Oxford University Press's Blog, page 251

Taking pride in standing up for the transgender community

At the beginning of 2017, following the tumultuous election season it was my hope that there would be few changes made to the years of progress for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) civil rights and equality. It was clear that prior to the election of 2016, the Obama administration, U.S. Supreme Court, and the Justice Department were committed to promoting social justice for LGBTQ individuals, and most especially the transgender community. In fact, significant progress was made with the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (2010), federal recognition of marriage equality (2015), a SAMHSA study rejecting conversion therapy (2015), and the promotion of Title IX protection for transgender youth in schools (2016), among other key areas.

The newly elected president had made campaign promises to support and protect the LGBTQ community, especially following the terrorist attack on the Pulse nightclub in Orlando. However, soon after the 2017 presidential inauguration, many policy changes directly affecting members of the transgender community were soon proposed or implemented.

Starting in February 2017, less than a month after President Trump’s inauguration, the Departments of Justice and Education withdrew landmark 2016 guidance explaining how schools must protect transgender students under Title IX law. The very next month the Census Bureau retracted a proposal to collect demographic information on LGBT people in the 2020 Census. In July, the President abruptly announced a ban on transgender individuals serving within the military which was as much of a surprise to the Pentagon as it was to members of the LGBTQ community. In October of the administration’s first year, the Justice Department released a memo instructing Department of Justice attorneys to take the legal position that federal law does not protect transgender workers from discrimination.

In February of 2018, the U.S. Department of Education announced it will summarily dismiss complaints based on gender identity discrimination. The following month, the Department of Defense policy changed on transgender individuals ability to serve in the military. Finally this past April, the administration proposed the removal of health care benefits for transgender individuals under the Affordable Care Act.

Image credit: LGBT Pride Parade by Josh Wilburn. Public Domain via Unsplash.

One of the leading national social justice advocacy organizations for the transgender community, The National Center for Transgender Equality notes, “The Trump administration has already taken numerous actions that harm transgender people, that undermine important protections, and even taken actions to erase transgender people from government surveys and therefore government programs.” Thus when we continue to create layers of invisibility through erasure, complicity, and complacency, we promote the active oppression of people and populations who so vitally need to be counted and included. Transphobia, stigma, bias, and stereotyping all increase the likelihood for risk factors related to various health (e.g., HIV transmission, substance use) and mental health (e.g., depression, anxiety) needs among members of the transgender community. It also remains essential that we do not conflate the needs of the transgender community with those of the lesbian, gay, bisexual or queer communities, when in fact, they have many unique health, mental health, and advocacy concerns to be addressed. Ultimately, when elected officials at the local, state or national level promote intolerance or create invisibility for minority groups, such as members of the transgender community, it increases the likelihood of others doing the same. In fact, over the past couple years, increases in hostility, hate crimes, and transphobia are on the rise.

Political ideologies aside, this is ultimately a matter of advocacy, fairness, equity, and equality for members of the transgender community. The need for advocacy extends far beyond building allyship, as it is vitally important for individuals to come together to raise a united voice to counter oppression of a minority community.

We are called across the professions of social work, medicine, nursing, psychology, psychiatry, counseling, and public health to affirmingly and effectively serve and advocate for all those in need. Thus, there has never been a greater time for the service community to step up and step in to the promotion of social justice and advocacy for all LGBTQ folks, but most especially for members of the transgender community.

It was after the 1969 uprising at the Stonewall Inn in New York City that the annual celebration of LGBTQ history and pride began in the month of June. Notably, members of the transgender community including Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera played a key role in leading the Stonewall uprising. LGBTQ pride month continues to be widely recognized nationally and internationally each year. When pride is celebrated across cities or towns via proclamations, or by holding pride parades, marches, lectures, or other such events, it promotes visibility, inclusiveness, and education about the widely diverse LGBTQ community. However, when a president and administration does not publicly recognize LGBTQ pride month, it can promote invisibility, a lack of support, and intolerance. Therefore, when we actively engage in various forms of advocacy whether during LGBTQ pride month or all year long, such as those noted below, we can actively demonstrate the promotion of social justice for transgender individuals and all those within the broader LGBTQ community.

Actions that can promote advocacy for the transgender community include becoming an informed advocate and ally: instituting transgender affirming language, practices, and policies at your school, agency, or workplace; calling and writing local, state, and federal (The White House, U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate) elected officials in protest against anti-transgender policies; using social media platforms to promote equality and counter transphobia; marching in an LGBTQ pride parade as a member of the community or ally; and creating an event in your agency or community to commemorate international transgender day of remembrance.

When we pridefully raise our voices and create affirming spaces for important dialogues such as increasing allyship with marginalized populations, we truly step up and we step in, we advocate, and we promote social justice. There is no alternative other than turning our backs on those that need us most. Ultimately, we must continue to believe that there is truth to the adage: “together we can make a difference”.

 

Featured Image Credit: “Trans Transgender Flag Pride” by katlove. CC0 via Pixabay. 

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Fosse Time!: innovation and influence in the films of Bob Fosse

Despite numerous honors throughout his illustrious career, including being the only director to earn the “triple crown” of show business awards—the Oscar, Emmy, and Tony—all in one year, Bob Fosse remains underrated in terms of his influence on the presentation of dance on film. From Sweet Charity, his first film as a director, through his multiple Oscar-winning Cabaret, to his autobiographical, Felliniesque All That Jazz, Fosse created a template for filming dance that has remained influential and remarkably vital years after these films first appeared. Dance-oriented music videos of the ’80s and ’90s by Michael Jackson, Madonna, and others were built on many of the signature Fosse moves. Film musicals from Flashdance to Chicago took his rapid-fire editing style to aggressive extremes. A new generation of music video stars and 21st century filmmakers continue to utilize “Fosse time” editing to ricochet across narrative boundaries.

For many years and with rare exceptions, dance in film followed the example of Fred Astaire, who demanded that directors keep the dancer’s body in full-frame, limit editing, and keep reaction shots to a minimum.

