Innovative Minds Don’t Think Alike

By JANET RAE-DUPREE

IT’S a pickle of a paradox: As our knowledge and expertise increase, our creativity and ability to innovate tend to taper off. Why? Because the walls of the proverbial box in which we think are thickening along with our experience.

Andrew S. Grove, the co-founder of Intel, put it well in 2005 when he told an interviewer from Fortune, “When everybody knows that something is so, it means that nobody knows nothin’.” In other words, it becomes nearly impossible to look beyond what you know and think outside the box you’ve built around yourself.

This so-called curse of knowledge, a phrase used in a 1989 paper in The Journal of Political Economy, means that once you’ve become an expert in a particular subject, it’s hard to imagine not knowing what you do. Your conversations with others in the field are peppered with catch phrases and jargon that are foreign to the uninitiated. When it’s time to accomplish a task — open a store, build a house, buy new cash registers, sell insurance — those in the know get it done the way it has always been done, stifling innovation as they barrel along the well-worn path.

Elizabeth Newton, a psychologist, conducted an experiment on the curse of knowledge while working on her doctorate at Stanford in 1990. She gave one set of people, called “tappers,” a list of commonly known songs from which to choose. Their task was to rap their knuckles on a tabletop to the rhythm of the chosen tune as they thought about it in their heads. A second set of people, called “listeners,” were asked to name the songs.

Before the experiment began, the tappers were asked how often they believed that the listeners would name the songs correctly. On average, tappers expected listeners to get it right about half the time. In the end, however, listeners guessed only 3 of 120 songs tapped out, or 2.5 percent.

The tappers were astounded. The song was so clear in their minds; how could the listeners not “hear” it in their taps?

That’s a common reaction when experts set out to share their ideas in the business world, too, says Chip Heath, who with his brother, Dan, was a co-author of the 2007 book “Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.” It’s why engineers design products ultimately useful only to other engineers. It’s why managers have trouble convincing the rank and file to adopt new processes. And it’s why the advertising world struggles to convey commercial messages to consumers.

“I HAVE a DVD remote control with 52 buttons on it, and every one of them is there because some engineer along the line knew how to use that button and believed I would want to use it, too,” Mr. Heath says. “People who design products are experts cursed by their knowledge, and they can’t imagine what it’s like to be as ignorant as the rest of us.”

But there are proven ways to exorcise the curse.

In their book, the Heath brothers outline six “hooks” that they say are guaranteed to communicate a new idea clearly by transforming it into what they call a Simple Unexpected Concrete Credentialed Emotional Story. Each of the letters in the resulting acronym, Succes, refers to a different hook. (“S,” for example, suggests simplifying the message.) Although the hooks of “Made to Stick” focus on the art of communication, there are ways to fashion them around fostering innovation.

To innovate, Mr. Heath says, you have to bring together people with a variety of skills. If those people can’t communicate clearly with one another, innovation gets bogged down in the abstract language of specialization and expertise. “It’s kind of like the ugly American tourist trying to get across an idea in another country by speaking English slowly and more loudly,” he says. “You’ve got to find the common connections.”

In her 2006 book, “Innovation Killer: How What We Know Limits What We Can Imagine — and What Smart Companies Are Doing About It,” Cynthia Barton Rabe proposes bringing in outsiders whom she calls zero-gravity thinkers to keep creativity and innovation on track.

When experts have to slow down and go back to basics to bring an outsider up to speed, she says, “it forces them to look at their world differently and, as a result, they come up with new solutions to old problems.”

She cites as an example the work of a colleague at Ralston Purina who moved to Eveready in the mid-1980s when Ralston bought that company. At the time, Eveready had become a household name because of its sales since the 1950s of inexpensive red plastic and metal flashlights. But by the mid-1980s, the flashlight business, which had been aimed solely at men shopping at hardware stores, was foundering.

While Ms. Rabe’s colleague had no experience with flashlights, she did have plenty of experience in consumer packaging and marketing from her years at Ralston Purina. She proceeded to revamp the flashlight product line to include colors like pink, baby blue and light green — colors that would appeal to women — and began distributing them through grocery store chains.

“It was not incredibly popular as a decision amongst the old guard at Eveready,” Ms. Rabe says. But after the changes, she says, “the flashlight business took off and was wildly successful for many years after that.”

MS. RABE herself experienced similar problems while working as a transient “zero-gravity thinker” at Intel.

“I would ask my very, very basic questions,” she said, noting that it frustrated some of the people who didn’t know her. Once they got past that point, however, “it always turned out that we could come up with some terrific ideas,” she said.

While Ms. Rabe usually worked inside the companies she discussed in her book, she said outside consultants could also serve the zero-gravity role, but only if their expertise was not identical to that of the group already working on the project.

“Look for people with renaissance-thinker tendencies, who’ve done work in a related area but not in your specific field,” she says. “Make it possible for someone who doesn’t report directly to that area to come in and say the emperor has no clothes.”

Janet Rae-Dupree writes about science and emerging technology in Silicon Valley.

Intelligence Redefined: Are You A Gifted Person?

For a long time the meaning of giftedness has been restricted to the rigid confines of achievement and accomplishment. Academic toppers are, and should be entitled to their share of glory, but in the process of lauding top scorers and scholarship winners we may be crowding out those who actually have advanced and complex patterns of development but just don’t fit the system’s definition of ‘top students’.

Characteristics of gifted individuals: If 75 per cent of the following 37 characteristics fit you, you are probably a gifted adult.
Are you a good problem solver?
Can you concentrate for long periods of time?
Are you a perfectionist?
Do you persevere with your interests?
Are you an avid reader?
Do you have a vivid imagination?
Do you enjoy doing jigsaw puzzles?
Often connect seemingly unrelated ideas?
Do you enjoy paradoxes?
Do you set high standards for yourself?
Do you have a good long-term memory?
Are you deeply compassionate?
Do you have persistent curiosity?
Do you have a good sense of humor?

Read

Are you a keen observer?
Do you love mathematics?
Do you need periods of contemplation?
Do you search for meaning in your life?
Are you aware of things that others are not?
Are you fascinated by words?
Are you highly sensitive?
Do you have strong moral convictions?
Do you often feel out-of-sync with others?
Are you perceptive or insightful?
Do you often question rules or authority?
Do you have organized collections?
Do you thrive on challenge?
Do you have extraordinary abilities and deficits?
Do you learn new things rapidly?
Feel overwhelmed by many interests/abilities?
Do you have a great deal of energy?
Often take a stand against injustice?
Do you feel driven by your creativity?
Love ideas and ardent discussion?
Did you have developmentally advanced childhood?
Have unusual ideas or perceptions?
Are you a complex person?
*Adapted from the Institute for the Study of Advanced Development.

One way to identify gifted individuals is their style of thinking. They usually employ divergent thinking. Their style is original and they tend to come up with crazy ideas, which other people find strange. But sometimes it is these crazy ideas that go on to become the most recognized ones of our time.

Gifted individuals face many challenges, with one of biggest being the inability to be correctly identified by the individuals who should be helping them realize their true potential.

As with any other student, it would be a shame if parents, teachers and peers did not recognize the strengths of gifted students and allow them to reach their true potential. But what must educators and parents do in order to make sure this does not happen?

However until more help is readily available, what are the gifted to do?

Sadly, not enough is known about giftedness. More time and energy need to be spent identifying traits among the gifted, especially since it is these students who go on to contribute much to improving the state of our world.

Acknowledge the possibilities, identify your capabilities and allow yourself to be different. You never know, you may be the next Einstein.

from link.

See how Mary, Joseph and their donkey did it

Help with Windows Movie Maker

If you are facing problems with WMM, that post if for you!
The following links will teach you the basis of WMM and more.
Good luck!

Official Web site
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/moviemaker/default.mspx

Video Tutorial
http://movies.atomiclearning.com/k12/moviemaker2/

Blackmail: The Solution

I have thought that the predominance in the minds of moralists
of a desire to edify has impeded the real progress of ethical
science: and that this would be benefited by an application to
it of the same disinterested curiosity to which we chiefly owe
the great discoveries of physics.

Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics

The topic of blackmail brings up central topics in novel ways:
the permissibility of threats and offers, the relations between
morality and the law, the role of concern for consequences and
for non-consequentialist ethical considerations, and the limits
of freedom. The paradoxicality of blackmail has been recognized
for a long time, and unlike the other essays this one does not offer
a new paradox. It aims to offer a solution. “With a solution like
this, who needs problems?” it might be thought, as the solution
is itself paradoxical. But first we need to understand what blackmail
is, and what its paradoxes are.
The notion of blackmail is sometimes applied loosely, its users
merely relying rhetorically on its strong pejorative implication.
I shall here consider it in a narrower and more exact sense which
includes the following features: (a) a declaration of intention to
act (or to refrain from acting) in a way concerning which one
has no obligations, that is otherwise legally permissible, and that
the blackmailer believes his or her target would find unwelcome;
and (b) an accompanying offer not to carry out the intention on
condition of the blackmailer’s receiving compensation that is
otherwise legally permissible. Let us call this “ordinary blackmail.”
The paradigmatic example is Q’s threatening to tell Z’s wife
about Z’s involvement with another woman, unless Z pays him
a large sum of money. It is legal to ask for money, and likewise
it is legal to tell (or even to threaten to tell) another person’s wife
about her husband’s infidelity. The ethical issues here are less clear.
Note only that none of the separate components of “ordinary
blackmail” is normally thought to be morally odious in a way
that can account for the common attitude towards blackmail.
Something strange is going on here.
Blackmail differs from “extortion,” a coercive request accompanied
by a threat to perform an illegal action (for example, to
use violence against someone). Blackmail is also distinct from
the threat to spread damaging false information, which might
involve the idea of “defamation.” “Ordinary blackmail” excludes
cases in which the blackmailer’s advantage comes about illicitly
(say, through wire-tapping). Requests by blackmailers to be paid
in unacceptable “currency” (for example, that the person being
blackmailed perform an immoral or illegal act) also lie outside of
blackmail in the sense that concerns us. These different cases bring
up various other issues that would hamper our effort to consider
the difficulties inherent in “ordinary blackmail.” We want
to think about the pure case.
Finally, the narrow notion of blackmail that we are considering
is not limited to threatening with information (as in Q’s
blackmailing Z). If, for example, you asked all shops of a certain
kind to pay you a monthly sum for not carrying out the credible
threat of opening a competing shop nearby, thereby running
them out of business, problems may arise that fall within our
area of concern (see Smilansky 1995a). In fact, there is reason
for thinking that this may in fact be worse, in one respect, than
ordinary blackmail, since here the victim is entirely innocent,
whereas in ordinary blackmail the victim has often done something
wrong or at least shameful, so that he has a weaker claim
to immunity. But we shall focus on the ordinary cases.
The idea of “ordinary blackmail” gives rise to two apparent
paradoxes, one of which is conceptual, the other substantive.

The Conceptual Paradox of Blackmail

If each of the components of the common sort of blackmail (the
asking for payment, the threat to do what one is otherwise
permitted to do, and the carrying out – or not – of the threat)
is in itself permissible, what is the source of our powerful objection
to blackmail? Why do these innocuous things become so
bad when brought together? Understanding common attitudes
towards extortion presents no similar difficulties for, if one is
not allowed to inflict violence on others, then one is not allowed
to threaten to do so, let alone to demand payment for desisting.
The contrast between blackmail and extortion thus also helps
to highlight the question that surrounds the negative attitude
towards blackmail.
Michael Clark (1994) has countered that the request for money
in “ordinary blackmail” is backed up by a threat, that this combination
brings forth something new, and that that new thing
is what’s problematic about blackmail. Thus there is nothing
paradoxical about the fact that, in themselves, the elements that
make up the practice of blackmail are permissible. And indeed
there are other similar practices (bigamy or prostitution come to
mind) that are morally problematic although their components
are not. The ethical significance of combined acts may hence
transcend the significance of their individual elements. If, then,
the first paradox is taken as formal, we can dismiss it. By pointing
this out, Clark might be said to have solved the conceptual
paradox.
However, the way in which the “alchemy” of the novel emergence
of badness or wrongness operates in “ordinary blackmail”
remains mysterious, and separately noting the innocuous nature
of each of the elements of “ordinary blackmail” helps to bring this
out. If one may threaten to do what one is (otherwise) allowed to
do, offering not to so act in return for monetary compensation
does not seem capable of bringing forth the sense of radical and
novel heinousness that blackmail arouses. Our dissatisfaction
with any quick dismissal of the paradoxicality of blackmail increases
when we reflect on other factors. The person being blackmailed,
Z, would in fact often prefer to be offered the option
of paying the blackmailer, and would often take up the option if
it was offered. In and of itself, Z would not welcome allowing
the would-be blackmailer to sell news of the affair to the press.
But since selling news is permissible, Z would wish to allow the
blackmailer to sell his or her silence to Z as well. Such concerns
are substantive, and they point us in the direction of the second
paradox.

The Substantive Paradox

The main philosophical difficulty with blackmail follows from
the apparent similarity between typical cases of “ordinary blackmail”
such as Q’s blackmailing Z, and common practices in social
and economic life that morality does not take to be extremely
reprehensible and that the law does not prohibit. In what
follows I will call them the “Other Social Practices.” In many
labor disputes, for example, workers legally threaten to cease
work in order to gain higher salaries. Employers similarly threaten
to close down operations or to hire other workers if their demands
are not accepted. In divorce cases each partner can threaten
to prolong the proceedings if the settlement does not go his or
her way. Boycotts of goods or services may be threatened in
order to back up various sorts of demands. Victims of inadequately
tested products may threaten to sue companies under
tort law, thereby bringing adverse publicity to the producers,
unless compensation is forthcoming. Politicians indirectly threaten
to cut funds for groups who do not support them. Many instances
of raising prices of scarce goods or services are in effect
monetary demands backed up by threats. All of these common
practices contain the same two features I distinguished for
“ordinary blackmail.” Why, then, do we consider them to be
fundamentally different from blackmail when we take up a moral
point of view?
One way of approaching the philosophical difficulty of blackmail
is to assume that common intuitions are correct. Under
this interpretation the puzzle becomes merely one of how to
justify the status quo. Even then we still have our philosophical
work cut out. A true philosophical attitude, however, will question
more deeply whether common intuitions are justified at all.
One of the effects of thinking about the Substantive Paradox
is that we call into question basic assumptions about rights and
about moral limits. The consequences of the Substantive Paradox
threaten to spread in both directions. We may come to feel
that we need to take a more tolerant moral stance towards
“ordinary blackmail,” perhaps by decriminalizing it (see Mack
1982). Alternatively, we may see the common practices that
resemble blackmail as being morally equivalent to blackmail,
and therefore less tolerable morally and legally. In either case,
the prospect is disconcerting.
Several attempts to solve the Substantive Paradox have
appeared in the literature. First, we can explain common attitudes
cynically. One such explanation is that being blackmailed in the
ordinary ways is frightening only to the rich and powerful, while
threats from employers or politicians would rarely concern them.
That people with money and power take “ordinary blackmail”
but not the Other Social Practices seriously is therefore hardly
surprising. But the cynical sort of explanation does not seem to
explain the strength of the common attitude toward “ordinary
blackmail,” let alone justify it. If you learned that your brother
or sister was seriously dating a person who had been engaged
in “ordinary blackmail,” you would be upset. This doesn’t seem
to be explained as a result of your being in the grip of “false
consciousness” induced by the manipulations of the rich.
Second, we may concede that, in moral terms, the similarity
between “ordinary blackmail” and the social practices is great,
but we may still believe that the distinction commonly made
between them is legally justified. This tack would explain away
the paradox. For example, difficulties with enforcement may
justify why legal attitudes towards the Other Social Practices and
“ordinary blackmail” should be different, although there may
be no deep moral differences between them (see, e.g., Feinberg
1988; Gorr 1992).
This approach is problematic. Although the issue of blackmail
involves both moral and legal matters, we can confine the case
for the existence of a paradox to the moral side. Even if society
didn’t legally sanction blackmail, it would be hard to deny that
we hold blackmailers to be morally despicable. We don’t usually
express such a severe negative attitude toward those who engage
in sharp economic bargaining. Even our strictly ethical intuitions
tolerate practices that, on closer inspection, may seem difficult
to distinguish from “ordinary blackmail.” So the moral/legal
divide is not a solution to the moral paradox. Moreover, we would
pay a high price if we argued for a firm distinction between the
moral and the legal issues. A huge gap between the two, in a
context such as this, would in itself be a surprising and disturbing
result. Finally, the moral and the legal seem particularly
intertwined in the matter of blackmail: ethical disapproval is a
central reason that our laws circumscribe blackmail.
A third way in which philosophers and jurists have tried
to deal with the Substantive Paradox is by seeking to identify a
feature of “ordinary blackmail” that distinguishes it ethically from
those acceptable social practices that seem so similar. This route
is the most alluring, because it would defuse the Substantive Paradox:
once we look closely, “ordinary blackmail” and the Other
Social Practices turn out to be substantially different. However,
such a litmus test has not proved easy to formulate. Among
other candidates philosophers and legal thinkers have considered
coerced versus uncoerced choices, the invasion of privacy,
the rights of third parties, the exploitation of an opponent’s
weaknesses, and the distinction between harming and not benefiting
(see, e.g., Murphy 1980; Lindgren 1984; Fletcher 1993).
The specific discussions are complex and intriguing, but they
have not been manifestly successful. The suggestions offered seem
to succeed only in limited types of cases, or to beg the question
by making crucial moral assumptions as to what is morally
disallowed – assumptions that the issue of blackmail shows to
be contentious. For example, the “gutter press” may invade a
person’s privacy and exploit her weaknesses in order to make
money just as a blackmailer does. A neighbor may threaten to
put up that second story he has permission to build, thereby
blocking one’s view, unless one gives way on some land dispute.
This would seem to be an instance of coerced choice and of the
threat of outright harm. Yet few of us view such practices in the
same way as we view “ordinary blackmail.”
None of the above ways seem to succeed in resolving the
Substantive Paradox. We have a strong intuition that blackmail
is no ordinary matter, but a particularly loathsome pursuit, morally
odious to a high degree and deserving of severe criminal and
social sanction. Yet no one has so far been able to point out
anything special about blackmail that justifies these intuitions.
Something else seems to be going on here that provides
a “solution.” But this solution itself is paradoxical. We don’t
single out “ordinary blackmail” because its bad features are unique
but because there is nothing good about it to overcome the badness.
My conclusion is that at the end of the day, “ordinary blackmail”
and the practices I have discussed may not inherently be
very different ethically. There may merely be further reasons for
allowing the other practices to continue. Our intuitive sense –
that something unique must be present in blackmail, to make it
so manifestly vile – is a mistake. Unless we find a different
explanation of the status of blackmail, we need to live with this
“deflationary” conclusion, namely, that there is nothing especially
negative about blackmail.
Approaches from the standpoint of rights-oriented, contractual,
and virtue-based ethics may all be able to contribute here,
but utilitarianism (or more broadly consequentialism, a concern
for consequences not necessarily related to utility) seems to
acquire a particular authority in justifying the common practices.
The nastiness of using information might actually be increased
when such information appears in the gutter press, but
other good reasons for maintaining a free press outweigh this.
Using “quasi-blackmail” to threaten and to offer advantages in
economic bargaining may likewise be justified because of its
economic efficiency or by virtue of the importance of the right
both to offer and to withhold one’s labor or employment to
others. But “ordinary blackmail” offers no equivalent saving
graces.
Decriminalizing “ordinary blackmail” would cause widespread
social harm. Some good might emerge (certain people may refrain
from wrongdoing because of the additional risk of being blackmailed),
but this would be negligible as compared to the damage.
The opening up of this new business opportunity, with the
disappearance or decline of the major current disincentives for
blackmail (the legal and moral sanctions), would mean that,
overall, people would be likely to face much more blackmail.
Although one may prefer to be able to buy off one’s blackmailer
if such a blackmailer were to exist, overall it would be better to
have as few blackmailers as possible. As invasion into one’s private
sphere becomes commercially viable, fear for individual
privacy would intensify. This would not be limited to public
figures, but potentially threaten everyone. And it would typically
be repetitive (that is, one would need to buy silence again and
again, perhaps from more than one source, and with no guarantee
that the matter would be favorably concluded). An atmosphere
would prevail in which each person, no matter how intimate or
how foreign, could constitute a potential enemy: Hobbes’s “war
of all against all.” And all to what purpose?
“Ordinary blackmail” is coercive, hurtful, demeaning, exploitative,
parasitical, and invasive, as are many other social practices.
There is nothing especially bad about it. Paradoxically, what
singles it out is that little or no good derives from it.

