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The statement from Ariana Huffington (in bold below) is one of the best examples of the folk theory upon which Critical Discourse Analysis is based - namely that words influence people in certain inevitable ways. It is also a good example of the sources of disaffection with the mainstream debate experienced by US conservatives as…
Read more →Google Reader (1000+) "Democracy means government by discussion, but it is only effective if you can stop people talking." (Clement Atlee) There is no doubt that pithy aphorisms are an important instrument in the socialisation toolkit (construction inventory) or any group (from couples, groups of friends to political parties, nations and, these days, humanity). To…
Read more →Colbert I. King - Why Obama Stands With His Church - washingtonpost.com This history comes to mind as I listen to conservative commentators, chief among them MSNBC's Pat Buchanan, brand as "racist" the slogan adopted by Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago: "Unashamedly black and unapologetically Christian." I am a big supporter (including in…
Read more →Nicholas Kristof is puzzled and pleased that the US electorate is keeping two individuals as front runners who are willing to express unpopular opinions: The World’s Worst Panderer - New York Times All of this is puzzlingly mature on the part of the electorate. A common complaint about President Bush is that he walls himself…
Read more →BBC - Radio 4 Woman's Hour -Male Primogeniture Jenni discusses the law of primogeniture with Liberal Democrat MP Lynne Featherstone, who has asked the Equality and Human Rights Commission to investigate the legality of this centuries old practice, and to royal commentator and author Charles Mosley. BBC - Radio 4 Woman's Hour -Primogeniture: Should the…
Read more →Women Are Never Front-Runners - New York Times But what worries me is that he is seen as unifying by his race while she is seen as divisive by her sex. What worries me is that she is accused of “playing the gender card” when citing the old boys’ club, while he is seen as…
Read more →Ubuntu: Just how popular is it? - Starry Hope Productions ...Ubuntu has managed to gain a large portion of the Linux mind share , at least amongst the tech community . Wikipedia: Mind share is the amount of attention required by something and the time spent thinking about something . It can also refer to…
Read more →Is It Possible To Be Half-Adopted?   Imagining someone giving away semen or an egg couldn’t possibly feel the same as imagining a parent giving a way a baby. Could it? The friend who asked whether I consider Mrs. Ramirez to be adopted is adopted herself, something she doesn’t associate with rejection but rather with…
Read more →Now, there's no doubt in my mind whatsoever that George Lakoff's theory of mental imagery (usually referred to via the concept of Image Schemas) describes a phenomenon that is profoundly real. However, the question remains what kind of reality it has. It exists and we see it all the time. But is it something that…
Read more →WHNews: Pay Gap - No Pay Day As of 30th October, if you’re a woman and you go out to work, you’re working for nothing until the 31st December. The Fawcett Society and the union Unison have declared today ‘Women’s No Pay Day.’ They’ve worked out that, given an average 17 per cent pay gap…
Read more →Evening News 24 - Refuse fire near City Hall   Arsonists sparked an emergency response after setting light to a rubbish container near City Hall on Saturday evening. The suspects started the fire shortly after 7pm on St Giles Street. Two fire engines were sent to the scene and firefighters used hoses to extinguish the…
Read more →Quote Details: William Hazlitt: Without the aid of... - The Quotations Page Without the aid of prejudice and custom I should not be able to find my way across the room. William Hazlitt   English essayist (1778 - 1830) It's always disconcerting to find that something I've been saying for years has been said a…
Read more →Media Blog on National Review Online What the BBC is telling children about the 9/11 attacks [Tom Gross] Here is what the BBC’s widely-read children’s section of their website (CBBC) is telling kids about the 9/11 attacks, the 6th anniversary of which falls today. It is not quite the al-Qaeda view, but it almost is…
Read more →BBC - Radio 4 - Today Programme Listen Again 11 Sept 2007 08:50 It's the 50th anniversary of the British Computer Society. But what can we expect over the next half century? Will our levels of dependence on the internet and computers change? One of the guests on the programme, Oliver Sparrow , made the…
