This is Improbable Too Read online

  Research spotlight

  ‘Mood and the Menstrual Cycle: A Review of Prospective Data Studies’

  by Sarah Romans, Rose Clarkson, Gillian Einstein, Michele Petrovic and Donna Stewart (published in Gender Medicine, 2012)

  ‘The Gendered Ovary: Whole Body Effects of Oophorectomy’

  by Gillian Einstein, April S. Au, Jason Klemensberg, Elizabeth M. Shin and Nicole Pun (published in the Canadian Journal of Nursing Research, 2012)

  ‘The Hermunculus: What Is Known about the Representation of the Female Body in the Brain?’

  by Paula M. Di Noto, Leorra Newman, Shelley Wall and Gillian Einstein (published in the Cerebral Cortex, 2012)

  Exponents of artists’ sexual activities

  To deal with their realization that some artists get a lot of sex while others get little or none, Helen Clegg, Daniel Nettle and Dorothy Miell made use of an ancient tool – a tool that mathematicians count among the sexiest of mankind’s inventions. The logarithm.

  The trio had joined forces, as they later described it, to ‘investigate the relationship between mating success and artistic success in a sample of 236 visual artists’.

  Clegg is a University of Northampton senior lecturer in psychology, Nettle a professor of behavioural science at Newcastle University and Miell the head of the College of Humanities and Social Science at the University of Edinburgh. Their report, called ‘Status and Mating Success Amongst Visual Artists’, appears in the journal Frontiers in Psychology.

  The study gives us barely any numerical detail. It says only this: ‘The distribution of number of sexual partners for these participants was highly skewed with a minimum of 0 and a maximum of 250 (M=10.67). Therefore, the data were converted to a log scale and [we performed our analysis] using this scale.’

  That ‘M=10.67’ is the median. Half of the 236 artists had had, each of them, fewer than 10.67 lovers. The other artists each had had in excess of 10.67 bed-mates. Or so they told the researchers.

  Two lovers. Twenty lovers. Two hundred lovers. They seem almost to be from different universes, the collections of five or six lovers, versus the serial harems of one hundred or two hundred. How to talk coherently about a hodgepodge of small and big numbers? You do it with logarithms.

  Roughly speaking (I don’t have room here to go into much detail), the logarithm of a particular number tells – measures, really – how many extra digits that number has. The number 1 has no extra digits. Its logarithm is zero. The number 10 has one extra digit. Its logarithm is 1. The number 100 has two extra digits; its logarithm is 2. The logarithm of 101 is ever-so-slightly bigger than 2 (it’s about 2.0043). The logarithm of 250 is bigger still (about 2.3979).

  The logarithm is a concise, rough way to compare things across vast scales of bigness and smallness. That painter who’s got a new girlfriend every few months? About log 2. That lonely graffiti gal whom everyone shuns? Log 0, it seems.

  The researchers used logarithms also when they tried to understand a related set of numbers. They had computed what they call the ‘mating strategy index’ of the various artists. ‘Each one-night stand gained one point, each relationship up to a month two points, and soon up to each relationship 10 years or over, which gained eight points. The total number of points for each person was added up and divided by their total number of relationships.’

  After tiptoeing through all their data and computations, the artists-and-sex researchers decided that ‘more successful male artists had more sexual partners than less successful artists, but this did not hold for female artists’.

  Clegg, Helen, Daniel Nettle and Dorothy Miell (2011). ‘Status and Mating Success amongst Visual Artists’. Frontiers in Psychology 2 (October): 310.

  An Improbable Innovation

  ‘Producing Replicas of Body Parts’

  a/k/a a moulding and cloning machine, by George Castanis and Thaddeus Castanis (US patent no. 4,335,067, granted 1982)

  ‌Form and cast finger, suitable for ‘simple cloning operations, particularly in the hands of children’

  Naughty thoughts, hemispherically

  When a person thinks about naughty things, does one side of the brain get more exercised than the other? Eight scientists studied that question. Their report, ‘Hemispheric Asymmetries during Processing of Immoral Stimuli’, appears in the journal Frontiers in Evolutionary Neuroscience. The stated goal is to describe ‘the neural organization of moral processing’.