by Saul Smilansky - 10 Moral Paradoxes

22 Peculiar Names for Groups of Animals

Have you ever heard the expression, "a gaggle of geese?" These names for groups of animals are pretty peculiar, too.

1. A shrewdness of apes
2. A battery of barracudas
3. A kaleidoscope of butterflies
4. A quiver of cobras
5. A murder of crows
6. A convocation of eagles
7. A charm of finches
8. A skulk of foxes
9. A troubling of goldfish
10. A smack of jellyfish
11. A mob of kangaroos
12. An exaltation of larks
13. A troop of monkeys
14. A parliament of owls
15. An ostentation of peacocks
16. A rookery of penguins
17. A prickle of porcupines
18. An unkindness of ravens
19. A shiver of sharks
20. A pod of whales
21. A descent of woodpeckers
22. A zeal of zebras

The Truth About Homework

Needless Assignments Persist Because of Widespread Misconceptions About Learning

By Alfie Kohn

There’s something perversely fascinating about educational policies that are clearly at odds with the available data. Huge schools are still being built even though we know that students tend to fare better in smaller places that lend themselves to the creation of democratic caring communities. Many children who are failed by the academic status quo are forced to repeat a grade even though research shows that this is just about the worst course of action for them. Homework continues to be assigned – in ever greater quantities – despite the absence of evidence that it’s necessary or even helpful in most cases.

The dimensions of that last disparity weren’t clear to me until I began sifting through the research for a new book. To begin with, I discovered that decades of investigation have failed to turn up any evidence that homework is beneficial for students in elementary school. Even if you regard standardized test results as a useful measure, homework (some versus none, or more versus less) isn’t even correlated with higher scores at these ages. The only effect that does show up is more negative attitudes on the part of students who get more assignments.

In high school, some studies do find a correlation between homework and test scores (or grades), but it’s usually fairly small and it has a tendency to disappear when more sophisticated statistical controls are applied. Moreover, there’s no evidence that higher achievement is due to the homework even when an association does appear. It isn’t hard to think of other explanations for why successful students might be in classrooms where more homework is assigned – or why they might spend more time on it than their peers do.

The results of national and international exams raise further doubts. One of many examples is an analysis of 1994 and 1999 Trends in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) data from 50 countries. Researchers David Baker and Gerald Letendre were scarcely able to conceal their surprise when they published their results last year: “Not only did we fail to find any positive relationships,” but “the overall correlations between national average student achievement and national averages in [amount of homework assigned] are all negative.”

Finally, there isn’t a shred of evidence to support the widely accepted assumption that homework yields nonacademic benefits for students of any age. The idea that homework teaches good work habits or develops positive character traits (such as self-discipline and independence) could be described as an urban myth except for the fact that it’s taken seriously in suburban and rural areas, too.

In short, regardless of one’s criteria, there is no reason to think that most students would be at any sort of disadvantage if homework were sharply reduced or even eliminated. Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of American schools – elementary and secondary, public and private – continue to require their students to work a second shift by bringing academic assignments home. Not only is this requirement accepted uncritically, but the amount of homework is growing, particularly in the early grades. A large, long-term national survey found that the proportion of six- to-eight-year-old children who reported having homework on a given day had climbed from 34 percent in 1981 to 58 percent in 1997 – and the weekly time spent studying at home more than doubled.

Sandra Hofferth of the University of Maryland, one of the authors of that study, has just released an update based on 2002 data. Now the proportion of young children who had homework on a specific day jumped to 64 percent, and the amount of time they spent on it climbed by another third. The irony here is painful because with younger children the evidence to justify homework isn’t merely dubious – it’s nonexistent.

*

So why do we do something where the cons (stress, frustration, family conflict, loss of time for other activities, a possible diminution of interest in learning) so clearly outweigh the pros? Possible reasons include a lack of respect for research, a lack of respect for children (implicit in a determination to keep them busy after school), a reluctance to question existing practices, and the top-down pressures to teach more stuff faster in order to pump up test scores so we can chant “We’re number one!”

All these explanations are plausible, but I think there’s also something else responsible for our continuing to feed children this latter-day cod-liver oil. Because many of us believe it’s just common sense that homework would provide academic benefits, we tend to shrug off the failure to find any such benefits. In turn, our belief that homework ought to help is based on some fundamental misunderstandings about learning.

Consider the assumption that homework should be beneficial just because it gives students more time to master a topic or skill. (Plenty of pundits rely on this premise when they call for extending the school day or year. Indeed, homework can be seen as a way of prolonging the school day on the cheap.) Unfortunately, this reasoning turns out to be woefully simplistic. Back “when experimental psychologists mainly studied words and nonsense syllables, it was thought that learning inevitably depended upon time,” reading researcher Richard C. Anderson and his colleagues explain. But “subsequent research suggests that this belief is false.”

The statement “People need time to learn things” is true, of course, but it doesn’t tell us much of practical value. On the other hand, the assertion “More time usually leads to better learning” is considerably more interesting. It’s also demonstrably untrue, however, because there are enough cases where more time doesn’t lead to better learning.