Read more →Just Say No "Nonetheless I took the tomatoes away." This is only partially a hermeneutic post. It's so rare to see poetry in blogs (unless they're poets' blogs which I don't read) but this last line in a post, turned it into a poem. It reminded me of my favorite poem by Vladimír Holan about…
Read more →Anil Dash: Cats Can Has Grammar The core behavior has existed for some time; "Image macro" is a generic term for this kind of folk art, and cats have always featured heavily in these types of Internet in-jokes. But a few distinct categories have sprung up that have helped amplify and popularize the phenomenon. Two…
Read more →YouTube - Miss Teen USA 2007 - South Carolina answers a question Miss Teen USA 2007 - Ms. South Carolina answers a question http://youtube.com/watch?v=lj3iNxZ8Dww[/youtube] It is all too easy to make fun of speakers like this. But most commenters on YouTube (and elsewhere) got it wrong. ChrisKangaroo It is obviuos that she has no idea…
Read more →Film examines Daily Mail 'diet' | The Guardian | Guardian Unlimited In the footsteps of Supersize Me, a documentary-maker has attempted to find out whether we are what we read by giving up all news sources except the Daily Mail. For 28 days, Nick Angel screened out all television, radio, print and online news sources…
Read more →The Girl Wars : Terrible Mother on Offsprung.com It seems like half the interactions between women can be classified as Girl Wars. Do we ever get out of this? And why the hell are girls so vicious to each other? When did they start this? Just a few years ago, Thing One was small and…
Read more →‘Bourne’ flick is ultimately un-American - Opinion & Editorial - BostonHerald.com I knew this movie was trouble when I read the reviews. Almost all the critics liked it. The only way American movie critics would like a violent car-chase film like this was if it bashed the USA, which, of course, it does. ... As…
Read more →Confessions of a BBC liberal - Times Online There is a perfectly reasonable case for progressive liberal reform of penal policy. There is also a perfectly reasonable case for a stricter and more punitive penal policy. This programme was quite clearly on the side of the former and the producer/writer was a member of BBC…
Read more →Making Light: Bookstore chain puts the screws on small publishers We have concluded that we have far too many suppliers, Malarkey again. Rimmer is inappropriately borrowing language from other industries, as though A&R were a construction firm and he’d noticed they were buying their bricks from too many different brickyards. Bricks are interchangeable. Books aren’t…
Read more →Analysis: Military Shows Gains in Iraq Despite political setbacks, American commanders are clinging to a hope that stability might be built from the bottom up—with local groups joining or aiding U.S. efforts to root out extremists —rather than from the top down, where national leaders have failed to act. Commanders are encouraged by signs that…
Read more →Disfavor for Bush Hits Rare Heights - washingtonpost.com That may stem in part from the changing nature of society. When Caddell's boss was president, there were three major broadcast networks. Today cable news, talk radio and the Internet have made information far more available, while providing easy outlets for rage and polarization. Public disapproval of…
Read more →New Statesman - Who is the real Hillary? she is certainly the most extraordinarily self-disciplined politician I have ever watched in action. But then she has to be, because she must balance the projection of images of supposedly masculine US power and strength with the reality of being a woman; she must be seen as…
Read more →BBC NEWS | Technology | Robot unravels mystery of walking "Babies use a lot of their brains to train local circuits but once they are trained they are fairly autonomous."Only when it comes to more difficult things - such as a change of terrain - that's when the brain steps in and says 'now we…
Read more →OpinionJournal - Peggy Noonan President Bush was hired to know more than the people, to be told all the deep inside intelligence, all the facts Americans are not told, and do the right and smart thing in response. That's the deal. It's the real "grand bargain." If you are a midlevel Verizon executive who lives…
Read more →Why Winston Wouldn't Stand For W - washingtonpost.com Writing about Churchill and Chamberlain, I've discovered, is like administering a Rorschach test to one's readers. People see in Churchill and Chamberlain what they want to see. They draw parallels between the 1930s and the events of today according to their own political philosophy. I've received congratulatory…
