From time to time we each run into newspaper or magazine items of interest, things we might want to share, things that others might want to read.

This will be a thread to facilitate that sharing. My hope is that each of our "regulars" will try to find one article per week to share.

If it's freely available on line, just post here a link and brief description.

If it's subscription-only, put the text in the wiki but, to alert others that you've done so, put here a mention with link to the wiki.

I trust everyone will use discretion so that this "sharing" doesn't turn into a battle over politics!

EDIT; PS re arnie's point: Articles are often copied on the web. My thought is that so long as it's with attribution, and is limited to occassional articles rather than a substantial portion of the paper, it constitutes "fair use" and would serve as valued publicity for the paper. Needless to say, any objections received would be honored.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: shufitz,

quote:

If it's subscription-only, put the text in the wiki

I suspect the newspapers might have issues with that; there's a boring old law about copyright that they might mention.

I've put in the first article, for your enjoyment, from a periodic column that takes a look at some interesting history. This one is about the movement for universal health care in the US a century ago.:

Health insurance "is a dead issue in the United States," reported a committee of the New York State Medical Society almost a century ago. It seems ludicrous today that anyone believed the debate over government-mandated health insurance had been settled forever. But in 1925, that's how things looked.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: shufitz,

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Come on, folks! Surely you read enough to come across, from time to time, interesting articles worth sharing.

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Here's one with bibliophile-interest. The Treasures of Timbuktu: Scholars in the fabled African city, once a great center of learning and trade, are racing to save a still emerging cache of ancient manuscripts. Two brief quotes:

The manuscripts paint a portrait of Timbuktu as the Cambridge or Oxford of its day

Most historians believe that Timbuktu was founded in the 1100s by a Tuareg woman named Bouctou, who ran a rest stop for camel caravans on a tributary of the Niger River. ("Tin Bouctou" means "the well of Bouctou.")

Here's one which is not particularly language related, but certainly is Big News of general interest.

Note the remarkable coincidence of the discovery of this cave on the exact date of that big event in New York === 11 September 2001.

Here's more.

On my computer, I could not get the full version of Jerry's story. If you have the same problem, try here: Fossil finds called 'national treasure'; Cave holds remains of Ice Age bear, many other species.

quote:

Originally posted by jerry thomas:
Here's one which is not particularly language related, but certainly is Big News of general interest.

Yes, Jerry, that certainly is Big News, and we can make it language related. I got this from another site:

The Riverbluff Cave Site was discovered on September 11, 2001 during construction of a road in Southwest Greene County, Missouri. Workers accidentally blasted a 40 feet wide by 20 feet high fissure into a large room that was heavily decorated with speleothems.

Tinman

I have one that should interest linguists and another for mathematicians and plant lovers.

Talk to the Hand: Language might have evolved from gestures

The Mathematical Lives of Plants

Tinman

I enjoyed the gestures article, Tinman, though I wonder what the creationists would think.

I loved this article from the NY Times. A 13-year-old is frustrated because his parents can't get political asylum (they should contact my daughter ) so he is taking out that frustration in trying to win the national spelling bee. What a healthy reaction! His room is apparently "stuffed to the ceiling" with sprachgefühl, a word he missed last year in a spelling bee.

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though I wonder what the creationists would think

I don't suppose they would let the facts get in the way of a good prejudice ;-)

Why Astronauts Need Down Time in Space: Some of the most interesting scientific discoveries made by astronauts occur during the all-too-rare free moments on space missionse. Astronauts spend much of their time on a list of tightly scripted research. That gives astronauts little opportunity to tinker with scientific instruments, or simply look at what is around them. That’s a shame, because when astronauts have been able to break from script, it has led to some significant scientific findings.

I was intrigued by this reiew of a book on England's "Glorious Revoution" of 1688-89. Excerpt:

When the English-speaking peoples consider the forces that have made them the global hegemonic political culture since the mid-19th century--representative institutions, the rule of law, religious toleration and property rights among them--they look back to Britain's "Glorious" Revolution of 1688. ... It heralded nothing less than a complete realignment of worldview for the Anglosphere. It changed everything.

I'd never heard of it, but of course I'm a USn. Is this bit of history familiar to you Brits, and is it considered to be of great importance?

