It’s July the first: Find more and more!
From Psychology Today
The Limits of Force-Fed Learning
From Literary Review
L’État, c’est Moi
Sudhir Hazareesingh on Charles de Gaulle and the France he saved.
http://www.literaryreview.co.uk/hazareesingh_07_10.html
Interview with Margaret Atwood
The Booker Prize-winning author and ‘dogged blogger and Tweeter’ talks to Rosalind Porterabout writing and publishing in these digital times.
http://www.literaryreview.co.uk/interview_07_10.html
Subterranean Sublime
David Lewis-Williams discovers the mystical art of our early ancestors on a journey through the Ice Age caves of the Dordogne.
http://www.literaryreview.co.uk/lewis-williams_07_10.html
When a Billion Chinese Jump
Will the decisions taken in Beijing determine humanity’s fate? Jonathan Mirsky on China’s environmental destruction and its far-reaching consequences.
http://www.literaryreview.co.uk/mirsky_07_10.html
From Discover
Newfound Fossils Suggest Multicellular Life Took Hold 2 Billion Years Ago
A Toothy Predator of the Prehistoric Seas: Meet the Leviathan Whale
Honoring Justice John Paul Stevens, Savior of the VCR
Best Science Teacher Ever Tricks Students Into Joining NASA Mission
Next from X Prize: An Award for Cleaning up BP’s Oil Spill?
The Little Flying Car That Could… Get FAA Approval
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Newfound Fossils Suggest Multicellular Life Took Hold 2 Billion Years Ago Is mulitcellular life like us just the new kid on the biological block, a latecomer to a world dominated by single-celled organisms like bacteria? Perhaps not—multicellular life could be nearly half as old as the Earth itself. A new study out today in Nature identifies fossils from Gabon in Africa that date back 2.1 billion years. The organic material is long gone, but the scientists say these are the oldest multicellular organisms ever found. That date takes them way back before the Cambrian explosion 500 million years ago that made multiple-celled life widespread on the planet. ‘We have these macrofossils turning up in a world that was purely microbial,’ says Stefan Bengtson, a palaeozoologist at the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm and a co-author on the report. ‘That’s a big deal because when you finally get big organisms, it changes the way the biosphere works, as they interact with microbes and each other’ [Nature]. It’s hard to know for sure that these specimens—which don’t have a name yet and grew up to five inches across—are truly multicellular, because no organic material remains. Sometimes bacteria live in larger sheets, and those aren’t true multicellular organisms. But in this case, study author Abderrazak El Albani says, the complex structure shown by the fossil remains show signs of communication between cells. And, he says, the timing of these fossils suggests why the organism was able to become more complex: There was suddenly lots of oxygen back then. Just a few million years before … the newly discovered fossils appear in the fossil record, Earth experienced what’s called the Great Oxidation Event. The sudden evolution of photosynthesizing bacteria radically changed Earth’s atmosphere, kick-starting its transformation from nearly oxygen-free into today’s breathable air [Wired.com]. With all that oxygen just waiting to be breathed, this was probably just one of many times multicellular life took off independently, according to paleontologist Philip Donoghue. Importantly, even if these fossils are the oldest-known multicellular organisms, that doesn’t mean they were the ancestors of all multicellular life, Donoghue said. ‘Multicellularity hasn’t evolved just once; it’s evolved almost 20 times even amongst living lineages,’ he said. ‘This is probably one of a great number of extinct lineages that experimented with [increased] organismal complexity’ [The Scientist]. Related Content: |
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A Toothy Predator of the Prehistoric Seas: Meet the Leviathan Whale Twelve million years ago, one sperm whale was king. Between 40 and 60 feet in length the beast scientists named Leviathan melvillei wasn’t any bigger than today’s sperm whales, but look at those teeth! As described in a paper published in Nature today, Olivier Lambert discovered the whale’s fossils in a Peruvian desert. The creature’s name says it all: [It] combines the Hebrew word ‘Livyatan’, which refers to large mythological sea monsters, with the name of American novelist Herman Melville, who penned Moby-Dick— ‘one of my favorite sea books’, says lead author Olivier Lambert of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris. [Nature News] The prehistoric sperm whale may have eaten baleen whales, and its largest chompers are a foot long and some four inches wide. For all the details, check out Ed Yong’s post on Not Exactly Rocket Science. Related content: |
