Good news from the museums/material culture community at University College London: The Anthropology department at UCL (University College London) is pleased to announce the Mary Douglas Awards, to students applying for Master’s programmes for entry in September 2013. These fee waivers, worth between £2000 -£ 4000 pounds will be awarded based on the merit of [...]
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Jason Baird Jackson: Mary Douglas Awards Available for Masters Work in Material, Visual, and Digital Culture Studies at UCL
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The Global Sociology Blog: The Visual Du Jour – More Leeches!
Surely, at some point, this austerity thing… somewhere… in the future… for sure, it’s going to work:
Making a large number of people poorer is guaranteed to boost demand.
More leeches!
Like Atrios keeps repeating, we are governed by evil and stupid people.
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hawgblawg: Levantine vs. Mandatory
I thought Avishai Margalit's review of Hadara Lazar's Out of Palestine: The Making of Modern Israel in the NYRB was entirely too soft on the British mandate in Palestine. But I thought Margalit's recollection of post-Mandate, post-1948 and what "Levantine" and "Mandatory" meant was very interesting:After the war we moved to a neighborhood that used to be the stronghold of the British civil administration. Our next-door neighbors looked familiar, in their shorts, blue shirts, open sandals, and deep suntans. They were part of a commune of kibbutz members serving as “missionaries” in one of the socialist youth movements at the time. But the Jewish neighbor next to them looked different, utterly different. He wore a suit and a tie even on the hottest days of the year and his collection of suits was wide and varied, but his collection of gloves was even more astonishing. One day I overheard two of the kibbutzniks nattering about our exceptionally well groomed neighbor. He is a “Mandatory type,” said one. Yes, yes, totally “Levantine,” said the other. I rushed to my mother for a social gloss. She gave a sanitized account of these two expressions. Well, she said, he is from Halab (Aleppo) and Halab is, so to speak, the northern capital of the Levant so that’s why he speaks such good French and, needless to say, Arabic. So much for the “Levantine.” As for the “Mandatory type,” she added, on top of French and Arabic he speaks English fluently, and already worked as a chief receptionist at the King David Hotel during the Mandate. This explains the way he dresses. Finally, she said, the kibbutzniks probably meant that he is not an Undzerer. My mother could never refrain from inserting into her Hebrew this Yiddish expression, which means: he is “not one of us.” From very early on, therefore, I had to grasp that “Mandatory type” is, in the exasperating cliché of today, “The Other.” Of course, as Jacqueline Kahanoff and Gil Hochberg among others have shown, a "Levantine" in Israel (especially one who spoke Arabic), was not Undzerer either. It wasn't so much a matter of a suit, tie and gloves.
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tabsir.net: Travels of Sir John Mandaville, 1
portrait of Sir John Mandeville, from 1459
[One of the most widely read Holy Land travel narratives of the 14th century was attributed to a certain Sir John Mandeville. Some scholars believed it was compiled from writings of It appears to have been compiled from the writings of William of Boldensele, Oderic of Pordenone, and Vincent de Beauvais. Whoever the author, it is a fascinating read for the positive depiction of Islam. The entire book is online, but here is the part on Islam.]
NOW, because that I have spoken of Saracens and of their country — now, if ye will know a part of their law and of their belief, I shall tell you after that their book that is clept ALKARON telleth. And some men clepe that book MESHAF. And some men clepe it HARME, after the diverse languages of the country. The which book Mohammet took them. In the which book, among other things, is written, as I have often-time seen and read, that the good shall go to paradise, and the evil to hell; and that believe all Saracens. And if a man ask them what paradise they mean, they say, to paradise that is a place of delights where men shall find all manner of fruits in all seasons, and rivers running of milk and honey, and of wine and of sweet water; and that they shall have fair houses and noble, every man after his desert, made of precious stones and of gold and of silver; and that every man shall have four score wives all maidens, and he shall have ado every day with them, and yet he shall find them always maidens. (more…)
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The Naked Anthropologist: Sex at the Margins reviewed in Gender & Development
Academic publishing is dysfunctional. Even I, who spend a good bit of time online, never received notice of a review of Sex at the Margins published four years ago in a major journal. Had I known about this one I would have responded to its complaints. The short reply is that the book is based on research I did for a phd. It never set out to be a definitive study of every possible situation, and it was started before I had even heard the word trafficking. By the time I approached the end, I knew I was publishing testimonies that other people would classify and analyse differently, but my object was to account for migrants’ own descriptions of their lives – including women living in the kind of situations depicted in this photo. Yes, I talked to folks like her and others pictured on this page, in Europe and before they had left their own countries. More of my reply after the review itself.
Gender & Development Vol 16, No 1, March 2008
Agustin, Laura Maria, Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry
London: Zed Books, 2007
This book should be recommended to everyone who works for any type of ‘rescue industry’, and especially to organisations helping migrants and prostitutes. It should also be interesting for all who read media stories about victims of trafficking, stories that are all similar, which all include information about police rescue actions, and accounts of sexual exploitation and violence; stories that we all know. Usually the stories do not mention that such actions do not have happy endings, that the ‘rescued women’ are sent back home into the very same situation they were trying to escape, and their lives there are now made more difficult by the new stigma of being a prostitute. Their traffickers are rarely punished.
The book is written by a person who herself has carried out ‘participatory research’, that is, she has worked with migrant prostitutes or ‘victims of trafficking’, as they are referred to in most cases. [LA: Not by me, by other commentators.] It is written from the perspective of a person who knows the situation from the inside, who has followed the flow of migration from Latin America to Spain, who understands the complexity of motivations and circumstances leading to the decisions to migrate. The author looks at women’s strategies to settle in a new country, to find a job there, to engage in one of the caring professions in the so-called ‘informal economy’, or in prostitution. The book is the result of Agustin’s attempts to match her own experience and knowledge gained during her work in migrant communities, with the political responses to the ‘issue of migration’ which are offered by international organisations, governments, and civil-society organisations. She observes the problems of migrant women working in prostitution, as well as the problems in the development of policy responses, the types of social support available to women, and the media accounts of their ‘exploitation’. As she writes: The migration discourse relies on numerous questionable dichotomies: work and leisure, travel and settling, legal and illegal. The label migrant goes to poorer people who are conceived as workers with no other desires and projects, but when migrants are women who sell sex they lose workers’ status and become ‘victims of trafficking’. The obsessive gaze on poverty and forced sex disqualifies working people’s participation in global flows, flexible labour, diaspora and transnationalism. Women are victimised more but the migrant label is disempowering for men too.
