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ABC News: Male Domination of the Internet Is Over, Study Finds The study says 68 percent of men and 66 percent of women now go online. Since women make up a larger portion of the population, that means they outnumber men in cyberspace. ... Although a similar percentage of men and women use the Internet…
Read more →Propp and other formalists had many things figured out quite right. Then the structuralists came and elevated emergent properties to the level of meaning creation. This post is an analogy in the sense that it compares the idea of the 'morphology of the folktale' but takes the source domain from cognitive morphology rather than traditional…
Read more →Christmas season's TV brings a lot of classic stories back to people's narrative environment. Many of these contain complex and multilayered representations of humanity's quest for self-understanding. These narratives play other roles, as well, connected to the psychological well-being of individuals. They are broadcast in moments of communal and familial rituals designed to promote group…
Read more →Now, here's an analogy that occured to me as I was pondering the indeterminacy of the meaning of some technical term in social science (I think it was metaphor). But it occurred to me that creating meaning (in the Brunerian sense) is very much like playing certain instruments (such as slide guitar). With slide guitar…
Read more →I realized that I needed another category dealing with issues related to the position of women in society and cognition. I decided to call it feminism in protest against the frequent dilution of the concept by labeling it 'gender studies' or 'women's lib'. Now, I very much agree that to understand the way our brains…
Read more →BBC - Radio 4 - All in the Mind It's just under a year since the Tsunami devastated coastal communities around the Indian Ocean . Raj reports from his recent visit to the Tamil Nadu region of India with the charity Action Aid, where he met some of the people affected, and observed the work…
Read more →BBC - Radio 4 - Woman's Hour -Phone-in: parents and schools A recent survey from the Department of Education shows that parents are increasingly unhappy with their local schools. Satisfaction levels have fallen by 10% during the past year and more than half of parents saw no change in the quality of schooling or thought…
Read more →BBC - Five Live - Mark Kermode film reviews included this and last week an interesting exchange. First, the reviewer claimed that watching the film The March of the Penguin makes it possible to assume some level of intelligent design (while criticising some American views stating essentially the same thing). Predictably, in the subsequent program…
Read more →Another great interview on onthemedia.org. This one dealing with the reliability of expert predictions (in the media and in general). On The Media-- THE GUESSING GAME PHILIP TETLOCK: When an expert has very, very strong opinions on an issue, when the expert places a high value on simplicity and has little patience with contradictions or…
Read more →I am coorganizing a conference Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis Across Disciplines (CADAAD) to be held at the University of East Anglia on June 29-30, 2006. The first call for papers goes out today. More on http://discourse.uea.ac.uk .
Read more →The Video Game Revolution: "Eight Myths About Video Games Debunked" by Henry Jenkins | PBS The availability of video games has led to an epidemic of youth violence. According to federal crime statistics, the rate of juvenile violent crime in the United States is at a 30-year low. Researchers find that people serving time for…
Read more →My Week In Thought This PBS essay neatly summarizes almost all the arguments I would ever make - or in some cases have made - in defense of video gaming. OK, there may be a fine line between vanity and self-referentiality but here we go. It struck me how powefully I was affected by this…
Read more →There's no Wikipedia entry for 'moral responsibility' | The Register The first, and the most immediately absurd of these two defenses, is that since nothing at all can be trusted, er, "definitively", then Wikipedia can't be trusted either. This is curious, to say the least, as it points everyone's expectations firmly downwards. If you recall…
Read more →Introduction Imagine that two millenia or so in the future, literary experts attempt to collect the glories of our literature. Most of our paper writings have crumbled into dust or used for kindling; all our digital files are long gone or indecipherable. English is a dead language and many of the cultural references are a…
Read more →"I've read the internet, and it's rubbish" - a comedian on a BBC Radio 4 show. In this essay, I will diagram exactly how this happened, but also include some speculation as to how things could have turned out differently, though it is no way intended as a work of "fan fiction". By highlighting how…
Read more →BBC - Radio 4 - Today Programme Listen Again David Cameron promised to tackle the lack of women MPs from his party. What can he do? Audio here An interesting discussion of three conservative MPs each arguing a different position. 1. women shortlists are necessary, 2. more older women (of non-child bearing age) should be…
Read more →On The Media-- OFF-YEAR COVERAGE The President gave a major speech on Wednesday, and TV news reacted. For every story there's a formula, whether earthquake, missing child, sex scandal or State of the Union, but this event was none of those. So the anchors reached into their bags and pulled out the mode that fit…
