Oxford University Press's Blog, page 310

Bullying beyond the schoolyard

When you stretch a rubber band, even after many times, it will likely return to its original form. We call this resilience. When children are stretched and bent out of shape due to bad experiences they encounter, we expect they will be resilient too and snap back to their previous self. However, after various types of difficult or traumatic interactions, children are not the same. The analogy of the rubber band does not hold up.

Most children experience bullying in some capacity—as victim, as witness, as bully—or maybe all three. As adults we tend to think there is no damage, with the exception of perhaps an uncomfortable memory or two. However, the science on this subject depicts something different.

Every day children are bullied in their own homes, in their schools, on their school buses, and in their neighborhoods. Children are bullied by parents, siblings, classmates, teachers, and by their friends. Bullying takes numerous forms: verbal, psychological, physical, and sexual, and takes place in person or online. Bullying is an international phenomenon. It is also an area where adults have conspicuously failed a basic social contract: to protect children.

For children, bullying can result in anxiety, depression, eating disorders, sleep disturbance, skipping school, dropping out of school, substance abuse, suicidal thoughts and actions, and homicidal thoughts and actions.

Despite contending with these numerous adverse reactions, only a small percentage of bullied children ever tell parents or guardians about what they are experiencing. This is a significant problem and begs for a solution. Parents who don’t know can’t do anything to intervene or to be supportive. Children say they don’t tell parents because they are afraid of the kinds of interventions parents might consider or because they don’t want to worry them. This leaves children trying to deal with the impacts of bullying on their own.

A good number of people are aware that bullying in childhood can be injurious and can even be life-threatening for some. But how many are aware that there is a significant aftermath that can last a lifetime?

Emotion photo by Tom Pumford. Public domain via Unsplash.

The effects of bullying on children are powerful. The effects on the same children, as adults, can be profound. Research indicates there are aftereffects including health, mental health and relationship problems for approximately 33% of adults who were bullied as children.

Adult victims of bullying suffer from immune system complications, diabetes, and heart disease at rates far greater than the national average. The hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenaline axis activated by constant anxiety in childhood remains on high alert for these adults. Further, studies have shown a greater likelihood of early mortality or premature death for those who were bullied compared to others.

Mental health problems for adults who were bullied as children are between two-times and twelve-times the national average. They include social anxiety, generalized anxiety, agoraphobia, depression, weight and body image problems, eating disorders, substance abuse, self-harming behavior, violent behavior, and suicide.

Relationships are affected for adults bullied as children. Their trust in others is eroded through years of torment, and so attempting an authentic friendship or intimate partnership is laced with anxiety. Consequently, some adults say they simply stay out of relationships—either with friends or with intimate partners. Some abandon a relationship when a conflict arises. Some stay in abusive relationships thinking: “Who else will want me?” Others take an offensive position and find that they are aggressive and violent in their relationships. All of this gets played out in work settings as well.

Childhood bullying leaves deep scars on many children and adults. Even those fortunate enough to come from extremely supportive families can carry profound and hidden wounds. At the same time, there are people who are able to turn their pain into something positive. I have described this phenomenon as Adult Post-Bullying Syndrome (APBS). APBS is different from PTSD. Adults with APBS describe negative effects from the bullying they endured but also describe specific positive consequences, such as wanting to help others. This is a component of post-traumatic growth.

Intervention for children at home and at school is critical. Where damage has been done, intervention takes the form of counseling or therapy for children and families, and for adults who still suffer. But prevention, of course, is the key. There are many anti-bullying programs in our US schools, however they often fail to consider the specific population of the school and attempt to apply a one-size-fits all approach. This has not been met with good results particularly in districts with large minority school populations. Prevention is based on an unshakeable commitment to the idea of respect for others, respectful interactions, and the intrinsic value of difference. Schools have not figured out, as yet, how to produce these values in a systemic and in an ongoing fashion. Unfortunately for our children and for all of us, we are not living at a time when valuing difference and valuing respectful interaction are public policy ideals.

Featured image credit: Poppy meadow by Body-n-Care. Public domain via Pixabay.

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Are we losing a generation of younger doctors?

We live in challenging times for physicians, who are required to do things that are wearing them out and making them feel bad about their jobs.

Surveys showing large percentages of doctors burned out, dissatisfied with their work or regretting their career choice point to something deeply psychological that is happening to many doctors—something that should make all of us very concerned.

The things happening to them are clear—their work is a daily treadmill of truncated, rapid-fire patient visits and cookbook medicine; they have too many administrative and infrastructure requirements placed under their responsibility; they must collect, document, and report performance-related minutiae; they have been forced to use information technology in heavy-handed ways; they must lead “teams” while at the same time caring for individual patients on a full-time basis; and they work under their employers’ assumption that they have to be watched to know if they are doing their job correctly.

All of these dynamics are magnified for the large number of salaried employees working in more-controlling corporate work settings.

Making things worse is the move to “value-based payment” schemes, particularly through the recent Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act rolled out late last year. If you spend hundreds of pages, as the MACRA final rule does, spelling out how someone is going to get paid, in this case physicians, don’t expect that someone to believe that you have their best interests at heart.

“…their work is a daily treadmill of truncated, rapid-fire patient visits and cookbook medicine.”