The book questions the politicised approach to women’s migration that results not only in too simplistic an interpretation of the new global trends, but as a consequence results also in developing inadequate responses to those trends. While writing about the situation of migrants, the author is showing how the use of the term ‘migration’ is reducing the complex meaning of the movement of people through the borders, especially those who are poor, and from the margins of the world. Migration as opposed to travel; migrants as opposed to travellers or tourists; the need for employment as opposed to the need to seek new horizons and to explore the world. In real life, argues the author, such oppositions rarely exist.
Agustin is describing some of the irrational actions and reactions to the migration of women, by presenting a discursive picture of the ‘migrant prostitute’, a picture that bears a heavy load of suspicion and stereotypes. The figure of a ‘victim of trafficking’ (helpless, abused, in need of support, not able to make sensible decisions and protect herself) is an extreme example of politicisation of the migration discourse. Even more extreme is the practical result of such a narrative, a model of assistance developed to assist victims.
‘Trafficking’ is, to some extent, a modern duplication of the ‘white slave’ discourse from the nineteenth and [early] twentieth centuries. Back then, the term ‘white slaves’ was designed to prevent women’s migration by spreading stories about what happened to women migrating from Europe to the Americas. Today, while the rhetoric is the same, the protection of innocent victims from sexual abuse, the term ‘trafficking’ is used to describe the global migration of women and, once again, the aim is to protect them from sex crimes. I share the conviction of the author that the view of a female migrant as a woman with no agency, no clearly defined migration project, helpless and in need of protection, has given rise to a very conservative, old-fashioned model of charity work.
However, after agreeing with the author on these points, I have to ask, what about the victims of trafficking? While challenging the definition of trafficking, and presenting the complex web of consequences that the contextualisation of migrant women as victims of trafficking has for their rights and their lives, Agustin does not mention the fact that some of the migrant women working in prostitution are indeed victims of trafficking and need support.
While it is very important to reject the charitable approach as flawed, what should replace it? I am not a big fan of any particular approach to prostitution adopted by policy makers to date. All of them seem to me inadequate, and fail to reflect the complexity of the issues covered by this term; and, even more, the complexity of real-life situations and biographies of the people involved. These are people who somehow, stubbornly, do not want to fit into our models. However, working for many years in eastern and central Europe, I have to acknowledge that the situation of many prostitutes cannot be described by any terms other than abuse, force, and exploitation. They are ‘owned’ by the pimps, have their earnings confiscated, and are not free to choose the conditions of their work, among other issues. We cannot use the language of consent, and insist that prostitution is a chosen profession to describe situations of cruel exploitation, deprivation of freedom of movement, and total dependence on the bar or brothel owners. In the same way in which violence against women in the family cannot be called ‘family life’, the violence against migrant women working in prostitution cannot be called ‘sex work’. The difference is that in the case of theorising family life, nobody, for political reasons, is trying to say that all marriages should be perceived as violent, and all married women should be treated as victims, just because violence against women in the family exists.
I am disappointed that Agustin stopped short of looking at the real violence against migrant women, especially those working in the sex industry. She does describe how the term ‘trafficking in women’ is misused, but does not look at the need to re-establish its proper meaning.
I wonder how it was possible that the term ‘trafficking’ was hijacked by the international organisations and state agencies, and that suddenly all women working in sex industry became ‘victims of trafficking’, not only migrants. In eastern Europe, the term is used also to describe ‘internal trafficking’. I would be even more interested to learn how it is possible that the very same actions of the state agencies that were the trigger for NGOs taking action to protect abused migrant prostitutes are now described as ‘anti-trafficking measures’. I do understand the mistrust of Agustin towards such actions, but I wonder whether the decision simply to refuse to look at abused migrant prostitutes as victims of trafficking will stop the violence against them.
Barbara Limanowska, UNDP
I can understand Limanowska’s disappointment: almost every book I read disappoints me in some way. However, it isn’t true that I simply ‘refused to look at abused migrant prostitutes’ or didn’t mention that some victims want support. Conversations I had with escapees from bad situations are included in the book; one vignette in the fieldwork chapter describes a shelter for escapees from trafficking in Madrid. Incidents migrants narrated to me that describe abuse are included as well. What I did that hadn’t been done before was listen to everything else they said, including complications like their compliancy in getting false papers, their willingness to get into debt, the priority they gave to earning money, their desire not to be rescued in the manner often imposed on them and their insistent rejection of a victim identity. Limanowska suggests, even back in 2008, that there are two clearly separable groups – migrants and trafficked people, which leads her to complain that I only wrote about one of the groups and neglected the other. What I actually did was analyse what hundreds of people said to me, trying to shed light on their bigger stories rather than classify them. I found no evidence for the existence of two discrete groups requiring different treatment (or policy). No one that I spoke with, even in shelters for trafficking victims, described themselves as belonging to a group separable from migrants in general.
Sex at the Margins is an edited version of my doctoral thesis. For two years after getting the phd I didn’t even bother to send it to Zed Books, the publisher I had a contract with. I simply never imagined it could be interesting or relevant to many people. That it was good enough for reviewers like Limanowska to forget it was a student’s work, not a big policy-oriented study, is actually a big compliment.
More of the many reviews of the book can be read here.
–Laura Agustín, the Naked Anthropologist
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Erkan in the Army now...: Cyberculture roundup: CISPA is back, Vote for the Netizen of the Year, Effects of a Patent Troll….
CISPA is Back: FAQ on What it is and Why it’s Still Dangerous
from EFF.org Updates by Mark M. Jaycox and Kurt Opsahl
The privacy-invasive bill known as CISPA—the so-called “cybersecurity” bill—was reintroduced in February 2013. Just like last year, the bill has stirred a tremendous amount of grassroots activism because it carves a loophole in all known privacy laws and grants legal immunity for companies to share your private information. EFF has compiled an FAQ detailing how the bill’s major provisions work and how they endanger all Internet users’ privacy. Please join us in speaking out against CISPA by contacting Congress now.