Read more →Amazon.com: Liberal Fascism: The Totalitarian Temptation from Hegel to Whole Foods: Books: Jonah Goldberg Goldberg draws striking parallels between historic fascism and contemporary liberal doctrines. He argues that âpolitical correctnessâ? on campuses and calls for campaign finance reform echo the Nazis' suppression of free speech; and that liberals, like their fascist forebears, dismiss the democratic…
Read more →Metaphorically Challenged : Terrible Mother on Offsprung.com âThat is an awesome metaphor,â? I said. Because it is. Itâs funny without the use of burning children. But it isnât accurate. John isnât on some emotional island where he canât understand what heâs doing. And he isnât trying to fight, really. He doesnât want to be inconvenienced…
Read more →CBC.ca Arts - Retired Czech leader Havel pens new play "Living in the world of political language was quite an inspiration" he said. "I try [in my play] to reflect the automatic political language, where you say one word to which other words are immediately added and the cluster [of words] then travels from one…
Read more →The Newshoggers: Jeri Thompson - asset or albatross? [Part Two] However, thanks to a commenter at my place , I see by common definition "trophy wife" is indeed considered to be an insult. All I can say is that I didn't mean it as such. I define the term to simply mean a marriage where…
Read more →Malfunctioning fax machine prints out bomb ClipArt, forces evacuation of area - Engadget In any normal town across America there are countless faxes sent and received which feature poorly chosen ClipArt: why then must a promotional fax like the one pictured above fail to print out correctly -- leaving only a picture of a bomb…
Read more →On The Media: Transcript of "Secrets & Lies" (May 4, 2007) BOB GARFIELD: The issue in question was Saddam's aluminum tubes and whether they were meant for centrifuges to produce nuclear fuel. If, as you say, the administration briefed the Senate Intelligence Committee that it was uncertain about those tubes but then hid that uncertainty…
Read more →Comparison To Clinton Is Dismissed - washingtonpost.com Tom Ingram, who was an adviser to Fred D. Thompson 's 1994 Senate campaign and has talked to him about a potential 2008 presidential run, said that he thought the Royal race might be good for Republicans, but not because of gender or any similarity Royal had to…
Read more →RealClearPolitics - Articles - Is the War on Terror Over? Do we still need to fight a war on terror? The answer seems to be no for an increasing number in the West who are weary over Afghanistan and Iraq or complacent from the absence of a major attack on the scale of 9/11. The…
Read more →On The Media: Transcript of "Me is for Media" (April 20, 2007) BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I don't want to diminish the horrific experience that those people went through, but it did seem at times as if they were reading lines from a script, almost as if they'd been through all this before. THOMAS de ZENGOTITA…
Read more →The following segment from the Wikipedia entry on suicide attack is a good example of how the restrictions on mapping in conceptual integration can be negotiated even "against the grain" of the "logic" of some of the basic propositional structures behind the conceptual frame. So, the argument against 'homicide bombing' correctly points out that the…
Read more →Imus's last outrage? - The Boston Globe Imus apologized for his latest remark and was suspended for two weeks. But this time, his job could be on the line, said John DePetro, a radio talk show host who was fired by WRKO after calling gubernatorial candidate Grace Ross a "fat lesbian." "As much as mine…
Read more →Politics, Lies, and 93 v. 8 - Swampland - TIME David Brooks has an excellent column today, and not for the usual reasons that liberals praise Brooks (and he drives conservatives crazy): because he comes halfway toward us. It’s because, in discussing the US Attorneys story, he nails a distinction that I, at least, was…
Read more →Golden Arches Wants 'McJob' Removed: McDonald's Targets the English McLanguage - International - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News McDonald's Corp. on Tuesday restarted its push to get the word "McJob" removed from dictionaries -- and has set its sights on the gold standard of lexicons, the Oxford English Dictionary. " Dictionaries are supposed to be paragons…
Read more →The metaphoric mappings that structure most of our frames are usually seen as automatic. However, more often than not, they are negotiated through discourse prior to becoming fully blended (entrenched). This image is a great example of one such mapping negotiation done almost entirely visually. This Apple Lisa ad from the 1970s has two functions…
