Oxford University Press's Blog, page 266

Female first: aerial women in mythology, pop culture, and beyond

The sacred is where you find it. We would be foolish to ignore human awe in contemplating the eternal stability of the night sky and envy for the flight of birds that seemed to fly between the earthly, somewhat troublesome world of constant change, and what appeared to be eternal heavenly realms. The ancient depictions of winged females, and not winged males, suggest women were perceived as having some special power that men did not. Historically, this often formed the background for gender conflicts—what women want to do and what men will allow them to do as well as female indifference to the terms set by men. Aerial women in mythology represent power and freedom. They have been worshipped as bird goddesses, Valkyries, winged goddesses, and witches. These and other flying females from a wide variety of cultures are linked to sexuality, death and rebirth, or immortality.

Think of the Egyptian goddess Isis who restored her husband to life by flapping her wings over his body and then had sex with him to conceive their son Horus. In different places and historical periods there were remarkably similar discourses about the unpredictable powers of aerial women, who could be generous or withholding, empowering or destructive. To fly is to experience a profound sense of freedom and power. But, because of the uncertain nature of these winged women, the question arose as to how they could be controlled—whether by supplication or coercion. Over time, they flew through a universe of ever-increasing constraint in which similar means were used to capture and domesticate them, to turn them into handmaidens of male desire and ambition. One consequence of this was male control of their sexuality. For many aerial females (swan maidens, fairies, Brunhilde), having sex can mean the loss of flight or the loss of power, as sex is part of their captivity and domestication. In contradistinction, some aerial females (goddesses, ḍākinīs, some tantric practitioners, shamans, and Asian mystics) are sexual only as their desires dictate.

Many airborne women marry mortal men, transforming them into something more than they had been, but they do not always live happily ever after. Aerial women often shape-shift between human and avian forms, as with swan maidens; while in human form, however, they are vulnerable to captivity. Once captured, they sometimes live with a man for years, and even have children, before finally escaping back into their bird form and fleeing. At other times an aerial woman willingly accepts a man but sets a condition or taboo—one that he inevitably breaks. She then flies away. This suggests the paradoxical nature of these creaturely and sexual beings; on the one hand, they are creatively involved with humans through their reproductive powers, while on the other they reject the terrestrial realm of human beings. They are essentially birdlike, briefly nesting on the earth but most at home in the sky. Some can confer the blessings of fertility and immortality or snatch life away. One needs to be very careful in dealing with them.

By the time actual aviation began, it was a carefully guarded power limited to men. Women fliers of the 1920s and 1930s were unperturbed by public opinion, as they described experiencing independence and freedom through flight. These women supported each other and organized in a very public way by staging the sky-breaking first air race by women pilots, the Women’s Air Derby of 1929. Amelia Earhart came in second, which the wildly popular, nationally-syndicated columnist and radio commentator Will Rogers trivialized by calling the event the Powder Puff Derby. The camaraderie of the participants led them to the establishment of the Ninety-Nines, the first organization for female pilots, still in existence today.

 Amelia Earhart standing under nose of her Lockheed Model 10-E Electra by Underwood & Underwood. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Wonder Woman in her early 1940s depiction brings us back to the question of sexuality. Although Wonder Woman appears not to be sexually active, and in spite of her love for US Army pilot Steve Trevor, the fact that she was born, as a princess, on Paradise Island—the mysterious home of the Amazons at the edge of the known world—signals a lesbian undertone that often rises to a crescendo in her relations with the Holliday College girls. Wonder Woman’s nom de guerre, Diana Prince—an inversion of her birth name, title, and gender—is but one example of her polymorphous sexuality.

With the advent of World War II, America was desperate for trained pilots, which required the hiring of civilian female pilots and led aerial women into war service, the inevitable domain of flying females. Like Valkyries hovering over the battlefield waiting to carry fallen heroes to Valhalla, female pilots ferried warplanes across America. Male civilian pilots could hitch rides on military planes, but women pilots could not because the press tracked almost every move the women pilots made and the Army was afraid of scandal. In March 1943, the Army briefly stopped women from being co-pilots with men and grounded them for nine days when menstruating. Both restrictions, however, were soon rescinded. Women’s sexuality continued to be guarded—they could fly, but sex was taboo—and menstruation, an assertion of their femaleness, remained a problem for many men.

It was not until 1977 that the United States Congress finally acknowledged women as military personnel, declaring them veterans and issuing them honorable discharges. Women were not allowed to fly again for the American military, or for commercial airlines, until the 1970s. Unfortunately, women were not considered for the early astronauts program of the 1960s, despite significant evidence that they were psychologically and physically better equipped than men to withstand the stress of space travel and were lighter in weight—always a benefit since the earliest days of flying. The continuing prevalent view was that women could not fly while menstruating. Somehow, the first female cosmonaut flew while menstruating without a problem, but it would take the United States another twenty years to send a woman into space. Sally Ride, a 32-year-old astrophysicist, blasted off on 18 June1983. In 1995, Eileen Collins, the first woman to pilot an American spacecraft, carried the pilot’s license of Evelyn Trout into space. Trout had flown in the 1929 Women’s Air Derby, and her pilot’s license was signed by Orville Wright.

From the earliest bird goddesses to the space age some women have refused to be defined by the restrictive gravity of men’s wishes or desires; their ability to fly empowered them to impose conditions on men, or to escape roles they found constricting. The ancient concept of powerful winged women shape-shifts into many different forms over time and place; sometimes they lose one or more characteristics while at other times they gained additional ones. Whether human, divine, or mythic creatures, men desire them, but not as they are. Rather, they want to clip their wings in order to hold them captive, controlling and constraining their freedom.

Featured image credit: Illustration to The Book of Wonder Voyages by John D. Batten. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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What is allowed in outer space?

