Academia Obscura
Page 22
‡ All with an extremely broad scope. The website claims that papers are ‘double-blind peer-refereed’ in 3–5 weeks, a timeframe that seems highly unlikely. The journals are not open access. In fact, you can’t seem to pay for access – even the table of contents is impossible to look at.
* In a stroke of social media genius, the Twitter account for the city of Fargo replied: ‘We’ll take that as a compliment!’
* I often wonder if all this talk of ‘tracks’ and ‘streams’ in conference programmes is the result of our subconscious desire to be frolicking in the woods instead of sitting in a conference room.
* I confess to having done both on multiple occasions, and both simultaneously on at least one occasion.
1 See allmalepanels.tumblr.com.
2 Thanks to Shane Caldwell (@superhelical) for making these up.
3 ‘About Us’, Academic Organization for Advancement of Strategic and International Studies (Academic OASIS) website.
4 Tweets by: Brendan A. Niemira (@Niemira); Matthew Partridge (@MCeeP); Tracy Larkhall (@TraceLarkhall); April Armstrong (@AprilCArmstrong); James Summer (@JamesBSumner); Sarah Polk (@SarahPolk); Catherine Baker (@richmondbridge); Trevor Branch (@TrevorABranch).
5 Sarah J. Young (@russianist).
6 Dan Jagger (@DrJagz).
7 Kolata, ‘For Scientists, an Exploding World of Pseudo-Academia’ (2013) New York Times.
8 Edwards, ‘OMICS Group Conferences – Sham or Scam? (Either Way, Don’t Go to One!)’ (2013) The Cabbages of Doom.
9 It is fantastic. You can generate your own at mixosaurus.co.uk/bingo/. Credit to Kat Gupta and Heather Froehlich for the idea, and Andrew Hardie for coding.
10 Thanks to Catchclaw (@catchclaw) for that last one.
11 ‘Kimposium! 26 November 2015’ (2016) Brunel University website.
12 Grove, ‘Academia Is Keeping up with the Kardashians’ (2015) Times Higher Education.
13 Brunel University, ‘Kimposium 2015’ (2015) YouTube.
14 Patton, ‘How Not to Be a Jackass at Your Next Academic Conference’ (2015) Vitae.
15 Ibid.
CAMPUS HIJINKS
At the centre of the campus of the University of Southern California sits a stately statue of the school’s unofficial mascot, ‘Tommy Trojan’. In 1958, a group of students conspired to coat Tommy in manure and rented a helicopter to dump their noxious cargo. As they attempted to disperse the manure it was drawn into the helicopter’s rotor blades, spraying the students with a taste of their own medicine.
That same year, Peter Davey of Cambridge University started the trend of sticking cars on campus rooftops. Following months of planning, reams of calculations, and help from students who volunteered to surreptitiously erect scaffolding, he hoisted an Austin Seven 70 feet to the top of the Senate House. It took a week to get the car down afterwards. In 1994 some MIT students followed suit, putting a fake campus police car atop the dome on Building Ten and issuing it with a parking ticket.
Perhaps feeling that cars on rooftops had become passé, students at Carleton College temporarily transformed the university’s observatory into a huge replica of R2-D2. The swivelling of the telescope made it the perfect medium, and the likeness came complete with all the robotic beeps of the original.1
Some of the biggest and best university pranks have been pulled off during college football games, which are a big deal in the US.*2 The 1961 Rosebowl was watched live by 100,000 spectators, and by millions on TV (by comparison, Wembley Stadium has space for 86,000 spectators).† They were shocked when fans held up cards which, taken together, read ‘CALTECH’. Tiny Caltech, the California Institute of Technology, is better known for science than sports, and were not even playing in the match. Crafty Caltech students had convinced a cheerleader that they were journalists, allowing them to sneak into the cheerleaders’ hotel rooms, and switch the cards and instructions for the fan displays. In 2004, two Yale seniors went one step further: they gathered twenty friends, costumed as the fictional ‘Harvard Pep Squad’, waltzed into Harvard’s stadium, and convinced 2,000 unsuspecting fans to unwittingly spell out the words ‘WE SUCK’.
