Big Business, Small Business, and Not-For-Profit Business Research

Exciting developments from the business world. Here's some of the latest research:

Protip for banks: Don’t over-invest in mortgages. Dr. Natacha Postel-Vinay at University of Warwick has done some research into Chicago during the great depression; the city had the highest urban bank failure rate at the time. Chicago’s real-estate boom led to a banking sector bust, although I’m sure that couldn’t possibly happen again.

Please don’t wait for the next available register. Syracuse University’s Martin J. Whitman School of Management has found that cashiers take longer to ring up customers when they’re all queued up in the same giant line, while they work faster when each cashier is responsible for their own line of customers. Note the part where they admit that “faster” does not equal “better service.”

“Affordability” is in the eye of the beholder (or voucher holder). Researchers from researchers from Florida Atlantic University, the University of Texas, Arlington, and the University of Utah have found that “affordable housing” is not very affordable when you add in the cost of getting to your job.

You don’t have to be crazy to be an executive at a nonprofit organization, but it helps. NC State University research has found that nowhere near as many of them retire “voluntarily” as had been previously assumed. Be sure to read the quote from the guy saying that the only people who take executive roles are the ones who are too naïve to understand what a disaster it’s going to be.

Natural disaster? Entrepreneurs to the rescue! Trenton Williams of Syracuse University has found that entrepreneurship “serves as a vehicle for generating positive social outcomes.” In some situations, survivors of natural disasters can alleviate suffering and generate transformational change for residences experiencing chronic poverty by creating their own businesses.

Some Jobs More than Others

Let's face facts: Robots are the future. For real this time. Beyond automated assembly lines, we are going to see robots in more and more human-facing roles (and people are looking especially closely at Japan on this one, since they have an older population that vastly outnumbers the working-age population, and someonething is going to have to care for them.)

So, the Georgia Institute of Technology did a study on how effective these robots are going to be in interacting with people. Sounds reasonable. After all, there's no point in blowing an entire R&D budget on Robot Guidance Counselors (that's robots doing the job of guidance counselors, not guidance counselors for robots, by the way) when it turns out that people would rather get life advice from a rolled-up newspaper.

It turns out that robots may have a future in the nursing industry. Grief counselors, not so much. Interestingly enough, subjects responded differently to the exact same robot contact depending on what they thought was happening. People who thought that the robot was cleaning their arm responded much more favorably than people who thought that the robot was trying to "comfort" them.

What does this mean for the sex robots of the future? too early to tell, but there may still be hope for them in certain specialized fetish niches.

(And I demand some recognition for the fact that I made it all the way through this post without changing their "Touched by a Robot" press release title into a "Touched by an Angel" joke!)

Do they have oil in Iowa?

Iowa's the corn state, right? I think it's the flat state where Napoleon Dynamite was set, but I'm not too strong on the geography in that region. I know Idaho is potatoes, but when I think of U.S. oil reserves, I know the big players are Texas and Alaska, and I don't think that Iowa contributes much.

It figures that the non-oil-rich states would be the ones working hardest on oil alternatives. After all, there's no incentive to come up with a scientific development that might undermine one of your state's big industries. Anyway, the point is that Iowa State University has come up with an organic asphalt that doesn't require petroleum to produce. They're testing it on one of their bike paths.

I'm happy about the idea, because even if I don't completely embrace all the "peak oil" hysteria, I still think it's important to use renewable resources. Non-renewable resources, by definition, have to run out sometime, after all. An Iowa bike path is a small start, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it catches on.

And this, boys and girls...

Is why we don't get attached to any one particular ideal, mindset, organization, or whatever. I mean, when it gets right down to it, is there anything out there actually worth dying over? Okay, fine, possibly the allies in WWII ending the holocaust, but examples are few and far between.

The University of Texas at Austin has been looking into extremism, and what people are willing to die for. They describe people willing to die for other members of their group as "fused," which is an interesting way of looking at it. Personally, I think it's commendable to be willing to sacrifice yourself to save others regardless of who they are, but this study focused on what people would do for members of their "group" versus people outside of it.

