Oxford University Press's Blog, page 969

Five women songwriters who helped shape the sound of jazz

By Ted Gioia

The songwriting business offered few opportunities to women in the early 20th century. And jazz bandleaders, despite their own experiences with discrimination, were hardly more tolerant of female talent. Although audiences expected the leading orchestras to showcase a ‘girl singer’, women were rarely allowed to serve in other capacities, either on the bandstand or writing arrangements and compositions.

Yet a handful of women managed to overcome the obstacles, and leave a lasting mark on both fields—gettings songs published that became both commercial hits and successful vehicles for jazz. In honor of Women’s History Month, I’d like to call attention to five women who helped shape the sound of jazz with their songs.

Irene Higginbotham (1918-1988) got so little attention for her contributions to jazz during her lifetime, that many scholars and critics confused her with another lady.  She was often described as the wife of jazz pianist Teddy Wilson, but that was a different Irene—Irene Kitchings (1908-1975). Yet Higginbotham was hardly an amateur: ASCAP has her registered as composer of almost 50 songs. But she is best known for one of them—“Good Morning Heartache,” a poignant ballad first recorded by Billie Holiday in 1946, and enjoying even more popularity when Diana Ross featured it in the 1972 film Lady Sings the Blues. The soundtrack album topped the Billboard chart in April 1973, and “Good Morning Heartache” was a surprise hit single more than a quarter of century after it was composed. Higginbotham was still alive at the time, but apparently no one thought to ask her what she thought about this unexpected turn of events.

Suggested listening:

Billie Holiday: “Good Morning Heartache”

Diana Ross: “Good Morning Heartache”

Ann Ronell (1905-1993) first encountered the world of songwriting via George Gershwin, whom she interviewed for a student publication when she was an undergraduate at Radcliffe. After her graduation, Gershwin helped her make connections in the New York music publishing industry, but Ronell found it hard for a woman to break into this male-dominated field. However, the success of Ronell’s 1932 song “Willow Weep for Me,” a bluesy pop tune that was a huge hit for Paul Whiteman, established her reputation as both composer and lyricist. Ronell’s next best-known song “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?”—showcased in the 1933 Disney cartoon Three Little Pigs—has also shown tremendous staying power, and has been recorded by artists as diverse as Barbara Streisand to LL Cool J.

Suggested listening:

Nancy Wilson: ”Willow Weep for Me”

Irene Taylor (with Paul Whiteman): “Willow Weep for Me”

Dorothy Fields (1905-1974) wrote lyrics for over 400 songs, and worked with many of the leading musical talents of her day. She contributed to the Cotton Club revues in the 1920s, where her songs were performed by Duke Ellington. With Jerome Kern, she wrote “The Way You Look Tonight,” which won the Oscar for Best Song in 1936, and with Jimmy McHugh she was responsible for future jazz standards “Exactly Like You,” “On the Sunny Side of the Street” and “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love.” At his first presidential inauguration, Barack Obama referred to one of Fields’s most famous lyrics—“Pick Yourself Up” from 1936—when he announced: “Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.”

Suggested listening:

Betty Carter: “The Way You Look Tonight”

Ella Fitzgerald: “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love”

Lil Hardin Armstrong (1898-1971) is probably best remembered as wife to jazz legend Louis Armstrong.  Their marriage lasted from 1924 until 1938, and Hardin played a key role in advancing her husband’s career during these years.  But her place in jazz history would be assured even without this connection.  She was pianist with King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, which I rank as the best jazz band of the early 1920s, and her most famous composition “Struttin’ with Some Barbecue” has been featured in more than 500 jazz recordings.  Her other songs include “Doin’ the Suzie Q,” “Just for a Thrill” (later recorded by Ray Charles) and “Bad Boy” (featured as title song a 1978 Ringo Starr album).

Suggested listening:

Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five (with Lil Hardin Armstrong): “Struttin’ With Some Barbecue”

Lil Hardin Armstrong: “Doin’ the Suzie Q”

Billie Holiday (1915-1959) was best known as a performer, not a songwriter. But several songs she composed or co-wrote have become standards. The ASCAP strike of 1940, which prevented radio stations from playing the songs of most of the well-known American tunesmiths of the day, presented Holiday with both the necessity and opportunity to develop her own songwriting skills. In collaboration with Arthur Herzog, Jr. she wrote “God Bless the Child,” which was a radio and jukebox hit in 1941. Other Holiday compositions include “Don’t Explain,” also written with Herzog, and the blues “Fine and Mellow.”

