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The New Weekly Studies Studies This Week's New Studies
by Jon Sindell

A new study from the University Of Washington finds that dog walkers who walk their dogs on their right-hand side on the eastern bank of streets situated along true north-south axes are 21% more likely than left-hand-side dog walkers to report satisfaction with their dog-walking experience. The study's authors theorize that the heightened frontal exposure to south-generated solar emanations experienced by right-side eastern-bank walkers may account for much of the discrepancy, though the authors do not rule out a differential effect from the Earth's magnetic field. Eighty-eight percent of dog-walking experts consulted hail the study as support for an official governmental recommendation that dog-walkers situated in the Northern Hemisphere walk their dogs on the right-hand side of the eastern bank of true north-south streets, but caution that research needs to be conducted into the effect of sun hats of varying brim dimensions in combatting the deleterious effects of increased exposure to direct solar emanations.

A new study released by the Department of Urban Health of the City of Toronto has found that urban schoolchildren who engaged in forty-five minutes or more of Unstructured Outdoor Play per day experienced fewer symptoms of depression and hyperactivity than children who did not. The five-year longitudinal study, which followed children from age seven through age twelve, also detected an inverse correlation between the quantum of a participant's UOP and the participant's body-mass index. Participants who engaged in the most UOP, according to the study, reported the highest levels of Fully Unalloyed Naturalness and engaged in the lowest frequency of Dysfunctional Interactions with Peers. One seven-year-old study participant, Janelle Bradford, told researchers: "I like to play."

A new study in the field of Global Advanced Gastronomical Studies has found a higher incidence of nascent symptions of pre-carpal-tunnel syndrome in British "tines-down" diners as compared with American "hand-switchers," i.e., diners who switch their tined dining utensil from their non-dominant to their dominant hand before conveying captured food materials to their ingestional orifice. The study by the GAGS Institute, the most comprehensive of its kind, surveyed approximately seventy-two-thousand subjects from the United States and Great Britain, and found that 1.077% of British "tines-down" diners reported at least mild nascent symptoms of pre-carpal-tunnel syndrome in their non-dominant arm, as compared with only 1.065% of American diners. Medical experts attribute the increased level of symptomology among tines-down diners to the greater degree of supination of the non-dominant wrist required to complete the ingestional protocol. Conversely, 1.072% of American "hand-switchers" reported at least mild early symptoms of pre-carpal-tunnel syndrome in their dominant arm, as compared with only 1.068% of British diners. The GAGS Institute anticipates partnering with the University Of Washington to compare the rates of pre-carpal-tunnel syndrome among tines-down and tines-up diners in the Southern versus the Northern Hemisphere.

A new survey with dramatic implications for the intersection of personal hygiene and public health has found an inverse correlation between the time subjects spend in the bathroom attending to personal hygiene and the quantum of time elapsed since the bathroom was last painted. The three-year survey, funded by the nonprofit Pigmental Advanced Institute for Necessary Tints, found that those subjects whose bathrooms had been repainted most recently spent an average of 36.4% more time attending to every one of the personal-hygiene dimensions studied, i.e.: dental care, hand-washing, ear-wax removal, and belly-button-lint extraction. The study further found that the effect remained constant whether the bathroom had been repainted in lovely Sea Foam Green, soothing South Seas Breeze, or invigorating Crystal Stream. The study has been lauded by public-health officials in dozens of cities, many of which have already commissioned studies of the effect of new paint jobs on the productivity of public-health officials.

Finally, a bifurcated attitudinal study of college graduates and tenured non-STEM professors finds a strong correlation between respondents' occupational and temporal status and their perception of the value of a non-STEM education, with 99.9% of tenured professors categorizing a non-STEM college education as "essential," "vital," or "indispensable," while only 45% of graduates one-to-five years removed from college used the same terms to describe their education, with 55% classifying their education as "banal," "lame," or "a ceaseless deluge of doctrinal sludge." Meanwhile, 82.3% of non-STEM graduates five or more years removed from college categorized their education as either "Eff off!" or "A bloody fookin' waste of time," with 1.3% jabbing a fork into the investigator's nose, tines up.