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South by south what? an academic’s report from SXSWEdu

By Ricky W. Griffin

South by Southwest (SXSW) has rapidly become a social phenomenon. But many people don’t really understand what it’s all about, in part because of the lens through which they may view it. For example, some know it as a music festival. For others, it’s a film festival. And for still others it’s about emerging technologies and opportunities for entrepreneurship. But in reality, it’s all three; SXSW is three large events–each part festival and part conference–run under a single, large umbrella over a period of about 10 days each March in Austin, Texas. SXSW Music has included over 2,000 performers playing in about 100 venues, and attracts over 12,000 registrants. SXSW Film focuses on new directing talent. SXSW Interactive has established a reputation for technological innovation and in 2013 attracted over 30,000 registrants. In 2011, SXSW launched two other conferences under the same umbrella: SXSW Eco focuses on environmental issues, while SXSWedu focuses on education innovation.

For the last several years my editors and I have grappled with issues of textbook pricing, digital interfaces, and related questions that have emerged as we gradually shift away from traditional print textbooks toward something “different.” I must admit that I didn’t really expect to learn much at SXSWedu. I’ve attended a few other “teaching” conferences over the years and found them to be of some value, but nothing groundbreaking. It turns out, though, that I couldn’t have been more wrong. The experience really was amazing, and I walked away both energized as a teacher and already planning my return next year for the full SXSWedu experience.

The wide variety of new education innovations and how people are already implementing those innovations truly opened my eyes to how I should approach teaching my own students. The conference sessions focused on all manner of topics, ranging from technology to MOOCS (massive open online course) to social media in the classroom. The presenters were engaging and interesting, and (had valuable information to share. For instance, I enjoyed hearing Corinne Hoisington (Central Virginia Community College) talk about how she uses mobile apps to promote student engagement. Nada Dabbagh (George Mason University) did a great job talking about the value of personal learning environments.

The audience members, for their part, were engaged and interested in what was being discussed. All the more fascinating, at least to me, was the heterogeneity of attendees. I’m used to attending conferences where people are increasingly compartmentalized by discipline, by sub-discipline, by mission, and so forth. But at SXSWedu the attendees ranged from elementary school teachers to university researchers to college administrators. And since the focus was on the processes of educations and learning rather than subject matter content, a person’s academic discipline was irrelevant.

I’ve also found myself wondering why we might not benefit from something like SXSWres (“res” for “research”—a festival or conference devoted to knowledge discovery processes that was similarly boundary-free). For example, when I think about whom I learn from today, the answer gravitates to the leading scholars in my field—people like Michael Porter, James Collins, and Jeffrey Pfeffer. But I could also learn from others outside my field. Universities often talk about interdisciplinary research but, at least in my experience, know little about how to encourage and reward it. If more of us could come together in settings that purposefully did not have discipline or mission-driven frameworks, who knows where that might lead?

Ricky W. Griffin is Distinguished Professor of Management and holds the Blocker Chair in Business in Mays Business School at Texas A&M University. His research on task design and dysfunctional work behavior has appeared in journals including Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, and Administrative Science Quarterly. He currently serves as the Editor in Chief for Oxford Bibliographies in Management. He has also served as Editor of the Journal of of Management, Program Chair and Division Chair of the Organizational Behavior Division and Program Chair of the Research Methods Division of the Academy, Program Chair and President of the Southwest Academy of Management, and on the Board of the Southern Management Association. He is a Fellow of both the Academy of Management and the Southern Management Association.

Developed cooperatively with scholars and librarians worldwide, Oxford Bibliographies offers exclusive, authoritative research guides. Combining the best features of an annotated bibliography and a high-level encyclopedia, this cutting-edge resource guides researchers to the best available scholarship across a wide variety of subjects.

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The ineffable magic of a distant island

The Telegraph Hay Festival is taking place from 23 May to 2 June 2013 on the edge of the beautiful Brecon Beacons National Park. We’re delighted to have many Oxford University Press authors participating in the Festival this year. OUPblog will be bringing you a selection of blog posts from these authors so that  even if you can’t join us in Hay-on-Wye, you won’t miss out. Don’t forget you can also follow @hayfestival and view the event programme here.

Roger Lovegrove will be appearing at The Telegraph Hay Festival on Thursday 30 May 2013 at 10am to explore some of the remotest places on earth. More information and tickets.

