Came across this really interesting article written in 2006 about several "rules" in Wikipedia. This person Eric Zorn (this is such a difficult last name for me to see correctly, because the R and the N when they are lower case just blend and look like a m, its spelled ZORN) is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune. In 2006 on a whim he decided to write a blog trying to start a Internet meme he called Zorm's Law.
Like a good self-promoter he went onto Wikipedia and published an article about this "law". The problem was that there was no notoriety for the term, so all the references he cited were from his own blog. Wikipedia editors didn't care for this self promotion and gathered for discussion. The editors had the choice to Delete the article, Merge it into his personal page or allow the Zorn's Law page to stand on its own.
In this article Zorn discusses his experience. I think the discussion (which is all included in the blog) makes for good reading for people learning how to edit Wikipedia.
I especially like this paragraph " This violates Wikipedia's rules, which forbid vanity postings and require validation from independent, credible sources. After all, an encyclopedia without standards is just a dumping ground for words."
When you are looking at the "vote" at the end of the article, you can see how the editors make their vote in BOLD print. You will also see that the editors really are quite funny, hopefully you can see yourself becoming one.
BTW really want to point out how neglected Zorn's personal Wikipedia page looks.
الأربعاء، 31 أغسطس 2011
الأحد، 28 أغسطس 2011
Laver's Law
| Indecent | 10 years before its time |
|---|---|
| Shameless | 5 years before its time |
| Outré (Daring) | 1 year before its time |
| Smart | 'Current Fashion' |
| Dowdy | 1 year after its time |
| Hideous | 10 years after its time |
| Ridiculous | 20 years after its time |
| Amusing | 30 years after its time |
| Quaint | 50 years after its time |
| Charming | 70 years after its time |
| Romantic | 100 years after its time |
| Beautiful | 150 years after its time |
Image source, via Lushlight.
"Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children"
I didn't realize that nowadays books are promoted through the use of trailers. You learn something every day. This is the trailer for "Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children."
As Jacob explores its abandoned bedrooms and hallways, it becomes clear that the children who once lived here—one of whom was his own grandfather—were more than just peculiar. They may have been dangerous. They may have been quarantined on a desolate island for good reason. And somehow—impossible though it seems—they may still be alive.I seem to be late in discovering the book; when I requested it from our library tonight, I found that I'm now 263rd on the hold list (so don't expect a review of the book from me anytime soon...)
The trailer is good, but even more interesting is the video about the making of the trailer. You can view that video at The Centered Librarian.
The NYC hurricane (of 1954)
1954 - A passerby holds on to a tree for support as hurricane swept waves hammer the sea wall adjacent to the Belt Parkway near 72nd Street in Brooklyn. The New York area and the New Jersey coastline were battered by Hurricane Carol...- but it still looks like that to me.
The Sylphina Angel butterfly
When seen in flight the transparent wings of this exquisite butterfly reflect a myriad of glittering colours - a kaleidoscope of iridescent green, blue, pink and golden hues that hold the observer spellbound as it flickers it's wings in bright sunlight. As it flutters rapidly around bushes and shrubs it could easily be mistaken for a damselfly, and it is not until it settles under a leaf and stops fluttering that it reveals its true identity.Source, via.
16 feet
...a delightful woodcut from Jacob Koebel's 1522 Von Ursprung der Teilung, Mass und Messung dess Ertrichs, der Ecker, Wyngarten, Krautgarten und anderer Velder..., an early surveying handbook (probably the first ever printed in Germany) that could be used to measure and set out (as stated in its title) herb gardens, vineyards, farms and the like. I'm not 100% sure of this, but I think what is going on in this image is the measuring of a rod (or "rute" in German), which is about 5.5 meters or 16 feet; and what we have in the picture is 16 men being positioned over a measuring device...And this from Wikipedia's discussion of the "foot" measurement:
The popular belief is that the original standard was the length of a man's foot... The average foot length is about 9.4 inches (240 mm) for current Europeans. Approximately 99.6% of British men have a foot that is less than 12 inches long. One attempt to "explain" the "missing" inches is that the measure did not refer to a naked foot, but to the length of footwear, which could theoretically add an inch or two to the naked foot's length. This is consistent with the measure being convenient for practical uses such as building sites. People almost always pace out lengths while wearing shoes or boots...It appears to me that Koebel is recommending that instead of taking an arbitrary person's foot, it would be better to assemble 16 men to create the standard of measurement, thereby improving the consistency of the measurement from town to town.
Alveolar capillaries
This image by Oliver Meckes was awarded the Second Place prize in the 2011 FEI-sponsored contest for best electron microscopic photography. I've elected to embed this one rather than the winning image, because this one depicts the absolutely jaw-dropping complexity and intricacy of the air-blood interface in mammalian lungs. The exact configuration would depend on the relative intravascular and intrapulmonary pressures at the time the image was taken, but to those familiar with the general biology of the lungs, this image shows the unimaginable thinness of the alveolar-capillary membrane (and the critical importance the erythrocyte deformability). (The yellow blobs are presumably alveolar macrophages patrolling the alveolus to remove microorganisms and particulate matter).
The explosive growth of student loans
The growth in student loans over the past decade has been truly staggering. Here's a chart based on New York Federal Reserve data for household debt. The red line shows the cumulative growth in student loans since 1999. The blue line shows the growth of all other household debt except for student loans over the same period...
Obviously the number of students didn't grow by 511%. So why are education loans growing so rapidly? One reason could be availability. The government's backing lets credit to students flow very freely. And as the article from yesterday noted, universities are raising tuition aggressively since students are willing to pay more through those loans...
All this college debt could put the U.S. on a slower growth path in the years to come. As Americans grapple with high student loan payments for the first few decades of their adult lives, they'll have less money to spend and invest. All that money flowing into colleges and universities is being funneled away from other industries where it would have been spent in future years.
Great Global Treasure Hunt, €50,000 prize
Inside its covers are 14 mind-and-imagination-stretching puzzles, ranging from the fairly easy to the super-fiendish. But these aren’t just any puzzles. Solve all 14, and you’ll find that the answers form the clues to the final puzzle – an exact location on Google Earth – thereby winning yourself a €50,000 (£43,740) cash prize...More at The Telegraph, which offers a "practice" treasure hunt based on the image above, the solving of which can win you a BA trip for two to the destination indicated by the image embedded above.
The form that solution takes is, in fact, a series of numbers, except that their significance is not mathematical, but geographical. For between them, they express, in ultra-precise latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates, a small point on the globe, measuring no more than 20 sq ft.
“Consider the torch, the empty birdcage, the Buddhist statue, the little drawing pinned to the wall. Not to mention the configuration of the curtains and spots on the dominoes, and other symbols and conformations.”Larger image here.