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Honoring Justice John Paul Stevens, Savior of the VCR The nation’s political focus this week is on the plodding confirmation hearings for Elena Kagan to become a Supreme Court justice. But if you need a break from choreographed political spectacle, it’s a good time to remember that the man she would replace, Justice John Paul Stevens, casts a long shadow over science and tech. Ars Technica revisits Justice Stevens’ legacy—he was a onetime Navy cryptographer who helped Internet freedom by ruling against parts of the Communications Decency Act and opposing software patents. And if you still have drawers full of Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes you taped off TV, you have Stevens’ decision in Sony v. Universal to thank for that (as well as setting the precedent that stopped the music industry from suppressing mp3 players). In that 1984 case, the Supreme Court came just one vote short of banning the Betamax VCR on the grounds that taping television shows off the air was an infringement of copyright. Justice Stevens wrote for a 5-4 majority that ‘time shifting’—the practice of recording shows for later viewing—was a fair use under copyright law. Stevens concluded that manufacturers were not liable for their customers’ infringement if their devices were capable of ‘substantial non-infringing use.’ He noted that Congress was free to amend copyright law to give Hollywood control over VCR technology, but concluded that the courts shouldn’t do so unilaterally [Ars Technica]. You, sir, shall be missed. Related Content:
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Best Science Teacher Ever Tricks Students Into Joining NASA Mission When Japan’s Hayabusa space probe returned home from a seven-year odyssey this month, we got to see the amazing video as it broke up in a brilliant flash in the atmosphere and deposited its sample container (hopefully containing asteroid material) in Australia. Three high school students from Massachusetts, however, got a much better view. They experienced it first hand, and helped make that video for the world to see, thanks to a little white lie told by their teacher. Ron Dantowitz of Brookline, Massachusetts, gave the three a challenge: If you had to track an object entering the atmosphere at 27,000 miles per hour, how would you know where to look, how would you keep the camera trained on the careening object, and what could you learn about the temperatures the object encountered? After they worked on the project for half a year, Dantowitz let loose his secret—this was no hypothetical scenario. He and the three students got to fly on the DC-8 over Australia and help NASA film Hayabusa’s return. ‘We had flown several practices, but when we took off for the real thing, I felt a surge of adrenaline,’ says [James] Breitmeyer. ‘I was on the edge of my seat, anxious for our plane to arrive at the right place at the right time.’ ‘We got to the rendezvous area 30 minutes ahead of time,’ says Dantowitz. ‘So we practiced the rendezvous to make sure everyone knew which stars to line the cameras up with to capture Hayabusa’s re-entry. By the time we finished the trial run, we had only 2 or 3 minutes to go’ [NASA Science News]. The students also captured spectral images like this one, showing how Hayabusa and its sample return container reacted with the atmosphere. Concerning the mission itself, scientists at Japan’s space agency JAXA are slowly prying open the container to find out whether their plucky explorer captured any samples from its visit to an asteroid. The presence of a low-pressure gas inside the capsule has already been detected, the agency is reporting. The nature of the gas, and whether it’s of extraterrestrial origin, has not yet been determined. The opening of the capsule is expected to take a week or more, though JAXA has not stated whether this is due to prudence on the part of the scientists or simply being unable to pry the darn package open [Popular Science]. We hope they find something inside. It would be the first time a probe has brought back samples from an asteroid it visited. And Hayabusa’s return after a long and troubled journey has inspired the Japanese government to pledge the funds for a sequel, the Washington Post reports. Related Content:
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Next from X Prize: An Award for Cleaning up BP’s Oil Spill? BP can’t clean up its mess. Kevin Costner’s trying. But if you know how to clean up the leaking oil in the Gulf of Mexico, you could be a winner. The X Prize Foundation says this week that it’s considering the creation of a multimillion-dollar prize for the solution to cleaning the BP oil spill. This is the same organization that put together awards of $10 million or more for private spacecraft and high mileage cars. The foundation’s Frances Beland announced the idea at an oil spill conference in Washington, D.C. Beland said the foundation wanted to come up with a prize to find a solution to capping the well but found it was unable to obtain enough data to design such a challenge, so it opted to focus on the cleanup. ‘We’re going to launch a prize for cleanup, and we’re going to kick ass,’ he said, to applause. Beland said 35,000 solutions to the Gulf crisis have been proposed to BP, the government and other organizations, including the X Prize Foundation [CNN]. Despite Beland’s high-flying rhetoric, many teams are finding little success in the other X Prize events that are ongoing. The Automotive X Prize, intend to reward cars that can exceed 100 miles per gallon, went through its knockout