  Debra Lieberman, a professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Miami, Florida, acts as spokesperson for the team. Other members are based at Miami, at the University of New Mexico and at Stanford University in California. Another, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, is at Duke University in North Carolina.

  They had to work with a few limitations – the same limitations that apply to anyone who tries to describe what’s going on in the brain.

  With the exception of a few crackpots or geniuses, scientists don’t claim to understand how the 100,000,000,000 or so parts of the human brain manage to think thoughts. Many of those multitudinous parts are connected to one another in complex ways that are quirkily different in every person. Some of the connections change over the course of a life, or a day, or even a few minutes. Many tiny brain parts are clumped into big conglomerations, some quite distinct (hello, cerebellum!), but others have fuzzy locations and borders.

  The study does not risk getting bogged down in those larger, complicated conundrums. It restricts itself to the simple question: how does immorality play out in the brain?

  The scientists sought their answer by recruiting some test subjects. They confronted each volunteer with several levels of immorality, in the form of words and images.

  The team used MRI machines to monitor indirectly (via electromagnetic emissions) where largish amounts of blood flowed in the brain as each volunteer confronted each example of immorality. In theory, anyway, blood flows most freely near whichever brain parts are actively thinking, or have just thought, or are just about to think, or are busily doing something else.

  In one test, volunteers saw different kinds of printed statements. Some were about pathogens (‘You eating your sister’s spoiled hamburger, You sipping your sister’s urine, You eating your sister’s scab’); some about incest (‘You giving your sister an orgasm, You watching your sister masturbate, You fondling your sister’s nipples’); some about ‘nonsexual immoral acts’ (‘You burgling your sister’s home, You killing your sister’s child’); and others about ‘neutral acts’ (‘You reading to your sister, You holding your sister’s groceries’).

  ‘Stimuli and task’ of ‘Hemispheric Asymmetries during Processing of Immoral Stimuli’

  In other tests, volunteers saw other kinds of statements or pictures, each chosen for its evident moral content.

  After all the immorality was seen, and the measurements made, the researchers calculated that the left side of the brain had been more involved than the right side. Thus, concludes the study: ‘There is a left-hemisphere bias for the processing of immoral stimuli across multiple domains.’

  Cope, Lora M., Jana Schaich Borg, Carla L. Harenski, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Debra Lieberman, Prashanth K. Nyalakanti, Vince D. Calhoun and Kent A. Kiehl (2010). ‘Hemispheric Asymmetries during Processing of Immoral Stimuli’. Frontiers in Evolutionary Neuroscience 2 (110): 1–14.

  Lieberman, D., and D. Symons (1998). ‘Sibling Incest Avoidance: From Westermarck to Wolf’. Quarterly Review of Biology 73 (4): 463–6.

  Schaich Borg, J., D. Lieberman and K.A. Kiehl (2008). ‘Infection, Incest, and Iniquity: Investigating the Neural Correlates of Disgust and Morality’. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 20: 1529–46.

  Lieberman, D., D.M.T. Fessler and A. Smith (2011). ‘The Relationship between Familial Resemblance and Sexual Attraction: An Update on Westermarck, Freud, and the Incest Taboo’. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 37: 1229–32.

  DeBruine, L.M., B.C. Jones, J.M. Tybur, D. Lieberman and V. Griskevicius (20
10). ‘Women’s Preferences for Masculinity in Male Faces Are Predicted by Pathogen Disgust, But Not Moral or Sexual Disgust’. Evolution and Human Behavior 31: 69–74.