The bottom line? Spainards want Americans dead. That's only a slight exaggeration, but the gist of it is that Spanish college students (who were studied for the project) were more willing to die for people inside of Europe than they were for people outside of it (specifically, America). There were also some interesting follow-up questions about who would be willing to die so that terrorists would get killed that raise some interesting ethical questions and insights into the nature of extremism.

Hopefully, I'll never be in a situation where I face a choice like that in real life.

Born Leaders (Gossips/Flirts/Wallflowers, etc.)

According to studies, your role in (and the size of) your social network is a function of your genetic code. Whether you're the central hub in a network of interconnected acquaintances or an outlier with a few friends who don't know each other, your position is apparently predicted by your genes.

To get these results, they studied fraternal and identical twins. The identical twins had the same number of people who knew them as friends, and those friends had an equal chance of knowing each other. Fraternal twins had social networks of differing "shapes," with different numbers of friends and a varying likelihood of whether or not those friends knew each other.

Almost as interesting as the unsung breakthrough itself is the ability of the professors involved to milk a concept for all the sweet, sweet grant money that they can get their hands on. That's right. Research into social networks should sound familiar for good reason--these same two professors from Harvard Medical School and UC San Diego were in the news previously for using grant money to research how social networks spread happiness.

I wish I had paid more attention in school. Then I'd be able to get people to pay me for spending all my time on myspace thoroughly researching social networks like these two professors.

Touching Costs Extra

What's your favorite possession? Where did you get it? How much is it worth to you?

Now imagine I gave you something cheap, like a keychain. Would you value it as much? You might if you held it for a little while. At the very least, you'd think it was more valuable than a keychain that you hadn't held.

All it takes is 30 seconds. Test subjects that held a coffee mug for 30 seconds showed an attachment to it that was stronger than those who held it for ten seconds, or those who hadn't held it at all. How strong? Well, subjects who held their coffee mugs would aggressively bid for them in an auction setting. So aggressively that four out of seven times the test subjects would pay more than the retail price for the mug, even when they were told how much it was selling for in the nearby campus bookstore.

It's a good reason to figure out what you're going to buy and what you're willing to pay for it before you enter the store, since all it takes is a little physical contact to completely abandon common sense.

Where did you learn that smile?

Or did you know it all along? That grin of triumph, the pout of unhappiness, are you doing it because you've seen other people do it, or because it just feels natural to you? If you hadn't seen other people expressing their emotions, would you still use the same expressions yourself?

Yes, you would. It turns out that some emotional responses are hard-wired, and not something that you learn. A study of blind and sighted athletes showed similar expressions on the faces of both blind and sighted winners (and similar expressions of disappointment on blind and sighted losers). Even athletes who were blind from birth "knew" how to express happiness and disappointment on their faces without seeing other people do it.

I don't really have any jokes to make about it, it's just kind of interesting.

Kick Unhappy Friends to the Curb

Also, the people at the center of social networks are happier.

UC San Diego and Harvard Medical School are publishing research in the British Medical Journal discussing happiness spreading through social networks. No, they're not involving sites like myspace, linkedin, or facebook because they're analyzing data collected from 1983 to 2003. Still, they tracked almost 5,000 people and their moods, determining that happy people keep happy friends, and an increased number of social contacts was associated with happier people.

Mind you, this is all self-reporting using statements like "I feel hopeful about the future" and "I felt that I was just as good as other people," so it's kind of cute that they're appling percentages to the amount of happiness that's being spread around, but I guess that's how science works.

The good news? Happiness is supposed to spread. The study cites a 15% increase in happiness if directly connected to a happy person, a 10% increase if connected to the friend of a happy person, and 6% if it's one step further out than that.

The bad news is that while having a happy friend gives you a 9% greater chance of being happy yourself, having an unhappy friend makes you 7% less likely to be happy.

