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56 | NewScientist | 1 December 2012 FEEDBACK OUR item on impossible instructions in an online questionnaire for those who wanted to join the UK retail organisation The Cooperative (27 October) reminded John Gledhill of his struggles to answer the customer questionnaire on the photo-sharing website Photobucket. One of the questions asked him to rank in order of preference ways of uploading images onto Photobucket, such as “from my mobile”, “from my PC” or “from Facebook”. You could rank each from 1 to 7 or put in “don’t know”. John duly put a “1” against “from my PC”, the only one he used, and put “don’t know” for all the rest. The questionnaire refused to let him do this. “You cannot use the same ranking for more than one item,” it told him sternly. John hadn’t realised “don’t know” was a ranking. Where, he wondered does it fit into the continuum of ordinals? But he wanted to complete the Domino sugar, according to the bag Alison Gibson picked up in Newtown, Pennsylvania, is “carbon- free”. So what’s left – water? questionnaire, so he left one “don’t know” in and arbitrarily re- ranked all the remaining answers from 3 to 7. This, he says, made the questionnaire “very happy”. He did point out in the final “Any other comments” box that his answers to the question were meaningless, apart from the one ranked “1” and the single remaining “don’t know”. He suggested that they might wish to redesign the question. “No doubt they won’t,” he says, “and their analysts will dutifully feed my rankings into a spreadsheet and work out some meaningless average from it.” We can only hope that Photobucket won’t be using statistics obtained in this way to determine its future strategies. THE headline on a recent press release raised Feedback’s eyebrows: “Naked Scientists Axed by BBC East.” Our eyebrows rose even further on reading this statement lower down the page: “…And Feedback’s postbag has been brimming over with messages of alarm…” It turns out the headline refers to the decision by the BBC’s eastern region to discontinue broadcasting its award-winning science programme The Naked Scientists after 10 years on air. The press release was put out by The Naked Scientists team (bit.ly/ UKhwCGnaked). It calls for support for the programme and notes that its campaign, initiated on its Facebook page, has already garnered a flood of messages of support – including those messages of “alarm” sent not to us but to the BBC Radio 4 Feedback programme. Apparently, BBC East’s bosses don’t think The Naked Scientists fulfils the BBC’s remit for local radio. Listeners campaigning to save the programme clearly disagree. YOU may remember that there was an election in the US – how long ago it seems now! You may remember a statistician called Nate Silver, whose blog was taken up by The New York Times and who accurately predicted the electoral college result in each state. You may remember howls of pre-emptive protest from those who wanted Mitt Romney to win. You may even remember Mitt Romney. Among those howls of protest were complaints by, for example, conservative pundit Dean Chambers that Nate Silver is “thin and effeminate” and therefore must be wrong. So here’s a tip for statisticians: if you want to be taken seriously, eat more, cycle less and, if you’ve got one, lose the moustache – you know what they say about those. (We discard as an outlier the possibility – which we suspect would be equally unacceptable to Silver’s detractors – that statisticians may be female.) You might even contemplate some research on the correlation between appearance and acceptance using, er, statistics. AT THE Summerhill Garden Centre in Basildon, Essex, UK, a cactus caught the eye of Freddy Heppell. The name alone was enough to attract his attention: a card on a stick announced that it was a “Computer Cactus”. Freddy turned the card over and discovered the promise: “I protect you and your loved ones from radiation and full of oxygen your home.” Beginning to suspect that the people marketing this cactus might be adherents of a strange philosophy (known to Feedback as “fruitloop”), Freddy read on. Under the heading “PRODUCE”, he found the words “Oxygen, Welfare, Life”. Under “REDUCE”, he found “Negative charges, radiation, magnetic waves”. The text was summed up by the slogan “Life without radiation”. All that from a cactus! Despite his scepticism, Freddy bought one. “It doesn’t work,” he reports. FINALLY, Tim Hall’s Facebook timeline told him, “Tim Hall is at Aviemore and one other place.” Tim says he has no idea where the other place is and he doesn’t want to check in case the uncertainty collapses and he suddenly finds himself there. You can send stories to Feedback by email at [email protected]. Please include your home address. This week’s and past Feedbacks can be seen on our website. For more feedback, visit newscientist.com/feedback PAUL MCDEVITT