(PS: hegemony: dominance, especially by one state or social group over others)

It's not a term I have heard before - although the history of the period was taught when I was at school.

I've definitely heard of it and it's not given that great importance nowadays in England and Wales. However, since it involved the overthrow of King James II (VI of Scotland) and the installation of William of Orange it is still seen as very important in Scotland and Northern Ireland.

It was certainly a period when the power of the monarch became circumscribed, and the country became much more religiously tolerant, apart from to catholics, that is. At the time, the (protestant) population thought it was "glorious" and prods in Scotland and Northern Ireland still do; a feeling not shared by the catholics.

While it was certainly an important event in the development of our country, I wouldn't call it earth-shattering.

The man who owns the Internet "Kevin Ham is the most powerful dotcom mogul you've never heard of ... a $300 million empire." He buys up web-addresses, with an eye to re-selling them. A current example:

millions of people who mistakenly type ".cm" instead of ".com" at the end of a domain name.

Try it with almost any name you can think of -- Beer.cm, Newyorktimes.cm, even Anyname.cm -- and you'll land on a page called Agoga.com, filled with ads served up by Yahoo.

Ham makes money every time someone clicks on an ad -- as does his partner in this venture, the West African country of Cameroon. Why Cameroon? It has the unforeseen good fortune of owning .cm as its country code -- just as Germany runs all names that end with .de.

The difference is that hardly any .cm names are registered, and the letters are just one keyboard slip away from .com ... . Ham ... reroute[s] the traffic. And if he gets his way, Colombia (.co), Oman (.om), Niger (.ne), and Ethiopia (.et) will be his as well.

As you may be aware, Rupert Murdoch has proposed to purchase the Wall Street Journal. In that context, today's Journal has a truly remarkable editorial on

... the question of journalistic "independence." There's been a lot of debate lately about what that means. We thought our readers might like to know what it has meant at the Journal ... over the decades.

It begins,

"Don't believe the man who tells you there are two sides to every question. There is only one side to the truth." So wrote William Peter Hamilton, one of the first men to hold the job of editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal ...

I feel alone in this thread. Doesn't anyone else ever read anything of interest in the papers?

Modern humans first emerged about 100,000 years ago. For the next 99,800 years or so, nothing happened. Well, not quite nothing. There were wars, political intrigue, the invention of agriculture -- but none of that stuff had much effect on the quality of people's lives. Almost everyone lived on the modern equivalent of $400 to $600 a year, just above the subsistence level.

Then -- just a couple of hundred years ago, maybe 10 generations -- people started getting richer. And richer and richer still. Per capita income, at least in the West, began to grow at the unprecedented rate of about three quarters of a percent per year. A couple of decades later, the same thing was happening around the world.

The underlying expectation -- that the present is supposed to be better than the past -- is a new phenomenon in history. No 18th-century politician would have asked "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" because it never would have occurred to anyone that they ought to be better off than they were four years ago.
- Steven Landsburg, A Brief History of Economic Time. More excerpts here.

from a Newspaper column: My Only Son by Dutch novelist Leon de Winter. I cite for the sociological point, trusting that we can keep political division out of this.

Americans manage to deal with the fact that tens of thousands of people will be killed each year on the roadways. But [as to Iran] the nation may soon decide that 3,500 deaths over four years is too much.

German genocide expert Gunnar Heinsohn investigates family size in various societies in relation to the frequency of violent conflict since 1500 A.D. His conclusion is disturbingly simple: The presence of large numbers of young men in nations that have experienced population explosions—all searching for respect, work, sex and meaning—tend to turn into violent countries and become involved in wars. He cites, as an example, the Palestinian territories, where many families have as many as four sons.

Most countries in which Islamofascism has taken root have experienced population explosions. Huge numbers of young men are searching in vain for a respectable future. They legitimize their frustration with a radical ideology that channels their dissatisfaction and finds roots in the ancient religious traditions of Islam.

Mr. Heinsohn’s explanation shows the extreme pacifism of today’s Europe to be more than a response to the horrific experiences of World War II. He sees Europe’s low birthrate as the basis for the remarkable period of peace Europe has nurtured since 1945. Europe’s sons have become too precious for war.

quote:

Europe’s sons have become too precious for war.

