by Glen Wright
12 ‘DANC 127 – How Does It Feel to Dance?’ (2014) Oberlin College Course Catalog 2014-2015.
13 Stupidity (2010) Occidental College course catalogue 2009–2010
14 Zamudio-Suaréz, ‘Is Anybody Reading the Syllabus? To Find Out, Some Professors Bury Hidden Gems’ (2016) Chronicle of Higher Education.
15 Selterman, ‘Why I Give My Students a “tragedy of the Commons” Extra Credit Challenge’ (2015) Washington Post.
16 ‘The Painting Reputed to Make Students Fail Exams’ (2014) BBC News.
17 See Felton et al., ‘Web-Based Student Evaluations of Professors: The Relations between Perceived Quality, Easiness and Sexiness’ (2004) Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, ‘Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education Attractiveness, Easiness and Other Issues: Student Evaluations of Professors on Ratemyprofessors.com’ (2015) Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education. For general discussion, see Wachtel, ‘Student Evaluation of College Teaching Effectiveness: A Brief Review’ (1998) Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education; Otto et al., ‘Does Ratemyprofessor.com Really Rate My Professor?’ (2008) Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education; Davison & Price, ‘How Do We Rate? An Evaluation of Online Student Evaluations’ (2009) Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education.
18 Berrett, ‘In Cheeky Pushback, Colleges Razz Rate My Professors’ (2014) Chronicle of Higher Education.
19 Boring et al., ‘Student Evaluations of Teaching (Mostly) Do Not Measure Teaching Effectiveness’ (2016) ScienceOpen Research.
20 Flaherty, ‘Iowa Bill Sparks Faculty Ire’ (2015) Inside Higher Ed.
FOOD, GLORIOUS FOOD
Crisper: If you’ve ever found yourself peckish with nothing to hand but half a bag of stale crisps, there is a simple solution for turning them into an appealing snack: play crisp noises while you eat.1 This tricks your brain into believing that they are fresh.
Bowled over: In one study on the link between appetite and portion size, participants slurped soup from bowls that quietly refilled themselves over a twenty-minute period.2 Researchers wanted to measure whether participants ate more from the refilling bowls (of course they did). My university is yet to respond to my urgent request to equip our offices with a ramen noodle delivery system based on this model.
Use your noodle: The University of Rochester offered one imaginative student a place at the university after he wrote an impressive admissions essay on his love for ramen noodles.3
The cheek of it: The medical literature is replete with stomach-churning accounts of food-related mishaps. In one case, a Korean woman complained of a prickling sensation in her mouth after eating a portion of parboiled squid.4 The doctor found ‘twelve small, white spindle-shaped, bug-like organisms’ attached to the inside of her cheeks and tongue. These turned out to be the ‘parasite-like sperm bags’ that the squid would have otherwise deployed for mating purposes.
Don’t play with your food: One case report documents a man with lipoid pneumonia, caused by injecting olive oil into places he shouldn’t have.*5 Another demonstrates that even a salami can be dangerous in the wrong hands (though ‘Rectal Salami’ is a truly incredible paper title).6 It is, however, occasionally acceptable to stick food where the sun doesn’t shine: one report recounts the fashioning of a ‘nasal tampon’ from cured pork to stem a nosebleed.7
Fish face: There is a rich literature on the swallowing of whole live fish, with at least four reports of this unfortunate error. One such report, entitled ‘Return of the Killer Fish’, documents the case of a 45-year-old man who, while drinking on a fishing trip with friends, attempted to swallow a whole live fish and died from asphyxiation.8
Piece of cake: In his book Admissible Sets and Structures Jon Barwise writes: ‘Section 6 should be supplemented with coffee (not decaffeinated) and a light refreshment. We suggest Heatherton Rock “Cakes”.’ He provides a recipe, reassuring readers that they ‘taste better than they sound’.†
A lovely cup of tea
As a British tea-drinker working in France, I have struggled with my choice of hot beverage. The social pressure to drink coffee here is as overpowering as the coffee itself, and there is no communal milk in the office (there is, however, a cupboard containing a seemingly endless supply of olive oil, salt and balsamic vinegar).
