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?

From the Files of the Department of Pointless Research

According to a study by Pear Analytics, an American market research firm, 40% of all "tweets" are "pointless babble". This raises a few questions in my mind-

1.)How did the designers of the study determine their definition of "pointless babble"? They cite "I'm eating a sandwich" as an example, but it seems to me this really depends on one's perspective. Perhaps for the large cohort of Twitter users who employ the service as a medium for vapid narcissism, reading news updates tweeted from the streets of Tehran is pointless babble, whereas reading about themselves or their friends having a tasty pastrami-on-rye is the apex of fulfilling interpersonal communication.

2.)What percentage of tweets were they expecting to consist of meaningful content? It's a microblogging service that restricts you to 140 characters per post, after all.

3.)What are the other 60% of Twitter posts? Lines from lost works of Shakespeare? Bits of the unifying theory of physics?

4.)Who decided to commission this study, and presumably pay people to design it and carry it out? In this economy, it seems like a marketing firm would have better things to do, like, say, helping its clients sell their products and keep their businesses afloat.

All questions to ponder.