In fact, more hours are least likely to produce better outcomes when understanding or creativity is involved. Anderson and his associates found that when children are taught to read by focusing on the meaning of the text (rather than primarily on phonetic skills), their learning does “not depend on amount of instructional time.” In math, too, as another group of researchers discovered, time on task is directly correlated to achievement only if both the activity and the outcome measure are focused on rote recall as opposed to problem solving.

Carole Ames of Michigan State University points out that it isn’t “quantitative changes in behavior” – such as requiring students to spend more hours in front of books or worksheets – that help children learn better. Rather, it’s “qualitative changes in the ways students view themselves in relation to the task, engage in the process of learning, and then respond to the learning activities and situation.” In turn, these attitudes and responses emerge from the way teachers think about learning and, as a result, how they organize their classrooms. Assigning homework is unlikely to have a positive effect on any of these variables. We might say that education is less about how much the teacher covers than about what students can be helped to discover – and more time won’t help to bring about that shift.

Alongside an overemphasis on time is the widely held belief that homework “reinforces” the skills that students have learned – or, rather, have been taught -- in class. But what exactly does this mean? It wouldn’t make sense to say “Keep practicing until you understand” because practicing doesn’t create understanding – just as giving kids a deadline doesn’t teach time-management skills. What might make sense is to say “Keep practicing until what you’re doing becomes automatic.” But what kinds of proficiencies lend themselves to this sort of improvement?

The answer is behavioral responses. Expertise in tennis requires lots of practice; it’s hard to improve your swing without spending a lot of time on the court. But to cite an example like that to justify homework is an example of what philosophers call begging the question. It assumes precisely what has to be proved, which is that intellectual pursuits are like tennis.

The assumption that they are analogous derives from behaviorism, which is the source of the verb “reinforce” as well as the basis of an attenuated view of learning. In the 1920s and ‘30s, when John B. Watson was formulating his theory that would come to dominate education, a much less famous researcher named William Brownell was challenging the drill-and-practice approach to mathematics that had already taken root. “If one is to be successful in quantitative thinking, one needs a fund of meanings, not a myriad of ‘automatic responses,’” he wrote. “Drill does not develop meanings. Repetition does not lead to understandings.” In fact, if “arithmetic becomes meaningful, it becomes so in spite of drill.”

Brownell’s insights have been enriched by a long line of research demonstrating that the behaviorist model is, if you’ll excuse the expression, deeply superficial. People spend their lives actively constructing theories about how the world works, and then reconstructing them in light of new evidence. Lots of practice can help some students get better at remembering an answer, but not to get better at – or even accustomed to -- thinking. And even when they do acquire an academic skill through practice, the way they acquire it should give us pause. As psychologist Ellen Langer has shown, “When we drill ourselves in a certain skill so that it becomes second nature,” we may come to perform that skill “mindlessly,” locking us into patterns and procedures that are less than ideal.

But even if practice is sometimes useful, we’re not entitled to conclude that homework of this type works for most students. It isn’t of any use for those who don’t understand what they’re doing. Such homework makes them feel stupid; gets them accustomed to doing things the wrong way (because what’s really “reinforced” are mistaken assumptions); and teaches them to conceal what they don’t know. At the same time, other students in the same class already have the skill down cold, so further practice for them is a waste of time. You’ve got some kids, then, who don’t need the practice and others who can’t use it.

Furthermore, even if practice was helpful for most students, that doesn’t mean they need to do it at home. In my research I found a number of superb teachers (at different grade levels and with diverse instructional styles) who rarely, if ever, found it necessary to assign homework. Some not only didn’t feel a need to make students read, write, or do math at home; they preferred to have students do these things during class where it was possible to observe, guide, and discuss.

Finally, any theoretical benefit of practice homework must be weighed against the effect it has on students’ interest in learning. If slogging through worksheets dampens one’s desire to read or think, surely that wouldn’t be worth an incremental improvement in skills. And when an activity feels like drudgery, the quality of learning tends to suffer, too. That so many children regard homework as something to finish as quickly as possible – or even as a significant source of stress -- helps to explain why it appears not to offer any academic advantage even for those who obediently sit down and complete the tasks they’ve been assigned. All that research showing little value to homework may not be so surprising after all.

Supporters of homework rarely look at things from the student’s point of view, though; instead, kids are regarded as inert objects to be acted on: Make them practice and they’ll get better. My argument isn’t just that this viewpoint is disrespectful, or that it’s a residue of an outdated stimulus-response psychology. I’m also suggesting it’s counterproductive. Children cannot be made to acquire skills. They aren’t vending machines such that we put in more homework and get out more learning.

But just such misconceptions are pervasive in all sorts of neighborhoods, and they’re held by parents, teachers, and researchers alike. It’s these beliefs that make it so hard even to question the policy of assigning regular homework. We can be shown the paucity of supporting evidence and it won’t have any impact if we’re wedded to folk wisdom (“practice makes perfect”; more time equals better results).

On the other hand, the more we learn about learning, the more willing we may be to challenge the idea that homework has to be part of schooling.

The Luxury Con… Be Boring to Succeed

We get asked about luxury in China a lot. Luxury fascinates, just thinking or writing about it, people seem to enjoy the proximity to all it tries to represent – wealth, class and status. For ages, we’ve argued that the luxury business in China is largely a smoke and mirrors act. Let us qualify that – there are certainly good markets in luxury cars and watches, but the clothing and accessories (bags, etc.) market is way overstated. We’ve explained before how luxury brands appear larger than they really are by negotiating cheap (or no) rents, carry low or last seasons stock and refuse to announce Mainland China numbers. Still, it seems many people ‘need’ to believe in luxury China. So we were interested to read Dana Thomas’s excellent new book Deluxe: How Luxury Lost its Lustre, which counters the statistics-free, hype-filled luxury booster books and reports that have appeared of late.

Thomas makes two points about luxury that apply to China and are the root of the problem. In order to drive their brands as prestige labels with high margins, they must 1) conceal how they’re cutting corners and costs in manufacture, and 2) conceal their sales performance. If they fail, then the whole rotten house of luxury collapses. The major trick is that luxury is now truly an industry that uses sweatshops, hires ex soap salesmen and is composed of hideous conglomerates such as LVMH. By being part of groups that do not reveal breakout figures, you can hide the truth – i.e. LV can be doing well as a brand, while Givenchy and Kenzo are disintegrating, and Fendi has never made a penny, but as long as only group results are issued, and LV can cross-subsidise the dying brands, then all can appear hunky dory. In China, with press reports of factory conditions few, ‘made in’ requirements lax and corporate transparency weak, the luxury groups thrive in fertile soil.

As money is cut back on production and quality (think Burberry’s recent China relocation) so it is ramped up on advertising and marketing (‘smoke and mirrors’ in English) to convince consumers they’re buying class and status. It’s little surprise that Richemont, a highly successful luxury group, emerged from a South African tobacco business – selling cigarettes to teenagers and luxury goods to adults is a closely related business in terms of base concept.

An increasing number of brands manufacture in China. Those luxury handbags women crave? Mostly now invariably made in China, though manufacturers sign strict confidentiality agreements with the brands never to reveal this fact. Several Guangdong factories make bags for a range of brands you pay fortunes for – hence a nice 15% minimum margin on bags. Access Asia was recently in a Chinese factory where the same workers on the same production line were making US$2,000 bags for an Italian brand, and US$35 bags for JC Penney, at the same time. Ever wondered why Coach has so many stores in China? Easy – they make virtually all their bags here. Prada, LV, Furla – all now largely made in China. And that’s where the cost cutting starts, and then continues, with no linings and cheaper thread, glue rather than stitching, as well as cheap labour. Still feeling classy? And typical mark ups on bags once you move to China? Think roughly under US$100 to make a bag, which then retails for US$1,200 upwards. Still think you’ve bought status? And it’s also the high-end ties and scarves. About US$25 max to make in China, and retailing for somewhat more. Still feel exclusive? Or just conned?

Perhaps most interesting culturally is Thomas’s (correct) assertion that there was a time when luxury brands were innovative and revolutionary in design. That era is now long gone, and brands fear leading the way believing it may alienate their increasingly conformist customer base that thinks simple bucks can buy class and style. And this is one key reason why luxury brands are finding an admiring market in essentially conformist China (as in Japan). Being boring may be their best hope.

Gali The Alligator - "Director´s Cut"

Why we curse. What the F***?

Fucking became the subject of congressional debate in 2003, after NBC broadcast the Golden Globe Awards. Bono, lead singer of the mega-band U2, was accepting a prize on behalf of the group and in his euphoria exclaimed, "This is really, really, fucking brilliant" on the air. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which is charged with monitoring the nation's airwaves for indecency, decided somewhat surprisingly not to sanction the network for failing to bleep out the word. Explaining its decision, the FCC noted that its guidelines define "indecency" as "material that describes or depicts sexual or excretory organs or activities" and Bono had used fucking as "an adjective or expletive to emphasize an exclamation."