You also may want to read up on the science of human motivation. That science, and my own research and observations over time, show that most doctors are indeed driven primarily by intrinsic desires, i.e., things such as the personal meaning in their work, strong interpersonal relationships with patients and the emotional rewards they get from helping people. A system based on extrinsic motivators and external oversight, inherent in MACRA and other pay-for-performance programs, further erodes doctors’ ability to pursue these intrinsic rewards.

The healthcare system​ still cannot acknowledge that physicians are trained to be independent, self-confident decision makers, often asked to act in the midst of high clinical uncertainty. The payment schemes placed on them now clash with this reality, mostly by producing the daily work environments described above, as does becoming salaried employees in organizations that dictate workflow and often give physicians little collective voice.

Meanwhile, the modern health quality movement—with its nonstop assembly line of “innovations” such as one-size-fits-all care guidelines, overuse of “big data” and management interventions such as Lean techniques—works under the false assumption that healthcare delivery is just like building cars on an assembly line or operating a hotel. It’s not.

Medical record by vjohns1580. CC0 Public domain via Pixabay.

We are at a tipping point in bringing doctors back to the fold. We must avoid turning wide swaths of patient care into cheapened sets of low-level, superficial transactions that now define so much of our everyday world. Of course, we can’t go back to a pure “do more, get more” payment system. And our system certainly needs a recommitment to quality and maximum value for the healthcare dollar.

But the danger with payment systems offering incentives that oversimplify complex clinical workflows, while conveying little sense of trust in doctors, is that they turn healthcare settings into places no one, including patients, seems to enjoy being in, which for a helping industry is sad. We will retire thousands of good, experienced doctors because they don’t need to put up with things as they are. We will lose a generation of younger doctors who see their work in less-passionate ways, going more for the paycheck or for a convenient lifestyle rather than for the joy of going the extra mile in their work and seeing patients benefit firsthand.

Much is needed to improve our healthcare system. Giving physicians a better everyday experience and motivating them correctly should be moved quickly toward the top of that list.

A version of this post was originally published on Modern Healthcare.

Featured image credit: Hand by Aditya Romansa. CC0 Public domain via Unsplash .

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10 questions with composer Sarah Quartel

Sarah Quartel is a Canadian composer, conductor, and educator known for her fresh and exciting approach to choral music. Her music is performed by children and adults around the world, and celebrates the musical potential of all learners by providing singers access to high quality and engaging repertoire. We spoke with Sarah about why she composes, how she approaches writing, and the pieces that mean the most to her.

What does a typical day in your life look like?  

I’ve just moved from Canada to Hawaii and while things are a bit more adventurous than usual these days, I expect that life will soon return to normal. A typical composition day starts early in the morning when I’m most productive. After a breakfast that includes something either fresh or preserved from my garden, I go straight to my studio to work on the latest commission or edit a new submission. If I’m writing lyrics or starting a new piece I spend time outside on my property or I head to a local spot I find inspiring. Now that I’m living in a climate that’s warm year round, I have a feeling I will be spending more of my composition days outside!

How do you begin to approach a new commission?

When I write a commission, I want to make sure it is something that will match the commissioning ensemble beautifully and at the same time be something I love, too. I begin by getting to know the commissioners as I well as I can. I listen to their recordings, study scores they’ve recently performed, and ask them about the spirit of their choir. On occasion I will invite choristers to be in touch with me personally. I did a piece for the Radcliffe Ladies’ Choir a couple of years ago and had a marvelous time reading the ladies’ thoughts on what their choir means to them. I used their words to inspire the text of the piece. They even invited me for tea. Best tea of my life!

Sarah Quartel. Used with permission.

What do you like to do when you’re not composing?

My favourite thing to do is spend time with my family. I also love to be outside. You’ll likely find me in the garden attending to my herbs or out with my husband going “holoholo.” My understanding of this Hawaiian word is that it means to go out wandering or journeying without a set destination. He and I regularly did this back home in Canada so it feels great to be living somewhere where there’s a word to describe our type of carefree adventuring.

What is the most exciting composition you’ve ever worked on and why?

I found ‘A Winter Day’ to be the most exciting piece I’ve worked on in recent years. I wrote it one autumn and discovered that composing a winter work during warmer months was absolutely thrilling. I could fully imagine winter around me and feel the chill on my skin. I also found this piece particularly exciting because I could watch it evolve and grow as I wrote it. I wasn’t expecting the melodies and colours that came out of this work.

What is your inspiration/what motivates you to compose? 

Beautiful things. Relationships, landscapes, home, treasured memories, poetry, people.

Do you treat your work as a 9-5 job, or compose when you feel inspired?

Because all of my pieces these days are commissions, I do treat composing like a 9-5 job. I feel so incredibly lucky that I get to create art on a daily basis but I do see this task as work. To promote balance in my life I try to keep my composing to “work hours.” However, when I’m coming up on a deadline or feeling particularly inspired, I will hide away in my studio for hours on end. My husband Eric is great at bringing me snacks if I’ve stayed locked away too long.

Which of your pieces holds the most significance to you? 

Currently my work ‘Sanctum’ holds the most significance to me. Consisting of four movements, each one depicts an aspect of the landscape of Vancouver Island, a stunning place I lived for nearly three years. The piece was commissioned by Ensemble Laude of Victoria, British Columbia and in writing the piece for these women, I came to feel very connected to them. In addition, my sister, cousin, two close friends and I sang the ‘Lux aeterna’ at my beloved grandmother’s funeral.

What made you want to be a composer? 

