This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has three segments. Here are bits of each of them: Helluva Twist — CHARLES DICKENS and his writings are still being “interrogated” (that’s the word in use) by scholars, at least one of whom is almost electrified by what might be there.Jeremy Parrott, an antiquarian bookseller […]
“Total body water was determined by deuterium oxide dilution in 17 normal male subjects with a range of 55.9% to 70.2% and an average value of 61.8% of body weight. Eleven normal females ranged from 45.6% to 59.9% with an average of 51.9%, or 9.9% less than the males. These total body water figures have […]
“Cool? Or Just Clunky? The Fight Over Dashboard Touch Screens,” says a headline today in the New York Times. Without mentioning it, the Times report tells of the aftermath of technology that was honored thirty years ago with an Ig Nobel Prize. The Times explains: do-it-all touch screens, the nerve centers of many new cars, have […]
This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: Find the emperor’s heart — Holy Roman Emperor Otto the Great certainly wasn’t, in the purest medical sense, heartless. But now he is. The search is on to find his missing heart, though it isn’t abundantly […]
The influence of the Ig Nobel Prize slowly seeps into academia — especially in techniques for piquing people’s curiosity and attention. Here’s a new, 2023 example. The Harvard Gazette, in a report headlined “The snappy book talk: ‘When does that happen in academia?’ ” tells of an innovative event: “Scholars had seven minutes to explain […]
For pure intellectual and verbal verve and daring, few fields of research rival that of Accounting Auditing Control. An audaciously provocative new example appears in the journal Accounting Auditing Control: “Rhizomic Digitized Surveillance, Contradictions, and Managerial Control Practice: Insights from the Société Générale Scandal,” by Aziza Laguecir and Bernard Leca (published in vol. 29, no. […]
This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has three segments. Here are bits of each of them: Nihilism and hypergunk — Irreducibly collective existence and bottomless nihilism aren’t for everyone. Or maybe they are. Jonas Werner, a philosopher at the University of Bern, Switzerland, published a crisp, perhaps irresistible, 16-page-long jotting called “Irreducibly […]
The special WATER issue (vol. 29, no. 2) of the magazine is now out and about. The table of contents and several of the articles are online. As you might guess, it’s full of improbable research about water.
A careful choice of words can perhaps prevent a tragedy. Here’s an example. A minority of human cannibals might become overexcited when they see the title of this study: “Trends in Dietary Quality Among Adults in the United States, 1999 Through 2010,” Dong D. Wang, Cindy W. Leung, Yanping Li, Eric L. Ding, Stephanie E. […]
This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: Arachnonecrocapitalism — The death of a spider in Texas has led to the birth of a philosophical movement, with Rice at both ends. This life-and-death saga began with a recent, almost instantly famous experiment at Rice University […]