Odd Bits Research Articles

Theoretical analysis of bus-invert coding

The closed-form formulas derived from the Markov chains depicting the bus-invert coding processes for even and odd bus widths are employed to compute switching activity and weight per bus transfer, to explain the diminishing returns with increasing bus width and to show the nonviability of partitioning a bus into smaller buses of odd number bits, etc. Probing into the codewords generated by the coding process, we obtain the same closed-form formulas as that obtained by the Markov-based approach. Our contributions form a superset over the previously published theoretical results and provide comprehensive background information for exploiting the bus-invert method for low-power applications.

Some odd bits for I.I. Gurevich’s biography

After graduating from Leningrad State University, I.I. Gurevich came to work at the Radium Institute. Soon after the start of the Great Patriotic War, the institute was evacuated to Kazan. There, Gurevich was recruited for the Soviet atomic project, headed by I.V. Kurchatov. By that time, Gurevich had carried out a number of research studies in neutron physics. While in Kazan, he defended his doctoral dissertation in that field. Alongwith Ya.B. Zeldovich, I.Ya. Pomeranchuk, and Yu.B. Khariton, Gurevich developed in the Soviet Union the theory of neutron moderation, without which nuclear reactors would have been impossible. He continued his studies in neutron physics in subsequent years too. At the end of the war, when the LIPAN, or the USSR Laboratory of Measuring Instruments (later to become the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy and, presently, the Russian Research Centre Kurchatov Institute ) was already in place, Gurevich came back to Leningrad for a few months. There, he married Tat’yana Borisovna Stroeva, whom he had known since the 1930s and loved to the end of his life. They moved to Moscow on May 9, 1945, Victory Day. It was, of course, pure coincidence, yet somehow symbolic. TheMoscow district of Shchukino, the Kurchatov institute’s location, was a suburb at that time; it was not until 1947 that it became part of the city. It inherited its name from a local village. The neighborhood included a military camp, barracks, huts, dachas, etc. There were also a few apartment houses owned by the Ministry of Defense and some other government departments, e.g., theGamaleya Institute ofMicrobiology and Epidemiology, which had been there since before the war. Many employees of the LIPAN lived on its premises. Isai Isidorovich and Tat’yana Borisovna were given an apartment in the institute’s main building; afterward, of course, such apartments were converted into service rooms. It was there that their eldest son, Aleksandr (the present writer) was born. As there was no physical distance between home and work, and also by virtue of his hospitality, Isai Isidorovich customarily brought home in the evening one colleague or another. Tat’yana Borisovna usually had no objections, but there were occasions when there

Teaching Generation.com

In one fell swoop, the revolution may accomplish what 10 years of education reform could not, the authors predict. The preparation that we have traditionally provided for teachers no longer allows them to maintain the status of with any credibility, because they cannot know as much as the Internet can make available to their students. HERE ARE THREE scenes that might well strike a fa-miliar note with Kappan readers. After you've read them, ask yourselves, What's wrong with these pictures? Scene 1. Private individuals and businesses, eager to keep their technological edge, frequently upgrade their technological equipment. They often donate used or broken computer equipment to schools and receive tax deductions. A few male teachers at a local school, who for idiosyncratic reasons are semiskilled computer users, are drafted into the role of school computer technicians. A district committee forms whose members are largely confused nonexperts who are assigned the task of creating yet another boring document: the district's plan. The world is changing fast, and, once again, these educators know they are playing catch-up. While talk among education policy makers moves from how computers can influence subject-matter instruction to establishing principles for distance learning, the teachers are spending fruitless hours trying to get odd bits of equipment to network, using old modems to access the Internet, and coaxing decrepit printers to print. In the end, skeptical veteran teachers at the school have even reason to believe that integrating technology into their lessons is going to be a waste of their time. Scene 2. One Saturday morning in the spring, a group of middle-grade teachers from the region gather on a campus of the University of California for a series of workshops on ways to teach sixth-graders about the ancient world. The first presenter has planned to demonstrate how her students do research on ancient Rome via Internet sites, but frustrated university staff members can't figure out how to get the room's network to access the Internet. A campuswide default setting that searches all modems for an open net connection is not yet in place in all classrooms. In the end, the harried presenter keeps her audience waiting while she photocopies the home pages of various sites and settles for describing the process to the group. Teachers leave the campus with an uncomfortable realization: not even the University of California can make this stuff work for teachers. Scene 3. About the same time in the spring, a major conference is held at Stanford University that is specifically designed for teacher leaders in technology. During a plenary session, computer guru Alan November describes the future: economically advantaged students and their parents will have access to up-to-date and exciting information on almost any subject via the Internet than most teachers or schools will be able to provide. A bewildered coordinator from a leading high school sees the implications and raises her hand to ask, Why will kids come to school? * * * At least since the Carnegie Commission's 1986 report, A Nation Prepared, education reformers and policy makers have been campaigning for a changing role for teachers - but for reasons other than the impact of and computer use. Teachers have been encouraged to become a guide on the side rather than the traditional sage on the stage. Shortly thereafter, in 1988, Kathleen Devaney and Gary Sykes described a new conception of teaching that emphasizes the continual and changing interplay between thought and action, based on close observation and reflection about the encounter or 'match' between students and subject matter, so that teaching would be more than skilled transmission but would become principled action.1 In one fell swoop, the revolution may accomplish what 10 years of education reform could not. …

