Improbable Research

When economists talk economics, some of them talk rubbish. Few mean it as plainly, as directly, as Alexi Savov [pictured here]. Savov wrote a study called Asset Pricing with Garbage, which filled 24 pages of the Journal of Finance early in 2011.

To Savov, garbage is valuable not only for its own worth, but because, in a mathematical sense, it represents many of the things that people and corporations treasure most. Maybe, just maybe, he implies, the rises and falls in garbage production reliably and fairly accurately measure what a society is worth….

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

Personal peer review – peering at data with one’s own eyes – is deemed crucial to some kinds of investigation. This eyeballed scrutiny figures in the war against indecent images of children. A study called Tanner Stage 4 Breast Development in Adults: Forensic Implications looks at the very different things different experts saw when they all peered at the same female nipples.

Many websites with pictures of unclad persons feature a statement specifying that all those photographed are over 18. In some court cases, expert physicians testify as to the possible age of the people in some of those photos. The new study and other research demonstrates that such experts can be – and often are – wrong….

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

The knifing of pumpkins, an innocent-seeming yet carefully planned act of mutilation, sometimes results (accidentally or otherwise) in sprays, bits and smatterings of human, as well as vegetable, gore. In such cases, blood –human blood – flows, drips and coagulates.

A hands-on experiment, or rather, an experiment on hands, in 2004, tried to determine the level of medical danger an amateur can and should expect when using a pumpkin-carving tool.

Alexander M Marcus, Jason K Green and Frederick W Werner [pictured here] at the State University of New York Upstate Medical University in Syracuse published a study, called The Safety of Pumpkin-Carving Tools, in the journal Preventive Medicine.

“Pumpkin-carving accidents”, they inform their peers who read the report, “may leave people with compromised hand function”….

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

BONUS: Detail from the study:

BONUS: Martha Stewart carves a pumpkin:

When economists train their sights on robbers, the point traditionally is to study those who loot on the grandest, most legal scale and who are called “financiers”, and also (if there be consulting fees) to assist those persons.

Economists Barry Reilly [pictured here] of the University of Sussex, and Neil Rickman and Robert Witt of the University of Surrey, went against that tradition. They stole a hard look at the lowest class of bank robbers, the ones who physically go into bank branches, grab cash, and literally leg it. Reilly, Rickman and Witt got access – exclusive and confidential access, they proudly confide – to data from the British Bankers’ Association about bank robberies. Recently they published a study called Robbing Banks: Crime Does Pay – But Not Very Much….

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

Prof John Hagelin‘s decision not to run against Mitt Romney and Barack Obama left this year’s US presidential race without a major candidate who is a scientist and who acknowledges – publicly – his ability to both counteract gravity and prevent crime.

Two decades ago, Hagelin and a team of fellow scientists performed a bold experiment. Their aim was to drastically reduce the amount of violent crime in Washington DC – a metropolis then noted for its high incidence of murder, rape and robbery. The Hagelin method was to systematically blanket the city with mental emanations from transcendental meditation and yogic flying.

Hagelin is, by his own admission, a remarkable man. A professor of physics and director of the Institute of Science, Technology and Public Policy at the Maharishi University of Management, in Fairfield, Iowa, he is a practised expert in quantum physics, transcendental meditation and yogic flying…

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