I assumed the site would have become a WWW cobweb by now, but no! compare-stuff is alive and kicking and has just been relaunched with a much funkier interface and a whole new attitude. And as of fairly recently, the site now has a great blog associated with it in which site creator Bob compares some bizarre stuff such as pollution levels versus torture and human rights abuses in various capital cities. Check out the correlation that emerges when these various parameters are locked on to the current Olympic city. It makes for very interesting reading.

Since the dawn of the search engine age people have been playing around with the page total data they return. Comparing the totals for “Company X sucks” and “Company Y sucks”, for example, is an obvious thing to try. Two surviving examples of websites which make this easy for you are SpellWeb and Google Fight, in case you missed them the first time around.

compare-stuff took this a stage further with a highly effective enhancement: normalisation. This means that a comparison of “Goliath Inc” with “David and Associates” is not biased in favour of David or Goliath.

Compare-stuff with its new, cleaner interface now takes this normalisation factor to the logical extreme and allows you to carry out a trend analysis and so follow the relative importance of any word or phrase. For example, “washed my hair”, with respect to a series of related words or phrases, for example “Monday”, “Tuesday”, “Wednesday”…”Sunday”. The site retrieves all the search totals (via Yahoo’s web services), does the calculations and presents you with a pretty graph of the result (the example below also includes “washed my car” for comparison).

Both peak at the weekend but hair washing’s peak is broader and includes Friday, as you might expect. It’s a bit like doing some expensive market research for free, and the cool thing is that you can follow the trends of things that might be difficult to ask in an official survey, for example:

You can analyse trends on other timescales (months, years, time of day, public holidays), or across selected non-time concepts (countries, cities, actors). Here are a few more examples:

Which day of the week do people tidy their desk/garage?

At what age are men most likely to get promoted/fired?

Which popular holiday island is best for yoga or line dancing?:

Which 2008 US presidential candidate is most confident?

Which day is best for Science and Nature?

As you can see, compare-stuff provides some fascinating sociological insights into how the world works. It’s not perfect though. Its creator, Bob MacCallum, is at pains to point out that it can easily produce unexpected results. The algorithm doesn’t know when words have multiple meanings or when their meaning depends on context. A trivial example would be comparing the trends of “ruby” and “diamond” vs. day of the week.

The result shows a big peak for “ruby” on “Tuesday”, not because people like to wear, buy or write about rubies on Tuesday, but because of the numerous references to the song “Ruby Tuesday” of course.

However, since accurate computer algorithms for natural language processing are still a long way off, MacCallum feels that a crude approach like this is better than nothing, particularly when used with caution. Help is at hand though, the pink and purple links below the plot take you to the web search results, where you can check that your search terms are found in the desired context; in the top 10 or 20 hits that is. On the whole it does seem to work, and promises to be an interesting, fast and cheap preliminary research tool for a wide range of interest areas.

With summer well under way, Independence Day well passed, and thoughts of Thanksgiving and Christmas coming to the fore already (at least in US shops), I did a comparison on the site of E coli versus salmonella for various US holidays. You can view the results live here, as well as tweaking the parameters to compare your own terms.

Originally posted June 4, 2007, updated August 19, 2008

Compare and Compare Alike

My good friend, Jean-Claude Bradley of Drexel University, a chemist and host of the UsefulChem Blogspot blog, who is very keen on the use of information technology and the notion of the open notebook was first to respond: “For me the answer is clear: it is a great way to find new collaborators whom I would otherwise not have met.” I’d have to agree, I’ve known JCB for quite some time now, although we’ve never even shaken hands. He was one of the early interviewees for my Reactive Profiles column. We didn’t meet virtually through online media, however, but through a mutual friend Tony Williams, then of ACD/Labs and now increasingly well known as ChemSpiderman.

Erik Mols, a Lecturer in Bioinformatics at Leiden University of Applied Science, The Netherlands, echoed JCB’s remark: “It gives me the opportunity to discuss with people I never would have met,” he said, and added that, “It creates possibilities for my students to do their internship abroad.”