The allocation of strips in Lammas Meadows by the casting of lots

ABSTRACT The annual casting of lots to allocate the hay crop of a Common or Lammas Meadow is often referred to in the literature in passing but with very few details being given of just how the process was actually carried out. In this paper odd bits of detailed information available from about twenty-five parishes have been collated to obtain an overall view of how the system worked. The results indicate that although the system was basically the same in all cases it varied a great deal in the details. In some places the system had become extremely complicated before it finally ceased to function. Each Meadow was divided up into several large, named divisions in each of which lot-casting took place to allocate the strips of hay that made up the division. This took place around Midsummer Day and just before the hay was cut. The lots were made of various materials and were marked with symbols. Many of these symbols were the same in different parishes and similar to house marks used elsewhere. The mark on the lot was cut in the ground at the head of the strip after allocation with a special knife. The hay from some of the strips was allocated to pay for the costs of maintaining the Meadow, for setting it out ready for lot-casting and for holding a feast afterwards.

Eight little piggies: reflections in natural history

Part 1 The scale of extinction: unenchanted evening the golden rule - a proper scale for our environmental crisis losing a limpet. Part 2 Odd bits of vertebrate anatomy: eight little piggies bent out of shape an earful of jaw full of hot air. Part 3 Vox populi: evolving visions - men of the thirty-third division - an essay on integrity, Darwin and Paley meet the invisible hand, more light on leaves time in Newton's century - on rereading Edmund Halley, fall in the house of Ussher. Part 4 Musings: clouds of memory - Muller bros. moving and storage, shoemaker and morning star authenticity - in touch with Walcott, counters and cable cars. Part 5 Human nature: Mozart and modularity the moral state of Tahiti - and of Darwin ten thousand acts of kindness the declining empire of apes. Part 6 Grand patterns of evolution: two steps towards a general theory of life's complexity - the wheel of fortune and the wedge of progress, tires to sandals new discoveries in the earliest history of multicellular life - defending the heretical and the superfluous, the reversal of Hallucigenia. Part 7 Revising and extending Darwin: what the immaculate pigeon teaches the burdened mind the great seal principle a dog's life in Galton's polyhedron betting on chance - and no fair peeking. Part 8 Reversals - fragments of a book not written: shields of expectation - and actuality a tale of three pictures a foot soldier for evolution.

