Improbable Research

The motorized ski tow eliminated laborious uphill hikes and thereby revolutionized downhill skiing. Early tows amounted to a rope threaded around a pair of pulleys and driven by a dismounted automobile engine and transmission. Modern tows span miles and operate at great heights….

The case at hand involved a chairlift in New Hampshire. A fractured housing caused the chair to separate from the cable and fall to the terrain far below. The two teenage male passengers were seriously injured and their parents sued the ski area. I was retained by the ski area in my usual role of metallurgist….

The plaintiff expert saw my report and changed his tune. He dropped the over-tightening claim and concluded the failure was due to sympathetic oscillations set up in the cable instigated solely by the
powering of the lift. These oscillations caused the chair to strike a tower and fracture the housing. He stated without proof the boys could not possibly have caused the swinging.

Anyone who has ever used a playground swing knows better. During the case the Boston Globe reported a Lake Tahoe accident in which teenagers “swinging the chairs” dumped people from 40 ft and injured 17 of them. But, this was a plaintiff expert so his clients had to be guiltless…. The plaintiffs lost their case against the ski area.

So writes Ken Russell, MIT professor emeritus of Metallurgy and Nuclear Engineering, in “The Case of the Strewn Skiers“

In the early 1990s, the Southern Baptist Church of Alabama produced the first mathematics-driven estimates of how many people are going to hell.

The estimates were a practical tool, a guide for where to concentrate the church’s evangelical efforts and where not to bother. Any well-run modern business does this. A company that sells insurance or cereal or cars likes to let its sales force know how many dependable customers are in each region, how many potential new customers, and also how many marginal prospects - people not worth wasting time on. With this information, the sales force can focus its efforts productively. So it is with the Southern Baptist Church of Alabama….

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

Gina Trapani, having found herself marinated in studies about productivity and the internet, muses (in Lifehacker) on what it all means:

Every time a new research study around personal productivity and office culture appears, we dutifully post the “proof” that information overload, email distractions, and multitasking are keeping you from getting work done—but are they? Sure, many of these findings seem very feasible, but it’s hard not to think they’re published only as a crutch for a larger commercial or media message—either “the internet is destroying your life!” or “you need to buy this product.” …

Even though we’re very much a cog in this giant machine, I have my doubts.

The longer I do this, the more I suspect that a good part of the “information overload” story is a myth cooked up by folks who don’t know how to use the internet well in order to demonize something they don’t understand. I get more done via email and surfing the web than my parents ever did using phones and libraries, even when I’m having a bad day and switch to my email application the moment I see a new message notification.

Stephen Gisselbrecht has joined the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists. He says:

I am happy to have found a scientific society that will cater to more than one of my interests.

Stephen S. Gisselbrecht, MA, LFHCfS
Senior Technical Research Assistant
Division of Genetics, Department of Medicine
Brigham and Women’s Hospital
Boston, Massachusetts, USA

But my bigger question is why doesn’t Japan dominate the Ig Noble Awards — those Nobel Prize parodies handed out at Harvard each year by the Annals of Improbable Research magazine. One would guess Japan would rule here the way the Russians have ruled in chess.

Yet Japan has won barely a dozen Ig Nobles since the prizes began 16 years ago, a modest amount but still almost twice the number of Japan’s genuine Nobels. And most of the Ig Nobles are genuine lulus….

So writes Thomas Dillon in the March 29, 2008 issue of Japan Times. He gives several examples.

(Thanks to investigator Mark Schreiber for bringing this to our attention.)