Read more →One article, two thoughts . Good going! TPM Online Article One of the things you notice, both as a skeptic and as an American in the UK , is that according to the British media â and a lot of non-media folks, too, I might add â pretty much all foolishness comes from the US…
Read more →How we should judge torture - Los Angeles Times Naturally, human rights groups are appalled by the suggestion that harsh treatment is ever justified. Similarly, blogger Andrew Sullivan dismisses the ticking time bomb as a "red herring" and argues that "you cannot raise or lower the moral status of mass murderers with respect to torture…
Read more →TPM Online Article So: whom to believe? There seems to be no doubt, as these authors and recent research suggest, that there's a genetic component to obesity. Nor is there any doubt that obesity, like alcoholism before it, seems to bring out the self-righteous moralist in people; fat means you've been greedy, gluttonous, or slothful…
Read more →The great 'On the Media' had an interview with 'the devil' - Bill Kristol of the Weekly Standard. But he did bring up an interesting point regarding the actual influence of the magazine in particular and the media in general. On The Media-- OLD STANDARD BROOKE GLADSTONE:: What do you think the world would be…
Read more →Navigating the 'human terrain' - Los Angeles Times THE U.S. ARMED forces have a problem. They have the technical capability to hit any target on the planet. But which targets should they hit? Unfortunately, our enemies in the war on terrorism don't operate tanks or warships that we could blow up. They lurk in the…
Read more →Universal preschool's big payoff - Los Angeles Times IT HAS LONG been an American article of faith that early schooling for poor children can work wonders. A word-rich classroom gives poor 3 and 4-year-old kids the basic tools for learning and for sharpening their talents for solving problems. A nurturing environment teaches children, many of…
Read more →Anthropology.net | Beyond bones & stones Anthropology is defined as the study of humankind and their origins throughout different places and times. The study focuses in detail on cultural, biological, linguistic, and archaeological research. Anthropology.net's mission statement is to expand understanding and appreciation of humanity by way of creating a cohesive online community of individuals…
Read more →BBC NEWS | UK | 'Gay weddings' become law in UK Hundreds of gay couples are preparing to form civil partnerships in the coming weeks as the law changes after decades of campaigning. Finally! But a discussion on the Today programme, well, today, was interesting in its focus on the word marriage. It turns out…
Read more →World News Article | Reuters.co.uk Kazakhstan's President Nursultan Nazarbayev won re-election by a landslide on Monday, official preliminary results showed, but the opposition in the former Soviet republic alleged vote-rigging. The result means Nazarbayev will rule for another seven years in the vast Central Asian state, a reassuring signal to big oil investors in the…
Read more →Narnia's lion really is Jesus - Sunday Times - Times Online AN unpublished letter from the novelist C S Lewis has provided conclusive proof of the Christian message in his Narnia childrenâs books. In the letter [to be published in a new collection of Lewis' letters], sent to a child fan in 1961, Lewis writes…
Read more →Be realistic about death penalty: PM - National Breaking News - Breaking News 24/7 - NEWS.com.au "But I think we have to be a little bit realistic in suggesting that the Government should complain as loudly as a death sentence being carried out on Saddam Hussein as we did in relation to Nguyen [Australian citizen…
Read more →news @ nature.com - Mind trick 'whittles the waist' - Illusion helps scientists to spot brain regions that shape our body image. Scientists have harnessed a perceptual trick known as the 'Pinocchio illusion' to help pinpoint the brain regions that control how we view our bodies. They made the discovery by scanning the brains of…
Read more →iDNES.cz - Nový zákon pÅesnÄ urÄ?uje, co je sexuálnà obtÄžovánà Nový trestnà zákon, který pÅijali poslanci tento týden, zavádà trestný Ä?in, který pÅesnÄ definuje sexuálnà obtÄžovánÃ. Od ledna 2007 bude za sexuálnà obtÄžovánà bude hrozit od 6 mÄsÃců do 8 let vÄzenÃ. ... New law outlines clearer guidelines for the police and prosecutors and introduces…
Read more →Digitizing literature - The Boston Globe But the act of reading a great book requires something of the reader: time. A book must be ''read," it can't be background noise nor can it be understood from a page. If books are reduced to just another streaming media, how does an author foreshadow an event or…
Read more →John Grishamm, The Broker Sure, this is a great book that fulfills all the prerequisite of its genre in a way that allows the reader to probe some of the possibilities of depth. The writing is taut (although I've only listened to it as a book on tape) and reminds me of the masters: Elmore…
Read more →A Man's Right to Choose - New York Times NOBODY is arguing that we should let my friend who impregnated his girlfriend off the hook. If you play, you must pay. But if you pay, you should get some say. If a father is willing to legally commit to supporting and raising the child himself…
Read more →Nature or nurture? - The Boston Globe Well, it turns out that the more you believe homosexuality is innate, the more accepting you are of gay rights. A full 79 percent of people who think human beings are born with a sexual orientation support gay rights, including civil unions or marriage equality. But only 22…
