
Academic Urban Legends - dougmccune
http://sss.sagepub.com/content/44/4/638.long
======
danieltillett
There are an amazing number of scientific urban legends in the lab too that
are passed down orally from senior to junior members. My personal favorite is
that drinking MilliQ (ultra pure water) will cause the cells in your gut to
explode [1]. How such a stupid idea ever got taken seriously by scientists who
should know better has always amazed me.

[1] On the topic of drinking MilliQ water I have always encourage all the
members of my lab to drink it. The reason why (apart from the taste which I
quite like), is that it allows you to detect when you have bacterial
contamination of your MilliQ carboy that will ruin your experiments.

~~~
x1798DE
Based on the fact that you didn't mention doing it, I am assuming you're
missing out on a brilliant opportunity for hijinks here. Suggestion - take an
alka-seltzer and some red food dye (I'm not sure if you can drip food coloring
directly onto an alka-seltzer slowly enough that the dye is absorbed without
causing the alka-seltzer to foam up, but probably you can experiment with
something like this) and hide it in your mouth ahead of time. Loudly proclaim
that it's harmless to drink MilliQ. Take a big beaker of MilliQ and drink it,
allowing plenty of it to reach the alka-seltzer. Pause for half a second,
start to look uneasy, grab your stomach, then start allowing blood-red foam to
spill out of your mouth. Fall to the ground shaking and moaning.

Bonus points if it'a "demo" you do while teaching a lab class.

~~~
danieltillett
Sounds like fun :)

I has a colleague who used to like putting dry ice bombs in people’s tip waste
containers. You would be sitting there pipetting away and them boom - tips all
over the bench.

------
jannic
I guess the original publication which listed the high iron content of spinach
was:

Bunge, G.. 'Weitere Untersuchungen über die Aufnahme des Eisens in den
Organismus des Säuglings'. Zeitschrift für Physiologische Chemie, 16 (1892)

[http://echo.mpiwg-
berlin.mpg.de/ECHOdocuView?url=/permanent/...](http://echo.mpiwg-
berlin.mpg.de/ECHOdocuView?url=/permanent/vlp/lit16848/index.meta&pn=2)

If that's true, then indeed, it was not a misplaced decimal point. Instead,
Bunge listed the iron contents of dried food.

~~~
danieltillett
It is interesting that the paper does not actually cite the original paper. I
guess it is not critical to the paper, but it does complete the story.

This does bring up a important point in that is old scientific publications in
languages other than english. I have many times run into references in German,
French or Russian that are only available as low quality scanned pdfs. As a
monolingual English speaker these are completely inaccessible to me. I would
be great to have all of them OCRed so at least we can run them through Google
Translate.

~~~
jannic
It seems more interesting to me that Rekdal doesn't cite this article:

[http://www.bestthinking.com/articles/science/chemistry/bioch...](http://www.bestthinking.com/articles/science/chemistry/biochemistry/the-
spinach-popeye-iron-decimal-error-myth-is-finally-busted)

It's a 2012 followup by Mike Sutton to the two publications from 2010. It
contains many new details, including a reference to Bunge (1892).

Perhaps, one should not only try to cite the original source, but also look
for recent research on the same topic?

~~~
danieltillett
>Perhaps, one should not only try to cite the original source, but also look
for recent research on the same topic?

This is (or should be) done standardly by all scientists. It is actually the
best way to learn about a field. Find the key paper (or at least the paper the
field thinks is key) and then read all the papers that cite that key paper.

I am sure this has been done by somebody, but it would be great to have this
citation link structure as a graph where you could click on any node and read
the paper.

~~~
kenjackson
The problem is that key papers are cited by a LOT of other papers, these with
variable quality.

~~~
danieltillett
Yes they are, but there is no better way of finding those papers that can’t be
found using keyword searches. I have found hundreds of critical papers over
the years by using this technique that I would never have found in a thousand
years using any other search method.

------
acbart
It'd be interesting if we could break down academic papers into stand-alone
facts, which could be cited more succinctly than the paragraphs of prose that
we do now. Ideally, this would look more like academic proofs, and it'd be
easier to argue and discuss components of a given paper. I'm sure that a good
amount of beautiful subtext would be lost, but might it be worth it to have a
more accurate way of linking knowledge?

~~~
hackuser
> It'd be interesting if we could break down academic papers into stand-alone
> facts, which could be cited more succinctly than the paragraphs of prose
> that we do now.

Perhaps there could be some kind of semantic syntax that would group together
the factual claim and supporting information (data and references). For
example,

<"e=mc^2",cite1,cite2,data1,data2>

The claims still could be included in prose, but also easily extracted,
analyzed, manipulated, etc.

With a little work the claims could form a semantic web, with all that
entails, and the validity of cites could be checked automatically when the
document is opened or on a regular basis, updating the claim appropriately.
For example, the UI could display the claim differently based on whether the
cited source has been withdrawn, partially invalidated, superseded, confirmed,
rarely cited, heavily cited, based on impact factor, if the source's own
citations have been invalidated (e.g., claimC cites claimB which cites claimA;
if claimA is invalidated, there should be some sort of indication in claimC --
consider that the invalidation of a seminal claimA would set off a massive
chain reaction, as it should), etc.

But that all seems obvious and I suspect I'm not the first to think of it.

~~~
jasonpriem
It is indeed interesting, and as you suspect it has attracted some attention.
Check out "nanopubs,"([http://nanopub.org](http://nanopub.org)), or Simon
Buckingham Shum's very cool work on ScholOnto
([http://projects.kmi.open.ac.uk/scholonto/](http://projects.kmi.open.ac.uk/scholonto/))
among others.

------
hackuser
Be sure to read to the end, or, after you read enough to grasp the idea then
skip down to the section "The narrow path has its temptations".

~~~
peatmoss
Yeah, my first thought was, "wow, I always thought that about spinach!" But,
that wasn't the point of the article at all. This was an engagingly written
article that kind of read like a mystery whodoneit?

~~~
vitoreiji
And the most concerningly satisfying is that everybodydoneit, apparently.
Including me, who didn't bother to read any one single paper cited.

------
juliendorra
This article made me think of The Leprechauns of Software Engineering[1], a
good book about the myths that are being passed as facts because of bad
citations in Computer Science papers.

[1] [https://leanpub.com/leprechauns](https://leanpub.com/leprechauns)

------
b_emery
> The explanation for this phenomenon is usually that authors have lazily,
> sloppily, or fraudulently employed sources, and peer reviewers and editors
> have not discovered these weaknesses in the manuscripts during evaluation.

I've seen this sort of thing in the literature I'm familiar with (HF Radar). I
don't think it's laziness or fraud, but a version of the telephone game played
as a kid. A 'fact' will get stated, and then repeated over and over until some
of the original meaning is lost and it becomes gospel. This can happen because
the fact is not crucial to the science in the paper but always part of the
introductions or statements about how the system works.

The statement I'm thinking about in particular is "if you have N receive
antennas, you can only find (simultaneously) N-1 signals". This is true if you
are using covariance-based methods such as Multiple Signal Classification
(MUSIC). It got repeated and repeated until the caveats (simultaneous, and
MUSIC) are longer included. Of course, if you have two orthogonal antennas you
_can_ distinguish two directions, perhaps not in complex situations!

~~~
jimmaswell
So that meams you can't get anything useful out of one antenna?

~~~
b_emery
If it's directional, you can get one direction. Which disproves the N-1 meme
that is in so many papers.

