Academia Obscura Read online

  22 Adler & Cole, ‘Designed for Learning: A Tale of Two Auto Plants’ (1993) Sloan Management Review; Gilbert & Ivancevich, ‘Valuing Diversity: A Tale of Two Organizations’ (2000) Academy of Management Perspectives.

  23 Wang & Reynolds, ‘Avoiding the “Catch 22” in Special Education Reform’ (1985) Exceptional Children; Laimoo, ‘Amphibian Conservation and Wetland Management in the Upper Midwest: A Catch-22 for the Cricket Frog’ (1998) Status and Conservation of Midwestern Amphibians.

  24 Lundberg et al., ‘Nitric Oxide and Inflammation: The Answer Is Blowing in the Wind’ (1997) Nature Medicine.

  25 Mooradian & Olver, ‘“I Can’t Get No Satisfaction:” The Impact of Personality and Emotion on Postpurchase Processes’ (1997) Psychology & Marketing.

  26 Cleary et al., ‘Editorial: Money, Money, Money: Not so Funny in the Research World’ (2015) Journal of Clinical Nursing.

  27 Holland et al., ‘Smells Like Clean Spirit: Nonconscious Effects of Scent on Cognition and’ (2005) Psychological Science.

  28 Breen, ‘A Stairway to Heaven or a Highway to Hell?: Heavy Metal Rock Music in the 1990s’ (1991) Cultural Studies.

  29 Vincent & Lailvaux, ‘Female Morphology, Web Design, and the Potential for Multiple Mating in Nephila Clavipes: Do Fat-Bottomed Girls Make the Spider World Go Round?’ (2006) Biological Journal of the Linnean Society.

  30 Utzinger et al., ‘An In-Depth Analysis of a Piece of Shit: Distribution of Schistosoma Mansoni and Hookworm Eggs in Human Stool’ (2012) PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases; Campos-Arceiz, ‘Shit Happens (to Be Useful)! Use of Elephant Dung as Habitat by Amphibians’ (2009) Biotropica.

  31 Shalvi et al., ‘Write When Hot – Submit When Not: Seasonal Bias in Peer Review or Acceptance?’ (2010) Learned Publishing.

  32 Hartley, ‘Write When You Can and Submit When You Are Ready!’ (2011) Learned Publishing.

  33 Calabresi & Melamed, ‘Property Rules, Liability Rules, and Inalienability: One View of the Cathedral’ (1972) Harvard Law Review.

  34 Krier & Schwab, ‘Property Rules and Liability Rules: The Cathedral in Another Light’ (1995) NYUL Review; Caruso, ‘The Missing View of the Cathedral: The Private Law Paradigm of European Legal Integration’ (1997) European Law Journal; Epstein, ‘A Clear View of the Cathedral: The Dominance of Property Rules’ (1997) Yale Law Journal; Nance, ‘Guidance Rules and Enforcement Rules: A Better View of the Cathedral’ (1997) Virginia Law Review; Rose, ‘The Shadow of the Cathedral’ (1997) Yale Law Journal; Schroedert, ‘Three’s a Crowd: A Feminist Critique of Calabresi and Melamed’s One View of the Cathedral’ (1999) Cornell Law Review; Bebchuk, ‘Property Rights and Liability Rules: The Ex Ante View of the Cathedral’ (2001) Michigan Law Review; Rule, ‘A Downwind View of the Cathedral: Using Rule Four to Allocate Wind Rights’ (2009) San Diego Law Review; Torrance & Tomlinson, ‘Property Rules, Liability Rules, and Patents: One Experimental View of the Cathedral’ (2011) Yale Journal of Law and Technology.

  35 Farber, ‘Another View of the Quagmire: Unconstitutional Conditions and Contract Theory’ (2005) Florida State University Law Review.

  36 Rayner et al., ‘Raeding Wrods with Jubmled Lettres: There Is a Cost’ (2006) Psychological Science.

  37 Storms et al., ‘Not Guppies, nor Goldfish, but Tumble Dryers, Noriega, Jesse Jackson, Panties, Car Crashes, Bird Books, and Stevie Wonder’ (1998) Memory & Cognition.