Humanity is no longer just exploring outer space for the sake of leaving flags and footprints. On February 6, the SpaceX Corporation conducted a successful first flight of its Falcon Heavy rocket, capable of carrying 63,800 kg (140,700 lb) to Low Earth Orbit (LEO), a capability not seen since the Apollo era. As the rocket’s reusable stages can be refueled and reflown, this rocket is a significant innovation and not merely a return to past capabilities. And with swagger uncharacteristic of the current space industry, the Falcon Heavy carried a Tesla Roadster sports car complete with a dummy at the wheel and live-streamed the whole thing. It should be clear by now that the space world is changing.

SpaceX is not the only pioneer. A wide range of new actors are entering outer space, including startup companies and nations accessing space for the first time. In addition to traditional space activities, the modern space industry fully intends to expand humankind’s economic and scientific horizon by building, making, buying, selling, and (soon enough) living in outer space.

What does space law permit (or prohibit)?

As with any human activity involving a multiplicity of actors and interests, some rational ordering of rights and obligations is crucial. And not long after Sputnik in 1957, along came the lawyers. Amidst Cold War tensions, international space law was created at the United Nations. The landmark Outer Space Treaty of 1967 includes visions for a bright future in outer space in its opening words, “[i]nspired by the great prospects opening up before mankind as a result of man’s entry into outer space.”

The drafters of international space law built a basic legal framework for space activities comprising seventeen short articles of the Outer Space Treaty which create a few core principles. This framework treaty was thereafter supplemented with a handful of other space treaties expanding on specific issues such as the rescue and return of astronauts and space objects, liability for damage, and the registration of space objects.

As with any treaty, the binding obligations of space law protect rights and establish responsibilities. These rights are broad and expansive. They include the right for states to freely access, explore, and use outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, without preauthorization from any other nation or from the international community. This broad freedom is balanced with certain obligations, such as state’s international responsibility for its national space activities (whether governmental or private). The treaty does not attempt to address everything humanity might do in space.

“Does space law permit the salvage and removal of non-functioning satellites? Does space law permit the establishment of a Moon Village?”

The drafters of the Outer Space Treaty did not and could not anticipate and predict all of the advancements and innovations that were to come. Wisely and most importantly, they knew their limits and did not attempt to regulate in the abstract. They did not envision the extent of commercial activity in space, satellite crowding at the Geostationary orbit, or the small satellite revolution, much less newly-emerging activities such as satellite servicing, space debris removal, manufacturing in space, commercial space stations, crewed planetary outposts, or the use of celestial resources. They certainly never envisioned a red convertible sports car in a precessing Earth-Mars elliptical orbit around the sun playing David Bowie.

So, if international law doesn’t actually prohibit the launching of a convertible electric sports car on an interplanetary trajectory, it must be legal, right? That’s one way of understanding space law. An opposing (and perhaps generally valid) view sometimes expressed is that unless a particular activity is positively authorized and regulated by a source of international law, then that activity is simply not legal (and possibly even illegal) under international law.

Others think there is more nuance in international law besides the binary legal vs. illegal distinction, and that any activity that is not addressed by law might be not clearly lawful and permitted, yet simultaneously also not per se illegal. Disturbingly, there is no clearly accepted and universally applicable general rule of international law deciding this question. The Lotus principle, also called the “permissive principle,” comes close. Shortly stated, the Lotus principle is “that which is not explicitly prohibited is therefore permitted.” However, as international law continues to develop more slowly than the pace of technological progress and the growth of interconnected globalized activities, the Lotus principle’s persuasiveness has waned.

In light of all of the advanced activities which might occur in outer space, international space law is often uncertain, if not totally silent. Does space law permit the salvage and removal of non-functioning satellites? Does space law permit the establishment of a Moon Village? Frankly, the texts of space law remain silent regarding these activities. However, instances of uncertainty (courts call it non liquet) and gaps (lacunae) are recognized concepts in international law. It is not practical to require that international space law explicitly permit every proposed or possible activity we seek to do in outer space. Requiring this level or certainty or proclaiming that if space law doesn’t authorize and regulate an activity then it must be illegal actually defeats the purposes of the treaty, and will prevent us from reaching those “great prospects opening up before mankind.”

The Outer Space Treaty, which marked its 50th anniversary last year, was intended to enshrine broad freedoms in outer space, but wisely did not precisely delineate what types of activities are exercises of these freedoms. Going forward, as we seek to actually achieve the great prospects of outer space, states and the international community will have to decide which activities should be regulated, as well as which activities we might refrain from regulating for the time being. But first, recognizing the modest nature of space law, with its many limits, and not seeing these limits as prohibitions, will be crucial if we are to even attempt to seize the great promises offered by outer space.

Featured image: SpaceX Dragon commercial cargo craft approaches the ISS by NASA. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Collaboration for a cure: harnessing the power of patient data

I am a classic example of a fitness fanatic who uses a wearable device to count my steps, measure my heart rate, and track my sleep pattern. Every day, I am armed with data gathered about my physical activity, alerting me as to whether I’ve been slacking in the gym or eating too many bags of crisps.

There is no doubt that now, more than ever, we live in a world where ‘big data’ is ubiquitous in influencing our daily decisions. However, since transitioning to work in the health data world, it has become apparent to me that the UK healthcare and research environment has still not caught on to this data-driven revolution.

Take a moment to think about the data that has been collected about you every time you have visited your GP, collected a prescription, or sat in the local A&E department for hours on end. The number of contact points you have with the NHS are endless, but do you really know the true significance of the data that is gathered about you?

The importance of our medical data can extend beyond our direct care. It can give insight into prevention, diagnosis, patient experience, survival, and quality of life. For example, routes to diagnosis data analysed by the National Cancer Registry and Analysis Service showed that 53% of high grade brain tumours were diagnosed as an emergency in 2013, and, of those, just 28% survive one year post diagnosis.

But, as if that’s not enough, data is also crucial in accelerating medical research, and yet it can be challenging for researchers to access patient clinical data as this involves a grueling application processes to a number of different data goliaths, alongside a handsome price tag. This, in turn, can mean many research projects are delayed and, more often than not, many can’t even make it off the ground.

The lack of available, accessible data means researchers may only be tapping on the surface of the data world, but in reality, a whole data ocean is out there waiting for them to swim in.