:Holy Delight: Typology, Numerology, and Autobiography in Donne's Devotions upon Emergent Occasions

Composed on the occasion of the poet's near-fatal bout with typhus in 1623, the Devotions contains the essential germ of John Donne's mature thought, embodied in obscurely structured verse/prose divisions. Because of its seeming digressiveness, critics have struggled to understand this most significant of Renaissance texts as a whole. Kate Gartner Frost, however, shows that the Devotions, which combines odd bits of natural history, personal life-data, quotations from scripture, and descriptions of unpleasant medical nostrums with personal religious outpourings, is a unified work belonging to the tradition of English devotional literature and spiritual autobiography from Augustine onward. Frost examines how Donne patterned his work on models and structures that allowed the blending of chronology, experience, anecdote, and insight into the fullness of extended metaphor reflecting the human condition. Donne's use of biblical typology is treated, as well as his adherence to a poetics rooted in pre-Copernican cosmology, which relies on underlying spatial structures. Finally, Frost reveals the actual numerological structures present in the Devotions and addresses the problem of discursive reading in relation to spatially organized premodern works. Originally published in 1991. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

A Valentine for Mrs. Snapp

A Valentine for Mrs. Snapp Jane McClellan When Mrs. Snapp wore her red knitted dress with white heart-shaped buttons, we children knew that preparations would begin for Valentine's Day. Mrs. Snapp had knitted the dress herself , her theory being that a good handknit dress would last a lifetime. So its style was a simple "Valentine's Day" since that would last a lifetime too. Hemlines could run up and down like signal flags, sleeves could puff or hang in bat wings, but the style Mrs. Snapp designated "Valentine s Day" never changed. She began wearing the bright red dress at least a month ahead, for valentines 65 were serious business for Mrs. Snapp. Other holidays were in some ways blemished for her. Diabetes took the zest out of Thanksgiving, an absence of children somewhat deflated Christmas, and a religious abstinence made New Year's Eve a waste of good sleeping time. But Mrs. Snapp had caught a beau, as the expression went in her day, and she was ever grateful to whatever cupids smiled on her and Mr. Snapp. "To the world he's my husband," she would confide to her fifth-graders, "but to me he's still my beau. I was dutifully impressed, for Mr. Snapp had gray hair and so was about a hundred, I surmised. Mrs. Snapp's hair was as black as Rose Red's or Snow White's, and she would blush and glitter when one of our fathers called her a "spring chicken." How the Snapps had managed to be high school sweethearts was an age-mystery we fifth-graders, innocent to the wiles of hair dye, never fathomed. I suppose her being so in love with old Mr. Snapp made her want everyone to taste of love's delights. Anyway, she made sure that every child in the room got lots and lots of valentines. And every girl got at least one from a boy and vice versa. All the valentines had to be handmade except for the candy hearts that said "I luv u" and "UR 2 hot 4 me" that Mrs. Snapp gave us. Not even a store-bought envelope could intrude on the sanctity of our little workshop. For weeks in advance we labored over paste pots, construction paper, and crayons . From home we brought snippets of lace, sawdust corkscrews, leftovers of red oilcloth, pinked squares of material samples, stray buttons, red felt packing strips, and odd bits of yarn. Each child kept his supplies in a work sack with his name on it, and the sooner he finished his day's work, the more valentines he could make. Some were models of honest sentiment with lacy hearts and original verses: "Roses are red, violets are blue. If you don't love me, I won't love you." Others were crayoned with crude humor— faces with missing teeth and outrageous freckles, pig-like snouts and doggy profiles . "If I give you a dog," the card would insinuate, "you'll be a pair!" Under Mrs. Snapp's watchful eye, only fairly pretty girls with robust egos ever received the more insulting valentines. The worst were somehow lost even if the perpetrator had dropped them in the big valentine mailbox on Mrs. Snapp's desk. For on the festive day, all elementary children went to assembly and sang spirited songs—"When Irish Hearts Are Smiling* and "She'll Be Coming Around the Mountain"—led by the principal . Meantime, teachers set out the refreshments and prepared the party. The actual giving out of valentines was done by two "Sweetheart Mailmen," a boy and girl picked from the class. They were always children who didn't receive as many valentines as others did. By the time they distributed half the class's, they felt they had been blessed with untold numbers of valentines. Despite Mrs. Snapp's secretive rifling of the box, the most and the nicest valentines went to the prettiest girl in class, Priscilla. All the boys liked her. Oh, sure, they sent the rest of us valentines, but never as large or as red or as lacy. By the time we had gone through five grades together, we...