  38 Nazir & Chowdhary, ‘From Urethra with Shove: Bladder Foreign Bodies. A Case Report and Review’ (2006) JAGS.

  39 Carlson et al., ‘You Probably Think This Paper’s about You: Narcissists’ Perceptions of Their Personality and Reputation’ (2011) Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

  40 Vale, ‘Local Pancake Defeats Axis of Evil’ (2005) arXiv.

  41 THE Reporters, ‘What’s in an (Academic’s) Name?’ (2015) Times Higher Education.

  42 Buttery et al., ‘Studies on Popcorn Aroma and Flavor Volatiles’ (1997) Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry; Cheeseman et al., ‘Multiple Recent Horizontal Transfers of a Large Genomic Region in Cheese Making Fungi’ (2014) Nature Communications.

  43 Perris et al., ‘Perceived Depriving Parental Rearing and Depression’ (1986) The British Journal of Psychiatry; Abrahams, ‘Things That Pop up in Databases. Read at Your Own Risk’ (2013) Improbable Research.

  44 Moran et al., ‘Diffusion in a Periodic Lorentz Gas’ (1987) Journal of Statistical Physics.

  45 Geim & H.A.M.S ter Tisha, ‘Detection of Earth Rotation with a Diamagnetically Levitating Gyroscope’ (2001) Physica B: Condensed Matter. For a fascinating insight into Geim’s work, see Lewis, ‘Nobel Prize in Physics: Andre Geim Went from Levitating Frogs to Science’s Highest Honor’ (2014) Slate.

  46 Brar et al., ‘Observation of Carrier-Density-Dependent Many-Body Effects in Graphene via Tunneling Spectroscopy’ (2010) Physical Review Letters; Jang et al., ‘Tunable Large Resonant Absorption in a Midinfrared Graphene Salisbury Screen’ (2014) Physical Review B.

  47 ‘Name of the Year: Your 2011 Name of the Year’ (2012). For Dutch names, see the Meertens Instituut Dutch Forename Database.

  48 Manuwal et al., ‘Progressive Territory Establishment of Four Species of Neotropical Migrants in Linear Riparian Areas in Western Montana’ (2014) BioOne.

  49 ‘A Family Affair: Four Manuwals Co-Author Paper’ (2014) Offshoots.

  50 Goodman et al., ‘A Few Goodmen: Surname-Sharing Economist Coauthors’ (2014) Economic Inquiry.

  51 Scott et al., ‘The Morphology of Steve’ (2004) Annals of Improbable Research.

  52 de Solla-Price, Little Science, Big Science (1963). Cronin, ‘Hyperauthorship: A Postmodern Perversion or Evidence of a Structural Shift in Scholarly Communication Practices?’ (2001) Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology.

  53 Leung et al., ‘Drosophila Muller F Elements Maintain a Distinct Set of Genomic Properties Over 40 Million Years of Evolution’ (2015) G3: Genes, Genomes, Genetics.

  54 Klionsky et al., ‘Guidelines for the Use and Interpretation of Assays for Monitoring Autophagy (3rd Edition)’ (2016) Autophagy.

  55 ATLAS Collaboration & Collaboration, ‘Combined Measurement of the Higgs Boson Mass in Pp Collisions at s√=7 and 8 TeV with the ATLAS and CMS Experiments’ (2015) Physical Review Letters.

  56 Castelvecchi, ‘Physics Paper Sets Record with More than 5,000 Authors’ (2015) Nature News.

  57 Howe et al., ‘Corrigendum: The Zebrafish Reference Genome Sequence and Its Relationship to the Human Genome’ (2013) Nature.

  58 Elmendorf, ‘Corrigendum to Elmendorf et al. (2012)’ (2014) Ecology Letters.

  59 Gamow, The Creation of the Universe (1952).

  60 ‘April 1, 1948: The Origin of Chemical Elements’ (2008) APS News.