Campus pranks have made it into the classroom too. In 1927, Georgia Tech student William Edgar Smith received an extra enrolment form, so he filled one out for the imaginary George P. Burdell. Smith completed coursework for his fictitious friend, earning him a real degree. Burdell has since become the stuff of university legend, earning many additional degrees and being admitted as a member of a range of clubs and societies. When Barack Obama spoke at the university, he joked that George was meant to be introducing him but was nowhere to be found.
Campus Police Reports, Brigham Young University
25 September–1 October, 20153
Sept. 27 – ‘University Police received a call about a transient in the Life Science Building at 10.31 p.m. The transient turned out to be a student who fell asleep while studying.’
Sept. 30 – ‘Around 8 a.m., Provo Police dispatch received a call about a moose in the area of 1450 E Oak Cliff Drive that was heading west towards Wasatch Elementary School, according to the Provo Police Facebook page. The responding officers were able to corral the moose in a nearby LDS Church parking lot. When the Utah Division of Wildlife officers arrived, the moose was subdued with a tranquilizer gun. The moose was released back into the wild.’
Oct. 1 – ‘A female student purchased $40 worth of food for General Conference weekend and stored it in a communal refrigerator in the basement of Hinkley Hall in Helaman Halls. When she returned the food was gone, and University Police believe it was most likely consumed.’
Oct. 1 – ‘A group of students playing hide and seek in the Harris Fine Arts Center at 11 p.m. caused a faculty member to call the University Police. The police arrived but were not able to find any of the students.’
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 just culturally, but also financially. In an attempt to calculate the value of teams, Ryan Brewer from Indiana University-Purdue University Columbus analysed the revenues and expenses of each football programme, then made cash-flow adjustments, risk assessments and growth projections to calculate what a college football team would be worth on the open market. He estimated the value of the top ten most valuable teams in 2015 to be about $7 billion.
† Astute football fans may note that Wembley’s maximum capacity is 90,000, but for some reason 4,000 fewer seats are available when it hosts an American football game.
1 ‘R2-D2 at Carleton College’ (2010) YouTube.
2 Beaton, ‘How Much Is Your Favorite College Football Team Worth?’ (2016) Wall Street Journal.
3 Faulk, ‘Police Beat Sept. 25–Oct. 1’ (2015) Daily Universe.
Animals are all over academia, from long-suffering lab rats to levitating frogs, and many an Ig Nobel has been won on the strength of an amusing animal study, including:
• ‘Walking Like Dinosaurs: Chickens with Artificial Tails Provide Clues about Non-Avian Theropod Locomotion’: researchers attached prosthetic tails to chickens in a bid to understand how dinosaurs walked.1
• ‘Dogs are Sensitive to Small Variations of the Earth’s Magnetic Field’: found that when dogs go to the loo, they prefer to align themselves with the Earth’s north–south magnetic field.2
• ‘Chicken Plucking as Measure of Tornado Wind Speed’: proposed that tornado speed be measured by the speed required to blow all the feathers off a chicken.3
• ‘Dung Beetles Use the Milky Way for Orientation’: discovered that when dung beetles get lost, they can find their way home by looking up at the Milky Way.4
• ‘Are Cows More Li
kely to Lie Down the Longer They Stand?’: found that it is more likely that a cow will soon stand up after it has been lying down for a long time, but that once it stands up, you can’t easily predict how long until it lies back down.5
A surprising number of cats and dogs have also been bestowed with degrees or appeared as authors on peer-reviewed papers.
Table 6: Cats and dogs with academic qualifications
Name
Animal
Year
Degree Awarded/Institution
Notes
Zoe D. Katze
Cat
2001
Hypnotherapy certifications
Zoe received a handful of different certifications (‘Not bad for a cat who’s not even purebred’).6
Colby Nolan
Cat
2004
MBA from Trinity Southern University
Cat of Pennsylvania Deputy Attorney General, who paid $299 as part of an exposé.7 Resulted in a fraud lawsuit.