However, the lack of data sharing has not gone wholly unobserved.

Last year, Life Science’s champion, Professor Sir John Bell, wrote a report providing recommendations to government on the long term success of the life sciences sector in the United Kingdom. One of the core recommendations is to ”establish two to five Digital Innovation Hubs providing data across regions of three to five million people” with the intention of rapidly enabling researchers to engage with a rich, meaningful dataset.

A reinforcing action of this recommendation particularly stood out to me as a charity employee: “National registries of therapy-area-specific data across the whole of the NHS in England should be created and aligned with the relevant charity.”

I don’t disagree that medical charities are paramount in driving initiatives like this, but is it not the voices and actions of the patients they represent that have the greatest power to influence data sharing?

Last year, we conducted a survey across 270 patients, which highlighted that 97% of those living with a brain tumour would be happy to share their data, not only to accelerate the development of new treatments and diagnostics, but also to help inform other patients in a similar position. Armed with this information, we developed BRIAN (Brain tumouR Information and Analysis Network), a platform which will enable us to access patient medical records through the power of patient consent.

Image produced by The Brain Tumour Charity. Not to be reused without permission.

This ambitious initiative will create a centralised hub of information from which patients and carers can learn from the experiences of others, whilst also facilitating researcher and clinician access to medical and quality of life data. BRIAN will be one of the first of its kind in the world.

There are also other disease-specific registries run specifically by medical charities across the United Kingdom, some of which are directly embedded into the system, and have been facilitating data collection and sharing for over 20 years. The benefits of such registries have been remarkable, in some cases providing enough data to support the development and approval of new treatments.

Nonetheless, data sharing is not the only obstacle preventing the use of healthcare data to reach its full potential. Primary and secondary care data is recorded within disparate NHS systems and comes in a range of formats (paper and electronic) making it difficult to build a full trail of a patient clinical record.

Beyond primary care, digital systems are more diverse and fragmented making interoperability much more difficult and, consequently, data can lack quality and clarity. Since the implementation of electronic health records in certain NHS trusts, and deployment of the Five Year Forward View, there has certainly been a data explosion. However, this data is only truly meaningful if it is structured and coded to support real-time clinical decision-making.

With the NHS being such a fundamental contributor of patient medical data, it is vital for it to create a sustainable environment through which the collection, aggregation, and analysis of the information it holds can underpin both effective patient care and the wider life sciences research strategies.

So what does the future of patient medical data look like in the United Kingdom?

I believe that medical charities are excellently positioned to create the infrastructure needed for the sharing of patient clinical data and to facilitate its collection for the purposes of improving delivery of care and accelerating research.

However, this work will only be driven through collaboration with the NHS and other governmental organisations to leverage barriers to data access, whilst ensuring that the patient’s wishes are at the heart of it all.

Featured image credit: Cold, Weather, Winter by StockSnap. CC0 via Pixabay.

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Is there a gender bias in teaching evaluations?

Why are there so few female professors? Despite the fact that the fraction of women enrolling in graduate programs has increased over the last decades, the proportion of women who continue their careers in academia remains low. One explanation that could explain these gender disparities are gender-biased teaching evaluations. In the competitive world of academia student evaluations are an important and frequently used assessment criterion for faculty performance. Outcomes of teaching evaluations affect hiring, tenure, and promotion decisions and, thus, have a strong impact on career progression.

Teaching evaluations are not the only domain in which there is evidence for gender bias in academia. Gender, for example, has been shown to be important for the success of grant proposals (see Van der Lee and Ellemers, 2015). It is, however, not straightforward to analyse gender biases for two reasons. First, it is often difficult to provide evidence on the potential underlying objective performance differences between women and men. Second, if evaluators are not randomly assigned to individuals who are evaluated, the estimated bias might reflect sorting of individuals with different degrees of stereotypes to male and female teachers. A few studies have overcome the latter problem by using random variation in the composition of hiring and promotion committees, and found mixed results (see Bagues et al. (2017) and De Paola and Scoppa (2015)).

Why is it important to think about whether teaching evaluations are biased? Bad teaching evaluations for women may not only have a direct negative effect on career progression, but may also have an indirect effect and lead to a reallocation of scarce resources from research to teaching. This reallocation of resources may in turn lead to lower (quality) research outputs. Gender biased teaching evaluations can also affect instructors’ self-confidence and beliefs about their teaching abilities, which may impact a woman’s decision on whether to continue in academia.

A recent study investigated whether female teachers receive lower teaching evaluations by using an exceptionally rich dataset of 19,952 evaluations of instructors at a Dutch university. An important advantage of the study in comparison to previous work is that students are randomly assigned to either female or male instructors within courses. This implies that gender differences in evaluations cannot simply reflect that women and men, for example, do teach different courses, or that more critical students choose courses with more female teachers. Another advantage compared to previous studies on gender bias is that the data also contains information on students’ grades and study effort, which allows to test whether gender differences in evaluations could be justified by objective performance differences between male and female teachers.

Checklist choice priorities survey by evondue. Public domain via Pixabay.

We find that female instructors receive systematically lower teaching evaluations than their male colleagues despite the fact that the instructor’s gender does not affect students’ grades, nor the effort students put into the course. These lower teaching evaluations of female faculty stem mostly from male students, but the effect is also present, though smaller in size, among female students. The gender bias is biggest for junior women and more concentrated in math-related courses, in which stereotypes against female teachers might be stronger compared to  non-math related courses. In teaching evaluations, students are not only asked to evaluate their teacher’s performance, but also asked to evaluate learning materials, such as text books, research articles, or the online learning platform. In our setting, these are identical for all sections of a course, irrespective of whether the section teacher is male or female. Strikingly, we find that these evaluation items, which are not in control of the section teacher, are more negative if the teacher is female, compared to when the teacher is male. One possible mechanism to explain this spillover effect is that students anchor their response to material-related questions based on their previous responses to instructor-related questions. We find no evidence that these gender differences in teaching evaluations are driven by gender differences in teaching performance. Results show that the gender of the instructor does not affect current or future grades, nor does it impact the effort of students, measured as self-reported study hours.

