Pumpkin Art

No 'Around the Internet' section this month - I've unfortunately not really had the time to blog at all recently.


Instead here is some 'Pumpkin Art' by artist Ray Villafane to enjoy:

The Ig Nobel Prizes 2010

The Ig Nobel prizes for 2010 were awarded last Thursday (30th September) at Harvard's Sanders Theatre.

For those who are unaware of them the Ig Nobels are a somewhat less serious version of the Nobel prizes, to quote Improbable Research (the people who award the prizes):

"The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think. The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative — and spur people's interest in science, medicine, and technology."

The winners were:

ENGINEERING PRIZE:

Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse and Agnes Rocha-Gosselin of the Zoological Society of London, UK, and Diane Gendron of Instituto Politecnico Nacional, Baja California Sur, Mexico, for perfecting a method to collect whale snot, using a remote-control helicopter.

MEDICINE PRIZE:

Simon Rietveld of the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and Ilja van Beest of Tilburg University, The Netherlands, for discovering that symptoms of asthma can be treated with a roller-coaster ride.

TRANSPORTATION PLANNING PRIZE:

Toshiyuki Nakagaki, Atsushi Tero, Seiji Takagi, Tetsu Saigusa, Kentaro Ito, Kenji Yumiki, Ryo Kobayashi of Japan, and Dan Bebber, Mark Fricker of the UK, for using slime mold to determine the optimal routes for railroad tracks.

PHYSICS PRIZE:

Lianne Parkin, Sheila Williams, and Patricia Priest of the University of Otago, New Zealand, for demonstrating that, on icy footpaths in wintertime, people slip and fall less often if they wear socks on the outside of their shoes.

PEACE PRIZE:

Richard Stephens, John Atkins, and Andrew Kingston of Keele University, UK, for confirming the widely held belief that swearing relieves pain.

PUBLIC HEALTH PRIZE:

Manuel Barbeito, Charles Mathews, and Larry Taylor of the Industrial Health and Safety Office, Fort Detrick, Maryland, USA, for determining by experiment that microbes cling to bearded scientists.

ECONOMICS PRIZE:

The executives and directors of Goldman Sachs, AIG, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, and Magnetar for creating and promoting new ways to invest money — ways that maximize financial gain and minimize financial risk for the world economy, or for a portion thereof.

CHEMISTRY PRIZE:

Eric Adams of MIT, Scott Socolofsky of Texas A&M University, Stephen Masutani of the University of Hawaii, and BP, for disproving the old belief that oil and water don't mix.

MANAGEMENT PRIZE:

Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, and Cesare Garofalo of the University of Catania, Italy, for demonstrating mathematically that organizations would become more efficient if they promoted people at random.

BIOLOGY PRIZE:

Libiao Zhang, Min Tan, Guangjian Zhu, Jianping Ye, Tiyu Hong, Shanyi Zhou, and Shuyi Zhang of China, and Gareth Jones of the University of Bristol, UK, for scientifically documenting fellatio in fruit bats.

Full details can be found here.

Around the Internet: September 2010 Edition

 

• Everything you never wanted to know about figs (hat tips once, twice and three times removed to Tyler Cowen, Andrew Sullivan and Christina Agapakis respectively).
• Micronaut: The fine art of microscopy (hat tip to Tyler Cowen).
• Stairway to Heaven [A Climber's View going up a 1768 foot gided tower] (hat tip to Richard Wiseman)

Fun with Probabilities

This post by Stephen Landsburg on his Big Questions blog has got me thinking about probabilites.

I'd like to post my own (well, plagarised from here) problem to readers:

Three poker chips are in a cup. One is marked with a BLUE dot on each side, another with a RED dot on each side, and the third has a BLUE dot on one side and a RED dot on the other. So there is one blue/blue chip, one red/red chip, and one blue/red chip.

Without looking, you take out one chip, and lay it on the table.

1. Suppose the up-side turns out to be BLUE? What is the chance that the down-side will also be BLUE?

2. What if the up-side is RED? What is the chance that the down-side will also be RED?

3. Before you see how the chip has fallen, what is the chance that it has the same color dot on both sides?

4. Suppose you answered 1/2 in response to Questions 1 & 2. That would mean that whichever the up color of the chip, the chance is 50/50 that the color on the down side is the same. But if at Question 3 you said that chance is 2/3, aren't you contradicting yourself?

If you follow the link to the paper the question comes from you'll get an explanation of the correct answer.  This is essentially a rephrasing of the more familiar Monty Hall problem.

UPDATE: The original link to this problems source no longer appears to be active.  You can try this one instead.