By Roger Lovegrove

The ineffable magic of a distant island! There is an irresistible lure even in fanciful images of distant islands: they are isolated morsels of land, far out in the wide reaches of oceanic isolation, tiny islands in tiny worlds of their own. The mind’s eye may dwell on the image of what life is like in such places, or even what emotions could be engendered by a cursory visit. However, the reality and actuality of what it means to escape to, or dwell on, such islands will remain alluring until we feel the tread of our feet on lonely land. Until then such islands hover tantalisingly out of our reach.

The oceans are dotted with these scattered fragments of land, most small, some very small. One small collection of Atlantic rocks supports a tiny permanent, albeit rotating, population despite being occasionally inundated and storm lashed. Each island is a self-contained world of its own, unique unto itself. The great majority of these oceanic worlds are of submarine volcanic origin. Atolls, legendary tropical coral paradises, are merely the remaining encircling necklaces of long lost volcanoes, eaten away by time and the sea until their final vestiges have sunk once more below the waves. All support thriving wild life communities, unrepeated elsewhere, however sparse or verdant, even those rocks periodically immersed. 

Many islands support species which are endemic to each individual island: plants which have been wind-drifted there over the eons since the islands’ first appeared above the sea surface, and reptiles as flotsam passengers from far away. Land birds too, at some stage have been transported by the fortune of wind or misdirection and remain stranded on many islands, remote from their places of origin. Gradually, over time such accidental immigrants evolve and obey Darwin’s rules and speciate through natural selection, becoming distinct from their historic parent stock and adding immensely to the biodiversity of the planet. Tragically many such species have since become extinct through the arrival and thoughtlessness of Man.

It was the great age of European exploration in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that began to chart some of the remote islands in the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific oceans. Ascension was discovered in 1501 and Tristan only five years later. Other discoveries continued across the years right up to the time in 1935, when the location of an outlying atoll in the Tuamotu Archipelago in the far reaches of the central Pacific was the final piece in the jigsaw completing the geography of the planet’s islands.

Remoteness is a subjective concept. Tristan da Cunha, 2000 miles from the nearest land is unquestionably remote but, so too in the human mind, is somewhere such as St Kilda, stormbound for much of the year and deeply frustrating for many who make serial futile attempts to land. Many of the remote islands have names that resonate with the magic of their calling: Mingulay, Fernando de Noronha, San Blas, Yap, Isleaux Aigrettes. Some unwittingly betray the story of their past or act as constant reminders of the sadness of past use: Devil’s Island, Solovetski, St Kilda. Wherever they are, whatever their story, they maintain their inescapable magic.

Roger Lovegrove is the author of Islands Beyond the Horizon: the life of twenty of the world’s most remote places – a personal account of distant islands he has visited from Arctic to Antarctic and tropics to temperate seas in the northern hemisphere. He was director of the RSPB in Wales for 25 years, is widely travelled, and was awarded the OBE for services to wildlife conservation in 1997.

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Image credit: Polar bear photograph © Roger Lovegrove. All rights reserved.

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The hunt for the origin of HIV

The month of May is home both to World Aids Vaccine Day (also known as HIV Vaccine Awareness Day) and the anniversary of the discovery of the AIDS virus itself. But how much do we know about where the HIV virus actually came from, and how it spread to become the global killer it is today? We spoke with Dorothy H. Crawford, author of Virus Hunt: The search for the origin of HIV, about the HIV virus and its history.

Where did the HIV virus originate?

Click here to view the embedded video.

How did the virus spread from wild chimpanzees?

Click here to view the embedded video.

How did the HIV virus become global?

Click here to view the embedded video.

Dorothy H. Crawford has been Assistant Principal for Public Understanding of Medicine at the University of Edinburgh since 2007. She is the author of Virus Hunt: The search for the origin of HIV, The Invisible Enemy, Deadly Companions, and Viruses: A Very Short Introduction. She was elected a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2001, and awarded an OBE for services to medicine and higher education in 2005.

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Do we need the apostrophe?

The Telegraph Hay Festival is taking place from 23 May to 2 June 2013 on the edge of the beautiful Brecon Beacons National Park. We’re delighted to have many Oxford University Press authors participating in the Festival this year. OUPblog will be bringing you a selection of blog posts from these authors so that  even if you can’t join us in Hay-on-Wye, you won’t miss out. Don’t forget you can also follow @hayfestival and view the event programme here.

