Clothing affects performance on math tests

I stumbled across an interesting article recently, entitled “The Swimsuit Becomes You: Sex Differences in Self-Objectification, Restrained Eating, and Math Performance” by Fredrickson et al. (1998). In the article, the experimenters describe how they attempted to measure the effects of clothing on self-objectification, or the tendency for an individual to appropriate the perceived opinions of others regarding their appearance. They randomly divided their participants into two groups, one of which would try on a swimsuit, and one of which would try on a sweater, and while each individual regarded themselves in a full-length mirror, they were asked to complete several questionnaires and do some other tasks. Not surprisingly, they found that the female cohorts who tried on the swimsuits experienced increased shame about their bodies, and those participants with high body shame scores tended to eat less when presented with an “unlimited” amount of food (i.e. they could eat as much as they wanted of what was presented). Men tended to experience significantly less body shame, and they showed much less restraint when eating than did the women.

More interesting, however, is their finding that wearing a swimsuit affected women’s scores on standardized math tests. Each participant did a fifteen-minute math test while wearing either the sweater or the swimsuit, and after the test scores were adjusted for each participant’s score on prior tests of math (i.e. the SAT or ACT), the overall tendency was for the women who were wearing the swimsuit to do much worse on the math test than the women wearing the sweater. This effect was not seen in the male group; in fact, the males who were wearing the swimsuit did slightly better than their counterparts in sweaters.

While I’m hardly qualified to judge the soundness of the methodology or the statistical analysis in this paper, I find this result fascinating in the context of, for instance, Leonard Sax’ and others’ arguments for sex segregated education, where the knee-jerk tendency is for people to attribute gender differences in scores on tests of cognitive abilities to some kind of biological or genetic factor. Clearly, the ability of a standardized test to capture some “absolute” measure of intelligence is not so cut and dried when the clothing that the test-taker is wearing can have such a remarkable effect. This seems especially relevant in the context of the increased sexualization of young girls, where the pressure to wear certain outfits might affect more than just socialization practices.

The National Post on women’s studies

About a week ago the National Post published an article about how many women’s studies programs in Canada are changing their names, and then followed it up with an editorial claiming that a “goodbye and good riddance” to women’s studies would be, regrettably, premature. The original article includes this gem:

Even the punctuation has deeper meaning: “The apostrophe can imply that the discipline belongs to women rather than has women as its object of study,” says Simon Fraser University’s recent proposal to change the name. “The program at SFSU chose to identify women as our object of study, not as the owners of the field.”

I call this quote a gem because it demonstrates the painfully deficient level of journalism that fills the pages of the Post. They attribute this statement about the punctuation to SFU, even though the statement itself refers to SFSU, a somewhat far-removed analogue located in San Francisco. Perhaps the Post is stricken by that same lack of copy editors, proofreaders and fact checkers that plagues most print media these days, but it took me all of ten seconds to google the quote and determine its correct source, which is presumably what Kathryn Blaze Carlson was paid to do in the first place. Their inability to distinguish Simon Fraser University from San Francisco State University belies the quality of reporting that informed their editorial, which is chock-full of easily falsifiable claims and unattributed scare quotes:

feminist legal scholars convinced the Supreme Court to permit preferential treatment for “traditionally disadvantaged groups”

Women’s Studies scholars have argued all heterosexual sex is oppression because its “penetrative nature” amounts to “occupation.”

They have…even put forward the notion that the only differences between males and females are “relatively insignificant, external features.”

Interestingly, but not particularly surprisingly, this last unattributed quote regarding the differences between men and women comes from a letter James C. Dobson wrote in response to the 1995 United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women that was held in Beijing. Dr. Dobson is founder of the evangelical non-profit organization Focus on the Family, which is unequivocally anti-abortion, anti-evolution, anti-homosexuality, anti-pornography, anti-feminism, anti-Palestine, and all those other antis that American conservative Christians seem to be about. Focus on the Family supported the McCain-Palin ticket, but only after Palin was brought on board; they funded ads equating the United States under Obama and the Democrats to Nazi Germany; and they spent two and a half million dollars to run a pro-life television ad during the upcoming Superbowl. In the letter, Dr. Dobson refers to the Beijing conference as the “most radical, atheistic and anti-family crusade in the history of the world”; he claims that China serves human fetuses in restaurants; and he claims that the conference’s mandate is to “do away with family, impose 50/50 quotas on all activities, eliminate motherhood, and institute polymorphous perversity.” See here for the actual mandate, which includes such radical ideas such as ensuring women access to health care, education, political representation, and employment.

