Dads-to-be pile on the pounds too

Gaia Vince in New Scientist:

Dn86611_250Dads-to-be pile on the pounds during their partners’ pregnancy too – at least in some monkey species, new research suggests. The findings may illuminate the biological changes that occur in men to encourage effective fatherhood, since the primates studied are exceptionally good parents.

Pregnancy is something that not all expectant fathers miss out on – male “sympathetic pregnancies” have been reported in humans but never systematically studied. They are often regarded as psychosomatic events.

Now a US team has studied the parental weight patterns of common marmosets and cotton top tamarins – two squirrel-sized, monogamous primate species – from conception to birth. Each month the 25 prospective dads and 33 pregnant mums were weighed. The creatures’ food supply was maintained but not increased during the gestation periods for the marmosets (five months) and tamarins (six months).

“We found that the males gained on average an extra 10% of their body weight during the pregnancy,” says Toni Zeigler who led the research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison National Primate Research Center.

More here.

Robert Falcon Scott, Antarctic Explorer

Paul Watkins reviews four books about RFS in the Times Literary Supplement:

Scott2David Crane’s exhaustively researched Scott of the Antarctic is a welcome addition to the wealth of reading material about one of Britain’s most famous explorers. It is all here. From “Con’s” early days as a fourteen-year-old naval cadet among the white-gloved eccentrics of the pre-First World War Royal Navy, Crane leads us through the death of Scott’s father and brother and the financial burden placed on him to support his mother and sisters. He traces Scott’s first journey to the Antarctic as captain of HMS Discovery, whose crew, despite many set-backs, returned home having come closer to the Pole than anyone had ever been at that time. Crane describes Scott on his arrival in London, blackened by soot and snow glare, plunged unwillingly into the limelight of royal galas and the lecture circuit. Two years after his marriage to Kathleen Bruce, Scott returns for his second and final voyage to the Antarctic, intent on planting the Union Jack at the South Pole and thus claiming it for Britain. As exhaustion and frostbite take their toll, we read again the immortal words of Oates (“I am just going outside and may be some time”) and the eerily prophetic last line of Scott’s journal, “For God’s sake, look after our people”, almost as if he could foresee the looming carnage of the First World War.

More here.

‘Presticogitation’: Professor’s bid to get word in OED

Nathan Bierma in the Chicago Tribune:

In the mid-1980s, Vanden Bosch — my English professor and now my colleague at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich. — coined the word “presticogitation.” It’s a spin-off of the word “prestidigitation,” which means “sleight of hand” and is used to describe magicians (derived from the French “preste,” meaning “nimble, quick,” and the Latin “digitus” for “finger.”)

“Presticogitation” is the cerebral equivalent — “rapid mental processing that commands compliance because of its speed and beauty,” as Vanden Bosch defines it.

“Since the mid-1980s, I’ve been asking students to try to find room for it in their writing,” he says. But Vanden Bosch says his campaign is more than a personal indulgence; it has a teaching purpose.

More here.

turing

Alan_turing_1

On June 8, 1954, Alan Turing, a forty-one-year-old research scientist at Manchester University, was found dead by his housekeeper. Before getting into bed the night before, he had taken a few bites out of an apple that was, apparently, laced with cyanide. At an inquest, a few days later, his death was ruled a suicide. Turing was, by necessity rather than by inclination, a man of secrets. One of his secrets had been exposed two years before his death, when he was convicted of “gross indecency” for having a homosexual affair. Another, however, had not yet come to light. It was Turing who was chiefly responsible for breaking the German Enigma code during the Second World War, an achievement that helped save Britain from defeat in the dark days of 1941. Had this been publicly known, he would have been acclaimed a national hero. But the existence of the British code-breaking effort remained closely guarded even after the end of the war; the relevant documents weren’t declassified until the nineteen-seventies. And it wasn’t until the eighties that Turing got the credit he deserved for a second, and equally formidable, achievement: creating the blueprint for the modern computer.

more from The New Yorker here.

Olivo Barbieri’s Aerial Photos

In Metropolismag.com:

It’s often hard to convince people that Olivo Barbieri’s aerial photographs are real. Slide1_2They look uncannily like hyperdetailed models, absent the imperfections of reality. Streets are strangely clean, trees look plastic, and odd distortions of scale create the opposite effect of what we expect from aerial photography–a complete overview, like military surveillance. “I was a little bit tired of the idea of photography allowing you to see everything,” Barbieri says. “After 9/11 the world had become a little bit blurred because things that seemed impossible happened. My desire was to look at the city again.”

