WHO needs Google when the world has New Scientist readers to dig out information? The Cutting Edge section recently reported a new CD player for blind people that remembers where it was when it is switched off (21 August, p 22). This prompted a deluge of letters suggesting the manufacturer Roberts Radio and the British Wireless for the Blind Fund (BWBF) had wasted time developing a player with what they called a “unique” bookmark function.
We agree that there are plenty of in-car and portable CD players that can resume play where they left off. But car players are hardly useful for blind people; portable players have fiddly controls that are hard to use if you can’t see them, and eat batteries if they are powering loudspeakers; and if you swap CDs halfway through, the next disc may start playing halfway through.
The BWBF’s Symphony CD player runs from the mains, has jumbo controls with Braille-like markings and is combined with a cassette recorder and a radio that emits rising and falling tones as it automatically searches for stations. It bookmarks CDs when it is switched off, or switched over to radio or cassette; and it makes a fresh bookmark when you change the CD.
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We cannot imagine anyone who is blind or partially sighted preferring anything else, especially as they can get a Symphony on free permanent loan in the UK. But we do have a constructive suggestion for any manufacturer thinking of using the word “unique”. Check with New Scientist readers first.
ANOTHER deluge of letters answered our puzzlement over the US Internal Revenue Service web page featuring the “cartoon dinosaur interpretation” (Feedback, 18 September). Apparently, out there in interwebland there’s a “traditional” set of instructions for using certain search engines, which shows you how to distinguish pages that mention an American cartoon dinosaur called Barney from those featuring a finance firm called Smith Barney.
Reader Martin Dionne suggests that “traditional” means “much plagiarised”, pointing out that the page on has exactly the same “it it” error as one on . Gabriel Hyde, in contrast, points out that the IRS has made nonsense of the explanation, even to those who grew up with said dinosaur, by replacing “Barney” with “Business”. James McNeill, however, continues the tradition of interweb factoids by making a connection with the character Bob the Dinosaur in Scott Adams’s Dilbert cartoons: “The idea was to search for small businesses, not corporate dinosaurs.” Thanks to these and dozens of other readers.
Feedback, meanwhile, prefers the help page that uses the London-centric search example “pie and mash not gravy” – though it’s a little too local to have been plagiarised. Yet.
THE Web of Knowledge, supported by the company Thomson ISI, provides instant information from any journal published during the past 20 years or so. And Rob Eason has been playing with it.
By “playing”, of course, we mean the kind of free-ranging yet rigorous inquiry which is an utterly worthy use of the time of any professor of optoelectronics such as Eason. And which leads to publication of original research results here in Feedback.
Eason has been playing in particular with the changes in frequency of certain author names as a proportion of all names added each year to the database – which now runs to over 23 million entries. He found that the Smiths of the world are trundling along with a gradually declining proportional contribution to the sum of published knowledge. But the Li clan shows exponential growth. There were a mere 850 papers with an author named Li in 1981, for example, and 20,000 in 2003.
Given how citation counts for researchers’ papers are used and abused by bean counters, Rob’s advice is clear. Publish with a Li. You know it makes sense. Reading the nice graph he sent, it is clear that by 2032 absolutely every paper published in the world will be by Li et al.
CLOSE to the University of York campus, UK, reader Elizabeth Swinbank tells us, is a letting agency whose window display includes information that it seems to think is of particular interest to students. For example: “294 metres to nearest pub; 2226 metres to nearest takeaway; 4.004 kilometres to York St John College.” So clearly the agency is not looking for mathematicians or physicists (or psychologists, who would hold that the distance home from the pub is greater than the distance there). Accountants might be interested in that much precision though.
FINALLY, our paper title of the week is “An improved method for predicting which heavy drinkers become intoxicated” by E. L. Abel and M. Kruger. It is nominated by Marc Abrahams, who just happens to organise the annual IgNobel awards ceremony, for achievements that “make people laugh, then think” – held this year on 30 September. We look forward to finding out more.
“Samsung develops high quality image censor for camera phones,” shouts a Yahoo news headline sent by Rick Gilbert. Does the camera blush as it coyly averts its lens?
