Oxford University Press's Blog, page 190

5 things we should talk about when we talk about health

Americans spend more money on health than anyone else in the world, yet they live shorter, less healthy lives than citizens of other rich countries. The complex reason for this is the multiple factors that affect our health. The simple reason is the fact that people seldom talk about these factors. Here are five things that people should be talking about when they talk about health:

1.) Money

The passage of the Affordable Care Act of 2010 has had a lot of people focusing on healthcare—particularly how costly things like doctor visits and prescription drugs are. This overshadows a debate about health itself and how economic standing can give someone an advantage or disadvantage in this respect.

Money pays for access to treatment, but it also pays for conditions that contribute to health. For example, the Affordable Care Act cannot make housing more affordable. The cost of housing determines where someone can live, and this can greatly affect one’s access to healthy food. The average income of a community also affects tax revenue, which in turn affects funding for pollution management and other things. All of these factors go into developing the health of a population.

The nature of the distribution and means of wealth (about 35-45% of wealth is inherited) reveals systematic elements in place to address in order to make health—not just healthcare—affordable.

2.) Place

A person’s health is dependent on many environmental factors: air quality, water quality, sanitation, infrastructure—whether it be related to public transportation, housing, or other commodities like green spaces— and many other features that are characteristic of where someone lives. Social surroundings are also paramount. Are there people available in the community to care for others when they’re in need? Are there social programs in place to promote community trust and education about how to improve public health?

Place extends further than one may think. Occurrences such as climate change show that the management of a single neighborhood’s environment can have a ripple effect on a regional and even global scale.

3.) People

While non-human factors such as wealth or the environment can certainly have an impact on the health of communities, the fact remains that those communities are made up of people. The way in which people interact is a crucial element that determines health.

It’s easy to tie health to hygiene and the spread of disease. This causes people to be preventive and exercise caution in terms of social interaction. However, the spread of the quality of health is not only determined by the management of infectious diseases, but rather also includes societal habits. For example, someone is 57% more likely to suffer from obesity if he maintains close relationships with other people who are obese.

This idea of contagion may cause people to think that isolation from certain people can promote better health. Unfortunately, this notion does not take into account the impact of isolation and social stigmatization. People who live in isolation are more likely to suffer from addiction and depression and have a higher potential risk of suicide. Isolation in combination with advancing age also increases the chance of difficulty in mobility and other health issues.

Social interaction and inclusion combats these negative health conditions, and works to destigmatize certain issues by creating supportive social networks. For example, healthcare workers who worked to reduce the marginalization of the LGBTQ community made dramatic progress in the management of HIV/AIDS and in diminishing the stigma that accompanies the disease. It’s likely possible to successfully employ similar tactics in order to improve treatment of addiction along with many other public health challenges.

4.) Compassion

Just as the management of a local environment can positively affect the global environment, so can an individual improve their health by realizing that they are not isolated. This is how compassion—caring about other people’s health—enters our discussion.

Compassion encourages people to invest in programs and policies that benefit the greater public good even without an immediate return. For example, a policy that may call for state funding to manage a measles outbreak can benefit the whole state by preventing the disease from spreading.

5.) Knowledge 

People once thought health was determined by a balance of “humors” (four types of fluid) in the body. Through the development of the scientific method and questions brought about by medical research, this idea has been dismissed, and researchers have developed more effective, fact-based medical practices.

Knowledge rarely grows in a straight forward fashion. Often it occurs in a trajectory characterized by asking and answering questions and then revisiting those answers with more detailed and nuanced questions later on. This pattern is important to understand how it might be best to talk about health. For example, we know that if someone gets a staph infection he should take an antibiotic. But it’s also very important to understand how the patient was infected in the first place.

Knowledge gives us an understanding of health, but continuing to question what we think we already know helps us to see where to investigate in the future.

While statistics regarding health factors are widely shared, the reason behind them are not often as discussed. When we talk about health, it’s important to approach the subject holistically, looking at a wide range of contributive factors. In order to truly make any change we have to engage in these types of conversations that look beyond narrow ideas about how health works.

Featured image credit: “Running” by skeeze. CC0 via Pixabay .

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The worrying ideology that helps Trump’s new friendship with Brazil

As the conflict develops in Venezuela between the US-backed Juan Guaidó and the incumbent government of Nicolás Maduro, one staunch supporter of the United States position is Brazil. Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro has also expressed support for Trump’s wall project, and for moving embassies to Jerusalem. This new friendship between the United States and Brazil is one of the few foreign-policy achievements of the Trump administration, which has generally seemed better at losing old friends than making new ones. How, then, do we explain the new US-Brazilian friendship that has arisen since the election of President Bolsonaro?

Some point to similarities in the electorates that helped both presidents into office. Famously, 81% of white US evangelicals voted for Donald Trump in 2016, and it has also been argued that Jair Bolsonaro owes his presidency to Brazilian evangelical voters. Evangelicals are an ever more important group in Brazil, where the Catholic Church continues to hemorrhage members.