  61 Singh, Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe (2005).

  62 Singh, ‘The Forgotten Father of the Big Bang’ (2004) Telegraph.

  63 Roderick & Gillespie, ‘Speciation and Phylogeography of Hawaiian Terrestrial Arthropods’ (1998) Molecular Ecology.

  64 Hart, ‘Co-Authorship in the Academic Library Literature: A Survey of Attitudes and Behaviors’ (2000) Journal of Academic Librarianship.

  65 Deville, ‘How to Determine the Order of Authorship in an Academic Paper’ (2014) Sylvaindeville.net.

  66 Kersten & Earles, ‘Semantic Context Influences Memory for Verbs More than Memory for Nouns’ (2004) Memory & Cognition.

  67 Baumeister et al., ‘Subjective and Experiential Correlates of Guilt in Daily Life’ (1995) Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

  68 Swann et al., ‘The Fleeting Gleam of Praise: Cognitive Processes Underlying Behavioral Reactions to Self-Relevant Feedback’ (1990) Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

  69 Hassell & May, ‘Aggregation of predators and insect parasites and its effect on stability’ (1974) Journal of Animal Ecology.

  70 Godfray, ‘100 Influential Papers – Longer Commentary. #13’ (2012) British Ecological Society.

  71 Sch
ulman et al., ‘Data Analysis Using S-Plus’ (1995) Sociological Methods & Research.

  72 Feder & Mitchell-Olds, ‘Opinion: Evolutionary and Ecological Functional Genomics’ (2003) Nature Reviews Genetics.

  73 Holyoak & Walker, ‘Subjective Magnitude Information in Semantic Orderings’ (1976) Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior.

  74 Jolicoeur & Besner, ‘Additivity and Interaction between Size Ratio and Response Category in the Comparison of Size-Discrepant Shapes’ (1987) Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance.

  75 Griffiths & Anderson, ‘Specification of Agricultural Supply Functions Empirical Evidence on Wheat in Southern N.S.W’ (1978) Australian Journal of Agricultural Economics; Belyea & Lancaster, ‘Inferring Landscape Dynamics of Bog Pools from Scaling Relationships and Spatial Patterns’ (2002) Journal of Ecology; Kupfer et al., ‘Forest Fragmentation Affects Early Successional Patterns on Shifting Cultivation Fields near Indian Church, Belize’ (2004) Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment.

  76 Berry et al., ‘Can Apparent Superluminal Neutrino Speeds Be Explained as a Quantum Weak Measurement?’ (2011) Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and Theoretical.

  77 Doyle, ‘Guaranteed Margins for LQG Regulators’ (1978) IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control.

  78 Gardner & Knopoff, ‘Is the Sequence of Earthquakes in Southern California, with Aftershocks Removed, Poissonian’ (1974) Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America.

  79 amarashiki, ‘LOG#170. The Shortest Papers Ever: The List’ (2015) The Spectrum of Riemannium.

  80 Hajdukovic & Satz, ‘Does the One-Dimensional Ising Model Show Intermittency?’ (1992) Nuclear Physics B.

  81 D’Amato et al., ‘Harry Belafonte and the Secret Proteome of Coconut Milk’ (2012) Journal of Proteomics.

  82 Di Girolamo et al., ‘Assessment of the Floral Origin of Honey via Proteomic Tools’ (2012) Journal of Proteomics.

  83 Email from Pier Righetti to Rajini Rao (21 March, 2014).

  84 Faulkes, ‘Maybe These Graphical Abstracts Could Be a Little Less Graphic’ (2014) NeuroDojo.

  85 Rodell, ‘Goodbye to Law Reviews’ (1936) Virginia Law Review.

  86 Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (1999).

  87 Brown, ‘The Joy of Footnotes (1)’ (2008) Telegraph.

  88 Staley, Reading with a Passion: Rhetoric, Autobiography, and the American West in the Gospel of John (1995).

  89 Louis & Sirico, ‘Reining in Footnotes’ (2005) Perspectives; Ames Magat, ‘Bottomheavy: Legal Footnotes’ (2010) Journal of Legal Education.