He began the Site Specific project in Rome, before moving on to Amman, Jordan; Las Vegas; Los Angeles; and Shanghai, China. He achieves the distinctive look by photographing from a helicopter using a tilt-shift lens–a method, he says, that “allows me to choose what I really like in focus: like in a written page, we don’t read [it as an] image but one line at a time.” Along with the still photographs, which are exhibited as enormous prints, Barbieri has been making short 35mm films. New York–not surprisingly–is next on his list of cities to tackle.

Hat tip Linta Varghese and Roop Roy.

James Langston Hughes, Poet

Today is the birthday of Langston Hughes (February 1, 1902 – May 22, 1967), and the first day of Black History Month:

HughesBorn in Joplin, Missouri, James Langston Hughes was a member of an abolitionist family. He was the great-great-grandson of Charles Henry Langston, brother of John Mercer Langston, who was the first Black American to be elected to public office, in 1855. Hughes attended Central High School in Cleveland, Ohio, but began writing poetry in the eighth grade, and was selected as Class Poet. His father didn’t think he would be able to make a living at writing, and encouraged him to pursue a more practical career. He paid his son’s tuition to Columbia University on the grounds he study engineering. After a short time, Langston dropped out of the program with a B+ average; all the while he continued writing poetry. His first published poem was also one of his most famous, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”, and it appeared in Brownie’s Book. Later, his poems, short plays, essays and short stories appeared in the NAACP publication Crisis Magazine and in Opportunity Magazine and other publications.

More here.  And this is his poem, “I, Too”:

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,”
Then.

Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed–

I, too, am America.

What pit bulls can teach us about profiling

Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker:

Pic2In epidemiological studies of dog bites, the pit bull is overrepresented among dogs known to have seriously injured or killed human beings, and, as a result, pit bulls have been banned or restricted in several Western European countries, China, and numerous cities and municipalities across North America. Pit bulls are dangerous.

Of course, not all pit bulls are dangerous. Most don’t bite anyone. Meanwhile, Dobermans and Great Danes and German shepherds and Rottweilers are frequent biters as well, and the dog that recently mauled a Frenchwoman so badly that she was given the world’s first face transplant was, of all things, a Labrador retriever. When we say that pit bulls are dangerous, we are making a generalization, just as insurance companies use generalizations when they charge young men more for car insurance than the rest of us…

More here.

Nancy Cartwright on God and Natural Laws

On her homepage, Nancy Cartwright has an interesting working paper, entitled “No God, No Laws”.

My thesis is summarized in my title, ‘No God, No Laws’: the concept of a law of Nature cannot be made sense of without God. It is not as dramatic a thesis as it might look, however. I do not mean to argue that the enterprise of modern science cannot be made sense of without God. Rather, if you want to make sense of it you had better not think of science as discovering laws of Nature, for there cannot be any of these without God. That depends of course on what we mean by ‘laws of Nature’. Whatever else we mean, I take it that this much is essential: Laws of Nature are prescriptive, not merely descriptive, and – even stronger – they are supposed to be responsible for what occurs in Nature. Since at least the Scientific Revolution they are also supposed to be visible in the Book of Nature, not writ only on stone tablets nor in the thought of God…

My claim here is that neither of these features can be made sense of without God; this despite the fact that they are generally thought to provide some autonomy of the world order from God.

But she does offer a way out.

MARTHA C. NUSSBAUM: The Moral Status of Animals

From the Chronicle of Higher Education:

In 55 BC, the Roman leader Pompey staged a combat between humans and elephants. Surrounded in the arena, the animals perceived that they had no hope of escape. According to Pliny, they then “entreated the crowd, trying to win its compassion with indescribable gestures, bewailing their plight with a sort of lamentation.” The audience, moved to pity and anger by their plight, rose to curse Pompey — feeling, wrote Cicero, that the elephants had a relation of commonality (societas) with the human race.

In 2000 AD, the High Court of Kerala, in India, addressed the plight of circus animals “housed in cramped cages, subjected to fear, hunger, pain, not to mention the undignified way of life they have to live.” It found those animals “beings entitled to dignified existence” within the meaning of Article 21 of the Indian Constitution, which protects the right to life with dignity. “If humans are entitled to fundamental rights, why not animals?” the court asked.

We humans share a world and its scarce resources with other intelligent creatures. As the court said, those creatures are capable of dignified existence. It is difficult to know precisely what that means, but it is rather clear what it does not mean: the conditions of the circus animals beaten and housed in filthy cramped cages, the even more horrific conditions endured by chickens, calves, and pigs raised for food in factory farming, and many other comparable conditions of deprivation, suffering, and indignity. The fact that humans act in ways that deny other animals a dignified existence appears to be an issue of justice, and an urgent one.