Some have pointed to other similarities between the Trump White House and the Bolsonaro Planalto (the presidential place in Brasilia). In both the Washington and Brasilia, for example, generals have been seen to be playing a stabilizing role in relation to sometimes unpredictable and outspoken presidents. Just as Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner play an unusual and outsize role in Washington, so Eduardo Bolsonaro and his bothers Flávio and Carlos play unusual and outsize roles in Brasilia.

Another reason for the excellent understanding between the two presidents was revealed in March when Bolsonaro visited Washington. At a dinner he held at the Brazilian embassy, he placed Trump’s former strategist Steve Bannon on his left, and on his right “Brazil’s Bannon,” Olavo de Carvalho.

Bannon and Carvalho in fact play slightly different roles. Bannon helped get Trump into the White House, as Joshua Green showed, but then lost influence over the new president, and never had a good relationship with the presidential offspring. Bolsonaro, in contrast, came to power without help from Carvalho, while Carvalho has an excellent relationship with the Brazilian presidential offspring. His influence over the presidency seems to be growing rather than declining.

Although Bannon’s and Carvalho’s roles differ somewhat, it is not wrong to call Carvalho “Brazil’s Bannon.” As well as the new social and economic forces that are producing ever more voters inclined to vote for candidates like Trump and Bolsonaro, there are intellectuals helping to craft new messages and policies that respond to these new forces. Both Bannon and Carvalho inhabit the same intellectual world, a world trend that is of growing importance to politics everywhere.

One thing that Bannon and Carvalho have in common is an appreciation for an obscure French philosopher, René Guénon, who died in 1951. Bannon told Joshua Green that while he was a young naval officer, reading one of Guénon’s books had changed his life. Carvalho was one of the first translators of Guénon into Portuguese.

Guénon is known for his critique of modernity, which is not, he argued, a stage in the upwards march human progress, but a stage in the downwards path of human decline. Most of modernity’s apparent achievements are actually only apparent. Science, for example, ignores all the questions that really matter. Individual reason cannot penetrate the transcendent. Western civilization is collapsing.

Guénon was not very interested in politics, and the remedy he proposed was a turn towards the transcendent. Bannon and Carvalho both seem to have accepted this, from what we can see of their traditionalist Catholicism. Some readers of Guénon, however, were interested in politics. One was an Italian, Julius Evola, who shared Guénon’s critique of modernity. Evola lived through Mussolini’s Italy without joining the Fascist Party—because he thought Mussolini was insufficiently radical. He died in 1974, and his works are now required reading for the radical right.

The time has come for those who do not share their objectives to pay attention to the ideas that are feeding recent political developments

Guénon and Evola are read alongside the rightist theorists of the following generation, of whom the most important were French: two journalists, Alain de Benoist and Guillaume Faye, who were central to the “New Right,” a movement started in May 1968 by French intellectuals dedicated to opposing the left that was then riding high on a wave of student protests and workers’ strikes. They launched a movement that adapted the methods of the left to support the aims and ideas of the right, including the ideas of Guénon and Evola. They also developed the idea that what mattered was not race, as the discredited theorists of the Third Reich had maintained ,but culture and identity. This idea is central to the “Identitarian” movement that is strong in Europe, especially in France and Austria, and speaks effectively to European voters’ growing preoccupation with immigration.

Similar views can be found in Russia, where an enthusiast of the French New Right, Alexander Dugin, has been adapting Guénon and Evola for the post-Soviet world. And then there is the Alt Right, the American version of this world, led by men such as Richard B. Spencer, infamous for his “Hail Trump, Hail our people” speech, and his role in the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Neither Bannon nor Carvalho has any interest in the crass Neo-Nazism that Spencer has come to symbolize. The intellectual world of the American Alt Right, however, connects with the intellectual world of the French New Right, and the intellectual world of the French New Right connects with that of Bannon and Carvalho. Evola’s readership has been growing steadily since the 1990s, as has that of the New Right thinkers. The time has come for those who do not share their objectives to pay attention to the ideas that are feeding recent political developments, including the new friendship between the United States and Brazil.

Featured image credit: Cidade Maravilhosa by Rafael Rabello de Barros. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia.

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Why politicians do care what the UN thinks

In a January 2019 press briefing at the White House, US National Security Adviser John Bolton flashed a legal pad with “5,000 troops to Colombia” written on it, a not-so hidden message to contested Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro that the United States was considering sending troops to the region. Maduro is presiding over a Venezuela in economic freefall and political turmoil. Bolton conjured images of the United States unilaterally sending troops to police the hemisphere as it had in the previous century. While any effort to depose Maduro militarily may ultimately be fraught, part of the concern triggered by Bolton’s warning was the absence of international support for any prospective intervention.