These results imply that teaching evaluations should be used with caution when evaluating individual teachers. Although frequently used for hiring and promotion decisions, teaching evaluations are usually not corrected for possible gender bias, the student gender composition, or the fact that not all students participate in these evaluations. If the gender bias in teaching evaluations is not taken into account, female teachers may receive less teaching awards, less pay rises, and ultimately be promoted less often than male teachers. Besides these possible direct effects, indirect consequences, such as the effect on the allocation of scare time from research to teaching, can further increase this problem. For these reasons, it is important to reconsider the importance of teaching evaluations for performance reviews of individual teachers, and to put less weight on teaching evaluations.

Featured image credit: Chairs education school college by Nathan Dumalo. Public domain via Unsplash .

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The unexpected role of nature at Amiens Cathedral [slideshow]

Medieval church designers drew on nature in surprising and innovative ways. Organic forms appear in unexpected places, framing the portals that provide access to sanctified spaces, punctuating interior walls and supports, and hanging from the vaults that soar above the beholder. These foliate sculptures are often characterized as mere ornamentation, devoid of meaning or purpose. However, the Gothic cathedral of Amiens (1220-1269) in northern France suggests that designers used plant motifs strategically to interconnect and inflect the stratified spaces of the building in particular ways. The stone vegetation not only underscores the primary themes of the figural sculptures on the main doorway, but also functions as a signpost for the foliage inside the building and the ritual acts staged therein.

Three sculpted portals pierce the west facade of Amiens Cathedral. The central door, the largest of the three, depicts the Last Judgment, one of the most common subjects on medieval church facades. The Archangel Michael weighs the souls of the risen dead in the lintel spanning the top of the door. In the tympanum directly above are the saved and the damned being led to heaven and hell. Crowning the composition is a depiction of Christ enthroned in the palace of heaven in the company of two kneeling intercessors (the Virgin Mary and John the Evangelist) and four angels holding the instruments of the Passion. A larger than life-size statue of Christ stands beneath an elaborate canopy in the trumeau at the center of the doorway. In the doorjambs to either side are statues of the Apostles.

Foliate sculptures are interspersed throughout the design of the Amiens portal. Two tangled vine friezes frame the lintel portraying the rising and weighing of souls. Their palmately-lobed leaves and round clusters of fruit leave little doubt that these friezes represent grapevines. The frieze below the lintel is aligned with the foliate capitals of the major and minor columns in the jambs, forming a continuous string of vegetation across the shallow space of the porch. Mirroring the serpentine forms of the lintel and jamb friezes are the entwined stems linking the figurated quatrefoils in the dado (bottom) zone of the buttresses flanking the central door, and the grapevine on the pedestal beneath the trumeau statue of Christ. The makers of the central portal carried the organic into the upper parts of the design with a depiction of a Jesse Tree in the two outermost archivolts enclosing the main scene. A muscular branch shoots from the side of the sleeping patriarch to support the royal ancestors of Christ above, including the crowned David playing his harp. The formal consonance between this fruit-bearing grapevine and the others lends cohesiveness to the doorway, unifying visually the dado, jambs, trumeau, lintel, and archivolts.

The semantically-charged grapevines on the Amiens portal function as glosses for the figural imagery, which focuses on Christ and his redemptive powers (“I am the true vine; and my Father is the husbandman,” John 15:1). The Christocentric associations of the vine are carried to the interior of the cathedral via the monumental frieze that runs around the entire building at the precise midpoint of the elevation. Unlike the botanical forms of the main portal, which unmistakably represent grapevines, the nave frieze does not accurately portray a specific plant species. And yet the interlaced stems marking the limits of each bay and clusters of round fruit are strongly suggestive of grapevines. It’s possible that the frieze’s distance from the viewer made the carving of mimetic details unnecessary for its identification as a grapevine. It’s equally possible, however, that the sequential experience of the cathedral as the beholder moved through space resulted in the production and transmission of meaning. Organic forms are not specifically coded, but can resonate in varied ways depending on the architectural context, the habitus of the viewer, and the adjacent figural imagery, among other factors. The juxtaposition of grapevines with images of Christ on the main portal lend the motif a decidedly Christocentric emphasis, and it’s with this emphasis in mind that medieval visitors encountered and interpreted the foliate frieze inside the building, making it a prime emblem of Christ. The Christ-vine connection expressed on the west facade and carried into the nave via the foliate frieze was then restated in a multisensory but fleeting manner during the ritual performance of the Mass with wine and bread at the high altar, which is on the same axis as the doorway and nave. What the foliage at Amiens Cathedral alerts us to, then, is the careful coordination of organic and figural imagery inside and outside the building, and a recursive structure, contingent upon the visitor’s movement, that becomes increasingly apparent after crossing the threshold.

 

Image: Author’s own. Used with permission.

Image: Author’s own. Used with permission.

Image: Author’s own. Used with permission.

Image: Author’s own. Used with permission.

Image: Author’s own. Used with permission.

Image: Author’s own. Used with permission.

Featured image: Author’s own. Used with permission.

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Brain tumour awareness: The end counts too

Here in the United Kingdom, we have the worst survival rates for brain cancer in Europe, with just 14% of patients surviving for ten or more years. Whilst prognosis for most other types of cancer has improved, brain tumour survival rates have remained stagnant, with no game-changing new drugs being developed in the last fifty years.

As brain tumours progress, the aggressive nature of the disease becomes apparent. Patients may experience symptoms such as, drowsiness, seizures, and loss of vision in the end weeks of life. Due to the rapid deteriorative nature of cognitive function, brain tumours can be fatal and treatment options often run into a dead end. At this stage many people find it is important to focus on the patient and put their quality of life foremost. Palliative care should be regarded as another, yet just as important field of medicine, when a cure is no longer possible, to give everyone the opportunity to live life to the full. End of life care aims to support people in the last year of life, and to die with dignity.

