Face: the future
Should you take at face value a science paper that suggests that your face is the result of a “self-fulfilling prophecy process”?
A study called “?” claims it “probes the origins” of a supposed either/or question. The question: do parents choose a name that seems to match their infant’s “innate facial characteristics” – or, instead, does the child’s facial appearance, as they grow up, change shape to better match some stereotype of people who have that birth name?
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Did Natalie always look like a Natalie? Or did her name impel her to become ever more Natalie-like? How about May? What of Dana, Jonathan, Daniel, Tom and Noam? The paper explores the facial fates of each of them.
The authors, whose first names are Yonat, Moses, Noa and Ruth, “suggest that even our facial appearance can be influenced by a social factor such as our name, confirming the potent impact of social expectations”.
An eminent psychologist suggested to Feedback that, often, a startling psychology report turns out to be at one of two extremes. That sometimes what looks like a cigar is indeed a cigar. And that sometimes it is just smoke, just “one of those statistical things where despite significant differences they were all wrong most of the time”.
Many years from now, will this names-and-faces study accord to whatever stereotype it now seems to fit? Or will its reputation grow to resemble some sharply different stereotype? Or, like most reports, scientific or otherwise, will it mature into being overlooked or forgotten? Time will tell. Or it won’t.
Whack-a-mammoth
People, some of them, take care in how they describe things.
The team who worked to tease out secrets from a 52,000-year-or-so-old hide of a mammoth (Feedback is trying to avoid the ambiguity that lurks in the phrase “mammoth hide”) got a surprise (żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ, 20 July, p 17). They found that beating a dead horse, or cow or mammoth, might not be as destructive – on a molecular level – as one would guess.
Specifically, they found their frozen mammoth’s genomic info had survived the presumed beatings of time. Further beatings were done to freeze-dried tissue from cows, not mammoths.
Horses, too, were involved – but only in bits and bytes, not in beatings. The team used segments of horse genome in computational aspects of their analysis.
The beatings took many forms. The documenting the affair calls them “perturbations”. More long-windedly, it calls them “disturbances that ancient dehydrated samples might plausibly encounter through millennia”.
This is how the paper describes those perturbing pummellings: “run over by a car, hit with a fastball, and pulverized with a shotgun, for varying degrees of mechanical impact; baking in a toaster oven for 1 h, microwaving for 6 min, dropping into liquid nitrogen, for thermal disturbance; and soaking, in either plain water or with added lemon juice”.
In choosing words, there is potential not just to improve, but to go even further. PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) published a “Complete List of Animal-Friendly Idioms”. It as a matter of taste to not say “beat a dead horse”, and instead say “feed a fed horse”.
A little bit random
Though you may not have heard anyone say “stochastic accuracy”, chances are you can recognise it.
When you examine a bunch of reported “facts” and notice that many of them really are not facts, you are seeing stochastic accuracy. You are detecting the presence of randomness.
Stochastic accuracy can be subtle, tricky to see. Sometimes, it pops into clarity only with painstaking technical measurements. Sharana Kumar Shivanand at the Alan Turing Institute in London did that recently in a about covariance estimation using h-statistics. “The objective of this paper”, he writes with technical scrupulosity, “is to analyse and ensure that only the stochastic accuracy is less than epsilon squared, divided by two”.
Sometimes, though, it leaps out at you. Feedback invites you to find a shiny example of an official pronouncement that displays stochastic accuracy. Send a link, or other non-random evidence, to feedback@newscientist.com.
A ghostly confession
A one-foot-in-the-graves-of-academe note arrived here, in response to the discussion about “holy ghostwriters”.
These are senior department members who automatically get co-authorship credit for research done by people of lower status (Feedback, 22 June).
The note says:”I have been asked on two occasions by research students to add my name to the authorship of their papers because they felt that it would give them more credibility. I agreed. I did at least read the manuscripts and suggest changes.
“I wrote another paper with help on the methods section from the first author. A third person involved in the work asked to replace me as last author because it would help his/her career. My career was as good as over, so I agreed to be last-but-one.”
The writer eschews sharing credit for that note, and goes a step further, saying: “If you use this, please keep me anonymous.”
Marc Abrahams created the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony and co-founded the magazine Annals of Improbable Research. Earlier, he worked on unusual ways to use computers. His website isÂ
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