Read more →Conservative U. -- in cyberspace - Los Angeles Times FIFTEEN YEARS AGO, conservatives saw a country that was split about 50-50 between the left and the right, as it is today and will continue to be for a long time. But the country's main cultural institutions were nearly all liberal — making conservatives rage and…
Read more →Death penalty: Time to rethink? :: The Daily Herald, Provo Utah Capital punishment does send a message that society will not tolerate brutal murders. Some killers, certainly, would kill again if given the chance. Even in prison, many sociopaths pose a threat to others. Death may be the only way to ensure that their criminal…
Read more →BBC NEWS | Education | Primary reading set for overhaul The way children are taught to read in primary schools in England needs to be changed, says a government review. It has backed the method synthetic phonics, which teaches children the sounds of letters and combination of letters before they move onto books. ... Many…
Read more →BBC - Thought for the Day, 29 November 2005 Should the aid workers [recently kidnapped] still have been in Iraq? I was struck yesterday by the different perspective of those commenting on the kidnapping. The spokesman for Care International, another aid agency, was quite clear. For him, the answer was "No". His priority in a…
Read more →Why school achievement isn't reaching the poor - The Boston Globe Other research in places like Dallas and Houston that show how high-poverty students are so much more likely to receive ineffective teachers repeatedly confirm how the nation's school children suffer from a ''crushing impact of maldistribution" of teachers, according to the Education Trust. In…
Read more →A column about labor relations and automotive job losses. Labor's Lost Story Almost everybody right of center sees the job losses as inevitable, the result of the American auto industry's failure to meet foreign competition and the "excessively" generous wages, health benefits and, especially, retirement programs negotiated by Reuther's union. The believers in inevitability inevitably…
Read more →Terror's stealth weapon: women - Los Angeles Times The stereotype exploited by terrorists is that women are gentle, submissive and nonviolent. Women evade most terrorist profiles because they are perceived as wives and mothers, victims of war-torn societies, not bombers. But terrorist organizations are increasingly employing women to carry out the most deadly attacks. Based…
Read more →The Very Foundation of Conservatism - New York Times The Olin Foundation's leaders understood that success is often unplanned, and so they focused on creating the conditions for success rather than thrusting a set of detailed agendas and goals upon grant recipients. Nobody, for example, expected that Allan Bloom's "Closing of the American Mind" would…
Read more →Killing the written word by snippets - Los Angeles Times Students are trading in books for search-and-seizure learning on the Internet, and real literacy is getting lost along the way. ... One memorable freshman sagely informed me that people shouldn't be reading entire volumes these days anyway. ... Many of this generation are aliterate —…
Read more →iDNES.cz - Å est Å¡kůdců, kteÅà zaruÄ?enÄ zniÄ?à váš poÄ?ÃtaÄ? Pokud nenastane zvrat v použitých technologiÃch, za 15 let budou procesory a grafické Ä?ipy vyzaÅovat na centimetr Ä?vereÄ?ný stejné teplo jako sluneÄ?nà povrch. Now here's an interesting throwaway line in an article about protecting hardware: "Unless there is a change in the technologies used, in…
Read more →There's no 'good' divorce - The Boston Globe Many experts and parents embrace the idea, confident that it's not divorce itself that harms children but simply the way that parents divorce. If divorced parents stay involved with their child and don't fight with each other, they say, then children will be fine. There's only one…
Read more →Unexpected countenance of change - The Boston Globe SOMEONE, a psychiatrist, discouragingly once said that people don't change very much, but the little ways they change, when they do change, are enormous. It seemed a dour but accurate assessment. It was practical wisdom -- the kind someone would acquire after being in the business many…
Read more →Students Ace State Tests, but Earn D's From U.S. - New York Times A comparison of state test results against the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federal test mandated by the No Child Left Behind law, shows that wide discrepancies between the state and federal findings were commonplace. In Mississippi, 89 percent of…
Read more →www.lidovky.cz - Intelektuálnà obrana xenofobie Podle Huntingtona dezinterpretovali liberálnà multikulturalisté 70. a 80. let povahu Ameriky, když ji lÃÄ?ili jako kulturnÄ otevÅený prostor vymezený pouze univerzálnÃmi zásadami lidských práv a demokracie. Na rozdÃl od identit evropských národů, které jsou uzavÅeným dÄdictvÃm minulosti, byla podle nich identita Ameriky otevÅená do budoucnosti - mÄla totiž povstávat ze…
Read more →Replant the American Dream When I lived abroad, Thanksgiving was always my favorite holiday. It was a chance to scrounge up a turkey, gather foreign and American friends, and celebrate what America represented to the world. I liked to give a sentimental toast when the turkey arrived at the table, and more than once I…