So, what does this study mean for you? Is it important for you to keep up a good front, to seem happy so you keep your friends happy? Or is it time to trim the dead wood and get rid of unhappy friends who are dragging you down, while you go out to look for some happier people?

How a (partly) blind brain sees

Our knack for improvisation and workarounds is more than just a way we cope with external problems. It's practiced by our very cells themselves.

It turns out that our brains can reorganize themselves to compensate for loss of eyesight due to macular degeneration. Macular degeneration, the leading cause of blindness in the elderly, is a disease that results in damaged retinas and a loss of vision. Because the vision loss occurs in the center of the visual field, the brain makes up for it by using other parts of the visual field to focus.

What does that mean in English? If your brain can't see what's right in front of you, it compensates by getting information from your peripheral vision (or other areas that your eye can focus on) to fill in the blanks. Kind of cool, really.

Biological Clocks In Reverse

The candle that burns twice as bright lasts half as long, and until recently it was thought that that the fly that produces twice as many offspring lives half as long. Thank goodness, then, for the USC biologists who found a way to express genes for fruitflies to have more children and expand their lifespan by 5 to 30 percent. I'm sure this is welcome news to all the career-minded fruitflies out there who were worried about their biological clocks.

Of course, the USC researchers are cagey, stating that "the implications for mamals are not clear." I'll tell you what I'd like them to clarify: whether I can live longer by doin' it more often. Oh, sure, there are alread quacks out there making just that claim, but I'd like to have some hard scientific evidence before I commit. (Hee hee, "hard"! Wait, I mean "That's what she said!")

So, in five or ten years, we may have some useful information about human reproduction and genes that can reduce aging. In the meantime, we're stuck with a lot more flies that will be hanging around a lot longer. Way to go!

You Can Finally Rest Easy

Back in 1936, unfettered by the demands on his time that would have been posed by cable television, internet pornography, and the XBox, Sir James Gray had nothing better to think about than dolphins. He wondered how they were able to swim at speeds upwards of 20 mph (no, I refuse to convert that into kilometers, you Europeans are on your own), given their muscle mass.

It sounds cute, but honestly, I'm not sure why anyone cared. They already had that staple of faux-science small talk, the old saw about how a bumblebee is aerodynamically impossible, and should not be able to fly, but I guess that everyone's looking for a new gem of useless trivia that they can trot out when they need something to talk about but want to sound smart.

So the dolphins, right. Rensselaer Polytechnic actually started studying the whole dolphin business. I'm not sure why they needed to; it has already been proven that dolphins can swim fast, why do we need to study whether or not it should be possible for them to swim fast? I guess that's why I'm not a scientist.

Now, more than 70 years later, "Gray's Paradox" has been solved. "The short answer," said the professor who led the project, "is that dolphins are simply much stronger than Gray or many other people ever imagined.”

Well, I never. What are the odds of that?

You Could Do It In Your Sleep

Well, you could learn it while awake, and then sleep to be sure you formed strong memories about it. I'm a fan of sleep. I think it cures a lot of problems. That's why I'm not surprised by the University of Chicago's report that sleep can help you learn.

Of course, the study is also near and dear to my heart because it involved video games. They looked at people playing video games and tested groups that slept in between rounds versus groups that did not. It turns out that the most effective way to learn something is to study, sleep, and then study some more; the test subjects that showed the most improvement were the ones that slept in between rounds.

Sadly, I don't think you can get the same effect from sleeping in class. If it did, my grades would have been much better. Rather, it looks like sleep is a way for your mind to sort and file the information you have learned, so that it can be recalled more effectively later.

What Bacteria and your Crazy Aunt Have in Common

They both love to knit, but you can actually see the hideous and useless (uselessly hideous? hideously useless?) sweaters that your aunt makes, while bacteria can weave things that are as useful as they are invisible to the naked eye.