Suggested listening:

Billie Holiday: “God Bless the Child”

Dee Dee Bridgewater: “Fine and Mellow”

Ted Gioia is the author of eight books on music. His most recent book is The Jazz Standards: A Guide to the Repertoire.

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March Madness: Atlas Edition

On 19 March 2013, 64 college basketball teams will meet on the court for the battle of the year. In the United States, college basketball season ends when elite teams compete in March Madness over the course of  four weeks. Teams compete based on their placement in a regional bracket, and either go home or move forward after a single game. Four teams will make the “Final Four” on 6 April, and on 8 April, the NCAA will have its college basketball champion.

Meanwhile, as your eyes are glued to the television, action simultaneously takes place in workplaces, social circles, and online. Bracketology, the art and science of placing bets on which teams will advance, is one of the signs that spring is here. Individuals design their own bracket and get points based on the accuracy of how they place their teams. The March Madness bracket inspires spin-offs in all walks of life, from The Morning News’ Tournament of Books to this Vatican Sweet Sistine bracket.

Here at Oxford, we’re celebrating March Madness: Atlas Edition. We’ve selected and placed 16 countries at random for the first round of “Sweet Sixteen.” Each week, we will ask a question that will determine which teams will move forward in the bracket. These questions will be based on statistics drawn at random from Oxford’s Atlas of the World: 19th Edition, and can range anywhere from a country’s level of endemism to its average daily food intake.

Tournament schedule:

Sweet Sixteen: 11 March                                                This week: Which country has the highest GDP per capita?

Round of 8: 18 March

Final Four: 25 March

Semi-finals: 1 April

Championship: 8 April

The first round begins today with the following 16 countries.

1. Madagascar                                                                    9. Italy

2. Democratic Republic of Congo                              10. Greece

3. Ethiopia                                                                          11. Costa Rica

4. Burma (Myanmar)                                                      12. Turkey

5. Indonesia                                                                       13. Venezuela

6. India                                                                                 14. Mexico

7. China                                                                                15. Australia

8. Japan                                                                               16. USA

To determine the winners in this week’s round, select the country with the highest GDP per capita within each bracket. The eight winners from each bracket will meet next week, judged by a set of statistics pulled at random from the atlas. You can print out our Atlas bracket (above) and place your bets, or play along on our Facebook page. See you on 18 March for the Round of 8!

Oxford’s Atlas of the World — the only world atlas updated annually, guaranteeing that users will find the most current geographic information — is the most authoritative resource on the market. The Nineteenth Edition includes new census information, dozens of city maps, gorgeous satellite images of Earth, and a geographical glossary, once again offering exceptional value at a reasonable price.

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Can art forgers be artists too?

Art forgeries are often decried for crime, but could they be considered art? Many young artists learn to copy old master before refining their own work, and contemporary artists often play with ideas of authorship. So can an art forger be considered a legitimate artist? Do they want to make a statement? What motivates art forgers to commit forgery? We spoke with Jonathon Keats, author of Forged: Why Fakes are the Great Art of Our Age.

How do you view art forgers?

Click here to view the embedded video.

What provokes an art forger to commit forgery?

Click here to view the embedded video.

Jonathon Keats is a critic, journalist and artist. He is the art critic for San Francisco Magazine, and has contributed art criticism to Art & Antiques, Art + Auction, Art in America, ARTnews, Artweek, and Salon.com. His arts writing has also appeared in Wired Magazine, ForbesLife Magazine, The Washington Post, and The Christian Science Monitor. He is the author of Forged: Why Fakes are the Great Art of Our Age and Virtual Words: Language on the Edge of Science and Technology. His conceptual art has been exhibited at venues including the Berkeley Art Museum, the Hammer Museum, and the Wellcome Collection.

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A history of psycholinguistics in the pre-Chomskyan era

By Willem Levelt

How do we speak and how do we understand language? It is widely believed that the scientific study of these uniquely human abilities was launched during the 1950s with the advent of Noam Chomsky’s generative linguistics. True, modern psycholinguistics received a major impulse from this “cognitive revolution,” but the empirical study of how we speak and listen and how children acquire these amazing skills has its roots in the late 18th century. By the end of the 19th century the psychology of language was an established science and the field was booming up to World War II. Empirical psycholinguistics emerged from four roots.

