Captains of Industry, Masters of Cheating

North American-born players racked up, on average, 53 penalty minutes, compared with 39 minutes for European natives, report Chris J. Gee and Larry M. Leith of the department of exercise sciences at the University of Toronto in the latest issue of Psychology of Sport and Exercise. What's more, the longer European-born players were in the NHL, the more thuggish their behavior became. The authors based their results on data from the first 200 games of the 2003--04 NHL regular season.

Did being a Bad Boy on the ice pay off? Apparently not. North Americans were no more likely to score goals or assists than Europeans, or to otherwise help their team, Gee and Leith found.

No, You Still Shouldn't Drink and Drive

There are a lot of things that aren't made today as they were made in the Good Old Days -- including beer, wine and liquor.

Since the early 1950s, the alcohol content of alcoholic beverages has declined substantially, according to William Kerr and his colleagues at the Alcohol Research Group. The average alcohol content of liquor dropped five percentage points from the early 1950s to 1997, they report. At the same time, the average alcohol content of wine sold in the United States fell from 16.75 percent in 1950 to 10.49 percent in 1991, then rebounded to 11.45 in 2002. The alcohol content in beer fell from 5.02 percent in 1950 to 4.58 percent in 1993 and rose to 4.65 percent in 2002, Kerr found.

Their findings appear in the latest issue of Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research.

Who Would Have Thought?Lucky Years and Mass Mailings

· "Superstition, Family Planning, and Human Development" by Quy-Toan Do and Tung Duc Phung, World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 4001. World Bank researchers find that Vietnamese children born in "lucky years" of the zodiac calendar are healthier and better educated than those born in other years. That's because they "are more likely to have been planned by their parents, thus benefiting from more favorable financial, psychological or emotional conditions for better human development."

· "Is Democracy Good for the Poor?" by Michael Ross, American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 50, No. 4. A UCLA political scientist finds that democracies spend more on education and health, but the benefits go mainly to the middle and upper classes.

· "Irritation Due to Direct Mailings From Charities" by Merel van Diepen, Bas Donkers and Philip Hans Franses, Erasmus Research Institute of Management Report 2006-029. Business professors in the Netherlands discover that people will accept two mailings from charitable organizations soliciting donations before they start to get really irritated.

Richard Morin is a senior editor at the Pew Research Center. Versions of this column appear athttp://www.washingtonpost.comandhttp://www.pewresearch.org.