Two new equalisation schemes for high-density digital magnetic recording systems with quad-phase modulation code

Quad-phase has desirable features for use in digital magnetic recording. Here we propose two novel equalisation schemes that seem attractive at high information densities. One scheme estimates the even and odd data bits in reverse order, while the other uses two equalisers to estimate even and odd bits separately.

Myths and Symbols in Religion and Folklore

WHAT interest now have folklorists in the remote past before the coming of Christianity in north-western Europe, a time when written records were rare and by no means reliable? We now know that folk customs and traditions of our own times, impressive and barbarous though they seem, cannot confidently be assumed to go back into 'the mists of antiquity', as popular guide-books are apt to phrase it. They probably emerged as recently as the nineteenth century or even later, and may have deliberately been given their present shape by some local antiquary, hoping to bring new dignity and popularity to some rowdy annual get-together. Consequently folklorists now tend to concentrate on the detailed history of recent customs, or on story-telling, jokes and popular practices of the present time which can be recorded on a vast scale by the computer. The tendency to avoid the study of past customs has been strengthened by the attitude of archaeologists. Faced with material from the historic past, they have been most reluctant for the last half-century or so, as Ralph Merrifield put it in The Archaeology of Religion and Magic, 'to recognise evidence for behaviour that has no obvious material purpose', if this was not found in a manifestly religious or mortuary context.' While accustomed to draw elaborate conclusions as to what those in earlier times ate or wore, or used as tools or weapons, in building, or in industrial or military organisations, they felt unable to comment on, or sometimes even to record, details which might indicate ideas about the sacred, the spirit world, attempts to avert bad luck, or popular rituals in everyday use. This negative attitude towards the interpretation of spontaneous religious practices or beliefs was of course in its turn a reaction against the tendency to assume that popular customs and traditional tales and odd bits of archaeological evidence difficult to understand must reveal glimpses of a wellorganised pagan past. Encouraged by Robert Graves and his like, many had envisaged a religion of set festivals and sacrifices with such concepts as the dying god, the naked goddess, the dancing corn spirit, all universally recognised by the folk. Traces of such an attitude remain with us yet, as in the recent case of a new Vicar of Bury,2 unnecessarily distressed and agitated by the fear that in allowing a Rose Queen for MayDay to be selected from little girls attending his Sunday School, he would be encouraging a heathen activity, 'firmly rooted' he is reported to have said, 'in pagan fertility rites ... like dancing round a maypole.' Those better versed in the study of folklore realise that such a dream world of orthodox heathen practices dominating early societies and reflected in fragments of later folklore could not conceivably have existed. It has become evident from the work of anthropologists among isolated and what might seem 'primitive' peoples that their beliefs are far from being fixed and simple; complications have inevitably crept in, either through outside influences or from the rich and complex reactions of the human mind and the creative powers of imagination, inspired by natural surroundings and life lived close to the natural world. We have to remember that those following a slower and simpler way of life were not less intelligent than we are; moreover they probably had far more opportunity and encouragement to use their natural gifts for the creation of symbols and the development of imagination and intuition.

