A dogged presence
Dogs should be kept out of human (that is, non-veterinary) hospitals 鈥� or, depending on circumstances, welcomed into them. Research papers make the case one way and another.
, published in the Indian Journal of Medical Research, nods to hospitals that are, or might be, visited by stray dogs. These are also known in the literature by the old sobriquet 鈥渦nbridled dogs鈥�, the technical term 鈥渇ree-ranging dogs鈥� and the zippy nickname FRDs.
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The report dishes delicious gossip about them: 鈥淎part from rabies, FRDs are reported to transmit several zoonotic diseases鈥� with incidents of dogs being on hospital beds and in ward areas, biting, obstruction of pedestrians (patients), barking and instances of grievous injuries even resulting in death.鈥� The study suggests creating 鈥淣o Free-Roaming Dog Zones鈥�.
Researchers in Indiana, meanwhile, offered anxious hospital patients a visitation by (mostly bridled) therapy dogs. Their study, , reports that the dogs seemed to render the patients 鈥渟ignificantly鈥� less anxious and that fewer people in the group who met therapy dogs needed pain medication than in a control group.
In the Netherlands, a study of found that the levels of Enterobacteriaceae and Clostridium difficile bacteria on those paws and shoe soles were, in their word, 鈥渃omparable鈥�. 鈥淭hus,鈥� they say, 鈥渉ygiene measures to reduce any contamination due to dog paws do not seem necessary.鈥�
Unpleasant polygons
What can you do with a broken stick? The question fascinates mathematicians, well, some of them. Lumberjacks, too 鈥� again, some of them. One difference between mathematicians, some of them, and lumberjacks, most of them, is that mathematicians publish a lot of academic papers. (In long-ago days, when lumberjacks roamed free in the world鈥檚 forests, they supplied virtually all of the paper for those mathematicians鈥� papers. The two groups are no longer so professionally entwined.)
A study, , examines what is possible after you have broken a stick into pieces of random lengths. If you then pick 鈥� also at random 鈥� three of those pieces, can you lay them on the ground to form a triangle? Will four make a quadrilateral? Five a pentagon? Six a hexagon? And so on.
Author William Verreault at Laval University in Quebec, Canada, warns that you had better define the problem carefully. If you don鈥檛, then 鈥渢he probabilities one seeks in a broken stick problem seem nearly impossible to calculate鈥�.
But if luck is with you 鈥� if you can form polygons 鈥� some of them may displease you. This puzzling phenomenon has been studied. It can approach what used to be called dark places of the soul. Johann Schneider, Krum Krumov, Ludmilla Andrejeva and Elka Kibarova went there, in 1993. Their study, called , used simple tests to probe the psyches of 173 university students in Bulgaria.
A study by Schneider eight years earlier had reported that German students 鈥� if those students were by nature conservative 鈥� perceived there to be . The Bulgarian study found no similar authoritarian/polygon-pleasantness perception distinction by conservative-natured students in Bulgaria. Nobody has yet explained why.
The shape of things
While many people work with explicit shapes, other people focus on shapelessness.
Tanya Behrisch at Simon Fraser University in Canada writes about the soundness of shapeless listening in . Shapeless listening, says Behrisch, is a 鈥渃ontemplative practice of attending without seeking to understand鈥�. Her paper appears in Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies.
Behrisch is blunt about shapelessness: 鈥淭hrough direct encounters with the more-than-human world (MTHW) I encounter otherness. Practices of oil painting, slowing down, shapeless listening, and gazing afford distinct ways of seeing that resist comprehension, naming, or control.鈥�
Ryangmi Lee, Boyeon An and Eunjin Jun tell how to tame a different kind of shapelessness. They published a how-to report in the Journal of the Korean Society of Clothing and Textiles. The report, , is a guide for museum conservators who want to preserve the shape of clothing items entrusted to their institutions.
The paper documents a specific achievement that can now be an inspirational example: 鈥淎 doctor鈥檚 coat worn by Seo Jae-pil鈥� was conserved with wet cleaning to remove thick wrinkles and brown stains that had been present for a long time.鈥�
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