I don’t think I ever decided to be a composer. Creating music has always come naturally to me. The phrase, “Sarah, that’s not Beethoven, you’re composing” could regularly be heard in my childhood piano lessons. (Whoops?) As my musical skill increased and my ear developed, I started hearing more and more melodies, harmonies, and layers of sound in my head. I really wanted to be able to hear them out loud and that is how I came to write choral music. Now, I continue to be a composer because I am always hearing new things and itching to make them come to life.

What might you have been if you weren’t a composer?

I would definitely be a full-time elementary school music teacher. When I finished university I immediately jumped into a classroom job and absolutely loved it. I still love teaching but with a full composition schedule, I’m in the classroom less these days. While living in Hawaii, I will be composing full time.

What’s your guilty pleasure listening?

I wouldn’t call it a guilty pleasure exactly, but when I’m feeling particularly self-indulgent I blast the ‘Agnus Dei’ from Fauré’s Requiem. I’ll often put the ‘Lux aeterna’ bit on repeat if I’m feeling particularly moody.

Featured image credit: Qualicum Beach, Vancouver Island by jpbloggs. Public domain via Pixabay.

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What is the land question in India today?

Land in the process of development can be viewed as a commodity, and like other commodities, can be bought and sold. Such a transformation presupposes that land historically was not a commodity. Peasant cultivators eked out a subsistent lifestyle and feudal lords taxed the peasants. Property rights as we know it did not exist then. Land was not owned, sold, or bought, but the threat of evictions of cultivators loomed large if tribute or tithe was not received by feudal lords or nawabs.

With the arrival of the East India Company and subsequently Britain, the land-based stability of the Indian village was swiftly undone. Clever and cunning, land revenues were efficiently collected by British officials through the zamindari intermediaries of the Moghul regimes. By collecting land taxes, which were now to be paid in cash, peasants were compelled to sell surplus output and offer their labor. Gradually evictions and the recognition of non-customary owners of land, largely former tax collectors and moneylenders, small time nobility, and increasingly affluent farmers characterized the countryside. Land became privately owned and changed hands, which led to vulnerability of millions of people around the world.

Land revenues was an important source for financing the British Government in India, which led to the introduction of cash and thus to a wage-based rural economy. This transformation of the peasant economy from subsistence to cash and wage-based economy with (surplus) output sold in the market place can be broadly construed as capitalist transition. Prefacing such a transition is primitive accumulation in which the separation of the peasants from their land and the means of production has been a prerequisite.

The expansiveness of capital, also known as accumulation, presupposes surplus value generated in an earlier cycle, which presupposes capitalist production, which presupposes “considerable mass of capital and of labor power (in the hands of producers of commodities).” But that is not the end of the story, rather its beginning.

For capital accumulation to proceed there must be primitive accumulation, which is not the result of capital accumulation but its starting point. Primitive accumulation, therefore, is nothing short of the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production, which pushes people off the land. It is primitive because it forms the prehistoric stage of capital and of the mode of production corresponding with it.

Germane to the land question is the attempt to rid the countryside of the “surplus” people and turn them into the industrial proletariat. Fewer people in rural areas suggest higher agricultural productivity and thus rising incomes. As cost of labor increases mechanization also takes root, while surplus people from the countryside find their way in urban areas working in non-agricultural activities such as industry, construction, and myriad informal activities.

The land question in India today is not about agrarian transition but about commodification.

Dynamic capital accumulation is expected to slowly dissolve low-end informal activities and formalize economic transactions. With lower food prices, urban wages would be marginally higher than rural wages to induce migration and generate labor for industrialization. Furthermore, rising incomes in the countryside would become markets for industrial goods and the two sectors would positively reinforce each other as savings were directed toward capital formation.

The land question has thus revolved around the agrarian transition question, which refers to a turning point when capitalist relations of production enter the countryside, providing the motor force for further capital accumulation outside of agriculture. Uprooted peasants become wage workers or the industrial proletariat, while farmers introduce efficiency-enhancing production methods, accumulate, and contribute to economic diversification.

Such a grand narrative for India today has at least three shortcomings. If the genesis of capitalism from noncapitalist relations of production occurred at a specific historical juncture, today the process of primitive accumulation is complete. Capitalism is characterized by both capitalist and noncapitalist forms of production organization, and land is not involved in the same historical role where farmers are dispossessed to usher in dynamic capital accumulation in the countryside.

Second, the inevitability of structural transformation is wanting. The persistence of a “subsistence economy” in the milieu of a small thriving advanced capitalist sector suggests an “incomplete transition” thus casting doubts on the idea of transition and capitalist progress itself. Dispossession in India is not producing wage laborers en masse to be employed by capital. It leads to confinement of the dispossessed in the informal sector, not to the complete dissolution of the peasantry, and not to the creation of an industrial proletariat. Instead, precarious forms of employment, such as self-employment, casual labor, and vagabondage are the manifestations of contemporary capitalism.

Third, the empirical reality for India shows that agriculture (and thus land) is not playing out its historic role in the transformation process. Differential rates of growth across classes and pronounced social differentiation in the countryside exists but does not necessarily drive dynamic accumulation in the countryside. The peasantry remains with the absence of a large industrial proletariat despite a fair degree of structural transformation through nonagricultural development.