Did you know that bacteria can secrete fibers, like butterflies and spiders? Small fibers, sure, but I don't think I need to remind you of what they say about thousand-mile journeys and single steps. So five years ago in Sweden, some scientists tried to control these bacteria to get them to produce useful shapes. And they did. Right now the bacteria produce artificial blood vessels (read: simple tubes, and tubes that are not approved for use in medical procedures involving humans, but again, miles and steps).

These days, the researchers involved have set up shop at Virginia Tech, and they've got big plans. They've now figured out how to use electrical fields to control the bacteria so that they can weave custom architectures in three dimensions. It's promising because the bacteria could build tiny scaffolding for things like bone grafts or cartilage repair. Of course, it's also going to be proprietary technology, only available from the companies involved for whatever sky-high rates they decide to charge, but what else is new in health care?

Besides, it won't be too long before the enslaved bacteria figure out how to knit the weapons and armor they need to throw off the shackles of their human oppressors...

You May Already Be Asleep

And not even know it. Your brain might just be waiting for one more segment to fall asleep before it shuts you down completely. Seriously.

Have you ever wondered why you can't remember the exact moment that you go to sleep? That always seemed weird to me. It turns out that a Washington State University paper is proposing that parts of our brain fall asleep little by little. The big sleep, the total shut down where you stop registering your surroundings and start dreaming, happens once a large enough portion of your brain has gone to sleep.

I like the cut of this paper's jib. It makes sense to me; it explains how I can be working on boring, repetitive tasks and just completely lose track of what I'm doing (parts of my brain fell asleep, but I stayed awake overall).

I'm also a fan of their argument for "sleep inertia," where your brain wakes up a little at a time. It explains why you're sluggish in the morning (or in my case, from the time the alarm goes off until four hours later).

The only weird question that this study raises is how I can tell if I'm awake or asleep at any given moment. Maybe I'm conscious, but most of my brain is asleep?

It's as American as not bothering to learn English

You know how you can get stuck with huffy people in elevators who are always yelling at people about how "You're in AMERICA! Speak ENGLISH or LEAVE!"? I used to deal with people like them all the time. Hearing people speak in a foreign language really got them worked up, for reasons I never understood.

So, in Wisconsin, they've found out that people like that would have been just as pissed off in the 1800s as they are today. The idea that immigrants coming to America immediately learned the language and started blending in? Yeah, that's a myth.

In fact, the UW-Madison looked at German settlers in Wisconsin from as far back as 1839, and found that some of them never bothered to learn English. In some cases, they lived in the U.S. for over 50 years and remained "monolingual" (German-speaking only). Even after a law was passed in 1889 requiring schools to be taught in English, school districts would still write to the office of the state school superintendent entirely in German.

It looks like we've been able to carry on since then without witnessing the complete collapse of society. I guess it's not as bad as some people make it out to be.

Space Mafia Flummoxed By Space Cement Shoes

Do you think about concrete as much as I do? Probably not. I bet you never concerned yourself with the fact that traditional concrete needs to work with a binder that's usually cement and water, but water is hard to come by in outer space. When you find it, you're better off using it for other things, like survival.

That means that when we go to the moon and beyond, we're going to want to rethink our plans to build permanent structures out of concrete. (I know, the science fiction books all have us using plasteel, or crazy super plexiglass, or some other space-age polymer mumbo jumbo, but we haven't invented those yet, have we? Seriously. Have we? I'd like to know. But I digress...) Not to mention the mafia will have a tougher time fitting people with cement shoes out there in the void.

I guess we could still use concrete, if someone figured out how to make concrete without water, like they did at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. I guess that they think about concrete as much as I do.

In a way, I'm kind of heartened to see so many scientists trying to figure out how to build things on the moon. I mean, we're not planning on landing there anytime soon, and I'm pretty sure that the space budget isn't going to be a priority until well after we're out of this current financial crisis, but it shouldn't be totally put on the back burner.

If you were going to build a space city, what would you use as your construction material?

And Beaten with a Rooping Iron

Let's talk about Worm Grunting, because it's completely awesome. You go into the woods, drive a stake into the ground, and then beat it with a rooping iron, which drives worms all around up to the surface. That, my friends, is worm grunting, and you do it to pick up bait before going fishing.

