The equations are, as expected, fairly simple and lighthearted, although there is more scientific substance to them than the sporting one quoted by Ben. We had a record turnout (several people couldn’t even get into the room and had to sit outside it until we removed some tables) and there was a very lively discussion following Paul’s short introduction. Nobody, from my recollection, said that the equations were silly or lacking in merit. In fact, the audience wanted more – and so Maxwell’s Equations and Schrodinger’s Equation came up, and we then had a discussion of what the square root of minus one might mean. After Paul left to catch his last train home, the discussion carried on, and I eventually had to shoo people downstairs.
So no, I wouldn’t agree with Ben that “there is no scientific merit to these equation stories. None. They don’t attract people to science; in fact, they sell the idea that science is pointless, indulgent, irrelevant boffinry”. In fact my own viewpoint is that they play an essential part in raising the mathematical consciousness of the general public. It is absurd that, while science has reached such a point that it cannot be explained in any other way than with mathematics, people are told that maths is irrelevant and scientists are advised to leave equations out of their presentations and books.

Perhaps a better conculsion for Ben to have made would have been:
“These equations are not to be taken too seriously. Some scientists maintain that they have no scientific merit, while others would argue that they help to get ordinary people thinking in a quantitative, mathematical way”.

But of course such statements don’t sell newspapers!

Jim.

… still nothing about the Tesco fee from Dr. Stevenson? …

No, and the silence is nearly as deafening as that emanating from Ben as to whether he’s going to come down to Brighton on Tuesday to argue the toss with Paul …

But hang on a minute – what exactly is the relevance of the Tesco fee? What difference would it make? After all, would our judgement of the worthiness of Ben’s column be affected by a knowledge of how much the Grauniad pays him to write it?

You mean readies, not reddies, in your last paragraph.

Yours nitpickingly,

crichmond

Stressed this Christmas? Just remember

EP + 2(PX+ W) + (FT + RW)

2

7th December 2006, London – Endless shopping queues, cold weather and the nightmare prospect of having the in-laws round for lunch are just some of the reasons why the UK is dreading Christmas 2006! New research released today by The Wrigley Company reveals that nearly a quarter (23%) of Brits are stressed out and not looking forward to the Christmas break. (* 2413 people interviewed by KRC for Wrigley)

With just ten days until the last shopping weekend before Christmas – the most stressful period of all according to 26% of study respondents – Wrigley has teamed up with top ‘stress professor’ Cary Cooper to help tackle Britain’s Yuletide stress problem. Professor Cooper has developed a formula – based on the results of the survey of 2,400 people – comprising the UK’s key Christmas stress elements that will allow Brits to calculate their personal Christmas stress factor. The professor has come up with some top tips on how to reduce those stress levels as well!

Exhaustion from the Christmas build up, leaving for work and coming home in the dark, getting in the supplies at home, those family members you just don’t want to see, and the return to work all add up to –

Exhaustion Period + 2 (Preparation for Xmas + Weather) + (Family Time + Return to Work) / 2 = Christmas stress!

In fact, the study shows that two million Brits will choose to flee the country on holiday and escape the Christmas crush altogether! Of those who stay behind, nearly half of us (48%) will get stressed out by the experience of Christmas shopping and buying festive foods; 14% will even spend time worrying about the workload left on their desks whilst others will agonise over who gets a Christmas card – with 12% even wanting cards scrapped altogether! It seems that the UK population this Christmas is more likely to resemble Scrooge than Tiny Tim…

People are planning to try and take action this year to battle the Christmas stress factor with 16% intending to nurture healthy habits like taking exercise or chewing gum to help manage stress. A further 28% aim to avoid the high streets altogether by shopping online; and 27% will be hiding from people that they find most stressful to try lower their stress levels.

Alarmingly, 44% of those surveyed admit they have no idea how to manage their stress levels and it would appear that putting your feet up and watching the telly (a favourite stress buster) won’t help at Christmas time, with endless reruns of the Snowman and Mary Poppins leaving nearly half of the population (47%) ready to tear their hair out!

“Christmas should be a happy time of year, but the pressures of modern life mean it’s becoming a period of stress for some instead. Simple things like planning ahead, shopping online, reserving quiet time or actually looking at the positive aspects of spending time with family are all ways you can manage stress and get the most out of the festive season,” says Professor Cary Cooper.