But some exceptions were notable. John Huston’s 1952 Moulin Rouge (a deeply influential film for Fosse) brought the camera in close enough to the Montmartre cabaret dancers to isolate legs, arms, and flashes of profile, and show perspiration and makeup traces in order to capture the immediacy of the performances.

Fosse displayed enormous confidence and imagination as a first-time director adapting his Broadway musical Sweet Charity to the screen in 1969. While all the numbers are striking, the film emerged as too busy and full of gimmicky, self-conscious camera work. “Rich Man’s Frug,” a full chorus set piece that satirizes the then-current “discotechque chic” style and attitude remains true to its stage roots, but Fosse pulls out every cinematic trick to provide movement and variety. The camera rushes in and out on the dancers, frequently crashing into their faces, then zooming back out. Percussive movements, such as fighters’ punches, are aimed directly at the camera. At the climax, the camera dives into the center of the dancers, adding special effects such as strobe lights, film negative exposures, and tinted color saturations. The number ends, appropriately, with a zoom out to a full stage picture. In this number and others in Sweet Charity, Fosse was in search of a means to translate his style of stage movement into cinematic terms.

“Rich Man’s Frug,” served as a blueprint for a whole genre of dance-oriented music videos and is emblematic of Fosse’s choreography: stylized and self-consciously theatrical, frequently calling attention to itself. It is this opportunity for strutting one’s stuff that made Fosse a patron saint for stars of the music video generation. Beyoncé went so far as to adopt the set, costumes, camera angles, and choreographic flourishes of Fosse’s original number in her music video for “Get Me Bodied.”

It’s likely that Fosse first had to make Sweet Charity before he could direct Cabaret. Perhaps it was the gravity of the Weimar Republic setting and its charting the rise of the Nazi party, or maybe Fosse had passed his experimentation phase. His camera showed new maturity and subtlety in filming Cabaret’s musical numbers, all set on the tiny Kit Kat Klub stage.

Its four minutes of highly concentrated dance, camera work, and audacious editing make “Mein Herr,” performed by Liza Minnelli, the ultimate Fosse number. The camera follows her closely, even trailing behind as she moves down stage. Sometimes the camera is nestled in the fly space above the stage, other times it seems to sit in the third or fourth row of the audience and captures waiters passing by. The dancers provide a silent, almost sinister accompaniment, and are shot in sometimes unflattering, but striking close-up, emphasizing the vaguely lewd chair choreography.

The editing of “Mein Herr” captures the details of performance—the strain, sweat, and physical effort of delivering a song and dance—but also its exhilaration. Through fast cuts, zooms, and tight editing, it achieves a unique power. “Mein Herr” made such an impact that later revivals of Cabaret based their television commercials around its camera and editing style.

Cabaret was an international success when it was released in 1972 and established Fosse as a visionary director who had brought the musical film to a new maturity. Before the year was out, Fosse made two more cinematic innovations. First, he directed and choreographed the concert for television, Liza With a Z, shot on film rather than videotape, using eight cameras placed around the theater and on the stage to capture the immediacy of this one-performance only event.

Finally, for Pippin, his then-current musical, Fosse directed the first successful television commercial for a Broadway show. By filming one minute of a dance number from the show, he immediately created a new marketing tool for Broadway.

In 1979, Fosse wrote and directed his most ambitious film. All That Jazz followed a director and choreographer very much like Fosse at a personal and professional crossroads. In the film’s opening number, which depicts an audition for a new musical, set to George Benson’s recording of “On Broadway,” Fosse virtually creates the modern MTV music video. He marshals the full repertoire of camera and editing tools to perform split second cuts that heighten tension. In the most memorable moment, a dozen dancers performing a standard pirouette are edited into one dizzying move.

All That Jazz appeared just two years before MTV broadcast its first music video, but its impact was seen almost immediately in the dance-oriented videos that soon became a staple of the network and emulated his choreography, camera technique, editing style, and theatrical tone. Rob Marshall’s 2002 film version of the Fosse stage musical Chicago reflected the influence of two decades of dance videos which, in turn, had been influenced by Fosse. A through-line can be drawn from Fosse’s first film in 1969 through the MTV-era, up to Chicago, and on to other more recent dance-heavy film musicals like Burlesque, Magic Mike, and the Step Up films.

So thoroughly has Bob Fosse’s dance and film aesthetic been absorbed into the popular culture that it no longer feels revolutionary, but rather part of the mainstream. He continues to cast a shadow over dance on film well into the 21st century.

Featured image credit: Still from Cabaret.

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Can environmental DNA help save endangered crayfish?

Most people have a passing familiarity with crayfish: as an occasional food item, or as animals routinely caught by children wading in streams and ditches in the summer. Yet few people likely realize how astoundingly diverse crayfish are globally. Our planet is home to approximately 600 species of crayfish, which use habitats ranging from caves to streams and lakes to terrestrial burrows.

Many of these crayfish face high risk of extinction. A recent assessment by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature found 32% of crayfish species are threatened with extinction. Causes of crayfish population declines include factors like habitat loss and degraded water quality, as well as displacement of native crayfish by non-native invasive crayfish. Often, crayfish species fail to live well together—a newly introduced crayfish may entirely replace a native species in a lake or stream over a few years. Invasive crayfish drive population declines of native species through mechanisms including the spread of disease, competition, and hybridization or reproductive interference.

The best management option for invasive crayfishes is to prevent the introduction of these species to new regions altogether. But what to do when Pandora’s box has been opened, and an invasive crayfish is released to the wild? Can we manage or mitigate the impacts of established invasive crayfishes on native species at risk of extinction? Control or eradication of invasive crayfish populations by mechanical removal or chemical treatment of habitats has been difficult, with few success stories. Alternatively, we might seek to prevent established populations of invasive crayfish from spreading to locations where rare, native crayfish still persist. This could involve managing connectivity of freshwater habitats around natural barriers like waterfalls or artificial barriers like dams, or even constructing barriers to try to limit the upstream or downstream spread of invasive crayfishes.