Simon Horobin will be appearing at The Telegraph Hay Festival on Tuesday 28 May 2013 at 2.30pm to ask: does spelling matter? More information and tickets.

By Simon Horobin

‘The apostrophe is the most troublesome punctuation mark in English, and perhaps also the least useful. No other punctuation mark causes so much bewilderment, or is so often misused.’

–R.L. Trask, The Penguin Guide to Punctuation

The recent decision by Devon County Council to drop the apostrophe from its road signs was met with dismay and anger by those concerned about the preservation of linguistic standards. Lucy Mangan, writing in The Guardian, branded it an ‘Apostrophe Catastrophe’ which ‘captures in microcosm the kind of thinking that pervades our government, our institutions, our times’, drawing parallels with the government’s handling of the banking crisis, binge-drinking and sexual assault. Similar prophecies of doom followed the decision by the bookseller Waterstones to drop the apostrophe from its shop names. Writing in the Daily Mail, Lindsay Johns lamented this wanton disposal of the rules of grammar which enable us to communicate. But is the preservation of the apostrophe really so crucial to the well-being of our society? Would consigning the apostrophe to the dustbin really threaten the future of our language as a means of communication?

It is seldom recognised by its guardians that the apostrophe is purely a feature of written language, with no spoken language correspondence. If we can do without it in speech, then why is it necessary in writing?  Even in writing the apostrophe is a relatively recent innovation; it was first introduced into English printed books in the 16th century to indicate an elision or a contraction, as it still does today in she’ll, can’t, it’s. In the 17th century its use was extended to indicate possession in singular nouns, the boy’s book, where the –s ending was understood either as an elision of the earlier ending –es, or erroneously as a reduced form of the possessive pronoun his. Further confusion was introduced in the 18th century when the apostrophe was extended to plural possessives, the boys’ books, where nothing has been omitted.

The use of the apostrophe to signal both elision and possession is the cause of much of today’s confusion, most notoriously in the distinction between it’s and its. For Lynne Truss the rule is simple and the punishment for breaking it should be suitably brutal:

‘Getting your itses mixed up is the greatest solecism in the world of punctuation. No matter that you have a PhD and have read all of Henry James twice. If you still persist in writing, “Good food at it’s best”, you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave’.

–Lynne Truss, Eats Shoots and Leaves.

But is such harsh condemnation really warranted? Since the apostrophe can signal possession, it is natural to assume that the neuter possessive its should also have an apostrophe. The pronoun its was first introduced in the 17th century to replace an earlier form his, which overlapped unhelpfully with the masculine pronoun. Because it was formed by adding a possessive ending to the subject pronoun it, the new pronoun was initially written it’s; a spelling which persisted until the 19th century.

Insecurity about where to place the apostrophe increasingly leads to its omission, so that we frequently find examples of its mine, as well as its insertion in contexts where it isn’t required. Particularly common is the addition of an apostrophe to plurals, known as the ‘greengrocers’ apostrophe’; so-called because it is thought to be particularly prevalent in signs advertising apple’s and orange’s. There is some historical justification for this error, however, since the apostrophe was originally inserted in the plurals of words which ended in vowels, like folio’s and opera’s, and still is in cases like ‘p’s and q’s’, ‘do’s and don’t’s’.

The apostrophe has long been a polarising issue among otherwise rational people. George Bernard Shaw, a vocal critic of English spelling, wrote cant and hes instead of can’t and he’s, arguing that the apostrophe was entirely redundant: ‘There is not the faintest reason for persisting in the ugly and silly trick of peppering pages with these uncouth bacilli’. Lewis Carroll, on the other hand, inserted additional apostrophes, preferring spellings like sha’n’t and ca’n’t as the proper contractions of shall not and can not. While there are those today who happily omit apostrophes in emails (not e’mails) and text messages (or txt msgs), there are those who firmly insist on its inclusion. The self-appointed monitor of Twitter posts, YourorYou’re, retweets messages in which these two words are confused with the simple comment: ‘WRONG!’.

The media storm that followed Devon County Council’s announcement resulted in  the decision being overturned. Residents of Tiverton’s Beck’s Square and Blundell’s Avenue can sleep peacefully in their beds; Lucy Mangan can put away her tin of paint. The precious apostrophe is safe. For now.

Simon Horobin is Professor of English at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Magdalen College. His book, Does Spelling Matter?, examines the role of spelling today, considering why English spelling is so difficult to master, whether it should be reformed, and whether the electronic age signals the demise of correct spelling. He also writes a blog about English spelling.