“Managing life’s little stresses doesn’t have to be complex; scientific studies have shown that chewing sugar free gum can help you relieve the symptoms of stress. So this Christmas, whether you’re shopping for presents or preparing for the family to arrive, a piece of gum could help you stay calm,” says Alexandra MacHutchon, from Wrigley.

Professor Cary Cooper’s top tips for managing Christmas stress

1) Do not leave everything to the last minute! Make sure you do start planning in the weeks leading up to Christmas – presents, provisions and what to do at New Year

2) Remember to have some fun along the way; do things you enjoy doing and include members of your family too

3) Make sure you don’t skip meals out of business, maintain a healthy diet and exercise regularly

4) Approach Christmas with a positive outlook – don’t let yourself think it will be a nightmare, focus on the best things about the festive period instead. That positivity will communicate itself to others around you

5) Take some ‘me’ time – take a bit of time just to relax, unwind and indulge yourself for a few minutes during the day

*KRC Research, November 2006, sample of 2414 adults in the UK

About the Wrigley Company
The Wrigley Company is the world’s leading manufacturer of chewing and bubblegum and a major player in the confectionery industry worldwide.

Some of Wrigley’s most famous brands include Wrigley’s Extra®, Airwaves®, Orbit®, Juicy Fruit®, Wrigley’s Spearmint®, Doublemint® and Hubba Bubba®. Wrigley is committed to diversifying close to home and recently launched its first non-gum products for over one hundred years – Extra™ Thin Ice™ and Extra™ Mints.

About Professor Cary Cooper

Cary L. Cooper is Professor of Organizational Psychology and Health at Lancaster University and the author of numerous scholarly articles and books on stress (e.g. Creating a Balance: Managing Stress, London: The British Library Press). He is also President of the International Stress Management Association and BACP.

For more information or images please contact:

Johnny Stark

GolinHarris
Fox Court

14 Gray’s Inn Road
London
WC1X 8WS

… still nothing about the Tesco fee from Dr. Stevenson? …

Andrew.

you mention lots of things not involving a fee, could you tell us how much Tesco paid you to use your name and the name of your academic institution for the Tesco Christmas Cracker equation?

I’d also be really interested to hear how you came to be doing it.

You might be interested to know that you weren’t the first person they approached, this arrived in the huge batch of equation emails last week:

to Ben Goldacre

You asked about approaches from companies commissioning “research”. In case you want to know how many people were approached, I was (presumably one of many) called by Tesco’s this time large year. For reasons you explain clearly every week, your request for emails is unlikely to give a scientifically meaningful figure for the hit rate of these phone calls; nevertheless, here is my experience. Tesco’s were looking for a physicist who could provide them with a “formula for Christmas crackers”. Although I can’t remember the details of the conversation, it wasn’t at all clear what they were asking for (except that it was unlikely to be a serious research proposal or to bring any positive publicity). Anyway, I explained that the physics of Christmas crackers was outside my area of research expertise and gave my apologies.

Since you mention me by name in your opinion piece, I suppose I’d better respond with my “plausible moral justification”:

It’s true that I wrote an equation about how to pull a Christmas cracker. Indeed, it was not the first ‘fun’ equation I wrote. The first time was at the behest of the Institute of Physics who, as part of their remit to spread the word of physics far and wide, were looking for a way to make use of the large amount of publicity surrounding the end of Sex in the City. We came up with the idea of an equation for how to walk in high-heeled shoes, combining physics with some heuristic ways of including other factors into a light-hearted equation. That got quite a lot of publicity, and the most important way, as far as science communication was concerned was not so much the newspaper stories, but when it led to TV and radio interviews (of which there were quite a lot – as you point out, news editors love them). The interviews gave the opportunity to explain the physics involved, to let people know that the equation was intended as a bit of fun (and that public money wasn’t being wasted on such research), and to hopefully explain how maths and physics can be applied to everyday things. If it matters, the Institute of Physics (or anyone else) did not pay me for this, and your insinuation that people do this sort of thing for their or their university’s greed is very far off the mark, as far as I can see.

As well as the Institute of Physics seeing the merit in such activities, the organisers of the Cheltenham Science festival asked me to talk (with a co-conspirator in the fun formula field) about these kinds of equations to a public audience (albeit one with an interest in science already). We included a kind of workshop where we created on the fly some equations with the help of the audience, getting people to think about the approximate way quantities change in a qualitative but numeric way, and stressing the importance of then testing the equations experimentally. I can’t prove that I’ve made someone study science as a result, but amongst the feedback from the audience were teachers who planned to use the workshop idea as a way of getting students thinking about maths. Indeed, I get emails not too infrequently from high-school students asking me about the formulae, since they are being asked to do projects and they find these equations as a way of making them more interesting. I’d be interested to know on what you base your claim that no-one gets attracted to science by these equations.