In northern California, one of the rarest crayfish in the world is barely holding on. The Shasta crayfish Pacifastacus fortis has an extremely restricted range, smaller than most large cities. It often occurs in groundwater springs draining old lava flows; these freshwater habitats are remarkable for their clear water and year-round cold temperatures. The Shasta crayfish is primarily threatened with extinction through displacement by the invasive signal crayfish, Pacifastacus leniusculus. When signal crayfish arrive in one of the few remaining habitats occupied by the Shasta crayfish, the native crayfish tends to decline and disappear over a few decades.

Image credit: Adult Shasta crayfish in “defence” posture, with the serrated rostrum (the protuberance between the eyes) visible, a diagnostic feature of the species. Image copyright Koen G. H. Breedveld, used with permission.

Population declines of the Shasta crayfish resulted in it being among the first crayfish listed to the Endangered Species Act in the United States. As a consequence, a number of conservation interventions have been attempted to save the Shasta crayfish from extinction. For example, several barriers have been constructed over recent years to exclude signal crayfish from Shasta crayfish habitat. This effort has been a mixed success: in each case, invasive crayfish spread above the barriers before their completion, but physical removal efforts are attempting to eradicate signal crayfish above the barriers, given that they can’t recolonize from downstream.

Shasta crayfish individuals have also been relocated to a small, spring-fed pond that is isolated from invasive crayfish populations. The hope is that a Shasta crayfish population will establish in this isolated site that is disconnected from streams and rivers invaded by the signal crayfish. However, whether this conservation relocation has worked is unknown: scientists and managers have not been able to find Shasta crayfish following their introduction. It may be that this conservation relocation failed, or that Shasta crayfish are rare enough in difficult to sample habitats that they simply can’t be detected or observed. Shasta crayfish often live in large boulder habitats that are hard to search, particularly without destroying the habitat or damaging the crayfish themselves.

How then, to monitor the outcomes or effectiveness of these type of conservation interventions for endangered crayfish? My laboratory has worked in recent years in the area of “environmental DNA” or eDNA—using trace fragments of DNA collected and identified from environmental samples to map the distribution and abundance of organisms. In many cases, eDNA has been found more sensitive to the presence of hard to detect organisms that conventional sampling or surveying methods. This may mean that eDNA could be used to detect invasive species at the low abundance leading edge of their spreading populations, or endangered species at locations where they persist as only a few individuals.

Image credit: Invasive crayfish barrier. Image copyright Eric R. Larson, used with permission.

We recently applied eDNA to evaluate the outcomes of management efforts for the Shasta crayfish in California, with a focus on not only detecting this endangered crayfish, but also the invader displacing it. We detected eDNA of the invasive signal crayfish at more locations than the Shasta crayfish, but we could find Shasta crayfish eDNA at some sites where this rare species was known to still persist. Further, we discovered Shasta crayfish eDNA at a location above an invasive crayfish barrier where it was believed to have been previously replaced by the invader. Upon resampling this site after our eDNA detection with conventional survey methods, Shasta crayfish were rediscovered; eDNA helped find a remnant population of this endangered crayfish that had been believed lost.

We do stress that eDNA is not without challenges or limitations to its application. This tool can be so sensitive to the presence of DNA of the target organism that contamination and false positives are a constant risk. Alternatively, might we have found more Shasta crayfish eDNA at other times of the year, given the life history or behavior of this crayfish? And how far might eDNA spread downstream of crayfish by stream flow in our particularly cold, swift-flowing study sites? These questions require ongoing study to improve the application of eDNA to management and conservation questions. However, the ability of this approach to detect organisms at low abundances, without disturbing their habitats or potentially handling or harming sensitive individuals, may make it a major monitoring and management tool in the future for crayfish and many other organisms.

Featured image credit: Spring habitat of the Shasta crayfish. Image copyright Eric R. Larson, used with permission.

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Kidney transplants, voucher systems, and difficult questions

It is commonly said that necessity is the mother of invention, and this was certainly the case at UCLA Medical Center in 2014. Howard Broadman, then aged 64 and a retired judge from San Diego County, California, was concerned that his grandson, Quinn Gerlach, would be unable to secure a transplant kidney when he needed one. (Quinn had been born with only one kidney, which was only partially functional.) To increase the chance of Quinn receiving a kidney in the future, Broadman proposed to UCLA Medical Center that he donate one of his kidneys in exchange for a “certificate.” This certificate could then be used by Quinn at an unspecified later date to move him to the top of the waiting list for transplant kidneys. The staff at the UCLA Medical Center agreed, and so began the first “voucher system” for kidney procurement.

Broadman’s concern with Quinn’s future was well-founded, for the demand for transplant kidneys greatly exceeds the available supply. In 2016, for example, although over 98,000 people were on the waiting list for a kidney in the United States, only 16,062 kidney transplants were performed (Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network, 2017 ). Different ways of alleviating this shortage have been proposed ranging from the confiscation of usable organs from the recently deceased (proposed by Aaron Spital at the Mount Sinai Health System) to the legalization of direct cash payment for kidneys from living vendors (proposed by, for example, Mark Cherry of St Edwards University and Janet Radcliffe Richards of Oxford University). For various legal and political reasons these proposals have gained little traction outside the pages of academic journals. Broadman’s private innovation was thus, as UCLA put it, a “game changer”. By providing persons close to someone who was expected to need a kidney in the future an incentive to donate one of their organs to a stranger, Broadman’s innovation increased the number of transplants that could be made by encouraging people to donate before becoming ineligible to do because of age or events that unexpectedly render them unfit to donate, and in doing so, created a voucher system.

Yet while the use of a voucher system to increase the numbers of kidneys available for transplant might appear to be an unmitigated good, it still raises some challenging ethical questions. Persons who are expected to participate in such systems as donors are likely to be those who are sufficiently well-educated to navigate their way through the healthcare system. This means that the introduction of such a system is likely to disproportionately benefit persons who are well-educated. Since a high level of education correlates (at least in the United States) with high economic status, this means that the principal beneficiaries of such a program will be those persons who are already relatively well-off. For instance, since high economic status is (in the United States) inversely correlated with being African-American, a voucher system is likely to give persons who are not African-American a relative advantage over those who are. The introduction of a voucher system thus raises a question of equity: Is it ethical to introduce a novel way of enhancing healthcare outcomes if this would be likely to exacerbate current inequalities?