Another good friend, Egon Willighagen, who is a post-doc at Wageningen University & Research Center, provided a quite detailed answer: “It provides one with the means to mine the overwhelming amount of information,” he says, “For example, searching for some scientific piece of software is more targeted when I search amongst bookmarks of fellow bio/chemoinformaticians than if I were to search Google.” He points out that the Web 2.0 services are most useful when one’s online friends have labelled or tagged particular tools, or better still commented or rated them, as can be done with http://del.icio.us/, for instance. This concept holds just as true for publications, courses, molecules, and other content.

Willighagen points out that conventional search engines do fill an important gap (WoS, Google, etc), “But, they lack the ability in itself to link this with expert knowledge,” he says, “This is particularly why Google, I think, is offering all sorts of services: to find a user profile from a mining point of view. FOAF, social bookmarking, etc, makes such profiles more explicit, allowing more targeted search results.”

Personal contact Joerg Kurt Wegner, a scientist at Tibotec (Johnson & Johnson), suggested that my original question might be couched in slightly different terms: “The question is rather why ’social science’ is different to ‘editorial science’?”

He suggests that one of the best visualizations for this difference is Alexa’s web ranking statistic comparing Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica. Wikipedia is a social information gathering process and Britannica is an editorial process. The graph shows that Wikipedia increased its access and popularity dramatically compared to Britannica. “Based on this, I would conclude that the benefit (not only the plain access) is higher for the social service,” Wegner says. He then emphasises that there is indeed a shared problem among scientists, that of information overload.

“Honestly, I cannot see how any editorial process can cope with this problem,” says Wegner. Social software in contrast might be able to tackle this challenge. “Social software
is
driven by
small dedicated user groupsSocial software is driven by small dedicated user groups (oligarchies),” he explains, “So, compared to an editorial process the number of ‘real’ contributors might actually not be higher. However, the enrichment of diverse and really interested people might be better. If you think that you need for science the smartest set of diverse people, then ’social software’ cannot be a bad choice, right?”

Wegner suggests that anyone who does not believe this to be the case should carry out a search for their collaborative partners using conventional information sources. The likely result once again will be information overload. More information but no increase in our reading capacity. “Information overload solutions and social software looks like a matching relationship to me,” he adds. The final obstacle is for social software, web 2.0, online networking, social media, whatever you want to call it, to be accepted by the majority and to mature. “Has social software reached a mature status in Gartner’s hype cycle,” asks Wegner, “that means that even conservative people will realize that it is highly recommended to adopt this technology. The question here is also not if science benefits from social media, but how steep the benefit curve is. The longer you wait, the flatter the benefit curve.”

Deepak Singh of the business|bytes|genes|molecules blog adds that, “Historically communication among scientists was limited, e.g. you could get together with your peers from around the world at a conference, or through newsgroups. That’s where collaborations were born, but the scale was limited out of necessity.” Things have changed significantly. “Today, with resources like open wet-ware, etc, and more avenues for online conversation, including blogs and wikis collaborations become a lot easier and feasible.”

In addition, Singh suggests that science is no longer restricted to peer-reviewed publications as the only means of formal communication within the scientific community. “You could publish a paper and blog about the back story, or like some others, e.g. Jean-Claude Bradley, you could practice Open Notebook Science.” He points out that the likes of videos and podcasts only add to the options now available for communicating science.

However, there is another thread to the idea of social media benefiting science and that is that it could also benefit the public with respect to science. “For some reason,” says Singh, “science ended up becoming this silo and preserve of the experts and we ended up with a chasm between experts and others.” Social media could close this gap and make it easier to create virtual communities of people who have common interests, like to share their knowledge, are just curious about things, or are lobbyists and others. “One area where I see tremendous opportunity is education,” Singh adds, “whether through screencasting, or podcasts, or just video lectures and wiki-based learning, that’s probably the one area where I am most hopeful.”

Find David Bradley on Nature Network here and on Nanopaprika nano science network here.

Online Science

Anyone would think Sciencebase resided in one of the seedier corners of the internet. Because of all the recent fuss about the new seven deadly sins, I was just checking out the visitor traffic using Google Webmaster Tools and found some quite worrying search queries that bring you, dear readers, to this cybershore.