Maybe too precious for religion, too.
One of the Joseph Campbell televised lecture series starts out with clips of different religions around the world -- Catholic priests, Jewish rabbis, Buddhist monks, Shinto priests, Muslim imams -- the point being the universality of man's spiritual quest.
Men's spiritual quest, actually, as there were no women shown at all. It made me wonder why religion is such a guy thing, and it occurred to me that maybe men are just more expendable. In fact, sending a bunch of them to go live on a mountaintop probably made things run more smoothly. And maybe that's why the number of European men going into the clergy has plummeted in recent decades: sons have become too precious.

In After the Empire Emmanuel Todd argues that when developing societies hit a certain literacy rate their birth rate drops precipitously, but before the drop occurs they go through a period of chaos and warfare. I think he argues that this is what happened during the protestant reformation, and that is is happening now in the Islamic world.

The fact that so many fundamentalists of the Judeo-Christian model are against any form of birth control plays right into these social observations. I did a little checking & found that Muslims' interpretation of the Koran allows for birth control in moderation. However, the Sharia also allows for multiple wives, which might balance that in the other direction.

Every summer the Chicago Tribune writes about their 50 favorite magazines. The books/literary/writing categories include: The Believer, Granta, The New York Review of Books, and of course The New Yorker, though they missed some good ones, such as Verbatim.

Here are the online journals they recommend: Mothering.com, NewScientist.com, The Onion A.V. Club (avclub.com), Pitchfork Media (pitchforkmedia.com), and Slate.com.

This lady must have been some teacher! A retiring teacher wrote a column remembering some of her students. It makes you realize how very much our teachers mean to kids.

Not word-related, but interesting. I don't know if this article (by a former lieutenant governor of New York) is available to non-subscribers, so I'll give some excerpts.

... in the U.S., women have a 63% chance of living at least five years after [cancer] diagnosis, and men have a 66% chance -- the highest survival rates in the world. These figures reflect the care available to all Americans, not just those with private health coverage. In Great Britain, which has had a government-run universal health-care system for half a century, the figures were 53% for women and 45% for men, near the bottom of the 23 countries surveyed.

... women in the U.S. are more likely to get a PAP test every two years than women in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the U.K., where health insurance is guaranteed by the government. In the U.S. 85% of women ages 25-64 have regular PAP smears, compared with 58% in the U.K.

The same is true for mammograms. In the U.S., 84% of women ages 50-64 get them regularly, a higher percentage than in Australia, Canada or New Zealand, and far higher than the 63% of women in the U.K.

Woohoo! In your face cancerous socialists!

Seriously though, insuring the last uninsured 15% of Americans is going to break this how?

I will have to look, Shu, but I seriously doubt that 85% of women between 25-64 receive "regular" PAP smears (how are they defining "regular?") and that 85% of women between 50-64 get "regular" mammograms. Heck, even when women can afford them, they sometimes don't get them.

And what about men and their PSA levels and their prostate exams?

While there are problems in other countries with their national insurance, I agree, we have plenty of problems here.

quote:

In Great Britain, which has had a government-run universal health-care system for half a century, the figures were 53% for women and 45% for men, near the bottom of the 23 countries surveyed.

If these figures are accurate (and the full source isn't quoted in the article) I suggest this has more to do with inclination than funding. Tests of this nature are free in the UK (as are all similar tests) but it's up to the patient to ask for them. If patients choose not to request tests then the GP isn't going to pester them.

I had tests recently on a suspicious mole (it was benign) and on my blood, blood pressure and heart-rate (a 24-hour monitor). Even though I saw the top skin-disease specialist in the south of England I paid nothing (except to park my car). The other tests were also free - even the 24-hour monitor. And, you may (or may not) be pleased to learn, all my results were normal.

I didn't have to wait long for the testing but I did have to wait. But it's no problem if you schedule such tests (I have already programmed in my next blood test, early in 2008).

The problem arises when people need urgent treatment and there's not enough equipment available and that problem is, in part, due to people not going for regular tests. If a problem is not diagnosed until it is severe then treatment delay is a major issue - and no medical system, anywhere in the world, will be able to cope with all urgent demands, all the time.

