Improbable Research

What does Brain say about alcohol consumption by youths? Read his study, and ponder it on New Year’s Eve. The study is:

“Crime and Disorder, Binge Drinking and the Licensing Act 2003,” Kevin Brain, Institute of Alcohol Studies Occasional Paper, January 2000.

In it, Kevin Brain says:

I… suggest that, currently, young drinkers are caught between two of the processes which, as Zygmunt Bauman has argued, characterise post-modern consumer societies -?seduction and repression?. The bounded and unbounded hedonistic drinkers are the seduced and the repressed of the post-modern alcohol order. Finally, I will conclude by briefly considering the implications of the arguments presented for future public policy.

Today we emailed our editorial board the news that the magazine is now Open Access. Just minutes after we in Cambridge (Massachusetts, USA) sent the message, this reply arrived from ed board member Dr. Mark Benecke, who was at that moment on a high-speed train somewhere in Germany:

Investigator Wendy Cooper of Canberra writes:

This photo was taken on the south coast of New South Wales, Australia on a recent visit. The sign was outside an establishment that you north Americans would call a “diner”

Hormones, chemical messengers, play many roles in the body. Researchers are still exploring and discovering new (to the researchers) uses. One such is reported in the October 11 issue of The New York Post:

One of the world’s richest and most secretive hedge funds is telling its traders to swallow female hormones to trade better, a lawsuit claims….

The firm, a powerful $10 billion hedge fund, is run by superstar trader Steven A. Cohen, one of Wall Street’s most prolific players who regularly takes home $500 million a year.

It was alleged that one of Cohen’s top bosses at SAC chided traders for being too aggressive – and that they must use a soft feminine touch to score in their trading pitches.

One junior trader claimed that the boss, Ping Jiang, a key producer at the big hedge fund, demanded that the young trader take female hormone pills to help erase his aggressive male ways so he could be more effeminate in his trading style….

(Thanks to investigator Scott Langill for bringing this to our attention.)

What did you win your prize for?

I won my prize for an article written six years ago about how we should alphabetise index entries that start with ?The?. Most of the rules suggest that you should look for The Beatles and The Bible at ?B?, but The Hague and first lines of poetry such as ?The camel?s hump is an ugly wump? at ?T?. If you look at the phone directory or other lists, however, you will find that these rules have been applied inconsistently. My conclusion was that we should consider indexing these terms under both the options.

Describe the award.

The award is a wooden block topped with a rubber chicken swallowing a plastic egg. The chicken is deliciously squishy, and the egg is appallingly yellow. I am fonder of my certificate, which has a picture of Rodin?s Thinker with the Thinker fallen to the ground. It has been signed by five real Nobel Laureates, one of whom presented me with my award….

2007 Ig Nobel Literature Prize winner Glenda Browne, interviewed by her son, Bill Browne, age 11, in the November 2007 issue of the Penrith High School Newsletter.

Click here to read the complete interview.