 Howard Broadman’s initiation of a voucher system at UCLA Medical Center raises questions that touch on some of the most foundational questions in ethics.

While this first ethical question might lead to an argument in favor of restricting the type of incentive to donate that is the foundation of a voucher system, the second ethical question is whether or not such systems might lead to an expansion of the type of incentives that can be used to encourage kidney donation. To offer potential kidney donors certificates that can be given to persons of their choice that will enable the holder to move to the top of the line for a transplant kidney is clearly the incentive to donate. But, if this type of incentive is held to be both legally and morally acceptable, then why should not other types of incentive—such as direct cash payment—also be considered similarly acceptable? Thus, unless there is a morally relevant difference between providing someone with a certificate to enable someone else to have a greater chance of securing a kidney to incentivize them to donate, and providing someone with a cash payment to incentivize them to donate, the legal acceptance of voucher programs such as UCLA’s paves the way for the legalization of a market in human transplant kidneys.

Howard Broadman’s initiation of a voucher system at UCLA Medical Center raises questions that touch on some of the most foundational questions in ethics—such as whether consequentialist or deontological concerns should trump in situations where they conflict. And these questions, in turn, raise practical questions for bioethicists—such as whether the primary end of medicine is simply the enhancement of health, or whether its operation should be tempered by social concerns external to its practice. Thus, the questions that surround voucher systems show that theoretical ethics, applied ethics, and the practice of medicine should not be addressed in isolation from each other.

Featured image credit: Wilderness by Ravi Rashan via Unsplash.

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Drug-resistant infections and the misuse of antibiotics in children

Antibiotics are among the most commonly prescribed drugs used in human medicine and have saved countless lives. But misuse and overuse of these important medications accelerates the emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, one of the biggest threats to global health. As experts who focus on this problem in children prepare for the Ninth Annual International Pediatric Antimicrobial Stewardship Conference, held from 31 May to 1 June, Dr. Theoklis Zaoutis, editor-in-chief of the Journal of the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society, shared several insights on drug resistance and antibiotic use among children.

How serious a threat is antibiotic resistance to the treatment of pediatric patients? Which drug-resistant infections are the most concerning right now?

It’s a major problem. Antibiotic-resistant infections are associated with worse outcomes for our patients. Children infected with resistant types of bacteria have higher chances of dying, have more days in the hospital, and cost more to treat. The World Health Organization considers antibiotic resistance to be one of the three greatest threat to human health moving forward. The United Nations has called on all nations to develop plans to address it.

The most concerning antibiotic-resistant infections right now are the multidrug-resistant Gram-negative infections (e.g., carbapenem-resistant Klebsiella and Pseudomonas, Acinetobacter). That’s where we’re seeing the majority of resistance. While we may have a few more available antibiotics for the treatment of drug-resistant Gram-positive infections, which are the other main type of antibiotic-resistant infection, we have very few drugs to treat multidrug-resistant Gram-negative infections.

How can the improved use of antibiotics, through antibiotic stewardship, help address this threat?

There are several core actions that can help prevent antibiotic resistance, including preventing infections in the first place through immunization, handwashing, food safety, and other means. However, it’s been pretty well established that the single most important factor in reducing drug resistance is changing how we use antibiotics. Approximately 50 percent of current antibiotic use is not necessary or appropriate. Antibiotic stewardship is really all about ensuring that antibiotics are used appropriately, meaning prescribing them only when they’re needed, utilizing the right antibiotic at the right dose and for the right duration. That’s what stewardship is: it’s essentially optimizing antibiotic use.

The World Health Organization considers antibiotic resistance to be one of the three greatest threat to human health moving forward.

What are some of the unique challenges that face antibiotic stewardship efforts targeting pediatric patients?

There are some unique populations in pediatrics; premature babies, or neonates, is one I would highlight. They don’t manifest infections in the same way as most other patient populations, the signs of infection are much more non-specific. There’s also many fewer antibiotic options for neonates. We often don’t know how to dose antibiotics in premature neonates.

What role can parents play in improving antibiotic prescribing and use among children?

They have a major role. If you look at studies, what you find is that there is a perception among clinicians that parents want an antibiotic for their child or will get upset if they don’t get that antibiotic. In fact, often what you’ll find in those studies is a mismatch between what the doctor perceives and what the parent actually wants. What parents want is reassurance; they want someone to explain to them that this is a viral infection, and it’s going to take ten days to get better, for example. Or how long to wait before an antibiotic might be useful and what the dangers of a particular antibiotic are.

Communication is a huge part of the parent-pediatrician relationship. Parents need to ask doctors, does my child really need this antibiotic? What is this going to do for my child? Is it going to change the outcome of their illness? How is it going to help them? Is it going to make them better quicker or prevent something bad from happening?

The lack of new antibiotic drug development has been a concern for many years. Are there any signs of new antibiotic options for treating infections in children in the development pipeline?

This is a financial issue, and the financial incentives, unfortunately, are not aligned. I think we’re beginning to see a glimmer of hope. There are people working to develop new drugs and efforts to more effectively incentivize companies to make new antibiotics. I think the most important thing for our pediatric patients is to push companies involved in antibiotic development to include children in their testing. Companies will often study new antibiotics primarily in adults, because that’s where the market is, for the most part. This leaves us without the dosing data we need to use these antibiotics safely in children, who metabolize drugs differently than adults.

Featured image credit: Pills by StockSnap. CC0 via Pixabay.

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Etymology Gleanings: May 2018

Still with the herd

Man, as they say, is a gregarious animal, and wearing horns could become the male of our species, but etymology sometimes makes unpredictable leaps. I of course knew that Italian becco means “cuckold” (the image is the same in all or most of the Romance languages, and not only in them), but would not have addressed this sensitive subject, had a comment on becco not served as a provocation. So here are some notes on cuckoldry from a linguistic point of view.