stage to narrow the competition before next month’s finals. Many of the entries fell by the wayside, unable to meet the milestones of at least 67 MPG or equivalent (MPGe) needed at this stage. (The ‘equivalent’ business is necessary because many of the experimental vehicles use energy sources other than gasoline.) The Knockout outcome was particularly disappointing for the West Philly team, a high-school group that garnered more and more attention as the contest progressed…. West Philly’s converted Ford Focus fell 3.5 points short of the required efficiency score of 67 MPGe, apparently due in part to a battery-charging snafu [MSNBC]. In addition, some of the car entries stretch the competition definition of being something you could sell to ordinary drivers. As DISCOVER saw when we visited the Shell Eco-Marathon, you can make cars that score way, way above 100 MPG if you sacrifice just about everything else in pursuit of that goal. The Auto X Prize cars are closer to what you might see on the road, but many of the designs are still a little out there. And given the teams’ struggles to meet even 67 MPG while staying within the competition’s rules, there’s a chance that the winner will be… nobody. ‘The prize money’s not won if you’re not successful,’ said Eric Cahill, X Prize’s senior director. He added that it’s ‘entirely possible’ that no competitor will achieve the target. ‘When the rules were first published, we received a lot of heat that this was too easy,’ Mr. Cahill said. But as batteries overheated, sensors malfunctioned and cars struggled to cut through densely humid air, the target looks anything but easy [The New York Times]. Thinking back to the mess in the Gulf, we can’t help but reflect on that ever-growing list of 35,000 ideas for the cleanup: Hopefully at least one of them has what it takes. Related Content:
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The Little Flying Car That Could… Get FAA Approval It’s a car… It’s a plane… It’s a car-plane. Last March, we described the maiden flight of Terrafugia’s new flying, driving machine, called the Transition. Now we’re one step closer to a Jetson’s reality: the Transition has just received FAA approval as a ‘light sport aircraft.’ Approval was not guaranteed, since the little guy is a bit husky, weighing more than the FAA’s ‘light sport aircraft’ limit. As The Register reports, Terrafugia wanted to keep the plane in this classification to keep the vehicle available to more drivers/pilots. [T]he plane-car was originally designed to fit within a weight limit of 1320 lb, meaning that it could qualify as a ‘light sport’ aircraft. A US light sport pilot’s license is significantly easier and cheaper to get than a normal private ticket, requiring only 20 hours logged, and red tape is lessened. [The Register] But giving Transition road-worthy safety gear (like an air bag) meant adding on the pounds. The FAA has said that they’re willing to let a little extra weight slide, allowing the Transition 110-pounds worth of stretching room. The vehicle can travel at 115 mph in the air and requires 1,700 feet to take off. When it folds up its wings (which it can do electronically), it can snuggle into a garage or a gas station. Though it does seem an exciting commuting option, Terafugia designed the Transition with pilots in mind, giving them the option to land and drive when flying conditions are too rough. The two-seater Transition can use its front-wheel drive on roads at ordinary highway speeds, with wings folded, at a respectable 30 miles per gallon. Once it has arrived at a suitable take-off spot–an airport, or adequately sized piece of flat private land–it can fold down the wings, engage its rear-facing propeller, and take off. [The Telegraph] So far, Terrafugia says 70 futuristic folks have pre-ordered the car, paying a refundable $10,000 deposit. The total price tag is $194,000. Related content: |
More medical news
Millions of vaccine doses to be burned
Medicine & Health / Medications
1hour ago | not rated yet | 1
(AP) — About a quarter of the swine flu vaccine produced for the U.S. public has expired - meaning that a whopping 40 million doses worth about $260 million is being written off as trash.
Study links low national average IQs with infectious diseases
1hour ago | not rated yet | 0 | 
(PhysOrg.com) — Researchers in the US have noted areas of the world with the lowest average intelligence quotient (IQ) also tend to have the highest rates of infectious diseases, and suggest the energy required …
Researchers Show How Active Immune Tolerance Makes Pregnancy Possible
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(PhysOrg.com) — The concept of pregnancy makes no sense — at least not from an immunological point of view. After all, a fetus, carrying half of its father’s genome, is biologically distinct from its mother. The fetus is …
A nice article for the literary minded
The Girl Who Fixed the Umlaut
By Nora Ephron The New Yorker
There was a tap at the door at five in the morning. She woke up. Shit. Now what? She’d fallen asleep with her Palm Tungsten T3 in her hand. It would take only a moment to smash it against the wall and shove the battery up the nose of whoever was out there annoying her. She went to the door.
