If you go to Google Scholar and search "Tai's model," you can find that this from 1994:<p>"Tai's formula is the trapezoidal rule"<p><a href="http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/17/10/1224.short" rel="nofollow">http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/17/10/1224.short</a><p>As well as Tai's response:
<a href="http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/17/10/1225.2.short" rel="nofollow">http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/17/10/1225.2.short</a><p>As a fellow academic, it seems to me like Tai wasn't really claiming to have reinvented the wheel here (or maybe I should say the area under the wheel). It looks to me like she took what my psychologist friends call the "Least Publishable Unit" (LPU) too much to heart. She claims, in the response, that she was asked to publish it by some colleagues so that they could cite her in a paper of their own; it's unclear to me why they would <i>need</i> to cite such a thing, but most likely it was just the typical explanation - where you cite your friends at any possible opportunity, even when they recapitulate Isaac Newton ;)<p>Granted, I think it's a weak rationale, but I suspect it's not so much that no one involved knew calculus; it's more that they wanted to drum up more citations for people inside their field rather than outside. In fact, I see that even the people who wrote in to protest managed to rack up 7 citations.
Beyond being a feel-good piece for math-inclined folks to finally have one to hold over those arrogant doctors, this basically reveals all the worst parts of credit distribution in academia. Until "knowledge" can be quantified and catalogued in an exhaustive database such that new contributions can be evaluated instantly for novelty, this kind of thing will occur because there are lots of inter-academic communication barriers to intermediate.<p>Also, the context of citations is important and isn't quantified by anyone. My guess would be that this paper has been cited more as a cautionary tale than in actual practice, and those two citations should not be treated equally.
From the paper:<p>In Tai's Model, the total area under a curve is computed by dividing the area under the curve between two designated values on the X-axis (abscissas) into small segments (rectangles and triangles) whose areas can be accurately calculated from their respective geometrical formulas. The total sum of these individual areas thus represents the total area under the curve. Validity of the model is established by comparing total areas obtained from this model to these same areas obtained from graphic method Gess than ±0.4%). Other formulas widely applied by researchers under- or overestimated total area under a metabolic curve by a great margin.<p>Absolutely hilarious!
Presently cited over 300 times according to Google Scholar:<p><a href="https://scholar.google.ca/scholar?cites=18129095207210817294&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en" rel="nofollow">https://scholar.google.ca/scholar?cites=18129095207210817294...</a><p>It's like an academic equivalent of a software patent on an existing idea.
Ha!<p>For whatever it's worth, physicists aren't necessarily up on everything written by the medical community. Take for example, these letters to Diabetes Care written in 1994 criticizing Tai's article soon after it was published:<p>www.math.uconn.edu/~kconrad/math1132s14/handouts/taicomments.pdf
Is knowledge knowledge if unknown?<p>This is similar to founders/creators getting kicked out when mass marketing kicks in - who generated the wealth?<p>In terms of human good, unfortunately it's the latter.<p>And if the definition of the Scientific Method includes sharing with a community. If so, you cannot do science alone. But how big does the community need to be? Does sharing it with one other person enough? A small community? A large community? <i>Everyone</i>?<p>I think, if we're going to include sharing, it has to be with all humanity (broadly, to include other imtelligences). Wartime science <i>isn't</i> science.
This is sad because it shows that general enducation standards have dropped dramatically across the board given that this sort of stuff really should be (and used to be) known by every high school student..