Engl. cuckold, going back to the trisyllabic cukeweld, is a thirteenth-century borrowing of an Old French noun. (The entire English vocabulary of adultery is French. Germanic was relegated for less subtle things.) It has the root of cuckoo and the element –old, usually called a pejorative suffix. The connection with the bird, though easy to guess, is oblique. The Common European cuckoo lays its egg or eggs in other birds’ nests, and the hatched bird indeed eats the other nestlings out of house and home. However, the bird story is not about “the husband of an unfaithful wife,” as older dictionaries delicately summarize the situation; it is mainly about raising a child fathered by the wife’s lover. The association is old. In the great Middle High German epic The Lay of the Nibelungen (ca. 1205), Hagen, the three ruling kings’ counsellor, suspects that the father of the queen’s son is not her husband but the hero Siegfried, and asks in irritation: “Suln wir gouche ziehen?”  (“Should we bring up cuckoos [bastards]?” Gouch, Modern German Gauch, means “cuckoo.”)

The prototypical cuckoo. Image credit: Reed Warbler feeding a Common Cuckoo chick in a nest. Brood parasitism by Per Harald Olsen.CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

But the cuckoo as the symbol of adultery has not survived, except in the English word cuckold. A deceived husband is supposed to wear horns, rather than resembling the parasite bird. All kinds of fanciful explanations have been offered to explain the allusion. According to the safest law of reconstruction (I have discovered it myself and advertise it at every opportunity), be it phonetics, grammar, or vocabulary, the more ingenious an explanation, the greater the chance that it is wrong. Some people trace the phrases “to wear horns, to give someone horns” to the infidelity of Roman wives: allegedly, the victorious legionnaires returned home with horns gracing their helmets but unaware of how their wives behaved during their absence—a nice flight of imagination. Another suggestion ascribes the idiom to the behavior of fighting stags, bulls, and their likes in heat. Stags (at least in English) have antlers, and I am sorry to add that antler is a word of unknown origin (from French).

The main problem is not to “guess” the origin of the strange reference to horns, but to discover its age. When did the speakers of the European languages begin to allude to horns as a telltale sign of wives’ infidelity? None of the data I have seen predates the Middle Ages, and some words are considerably later. Perhaps German Hahnrei “cuckold,” another thirteenth-century noun (that is, it first showed up in texts at that time), supplies the sought-for clue. The word is a bit dated but not obsolete.  The origin of the second syllable (-rei) is rather obscure, even if not beyond reconstruction, but the root—hahn—poses no problems: it means “rooster” and is related to Engl. hen.

Images of cuckolds are many and uninspiring. Image credit: The celebration [fête] of the Order of Cuckoldry before the throne of her majesty, Infidelity by H. Churchyard. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.According to a plausible explanation, the story runs as follows. Some cockerels were castrated at a rather early age, to be fattened and used for food. Castrated roosters are called capons. (Capon is of course another French word, for it designates a bird used for food, and after the Conquest fine cookery was the domain of Romance-speaking specialists.) The spurs of the castrated capons were cut off and implanted into the comb, in order to distinguish them from the rest of the fowl. The spurs continued to grow and often began to look like real horns. Apparently, this custom was known all over Western Europe. It follows that the word Hahnrei was originally applied not to the husband of an adulterous wife but to a castrate (or an impotent?), a male who could not become a spouse. That is why a deceived husband was said to wear horns. This explanation seems convincing. If someone knows a better one, kindly share it with our readers.
More words for bulls and cows

Engl. buffalo goes back a long way to Latin būfalus. Greek boúbalos meant “antelope” and “wild ox.” Once again we come across b- ~ bu– words for the bull. If Luwian cuneiform for “cow” was wawi, the first impression is that we have an onomatopoeia, perhaps even a baby word.  (Luwian, I am happy to report, is an ancient language of the Anatolian group.) If this suggestion has any value, it further undermines the idea that bull is connected with ball and that the animal’s name reflects a pars pro toto situation (“part used as the name of the whole”), as, in, for example, all hands aboard! (obviously, not only the hands will appear) or twenty head of cattle (their tails will predictably come after them). It is hard to imagine that someone ever said: “Here are excellent balls,” meaning: “Here is a big bull.”

Chow and cow cannot be connected. Chow is a dialectal phonetic doublet of chew (Old Engl. cēowan), while the old form of cow is cū. Likewise, horn cannot derive from any word or root without r in the middle. A non-Germanic cognate should begin with k (as in the borrowed words cornea and cornucopia). No can I detect a bridge from bull to warm.

My thanks are due to the correspondent who informed me that wether “castrated ram” is an unforgotten word in Australia and New Zealand. But it seems to have fallen into desuetude in American English. Nor does the following doggerel (a tongue twister) have any currency in my parts (in my promiscuous parts, as Kipling put it): “I don’t know whether the wether will weather the weather or whether the weather the wether will kill.”  Even my spellchecker ignores wether. However, bellwether is remembered, even if not too well.

Odds and ends

Otiose and otiosity. The adjective otiose means “of no practical effect; useless.” This spelling goes back to the nineteenth century. The senses “idle, at leisure” are now archaic (but then the word is in general bookish and rare). In a slightly different form the word appeared in English texts in the fifteenth century and meant “at ease.” Its etymon is Latin otium “leisure”; hence the adjective.  Otiosity emerged in English at the end of the fifteenth century. In English, otiosity was not derived from otiose: they were borrowed separately.

Ethics. The word goes back to Greek ēthos, which meant “dwelling, an accustomed seat (hence in the plural “abodes or haunts, usually of animals; compare Engl. habit and inhabit); usage; custom; personal disposition; nature, character.”  In Classical Greek, this word partly overlapped with hétos (short é!) “habit, custom.” The ancient root of ēthos began with sw– and meant “one’s own.” Engl. ethos is a nineteenth-century word, but the adjective ethic is contemporary with Shakespeare.

Some of the questions I received require long explanations, and I’ll answer them in the nearest future. It should be added that I am not responsible for the order in which the readers’ comments appear on the website. Although the procedure is not known to me, it has nothing to do with the content of the remarks or the personality of the correspondent.