More here.

Polar Satellite Freeze

Charles Q. Choi in Scientific American:

000925d8fc1c13cbbc1c83414b7f012a_1The long-range weather forecasts that warned of where Hurricane Katrina would strike depended on data from polar satellites. They capture not only details over the Arctic and Antarctic but also virtually every point on the planet’s surface as the world turns under them. Now the replacements for the aging U.S. military and civilian fleet are in jeopardy. The program is as much as $3 billion over budget, and the launch of the first replacement satellite is as many as three years behind schedule.

More here.

Norms in Academic Publishing are Changing

Gary King in PSOnline:

A decade ago this journal published a symposium on replication policies in political science. The symposium began with an article I wrote entitled “Replication, Replication,” and was followed by opposing and supporting comments by 19 others (King, 1995). The debate over proper policies continued for a few years in subsequent issues of the journal and a variety of other public fora. Since then, many journals in political science have adopted some form of a data sharing or replication policy. Some strongly recommend or expect data sharing and some require it as a condition of publication. The editors of the major international relations journals have collectively written and committed themselves to a strong standard minimum replication policy (Gleditsch et al. 2003). Most important, numerous individual scholars now regularly share their data, produce replication data sets, put these data sets on their web sites, send them to the ICPSR and other archives, or distribute them on request to other scholars. Scholars sometimes worry about being “scooped,” about maintaining the confidentiality of their respondents, or about being proven wrong, but since authors who make their data available are more than twice as cited and influential as those who do not (Gleditsch, Metelits, and Strand 2003), the strong trend toward data sharing in the discipline should not come as a surprise.

The broader scientific community both collectively and in many other individual fields is also moving strongly in the direction of participating in or requiring some form of data sharing. Recipients of grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health now are required to make data available to other scholars upon publication or within a year of the termination of their grant. Replicating, and thus collectively and publicly validating, the integrity of our published work is often still more difficult than it should be, and some still oppose thewhole idea, but our discipline has made substantial progress.

Ted Koppel’s embarrassing debut as a Times columnist

Jack Shafer in Slate:

060130_press_koppelIt’s not Ted Koppel’s fault that the New York Times has made him a Times contributing columnist. As Koppel writes in yesterday’s (Jan. 29) debut column, “And Now, a Word for Our Demographic,” the invitation came from an “editor friend of mine,” so the fault belongs to whoever assigned, accepted, and edited or rewrote Koppel’s self-indulgent, self-congratulatory, late-to-the-party, and punishingly obvious 1,500-word piece about the state of television news. (It’s bad.) It’s not even Koppel’s fault if he thinks he’s any good at this columnist thing, when he isn’t. If we were to belittle every person who stretched his talents until they pop, we’d have little time for anything else.

So, my critique isn’t personal, it’s institutional. Based on what did the Times think Koppel could write a compelling newspaper column? Did they not see disaster in this piece?

More here.

Chronic pain traced to surprising source

From MSNBC:Pain_1

Some types of ongoing, inexplicable pain like arthritis are caused by intact, healthy nerve fibers rather than those that have been damaged, a new study finds. The discovery surprised researchers. It had not been made before partly because studies of chronic pain have tended to focus on the damaged nerves. The new understanding, reported in the Jan. 25 issue of the journal Neuroscience, could help scientists develop new types of painkillers.

The evidence so far applies only to ongoing pain associated with nerve injury and inflammation, although it may turn out to be more widely applicable, said Sally Lawson, a professor of physiology at the University of Bristol in Britain.

More here.

Mine Buster Targets Breast Cancer

From Wired News:Landmines2_t_1

A University of Arkansas scientist has developed a technology that makes undersea mud as clear as water, revealing deadly land mines. Now, she’s adapting the technique to detect a type of biological land mine — breast-cancer tumors. Magda El-Shenawee, an associate professor of electrical engineering, is adapting her rough-surface computational analysis — which, put very simply, is an algorithm that models dirt — to detect breast tissue cells that have gone awry. It turns out seeing through dirt is not so different from seeing through breast tissue.She’s collaborating with University of Arkansas professor Fred Barlow to develop, design, build and test a microwave imaging system to detect early stage breast cancer. “Eventually, we may be able to use this technology to not only reveal whether a tumor is present,” said Barlow, “but to find out what type of tumor it is.”

The work stems from El-Shenawee’s previous work at Northeastern University in Boston, where she developed the land-mine detection technique. Using a supercomputer and an extremely fast technique called “steepest descent fast multilevel multipole method,” or SDFMM, she worked out computational models that sift through ocean mud to find explosive devices.

More here.