In recent years, a number of studies have found that the American public is more supportive of military interventions when the intervention is endorsed by a multilateral organization like the United Nations. What is less clear is whether US foreign policy elites – including government officials, think tank, and academic experts, and interest group leaders – also are influenced by multilateral endorsement.

Multilateral endorsements can signal to audiences that a military mission is likely to be more successful, it is likely to be perceived as more legitimate, and/or that other actors are likely going to share the burden in terms of troops and the financial costs of an intervention.

It is not immediately obvious that professionals with a particular influence on US foreign affairs respond to endorsements by multilateral organizations. Experts follow foreign policy closely and thus are in less need of a second opinion from international audiences about the morality or efficacy of interventions. But perhaps such signals are important to elites since they might have greater awareness of the benefits of multilateral support.

On average, support for the use of force among elites was 15 percentage points higher in the multilateral condition than in the unilateral condition.

But it appears that multilateral endorsement has a large positive effect on support among foreign policy leaders for the use of force across a range of conflict scenarios. Foreign policy elites were more likely to support intervention in both generic scenarios, like genocide, as well as more specific scenarios, such as a North Korean invasion of South Korea or violent extremism in Iraq and Syria, when United Nations support was involved. On average, support for the use of force among elites was 15 percentage points higher in the multilateral condition than in the unilateral condition. It also appears that multilateral endorsement matters for both Democratic and Republican elites, with the effects larger and more significant for Democrats than Republicans.

Comparatively, multilateral support had a weaker effect on the public than it did on the elites, with support for sending troops just six percentage points higher in the multilateral condition across all scenarios for the public.

This suggests that the specialized expertise of foreign policy leaders may make them more, rather than less, responsive to the endorsement effects of multilateral organizations, especially compared to the public. Regarding future military interventions in which the United States might be involved —whether in Venezuela, in the Baltics, or in Asia—multilateral endorsement may provide an important signal to leaders about the wisdom or legitimacy of such efforts. Since they already have knowledge of foreign policy, they may value multilateral endorsements either because such interventions spread the costs more widely and/or are perceived as more legitimate.

Featured image: Photo by konferenzadhs. Public domain via Pixabay. 

 

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Preaching as teaching in the Medieval church

We have long assumed that medieval sermons were written for the laity, that is, those with no Latin and probably minimal literacy. But most of the sermons that survive in English contain a significant amount of Latin. What did a medieval lay person understand when he or she heard a sermon?

The function of such Latin is just one part of the blurry picture we have of the nature of medieval literacy. Walter Map (1140-1210) described a boy he knew whose family was clearly of some means (the boy later became a knight) who was, on the one hand, illiteratus, but on the other hand was praised for his penmanship because he “knew how to transcribe any series of letters whatever.” Margery KempeArthur Vernon, Rector of Whitchurch, preaching from a book. CC BY-SA 2.0 by Mike Searle via geograph.

One theory about such sermons is that they were preached to a bilingual audience (perhaps in a monastery), but even the image in this sermon evokes a much broader competence: just as the very syntax of Latin and English are merged here the very existence of such sermons suggests that the abilities of the clergy and laity may have been more generally entwined than we have tended to suppose.

Many sermons were preached, just as they are today, to mixed audiences of varying occupations and social classes. We don’t know the origins of another important sermon, which survives in a Trinity College, Cambridge, manuscript, but it is typical enough in form for us to presume that its intended audience was also typical. Furthermore, even though this text is what is usually described and edited as an “early English” sermon the whole of its first sentence – “Hec est dies quam fecit dominus exulatemus & letemur in ea” – is in Latin.

We might also assume that this sentence was incomprehensible to its intended audience because that sentence is instantly translated in full: “This dai haveth ure drihten maked to gladien and to blissen us.” [This day our lord has made to gladden us and to cause us to rejoice.]

But the sermon also continues to weave Latin sentences of this kind throughout so that, in the end, it contains nearly as much Latin as English. Moreover, although explanations are almost always given in English, clarification does not always come by means of translation. When the priest explains the meaning of the baptismal gown, for example, he describes it first in Latin, “Vestis innocencie restituitur in baptismo dicente sacerdote: Accipe uestem candidam immaculatam” [The clothing of innocence is restored in baptism with the priest saying: Take here this white, unstained gown], and then in English,

Lothlesnesse understondeth the man at his folcninge. And that bitocneth the crisme cloth the the prest biwindeth that child mide. And thus seith:  Underfo shrud with and clene. This shrud haveth ech man on him after his fulcninge.

[The man understands his innocence at his baptism. And the chrism cloth, which the priest wraps the child in, symbolizes that. And he says thus: Take this pure shroud. Each man has this shroud on him after his baptism.]

but it is the concept of the baptismal gown and its meaning that are carried from one language to the other, not the sense, word for word or even phrase for phrase. One could even assume that the priest is here assuming that his parishioners understood the Latin his English then more extensively elaborates.

