by Glen Wright
4 Kaku, Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 (2011).
5 Nick T, ‘A Modern Smartphone or a Vintage Supercomputer: Which Is More Powerful?’ (2014) Phone Arena.
6 ‘Bubble Chambers Gallery’, CERN High School Teachers.
7 Pinckard, ‘Front Seat to History: Summer Lecture Series Kicks Off’ (2006) Berkeley Lab View.
8 Leike, ‘Demonstration of the Exponential Decay Law Using Beer Froth’ (2002) European Journal of Physics.
9 Grim, ‘A Possible Role of Social Activity to Explain Differences in Publication Output among Ecologists’ (2008) Oikos.
10 Cordell & Mccarthy, ‘A Case Study of Gut Fermentation Syndrome (Auto-Brewery) with Saccharomyces Cerevisiae as the Causative Organism’ (2013) International Journal of Clinical Medicine.
11 Soifer, Building a Bridge II: from Problems of Mathematical Olympiads to Open Problems of Mathematics (2010) Mathematics Competitions
12 Soifer, How Does One Cut a Triangle? (1990).
13 See @TwournalOf on Twitter.
14 ‘About’, Nanopublications website.
15 Thompson et al., ‘Data Publishing Using Nanopublications’ (2012) TinyToCS.
16 Upper, ‘The Unsuccessful Self-Treatment of a Case of “Writer’s Block”’ (1974) Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis.
17 Molloy, ‘Unsuccessful Self-Treatment of a Case of “Writer’s Block”: A Replication’ (1983) Perceptual and Motor Skills.
18 Hermann, ‘Unsuccessful Self-Treatment of a Case of “Writer’s Block”: A Partial Failure to Replicate’ (1984) Perceptual and Motor Skills.
19 Skinner et al., ‘The Unsuccessful Group-Treatment of “Writer’s Block”’ (1985) Perceptual and Motor Skills.
20 Skinner & Perlini, ‘The Unsuccessful Group Treatment of “Writer’s Block”: A Ten-Year Follow-Up’ (1996) Perceptual and Motor Skills.
21 Didden et al., ‘A Multisite Cross-Cultural Replication of Upper’s (1974) Unsuccessful Self-Treatment of Writer’s Block’ (2007) Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis.
22 Mclean & Thomas, ‘Unsuccsessful Treatments of “Writer’s Block”: A Meta-Analysis’ (2014) Psychological Reports.
23 Moreton, ‘S’More Inequality: The Neoliberal Marshmallow and the Corporate Reform of Education’ (2014) Social Text.
24 Tsigie et al., ‘A Roadmap to the Extension of the Ethiopic Writing System Standard Under Unicode and ISO-10646’ (1999).
25 Reinertsen, ‘Welcome to My Brain’ (2013) Qualitative Inquiry.
26 Arnoldo et al., ‘Identification of Small Molecule Inhibitors of Pseudomonas Aeruginosa Exoenzyme S Using a Yeast Phenotypic Screen’ (2008) PLOS Genetics.
27 Garner et al., ‘Reconstitution of DNA Segregation Driven by Assembly of a Prokaryotic Actin Homolog Ethan’ (2010) Science.
28 Cole et al., ‘Strong Evidence for Terrestrial Support of Zooplankton in Small Lakes Based on Stable Isotopes of Carbon, Nitrogen, and Hydrogen’ (2011) Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
29 Cabanac, ‘Shaping the Landscape of Research in Information Systems from the Perspective of Editorial Boards: A Scientometric Study of 77 Leading Journals’ (2012) Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, ‘Unconventional Academic Writing’ (2015) Figshare.
30 Mulligan & Sala-i-Martin, ‘Transitional Dynamics in Two-Sector Models of Endogenous Growth’ (1993) Quarterly Journal of Economics.
31 Chierichetti et al., ‘Rumour Spreading and Graph Conductance’ (2010) in 21st ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA).
32 Roberts, The History of Science Fiction (2005).
33 ‘Leigh Van Valen, Evolutionary Theorist and Paleobiology Pioneer, 1935–2010’ (2010) UChicagoNews.
34 van Valen, ‘A New Evolutionary Law’ (1973) Evolutionary Theory.
35 Thanks to John Fea for this one: Fea, ‘This May Be the Best “Acknowledgments” Section of All Time’ (2016) The Way of Improvement Leads Home.
36 Behrens et al., ‘What Is the Most Interesting Part of the Brain?’ (2013) Trends in Cognitive Sciences.
37 Marin, ‘On the Residual Nilpotence of Pure Artin Groups’ (2006) Journal of Group Theory.
38 Goupil et al., ‘Rotational Splittings with CoRoT, Expected Number of Detections and Measurement Accuracy’ (2006) in Fridlund et al. (eds), ESA Special Publication.
