‘h’ is for hahaha

Andy Purvis’s cheeky letter to TREE made me giggle.

About the h index: it’s presumably a random number until you get more than about eight publications? Hmm. I think that possibly this is just more MeyersBriggsian pigeonholing, or perhaps it satisfies a numerological fetish that academics are too lofty to admit. Heh. I think mine is 2.5.

BBC headlines ‘really annoying’

A rant, just for a second.

Like every other computer-bound sod I compulsively check the BBC news webpages all day and consider myself somewhat familiar with their style. The thing that’s really narking me off right now is their headlines. From today’s (although yesterday’s was much worse):

1. Twin blasts ‘kill 24′ in Baghdad

2. Majority ‘back’ animal research

3. Schools ‘must teach about drugs’

The little ‘scare quotes‘ are breeding and multiplying all over the page. It was my understanding that scare quotes are used to denote where a term was a matter of opinion rather than strict fact (or to convey some sort of journalistic editorialising if one could be bothered with the double entendre). So the use in the title of this post, and in the last example there, seem to be the valid use of the little splashes of punctuation. But why (for example) in ‘kill 24′? According to the sources at least 24 people were killed. As a reading of breaking news, I am quite okay with Twin blasts kill 24 in Baghdad, even if it ends up that somewhat more or less is the confirmed number. Do people really get terribly and litigiously upset if headlines don’t indicate uncertainty on every detail?

The second example is presumably qualifying that the majority of people polled, while supportive of animal-based research, don’t necessary want their taxes spent on it. But we get that from the article. There is a statement of general fact there: the majority of people polled do back research. Of course there’s qualification, else the article would merely be the headline.

Now, I completely understand that the headline-writing for the BBC News website is some sort of ordeal of attempting to fit maximum clickable interest into less than seven words. BUT. The increase (and I really do think it has increased) in the use of the quotes implies to me (1) lack of imagination and (2) some sort of lazy journalism where the headlines become all about opinion – and not balanced presentation of the facts and issues as well as the requisite quotes from two polarised sources, just for ‘balance’.

And since one of the Editors said on their blog the other day that they read what bloggers say about their site, I look forward to my queries being addressed.

on dialects of english

My friend J once described something as being “kitty-corner” from a person in a restaurant, and I seriously thought she was making up random feline-words because she’s such a sucker for cats.

It turned out that kitty-corner (or catty-corner) is some Yankee slang for “diagonally opposite” – who knew?

I just thought of this as I was in a waiting room this morning with its attendant collection of rubbish magazines, one of which was the Reader’s Digest. Ah, the Digest, with its moralising stories of real-life bravery and unceasingly good clean jokes. When I was a kid and fancied myself the cleverest, I used to like those “Word Power” quizzes where you had to know the meaning of some tricky vocabulary word. Sometimes, however, they were completely beyond my ken, not ‘cos I wasn’t smrt, but because I wasn’t North American.

I am still fascinated and will yabber on boringly to people here, even after five years, about dialect differences. “Oh, we call it a such-and-such,” I say, and go on to make people’s eyes glaze over with the myriad ways in which sweets differ from candies differ from lollies (my term) which differ from ice lollies which are actually iceblocks, not popsicles. My fairly international set of friends provide hours of fun for my dialectical (haha) observations.

Wiki sez:

On New Zealand English.
Some NZ vocab words. Up the Boohai!
On Maori influence on NZ English, including some of my favourite phrases to use that result in blank stares:
taihoa: hold on a second, wait up
puku: belly, esp. when full
half-pai: pai = good. I had always thought this was half-pie, denoting something half-done or unfinished, but this makes much more sense.
Am suprised porangi is not on there, but maybe only the kids I grew up with delighted in using “crazy” as an insult.

Another guide to Kiwi slang, which is making me yearn to have a blog called “Waikikamukau Dispatches”.

working, you say?

Some days I would like to re-animate George Peter Murdock and have a beer with him. G.P., I’d say, after shaking his hand vigorously (although not too hard, because, you know, zombie corpse) G.P., you would have really liked the concept of the computer database, and maybe if you’d had one, you mighta got out for a Sunday drive or a game of darts once in a while, because how you did all this proto-spreadsheet stuff without an actual spreadsheet is admirable.

I bet he was the kind of nerd who remembered everything about the ethnographic materials he categorised, too, and would always know the Haha exception to the rule (Ah, but in Haha society they have matrilateral cross-cousin marriage AND make their tents from goatskin).

Anyhow. Endless recoding of variables according to the hypothesis under question is tedious enough. The really hard part is trying not to become swamped by overwhelming self-censure regarding categorisation and classification of complex human group behaviours. I can deal with 90% of social anthropologists disagreeing with the cross-cultural comparison approach, because the hypothesis that cultures are not to be understood except on their own internal terms is to me, simply that: an hypothesis, and one that most anthropologists have put aside testing.

Part of having an evolutionary approach to human behaviour is taking on board the notion that there are some broad patterns in human behaviour, including social life, and that one can discover those with the tools and models from evolutionary biology. Note to new readers: this does NOT mean some sort of old-fashioned sociobiology assuming a genetic/biological/essentialist/stupid nature-nurture dichotomy approach to behaviour. Traits do not have to be genetic to evolve. Boyd & Richerson have written extensively on cultural evolution for an introductory audience if you need to wrap your head around that.