Economic growth has been accompanied by land acquisition, leading to protests and protracted contestations. Hence the narrative of dispossession being historically so crucial to capitalist development is, at this juncture, really a narrative of dispossession and not of capitalist transition.

The land question in India today is not about agrarian transition but about commodification. It is about desperate cultivators holding onto small parcels of land, others selling/acquiring land to install gleaming steel and glass buildings, four-lane highways, industrial corridors, and special export zones. The state also acquires land under the guise of public purpose on behalf of big business when dispossession and loss of livelihoods are at stake. The land question today is not about transition but the unprecedented stalemate between dispossession and lack of capitalist dynamism, and in some instances a cozy relationship between big business and the state underpinning a highly polarized society.

Featured image credit: Pasture land goa by sarangib via Pixabay.

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Alternative music classes: why not guitar?

The National Association for Music Education (NAfME) formerly known as MENC is the world’s largest arts education association. Amongst its many roles, NAfME holds annual conferences to provide professional development and support to active music educators. Leaders in the field of music education brought the message that enrollments in band, choir and orchestra were declining and music educators were going to have to become creative in offering music classes which students will be interested in attending.

This message of declining enrollment was delivered at the 2005 annual conference held in Minneapolis, MN. The atmosphere of this conference was on the dark and gloomy side as music educators began processing new information about having to do something differently to attract students into their classrooms. After all, this was not just a prediction. The hard-working folks at the NAfME headquarters had hard data to back up this claim.

In 2005, there were only a small number of states that were already thinking this way. Virginia, New Mexico and Nevada had been offering classes in guitar for over a decade by this time. The enrollment numbers in these classes were quite high and the challenge was finding qualified, licensed music educators capable of teaching guitar as a serious instrument. Arizona and Nevada had also added Mariachi classes as an alternative with a great deal of success.  Like the guitar classes, finding qualified, licensed music educators who had a strong background in Mariachi was and remains a challenge.

During the 2005 NAfME conference, suggestions were made to offer music classes in Rock Band, the History of Rock, the History of Jazz, Jazz Band, Jazz Choir, Show Choir, Barbershop, Opera, Percussion Ensemble, Steel Drums, Guitar, Mariachi, Folk Guitar, Rock Guitar, Jazz Combos, and on and on. There seemed to be an endless list of creative solutions for attracting students who seemed to spend a lot of time playing video games and Guitar Hero. Guitar Hero was released in November of 2005 just in time for the holiday season of that year. History indicates there was a particular high interest in students joining guitar classes between the years 2006-2010 which may be directly tied to the popularity of Guitar Hero.

Schools began to respond.  In many cases, the band director did not have six classes of band, but maybe three classes of band, one class of jazz band, and two classes of music appreciation or other fillers to make up for not having six classes of band.  Schools quickly learned they could attract the numbers needed to fill guitar classes.  In some cases, the band teacher, choir teacher and even the orchestra teacher were given guitar classes to teach to complete their schedules.  In many cases, these music teachers did not play the guitar and many had no interest in learning to play the guitar.

About a decade earlier, in 1995, NAMM (National Association of Music Merchants), GAMA (Guitar Accessory Manufacturers Association) and NAfME (National Association for Music Education) joined together to create Teaching Guitar Workshops, a five-day workshop offered during the summer which is targeted to non-guitar playing music educators who may decide to offer a guitar class at school.  It is estimated by this organization that over three thousand school music teachers have attended one or more of these summer workshops since its inception and these teachers have collectively taught over one and a quarter million guitar students.

In 1996, Clark County School District located in Las Vegas, NV started the first guitar program in one middle school.  Fifteen years after starting the first guitar class in one school, Clark County offered guitar classes in a total of sixty-two schools with approximately five thousand, seven hundred guitar students enrolled.  At the time, few colleges were offering a music education degree with an emphasis in guitar, so finding qualified, licensed guitar teachers was a major challenge.  Of the sixty-two music educators teaching guitar, only twelve had majored in college on guitar.  The other fifty music educators had majored in areas related to band, choir and orchestra.  Many from this group had never played a guitar.

For years, Clark County experienced a thirty percent annual turnover of music educators who were teaching guitar as a secondary instrument.  Music educators were demonstrating they would rather change or quit their jobs than teach guitar.  At some point, school principals began eliminating guitar classes in order to retain the music teachers.  At the same time, Clark County became more aggressive with offering regular professional development classes in how to teach guitar and weekly lesson plans for the teachers with supplementary teaching materials for those non-guitar playing music educators.

Because the growth of guitar classes in Clark County was so explosive, there were mistakes made as most decisions were being made by trial and error.  The take-away from forcing music educators to teach alternative music classes is there needs to be plenty of supportive professional development, a mentoring program and a supply of weekly materials to assist teachers for their success in teaching in an area in which they are not familiar.   Today, after twenty-one years, Clark County offers guitar classes in forty schools and now has stability in teacher retention. Clark County has been able to hire more teachers who have majored in guitar at college and a number of music teachers have found they prefer teaching guitar full time as opposed to teaching band part-time.

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The reign of law in international investment decision-making

The second Investment Claims Summer Academy took place on 6-7 July 2017 at Lady Margaret Hall and focused on the role of international law in international investment decision-making. The Summer Academy opened with a quote from Sir Hersch Lauterpacht’s 1933 The Function of Law in International the International Community: “The reign of law, represented by the incorporation of obligatory arbitration as a rule of positive international law, is not the only means for securing and preserving peace among nations. Nevertheless it is an essential condition of peace.” Campbell McLachlan, Laurence Shore, and Matthew Weiniger relied upon the quote to open their second edition of International Investment Arbitration: Substantive Principles. In the first session of the Summer Academy, Ian Laird reviewed and discussed International Investment Arbitration with Matthew Weiniger, QC as a way to set the stage for remaining proceedings.