Read more →MyDD :: Direct Democracy for People-Powered Politics Roger Ailes: "And it is true that Barack Obama is on the move. I don't know if it's true that President Bush called Musharraf and said, 'Why can't we catch this guy?'" [...]Obama is a terrorist. Ha ha ha. Ailes is clearly upset that his brand is being…
Read more →Why I had to quit the John Edwards campaign | Salon News Even before Donohue stepped in, various right-wing bloggers were obsessed with my gender and sexuality. As I noted at the time of my resignation, the majority of the hate mail I was receiving was from men, and almost all the e-mails made note…
Read more →OBAMA: We ended up launching a war that should have never been authorized and should have never been waged and to which we have now spent $400 billion and has seen over 3,000 lives of the bravest young Americans wasted . Michelle Malkin: Obama: Soldier deaths = "Wasted" lives I could go on, but it…
Read more →Media Matters - Conservatives continue to use Fox's 24 to support hawkish policies conservative talk radio host Laura Ingraham told host Bill O'Reilly: "The average American out there loves the show 24. OK? They love Jack Bauer. They love 24. In my mind that's close to a national referendum that it's OK to use tough…
Read more →Was 9/11 really that bad? - Los Angeles Times Has the American reaction to the attacks in fact been a massive overreaction? Is the widespread belief that 9/11 plunged us into one of the deadliest struggles of our time simply wrong? If we did overreact, why did we do so? Does history provide any insight?…
Read more →BBC NEWS | UK | Younger Muslims 'more political' Young Muslims are much more likely than their parents to be attracted to political forms of Islam, a think tank survey has suggested. Support for Sharia law, Islamic schools and wearing the veil is much stronger among younger Muslims, a poll for the centre-right Policy Exchange…
Read more →The Politico But it wasn't revealing because she was suggesting her husband is "evil and bad." It was revealing because -- asked about dealing with evil men like Osama bin Laden -- her mind seemed to go to her domestic enemies. It's absurd to suggest that she thinks Bill is evil like Osama. But Kenneth…
Read more →iTWire - A new 'iBook' from Google?: be afraid, be very afraid Google is plotting to do for books what the iPod has done for music: make them purchasable by download to a portable access device. Could civilisation as we know it be under threat? ... The news immediately lead Sunday Times commentator, Bryan Appleyard…
Read more →'Hold Your Wee for a Wii' Death Shuts Down Show - Gameworld Network news story Ten employees have lost their jobs over the incident, and the radio show is permanently off the air. .... 28 year old Jennifer Strange was found dead in her Rancho Cordova home on Friday. A preliminary coroner's report indicated the…
Read more →Hawking says climate change poses greater threat to humanity than terrorism - International Herald Tribune LONDON: Scientist Stephen Hawking described climate change Wednesday as a greater threat to the planet than terrorism. The interesting thing here is not so much that this clearly illogical comparison is being given any credence but that none of the…
Read more →digg - The Digg Comment Algorithm Everything in this world can be shown as a flowchart algorithm. This, of course, applies to the complex and not well researched field of “Digg comments“. Here’s my humble attempt to define an algorithm which should encompass all of the many possibilities of comment development on Digg. There are…
Read more →I got an A in Phallus 101 - Los Angeles Times The problem that the Young America's Foundation list, first issued in 1995, highlights isn't simply the hollowing-out of the traditional humanities and social sciences disciplines at colleges and their replacement by crude indoctrination sessions in whatever is ideologically fashionable — although that's a serious…
Read more →Limp language leaves kids with an awesome paucity of speech [Teenagers on which the author eavesdrops] They've got one all-purpose word -- "awesome" -- to cover everything from mild approval to exhilaration. When they're indignant or angry, they have to fall back on clichés -- including a few tired four-letter words. ... Today, teens aren't…
Read more →On The Media: Transcript of "God No!" (December 15, 2006) In response to the global challenge posted by religious extremism, a small group of impassioned atheists has taken a new approach. They target the tolerant with both reason and ridicule. "The New Atheists", as they were dubbed by Gary Wolf in a recent article in…