  May we recommend

  ‘The “Smellscape” of Mother’s Breast: Effects of Odor Masking and Selective Unmasking on Neonatal Arousal, Oral and Visual Response’

  by Robert Soussignan, Paul Sagot and Benoist Schaal (published in Developmental Psychobiology, 2007)

  Kerbstone cops

  Policewomen who work undercover as prostitutes have certain needs. Scholars have not addressed those needs until recently. Or at least, no scholar has done so in a way that would be accepted for formal publication in a research journal in the field of information science.

  Lynda M. Baker is an associate professor in the library and information science programme at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. Her study, called ‘The Information Needs of Female Police Officers Involved in Undercover Prostitution Work’, was published in the journal Information Research.

  Baker interviewed seven vice officers, and then observed two of them in action. She learned that ‘officers need a variety of information’. One decoy officer refused to co-operate in the study; Baker does not inform us as to why.

  The profession, like all professions, has its own peculiar information requisites. Baker writes that: ‘To be a credible decoy, officers need to know and become comfortable with the language of the street. Some officers said they learned it on the street by listening to real prostitutes. Others consulted fellow officers for clarification of unknown terms. One officer mentioned receiving a booklet from the police department in Las Vegas with updates on changes in terms. The crucial point is that, to make their case, the officers need to understand completely what a john is requesting. If they are conversing with a john who is using strange terms, Officers C and G stated that they feign ignorance by stating: “I’m from [another city] and we don’t use that in [name of the city]. What’re you talking about?” ’

  A decoy exchanges information with four groups of people: johns, prostitutes, vice squad team members and members of the community. Each calls for a different type of what Professor Baker calls ‘information behavior’. This is further specialized for each region of the city.

  The officers need to ‘know what to wear and how to act. If they are in a drug-infested, low-paying area, the decoys will wear older clothes and shoes, may blacken a tooth, and apply makeup haphazardly … To make their case, the decoys must seek information from the johns, that is, a request for a sex act in exchange for something of value.’

  Baker points out that ‘Information is both given to and sought from prostitutes who are working in the area of the decoy operation. Because the prostitutes can be territorial, telling them, “This is my corner”, often works for the decoys.’

  Information does flow in two directions, and it is valuable. Accounting for that can be tricky, points out Baker: ‘One business owner, who did not know that a decoy operation was underway in front of his store, called the police on a decoy. On the street, therefore, the decoy walks a tight line when it comes to informing business owners about her work.’

  In a separate report Baker assessed the attitudes and experiences of seven police decoys – presumably the same seven. She reports that ‘Most of the officers described their work as interesting’.

  Baker, Lynda M. (2004). ‘The Information Needs of Female Police Officers Involved in Undercover Prostitution Work’. Information Research 10 (1): n.p., http://informationr.net/ir/10-1/paper209.html.

  — (2007). ‘Undercover as Sex Workers: The Attitudes and Experiences of Female Vice Officers’. Women & Criminal Justice 16 (4): 25–41.

  In brief

  ‘The Stressful Kiss: A Biopsychosocial Evaluation of the Origins, Evolution, and Societal Significance of Vampirism’

  by Donald R. Morse (published in Stress Medicine, 1993)

  The author, at the Temple University School of Dentistry, in Philadelphia, explains: ‘On the positive side, vampirism can provide temporary escape from the stressors of the 1990s; on the negative side is the sinister nature of engaging in ritualistic, cultic vampirism.’

  ‌Eight

  ‌What Comes after the Colon?