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Image credit: Greengrocer’s apostrophe correction by Sceptre, [Creative Commons] via Wikimedia Commons.

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Tragedy of the science-communication commons

By Andrew Gelman

There’s a prevailing notion that communicating science is difficult, and it is therefore difficult to engage the general public. People can be fazed by statistics in particular, so how can we convey the importance of this science effectively?

I’ve earlier written that science is science communication — that is, the act of communicating scientific ideas and findings to ourselves and others is itself a central part of science. My point was to push against a conventional separation between the act of science and the act of communication, the idea that science is done by scientists and communication is done by communicators. It’s a rare bit of science that does not include communication as part of it. As a scientist and science communicator myself, I’m particularly sensitive to devaluing of communication. (For example, Bayesian Data Analysis is full of original research that was done in order to communicate; or, to put it another way, we often think we understand a scientific idea, but once we try to communicate it, we recognize gaps in our understanding that motivate further research.)

I once saw the following on one of those inspirational-sayings-for-every-day desk calendars: “To have ideas is to gather flowers. To think is to weave them into garlands.” Similarly, writing — more generally, communication to oneself or others — forces logic and structure, which are central to science.

Dan Kahan saw what I wrote and responded by flipping it around: He pointed out that there is a science of science communication. As scientists, we should move beyond the naive view of communication as the direct imparting of facts and ideas. We should think more systematically about how communications are produced and how they are understood by their immediate and secondary recipients.

The science of science communication is still in its early stages, and I’m glad that people such as Kahan are working on it. Here’s something he wrote recently explicating his theory of cultural cognition:

The motivation behind this research has been to understand the science communication problem. The “science communication problem” (as I use this phrase) refers to the failure of valid, compelling, widely available science to quiet public controversy over risk and other policy relevant facts to which it directly speaks. The climate change debate is a conspicuous example, but there are many others, including (historically) the conflict over nuclear power safety, the continuing debate over the risks of HPV vaccine, and the never-ending dispute over the efficacy of gun control…. The research I will describe reflects the premise that making sense of these peculiar packages of types of people and sets of factual beliefs is the key to understanding—and solving—the science communication problem. The cultural cognition thesis posits that people’s group commitments are integral to the mental processes through which they apprehend risk…

I think of Kahan as part of a loose network of constructive skeptics, along with various people including Thomas Basbøll, John Ioannidis, the guys at Retraction Watch, bloggers such as Felix Salmon, and a whole bunch of psychology researchers such as Wicherts, Wagenmakers, Simonsohn, Nosek, etc. This doesn’t represent a complete list but rather is intended to give a sense of the different aspect of this movement-without-a-name. Ten or twenty or thirty years ago, I don’t think such a movement existed. There were concerns about individual studies or research programs, but not such a sense of a statistics-centered crisis in science as a whole.

Andrew Gelman is a Professor in the Department of Statistics at Columbia University. He is the co-author of Teaching Statistics: A Bag of Tricks with Deborah Nolan. Read his blog Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.

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Bismarck: as seen by his personal assistant

The Telegraph Hay Festival is taking place from 23 May to 2 June 2013 on the edge of the beautiful Brecon Beacons National Park. We’re delighted to have many Oxford University Press authors participating in the Festival this year. OUPblog will be bringing you a selection of blog posts from these authors so that  even if you can’t join us in Hay-on-Wye, you won’t miss out. Don’t forget you can also follow @hayfestival and view the event programme here.

Jonathan Steinberg will be appearing at The Telegraph Hay Festival on Tuesday 28th May 2013 at 7 p.m. to speak about Otto Von Bismarck. More information and tickets.

By Jonathan Steinberg

An old English proverb claims that ‘no man is a hero to his valet’. In this, as in so many other respects, Otto von Bismarck defies the rule. In 1875, Christoph Willers von Tiedemann, a youngish Liberal member of the German parliament, became Bismarck’s first personal assistant; the job took up most of his time for the next six years. When he received a formal invitation to tea addressed to Privy Councillor Christoph von Tiedemann from his wife, complete with his home address to remind him where it was, he decided to resign.  At the end of his service he sketched a portrait of his remarkable boss.