Around the Internet: August 2010 Edition

• Awesomeness Reminders (hat tip to Tyler Cowen)
• Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. (hat tip to Adam Rosalky)
• Extraordinary Stroboscopic Effect (hat tip to Richard Wiseman)
• Monkeys hate flying squirrels, report monkey-annoyance experts (hat tip to Tyler Cowen again)
• The Mpemba Effect
• Roads fit for People: Spontaneous order on the road (hat tip to Alex Tabarrok)

Around the Internet: July 2010 Edition

Another quiet month for the 'Around the Internet' section I'm afraid.

• The End of History (hat-tip to Tyler Cowen)
• This Too Shall Pass music video by Ok Go

Vince Cable's Graduate Tax

The latest news about university funding is Business Secretary Vince Cable's proposed Graduate Tax, where graduates pay a tax dependent on income after graduation and the money is channelled directly to universities.

Left Foot Forward covers the story here, however the focus is on Cable himself and on whether or not he will keep his campaign promise of scrapping tuition fees, rather than a discussion of whether this proposal is the best way to fund higher education or of the wider implications of the policy.

LFFs analysis is based on the assumption that:

The fair solution is to abolish tuition fees and ensure that graduate contributions are based on actual earnings in the real world, rather than sticker prices in prospectuses, which are based on guesswork.

However, little to no thought appears to have been given to whether or not this is the best way to fund higher education and what impact this will have on decisions made by students and graduates alike.

I think this is the appropriate time for a full disclaimer:

I am a university graduate; I have an engineering degree and a pretty good job; I had the privilege of attending university without the need to pay any tuition fees whatsoever (I do have a substantial loan to pay back, but that was only to cover living expenses).

In principle I have nothing against the idea of getting the people who have benefited most from a service to pay the most for it.  My concern is not simply out of self-interest of not wanting to pay any more tax.  My concern is in how the tax will affect people's behaviour.

For example how many potential students of engineering/medicine/law/etc. will choose to study history or teaching instead, figuring that they're likely to earn less in those professions therefore avoid the graduate tax?  How many potential students will decide not to go to university at all?  (This may or may not be a legitimate concern, considering that UK universities are already grossly over-applied for).  What will be the impact of these decisions on the wider economy in the long term?

Maybe the numbers are small and these concerns of little consequence.  What troubles me is that I haven't seen any analysis of the proposals that even considers these questions.

Public Transport in Cuba

I recently had the opportunity to visit the fascinating country of Cuba.  Whilst there I was informed by a tour guide of the solution the Cuban government have come up with to tackle the problem of providing public transport.

As you may already be aware Cuba is a socialist country, in fact judging from my own experiences it is by far the most socialist country I have ever visited (including China and Vietnam).  The government owns just about everything: it's part or whole-owner in all the hotels, about half of the cars we saw driving around were government owned (you can tell from the colour of the license plate), 85% of the farmland, all of the shops and most residential property lies in the government's hands.

As a foreigner you're not allowed to buy property in the country, you can only lease it from the government.  Prices in shops are set by the government so are the same everywhere (our rep pointed out that even though there is a 'duty free' shop at the airport this is essentially a joke as the prices are no different to anywhere else) - the only exception to this are flea markets.  Locals are only allowed to buy a private car from government-run car dealerships; the type of car they are permitted to buy is dictated by how much they have paid to the government in taxes.

Many locals therefore, drive government-owned cars and/or rely on public transport.  The solution the government have come up with to provide it's citizens with public transport is to introduce a simple law which is essentially this:

If you are driving a government vehicle (i.e. one with blue license plates) and you have space for additional passengers you must stop to pick up hitch-hikers.

They enforce this by having government officials man hitch-hiking posts (which operate like bus stops) and flagging down vehicles with blue license plates to check if they can accommodate the hitch-hikers.

I wouldn't dream of hitch-hiking or picking up a hitch-hiker in this country, but I've been assured that it's an incredibly common and safe practice in Cuba.

Around the Internet: June 2010 Edition

I've not had a lot of time to put together an 'Around the Internet' for this month, as you may have noticed I've not blogged for several weeks now.  The following two stories entertained me though:

"A German student created a major traffic jam in Bavaria after making a rude gesture at a group of Hell's Angels motorcycle gang members, hurling a puppy at them and then escaping on a stolen bulldozer."  Story here via Reuters.

Barbados versus Grenada, the demand for own goals, 1994.

(hat-tip to Tyler Cowen for both stories).

Holiday

I'm going away on holiday tomorrow, and am unlikely to have much internet access, so won't be blogging for the next couple of weeks.