  In brief

  ‘Pressures Produced When Penguins Pooh: Calculations on Avian Defaecation’

  by Victor Benno Meyer-Rochow and Jozsef Gal (published in Polar Biology, 2003, and honoured with the 2005 Ig Nobel Prize in fluid dynamics)

  ‌Penguano, with ‘rectal pressure necessary to expel faecal material over a distance of 40 cm’

  Some of what’s in this chapter: Some – but not all – call it waste • Cucumbers sans burp • Personal ammunition, within and then without tanks • Bean outcome surprise • Gods’ pollution • Addicted to cow dung fumes • What relative delight comes from your child • Child-parent feedback • How disgusting, please? • Eminence in rat-catching • Dog-savoured dreck • Cat-box smell-test chamber • Unbuild a tower • Finger-skills for nurses

  Talking rubbish

  When economists talk economics, some of them talk rubbish. Few mean it as plainly, as directly, as Alexi Savov. Savov wrote a study called ‘Asset Pricing with Garbage’, which filled twenty-four 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. Savov, an assistant professor of finance at New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business, did the garbage research a few years earlier when he was still at the University of Chicago.

  Economists struggle, always, to get a better mental grasp of the messy confusion known as ‘the economy’. Some economists are consumed with the economic concept called ‘consumption’. They want to know how much stuff – solids, liquids, gases, energy, services, whatever – get consumed during different years.

  But these economists disagree violently about which stuff to measure. Savov’s garbage work takes its place in the long line of studies wrestling with the worth-versus-worthlessness of measuring all sorts of durable goods (cars, kettles), private goods (chocolate bars, gift copies of Fifty Shades of Grey), public goods (roads, statues of Margaret Thatcher), luxury goods (yachts, diamond bling), energy, services and whatnot.

  Savov says he analysed ‘47 years of annual data from the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) … I use municipal solid waste (MSW), or simply garbage, as a new measure of consumption. Virtually all forms of consumption produce waste, and they do so at the time of consumption. Rates of garbage generation should be informative about rates of consumption.’

  Savovian garbage includes detritus from both homes and businesses. ‘Everyday items such as product packaging, grass clippings, furniture, clothes, bottles, food scraps, newspapers, appliances and batteries.’ It excludes materials, typified by construction waste and municipal wastewater treatment sludge, that are sent directly to landfills.

  Savov checked his methods by applying them also to ten years of garbage data from nineteen European countries including the UK. He found the Euro-garbage econometric performance to be ‘consistent with the US results’.

  His paper points out many subtleties in the relationship of garbage to things that his profession has traditionally tracked and esteemed – luxury goods, stocks and bonds – as indicators of the worth of our wealth. Garbage, he concludes, gives a solider, less often illusory, picture of the economy.

  The final sentence of Savov’s study adds meaning to the old saying ‘garbage in, garbage out’. Savov writes: ‘The relative success of garbage as an alternative measure of consumption raises the possibility that the failure of the standard consumption-based model is due to a failure to measure consumption properly.’

  Savov, Alexi (2011). ‘Asset Pricing with Garbage’. Jo
urnal of Finance 66 (1): 177–201.

  Questioning burping

  ‘What Are Burpless Cucumbers?’ This apparently simple question is perplexing to many of the people who produce and sell the green, oblong objects. Todd C. Wehner, a professor of horticultural science at North Carolina State University, tried to clarify the matter by conducting an experiment. He fed burpless cucumbers to both burpable and burpless judges, then published his results in a study called ‘What Are Burpless Cucumbers?’

  The marketplace offers conflicting information about burpless cucumbers. Some seed purveyors claim the word ‘burpless’ is just a synonym for ‘seedless’. Others, the Burpee seed company among them, blithely fudge on the matter. Burpee offers eight kinds of burpless cucumber, including one called Big Burpless Hybrid. Burpee says: ‘These varieties have almost no seed cavities for easier digestion.’

  Methods and materials for ‘Burpiness Testing’

  But some are confident about the vegetable’s burplessness.

  The Thompson & Morgan seed catalogue, for example, offers (at the time of writing) the Burpless Tasty Green F1 variety at a price of £2.49 for a packet of ten seeds, with this assurance:

  Crops in: 58 Days

  Description: Yes, it’s true. No indigestion problems with this cucumber. Flavour is superb, crisp and delicious – anyone can eat it and they are very easy to grow.