Improbable Research

A good number of people would probably find walking across a tightrope or slackline a decidedly non-trivial task. If it helps, assistance is at hand in the form of a comprehensive mathematical analysis which looks not only at the effect of the human on the rope, but also the rope on the human – in four dimensions.

See: ‘Balancing on tightropes and slacklines’ Journal of the Royal Society, Interface (2012) 9, 2097–2108. A joint investigation by Dr. Paolo. Paoletti (now at Centre for Engineering Dynamics, School of Engineering, University of Liverpool), along with L. Mahadevan (Lola England de Valpine Professor of Applied Mathematics, Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, and Professor of Physics, at the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, and Wyss Institute for Bioinspired Engineering, Harvard University, Cambridge US.) [The professor was co-recipient of the 2007 Ig Nobel physics prize for studying how sheets become wrinkled.]

“Our analysis of the open and closed-loop dynamics shows the existence of an optimal rope sag where balancing requires minimal effort, consistent with qualitative observations and suggestive of strategies for optimizing balancing performance while standing and walking.”

Improbable Clarification : A tightrope is a slackline that’s too tight, and a slackline is a tightrope that’s gone loose.

Also see, related, but bigger : Lateral excitation of bridges by balancing pedestrians. Proc. R. Soc. A 8 April 2009 vol. 465 no. 2104  pp. 1055-1073

Last night two of our editors were in the audience of a special event at the Coolidge Corner Cinema. Afterwards, one of them wrote (on Facebook) this appraisal:

Last night, we went to a screening of “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” The movie was preceded by a talk by Melissa Franklin, chair of the Harvard Physics department and one of the discoverers of the Higgs boson. Dr. Franklin talked for about 20 minutes on the physics of cartoons, and the role of cartooning in physics. She was as funny as a professional comedian.  She’s like Ellen Degeneres with an IQ of two thousand.

You just don’t GET that kind of entertainment in every city, folks.

Here’s a scene from the movie:

BONUS: Mark O’Donnell’s list, originally published in Esquire magazine, of “The Cartoon Laws of Physics“. In her talk, Professor Franklin lauded the robust subtleties of these laws.

A photo of an American flag has power over the minds of men and women, implies this study:

“A Single Exposure to the American Flag Shifts Support Toward Republicanism up to 8 Months Later,” Travis J. Carter [pictured here], Melissa J. Ferguson and Ran R. Hassin, Psychological Science, 2011 22: 1011. The authors at the University of Chicago, Cornell University, and Hebrew University, explain:

“396 participants were recruited through advertising in online social-networking sites (e.g., Facebook.com) to participate in an online survey in exchange for a $10 Amazon.com gift certificate…. For participants in the control condition, there was nothing in the corner of the survey (to view the survey, see Experimental Manipulations in the Supplemental Material). Except for this single presentation of the American flag on this particular survey, the procedure and materials in all sessions were identical for all participants…. Our results also demonstrate that a single exposure to a national flag can have wide-ranging effects. “

The American Psychological Association, which publishes the journal Psychological Science, issued a press release about it, with the headline “Sneaky Stars and Stripes” and the flag photo you see here.

BONUS: Dr. Carter also published a solo essay, in Psychology Today, with the headline “Despite What You Might Have Heard, Psychology is Science“, as we mentioned by way of giving context to a previous blog item.

UPDATE: Rolf Zwaan says “This finding has recently been massively non-replicated, as I describe here.”

Brenda Hassett has joined the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists (LFHCfS). LFHCfS member Tharin Blumenschein, who nominated her, says:

My friend Brenna Hassett posted this photo on Facebook, while admitting: “I have big hair”. It  is proof of her luxuriant, flowing hair. She’s a postdoc at the Natural History Museum, in London. Her professional details can be found in her professional page, with her hair carefully disguised.

Brenna Hassett, Pd.D., LFHCfS
Postdoc
Earth Sciences Department
Vertebrates and Anthropology Palaeobiology
Natural History Museum
London, UK

This week’s Press Release of the Week was released into the wild by Leiden University. Here are its headline and highlights:

Reduced cognitive control in passionate lovers

People who are in love are less able to focus and to perform tasks that require attention. Researcher Henk van Steenbergen [pictured here] concludes this, together with colleagues from Leiden University and the University of Maryland. The article has appeared in the journal Motivation and Emotion….

“When you have just become involved in a romantic relationship you’ll probably find it harder to focus on other things because you spend a large part of your cognitive resources on thinking of your beloved”, Van Steenbergen says. “For long-lasting love in a long-term relationship, on the other hand, it seems crucial to have proper cognitive control.” Over time, a balance between less and more cognitive control may be critical for a successful relationship….

Van Steenbergen emphasizes that the link between romantic love and cognitive control is a new area of research. “The reason why romantic love is associated with cognitive control is still unknown.”

The study is:

“Reduced cognitive control in passionate lovers,” Henk van Steenbergen, Sandra J. E. Langeslag, Guido P. H. Band, Bernhard Hommel, Motivation and Emotion, November 2013. The authors are at Leiden University and the University of Maryland. The authors write:

“We examined the link between passionate love and cognitive control in a sample of students who had recently become involved in a romantic relationship. Intensity of passionate love as measured by the Passionate Love Scale was shown to correlate with decreased individual efficiency in cognitive control as measured in Stroop and flanker task performance…. This study provides the first empirical evidence that passionate love in the early stages of romantic relationship is characterized by impaired cognitive control.”

BONUS: Travis J. Carter, Ph.D., a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, published an essay in Psychology Today with the headline “Despite What You Might Have Heard, Psychology is Science“.  Dr. Carter writes:

“We base our assertions on real data…. That’s what psychologists do: we collect a lot of data based on what we can see, make inferences, and then test those inferences to see if they hold up to scrutiny. This is the scientific method, and it’s the best way to find out what’s true.”

Dr. Carter is himself the lead author of a study that, one way or another, raises flags.