"Bubble cloud" seen near Beijing
As reported by ITN (Via Nothing To Do With Arbroath) :
One observer at the Beijing Planetarium described what he saw: "At first, it's relatively small and bright, the upper part is something like a semi-circle, a spherical ring of light, it's obviously becoming bigger and bigger then." The object, which appeared in the sky for fifteen minutes, gradually became bigger and thinner.This looked very familiar to me, so I searched this morning, and finally found links to reports of a similar phenomenon observed in Hawaii earlier this summer. Here's how it was reported by Discover Magazine:
The footage is from a webcam mounted outside the CFHT astronomical observatory in Hawaii... You see some stars and the horizon, then suddenly an ethereal pale arc pops into view. It rapidly expands into a thin circular shell, then fades away as it fills the view. The whole thing takes a few minutes to expand; you can see the stars moving during the event...More at the link, including video of the Hawaiian event. As a side note, I wonder how much missile fuel is ejected above our planet each year, and what cumulative effect is has on the atmosphere (and on us)... [Addendum: see David's info in the Comments].
I blurred the image just a bit to reduce some of the noisy background, and what leaps out is that the expanding halo is limb-brightened, like a soap bubble, and fades with time. That strongly points toward something like a sudden impulse of energy and rapid expansion of material, like an explosion of some kind. Note that the ring itself appears to be moving, as if whatever caused it was moving rapidly as well. It took me a minute after watching the video to remember the bizarre Norway spiral from a couple of years ago, a phenomenal light show caused by an out-of-control rocket booster jetting out fuel in space...
Asterisk board member calvin 737 was the first to suggest it might be related to a Minuteman III missile launch around that time. As more people on the forum dug into it, the timing was found to be right. The missile launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base (in California) at 03:35 Hawaii time, just minutes before the halo was seen...
...the missile is above most of the Earth’s atmosphere, essentially in space. So when that gas is suddenly released from the stage expands, it blows away from the missile in a sphere. Not only that, the release is so rapid it would expand like a spherical shell — which would look like a ring from the ground (the same way a soap bubble looks like a ring). And not only that, but the expanding gas would be moving very rapidly relative to the ground since the missile would’ve been moving rapidly at this point in the flight.
More very very basic Editing ~ Pet Psychics page as example
If you haven't already read This Blog, you might want to visit there first. We worked on correcting spelling, adding and removing hyperlinks and how to use Watchlists. I'm going to continue editing the Pet Psychic Page as our example. I do have an article by Karen Stollznow that I want to incorporate into the pet psychic page, I will try to explain my thinking as I edit the page as well as the "how-to" of doing so. (NOTE: the hyperlink above to the pet psychic page is the one you should use if you are following along with this blog, it contains the page before making these changes. In other words the Before, if you just want to jump to the After then click here.)
As I said before, this is just a wall-o-text, most readers are going to be bogged down trying to read through it. We need to get a bit more organized before proceeding with Karen's article. I'm going to insert headings to help.
I don't want to re-write the article, just better organize it. If you want to have a go at it after reading this blog, please do so. That is part of the joy of Wikipedia.
We are looking at 7 paragraphs. The lede (first paragraph) is okay, but I think that the criticism part where it starts "The scientific community has rejected all claims of psychic phenomena..." should be in its own section. Also the 7th paragraph is about the history of pet psychics and should go towards the beginning.
At the end of paragraph 3 there is this sentence "In recent years quantum physics has been able to redress the balance with experiments and meta-analyses of work on thought transfer". I followed the citation at the bottom of the Wiki article and the author is this person. Dean Radin, the citation is a book that he wrote in 2006, but it gives you no way of following the cite, no page numbers ect. So this sentence will be removed from the pet psychic article. If the original editor wants to put it back in then he/she will have to better reference it.
The last sentence of paragraph 7 is badly worded, "The number of businesses offering pet psychic services has steadily increased but the industry remains unregulated and its claims unverifiable scientifically". I think that sounds better.
Love this line, "They claimed they could communicate telepathically,[28] then came the discovery that they could also communicate with animals...even animals that have died." What "discovery"? Again referencing a paranormal book with no page number where this knowledge is coming from. I Think this sentence will also change. "They claimed they could communicate telepathically with animals living or dead."
This whole paragraph needs to go. "Reasons for consulting a pet psychic vary, but typically center on bringing a troubled human and animal companion relationship to mutual satisfaction.[23][26] Bernadine Cruz, a veterinarian in Laguna Hills, California, states, "animal owners sometimes seek to center themselves through their pets, and whisperers make it easy."[2] Others pet psychics specialize in helping develop a better relationship with a household pet or competitive partnership with a horse." The veterinarian is not noteworthy, and the whole paragraph does nothing for the article.
I'm going to clean this up further by adding paragraph headings. This is done by typing ==name of heading== the more = signs you use, the bigger the font the heading becomes. So if you are adding a heading to an article that already exists use the same amount of = signs as are in the rest of the article.
I'm going to insert headings called ==In the media== and ==Criticism of pet psychics== I've been told by other editors who keep changing my edits that Wikipedia does not capitalize every word in a heading even though I think it looks better that way.
This paragraph seems to be getting a total pass... "
I'm going to have to look into this article and see if there has been any investigation into it. I just can't let these statements saying there is evidence for psychic pets go unchallenged. But in true Wikipedia fashion I won't delete the paragraph, but look for something to add to it. I know Richard Wiseman has done some experiments similar to Jaytee. But what I would like to find is someone writing about Sheldrake's experiments.
Okay, some time has passed and I've been reading about Sheldrake's dog coming home tests. I found an article by Joe Nickell about pet psychics and he mentions Wichard Wiseman's replication of Sheldrake's experiment. Here is the part of Nickell's article that I'm going to glean from.
Each editor of Wikipedia does this differently, I like to quote. Wikipedia would rather you write it in your own words and quote only a bit, so lets give it a go here.
"Replicating Sheldrake's experiment with Jaytee, [[Richard Wiseman]] in 1998 designed four tests for a dog a Austrian television show felt had been successful knowing when its owner would return home. Wiseman ruled out all cues and routines the dog could previously have been picking up. When tested with these controls the dog failed all four tests. [[JREF]] investigator [[Joe Nickell]] writes that "the experiments suggested "that selective memory, multiple guesses and selective matching could often have sufficient scope to give an owner the impression of a paranormal effect."
Can you improve on my writing? Probably! Your welcome to edit the blurb on Wikipedia.
Now we need to cite it. Here is the link to the article again. http://www.csicop.org/si/show/psychic_pets_and_pet_psychics/ The author is Joe Nickell, for Skeptical Inquirer Magazine,Volume 26.6, November / December 2002, article is called "Psychic Pets and Pet Psychics". Investigative Files is the name of his column This should be all we need to cite the article. I'm placing this blurb right after the third paragraph where they reference Sheldrake. I know that what I'm writing is criticism and should go under the criticism heading, but I want it to flow from the previous paragraph. We can always change it.
I find it easier to look for another journal reference located on the page I'm editing, copy and paste it where I want it to go (or on a word document somewhere else) then change all the details. Lets try it. I found this reference (called "cite web" there were other references that were called "cite book").
