Improbable Research

Many people, of a morning, wonder why their breakfast cereal becomes soggy. Thanks to a study published in 1994, the answer can be read over morning coffee.

A Study of the Effects of Water Content on the Compaction Behaviour of Breakfast Cereal Flakes, by DMR Georget, Roger Parker and Andrew Smith of the Institute of Food Research in Norwich, looks at the basic physics of the matter. The scientists rigorously analyse how crunchiness declines in the presence of a soggifying liquid….

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

Who waves what at whom, and to what effect, are the central questions in a study called Deceptive Digits: The Functional Significance of Toe Waving by Cannibalistic Cane Toads, Chaunus Marinus. Professor Richard Shine, of the University of Sydney, and his postdoc student Mattias Hagman published this nine-page report in the journal Animal Behaviour.

The cane toad, they muse, “is one of the most intensively studied anuran species worldwide … It is thus remarkable that the distinctive toe waving behaviour of this species has not been reported in earlier literature.” This is the toad Australians have loved to hate ever since the 1930s, when it was imported from Hawaii to prey on certain agriculturally annoying beetles. Because nothing much in Australia is keen to eat cane toads, the warty immigrants have bred themselves into multitudes ever increasing.

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

If you want to use technology to identify when a person is snoring, you’d probably need a long series of steps that begins with attaching wires to the person’s scalp, chin and eyelids. But soon the task will be much simpler - just stick a microphone on the bedside table, and use a computer to distinguish what’s a snore sound and what’s not.

Credit for this breakthrough goes to William Duckitt, Seppo Tuomi and Thomas Niesler of the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa. They describe their technical tour de force in a paper called Automatic Detection, Segmentation and Assessment of Snoring from Ambient Acoustic Data, published in the journal Physiological Measurement….

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

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.

Ronald McDonald is not just a clown who hawks hamburgers and chips. According to two scholars writing in the journal Leadership Quarterly, Ronald McDonald is also a transformational corporate leader.

David M Boje, who holds the Bank of America Endowed Professorship of Management at New Mexico State University, and Carl Rhodes, associate professor in the School of Management at the University of Technology Sydney, in Australia, produced a study called The Leadership of Ronald McDonald: Double Narration and Stylistic of Transformation.

Boje and Rhodes put their case forthrightly. “The argument,” they say, “is that rather than just being a spokesperson or marketing device for the McDonald’s corporation, Ronald performs an important transformational leadership function….

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