This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: Not such a comfort — To see how a man’s stress levels and diet might alter his shape, one might give comfort food to a stressed rat and study its penis. Researchers at the State University of […]
What makes most scientists most excited is the same thing that—if they’ve heard about it—makes many non-scientists wonder if scientists are nuts: Way more than half of “the stuff the universe is made of” is still a mystery to scientists. Which may strike you as a crazy thing to realize, and a crazy thing to say. […]
When statisticians are confronted with sets of data, they occasionally find there are data missing. This phenomenon has been given the name ‘Missingness’. Sometimes, a decision is taken that these missing data can be ignored, in which case they are classed as ‘Ignorable Missingness’. But on occasion, some missing data just can’t be ignored. In […]
“Identifying patterns in the world requires noticing not only unusual occurrences, but also unusual absences.” – inform professor Anne S. Hsu and colleagues Andy Horng, Thomas L. Griffiths and Nick Chater in a new paper for the journal Cognitive Science. “We examined how people learn from absences, manipulating the extent to which an absence is […]
Do you ever get an uncanny feeling that one of your toes is missing, despite the fact that they’re all there? You’re not alone. “To the best of our knowledge, the present study is the first to document the [erroneous] experience of a ‘missing toe’ in healthy volunteers.” “Nineteen young adult participants underwent tactile stimulation […]
Although it’s possible to create a swathe of specially crafted ‘academic drivel’ on the concept of the Absence of Absences that certainly doesn’t preclude the concept from serious study. In fact there’s quite a body of academic work which addresses this very subject – see for example the work of George Botterill (University of Sheffield, UK) […]
The problem of mismatched and missing socks has spurred inventors to invent a better way to keep matching socks matched together. The article “Inventions to Match Up Matching Socks” gives a history of some of the most spectacular efforts — as revealed in patents and scientific studies. The article is one of the highlights of the special […]
Big numbers can be intimidating. Some people are more comfortable talking, instead, about small numbers. Here’s an example. In this video, called “Commission Meeting Million Dollar error Sept-23-2009“, a woman identified as Mrs. Carter asks two questions. Here’s a partial transcript: MRS. CARTER: “There were two things that were brought up at the budget committee […]
Difficulties sometimes present themselves when statisticians are faced with the task of making accurate predictions from sets of data which have gaps – in the sense that some of the data are missing. The question then arises – are the missing data ignorable or non-ignorable? For a background on how the complexities of Bayesian mathematics […]
In 1995, the Ig Nobel Prize in literature was awarded to two surgeons who painstakingly assembled a study called Rectal Foreign Bodies: Case Reports and a Comprehensive Review of the World’s Literature. Those case reports involve, among other items: seven light bulbs; a knife sharpener; two flashlights; a wire spring; a snuff box; an oil […]