The Viennese engineer Wolfgang von Kempelen spent 20 years constructing a “speaking machine”. His 1891 book contains a precise construction manual. Copies have been built and indeed, the machine can articulate complex utterances such as Leopoldus secundus. It is the first serious working model of the vocal tract. During the 19th century the study of speaking became an experimental endeavor. It became possible to exactly measure the “mental durations” involved in naming pictures, colors, or numbers. Wilhelm Wundt’s psychology laboratory in Leipzig, the first of its kind, became the cradle of experimental psycholinguistics.

Franz Joseph Gall, also in Vienna, was the first to develop serious brain anatomy during the final two decades of the 18th century. His dissection classes there and later in Paris attracted some of the best medical students. Gall proposed the theory that mental faculties such as the memory for words were localized in specific regions of the brain. The stronger such an innate ability, the larger the corresponding brain region. This idea was never entirely lost in neuroscience. Paul Broca’s advanced brain anatomy made it possible in 1865 to localize an important region involved in the production of speech in the left frontal lobe. With Carl Wernicke’s localization of a second region, involved in speech understanding, the study of language in the brain had become a mature chapter of psycholinguistics.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile of 1762 pleaded for a reform of education, a “natural” education without drill. Rousseau’s plea for the careful observation of children initiated the keeping of diaries by parents and teachers. Philosopher Dietrich Tiedemann was the first to publish a diary, in 1787. It follows his son’s development during the 30 months since his birth and includes a number of observations on Friedrich’s acquisition of speech. More diaries followed during the 19th century, but diary studies became a real boom after Darwin (1877) published his own observations on son William’s early development. Studies of language acquisition, for a variety of languages, kept appearing till the present day. They became an important database for theories of language acquisition.

Sanskrit scholar William Jones formulated the lexical affinities between Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin in his 1786 lecture for the Asian Society of Calcutta. Such affinities among Indo-European languages had been observed since medieval times, but the budding Romantic notion of evolution became the impetus of explaining these affinities from a common origin of these languages. There must have been some proto-language from which all languages in the family evolved. This raised the question of how primordial human beings began to speak such a simple proto-language. This, one realized, was a psychological issue. Ever since, the empirical study of language origins and language functions in human communication has been an important chapter of psycholinguistics. Studying the emergence of language, in particular of sign languages, is still a rich chapter of psycholinguistics.

Peace did not always reign in the community of psycholinguists. Major controversies arose around World War I. In the European tradition it had always been a matter of course that language use is a mental phenomenon. But this was anathema for emerging American behaviorism. Speech acts are mere responses to stimuli; there is no mind mediating between the two. But peace was literally and seriously disturbed during Hitler’s regime. European leaders in psycholinguistics emigrated, mostly to the United States, in two waves. First, right after Hitler came to power in 1933, almost immediately ordering the dismissal of Jewish staff at German universities. Second, after the Austrian Anschluss in 1938 and the following invasions all over the European continent. It was only after World War II that the four roots of psycholinguistics sprang to live again as an interdisciplinary theory of human communication.

Willem Levelt is the author of A History of Psycholinguistics: The Pre-Chomskyan Era. He is director emeritus of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, which he founded in 1980. He is also emeritus honorary professor of psycholinguistics at Nijmegen University. He has a PhD in psychology from Leiden University (1965), was a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard University, a visiting professor at the University of Illinois, full professor of psychology at Groningen University, member at The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (1971-1972), professor of experimental psychology at Nijmegen University and, since 1980, scientific member of the Max Planck Society. He has published widely in psychophysics, mathematical psychology and psycholinguistics. His books include On binocular rivalry(1965), Formal grammars in linguistics and psycholinguistics (3 Vols, 1974, republished in 2008) and Speaking: From intention to articulation (1989).

