Academia Obscura
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46 Broockman & Kalla, ‘Durably Reducing Transphobia: A Field Experiment on Door-to-Door Canvassing’ (2016) Science.
47 Palus, ‘BMC Retracts Paper by Scientist Who Banned Use of His Software by Immigrant-Friendly Countries’ (2015) Retraction Watch.
48 Kupferschmidt, ‘Scientist Says Researchers in Immigrant-Friendly Nations Can’t Use His Software’ (2015) Science.
49 Bhattacharjee, ‘The Mind of a Con Man’ (2013) New York Times.
50 Subramanian, ‘Google Study Gets Employees to Stop Eating So Many M&Ms’ (2013) Time.
51 Gattuso et al., ‘Contrasting Futures for Ocean and Society from Different Anthropogenic CO2 Emissions Scenarios’ (2015) Science.
52 Ferguson, ‘Article Using Tin Foil, Cling Wrap to Debunk Ocean Warming Retracted after Urgent Peer Review – Retraction Watch at Retraction Watch’ (2014) Retraction Watch.
53 Fang et al., ‘Misconduct Accounts for the Majority of Retracted Scientific Publications’ (2012) Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
54 Sokal, ‘Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity’ (1999) Social Text.
55 Sokal, ‘A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies’ (1996) Lingua Franca.
56 Robbins & Ross, ‘Response: Mystery Science Theater’ (2000) in The Sokal Hoax: The Sham that Shook the Academy.
57 Sokal, ‘A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies’ (1996) Lingua Franca.
58 Abrahams, ‘Words That, Taken Together Possibly Mean Something’ (2014) Improbable Research.
59 Conner-Simons, ‘How Three MIT Students Fooled the World of Scientific Journals’ (2015) MIT News.
60 All of the emails and accompanying documentation are available on the SCIgen website.
61 Erickson, ‘On Having a Huge Sadneess’ (2005) Ernie’s 3D Pancakes.
62 Simpson et al., ‘“Fuzzy” Homogeneous Configurations’ (2014) Aperito Journal of Nanoscience Technology.
63 Seth & Singh, ‘Use of Cloud-Computing and Social Media to Determine Box Office Performance’ (2013).
64 Kabra, ‘How I Published a Fake Paper, and Why It Is the Fault of Our Education System’ (2013).
65 Labbé, SCIgen Detection website.
66 Sample, ‘How Computer-Generated Fake Papers Are Flooding Academia’ (2014) Guardian.
67 ‘Academic Publishing: Science’s Sokal Moment’ (2013) Economist.
68 Eisen, ‘I Confess, I Wrote the Arsenic DNA Paper to Expose Flaws in Peer-Review at Subscription Based Journals’ (2013) Michaeleisen.org.
69 Stromberg, ‘“Get Me Off Your Fucking Mailing List” is an Actual Science Paper Accepted by a Journal’ (2014) Vox.
70 In Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893), illustrated by Harry Furniss. Public Domain: copy held at University of California Libraries (available at archive.org).
BEARDS
Academia has long been the bastion of beards, and now they are making a hipster-fuelled comeback outside the ivory tower too.
As a result, a 2014 study in Biology Letters suggested that we are fast approaching ‘peak beard’, the point at which beards are so common that they become undesirable from an evolutionary perspective.1 The researchers showed participants a range of pictures of faces, manipulating the frequency of beards, and then measured preference for four levels of beardedness. Both women and men found heavy stubble and full beards more attractive when presented with a set of faces in which beards were rare. Likewise, clean-shaven faces were least attractive when such faces were common, and more attractive when rare.
Such peaks are apparently cyclical. A previous review of facial hair styles found that sideburns peaked in 1853, moustaches in 1877 and beards in 1892.2 Moustaches subsequently had a renaissance, before peaking again from 1917 to 1919. The study also noted a positive correlation between the prevalence of beards in men and the average width of women’s skirts – as beards become more common, skirt widths increase.
In ‘Beards: An Archaeological and Historical Overview’, the author notes:3
Beards have been ascribed various symbolic attributes, such as sexual virility, wisdom and high social status, but conversely barbarism, eccentricity and Satanism.
