This is Improbable Too

by Marc Abrahams

  Robinson, a business professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, gathered his findings about those findings into a study that he called ‘Fashions in Shaving and Trimming of the Beard: The Men of the Illustrated London News, 1842–1972’. It was published not in Britain but in the American Journal of Sociology, in 1976.

  Robinson used and, he says, improved upon a general analytic technique pioneered by Jane Richardson and Alfred L. Kroeber, who in 1940 ‘measured annual fluctuations in width and length of skirts, waistlines and decolletage as ratios to women’s heights’.

  ‘My procedure for gathering data’, Robinson explains, ‘was, quite literally, to take a head count, determining for any one year the comparative frequencies of men’s choices among five major features of barbering: sideburns alone, sideburns and moustache in combination, beard (a category that included any amount of whiskers centring on the chin), moustache alone, and clean shavenness’. For the mathematically inclined, Robinson notes that ‘the number of clean-shaven men in any year is by definition the reciprocal of the sum of those in the four whisker categories’.

  Intent on choosing data that would accurately reflect the reality of Londoners’ facial hair, Robinson excluded photos of groups (because some faces might appear only partially, or in misleading angles), royalty (because royals receive more press coverage, if not necessarily more hair, than the general populace), advertisements and ‘pictures of non-Europeans’. One graph shows, beginning in the year 1885, a stark, almost unceasing rise in clean-shavenness.

  Sideburns decline until about the year 1920, thereafter making only negligible appearances. Beards, too, hit bottom in 1920, but quasi-periodically grow back to modest popularity.

  In that hair-oilshed year 1921, moustaches reach their all-time peak, adorning nearly 60 percent of the non-grouped, non-royal, non-advertised, non-non-European men appearing in the Illustrated London News. Thereafter, moustaches dominate all other forms of facial hair.

  In one provocative graph, Robinson plots two grand, 115-year-long, rising-and-falling waves. One represents women’s skirt width (in proportion to the women’s height). The other shows the pervasiveness of beards among the male population. The skirt-width-ratio wave precedes the beard wave by a gap of twenty-one years. Robinson says the data reveals that ‘men are just as subject to fashion’s influence as women’.

  The monograph notes: ‘Skirt width (1823–1934) and beard frequency fluctuations (1844-1955), five-year moving averages. The time scales of the two curves have been positioned to allow for assumed 21-year lead in skirt fluctuations possibly related to comparative youthfulness of subjects’.

  Fashion tells just part of the story. A quarter century after Robinson’s analysis, an independent, aptly-named scholar – the Irish-born, America-adopted Nigel Barber – published a study in which he reports that: ‘Men shave their mustaches, possibly to convey an impression of trustworthiness, when the marriage market is weak’.

  Robinson, Dwight E. (1976). ‘Fashions in Shaving and Trimming of the Beard: The Men of the Illustrated London News, 1842–1972’. American Journal of Sociology 81 (5): 1133–41.

  Richardson, Jane, and Alfred L. Kroeber (1940). ‘Three Centuries of Women’s Dress Fashions: A Quantitative Analysis.’ Anthropological Records 5 (2): 111–54.

  Barber, Nigel (2001). ‘Mustache Fashion Covaries with a Good Marriage Market for Women’. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 25 (4): 261–72.

  May we recommend

  ‘Harry Potter and the Recessive Allele’

  by J.M. Craig, R. Dow and M. Aitken (published in Nature, 2005)

  ‘Duty of Care to the Undiagnosed Patient: Ethical Imperative, or Just a Load of Hogwarts?’

  by Erle C.H. Lim, Amy M.L. Quek and Raymond C.S. Seet (published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, 2006)

  Kangaroo care

  You might think that an Israeli Medical Association report called ‘Combining Kangaroo Care and Live Harp Music Therapy in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit Setting’ is the first medical study of the combined effects, on newborns, of kangaroo care and music therapy. Not so.

  The invention of kangaroo care (also called kangaroo therapy) is widely attributed to a pair of doctors in Colombia in the late 1970s. Initially, both the idea and the name triggered scepticism. Thus the appearance in 1990 of a paper called ‘Kangaroo Care: Not a Useless Therapy’, in a magazine published by America’s National Association of Neonatal Nurses.