‘I know you’re home,’ he said.
Kalle fucking Blomkvist.
She tried to remember whether she was speaking to him or not. Probably not. She tried to remember why. No one knew why. It was undoubtedly because she’d been in a bad mood at some point. Lisbeth Salander was entitled to her bad moods on account of her miserable childhood and her tiny breasts, but it was starting to become confusing just how much irritability could be blamed on your slight figure and an abusive father you had once deliberately set on fire and then years later split open the head of with an axe.
Salander opened the door a crack and spent several paragraphs trying to decide whether to let Blomkvist in. Many italic thoughts flew through her mind. Go away. Perhaps. So what. Etc.
‘Please,’ he said. ‘I must see you. The umlaut on my computer isn’t working.’
He was cradling an iBook in his arms. She looked at him. He looked at her. She looked at him. He looked at her. And then she did what she usually did when she had run out of italic thoughts: she shook her head.
‘I can’t really go on without an umlaut,’ he said. ‘We’re in Sweden.’
But where in Sweden were they? There was no way to know, especially if you’d never been to Sweden. A few chapters ago, for example, an unscrupulous agent from Swedish Intelligence had tailed Blomkvist by taking Stora Essingen and Gröndal into Södermalm, and then driving down Hornsgatan and across Bellmansgatan via Brännkyrkagatan, with a final left onto Tavastgatan. Who cared, but there it was, in black-and-white, taking up space. And now Blomkvist was standing in her doorway. Someone might still be following him—but who? There was no real way to be sure even when you found out, because people’s names were so confusingly similar—Gullberg, Sandberg, and Holmberg; Nieminen and Niedermann; and, worst of all, Jonasson, Mårtensson, Torkelsson, Fredriksson, Svensson, Johansson, Svantesson, Fransson, and Paulsson.
‘I need my umlaut,’ Blomkvist said. ‘What if I want to go to Svavelsjö? Or Strängnäs? Or Södertälje? What if I want to write to Wadensjö? Or Ekström or Nyström?’
It was a compelling argument.
She opened the door.
He handed her the computer and went to make coffee on her Jura Impressa X7.
She tried to get the umlaut to work. No luck. She pinged Plague and explained the problem. Plague was fat, but he would know what to do, and he would tell her, in Courier typeface.
<Where are you?> Plague wrote.
<Stockholm.>
<There’s an Apple Store at the intersection of Kungsgatan and Sveavägen. Or you could try a Q-tip.>
She went to the bathroom and got a Q-tip and gently cleaned the area around the Alt key. It popped into place. Then she pressed ‘U.’ An umlaut danced before her eyes.
Finally, she spoke.
‘It’s fixed,’ she said.
‘Thanks,’ he said.
She thought about smiling, but she’d smiled three hundred pages earlier, and once was enough. ♦
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/humor/2010/07/05/100705sh_shouts_ephron?printable=true#ixzz0sR9Koqdg
Psychiatric news
The effectiveness of psychosocial interventions for men with prostate cancer: a systematic review
Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men and the second most common cause of cancer death among men in the United Kingdom (Cancer Research UK 2008). More than 670,000 men are diagnosed with prostate cancer each year (Cancer Research UK 2009). In the US, one in six (16.7%) of…
more >
Cerebrovascular risk comparable with first- and second-generation antipsychotics
Researchers have found no significant difference in the risk for cerebrovascular adverse events among patients aged 50 years and older taking first- and second-generation antipsychotics.
more >
Early improvement criteria defined in first-episode schizophrenia
Patients with a first episode of schizophrenia who achieve at least a 30% improvement in symptom score after 2 weeks are more likely to show treatment response or remission at 8 weeks than their peers who show no such improvement, study results show.
more >
Emotional stimuli response deficits distinguish SMD from bipolar disorder
Adolescents with severe mood dysregulation have a blunted response to emotional stimuli that is not seen in adolescents with bipolar disorder, and may therefore help in distinguishing between the two disorders.