Not only does the Post use this man, of all people, as an authority on women’s studies, but they couch his quote as if it originated from an actual women’s studies scholar. If ever there was an example of embarrassingly, shockingly piss-poor journalism, this is it. Get a grip, National Post.

[h/t Echidne]

DO YOU MAKE ANY OF THESE EMBARASSING MISTAKES?!

This test recently appeared on the blog HTML Giant. According to Amy McDaniel, who published the test, the questions and answers came from a worksheet from one of David Foster Wallace’s classes. As tends to be the case with prescriptive dogmatists (“kibbitzers and nudniks,” in Stephen Pinker’s terms), many of the solutions are brutally ignorant of the way language actually works. I’ve included the proffered solutions in red following each question.

IF NO ONE HAS YET TAUGHT YOU HOW TO AVOID OR REPAIR CLAUSES LIKE THE FOLLOWING, YOU SHOULD, IN MY OPINION, THINK SERIOUSLY ABOUT SUING SOMEBODY, PERHAPS AS CO-PLAINTIFF WITH WHOEVER’S PAID YOUR TUITION [by David Foster Wallace]

1. He and I hardly see one another.

He and I hardly see one each another.

“One another” is used for a noun that is three or more in number; “each other” is used for two.

2. I’d cringe at the naked vulnerability of his sentences left wandering around without periods and the ambiguity of his uncrossed “t”s.

I’d cringe at the naked vulnerability of his sentences left wandering around without periods and at the ambiguity of his uncrossed “t”s.

This is a parallelism problem. The subject cringed at two things; the intervening prepositions “of” and “without” cloud the meaning without the repeated “at.” Lots of people put a comma before and, but that is a nonstandard way to improve clarity.

3. My brother called to find out if I was over the flu yet.

My brother called to find out if whether I was over the flu yet.

If you can use whether, always do so. If implies conditionality. Whether or not is redundant.

4. I only spent six weeks in Napa.

I only spent only six weeks in Napa.

The adverb only modifies six, not spent. If it modified spent, the sentence would be implying that the subject didn’t, say, work or weep or dance six weeks in Napa–merely spent six weeks there. Clearly, not the author’s intention.

5. In my own mind, I can understand why its implications may be somewhat threatening.

In my own mind, I can understand why its implications may be somewhat threatening.

You can understand something only in your own mind.

6. From whence had his new faith come?

From wWhence had his new faith come?

Grossly redundant. Whence means from where.

7. Please spare me your arguments of why all religions are unfounded and contrived.

Please spare me your arguments of as to why all religions are unfounded and contrived.

Idiom error.

8. She didn’t seem to ever stop talking.

She didn’t seem ever to ever stop talking.

Don’t split infinitives if you can easily avoid it. Here you can easily avoid it without sacrificing meaning or elegance of expression.

9. As the relationship progressed, I found her facial tic more and more aggravating.

As the relationship progressed, I found her facial tic more and more aggravating irritating.

Aggravating was a special peeve of Wallace’s, since you could just as easily use irritating and thereby not, ahem, irritate readers who believe that aggravate should only mean to make worse. Again, his thing was that if you can use a synonym that doesn’t come with a fraught usage history, you should, because you never want readers to be distracted in that particular way.

10. The Book of Mormon gives an account of Christ’s ministry to the Nephites, which allegedly took place soon after Christ’s resurrection.

The Book of Mormon gives an account of Christ’s ministry to the Nephites, which allegedly took place soon after Christ’s his (or His) resurrection.

