This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has five segments. Here are bits of each of them: Tiny black hole batteries — … They handwave away the swath of problems reputed to afflict anyone who suggests even going near a black hole. Their black hole, they specify, will be a “tiny black hole”. This […]
There’s new paper ammunition for all combatants in the eternal anger-and-joy-filled war to explain why more men than women officially keep on studying mathematics. The new paper that provides—that is itself—the ammunition is: “Girls’ Comparative Advantage in Reading Can Largely Explain the Gender Gap in Math-Related Fields,” Thomas Breda and Clotilde Napp, Proceedings of the […]
There may be no safe space in the ongoing war, between scholars, about blank characters.[SPACE] The latest salvo is in the form of a published study.[SPACE,SPACE] You can look for yourself at the character spacing in the study itself: “Are Two Spaces Better Than One? The Effect of Spacing Following Periods and Commas During Reading,” […]
“The dirt ground into the margins of medieval manuscripts is one of their interpretable features, which can help us to understand the desires, fears, and reading habits of the past.” – explains researcher Dr Kathryn M. Rudy who is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Art History, of the University of St Andrews, Scotland. […]
XKCD tries to answer the question “At what point in human history were there too many (English) books to be able to read them all in one lifetime?”
Join us this Saturday, for the Improbable Research session at ARISIA, in Boston. Marc Abrahams will introduce an all-star lineup. The performers will do dramatic, two-minute readings from bizarre studies collected by the Annals of Improbable Research. Each performer will be unfamiliar with the study she or he is reading aloud, aside from skimming through it immediately before the […]
Tim Radford, science editor of the Guardian ’til recently, mastered the art of telling a gripping, good story — no matter how tough the topic. One day Tim wrote some notes about how to do it. Here’s the start of his “Manifesto for the simple scribe” (to see the whole list, click on the link): […]
“In linguistics, the Gunning fog index is a test designed to measure the readability of a sample of English writing,” says Wikipedia. Someone named Simon has put a Gunning fog calculator online. This and the preceding paragraph together have a Gunning fog index of 11.47, sayeth the calculator.
“Harmful Effects of Preexisting Inappropriate Highlighting on Reading Comprehension and Metacognitive Accuracy,” Vicki Silvers Gier, David S. Kreiner and Amelia Natz-Gonzalez, Journal of General Psychology, vol. 136, no. 3, 2009, pp. 287–300. Silvers Gier and Kreiner were awarded the 2002 Ig Nobel Prize in literature for their 1997 report “The Effects of Pre-Existing Inappropriate Highlighting […]
One of the curses of my new job is having to commute from Cambridge into London two or three (or four or five …) days a week. Commuting must be good for something. One of the things I find it good for is primate behaviour research. I have found, for example, than commuters do not […]