Studies have indeed returned mixed results. In one study, full beards rated highest for parenting ability and healthiness,4 while in another, bearded men with an aggressive facial expression were perceived as being significantly more aggressive than the same men when clean-shaven.5 One study even considered whether a woman’s menstrual cycle affects their perception of beards.*6
While a beard might provide a small amount of sun protection,7 there are concerns that bearded scientists could inadvertently harbour dangerous microorganisms or chemicals in their face fur. A 1967 paper published in Applied Microbiology, aimed to evaluate the risks.8 What ensues is a bizarre study that involved spraying pathogens on academics’ beards (73-day-old beards, to be precise), washing their faces, then collecting some beard dust to see if the pathogens were still present. The paper also documents a second study testing the pathogen-infested beards on chicks using an ultra-creepy human-head mannequin.
After much contamination, washing, and the needless death of a handful of sentient beings, the authors find that a beard would only pose a risk following a ‘recognizable microbiological accident with a persistent highly infectious microorganism’, or if the wearer was ‘engaged in a repetitious operation that aerosolized a significant number of organisms’.
Figure 12: Chickens exposed to natural hair beard on mannequin
Notes
For the love of trees, I have opted to keep this bibliography (relatively) short. For more details, please go to AcademiaObscura.com/buffalo, where I plan to concoct a multimedia extravaganza containing links, photos, and videos. If I get distracted and don’t get around to doing this (highly likely), I will at the very least provide full references and PDFs (where I can do so legally).
* Not really: ‘preferences vary only subtly with respect to hormonal, reproductive, and relationship status’.
1 Janif et al., ‘Negative Frequency-Dependent Preferences and Variation in Male Facial Hair Negative Frequency-Dependent Preferences and Variation in Male Facial Hair’ (2014) Biology Letters.
2 Robinson, ‘Fashions in Shaving and Trimming of the Beard: The Men of the Illustrated London News, 1842–1972’ (1976) American Journal of Sociology.
3 Dowd, Beards: An Archaeological and Historical Overview (2010).
4 Dixson & Brooks, ‘The Role of Facial Hair in Women’s Perceptions of Men’s Attractiveness, Health, Masculinity and Parenting Abilities’ (2013) Evolution and Human Behavior.
5 Dixson & Vasey, ‘Beards Augment Perceptions of Men’s Age, Social Status, and Aggressiveness, but Not Attractiveness’ (2012) Behavioral Ecology.
6 Dixson et al., ‘Do Women’s Preferences for Men’s Facial Hair Change with Reproductive Status?’ (2013) Behavioral Ecology.
7 Parisi et al., ‘Dosimetric investigation of the solar erythemal UV radiation protection provided by beards and moustaches’ (2012) Radiation Protection Dosimetry.
8 Barbeito et al., ‘Microbiological Laboratory Hazard of Bearded Men’ (1967) Applied Microbiology.
Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you’re doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.
E. L. Doctorow
I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.
Douglas Adams
There is nothing to writing.
All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.*
Ernest Hemingway
A PASSAGE REGARDING SUCCINCTNESS AND THE EXIGENCIES OF PROACTIVELY COUNTERACTING SESQUIPEDALIANISM IN ACADEMIC COMPOSITION *1
Academics are not known for their concise writing concision. We have a reputation for droning on in language strewn with jargon and unnecessarily long words. Yet on occasion the rare brevity seen earlier with the
one-word abstracts can be observed in academic papers.