Cultural conservatives were outraged. California Representative Doug Ose tried to close the loophole in the FCC's regulations with the filthiest piece of legislation ever considered by Congress. Had it passed, the Clean Airwaves Act would have forbade from broadcast

the words "shit", "piss", "fuck", "cunt", "asshole", and the phrases "cock sucker", "mother fucker", and "ass hole", compound use (including hyphenated compounds) of such words and phrases with each other or with other words or phrases, and other grammatical forms of such words and phrases (including verb, adjective, gerund, participle, and infinitive forms).

The episode highlights one of the many paradoxes that surround swearing. When it comes to political speech, we are living in a free-speech utopia. Late-night comedians can say rude things about their nation's leaders that, in previous centuries, would have led to their tongues being cut out or worse. Yet, when it comes to certain words for copulation and excretion, we still allow the might of the government to bear down on what people can say in public. Swearing raises many other puzzles--linguistic, neurobiological, literary, political.

The first is the bone of contention in the Bono brouhaha: the syntactic classification of curse words. Ose's grammatically illiterate bill not only misspelled cocksucker, motherfucker, and asshole, and misidentified them as "phrases," it didn't even close the loophole that it had targeted. The Clean Airwaves Act assumed that fucking is a participial adjective. But this is not correct. With a true adjective like lazy, you can alternate between Drown the lazy cat and Drown the cat which is lazy. But Drown the fucking cat is certainly not interchangeable with Drown the cat which is fucking.

If the fucking in fucking brilliant is to be assigned a traditional part of speech, it would be adverb, because it modifies an adjective and only adverbs can do that, as in truly bad, very nice, and really big. Yet "adverb" is the one grammatical category that Ose forgot to include in his list! As it happens, most expletives aren't genuine adverbs, either. One study notes that, while you can say That's too fucking bad, you can't say That's too very bad. Also, as linguist Geoffrey Nunberg pointed out, while you can imagine the dialogue How brilliant was it? Very, you would never hear the dialogue How brilliant was it? Fucking.

The FCC's decision raises another mystery about swearing: the bizarre number of different ways in which we swear. There is cathartic swearing, as when we slice our thumb along with the bagel. There are imprecations, as when we offer advice to someone who has cut us off in traffic. There are vulgar terms for everyday things and activities, as when Bess Truman was asked to get the president to say fertilizer instead of manure and she replied, "You have no idea how long it took me to get him to say manure." There are figures of speech that put obscene words to other uses, such as the barnyard epithet for insincerity, the army acronym snafu, and the gynecological-flagellative term for uxorial dominance. And then there are the adjective-like expletives that salt the speech and split the words of soldiers, teenagers, and Irish rock-stars.

But perhaps the greatest mystery is why politicians, editors, and much of the public care so much. Clearly, the fear and loathing are not triggered by the concepts themselves, because the organs and activities they name have hundreds of polite synonyms. Nor are they triggered by the words' sounds, since many of them have respectable homonyms in names for animals, actions, and even people. Many people feel that profanity is self-evidently corrupting, especially to the young. This claim is made despite the fact that everyone is familiar with the words, including most children, and that no one has ever spelled out how the mere hearing of a word could corrupt one's morals.

Progressive writers have pointed to this gap to argue that linguistic taboos are absurd. A true moralist, they say, should hold that violence and inequality are "obscene," not sex and excretion. And yet, since the 1970s, many progressives have imposed linguistic taboos of their own, such as the stigma surrounding the N-word and casual allusions to sexual desire or sexual attractiveness. So even people who revile the usual bluenoses can become gravely offended by their own conception of bad language. The question is, why?

The strange emotional power of swearing--as well as the presence of linguistic taboos in all cultures-- suggests that taboo words tap into deep and ancient parts of the brain. In general, words have not just a denotation but a connotation: an emotional coloring distinct from what the word literally refers to, as in principled versus stubborn and slender versus scrawny. The difference between a taboo word and its genteel synonyms, such as shit and feces, cunt and vagina, or fucking and making love, is an extreme example of the distinction. Curses provoke a different response than their synonyms in part because connotations and denotations are stored in different parts of the brain.

The mammalian brain contains, among other things, the limbic system, an ancient network that regulates motivation and emotion, and the neocortex, the crinkled surface of the brain that ballooned in human evolution and which is the seat of perception, knowledge, reason, and planning. The two systems are interconnected and work together, but it seems likely that words' denotations are concentrated in the neocortex, especially in the left hemisphere, whereas their connotations are spread across connections between the neocortex and the limbic system, especially in the right hemisphere.

A likely suspect within the limbic system is the amygdala, an almond-shaped organ buried at the front of the temporal lobe of the brain (one on each side) that helps invest memories with emotion. A monkey whose amygdalas have been removed can learn to recognize a new shape, like a striped triangle, but has trouble learning that the shape foreshadows an unpleasant event like an electric shock. In humans, the amygdala "lights up"--it shows greater metabolic activity in brain scans--when the person sees an angry face or an unpleasant word, especially a taboo word.

The response is not only emotional but involuntary. It's not just that we don't have earlids to shut out unwanted sounds. Once a word is seen or heard, we are incapable of treating it as a squiggle or noise; we reflexively look it up in memory and respond to its meaning, including its connotation. The classic demonstration is the Stroop effect, found in every introductory psychology textbook and the topic of more than four thousand scientific papers. People are asked to look through a list of letter strings and to say aloud the color of the ink in which each one is printed. Try it with this list, saying "red," "blue," or "green" for each item in turn from left to right:

red blue green blue green red

Easy. But this is much, much, harder:

red blue green blue green red

The reason is that, among literate adults, reading a word is such an over-learned skill that it has become mandatory: You can't will the process "off," even when you don't want to read the words but only pay attention to the ink. That's why you're helped along when the experimenters arrange the ink into a word that also names its color and slowed down when they arrange it into a name for a different color. A similar thing happens with spoken words as well.

Now try naming the color of the ink in each of these words:

cunt shit fuck tits piss asshole

The psychologist Don MacKay has done the experiment and found that people are indeed slowed down by an involuntary boggle as soon as the eyes alight on each word. The upshot is that a speaker or writer can use a taboo word to evoke an emotional response in an audience quite against their wishes. Thanks to the automatic nature of speech perception, an expletive kidnaps our attention and forces us to consider its unpleasant connotations. That makes all of us vulnerable to a mental assault whenever we are in earshot of other speakers, as if we were strapped to a chair and could be given a punch or a shock at any time. And this, in turn, raises the question of what kinds of concepts have the sort of unpleasant emotional charge that can make words for them taboo.

The historical root of swearing in English and many other languages is, oddly enough, religion. We see this in the Third Commandment, in the popularity of hell, damn, God, and Jesus Christ as expletives, and in many of the terms for taboo language itself: profanity (that which is not sacred), blasphemy (literally "evil speech" but, in practice, disrespect toward a deity), and swearing, cursing, and oaths, which originally were secured by the invocation of a deity or one of his symbols.

In English-speaking countries today, religious swearing barely raises an eyebrow. Gone with the wind are the days when people could be titillated by a character in a movie saying "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn." If a character today is offended by such language, it's only to depict him as an old-fashioned prude. The defanging of religious taboo words is an obvious consequence of the secularization of Western culture. As G. K. Chesterton remarked, "Blasphemy itself could not survive religion; if anyone doubts that, let him try to blaspheme Odin." To understand religious vulgarity, then, we have to put ourselves in the shoes of our linguistic ancestors, to whom God and Hell were a real presence.

Say you need to make a promise. You may want to borrow money, and so must promise to return it. Why should the promisee believe you, knowing that it may be to your advantage to renege? The answer is that you should submit to a contingency that would impose a penalty on you if you did renege, ideally one so certain and severe that you would always do better to keep the promise than to back out. That way, your partner no longer has to take you at your word; he can rely on your self-interest. Nowadays, we secure our promises with legal contracts that make us liable if we back out. We mortgage our house, giving the bank permission to repossess it if we fail to repay the loan. But, before we could count on a commercial and legal apparatus to enforce our contracts, we had to do our own self-handicapping. Children still bind their oaths by saying, "I hope to die if I tell a lie." Adults used to do the same by invoking the wrath of God, as in May God strike me dead if I'm lying and variations like As God is my witness, Blow me down!, and God blind me!--the source of the British blimey.