It's really more of a rubbing motion with the rooping iron (a special piece of metal), but Vanderbilt University Researchers wanted to know why some hillbillies with sticks (excuse me, "Apalachicola residents who have collected decades of experience with subsistence living") were able to get such dramatic results. It turns out that the answer is moles.

A digging mole can eat up to its own weight in worms in a single day, and it sounds a lot like a worm grunter. To escape from a mole, earthworms will dig to the surface and wriggle as far away from the sound as they can before returning to the earth. Worm grunters take advantage of this fact by scaring the worms to the surface.

I for one, think that we should be thanking these earthworms for their noble contributions to society, not only as bait, but for the addition of new words into the English lexicon including "worm grunting" and "rooping iron." I know I'm going to try to use them in a sentence, at least once a day.

Religious Kids Have More Incentive To Lie

At least, that's the conclusion that I've drawn from a study conducted by Brigham Young University sociologists. I think my findings are as valid as theirs, even if they were looking at a link between religion and marijuana use.

The study measured "religiosity" in teenagers, defined as how freqently they attended church and how important religion was to them. The researchers examined data sets from a National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health and a state-wide survey of Utah schools. They compared answers to conclude that teens with more "religiosity" were half as likely to use marijuana, drink alcohol, or smoke.

Interestingly enough, this religiosity didn't affect the likelihood of their using cocaine or heroin.

Are we really going to take these teenagers at their word? First, it's completely possible that they're upwardly exaggerating the number of times that they go to church. I do it all the time. Second, wouldn't the kids who ARE more religious want to avoid being judged by their church and their peers for using drugs? Oh, sure, their religion might consider lying to be a sin, but if they're already sinning by using drugs, why wouldn't they lie about it?

I'm not saying that participating in a religious community has no benefits at all, I just want to be cautious about not overestimating them. After all, good parenting is important, too.

100 Years of Mixed Blessings

Nitrogen has been a pretty powerful tool, increasing crop yields on one hand and killing marine life on the other. But most of its impact wouldn't have been felt if it weren't for a 100-year-old process, the Haber-Bosch process for synthesizing ammonia from atmospheric nitrogen.

The widespread availability of nitrogen created by the process allowed for the use of nitrogen in explosives and fertilizer (and sometimes both at the same time) and spawned a huge chemical industry that was able to discover new uses and applications for it. The problem now is to figure out how to meet the increased demand we've created.

Hi there, third world countries! Were you looking to develop your farming efforts so that you can actually feed your citizens?

In a way, it's kind of like oil. In the early 1900s, no one cared about it. Now, everyone wants a car and oil is a resource that affects almost all of us in our daily lives. Similarly, four of the world's leading environmental research centers think that nitrogen is going to become important, and I agree with them when you consider the increased demand for biofuels along with the growing needs of a globally increasing population.

I disagree when they say we'll have a nitrogen-based economy. Do we have an oil-based economy now? Yes, oil is a crucial part of the economy, but not the sole scale against which all other economic gains or losses are measured.

I could be wrong, though. What do you think the next big natural resource is going to be?

Getting Your News from Here Is a Terrible Idea

Of course, the Journal of the American Medical Association says that getting your medical information from any type of news media is a bad idea because the information is biased. Patients and even some doctors get their information from news articles that can be based on studies funded by pharmaceutical companies or other potential conflicts of interest. More than 40% of the news sources (in print and online) that they reviewed failed to disclose how the studies they reported on were funded.

My unbiased report is that we're biased. Well, the major news outlets are biased, I'm just an idiot with a keyboard, but that still counts as me being biased by my own stupidity. If you REALLY want to be able to make informed, objective decisions about new drugs or specific medical treatments, you'd better have access to a lab that can do the research for you. And you'd better pray that the lab isn't biased.

Question: Do you still look at news and other information coming from sources that you know are not objective? I do, especially because you can actually get more information from them by reading between the lines.