bow-Lingual were awarded the Ig Noble Peace Prize, Con Slobodchikoff, professor emeritus at Arizona State University and President and CEO of Animal Communications, Ltd., explains how near we are to having computer-aided communications with some animals. Megan Garber interviewed Slobodchikoff for The Atlantic. Here’s a bit of that interview:

So I think we have the technology now to be able to develop the devices that are, say, the size of a cellphone, that would allow us to talk to our dogs and cats. So the dog says “bark!” and the device analyzes it and says, “I want to eat chicken tonight.” Or the cat can say “meow,” and it can say, “You haven’t cleaned my litterbox recently.”

But if we’re going to get to that technology, it’s going to take some research. And it’s probably five to 10 years out. But I think we can get to the point where we can actually communicate back and forth in basic animal languages to dogs, cats, maybe farm animals — and, who knows, maybe lions and tigers.

In 2002, an Ig Nobel Prize was awarded to Keita Sato, President of Takara Co., Dr. Matsumi Suzuki, President of Japan Acoustic Lab, and Dr. Norio Kogure, Executive Director, Kogure Veterinary Hospital, for promoting peace and harmony between the species by inventing Bow-Lingual, a computer-based automatic dog-to-human language translation device.

BONUS: TechCrunch reviews, and Wired reviews, the iPhone app version of Bow-Lingual.

This video commercial is called “Bowlingual voice dog translator gets upgrade“:

A progress report on a slow, steady approach to controlling malaria:

“Using carnivorous plants to control malaria-transmitting mosquitoes,” Jasper Ogwal-Okeng, Mary Namaganda, Godfrey Sande Bbosa, James Kalema, Malaria World, 2013, 4, 10. (Thanks to investigator Bart Knols for bringing this to our attention.) The authors report:

“This GCE project set out to develop a novel way of controlling malaria-transmitting mosquitoes by deploying live, insect-eating plants around houses and in mosquito breeding sites. Field surveys were undertaken to collect and identify carnivorous plants. Aldrovanda vesiculosa and Utricularia reflexa were collected from swamps in various locations in Uganda and brought to the laboratory where they were kept in distilled water into which larvae of Anopeheles gambiae were introduced and the impact of the plants studied.”

BONUS: An approach derived from the experimental (and Ig Nobel Prize-winning) discovery that common malaria-transmitting mosquitoes are strongly attracted to the smells of limburger cheese and the smell of human feet:

“Outdoor mosquito control using odour-baited devices: development and evaluation of a potential new strategy to complement indoor malaria prevention methods,” Fredros O. Okumu, Robert D. Sumaye, Nancy S. Matowo, Stephen P. Mwangungulu, Emmanuel W. Kaindoa, Irene R. Moshi, Edith P. Madumla, Dickson W. Lwetoijera, Malaria World, 2013, 4, 8.

BONUS: Bart Knols explains some facts about malaria-carrying mosquitoes:

BONUS: An Associated Press report about work that builds on that Ig Nobel Prize-winning work: “Stinky feet may aid malaria traps” (Thanks to investigator Hugh Henry for bringing this to our attention.)

The authors of the study “Collective Motion of Moshers at Heavy Metal Concerts” [epub February 13, 2013, arXiv:1302.1886v1] have now come out with a version called ”Collective Motion of Humans in Mosh and Circle Pits at Heavy Metal Concerts.” Jesse L. Silverberg, Matthew Bierbaum, James P. Sethna, and Itai Cohen, at Cornell University, published anew in Physical Review Letters [vol. 110, 228701, epub. 29 May 2013], where they say:

“Using videos publicly available online, we study the highly energized collective motion of attendees at heavy metal concerts. We find these extreme social gatherings generate similarly extreme behaviors: a disordered gaslike state called a mosh pit and an ordered vortexlike state called a circle pit. Both phenomena are reproduced in flocking simulations demonstrating that human collective behavior is consistent with the predictions of simplified models.”

A publicly available, jittery video captured them speaking aloud of these things:

(Thanks to investigator Philip Robinson for bringing this to our attention.)

People do not all perceive things the same way, suggests this study:

“Perceptual Differences Between Hippies and College Students,” Robert Brothers [pictured here] and Rosslyn Gaines, Journal of Social Psychology, vol. 9. no. 2, 1973, pp. 325-335. The authors, at UC Berkeley and UC Los Angeles, report:

“Perceptual differences were investigated between 50 college students who were non-drug users and 50 hippies who used LSD…. The first hypothesis was that hippies would respond to the perceptual measures in a developmentally more primitive or childlike fashion than the college students. The second hypothesis was that hippies who reported mostly bad drug trips would be more like college students than the hippies who reported good drug trips. The results support part of the first hypothesis in that hippies performed significantly differently from college students in the predicted direction on the Color-Form Attention, Judgment of Sounds, and Autokinetic Effect Tests only. No significant differences were found between hippies reporting good vs. bad drug trips.”

(Thanks to Tom Stafford for bringing this to our attention.)