Apparently, 4% of the searches on Google Images this week brought you looking for the periodic table of sex!

Well, I have to admit, there is a thumbnail graphic of said item on the site, mentioned in a post Periodic Post, from August 2006. And, Sciencebase ranks #7 in Google for that phrase, so it’s perhaps not surprising. Slightly more worrying is what people were searching for who reached my post Giving Good Headline, which was about the subject of press releases and the best approach to headline writing. Then there are the dozens of visitors looking for Girly Games who found my article on the psychology of video game addiction and how it apparently differs between males and females.

I’m loathe
to
list some
of the other
terms people
are searching forI’m loathe to list some of the other terms people are searching for on Google Images for that brings them to Sciencebase, oh go on then, you twisted my arm: erectile dysfunction, premature ejaculation, seven deadly sins, erotic, and several I’d blush even to type.

Now, Sciencebase, for one reason or another (and it’s not because, it’s that kind of site) somehow ranks quite highly for several of those terms. However, there are a few others that bring visitors to the site for which the site ranks way, way down the search engine results pages (SERPs), and I don’t just mean the bottom of page 1, or page 2 even, I mean bottom of page 73. Now, that reveals true search diligence, I’d suggest. Whoever works their way through 72 pages of results to get to that one item?

Most visitors are not after smut, thankfully, they’re after the site’s hard-hitting science news and views with a cynical bite. Unfortunately, as I was writing this post, I realised that posting it in its original form was unlikely to reduce the tide of filth, in fact it might simply encourage more of those seedier searches, so I’ve removed a few of the less choice keywords, just to make it safe for work and to prevent the site from getting slapped with an adult-filtering ban.

Afters I’d put the finishing touches to this piece, I checked the site’s top searches in GWMT again, just to see if there had been any additional phrases of interest. I discovered that Sciencebase is now ranking for “polar bears willie soon” in blog searching. Asa search phrase that has to be pretty unique. I assumed it was from someone in the UK urgently tracking down Arctic bestiality sites, or Inuit innuendo, until I realised it’s actually two phrases - Polar Bears (the Arctic beast in question) and Willie Soon (the climate change skeptic) - both of which I mentioned in my CO2 refusenik post recently. It seems that Sciencebase is not quite the quagmire of filth some of the site’s visitors had hoped after all.

Sciencebase Seedier Side

A couple of weeks ago I was reading a post by Will Griffiths on the ChemSpider Open Chemistry Web blog about how the DOI citation system of journal article lookups might be improved. The DOI system basically assigns each research paper a unique number depending, with an embedded publisher tag. Enter a DOI into a look up box (e.g. the DOI lookup on Sciencebase, foot of that page) and it almost instantaneously takes you to the paper in question. I use the DOI system for references in Sciencebase posts all the time.

There are a few cons that counteract its various pros, for instance, not all publishers use it and among those that do there are some who do not implement the DOI for their papers until they are in print, as opposed to online. Despite that it is very useful and commonly used. Having read Griffiths’ post about OpenURL a non-proprietary DOI alternative, I thought maybe it would be even more powerful if the concept were taken back another step the author level and I came up with the concept of a PaperID, which I blogged about on Chemspy.com. PaperID, I reasoned could be a unique identification tag for a reasearch paper, created by the author using a central open system (akin to the InChI code for labelling individual compounds). I’m still working out the ins and outs of this concept and while a few correspondents have spotted potentially fatal flaws others see it as a possible way forward.

Meanwhile, CrossRef, the association behind the publisher linking network, has just announced a beta version of a plugin for bloggers that can look up and insert DOI-enabled citations in a blog post. I’ve not investigated the plugin in detail yet, but you can download from a Crossref page at Sourceforge.net. the Crossref plugin apparently allows bloggers to add a widget to search CrossRef metadata using citations or partial citations. The results of the search, with multiple hits, are displayed and you then either click on a hit to go to the DOI, or click on an icon next to the hit to insert the citation into their blog entry. I presume they’re using plugin and widget in the accepted Wordpress glossary sense of those words as the plugin is available only for Wordpress users at the moment with a MoveableType port coming soon.