E-Verify: Bad for American Businesses and Worker Privacy
from EFF.org Updates by Activism Intern
by Sophia Elson
Earlier today, there was a hearing in the House Judiciary Committee on whether all employers nationwide should be required to use the employment verification system E-Verify to investigate the backgrounds of each new employee they hire.
ISPs Finally Explain How ‘Six Strikes’ Anti-Piracy Program Will Work
from Mashable! by Alex Fitzpatrick
Is Twitter actually worth $10 billion? We have our doubts
from The Next Web by Alex Wilhelm
John Cusack’s Reddit AMA on Freedom of the Press Foundation
from Boing Boing by Xeni Jardin
The Real and Dangerous Effects of a Patent Troll
from EFF.org Updates by Julie Samuels
The patent system is broken. Software patents serve as little more than a tax on innovation. Patent trolls extort money from legitimate small businesses and innovators, hurting our economy and society-at-large.
Support free expression: Vote for the Netizen of the Year
from The Official Google Blog by Emily Wood
One in three Internet users suffers from restricted access to the web due to government censorship, filtering or online surveillance, according to the free expression advocacy group Reporters Without Borders. Around the world, bloggers and cyber-dissidents are jailed for expressing their views. Reporters Without Borders makes sure their struggles are not forgotten.
Army releases some documents on Bradley Manning case
from Boing Boing by Xeni Jardin
Related posts:
Cyberculture roundup: Assange’s TV show, CISPA as the new threat and more…
Cyberculture roundup: New Laws on Privacy issues, Iranian presidential candidate does Reddit AMA, CISPA on the agenda…
a Cyberculture roundup: US copyright enemies list, Facebook ‘Organ Donor’, Digital Activism, CISPA, the Pirate Bay
Cyberculture roundup: CISPA threat continues, Stop Cyber Spying Week, Google Drive,
a new threat CISPA; WordPress dominates the blogging scene.. A cyberculture roundup..
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Discard Studies: The Recycling of Building Materials in Late Antiquity: Practice and Ideology 3/9/13
The Recycling of Building Materials in Late Antiquity: Practice and Ideology Saturday 9th March, 10.00-4.00 pm The Birley Room, D203, Department of Archaeology, Durham University, UK Schedule: 10.00 am Coffee I: 10.30-11.15 Managing Spolia: Legislation and Economy Legislation and Architectural Reuse in the Roman Empire (100 BC – AD 500) By Yuri Marano, yuri_marano@hotmail.com In … Continue reading »
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Language Log: Sex and FOXP2: Preservation of endangered stereotypes
Last week, when I discussed the return of the zombie meme about women talking three times more than men ("An invented statistic returns", 2/22/2013), I promised to come back to the real scientific results in the paper whose public relations campaign unleased that extraordinary outburst of mass-media pseudoscience.
The paper was J. Michael Bowers, Miguel Perez-Pouchoulen, N. Shalon Edwards, and Margaret M. McCarthy, "Foxp2 Mediates Sex Differences in Ultrasonic Vocalization by Rat Pups and Directs Order of Maternal Retrieval", The Journal of Neuroscience, February 20, 2013, As the title indicates, the paper is mostly about baby rats; and the reader is hereby warned that the following discussion may be longer than you're going to be willing to sit through. I'm afraid, though, that if you care about what this paper said and what it means, you're going to have to put in some time, here or elsewhere.
First, a bit of background about Foxp2. As Wikipedia explains,
Forkhead box protein P2 also known as Foxp2 is a protein that in humans is encoded by the FOXP2 gene, located on human chromosome 7 (7q31, at the SPCH1 locus). Foxp2 orthologs have also been identified in all mammals for which complete genome data are available. The Foxp2 protein contains a forkhead-box DNA-binding domain, making it a member of the FOX group of transcription factors, involved in regulation of gene expression.
Like all genes, FOXP2 interacts with many other genes, along with epigenetic and environmental factors, to create, maintain and regulate all sorts of structures and functions. From Genevieve Konopka et al., "Human-specific transcriptional regulation of CNS development genes by FOXP2", Nature 462: 213-217, 11/12/2009, here's a picture of "one of the modules containing FOXP2 and FOXP2chimp differentially expressed genes":
And let me quote again from the scientist who first identified the role of the FOXP2 gene in speech and language impairment, Simon Fisher, ("Tangled webs: Tracing the connections between genes and cognition", Cognition 101(2): 270-297, September 2006.):
[T]he deceptive simplicity of finding correlations between genetic and phenotypic variation has led to a common misconception that there exist straightforward linear relationships between specific genes and particular behavioural and/or cognitive outputs. The problem is exacerbated by the adoption of an abstract view of the nature of the gene, without consideration of molecular, developmental or ontogenetic frameworks. […] [A]doption of an abstract concept of the gene can lead to erroneous conclusions, which are incompatible with current knowledge of molecular and developmental systems. Genes do not specify behaviours or cognitive processes; they make regulatory factors, signalling molecules, receptors, enzymes, and so on, that interact in highly complex networks, modulated by environmental influences, in order to build and maintain the brain.
The FOXP2 mutation that Fisher et al. identified in the KE family ("Localisation of a gene implicated in a severe speech and language disorder", Nature Genetics, 1998) was associated with "an underlying impairment in coordination of the orofacial musculature affecting non-speech movements", as well as speech apraxia, higher-level language problems, and general cognitive issues. And to emphasize again that FOXP2 is not "the language gene" or "the speech gene" or even "the vocalization gene", we can learn from Weiguo Shu et al. ("Foxp2 and Foxp1 cooperatively regulate lung and esophagus development", Development 2007) that:
The airways of the lung develop through a reiterative process of branching morphogenesis that gives rise to the intricate and extensive surface area required for postnatal respiration. The forkhead transcription factors Foxp2 and Foxp1 are expressed in multiple foregut-derived tissues including the lung and intestine. […] [L]oss of Foxp2 in mouse leads to defective postnatal lung alveolarization, contributing to postnatal lethality. […] These data identify Foxp2 and Foxp1 as crucial regulators of lung and esophageal development, underscoring the necessity of these transcription factors in the development of anterior foregut-derived tissues and demonstrating functional cooperativity between members of the Foxp1/2/4 family in tissues where they are co-expressed.