{{cite web |last=Gracely, Ph.D. |first=Ed J. |authorlink= |title=Why Extraordinary Claims Demand Extraordinary Proof |work=PhACT |year=1998 |url= http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/extraproof.html|accessdate=2007-07-31}}
Here is what it looks like in the References area. ^ Gracely, Ph.D., Ed J. (1998). "Why Extraordinary Claims Demand Extraordinary Proof". PhACT. Retrieved 2007-07-31.
Pretty intimidating looking isn't it? If you want something to appear as a footnote then you must use something that starts with Everything must be changed exactly, so when you are doing something like this, try not to get distracted. Do it at one sitting.
{{cite web |last=Nickell |first=Joe |authorlink= |title=Psychic Pets and Pet Psychics |work=Investigative Files |year=November-December 2002 |url=http://www.csicop.org/si/show/psychic_pets_and_pet_psychics/ |accessdate=2011-08-27}}
This is what it looks like on "Preview"
^ Nickell, Joe (November-December 2002). "Psychic Pets and Pet Psychics". Investigative Files. Retrieved 2011-08-27.
Lets use Joe Nickell's article for another area on the page. Here is what Joe writes about pet psychics.
Lets glean something from this to use in the criticism section.
[[Joe Nickell]] believes that [[cold reading]] is the reason why so many pet psychics look like they are communicating with animals. Watching pet psychics like Gerri Leigh and [[Animal Planet]]'s [[Sonya Fitzpatrick]] work in front of an audience, their conversations with the animals appear to be impressive until you understand that "it is the pet owners, not the pets themselves, who "validate" the pronouncements."
We can use the exact same citation. At first I didn't hyperlink to Joe Nickell, but looking at the "show preview" as I'm adding this on to the page, it seems it has been many paragraphs since Joe was linked, so I'm going to do it. Also because I'm checking the "preview" each time I noticed that Gerri Leigh whom I had first tried to hyperlink to is giving me only red print. I searched for her on Wikipedia and she does not have a page, so I'm removing the [[ ]] around her name.
There might be more I can glean from Nickell's article, but lets move on. Here is Karen Stollznow's article that brought me to use the pet psychic page as the example on how to edit. http://www.csicop.org/sb/show/ballad_of_jed_and_the_pet_psychic Article called "The Ballad of Jed (and the Pet Psychic)" March 2003 for Skeptical Inquirer Magazine.
Here are the parts that sum up the article (the conclusion), I will need to glean two or three sentences that will represent the article on the pet psychic page.
I've already read the article several times, so writing it in my own words with very few quotes shouldn't be a problem.
Linguistic professor [[Karen Stollznow]] writing for [[Australian Skeptics|The Skeptic]] magazine tested a pet psychic with a cat named Jed. Not only was the psychic "completely inaccurate in her reading of Jed’s age, place of birth, background, behavior, health, and my health..." she was unable to tell that Jed was not her cat. Stollznow concludes that "language is human-species specific. We don’t and can’t “know” what animals think."
Now our citation. Lets just use Nickell's cite as a starting point, change out everything to apply to Karen's article.
{{cite web |last=Stollznow |first=Karen |authorlink= |title=The Ballad of Jed (and the Pet Psychic) |work= |year=March 2003 |url=http://www.csicop.org/sb/show/ballad_of_jed_and_the_pet_psychic |accessdate=2011-08-27}}
^ Stollznow, Karen (March 2003). "The Ballad of Jed (and the Pet Psychic)". Retrieved 2011-08-27.
Notice on the reference cite I left blank the "work=" area. On Nickell's article I wrote "Investigative Files" on Karen's I didn't know what to write so I just left it blank. The same thing was done on both Karen and Joe's cites where it says "authorlink=". I didn't know what to write there so I left it blank. The citation still footnotes and looks wonderful!
So now I'm going to preview the page one more time, it is already on my watchlist. I'm going to write "added two articles and reorganized the page" in the edit summary. Then when I'm sure I'm completely done I will "publish" the page.
So I'm done working on this page. Please feel free to expand the article, rewrite it, fix grammar or whatever you think is needed. Remember we are looking for neutral tones, let the reference you are citing speak for you. I left almost everything that was in the page when I got to it, just moved things around and added the two articles.
There were several things I almost did to make the skeptic side sound better, but I removed them. For your learning sake this is what I didn't include (but wanted to). Professor [[Richard Wiseman]] or [[Richard Wiseman]] PhD.
The same thing with Joe Nickell. I wanted to write "after years of experience investigating pet psychics..." this would also have been non-neutral, I'm sure I could have come up with references to his "years of experience" but it wouldn't have anything to do with the article.
I did include the words "Linguistic professor" for Karen's blurb. I suppose that could be removed, but as I was quoting her about human communication, I felt that in this case it was an important part of the blurb.
Just in case you were wondering how many people we can expect will read our newly improved pet psychic page... About 350 a month or 4,200 a year. Is that a lot? If I, Susan Gerbic were to write a blog about those same two articles and place it somewhere on the Internet for the world to read, I doubt that I could get that many reads. Keep in mind that whether or not I wrote the blog, people are still going to be visiting the Wikipedia page. I'd rather those 350 people find the Wiki page.
As I said, I'm moving on to other Wikipedia articles that need improvement as well. This one isn't perfect, but it is way better. I hope you learned from my thought process, and maybe it will make you a better editor. Improve on what I'm teaching you, and the only way to do that is to get out there and EDIT!
Susan
As I said before, this is just a wall-o-text, most readers are going to be bogged down trying to read through it. We need to get a bit more organized before proceeding with Karen's article. I'm going to insert headings to help.
I don't want to re-write the article, just better organize it. If you want to have a go at it after reading this blog, please do so. That is part of the joy of Wikipedia.
We are looking at 7 paragraphs. The lede (first paragraph) is okay, but I think that the criticism part where it starts "The scientific community has rejected all claims of psychic phenomena..." should be in its own section. Also the 7th paragraph is about the history of pet psychics and should go towards the beginning.
At the end of paragraph 3 there is this sentence "In recent years quantum physics has been able to redress the balance with experiments and meta-analyses of work on thought transfer". I followed the citation at the bottom of the Wiki article and the author is this person. Dean Radin, the citation is a book that he wrote in 2006, but it gives you no way of following the cite, no page numbers ect. So this sentence will be removed from the pet psychic article. If the original editor wants to put it back in then he/she will have to better reference it.
The last sentence of paragraph 7 is badly worded, "The number of businesses offering pet psychic services has steadily increased but the industry remains unregulated and its claims unverifiable scientifically". I think that sounds better.
Love this line, "They claimed they could communicate telepathically,[28] then came the discovery that they could also communicate with animals...even animals that have died." What "discovery"? Again referencing a paranormal book with no page number where this knowledge is coming from. I Think this sentence will also change. "They claimed they could communicate telepathically with animals living or dead."