According to Geoffrey Bilder, CrossRef’s Director of Strategic Initiatives, “CrossRef is helping jumpstart the process of citing the formal literature from blogs. While there is a growing trend in scientific and academic blogging toward referring to formally published literature, until now there were few guidelines and very few tools to make that process easy.” Well that reference to a jumpstart sounds like marketing-speak to me, as Sciencebase and
dozens
of other
science blogs have
been using
DOI for yearsSciencebase and dozens of other science blogs have been using DOI for years.

Whether or not I will get around to installing what amounts to yet another Wordpress plugin I haven’t decided. I may give it a go, but if it works as well as is promised you will hopefully not see the join. Meanwhile, let me have your thoughts on the usefulness of DOI and the potential of OpenURL and PaperID in the usual place below.

Search and Cite for Science Bloggers

It was a post by Wayne Liew WayneLiewDot.com that persuaded me to do the necessary and his recommendation for using a plugin that automates that whole process was the tipping point I needed.

Having carried out the upgrade (more on the actual Wordpress upgrade process here) and found only a few minor problems, like a disordered sidebar, a couple of out-of-date plugins and just one irrelevant dead plugin, and fixed those as best as I could, I figured it was time for a weekend break. So my wife and I headed off to the seaside, abandoned the children with their grandparents and took off with the dog for a well-earned break at an artsy country town on the Suffolk coast. (Photos will appear soon on my flickr account, see the footer for the link). Hence this trivial and possibly pointless post.

Back with a more substantial science based post later this week.

Sciencebase Upgraded

Currently, the only truly effective way consumers can stop the collection of their personal data when shopping is not to use the internet, to be paid and to pay for everything in cash, and to hide their money in their mattress.

More seriously, most of us will continue to use web services despite privacy concerns. You can try to opt-out of marketing schemes or reconfigure your web browser to reject advances from sites that offer cookies or install spying applications. However, most such rejections will prevent you from trading on most e-commerce sites altogether. So, cookies will crumble, there’s no two ways about it if you want to shop online or use web 2.0 interactive sites. You can, of course, use software to delete those cookies as soon as you’re finished your interaction with the site and so gain a little privacy and prevent the sites tracking where you went after you left when you visit a second time. But, either way, they’re going to get lots of useful information while the cookie lasts.

There is
no
single solution
to preventing the
increasing erosion
of personal privacyThere is no single solution to preventing the increasing erosion of personal privacy on the Web, says Madan Lal Bhasin of the Business School SungKyunKwan University in Seoul, South Korea. Writing in the latest issue of the International Journal of Internet Marketing and Advertising (2008, vol 4, pp 213-240) he describes how new e-commerce technology has increased the ability of online retailers and others to collect, monitor, target and sell personal information about their customers to third parties.

Countless companies across the globe are doing just that in ways that were not dreamed of before the advent of the Web. Moreover, the emergence of so-called social media web 2.0 sites, such as MySpace and Facebook has led to a new generation of privacy issues that go beyond those seen with conventional e-commerce websites.

As such, online consumer and web user privacy is becoming an ever keener focal point among cyber activists as well as among governments and regulators. That said, when it is the governments themselves losing and abusing the personal data of millions of taxpayers (see recent UK news), then the notion of any government protecting one’s privacy becomes absurd. Nevertheless, in the long-term, finding a balance between absolute personal privacy and the smooth operation of commerce and social sites in cyberspace poses a significant challenge.

Bhasin and colleagues point out that are grave dangers for corporations that collect and use personal information, ignoring privacy legislative and regulatory warning signs. Indeed, such abuse could prove to be very costly not only in terms of putative fines from regulators but also through loss of business among customers increasingly aware of their privacy rights. In the worst-case scenario it is not beyond the realms of possibility that a company abusing standard privacy etiquette to the extreme could collapse should word spread and users boycott the site or mount retaliatory attacks of their own against the company’s web servers. Regardless, many companies can and do repeatedly flout the complex rules and regulations that govern privacy in the US, Europe, and elsewhere.