Henrietta
Cat
2004
Diploma in nutrition from the American Association of Nutritional Consultants
Science Journalist Ben Goldacre’s cat. Obtained as part of an investigation into the qualifications claimed by a famous TV nutritionist. (‘A particular honour since dear, sweet, little Hettie died about a year ago.’)8
Sonny
Dog
2007
Medical diploma from Ashwood University
Sonny belonged to an Australian comedian and obtained his degrees as part of a skit on The Chaser’s War on Everything. The ‘work experience’ section of Sonny’s application to the university included ‘significant proctology experience sniffing other dogs’ bums’.9
Lulu
Dog
2010
Law degree from Concordia College
Mark Howard, a member of the legal team for BskyB during a lawsuit, obtained a degree for his dog from the same alma mater as the defendant.10
Pete
Dog
2013
MBA
Pete received a master’s degree in just four days, for £4,500. Newsnight reported that Pete (named Peter Smith on his fake CV) was offered the degree based on his fictitious work experience and undergraduate degree.11
CATS
If #AcademicsWithCats has taught us anything, it is that academics, like everyone else with an internet connection, love cats.*12 But the academic–cat relationship predates the social media era by hundreds of years. Emir Filipović from the University of Sarajevo was trawling through the Dubrovnik State Archives when he stumbled upon a medieval Italian manuscript (dated 1445) marked clearly with four paw prints.13
Figure 17: Paw prints on medieval manuscript
It could have been worse. Around 1420, one scribe found a page of his hard work ruined by a cat that had urinated on his book. Leaving the rest of the page empty, and adding a picture of a cat (that looks like a donkey), he wrote the following:
Here is nothing missing, but a cat urinated on this during a certain night. Cursed be the pesty cat that urinated over this book during the night in Deventer and because of it many other cats too. And beware well not to leave open books at night where cats can come.
Though occasionally ruining manuscripts, cats undoubtedly saved a great deal of invaluable works by hunting mice that would have otherwise had a field day feasting on the paper. Others, like Jordan the library cat, have taken a less ambitious approach to academic life. Jordan’s home is the Edinburgh University friary, but he hangs out in the library, where students fawn over him as he sleeps in his favourite turquoise chair. He has his own Facebook page and the library has even issued him a library card.
One curious cat has outshone all other academic animals. F.D.C. Willard has published as a co-author and, incredibly, the sole author of papers in the field of low temperature physics.14
When American physicist and mathematician Jack Hetherington was told that he needed to eliminate the use of the royal ‘we’ in a paper, he was reluctant to retype the entire manuscript (this was in the days of the typewriter, so rewording the paper would have been a considerable undertaking). To save time, he simply added his cat as a co-author. Concerned that colleagues would recognise Chester’s name, he concocted a pen name: F.D. for Felis domesticus, C for Chester, and Willard after the cat that sired him. The joint paper was published in Physical Review Letters in 1975 and has been cited about 70 times.
When his complimentary printed copies arrived, Hetherington inked Chester’s paw, signed a few, and sent them to friends. One of the copies found its way to a colleague who later recounted that a junior physicist on a conference organising committee proposed inviting Willard to present the paper because ‘he never gets invited anywhere’.15 Hetherington’s colleague showed the committee his signed copy of the paper, whereupon everyone in the room agreed that the paper appeared to have been signed by a cat. Neither Willard nor Hetherington was invited.
‘Shortly thereafter a visitor to [the university] asked to talk to me, and since I was unavailable asked to talk with Willard’, Hetherington later recalled. ‘Everyone laughed and soon the cat was out of the bag.’