So, perhaps, looking at such English sermons we might not have to wonder about how much of them the laity understood after all. The very bulk of the carefully explicated Latin they contain could itself have produced the very bundling of competence that the sermon here describes. When a priest provides as much Latin as he did in a sermon like this one, and translates most of it line by line as he goes, he was not just preaching, he was teaching his congregation. Sitting in church, listening to the Latin of scripture or the liturgy, the laity heard a language that was not so different from the English they heard every day because sermons just like scripture had taught them, Sunday by Sunday, and year by year, how to understand it.

Featured image: Church Dom Chapel by Tama66. Public Domain via Pixabay.

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Can plants help us avoid a climate catastrophe?

The amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by burning of fossil fuels is at a staggering all time high of 34 billion tonnes, having risen every decade since the 1960s. Not surprisingly, our carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels, and land-use changes, including deforestation, have raised the atmospheric concentration of this major greenhouse gas to a level unprecedented in human history.

What’s more, the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide has risen so rapidly over the past few decades that Earth’s temperature has yet to fully adjust to the new warmer climate it dictates. This means that even if we could magically stop our carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels overnight, we have already committed Earth to transition to a warmer climate. Global temperatures have risen by more than 1°C since the 1970s. How much more warming are we likely to experience? Another 0.5°C, 1.5°C, 2.5°C or worse? Scientists are working urgently to try and better constrain this number. Meantime, over 190 nations worldwide signed up to the 2015 Paris Agreement with the goal of limiting warming to less than 2°C and ideally less than 1.5°C. Given the current situation, even a lenient 2°C target now looks wildly optimistic, especially given 34+ billion tonnes of carbon dioxide are added every year we delay mitigation measures.

This is why, along with the United Nations and the National Academy of Sciences in the United States, the UK’s Royal Society acknowledges drastic phase-down of our carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels for energy will be insufficient to avoid seeding catastrophic human-caused climate change. We actually have to start removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, safely, affordably, and within the next 20 years.

Enter, the kingdom of plants.

Hundreds of millions of years ago, during the Devonian Period (393-383 millions of years ago), plants bioengineered a cooler climate as the spread of forests lowered atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. As their root systems evolved to become larger and more complex, trees generated soils and accelerated the breakdown of rocks and minerals into minute grains, forming dissolved bicarbonate in the process. Eventually, this bicarbonate washed into the oceans, where the carbon it carries was stored for hundreds of thousands of years or locked up on the sea floor.

We now think it may be possible to mimic those processes to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The method would be to dress the soils of agricultural landscapes with crushed rapidly weathering rocks, such as basalt. This biogeochemical soil improvement could also boost yields by adding plant-essential nutrients, helping reverse soil acidification, and helping restore degraded agricultural top soils that provide food security for billions of people. Although there are possible drawbacks and unintended consequences, the approach may be practicable. Humans have put over ten million square kilometres of land to the plough, and application of crushed rock to this farmland could be feasible by exploiting existing infrastructure.

However, at the very best, this approach might remove only about 1/10th of our current emissions.

We could also undertake reforestation of forested lands once cleared for agriculture and afforestation of new areas, again mimicking the ancient spread of forests across the continents. Planting millions of trees could help by storing carbon dioxide in forest biomass and soils. Undertaken across a sufficiently large area of the globe, these actions might sequester another few billion tonnes of carbon dioxide.

Even these sorts of radical measures will not represent a sufficient climate restoration plan, however. A wider portfolio of carbon removal techniques will be required to scrub sufficient amounts of carbon from the atmosphere each year. But the technologies need multibillion dollar investment to move them from the lab to pilot schemes and then to determine which can scale massively. At the same time, we will need to fundamentally transform our global energy systems to halt carbon emissions.

As Erik Solheim, until recently the executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme, has remarked, “if we invest in the right technologies, ensuring that the private sector is involved, we can still meet the promise we made to our children to protect their future. But we have to get on the case now.”

Right now, carbon dioxide removal looks like a prohibitively expensive option for helping slow the pace of climate change. Taking action places an enormous burden on young people and future generations. But taking no action asks them to face dire consequences including intensifying droughts, heat-waves, storms, ice-sheet melt and sea-level rise flooding coastal regions. This is the intergenerational injustice of our time.

Our current crisis is urgent and unfolding at a time when global food demand will need to more than double before the end of the century. Can we sustainably feed a crowded planet, preserve the wonderful diversity of life on Earth, and stabilize the climate? These are the daunting challenges facing humanity. Faced with the collective moral failure of world leaders to act, it is hardly surprising that young people worldwide are bravely striking for action on climate change supported by thousands of scientists. At stake is nothing less than the future of humanity.

Feature Image credit: “Green and white leaf plant” by Jackie DiLorenzo. Public Domain via Unsplash.