more >
Cross-prevalence of migraine and bipolar disorder
Bipolar Disorders 2010; 12(4): 397-403
Clinical outcomes associated with depression, anxiety and social support among cardiac rehabilitation attendees
Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry 2010; 44(7): 658-66
Anxiety and depression in cancer patients compared with the general population
European Journal of Cancer Care 2010; 19(4): 522-9
Intimate relationships and childbearing after adolescent depression: a population-based 15 year follow-up study
Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology 2010; aop: 10.1007/s00127-010-0238-7
Cognition and disability in bipolar disorder: lessons from schizophrenia research
Bipolar Disorders 2010; 12(4): 364-75
Treating comorbid substance use disorders in schizophrenia
International Review of Psychiatry 2010; 22(2): 191-201
Fairy tales can have gruesome origins follow the links and you’ll be surprised
Top 10 Gruesome Fairy Tale Origins
You can read the original list here.
Items in this podcast:
10. The Pied Pier
9. Little Red Riding Hood
8. The Little Mermaid
7. Snow White
6. Sleeping Beauty
5. Rumpelstiltskin
4. Goldilocks and the Three Bears
3. Hansel and Gretel
2. The Girl Without Hands
1. Cinderella
More medicine related news
families that refuse to accept their sexuality
The Government’s Forced Marriage Unit says there has been a surge such cases over the past year.
Simple spit test to find bone marrow matches without donors having to visit the doctor
A British charity is hoping to double the number of lives saved by encouraging potential patients to take a quick spit test rather than give a blood sample.
The Eye-Phone: Scientists develop new smart phone app to tell you what prescription glasses you need
The app, developed by researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, uses the human eye’s ability to focus to diagnose exactly how bad their eyesight is.
Future shock: Scientists give a 245-year-old mummy a CT scan to delve into his mysterious past
The mummy, Michael Orlovits, was born in Vac, Hungary, in 1765. He is currently one of a three-member mummy family on loan to the California Science Center.
News from the fossil and animal kingdom
Data downloaded from a memory chip on the device - the size of a shirt button - showed that the bird had reached Guinea-Bissau in west Africa.
Monster of the Deep: Scientists find fossil skull of 43ft long whale which had 14in teeth
The fossilised skull and jaw of the gigantic creature, which was 43ft long with a 10ft head, were found off the coast of Peru. It is believed the creature would have preyed on other whales as it boasted 14in teeth. …read
Sexual selection: Dinosaurs developed elaborate crests and sails ‘to attract the best mates’
Scientists believe the developments were not to control body temperature or to help steer in flight, as previously thought.
More medical and behavioral news
Authoritative parenting style influences family eating behavior and better nutrition in adolescents
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Investigators from the University of Minnesota have found a direct association between parenting style and the frequency of meals eaten together as a family and that an authoritative parenting style was associated with more …
Needles improve exercise tolerance in heart patients
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Acupuncture can improve exercise tolerance in patients suffering from chronic heart failure. This was determined in a clinical pilot study by the team headed by Dr. Johannes Backs, physician and study director …
The usefulness of PSA testing
A new study from Sweden revealed that screening men between 50 and 65 years old with the PSA test for prostate cancer reduced deaths by nearly a half over 14 years and concluded that prostate cancer screening compares favorably with screening for other cancers, but also cautioned that the risk of overdiagnosis is substantial, causing an expert to point out that such findings should not be taken as a reason to introduce universal PSA testing.
You can read about the study, which was funded by the Swedish Cancer Society, the Swedish Research Council, and the National Cancer Institute, and led by Dr Jonas Hugosson from the University of Gothenburg, in the 1 July Early Online issue of The Lancet Oncology.
Hugosson and colleagues wrote in their background information that one way to decrease the risk of death from prostate cancer, a leading cause of death from malignant disease among men in the developed world, is to screen for PSA (prostate-specific antigen, a biomarker that can indicate the presence of cancer), but there is a lot of controversy about whether the benefits of screening outweigh the harms.
For the study, which began in December 1994, the researchers randomized 20,000 men aged from 50 to 65 to either a screening group or to a control group.
The men had been randomly selected from a population register, and those in the screening group were invited to have a PSA test every two years, until they reached an upper age limit of between 67 to 71 years (median 69), while those in the control group were not.
Men in the screening group with high PSA could opt to take further tests, including rectal exams and biopsies.
