Journal Objectives:

1. To amuse, chuckle, and poke fun at poorly-done scientific research.
2. To stimulate discussion on what scientific research should truly be.

1. Findings should be ridiculous or nonsensical.
2. Research must be conducted by professional researchers.
3. Preferably published in "scientific" journals with lots of meaningless statistical analysis.

The first volume of this celebrated online journal focuses on the "flimsy findings" of academic research. I wonder whether these "pearls of wisdom" were worth the time, cost, and effort of research, but I'm not inclined to conduct another meaningless study to examine that. The point I'm trying to make here is that "what ain't worth studying ain't worth studying well."

OSLO (Reuters) - First born children in Norway get better education and as adults are more successful in the job market than younger siblings, a Norwegian-U.S. study showed.

"It is the birth order and not necessarily the size of the family that is important," said economics professor Kjell Salvanes of the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration. "It is better if you are the first born." Salvanes and two colleagues from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) based their study on census data of Norwegians born between 1912 and 1975.

The findings will be published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, a Harvard publication, in May.

They found that younger siblings tend to get less schooling than their elders and then end up with lower pay on average and were more likely to be in part-time work, Salvanes said. The findings were likely to hold true in other countries, he said.

"In terms of educational attainment, if you are the fourth born instead of the first, you get almost one year less education, and that is quite a lot," Salvanes told Reuters.

And first-born children tend to weigh more at birth than their younger brothers and sisters, which is a good predictor for educational success, Salvanes said.

Children alone with two adults also tend to get more intellectual stimulation than children in large families who get less parental attention, he said.

First-born children seem to learn from teaching their younger siblings, contrary to the common notion that younger children benefit by learning from their elders, Salvanes said.

So does that mean big sisters really are smarter?

"Yes. It's hard to admit because I have older sisters," Salvanes said.

Source: Click here

[Editorial comment: The practical implication of this study is that if you were not the first-borns in our family, you are doomed to fail. My condolences for the author not being the sharpest tool in the shed - blame it on the older siblings:-(]

By Marilyn Elias, USA TODAY, Feb 8, 2004

The truism that all adults need at least eight hours of sleep a night for good health should be put to rest by mounting evidence that less may be better, a leading sleep scientist says.

People who sleep about seven hours a night live the longest, three huge studies have found, the newest out in the February issue of the journal SLEEP.

In the latest report from Japanese researchers, 104,010 adults were followed for about 10 years. At the start, the participants answered questionnaires about their sleep patterns, and about their health, mental health and lifestyle habits, which also can affect survival. After accounting for all of these factors, adults getting an average of seven hours had the lowest death rates. Surprisingly, less sleep, even as little as four hours a night, didn't significantly increase deaths for men and only lowered survival for women if they averaged less than four hours. But adults who slept longer than seven hours, particularly women, were more likely to die during the 10 years.

Two other major published studies and a dozen smaller ones came to similar conclusions, says psychiatrist Daniel Kripke, a sleep researcher at the University of California-San Diego School of Medicine. Doctors shouldn't tell all of their patients to get at least eight hours of sleep, he says in an editorial in the journal. Hormonal changes triggered by darkness or other unknown biological effects from long sleep could be affecting survival, Kripke says.

Source: Click here

[Editorial comment: Well, the doc said it! We should sleep less at night, so that we are drowsy, pesky, and irritable the following day. Then, maybe we can live longer, unless we are first run over by a car or get caught up in a road rage or pick a fight at work.]

Tom Murray (Folio Staff)

A recent observational study on children and shopping cart safety by the University of Alberta's Dr. Andrew Harrell has caused a minor uproar in the Canadian media. His findings, which can be boiled down to the notion that good-looking children are more likely to be better attended to by their parents than "unattractive" kids are, has provoked articles in Macleans Magazine, the Edmonton Journal, and CTV. Responses from parents interviewed about Harrell's findings have ranged from discomfort to denial.

"I've gotten a few e-mails about it," Harrell said. "People are sensitive about this issue of attractiveness."

Harrell, the executive director of the Population Research Laboratory in the Department of Sociology, has been researching shopping cart safety since 1990, publishing a total of 13 articles on the topic. Earlier articles, concerning the configuration of shopping carts, length of the shopping trip and the age of the child were innocuous enough to escape widespread notice, but the unpleasant notion that we favour cute children over homely ones has triggered the minor uproar.

"Most people are upset that attractiveness would even be a factor - they certainly don't think it is. If you give them a questionnaire, they'll say, 'No, I love all my kids, and I don't discriminate on the basis of attractiveness.' The whole point of our research is that people do."

Harrell's team of observers followed parents and their two to five-year-old children around the grocery store for 10 minutes each, noting if the child was buckled into the grocery-cart seat, and how often the child wandered more than 10 feet away. Findings showed that 1.2 per cent of the least attractive children were buckled in, compared with 13.3 per cent of the most attractive youngsters. The observers also made judgments as to age, gender and attractiveness. A second set of observers documented the adequacy of the parenting and use of seatbelts, among other things. In total, there were 426 observations at 14 local supermarkets.

Harrell figures that it's a Darwinian response: we're unconsciously more likely to lavish attention on attractive children simply because they're our best genetic material. This shouldn't come as too much of a shock - other studies, such as a 1995 report by psychologists at the University of Texas, verify Harrell's findings.

