Passing the Dinner Table Test

Absence at the Dinner Table:

The Dinner Table Problem: the Rectangular Case

Consider n people who are seated randomly at a rectangular table with ⌊n/2⌋ and ⌈n/2⌉ seats along the two opposite sides, for two dinners. What is the probability that neighbors at the first dinner are no longer neighbors at the second one? We give an explicit formula and show that its asymptotic behavior as n goes to infinity is e(1+ 4/n) (it is known that it is e(1−4/n) for a round table). A ...

Dinner Table Human Capital and Entrepreneurship

We document three new facts about entrepreneurship. First, a majority of male entrepreneurs start a firm in the same or a closely related industry as their fathers’ industry of employment. Second, this tendency is correlated with intelligence: higher-IQ entrepreneurs are less likely to follow their fathers. Third, an entrepreneur that starts a firm in the same 5-digit industry as where his fath...

Does antimicrobial stewardship begin at the dinner table?

Stewardship Begin at the Dinner Table? To the Editor—Waters et al [1] are to be congratulated for their work characterizing and profiling Staphylococcus aureus found in commercially available meat purchased throughout the United States. This study found that 50% of retail beef, pork, and poultry products are contaminated with S. aureus, and 96% of these isolates were resistant to at least 1 ant...

Passing the test

It was while drafting an editorial on the timely subject of publishing ethics that it first came to light that Biology Open (BiO) was one of the journals that received as a submission a spoof article devised by a journalist working for the journal Science (Bohannon, 2013). The article was described as being obviously flawed to any competent scientist. 304 spoof articles were submitted to Open A...