The researchers are still monitoring the groups, with men who have not reached the upper age limit still being offered a PSA test.
The results reported in The Lancet Oncology paper include cumulative prostate-cancer incidence and mortality data up to the end of December 2008, and show that:
76 per cent of the screening group had at least one PSA test.
Over a median follow up of 14 years, the cumulative incidence of prostate cancer was 12.7 per cent in the screening group (1,138 men diagnosed), and 8.2 per cent in the control group (718 diagnosed).
This resulted in a hazard ratio (HR) of 1.66, with 95 per cent Confidence Interval (CI) ranging from 1.50 to 1.80, with a high statistical significance value of p<0.0001.
The rate ratio for death from prostate cancer was 0.56 in the screening group compared with the control group (95% CI from 039 to 0.82, p=0.002).
This figure was 0.44 for the rate ratio of all attendees compared to controls (95% CI from 0.28 to 0.68, p=0.0002.
Taken altogether these figures translate to 293 (95% CI from 177 to 799) men need to be invited to screening and 12 to be diagnosed to prevent one death from prostate cancer.
The authors wrote that the study showed deaths were nearly halved over 14 years with screening, but that the ‘risk of over-diagnosis is substantial and the number needed to treat is at least as high as in breast-cancer screening programs’.
They concluded that:
‘The benefit of prostate-cancer screening compares favorably to other cancer screening programs.’
In a ‘reflection and reaction’ article in the same issue of the journal, Dr David Neal, a professor in the Department of Oncology at University of Cambridge in England, comments on the findings by Hugosson and colleagues in the light of the overdiagnosis and overtreatment controversy surrounding PSA testing.
The PSA test remains controversial ‘because it detects some cancers that will never present during the patient’s lifetime’, and ‘results in unnecessary treatments that can damage men’s quality of life’, writes Neal.
He notes that although these points are valid, the study shows that in certain circumstances, PSA testing reduces deaths from prostate cancer, but added that it does not imply ‘PSA screening programs should now be introduced internationally’.
‘Mortality results from the Göteborg randomized population-based prostate-cancer screening trial.’
Jonas Hugosson, Sigrid Carlsson, Gunnar Aus, Svante Bergdahl, Ali Khatami, Pär Lodding, Carl-Gustaf Pihl, Johan Stranne, Erik Holmberg, Hans Lilja.
The Lancet Oncology, Early Online Publication, 1 July 2010
DOI:10.1016/S1470-2045(10)70146-7
Another interesting academic article
Rhetorical testosterone and analytical hallucinations
In her most recent column (‘Obama: Our first female president‘, 7/1/2010), Kathleen Parker argues that Barack Obama writes like a girl:
If Bill Clinton was our first black President, as Toni Morrison once proclaimed, then Barack Obama may be our first woman President. […]
No, I’m not calling Obama a girlie President. But … he may be suffering a rhetorical-testosterone deficit when it comes to dealing with crises […]
What’s her evidence for this lack of ‘rhetorical-testosterone’? Along with a lot of vague stuff about how Obama is ‘a chatterbox’ who shares with ‘Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton’ (!) the ability to ‘assume feminine communication styles effectively’, the column includes exactly one relevant fact:
Obama’s [oil crisis] speech featured 13 percent passive-voice constructions, the highest level measured in any major presidential address this century, according to the Global Language Monitor, which tracks and analyzes language.
If you’re not a regular reader, please take a few minutes to scan our last discussion of linguistic ‘analysis’ from Paul Payack’s Global Language Monitor (‘Language guru runs with the journalistic pack‘, 6/17/2010). According to Mr. Payack, president Obama’s address on the gulf oil spill was excessively ‘professorial’ because its average sentence length was 19.8 words. I checked on president George W. Bush’ post-Katrina speech, and found that its average sentence length was 23.5 words, suggesting that either Bush was even more ‘professorial’ than Obama, or that Mr. Payack was full of it.
So what about those passives?
The first thing to say is that there isn’t the slightest evidence that passive-voice constructions are ‘feminine’. Women don’t use the passive voice more than men, and among male writers, number of passive-voice constructions doesn’t appear to have any relationship at all to real or perceived manliness. The ‘passive is girly’ prejudice seems to be purely due to the connotations of (other senses of) the term passive, misinterpreted by people who in any case mostly wouldn’t recognize the grammatical passive voice if it bit them on the leg. (See e.g. ‘When men were men, and verbs were passive‘, 8/4/2006; ‘How to defend yourself from bad advice about writing‘, 11/1/2006; ‘‘Passive Voice’ — 1397-2009 — R.I.P.‘, 3/12/2009.)