Technology that protects consumer privacy must work without stifling e-commerce. It must somehow be foolproof and be entirely transparent to end-users. Unfortunately, no such technology yet achieves this. There are countless personal software products, such as anti-spyware programs, cookie cutters, anonymous proxies, and other solutions, such as Firefox plugins like NoScript (which blocks all scripting on a website) and AdBlockPlus (which blocks advertisements). These can reduce the chances of private data being sucked from an individual’s web browsing habits.

However, there are hundreds of such programs each with a slightly different purpose. The field is heavily fragmented and many users are not only unaware of these programs they are also generally unaware of the existence of spyware and cookies. An additional problem arises when novice users having heard rumour of spyware, download tools without taking advice. There are well-known legitimate tools available. There are many instances of malware surrogates of those tools that often rank higher in the search engine results pages and so are more prominent. Installation of such rogue programs can result in deeper privacy compromises than the user hoped to avert.

Similarly, software that encrypts, deletes history files or shields your computer from apparently benevolent, but potentially malicious, applications is available but many users are again unaware of the issues intrinsic to using cyberspace and so do not use such programs. Rogue versions of every kind of protective software existRogue versions of every kind of protective software exist to exploit the novice user.

Legitimate e-commerce and web 2.0 sites have transparent privacy policies. These sites and others may also use online seals of trustworthiness and browser certificates that demonstrate credibility. However, such statements and badges are only useful if the companies that display them adhere to the underlying principles. Any company could wear a badge of honour, and yet even large, well-known companies do not necessarily comply fully with their own privacy policies and they allow trust certificates to expire. something many users simply ignore without realising the implications.

“Unfortunately, there is no ’single’ solution to stop the erosion of privacy in cyberspace - no single law that can be proposed or single technology that can be invented to stop the profilers and spies in their tracks,” Bhasin re-asserts. He concludes that, “The battle of privacy, of course, must be fought on three fronts - legal, political and technological - and each new assault must be vigilantly resisted as it occurs.” Whether or not individuals will ever have the weaponry to win the battle is a different matter, we can try, but I suspect the only truly private approach is that bundle of cash stuffed in your mattress.

No Spies Under My Bed

I usually ignore the comment spam folders on this website as per my own advice. Occasionally, however, I will scan them quickly. I do so if a regular reader has commented and has emailed to say that their comment is yet to appear. Legitimate words do sometimes get caught in the Akismet netting. I can then add the individual to the filter whitelist and approve the comment.

Spam comments usually come in one of a few limited types. The first is the straightforward nonsense list of random lewd keywords, Rx ingredients, and messages pertaining to the impossible enhancement of various organs, and it is not to Messrs Hammnond nor Henry Willis and his Sons to which I am referring here. The second type is the bizarre one-word message saying: “Cool!”, “Nice,” “Sorry,” and “Interesting”. When you first see this kind of message, they may give a blogger a little ego boost (about 0.000003154%). But, after the 10,376th you begin to doubt their sincerity, especially as they are usually accompanied by links to lewd keywords, Rx ingredients and the enhancement of various…you know the rest.

Anyway, there is another kind of comment spam and that is the kind that resembles a genuine comment but then lets itself down with a stupid link to a dumb site. It’s usually a brief sentence or phrase. Sometimes it will be an entirely random string of words, presumably scraped from an online text, but occasionally it will seem to actually be attempting to engage in a conversation via a blog’s comments.

You might see phrases like: “Hi Guys! What Your Site Powered By?” and a link to some expensive software, “My brother Tom’s been working real hard all year, but he’s struggling to make ends meet. How do you think he could improve his credit rating?” and a link to a credit card site, or perhaps “Let’s keep in touch we can help each other with sites,” and a link to some unknown web hosting company. Even bizarre queries such as “What effects did katrina on mississippi?” with an insurance link appear every now and then.