The article actually says, "...The high rate of screening in the U.S. reflects access as well as educational efforts by the American Cancer Society and others..." and I agree entirely with the second part of the sentence. But I do not think that access to screening is a major problem in the UK. The NHS has its faults but availability of screening to those who want it isn't one of them.

Big Brother is watching us all

quote:

"As you walk through a crowd, we'll be able to track you," said Professor Challapa. "These are all things that don't need the cooperation of the individual."

Tinman

Here's another quote from the Big Brother article:

quote:

"Unless we're going to train every American citizen and soldier in 16 different languages we have to develop a technology that allows them to understand - whatever country they are in - what's going on around them.

"I hope in the future we'll be able to have conversations, if say you're speaking in French and I'm speaking in English, and it will be natural."

"And the computer will do the translation?"

"Yep. All by computer," he said.

Excuse me while I guffaw

Translating software is far from perfect - but it works and is improving all the time. Don't write it off. Remember, the first application of a new process is usually less effective than the most recent application of an existing one. Remember film cameras?

Many clever people have lived to regret their prophesies, such as these: http://www.kadifeli.com/fedon/diduknow.htm

Yes, MT (i.e., machine translation) has been getting better since the first attempts in the '50s. In the EU, there are 23 official languages. Some documents need to be translated into all of them, and, depending on which language the text was authored in, this is far from a trivial task. The EU has been using MT for at least a decade. They're using SYSTRAN software, which is pretty old, and is the same software that Babelfish and other popular website use. They have specialized dictionaries, writing guidelines, and human editors and writers who review and fix translation mistakes.

MT does better with straight-forward technical or legal prose than with poetry and gnomic texts such as proverbs. I took the first computational linguistics class offered at Cal in the late '70s. It was a graduate, survey course taught by an ABD doctoral student, Henry S. Thompson, who was then working at Xerox PARC and has since moved on to a professorship at the University of Edinburgh. (Some rather well-known professors also sat in on the class, e.g., George Lakoff and Lotfi Zadeh.) The classic mistranslation (apocryphal) story is from the '60s, which we learned in that class, was the phrase "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak" which came back "The vodka is good, but the meat is rotten". Nonetheless it is fun, and I urge people to try the link bethree5 gives above or go to Babelfish and have fun.

[Fixed typo.]

This message has been edited. Last edited by: zmježd,

I suspect there will always be a need for humans - but not to translate but to proofread. Sadly, although most people seem sceptical about a computer's ability to translate they seem to put 100% trust in its ability to spell and grammar check.

Grammatical solecisms about, even in the most respectable organs and, of course, we are all familiar with the incomprehensibility of many sets of instructions for equipment - even those written by UK and US manufacturers.

Let this be a warning to those who do not believe in having their work proofed: http://www.poeticexpressions.co.uk/poems/Spelling%20Chequer.htm

Here's a link to Taylor Mali's performance of The Impotence of Proofreading at an actual poetry slam caught on video !

quote:

Many clever people have lived to regret their prophesies, such as these: http://www.kadifeli.com/fedon/diduknow.htm

Great site, RE! I found this one especially revealing of its era's mindset: David Sarnoff's associates in response to his urgings for investment in the radio in the 1920s, said, "The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?"

One of my favourites is the comment on the telephone, by Sir William Preece, chief engineer of the British Post Office, in 1876. In spite of the fact that the device was invented by a Briton (albeit in the USA) he said, "The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys".

After half a century, Army rights a wrong

Army: Black Soldiers Wronged in POW Case

quote:

Originally posted by bethree5:


Excuse me while I guffaw

I posted on this game a couple of years ago The software must be British, since it changes "pants" to "trousers."

Surgery on girl born with eight limbs deemed a success


Falling cow hits van


Woman arrested for biting ex-boyfriend's lip off while kissing

Good Stories, Good Math
Preschoolers who can tell good stories develop good mathematical skills by the first grade

This is such an interesting article, tinman. The headline's a bit misleading-- it's preschoolers with a predilection for relating various viewpoints within a single story who turned out to be strong in math later.