  The idea of kangaroo care is for premature babies to spend most of their time being held or pressed against the mother, the two maintaining direct ‘skin-to-skin’ contact. This was meant as a substitute for incubators in places where those were unavailable. Later, some doctors and nurses began recommending that even the most modern hospitals adopt the practice.

  Eventually came attempts to see whether – or not – kangaroo care produces good effects. Research journals began publishing studies, including the provocative ‘Kangaroo Care Modifies Preterm Infant Heart Rate Variability in Response to Heel Stick Pain: Pilot Study’.

  Then someone got the idea of adding music. Researchers at several institutions in Taiwan combined forces to perform an experiment, documented in a 2006 paper, ‘Randomized Controlled Trial of Music during Kangaroo Care on Maternal State Anxiety and Preterm Infants’ Responses’, in the International Journal of Nursing Studies. The experimenters had mothers and premature babies snuggle skin-to-skin while listening to recorded music emanated, for sixty minutes, from a Philips AZ-1103 ‘ghetto blaster’. At the same time, other mothers and preemies neither snuggled skin-to-skin nor heard recorded music.

  The Taiwan researchers found that the kangaroo’ed babies slept a bit more than the non-kangaroo’ed babies, and cried a bit less. And, they say, the kangarooing mothers gradually felt ever-so-slightly lessened anxiety. As for the babies’ health – the main reason people recommend kangaroo care – they reported ‘no significant difference on infants’ physiologic responses’ between those who got kangarooing and music, and those who did not.

  The new Israeli kangaroo-plus-harp-music study also reports that their particular ‘combined therapy had no apparent effect on the tested infants’ physiological responses or behavioural state’. But a similar study – which the Israeli study does not mention – done in Finland and published online a year earlier by the Nordic Journal of Music Therapy reported that kangaroo therapy accompanied by live harp music ‘did’ affect the medical state of the child. The Finns say that it ‘decreased the pulse, slowed down the respiration and increased the transcutaneous O2 saturation’, and ‘affected the blood pressure significantly’.

  And so doctors and nurses must await further research before they know the value of prescribing kangaroo care with live harp music.

  Schlez, Ayelet, Ita Litmanovitz, Sofia Bauer, Tzipora Dolfin, Rivka Regev and Shmuel Arnon (2011). ‘Combining Kangaroo Care and Live Harp Music Therapy in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit Setting’. Israeli Medical Association Journal 13 (6): 354–8.

  Jorgensen, K.M. (1999). ‘Kangaroo Care: Not a Useless Therapy’. Central Lines 15 (3): 22.

  Cong, Xiaomei, Susan M. Ludington-Hoe, Gail McCain and Pingfu Fu (2009). ‘Kangaroo Care Modifies Preterm Infant Heart Rate Variability in Response to Heel Stick Pain: Pilot Study’. Early Human Development 85 (9): 561–7.

  Lai, Hui-Ling, Chia-Jung Chen, Tai-Chu Peng, Fwu-Mei Chang, Mei-Lin Hsieh, Hsiao-Yen Huang and Shu-Chuan Chang (2006). ‘Randomized Controlled Trial of Music During Kangaroo Care on Maternal State Anxiety and Preterm Infants’ Responses’. International Journal of Nursing Studies 43 (2): 139–46.

  Teckenberg-Jansson, Pia, Minna Huotilainen, Tarja Pölkki, Jari Lipsanen and Anna-Liisa Järvenpää (2011). ‘Rapid Effects of Neonatal Music Therapy Combined with Kangaroo Care on Prematurely-Born Infants’. Nordic Journal of Music Therapy 20 (1): 22–42.

  Swirling sexual positions

  Amid the swirls of controversy that buffet other sexuality researchers, one man focuse
s, quietly, on swirls. In a report called ‘Excess of Counterclockwise Scalp Hair-Whorl Rotation in Homosexual Men’, Dr Amar J.S. Klar announces a subtle discovery. ‘This is the first study’, he writes, ‘that shows a highly significant association of biologically specified counterclockwise hair-whorl rotation and homosexuality in a considerable proportion of men in samples enriched in gays.’ Klar heads the developmental genetics section of the Gene Regulation and Chromosome Biology Laboratory at the US National Cancer Institute in Frederick, Maryland. His hair-swirl study appears in a 2004 issue of the Journal of Genetics.

