A RECENT announcement from The Scientific World website has thrown the chemical information mailing list CHMINF into a tizzy. Apparently, the medical database MEDLINE is to abstract The Scientific World journal. But how will it be referenced? The official name is TheScientificWorldJOURNAL. And, yes, all those capital letters really should be there.
The worry is that MEDLINE will create a whole range of variations on the title in its abstracts, meaning the journal might be listed under several different names, such as Scientificworldjournal, TheScientificWorldJournal, and so on. And this could result in Web searches failing to locate it.
But it was CHMINF contributor Wendy Warr who pointed out that this is just the tip of a typographical iceberg. There are probably countless mistyped references to systems such as Cerius2 and RS3, 鈥淪TN Express with Discover!鈥� with its bizarre exclamation mark and the word Discover in italics, and even the Royal Society of Chemistry鈥檚 鈥渃hemsoc鈥�, which must never start with a capital 鈥淐鈥�.
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Then there are molFile, MolFile, and molfile, ISIS/Base (no dash just a slash), ChemWeb and chemweb, and even SCIENCEbase.com, or is it Sciencebase.com?
The fact that messing around with capital letters and strange punctuation can cause confusion doesn鈥檛 seem to stop more and more people doing it. As we write, we鈥檝e just come across a new journal called ComPlexUs.
You鈥檒l never get NEW scienTist! doing anything like that.
REFRESHING honesty in a press release from the Nature journals earlier this month. It seems that even their own editors find the papers they鈥檙e publishing boring. 鈥淎pologies,鈥� it begins. 鈥淭his, frankly, is not the most exciting press release you will get this year. It tells you about the titles of a number of papers that the Nature journals are publishing online this Sunday, as well as how to access them on the press site.鈥�
鈥淯nusually, though, this release does not contain enticing paragraphs highlighting selected papers. As you know鈥� we try not to oversell our papers, and anyway we never highlight every single paper鈥攁nd in this case the editors all felt that the papers we are putting up on Sunday lack the kind of general interest that would merit particular signposting鈥︹��
Such an unenthusiastic press release has to be a publishing first.
READER David Braunholtz found himself talking to a utilities saleswoman who explained that: 鈥淚f you pay for both gas and electricity by direct debit, you get 5 per cent [or some such] off each, that makes 10 per cent off altogether.鈥�
He tried to convince her that 鈥減er cent off鈥� does not work like that, but she didn鈥檛 seem to understand what he was on about. More worryingly, he has since told several intelligent and extensively educated colleagues (albeit not in mathematics) this tale, expecting to see at least a wry smile, to be met by confusion as to what the point of the story was.
Perhaps there is a need for short courses in 鈥渞etail maths鈥�?
A COMPUTER magazine that Patrick Flynn bought recently came with a free CD. Inside the envelope containing the CD was a card from AOL which gave him a registration number and password and invited him to use them in a free trial. The password was 鈥淕ECKO-CLOACA鈥�. He was rather surprised to be invited to use the words for a lizard鈥檚 anus as his Internet password.
SCIENCE can now measure memory, emotional stability, and even a person鈥檚 energy level down to a single percentage point, according to the latest spam promoting the 鈥淯ltimate HGH 1000 human growth hormone releaser鈥�.
The product offers a percentage improvement in just about everything you would want to improve. An 82 per cent loss of body fat, 61 per cent wrinkle reduction, 88 per cent stronger muscles and a 75 per cent boost in sexual potency are all 鈥�100 per cent guaranteed鈥�.
And that鈥檚 not all. There is also a guaranteed 62 per cent improvement in memory, an 84 per cent improvement in energy level and a 67 per cent improvement in emotional stability. What scientific techniques have been used to determine these percentage values is unclear.
It all makes us wonder: does anyone ever get taken in by rubbish like this to the point of giving their credit card details to buy the stuff? We sincerely hope not.
FROM TIME to time we鈥檝e discussed the problem of truncated email subject headings, where the limited amount of space in the headings box results in the end of the heading getting cut off.
Reader Alan Carter reports a new example. He recently got an email from the transport campaign group TRANSform Scotland with the subject heading 鈥淧ostponement of tomorrow鈥檚 seminar鈥�. But all that was visible in the heading field was 鈥淧ostponement of tomorrow鈥�. Carter thought it sounded like rather a good idea.
READER Seth Kennedy was struck by a headline in his local paper The Hendon and Finchley Times: 鈥淗ospital moves to stop patients falling over.鈥� Kennedy comments that the patients would surely be less likely to fall over if the hospital stayed still.
叠尝鲍贰驰翱狈顿贰搁鈥橲 broadband Internet service apparently has transdimensional side effects. Reader Julian Barker tells us that a recent message to the newsgroup where blueyonder posts service announcements contained this sentence: 鈥淭he only customers that will be affected by this issue are those that leave their PCs on for over 24 hours a day.鈥�
FINALLY, back to Nature again. The paper on the genome of fission yeast in a recent issue lists 133 authors (21 February). As the total genome is 4929 genes, that鈥檚 37 genes per author. Well done, everybody.