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On snuff and snout

Last week (see the post for May 1, 2019), I finished my story by citing the German phrase mirist es schnuppe “it is all the same to me, I cannot care less,” literally, or so it appears, “it is tobacco to me.” Such phrases are often almost meaningless. Consider the English equivalent not to give a tinker’s dam(n).There is no agreement on the last word. Is it damn? Then the phrase is rude (though perhaps not in this day and age, when most of us have become deaf to swearing). But what if it is dam, a coin? Then the impolite phrase is acceptable but still enigmatic: what do tinkers have to do with it? However, schnuppe looks like Schnuppe “snuff on a candle,” only spelled with a small letter (nouns are capitalized in Modern German). Why schnuppe? At one time, schnuppe was derived from Yiddish schonab “cool.” According to a more realistic suggestion, schnuppe is indeed “snuff on a candle,” something worthless. However, in the same idiom, instead of schnuppe, one can say wurst. The noun wurst means “sausage” (just spell it with capital W!), certainly not a worthless object.

Taking snuff and enjoying it. Image credit: “Schnupfer corrected” by Sharrow Mills. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

European languages have a complex relationship with nicotine. The not too common Russian expression delo—tabak “this business is tobacco” means “the affair has gone awry.” Why so? But here we are interested in English usage. I am aware of two idioms with snuff. Today, the first of them is either rare or forgotten: to take it in snuff “to take offence.” The few explanations of this phrase are full of words like doubtless, it is clear, no doubt, and almost certain, which should be interpreted as meaning that everything is doubtful, unclear, and uncertain. If I am not mistaken, the OED does not mention take it in snuff among the several similar variants from its files. One of them is to give one snuff “to punish,” with the earliest citation going back to 1890 (and this must be approximately the time when this odd idiom was coined). But take it in snuff showed up in my database.

Here is one of the attempts to make sense of snuff here: “The original reference was… to the unpleasant smell proceeding from the smoking snuff of a candle, but there may also have been association with snuff  ‘an (or the) act of snuffing, especially as an expression of contempt or disdain’.” Ay, there’s the rub. As usual, we cannot decide which snuff is meant: tobacco or the charred part of the candlewick. Hence the hesitant tone in the 1869 note, written by John Addis (†1876), a poet and a regular perspicacious contributor to Notes and Queries. He believed that the nose powder took its name from the act of snuffing up (by which it is inhaled, while snuff “dudgeon” comes from the sniffing (his italics in both cases), “the expansion of the nostrils, which is a sign of sudden passion.” “The connection which seemingly exists between the snuffing of a candle and the blowing of the nose,” Addis continued, “is more puzzling….. Can [it] arise from the like action of the finger and thumb in both cases, before snuffers and pocket-handkerchiefs were invented?”

Giving snuff and not enjoying it. Image credit: “Kid people” by unknown artist. Public Domain via SVG Silh.

To complicate matters, Latin emungo means “to blow one’s nose” and “to cheat,” while in French we find moucher “wipe somebody’s nose; to snub, give one snuff” (a common combination in European languages) and (!) to “snuff a candle”! The following comment, also dated to 1869, insists that “this saying [take it in snuff]…has no connection with ‘powdered tobacco’…. The act of drawing up the nostrils is sniffing or snuffing, as expressing of disgust, contempt, scorn, or ridicule, naturally produces the wrinkles on the nose; and this… from being so common a way of exhibiting their feelings, first suggested the idea and gained for it such acceptance, that even by Plautus it is spoken of as ‘vetustum adagium’ [very old adage].”

All this may be true, but in the idioms cited above, German schnuppe means “tobacco,” and so does Russian tabak. It looks as though at some stage, the words for snuff1 and snuff2 got into each other’s way. The dense plot thickens even more when we look at the still living phrase up to snuff “up to the required standard; shrewd.” Is snuff “mucus in the nose” or “tobacco” here? The familiar quotation from Horace homoemunctænaris (approximately, “a man whose nose is free from snot”) means “a sagacious man.” We again wonder: couldn’t up to snuff arise with the sense similar to that suggested by Horace’s image (even though it had not been recorded in English before 1810) and later be associated with tobacco?

Horace: homo emuctæ naris. Image credit: Page 53 of “A day in ancient Rome; being a revision of Lohr’s ‘Aus dem alten Rom’, with numerous illustrations, by Edgar S. Shumway” by Internet Book Archives. No known copyright restrictions via Flickr.

Finally, last time, I promised to return to the English word snotty. Why does it mean “conceited; impudent; superior”? The history of this adjective is as follows (the dates in parentheses are those reflecting the citations given in the OED): “foul with snot” (1545-1633; so, apparently, no one has used snotty as suggested by its origin for nearly four centuries!); “dirty, mean, contemptible” (now dialectal or slang: 1681-1974), and “angry, pert, short-tempered, proud, conceited,” now “supercilious, conceited” (1870-1978). Its synonym (almost a doublet) is snooty, derived from a phonetic variant of snout, thus “looking down one’s nose,” as it were. The nose is a prominent part of the face. It does a lot of things. Yet the way from “full of mucus” to “supercilious” is remarkable.