Nonetheless, I patriotically persist, following the sage advice of the UK Ministry of Munitions (1916): ‘An opportunity for tea is regarded as beneficial both to health and output.’
Many have weighed in on how to make the perfect cup of tea. The Royal Society of Chemistry has produced guidelines that recommend loose-leaf Assam, steeped in fresh-boiled* filtered water in a pre-warmed pot, complemented with milk and white sugar.9 Neuroscientist Dean Burnett (author of the fantastic book The Idiot Brain)10 concludes that the mere premise of the age-old question is itself so subjective that it can never be definitively answered.11
An emerging field of scientific inquiry is now considering post-brew best practice. In one paper, scientists have modelled the ‘teapot effect’ (the pesky dribble down the underside of the spout),12 and in another (ironically written by four Frenchmen) have identified a few factors that affect dribbling.†13 These include the curvature of teapot lip, the flow rate, and the ‘wettability’ of the teapot material. The main culprit, the ‘hydro-capillary’ effect, can easily be overcome by either thinning the spout or by applying super-hydrophobic materials to the lip.
A fraught walk back to the desk follows the making of any hot drink, with its inevitable hand-scalding and mess-making. The authors of ‘Walking with Coffee: Why Does It Spill?’ are sympathetic.14 They conducted an experimental study on beverage spillage, controlling for various walking speeds and initial liquid levels, and figuring out how to stay within the ‘critical spill radius’ (i.e. the edge of the mug).
Some Australian researchers investigated the rate at which teaspoons disappeared from their staff kitchen by meticulously tracking 70 teaspoons for five months.15 Teaspoon half-life was 81 days, with a staggering overall attrition rate of 80%. The researchers were stumped as to why this occurs, offering ‘escape to a spoonoid planet’ as one possible explanation.
Academics have even overthought the simple biscuit. ‘Washburn’s Equation’ has been used to describe how liquid moves through the biscuit, while a team of mechanical engineers led by Len Fisher used a gold-plated digestive to figure out how best to dunk.*16 A full cup and an angled entry are essential, but the secret is to flip the biscuit post-dunk so that the drier side supports the weaker side as you move from mug to mouth.
Cheers!
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).
* On reflection, I am not sure that you should be injecting olive oil into any of your body parts.
† Recipe: Combine 2 cups of self-rising flour with 1 teaspoon of allspice and a pinch of salt. Use a pastry blender or two cold knives to cut in 6 tablespoons of butter. Add ⅓ cup each of sugar and raisins (or other urelements). Combine this with 1 egg and enough milk to make a stiff batter (3 or 4 tablespoons of milk). Divide this into 12 heaps, sprinkle with sugar, and bake at 205°C for 10–15 minutes.
* Reboiling reduces the oxygen content of the water, affecting the flavour of the tea.
† I don’t mean that they wrote it with the intention of being ironic in the classical Ancient Greek comedic sense (traditional use of the term is rooted in the Greek comic character Eiron, a smart underdog who repeatedly triumphs over the boastful character Alazon), but rather that Frenchmen writing in such detail about a quintessentially English occupation is ironic. At this point, about 50% of readers are mentally screaming at the page: ‘That isn’t real irony! It is
just an amusing contradiction between your expectations and the reality!’ In fact, ‘irony’ has been used to describe situations that are incongruous with expectation since at least 1640 (sometimes distinguished as ‘situational irony’, ‘irony of fate’, ‘irony of events’ or ‘irony of circumstance’). Alanis Morissette fans unite!
* The research was funded by McVitie’s.
1 Zampini & Spence, ‘The Role of Auditory Cues in Modulating the Perceived Crispness and Staleness of Potato Chips’ (2004) Journal of Sensory Studies.
2 Wansink et al., ‘Social and Behavioral Bottomless Bowls: Why Visual Cues of Portion Size May Influence Intake’ (2005) Obesity Research.
3 Lan, ‘Love of Instant Noodles Gets Guy into US College’ (2014) Ecns.
4 Park et al., ‘Penetration of the Oral Mucosa by Parasite-like Sperm Bags of Squid: A Case Report in a Korean Woman’ (2012) The Journal of Parasitology.
