Some Retraction Watch Items: A star may not be quite as bright, but an astronomer deserves a gold star for retracting his findings within 24 hours of posting them and thanking those that helped him find the error. A study “asked whether the top scientific journals, Nature and Science, represented men and women equally as authors, subjects, and objects in photographs. Overwhelmingly, women were underrepresented in these magazines, an effect that was apparent even in advertisements and stock photographs.” “A scientific paper can mislead,” says Andrew Gelman. “People can read a paper, or see later popularizations of the work, and think that ‘science shows’ something that science didn’t show.”

Rose Madeline Mula writes: The mimeograph machine was another diabolic duplicating device. If we didn't want to get purple ink all over ourselves, instead of using a ditto master, we typed a mimeograph stencil. This was a blue sheet over a stiff backing on which we typed without a typewriter ribbon so that the keys cut through the stencil. If we made a mistake, we coated it with a special white glop, waited for it to dry, and then tried to cut the correct symbols through the glop. Good luck. When the typing and glopping were finished, we wrapped the stencil around the black-ink coated drum of the mimeograph machine and cranked out the required copies. The big advantage of this method was no purple-stained clothes and body parts. We did, however, wind up with black-stained clothes and body parts.

Elaine Soloway writes: I have turned to therapy a handful of times. My slim record is not because I disdain the practice or am reluctant to reveal my secrets. Fifty-five minutes focused on me, a sympathetic witness to my angst, a collaborator in my version of the story; who wouldn't relish the experience. Because I had not lived in the same city as my daughters for 25 years, and since I was unfettered in Chicago (no husband, house, dog, car, debt), I thought the time was right to jump into their world. But, instead of considering this decision an abandonment of Los Angeles, I'll add Bi-Coastal to my labels and have the best of both worlds.

The items exploring the vast spectrum of Tolkien's creative and scholarly output range from his early abstract paintings in The Book of Ishness to the tales he wrote for his children. Original manuscripts of his popular classics sit alongside lesser-known and posthumous works and materials, some of which will be on public display for the very first time. The range of objects on display includes Tolkien's creation of language, his childhood and student days, his career as a scholar of literature, and his family life as a husband and father.      

"CBP and U.S. Border Patrol developed a methodology for prioritizing future barrier deployments along the entire southwest border, which included input from Border Patrol officials, data on illegal entry traffic, and analysis of operational and engineering feasibility for each potential location. However, the strategy did not include analysis of the costs associated with deploying barriers in each location or segment, which can vary depending on topography, land ownership, and other factors. Without assessing costs, consistent with leading practices for capital decision making, CBP does not have complete information for prioritizing locations to use its resources in the most cost-effective manner." 

Purdue’s 1996-2002 marketing plans for OxyContin, which Kaiser Health News made public this year for the first time, offer an unprecedented look at how that company spent millions of dollars to push opioids for growing legions of pain sufferers. Some of those drugmakers’ sales promotions downplayed or ignored the risks of taking opioids, or made false claims about their safety, federal regulators have asserted in warning letters to the companies. A wave of lawsuits demanding reimbursement and accountability for the opioid crisis now ravaging communities has heightened awareness about how and when drug makers realized the potential dangers of their products.

Austin, Texas recently took a new tack in the ongoing war between “sanctuary cities" and federal immigration authorities. Declaring itself a “freedom city,” the Texas capital instructed its police officers to arrest fewer people for minor crimes — to prevent their fingerprints from going to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — and to inform people that they may refuse a request to present their immigration papers. Though novel, Austin’s gambit fits into a broader pattern: As the Trump administration this year ratcheted up its efforts to curb illegal immigration, cities and states experimented with new ways to resist — or assist — the crackdown.

In 1848 — a year of political revolution across Europe — seven young Englishmen with aspirations to rebel against the art world formed a secret artistic alliance. Calling themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the artists — including William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and John Everett Millais — opposed the Royal Academy of Art’s prevailing aesthetic tenets embodied by its first president, Sir Joshua Reynolds, whom they christened “Sir Sloshua.”

"We’ve recently become aware of a growing number of manufacturers marketing “vaginal rejuvenation” devices to women and claiming these procedures will treat conditions and symptoms related to menopause, urinary incontinence or sexual function. The procedures use lasers and other energy-based devices to destroy or reshape vaginal tissue. These products have serious risks and don’t have adequate evidence to support their use for these purposes. We are deeply concerned women are being harmed."

Earlier this season I had found that a shallot in my fridge had started growing. I took a chance and planted it. Then I forgot about it, never really expecting anything to come of it. Then the garden surprised me. A tall stalk reached out of the dirt. I thought it was a wild onion and left it alone. It continued to shoot up and then there was an intriguing flower at the end of it. When I dug it up to see what was growing, I saw the shallot had grown and multiplied! Not only was the flower beautiful to see but the shallots were delicious to eat.

Few American homeowners were spared from the broad housing collapse a decade ago, but Generation Xers were hit particularly hard. Newer to the housing market, more likely to be buying at peak prices and taking on more mortgage debt to buy their homes, they lost more wealth than other generations. But a new Pew Research Center analysis of Federal Reserve data finds that Gen Xers are the only generation of households to recover the wealth they lost during the Great Recession.

Joan L. Cannon wrote: An editor no longer can browse the slush pile for something that might be to his or her individual taste and take a flier on it. As for fiction: the formulas for success (read enormous sales) have multiplied. Does the story have a thriller pace? Check. Plenty of sex, preferably explicit and at least somewhat unconventional? Check. Violence? Check. Shocking characters, scenes, plots? Check. Or, perhaps to fit into another category, it may need to be gently bland, without a suggestion of the unpleasant realities of life and certainly no more than a hint of sex, and make every character call regularly and verbally on the Almighty. Even the category romances of my day have become less rather than more convincing.

"A 2017 study in the Journal of Economic Perspectives examined the consumption of false news in the US during the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election. In a survey of 1,208 U.S. adults, 15 percent said they remembered seeing false news stories, and 8 percent acknowledged seeing one of these stories and believing it. The study’s authors — Hunt Allcott, an associate economics professor at New York University, and Matthew Gentzkow, an economics professor at Stanford University — estimated that US adults, on average, 'read and remembered on the order of one or perhaps several fake news articles during the election period.'"

The authors stress that rising temperature and climate change should not be viewed as direct motivations for suicide. Instead, they point out that temperature and climate may increase the risk of suicide by affecting the likelihood that an individual situation leads to an attempt at self-harm. “Hotter temperatures are clearly not the only, nor the most important, risk factor for suicide,” Burke emphasized. “But our findings suggest that warming can have a surprisingly large impact on suicide risk, and this matters for both our understanding of mental health as well as for what we should expect as temperatures continue to warm.”