IT鈥橲 good to see government think tanks using their observational skills to the full. As evidence, reader Kevin Jump quotes from the recent report Waste Not, Want Not: A strategy for tackling the waste problem from a British government strategy unit: 鈥淓ngland has traditionally relied on landfill because of the country鈥檚 abundance of holes鈥︹��
FEEDBACK receives dozens of spam email messages every day. They offer various improbable anatomical enlargements, health, wealth and so on. Some even promise to aid your prominence in Internet searches, saying things like: 鈥淚 visited your website and noticed that you are not listed in most of the major search engines and directories鈥︹��
Many readers whose email addresses are listed on a Web page will doubtless have received something similar. If you鈥檙e one of them, you鈥檙e in good company: even search engines get them. According to , Google received the following spam email: 鈥淒ear google.com, I visited your website and noticed that you are not listed鈥︹��
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PERHAPS you can make objectionable spams disappear using new technology from the University of Ulster. Adam Henley alerted us to a news item on entitled 鈥淓ye glasses could aid disabled web users鈥� that explains: 鈥淐ensors positioned inside the specially designed glasses enable users to move the cursor simply by moving their eyes.鈥� Or not, presumably, if the censors don鈥檛 like what they see.
THEN again, if you are very lucky, your spam might include the following: 鈥淭his letter has been around the world at least seven times. It has been to many major conferences. Now it has come to you. It will bring you good fortune. This is true even if you don鈥檛 believe it.鈥�
Want to know more? Here are the instructions: 鈥淚nclude in your next journal article the citations below; remove the first citation from the list and add a citation to your journal article at the bottom; make 10 copies and send them to colleagues.鈥�
Then there follows the list of papers, such as, 鈥淧ostmodern neo-cubism and the wave theory of light鈥� by J. Miller, Journal of Cognitive Artifacts, vol 8, p 113 (1992), along with the mandatory dire warnings: 鈥淚n the Midwest, Prof K. failed to pass on the letter, and in a budget cutback his entire department was eliminated.鈥�
Which, given managerial initiatives in research assessment, is disturbingly close to how science is really done. You can read the whole thing at (for example) . Pass it on.
ANOTHER intriguing 鈥� and, we are assured, genuine 鈥� piece of research is reported in Applied Ergonomics, vol 33, p 523: 鈥淎n analysis of the forces required to drag sheep over various surfaces鈥�.
Live sheep were dragged by their front legs over different types of flooring to see if the arduous job of sheep-shearers could be made any easier. The five sheep endured a total of 400 trials. It all seems hardly worth the effort, given the report鈥檚 conclusion: it is easier to drag sheep downhill.
HIDE this item from any disaffected American school students. If they are bored, or don鈥檛 like a teacher, they could take revenge on the whole system. All they have to do is refuse to let their names and addresses be passed on by their schools to the Department of Defense鈥檚 recruiters for the military.
New legislation called the No Child Left Behind Act requires schools to pass contact information about their students to the recruiters 鈥� and if they don鈥檛, it could affect their funding.
Until now, most schools in the US have kept details about their students strictly confidential. According to Mother Jones magazine, many educators are shocked to discover that school funding now depends on breaking this confidentiality.
It all brings to mind the story 鈥� and this might be urban myth 鈥� about military call-up papers being repeatedly sent to two brothers who, years earlier, had used pseudonyms when they were responding to a free ice cream offer. Get in line, Michael Mouse鈥�
IT SEEMS that today鈥檚 college students have rather different preoccupations to those we fondly remember. Several US college newspapers now run sex advice columns. Sample: 鈥淭he idea of spreading whip cream all over your body so that your partner can lick it off may sound ravishing,鈥� Cathy Meals, columnist at the University of Wisconsin, observes. But it鈥檚 not the morality of it that concerns her so much as the sanctity of the temple that is the student body. Says Meals: 鈥淗ave you ever actually tried to eat that much whip cream at once? It鈥檚 not normal.鈥�
COMPUTER architects seem to be running out of metaphors and analogies by which to name the abstractions they create. Files and directories, for example, come in tree structures, with a root and branches. So a collection of those is, obviously, a forest. Unfortunately, if Feedback has understood the installation instructions for Microsoft鈥檚 Distributed File System correctly, it involves multiple collections of forests, each called鈥� a blob. So what, we wonder, would a collection of those be called?
Baby Meltus For Babies Coughs bears the following instruction for literate one-year-olds: 鈥淧lease read this leaflet carefully before starting to take Baby Meltus for Babies Coughs鈥