5 Bhagat et al., ‘Self-Injection With Olive Oil’ (1995) Chest.
6 Shah et al., ‘Rectal Salami’ (2002) International Journal of Clinical Practice.
7 Humphreys et al., ‘Nasal Packing with Strips of Cured Pork as Treatment for Uncontrollable Epistaxis in a Patient with Glanzmann Thrombasthenia’ (2011) Annals of Otology, Rhinology and Laryngology.
8 Deidiker, ‘Return of the Killer Fish: Accidental Choking Death on a Bluegill (Lepomis Macrochirus)’ (2002) The American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology.
9 Emsley, ‘News Release: How to Make a Perfect Cup of Tea’ (1987) Royal Society of Chemistry.
10 Burnett, The Idiot Brain: A Neuroscientist Explains What Your Head Is Really Up To (2016).
11 Burnett, ‘How to Make Tea Correctly (according to Science): Milk First’ (2014) Guardian.
12 Vanden-Broeck & Keller, ‘Pouring Flows’ (1986) Physics of Fluids.
13 Duez et al., ‘Beating the Teapot Effect’ (2009) arXiv.
14 Mayer & Krechetnikov, ‘Walking with Coffee: Why Does It Spill?’ (2012) Physical Review E – Statistical, Nonlinear, and Soft Matter Physics.
15 Lim et al., ‘The Case of the Disappearing Teaspoons: Longitudinal Cohort Study of the Displacement of Teaspoons in an Australian Research Institute’ (2005) British Medical Journal.
16 Conor, ‘Biscuit Dunking Perfected’ (1998) Independent.
Impact in academia is like sex: everyone is talking about it, but few are having it. Or at least not as regularly and as intensely as they’d like. We all want more of it, and many of us are obsessively measuring and analysing it.*
An oft-repeated pearl of wisdom is that you can’t manage what you can’t measure,† and measuring impact is no mean feat. The traditional measure is citations, which is in theory as simple as counting the number of times a given paper has been cited by other papers. But it’s harder than it seems. There is an entire field dedicated to measurements like this, bibliometrics, and researchers have written countless papers trying to figure out how to efficiently and accurately count citations.
In spite of this fixation on citations, there appears to be some truth in the adage that around half of all academic papers are read by just a handful of people.‡1 For example, one study concluded that if you exclude self-citations (i.e. academics citing their own papers), approximately 80% of journal articles in the humanities don’t get cited within the first five years.2 (The figure for the natural sciences is considerably better at 27%).
These ‘simple’ measures of impact are not nearly nuanced enough: the total number of citations amassed by an academic can easily be increased (by self-citation, participation in a single highly-cited study, or by churning out loads of papers that each get a few citations); while referring only to the total number of papers fails to account for the quality of the work. As a result, a raft of alternatives has been proposed.
The h-index, which was set out in 2005 and is now one of the core measures of citations, attempts to measure both productivity and citation impact. It is based on the set of the scientist’s most cited papers and the number of citations they have received, such that an h-index of twelve means that twelve of the academic’s papers have been cited at least twelve times.*
There are around one thousand scholars that boast an h-index of over 100 (i.e. they have published at least 100 papers that each have at least 100 citations each).3 American neuroscientist Graham Colditz, known for his research on obesity, currently has a world-beating h-index of 264.
Needless to say, the h-index, and all of the other proposed alternative metrics for impact, suffer from their own problems, and scholars are increasingly wondering whether such measures are not virtually meaningless in the real world. In Einstein’s words: ‘Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.’†
Many national funding bodies and review processes are now starting to ask for evidence of ‘societal impact’ as a complement to the traditional metrics. While encouraging scholars to step outside the ivory tower and bring research to the real world might not be such a bad idea (and of course, many are already making considerable effort to do so), some dread the thought of such an outward-facing exercise. Even the term ‘impact’ is now often jokingly analogised with that of a car crash.