It became apparent quickly that Sir Hersch Lauterpacht’s quote was a good place to start – recent events have made abundantly clear that international law as a whole finds itself under increased strain to preserve the peace, never mind secure it. Yet, as the book discussion and the Summer Academy made clear, the task of securing the reign of international law by means of pacific dispute settlement is the more daunting when disputes do not involve classic state-to-state foreign policy entanglements. Seemingly more is at stake when such legal disputes pit states against non-state actors.

As the proceedings of the Summer Academy highlighted throughout, the delegates were highly skeptical of the introduction of a court as a sufficient or prudent means to address the current political resistance to investment arbitration. As a matter of political dynamics, it appears that much of the fire against investor-state dispute resolution is caused by the conclusion of instruments codifying rules for trade and investment law jointly. Investment chapters provide an easy target for a broader opposition to globalization and legal instruments facilitating it. The introduction of an investment court does not address this underlying opposition to globalization.

The Summer Academy also featured a discussion on counterclaims focused on two separate issues. First, the discussion addressed the jurisdictional basis for counterclaims. It noted that counterclaims were frequently dismissed on jurisdictional grounds due to the narrow nature of consents to arbitration in investment treaties. Delegates noted, however, that such a problem would not arise in the context of an arbitration premised upon a contractual consent to arbitration or a combination of a contractual consent to arbitration and treaty consent as was the case in the Perenco v. Ecuador and Burlington v. Ecuador decisions on the state’s counterclaim. Second, the delegates discussed whether broadly worded treaty consents on their own might be able to achieve a similar result.

“The reign of law, represented by the incorporation of obligatory arbitration as a rule of positive international law, is not the only means for securing and preserving peace among nations. Nevertheless it is an essential condition of peace.”

The Summer Academy addressed the question of the appropriate role of tribunal secretaries and tribunal assistants. The discussion began with a comparison of the role of clerks in domestic judicial systems to the role of tribunal secretaries in investor-state arbitration. The delegates noted that tribunal secretaries, unlike clerks, are not authorized to assist the tribunal with a substantive resolution of the dispute. Instead, as born out by the History of ICSID, tribunal secretaries assist with the procedural aspects of an award as well as the procedural organization of the arbitration only.

Sessions included concerns on the potential relevance of the Paris Agreement for investment arbitration. The delegates noted that climate change action by states might well impair existing energy and oil and gas projects. The delegates then considered how climate change regulation would be addressed in the absence of the Paris Agreement. It was noted that depending upon the Bilateral Investment Treaty (BIT), the issue might be dealt with differently – either by requiring a European proportionality analysis or a U style takings analysis. The delegates agreed that neither of these analyses as a matter of law would provide a complete defence to states against investment claims for the good faith enactment of climate change regulations.

The Academy asked the policy question of whether Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) was fast becoming a thing of the global south. The delegates noted that there was a significant backlash in developed economies against ISDS now that there was a real prospect that strong investment protections could create liability for developed states. The delegates suspected that this led some policymakers to express displeasure as, in their minds, investment treaties were intended to support the rule of law in developing economies rather than doing so in developed mature jurisdictions. The response therefore was to seek to recalibrate the ISDS system in such a way as to minimize the potential for such liability – all the while protecting outgoing developed state capital.

The penultimate session focused on remedies. It noted that remedies actually awarded in investor-state arbitration were significantly below the valuations of claims undertaken by arbitration claimants. It then looked to the significant annulment challenges drawn by the remedies portions of investor-state proceedings, particularly Mobil v. Venezuela, Tidewater v. Venezuela, and Occidental v. Ecuador.

The Summer Academy closed with a discussion of Antonio Parra’s second edition of the History of ICSID. The discussion highlighted the political climate in which the World Bank considered the need to introduce a facility for the resolution of investor-state disputes. Antonio Parra relayed the extraordinary vision and tenacity of ICSID’s “founding father,” Aron Broches, in the creation of ICSID.

As we are debating the future of ISDS, the Summer Academy brought back to mind that these are lessons we would do well to remember.

The full Investment Claim’s Summer Academy report is available on Investment Claims.

Featured image credit: Lady Margaret Hall by Tejvan Pettinger. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr .

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Climate change: a call for government intervention [video]

“The world is facing a catastrophe.”

It is too late for individuals to make a significant difference in the preservation of ice caps. At the current rate of global warming, government intervention is needed.

In the following video and excerpt from A Farewell to Ice, Peter Wadhams, one of the world’s leading experts on polar ice, discusses the role that governments around the world need to play in order to combat global warming.