This whole paragraph needs to go. "Reasons for consulting a pet psychic vary, but typically center on bringing a troubled human and animal companion relationship to mutual satisfaction.[23][26] Bernadine Cruz, a veterinarian in Laguna Hills, California, states, "animal owners sometimes seek to center themselves through their pets, and whisperers make it easy."[2] Others pet psychics specialize in helping develop a better relationship with a household pet or competitive partnership with a horse." The veterinarian is not noteworthy, and the whole paragraph does nothing for the article.
I'm going to clean this up further by adding paragraph headings. This is done by typing ==name of heading== the more = signs you use, the bigger the font the heading becomes. So if you are adding a heading to an article that already exists use the same amount of = signs as are in the rest of the article.
I'm going to insert headings called ==In the media== and ==Criticism of pet psychics== I've been told by other editors who keep changing my edits that Wikipedia does not capitalize every word in a heading even though I think it looks better that way.
This paragraph seems to be getting a total pass... "
Parapsychologist Rupert Sheldrake claims that he has shown in experiments that some pets are psychic. A parrot, N'kisi, in New York uttered statistically more words that had to do with random cards her owner were looking at in another room in one series of experiments,[16] and in another series of experiments a dog, Jaytee, spent statistically more time at the window during the time his owner was on her way home (at random times) than other times when Jaytees owner was out"
I'm going to have to look into this article and see if there has been any investigation into it. I just can't let these statements saying there is evidence for psychic pets go unchallenged. But in true Wikipedia fashion I won't delete the paragraph, but look for something to add to it. I know Richard Wiseman has done some experiments similar to Jaytee. But what I would like to find is someone writing about Sheldrake's experiments.
Okay, some time has passed and I've been reading about Sheldrake's dog coming home tests. I found an article by Joe Nickell about pet psychics and he mentions Wichard Wiseman's replication of Sheldrake's experiment. Here is the part of Nickell's article that I'm going to glean from.
The researchers responded to a suggestion by Rupert Sheldrake that just such a study be undertaken, and it followed a formal test of the alleged phenomenon by an Austrian television company. That test focused on an English woman and her dog and seemed successful. Wiseman et al. (1998) conducted four experiments designed to rule out the pet’s responding to routine or picking up sensory cues (either from the returning owner or from others aware of the expected time of return), as well as people’s selective memories and selective matching, and other possible normal explanations.
In all four experiments the dog failed to detect accurately when her owner set off for home, contradicting claims made on the basis of the previous (Austrian TV) study. The experiments suggested "that selective memory, multiple guesses and selective matching could often have sufficient scope to give an owner the impression of a paranormal effect."
Each editor of Wikipedia does this differently, I like to quote. Wikipedia would rather you write it in your own words and quote only a bit, so lets give it a go here.
"Replicating Sheldrake's experiment with Jaytee, [[Richard Wiseman]] in 1998 designed four tests for a dog a Austrian television show felt had been successful knowing when its owner would return home. Wiseman ruled out all cues and routines the dog could previously have been picking up. When tested with these controls the dog failed all four tests. [[JREF]] investigator [[Joe Nickell]] writes that "the experiments suggested "that selective memory, multiple guesses and selective matching could often have sufficient scope to give an owner the impression of a paranormal effect."
Can you improve on my writing? Probably! Your welcome to edit the blurb on Wikipedia.
Now we need to cite it. Here is the link to the article again. http://www.csicop.org/si/show/psychic_pets_and_pet_psychics/ The author is Joe Nickell, for Skeptical Inquirer Magazine,Volume 26.6, November / December 2002, article is called "Psychic Pets and Pet Psychics". Investigative Files is the name of his column This should be all we need to cite the article. I'm placing this blurb right after the third paragraph where they reference Sheldrake. I know that what I'm writing is criticism and should go under the criticism heading, but I want it to flow from the previous paragraph. We can always change it.
I find it easier to look for another journal reference located on the page I'm editing, copy and paste it where I want it to go (or on a word document somewhere else) then change all the details. Lets try it. I found this reference (called "cite web" there were other references that were called "cite book").
{{cite web |last=Gracely, Ph.D. |first=Ed J. |authorlink= |title=Why Extraordinary Claims Demand Extraordinary Proof |work=PhACT |year=1998 |url= http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/extraproof.html|accessdate=2007-07-31}}
Here is what it looks like in the References area. ^ Gracely, Ph.D., Ed J. (1998). "Why Extraordinary Claims Demand Extraordinary Proof". PhACT. Retrieved 2007-07-31.
Pretty intimidating looking isn't it? If you want something to appear as a footnote then you must use something that starts with Everything must be changed exactly, so when you are doing something like this, try not to get distracted. Do it at one sitting.
{{cite web |last=Nickell |first=Joe |authorlink= |title=Psychic Pets and Pet Psychics |work=Investigative Files |year=November-December 2002 |url=http://www.csicop.org/si/show/psychic_pets_and_pet_psychics/ |accessdate=2011-08-27}}
This is what it looks like on "Preview"
^ Nickell, Joe (November-December 2002). "Psychic Pets and Pet Psychics". Investigative Files. Retrieved 2011-08-27.
Lets use Joe Nickell's article for another area on the page. Here is what Joe writes about pet psychics.
People who are both devoted to their pets and credulous about the paranormal may easily fall prey to unsubstantiated claims of pet psychics. Some profess to treat animals’ emotional problems, for example, after supposedly communicating with them by ESP or other paranormal means, such as through astrology or assistance from the seer’s "spirit guides" (MacDougall 1983; Cooper and Noble 1996).
Having studied pet psychics at work—including Gerri Leigh (with whom I appeared on Springer) and Sonya Fitzpatrick (star of the Animal Planet channel’s The Pet Psychic)—I find that they impress audiences with some very simple ploys. Consciously or not, they are essentially using the same fortunetellers’ technique—"cold reading"—that is used for human subjects. This is an artful method of gleaning information from someone while giving the impression it is obtained mystically (Hyman 1977). After all, it is the pet owners, not the pets themselves, who "validate" the pronouncements. Here is a look at some of the common cold-reading techniques used by pet psychics.
These and other techniques help convince the credulous that pet psychics have telepathic or clairvoyant or other powers.
Lets glean something from this to use in the criticism section.
[[Joe Nickell]] believes that [[cold reading]] is the reason why so many pet psychics look like they are communicating with animals. Watching pet psychics like Gerri Leigh and [[Animal Planet]]'s [[Sonya Fitzpatrick]] work in front of an audience, their conversations with the animals appear to be impressive until you understand that "it is the pet owners, not the pets themselves, who "validate" the pronouncements."
We can use the exact same citation. At first I didn't hyperlink to Joe Nickell, but looking at the "show preview" as I'm adding this on to the page, it seems it has been many paragraphs since Joe was linked, so I'm going to do it. Also because I'm checking the "preview" each time I noticed that Gerri Leigh whom I had first tried to hyperlink to is giving me only red print. I searched for her on Wikipedia and she does not have a page, so I'm removing the [[ ]] around her name.
