From the Files of the Department of Pointless Research, case #2

It appears researchers in Canada have been hard at work on a problem even more pressing than quantifying the amount of useless babble on Twitter - gaming out the most effective government response to a zombie apocalypse. Once again, this raises several questions:

1.)Was this project in any way officially sanctioned or subsidized by the University of Ottawa or Carleton University? If so, was the person responsible for approving the grant proposal drunk? High? Brain-damaged? Some combination of the three? Not to go all snobbish academic fuddy duddy on you, but if I were a donor to either of these schools, or a Canadian worker paying taxes to support them, I'd want the money spent on something with a bit more, uh, scholarly merit.

2.)Do these researchers have tenure? If so, is it reviewable?

3.)If you're going to research infectious disease, wouldn't it be a better use of time and resources to concentrate on a disease that actually exists? Or, at the very least, concentrate on a fictional disease that poses more of a threat, such as the Andromeda strain?

4.)Are the authors of the study aware of, and did they properly acknowledge, previous scholarship in this area of study?