{"id":53,"date":"2007-10-04T13:14:00","date_gmt":"2007-10-04T13:14:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/2007\/10\/04\/watch-a-movie-use-google-get-published\/"},"modified":"2007-10-04T13:14:00","modified_gmt":"2007-10-04T13:14:00","slug":"watch-a-movie-use-google-get-published","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/2007\/10\/04\/watch-a-movie-use-google-get-published\/","title":{"rendered":"Watch a movie, use Google, get published"},"content":{"rendered":"

or “Stop that, it’s silly”.<\/span>
<\/span>
There’s been too much silliness around here. I mean, some daftness is necessary in life, but I realised today that the entire first page of this blog is curently made up of posts with the <\/span>silliness tag<\/span><\/a>. So, to ease me back into some more serious scientific posting, here’s an only mildly silly <\/span>article in Current Biology<\/em><\/span><\/a>.<\/span>
<\/span>
The authors decided to investigate whether the rate of left-handedness has risen, from apparently around 3% of those born in 1900 to around 11% today. But how to obtain an accurate measure of handedness in the Victorian era? <\/span>
<\/span>
Ooh, by watching a movie! To be precise, documentaries on life in Northern England between 1897 and 1913. After citing <\/span>Wikipedia<\/span><\/a> (an unusual tactic in scientific publishing), the authors go on to describe how they analysed the arm-waving preferences of 391 people shown in the footage. <\/span>
<\/span>
And the all-important experimental controls? The article includes another unusual phrase in scientific publishing: “a modern control group of equal size… was obtained by entering ‘waving’ into Google Image”. You can recreate this historical moment in scientific research by following <\/span>this link<\/span><\/a>. At the time of writing, the first page of results includes six cartoons, a puppy, a bear, and two seals. I didn’t read the supplemental data for the “technical details” of this novel methodology, but I assume the search results were filtered somehow.<\/span>
<\/span>
I’ve been a wee bit rude about this article, but it does actually contain some interesting data. By estimating the age of subjects in both groups, a correlation between date of birth and the rate of left-handedness emerged. The rate fell quite sharply between ~1840 and ~1900, and then rose steadily before plateauing at today’s rate in around 1960. Speculation about the reasons for this change includes the increasing levels of education and industrialisation (i.e. machine use) in Victorian England, potentially making left-handers more visible and more vulnerable to pressure to conform. There’s even a suggestion for further studies, which might involve performing similar analyses in different countries with different rates of education and industrialisation.<\/span>
<\/span>
Despite its quirks, this article raises some important points. <\/span>
<\/span><\/p>\n