There might be more I can glean from Nickell's article, but lets move on. Here is Karen Stollznow's article that brought me to use the pet psychic page as the example on how to edit. http://www.csicop.org/sb/show/ballad_of_jed_and_the_pet_psychic Article called "The Ballad of Jed (and the Pet Psychic)" March 2003 for Skeptical Inquirer Magazine.
Here are the parts that sum up the article (the conclusion), I will need to glean two or three sentences that will represent the article on the pet psychic page.
On the basis of this session, Ann didn’t provide any evidence of psychic abilities but instead appeared to employ similar techniques, either consciously or not. As confirmed by Jed’s owners, Ann was completely inaccurate in her reading of Jed’s age, place of birth, background, behavior, health, and my health. The shelter “hit” was more miss, posed as a question, and then an uncertain claim with the caveat “think.” Most damning of all, Jed is not my cat, and my home is not his!
It’s an easy gig to speak on behalf of the voiceless. Animal communication, of a paranormal nature, presupposes that the pet is telepathic, is able to understand human language and thought, and able to “respond” in kind. “Interspecies communication” appears to be a visual and subjective or imaginative interpretation of the physical and behavioral traits of non-human animals. No matter how many commands your dog responds to, no matter how many words Koko can sign, no matter how many words your parrot can mimic, language is human-species specific. We don’t and can’t “know” what animals think. Despite our own linguistic abilities, it’s difficult enough to know what people think.
I've already read the article several times, so writing it in my own words with very few quotes shouldn't be a problem.
Linguistic professor [[Karen Stollznow]] writing for [[Australian Skeptics|The Skeptic]] magazine tested a pet psychic with a cat named Jed. Not only was the psychic "completely inaccurate in her reading of Jed’s age, place of birth, background, behavior, health, and my health..." she was unable to tell that Jed was not her cat. Stollznow concludes that "language is human-species specific. We don’t and can’t “know” what animals think."
Now our citation. Lets just use Nickell's cite as a starting point, change out everything to apply to Karen's article.
{{cite web |last=Stollznow |first=Karen |authorlink= |title=The Ballad of Jed (and the Pet Psychic) |work= |year=March 2003 |url=http://www.csicop.org/sb/show/ballad_of_jed_and_the_pet_psychic |accessdate=2011-08-27}}
^ Stollznow, Karen (March 2003). "The Ballad of Jed (and the Pet Psychic)". Retrieved 2011-08-27.
Notice on the reference cite I left blank the "work=" area. On Nickell's article I wrote "Investigative Files" on Karen's I didn't know what to write so I just left it blank. The same thing was done on both Karen and Joe's cites where it says "authorlink=". I didn't know what to write there so I left it blank. The citation still footnotes and looks wonderful!
So now I'm going to preview the page one more time, it is already on my watchlist. I'm going to write "added two articles and reorganized the page" in the edit summary. Then when I'm sure I'm completely done I will "publish" the page.
So I'm done working on this page. Please feel free to expand the article, rewrite it, fix grammar or whatever you think is needed. Remember we are looking for neutral tones, let the reference you are citing speak for you. I left almost everything that was in the page when I got to it, just moved things around and added the two articles.
There were several things I almost did to make the skeptic side sound better, but I removed them. For your learning sake this is what I didn't include (but wanted to). Professor [[Richard Wiseman]] or [[Richard Wiseman]] PhD.
The same thing with Joe Nickell. I wanted to write "after years of experience investigating pet psychics..." this would also have been non-neutral, I'm sure I could have come up with references to his "years of experience" but it wouldn't have anything to do with the article.
I did include the words "Linguistic professor" for Karen's blurb. I suppose that could be removed, but as I was quoting her about human communication, I felt that in this case it was an important part of the blurb.
Just in case you were wondering how many people we can expect will read our newly improved pet psychic page... About 350 a month or 4,200 a year. Is that a lot? If I, Susan Gerbic were to write a blog about those same two articles and place it somewhere on the Internet for the world to read, I doubt that I could get that many reads. Keep in mind that whether or not I wrote the blog, people are still going to be visiting the Wikipedia page. I'd rather those 350 people find the Wiki page.
As I said, I'm moving on to other Wikipedia articles that need improvement as well. This one isn't perfect, but it is way better. I hope you learned from my thought process, and maybe it will make you a better editor. Improve on what I'm teaching you, and the only way to do that is to get out there and EDIT!
Susan
الجمعة، 26 أغسطس 2011
Very, very basic editing how-to for Wikipedia: Example used is Pet Psychics page
(Example used is Pet Psychicpage)
It seems from the numerous comments I receive that there is a need for a simple how-to blog. Scattered amongst my past blogs have been examples of how to edit pages focusing on the topic of that blog. I'm going to attempt to pull many of these helpful examples into one blog for easier reference. There are many tutorials existing on the Internet, including YouTube showing video of someone editing, and on Wikipedia itself.
I would also like to note that I am more than willing to virtually hold your hand through all the edits you feel you need help with. Please contact me here or on Facebook (Susan Gerbic) and I will do what needs to be done. Keep in mind that our correspondence may become fodder for a future blog.
So here are some of the things I've learned in the last eightmonths of editing. Firstly, you must createan account with Wikipedia. You can edit anonymously, but nearly all of the edits I and other editors revert are from people too afraid to leave their name, just their IP address. Be proud of the changes you make, leave your name.
I am a Wikipedia editor. I was not hired, nordid I applyfor the position, norwas I approved. I registered, and that allows me toedit; but I must follow the rules. That's it. You can be an editor, also.
You do not have to start by creating new pages. Start by making simple edits like correcting grammar and spelling errors. Even punctuation improvement helps pages and gives the new editor confidence and skills.
Let's take a good look at a typical page. I'm heading over to the Pet Psychicpage for a quick edit. The link you follow in the sentence above is an old version by the time you read this blog. I'm going to be making some changes, so the current page will look differently.
First off, it is just a wall-o-text. How to wade through this? (Weare not editing for skeptical readers so much, but for the general reader.) First thing you notice is that there is red writing around the words animal communicators. This means that someone inserted a hyperlink to the phrase, but it does not actually go to a page. I just searched Wikipedia and did not find anything it could link to. So we need to clean this up. Here is how...
Sorry, the picture is kind of small, but you can just see the "Edit" tab in blue. In the middle of "Read" and "Viewhistory.”Click on that tab. What you will now see is pretty scary looking—lots and lots of data.Don't be scared off.
You will see this "[[animal communicator]]s" on the seventhline. The [[ and ]] brackets are used to hyperlink to other Wikipedia pages. When the hyperlink appears on the "read" page, it will be in blue writing. What is inside the [[ and ]] brackets must be exactly the page you want it to go to. Notice that the editor put the lower case "s" outside the brackets. They did this because, without it the sentence would not make sense. Here is the original sentence: "while others are more like animal communicators"
I am now going to remove the brackets from around the words. At the bottom of the page you will see this.