Some years later, Hetherington and his collaborators were struggling to agree on the finer points of an article they were working on. With none of them ultimately willing to sign off on the finished product, they pulled Willard out of retirement and named him as the sole author of the paper, which was eventually published in the French journal La Recherche.16
Willard was considered for a position at the university and, in honour of his contribution to physics, APS Journals announced (on 1 April, 2014) that all feline-authored publications would be made open access.17 The announcement reads: ‘Not since Schrödinger has there been an opportunity like this for cats in physics.’
Cat research
When cats aren’t contributing to academic life, they are themselves the subject of a large body of interesting research (including a much-publicised study suggesting that your cat may wish to kill you).*18 Feline-themed papers include ‘Demography and Movements of Free-Ranging Domestic Cats in Rural Illinois’ and ‘How Cats Lap: Water Uptake by Felis catus’.19 However, the most pressing cat research from a human perspective investigates their propensity for spreading mind-controlling parasites.
Cats are carriers of the parasite Toxoplasma gondii, which alters the behaviour of animals to make them less afraid of predators (and therefore more likely to be killed, eaten, and used as a conduit for further propagation of the parasite).†20 An unconventional Czech scientist, Jaroslav Flegr, has made researching these parasites his life’s work. Ever since a light bulb moment in the early 1990s, he has been investigating the potentially parasitic link between cats and humans.21 We’ve long understood that infection with Toxoplasma is a danger during pregnancy and a major threat to people with weakened immunity. However, the research of Flegr and others goes further, suggesting that infected humans are statistically more likely to be involved in car crashes caused by dangerous driving and have greater susceptibility to schizophrenia and depression.22
Even if your cat is trying to kill you or is inadvertently depressing you, they are still cute, and looking at cute pictures has been shown to improve your productivity.23 Kitty pics will always leave you feline good.*
PLAYING FOWL
Chickens prefer beautiful humans. That is the conclusion (and title) of a 2002 paper published in Human Nature.24 The researchers trained chickens to identify humans by pecking at a photo of an average face on a computer screen in exchange for food. Then, when the chickens were presented with a mix of photos, they pecked more at the photos of attractive faces (as determined by asking a group of biology undergraduates which people they would like to go on a date with). The import of the study, which is not immediately obvious, is that ‘Human preferences arise from general properties of nervous systems, rather than from face-specific adaptations.’ In a similar fashion, pigeons can
be taught to discriminate between good and bad paintings by children.25
If all this seems rather odd, consider the presentation given by Doug Zongker during the humour session at the 2007 conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Zongker’s presentation consists entirely of the word ‘chicken’ repeated over and over, as do his slides, which also feature nonsensical chicken flow charts and graphs.26 At the end of his presentation an audience member asks if the research was funded by Colonel Sanders, to which Zongker replies: ‘Chicken.’*27
In her thesis on ‘Evaluating Computational Creativity’,28 Anna Jordanous uses Zongker’s paper as an example of how humour differs across domains: ‘Chicken shows creativity in a domain that emphasises content correctness and usefulness (scientific research papers), because of the extreme absence of any scientifically useful and correct content.’ She isn’t the only one to have cited Zongker’s epizeuxical paper. Evan Bradley slipped a reference to Chicken into his PhD thesis,29 and now includes it in the reading lists for his psychology classes at Penn State Brandywine.30 In A Field Guide to Mesozoic Birds and Other Winged Dinosaurs, the authors cite Chicken as their source for the statement: ‘Even the yellow yolk of a chicken egg is due to carotenoids.’31
(HOMOSEXUAL NECROPHILIAC) DUCKS
I’ve always loved ducks (they can fly and their body is a boat – what’s not to love?), but a notorious study has tested this love.
One June day in 1995, at around 5.55p.m., Cees Moeliker was happily working away at the Natuurmuseum Rotterdam when he heard an almighty thud. These noises were not uncommon. The genius architects that designed the new wing of the museum, situated in the middle of a park, had decided that it would look great in glass. Unfortunately, when the sun is shining the glass acts as a mirror, so birds don’t see it and sometimes collide head on.