Read more →Foreign Policy: Why Hawks Win Why are hawks so influential? The answer may lie deep in the human mind . People have dozens of decision-making biases, and almost all favor conflict rather than concession. This is an interesting blend of folk psychology and 'professional' psychology. The first part if completely within the realm of sensationalist…
Read more →Amazon Online Reader : Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage p. 82 The sexual double standard was so completely accepted by Romans that the educator Quintilian used the notion of a sexual single standard as the perfect illustration of an illogical proposition : "If a relationship between a mistress…
Read more →A Renaissance of the Commons | Nick Lewis: The Blog Cultures, like people, can run out of ideas. They can exhaust themselves in the face of events and ideas they can no longer predict, explain or control. When they do, they revert to the repetitive assertion of the simplest and most soothing of their founding…
Read more →Left Behind Games The storyline in the game begins just after the Rapture has occurred â when all adult Christians, all infants, and many children were instantly swept home to Heaven and off the Earth by God. The remaining population â those who were left behind â are then poised to make a decision at…
Read more →On The Media: Transcript of "Paper Wait" (December 1, 2006) BROOKE GLADSTONE: So why not then stick to âsectarian violenceâ?? What changed? BILL KELLER: You know, itâs kind of emerged as an issue, and then last Sunday we ran a story about one of our reporters in Baghdad, Ed Wong, who surveyed a number of…
Read more →Column by PC Magazine: Our Modern World—Weirder by the Minute DIGITAL CAMERA ARM STRETCH. Okay, let's get to the meat of this essay. Perhaps the weirdest societal change has to do with digital cameras and the practice of framing shots in the preview window by holding the camera out in front of yourself. Even ten…
Read more →November 17, 2006, Hour Two: The Family that Couldn't Sleep / The Artist and the Mathematician Starting in the 1930s, Nicolas Bourbaki published dozens of papers, becoming a famous mathematician. There was just one problem: he didn't exist. Join Ira in this hour on Science Friday for a conversation with Amir Aczel about the genius…
Read more →On The Media: Transcript of "The Power of Myth" (November 24, 2006) ANA MARIE COX: Well, I think that Joe is a provocative thinker and a great reporter. He was really early out of the gate t rying to put a narrative around this election . There was a very unusual mid-term. There were races…
Read more →From the Wikipedia entry : Accepted is a 2006 comedy motion picture about a group of high school seniors who, after being rejected from all colleges to which they had applied, create their own college. ... At one point Bartleby [the main character] wants to end the charade before it begins, but is overcome with…
Read more →YouTube - Team America Finale Speech PhatGun (3 months ago) HAHAHAHAHHAHAHA SO TRUE!!! Tomster22 (19 hours ago) Neo-Cons = Dicks, Peacenicks = Pussies, Islamo-Fascists = Assholes AerisRocks (2 months ago) lol! Thats a great metaphor they used...assholes want us to shit on everything and dicks fuck assholes lmfao, great scene. This post has been brewing…
Read more →ANTI- Album - Orphans What’s Orphans? I don’t know. Orphans is a dead end kid driving a coffin with big tires across the Ohio River wearing welding goggles and a wife beater with a lit firecracker in his ear. Just like true mythopoeic narrative is returning to its roots through TV series after a brief…
Read more →BBC - Radio 4 - Feedback Love quadrangle Things have been getting very steamy in the cowshed at Brookfield lately and Archers listeners who've written to Feedback talk of sensationalism and complain that some of the main characters seem to have had personality transplants. After David Archer's flirtation with his old flame Sophie, his wife…
Read more →Buzz Out Loud: CNET's podcast of indeterminate length on CNET.com [ click here to listen to clip ] recently featured this fascinating discussion of analogies. A caller suggests an analogy and the hosts discuss both the aptness of the analogy itself as well as the medium of analogies for elucidating certain issues. The combination of…
Read more →14 WFIE, The Tri-State's News Leader: Manhunt Ends, Baby Found Safe A fugitive couple who hid in a camper are now behind bars. The kidnapped baby is safe, and the funeral for the social worker who cared the baby is over. It's been a busy and emotional 24 hours. What a great little example of…
Read more →Evening News 24 - Cyclist attacked by An N&N spokesman said: âAccording to sources this gang has been doing this for a while - stopping people at the bridge and demanding money to get across. âBut this was the first time they have actually attacked anyone and he has been not only harmed, but also…