Nevertheless, I know that not everyone agrees with the utility of such activities, so I went along to a Cafe Scientifique and opened a debate about the public perception of news stories featuring these kind of equations. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, there was a range of opinion. None quite as extreme as yours, but a minority of people were staunchly against such things. The thing they all had in common was that they were already practicing scientists (so not the target audience of these stories) and felt that it debased the subject. The non-scientists present were generally well-disposed to the idea of scientists spending a small amount of their time doing things like writing equations about everyday things, going on TV to describe them, going to teachers conferences to talk about them and going to public debates to find what the public really thinks about them (and it’s not that it sells the “idea that science is pointless, indulgent, irrelevant boffinry” )

Still, there’s an interesting debate to be had on this issue, and you raise legitimate points. It’s too bad that you decided to include in your article the cheap ad hominem stuff about greed and inability to make an honest living. Still, if you’re interested in debating the issue further, why not come along to the Brighton Cafe Scientifique on 20th March when the discussion, prompted by a short talk from me, will be about this very issue? There’s no fee involved, I’m afraid, as with so much of this science communication business, but I’ll be there.

On the basis of anonymity, I am happy to contribute the following experience.

Would we do this again? I can’t speak for my colleague, but I would always be open to offers providing there was a real question somewhere at the heart of the approach. I entirely agree with your comments on the willingness of psychologists to invent an ‘objective’ measure of anything and turn it into a spurious formula. However, scientific journeys do sometimes start from trivial questions – why do apples fall down rather than up? You might not be able to do much on a PR budget, but you may be able to find out whether something is worth taking further with a reputable funder – and the cash is always useful. When top scientists get salaries that match those of City law firms, maybe we can be held to the same ethical standards. In the meantime, I personally don’t think we should be too prissy about who we do business with.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/manchester/4468884.stm

The associated press release came out a year ago.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Sokal

The psychologists’ distinctive contribution has been to add a touch of tabloid to the formula-balls, rather than basking in po-mo mystic obscurantism.

Scientists have found the formula for the perfect chocolate chip cookie:

Quality = N! log (D) – gamma(H + H^2) + tanh(C – S^4) ^ (2 pi A)

Where N is number of chocolate chips, D is diameter, C is crunchiness, S is soggyness, A is aroma and H is hardness.

I’ll go fetch my asterisks.

I’ve just reread Nick Horby’s “Seven goals and a punch-up” chapter from Fever Pitch, and I think the following input parameters are needed:

N: National, political and geographical factor. This should move events like England vs Scotland or Poland vs Germany up the list.

To find N, add 2 points for a land border or 1 point for overlapping territorial waters. Add 2 points if there’s been war between the countries in the past century. For a colonial/empire relation or recent long-term occupation add 2 points.

Hmmm, some sort of “Axis of Evil” factor is also needed, otherwise USA vs Iran scores zero! Maybe the president of each country gets to optionally randomly dislike 3 other countries. 2 bonus points an “Axis of Evil” encounter.

U: Underdog factor. It’s always best to win unexpectedly, like Greece in Euro 2004. Take the decimal starting odds as being U

C: Comeback factor. The Ashes match at Headingly, 1981 was great because everyone had written England off. Hornby also claims that the best football matches are being 2:0 down and winning 3:2, and I’m sure any Liverpool fans who were in Istanbul would appreciate the importance of C. C are the maximum decimal odds reached during the match.

S: Seven Goals. A good match has lots of goals, lots of sixes, lots of tries etc. Each sport is given a designated highlight. S is the ratio of occurrences of said highlight in the match to mean occurrences for all similar matches. For example, say that on average there is 1.5 knockdowns per boxing bout. If in total a boxer is down 3 times then S would be 2.

T: Television. Things only enter the national consciousness if millions of people see it live. T is the fraction of the country which is awake and can get in front of a TV. If it’s on pay per view at 4am, it’s not going to beat Torvill and Dean.

I would suggest that the sport involved doesn’t matter at all, otherwise there is no way to explain how the english can get excited about yacht racing or ice skating or curling. I sadly can’t think of any way to objectionally measure scandalous decisions and disgraceful behaviour, which both you and Nick Hornby think to be vital.

So there we have five objective parameters, N,U,C,S and T. Maybe some linear combination would work?