FOR anyone who has wondered why some shops keep playing one particular music radio station in the background, we may have the convoluted answer. The radio industry is experimenting with new ways of measuring how many people listen to which radio stations and for how long. It wants to get away from the old system of giving diaries to a test sample of people to record their listening habits.
One clever new idea is to get testers to wear a watch-sized device which records snatches of sound every minute. Once a week the device is hooked up to a central system which compares the results with reference recordings of everything the local radio stations have been broadcasting, and automatically rates listening preferences.
“Smart operators have already worked out how they think they can cheat the ratings,” a bigwig from a chain of radio stations confided to us. “They will encourage supermarkets and shopping malls to play one particular radio station over their sound system. So all the time a tester is shopping, their device will be upping the ratings for that station.” And yes, it seems “encourage” means “with cash”.
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Feedback has a simple answer: public nuisance fines for background music in any shop.
EVERY scientific action produces a reaction. Sometimes the reaction is part of the corrective process of normal science and sometimes, well, there are organisations such as the Cato Institute in Washington DC dedicated to the proposition that government regulation is morally wrong. The Cato Institute is particularly keen on promoting the concept of “junk science” – which appears to mean science whose results suggest more regulations. The unfettered functioning of the free market means, naturally, that the more noise is made about alleged “junk”, the bigger the financial interest it threatens.
We have here, for example, an article by Steve Milloy of the Cato Institute published in The Washington Times (proprietor: the Reverend Sun Myung Moon) entitled “Overblown obesity scare”. Our reading of the article led us to the conclusion that different studies produce different results. But Milloy’s argument hinges on the phrase, “the alleged 300,000 deaths [from obesity in the US] are generated by statistics, not science”, which leads him to conclude that the figure is, you guessed it, “junk science”.
Epidemiologists might want to sue. They are undeniably scientists. In fact, is there any science without statistics? But of course Milloy could respond in the same spirit that his description was “words, not language”.
GIVEN the amount of interest googlewhackblatts – words that produce just one result when entered into the eponymous search engine – have provoked among our readers, Martyn Berry notes, “at this rate our racier universities will be establishing chairs in googlewhackblattology and googlewhackblattometrics”.
If so, classics departments could conceivably stake a claim to house these chairs, thanks to Jeff Bock-Brown, who reports his chance discovery of the Greek/Latin compound phrase hapax legomenon, which means a word or form that occurs only once in the entire corpus of a given language. True pedants, he suggests, will prefer the pure Greek googlehapaxgraph.
Reader Debra Ferreday pointed out in the 4 September issue (p 23) that searches for alapacoid had produced one result only because the actual word is alopecoid, meaning foxlike. And coincidentally, Colin Dold wrote on 3 September to offer us the “googlewhattblack” – a googlewhackblatt that comes into existence only because someone misspells a word.
And we should probably close all this with Sushie Dobinson’s observation that some years ago she read an estimate that the world’s supercomputers spent some silly proportion of their time playing networked Doom. “Nice to see the geeks have now got their priorities sorted,” she says.
IT MAKES a sort of sense, but it still reads rather strangely. Tecwyn Davies went into a practical session at Cardiff University to find, written on the whiteboard by a previous occupant of the room, “All students cutting up eyeballs MUST wear safety goggles”.
THE label on the snazzy Brine lacrosse gloves that Craig Simms purchased helpfully told him that they were made of 33 per cent PVC leather [sic], 9 per cent pigskin, 6 per cent polyester mesh and 52 per cent “other miscellaneous materials”.
FINALLY, though we know that pointing out other publications’ errors is tempting fate, Feedback can’t resist honouring London newspaper The Guardian for its leader article celebrating the 50th anniversary of CERN, the nuclear physics research facility in Switzerland. The article suggested what the new accelerator there may discover: “It may turn up the elusive Higgs Bosun”. This event would no doubt be greeted by a massed physicists’ chorus of “Hello, sailor!”
“Our cars are in the sun 24 hours a day, and need all the protection they can get,” says a US police chief in an infomercial for car polish. “I was right impressed,” responds reader Mike Moscoff.