Though modernist fiction loves to tell a tale from multitudinous viewpoints, the tried-and-true classic method (one viewpoint-- either omniscient narrator, or main character [1st or 3rd person]) seems to be most often chosen by top literary authors. (That would make an interesting study, too!) However, regardless of the formality chosen, certainly our great writers must understand their stories from each character's viewpoint. (Wonder if they're good at math too?)

I am married to a mathematician-turned-engineer. No question the mathman in him causes him to listen closely to a problem, then re-pose the question from various angles. This is perhaps a hallmark of scientists as well.

What strikes me about this is that psychologists often come from a mathematical background. I'd always attributed this to behavioral science and the importance of statistical analysis. But the fact is, the reason I occasionally spend hard-earned dollars on a therapist is her gift for visualizing social situations from each person's viewpointf-- and thereby helping me learn to speculate where the other guy is coming from.

Fascinating!

Though modernist fiction loves to tell a tale from multitudinous viewpoints, the tried-and-true classic method (one viewpoint-- either omniscient narrator, or main character [1st or 3rd person]) seems to be most often chosen by top literary authors.

My favorite multi-POV novel was written when Victoria was Queen and the sun never set on the British Empire: Bram Stoker's Dracula. Modernism ran its happy course from the Gay 'Ninties to the end of WW2. Postmodernism (a critical term with which few are happy, but for which fewer have suggested a replacement term) revels in all sorts of diegetic hijinks: e.g., mis-en-abyme, unreliable narrator. There are two good books on pomo literature, both by Brian McHale: Postmodernist Fiction (1987) and Constructing Postmodernism (1992).

[QUOTE]Originally posted by zmježd:
...mis-en-abyme, unreliable narrator...
Har Har!!

Egad, post-modern. A fair amount of it was shoveled in my direction as a Romance Lit major in the late '60's. I drew the line at Rayuela by Julio Cortazar (1963), 600+ pages of small print in my old edition.. & the idea is you can pull off the binding & re-shuffle the pages any way you like [and read it]! Well, I exaggerate, but only a tad. I "did my own thing," i.e. read selections of my own choosing-- as much as I had to to get by!

i.e. read selections of my own choosing-- as much as I had to to get by!

So, it sounds like it was a learning experience. Mozel tov!.

1944 Conviction of Black G.I.’s Is Ruled Flawed

On August 14, 1944 an Italian prisoner of war was lynched at Fort Lawton in Seattle. Three black soldiers were accused of the lynching and charged with murder, and forty others were were charged with rioting, resulting in the largest court-martial of World War II.


The case was recently reviewed and the board ruled the trial was "fundamentally unfair and improper." The prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, withheld crucial evidence from the defense.

The review of the case was prompted by Jack Hamann's book, On American Soil."

I was privileged to hear the author speak last night at the Shoreline Library (Gotta put a plug in for those libraries). Hamann also praised the libraries. He said he and his wife traveled all around the States (twice) interviewing anyone connected to the case and researching at libraries.

I strongly recommend the book.

A Video That's Worth a Million Words
Award-winning video reveals the simplicity and beauty of an abstract mathematical tool, includes a link to a video, "Möbius Transformations Revealed."

Read the article, then watch the video. Then read the article again.

Cutting comments: the foreskin debate.

So are you for skin or against it?

"Aye, there's the rub!" (And, according to the article, a four minute longer rub at that!)

Now look what they're using them for! As some blogger commented, the next question is, can you take cells from the lopped-off foreskin and use them to grow a new one?

"It is not imperative to lash her, it is not imperative to send her to prison," said Ghazi Suleiman. "But I think the lady, she hasn't got any intention to insult the Islamic religion, therefore I am sure, very sure that if she went to the court she might be acquitted."
No doubt about it .... read more...

In these days when the news is always negative, here is a great story about a Captain in Iraq who adopted an Iraqi boy with cerebral palsy. This little 9-year-old had learned enough English from the nuns at the orphanage to communicate to Captain Scott Southworth. Southworth isn't married, but he has brought little Ala'a Eddeen back to the U.S., and Ala'a loves it here!

I found this quote so heartwarming:

quote:

Over the next 10 months, the unit returned to the orphanage again and again. The soldiers would race kids in their wheelchairs, sit them in Humvees and help the sisters feed them.