Erin Butler and Nathaniel Dominy, who are scientists at Dartmouth College, married to each other, and Monty Python fans, have written a paper that does a gait analysis of the various silly walks performed in the classic sketch known as the Ministry of Silly Walks. John Cleese plays Mr. Teabag, who works at the Ministry of Silly Walks. Mt. Putey (Michael Palin) comes to his office hoping for a grant to develop a silly walk. Butler and Dominy did the study to celebrate the sketch’s 50th anniversary, and to draw attention to the need to reform the peer review process for health studies.
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For their own gait analysis, Butler and Dominy studied both Mr. Putey’s and the Minister’s gait cycles in the video of the original 1970 televised sketch, as well as the Minister’s gaits from a 1980 live stage performance in Los Angeles. “If silly walking can be defined as deviations from typical walking, then silliness can be quantified using two-dimensional video-based motion analysis,” they wrote. So that’s what they did. Butler and Dominy found that the Minister’s silly walk is much more variable than a normal human walk—6.7 times as much—while Mr. Putey’s walk-in-progress is only 3.3 times more variable.
So what does all this silly walking have to do with academic peer review? The sketch might be satirizing bureaucratic inefficiency, but Cleese’s Minister is essentially engaging in a hyper-streamlined version of the peer review process in his meeting with Mr. Putey that (the authors concluded) resulted in a fair assessment. In reality, “Peer review is a very time-intensive process, both for the application and the reviews,” said Butler.
“If the process were streamlined and grants were awarded more quickly, researchers could start their work earlier, accelerating the timeline for research,” said Dominy. This would also save grant administrators time and money.
Read more of their findings at Ars Technica. -via Real Clear Science
(Image credit: Erin E. Butler and Nathaniel J. Dominy)
Source: neatorama