The most famous man in literary history who thought that he had been cuckolded: A tragedy of betrayed trust. Image credit: Scene from “Othello” with Paul Robeson and Uta Hagen as Desdemona, Theatre Guild production, Broadway, 1943-44 by Unknown. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Toward Spelling Congress: London, May 30, 2018

One of the most insightful works on the literacy of the Middle Ages is H. J. Chaytor’s book From Script to Print: An Introduction to Medieval Vernacular Literature. I would like to quote a passage from it:

School instruction starts with the book, and the book’s orthography is regarded as a kind of legal code against which there is no appeal. Meanwhile, language develops, and sounds change, but ‘spelling’ remains fixed, unless the tinkering of amateur philologists helps to make confusion worse confounded, with the result that English orthography is now the despair of Europe, while that of France leaves much to be desired (emphasis added).

(Shouts from the audience: “Hear, hear!”)

Featured Image: Buffalo, NY. The town’s name possibly goes back to the name of Buffalo Creek, but the etymology is not certain. This is a common problem: compare Boulder, Colorado (the post for 22 February 2017). Featured Image Credit: Buffalo 1813 by Benson Lossing. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons. 

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Markets aren’t natural: governments have to make them work

Whether we recognize it or not, “marketcraft” constitutes a core government function comparable to statecraft. By marketcraft, I refer to all the things governments do to make markets function and flourish, like corporate law, antitrust policy, intellectual property rights, and financial regulation. Marketcraft has profound implications for economic performance, social welfare, and national power – so we should want to get it right. We should seek to optimize marketcraft rather than to minimize government intervention.

Moreover, if we reframe government regulation as marketcraft, then we instantly dispel the common misperception that markets can thrive without governance. This, in turn generates more accurate analysis of market dynamics and more appropriate prescriptions for government policy. We should view government regulation less as a constraint on markets than as a prerequisite for competitive and dynamic markets.

The marketcraft frame views market reform as building market institutions, while the pervasive language of “liberalization,” “privatization,” and “deregulation” implies a process of removing obstacles. But liberalizing markets does not mean liberating them. In reality, it requires more state capacity, not less. It means more regulation, not less.

Consider the most dramatic examples of market reform, those of the post-Communist world. We have now experienced several decades of debate over the nature of the transition from a planned economy to a market economy. The crux of the debate hinged on whether market reform was primarily a matter of dismantling the old command system, or one of building the institutions to sustain a market economy. The latter view has now prevailed, both in the realm of scholarly analysis and  real-world experience. But from the marketcraft view, this should have been obvious from the outset.

Or consider market reform in developing countries. We have traversed several decades of controversy over the nature of the fundamental challenge and the appropriate solutions, sometimes depicted as a contest between the Washington Consensus and a more institutional perspective. And the latter view has now prevailed, after a protracted battle, countless flawed policies, and untold human suffering. But shouldn’t we have figured this out sooner?

 Marketcraft has profound implications for economic performance, social welfare, and national power – so we should want to get it right.

And finally, what about market reform in the advanced industrial countries? While we have discovered that market reform requires building institutions in post-Communist and developing countries, we have been slow to recognize that the same logic applies to rich countries as well. Ironically, we are less attuned to the institutional character of market reforms in rich  countries because they already have fairly well-developed institutional infrastructures. But market reform in these countries means enhancing governance, just as it does elsewhere.

The term we most commonly use to describe market reform in developed countries – deregulation – nicely illustrates the confusion. Deregulation  is typically used to depict a decrease in government regulation and an increase in market competition, as if two were natural associated. But enhancing competition most often requires more regulation. In network sectors, for example, incumbents are not likely to voluntarily cede their market power. So the government has to fabricate competition via regulation. In telecommunications, governments crafted competition via asymmetric (i.e. anti-incumbent) regulation, requiring officials to lease their lines to their competitors.

In developed countries, as elsewhere, insufficient attention to the institutional nature of markets has fostered policy errors, with devastating results. The causes of the 2008 global financial crisis are complex, multidimensional, and intertwined, yet the essence of the story boils down to a massive failure of marketcraft. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan made this case rather poignantly, if inadvertently, in his famous recantation in testimony to Congress in 2008. “Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholder’s equity (myself especially),” he conceded, “are in a state of shocked disbelief.” Pressed by Committee Chairman Henry Waxman on whether his laissez-faire ideology contributed to decisions that he regrets, Greenspan replied, “What I am saying to you is, yes, I found a flaw . . .”

The US authorities committed fundamental errors of marketcraft in the lead-up to the financial crisis. They gave financial institutions greater freedom to engage in risky behavior without strengthening regulation and oversight. In the 1990s, they chose not to regulate derivatives, complex financial instruments such as stocks and options that derive their value from some other underlying asset such as a commodity.  They did so partly because they viewed the derivatives market as an isolated arena for sophisticated investors, and partly because they feared that regulation would destabilize financial markets. They put too much faith in the ability of market players to self-regulate. And they failed to appreciate the degree to which the US mortgage-backed securities market had become plagued with misaligned incentives.

But marketcraft can generate successes as well as failures. After all, marketcraft produced the information revolution. The US government funded the research that produced much of the relevant technology, and provided early-stage capital for many of the most successful high-tech firms. US institutions, and the Silicon Valley ecosystem in particular, fostered the innovative start-ups that played a key role in commercializing the Internet, with innovations in devices, computing, transmission, and services. Antitrust policy played a less obvious but equally critical role by preventing vertically integrated firms like IBM and AT&T from dominating the emerging information technology sector. And this in turn enabled the open innovation characteristic of the digital economy. Regulatory reform brought lower communications costs, including flat-rate local service, which allowed startups to offer value-added services, and household consumers to experiment with new applications at a reasonable cost.

The financial crisis and the information revolution illustrate the enormous stakes in the game of marketcraft. The marketcraft realm is growing as a share of what governments do, and as a core element in how governments enhance or undermine the welfare of their people. Some of the core items on the marketcraft agenda – financial regulation, intellectual property rights, and the governance of the digital economy – are among the most consequential policy issues today, and will be even more critical going forward.