Simple rule, avoid needless repetition.

Let’s take these one at a time.

1. The rule that each other is to be used with two items and one another for three or more was well-developed in 1851, but can be traced as far back as 1785 to a work by George N. Ussher. In 1851, Goold Brown noticed that “misapplication” of the phrases was very common, and he expressed bewilderment that so many people were apt to misunderstand such a common phrase. The Merriam Webster Dictionary of English Usage (MWDEU) suggests that his bewilderment was due to the fact that the rule governing the use of these two phrases has no actual basis in the use of the phrases by native English speakers: “The interchangeability of each other and one another had been established centuries before Ussher or somebody even earlier had thought up the rule.”

2. I agree with the recommended change, although I’d switch the two phrases around so that the shorter one comes first. This isn’t actually a parallelism problem – the two phrases are parallel, it’s just that the first one is so long that the reader is likely to forget the main verb by the time they get to the second phrase. Compare the sentence, “I’d cringe at the vulnerability of his sentences and the ambiguity of his uncrossed Ts.” No shortage of parallelism there.

3. Using if instead of whether to introduce a noun phrase was disparaged by a proper English chap named J. Johnson in 1762, who called it a “Scotticism.” Unfortunately for him, the usage he attacked was considered standard English by his better-known contemporary Samuel Johnson, the author of the landmark A Dictionary of the English Language [wiki]. The MWDEU notes that “if…is almost always used to introduce a noun clause that is the object of a verb such as doubt, see, ask, wonder, decide, and know,” to which I would add find out.

4. There’s no hard and fast rule for determining adverb placement. Some prescriptivists have railed against separating a verb from its auxiliary with an adverb, others have complained about adverbs that come between a verb and its object. The MWDEU says that, in determining adverb placement, “you will need to rely on your common sense and your ear for the language rather than on a rule.” According to my ear for the language, not only does Wallace’s proposed correction sound awkward, but the possibility of readers applying the adverb to the verb spent in the original is so minuscule as to be negligible.

5. It’s true that “in my own mind” is kind of a dumb way to start this sentence, but I’m guessing that this kind of introductory phrase would be used to emphasize the fact that the author’s understanding differs from some other relevant viewpoint. Instead of striking it out altogether, I might replace it with something like “from my experience” or something, depending on the context.

6. The MDWEU cites the conflict over from whence as a result of the disparity between the idiomatic use of whence and the Latin logic behind the word. Appealing to the Latin roots, it is clear that the word whence does already include the notion of from. However, that has never stopped hundreds of thousands of native English speakers, including writers who we canonize as exemplars of great writing such as Shakespeare, Benjamin Franklin, Jonathan Swift, and Thomas Jefferson, from shamelessly using from whence in their work. Even Samuel Johnson, who observed the conflict over this phrase, was known to use it in his own writing from time to time. So although there is an argument that from whence might be redundant, based on its Latinate roots, any well-informed descriptivist must conclude, as the MWDEU does, that there is “no great fault in using it where it sounds right – and great writers have been using it where it sounded right all along.”

7. I agree with the correction wholeheartedly.

8. Split infinitives have been the darling of the prescriptivist world for at least a hundred years. Ambrose Bierce, back in 1909, suggested that all the attention paid to split infinitives has merely been a result of the construction being given a name:

Condemnation of the split infinitive is now pretty general, but it is only recently that any one seems to have thought of it. Our forefathers and we elder writers of this generation used it freely and without shame – perhaps because it had not a name, and our crime could not be pointed out without too much explanation.

Split infinitives have been used by native English speakers since at least the 14th century, and we could conceivably find examples much earlier if we had a reliable corpus that was big enough. According to the MWDEU, “the objection to the split infinitive has never had a rational basis.” They suggest that the objection stems from fear of the divergence of English from more elegant and high-class languages, such as Latin and Greek, that never split infinitives.  Due to the overwhelmingly commonality of the split infinitive among native English speakers, “the consensus in the 20th century…seems to be that awkward avoidance of the split infinitive has produced more bad writing than the use of it.”