C. P. Cavafy: The Poet in the Reader

CP. Cavafy: The Poet in the Reader Diskin Clay If Cavafy heard 125 voices within him telling him that he could write history, he must have heard them as he was reading history—the history he finally transformed into three cycles of poems he entitled "Ancient Days," "The Beginnings of Christianity," and "Byzantine Days." Cavafy was a demanding reader of history, as his reading notes to Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire demonstrate .1 He approves, for example, of Gibbon's accuracy in recording the precise height of the column on which Simeon Stylites perched for some 30 years of a pious life.2 But Cavafy can censure Gibbon for his misconception of the Roman province of Achaea or for his failure to appreciate the principles of Byzantine prosody.3 And he disliked the conception of Hellenism that prompted Gibbon to allow Augustus to refer to Cleopatra as a "barbarian queen."4 And strikingly, Cavafy notes with apparent admiration Gibbon's description of Tacitus as a "philosophic historian."5 There are no poems more revealing of Cavafy as the poet of history than the poems he never finished. Five of these—all on Julian the Apostate—have been published by Renata Lavagnini (1981). None of these poems had reached its final form at the time of Cavafy 's death, but all give us a rare glimpse of Cavafy as a reader, an historian, and finally as a poet of history. These five poems and some 25 others belong to the Cavafy Archives and they are themselves archival . They are contained, in odd bits and pieces, in five folders. In them Cavafy deposited not only the successive drafts and corrections to the five poems on Julian, but excerpts and notes from the reading that went into them. In the case of his poem on St. Athanasios, we find a sheet with a passage excerpted from "Mrs. Butcher, The Story of the Church of Egypt: vol. I, pages 184, 185."6 There are also notes to the relevant passages from Migne's collection of the writings of the Greek fathers of the church and a comment by the poet on his projected St. Athanasios: "NOTES: In Migne 67 (Sozomen and Socrates ) and 82 (Theodoret) Butcher's version is not to be found. If it can't be discovered elsewhere, in some life of St. Athanasios, the 65 66 Diskin Clay poem won't stand." Cavafy never located Butcher's source and he finally abandoned his St. Athanasios. He had begun it in April 1920 and left it unfinished in November of 1929.7 This is the poet of Kaisarion (19W1918):8 In part to verify of the details of an age, in part to kill time, Last night I picked up and read through a collection of Ptolemaic inscriptions. . . . When I had managed to get straight the details of this age I would have put the book down, but a small and insignificant detail concerning King Kaisarion suddenly caught my eye. The phrase was the advice given to Octavian not to allow many Caesars—polykaisarie. It was a phrase so arresting that it allowed Cavafy the room to create Kaisarion in his own imagination, and to surround this imaginary vision of the young "King of Kings" with the Machiavellian advice that went back to Odysseus and Iliad II.9 One of the drafts of the stillborn poems on Julian (Julian's Escape , December 1913) contains still another phrase that caught Cavafy 's eye—Julian's dismissal of his early faith in the solemn and pompous "Let there be forgetfulness of that darkness." The actual phrase comes from Julian's pagan Hymn to King Helios10 and is directed at the emperor's early Christianity, which he would bury in darkness. The historian in Cavafy recognized that Julian had managed to forget something else about his early Christianity—the fact that he owed his life to the Christian priests who were responsible, in the words of Gregory of Nazianzos, for his "unbelievable and unexpected " escape from the massacre that followed the death of Constantine in 337.11 This is the comment of Cavafy, the poet in the reader of Julian and...

'I Had a Baby Sister but She Only Lasted One Day'

love you, Elisabeth, we'll never forget you. Five-year-old Corey spoke these words to her sister, who had been born the night before and now lay dying because of severe congenital defects. Twenty-four hours earlier, if you had asked us if we thought a child should see a deformed, dying sibling, we would have been surprised that the question was even asked. During the sad 24 hours of Elisabeth's life, Corey taught us a great deal about our own feelings and about a child's capacity to handle illness and death. The first indications of problems with the pregnancy came after Susan had amniocentesis. I was present for the procedure, and we both were thrilled to see our baby waving her hand on the ultrasound screen. We confidently waited to hear that everything was all right. Everything was not all right. The geneticist had found two odd bits of extra chromosomes,

BASIC for numerical quadrature

Although I have been involved in the development of programs for numerical evaluation of integrals for a number of years, it was only recently that I became aware of the importance of providing such tools in BASIC. I admit to having had a built-in predjudice against people using BASIC. To me it seemed that these people were either solving trivial problems, or were too lazy to learn FORTRAN. But in the last year or so, I have been made aware that BASIC is very much an alive language with sophisticated scientific users. The growth in popularity of the microcomputer is partly responsible for this. At NBS I also see many more scientists who are not as computer oriented as those I met at Los Alamos and this has some effect too. In this talk I would like to describe a few important quadrature techniques that are essential to have and how they can be best implemented in BASIC. This seems to me a rather neglected area. There may be a few odd bits of software around in BASIC, but most are not what I would call state-of-the-art. If I am wrong about this I would be happy to be corrected. We could publish a bibliography of such programs here in the SIGNUM Newsletter. In the first section, as a convenience to those of us who are not very familiar with the language, I outline several of the differences with FORTRAN.