OK, against this background, what did Bowers et al. find? From their abstract:
We observed that isolated male rat pups emitted substantially more USV [ultrasonic vocalization] calls and these were characterized by a significantly lower frequency and amplitude compared with female rat pups. Moreover, the dam was more likely to first retrieve male pups back to the nest, then females. The amount of Foxp2 protein was significantly higher in multiple regions of the developing male brain compared with females and a reduction of brain Foxp2 by siRNA eliminated the sex differences in USVs and altered the order of pup retrieval. Our results implicate Foxp2 as a component of the neurobiological basis of sex differences in vocal communication in mammals.
After reading the paper, I remain puzzled about the time scale on which the FOXP2 gene and its associated protein affect the vocalization of rat pups, and therefore about the presumed mechanisms of influence. Do differential levels of Foxp2 protein in the brains of rat pups directly influence their vocalizations, say by modulating neurotransmitter levels? Or rather, do differential levels of Foxp2 cause developmental changes (say in neural cytoarchitecture), which then later affect vocalizations?
Some hints in the paper suggest that they have the second sort of thing in mind. Thus they cite a 2010 paper about zebra finches showing that "chronic reduction of Foxp2 expression with viral transfection of siRNA directed against the mRNA reduces dendritic spines on striatal neurons". And in their experiment, the intracerebroventricular injections of Foxp2 siRNA (or the scrambled missense control dose) were done on the first two days of life ("ICV injections were done on PN0 and PN1″), whereas the isolation-call experiments were done on the fourth day of life ("Vocal emissions were recorded for 5 min using PN4 pups that were isolated from maternal interaction").
Some rat biochemists among our readers may be able to clarify this one way or the other, but I interpret this to mean that the siRNA suppression of Foxp2 expression would probably have influenced the rats' behavior mainly through differences in brain development over the intervening three days, and not through some physiological effect mediated more directly by Foxp2 levels at the time of testing. There is a discussion (e.g. in respect to their Fig. 3) of the time-course of the Foxp2 supression, but I don't understand its implications for interpretation of the main results.
The observed behavioral efffect was this:
Control males produced 603 total vocalizations compared with the 350 produced by control females (Fig. 2A, post hoc, p values <0.001). In contrast, siRNA-treated males produced 466 total vocalizations, which were significantly fewer than control males (post hoc, p < 0.05). Moreover, siRNA-treated females produced 465 total vocalizations, which was significantly more than the control females (post hoc, p < 0.05). The observed reversed pattern for siRNA-treated females to produce more total vocalizations and for the siRNA-treated males to produce fewer total vocalizations was not a hypothesized outcome.
There' are some previous pubications on manipulations of FOXP2 in mice, whose results and interpretations are complex and not entirely congruent with these results in rats — there's a fairly extensive discussion in "Mice with the 'Language Gene' stay mum", 6/4/2009.
Now, what about humans?
Fresh-frozen human cortex samples from boys and girls were obtained from the University of Maryland Brain and Tissue Bank. Demographics on the male tissue samples are as follows: 5 males, all of whom were Caucasian. The postmortem interval range was 15–19 h and the mean age was 4 years 196 d, with an age range of 4 years 5 d to 5 years 114 d. For the female tissue samples there were 5 females: 1 Caucasian, 3 African American, and 1 Asian. The postmortem interval range was 12–24 h and the mean age was 4 years 268 d, with an age range of 3 years 347 d to 5 years 34 d. All donor tissue was free of disease or infection. In all cases, the cause of death was due to accident. The cortex samples were all from the left hemisphere and taken from Brodmann's area 44.
Let me note in passing that the low N (five boys and five girls) makes it possible, and even likely, that there were some confounding factors other than sex — indeed, the paper cites one, namely race.
Anyhow, here are the results:
And here's their description of the results:
Because normal functioning FOXP2 is important for human language, we obtained human cortex samples from non-diseased donors. The cortex samples were all from the left hemisphere, specifically Brodmann's area 44. We found females to have higher basal levels of FOXP2 protein than males, (t(8) = 2.54, p = 0.03, Fig. 5A). There was no gender difference in the amount of protein levels for the closely related FOXP1 (t(8) = 1.86, p = 0.1, Fig. 5B).
Based on measuring the graphs (the paper doesn't give the numbers), it seems that the proportional difference in means is actually bigger for Foxp1 than for Foxp2 (about 1.5 to 1 vs. 1.4 to 1), so that when they write that "There was no gender difference in the amount of protein levels for the closely related FOXP1″, we could alternatively read that as "In this sample, the variance of Foxp1 in girls was greater (because of one outlier?), and as a result, the difference in means (though in the same direction as for Foxp1) did not quite achieve statistical significance".
But more important, if we take Bowers et al.'s interpretation of their human results at face value, we might interpret it in relation to one plausible interpretation of the literature on human language development, namely that female infants and toddlers do have an average advantage over boys in various aspects of speech and language development, with the difference generally decreasing or even swinging the other way though primary- and secondary-school years. See e.g. this table from Janet Shibley Hyde and Marcia C. Linn, "Gender Differences in Verbal Ability: A Meta-Analysis", Psychological Bulletin 1988. Positive d means an an average advantage for females (expressed as difference in group means divided by within-group standard deviation); negative d means an average advantage for males.
There seem to be somewhat larger sex differences in vocabulary size for younger infants (e.g. this study of 18- and 24-month-old infants), though I haven't found a meta-analytic survey that breaks the effects down by age. But see Janet Shibley Hyde, "The Gender Similarities Hypothesis", American Psychologist 2005, for a broader and more recent meta-analysis of behavioral meta-analyses; and Mikkel Wallentin, "Putative sex differences in verbal abilities and language cortex: A critical review", Brain and Language, 2009, for a review of both behavioral and neurological evidence.
This interpretation of Bowers et al.'s human results is a bit of a stretch, since their human sample was so small and so problematic in other ways. But even if we accept this interpretation for the sake of argument, it's a long way from Foxp2 levels in the developing brains of kids between 3 and 5 years old, and these random interpretations from the extensive press coverage:
Scientists have discovered that women possess higher levels of a "language protein" in their brains, which could explain why females are so talkative.
Women’s brains have higher levels of a “language protein” called FOXP2, according to a study conducted by researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.
Does your guy nag you for talking too much? Shut him down next time by letting him know that women gab more because of…our superior brain activity.