9. The OED cites a sense of the adjective aggravating, meaning “exasperating, irritating, provoking,” that goes back to 1775. If Wallace has a problem with this usage, perhaps his best solution would be to procure a time machine.

10. I agree with this change, although I would add that in some cases this type of repetition is warranted. If the sentence in question was “Dave gave an account of Sam’s argument with Alan, which allegedly took place soon after his math exam,” the possessive pronoun his could refer to any of the three people in the main clause, and thus it would be preferable to change the word his to Sam’s to avoid confusion.

The methodology I used in this post – namely, taking a couple minutes to look things up in the OED or the MWDEU – was adapted from the work of the fine folks over at Language Log, and I would recommend that others take up this methodology as well next time they see someone making specious claims about the way language should be. After all, the MWDEU is available in full, for free, on Google Books.

Tax Havens Gardens

In May 2006, councilor Peter Ladner introduced and passed a motion to increase the number of community gardens in the Lower Mainland to 2 010 by the year 2010, as part of Vancouver’s “Olympic legacy.” Recently, since the economy took a dive, commercial property developers have taken this suggestion up with aplomb, but not because their hearts are two sizes too big.

According to Charlie Smith at the Straight, the tax break is roughly 80%, and the city stood to lose $650 090 this year from this type of reclassification. According to Alan Garr at The Courier, this amount gets transferred onto the tax responsibilities of other landowners; back in February, he calculated that each plot in the garden at Davie and Burrard was being subsidized by taxpayers in the amount of $3450, or roughly “$350 for the space needed for one tomato plant.” In May, the Straight reported that 17 lots had been converted since 2007, and another six were in the works – as Global notes, five of those had come through as of the beginning of December, and the garden in question was under review. Considering the apparent popularity of this tactic, the amount of lost revenue is likely nearing a million dollars.

To make this more aggravating, CityCaucus.com reports that the city council’s current policy on dealing with this loophole is to defer to the BC Assessment Authority, who is more or less doing what it’s told to do by the tax laws that govern it, so who knows when we can expect city council to do anything about it. Gregor Robertson, everybody’s favourite liberal businessman, has been supporting a major tax shift away from commercial properties and onto residential properties since before he was elected mayor, which, according to the Straight, amounts to a four percent increase for residential landowners and a zero percent increase for commercial landowners. This policy is being written into the same budget that’s about to cut $20 million in city services next year, including a $3 million cut in community services, a $2.8 million cut to parks and recreation, and a $1.4 million cut to the public library system.

Oh, and don’t forget that somewhere in there the city scrounged up $450 000 to spend on $350 uniforms for the Host City Team to wear during the Olympics.

Bruno Latour on science

The CBC documentary series Ideas did a 24-part series entitled How To Think About Science. In Part 5, Bruno Latour said this:

When I did this work on science practices, no one understood it. It was taken as a “debunking” of science. So I was very interested because I never though that that had to be debunked. I though it had to be studied and described, but not – debunking never interested me. And yet it was taken by people as debunking. So I became very interested in that argument – why is that people, when you describe science, [...] people believe it is a debunking? So what’s their idea of society when a description of science becomes a threat?