In Septem­ber 2012 the summer sea ice reached its lowest area yet, and the BBC made a film about the retreat, in which I was interviewed, among others, and satellite maps of the retreat were shown. The programme was televised on 5 September 2012, and was followed by a studio discussion in which the BBC decided that both ‘sides’ should be rep­resented. The entire body of climate scientists was represented by Natalie Bennett, newly appointed chair of the Green Party, whose heart was in the right place but who had no knowledge of the Arctic. The tiny group of deniers was represented by Peter Lilley MP, for­merly a Tory government minister, who had just published a report funded by the Lawson foundation in which he recommended taking no action on climate change and ignoring the Stern review. He claimed that he had been brought to the BBC under false pretences, that the BBC report had been concocted (despite the fact that satellite images of ice retreat were shown), and that I was a ‘well known alarmist’, a slander which he repeated five times. He claimed that he knew more about climate change than I did because he was able to quote from the 2007 IPCC assessment which concluded that summer sea ice would not disappear until the end of the twenty-first century. Despite being vice-president of an oil company, Tethys Petroleum, which works mainly with regimes in Central Asia, Lilley was subse­quently put on the Environment and Climate Committee of the House of Commons, from which advantageous position he worked to define climate change legislation. Thus Lord Lawson’s secretive foundation gained a representative on a powerful government committee. Lilley is not alone – there are many others in similar positions, especially in the ranks of the Republican Party in the USA, but he does personify the forces of obfuscation and misrepresentation which result in pub­lic inaction in the face of a major threat to human survival.

On the rare occasions when it engages in debate, Lawson’s Global Warming Policy Foundation now adopts a position slightly modified from its earlier simple blanket denial of climate change. It agrees that the climate may be changing, though not admitting that it is due to the activities of Man, but says that the way to deal with it is adap­tation, not mitigation. ‘Mitigation’ means trying to do something about the causes of climate change, whether by reducing emissions, trying to find ways of removing greenhouse gases from the atmos­phere, or managing solar radiation by geoengineering. ‘Adaptation’ means, in effect, ‘let’s let it go and just try to live with it’. The trouble is that the amount of warming that will occur if we just let things go, which even conservative IPCC models estimate as being 4ºC by the century’s end, is going to be catastrophic for the maintenance of life on Earth. The warming will continue beyond 2100 and reach greater heights in the absence of action on CO2.

Ice by Free-Photos. CC0 public domain via Pixabay.

Scientists who publicly state the facts about the climatic threat to the world offer a challenge to the national security of the state and provoke a response. In the UK Ian Boyd, the chief scientific adviser at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), said that scientists should avoid ‘suggesting that policies are either right or wrong’ and should express their views ‘by working with embedded advisers (such as myself), and by being the voice of reason, rather than dissent, in the public arena’. This statement of staggering arrogance assumes that Boyd’s wisdom is superior to everyone else’s and that he will always ‘speak truth to power’. But the attitude that it represents is being enforced through directives to scientists with UK Government research contracts. Governments of countries such as Canada and Australia, until recent political changes, went even further than the UK’s in their suppression of science, firing large numbers of environmental scientists so that research which deter­mines the magnitude of climate-induced changes was simply not conducted any more. The key decisions about saving the world from climate change obviously have to be made by governments. But, trag­ically, some governments seem to have no intention of making them and are more interested in suppressing scientific research if results imply dissent.

The climate change deniers’ emphasis on adaptation has been pow­erfully answered by Professor Robert P. Abele:

As we inflict violence on the planet to the point of its mortality, we inflict violence on ourselves, to the point of our mortality. A dead planet will result in dead people, and a people and/or its leaders who are psychologically and/or ethically desensitized to the consequences of this Terran violence have no chance of long-term survival.

Or, as Chief Seattle put it more eloquently more than a century ago:

All things are connected. Whatever befalls the Earth befalls the children of the Earth.

If we destroy our planet we destroy ourselves. There is nowhere else for us to go. There is no planet B. It will not just be farewell to ice, but farewell to life.

Featured image credit: “cold-foggy-frozen-glacier-ice” by Pexels. CC0 public domain via Pixabay.

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Not finding Bigfoot

The Renaissance is remembered as a time of renewed interest in scientific investigation, yet it also brought a huge increase in sightings of fantastic creatures such as mermaids and sea serpents. One explanation for this apparent paradox is that the revival of classical art and literature inspired explorers to look for the creatures of Greco-Roman mythology. Another reason was the expansion of trade. Cryptids, fantastic creatures that elude established terms of description, tend to arise on the boundary of two or more cultures.

The crews of explorer ships were remarkably cosmopolitan, drawing sailors from cities across the globe. With that came the blending of legends, which might be imperfectly understood and then exaggerated. From this came European depictions of mermaids blended with indigenous Nigerian beliefs to produce . Similarly, the Loch Ness Monster originated in legends that go back at least to the early Middle Ages, but the media represent it using an image taken from a relatively modern discovery ─ the plesiosaur. Another example, the Mokéle-mbêmbe, a cryptid of Central Africa, usually described as an Apatosaurus. Images of Bigfoot are also a blend of indigenous and Western lore. They are essentially a syncretic blend of giants and monsters from several Native American tribes, such as the Wendigo of the Northern Algonquins and the Wechuge of the Athabaskans. These are then taken out of their original cultural setting, stripped of their most distinctive features, equated with one another and placed in the context of popular science. They cease to be embodiments of the elements and become hominids, at times complete with evolutionary histories, not very different from cave dwellers pictured around a fire in slightly old-fashioned textbooks. They still express a mythology, but it is mostly a Western one of the emergence of modern man from a primitive world. As we have felt increasingly cut off from our past, the triumphalism of this vision has been softened, and people have come to imagine it as bucolic. But the images of Bigfoot also preserve Native American heritage, which emerges from time to time in reference to local reports of him.