First you click on the"Show preview" button.
You will see a bunch of red writing at the top saying that "this is only a preview.” You will also see the change I made. The words "animal communicators" are no longer in red ink.
Next, I am going to click the box next to "Watchthis page.” This means that whenever someone edits this page, I will get a notice on my watchlist. This way, I can quickly see if someone has reverted my edit or added anything else to the page.
Next, I will write something in that "Editsummary" area. I'm going to write "took off hyperlink to animal communicators.” Then I'm going to hit the "Save page" button. All of these steps should be performed every time you edit.
Now, I'm going to show you what the watchlist looks like for this edit.
At the very top of the page on the right-hand side arethe words, "Mywatchlist.” I'm going to click on that and show you what I see.
Well, my watchlist page is quite busy-looking, but here is pretty much what you will see on your own watchlist—the date and all the edit info. The "diff" means the difference between before I edited and after. "hist" means the history of the page’s edits. That is a very long list of past edits. The "Sgerbic" is me; if you click on it you will go to my Wikipediaeditor page. Other editors leave messages there, it is also a place where editors can get to know each other. Having a page does give you credibility in the editing community, and I suggest you all make your own page (another blog someday). You can see where I wrote the reason for the edit.
Let’s see what else we can do with this page. What about the first paragraph? Wikipedia calls this a "lede.” Changing a lede can be a really big deal; some pages, like Astrologyand Homeopathy,have years of work in getting the lede just right. Wikipedia has to be neutral, and the lede needs to reflect that. Don't start changing ledes unless you look at the "Talkpage" first. Find that tab on the left-hand side on the top and click on that.
You will see a bunch of pink blobs with kittens and a horse on them. This means that there are Wikipedia editors that are focusing on just the pages concerning cats and horses. Go figure. There is also an area for skepticism project. This is a now-dormant site where skeptics go to find what needs to be done. At the bottom of the page it says "This page was last modified on 12 May 2009 at 05:00." Itwas over twoyears agothat anyone wrote anything on the talk page. This does not mean things have not been changed on the page the public views, only the talkpage.
In my opinion, this page looks pretty dormant. If you wanted to change the lede somehow, or totally edit the page, I doubt that anyone would notice or care. The Pet Psychicpage is probably on several editors’ watchlists, so they will notice anything that changes and may scurry on over to look at your edit more closely. If you click on the "article" tab you will be taken back to the page everyone reads. Here is the lede again:
I would also like to note that I am more than willing to virtually hold your hand through all the edits you feel you need help with. Please contact me here or on Facebook (Susan Gerbic) and I will do what needs to be done. Keep in mind that our correspondence may become fodder for a future blog.
So here are some of the things I've learned in the last eightmonths of editing. Firstly, you must createan account with Wikipedia. You can edit anonymously, but nearly all of the edits I and other editors revert are from people too afraid to leave their name, just their IP address. Be proud of the changes you make, leave your name.
I am a Wikipedia editor. I was not hired, nordid I applyfor the position, norwas I approved. I registered, and that allows me toedit; but I must follow the rules. That's it. You can be an editor, also.
You do not have to start by creating new pages. Start by making simple edits like correcting grammar and spelling errors. Even punctuation improvement helps pages and gives the new editor confidence and skills.
Let's take a good look at a typical page. I'm heading over to the Pet Psychicpage for a quick edit. The link you follow in the sentence above is an old version by the time you read this blog. I'm going to be making some changes, so the current page will look differently.
First off, it is just a wall-o-text. How to wade through this? (Weare not editing for skeptical readers so much, but for the general reader.) First thing you notice is that there is red writing around the words animal communicators. This means that someone inserted a hyperlink to the phrase, but it does not actually go to a page. I just searched Wikipedia and did not find anything it could link to. So we need to clean this up. Here is how...
Sorry, the picture is kind of small, but you can just see the "Edit" tab in blue. In the middle of "Read" and "Viewhistory.”Click on that tab. What you will now see is pretty scary looking—lots and lots of data.Don't be scared off.
You will see this "[[animal communicator]]s" on the seventhline. The [[ and ]] brackets are used to hyperlink to other Wikipedia pages. When the hyperlink appears on the "read" page, it will be in blue writing. What is inside the [[ and ]] brackets must be exactly the page you want it to go to. Notice that the editor put the lower case "s" outside the brackets. They did this because, without it the sentence would not make sense. Here is the original sentence: "while others are more like animal communicators"
I am now going to remove the brackets from around the words. At the bottom of the page you will see this.
First you click on the"Show preview" button.
You will see a bunch of red writing at the top saying that "this is only a preview.” You will also see the change I made. The words "animal communicators" are no longer in red ink.
Next, I am going to click the box next to "Watchthis page.” This means that whenever someone edits this page, I will get a notice on my watchlist. This way, I can quickly see if someone has reverted my edit or added anything else to the page.
Next, I will write something in that "Editsummary" area. I'm going to write "took off hyperlink to animal communicators.” Then I'm going to hit the "Save page" button. All of these steps should be performed every time you edit.
Now, I'm going to show you what the watchlist looks like for this edit.
At the very top of the page on the right-hand side arethe words, "Mywatchlist.” I'm going to click on that and show you what I see.
Well, my watchlist page is quite busy-looking, but here is pretty much what you will see on your own watchlist—the date and all the edit info. The "diff" means the difference between before I edited and after. "hist" means the history of the page’s edits. That is a very long list of past edits. The "Sgerbic" is me; if you click on it you will go to my Wikipediaeditor page. Other editors leave messages there, it is also a place where editors can get to know each other. Having a page does give you credibility in the editing community, and I suggest you all make your own page (another blog someday). You can see where I wrote the reason for the edit.
Let’s see what else we can do with this page. What about the first paragraph? Wikipedia calls this a "lede.” Changing a lede can be a really big deal; some pages, like Astrologyand Homeopathy,have years of work in getting the lede just right. Wikipedia has to be neutral, and the lede needs to reflect that. Don't start changing ledes unless you look at the "Talkpage" first. Find that tab on the left-hand side on the top and click on that.
You will see a bunch of pink blobs with kittens and a horse on them. This means that there are Wikipedia editors that are focusing on just the pages concerning cats and horses. Go figure. There is also an area for skepticism project. This is a now-dormant site where skeptics go to find what needs to be done. At the bottom of the page it says "This page was last modified on 12 May 2009 at 05:00." Itwas over twoyears agothat anyone wrote anything on the talk page. This does not mean things have not been changed on the page the public views, only the talkpage.