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Image Credits: (1) Dr. Joseph Francis Gall. Print Collection portrait file. Source: NYPL Digital Gallery

(2) Sir William Jones. Print Collection portrait file. Source: NYPL Digital Gallery

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The connection from physical to mental

By Robert Kirk

Physicalists like me think everything in the world is ultimately physical, and that the physical facts provide for all the facts, including consciousness. But how should we conceive of the link between physical and mental? It is helpful to think in terms of descriptions. Descriptions in the vocabulary of physics can specify everything physical that there will have been; and physicalism commits us to the view that truths in that vocabulary specify everything that there will have been. But those truths use a very restricted set of concepts. What about truths in terms of different conceptual schemes, for example those of other sciences such as astronomy, biology, and psychology; or of more or less unscientific specialities such as history and art; or of everyday language? Physicalists must hold that those truths are redescriptions of a reality describable in terms of the narrowly physical vocabulary: of parts or aspects of the same vast swirl of matter and energy. A pebble is an aggregate of atoms and subatomic particles; if you have the aggregate, you have the pebble. So if we say there is a pebble at a particular place and time we are redescribing what could have been specified in terms of the locations and states of particles. Similarly (we physicalists must hold) mental truths such as ‘Victoria loves Albert’ are redescriptions of parts or aspects of what could have been specified – though much less intelligibly – in terms of the locations and states of particles.

Although those points are familiar, it is not generally recognized what they imply about the physical-to-mental connection. Saying it is necessary is not enough: even dualists can accept that. One popular approach is inspired by Kripke. According to ‘a posteriori physicalism’, physical truths necessitate mental truths on account of a posteriori necessary psycho-physical identities. Unfortunately this approach doesn’t work if we take those points about redescription seriously. If mental truths are redescriptions of a reality specifiable in narrowly physical terms, then the physical truths (I regret having to use this expression) ‘logico-conceptually entail’ truths stated in terms of non-physical vocabularies: it is impossible for broadly logical and conceptual reasons that those narrowly physical statements should have been true and those non-physical statements false. Although this logico-conceptual entailment thesis allows physicalism to be only contingently true, it contrasts sharply with the usual kind of a posteriori physicalism, which is not even sufficient for physicalism (and is actually inconsistent with it if I am right).

You might object that there are no analytic connections from physical truths to truths about experiences. But semantic rules can determine that a given description specifies a certain item and also that this item qualifies for a certain redescription. That means there can be logical and conceptual links between the descriptions as wholes even if there are no analytic links.

In opposition to the Kripke-inspired a posteriori physicalism mentioned earlier, David Chalmers and Frank Jackson argue that physicalists should maintain that mental truths are derivable a priori from the totality of narrowly physical truths. That approach differs significantly from the one I recommend, and I think it too is mistaken. Physicalists must maintain that while the link from physical to mental is logico-conceptual, it is not necessarily knowable a priori.

That may strike you as paradoxical. How can phenomenal truths be logico-conceptually entailed by narrowly physical truths if not even a being with superhuman cognitive powers could infer them a priori from the latter? But logico-conceptual entailment depends solely on logico-conceptual facts, while a priori inferrability depends additionally on epistemic facts: a crucial difference. The logico-conceptual entailment thesis is compulsory for physicalists, but there are no good reasons why they should also hold that the facts about what our experiences are like can be inferred a priori from the narrowly physical facts. Indeed there are powerful reasons to the contrary, as vividly illustrated by Jackson’s famous example of Mary. You may suspect that all this only brings out an inconsistency at the heart of physicalism, but it doesn’t.

The key consideration is that any satisfactory explanation of consciousness will include an explanation of our special epistemic position with respect to our phenomenally conscious states. It is only by actually having experiences that we learn what it is like to have them; and we do that without having to know the underlying physical or functional facts. We have developed special concepts for describing experiences from our own point of view even if we are ignorant of those underlying facts; which explains a sense in which phenomenal concepts float free of physical and functional concepts. So (I argue) physicalists can consistently endorse the logico-conceptual entailment thesis while denying the a priori entailment thesis.

That conclusion depends on the controversial assumption that there can be a physicalistically acceptable explanation of consciousness. Many people are so impressed by intuitions about zombies and transposed qualia that they believe that merely physical truths cannot logico-conceptually entail phenomenal truths, in which case physicalism and functionalism are sunk for that reason alone. I think they are wrong, but I have not been attempting to defend physicalism here, only to suggest how physicalists should conceive of the relation between physical and mental truths.