A 2003 paper, ‘Higher taxa: Reply to Cartmill’, consists of two words: ‘Enough already.’† This was the final shot fired in a year-long back-and-forth between Ian Tattersall, curator emeritus at the American Museum of Natural History, and Boston University professor Matt Cartmill. Cartmill kicked off with his paper ‘Primate Origins, Human Origins, and the End of Higher Taxa’, to which Tattersall replied with ‘Higher Taxa: An Alternate Perspective’. Cartmill hit back with ‘The End of Higher Taxa: A Reply to Tattersall’, before Tattersall finally declared that he’d had enough already. The two (who I believe are otherwise good friends) have been battling each other since the 1980s over various arcane details of systematics.‡
Similarly terse is a sarcastic paper regarding the use of the term ‘chemical-free’.2 The authors first declare that their aim is to describe all consumer products that are appropriately labelled as ‘chemical-free’, then they explain that this is a misnomer because everything contains chemicals, and then follow up with two blank pages. The only other text is a footnote at the end of the paper declaring that the authors have no competing financial interests, but ‘would have short-sold “Rubber Ducky Sunscreen” on principle if it was publicly traded’ (according to its website, Rubber Ducky is a ‘100% Chemical-Free’ sunscreen).
Figure 13: The writing process
Mathematics is the field with the longest history of shortest papers. Euler’s conjecture – a theory proposed by Leonhard Euler in 1769 – survived unchallenged for 200 years, until two mathematicians unceremoniously debunked it in 1966 with just two short sentences printed in the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society.*3 Others have matched the two-sentence record, though none have shattered any 200-year-old conjectures in the process.
This trend for short maths papers culminates with the paper ‘Can n2 + 1 unit equilateral triangles cover an equilateral triangle of side > n, say n + ε?’. The body of the paper consists solely of the text ‘n2 + 2 can’, followed by two diagrams. Professor Alexander Soifer* recounts that American Mathematical Monthly was taken aback by his article.11 Two days after submission, an editorial assistant acknowledged receipt of the paper, but stated that it ‘is a bit too short to be a good Monthly article . . . A line or two of explanation would really help.’12 Soifer consulted with his co-author, John Conway, over coffee. His equally concise response was: ‘Do not give up too easily.’
Soifer fired back the same day to make his case:
I respectfully disagree that a short paper in general – and this paper in particular – merely due to its size must be ‘a bit too short to be a good Monthly article’. Is there a connection between quantity and quality? . . . We have posed a fine (in our opinion) open problem and reported two distinct ‘behold-style’ proofs of our advance on this problem. What else is there to explain?
Less than a week later they received a response from Editor-in-Chief Bruce Palka offering to publish the paper in a box on a page that would have otherwise contained a lot of blank space. The authors accepted and the paper was published.†
Nanopublications
While the preceding examples are mostly concise for comic effect, it does seem increasingly clear that the shortened attention spans of the social media era will make such brevity increasingly necessary. In any case, condensing research results into digestible chunks is a reasonable response to the overwhelming quantity of literature that academics have to sift through.
Although the momentum to develop the world’s first Twitter-only journal appears to have stalled,13 the journal Tiny Transactions on Computer Science (TinyToCS) has begun in earnest, publishing computer science research of 140 characters or less.* These handy snippets, dubbed ‘nanopublications’, are the ‘smallest unit of publishable information: an assertion about anything that can be uniquely identified and attributed to its author.’14 TinyToCS published a nanopublication about nanopublications, which serves simultaneously as both an explanation and an example of the format. The entire paper reads:15
The nanopublication model incentivizes rapid, citable data dissemination, interoperability, semantic reasoning, and knowledge discovery.
WRITING IS DIFFIC
If Tattersall’s two words is two too many, or if nanopublications still seem too long, a series of papers on ‘Writer’s Block’ may be the antidote.† In 1974 psychologist Dennis Upper ‘wrote’ an academic paper containing precisely no words, entitled ‘The unsuccessful self-treatment of a case of “writer’s block”’.*16 The enthusiastic peer reviewer stated that they examined the manuscript with lemon juice and X-rays and did not find a single flaw, concluding that the paper should be published without revision. (‘Surely we can find a place for this paper in the journal – perhaps on the edge of a blank page.’)
In 1983, Geoffrey Molloy published a replication in which he also failed to put pen to paper,17 though a year later Bruce Herman advanced the literature ever so slightly in his ‘partial failure to replicate’:18
Self-treatment of ‘writer’s block’, while generally reported to be unsuccessful (Molloy, 1983; Upper, 1974), may not be entirely without merit. I say this becau
Herman notes that the paper was supported by a grant from the American Institute of Communicative Disorders† and that portions of the paper were presented at the First Annual Convention of the International Association to Combat Writer’s Block (presided over by Isaac Asimov).