To our surprise, we find Old (!) Engl. snotor “clever, wise,” with close cognates not only in Old High German and Old Icelandic but also in Gothic, a Germanic language recorded in the fourth century. Old Engl. (gi) snot, mentioned among other things last week, meant “snot, mucus in the nose” (gi- is a collective prefix here). The origin of those Germanic adjectives has provoked long but inconclusive controversy. It has been suggested that snotor and its kin perhaps derive from some word for “snout” (snout once meant “trunk”) or rather “feel” (noun, a hunting term). To be sure, they may have a root that has nothing to do with nose, but this is less likely.

A snooty snob. Image credit: “Cartoon Cold Comic” by OpenClipart-Vectors. Pixabay License via Pixabay.

In the previous post, we watched an impressive variety of vowels and consonants in the words under discussion: sniff~ snuff, snip, snub, snot. I suggested that this was the result of language play. The same variety comes to the fore in Old Germanic. Old English had snoffa “nausea” and snofl “mucus,” along with its synonym snyfling (which immediately reminds us of Engl. snivel), while Old Icelandic had snoppa “snout” (the length of ffand pppossibly suggests emphasis), and –snot. If snotty“full of snot” could eventually yield “supercilious,” is it possible that Old Engl. snotor “clever” and Gothic snutrs “wise” are the last stages of a similar progression (from “looking superior” to “very clever”)? We don’t know, but, if similar sematic change occurred independently about a thousand and about a hundred years ago, we can only marvel at the constancy of human associations. By the way, when Germans say that they have the nose full, they mean that they are fed up with the issue.

Featured image: “Tobacco Harvest” by WikimediaImages. Pixabay License via Pixabay.

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5 of the most important women working in endocrinology

Gender inequality persists in all sectors of society, including science and medicine disciplines. While female clinicians and researchers are increasing in number and now comprise almost 50% of medical school graduates in the United States, they remain underrepresented in scholarly publications and academic positions (20% to 49% of researchers in 12 countries and regions). Although nearly half of medical school graduates are women, they continue to hold significantly fewer senior academic positions and tenured faculty posts than their male counterparts, and receive less federal grant money than men. The median National Institutes of Health award was $41,100 less for female researchers compared to their male counterparts, and in top US institutions, the median disparity reached $76,500.

Endocrinology, that focuses on the endocrine system, which regulates hormones, combines fundamental scientific discovery and medical care that greatly influence human health. Research scientists perform fundamental and clinical research into how hormones function and the mechanisms behind endocrine-related disorders.

Here are five important women making a dramatic impact on the field.

Sally A. Camper is the Margery W. Shaw distinguished university professor of human genetics at the University of Michigan. She is recognized for research on the genetics of birth defects, especially hearing and skeletal disorders. Camper was among the pioneers in the use of genetically engineered mouse models to model human disease and study developmentally regulated gene expression. Her studies with human patients and engineered mice have revealed genetic causes and the mechanisms of several diseases. Her most highly cited work addresses the roles of specific proteins called transcription factors in pituitary development. She is devoted to the education of biomedical researchers and has received university and national mentoring awards. Read her recent research published in Endocrinology. 

Carol Lange is a professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota. Lange’s research is focused on the role of proteins called steroid hormone receptors, in breast cancer. These proteins contribute to breast cancer risk and can dramatically influence responses to breast cancer therapies. She has developed new reagents (antibodies, stable cell lines, genetically engineered mouse models) routinely and employed biochemistry and modern cell and molecular biology techniques to study hormone action and gene regulation related to cancer biology and tumor progression. As an independent scientist focused on hormones and cancer, she has mentored more than 30 trainees and numerous junior faculty members.

Su Young Han is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Centre for Neuroendocrinology at the University of Otago in New Zealand. Her research focuses on how the brain regulates and is regulated by hormones. She has pioneered the use of optogenetics and fiber photometry, where optical fibers are implanted near regions of interest in mouse brains, in order to study neuronal activity in animals.

Margaret E Wierman is a professor of medicine and integrative physiology and chief of endocrinology at the Rocky Mountain Regional VA Medical Center. Wierman’s research interests are in the regulation of genes that control reproduction. She also studies the molecular mechanisms of pituitary tumors and adrenal cancer. Wierman has a long track record in mentoring and pipeline development of academic researchers. She developed and directs a grant review and mock study section program at Colorado to aid junior investigators in obtaining awards.

Licy L Yanes Cardozo is an assistant professor in the departments of Cell and Molecular Biology and Medicine/Endocrinology at the University of Mississippi Medical Center. As a physician-scientist, she encounters patients with clinical conditions such as polycystic ovary syndrome. Her research focuses on understanding the role of sex hormones, specifically androgens, in cardiovascular and metabolic diseases, including diabetes and obesity.