Robert Kirk is emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Nottingham, where he worked for 33 years. His first degree was in classics, but he was inspired to switch to philosophy by reading Quine’s Word and Object.  Kirk’s books include Relativism and Reality: a Contemporary Introduction, Zombies and Consciousness, and his latest work: The Conceptual Link from Physical to Mental (OUP, 2013).

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Image credit: Filos segundo logo by Filosofias Filosoficas. Creative Commons License via Wikimedia Commons.

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Home clutter, confusion, and chaos

Spring cleaning is just around the corner. In this excerpt from Pursuing the Good Life (originally published on Psychology Today), the late Christopher Peterson reflects on his own clutter and the detrimental effects of clutter on people.

Don’t own so much clutter that you will be relieved to see your house catch fire. — Wendell Berry

Some time ago, I wrote a blog entry here about my tendency to accumulate books. I made the offhand comment that I am good at getting rid of stuff, except for books. I need to retract that statement, not insofar as it applies to books because I remain knee-deep in them but to other stuff. A few weeks ago, on the occasion of scheduling some home repairs, I decided to straighten up where I live so that it would be more presentable to strangers.

My straightening up shocked me because I discovered all sorts of stuff that I barely remembered having much less using: two dozen polo shirts still in their original packaging, five working telephones, two typewriters, an ironing board but no iron, and so on, and so forth. It was not as if any of this stuff had sentimental value. It had simply accumulated one item at a time over the more than two decades that I had lived in the same place. These things were tucked away in closets and cupboards and dresser drawers, although the excess of the excess also spilled out into my so-called living area. I had become so used to stepping over and around my stuff that I scarcely noticed it.

But when I paid attention, I became unhappy and realized that my home, although clean, was scarcely livable. I remembered the leave of absence I took in 2000 when I relocated to Philadelphia for a while, taking with me only what would fit in the trunk of my car. It was a productive and satisfying time for me. The work I was doing of course had a lot to do with that, but now I wonder if living in an uncluttered space and way also played a role. In Philadelphia, I could always find things. I was never late leaving my apartment. And I felt in control of my environment because I literally was.

Back to the present. Midst numerous trips to the dumpster and the Salvation Army, I happened across several research articles that confirmed my suspicions about the psychologically-damaging effects of clutter and confusion where one lives (e.g., Matheny, Wachs, Ludwig, & Phillips, 1995). This line of research studies the effects on children of living in what is termed a chaotic environment. On focus is not the interpersonal chaos that may preside in some homes; that too takes a toll. Rather, the focus is on physical settings that are noisy and disorganized. Children who live in these settings have more than their share of problems. Interestingly, one study about which I read ruled out a genetic influence on chaos and the problems it can cause (Jaffee, Hanscombe, Haworth, Davis, & Plomin, 2012). One might wonder if there is a common factor (based in genetic influences) responsible for both a chaotic home environment and troubled children, with no necessary link between them. That seems not to be the case. “Environment” has a main effect on problems.

My home is not all that noisy, and I of course am not a child, but I am willing to generalize the results because they provide practical suggestions about how all of us might live a better life. Simplify, organize, and streamline the physical environment where we live. Get rid of clutter. Minimize chaos. Reduce hubbub.

I have watched the A&E television show Hoarders often enough to know that people may strongly resist getting rid of their stuff, and I wondered if I would have the same reluctance. So I did some experimentation. After I bagged up things for the dumpster and boxed things up for the Salvation Army, I let them sit for a day or two. I monitored my reaction. I experienced no regret or remorse. Only satisfaction. So I took them out. I guess I inadvertently accumulate, but I do not obsessively hoard.

Positive psychology research tells us that materialism gets in the way of a satisfied life (Kasser, 2002). That is, the pursuit and accumulation of expensive things are barriers to living well. It also seems that the pursuit and accumulation of things per se — stuff — are also barriers.

In Pursuing the Good Life, one of the founders of positive psychology, Christopher Peterson, offers one hundred bite-sized reflections exploring the many sides of this exciting new field. With the humor, warmth, and wisdom that has made him an award-winning teacher, Peterson takes readers on a lively tour of the sunny side of the psychological street. Christopher Peterson was Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan. One of the world’s most highly cited research psychologists and a founder of the field of positive psychology, Peterson was best-known for his studies of optimism and character strengths and their relationship to psychological and physical well-being. He was a frequent blogger for Psychology Today, where many of these short essays, including this one, first appeared.