The “Patterson-Gimlin film”, produced in 1967 and purportedly showing a Bigfoot striding into a forest, is in many ways a reflection of nostalgia for a simpler time. Even for an amateur production made half a century ago, it is of poor quality. The film is gritty and indistinct, and the hands that held the camera were very unsteady. The figure appears awkward and, when she gazes backward, even a bit self-conscious. That “primitive” appearance may be part of the reason why, of all the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of photographs that people have claimed were of Bigfoot, this one has been given a unique status as the standard to which all the rest are compared.

Image credit: “A Flying Head from Iroquois mythology, an inspiration for Bigfoot.” Originally from Bureau of Ethnology Annual Report, 1880. Reprinted in Imaginary Animals: The Monstrous, the Wondrous, and the Human (London: Reaktion Books, 2013), Boria Sax. Used with permission.

Since 2011, Finding Bigfoot has been one of the most popular shows on the Animal Planet channel. It features four representatives of the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization (BFRO) in their search for the elusive hominid. The episodes follow a pattern as standardized as that of any sit-com. Each begins with a new report or photograph that the team members believe provides evidence of Bigfoot, followed by a trip to investigate it. The researchers try various methods to attract Bigfoot such as lights, music, and food. They meet with local people and sometimes go to a town hall meeting to hear about encounters with Bigfoot. Often, they think that they have come close, but they never find Bigfoot in the end. The show is full of nostalgia for a real or imagined idyll of rural America. Appealing as the cast may be, I have the impression that not only could the team not find Bigfoot if they wanted to, but they probably would not want to if they could. Any real Bigfoot might disappoint us, perhaps by refusing to ever lay his cell phone down.

The nostalgia involved in this endeavor is so various and persistent that it seems to overwhelm even Bigfoot. Its object constantly shifts, from pre-Columbian society, to small-town America, prehistoric humankind, to old mythology, and so on. There is even nostalgia for an idealized science of the past, which seemed able to banish all ambiguities. The heroes of Finding Bigfoot build campfires in the woods and knock on trees to communicate, a bit like Boy Scouts in the 1950s, who, in turn, were imitating popular depictions of “settlers and Indians”. In the end, perhaps Bigfoot is really a symbol of what I would call “deep nostalgia,” a longing not for any particular time or place but for the past itself.

Featured Image credit: Stone Giant from Seneca mythology, an inspiration for Bigfoot. Originally from Bureau of Ethnology Annual Report, 1880 . Reprinted in Imaginary Animals: The Monstrous, the  Wondrous, and the Human (London: Reaktion Books, 2013), Boria Sax. Used with permission.

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10 facts about cymbals

There are many cymbal variants and a multitude of sounds can be produced depending upon how the instrument is played. With its indefinite pitch and ability to make unusual or striking sounds, cymbals are an integral part of the percussion family.

1. Modern cymbals range from 30cm to 65cm in diameter, but orchestra cymbals generally range from 40cm to 50cm, which enables brilliance and resonance in an orchestral setting.

2. Cymbals are made to be slightly convex so that only their outer edges touch, and contain a small domed opening in the middle.

3. Some cymbals are held with a strap, which is tied with a sailor’s knot from the central hole inside the middle of the cymbal.

4. Chinese cymbals are slightly different in shape and manufactured differently than modern “Turkish” cymbals, producing a “brittle” sound only used in Western orchestras for special effects.

Image credit: Cymbal by StockSnap, Public Domain via Pixabay.

5. In many illustrations of cymbals used by Greeks and Romans from the Middle Ages, cymbals are shown being played horizontally.

6. Although it is widely asserted that China has the longest history of cymbal-making, the instrument may have been introduced into China from India.

7. Cymbals were played in Assyrian military bands alongside lyres and drums.

8. Different variations of suspended cymbal were first developed for jazz and popular music before being utilized in the orchestra.

9. Crotales, or “antique cymbals,” are smaller cymbals of definite pitch which were first manufactured in the 20th century.

10. The notation for cymbals is usually written on a single line in orchestral scores.

Featured image: “Cymbals”. Photo by Nikon Jazz . via Flickr .

Information for this post was sourced from the “Cymbals ” entry by J. Blades, J. Holland and J. Montagu in The Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments (2 ed.) available on Oxford Reference .

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Revenons à nos moutons!

I keep returning to my sheep and rams because the subject is so rich in linguistic wool. Last time (see the post for 11 October 2017), I looked at the numerous etymological attacks on sheep and came to rather uninspiring results. It should perhaps have been added that even the indomitable Charles Mackay, who traced countless English words to Gaelic, had no clue to the origin of sheep. He only wondered where the slangy idiom to cast sheep’s eyes “look furtively,” said, as he explained, of a bashful lover, came from. He of course found an Irish Gaelic source, as was his wont, but his discovery presents no interest. We may only pay some amused attention to his formulation: “It is doubtful, notwithstanding the easy acquiescence of philologists in the commonly received derivation of these words [earlier, he also mentioned sheepish], whether they have any relation to the animal called the sheep. [In anticipation of this statement I began my first post in the series with the puzzled question about the adjective sheepish, but had no suggestion to offer.] The sheep is no more timid, though considerably more stupid than other animals. The French say ‘béte comme un mouton’, where the English say, ‘stupid as an ass’. Neither is a sheep’s eye a particularly amorous one.” Then he offered a list of words (seap or seop “to slink away, to steal off furtively, etc.”) and went on to the next word in his dictionary. Human beings are so superior, aren’t they? What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, etc. In comparison, sheep are sheepish, and asses are asinine. And yet we cannot explain the simplest idiom or the origin of a monosyllabic animal name. Let us leave sheep to their devices and, as said in the title of this post, revenons à nos moutons.