 

While science and medicine remain male-dominated fields, female researchers contribute notably to advancing science and technology. It’s important to celebrate the achievements of women in science as they may serve as role models to inspire the next generation of scientists and continue to work to make new scientific and medical breakthroughs that can substantially impact human health and quality of life.

Featured image: African Scientist Medical Worker by anyaivanova. Royalty free via shutterstock. 

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What stops us from following financial advice? We may be more biased than you think

While improving consumers’ financial literacy has finally received the attention it deserves among policymakers, many people still lack the knowledge to make informed financial decisions. Thus, when it comes to financial matters, the majority of households turn to advisors.

Clearly, however, advisors’ recommendations—however beneficial they might be—do not translate into informed financial decisions if clients do not act on them. So what makes people follow financial advice once they have sought it?

It seems that demographic similarities between clients and their financial advisors make a difference. This is because people simply feel more comfortable with people like them. Sameness leads to mutual understanding in all kinds of personal relationships ranging from marriage and friendship to professional interactions. As a result, people are more likely to heed the opinions and advice of people like them.

The effect of sameness is not the same for all clients, though. Men are more likely to follow the advice of other men if they’re the same age. By contrast, women are more likely to follow advice from other women only when their financial advisors have the same marital and parental status (married women with children are much more likely to follow the advice of financial advisors who are also married mothers).

Moreover, financial knowledge matters: clients are more likely to follow financial advice only if there is a considerable knowledge gap between the client and the advisor.

The effect of sameness on following advice washes out, however, once clients learn more about their advisors. Demographic similarities become increasingly irrelevant the longer clients and advisors work together.

Clients’ implementation of financial advice can be explained in large part by how they perceive the interaction with their advisors rather than rational considerations about whether the recommendations actually suit their needs. Client-advisor matching based on similarities can harness the effect that demographically closer people benefit from easier mutual understanding. The fact that sameness fosters interpersonal trust formation independent of fundamentals, however, makes people vulnerable. It would be easy for advisors to exploit this in their own interest.

Featured image: Photo by Headway. Public Domain via Unsplash. 

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Using punctuation to pace

Ernest Hemingway is famous for his use of short sentences to build tension, as in this example from A Farewell to Arms, describing Catherine Barkley’s childbirth:

She won’t die. She’s just having a bad time. The initial labor is usually protracted. She’s only having a bad time. 

The staccato style of the sentences builds a hold-your-breath tension. 

Other writers pack everything into a single breathless exhale. One of my favorite examples is from Brian Doyle’s essay “His Last Game,” writing about a drive with his brother: 

We drove through the arboretum checking on the groves of ash and oak and willow trees, which were still where they were last time we looked, and then we checked on the wood duck boxes in the pond, which still seemed sturdy and did not feature ravenous weasels that we noticed, …

Punctuation-wise, most of us fall between these two extremes. We are neither staccato nor breathless.

That’s just the first half of the sentence.

Punctuation-wise, most of us fall between these two extremes. We are neither staccato nor breathless. Instead, we use punctuation to establish a comfortable pace for readers by grouping and emphasizing certain chunks of information. And as we edit our own work, from first to final draft, we see how small differences in punctuation come together to create larger effects.

Here are two versions of a paragraph from the opening chapter of my book Sorry About That. The section describes the encounter between Oprah Winfrey and writer James Frey after the deceptions in Frey’s A Million Little Pieces had come to light. Oprah had defended Frye at first, felt betrayed as the facts of the deception came to light, and angrily led him through his lies on her program. She later felt bad and invited him back for an on-air apology. The paragraph begins with the assertion that we share some traits with Oprah and James Frey.

We are all a bit like Oprah and James Frey: we make mistakes, misspeak, mislead, and misbehave. We can be inconsiderate, rude, and even offensive. Some of us lie and cheat and steal, and some people kill or commit historic crimes.

We are all a bit like Oprah and James Frey. We make mistakes. We misspeak, mislead, and misbehave. We can be inconsiderate, rude, and even offensive. Some of us lie and cheat and steal. And some people kill or commit historic crimes.

Do you have a preference? 

I preferred the second version. In the first, mistakes, misspeaking, misleading and misbehaving are all clumped together and the colon seems to attribute all of them to Oprah and Frey. In the second, the comparison is more focused: we are like Orpah and James Frey because we all make mistakes. In the first paragraph too, lying, cheating, stealing, killing and historic crimes are all in the same sentence. In the second paragraph, the most serious offenses are separated from less serious ones, and the punctuation maps the severity of the offenses. 

Here is another, less complicated, punctuation choice:

When we face our transgressions, we often feel the need (or are called upon) to apologize. 

When we face our transgressions, we often feel the need—or are called upon—to apologize.

The contrast is between parentheses and dashes. In the first, the parentheses make the phrase “or are called upon”a whisper to the reader, a confidential aside. In the second, the dashes emphasize those words—signaling the contrast between feeling the need to apologize and being called upon to do so. Commas would have been a middle-of-the-road choice, but that option would have left the intention less specific—neither an aside nor an emphatic.