First his physical appearance — his tall frame, broad shoulders and great arms and legs, his high forehead and brilliant, expressive eyes made him an impressive figure. After the victories of the wars of unification, the Kaiser elevated him to the rank of active general in a cavalry regiment and that entitled him to wear the sulfur-yellow uniform of his regiment in which he dressed for the rest of his life. Bismarck once remarked to Tiedemann that his promotion gave him great pleasure because it liberated him from the daily struggle with stiff shirts, studs and celluloid collars. He had no personal vanity, never cared what he looked like, could not be bothered to sit for portraits and on the one occasion when he had to wear civilian dress at Bad Gastein looked so silly in a huge top hat that his wife forbade him to wear it. He had unusually full and bushy eyebrows. In Tiedemann’s Sechs Jahre Chef der Reichskanzlei unter dem Fürsten Bismarck he remembers,

“If he was excited or nervous, he tended to fiddle with the hair of his eyebrows the way some men play with their beards. When that happened, you had to reckon with a day of first-order difficulty…If I came in and noticed that the Prince had on his melancholy, world-weary expression, and stared out the window and twisted his eyebrows, I knew that a storm would burst any minute. I would raise an insignificant matter and usually got the answer, “don’t care; do what you think best.”

On other occasions, he would plunge into a complex matter and dictate for hours in nearly perfect prose. He reworked his speeches with the care of the great writer and played with ideas and phrases until he got them right. He took three days to find “the honest broker” to describe Germany’s role in the crisis that led to the Congress of Berlin. He spoke in the Reichstag or Landtag without complete texts and his vigorous, witty and lively prose just flowed.

He had incredible mental abilities, nearly total recall memory and a capacity to see the key issue in a complex problem and to take instant decisions. The renewal of the Austro-German trade agreement had led to a crisis and deadlock. The Prussian ministers had debated it for six hours without reaching consensus and the German ambassador in Vienna had written a long report. Justice Minister Friedberg had arrived in Varzin and took part as Tiedemann set out the issues.

“After I had finished listing the main points of difference between the two states, the Prince, without pausing to think, replied as he peeled a hard-boiled egg, ‘Answer to 1): I shall make this concession if absolutely necessary; to 2): wouldn’t dream of it; to 3) that has to be left to later agreements.’ Later Friedberg took me on one said and said “What sort of man is this! In Berlin we debated this for six hours and could not arrive at a conclusion. And here the matter is settled over breakfast in six minutes.”

Tiedemann noted his incredible, relentless ego, his power drive, his division of mankind into “friends” regarded as servants and “enemies”, who were either as “scoundrels” or “idiots”’. Yet he had no personal vanities of any kind. As Tiedemann wrote,

“He considered vanity as a kind of mortgage on its bearer and reduced the person’s value by the exact amount of the burden. His folio in the great mortgage ledger of human failings was in this respect absolutely blank. There can be very few human beings who cared so little for outer appearances, was so indifferent to, and placed so little value on, rank, station, precedence or etiquette. He yearned neither for recognition from above nor applause from below.”

His tolerance of opposition was pretty close to nil. After a cabinet meeting, he exploded, “If I want to eat a spoonful of soup, I have to ask eight jackasses for permission.” He tended to brood on the opposition in his sleepless nights and repay a pin prick with a dagger.

To his biographer, Bismarck remains the most interesting figure of the nineteenth century, as alive and engaging in my imagination as he was to Christoph von Tiedemann in person.

Jonathan Steinberg is the Walter H. Annenberg Professor of Modern European History at the University of Pennsylvania, and Emeritus Fellow, Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He is the author of Yesterday’s Deterrent: Tirpitz and the Birth of the German Battle Fleet (1965), Why Switzerland? (2nd ed.1996) and All or Nothing: The Axis and the Holocaust, 1941 to 1943 (classic edition 2002). He was also the principal author of The Deutsche Bank and its Gold Transactions during the Second World War (1999). His most recent book is Bismarck: A Life (2011).

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Image credit: By Loescher und Petsch [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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The History of the World: President Kennedy and the moon landing

25 May 1961

The following is a brief extract from The History of the World: Sixth Edition by J.M. Roberts and O.A. Westad.

Possibly spurred by a wish to offset a recent publicity disaster in American relations with Cuba, President Kennedy proposed in May 1961 that the United States should try to land a man on the moon (the first man-made object had already crash-landed there in 1959) and return him safely to earth before the end of the decade… Kennedy said nothing of the advancement of science, of commercial or military advantage – or, indeed, of what seems to have been his real motivation: to do it before the Soviets did.

