This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has five segments. Here are bits of each of them:
- Down, with texting — Want to guess what might happen if someone walks while texting? If you prefer a formally educated guess to an autodidactic supposition, Paulo Pelicioni and his colleagues at the University of New South Wales, Australia, can supply it…. They tell the story by implication – note their efficiency in choosing the word “impact” – in the title of their study: “Impact of mobile phone use on accidental falls risk in young adult pedestrians.” …
- Man of more letters — The lengthy list of 16 academic abbreviations attached to a person’s name, as noted by Feedback last month (15 July), failed to impress Ian Glendon. He says: “Your correspondent’s piffling 16 post nominals falls short of those in correspondence I had with an erstwhile colleague at the end of 2022 – who may have added more since – but who had these 22 at that time…
- Autophagy for all — Some guidelines are brief, others a lot less so. A research journal article called “Guidelines for the use and interpretation of assays for monitoring autophagy (4th edition)” is less so. The article is 382 pages long. It includes a reference list that has 4068 items. It also has approximately 2930 co-authors. (Feedback counted them, but isn’t confident in the accuracy of that count….
- A jarring superpower — Ken Bradley adds a numberific trivial superpower to Feedback’s ever-expanding catalogue. He says:”Two years ago, our 9-year-old grandson J., at his school in Australia, won no less than four competitions for the best estimate of the number of sweets (or, in one case, pencils) in a large jar. This month, now aged 11 and at school in England, he again won a prize, at a summer fete, by estimating that there were 584 sweets in a jar….
- Pleasing everyone — “You can’t please everyone,” says a report (“Remove, reduce, inform: What actions do people want social media platforms to take on potentially misleading content?“) by Shubham Atreja, Libby Hemphill and Paul Resnick at the University of Michigan School of Information. Their conclusion echoes many conclusions, from many times, about many subjects. The lament always reduces to those same four words: “You can’t please everyone.” Is the statement true? …