Doing away with academic gatekeeper language.

January 18, 2018 7:45 AM

Do Large (Magnitude ≥8) Global Earthquakes Occur on Preferred Days of the Calendar Year or Lunar Cycle?
posted by biffa (18 comments total)

tldr
posted by CynicalKnight at 7:52 AM on January 18, 2018 [9 favorites]

I was expecting.... more.
posted by slipthought at 7:54 AM on January 18, 2018 [3 favorites]

Some background: SRL is the Seismological Society of America's more "relaxed" journal (they published this, for instance -- necessary background). Also, Susan Hough knows earthquake catalogues as well as anyone alive.
posted by irrelephant at 8:03 AM on January 18, 2018 [4 favorites]

This is The. Best.
posted by Secretariat at 8:23 AM on January 18, 2018 [1 favorite]

Somewhere the ghost of Iben Browning raises an eyebrow.
posted by 1f2frfbf at 8:24 AM on January 18, 2018

When I'm mistakenly put on an email chain, should I hit reply all asking to be removed? I'm sure it's a previously, but hard to search up.
posted by persona at 8:25 AM on January 18, 2018 [1 favorite]

Betteridge's Law, but for academic papers.
posted by Chrysostom at 8:33 AM on January 18, 2018

Well dammit, now I want to buy the article.
posted by yhbc at 8:36 AM on January 18, 2018

I had a tedious geology professor once who claimed he could predict earthquakes. It was mostly the lead-in to a lecture about probability, involved us flipping a bunch of coins and him predicting the coinflips, and then ended with us all having a general feeling about the frequency of different sizes of earthquakes each year worldwide.

I'm currently predicting all the geology professors starting their classes this week with a discussion of this paper.
posted by Secretariat at 8:45 AM on January 18, 2018

That's one perspective. But on the other hand: no.
posted by The corpse in the library at 9:05 AM on January 18, 2018 [1 favorite]

> When I'm mistakenly put on an email chain, should I hit reply all asking to be removed?

You can get reprints.
posted by theora55 at 9:49 AM on January 18, 2018

I can't find the original on Sci Hub, guess I need to go down to my local university library?
posted by Nelson at 10:02 AM on January 18, 2018

If you read the bibliography, this is a meta-analysis based on four other papers:

- "Nuh-uh"
- "Derp"
- "Are You Mental?"
- One out of Japan whose title I can't read
posted by Quindar Beep at 10:12 AM on January 18, 2018

I would like to cite this article the next time I am in Acapulco and someone pops their head out from a dark alley off Avenida Costera Miguel Alemán to ask me if I "wanna get fucked up".
posted by CynicalKnight at 10:55 AM on January 18, 2018 [1 favorite]

One hypo-laconic paper. Wow, but informative.
posted by Oyéah at 1:28 PM on January 18, 2018

I love this. I'd like to see yes-no abstracts become a trend.
posted by Transl3y at 2:13 PM on January 18, 2018

As soon as I saw the OPP link, I thought "Betteridge". If I spent non-zero time with clickbait-y "news" services like BuzzFeed and HuffPo I probably would not have even noticed that it was a question, because that's what half the headlines look like now. (The other half are two short sentences. Here's why.)

Quit the sweet news snack habit, folks, it rots the brain.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines
posted by intermod at 8:05 PM on January 18, 2018

> Oyéah:
"One hypo-laconic paper. Wow, but informative."

The actual paper isn't laconic. It's based on a study of 214 earthquakes and it concludes that there is no evidence that large earthquake rates are modulated significantly by the position of the Earth relative to either the Moon or the Sun, and also that apparent clustering and anticlustering arise commonly in random catalogs, potentially fueling enduring earthquake myths.

It's a rigorous analysis of what seems to be a popular misconception. The Significant Earthquake Database is here.
posted by Vesihiisi at 12:02 PM on January 19, 2018 [2 favorites]