"Attractiveness as a big predictor of behaviour, especially parenting behaviour, has been around a long time," Harrell said. "When I was a grad student in the late 1960s, people were doing research on it, finding it an important factor in everyday life, in how we treat others. It's pretty ancient literature, in terms of the longevity of the field. My advisor in graduate school has gone on to do a fair amount of work in child abuse, and he's been talking about these factors for decades now."

It's not as though Harrell is pleased with his own findings. The 60-year-old has five children of his own and is grandfather to three. The idea that one child would be given precedence over another based on looks is repugnant to him, but the facts are tough to get around, and more so to swallow, even in the scientific community.

"Our original data was collected back in the '90s, and the research that the Macleans' article was based on was completed in 2003. I've been massaging it and re-analyzing it just to make it palatable to a journal. We have three studies dealing with the same topic, but I know they're not politically correct, and you need a brave journal to publish them."

Source: Click here

[Editorial comment: Boy oh boy, Dr. Harrell milked this junk for 13 papers! Even if this were true, what can you do about kids that are not so good-looking: enroll them in ABC's Extreme Makeover? Here's a bright idea for the author to study for his next 13 papers - are ugly ADULTS treated worse than good-looking adults?]

By Sharon Begley, Wall Street Journal, May 27, 2005 (Page B1).

Not every scientist can discover the double helix, or the cellular basis of memory, or the fundamental building blocks of matter. But fear not. For those who fall short of these lofty goals, another entry in the "publications" section of the ol' c.v. is within your reach. The proliferation of scientific journals and meetings makes it possible to publish or present papers whose conclusion inspires less "Wow! Who would have guessed?" and more "For this you got a Ph.D.?" In what follows (with thanks to colleagues who passed along their favorites), names have been withheld to protect the silly.

Want job satisfaction? A "careful choice of career is the key," researchers concluded in a paper this spring in the Journal of Economic Psychology. Choosing a career based on a well-lubricated encounter at a bar, it turns out, may not be the most promising route to career satisfaction. People who choose their jobs carefully are more likely to be satisfied with them than those who take a flying leap into the great unknown.

In April, scientists reported in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research that college students tend to drink much more alcohol than they think. Or, may I suggest, than they like to think. Or than they admit to their parents. Or remember.

Want to reduce problems with medications, such as harmful side effects or drug combinations that will kill you? The solution is at hand: "Communication between primary-care physicians and patients can reduce" such problems and the chance that patients will be harmed. That is especially true if doctors encourage their patients to -- wait for it -- tell them when they experience a bad side effect, concluded a study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine in January. When patients reported an adverse effect, they were more likely to be switched to a different drug than if they never mentioned it. For this, let us be grateful.

In what its sponsors called a "landmark study," scientists found that when your fingers are numb and turning that lovely robin's-egg blue, you make more typing effors. Er, errors. "When employees get chilly," the scientists concluded, "they are not working to their full potential." Achoo!

Investigators working on that finger-in-the-chili case at Wendy's may find inspiration in a study published online in March in the Annals of Emergency Medicine. Every year some 28,000 kids and adults wind up in hospital emergency rooms because some mishap has cut off a finger; one high-risk group is men over 55. Apart from digits lost in workplace accidents, the most common cause of finger amputation in the men is -- drumroll, please -- power tools. So anyone looking suspiciously at, oh, sinks or toasters for their finger-gobbling potential can more profitably focus on chainsaws.

Taking nothing, especially not their readers' intelligence, for granted, the researchers advise men who use power tools to "avoid exposing their fingers to direct contact" with razor-sharp blades spinning at a few thousand rpm. Wise advice, to be sure, although you've got to think that anyone who didn't know this is in for more serious problems than a lost finger.

Just in case you were wondering whether it's a good idea to suck up carcinogens and respiratory poisons when your airways are already crippled, scientific proof is at hand. A study found that asthma worsens the effects of smoking, putting puffers at greater risk for the kinds of lung problems that smoking causes than people without asthma. If you do not have asthma, your airways are in somewhat better shape to withstand a toxic assault. Bottom line: Doctors should urge asthmatics to quit smoking.

Far be it from me to belittle research on forensic science, since I have written about the importance of questioning such conventional wisdom as the reliability of fingerprint evidence and the credibility of confessions. But surely we can do better than a February study in the journal Psychonomic Bulletin & Review that concluded that it's easier to identify someone close to you than someone more than a football-field-length away. At 450 feet, the scientist concludes, "the human visual system starts to lose small details."

If you had found yourself in the nation's capital earlier this month, you might have heard researchers at an American Heart Association conference proclaim that if you work full time and watch television, play videogames or surf the Internet in your off hours, then you are probably not engaging in as much heart-healthy physical activity as full-timers who spend no time with TV, videogames and the computer.

Full-time workers who spend more of their down time in front of a screen also get significantly less exercise than part-time workers who spend the same number of hours glued to one screen or another, but do other things with the rest of their time. (Memo to self: Working full-time eats up . . . time.) While the finding fails the "tell us something we didn't know" test, at least it does so with statistical significance: It was based on data from 4,500 people.

Source: Click here

[Editorial comment: The practical implication of this research is: if you want to save your fingers, stay away from power tools (ahem! need I say more!). Other findings derived from years of hard work by Ph.D.s are: (1) incentives motivate knowledge workers, (2) people who do not trust online websites may not buy products/services from those sites, and (3) data warehouses that are refreshed more frequently will stay more accurate.]