Of course, at this stage in blogging history, most bloggers recognise these messages as detrimental to their sites as, once again, they will have the enhancing, Rx and lewd keyword links built in. But, it’s the unusual style in which some are written that intrigues me. I don’t think it says anything much about the psychology of spammers, especially those that are nothing but spewing bots, nor about anything deep taking place in English lessons. They are intriguing in how sophisticated might be the phrasing let down by a slip of syntax or grammatical integrity.

For instance, a recent commenter was able to construct the following quite complex sentence: “Your website
is
beautifully decorated
and easily navigatedYour website is beautifully decorated and easily navigated.” and yet they blew it with their second line: “I have enjoyed visiting the site today and visit again,” which unfortunately doesn’t parse. Similarly, “Some nice article here. thanks for it.” Not only starts a “sentence” with a lower case “t” but there is a serious mismatch between the quantities discussed.

Admittedly, some of the less exact grammar comes from spam originating in parts of the world where the native tongue may not be English. Personally, I would be useless at spamming in Portuguese, Mandarin, Hindi, or any of a few dozen other languages. I could probably scrape through with a spam in French, German, Italian, or Spanish, although I’d have to have an international lewd word dictionary to hand to do so.

In the following comment spam, there is almost subtle use of the word “seldom”, but it lies in stark contrast to the quality of grammar in the rest of the phrase: “This is really fresh idea of the design of the site! I seldom met such in Internet. Good Work dude!”

An easy target is this comment, which appears repeatedly: “I’d prefer reading in my native language, because my knowledge of your languange is no so well. But it was interesting! Look for some my links”. Yes, if that one had escaped Akismet and I’d approved it I can just imagine readers dashing off to look for those links, which, you guessed it, pointed to some great insurance deals on organ enhancement drugs.

Spammatical Errors

I am currently writing a post about pico and femto satellites for Sciencebase, these devices are tiny compared to the enormous one tonne behemoths many of us would picture if asked to visualise an artificial satellite (more on that later). Anyway, the earth’s escape velocity at sea level from a standing start was a figure I needed to hand while writing the piece.

I found a value in metres per second, converted to kmh and did a quick search with Google Toolbar just to get some references and to confirm my calculation. The kmh value, as you may have guessed, comes out at about 40320. However, Google’s auto-suggest offered me a search for the phrase “40320 plain bob major”, which was odd, to say the least, but would have been the obvious figure to a bell-ringing friend of mine. He would have immediately spotted it as an astoundingly long peal of bells. In fact, this very long peal was rung in 1963 in Loughborough, England, using eight tower bells in all possible permutations 8 multiplied by 8 factoria (8×8!) would come to 322,560 blows. Apparently, it took
more
than 18
hours to ring
the changesit took more than 18 hours to ring the changes all the way through.

Of course, the peal of 40320 arises because of the 8 factorial connection, 8×7×6×5×4×3×2×1 (8!) and has nothing to do with earth’s escape velocity, but it hooked me on a bit of guided searching looking for other significant mentions of the number 40320.

40320 is the number of minutes in 4 weeks and so February with its usual 28 days, should be designated “International Factorial Appreciation Month” according to one author (except in leap years, such as 2008, of course).

Kentucky 40320 is a spot on Ford Hampton Road in Kentucky, USA.

Item 40320 in the SigmaAldrich catalog of chemicals is 2,2-dimethylglutaric acid and bug number 40320 in Ubuntu Linux - “devhelp starts with an “empty” page area, which is not redrawn”, whatever than means, apologies to Ubuntu fans, I’ve not been there, nor done that yet.

The PubMed ID (PMID) 40320 points to a paper in the August 1979 issue of the journal Tijdschr Diergeneeskd entitled “Relationship between the presence of meconium in newborn lambs and postnatal pH and blood gas tension levels” and Tinyurl page 40320 displays a scan of a cheque for $950 with the filename bloodmoney.jpg.

Assuming Rudolph is at the front, there are 40320 ways to arrange the other eight reindeer (this simply relies on the 8! value mentioned earlier and could apply to clusters of any eight objects). It ignores “Olive the other reindeer”, you know the one who used to “laugh and call him names”. At the time of writing there were 207 cars listed for sale according to Google that had 40320 miles on the clock and just 5 with that same number in kilometres, while according to Cancerwise, 40320 women will be diagnosed with uterine cancer this year.