39 Moreton, ‘S’More Inequality: The Neoliberal Marshmallow and the Corporate Reform of Education’ (2014) Social Text.
40 Hodges, Model Theory (1993).
41 He & Raichle, ‘The fMRI Signal, Slow Cortical Potential and Consciousness’ (2009) Trends in Cognitive Sciences.
42 Davis, ‘An External Problem for Plane Convex Curves’ (1963) in Convexity: proceedings of the Seventh Symposium in Pure Mathematics of the American Mathematical Society.
43 ‘Albert Paul Malvino Quotes’, Good Reads.
44 Brown & Henderson, ‘A New Horned Dinosaur Reveals Convergent Evolution in Cranial Ornamentation in Ceratopsidae’ (2015) Current Biology.
45 Jackson, ‘Chinese Acrobatics, an Old-Time Brewery, and the “Much Needed Gap”: The Life of Mathematical Reviews’ (1989) Mathematical Reviews.
46 Reimers et al., ‘Response Behaviors of Svalbard Reindeer Towards Humans and Humans Disguised as Polar Bears on Edgeøya’ (2012) Arctic, Antarctic, and Alpine Research.
47 Nishimura et al., ‘Ping-Pong Ball Avalanche at a Ski Jump’ (1998) Granular Matter.
48 Chris Ashford, ‘Bareback Sex, Queer Legal Theory and Evolving Socio-Legal Contexts’ (2015) Sexualities
49 Neville Morley, ‘“The Strong Do What They Will, and the Weak Endure What They Must”: Thucydidean Echoes in Fifty Shades of Grey’ (2015) in Thoukidideia: Occasional Publications of the Berlin Thucydides Centre.
50 Casajus et al., ‘Body Composition in Spanish Soccer Referees’ (2014) Measurement and Control.
51 Nemiroff & Wilson, ‘Searching the Internet for Evidence of Time Travelers’ (2013) arXiv.
52 Swartz, Why People Hate the Paperclip: Labels, Appearence, Behavior and Social Responses to User Interface Agents (2003).
53 Minetti et al., ‘Humans Running in Place on Water at Simulated Reduced Gravity’ (2012) PLOS ONE.
54 Rubio et al., ‘Characterization of Lactic Acid Bacteria Isolated from Infant Faeces as Potential Probiotic Starter Cultures for Fermented Sausages’ (2014) Food Microbiology.
55 Turing, ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’ (1950) Mind.
56 Watson & Crick, ‘Genetical Implications of the Structure of Deoxyribonucleic Acid’ (1953) Nature.
57 Mendeleev, ‘The Periodic Law of the Chemical Elements’ (1889) Journal of the Chemical Society.
58 Gomberg, ‘An Instance of Trivalent Carbon: Triphenylmethyl’ (1900) Journal of the American Chemical Society. Thanks to Laura van Laeren (@lauravlaeren) for finding that one.
59 Preti et al., ‘The Psychometric Discriminative Properties of the Peters et Al Delusions Inventory: A Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve Analysis’ (2007) Comprehensive Psychiatry.
60 Riba et al., ‘Subjective Effects and Tolerability of the South American Psychoactive Beverage Ayahuasca in Healthy Volunteers’ (2001) Psychopharmacology.
61 Koski et al., ‘Skeletal Development of Hand and Wrist in Finnish Children’ (1961) American Journal of Physical Anthropology.
62 Preti et al., ‘The Psychometric Discriminative Properties of the Peters et al Delusions Inventory: A Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve Analysis’ (2007) Comprehensive Psychiatry.
63 Hainmueller & Hiscox, ‘Educated Preferences: Explaining Attitudes Toward Immigration in Europe’ (2015) Sante Publique. This phrasing appears in a preprint version of the paper, but appears to have been cut from the final published version.
64 Laulajainen, ‘A Static Theory of Dry Bulk Freight Rates by Route’ (2006) Maritime Policy & Management.
65 Clarke, ‘The Transient and St
eady State Responses in Oxygen Consumption by Tropical Butterflies to Temperature Step Transfer Tests’ (1977) Journal of Zoology.
66 Glover et al., ‘Heterogeneity in Physicochemical Properties Explains Differences in Silver Toxicity Amelioration by Natural Organic Matter to Daphnia Magna’ (2005) Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry / SETAC.
67 Shcherbak, ‘The Phosphorus Fractions of Muscle During Hypoxia’ (1959) Bulletin of Experimental Biology and Medicine.
68 Unuvar et al., ‘Mercury Levels in Cord Blood and Meconium of Healthy Newborns and Venous Blood of Their Mothers: Clinical, Prospective Cohort Study’ (2007) Science of the Total Environment.