  The phenomenon is easy to overlook. Klar explains: ‘Since the hair whorl is found at the top (“crown”) of the head and thereby it is difficult to observe one’s own whorl and the direction of orientation is seemingly an unimportant feature, most people are oblivious to the direction of their hair-whorl rotation. It takes two mirrors to observe one’s own hair-whorl.’ His monograph includes a photograph showing the ‘scalp hair whorl of an anonymous man selected from the general public’, and directs the reader to hold that picture in front of a mirror in order to ‘appreciate the counterclockwise orientation’.

  How difficult is it to collect hair-whorl-direction data? Klar says that he, for one, got lucky: ‘By chance I happened to be vacationing at a beach where preponderance of gay men was fortuitously noticed. The subjects were considered to be homosexuals because of their public display of stereotypical interpersonal relationship deemed typical of homosexual men. This assessment was reinforced by the dearth of females and children on the beach … Conveniently, the gay men were highly concentrated in one area of the beach. Such considerations made it relatively easy to collect the data on groups of predominantly gay men with great confidence even though the subjects were not asked for their sexual preference.’

  A year later Klar returned to the same beach and collected another load of data. He reports: ‘Altogether in a combined sample of 272 mostly gay men observed, 29.8% exhibited counterclockwise hair-whorl orientation’. This, he says, is ‘vastly different from the value of 8.4% counterclockwise rotation found in the public at large, which included both males and females.’

  ‌Observed: ‘hair-whorl phenotype’. The author explains: ‘By holding the picture in front of a mirror and looking at its image, the reader can appreciate the counterclockwise orientation.’

  The study does not take account of the erstwhile hair-whorl directionality of persons who are now bald. He explicitly excluded them from consideration, along with anyone who was wearing a sun hat.

  Klar suggests a direction for further exploration: ‘It should be equally interesting to compare the proportions of clockwise and counterclockwise hair-whorl orientations in lesbian women with those in females at large.’

  The report ends with a simple notice that deftly fends off the research-is-a-waste-of-government-money crowd: ‘Author’s personal funds were used for the study.’

  Klar, Amar J. S. (2004). ‘Excess of Counterclockwise Scalp Hair-Whorl Rotation in Homosexual Men’. Journal of Genetics 83 (3): 251–5.

  Research spotlight

  ‘Digit Ratio (2D:4D) in Lithuania Once and Now: Testing for Sex Differences, Relations with Eye and Hair Color, and a Possible Secular Change’

  by Martin A. Voracek, Albinas Bagdonas, and Stefan G. Dressler (published in Collegium Antropologicum, 2007)

  Experiments with nude dolls

  A generic life-size doll, with no modifications, was the key element in at least one unplanned experiment – the experiment documented in a 1993 letter to the journal Genitourinary Medicine entitled ‘Transmission of Gonorrhoea through an Inflatable Doll’. But, generally, scientists who conduct planned experiments that rely on life-size dolls prefer to carefully optimize, or even create, their own doll.

  That unplanned inflatable doll experiment centred on a ship’s captain who ‘with some hesitation … told the story’ while being treated at a sexual disease clinic in Greenland. The captain had without permission entered an absent crewman’s cabin, borrowed a piece of equipment and later suffered the consequences.

  That inflatable doll was not purpose-built for scientific use. Only through delightful happenstance did it satisfy the scientists’, as well as the captain’s, needs. Most scientists hate to depend on serendipity, especially if they have to depend on a doll.

  A study called ‘Convective Heat Transfer from a Nude Body Under Calm Conditions: Assessment of the Effects of Walking With a Thermal Manikin’ exhibits the forethought and niggling care that can go into acquiring a suitable nude doll. Five mechanical engineers at the University of Coimbra, Portugal, wanted to study how, as a person strolls in the open air, heat flows both away from and into the skin. So, they obtained ‘a Pernille type thermal mannequin named Maria’, which ‘is articulated and divided into 16 parts independently controlled by a computer’. Maria features ‘a fibreglass armed polyester shell covered with a thin nickel wire wound around all the body to ensure heating and temperature measurement’.