Still, there’s a point of fact here. Did president Obama’s speech really have more passive-voice constructions than any other major presidential address this century?
Getting a meaningful number for ‘percent passive-voice constructions’ requires some definitions. What are we taking a percentage of: sentences? tensed clauses? all clauses? all constructions where voice could be varied? And what counts as passive? do get-passives, adjectival passives, passive-participle modifiers, etc., add to the total or not?
I’m not sure what definitions Paul Payack used. For some evidence that he’s among those who don’t have a clue what a passive-voice construction actually is, in the traditional grammatical sense, see Ben Zimmer’s post ‘There will be passives‘, 11/7/2008. I don’t have time this morning to try to figure out how Mr. Payack derived his passive percentages, if any information about this is available — I’ll have more to say when I’ve looked into this further.
But I did just make a quick analysis of president George W. Bush’s post-Katrina address to the nation. I count 142 sentences, 25 of which contained one or more passive-voice tensed verb constructions. That’s 17.6%.
Doing the same thing with Barack Obama’s post-oil-spill address, I count 135 sentences, 15 of which contain one or more passive-voice tensed verb constructions. That’s 11.1%.
If instead I calculated the percentage of tensed verbs that are in the passive voice, or the percentage of voice-relevant constructions that are passive, I’d get somewhat different numbers. But I don’t believe that any of these alternative calculations would rescue Mr. Payack’s assertion, or Ms. Parker’s little exercise in empirically vacuous meme-replication. She wrote:
We’ve come a long way gender-wise. Not so long ago, women would be censured for speaking or writing in public. But cultural expectations are stickier and sludgier than oil. Our enlightened human selves may want to eliminate gender norms, but our lizard brains have a different agenda.
Parker’s lizard brain, I’m sorry to say, seems to have the agenda of promoting — with less than no evidence at all — one of the currently fashionable journalistic tropes about Obama.
[For some background that may help you to evaluate the credibility of Paul J.J. Payack as a linguistic analyst, see ‘There will be passives‘, 11/7/2008; ‘The million word hoax rolls along‘, 1/3/2009; ‘Forbes on neologisms, and the return of the million-word bait-and-switch‘, 4/23/2009; ‘The millionth word in English could be 'sucker'‘, 5/12/2009; ‘End times at hand‘, 6/6/2009.]
Some assorted interesting links
Summer Most Dangerous Time to Travel .
Acts of God: Why Lightning Strikes Religious Symbols .
One injection a week for diabetes patients? .
Textaphrenia & textiety: Message conveys disorder .
Iranian Woman Faces Being Stoned to Death for Adultery.
Caveman too went to the movies – Science – Home .
Egypt finds evidence of unfinished ancient tomb.
Unusual 17th-century Dutch horse burial site found.
Parkinson’s breakthrough as side effect from therapy eliminated .
Experiencing Different Cultures Enhances Creativity
Creativity can be enhanced by experiencing cultures different from one’s own, according to a study in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (published by SAGE).
Three studies looked at students who had lived abroad and those who hadn’t, testing them on different aspects of creativity. Relative to a control group, which hadn’t experienced a different culture, participants in the different culture group provided more evidence of creativity in various standard tests of the trait. Those results suggest that multicultural learning is a critical component of the adaptation process, acting as a creativity catalyst.
The researchers believe that the key to the enhanced creativity was related to the students’ open-minded approach in adapting to the new culture. In a global world, where more people are able to acquire multicultural experiences than ever before, this research indicates that living abroad can be even more beneficial than previously thought.
‘Given the literature on structural changes in the brain that occur during intensive learning experiences, it would be worthwhile to explore whether neurological changes occur within the creative process during intensive foreign culture experiences,’ write the authors, William W. Maddux, Hajo Adam, and Adam D. Galinsky. ‘That can help paint a more nuanced picture of how foreign culture experiences may not only enhance creativity but also, perhaps literally, as well as figuratively, broaden the mind.
The article ‘When in Rome… Learn Why the Romans Do What They Do: How Multicultural Learning Experiences Facilitate Creativity’ in the June 2010 issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin is available free for a limited time here.
Source: SAGE Publications
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