The study, compiled by neuroscientists and psychologist from the University of Maryland, concluded that women talked more because they had more of the Foxp2 protein.
Researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine found a chemical called 'Foxp2′ was responsible for the fact the average women speaks 20,000 words a day, 13,000 more than the average man.
See "An invented statistic returns" (2/22/2013) for a larger and more depressing sample.
My conclusions?
Sex (difference) sells.
Validation of endangered stereotypes sells even better.
Here's a small test of these hypotheses. Among the many interesting and important papers about the relationship between FOXP2 and human language, one of my favorites is Sonjua C. Vernes et al., "A Functional Genetic Link between Distinct Developmental Language Disorders", The New England Journal of Medicine, November 2008. Its abstract:
BACKGROUND: Rare mutations affecting the FOXP2 transcription factor cause a monogenic speech and language disorder. We hypothesized that neural pathways downstream of FOXP2 influence more common phenotypes, such as specific language impairment.
METHODS: We performed genomic screening for regions bound by FOXP2 using chromatin immunoprecipitation, which led us to focus on one particular gene that was a strong candidate for involvement in language impairments. We then tested for associations between single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in this gene and language deficits in a well-characterized set of 184 families affected with specific language impairment.
RESULTS: We found that FOXP2 binds to and dramatically down-regulates CNTNAP2, a gene that encodes a neurexin and is expressed in the developing human cortex. On analyzing CNTNAP2 polymorphisms in children with typical specific language impairment, we detected significant quantitative associations with nonsense-word repetition, a heritable behavioral marker of this disorder (peak association, P=5.0×10−5 at SNP rs17236239). Intriguingly, this region coincides with one associated with language delays in children with autism.
Google Scholar lists 268 citations for this paper, suggesting that I'm not the only person who found it interesting. But searching LexisNexis for media uptake of this work I found just one citation — in a publication called Children Now ("I Can, the UK charity for children's communication skills, has welcomed evidence identifying a gene that appears to cause speech and language difficulties") — compared to dozens of references to Bowers et al. (out of the hundreds that Google News finds for us).
Some earlier LLOG posts that may be relevant:
"The continuing misrepresentation of FOXP2 effects", 9/5/2005
"Neanderthals may have had headline writing gene", 10/18/2007
"Wherein I take the bait", 9/21/2007
"Mice with the 'language gene' stay mum", 6/4/2009
"More on FOXP2", 6/5/2009
"The hunt for the Hat Gene", 11/15/2009
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hawgblawg: Leila Fade of NPR on mahragan
I missed it, she covered mahragan (which she calls electro shaabi), as well as rocker Ramy Essam and graffiti artist Ganzeer, on September 4, 2012. She mentions Alaa Fifty, Amr Haha (7a7a) and Ahmed Vigo [the NPR transcript says: "Achmed (unintelligible)"]. It's a very short report, it doesn't tell us much we don't already know (other than the fact that mahragan vocalists are called "mike men" -- I need to check this), but it's basically on target.And folks, there is more mainstream media coverage of mahragan in the offing. I can feel it.
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hawgblawg: Gucci fur poncho kufiya
Seriously. 100% fox fur.Check it out here. Gucci describes it as a "GG pattern mini poncho with fur detail." Price? No idea.
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hawgblawg: very adorable kufiyas
Source: img5.visualizeus.com via Danyelle on Pinterestsource here
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hawgblawg: kufiya leggings
Source: mirari-pleases.com via Esther on Pinterestdescribed as "Lala Berlin inspired leggings with Keffiyeh print." Source is here.
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hawgblawg: Kufiya Castro Hat
Source: milcentric.com via Julian on PinterestThe 'pin' describes it as "NSBQ Shemagh Houndstooth Military Cap Hat."NSBQ describes it as a CastroHat, and sells it for $80. NSBQ (NING SI BU QU) is a brand created in 2006 by Hong Kong Hip-Hop artist MC Yan.
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hawgblawg: more threeAsfour designer kufiya dresses
Source: kuffiyaclothing.tumblr.com via Kuffiya on PinterestI blogged about threeAsfour previously. But I didn't have these nice photos.
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Language Log: Dogs and Japanese not admitted
Sign in the window of a snack shop in Houhai district of Beijing called Beijing Snacks (Bǎinián lǔ zhě 百年卤者 [Century Braiser]):
The sign reads:
Běndiàn bù jiēdài Rìběnrén Fēilǜbīnrén Yuènánrén hé gǒu
本店不接待日本人菲律宾人越南人和狗
This shop does not receive the Japanese, the Philippines, the Vietnamese, and dog.
I find it extremely interesting and encouraging (in terms of orthography) that the characters on the sign that constitute proper nouns are grouped together and set off with spaces. Moreover, there is an attempt to have the translation positioned in such a manner that the English words are paired with the corresponding Chinese words, as though they were running glosses or annotations.
See "Beijing restaurant bans Pinoys and dogs" and "No Dogs, But Also No Japanese, Filipinos, Or Vietnamese Allowed?."
This sign calls to mind the widespread legend that Huangpu Park (at the northern end of the Bund in Shanghai) used to have at its entrance a sign that read "No dogs or Chinese allowed" — popularized in the Bruce Lee film "Fist of Fury" — but which is fictitious in that form.
[A tip of the hat to Geoff Wade]
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Language Log: Opens the waterhouse; open water rooms
Yunong Zhou sent me the following signs from China:
Before providing transcription and translation of these two signs, a little bit of cultural background is necessary. My experience, from living and travelling in China for more than forty years and from having married into a Chinese family, is that Chinese people have traditionally not liked to drink cold water (or cold milk, for that matter), but strongly prefer hot water (and hot milk). They give lots of reasons for their preference, such as that it is safer, tastes better, is less likely to upset the stomach, and so forth. Consequently, it has been customary — and comforting — to have some means to provide hot, boiled water in buildings such as offices, hotels, hospitals, and dormitories.
In the old days, every hotel room was provided with large thermos bottles full of piping hot water. But where did the hot water come from? A room with a large boiler where people would go to fill up their thermos bottles (or where the staff would do it for them). That's what these two signs are about. Nowadays many modern buildings no longer have a special room with a large boiler for making hot water. Instead they come with electric kettles in each room, though more and more modernized people are willing to drink bottled water, which is not hot.