  In 2004, an entire, special issue of the European Journal of Applied Physiology featured twenty-seven studies involving mannequins. In some of those studies, the researchers refer to their mannequin by name. Jintu Fan and Xiaoming Qian, of Hong Kong Polytechnic University’s institute of textiles and clothing, called their monograph ‘New Functions and Applications of Walter, the Sweating Fabric Manikin’.

  Fan and Qian write that Walter ‘simulates perspiration using a waterproof, but moisture-permeable, fabric “skin” [that] can be unzipped and interchanged with different versions to simulate different rates of perspiration’. Fan and Qian say their greatest challenge about Walter ‘is to measure the amount of water added to or lost from [him].’

  ‌‘Walter in “walking motion” ’

  In other experimental studies, ones where a mannequin is subjected to hellacious treatment, the writing sometimes shows a particular, uncomfortable kind of restraint. ‘Exposure to hot water steam is a potential risk in the French Navy’, says one such paper, explaining a moment later that ‘this extreme environment during an accident leads to death in a short time’. In that study, as in others involving extreme exposures, the mannequin’s name – if anyone bothered even to give it a name – is withheld from the public.

  Ellen Kleist and Harald Moi were honoured with the 1996 Ig Nobel Prize in public health for the doll ghonorrhoea report.

  Kleist, Ellen, and Harald Moi (1993). ‘Transmission of Gonorrhoea through an Inflatable Doll’. Genitourinary Medicine 69 (4): 322.

  Virgílio, A., M. Oliveira, Adélio R. Gaspar, Sara C. Francisco and Divo A. Quintela (2012). ‘Convective Heat Transfer From a Nude Body Under Calm Conditions: Assessment of the Effects of Walking With a Thermal Manikin’. International Journal of Biometeorology 56 (2): 319–32.

  Fan, Jintu, and Xiaoming Qian (2004). ‘New Functions and Applications of Walter, the Sweating Fabric Manikin’. European Journal of Applied Physiology 92 (6): 641–4.

  Desruelle, Anne-Virginie, and Bruno Schmid, ‘The Steam Laboratory of the Institut de Médecine Navale du Service de Santé des Armées: A Set of Tools in the Service of the French Navy’. European Journal of Applied Physiology 92 (6): 630–5.

  An improbable innovation

  ‘Human-figure display system’

  a/k/a mannequin with repositionable arms and legs, by Rebecca J. Bublitz and Annette L. Terhorst (US patent no. 6,601,326, granted 2003)

  ‌Figures 1 and 8 from US patent no. 6,601,326.

  ‌Slime to the rescue

  Slime would become the US military’s prime weapon to immobilize large ships under a scheme outlined for the US Air Force’s Air Command and Staff College.

  Lieutenant Commander Daniel Whitehurst, a student at the college, figured out how to combine a raft of existing technologies to produce the officially ‘non-lethal’ armament he calls The Slimeball. He prepared a report in 2009. ‘The Slimeball’, Whitehurst writes, ‘is a two-part weapon system consisting of a floating sticky fo
am barrier that will resist attempts to remove it, and a submerged gel barrier that will impede movement through a ship channel. The parts can also be used independently of each other.’

  Whitehurst gives three examples of targets well suited for The Slimeball’s gooey power. He explains how to use it against pirates in Boossaaso, Somalia; against the Iranian navy near the city of Bandar Abbas in the Strait of Hormuz; and against China’s underground submarine base at Sanya, on Hainan Island.

  The Slimeball requires foam with particular qualities. Whitehurst specifies: ‘The primary component of such a material would contain properties commonly found in shaving cream … As commercially formulated, shaving cream is too insubstantial to create more than a nuisance to vessels, but in a denser form and combined with the chemical properties like those of a pre-existing substance known in defence circles as “sticky foam”, it would pose a far greater challenge for removal and have a greater dissuasive effect on vessels operating on the surface.’

  Sticky foam, Whitehurst explains, was designed for use against people. He allows that it has ‘some significant drawbacks’ as an anti-personnel weapon. These include ‘the risk of suffocation and the inability to transport the target due to the, well, stickiness of the material’.

  Whitehurst expresses optimism that this kind of officially non-lethal tool need not be lethal. ‘It has been suggested that due to the maturity of knowledge and development in this field, the drawbacks can be “engineered out” ’, he writes.