Casting sheep’s eyes?

The German etymologists who compiled their dictionaries in the first half of the nineteenth century and even later (some of them, however unsatisfactory from today’s point of view, were inspired by Jacob Grimm’s insights, while others produced fantasies) knew no more about the history of German Schaf than their English colleagues knew about sheep. But the first modern etymological dictionary of Dutch (1892) suggested that schaap “sheep” was a cognate of Engl. shave. Johannes Franck, the author of the dictionary, most probably, came to his conclusion under the influence of August Fick (whom I mentioned in the previous post), for Franck believed that the sheep perhaps acquired its name on account of its wool as it is used by people. This opinion got the endorsement of the dictionary’s later editor, the celebrated Dutch linguist Nicolaus van Wijk, but it received little support outside the Netherlands (as we have seen) until it was revived in the late 1980’s. Today, Franck’s derivation seems to enjoy a tepid approval in our etymological dictionaries and special publications.

Little Bo-Peep will find her sheep, possibly wagging their origins behind them.

Curiously, in 1923, Ferdinand Holthausen, one of the best-read and most active Germanic and English etymologists of his time, asked whether sheep ~ Schaf ~ schaap had anything to do with German schaffen “produce, create.” Even he did not know that almost a century earlier Charles Richardson had the same idea (see again the previous post). He must have been aware of that dictionary but probably could not expect to find any useful information in it, and he was right, but outdated books may, almost by mistake, contain useful guesses. That is why a solid etymology should begin with a survey of everything ever said about the origin of the word being examined. Even serious researchers tend to come up with old hypotheses, correct or refuted by their predecessors, and admire their originality. Later, Holthausen must have thought better of his idea and did not return to it, but the entries in his etymological dictionary of English, of which three editions exist, are disappointingly brief (a sentence or two) and give no idea of his vast store of knowledge.

Even if sheep and shave are related, some questions remain, the hardest of them being why our word is known only in West Germanic and, in more general terms, why the Indo-European noun, whose English reflex (continuation) is ewe, had to be replaced not only in West Germanic but also in Scandinavian, where the sheep is called fær and the like. Ewe has cognates in numerous languages and always means “female sheep.” Did the ancient Indo-Europeans coin that animal name before they learned the art of wool shearing or even before they domesticated the sheep, so that later they needed a new word to emphasize the new skill? And what is the origin of the consistently feminine noun ewe (Germanic awi-, Indo-European owi-)? Did it mean “the mother of lambs”? No one knows for sure.

A shorn sheep, or progress in domestication.

The conjectures on this score I have seen are as follows (my source is Richard N. Bailey’s summary, though my database contains about fifty titles dealing with ewe: it is, as could be expected, a much-discussed word). 1) Owi– has the same root as the verb meaning “to look after; help, search” (here the pattern of ablaut is wrong and the development of meaning is unclear); 2) owi– is related to the hypothetical root glossed as “to get accustomed,” allegedly, from the idea of wild sheep accustomed to the flock for breeding” (an unprofitable fantasy, and the reconstructed root  may not have existed); 3) the word derives from the root meaning “bed,” as in Greek: thus, from the idea of “mother-animal with lambs in a lair” (this reconstruction presupposes that female sheep were needed only as the producers of lamb), and 4) the root of owi– is the same as in some recorded words meaning “to dress, to clothe.”

Naturally, those who think that sheep is akin to shave cite the fourth etymology as correct, but the obvious semantic parallel may work against rather than for them. Assuming that even the ancient word owi- already suggested the idea of clothing, who needed synonyms like sheep and fær with the same or approximately the same reference? Perhaps sheep is indeed related to shave, but, if so, the best hypothetical etymology of ewe begins to look uninviting. In the previous post, I mentioned the obscure idea that the coining of skæpe-, the protoform of sheep, signified progress in the domestication of sheep. Granted, people learned the art of sheep shearing late. However, the idea that, once they acquired the new skill, they invented a new word for the old animal looks strange. Yet something like that might have happened, provided owi– had nothing to do with wool. At first, the word could have been a technical term or slang (“wool-beast,” “shear-beast”). Later it became part of the “Standard.”

To make things even more complicated, let us remember the archaic verb to yean “to bring forth” (said about a ewe), that is, “to lamb.” This verb seems to share the root with Latin agnus, familiar even to those who know no Latin from Agnus Dei “Lamb of God.” The Indo-European form of agnus must have sounded approximately like agwn-, and it hardly has anything to do with ewe, from owe-.  If someone wants to know more about the sheepfold, consider Old Icelandic smali “sheep,” that is, “small (cattle).” And, naturally, I’ll stay away from cattle, chattels, and all things bullish, bovine, pecuniary, and others which are too peculiar. Alone the wealth of synonyms for “sheep” and “lamb” is astounding. The words are extremely old, and we have little hope of penetrating the darkness. However, it does not follow that our wanderings have been entirely unprofitable. I never get tired of this optimistic, formulaic flourish.

Agnus Dei.

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