Read more →They Held Their Noses, and Ate - New York Times Proper notions of English husbandry generally demanded that flesh be domesticated, grain neatly planted and fruit and vegetables cultivated in gardens and orchards. Given these expectations, English migrants recoiled upon discovering that the native inhabitants hunted their game, grew their grain haphazardly and foraged for…
Read more →BBC NEWS | Politics | 'A third of pubs' to open longer About one-third of all the pubs, clubs and shops in England and Wales licensed to sell alcohol are to get longer opening hours, BBC research suggests. Now, this news is really interesting because of the folk-models of social causality that get employed on…
Read more →Who would have thought that a simple misspelling of a person's name would cost me so much time. But it did happen and it was an entirely my fault. A friend whose name is pronounced by all and sundry Maia or Myra, spells her name (as a consequence of Welsh blood in her East Anglian…
Read more →Turning academia into a cafeteria - Los Angeles Times DECADES AGO, I clutched an official New York state examination booklet as a proctor threatened me and hundreds of my nervous schoolmates with a felony conviction if we cheated. We dutifully signed a statement that declared we would not. Students still sign declarations on examination booklets…
Read more →Bring Democracy to Congress Perhaps we should redeploy the democracy experts we have sent to the Middle East and ask them to work on our Congress. The past few days have confirmed that our national government is dysfunctional. ... Which brings us back to those democracy experts we are sending around the world. Let's bring…
Read more →Senators are blowing smoke on gas - Los Angeles Times Unless they can repeal the law of supply and demand, they can't do a thing about prices. ... Gas, like everything else, has its price set by supply and demand. No company charges what it thinks is fair. They charge as much as they can…
Read more →Here's definitely a podcast worth listening to ! Niles Eldredge and Edward J. Larson discuss the upcoming Darwin exhibit and Darwin's legacy. Particularly their discussion of Darwin's contribution of the mechanism of 'natural selection' to an existing idea of 'evolution' is illuminating. As an essentially social scientist, it reminded me (again) of Engels' words at…
Read more →A Library for The New World Digitized, instant communication is the great technological revolution of our time. It has streamlined business and delivered more information more quickly to more people than ever. And it has accelerated basic and applied research. Both the problems and the researchers who work on them are scattered around the world…
Read more →BBC NEWS | In Depth | The Thatcher years in statistics It is 15 years since Margaret Thatcher resigned as prime minister. Use this graphical guide to see how life in Britain changed during her time in power. A great interactive toy to contrast certain trends during Thatcher's reign. I found particularly the interpolation of…
Read more →BBC NEWS | Politics | Thatcher's role for women Patricia Hewitt, a minister Tony Blair's Cabinet, told the BBC News website: "Margaret Thatcher broke through the glass ceiling in politics. But it is a tragedy that, having become the UK's first women prime minister, she did so much to undermine the position of women in…
Read more →Access Holy Wood - On the Media BROOKE GLADSTONE: Ah, Watergate, the gift that keeps on giving. But aside from Woodward's access to well-placed anonymous sources, there's little resemblance between Watergate Bob and White House Bob. Watergate Bob used disgruntled mid-level bureaucrats to tunnel his way into the bowels of a White House scandal. White…
Read more →There was an interesting discussion on the BBC's Today Programme (click for audio) over some recent Lancet-published study doubting the efficiency of homeopathic treatments vs. a study conducted at the Bristol homeopathic hospital showing that about 70% of patients report some improvement in how they feel. Since many educated, and otherwise critical, people of my…
Read more →Portable Media Expo and Podcasting Conference Saturday Sessions Audible's CEO Don Katz's keynote address at the Podcast Expo brought together very many interesting points regarding the relationship of the oral and written tradition and the role of new technologies in giving new importance to the ultimate pre-technological medium: storytelling. ( Audio here ) He reminded…
Read more →It's hard to avoid the comparison between the country [Bosnia] deemed a quagmire in the 1990s and the one where the United States is bogged down today. Start with the U.S. and other NATO troops who began arriving in Bosnia shortly before Christmas 1995. There were 60,000 of them at first in a country of…
Read more →The fall of Bob Woodward - The Boston Globe The free press is an absolute value not only because the unfettered flow of information is essential to the republican system, nor only because the fourth estate serves as a check on the power of the other three, but because public expression is necessary for the…
Read more →Evolution is, in fact, the foundation of the entire science of modern biology and much of modern medicine. No, there is no absolute ''proof" of evolution, but that's not how science works. The evolutionary theory of origin of species is supported by abundant evidence from the fossil record and genetics research—indicating, for instance, that both…
Read more →This is a blog (with the prospect of a podcast) that will track my thoughts on a variety of subjects as they come to me in my online life.
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