Maintaining quality of life at the end stage is essential, however critical discussions around end-of-life care and advanced planning are often seen as a taboo subject. Or perhaps they are just too difficult? The brainstrust offers several guiding principles for caregivers, family, and patients to follow, when those challenging conversations arise:

Even though it is difficult, plan as much as you can in advance. It will help ensure the patient’s wishes are known and respected.
If the point comes when treatments are causing more harm than good, or not extending life or quality, then they should be stopped. The objective shifts from curing the disease to caring for the patient, to make them the most comfortable.
Be firm. Know what you need in terms of support and care and don’t be afraid to voice your opinions. If you are confused or need advice, speak to your GP or charities for help.

But why, when no curable treatment is available, are so few patients receiving palliative care?

Palliative care can be administered in a dedicated unit at a hospital, in a hospice or at the patient’s home. In the eyes of the patients, receiving care at home is more favourable and quality of life is much easier to maintain. Implementing various practices as early as possible increases efficiency of this type of treatment and maximises advantages for the patient.

Brain tumours are categorised from Grades 1 to 4 depending on their severity, how fast they are growing, and likelihood of metastasis. Low grade tumours (grades 1 and 2) are mostly contained and do not pose a high threat of spreading. However, these tumours can be harmful and are not necessarily curable – rate of growth is simply slower. High grade tumours are much more aggressive and faster growing in nature. These malignant tumours can result in rapid deterioration, for example high grade glioma median survival is approximately 14.6 months. Since brain tumours often result in significant physical and mental impairment, patients tend to require higher levels of care. But why, when no curable treatment is available, are so few patients receiving palliative care?

Man, Woman, Elderly by MabelAmber. CC0 Creative Commons via Pixabay.

Medicare, the federal health insurance programme, estimates that 77% of high-grade glioma patients in hospice are enrolled for less than a week in the United States. This could be because many people are under the misconception that hospice care should only be used in the last few weeks of life or simply because of the image that surrounds it. Earlier referrals could be one method to ensure the wishes of patients’ and their families are fulfilled. It has been suggested that formal palliative care training is needed for healthcare professionals – as the number of referrals to hospice is dependent on the neuro-oncologist and whether or not they have undergone training.

While less than 2% of cancer research funding is spent on brain tumours, palliative care is much worse off with less than 0.5% of medical research funding being spent on end of life care research in England. Brain tumour research has a lot further to go, but priorities are in place. And ensuring patients’ quality of life is not compromised, is certainly on the agenda.

Featured image credit: Photo by Roman Kraft. CC0 public domain via Unplash.

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That’s what she said: celebrating women in history [slideshow]

Achievements, contributions, and developments made by women have often gone overlooked or unacknowledged throughout world history. In 1909, “National Women’s Day” was held on 28 February in New York, which was amended to “International Women’s Day” two years later. President Jimmy Carter issued a proclamation declaring the week of 8 March, 1980, as National Women’s History Week. Congress then designated the entire month of March as Women’s History Month in 1987, to raise awareness and empower women by celebrating those who have shaped society and history worldwide.

Below is a list of eight women who have each made enormous contributions to world history. It is a list that could go on indefinitely, and one that we hope opens up discussions on the incredible women that have helped pave the way for us all.

 

Edith Wharton (1862–1937)

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.

Edith Wharton, born in New York City, often expressed that she felt she fell short of both her mother’s and society’s expectations for a young woman, whose only purpose in life was to make a socially advantageous marriage. She spent most of her childhood retreating into a world of “making up”, which fueled her desire and skill for storytelling. Her first novel, The Valley of Decision, brought recognition amongst her contemporaries, and her second, The House of Mirth, solidified her name in fiction writing. She visited a number of frontlines in France during World War I and worked to aid refugees by establishing schools and orphanages for them in Paris. King Albert of Belgium awarded her the Medal of Queen Elizabeth and the French government recognized her work by making her a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor. She was the first woman that Yale University awarded with an honorary doctorate of letters, and she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Image credit: “Edith Wharton” by unknown. Public domain via Wikimedia.

Jane Addams (1860–1935)

Private beneficence is totally inadequate to deal with the vast numbers of the city’s disinherited.

Born on the eve of the Civil War in a small farming community in Illinois, Jane Addams was among the first generation of college-educated women in the United States. In the 1880s, school teaching and missionary work were the primary occupations open to women seeking a public role, but Addams was not interested in either. In a society with little use for educated women, Addams opened Hull-House, a settlement house in Chicago. She encouraged residents to expand beyond direct service to the neighborhood and to lobby for improved sanitation, factory legislation, a juvenile court system, and enforcement of anti-prostitution and anti-drug laws. In this way, Hull-House participated in the Progressive Era’s redefinition of the role of government in a democratic, capitalist society. Addams became the first US woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.

Image credit: “Portrait of Jane Addams” by Elizabeth B. Brownell. Public domain via Wikimedia.

Phillis Wheatley (1753–1784)

The world is a severe schoolmaster, for its frowns are less dangerous than its smiles and flatteries, and it is a difficult task to keep in the path of wisdom.

Born in 1753, Phillis Wheatley was a renowned poet and cultivator of the epistolary writing style. She was born in Gambia, Africa, and was enslaved as a child of seven or eight. She was later sold in Boston to John and Susanna Wheatley, who allowed her to learn to read and encouraged her writing upon discovering her natural talent and ability. She published her first poem in the Newport Mercury when she was about twelve. Her collection Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773) appeared in print in London, and she traveled to England to assist in its publication. She received recognition from various dignitaries and it was “at the desire of my friends in England” that she was granted her freedom in October 1973. Wheatley left behind an enormous legacy of firsts: she was the first African American to publish a book, the mother of African-American letters, the first woman writer whose publication was encouraged and fostered by a community of women, and the first American woman author who tried to earn a living by means of her writing.

Image credit: “Phillis Wheatley” by Scipio Moorhead. Public domain via Wikimedia.

Efua Dorkenoo (1949–2014)

If it was little boys getting their penises cut off, there would be a revolution.