Photograph of Astronaut Edwin E. (Buzz) Aldrin, Jr. Posing on the Moon Next to the U.S. Flag, 07/20/1969. (c) Public Domain, courtesy of the National Archives.

During the early 1960s the Soviets continued to make spectacular progress. The world was perhaps most excited when they sent a woman into space in 1963, but their technical competence continued to be best shown by the size of their vehicles – a three-man machine was launched in 1964 – and in the achievement the following year of the first ‘space walk’, when one of the crew emerged from his vehicle and moved about outside while in orbit (though reassuringly attached to it by a lifeline). The Soviets were to go on to further important advances in achieving rendezvous for vehicles in space and in engineering their docking, but after 1967 (the year of the first death through space travel, when a Soviet cosmonaut was killed during re-entry) the glamour transferred to the Americans. In 1968, they achieved a sensational success by sending a three-man vehicle into orbit around the moon and transmitting television pictures of its surface. It was by now clear that ‘Apollo’, the moon-landing project, was going to succeed.

In May 1969 [an American] vehicle … approached to within six miles of the moon… A few weeks later, on 16 July, a three-man crew was launched. Their lunar module landed on the moon’s surface four days later. On the following morning, 20 July, the first human being to set foot on the moon was Neil Armstrong, the commander of the mission. President Kennedy’s goal had been achieved with time in hand.

Reprinted from THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD: Sixth Edition by J.M. Roberts and O.A. Westad with permission from Oxford University Press, Inc. Copyright © 2013 by O.A. Westad.

J. M. Roberts CBE died in 2003. He was Warden at Merton College, Oxford University, until his retirement and is widely considered one of the leading historians of his era. He is also renowned as the author and presenter of the BBC TV series ‘The Triumph of the West’ (1985). Odd Arne Westad edited the sixth edition of The History of the World. He is Professor of International History at the London School of Economics. He has published fifteen books on modern and contemporary international history, among them ‘The Global Cold War,’ which won the Bancroft Prize.

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Arrested Development: The English language in cut-offs

By Mark Peters

Arrested Development—the cult comedy set to rise from the dead on Netflix 26 May 2013—had its own distinctive language. It was a show of catchphrases.

“I’ve made a huge mistake.”

“No touching!”

“I’m a monster!”

“There’s always money in the Banana Stand.”

“Steve Holt!”

“Her?”

Unlike 30 Rock, Seinfeld, or The Simpsons, Arrested Development didn’t crank out many new words. Much like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Arrested Development took characters, rather than language, to the limit. Sure, there was hop-on, as in “You’re gonna get some hop-ons” (while driving the preposterous stair car). “Douche chill” was a memorable exclamation by Tobias, though it was used in only one episode. Cornballer is a fun word for a ridiculously unsafe product that produced delicious cornballs and first-degree burns.

One Arrested Development term stands out: never-nude (or, if you like, never nude or nevernude).

This term was first used in the 14 December 2003 episode “In God We Trust,” when twins Michael and Lindsay Bluth discuss her farcical marriage to Tobias:

Michael: You guys were not sharing a bedroom before?

Lindsay: Well, the cut-offs weren’t exactly a turn-on.

Michael: Yeah, what’s the deal with the cut-offs?

Lindsay: You’ve got to promise not to tell anyone this.

Michael: Okay.

Lindsay: He’s a never-nude.

Michael: Is that exactly what it sounds like?

Narrator Ron Howard then chimes in: “Tobias suffered a rare psychological affliction of never being able to be completely naked,” accompanied by ridiculous images of Tobias in those cut-offs. The cut-offs—a horrifying, do-it-yourself version of Daisy Dukes—are always worn by Tobias, even in the shower or under underwear. A preference for this denim disaster is the main symptom of being a never-nude, as shown by all the people wearing them at a recent fan gathering. Cut-offs are to Arrested Development fans as pointy ears are to Trekkies.

This term is not widely used, but it’s part of the lexicon for some, as shown by uses on Twitter. A female professional wrestler describes a situation that would surely make Tobias freak: “Had my first massage. As someone who is awkward being touched, ticklish, a never nude, and can’t sit still, it was a traumatizing experience.”