Read more →One small word is one giant sigh of relief for Armstrong âThatâs one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,â? they heard him say as he dropped from the ladder of his spacecraft to make the first human footprint on the lunar surface. But from the moment he said it, and for 37…
Read more →On The Media-- The War in Iraq = Iraqi Civil War ETHAN BRONNER: Our policy is not to label it a civil war. We recognize and describe elements of civil war in what's going on in Iraq. We tend to call it sectarian conflict, sectarian violence. Civil war, to us, feels like a stage of…
Read more →On The Media-- Eau-Stained Wretch BOB GARFIELD:: He describes another perfume as, quote, "sweeping over you like the silent, massive shadow of an Airbus A340, and yet another is "like looking down into a well of cool, black water." I told Burr he had a real knack for turning a phrase, but that I had…
Read more →Bearing witness to a teacher's task - The Boston Globe Many people believe they know what makes effective schools because they have attended school. This is akin to saying I am a physician because I've been in a hospital. I challenge any of this group to spend a week teaching in a public school classroom…
Read more →The Books Google Could Open The nation's colleges and universities should support Google's controversial project to digitize great libraries and offer books online. It has the potential to do a lot of good for higher education in this country. ... This powerful tool will make less well-known written works or hard-to-find research materials more accessible…
Read more →On The Media-- I Know You Are But What Am I? SHANKAR VEDANTAM: [The study] just showed six television clips of the conflict to 144 observers, some of whom were pro-Israeli and some of whom were pro-Arab and some of whom were neutral. And pro-Israelis found that the clips had an astonishing number of anti-Israel…
Read more →NPR : Roundtable: The Future of Jazz Radio News & Notes with Ed Gordon, August 10, 2006 · Some experts say the jazz radio format is in crisis. Some of the few stations devoted to jazz may soon change format. Guests: Suzan Jenkins, president of Jazz Alliance International, an industry group; Tom Thomas, president of…
Read more →MercuryNews.com | 07/31/2006 | Internet raises gender gap This gender gap, which affects everything from the marketing of new technology to attracting more women for engineering careers, is elegantly illustrated in an academic study just published by a researcher from Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. Eszter Hargittai tested and interviewed 51 women and 49 men…
Read more →Czech lobby in Washington takes a second seat to Poland - 22-05-2006 - Radio Prague There are three criteria that countries must fulfil in order to qualify for the proposed amendment to the U.S. Visa Waiver Program. The first is membership in the European Union; secondly, they must be allies in the war in Iraq…
Read more →CBC Radio | Quirks & Quarks | April 8, 2006 Heading into the 21st Century, our planet is undergoing rapid change. Species are disappearing daily, and along with them human languages and cultures. Terry Glavin, a conservationist and writer, set out to document these changes in his new book, Waiting for the Macaws. Along the…
Read more →NPR : Global Sex Survey: Satisfied in the West A groundbreaking international sex survey reveals that couples in Western countries are the most sexually satisfied, while countries in the East appear to be less satisfied. The reporter commented that it is ironic, that in societies where men were the dominant gender, they also tended to…
Read more →Several years before his death, the famous Estonian semiotician Yuriy Lotman came to Prague and the thing that I still remember from his talk is an admonition that boundaries are the places to study because that's the most interesting phenomena happen (or come to the surface) at the border between two stereotypes (my words not…
Read more →I was just listening to the UK Prime Minister's Question Time. I don't do it very often, because the questions and answers are predictable in content and not particularly informative, but maybe I should tune in more often to get a sense of the tone of the exchange. As I was listening, I was struck…
Read more →AfterEllen.com - The L Word's Vanishing Bisexual The L Wordâs representation of bisexuality reflects popular and sometimes opposing ideas about bisexuality. One belief--represented best on the series by Jenny--is that those who identify as bisexual are merely experimenting with their sexuality before they choose to identify as strictly heterosexual or homosexual, thus suggesting that a…