In my opinion, this page looks pretty dormant. If you wanted to change the lede somehow, or totally edit the page, I doubt that anyone would notice or care. The Pet Psychicpage is probably on several editors’ watchlists, so they will notice anything that changes and may scurry on over to look at your edit more closely. If you click on the "article" tab you will be taken back to the page everyone reads. Here is the lede again:
A petpsychic, animal communicator, orpet whispereris a person who claims to be able to communicate psychicallywith animals.[1][2]Some pet psychics claim to be able to communicate with long-dead animals,[1]while others are more like animal communicators or animal psychologists.[3][4]Psychicrefers to a claimed ability to perceiveinformation hidden from the normal sensesthrough what is described as extrasensory perception, or to those people said to have such abilities. Pet Whisperer is usually applied to a trainer like César Milan or Monty Roberts, who use their body language and the psychology of the dog or horse, to communicate with the animal.
I'm reading it through and I think the lede is pretty good. Neutral enough. I'm no grammar wizard, so I'm not confident enough to go around and change things. But some wording in this lede might be driving you nuts, feel free to make the changes. Just follow the directions of "preview,” "watch this page,” "edit summary," and then "save.”
I do notice something, two names that stand out, the editor seems to think the reader will know who these people are. I don't. So I'm going to copy the name "Monty Roberts" and put it in a Wiki search bar. (NOTE: I keep several tabs open on my screen so I don't have to close down the project I'm working on) Sure enough, Monty Robertsis the horse whisperer I heard so much about. What about the other guy? This gets a bit more complicated, I will explain later;but first, let’s createMonty's hyperlink.
Remember, we need to go to the "Edit" page and find the reference to Monty Roberts we want to hyperlink to. It is the very last sentence inthe paragraph. I am going to put brackets around the words so it looks like this: [[Monty Roberts]]. Then at the bottom of the page I select "Preview" and make sure that it links blue. I have already checked "Watchthis page.” Then, I write in the “Edit summary” box what I did. I'll write "hyperlinked to Monty Roberts page.” Whenthat is correctly done, I can then "save.”
We are doing really well, so let’s try the more difficult step of linking the"César Milan" page to the Pet Psychicpage. When I copied the name and searched for it on Wikipedia it came up with this...
When I click on the blue "Cesar Millan" above, it is the man we want. Now I have a couple of choices to make. I can change the spelling to Cesar Millan and that will be the end of it. Or I can keep the spellingof "César," which apparently is correct by looking at his page. The last name Millan was spelled incorrectly on the pet psychic page. If I just try to hyperlink to "César Millan" and then hit "Preview," it comes up red again. We need to do something else.
I want to make the reader see the words "César Millan" but link to the page for "Cesar Millan.” I learned by trial and error; here is how I handle it. I scan the page I'm currently on and look for an edit that will help me do this edit. As I look through the edit page, in the middle of the third paragraph I see this [[Skepticism|skeptical]] weird looking thing. This means that the word "skeptical" is showing on the main screen, but it hyperlinks to the page called "Skepticism.” My laptop does not have that little line in between the two words anywhere on the keyboard. So I just copy the weird looking thing, and change out the words I want to use.
[[Skepticism|skeptical]]
[[Cesar Millan|César Millan]]
Now on the edit screen where the name César Milan (with one “l”) was, I'm going to copy and paste in my new edit. The edit looks like the following, first what the edit screen looks like, then what the finished edit looks like to someone reading the page.
Pet Whisperer is usually applied to a trainer like [[Cesar Millan|César Millan]] or [[Monty Roberts]], who use their body language and the psychology of the dog or horse, to communicate with the animal.
"Pet Whisperer is usually applied to a trainer like César Millanor Monty Roberts, who use their body language and the psychology of the dog or horse, to communicate with the animal. "
The first partof the bracketed textis the correct spelling of the page you want to hyperlink to. The second part is what you want people to read. We don't want to overuse the hyperlinks either; it makes the page too busy-looking. So you really want to only hyperlinkonce to a term, not every time it occurs. I noticed that in the next paragraph they have hyperlinked to Cesar Millan. I'm going to remove the brackets and change the first name to César to be consistent throughout the article.
First I click "Preview" then add this to the edit summary area, "Changed Cesar Millan hyperlinks" then when I'm sure I like all the changes, I click "save.”
When you have the edit screen open, you will notice the red wavy lines under words, usually meaning something is misspelled. Let’s see if there are some we can change quickly.
"Others pet psychics specialise in helping develop a better relationship with a household pet…"
"Others claim the animal does not need to be proximally close to the one doing the reading or even alive."
"Others claim the animal does not need to be proximally close to the one doing the reading or even alive."
"specialise" should be "specialize" and "proximally" should be "proximately.” I made the spelling changes, then hit "preview" andwrote something in the summary, "spelling," then "save page.”
We are all done!
I know that these changes we made are not earth-shattering Guerrilla Skepticism changes to the Pet Psychicpage. But what we did were all simple edits that are done all the time when you are editing. Gaining knowledge and confidence editing were just what I was looking for on this blog. I hope you find this helpful, please comment.
Susan
Cave spider hides in sand
Reminds me of a child pulling a blanket over his/her head and saying "now you can't see me." But perhaps there was more burying not included in this video clip.
One BILLION vehicles in the world
The number of vehicles in operation worldwide surpassed the 1 billion-unit mark in 2010 for the first time ever. According to Ward’s research, which looked at government-reported registrations and historical vehicle-population trends, global registrations jumped from 980 million units in 2009 to 1.015 billion in 2010...Data such as these have not deterred presidential candidate Michelle Bachmann from promising $2.00 gasoline if she is elected president (via Cynical-C):
The market explosion in China played a major role in overall vehicle population growth in 2010, with registrations jumping 27.5%. Total vehicles in operation in the country climbed by more than 16.8 million units, to slightly more than 78 million, accounting for nearly half the year’s global increase. The leap in registrations gave China the world’s second-largest vehicle population, pushing it ahead of Japan, with 73.9 million units, for the first time.
India’s vehicle population underwent the second-largest growth rate, up 8.9% to 20.8 million units, compared with 19.1 million in 2009. Brazil experienced the second largest volume increase after China, with 2.5 million additional vehicle registrations in 2010.
U.S. registrations grew less than 1% last year, but the country’s 239.8 million units continued to constitute the largest vehicle population in the world.
An interesting article at MinnPost discusses what she would have to do to fulfill that promise.
A president of the United States can drive gasoline prices down, and the promise to do so is not new... likely, she is looking at Newt Gingrich's plan from 2008. Gingrich proposed opening up the spigots on the country's Strategic Petroleum Reserve and dumping the whole stockpile on the open market... But once you have emptied the 727 million barrels of crude from the SPR on the market, which the world would drink up in a month (faster, if cheaper), there would be nothing left in the strategic tank... the price of gasoline at the pump would fall below $2 a gallon for about a week before oil investors figured out it was only a political gag... Of course, she could, with Congress's help, open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to drilling. That would cause a slight lowering of prices for a short time. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates there are roughly 7 billion barrels of recoverable crude in the ANWR. Americans consume more than 20 million barrels of petroleum a day. So if we kept all that oil for ourselves, we would use every last drop of it within a year...More discussion at the link re shale oil recovery, etc.