Featured image credit: stock trading finance Ahmad Ardity. Public Domain via Pixabay.

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Voltaire on death

Voltaire, the French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher, wrote over 20,000 letters over his lifetime. One can read through his letters to learn more about his views on democracy and religion, as well as the soul and afterlife. The following excerpts from his letters show how his thoughts and ideas about death and the soul evolved over time.

Voltaire first brushed with death in December 1723. At the young age of 29 he contracted smallpox. In a letter written to Louis Nicolas Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, baron de Preuilly in December 1723, Voltaire reflects on the previous days and his few regrets:

“[I] made my confession; and my will, which, as you will readily believe, was exceedingly short. After that, I calmly awaited death: only regretting that I had not put the finishing touches to my poem and to Mariamne, and that I must part from my friends so soon.”

He recovered from this bout of smallpox, but, as was indicative of the time, was quite incorrect about the nature of the disease, stating in the same letter:

“Smallpox is, in a simple form, merely the blood ridding itself of its impurities, and positively paves the way to more vigorous health.”

In 1726, Voltaire’s sister Catherine Arouet died. Quite shaken, he muses on death in his letter to Nicolas Claude Thieriota:

“Life is but a dream full of starts of folly, and of fancied, and true miseries. Death awakes us from this painful dream, and gives us, either a better existence or no existence at all.”

“Life is but a dream full of starts of folly, and of fancied, and true miseries. Death awakes us from this painful dream, and gives us, either a better existence or no existence at all.”

Almost 10 years later in 1735, Voltaire muses on what the soul is in a letter to René Joseph Tournemine. The letter marks an important point in his intellectual development:

“[M]atter itself does not perish. Its extent, its impenetrability, its need to be delimited and to be located in space, all that and a thousand other things remain after our death. Why should not what you call soul also remain? It is certain that I know what I call matter only by some of its properties, and those very imperfectly. How then can I assert that omnipotent God has not been able to give it the faculty of thought?”

He later admits:

“I am very far from believing that I can assert thought to be matter. I am equally far from being able to assert that I have the slightest idea of the nature of what is called soul.”

Jumping ahead to August, 1769, Voltaire has been ill and is contemplating his own death, in this letter to Gottlob Louis von Schönberg, Reichsgraf von Schönberg:

“Yes, sir, it is true that I have been very ill. But that is the common lot of old age, especially when one has always had a feeble constitution: and these little warnings are the stroke of the clock to tell us that soon we shall have passed beyond time.”

He next introduces an interesting perspective of death: that animals benefit from not knowing it is coming:

“Animals have a great advantage over human beings: they never hear the clock strike, however intelligent they may be: they die without having any notion of death: they have no theologians to instruct them on the Four Ends of animals: their last moments are not disturbed by unwelcome and often objectionable ceremonies: it costs them nothing to be buried: no one goes to law over their wills: but in one respect we are greatly their superior — they only know the ties of habit, and we know friendship.”

Thirty-five years after previously writing down his thoughts about the eternal soul, Voltaire muses how it’s not known whether or not the soul lives on, in his letter to Frederick William, Prince of Prussia, November 1770:

“It is very true that we do not know any too well what the soul is: no one has ever seen it. All that we do know is that the eternal Lord of nature has given us the power of thinking, and of distinguishing virtue. It is not proved that this faculty survives our death: but the contrary is not proved either. It is possible, doubtless, that God has given thought to a particle to which, after we are no more, He will still give the power of thought: there is no inconsistency in this idea.“

Even if we do not know whether the soul lives on, Voltaire pragmatically advises that it is the best course of action to always do right:

“In the midst of all the doubts which we have discussed for four thousand years in four thousand ways, the safest course is to do nothing against one’s conscience. With this secret, we can enjoy life and have nothing to fear from death.”

On May 26, 1778, Voltaire wrote his last letter. Death is clearly on his mind; the letter, written to Trophime Gérard de Lally-Tolendal, chevalier de Lally-Tolendal, is comprised of only one sentence:

“The dying man returns to life on hearing this great news: he tenderly embraces M. de Lally: he sees that the King is the defender of justice: and he dies content.”

Voltaire died four days later at the age of 83.

Featured image credit: Death by Alphonse Édouard Enguérand Aufray de Roc’Bhian. Public domain via The Metropolitan Museum of Art .

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What is a mathematical model?

As a mathematician who focuses his attention on a field called dynamics, I am often asked when queried about my area of specialty, exactly what is a dynamical system? I usually answer something like: “I study the mathematics underlying what is means to model something mathematically.” And this seems to work as most people have a basic understanding that mathematics is used in science and engineering to model either a physical or an abstract process and to mine it for information. But thinking a little deeper, there is a better question to ask: What exactly is a mathematical model?

Every time we attempt to understand some new phenomenon or idea that may be quantifiable, our first and very natural pass at comprehension is to compare its values, behavior, and limits to something we already understand or at least have control over. Time is a common concept to measure our new phenomenon against, as in how is it changing as time passes? But we can use any known quantity with which to compare our new idea. Think of drug efficacy by dosage, say, or population growth by population size. This comparison comes in the form of a relation tying together values of our new phenomenon to values of something we already know. And when this relation between our newly quantified concept and something we already have control over is functional (meaning to each value of our known quantity, there is at most only one value of the new one), we can use our known quantity to discover, play with, and/or predict values of the new variable via studying the properties of the relationship or function.

The idea of a functional relationship tying together the values of two measurable quantities, one of which we know and the other we want to know more about, is, in essence, a mathematical model.

Sometimes, the input and output variable values can be discrete (individual real numbers with gaps between values), or continuous (like an interval of real numbers), and the properties of the functions, as mathematical models, will reflect this. In mathematics, sets of numbers (collections of valid input and output variables, the known and newly studied phenomena, respectively) and functions between them are part of the fundamental building blocks of all of our mathematical structures. We structure the vast majority of our thought processes around the functional relationships between quantifiable phenomena.