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Mothering Sunday and Mother’s Day

By Philip Carter

This Sunday, if you give (or receive) cards, flowers, and gifts for Mothering Sunday, spare a thought for Constance Adelaide Smith. In 1913 Constance read an article in a local newspaper which described plans to introduce to Britain an American ‘Mother’s Day’ celebration. The aim, as devised by the Philadelphian Anna Jarvis, was to establish a celebration to be held annually on the second Sunday in May. In the United States, Jarvis’s Mother’s Day celebration had quickly taken off, having gained congressional and presidential approval in 1908 and 1914.

In Nottingham, Constance Smith thought otherwise. While recognizing the appeal and value of a day dedicated to mothers, she sought not to encourage Anna Jarvis’s secular holiday, but to revive and promote the English practice of ‘Mothering Sunday’—a traditional feature of the early modern church calendar, but one that had fallen into neglect by the early twentieth century.

Over the next 25 years, until her death in 1938, Constance Smith dedicated herself to the observance and promotion of a Christian festival—held on the fourth Sunday of Lent (and thus falling between 1 March and 4 April)—that celebrated both the mother church and earthly mothers. In books, cards, plays, and poems Constance Smith explained the meaning of Mothering Sunday and encouraged the making and giving of traditional foods, such as simnel cakes and wafer cakes. By 1938 it was said that Mothering Sunday was celebrated in every parish across Britain and in every country of the British empire. By comparison the appeal of the American-style Mother’s Day remained limited, at least until the Second World War.

Thereafter, and due partly to the influence of US servicemen stationed in Britain in the 1940s, the practice of Mother’s Day revived and became increasingly interwoven with Mothering Sunday. Commercial pressures to give cards, flowers, and bought gifts (rather than traditional foods) has firmly established today as ‘Mother’s Day’, though in Britain its annual timing continues to be determined by the Christian calendar. Interestingly, neither Constance Smith, nor Anna Jarvis, were married or had children.

Listen to Constance Smith’s biography podcast:

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Philip Carter is Publication Editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography  is the national record of men and women who have shaped British history and culture, worldwide, from the Romans to the 21st century. In addition to 58,500 life stories, the ODNB offers a free, twice monthly biography podcast with over 175 life stories now available. You can also sign up for Life of the Day, a topical biography delivered to your inbox, or follow @odnb on Twitter for people in the news. The Oxford DNB is freely available via public libraries across the UK. Libraries offer ‘remote access’ allowing members to log-on to the complete dictionary, for free, from home (or any other computer) twenty-four hours a day.

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Six facts about physiology

The Mayo Clinic Scientific Press suite of publications is now available on Oxford Medicine Online. To highlight some of the great resources, we’ve pulled together some interesting facts about physiology from James R. Munis’s Just Enough Physiology.

(1)     In physiologic terms, we are exposed to three main sources of pressure: (1) the weight of the atmosphere; (2) hydrostatic forces exerted by the weight of body fluids; and (3) mechanical pressure generated by the heart or other muscles that contract around those fluids.

(2)     In 1978, two climbers (Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler) reached the summit of Mount Everest without using supplemental oxygen. Physiologists originally thought such a climb was impossible because a calculation of lung oxygen levels at that altitude indicated that nothing beyond basal metabolism could be supported, even with hyperventilation. Thus, a climber theoretically would not have sufficient oxygen available for the exercise that was needed to reach the summit in the first place. Messner and Habeler proved the physiologists wrong.

(3)     Transmural pressure is the pressure inside a vessel minus the pressure outside. Perfusion pressure is inlet minus outlet pressure.

(4)     Stroke volume is determined by three factors — preload, afterload, and inotropy — and these determinants are in turn dependent on how the left ventricle handles pressure.

(5)     A little more than a hundred years ago, the physiologist Ernest Starling told a story and asked a riddle: why does heart failure cause capillary edema? His audience, sheltered from a London winter inside the halls of the Royal College of Surgeons, had come to hear about heart failure. When Ernest Starling lectured, however, there was usually something remarkable to hear. The experiment that Starling highlighted was very simple. He placed a catheter into the pericardium of an anesthetized dog and slowly infused oil into it. This produced an incremental cardiac tamponade, i.e. a form of acute heart failure.