Read more →CNN.com - Quotes from the Golden Globes - Jan 16, 2006 "As I was coming in, I felt a little tug at my skirt. And I looked, and there was a little girl maybe 8 or 10 in her first party dress, and she said, 'Because of you I want to be president someday.' And…
Read more →Technology News: E-Commerce: Study: Poor Web Design Alienates Customers One twentieth of a second. That's about how long it takes for a Web site Get Linux or Windows Managed Hosting Services with Industry Leading Fanatical Support. to make a first impression on an Internet user, according to researchers at a Canadian university, whose findings could…
Read more →The Prejudice Map The Prejudice Map According to Google, people in the world are known for... Here's an interesting 'mash up' of Google's API that supposedly answers the question above. It uses a very simple Google query as in http://www.google.com/search?q="germans+are+known+for+*" to create a graphical overview of the different 'prejudices' about various cultures in the world…
Read more →January 13, 2006, Science Friday = Franklin at 300 Franklin as inventor, socialite and statesman, and take a look at the Tercentenary Exhibition in his honor, now open in Philadelphia. America is often said to be an experiment in new national identity (or something along those lines). However, any closer examination of American national identity…
Read more →Wired News: Military Women Can Hack It Female soldiers have long fought off perceptions that their bodies just aren't equipped to handle the rigors of training and warfare. But a decade's worth of research suggests that women are hardly as fragile as critics once thought. A new study by military researchers found that many assumptions…
Read more →The Aargh Page # Not surpisingly, "argh" is much more frequent than any of the alternatives, and the items with fewer 'a's or 'r's are more frequent than their longer neighbors. # However, there are high-frequency islands , even way out in the long-word planes. For example, "a17r23gh" (17,23) occurs in 171 pages, even though…
Read more →On The Media-- NAMING RIGHT The key variables that differentiated the titles that had been number-one bestsellers from the titles that had failed to be were whether the title was literal or figurative, the word type of the first word, although it was interesting that the word type of the second word didn't matter, and…
Read more →NPR : Muslim Migrants, 'Embracing the Infidel' Author Behzad Yaghmaian spent two years traveling with Muslim migrants and collected their stories on safe houses, bribes, police custody, and human trafficking. He talks about his book, Embracing the Infidel: Stories of Muslim Migrants on the Journey West. An interesting podcast about a book illustrating the transformation…
Read more →Urban Legends Reference Pages: College (The Unsolvable Math Problem) This legend combines one of the ultimate academic wish-fulfillment fantasies — a student not only proves himself the smartest one in his class, but also bests his professor and every other scholar in his field of study — with a "positive thinking" motif which turns up…
Read more →There are two analogies in this post! What great value. Discover Music through The Music Genome Project by Pandora Together we set out to capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level. We ended up assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or "genes" into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes…
Read more →Florida high court kills school voucher program In a ruling expected to reverberate through battles over school choice in many states, the Florida Supreme Court on Thursday struck down a voucher program for students attending failing schools, saying the state Constitution bars Florida from using taxpayer money to finance a private alternative to the public…
Read more →I thought, I might add another category for the new year. analogies. This springs from two separate and seemingly conflicting tendencies in my intellectual life. One is to expose potentially harmful and disparate analogies and the other is to create new analogies to illuminate similarities otherwise unnoticed. I use these strategies in teaching, popular writing…
Read more →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 →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 - 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 →"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 →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 →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 →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…
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