In one of these functional relationships between two quantified entities, indeed, in a mathematical model, we can vary the values of the input variable from one value to the next or to the previous one, as a means to study the function’s properties. Studying the properties of a model (a function) in this fashion is something a mathematics student begins to do at a basic level in what we call calculus, or the “calculus of functions of one independent variable,” and at a higher level in areas like analysis and topology.

The idea of a functional relationship tying together the values of two measurable quantities, one of which we know and the other we want to know more about, is, in essence, a mathematical model.

We tend to also use the properties of functions (models) often without really being aware. We understand somewhat intuitively that the warmest part of a day is about two thirds of the way through the daylight hours, linking temperature to time over a day. We also know that two aspirin are more effective at pain relief than one, but intuitively understand that there is probably a maximum effective dosage that is safe before deleterious effects kick in, whether or not we choose to test the theory.

But mostly, the central power of a mathematical model, as a functional relationship between two measurable quantities, one known and one studied, is in its ability to predict, uncover, or extrapolate trends in the new quantity. And here is where my field of choice in mathematics becomes relevant: functions between quantities contain dynamical information. If we apply a function to a set, allowing its output to be reused as an input, over and over again, we can uncover properties of the function (and sometimes also of the set) by watching where individual inputs go upon repeated application of the function. This idea, iterating a function on a set (the discrete version) or using calculus to write a model as a differential equation (the continuous version), is what we call a dynamical system. In such a dynamical system, we often call the numbers that represent the iterates, or the input variable in a differential equation, the time variable, due to its common interpretation as actual time in models of science, engineering and technology. However, there is no real compelling reason why in general. But underlying both a function and its iterates (a discrete dynamical system) or a system of ordinary differential equations (the continuous one), is the idea of a function whose input and output variable values come from the same set of possibilities. So a dynamical system is the mathematical discipline that studies the structure of mathematical modeling. And a mathematical model is simply a function.

Forming and studying functional relationships to understand new things? In mathematics, this is called modeling. And in real life?

Featured image credit: ‘Koch curve’ by Fibonacci. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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When corporations do the right thing

Delta Airlines was one of more than a dozen companies to cut ties with the NRA after the school shooting in February 2018 that left 17 dead in Parkland, Florida. The Georgia state legislature, dominated by NRA supporters, wasted little time in punishing the Atlanta-based airline by denying its $50 million tax exemption on jet fuel. Meanwhile, a spokeswoman for the NRA fended off accusations of any responsibility it might bear for the shooting by telling reporters, “you love the ratings.” Delta CEO Ed Bastian referred to that cynical jibe when he explained Delta’s move to end its discount for NRA members: “Our values are not for sale.” While Bastian proclaimed his support for the Second Amendment and Delta’s neutrality with respect to the political debate over gun control, the challenge to reporters delivered by the NRA spokeswoman clearly struck a nerve. As CEO of an award-winning Fortune Five Hundred company whose success depended on its reputation for safety, service, and good will, Bastian did not want Delta associated with the NRA or with corporate profiteering.

In a similar spirit six months earlier, CEOs from major American corporations spoke out against racial violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, President Trump’s inadequate response to the violence of white supremacists and their racist rhetoric prompted CEOs from Merck, General Electric, Apple, Goldman Sachs, Unilever, Armor, Dow, and Pepsi to separate themselves from him. The President’s failure to denounce white nationalist violence in Charlottesville led to the disbanding of two of his most important economic advisory councils.

The upright behavior of corporations in this fraught situation derive from old ideas about corporate responsibility for common good. To be sure, common good has meant different things to different groups, and corporate responsibility has all too often been honored in the breach. But corporate organizations became foundational to American economic and social order because many Americans expected corporate enterprise to benefit public life as well as private pockets.

NRA Headquarters, Fairfax Virginia USA by Bjoertvedt. CC-BY-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

When corporations multiplied in the US after independence from British rule, the state governments granting corporate charters expected these organizations to bring improvements that would serve the common good. With state and local governments often too poor to finance roads and bridges, and opportunities for new industries abounding, corporations appeared to embody republican idealism with  the virtues of hard work, grassroots organization, and social discipline. Corporations did have their critics – notably Adam Smith, who believed they led to monopolies, and Thomas Jefferson, who thought they encouraged wealthy elitism. But American enthusiasm for corporations as voluntary organizations that brought people together in new, efficient, and beneficial ways was remarkable. Corporations multiplied faster in the US in the early decades of the nineteenth century than anywhere else, laying the groundwork for the development of big corporations later in the nineteenth century, and stimulating corporate development in other parts of the world.

Affinities between commercial corporations and churches contributed to the moral prestige that many business organizations enjoyed in the early nineteenth century. Even later, in the context of large-scale industrial growth, labor unrest, and the trends toward hierarchical organization after the Civil War, commercial corporations continued to espouse values similar to those endorsed by churches, including loyalty, honesty, and voluntarism. Well into the twentieth century, commercial and religious institutions had overlapping memberships, with business leaders prominent in church, and church members active in business. Shared expectations about conduct and many forms of influence ran back and forth. Unfortunately, provisions for defending white supremacy and male headship were woven into this intercourse, shaping what people with power meant by doing good and benefiting society. Today, those provisions are often (although not often enough) exposed and challenged.

Attentive to their markets, to social conventions, and popular trends, both commercial and religious organizations strive to attract followers and look good. The aspiration to stand on moral ground that businesses and religious institutions have long shared helps explain the disgust Americans express today when commercial corporations – Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, Koch Industries, SeaWorld, Facebook – behave as if they are not accountable, and when they deny responsibility for the consequences of their work. Fortunately, there are many companies who do better.

We have come to an interesting point in American history where commercial corporations like Delta Airlines are acting with a degree of moral clarity that many evangelical churches seem to lack, especially with respect to readiness to confront racism and gun violence. We should not credit Delta or any other company for more than it deserves, nor should we overlook the fact that many religious organizations also promote racial justice and reject affiliation with the NRA. Nevertheless, we should recognize corporations with clout and will to benefit the common good, and ask them to do more.

Featured Image credit: DELTA AIRLINES by Eddie Maloney. CC-BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons .

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