Where was I? Part of the requirement involves operationalising the variables under study, so complex forms of behaviour become things such as “avunculocal postmarital residence“, which obscures a multitude of individual behaviours: those that choose other forms of residence, and those individuals that change within their lifetime. It also obscures the dynamic changes, through time, of the population as a whole.

So part of my work routine involves telling myself that folks like G.P. weren’t simply doing the ethnographic equivalent of stamp-collecting when compiling databases of cross-cultural information like the Ethnographic Atlas and the Outline of World Cultures. Those labels mean something more than they don’t mean something. And they are the best information currently (and probably that we’ll ever have) available for large-scale cross-cultural analysis.

so pretty in there!

The Wellcome Trust’s Biomedical Image Awards. I used to love the photo-identification round (“what is this strange wire contraption?” an egg-beater!) in quiz shows like University Challenge or W3 when I was younger, but I’m pretty sure none of these would be identifiable but anyone but their respective experts.

I particularly like the aspirin and the Vaginocola.

so that’s how you get here from there

WordPress tells me my blog was discovered using the following search terms:

“Benedictine influences in the asian cult”

“pbs documentary new guinea strange people”

Hope that worked out for y’all, people!

ah, the national health “service”

The Beeb report on the hitherto-undisclosed waiting-times for diagnostic tests in the NHS. Waiting time has usually referred to waiting for treatments (such as operations); this is the first time it has been made public how long people have to wait to get things like, for instance, scans. The revelation here is that people are waiting up to six months, sometimes longer, for diagnoses.

LIKE FOR INSTANCE ME.

I am at present waiting for an ultrasound scan on some painful girly-bits, and when I mean painful, I mean “double-over and feel like passing out” painful. The scan is at the end of this month.

I just checked my diary, and I’ve been waiting since January 27th. Mmm-hmm.

a vagary of links

A “vagary”, according to The Source, is the collective noun for ‘impediments’. More pages that collect collective nouns are here and here. I am amused that a group of submarines is called a wolfpack, and that a group of sheldrakes is a doading (shoutout to my friend Duckie!).

Henceforth a group of links to things almost, but not quite entirely like tea relevant to The Thesis shall be known as a Vagary.

First, the Guardian reports on what most menstruating women know: that your hot water bottle really does relieve internal pain. A couple months back I read about a study that demonstrated that heat was as effective as ibuprofen in relieving menstrual pain. This is good news for our livers, no doubt, but carrying around a hot water bottle is impractical for about 99% of women. Those stick-on heat things with the iron filings in them seem to do a good job though!

Chocolate, it seems, is really not anti-depressant: “any mood benefits of chocolate consumption are ephemeral.” It’s just cos you’re stuffing your gob, not the magical woo-woo power of cacao.

Some gems from Medical Hypotheses, which I might unfairly characterise as a place where MDs who still yearn for the third-year undergraduate speculative essays they never got to write because they were too busy memorising the major craniofacial nerves get to, um, write those essays. Hey, it’s called Hypotheses for a reason. I kinda love this. I wish *I* had left-field theory to write up. Hours of fun.

Ecstacy makes you feel good and want to touch people and rub up against them and slide your–sorry. Ecstacy makes you feel saucy ‘cos of vasopressin and oxytocin. Man, that oxytocin stuff is awesome. It makes women forget the trauma and pain of childbirth, stimulates breastfeeding, makes you trust people more, increases your pain tolerance… why can’t I buy *that* from those guys at Camden Market instead of the magic mushrooms?

This one argues that there might be adaptive reasons behind our pervasive use of alcohol and caffeine. That is, caffeine makes us SMRT in an environment where competition is social/intellectual rather than physical, and alcohol dampens down the stress response in environments that lack social networks and cause a greater fear response. Oh, and apparently, if you’re drunk and in some sort of traumatic injury situation you heal better or something. This article is so unnecessarily convoluted in its prose I could only skim it, and it seems to be the kind of evolutionary psychology armchair handwaving that could be problematised pretty quickly; they don’t seem to have a grasp on their timelines (like, WHEN are these environments) or their cross-cultural caff/booze frequencies. But, you know, some testable hypotheses.

Cultural evolution causing baldness. I dunno in what sense cultural evolution is being used here, but possibly the loosest type, i.e. cultural change. Anyhow, apparently wearing headdresses and having close-cropped hair means sebum builds up on the hair shaft, and that’s bad and causes baldness. This is my favourite bit:

“Many people affected by common baldness have noted that they started to suffer from it during military service. This theory could explain this fact. The difference in hair length is the key. Military people, skinheads and others wear their hair short and therefore they can induce problems with the sebum flow. On the contrary, hippies, Hindus, etc. wear long hair.”

Dude. Good luck with that one.

Finally, the piece de resistance: defecating at night-time (only) may help you lose weight. Because you’re carrying your shit around with you all day, and that takes energy.

This gets the special face: o.O