October 29, 2002

Measurement Web Site of the Month:
Hot A.I.R.
http://www.improbable.com/

Do you think you know a suitable candidate for Measurement Web Site of the Month? Send us your nominations.

We here at The Measurement Standard take research seriously, but we like to have fun, too. Imagine our delight in discovering a Web site that puts the two together, with a healthy dose of humor for good measure. Yes, indeed, that is what you’ll find at Hot A.I.R., the Annals of Improbable Research.

This site is largely devoted to the nerdy hijinks of academic research types with more brains than social skills (“Britney's Guide to Semiconductor Physics,” “The Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists™”). But here you’ll also find links to a great many scholarly research papers sporting serious credentials but dubious common sense. The best of these have received the Ig® Nobel Prize, the “annual award for achievements that cannot or should not be reproduced.”

Among the recent Ig Nobel prize winners, you’ll find such research efforts as the “discovery that, biochemically, romantic love may be indistinguishable from having severe obsessive-compulsive disorder,” “Courtship Behaviour of Ostriches Towards Humans Under Farming Conditions in Britain,” “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments,” and “Demonstration of the Exponential Decay Law Using Beer Froth,”

all published in scholarly journals with, apparently, serious news holes to fill.

Yes, yes, we know—great science is often born of seemingly frivolous investigations. Today’s beer mug might very well be tomorrow’s Newton’s apple. And so we applaud both the Ig Noble winners, and the Hot A.I.R. site for presenting the lighter side of research.

New articles in this issue:

Articles with red titles require a subscription:
The View from the Pyramids:
The 2002 Cairo IPRA Conference.
Should you Trust your Agency with Measurement?
How to choose and work with a measurement-savvy agency.
Shopping for an Agency?
We rate seven top agencies.
The “Ad Value” of PR:
Jim Macnamara on AVEs.
Advertising is Dead; Long Live Advertising:
The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR, by Ries and Ries.
How Do I Get my Boss to Use Measurement Properly?
Nobody likes failure, except when it leads to improvement.

The following articles do not require a subscription:
The Paine of Measurement:
Agencies should use research to measure their clients’ success, not their own.
The PR Weather Report:
Clearing skies in November.
Can This Reputation Be Saved?
Will Rosie Bloom Again?
Measurement Maven of the Month: Wilma Mathews
Measurement Menace of the Month: Jan Hendrik Schon
Measurement Site of the Month: Hot A.I.R. and improbable research.
Benchmarking in Their Blood: Andrew West
This Measurement Life:
Doing the Agency Shuffle with Martha and Bob.

1. You’ll learn how to use hard numbers to prove the results of your PR efforts.
   
2. You’ll learn which are the right vendors for your measurement projects.
   
3. You’ll learn how to design your program right from the start to be easily measureable.

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Struggling to set up your measurement system?
Katie Delahaye Paine can help you at measuresofsuccess.com.

133 Islington Street, Portsmouth, NH 03801,
603-431-6967 www.measuresofsuccess.com