This question was a response to the backlash that he received because of his first book, entitled Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Fact, based on his use of the term “social construction” to indicate the book’s focus on the social aspects of scientific practice. He indicated that it was never his intention to debunk science, and that he only intended to enrich science by providing a more thorough and socially-grounded explanation of how science is actually done. After people began expressing distaste at the idea that scientific fact could be “socially constructed,” he came to realize that the possibility of this distaste is predicated on a dualistic view of the world that posited a sharp demarcation between nature and culture. Under this paradigm, science can be viewed as purely rational, and consequently a mere description of nature unaffected by the messy social influences of culture. Thus, a description of scientific facts as being socially constructed threatens to make science “disappear,” because it does not fit neatly into the nature/culture paradigm. (Compare arguments that gender is socially constructed; opponents of this view often feel as though traditional gender roles are in danger of disappearing. Because the view of gender as being “natural” rather than “social” fits so well into a dualistic nature/culture worldview, the acceptance of a paradigm that legitimates social influences on gender is hard to swallow, despite it’s being ostensibly more thorough.) Not surprisingly, Latour suggested that the split between nature and culture is merely political, and that it serves institutions that are in a position to benefit from speaking for one side or the other: science for nature, and politics for culture. I’ve repeatedly stated, here and elsewhere, that the nature/culture dualism is frustratingly normalized, and that things that are posited as purely in the realm of one or the other are almost always affected by a combination of both. I agree with him that overcoming this false dichotomy is a critical project. Latour seems unduly optimistic, though, when he suggests that, in David Cayley’s words, “this myth [...] is now clearly finished, undone by an ecological crisis in which human and non-human agencies are clearly blended” (namely, global warming). This may be the case in philosophy of science circles, as it seems to be in academic feminist ones, but I think this dualism still underscores a vast majority of people’s understanding of the world and serves as the basis of their decision making about issues that affect it, and that fact legitimates the existence of, for instance, climate change deniers in the highest echelons of power.

Humans and men: there are differences

The tendency to equate men with humankind is an old one, evidenced by little things like the age-old icon of evolution seen here:

Bob McDonald, on his CBC show Quirks and Quarks, did a masterful job of talking about humankind without ever mentioning or speaking to a woman on his August 22nd “best of” show, which was a re-broadcast of his show from April 25th, 2009 (available in full here). In attempting to answer the question “Are we inherently violent, or are we a naturally peaceful creature trapped in a violent culture?” Mr. McDonald, not surprisingly, seeks out academic sources who support the former option.

The first person he talks to is Dr. Richard Wrangham, professor of “biological anthropology” at Harvard University and coauthor of the book Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence. Dr. Wrangham describes to Mr. McDonald the incident in chimpanzee research that led to the idea that chimpanzees may be inherently violent; prior to 1974, the bulk of chimpanzee observation, primarily constituted by Jane Goodall’s work with the Gombe chimpanzees in Tanzania, had revealed that chimpanzees are only mildly violent, with most altercations being only minor (with the exception of one incident in which they stole and killed a human baby). In 1974, a group of chimpanzees was observed to silently approach a male member of a neighbouring chimpanzee community and then ambush and brutally kill him.  Since then, the same behaviour has been observed a number of times, and is in fact featured prominently in the popular BBC series Planet Earth. Prof. Wrangham explains that this behaviour is evolved as a way for groups of chimpanzees to expand their territory so as to have more resources to support more children.

The second person Mr. McDonald speaks with is Dr. David Carrier, a comparative physiologist at the University of Utah. Dr. Carrier points out that there is an energy cost to bipedalism, which suggests that there must be some evolutionary advantage to standing upright. This advantage is the ability of bipeds to use their forelimbs as weapons. Dr. Carrier rejects the notion that there might be other uses for one’s forelimbs that might offset the mechanical disadvantage of being two-legged, based on the two facts that a) Australopithecines had short legs, which would have given them a stabler base for hand-to-hand combat, and b) human hands are better-proportioned for forming fists than those of any other primates. [He really said this! I recommend to Dr. Carrier that he punch someone, and see how well-evolved his  metacarpals are.]

The third person invited on the show is Dr. Aaron Sell, an evolutionary psychologist from UC Santa Barbara. Dr. Sell did an experiement where he took male participants to the gym and had them lift weights to determine their level of strength, then they photographed the participants’ faces and had other participants look at the photos to see how well they could judge the strength of these people by their looks. As it turns out, “at least with men,” people were generally able to determine the strength of a person by looking at their face. Dr. Sell suggests that facial structures such as the brow and the jawbone are determined by testosterone, which is the same hormone that makes men big and strong; thus, men with low brows and big jawbones are more likely to be strong. That’s why, when someone makes an angry face, the muscles they use tend to accentuate the brow and the jawbone.