69 Wilberforce et al., ‘Towards Integrated Community Mental Health Teams for Older People in England: Progress and New Insights’ (2011) International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry.
70 Zhu et al., ‘The Effect of Emotional Conflict on Attention Allocation: An Event-Related Potential Study’ (2015) Health.
71 Ibid.
72 Huxley, Area, Lattice Points, and Exponential Sums (1996).
73 Johnstone, ‘On a Topological Topos’ (1979) Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society.
74 Cox & Zucker, Intersection numbers of sections of elliptic surfaces (1979) Inventiones Mathematicae (named in Schwartz, ‘Subgroups of Finite Index in a Free Product With Amalgamated Subgroup’ (1981) Mathematics of Computation.)
75 Weyl, The Classical Groups: Their Invariants and Representations (1939).
76 Bosch, ‘Unification of the Fundamental Plane and Super-Massive Black Holes Masses’ (2016) Astrophysical Journal.
77 Bunnett & Kearley, ‘Comparative Mobility of Halogens in Reactions of Dihalobenzenes with Potassium Amide in Ammonia’ (1971) The Journal of Organic Chemistry.
78 Parent & Eskenazi, ‘Toward Better Crowdsourced Transcription: Transcription of a Year of the Let’s Go Bus Information System Data’ (2010) 2010 IEEE Workshop on Spoken Language Technology, SLT 2010 – Proceedings.
79 Schaul et al., ‘Coherence Progress: A Measure of Interestingness Based on Fixed Compressors’ (2011) Lecture Notes in Computer Science (Including Subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics).
80 Cantrill, ‘A Quantitative Analysis of How Often Nature Gives a Fuck’ (2015) Chemical Connectionls.
81 Johnson, ‘“Art” Was a Load of Fluff’ (2001) Nature.
82 Fairman, ‘Fuck’ (2007) Cardozo Law Review.
83 Walker, ‘An Obscenity Symbol’ (2015) American Speech.
84 Leiter, ‘No Ranking is Too Trivial to Spark Commentary from Folks with Time to Burn …’ (2007).
85 Spindelman, ‘Shockfreude and the Very Democratic Teachings of “Professor Fuck”’ (2016) Ohio State Law Journal.
86 McCawley, The Eater’s Guide to Chinese Characters (1984).
87 Dong, ‘English Sentences Without Overt Grammatical Subject’ (1992) in Zwicky et al. (eds) Studies out in left field: defamatory essays presented to James D. McCawley on the occasion of his 33rd or 34th birthday.
88 Yang et al., ‘Electrochemical Synthesis of Metal and Semimetal Nanotube – Nanowire Heterojunctions and Their Electronic Transport Properties’ (2007) Chemistry Communications.
89 Duan et al., ‘Structural and Electronic Properties of Chiral Single-Wall Copper Nanotubes’ (2014) Science China Physics, Mechanics and Astronomy.
90 Jane, ‘“Back to the Kitchen, Cunt”: Speaking the Unspeakable about Online Misogyny’ (2014) Continuum.
91 Dawson, ‘The Compleat Motherfucker: A History of the Mother of All Dirty Words’ (2009).
92 Leverette, It’s Not TV: Watching HBO in the Post-Television Era (2009).
93 Lavery & Kim, Reading Deadwood: A Western to Swear By (2006).
94 Lie, Translate This, Motherfucker! A Contrastive Study on the Subtitling of Taboo (2013).
95 Oshiro, Optically Enhanced Nuclear Cross Polarization in Acridine-Doped Fluorene (1982); Cambridge Institute for Medical Research and Department of Medicine, ‘Information Sheet for Research into Genetic Variation AND Altered Leucocyte Function in Health and Disease (GANDALF)’ (2010); Langrish, ‘Biodiesel Exhaust, Acute Vascular and Endothelial Responses’ (2011); McKee et al., ‘Black Intelligence Test of Cultural Homogeneity’ (2011) in Encyclopedia of Child Behavior and Development; Zhou & Rienstra, ‘High-Performance Solvent Suppression for Proton Detected Solid-State NMR’ (2008) Journal of Magnetic Resonance; Goodacre et al., ‘The RATPAC (Randomised Assessment of Treatment Using Panel Assay of Cardiac Markers) Trial: A Randomised Controlled Trial of Point-of-Care Cardiac Markers in the Emergency Department’ (2011) Health Technology Assessment; Kivipelto et al., ‘The Finnish Geriatric Intervention Study to Prevent Cognitive Impairment and Disability (FINGER): Study Design and Progress’ (2013) Alzheimer’s & Dementia; Schwitter et al., ‘MR-IMPACT II: Magnetic Resonance Imaging for Myocardial Perfusion Assessment in Coronary Artery Disease Trial: Perfusion-Cardiac Magnetic Resonance vs. Single-Photon Emission Computed Tomography for the Detection of Coronary Artery Disease: A Comparative’ (2013) European Heart Journal; Pottegård et al., ‘SearCh for humourIstic and Extravagant acroNyms and Thoroughly Inappropriate Names For Important Clinical Trials (SCIENTIFIC): Qualitative and Quantitative Systematic Study’ (2014) British Medical Journal; Ibrahim et al., ‘Development, Validation, and Factorial Comparison of the McGill Self-Efficacy of Learners For Inquiry Engagement (McSELFIE) Survey in Natural Science Disciplines’ (2016) International Journal of Science Education.
