Improbable Research

For families who live apart, the notion that ‘quality time’ comes from time spent together as a family is rather exclusionary. Not only that, but Pia Christensen from the University of Copenhagen believes that underlying this notion is an assumption that family time is ‘good’ for children. After listening to the views of English children living in the north of England about time with their families, Christensen found that these ten- to eleven-year-olds did not actually want more time with their families.

That’s an excerpt from the book Beyond 9 to 5, Sarah Norgate, 2006, Columbia University Press, New York.

One of the curses of my new job is having to commute from Cambridge into London two or three (or four or five …) days a week. Commuting must be good for something. One of the things I find it good for is primate behaviour research. I have found, for example, than commuters do not read books.

This started with an observation last November - lots of people on the tube were starting books. Lots of them, reading the first few pages of books. None of them reading the end. Surely just coincidence?

Think again.

I started collecting statistics. I observed all the people on the trains that I saw reading books, and wrote down how far someone was through a book. I could not tell whether they were on page 276 out of 327, but I could estimate what proportion of the book they had read - 30%, 70% etc. Only real books count - manuals and computer books don’t, as people do not read them linearly. Magazines etc. don’t count, mainly because it is impossible to tell whether someone is on page 7 out of 13, or page 9. But a meaty bit of Tom Clancy or Dostoevsky or molecular biology or something, I got quite good at estimating how far on the readers had got. Of course, I had to note all the books being read in a carriage, to get a valid sample. This
lead to much craning and staring, and in any other country in the world I would probably have been shot. In England, of course, no-one comments.

Anyway, here are some numbers,…

So writes William Bains, in a Trinkaus-like study called “Why commuters do not read.”

This screen capture — a Google News summary from Thursday morning, July 2, 2009 — demonstrates that, a mere days after the death of Michael Jackson, people struggle to capture the man’s essence. Perhaps some time, years from now, historians will make sense of the phenomenon:

Scientists who struggle to get their reports published, or to get anyone to pay attention to them, might consider the path blazed by Dr Mohamed El Naschie. El Naschie found an appreciative science journal editor. The editor subsequently published hundreds of El Naschie’s studies, and also made El Naschie a glamorous figure - featuring him in lavish photo-spreads in the company of famous scientists and powerful world leaders.

The science journal is called Chaos, Solitons & Fractals. Its founding editor-in-chief is Dr Mohamed El Naschie.

A 19-page pictorial in the August 2005 issue shows El Naschie in the company of numerous Nobel laureates, and also of many medals, plaques, certificates and floral arrangements.

There are four photos of him with Nobel laureate Gerardus ‘t Hooft, including one labelled: “El Naschie and ‘t Hooft received by Crown Prince Sultan in his palace in 2003″. We see him with Nobel laureate Gerd Binnig, and in two photos with Naguib Mahfouz. One of the latter is captioned “N Mahfouz, Nobel laureate in literature, the first Arabic-speaking novelist to receive this honour, together with Mohamed El Naschie in Cairo. Mohamed was asked by Mahfouz to explain to him his theory, which he valiantly tried.” …

So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.

When I was a teenager, I made a commitment to read every book in the Searsport, Maine library. that’s not as daunting as you might think, given the small size of the library. I started in at ‘A’ and proceeded to nearly the middle of ‘A’. I read some awful crap and realized that just because someone invested a lot of time and energy in writing a book, didn’t mean that it was worth any of my time reading it.

So writes Earle Rich of Granite Geek