Such oaths, of course, would have been more credible in an era in which people thought that God listened to their entreaties and had the power to carry them out. Even today, witnesses in U.S. court proceedings have to swear on the Bible, as if an act of perjury undetected by the legal system would be punished by an eavesdropping and easily offended God. But, even if these oaths aren't seen as literally having the power to bring down divine penalties for noncompliance, they signal a distinction between everyday assurances on minor favors and solemn pledges on weightier matters. Today, the emotional power of religious swearing may have dimmed, but the psychology behind it is still with us. Even a parent without an inkling of superstition would not say "I swear on the life of my child" lightly. The mere thought of murdering one's child for ulterior gain is not just unpleasant; it should be unthinkable if one is a true parent, and every neuron of one's brain should be programmed against it.

This literal unthinkability is the basis of the psychology of taboo in general, and it is the mindset that is tapped in swearing on something sacred, whether it be a religious trapping or a child's life. And, thanks to the automatic nature of speech processing, the same sacred words that consecrate promises--the oath-binding sense of "swearing"--may be used to attract attention, to shock, or to inflict psychic pain on a listener--the dirty-word sense of "swearing."

As secularization has rendered religious swear words less powerful, creative speakers have replaced them with words that have the same degree of affective clout according to the sensibilities of the day. This explains why taboo expressions can have such baffling syntax and semantics. To take just one example, why do people use the ungrammatical Fuck you? And why does no one have a clear sense of what, exactly, Fuck you means? (Some people guess "fuck yourself," others "get fucked," and still others "I will fuck you," but none of these hunches is compelling.) The most likely explanation is that these grammatically baffling curses originated in more intelligible religious curses during the transition from religious to sexual and scatological swearing in English-speaking countries:

Who (in) the hell are you? >> Who the fuck are you?

I don't give a damn >> I don't give a fuck; I don't give a shit.

Holy Mary! >> Holy shit! Holy fuck!

For God's sake >> For fuck's sake; For shit's sake.

Damn you! >> Fuck you!

Of course, this transmutation raises the question of why words for these particular concepts stepped into the breach--why, for example, words for bodily effluvia and their orifices and acts of excretion became taboo. Shit, piss, and asshole, to name but a few, are still unspeakable on network television and unprintable in most newspapers. The New York Times, for example, identified a best-seller by the philosopher Harry Frankfurt as On Bull****.

On the whole, the acceptability of taboo words is only loosely tied to the acceptability of what they refer to, but, in the case of taboo terms for effluvia, the correlation is fairly good. The linguists Keith Allan and Kate Burridge have noted that shit is less acceptable than piss, which in turn is less acceptable than fart, which is less acceptable than snot, which is less acceptable than spit (which is not taboo at all). That's the same order as the acceptability of eliminating these substances from the body in public. Effluvia have such an emotional charge that they figure prominently in voodoo, sorcery, and other kinds of sympathetic magic in many of the world's cultures. The big deal that people ordinarily make out of effluvia--both the words and the substances--has puzzled many observers. After all, we are incarnate beings, and excretion is an inescapable part of human life.

The biologists Valerie Curtis and Adam Biran identify the reason. It can't be a coincidence, they note, that the most disgusting substances are also the most dangerous vectors for disease. Feces is a route of transmission for the viruses, bacteria, and protozoans that cause at least 20 intestinal diseases, as well as ascariasis, hepatitis A and E, polio, ameobiasis, hookworm, pinworm, whipworm, cholera, and tetanus. Blood, vomit, mucus, pus, and sexual fluids are also good vehicles for pathogens to get from one body into another. Although the strongest component of the disgust reaction is a desire not to eat or touch the offending substance, it's also disgusting to think about effluvia, together with the body parts and activities that excrete them. And, because of the involuntariness of speech perception, it's unpleasant to hear the words for them.

Some people have been puzzled about why cunt should be taboo. It is not just an unprintable word for the vagina but the most offensive epithet for a woman in America. One might have thought that, in the male-dominated world of swearing, the vagina would be revered, not reviled. After all, it's been said that no sooner does a boy come out of it than he spends the rest of his life trying to get back in. This becomes less mysterious if one imagines the connotations in an age before tampons, toilet paper, regular bathing, and antifungal drugs.

The other major source of taboo words is sexuality. Since the 1960s, many progressive thinkers have found these taboos to be utterly risible. Sex is a source of mutual pleasure, they reason, and should be cleansed of stigma and shame. Prudery about sexual language could only be a superstition, an anachronism, perhaps a product of spite, as in H. L. Mencken's definition of puritanism as "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy."

The comedian Lenny Bruce was puzzled by our most common sexual imprecation. In a monologue reproduced in the biopic Lenny, he riffs:

What's the worst thing you can say to anybody? "Fuck you, Mister." It's really weird, because, if I really wanted to hurt you, I should say "Unfuck you, Mister." Because "Fuck you" is really nice! "Hello, Ma, it's me. Yeah, I just got back. Aw, fuck you, Ma! Sure, I mean it. Is Pop there? Aw, fuck you, Pop!"

Part of the puzzlement comes from the strange syntax of Fuck you (which, as we saw, does not in fact mean "Have sex"). But it also comes from a modern myopia for how incendiary sexuality can be in the full sweep of human experience.

Consider two consenting adults who have just had sex. Has everyone had fun? Not necessarily. One partner might see the act as the beginning of a lifelong relationship, the other as a one-night-stand. One may be infecting the other with a disease. A baby may have been conceived, whose welfare was not planned for in the heat of passion. If the couple is related, the baby may inherit two copies of a deleterious recessive gene and be susceptible to a genetic defect. There may be romantic rivals in the wings who would be enraged with jealousy if they found out, or a cuckolded husband in danger of raising another man's child, or a two-timed wife in danger of losing support for her own children. Parents may have marriage plans for one of the participants, involving large sums of money or an important alliance with another clan. And, on other occasions, the participants may not both be adults, or may not both be consenting.

Sex has high stakes, including exploitation, disease, illegitimacy, incest, jealousy, spousal abuse, cuckoldry, desertion, feuding, child abuse, and rape. These hazards have been around for a long time and have left their mark on our customs and our emotions. Thoughts about sex are likely to be fraught, and not entertained lightly. Words for sex can be even more touchy, because they not only evoke the charged thoughts but implicate a sharing of those thoughts between two people. The thoughts, moreover, are shared "on the record," each party knowing that the other knows that he or she has been thinking about the sex under discussion. This lack of plausible deniability embroils the dialogue in an extra layer of intrigue.

Evolutionary psychology has laid out the conflicts of interest that are inherent to human sexuality, and some of these conflicts play themselves out in the linguistic arena. Plain speaking about sex conveys an attitude that sex is a casual matter, like tennis or philately, and so it may seem to the partners at the time. But the long-term implications may be more keenly felt by a wider circle of interested parties. Parents and other senior kin may be concerned with the thwarting of their own plans for the family lineage, and the community may take an interest in the illegitimate children appearing in their midst and in the posturing and competition, sometimes violent, that can accompany sexual freedom. The ideal of sex as a sacred communion between a monogamous couple may be old-fashioned and even unrealistic, but it sure is convenient for the elders of a family and a society. It's not surprising to find tensions between individuals and guardians of the community over casual talk about sex (accompanied by hypocrisy among the guardians when it comes to their own casual sex).

Another sexual conflict of interest divides men from women. In every act of reproduction, females are committed to long stretches of pregnancy and lactation, while males can get away with a few minutes of copulation. A male can have more progeny if he mates with many females, whereas a female will not have more progeny if she mates with many males--though her offspring will do better if she has chosen a mate who is willing to invest in them or can endow them with good genes. Not surprisingly, in all cultures men pursue sex more eagerly, are more willing to have casual sex, and are more likely to seduce, deceive, or coerce to get sex. All things being equal, casual sex works to the advantage of men, both genetically and emotionally. We might expect casual talk about sex to show the same asymmetry, and so it does. Men swear more, on average, and many taboo sexual terms are felt to be especially demeaning to women-- hence the old prohibition of swearing "in mixed company."

A sex difference in tolerance for sexual language may seem like a throwback to Victorian daintiness. But an unanticipated consequence of the second wave of feminism in the 1970s was a revived sense of offense at swearing, the linguistic companion to the campaign against pornography. As a result, many universities and businesses have published guidelines on sexual harassment that ban telling sexual jokes, and, in 1993, veteran Boston Globe journalist David Nyhan was forced to apologize and donate $1,250 to a women's organization when a female staffer overheard him in the newsroom using the word pussy-whipped with a male colleague who declined his invitation to play basketball after work. The feminist writer Andrea Dworkin explicitly connected coarse sexual language to the oppression of women: "Fucking requires that the male act on one who has less power and this valuation is so deep, so completely implicit in the act, that the one who is fucked is stigmatized."

Though people are seeing, talking about, and having sex more readily today than they did in the past, the topic is still not free of taboo. Most people still don't copulate in public, swap spouses at the end of a dinner party, have sex with their siblings and children, or openly trade favors for sex. Even after the sexual revolution, we have a long way to go before "exploring our sexuality" to the fullest, and that means that people still set up barriers in their minds to block certain trains of thought. The language of sex can tug at those barriers.

