ORIGINAL: KurtC
ORIGINAL: Agathosdaimon
well my wife says the study actually would have been really carried out after looking over its method, but that really there was still not much more to it than staff buying some spoons and marking them and that this would likely have just been a spare time bit of fun - apparently there are researchers out there for who things like this - doing studies and applying scientific rigour is their idea of fun - i know my wife finds math anre excel a lot more fun than i ever will, - but then she sees me playing turnbased wargame and thinks its the most boring thing in the world and cannot understand why i would ever play such a thing.
So, you're saying we are being trolled by Australian researchers? Oh the humanity! haha!
you could say that, but i believe this is just researchers humoring themselves and if the public learns about it is incidental - anyone can view abstracts, but actual journal articles and papers are not viewable unless you are subscribed them - usually it is just insitutions that are subscribed.
scientific researcher humour is a bit too dry and injokey for me, some jokes i have seen are literally just formulas that only other scientists would get.
If they are ever trolling anyone it is usually the scammy pretend predator journals that spam their inboxes - the ones that pretend to be some important journal and that have no quality control at all -and some are so lazy that the publish the joke papers even when the submitter doesnt even pay the fee they demand (and not that they should)