Yet there are countless ways to make an impact. Browsing through the case studies submitted to the UK’s Research Excellence Framework process (the REF),* the amorphous nature of ‘impact’ in the modern academy is evident. In an excellent example of science and humour working together, Oliver Double at the University of Kent wrote and performed a stand-up comedy performance entitled Saint Pancreas to teach people about type 1 diabetes.4 Elsewhere, a team of researchers at Coventry University set out to improve land management in Africa and ended up reframing an invasive tree species as a useful commodity. The government of Kenya subsequently built a green power station run on charcoal from the trees, while the Mesquite Company in Texas is now making $150,000 a year from selling the stuff for use in barbecues.5
ERDŐS
The Erdős number pays homage to the improbably prolific Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős, whom Time called ‘The Oddball’s Oddball’.6 Erdő˝s spent his life as a vagabond, constantly travelling between scientific conferences, universities and the homes of colleagues around the world. He could fit most of his few possessions into a single suitcase, and earned enough as a guest lecturer and from various awards and prizes to fund his travels and basic needs. He donated the rest to worthy causes and people in need.
Erdős would typically show up unannounced at a colleague’s doorstep, announce ‘My brain is open’, and stick around for long enough to collaborate on a couple of papers before moving on a few days later (‘another roof, another proof’).
Erdős drank copious quantities of coffee. He also took amphetamines, which he felt were an essential part of his productivity. A friend once bet Erdős $500 that he could not abstain from amphetamines for a month. Erdős easily won the bet, but complained that mathematics had been set back by a month during his abstinence: ‘Before, when I looked at a piece of blank paper my mind was filled with ideas. Now all I see is a blank piece of paper.’* He promptly resumed his amphetamine use.
Erdős’s publication list stretches to a face-melting 1,525 articles, and he collaborated directly with 511 people. It is from this incredible productivity and collaboration that we get the Erdős number, which describes a person’s degree of separation from Erdős himself, based on their collaboration with him, or with another who has their own Erdős number. Erdős has number 0, immediate collaborators have an Erdős number of 1, and their collaborators have an Erdős number of 2, and so on. The number was first defined in 1969 by analyst Casper Goffman (Erdős = 2).7 About 268,000 people have a finite Erdős number and, due to interdisciplinary collaborations, numerous academics in non-mathematical fields also have Erdős numbers.8
Unusual characters who might be said to have an Erdős number include:
• Matt Damon. Good Will Hunting was conceived and scri
pted in part by Matt Damon. Mathematician Dan Kleitman (Erdős = 2) was a consultant on the film, which, if you stretch the concept a bit, gives Damon an Erdős number of 3.9
• Baseball Hall of Famer Hank Aaron.* Carl Pomerance, a professor at Dartmouth College and one of Erdős’s collaborators, reports that a baseball was autographed by Erdős’ and Aaron during a ceremony to award them both honorary degrees at Emory University in 1995.10
• F.D.C. Willard (a Siamese cat that ended up in an author list – see page 195).11 According to a thread on Reddit, that most reliable of sources, Willard has an Erdős number of 7.
• A horse. Jerry Grossman of Oakland University, founder of the Erdős Number Project, contributed an article to a magazine jointly with Smarty, his wife’s horse. As Grossman has an Erdős number of 2, Smarty has an Erdős number of 3.12
An extension of the Erdős number, and a deeper dive into the small- world phenomenon that feeds it, is the Erdős–Bacon number. This is the sum of one’s Erdős number and their Bacon number, i.e. the number of links, through roles in films, by which a person is separated from actor Kevin Bacon. For example, Stephen Hawking has an Erdős–Bacon number of 7: his Bacon number of 3 (via his appearance alongside Patrick Stewart in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation) is lower than his Erdős number of 4.
K-INDEX
Neil Hall, a biologist at Liverpool University, proposed a tongue-in-cheek alternative to the h-index: the Kardashian Index. Hall was concerned that social media has made it possible to be ‘renowned for being renowned’, rather than for making any substantive scholarly contribution. In response, he developed a metric to ‘clearly indicate if a scientist has an overblown public profile so that we can adjust our expectations of them accordingly.’13