Born in Cape Coast, Ghana, Efua Dorkenoo moved to England at the age of nineteen. It was while training as a midwife in Sheffield that she first encountered the consequences of female genital mutilation (FGM). A young African woman in labour had undergone infibulation so severe she was unable to give birth naturally. Dorkenoo resolved to devote herself to researching and campaigning against the practice. She established the Foundation for Women’s Heath, Research and Development, to campaign for the abolition of FGM. It was largely through her campaigning that the practice was made illegal in Britain, through the Female Circumcision Act (1985). Dorkenoo, known by colleagues and fellow campaigners as Mama Efua, was widely regarded as the inspiration, pioneer, and leader of the campaign to eradicate FGM, and the key figure in moving the issue to the top of governments’ and international organizations’ agendas. She was particularly insistent that FGM should be seen as an abuse of human rights, not simply a health issue.

Image credit: “Efua Dorkenoo” by Lindsay Mgbor. CC-BY-2.0 via Wikimedia.

Rosalind Franklin (1920–1958)

You look at science (or at least talk of it) as some sort of demoralizing invention of man […] But science and everyday life cannot and should not be separated.

Early in her career, Rosalind Franklin worked with coal to improve X-ray techniques for dealing with substances of limited internal order. In a series of investigations, Franklin made discoveries that later proved to be highly relevant for the development of carbon fibers. In 1950 Franklin was invited to build an X-ray diffraction laboratory at King’s College, London, to study the structure of DNA. Within the first year she transformed the state of the field by producing much better X-ray patterns than ever before. Moreover, Franklin showed that two forms of the DNA molecule existed and she defined conditions for the transition between them. The results of her work helped lay the foundations of structural molecular biology and she will be remembered for her pivotal contributions to one of the most important discoveries of the twentieth century.

Image credit: “Rosalind Franklin” by A Other. Public Domain via Flickr.

Emmeline Pankhurst (1858–1928)

The argument of the broken window pane is the most valuable argument in modern politics.

When she attended school, Emmeline Pankhurst learned that the education of girls was considered less important than that of boys–the principle aim being how to make a home comfortable for men. Throughout Pankhurst’s life, she was elected onto the executive committee of the Manchester National Society for Women’s Suffrage and was a member of the Fabian Society, the Women’s Liberal Association, and the Women’s Franchise League. Her home at Russell Square became a center for political gatherings, particularly of socialists, suffragists, and radicals. Pankhurst knew that if society was to progress women must lift themselves out of their current position and campaign for the parliamentary vote, so she formed the Women’s Social and Political Union, an organization dedicated to campaigning for votes for women on the same terms they were granted to men. She died in June 1928, only weeks before the Conservative government’s Representation of the People Act (1928) extended the vote to all women over 21 years of age.

Image credit: “Emmeline Pankhurst” by Matzene, Chicago. Public Domain via Wikimedia.

Rosa Parks (1913–2005)

Our mistreatment was just not right, and I was tired of it.

Born in Tuskegee, Alabama, Rosa Parks is often considered “the first lady of civil rights” and “the mother of the freedom movement”. On 1 December 1955, Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus for a white passenger, for which she was arrested. The African American community of Montgomery responded in two ways: challenging the constitutionality of segregation, and boycotting the buses. Parks served both as a symbol and strategist, working as a dispatcher for the alternative transportation system and distributing food and clothing to boycott participants who lost their jobs. In 1996, Parks received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and was honored with the Congressional Gold Medal three years later. She became the first woman and the second African American to lie in honor in the Capitol Rotunda in Washington, D.C.

Image credit: “Rosa Parks” by Unknow. Public Domain via Wikimedia.

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797)

I do not wish them [women] to have power over men; but over themselves.

The only formal schooling, Mary Wollstonecraft received was a few years at a day school in Yorkshire, where she learned to read and write. The rest of her knowledge, including several foreign languages, was self-acquired and the indignation she felt towards the disparity between men and women’s educational opportunities was gained first hand. She gave herself three months, produced over 300 pages, and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman became an immediate best-seller. Often considered harsh, the text asserts that women are “rendered weak and wretched” particularly through the attitudes and actions of “men who, considering females rather as women than human creatures, have been more anxious to make them alluring mistresses than affectionate wives and rational mothers”. As later feminists attest, women are made, not born, and it is this process of enforced feminization which is the principal target of Wollstonecraft’s polemic. Such has been Wollstonecraft’s influence, she is revered as one of the most discussed, admired, criticized, and mythologized feminist intellectuals in history.

Image credit: “Mary Wollstonecraft” by Unknow. Public Domain via Wikimedia.

 

Featured image credit: ‘Studies of Women’s Heads’ by Web Gallery of Art. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons .

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Etymology gleanings March 2018

Dental problems

One of the questions I received was about dent, indent, and indenture. What do they have in common with dent– “tooth,” as in dental and dentures? Dent, which surfaced in texts in the 13th century, meant “stroke, blow” (a noun; obviously, not a derivative of any Latin word for “tooth”) and has plausibly been explained as a variant of its full synonym or doublet dint. The variation e ~ i was and is still common in English dialects. Today, we use dint only in the phrase by dint of. The word has safe cognates in the Scandinavian languages but nowhere else. Its root may be sound-imitative (mere guessing).

The senses of indent explain the word’s origin. They are: “to make notches resembling teeth; cut into points or jags like a row of teeth; jag; serrate.” Latin indentare already meant, among other things, to indent a document. Indenture referred to a deed made in several copies, all having their edges “indented” (that is why the word so often occurs in the plural). From this legal sense we have the verb indent “engage a servant; contract.” Outside the legal profession, indent is used mainly with reference to starting a line further from the margin, a synonym of justify (a confusing verb; an editor told me about an author who was asked to “justify” in numerous places of his manuscript and gave detailed explanations of his reasoning).