(6)     Like mammals, birds are warm-blooded animals (homeotherms). This means that they are metabolically active, even in the coldest or highest environments, and they have to maintain a constant flow of oxygen to the brain if they want to remain neurologically intact and still enjoy the view. To keep oxygen flowing at high altitudes, the bird must massively hyperventilate. One consequence of hyperventilation, though, is severe hypocapnia and respiratory alkalosis. Regardless of competing needs, though, it is still remarkable that these birds can achieve high enough oxygenation to support life (and exercise) at such extraordinary altitudes. That said, birds do have an unfair advantage over us — their lungs use a system of ventilation/perfusion matching that is more efficient than that of the mammalian to-and-fro alveolar lungs.

James R. Munis is a member of the College of Medicine at the Mayo Clinic and the author of Just Enough Physiology. Physiology is the science that is applied at the boundary between life and death; this is why it’s so important to those of us who tread that same boundary every day in the practice of anesthesiology and critical care.

The Mayo Clinic Scientific Press suite of publications is now available on Oxford Medicine Online. With full-text titles from Mayo Clinic clinicians and a bank of 3,000 multiple-choice questions, Mayo Clinic Toolkit provides a single location for residents, fellows, and practicing clinicians to undertake the self-testing necessary to prepare for, and pass, the Boards and remain up-to-date. Oxford Medicine Online is an interconnected collection of over 250 online medical resources which cover every stage in a medical career, for medical students and junior doctors, to resources for senior doctors and consultants.

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Friday procrastination: Rain on the sun edition

By Alice Northover

OUP author Jason Mittell is understandably proud of his student’s excellent video.

March Madness begins. We’ll be starting our own on the OUPblog and OxfordWords soon, but check out one for the papacy and of course .

Click here to view the embedded video.

American Revolutionary art Internet-ed.

The relationships between language and thought.

Kipling wants you to back off okay?

Philosopher Julian Baggini is burning his Britannicas.

I want to be Belle da Costa Greene.

#bbpBox_309643816212758528 a { text-decoration:none; color:#0084B4; }#bbpBox_309643816212758528 a:hover { text-decoration:underline; }Check it out! - 11,000 pics of decorated medieval books under Creative Commons license. (collections KB & Meermanno). http://t.co/jpPiK6nxkLMarch 7, 2013 7:36 am via Safari on iOS Reply Retweet Favorite Erik Kwakkel

I’m changing the way I walk to work to catch Bergdorf Goodman’s Literary Windows.

The Chicago History Museum is on Tumblr and our author Lydia Carr works there.

Breakfast reveals your true character. (So what does Bagel Fridays reveal about our New York office workers?)

University of Iowa’s medieval manuscripts are in the public domain.

The fight to save Iraq’s National Library.

Lady detectives of the 1940s + music = awesome.

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Why are Mexicans leaving farm work, and what does this mean for US farmers?

By J. Edward Taylor and Diane Charlton

The Findings

Agriculture in North America traditionally has had its comparative advantage in having access to abundant low-skilled labor from Mexico. Around 70% of the United States hired farm workforce is Mexico-born, according to the National Agricultural Worker Survey (NAWS). Fruit, vegetable, and horticultural farms in the US have enjoyed an extended period of farm labor abundance with stable or decreasing real wages. However, new panel data reveal a declining long-term trend in the farm labor supply in rural Mexico. In coming years, US farmers will need to offer higher wages to induce new workers to migrate northward to US farm jobs.

The Evidence

Migration within Mexico and to the US increased in the years prior to the recession; however, with the onset of the recession there was a sharp decrease in migration to the US (see Figure 1). The combined shares of the workforce migrating to agriculture either within Mexico or to the US decreased between 2007 and 2010. In contrast, the percentage of the workforce working in the Mexican non-farmwork sector grew steadily.

Figure 1. Number of workers that migrate to each sector by survey round. Taylor, J.E., D. Charlton, and A. Yúnez-Naude. 2012. “The End of Farm Labor Abundance.” Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy. 34(4):587-98.