The first sign says kāishuǐ fáng 开水房 ("room for boiling water"), but the English translation parses it thus: kāi shuǐfáng.
The second sign reads kāishuǐ jiān 开水间 ("room for boiling water"), but the translation parses it thus: kāi shuǐ jiān.
To complete this brief introduction to the culture of boiled water, I'll add a few more related words:
cháshuǐ 茶水 — still available free in many airports and train stations, this is extremely diluted tea; basically boiled water with but the slightest amount of tea flavor and color. Superficially, the name seems to mean the same thing as German Teewasser, but the latter — I think — signifies "boiled water for infusing tea", though I may be wrong about that. In Japanese, we have the expression o chanomizu お茶の水 ("honorable tea water"); there's a neighborhood in Tokyo that goes by that name, and there's even an Ochanomizu University, one of two national women's universities in Japan.
lěng kāishuǐ 冷开水 — boiled water that has been allowed to cool down, the idea being that, if you're going to drink water that is not scalding hot, you should at least boil it first anyway
shuǐ kāile 水开了 — lit. "water has opened", i.e., "the water has boiled / is boiling"
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Design Culture Lab: The Internet of Animals. Game on!
I’ve spent almost every day for three or four years thinking about, talking about, writing about, and working towards something I’ve come to call an internet of animals.
This week, two things happened that expanded what the internet of animals could become.
1) Some scientists used the internet to link the brains of rats and get them to do stuff together
Guardian: Brain-to-brain interface lets rats share information via internet
“Even though the animals were on different continents, with the resulting noisy transmission and signal delays, they could still communicate. This tells us that we could create a workable network of animal brains distributed in many different locations.”
Nature: Intercontinental mind-meld unites two rats
“Nicolelis’ … team is already working to link the brains of four mice. The researchers are also set to start similar experiments with monkeys, in which paired individuals control virtual avatars and combine their brain activity to play a game together.”
Daily Mail: Telepathy is real! Scientists develop mind-reading implant that links the brains of rats in the US and Brazil
“British expert Professor Christopher James, from the University of Warwick, who has conducted similar research, said: ‘We are far from a scenario of well-networked rats around the world uniting to take us over, the stimulation is crude and specific. As for the ethics, I struggle to think of any applications that would not have ethical issues’.”
2) Some other famous scientists and a famous musician proposed an “interspecies internet”
TED Blog: The interspecies internet: Diana Reiss, Peter Gabriel, Neil Gershenfeld and Vint Cerf at TED2013
Gabriel:”What would happen if we could somehow find new interfaces – visual, audio — to allow us to communicate with the remarkable beings we share the planet with.”
Gershenfeld: “I was struck by the history of the internet, because it started as the internet of middle-aged white men … I realized that we humans had missed something — the rest of the planet … We’re starting to think about how you integrate the rest of the biomass of the planet into the internet.”
Cerf: “What’s important about what these people are doing: They’re beginning to learn how to communicate with species that are not us, but share a sensory environment. [They're figuring out] what it means to communicate with something that’s not a person. I can’t wait to see these experiments unfold.”
Mashable: Peter Gabriel, Vint Cerf Launch ‘Internet for Animals’
Cerf: “We should not restrict the Internet to one species. Other species should be allowed to participate.”
Facebook: The Interspecies Internet
“We hope to link up the captive species who already have demonstrated a cognitive and linguistic understanding of interspecies communication from facility to facility (especially the families that have been separated), and additionally to their species in their native lands. Schoolchildren in the native regions where these animals are in danger, would be able to communicate with the animals via tablet and learn that these animals are intelligent and friendly.
Yup. Things are about to get weird.
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Language Log: Rage in Kunming
We at Language Log are already quite familiar with Kunming, the capital of Yunnan Province. That's where the completely fake Apple store was discovered by a blogger named BirdAbroad (see "Your friendly fake Apple Stoer in Kunming"). It's also where we located some of our most amazing airport Chinglish.
Now, in the same airport, a Chinese Communist official went on a rampage after missing his flight and thoroughly trashed a check-in station. First, a silent video which is fairly well known:
What this man is doing in Chinese would be called fā píqì 发脾气 ("throwing a tantrum; having a fit"), a kind of infantile behavior to which adults sometimes succumb. His name is Yan Linkun, and he's the deputy chairman of a mining company and a member of the Communist Party political advisory body in Yunnan, as well as a member of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC). Here is an article from the Chinese version of China Daily showing Yan Linkun apologizing to a broadly smiling higher-up who is shaking his hand amiably.
I was extremely fortunate to find a shorter video with sound, so we can hear some of the what the man is shouting:
It's hard to hear everything Yan Linkun is saying, but it seems like part of it goes thus:
Wǒ běnlái dǎ de shì tóuděng cāng de. . . Shénme yìsi a! Shénme yìsi, a? ! Wǒ běnlái shì tóuděng cāng de. . . . Tài qīfù rénle. . . Dōu jǐ cìle? ! Tài qīfù rénle. Āi, gǎnjǐn gěi wǒ kāimén nǎ! . . . Āi, nǎ yǒu zhèyàng de, tài qīfù rénle! . . . Tóuděng cāng. . .
我本来打得是头等舱的。。。什么意思啊！什么意思，啊？！我本来是头等舱的。 。。。 太欺负人了。。。都几次了？！太欺负人了。哎，赶紧给我开门哪！。。。哎，哪有这样的，太欺负人了！。。。头等舱。。。
"I originally booked a first class [ticket]…. What do you mean, huh?! What do you mean, huh?! I originally booked a first class [ticket]…. You're really bullying me…. And not just once?! You're really taking advantage of me. Hai! Hurry up and open the door!… Hai, how can you be like this? Really browbeating me!… First class…."
I have translated qīfù 欺负 ("dupe; hoodwink; cheat; deceive; bully; take advantage of") in several different ways to try to bring across the various nuances of the word.
Perhaps others who watch the video can catch more of Yan Linkun's ranting and raving or what some of the onlookers are saying.
I sent this video to a former student of mine who lives in Kunming. Here is her reply: "YouTube is blocked in China… no freedom… i could have used a VPN, but again it's not working very well and very slow to watch videos in 阻国."