40320 is the item number for a “please shower” sign at BackyardGardener.com and BIOS 40320 is the Aquatic Conservation course covering global freshwaters, science and policy at University of Notre Dame.

Most of these various facts are totally unrelated, except those invoked by 8! Amazing what you learn writing about femto satellites. If you have any other fascinating examples of the number 40320 please give them a mention in the comments box below.

40320, Such a Significant Figure

As Russ Swan of Laboratory Talk pointed out in reference to my previous post on the redundancy of the phrase “male semen”, there are numerous other examples around. For instance, the phrase HIV virus is equally redundant as it literally says, “human immunodeficiency virus virus”, likewise ATM machine (automated teller machine machine), PIN number (personal identification number number) and the Sierra Nevada mountain range (Snowy mountain range mountain range). There are lots more everyday examples of interlanguage tautologies of the latter kind on Wikipedia

But there are plenty of examples in science and technology. For instance, this patent title - RAID array configuration synchronization at power on is just one of many examples that cite the acronym RAID followed by the word array, as if RAID standing for “redundant array of independent disks”. Ironic indeed that the phrase itself contains the word redundant.

HIV virus shows up countless times throughout the media, and no less in scientific journal article titles, such as this one - Prevalence of HIV virus among patients, I even saw the phrase “female girls” in one reference on the subject of Rett syndrome. And, there are plenty of examples along the lines of LED display, LCD display, and DC current.

Not quite a pure rhetorical tautology, the graphics acronym TIFF is often accompanied by the word “file” as in a TIFF file, which literally means “tagged image file format file”. Same goes for the phrase pertaining to Adobe’s almost ubiquitous and much-maligned “PDF format”, which expands to “portable document format format”. Then there are phrases like DOS operating system (disk operating system operating system), Windows NT technology, (Windows New Technology technology), BASIC code (Beginners’ All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code code), and ISDN network (Integrated Services Digital Network network).

There’s a nice extensive, long itemised listing of redundant tautologies to be found located here, but is there any purposeful point to drawing your attention to these phrases? Not really, but they’re great fun to find so if you discover any others please let me know via the comments box.

An Amply Adequate Sufficiency of Tautology

In the spirit of recent posts about conversational spam and other such topics, I thought I’d let you into a little secret. My blog comment spam folder fills up every day but thanks to Akismet you never get to see the spam on the blog itself. Same goes for my GMail account spam folder (I route all email through it for that very reason). You probably find the same. Several hundred spam comments every day and the same again in email spam. It can get out of control during the holiday season when you’re not there to check every day. So, what do with it all?

You have two options: you could quickly scan page after page of spam, which can add up to a lot of time each week looking for false positives (and that’s even if you are greasing the spam) or you could simply learn to let go of your spam folders.

Both Akismet for comment spam and GMail for email spam automatically delete the contents of their respective spam folder once entries reach a certain age. The trick is not to be tempted to keep checking the spam folders, just in case. Just let the filters do their job and ignore the contents. If there are false positives, so what? 99.999% of the stuff that is filtered (once you’ve trained the system by properly assigning definite false positives and false negatives early on) is most certainly spam.

Do you really need to wade through page after page of ads for “lager beasts”, “vI@ gera gel”, and “dr@gs Rx online”? No? Me neither. Just learn to let go and you will feel a weight lifted from your shoulders. After I got back online following the Christmas break (other winter solstice festivals are available), Sciencebase had accumulated 14052 spam comments. One click on “Delete All” removed the whole lot from the blog’s database.

I am sure some readers will have found that no amount of training prevents a regular slurry of false positives, so for those poor unfortunates you may have to ignore this advice.

For those with a 99.9999% miss rate, the forget-about-it approach is such a powerful exercise in self control, it’s almost Zen, although I’m sure the psychologists in the audience will have something to say about that (in fact please do, but make sure your comments don’t look spammy).

Learn to Let Go of Your Spam Folders