Big bad wolves have big bad teeth and come to no good end. Image credit: Little Red Riding Hood by Jessie Willcox Smith. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

In connection with these words, I would like to offer a short illustration of the ways historical phonetics works. Most of us who want to know the origin of words treat the problems more or less as we treat food at a restaurant. If the dish is tasty, we may not be too interested in the cook’s methods. For that reason, I usually try to stay away from “boring” details, but sometimes they are needed. Though here I could have avoided the explanation that follows, perhaps someone will be curious to see how linguists arrive at their results.

Latin dens has the genitive dentis, and only from the genitive do we learn the word’s (and the tooth’s) true root. Thus, we should compare tooth and dent-. By the constantly invoked First Consonant Shift, non-Germanic d becomes t, while non-Germanic t becomes þ (= th). This is exactly what happens in our case: compare dent– and tooth. To be sure, the vowels do not match. Here, light comes from Dutch (tand) and German (Zahn), but the Dutch word is more convenient, because it is closer to the Germanic protoform tanþ-. The vowel a alternates with e in dent– by ablaut, another indispensable weapon, regularly wielded in this blog. Those who have the ill luck to know the word periodontitis will see the same root in its Greek shape and on one more grade of ablaut (here, o). Mastodon, though the species is extinct, also comes in handy, especially considering how much the word has been used for social purposes. To complete the feast, have a look at the Gothic word for “tooth” (tunþus): one more vowel in the root. This is the stuff on which students of the history of English used to cut their teeth. I said used to, because, at least in the United States, the number of English majors who can perform the operations described above is now close to zero. Nor do many graduate students learn such things. Well, one grade of ablaut is called the zero grade (see tunþus, above), and, as so many people responsible for our curricula say: “The young people need jobs.” Who will cast a stone at them? (This metaphor will occur to some in a different context below.) How many jobs are there requiring the knowledge of the Latin genitive and consonant shifts?

Scythian dentistry at its best. Image credit: Extracting a tooth. Design on a Phoenician vase. CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
A postscript on liver

Two of the recent questions were about liver (see the previous post). One concerned the Slavic words: “Why, in giving the putative Indo-European form, did you ignore the name for ‘liver’ in Slavic?” The Russian for “liver” is pechen’ (stress on the first syllable), and its root is pek- ~ pech’– “(to) bake.” The Ukrainian word is almost the same, but its very similar cognates in Church Slavonic, Polish, and Czech mean “roasted kidneys or liver.” This use reminds us of Leberwurst, mentioned last week. Obviously, pechen’ and its likes are much later names of the organ and were coined to designate the dish. A similar substitution happened in Lithuanian, but not in Latvian, which has a word related to Latin iecur. No word that has come down to us should be understood as particularly old.

As regards the dish, Popular Latin ficatum iecur was a translation loan of the Greek phrase sukōtón épar “goose liver stuffed with figs,” but, curiously, it is the first word that came to designate liver on the plate. Hence Italian fegato and Modern Greek sukōti.

Bedlam and maudlin

The pronunciation and the meaning of both words have been accounted for very well. In Betlem, the Middle English form of Bethlehem, t was voiced before l; hence Bedlem. The name of the Hospital of St. Mary of Bethlehem, a lunatic asylum (that is, Bedlem), produced Bedlam, and as early as the 18th century, the sense “a state of uproar and utter confusion” developed.

Magdalene is Latin, but the Middle English form Maudelaine goes back to the pronunciation of the name in Old French.  The name of the college at Oxford retains the bookish (Latin) form in writing and the popular one in pronunciation. Maudlin “tearful” goes back to the images of the weeping Magdalene. Later, the word became a synonym of mawkish. But from early on, the adjective was associated with drunken tears.

This is Titian’s picture The Penitent Magdalene. Image credit: De boetvaardige Maria Magdalena by Titan. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Devil and deviant

The question was whether these words are related. No. Devil is a borrowing from Greek, and deviant is a Romance word. Latin deviare meant “to deviate.” It has the prefix de and the root via “way” (thus, “to turn aside from one’s way”). The proximity, suggested by our correspondent, is due to folk etymology. A similar case of folk etymology is an assumed connection between God and good.

Joy and sorrow                            

The history of joy in English is transparent. The word is from French (Modern French joie). It goes back to the root of Latin gaudea, the plural of gaudium “joy.” Some people may still remember the beginning of the students’ graduation song Gaudeamus igitur “Let us (therefore) rejoice.” The Latin noun has congeners in Classical Greek dialects. The rest is, as in so many other cases, moderately intelligent guesswork. By contrast, sorrow is problematic from the start. It has very close cognates in all the Germanic languages, but outside Germanic, the picture is unclear.  Perhaps Lithuanian sergù “I am ill,” Tocharian B sark “illness,” and Middle Irish serg “illness” are related. No source mentions the Hittite connection, suggested in the reader’s comment on liver.

Chockfull

I think it is proper to finish this post by commenting on the origin of the word chockfull. The word, obviously not from French, surfaced first in Middle English and was rare. Its origin is therefore obscure. Perhaps chock– is related to cheek. In the 17th century, choke-full appeared, with the variant chuck-full (there is the word chuck “chunk”). So we don’t know whether the word suggests choking.

To be continued next week.

Featured image credit: “Oxford England Bicycles Black And White British” by Libraianmari. CC0 via Pixabay. 

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Misconceptions of vaccines

Vaccines help to provide immunity against diseases. Sadly, there are a number of misconceptions surrounding vaccines, leading to some areas of the community opting not to vaccinate. This has a negative impact as decreasing immunisation rates can lead to an increase in diseases that can be prevented by vaccines, as was seen with the whooping cough in California.

Misconceptions such as ‘vaccines can overwhelm a child’s the immune system’ are dangerous, and have no scientific or medical standing. In reality, the cells in the immune system are continuously being renewed; meaning the likelihood of the system being overwhelmed is next to nil, thanks to cell replenishment. Similar misconceptions have in part been fuelled by social media, with the rise of ‘fake news’ and ‘fake science’, contributing to a mistrust of immunisation threats.

Learn more about misconceptions of vaccines with the interactive fact sheet below.

Download the fact sheet as a PDF or JPEG.

