Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more
Showbiz returns a compliment
OCCASIONALLY Feedback points at coverage of celebrities and, from the lofty viewpoint of mathematical and empirical rationality, giggles (for example, 23 January 2010). It’s nice to see the compliment returned.
Returned, specifically, by Sophie Heawood in the Lost In Showbiz column of the UK’s Guardian newspaper, on the diet of Jennifer Aniston (an actress). Jennifer, it seems, “stays in shape” by “eating five meals a day”. Before inquiring further, Sophie insists that “we must ask the question on everybody’s lips: which shape? (A rhombus? A dodecahedron? Surely not a degenerate tessellation of a Euclidean 3-space?)”
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We that Sophie found the last-named on the . We hope (and expect) that she looked further and marvelled at the name of a member of this set, the (a stripy beach ball, since you ask). Here’s hoping that this helps make topology cool with da yoot.
Alan Oliver sends a report from the Adelaide Sunday Mail that “During last week’s farmers made more than 250 reports of mice using their smart phones.” Clever mice!
Microsoft cool with the youth
MICROSOFT’S management seldom come down from their mountain to take questions from the press. So when one Bryan Biniak was billed to give a “Special Power Session” at a tech event in Malta, Feedback’s colleague jumped on a plane. Biniak’s theme: Microsoft is now seen as “cool” with the youth. To prove it he showed a video of surfing in California, and then painted a rosy future in which the Windows 10 operating system, to go on sale later this year, will be the bedrock of all things computing.
Our colleague chimed in to suggest that with hundreds of tech writers, from 55 countries, in the same room, this was a golden opportunity to learn first-hand what they thought of Windows 8, the previous computing panacea. Biniak estimated, on a show of hands, that around 60 per cent had tried it; and 30 per cent used it. And who liked it? Two, maybe three, hands went up. “So… less,” said Microsoft’s obviously shaken general manager of developer experience, swiftly moving on to take safer questions.
Scepticism on school standard
SCHOOL students in the UK have been sitting examinations since 11 May. Feedback confidently predicts a spate of articles bemoaning dumbing-down as grades rise, neglecting the possibility that the kids actually are getting smarter (1 February 2014).
Some will be smart enough to query an assumption in the “GCSE Science B” specification : “Describe scientific evidence which supports or refutes the idea of man-made global warming… Explain how it is possible to have good agreement between scientists about the greenhouse effect, but disagreement about whether human activity is affecting global warming.”
Ruth Ashbee worries that this “seems to pander to climate-change deniers”. How statistically significant are the actual scientists who dissent on causes of global warming, anyway?
The power of neuroscience
NEUROSCIENCE is powerful: mentioning it persuades people of the quality of adjacent reports. Feedback is grateful to Rebecca Rhodes and colleagues for their review of literature on the subject of persuasiveness, introducing us to formal studies of such concepts as “seductive detail” and “illusion of explanatory depth”.
The “methods” section of their paper () opens: “We constructed a news-like article that… claimed that listening to music while studying was beneficial for learning…” They introduced this either with a non-specific mention of neuroscience, or the mere observation that people like to listen to music while reading. Study volunteers who read the version alluding to neuroscience showed a smallish but significant increase in their rating of the “quality of the researcher”. They were 2.3 times as likely to claim they understood the mechanism behind the claim about music and learning.
Insufficient scepticism there
ALSO, only 34 per cent of participants in the above study spotted the flaw in the fake “music study” that it presented. The made-up report was very clear that it was a comparison between self-selected groups. The authors do not report how many of these sceptics were among the 54 per cent of participants who claimed to have taken a university statistics course. It seems you can get away with claiming just about anything. Except here, of course…
Insufficient scepticism there
FINALLY, and disappointingly, the study of the persuasive power of the word “neuroscience” did not also test the impact of showing pictures of bits of brain “lit up” in magnetic resonance imaging. Feedback imagines such images evoking the subconscious reaction: “Look! I see actual evidence! It does that, there!”
We face here a methodological difficulty, namely: what graphic should the “control” group be shown? Should it be equally colourful and randomly sciency: a galaxy simulation? Or perhaps the remarkable image of a fish brain apparently sparking into life when shown emotionally laden photos of people (5 March 2011)? The caption that springs to mind is, “.” As was the fish in the scan.