  90 Pudwell, ‘Digit Reversal Without Apology’ (2005) arXiv.

  91 Blanchard et al., Differential Equations (2011)

  92 Yang et al., ‘Law of Urination: All Mammals Empty Their Bladders Over the Same Duration’ (2013) arXiv.

  93 Yang et al., ‘Duration of Urination Does Not Change with Body Size’ (2014) PNAS.

  94 Morisaka et al., ‘Spontaneous Ejaculation in a Wild Indo-Pacific Bottlenose Dolphin (Tursiops Aduncus)’ (2013) PLOS ONE. For spontaneous ejaculation in other animals, see: Aronson, ‘Behavior Resembling Spontaneous Emissions in the Domestic Cat’ (1949) Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology; Orbach, ‘Spontaneous Ejaculation in a Rat’ (1961) Science; Beach & Eaton, ‘Androgenic Control of Spontaneous Seminal Emission in Hamsters’ (1969) Physiology & Behavior; Huber & Bronson, Social Modulation of Spontaneous Ejaculation in the Mouse (1980) Behavioral and Neural Biology; McDonnel, ‘Spontaneous Erection and Masturbation in Equids’ (1989) in Proceedings of the annual convention of the American Association of Equine Practitioners. For the unusual human case, see Sivrioglu et al., ‘Reboxetine Induced Erectile Dysfunction and Spontaneous Ejaculation during Defecation and Micturition’ (2007) Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology and Biological Psychiatry.

  95 Reisdorf et al., ‘Float, Explode or Sink: Postmortem Fate of Lung-Breathing Marine Vertebrates’ (2011) Palaeobiodiversity and Palaeoenvironments.

  96 Maruthupandian & Marimuthu, ‘Cunnilingus Apparently Increases Duration of Copulation in the Indian Flying Fox, Pteropus giganteus’ (2013) PLOS ONE.

  97 Utzinger et al., ‘An In-Depth Analysis of a Piece of Shit: Distribution of Schistosoma Mansoni and Hookworm Eggs in Human Stool’ (2012) PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases.

  98 Jablonski et al., ‘Remains of Holocene Giant Pandas from Jiangdong Mountain (Yunnan, China) and Their Relevance to the Evolution of Quaternary Environments in South-Western China’ (2012) Historical Biology.

  99 Meyer-Rochow & Gal, ‘Pressures Produced When Penguins Pooh – Calculations on Avian Defaecation’ (2003) Polar Biology.

  100 Shafik, ‘Effect of Different Types of Textile Fabric on Spermatogenesis: An Experimental Study’ (1993) Urological Research.

  101 Due et al., ‘Effect of Normal-Fat Diets, Either Medium or High in Protein, on Body Weight in Overweight Subjects: A Randomised 1-Year Trial’ (2004) International Journal of Obesity.

  102 Murakami-mizukami et al., ‘Analyses of Indole Acetic Acid and Absclsic Acid Contents in Nodules of Soybean Plants Bearing VA Mycorrhizas’ (1991) Soil Science and Plant Nutrition.

  103 Xie et al., ‘An Integrative Analysis of DNA Methylation and RNA-Seq Data for Human Heart, Kidney and Liver’ (2011) BMC Systems Biology.

  104 Monks et al., ‘Variation in Melanism and Female Preference in Proximate but Ecologically Distinct Environments’ (2014) Ethology.

  105 ‘Overly Honest References: “Should We Cite the Crappy Gabor Paper Here?”’ (2014) Retraction Watch.

  106 Drinkel et al., ‘Supporting Information for: Synthesis, Structure and Catalytic Studies of Palladium and Platinum Bissulfoxide Complexes’ (2013).

  107 Schulz, ‘A Puzzle Named Bengü Sezen – A Historic Case of Fraud in the Chemistry Community Leaves Many Questions and Issues Unresolved’ (2011) ACS Publications; Drahl et al., ‘Insert Data Here . . . But Make It Up First’ (2013) C&EN.

  108 Drahl, ‘Controversial Organometallics Paper Cleared of Falsification Charge’ (2014) C&EN; Gladysz & Liebeskind, ‘Editors’ Comments on the Addition/Correction to “Synthesis, Structure, and Catalytic Studies of Palladium and Platinum Bis-Sulfoxide Complexes”’ (2014) Organometallics.