Featured image credit: Friends by  Nathaniel Tetteh. CC0 public domain via Unsplash.

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Aftering critical theory: reimagining civil “religion”

Why haven’t the insights of critical theory been more widely incorporated into the work of religious studies scholars in particular, and humanists more generally? Conversely, why have critical theorists missed the cross-cultural patterns of signification that have shaped post-tribal hierarchies for millennia, when they are so adept at finding hidden epistemological linkages within western political hegemonies? The answers to both of these questions are important because humanists are in desperate need of a more expansive theoretical hermeneutic with which to better “read” the contemporary world.

It turns out, we don’t have to wander too far into the intellectual wilderness to find a viable track. It lies hidden in plain sight, in the well-known but insufficiently understood discourse on civil religion. Indeed, there are clues at the very epicenter of the Enlightenment. Book IV, Chapter 8 of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract—which first articulates the idea of a civil religion (religion civile)—was not proposing some radically new reconfiguration of civil society, as is often assumed. He was merely rhetorizing a long perduring historical process: namely, the ideological sublation of alternative otherworldly orders. Rousseau was plotting the strategy by which discrete communities of strangers come to dwell within the same “imagined community,” which is to say uneasily, temporarily, and always with the promise of violence.

It is, in fact, a very old antagony, and history is replete with examples of it. There is the fifth-century Athenian rhetorician Isocrates’ oration Panegyricus, which calls for a barely coherent “Greece” to be unified by Athenian philosophy. And there’s Philo Judaeus, a first-century Hellenistic Jew, whose work, The Embassy on Gaius, protests the installation of the Roman emperor Caligula’s effigy in the Temple by offering up the Jewish “nation” (ethnos) for collective self-sacrifice. Though their circumstances were very different (Isocrates was a member of a culturally ascendant ethnic elite, and Philo was a member of a culturally hybridized ethnic minority), they each suggest the same underlying contingency. Specifically, nations and nationalism aren’t newly emergent social phenomena; religions and religiosity aren’t vestigial social formations. The conditions for the emergence of something like a “nation,” or a “religion,” have been with us since societies began transitioning from tribal networks (i.e. kinship relations) to institutional hierarches (i.e. supra-kinship relations).

The fact that we’ve misunderstood the nature and historical status of these two trans-local social typologies (i.e. nations and religions) shouldn’t surprise us. Indeed, as Foucault showed us—but was himself unable to escape—the discipline/ing of thinking shapes not only how we see things but what we see. Our disciplines curate our answers, and our questions.

That many of us in the intelligentsia have come to believe that modernism or the Enlightenment was a definitive break with a past that was materially precarious but internally consistent, enchanted but superstitious—is precisely what we’ve been institutionalized to believe. That the world we now inhabit is fundamentally different from the world that preceded us (for good or ill—pick your millenarianism) is the favorite story trans-local supra-kin communities tell about themselves. Why would our scholarly community be any different?

It is the humanist’s responsibility to imagine—or contribute to the imagining of—more comprehensive epistemological frameworks. Frameworks that become more capacious over time, not less.

To overcome the “structural amnesia” of our disciplines, we must humanize them—ask questions that are both more ambitious, and humbler. One wonders, for example, at what the other Alexandrian Jews thought when they heard Philo’s gruesome offering, his enthusiastically detailed description of the ways in which the nation would anoint the defiled temple with its own blood. I don’t mean what the marginalized “Jews” in the provinces thought of Philo’s urban chest thumping—though it’s an important question explored by a number of scholars. I mean what did the other peripheral elites think, the ones with Alexandrian lovers, illegitimate Egyptian children, small businesses, who loved beer and the sun, the ones for whom we have no records, the ones we tend to fossilize socially, economically, ethnically, into one corporate body?

These details are, of course, lost to history, but to consider them is not irrelevant, or sophomoric—or hopelessly “Western.” It is the humanist’s responsibility to imagine—or contribute to the imagining of—more comprehensive epistemological frameworks. Frameworks that become more capacious over time, not less. Philo’s sacrificial exhortation, for example, strikes the less historically-hidebound reader as a sanguinary preface to US President John F. Kennedy’s rhetorically rousing enjoinment, “ask not what your country can do for you.” While Isocrates’ sermon on the transcendental value of philosophy, education (paideia), and chauvinistic cosmopolitanism, echoes in Charles Hodge, the eighteenth-century Presbyterian theologian and leading voice of Princeton Theology, who so closely tied his theology to his politics. But these comparisons are difficult to coordinate using our current scholarly instruments. They sound rushed, de-contextualized, naïve. Even our best critical theories have become ensnared by the powers they would critique.

There are many lessons that we might learn from reading critical theory, but one of them is that transcendental grounds aren’t found—they’re won. It is, of course, true that the “world religions” discourse, and the analytic frameworks that essentialize religion, were socially constructed by soldiers’ bayonets and colonial administrators’ pens, but there is nothing uniquely “Western” about violently forcing one’s cosmology onto foreigners, then gradually mythologizing the sympathetic significations that emerge. Sufism is a good example of this. Still, the work of the critical theorists is vital because it is essential to the creative process. We have to be reminded over and over again that the principles we take for granted overcame other definitive but antagonistic material histories.

Yet, in many cases, critical theorists have contested with these discourses for so long their critiques have become myopic. They’ve missed the genre’s counter-intuitive Eurocentrism, and too easily glossed the intellectual limitations of its insular argot. Difference should be recognized, not fetishized. Not because there’s something wrong with a fetish, but because its power comes from privacy, titillation, the small-circle sociality of cants. Ours is a public charge. What we discover in secret, alone in the library, is a debt owed to the world. Those of us who have had the privilege to acquire the very best tools a professional twenty-first century reader can buy, are responsible to those of us without those tools. It is incumbent upon us to build a new epistemology out of the history we have inherited. New formulations of the world are established when history’s constants are creatively rearranged around present-day variables. What was once our ancestors’ ruddy mess is now our own.

Featured image credit: god religion ray of light by TeroVesalainen. Public domain via Pixabay.

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