Which brings us back to fucking--Bono's fucking, that is. Does a deeper understanding of the history, psychology, and neurobiology of swearing give us any basis for deciding among the prohibitions in the Clean Airwaves Act, the hairsplitting of the FCC, and the libertinism of a Lenny Bruce?

When it comes to policy and law, it seems to me that free speech is the bedrock of democracy and that it is not among the legitimate functions of government to punish people who use certain vocabulary items or allow others to use them. On the other hand, private media have the prerogative of enforcing a house style, driven by standards of taste and the demands of the market, that excludes words their audience doesn't enjoy hearing. In other words, if an entertainer says fucking brilliant, it's none of the government's business; but, if some people would rather not explain to their young children what a blow job is, there should be television channels that don't force them to.

What about decisions in the private sphere? Are there guidelines that can inform our personal and institutional judgments about when to discourage, tolerate, and even welcome profanity? Here are some thoughts.

Language has often been called a weapon, and people should be mindful about where to aim it and when to fire. The common denominator of taboo words is the act of forcing a disagreeable thought on someone, and it's worth considering how often one really wants one's audience to be reminded of excrement, urine, and exploitative sex. Even in its mildest form, intended only to keep the listener's attention, the lazy use of profanity can feel like a series of jabs in the ribs. They are annoying to the listener and a confession by the speaker that he can think of no other way to make his words worth attending to. It's all the more damning for writers, who have the luxury of choosing their words off-line from the half-million-word phantasmagoria of the English language.

Also calling for reflection is whether linguistic taboos are always a bad thing. Why are we offended--why should we be offended--when an outsider refers to an African American as a nigger, or a woman as a cunt, or a Jewish person as a fucking Jew? I suspect that the sense of offense comes from the nature of speech recognition and from what it means to understand the connotation of a word. If you're an English speaker, you can't hear the words nigger or cunt or fucking without calling to mind what they mean to an implicit community of speakers, including the emotions that cling to them. To hear nigger is to try on, however briefly, the thought that there is something contemptible about African Americans and thus to be complicit in a community that standardized that judgment into a word. Just hearing the words feels morally corrosive. None of this means that the words should be banned, only that their effects on listeners should be understood and anticipated.

Also deserving of reflection is why previous generations of speakers bequeathed us a language that treats certain topics with circumspection and restraint. The lexical libertines of the 1960s believed that taboos on sexual language were pointless and even harmful. They argued that removing the stigma from sexuality would eliminate shame and ignorance and thereby reduce venereal disease, illegitimate births, and other hazards of sex. But this turned out to be mistaken. Sexual language has become far more common since the early '60s, but so has illegitimacy, sexually transmitted disease, rape, and the fallout of sexual competition like anorexia in girls and swagger-culture in boys. Though no one can pin down cause and effect, the changes are of a piece with the weakening of the fear and awe that used to surround thoughts about sex and that charged sexual language with taboo.

Those are some of the reasons to think twice about giving carte blanche to swearing. But there is another reason. If an overuse of taboo words, whether by design or laziness, blunts their emotional edge, it will have deprived us of a linguistic instrument that we sometimes sorely need. And this brings me to the arguments on the pro-swearing side.

To begin with, it's a fact of life that people swear. The responsibility of writers is to give a "just and lively image of human nature," as poet John Dryden wrote, and that includes portraying a character's language realistically when their art calls for it. When Norman Mailer wrote his true-to-life novel about World War II, The Naked and the Dead, in 1948, his compromise with the sensibilities of the day was to have soldiers use the pseudo-epithet fug. (When Dorothy Parker met him, she said, "So you're the man who doesn't know how to spell fuck.") Sadly, this prissiness is not a thing of the past: Some public television stations today fear broadcasting Ken Burns' documentary on World War II because of the salty language in his interviews with veterans. The prohibition against swearing in broadcast media makes artists and historians into liars and subverts the responsibility of grown-ups to learn how life is lived in worlds distant from their own.

Even when their characters are not soldiers, writers must sometimes let them swear in order to render human passion compellingly. In the film adaptation of Isaac Bashevis Singer's Enemies: A Love Story, a sweet Polish peasant girl has hidden a Jewish man in a hayloft during the Nazi occupation and becomes his doting wife when the war is over. When she confronts him over an affair he has been having, he loses control and slaps her in the face. Fighting back tears of rage, she looks him in the eye and says slowly, "I saved your life. I took the last bite of food out of my mouth and gave it to you in the hayloft. I carried out your shit!" No other word could convey the depth of her fury at his ingratitude.

For language lovers, the joys of swearing are not confined to the works of famous writers. We should pause to applaud the poetic genius who gave us the soldiers' term for chipped beef on toast, shit on a shingle, and the male-to-male advisory for discretion in sexual matters, Keep your pecker in your pocket. Hats off, too, to the wordsmiths who thought up the indispensable pissing contest, crock of shit, pussy-whipped, and horse's ass. Among those in the historical record, Lyndon Johnson had a certain way with words when it came to summing up the people he distrusted, including a Kennedy aide ("He wouldn't know how to pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were printed on the heel"), Gerald Ford ("He can't fart and chew gum at the same time"), and J. Edgar Hoover ("I'd rather have him inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in").

When used judiciously, swearing can be hilarious, poignant, and uncannily descriptive. More than any other form of language, it recruits our expressive faculties to the fullest: the combinatorial power of syntax; the evocativeness of metaphor; the pleasure of alliteration, meter, and rhyme; and the emotional charge of our attitudes, both thinkable and unthinkable. It engages the full expanse of the brain: left and right, high and low, ancient and modern. Shakespeare, no stranger to earthy language himself, had Caliban speak for the entire human race when he said, "You taught me language, and my profit on't is, I know how to curse."

Where vehicles are left to die

here are some examples of vehicle cemeteries around the world, areas on earth that have unwittingly become the home to rusting, unused machines - remember, this is just a selection of the many boneyards on earth and while they often look stunning and make for a great photo, the environmental costs far outweigh the view.

(photos found on flickr link to source)

- ships

bay of nouadhibou, mauritania

welcome to the bay of nouadhibou, mauritania, an area containing over 300 ships which have been abandoned during the last 20 years.

until recently the attraction of this particular area for frustrated boat owners was, unsurprisingly, money. in order to avoid the high costs needed to discard a ship properly, people from all around the globe slowly realised that the harbour authority in this particular bay was corrupt and would turn a blind eye to any decaying vessel in return for a cheeky backhander.

the result can be seen below. it’s a surreal, haunting image. there’s an unembeddable clip of some of the dead ships here.

have a look on google maps here.

- mining vehicles

consolidated diamond mine, oranjemund, namibia

i found this brilliant photo on flickr (click pic to go source) and, according to the description, once a piece of mining equipment or a mining vehicle enters the consolidated diamond mine in oranjemund, namibia, it’s never allowed to leave. for that reason there’s a huge vehicle graveyard near the mine. considering the mine apparently owns the largest private earthmoving fleet in the world, that must be a huge boneyard.

i’ve had a look on google maps for the boneyard but the area is massive. the picture below is of a collection of machinery i found - whether it’s the correct collection i don’t know. take a look on google maps here.

- planes

amarc/the boneyard, tuscon, arizona

home to over 4000 aircraft, amarc (aerospace maintenance and regeneration center) is managed by the us airforce material command who claim to carry out ‘a continual process of anti-corrosion and re-preservation work’ in order to stop the unused aircraft damaging the surrounding environment. whether that’s the case or not, i don’t know.

either way, it’s an immense amount of aircraft in such a relatively small area.

take a look on google maps here.

a drive through the area…

- trains

train cemetery, uyuni, bolivia

a kilometre outside the town of uyuni in bolivia is the train cemetery, a resting place for dozens of old steam engines along a short length of unused track. pretty much all of the trains are comlpetely covered in rust and way beyond any kind of repair, the eerie sight attracting a large number of tourists each year who have come to the area to see the world’s largest salt flats (salar de uyuni) and a few locals on the hunt for scrap metal.

the area on google maps can be found here.

- nuclear-propelled submarines

various harbours, far east russia

frightening but true.

following the cold war, russia is now home to the largest fleet of nuclear-propelled submarines in the world, a large percentage of these currently out of service and residing in harbours on the eastern coast of russia in various states of decay, the main reason for the neglect apparently being lack of funds. these areas have become known as the ’submarine cemeteries’.

here are some photos from just a couple of these harbours.

zvezda

above: 2 unused submarines at zvezda shipyard.

below: a similar scene on google maps. direct link here.

chazma bay

above: submarine reactor compartment units floating in chazma bay.

below: a simliar view on google maps. link here.

sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

The 5 Keys to Success in Foreign Language Learning

Note: These guidelines should be rigorously followed, even if you are taking a language course.