Theories of revolution reconsidered

Just over a decade ago, Lawrence Stone capped an elegant essay on "Theories of Revolution" with the anticipation that social theory would increasingly enlighten historical research, and modern historiography help confirm or refute more daring theoretical conjectures.2 Since then, several fine works of historical and comparative analysis have been published on the origins and outcomes of revolutionary situations.3 As yet, however, no general theory featured in Stone's review has been employed in any capacity beyond decorative footnoting by noteworthy students of revolutionary history, past or present. At most, one or another general theory has served to provide catchy, convenient headings for topical partitions in historical narrative.4 Nor, from their side, have authors of general theories ventured to test their ideas against well-researched blocs of historical data. Instead, they have been content to relay odd bits of history an anecdotal "evidence" for the hypotheses at hand. And when political analysts have sought to explain how successful revolutionaries prevailed, they have preferred to winnow the writings of movement strategists rather than consult the social science model-builders.S

Alan's geo-igloo

Knowing my reluctance to throw away anything that might at sometime come in handy in our classroom, the children arc always turning up with odd bits and pieces. Parents say apologetically, “He would bring it. I kept saying it was broken and of no use, but he said you'd want it.” I am embarrassed sometimes as I explain that I really do like getting broken clocks, plastic bottles, bits of motorcycles, and wheels off prams. Our school is quite well off for storage space and we manage to find a usc for most things sooner or later.

Construction of Maps from “Odd Bits of Information”

Computer programs can produce very accurate maps from an apparently inadequate set of facts.

Coherent light sources and refractive index fields

Developments in the techniques of using laser beams for measuring the structure and velocity of phase objects should by now have entirely revolutionized these methods. Yet it is a curious fact that the workers who use such devices to determine distributions of for example gas temperature or composition in heat and mass transfer, aerodynamic or combustion studies still often prefer to spend great effort or several thousand pounds on a large Mach–Zehnder interferometer when a £100 laser would enable them to produce a better and more versatile system with the odd bits of glass lying around the laboratory.

Neuroticism and anxiety among women with cancer

Comparison of the N.S.Q. and S.A.F. scores of women undergoing radio-therapy for a variety of malignant conditions with those of a control group reveals that the malignant group show significantly more ego-weakness (S.A.F.) and more anxiety (N.S.Q.). Various comparisons within the malignant group suggest that women with cancers of non-sexual sites may be more neurotic and show less integration of the self-sentiment and that women with breast cancer may be characterized by more covert relative to overt evidence of anxiety. A species of item analysis, carried out using X 2, yielded 14 items which significantly differentiated the experimental from the control group. The bulk of these contribute towards anxiety but a few show the malignant group as less anxious. There is also some limited evidence of emotional toughness and depression on the part of the cancer patients. Women with lesions of non-sexual sites as distinct from sexual sites seem characterized by ‘ready admission’ and the higher anxiety score contributed by such a tendency. This is based on 4 items which significantly differentiate these 2 subgroupings. It seems best to interpret most of the data as consequent upon the subjects being cases of malignancy. The odd bits of data that might conceivably be construed as reflecting the pre-morbid personality of these women seem insufficient grounds upon which to stake a claim for a psychosomatic element in malignant disease. This may only mean that we have not yet hit upon the gauge which will give us the measure of something, upon which eminent men from Galen's time to the present have insisted—if not always with full accord as to its nature—was there. The very real possibility that cancer patients are given to motivational distortion in the context of self-rating instruments raises problems as to what form this gauge might take and still retain the properties of a simply administered screening device. In the last analysis it seems likely that future researches will have to select the more promising findings of such retrospective, metric researches as exist and enter upon a long-term, prospective study akin to that reported by Hagnell [5]. Only in this fashion can the probability of there being a predisposing entity in malignant etiology which takes the form of some aspect of personality be reliably assessed. Meanwhile, inadequate as they must be with respect to a final answer, the smaller retrospective studies can contribute some sort of preliminary reconnaissance of a more than usually tangled but interesting battlefield.

