WHAT makes a scientific paper âsurprisingâ or âunexpectedâ? Michal Jasienski believes the rapid increase in the frequency of these words in papersâ titles is simply a bid by the authors to stand out amid the deluge of publications.
Every minute, on average, two papers are added to the Science Citation Index. When Jasienski, a statistician at National-Louis University in Nowy Sacz, Poland, searched the index he found just 48 occurrences of âsurprisingâ and âunexpectedâ in titles between 1900 and 1955, but 1660 between 2001 and 2005. The average annual increase in the figure is 10 per cent. At this rate, everything will be surprising before too long.
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If grabbing attention is the goal, it is not working. Jasienski took a sample of 100 âsurprisingâ papers and found that on average they were cited by other researchers no more often than 100 matched papers from the same journals. As he notes, this finding may merit a paper with âsurprisingâ in its title.
Chemists appear to be startled more often than other researchers. Jasienski suggests this is a consequence of employing automated techniques that pick out new potential drugs or superconductors, for example, from large collections of randomly synthesised substances. âWhen theory sleeps and unsupervised playing with chemistry sets is allowed,â he concludes, âserendipity rules and research abounds in âunexpectedâ outcomes. Chemistry closes a circle and meets her older sister, alchemy.â
ââJust what we all need,â says Andrew Fogg of the instruction that came with his Fuji digital camera. âSet the exposure compensation and white balance to manual to easily control yourselfââ
WHEN big news breaks, especially when it has a technical element, news organisations are naturally keen to get expert comment on whatâs up. Unfortunately, there arenât always enough experts to go round. In the wake of the arrest on 10 July of suspects in an alleged plot to blow up planes flying from the UK to the US, CNN seems to have tried for the US Department of Homeland Security and got through instead to DESO, the Department for Extrapolation and Speculation Overdrive.
âA senior congressional source,â CNN reported, âsaid [that] it is believed the plotters planned to mix a British sports drink with a gel-like substance to make a potent explosive.â
Now it is true that Brits have some pretty strange âsports drinksâ. But they all share the same basic list of ingredients: water and some sugars plus relatively small amounts of sweetener, flavour, colour, salts, preservatives and so on. Boring old conventional chemistry doesnât suggest any interesting reactions of this concoction with any gels we can think of. There are, of course, dangerous liquids that could be smuggled in a sports drink bottle, which is probably how this story originated. But we are, for obvious reasons, not going to name those.
It is alarming how Chinese whispers work with these things. Newspapers around the world â from The Hindu in Chennai, India, to The Australian in Sydney â simply repeated the quote. We recommend pausing for a nice cup of tea and a think before pasting such things into articles.
FROM the department of the blindingly obvious: âStudy suggests TV-watching lowers physical activity,â proclaims a press release about a paper in the 27 July issue of the American Journal of Public Health. It goes on: âA study of low-income housing residents has documented that the more television people say they watched, the less active they were.â
And hereâs another press release, this one from the University of Liverpool in the UK. âPredators prefer to hunt small-brained prey,â it says of a study published in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters. It goes on: âPredators such as leopards and chimpanzees consistently target smaller-brained prey less capable of escape.â No prizes for suggestions as to why they might want to do that.
WHEN fate hands you a lemon, make lemonade, or so the old saying goes. Feedback wonders whether NASA has considered the implications of the external inspection of the space shuttle Discovery while in orbit on its recent mission, which found white splotches on the black edge of one of the shuttleâs wings.
NASA thinks the splotches were bird droppings that survived drenching by thunderstorms, water sprayed at the shuttleâs main engines and the launch into orbit. So could bird droppings be the right stuff for patching the shuttleâs notoriously fragile thermal tiles?
AND talking of the US space agency, would you agree that âNASA should improve employee awareness of requirements for identifying and handling sensitive but unclassified informationâ? This is the title of report IG-06-010-R issued by NASA headquarters (linked from ).
Unfortunately, we cannot be totally sure what should be improved or how. Appendix B to the report has been âredactedâ â presumably because its contents are too sensitive to be published.