A group of authors then published their unsuccessful group-treatment of a case of writer’s block,19 in which ‘a regime of weekly 1-hr. sessions over a 2-yr. period was ineffective in remediating writer’s block in any of the five participants.’ The group conducted a follow-up assessment a decade later.20 Treatment had continued to be unsuccessful, which the authors postulate might be due to ‘(a) second author’s relocation to another university, and (b) apparent inability of the other original participants to respond to posthumous treatment.’
Another decade passed before Didden et al. published ‘A Multisite Cross-Cultural Replication’,21 i.e. a blank page written by several authors on different continents. This time the authors state that the article was supported by a $2.50 grant from the first author’s personal funds, and that they hope to submit the paper to the ‘next international conference in St Tropez’. Upper’s blankness had stood the test of time and the reviewer was once again enthusiastic, commending its ‘awe-inspiring brevity’.
The latest in this long line of papers came in 2014 with Mclean and Thomas’s meta-analysis, which concludes: ‘Group-treatments tend to be slightly more unsuccessful than self-treatments.’22
This research isn’t getting us any closer to a cure, yet in 1925 Hugo Gernsback, one of the pioneers of science fiction, may have already invented it. In Science and Invention magazine, he showcased one of his bizarre creations, ‘The Isolator’. The cumbersome contraption, which resembles a cross between a giant gas mask and an old-school diving helmet, was intended to encourage focus and concentration by eliminating external sensory stimuli. The helmet completely blocked out sound, limited vision to a tiny horizontal slit, and supplied the writer with pure oxygen.
I’ll stick to the library.
Figure 14: The Isolator
TRIPE
Getting the words flowing is a difficult, sometimes seemingly insurmountable, first step in any writing project, but the real challenge is writing concisely and comprehensibly.
Social Text, target of Alan Sokal, is known for publishing some particularly perplexing articles. ‘S’More Inequality – The Neoliberal Marshmallow and the Corporate Reform of Education’, singled out by Marc Abrahams, is one such paper.23 Keen for a challenge, I had a go at reading it. It was bloody difficult. One scholar posted on Twitter that it was a ‘fascinating read’, (though sarcasm is notoriously hard to detect in written form).*24
Here is an extract of the abstract:
The marshmallow test is more than a handy synecdoche for the cold new logic be
hind shrinking public services and the burgeoning apparatus of surveillance and accountability. It also shows how the sciences of the soul can be deployed to create the person they purport to describe, by willing political transformation.
Quite.
If this paper dances gaily on the fringes of comprehensibility, another of Abrahams’s collected oddities, a paper published in Qualitative Inquiry entitled ‘Welcome to My Brain’, is baffling beyond belief.25 Reading it is akin to being inside a migraine, and one puzzled scientist asked his colleagues to read it so he could be sure he hadn’t had a stroke.
The keywords for the paper include ‘de/re/subjective twisted/ing brain de/re/construction’, and a sizeable chunk of the text is dedicated to telling the reader what the paper is about (with little success). The abstract reads:
This is about developing recursive, intrinsic, self-reflexive as de-and/or resubjective always evolving living research designs. It is about learning and memory cognition and experiment poetic/creative pedagogical science establishing a view of students ultimately me as subjects of will (not) gaining from disorder and noise: Antifragile and antifragility and pedagogy as movements in/through place/space . . . I use knitting the Möbius strip and other art/math hyperbolic knitted and crocheted objects to illustrate nonbinary . . . perhaps. Generally; this is about asking how-questions more than what-questions.
Also seeking reassurance that I hadn’t suffered a stroke, I read this over the phone to a close friend, comedian and confidant Haydn Griffith-Jones. He proffered that maybe it only sounded complex, but in reality was quite simple. By way of example he recounted that he’d recently been perusing the wares of an online sex toy retailer and had found the ‘double penetrator strap-on vibrating rabbit cock ring’ to be considerably less complex and intimidating than its name would suggest. I looked it up and can confirm that both are every bit as complex (and ridiculous) as they sound.