1) Spend the time!

By far the most important factor is how much time you are immersed in the language. The more time you spend with the language, the faster you will learn. This means listening, reading, writing, speaking, and studying words and phrases. This does not mean sitting in class looking out the window, nor listening to other students who do not speak well, nor getting explanations in your own language about how the language works. This means spending time enjoyably connected to the language you are learning.

2) Listen and read every day!

Listen wherever you are on your MP3 player. Read what you are listening to. Listen to and read things that you like, things that you can mostly understand, or even partly understand. If you keep listening and reading you will get used to the language. One hour of listening or reading is more effective than many hours of class time.

3) Focus on words and phrases!

Build up your vocabulary, you’ll need lots. Start to notice words and how they come together as phrases. Learn these words and phrases through your listening and reading. Read online, using online dictionaries, and make your own vocabulary lists for review. Soon you will run into your new words and phrases elsewhere. Gradually you will be able to use them. Do not worry about how accurately you speak until you have accumulated a plenty of words through listening and reading.

4) Take responsibility for your own learning!

If you do not want to learn the language, you won’t. If you do want to learn the language, take control. Choose content of interest, that you want to listen to and read. Seek out the words and phrases that you need to understand your listening and reading. Do not wait for someone else to show you the language, nor to tell you what to do. Discover the language by yourself, like a child growing up. Talk when you feel like it. Write when you feel like it. A teacher cannot teach you to become fluent, but you can learn to become fluent if you want to.

5) Relax and enjoy yourself!

Do not worry about what you cannot remember, or cannot yet understand, or cannot yet say. It does not matter. You are learning and improving. The language will gradually become clearer in your brain, but this will happen on a schedule that you cannot control. So sit back and enjoy. Just make sure you spend enough time with the language. That is the greatest guarantee of success.

5 Great Reasons to Learn a Foreign Language

1. Improve your English - I know this might not make sense at first but hear me out. As a person who speaks only one language you have no basis for comparison; all you know is English. In different languages the same idea is often expressed in different ways. Knowing another language gives you a great measuring stick. It will help you better understand tenses, prepositions, and all the other parts of speech we normally take for granted. You will find yourself speaking and writing more precise creative sentences. There is a reason most great writers and poets are students of many languages.

2. Enhance your travel experiences - Traveling is one of the great joys of life and also one of the most expensive. Why not get the most out of your experience? As a person who doesn’t know the native tongue you are completely excluded from the culture. The locals shun you and you are relegated to sightseeing and taking cheesy photos. Knowing even a few phrases of the language will make a huge difference. You will meet many more people and find it much easier to get around. People are much more receptive if you make an effort to speak their language. This can turn a frustrating experience into the trip of a lifetime.

3. Languages are beautiful - Language is what makes us human. It is the medium we use to share our thoughts with the world. Could you imagine thought without language? Great language also has a wonderful musical quality. Learning a new language is like learning a new way to think and a new way to sing. I am often struck by new phrases that are profoundly meaningful and melodic. At those moments I feel grateful to be alive. Don’t sell yourself short by stubbornly ignoring every language but one.

4. Join the global community - Believe it or not, the majority of the world does not speak English. We are so isolated that we hardly realize this. The truth is new thoughts and ideas are happening everywhere and they are not being immediately translated. The world is getting smaller and we are coming into contact with more non-English speakers all the time. Gain an advantage for yourself in business and personal relationships by being able to communicate with people in their language. This will set you apart and gain you immediate respect and credibility.

Last, but not least:

5. It’s just plain sexy - I’m not saying you should learn a few corny Italian pickup lines and go saying them to everyone you meet, but knowing a foreign tongue and applying it tastefully is undeniably attractive. It implies education, good taste, and refinement, and it will certainly make you standout against the competition. Imagine saying a beautiful phrase with perfect pronunciation to a lovely coed. You will immediately have her attention; she will be dying to know what it means. I know this from experience.

Now that you are dying to improve your mind by learning a foreign language you are probably wondering how to go about doing it. The task appears daunting at first, but have no fear, in my next post I will detail how to teach yourself a foreign language in less than an hour a day. I’ve developed this method through personal trial and error, and trust me, it works much much better than the way your were taught in school. And best of all, it’s tons of fun. Once you start making progress you won’t want to stop.

How to Teach Yourself a Foreign Language

For anyone who doesn’t understand why learning a foreign language is a good idea, read 5 Great Reasons to Learn a Foreign Language. Everyone else, let’s get started.

Note: I don’t claim that following these instructions will make you fluent. Fluency requires time and immersion. What this post will help you do is become conversant. You will be able to have a simple conversation, ask for directions, order at a restaurant, make small talk, etc. You will also be able to read fairly well with the use of a dictionary. Following these steps will give you a great base in a new language.

Course Materials

The first step is acquiring the materials you will use to teach yourself. The first thing you need is an audio language course. This is essential for developing your basic vocabulary and, more importantly, your pronunciation. I can personally recommend the Pimsleur Language Programs (aff) because that is what I use and I’ve had a great experience with them. Pimsleur uses memorization techniques and question and answer prompts to keep you involved in the lesson and help you retain what you learn. The lessons are about 30 minutes long. A great place to do them is during your commute. This saves you time, makes the drive go faster, and is surprisingly fun. If you don’t want to go with Pimsleur there are plenty of alternatives, but from what I’ve read they are not as engaging.

The next thing you’ll need is a basic grammar guide and a dictionary for the language you want to study. This will help you understand the basic mechanics of the language and the differences and similarities with English. You will use this continuously as a reference.

You should also get some interesting books in the language. For me this is a huge motivator because reading something interesting is much more rewarding than reading a text book. The way to go in the beginning is dual language books (aff). These have the original language on the left side and a literal English translation on the right. This allows you to start reading great books without having to reach for a dictionary every other word. It is also great for learning idioms, expressions, and verb tenses.

Getting Started

Once you have your materials you are ready to learn. Start off by doing the first lesson of your audio language course. Continue doing a lesson a day. You can do these on your commute or while you exercise to save time. For a while I did lessons while walking up and down the stairs of my apartment building. (No, I don’t care if people think I’m weird.)

In conjunction with this you should read your introductory grammar guide. This will give you a foundation in the language and help you learn the different parts of speech and their English equivalents. Don’t worry about memorizing every single rule. It simply isn’t possible. The idea is to get a general understanding first. This is the most boring part of the process, but don’t give up because it’s well worth it.

Making Progress

When you finish the grammar guide you will also have completed several days of audio lessons. At this point you will feel much better about your learning ability. You will know the important basic phrases and speak much more naturally. This method of learning is much more effective than traditional school teaching because you are actively engaged the entire time. The audio lessons force you to listen and speak more than I ever did in school.

Now it’s time to start reading those dual language books. Digging into some interesting material will build your vocabulary. Whenever possible always read aloud. This helps your speech, memorization, and makes you start thinking in the new language. I’ve found reading and doing the audio lessons concurrently enhances both experiences. During the lessons, being able to visualize words makes them easier to understand. Likewise, while reading, the pronunciation experience improves your internal monologue.

Don’t be in a rush. Read slowly and reread until you understand. Don’t hesitate to look up verb conjugations in your grammar guide. The same goes for the audio lessons. If you have trouble with a lesson, repeat it the next day. As the lessons get more complicated, I start doing them twice. The second time is actually more enjoyable. Hitting each phrase right on the money is a huge confidence booster.

Be consistent

It is extremely important to study for a short time every day. Daily repetition makes the language second nature. It is much better to read for a short time every day than to put in several hours once or twice a week. When you get a spare minute, try finding new things to read online. You will be surprised how good your comprehension is.

After a few months of consistent practice you will really start to see progress. Beautiful foreign phrases with be stuck in your head, your pronunciation will be damn near decent, and you will be able to read and understand whole paragraphs. Once you make it this far, you’ll have some serious momentum going. You will understand more than you ever did in school and you won’t want to stop.

Taking off the Training Wheels

Eventually you will complete all the audio lessons and a couple dual language books. You’ll be able to read well with a dictionary and carry on simple conversations. You are now ready to spread your wings and fly. Start reading the greatest books in your language and use a dictionary when you need to. Find someone who speaks your new language and talk to them. Go to online forums for your new language and make an email buddy. If you can, plan a trip to a country that speaks your language and experience the local culture. If you are curious about another language, then start learning that too!

Regardless of how you use your new language skills, you will have become a more educated interesting person. More importantly, you will have proven to yourself that you are much smarter than you thought.