  109 Drahl et al., ‘Insert Data Here . . . But Make It Up First’ (2013) C&EN.

  110 von Kieseritzky, ‘In Defense of Emma’ (2013) Synthetic Remarks.

  ACADEMIC WHIMSY

  The Bee’s Knees: A paper in Biology Letters reported that buff-tailed bumblebees choose which flowers to harvest based on the colours of flowers and where they are located relative to each other.1 But the real revelation is that the paper was written by a class of twenty-five school children from Blackawton Primary School in Devon:

  We discovered that bumblebees can use a combination of colour and spatial relationships in deciding which colour of flower to forage from. We also discovered that science is cool and fun because you get to do stuff that no one has ever done before.

  If you need a break from a stressful schedule or the abstruse language of academic papers, this one will remind you that at its best, science can be accessible, engaging, and fun for all ages.

  Pooh Problems: Another paper, ‘Pathology in the Hundred Acre Wood: a Neurodevelopmental Perspective on A. A. Milne’2 goes in somewhat the opposite direction, taking something joyous and beloved from our childhood and ruining it entirely. The paper takes a look at the dark underside of Winnie the Pooh and finds ‘a forest where neurodevelopmental and psychosocial problems go unrecognized and untreated’. Piglet suffers from a generalised anxiety disorder, while Tigger has a recurrent pattern of risk-taking behaviours. The prognosis for Pooh is pretty grim: attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD); impulsivity (evidenced by his misguided plan to wangle honey by disguising himself as a cloud); obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD); and Tourette’s.

  The Others: Continuing in the vein of familiar topics viewed through a new lens, ‘Body Ritual among the Nacirema’ satirises anthropo
logy’s tendency to exoticise ‘other’ cultures by turning the spotlight on the USA.3 Horace Miner’s 1956 paper, published in American Anthropologist, provides an introduction to American culture using the vernacular (and occasionally condescending tone) of an anthropologist describing a hitherto uncontacted tribe. Miner focuses on the American obsession with appearance and hygiene, including a ‘mouth-rite ritual’ that involves ‘inserting a small bundle of hog hairs into the mouth, along with certain magical powders, and then moving the bundle in a highly formalized series of gestures.’ We are also introduced to the Nacirema’s charm-boxes (medicine cabinets), household shrines (bathrooms), medicine men (doctors), and their cultural hero Notgnihsaw known for, amongst other things, ‘the chopping down of a cherry tree in which the Spirit of Truth resided’.

  Star Man: In 1978, 30 years before winning a Nobel Prize, Paul Krugman wrote a paper entitled ‘The Theory of Interstellar Trade’,*4 (‘a serious analysis of a ridiculous subject, which is of course the opposite of what is usual in economics’ – his words, not mine). Krugman proposes a method for calculating interest on goods that travel at close to the speed of light and proves two ‘useless but true theorems’ about the dynamics of interest rates in interplanetary markets.

  FIVE OUT-OF-THIS-WORLD

  STAR WARS PAPERS

  1. It’s a Trap: Emperor Palpatine’s Poison Pill 5

  Abstract: ‘In this paper we study the financial repercussions of the destruction of two fully armed and operational moon-sized battle stations (“Death Stars”) in a four-year period and the dissolution of the galactic government in Star Wars.’

  Highlights: Estimates that the Death Star cost $193 quintillion (including R&D); concludes that the Rebel Alliance would need a bailout of 15–20% of Gross Galactic Product to mitigate the fallout of Death Star destruction.

  2. Using Star Wars’ supporting characters to teach about psychopathology6

  Abstract: ‘The pop culture phenomenon of Star Wars has been underutilised as a vehicle to teach about psychiatry . . . The purpose of this article is to illustrate psychopathology and psychiatric themes demonstrated by supporting characters, and ways they can be used to teach concepts in a hypothetical yet memorable way . . . Characters can be used to approach teaching about ADHD, anxiety, kleptomania and paedophilia.’