Finally, consider this pair:

Some of us apologize well and use language to repair relationships and restore respect; others apologize poorly and our insincerity leaves transgressions unresolved or even causes new harm.

Some of us apologize well and use language to repair relationships and restore respect. Others apologize poorly and our insincerity leaves transgressions unresolved or even causes new harm.

These differ only in that the first has a semicolon while the second uses a period. What’s the difference? The first can be read as imputing a closer connection to the two clauses—perhaps even a silent however. The second treats the sentences as standing on their own, which affords the last clause a bit more emphasis. As you revise and edit your work, think about the choices that punctuation affords for the pace of paragraphs and sentences. 

But don’t overdo it. There is a story about the famous prose stylist Joseph Conrad that goes like this: When Conrad emerged from his study after a morning of writing, his wife asked what he had done. He said, “I took out a comma.” The story is most likely apocryphal—or at least I hope it is.

Featured image credit: Black and White Typewriter by Matt Williams. Public domain via Unsplash.

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Economics can help us protect the world’s wildlife

People affect nature, nature affects people. This interaction of humans and nature creates opportunities and risks to both. One major challenge today is how to protect biodiversity. Across the world, scientists tell ­­us the diversity and abundance of life on earth is declining. From coral reefs affected by bleaching and pollution, to lions in Africa, to marine mammals killed by plastic pollution, we hear increasingly bad news from the natural world. Economics can help us understand why these losses are happening and figure out how to reverse these losses.

Consider first the loss of many species in farmland birds, bumblebees and butterflies from parts of the UK where they were previously abundant. One important reason for this loss has been the very big changes over the last 60 years that have taken place in how UK farmland is managed. Farmers have responded to signals from markets about what outputs society values – food – yet receive no reward from markets for protecting biodiversity on their land. Indeed, decisions to protect birds, bees, and butterflies may cost farmers since they have to forego the chance to increase their incomes. Market failure, as economists call it, thus results in a negative pressure on farmland biodiversity. Economics can thus help us understand why biodiversity declines. But it can also help us fix this problem. Since the late 1980s, farmers have been offered financial incentives under the Common Agricultural Policy to change their land management to be more wildlife-friendly. Now protecting wildlife is consistent with protecting family farm incomes. But how exactly we choose to implement these wildlife subsidies turns out to be crucial for how effective such a policy is at reversing the decline in farmland wildlife, and how much this costs the taxpayer.

In Africa, lion populations are declining as their habitats are modified and as lions are illegally killed. However, if we think about the economic incentives for people actually living in lion country, it’s clear that they can be worse off when lions are around, since lions prey on livestock and pose dangers to local people. Economists advise that what needs to happen is that local people need to be able to benefit more from protecting lions. This could happen if developers promote wildlife tourism businesses that benefit local communities. Moreover, we need to think carefully about the net effects of banning global trade in wildlife products. With regard to the conservation of African elephants, banning trade in ivory drives up its price. Higher prices for ivory mean higher rewards for poachers, and more chance of conflict. Banning trade also deprives countries of the chance to gain income from the sustainable management of elephant herds. While many find the killing of wild animals morally repugnant, and while legal trade in wildlife products can enhance opportunities for illegal trade, banning trade in something can generate incentives for people to increase hunting efforts.

Image credit: “Lesser Prairie Chicken” by dominic sherony. CC BY-SAY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Economics also tells us that badly-designed environmental policy can make the plight of wildlife worse. In the United States, the conflict over the Lesser Prairie Chicken protected by the Endangered Species Act is a prime example. The law requires people to protect any endangered irrespective of the cost to protect the species. Protecting the bird means more control over grazing, irrigation, construction, and energy development in five Western states regardless of costs to the landowners in the states. The five governors of these states have all complained about the costs of this law. The federal government has tried to respond by offering up less confrontational conservation approaches, like not prosecuting landowners who accidentally harm the bird, provided that they agreed to restore its habitat. The goal was to encourage collaboration rather than conflict between state governments and private landowners, modify land management, restrict energy leasing on state land, and create incentives for conservation on private land. This plan, however, remains controversial. Congress has attempted to block it, while states, industry, and environmental groups mounted legal challenges.

Finally, invasive species have been recognised by ecologists as posing a serious threat to native wildlife. Economics tells us that markets generate inadequate incentives for the control of invasive species. If a private landowner spends money on controlling an invasive species on his land, this generates spill-over benefits to neighbouring landowners. Each landowner thus has an incentive to free ride on the control efforts of others, so that we can easily see an outcome where no-one chooses to act, even though society would be better off if everyone cooperated to control the spread of invasive species. Economic analysis can reveal good ways to encourage such cooperation, and thus the best ways of countering this global threat to biodiversity.

Featured image credit: “Elephant African Bush” by cocoparisienne. Pixabay License via Pixabay .

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