She makes a very clever pun on zǔguó 阻国 ("blocking / obstructing country") and zǔguó 祖国 ("motherland; fatherland; homeland; native land").
The motherland could have used a bit more blocking right there in Kunming when Yan Linkun began to trash the check-in counter. The security forces just stood by and watched, perhaps because he's a member of the Communist Party and can behave with impunity?
[Thanks to Jing Wen, Gianni Wan, Jiajia Wang, and Fangyi Cheng.]
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Erkan in the Army now...: Cengiz Aktar: Mesele kalkınmaysa tabiat teferruattır
Mesele kalkınmaysa tabiat teferruattır
İtiraf edelim bizim kuşağın çevreye ilgisi yok denecek kadar azdır. Ya farkında değildir, ya umuru değildir, ya da çevrenin ilânihaye sürdürülebilir olduğu kanaatini taşır. “Ağır siyaset” yapmaktan “soft” çevreye bakacak vakti yoktur. Sınırsız kalkınmanın en büyük erdem mertebesinde olduğu, ekonominin iyi gitmesinin her şeyin çaresi olduğu önkabullerinin zihniyeti baskıladığı bu üçüncü dünyalı eziklikten hem sol hem sağ nasibini ziyadesiyle almıştır. Tam da bu yüzden solda Yeşillerle EDP’nin birleşmesi ve mütedeyyinler arasında çok yeni de olsa beliren çevreci itiraz takdire şayan.
Son on yıldır kalkınmada lig atlama peşinde olan, pastanın iyice irileştiği Türkiye’de “ekonomi” artık temel toplumsal değer halini almış durumda. Eskiden İstanbul ve birkaç Anadolu şehriyle sınırlı ekonomik faaliyet hızla ortak bir pazara dönüşüyor. Parayla tanışıyor, hızla tüketim toplumu hatta bağımlısı oluyor Türkiye. Bu hazcı şölende çevrenin esamisi mi okunur? Kırsaldan yeni kurtulup kentin nimetleriyle yeni tanışan kitleler için kırsalı çağrıştıran “çevre” bir nevî “gericilik” değil midir? İktisaden gelişmekte olan ülkelerin hemen hepsi bu yolun yolcusu değil mi nitekim?
Oysa yumurta kapıda kırıldı bile. Ciddî bilimsel araştırmalar dünyanın, insan eliyle ve geri dönüşü olmayan bir doğal dengesizliğe doğru kürek çektiğini hatırlatıyor her gün. Buna rağmen siyasî ve iktisadî karar vericiler, genel itibariyle üç maymunu oynamayı sürdürüyor. Bizim hükümet bu gaflet yarışının dünya şampiyonlarından. “Halka hizmette sınır yok, bedel önemli değil.” Sorun şu ki o bedel memleketin istikbali.
Bu sütunda pekçok defa dile getirdiğim millî çevresevmezliğin altyapısını oluşturan hukukî araçlardan sonuncusu yasalaşmak üzere. Bugün Genel Kurul’a gelmesi, yarın da yasalaşması sözkonusu. Bu yasa da çıktığında memleketin taşı toprağı artık tamamen hükümet ve bürokrasinin iki dudağının arasından çıkacak talimatların insafına terk edilmiş olacak. Geçen mayıs sonu, adına utanıp sıkılmadan “Tabiatı ve Biyolojik Çeşitliliği Koruma” yasa tasarısı denen metnin ilk 14 maddesi TBMM Çevre Komisyonu’nda onaylanmıştı. Aslında hikâyesi uzun; 2003 yılından beri üzerinde çalışılan taslak 2009’da hazır hale geldi. Metin, 2009’da şu an sayısı 90’ı bulan sivil toplum kuruluşunun oluşturduğu Tabiat Kanunu İzleme Girişimi ve Avrupa Komisyonu’nun muhalefetiyle karşılaştı. Geri çekildi ama her daim olduğu gibi bir zaman sonra yine yasama sürecine dâhil edildi. İkide birde işittiğimiz “AB uyumu” gerekçesinin burada kıymeti harbiyesi yok zira müzakere edilmekte olan Çevre Faslı’nın beş kapanış kriterini karşılamaktan çok uzağız ve şimdi bu yasayla daha da uzaklaşacağız.
“Üstün kamu yararı doğal çevrenin korunmasıdır”
Geçmekte olan yasa doğal ve kültürel sit alanlarını, muğlâk tanımlanmış “koruma-kullanma dengesi” ve “üstün kamu yararı” kavramları yoluyla, korumadan ziyade madencilik, enerji, sanayi, tarım, turizm sektörlerinin kullanımına açıyor. Oysa Danıştay 6. Daire birkaç sene önce Karadeniz’de bir HES’e karşı yerel halkın açtığı davada bölge idare mahkemesinin verdiği yürütmeyi durdurma kararını onamış ve yukarıdaki hükmü vermişti. Bu içtihat doğrultusunda yasanın sayısız hukukî işleme neden olacağını tahmin etmek zor değil.
Yasayla 1958’den bu yana doğa koruma konusunda edinilmiş tüm kazanımlar bir kalemde siliniyor. Korunan alanların ki bu toplam toprağın %4’üne tekabül ediyor – sınırlarının değiştirebilmesi veya tümüyle kaldırılmasının önü açılıyor. İlk tasarıda bilimsel çevreler, ilgili kamu kurumları, sivil toplum kuruluşları ve koruma alanlarında yaşayanların karar süreçlerine dâhil olması için öngörülen ulusal ve yerel kurulların hiçbiri son tasarıda yok.
Türkiye’deki 41 millî park, 31 tabiatı koruma alanı, 107 tabiat anıtı, 184 tabiat parkı, 80 yaban hayatını geliştirme sahası, 12 Ramsar sulak alanı ve koruma altındaki binlerce ormanlık alan ve diğer doğal varlıklar bağımsız kurullarca bir nebze korunabiliyordu. Yasa çıktığında bağımsız Koruma Kurulları’nın doğal sitler üzerinde herhangi bir yetkisi kalmayacak. Sit alanının kaderini belirleyecek kurullar artık bağımsız olmayacak, kurul üyeleri atamaları Çevre ve Şehircilik Bakanlığı tarafından yapılacak.
