This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them:
- Face: the future — Should you take at face value a science paper that suggests that your face is the result of a “self-fulfilling prophecy process”? … Did Natalie always look like a Natalie? Or did her name impel her to become ever more Natalie-like? How about May? What of Dana, Jonathan, Daniel, Tom and Noam? The paper explores the facial fates of each of them….
- Whack-a-mammoth — … The beatings took many forms. The paper documenting the affair calls them “perturbations”. More long-windedly, it calls them “disturbances that ancient dehydrated samples might plausibly encounter through millennia”. This is how the paper describes those perturbing pummellings: “run over by a car, hit with a fastball, and pulverized with a shotgun, for varying degrees of mechanical impact; baking in a toaster oven for 1 h, microwaving for 6 min, dropping into liquid nitrogen, for thermal disturbance; and soaking, in either plain water or with added lemon juice”. …
- A little bit random — Though you may not have heard anyone say “stochastic accuracy”, chances are you can recognise it. When you examine a bunch of reported “facts” and notice that many of them really are not facts, you are seeing stochastic accuracy. You are detecting the presence of randomness.,,,
- A ghostly confession — A one-foot-in-the-graves-of-academe note arrived here, in response to the discussion about “holy ghostwriters”. These are senior department members who automatically get co-authorship credit for research done by people of lower status (Feedback, 22 June). The note says…