#bbpBox_140549546148249601 a { text-decoration:none; color:#0084B4; }#bbpBox_140549546148249601 a:hover { text-decoration:underline; }Had my first massage. As someone who is awkward being touched, ticklish, a never nude, and can't sit still, it was a traumatizing experienceNovember 26, 2011 5:56 pm via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite


Here, a parent uses the term to discuss a child’s clothing preferences: “It’s the last year we’ll be able to dress the 2yo for Halloween as anything we want. Last year she was a never-nude. Any suggestions?”

#bbpBox_24352014209 a { text-decoration:none; color:#009999; }#bbpBox_24352014209 a:hover { text-decoration:underline; }It's the last year we'll be able to dress the 2yo for Halloween as anything we want. Last year she was a never-nude. Any suggestions?September 12, 2010 11:56 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite


I’m impressed by the following joke, which plays on the shredded wardrobe of Bruce Banner’s alter ego: “The Hulk is a never nude.”

#bbpBox_200182177927929856 a { text-decoration:none; color:#676B6C; }#bbpBox_200182177927929856 a:hover { text-decoration:underline; }The Hulk is a never nude.May 9, 2012 7:15 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite


I don’t understand this next joke, but I kind of love it anyway: “Meryl Streep is a never nude.”

#bbpBox_159919653962002433 a { text-decoration:none; color:#0084B4; }#bbpBox_159919653962002433 a:hover { text-decoration:underline; }Meryl Streep is a never nude.January 19, 2012 4:46 am via Twitter for AndroidReplyRetweetFavorite


As Ana Marie Cox recently demonstrated, the term can also be used for political commentary: “I should be prepping for TV but I keep wondering who in the WH is a never-nude. Pretty sure it’s not Biden… He’s more of an Oscar.” (Arrested Development fans know this is a nod to Oscar Bluth, George Bluth’s pot-smoking, lemon-grove-owning, folk-singing twin.)

#bbpBox_334755645200953344 a { text-decoration:none; color:#2FC2EF; }#bbpBox_334755645200953344 a:hover { text-decoration:underline; }I should be prepping for TV but I keep wondering who in the WH is a never-nude. Pretty sure it's not Biden... He's more of an Oscar.May 15, 2013 3:42 pm via Tweetbot for iOSReplyRetweetFavorite


Awesomely, there’s a real-life equivalent of never-nudism: gymnophobia. Gymnophobics may sound like they’re afraid of gym class, but they’re really afraid of nudity. However, I imagine they’re also afraid of gym class, which is traditionally a hellstorm of unwelcome nudity and could therefore be a Petri dish for future never-nudes.

In “Marta Complex,” narrator Howard notes that never-nudes are not recognized by the DSM-IV, the then-latest edition of the renowned psychiatric manual. Alas, the recently published DSM-5 still neglects the term. Never-nude may never be recognized by the psychiatric community or the Oxford English Dictionary, but it’s as near and dear to Arrested Development fans as Buster’s hook, Lucille’s alcoholism, Job’s scooter, and George Michael and Maeby’s incestuous love.

As Tobias once said of never-nudes—in a line that perfectly doubles as a rallying cry for fans of the cultiest of cult shows—“There are dozens of us! Dozens!”

Mark Peters is a lexicographer, humorist, rabid tweeter, and language columnist for Visual Thesaurus. If you’re in Chicago, go see the sketch comedy show he wrote: Nachos…From the Abyss. Read his previous OUPblog posts on the language of Batman, reduplication, and tweets.

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Online resources for oral history

By Caitlin Tyler-Richards

After listening to this week’s podcast with managing editor Troy Reeves and oral historian extraordinaire Doug Boyd, you might think the Oral History Review has fallen prey to corporate sponsorship. Let me assure you, dear audience, that we are not in bed with Starbucks, E-Harmony, or General Mills. Instead, it seems Doug, guest editor of our special issue “Oral History in the Digital Age” and author of “OHMS: Enhancing Access to Oral History for Free,” is prone to elaborate metaphors when describing oral history best practices.

In addition to revealing that fun fact, this week’s podcast discusses OHDA, OHMS, and other fantastic acronyms related to the numerous online resources Doug and his numerous collaborators have developed for researchers working with oral histories.

[See post to listen to audio]

Or download a copy of the podcast directly.