Pogonophora in the Sub-antarctic

I HESITATE to ask for valuable space to try to put right some errors; but I think the matter is both biologically and historically important. I have only just seen Dr. D. B. Carlisle's translator's preface to his English edition of Dr. A. V. Ivanov's Pogonophora (Academic Press, London, 1963). I regret that it contains most serious misstatements, giving not only an entirely false impression of the abundance of pogonophores in the Sub-antarctic, but also making quite untrue accusations against the scientific staff of the R.R.S. Discovery working in those waters in the 1920's. These errors have unfortunately grown from his misunderstanding and exaggeration of a light-hearted and no doubt foolish remark I made, so I feel I must try to correct this unfortunate impression. All the dredge and trawl hauls taken by the Discovery and Discovery II (Dr. Carlisle confuses the two ships) were gone through with meticulous care and all the species sorted out and preserved in separate tubes or jars, an operation often taking many hours. At the end there sometimes remained odd bits of debris, perhaps bits of twine or wire broken from the net or lashings of the dredge and so forth, which we classed as ‘gubbins’, or jokingly, the ‘Gubbinidae’, to be more carefully examined before being thrown away. Years later, on looking at specimens of Pogonophora with their long exceedingly thin tubes looking like bits of twine, I told the story of our sorting operations on the Discovery and said, just to emphasize how fibre-like they are: “I would not be surprised if I had thrown some pogonophores away as twine among the Gubbinidae !” It was no doubt a silly thing to say, but I never dreamt it could be taken seriously. If it did happen, not more than one or two specimens might have been lost that way. No large quantity could possibly have been so missed. Dr. Carlisle, who heard me say this, let this story grow in his mind. It may seem childish to worry with it, but his statements are so damaging to British oceanography and scientifically so false, that I feel a correction should be made. Dr. Sidnie Manton has not unnaturally directed attention to his comments in her review of the book in Nature (204, 1020; 1964).

Another Approach to Ecology

The study of ecology is both a frustrating and a challenging topic for many high school biology teachers. The most satisfactory way to teach the unit is in the field, but limited class time and problems of travel drastically restrict field studies in most cases. In the classroom a lack of stimulating laboratory experiences is a definite handicap. In addition, most textbooks confine the discussion of ecology to: (1) a study of three or four distinct habitats, (2) a discussion of a balanced aquarium, and (3) the application of to conservation. Too frequently the student emerges with a mind filled with odd bits of information but with no real unifying concepts. To help the student develop an appreciation for a fuller meaning of the ecological concept, the method that follows was developed.1 The idea is not original, but the application may be a new one for some teachers. The method involves the use of distribution maps. Each student is given a basic set of mimeographed maps (maps 1-12) for his own use. Additional maps (such as maps 13-18) are made available from time to time. Questions involving correlations to be drawn from these maps are assigned as homework. From the outset it is necessary to insist that all correlations must come from the maps alone. Supplementary ideas from newspapers, textbooks, or friends cannot be allowed. If the student is to develop analyzing ability he must learn to develop his conclusions from authentic data (in this case, the maps). He must learn not to be led astray by ideas that he has always known to be so-ideas that may or may not be valid. In preliminary discussions with the students it usually becomes apparent to them that they know very little about Indiana, other than that the state is flat, is a good place to grow corn, and is hot in the summer. Since it has been estimated that fully 45 % of the native species of plants growing in the state are on edges of their ranges, it is obvious that Indiana is much more complex than most students realize.2

The Statistical Significance of Odd Bits of Information

The Statistical Significance of Odd Bits of Information