This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has three segments. Here are bits of each of them:
- Dogged hospital presence — Dogs should be kept out of human (that is, non-veterinary) hospitals – or, depending on circumstances, welcomed into them. Research papers make the case one way and another.“Towards dog-free hospital campuses in India”, published in the Indian Journal of Medical Research, nods to hospitals that are, or might be, visited by stray dogs. These are also known in the literature by the old sobriquet “unbridled dogs”, the technical term “free-ranging dogs” and the zippy nickname FRDs. The report dishes delicious gossip about them…
- Unpleasant polygons — What can you do with a broken stick? The question fascinates mathematicians, well, some of them. Lumberjacks, too – again, some of them. One difference between mathematicians, some of them, and lumberjacks, most of them, is that mathematicians publish a lot of academic papers. (In long-ago days, when lumberjacks roamed free in the world’s forests, they supplied virtually all of the paper for those mathematicians’ papers. The two groups are no longer so professionally entwined.) A study, “On the probability of forming polygons from a broken stick”, examines what is possible…
- Shape and shapelessness — … Tanya Behrisch at Simon Fraser University in Canada writes about the soundness of shapeless listening in “Shapeless listening to the more-than-human world: Coherence, complexity, mattering, indifference”. Shapeless listening, says Behrisch…