Mexico is following the pattern of countries around the world: as its income rises, workers shift out of farm work into other sectors. Mexico’s per-capita income, adjusted for the cost of living, now exceeds $15,000 per year. Growth in Mexico’s non-agricultural employment began before the recession and persists now. As non-farm opportunities increase, the Mexican workforce will continue moving out of agriculture.

Why do we see decreases in the supply of Mexican farm labor?

The received wisdom in development economics is that the domestic supply of agricultural labor starts out being relatively elastic (i.e., abundant), but the farm labor supply shifts inward and becomes less elastic as countries’ per-capita incomes increase and people shift from farm to nonfarm jobs. In order to induce domestic workers to supply their labor to farm jobs, agricultural wages must rise apace with nonagricultural wages. This is all the more true if non-farm jobs bring non-pecuniary benefits compared to farm jobs and/or workers associate farm jobs with drudgery.

Tighter border enforcement and drug-related violence along the border may deter migration, but our analysis suggests that for US agriculture their main effect is largely secondary, reinforcing a negative trend in rural Mexicans’ willingness to do farmwork. For example, after the “great recession” in 2008, the share of Mexican immigrants working in agriculture decreased more than the share working in non-agriculture. The recession had a large negative impact on construction and service jobs in the non-farm sector while labor demand in the farm sector remained steady and commodity prices rose. If unemployed workers in the non-farm sector sought jobs on US farms during the recession, then one might expect the supply of agricultural labor to increase. Data show that some immigrants did shift from non-farm to farm work after the recession, but more shifted from farm to non-farm in the US. If the decrease in immigration in recent years were the result of increases in border patrol or drug-related violence, then the decrease in farm labor supply should be similar to the decrease in non-farm labor supply, but the data show the opposite.

US agriculture appears to be doubly adversely affected by the decline in the supply of immigrant labor and a shift in the Mexican labor supply away from farmwork.

Implications for US agriculture

A declining farm labor supply in rural Mexico and competition from Mexico’s farmers combine to raise the reservation wage of migrating to the United States—that is, the minimum US farm wage needed to induce new workers to migrate northward to farm jobs. US growers must look for substitute inputs to agricultural production as the supply of agricultural workers is declines.

Potential solutions for US farmers

One solution is to seek migrant workers from other countries with lower reservation wages. However, the US-Mexico situation is unique, with two countries at vastly different levels of income sharing a common border. Central American countries are small compared to Mexico and they too are changing. The cost of importing low-skilled labor increases progressively as one looks farther afield, say, to Asia. Consequently, importing agricultural labor into the US from more distant countries does not appear plausible.

Another solution is to invest in labor-saving agricultural technologies and transition away from labor-intensive crops. Under this scenario, capital improvements in farm production will increase the marginal product of farm labor, and US farms will change their labor-management practices, hiring fewer workers at higher wages. In the years 2007-2009, 23% of US farmworker families had income below the poverty line (Martin, 2012). Improvements in agricultural production technology are a necessary input to increase farm wages, allowing farmworker families to rise above the poverty line. Simultaneously, rising farm wages create an incentive for farmers to make the necessary investments to raise farmworker productivity.

J. Edward Taylor and Diane Charlton are the authors of “The End of Farm Labor Abundance” in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, which is available to read for free for a limited time. Edward Taylor is Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Director of the Center on Rural Economies of the Americas and Pacific Rim (REAP) at the University of California, Davis, where he teaches courses on international development economics and econometric methods. He is also co-editor of the American Journal of Agricultural Economics and founder of the alternative textbook initiative, RebelText.org. Taylor has written extensively on the economy-wide impacts of agricultural and development policies and on immigration.  He co-authored Village Economies: The Design, Estimation and Use of Villagewide Economic Models (Cambridge University Press) and Worlds in Motion: Understanding  International Migration at the End of the Millenium (Oxford University Press). He is listed in Who’s Who in Economics and has advised a number of foreign governments and international development agencies on matters related to economic development. Diane Charlton is a PhD student in Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of California, Davis. Her areas of focus are agriculture and international development.

Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy aims to present high-quality research in a forum that is informative to a broad audience of agricultural and applied economists, including those both inside and outside academia, and those who are not specialists in the subject matter of the articles. In addition, AEPP publishes specially-commissioned featured articles focusing on the synthesis and integration of applied research and on future research agendas.

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