Doug Boyd serves as the Digital Initiatives Editor for the Oral History Review. Also, he directs the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky Libraries and is a recognized national leader regarding oral history, archives and digital technologies. Most recently, Boyd led the team that envisioned, designed, and implemented the open-source OHMS system that synchronizes text with audio and video online. He recently managed the IMLS grant project Oral History in the Digital Age (directed by MATRIX at Michigan State University), establishing current best practices for collecting, curating, and disseminating oral histories.

The Oral History Review, published by the Oral History Association, is the U.S. journal of record for the theory and practice of oral history. Its primary mission is to explore the nature and significance of oral history and advance understanding of the field among scholars, educators, practitioners, and the general public. Follow them on Twitter at @oralhistreview, like them on Facebook, or follow the latest OUPblog posts to preview, learn, connect, discover, and study oral history. His paper, “OHMS: Enhancing Access to Oral History for Free,” is free to read for a limited time.

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Do nurses care?

By Wilfred McSherry

Almost on a daily basis the tabloids and media have some negative comment or observation to make about the dreadful state of the National Health Service (NHS) and the atrocious standards of care that patients receive at the hands of NHS nurses.

There is no escaping the fact that there has been a steady flow of published reports highlighting the dreadful, neglectful and it must be stated downright cruel treatment some patients have received at the hands of nurses. The culmination of such allegations was the publication of the Public Inquiry into The Mid Staffordshire Hospital NHS Trust on 6 February 2013.

However, to brand all nurses as uncaring is unjustified and totally unacceptable. While it would be wrong and indeed naïve to ignore the findings from the reports and the public inquiry there is a need for balance and moderation; the nursing profession has taken a beating, many nurses are feeling disillusioned and fatigued by the constant and relentless barrage of criticisms and negativity. The image and confidence of nursing and nurses has been crushed and is at an all time low.

Not everything is bad on the contrary there is evidence that demonstrates that nurses do care and are caring and that the general public do have confidence in the vast majority of nurse. The National summary of the results for the 2012 Inpatients survey provides valuable evidence that counteracts the negativity offering a a more positive and realistic impression:

“Eighty percent of respondents reported that, overall, they were “always” treated with respect and dignity while they were in hospital, up from 79% in 2011. There was a corresponding decrease in the proportion who said this was “sometimes” the case from 18% in 2011 to 17% in 2012. Three percent said they did not feel they were treated with respect and dignity.”

Similarly, findings from the survey demonstrate that despite the negative image of nurses the general public do have confidence in the nursing profession:

Over three quarters of respondents (76%) said that they “always” had confidence and trust in the nurses treating them, an improvement from 74% in 2011. There had been a corresponding decrease in the proportion who respond “sometimes” (22% in 2011 and 20% in 2012) or “no” (4% in 2011 and3% in 2012).

These findings affirm that the vast majority of nurses do care and that the contribution nurses’ make is valued by a large section of the general public. However, the survey reveals that a small percentage of patients do not have confidence and trust in the nurses caring for them — so what can nurses do to improve the patient experience and patient satisfaction?

We would like to offer the following words of encouragement:

Despite recent criticism the evidence suggests that the vast majority of nurses do care and are caring. Therefore, nurses need to remain optimistic, recognising and celebrating the positive contribution that they make to people’s lives.
Caring cultures are created and constructed by those who lead, manage and govern. Nurses must support and value each other and fundamentally organisations must acknowledge and affirm the unique contribution nurses make in the provision of care
There is nothing basic that nurses do! Nursing needs nurses, individuals possessing the requisite knowledge, attitudes and skills to safeguard the fundamentals of nursing care.
Nurses need to be allowed to care. There needs to be an overhaul and removal of the unnecessary bureaucracy that stifles nurses preventing them from caring and being with patients.

Finally, watch the following YouTube clip taken from the Royal College of Nursing Congress held in Liverpool 2013.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Molly Case presents the poem titled ‘Nursing the nation’. Molly personifies all the attributes espoused in the new strategy and vision for nursing launched in England in December 2012 — Care, Compassion, Competence, Communication, Courage, Commitment — affirming that the future of nursing is safe and that most nurses do care and want to care!

Wilfred McSherry is Professor in Dignity of Care for Older People, Centre for Practice and Service Improvement at the Faculty of Health Staffordshire University and The Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust UK and Part-Time Professor at Haraldsplass Deaconess University College, Bergen, Norway. He is the co-editor of Care in Nursing: Principles, Values, and Skills with Robert MSherry and Roger Watson.

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Image credit: Japanese Nurse. © masahironakano via iStockphoto.

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