The fourth and final guest on the show is Dr. Craig Kennedy, a neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. He noticed that trained male mice are able to learn a complex task (in this case, pushing a button) in order to get the chance at fighting with another male mouse. The same mice, with their dopamine receptors disabled, do not exhibit the same behaviour; this suggests that the mice’s brains release dopamine – the “pleasure chemical” – when they experience aggression. Dr. Kennedy wanted to see if humans were the same way, so he designed an experiment that involved young men watching things such as hockey fights and scantily clad young women. He found that watching a hockey fight and ogling a scantily clad woman had similar effects on the dopamine receptors in these men’s brains, thus supporting the hypothesis that watching violence is pleasurable. [He conventiently declined to remark on the effects of partaking in violence.]

Although they all have their flaws and quirks, these particular experiments and hypotheses are not what I have a problem with. I have a problem with the fact that Bob McDonald had four men on his show and used their observations about male behaviour as grounds for the conclusion that “humans are inherently violent.” It shouldn’t take a university degree to notice that the guests on Quirks and Quarks were only talking about half of humankind. Using evidence from a small and non-representative sample to make conclusions about a whole population is known in philosophy as a hasty generalization, the bane of inductive reasoning. It’s a scientists job to avoid making generalizations by using as representative a sample as  possible; with the exception of Dr. Carrier, who appears to have his own set of problems, all of these scientists do their job very poorly in this regard, as does Mr. McDonald.

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Is Mel Gibson deriving pleasure from bossing around a bloodied-up Jew?

Greener than Kermit after a cheap jewelry bender

Siemens recently unveiled an electric chopper custom-built built by the folks at Orange County Choppers.  Here is an interview with the OCC patriarch, Paul Teutel:

If you skip to 0:16, Paul points out that his new world headquarters building is so environmentally friendly that it is actually “fifty-two percent above green.”  If the arrival of green as a meaningless catchphrase has not yet been announced, I propose that this serve as its announcement. The thing that makes catchphrases meaningless is, of course, the fact that they can be applied to nearly any referent without causing any logical contradictions: nowadays, you can see green used to describe New York, the Pontiac G5, Gmail, and various other random things. When Paul uses it to describe the baseline LEED certification requirements, then, he isn’t breaking from any conventional use of the word that would associate it with a particular thing.

According to this site, the OCC headquarters has been certified as LEED Silver, which means that it scored between 50 and 59 points during the LEED auditing process, whatever that involves. Aside from the fact that he apparently confused LEED points with percentage points, Paul actually deserves some commendation for his new building; 75% of the materials used were recycled, all of the lighting is attached to motion sensors, a top-of-the-line HVAC system controls the internal environment, and the building is clad with “Dryvit Outsulation,” which allegedly offers an 80% reduction in CO2 emissions over the lifecycle of the product compared to brick.

Welcome back!

Wow. My neglect for this blog is second only to Stephen Harper’s neglect for what it feels like to be a human. I apologize, and implore you to stay tuned for a slough of exciting posts that are due to drop any day now.

Hohle Fels Venus reveals more about modern times than ancient ones

A 35 ooo-year-old ivory figurine discovered in a small cave in Germany this past September has proven to be the oldest known piece of figurative art in the world, beating the previous record-holders by 5 000 years. Disappointingly, but not unsurprisingly, the archaeologists who made the discovery revealed their modern prejudices by describing the figurine as ancient porn. Violet at Reclusive Leftist elaborates:

…the Science Now article, the archaeologist who found the figurine is talking about pornographic pin-ups: “I showed it to a male colleague, and his response was, ‘Nothing’s changed in 40,000 years.’” That sentence needs to be bronzed and hung up on a plaque somewhere, because you couldn’t ask for a better demonstration of the classic fallacy of reading the present into the past. The archaeologist assumes the artist who created the figurine was male; why? He assumes the motive was lust; why? Because that’s all he knows. To his mind, the image of a naked woman with big breasts and exposed vulva can only mean one thing: porn! Porn made by men, for men! And so he assumes, without questioning his assumptions, that the image must have meant the same thing 35,000 years ago. No other mental categories for “naked woman” are available to him. His mind is a closed box.

Sad, but true.