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SYDNEY: Most people catch a movie or kick back in front of the television in the name of relaxation, but some academics are avidly studying the box in the name of research. In other cases, TV has inspired science. Here we bring you some of the fruit of their labours.
COMATOSE PLOTS
Comas are a handy device that screenwriters use to create dramatic plotlines stretching over numerous episodes. But researchers at the University of Pennsylvania in the U.S. have found that the outcome for these patients bears little relation to real life. As reported in the British Medical Journal in 2005, soap opera characters are a resilient breed, with 89 per cent of the afflicted making a remarkable recovery. This is pretty impressive considering that, in real life, 50 per cent of people never wake up and fewer than 10 per cent regain full function.
SILLY WALKS
Four decades ago, the BBC television series Monty Python's Flying Circus established the 'Ministry of Silly Walks' in a comedy sketch. The unconventional deportment of John Cleese and co. left audiences in stitches and inspired many imitators, but failed to catch on in everyday use. Now, movement experts at Princeton University in New Jersey and Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, have collaborated on a study explaining the rarity of silly walks in humans. Unusual gaits, like those seen in the Monty Python sketch, were found to be far less energy efficient than our regular way of walking, they said in 2007 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society a journal. In other words they are, indeed, silly.
BEAM ME UP SCOTTY
Postgraduate students are often too busy to watch much television, but Djoymi Baker from the University of Melbourne in Australia managed to get through 700 episodes of various series of Star Trek while doing her PhD. The self-confessed trekkie was interested in the knock-on effect of the cult television show on science and technology. She concluded that Star Trek has had a significant influence on developments, and has collated many examples of researchers who cite the long-running series of shows as an inspiration. According to Baker, automatic doors and flip-top mobile phones are some such Star Trek derived technologies.
CLONING FEARS
As part of a study into public attitudes towards human cloning, government body Biotechnology Australia evaluated 33 films that addressed the issue. They were not surprised to learn that the science portrayed was less than accurate in 72 per cent of the movies. According to their study, published in 2006, nearly half the movies placed cloning technology in the hands of immoral scientists and corporations operating outside the law. The themes of movies were found to mirror the real-life concerns of the public, but it's not clear whether the portrayal of cloning in movies was also a factor behind those concerns.
DR. EVIL?
If your life were made into a movie, what genre would it be? It's doubtful that your average scientist would pick horror. But according to Christopher Frayling, a British expert on popular culture and author of Mad, Bad and Dangerous? The Scientist and the Cinema, a survey of 1,000 horror films shown in the U.K. between the 1930s and 1980s, reveals that scientists make regular appearances in scary movies. Of these scientists (and their creations), a whopping 31 per cent portrayed villains, while they played heroes in a mere 11 films.
BIG BUCKS
Investing in films is risky business, so Josh Eliashberg and his co-workers from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia set out to improve the odds. They created a mathematical system that can analyse movie plots to forecast their box-office return. Using a sample of 81 movies, the team applied their system to select 30 profitable movies to back. The result as detailed in the journal Management Science in 2007, was a 5.1 per cent return – significantly better than a random selection or a 'typical' studio portfolio which returned a 24.4 per cent loss, they said. It remains to be seen if their technique catches on with investors.
MINORITY REPORT
Eva Flicker from the University of Vienna, Austria, studied 60 films made between 1929 and 2003, which contained scientists. Her report, published in the journal Bridges in 2005, revealed that only 18 per cent of the scientist characters were women. This ratio seems to be rising, though, with a study of more recent films by Jocelyn Steinke of Western Michigan University finding the proportion of female scientists was 31 per cent. However, the fictitious females fared far better than their male counterparts when it came to morality and mentally unhinged tendencies.
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