Sonuçta bu yasanın da dahil olduğu kalkınma politikasıyla, 3500’den fazla yerel bitki türüyle dünyanın eşsiz doğa zengini topraklarından birisinde bulunan Türkiye bu mirası geri dönüşsüz kaybetme riskiyle karşı karşıya. Ekonomi büyürken lâfı mı olur!
Bu yazı ilk olarak Taraf’ta yayınlandı. Yazarın izniyle burada da yayınlanıyor…
Related posts:
Cengiz Aktar: Mesele kalkınmaysa işçi teferruattır
Cengiz Aktar: Büyüme saplantısı: Bir durum tespiti (1)
Cengiz Aktar: Yeni siyasî tutuklu tanımı
Cengiz Aktar: Danışsız, düzensiz, denetsiz……bir inşaat furyasıyla karşı karşıya Türkiye.
Cengiz Aktar: Doğa, kültür, kent talanına karşı Anadolu Yürüyüşü
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Erkan in the Army now...: Cyberculture roundup: “The Copyright Alert System FAQ, Yochai Benkler on Bradley Manning Case, Texting/Fingered Speech, More on Patent Trolls…
The Copyright Alert System FAQ
from EFF.org Updates by Daniel Nazer
It’s been a long time coming, but the copyright surveillance machine known as the Copyright Alert System (CAS) — aka “Six Strikes” — has finally launched. CAS is an agreement between major media corporations and large Internet Service Providers to monitor peer-to-peer networks for copyright infringement and target subscribers who are alleged to infringe — via everything from “educational” alerts to throttling Internet speeds. Unfortunately, the Center for Copyright Information, which is running this “educational” program, is hardly a neutral information source. So, as the participants finally begin to reveal some details, we’re here to provide an alternative.
Yochai Benkler: The dangerous logic of the Bradley Manning Case
from Boing Boing by Xeni Jardin
Yochai Benkler, in The New Republic, on an exchange that took place in a military courtroom in January during pre-trial hearings in the Bradley Manning/Wikileaks case:
Bradley Manning military trial updates: live-blogs, who to follow on Twitter, and analysis
from Boing Boing by Xeni Jardin
Bradley Manning Admits to Being Wikileaks Source
from Mashable! by Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai
Texting Isn’t Writing, It’s Fingered Speech
from Wired Top Stories by Michael V. Copeland
All the handwringing by 7th-grade English teachers and parents over the tens of millions of grammatically challenged texts sent every day misses the point of what texting is: it’s speech.
Making the cloud more accessible with Chrome and Android
from The Official Google Blog by Emily Wood
If you’re a blind or low-vision user, you know that working in the cloud poses unique challenges. Our accessibility team had an opportunity to address some of those challenges at the 28th annual CSUN International Technology and Persons with Disabilities Conference this week. While there, we led a workshop on how we’ve been improving the accessibility of Google technologies. For all those who weren’t at the conference, we want to share just a few of those improvements and updates:
Deep Dive: Software Patents and the Rise of Patent Trolls
from EFF.org Updates by Adi Kamdar and Daniel Nazer
Beloved podcasts like the Adam Carolla Show and HowStuffWorks are under attack. They and other podcasts are getting sued for, well, podcasting. And they’re not the only victims—developers are being targeted for building mobile apps, and offices around the nation are being attacked for using ordinary networked scanners. These creators are only a few of the thousands of victims of one of the biggest threats to innovation: patent trolls.
Japanese Police Arrest 27 File-Sharers in Nationwide Show of Force
from TorrentFreak by enigmax
Firefox’s new, smarter cookie policy is a privacy win for users
from EFF.org Updates by Dan Auerbach
Mozilla recently announced a change to its default cookie policy for Firefox that will help protect users against unwanted tracking by invisible third parties. In short, a user will have to intentionally interact with a site in order for the site to be able to set a tiny snippet of data used for identification purposes known as a “cookie” on the user’s machine.
China’s Internet Censors for Sale
from EFF.org Updates by Danny O'Brien
What happens when a country’s government censors the entirety of its domestic web, with no oversight or transparency? It turns out that politicians aren’t the only ones with an interest in repressing free expression–and given a lever of control, a black market of censors quickly emerges.
The Rise of The Harlem Shake
from Sysomos Blog by Sheldon Levine
If you keep up to date on what’s hot on the internet, you’ve no doubt stumbled across a Harlem Shake video in the past couple of weeks. The strange videos have quickly become one of the most popular things on the internet and everyone is trying to get in on the action. What’s really interesting about this trend is how quickly it went viral.
‘According to Wikileaks’: The journalistic legacy of Bradley Manning
from FP Passport by Joshua Keating
US Trade Office Calls ACTA Back From the Dead and Canada Complies
from EFF.org Updates by Maira Sutton
Major announcements from the US and Canada today give a clear indication that the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is coming back with a vengeance. ACTA is an agreement negotiated and signed by 11 countries, carrying intellectual property (IP) provisions that would negatively impact digital rights and innovation by ratcheting up IP enforcement measures beyond existing international standards. It will not take effect until six countries ratify the agreement, and Japan is so far the only country to have done so.
The CISPA Government Access Loophole
from EFF.org Updates by Kurt Opsahl
The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act—CIPSA, the so-called “cybersecurity” bill—is back in Congress. As we’ve written before, the bill is plagued with privacy problems and we’re urging concerned users to email their Representatives to oppose it.
SHIELD Act: The Internet Shows It’s Ready to Smash Patent Trolls
from EFF.org Updates by dm
The Internet is ready for patent reform.
In the days since Reps. Peter DeFazio and Jason Chaffetz introduced their patent-troll-smashing SHIELD Act(Saving High-tech Innovators from Egregious Legal Disputes), there’s been a steady increase in attention and momentum, both in the press and among the public at large, to the issue of vexatious patent lawsuits.
Related posts:
Cyberculture roundup: Alleged WikiLeaks Source Bradley Manning on trial, Syria Goes Dark, E-Book Buyer’s Guide to Privacy…
Cyberculture roundup: CISPA is back, Vote for the Netizen of the Year, Effects of a Patent Troll….
“Bradley Manning speaks about his conditions- Cablegate roundup
another cyberculture roundup: “Generation C” now; ” Do Not Track” issue; Bradley Manning trial…
WikiLeaks fulfills pledge for Bradley Manning. Cablegate roundup
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