THE ‘SCIENTIFIC’ METHOD
Theory is when you know everything but nothing works. Practice is when everything works but no one knows why. In our lab, theory and practice are combined: nothing works and no one knows why.
For all the pretence of objectivity and control, science can be a satisfyingly rough and ready business. There are likely thousands of scientific experiments that could be filed under ‘MacGyver’, but we rarely get to hear about them as the true story is lost in the transition from lab to publishable paper.*1
The Twitter hashtag #OverlyHonestMethods, which started in 2013, has seen thousands of contributions from academics of all disciplines sharing their slightly unscientific approaches. The tweets offer some candid insights into the day-to-day functioning of labs and offices across the world:2
• We used jargon instead of plain English to prove that a decade of grad school and postdoc made us smart.
• Brains were removed and dissected in, on average, 58 seconds. We know precisely due to a long-running lab competition.
• Stimuli for this experiment were inspired by a Monty Python sketch . . . they worked so I stuck with it.
• Slices were left in a formaldehyde bath for over 48 hours, because I put them in on Friday and refuse to work weekends.
• I used that specific sequence of biotinylated DNA because I found some in the freezer.
Many media outlets, seemingly unaware that scientists (sometimes) have a sense of humour, saw the hashtag as an online confessional. But really it is about the highs and lows of academic life that scientists share: working weekends and nights because there’s a deadline looming or because it is the only time that an expensive new bit of equipment is available; drinking implausible amounts of coffee; and being frustrated at the constraints imposed by funders and employers. Scientists sometimes take shortcuts, but that doesn’t mean science is broken.3
Occasionally, published papers can be starkly honest too. Researchers on a paper about the influence of the moon’s phases on sleep admit that they hadn’t considered their line of argument when they collected the data, but that: ‘We just thought of it after a drink in a local bar one evening at full moon, years after the study was completed.’4 In a similarly honest fashion, a couple of French researchers studied how birds react to speeding cars: ‘The study took place in western France mostly on our way home.’5
I find these pragmatic methodologies of convenience reassuring, almost comforting. The same cannot be said of the me
thods section of a 1969 study, that I can only hope would no longer pass the relevant animal ethics review procedures:
After unsuccessful attempts to trap the redtail monkeys at the Zika Forest with the intention of live-bleeding and release, monkeys had to be sampled by means of 12-bore shotguns.
As disgusting, but not as depressing, Hare et al. describe in detail how they got hold of cow dung for their study:6
Fresh cow dung was obtained from free-ranging, grass-fed, and antibiotic-free Milking Shorthorn cows (Bos taurus) in the Tilden Regional Park in Berkeley, CA. Resting cows were approached with caution and startled by loud shouting, whereupon the cows rapidly stood up, defecated, and moved away from the source of the annoyance. Dung was collected in ZipLoc bags (1 gallon), snap-frozen and stored at –80°C. Dung [was] thawed at 4°C and moistened slightly before use.
SOMETHING FISHY
In 2009, a team of neuroscientists and psychologists conducted a study wherein they showed a series of photographs depicting social situations to their subject, asked them to determine what emotion the individual in the photo was experiencing, and measured their brain activity in an MRI scanner.7
The sole participant in the study: ‘One mature Atlantic Salmon, 18 inches long, 3.8 lbs . . . not alive at time of scanning.’
This silliness started out as a standard pre-study machine test, used to calibrate the scanner.* Craig Bennett and his team weren’t content with the low contrast scans of the oil-filled balloon commonly used for such tests. Ever the scientists, they worked their way through a menu of options. They started with a pumpkin, but were dissatisfied with its lack of compositional complexity. Then they scanned a Cornish game hen (also not alive at the time of scanning), which produced a decent image, but still wasn’t as punchy as they wanted. Finally, they settled on the scan of the salmon for its rich mix of textures.
The procurement of said salmon led to arguably the most delightful declaration in the history of academia. Bennett marched into his local grocer and declared:
I need a full-length Atlantic Salmon. For science.*