Credit for top and second images.
Why the birdbath turns red
This member of the Volvocales is usually encountered by people who have the good sense to install birdbaths in their gardens. Very often the first indication that something strange is happening is that the water begins to change to an orange-red colour. If you're lucky enough to have a microscope at hand a strange sight awaits you. The culprit for this unusual coloration is a micro-organism called Haematococcus pluvialis. The red colour is due to the pigment called astaxanthin, which possibly protects the organism from the harsh sunlight, especially the ultraviolet rays from the Sun...It has been my experience that whenever these micro-organisms are found they nearly always appear to be in a state of encystment at the bottom of the bird bath. Only when the cell is placed under the cover slip does it appear to come to life. It is remarkable that this organism can withstand extremes of climate, many bird baths completely dry up for long periods of time... Eric Hollowday wrote a small piece stating that there are recorded instances of these animals being kept dry for up to 7 years in the laboratory
The back-story of "Charlotte's Web"
From a review of a new book in the Barnes and Noble Review:
Fifty-nine years after its publication, Charlotte's Web is the bestselling children's book in U.S. history... E. B. White managed, without pomposity, preachiness, or condescension, to encompass issues of mortality and the power of both friendship and the written word...I haven't read Michael Sims' book, so this post doesn't go in the recommended books category, but the book does sound interesting.
How did he do it? That's the question Michael Sims set out to answer in The Story of Charlotte's Web, which offers an engaging, distilled, highly focused biography of White...Elwyn Brooks White showed an early proclivity toward writing and was heavily influenced by what he called "the ecstasy of loneliness" in Thoreau's Walden and the typing cockroach named Archy created by newspaper columnist Don Marquis... At Cornell, White picked up the nickname Andy as well as the imperative to "Omit needless words!" from Professor William Strunk, Jr., whose seminal handbook, The Elements of Style, White would later revise...
[The focus of the book is on] life on the farm in North Brooklin, Maine, where White and his wife, New Yorker editor Katharine Angell White, eventually relocated... Upset over the death of a pig he had nursed, he wrote in an essay for Harper's magazine, "The loss we felt was not the loss of ham but the loss of pig." In Charlotte's Web, he could make the pig live... He explains the import of several names, including Charlotte A. Cavatica, from the genus Aranea cavatica; verdantly symbolic Fern Arable; and the allusion to ancient Greeks in Arcadia in Doctor Dorian...
With clarity and lack of stuffiness worthy of his subject, Sims succinctly sums up Charlotte's Web's major themes: "Mortality stalked the scene from the first line: 'Where is Papa going with that ax?' The farm animals spoke with casual familiarity of trouble and death…. But overall Andy's theme was the joy of being alive, of reveling in the moment with visceral attention."
Does rigid church doctrine drive away young people?
There is good evidence that an increasing number of young Europeans and Americans characterize themselves as atheist. Here's some speculation about the reason for that trend:
More (re the first topic) at AlterNet, via The Dish.
In a society that's increasingly tolerant and enlightened, the big churches remain stubbornly entrenched in the past, clinging to medieval dogmas about gay people and women, presuming to lecture their members about how they should vote, whom they should love, how they should live. It's no surprise that people who've grown up in this tolerant age find it absurd when they're told that their family and friends don't deserve civil rights, and it's even less of a surprise that, when they're told they must believe this to be good Christians, they simply walk away.I would argue that the same general principles are driving young Americans away from participation in the major political parties. As the Democrats and Republicans dig in their heels and ruthlessly adhere to uncompromising adherence to certain governing patterns, young and educated voters are turning their backs and increasingly self-identifying as "independents."
This trend is reflected in the steadily rising percentages of Americans who say that religion is "old-fashioned and out of date" and can't speak to today's social problems. The Roman Catholic church in particular has been hit hard by this. According to a 2009 Pew study, "Faith in Flux," one in ten American adults is a former Catholic, and a majority of ex-Catholics cite unhappiness with the church's archaic stance on abortion, homosexuality, birth control or the treatment of women as a major factor in their departure. But evangelical and other Protestant denominations are feeling the same sting. According to a survey by the sociologists Robert Putnam and David Campbell, moderates and progressives are heading for the exits as the churches increasingly become the domain of conservatives...
More (re the first topic) at AlterNet, via The Dish.
Something round under the ground at King's Knot
Though the Knot as it appears today dates from the 1620s, its flat-topped central mound is thought to be much older. Writers going back more than six centuries have linked the landmark to the legend of King Arthur.Archaeologists from Glasgow University, working with the Stirling Local History Society and Stirling Field and Archaeological Society, conducted the first ever non-invasive survey of the site in May and June in a bid to uncover some of its secrets. Their findings were show there was indeed a round feature on the site that pre-dates the visible earthworks...
Around 1375 the Scots poet John Barbour said that "the round table" was south of Stirling Castle, and in 1478 William of Worcester told how "King Arthur kept the Round Table at Stirling Castle". Sir David Lindsay, the 16th century Scottish writer, added to the legend in 1529 when he said that Stirling Castle was home of the "Chapell-royall, park, and Tabyll Round".
It has also been suggested the site is partly Iron Age or medieval, or was used as a Roman fort.
الخميس، 25 أغسطس 2011
Harvesting the blood of horseshoe crabs
One may wonder why the horseshoe crab is sensitive to endotoxin and, furthermore, how does the crab benefit from this phenomenon? As we know, seawater is a virtual "bacterial soup". Typical near-shore areas that form the prime habitat of the horseshoe crab can easily contain over one billion Gram-negative bacteria per milliliter of seawater. Thus, the horseshoe crab is constantly threatened with infection. Unlike mammals, including humans, the horseshoe crab lacks an immune system; it cannot develop antibodies to fight infection. However, the horseshoe crab does contain a number of compounds that will bind to and inactivate bacteria, fungi, and viruses. The components of LAL are part of this primitive "immune" system. The components in LAL, for example, not only bind and inactivate bacterial endotoxin, but the clot formed as a result of activation by endotoxin provides wound control by preventing bleeding and forming a physical barrier against additional bacterial entry and infection. It is one of the marvels of evolution that the horseshoe crab uses endotoxin as a signal for wound occurrence and as an extremely effective defense against infection.Photo via Fresh Photons, but to read about this, I recommend the Horseshoecrab.org website.
Addendum: A related story in the Washington Post in May 2012 reports at least an apparent temporary recovery in crab numbers.
The twin rate in the U.S. has skyrocketed
The twin boom can be explained by changes in when and how women are getting pregnant. Demographers have in recent years described a "delayer boom," in which birth rates have risen among the sort of women—college-educated—who tend to put off starting a family into their mid-30s or beyond. There are now more in this group than ever before: In 1980, just 12.8 percent of women had attained a bachelor's degree or higher; by 2010, that number had almost tripled, to 37 percent. And women in their mid-30s have multiple births at a higher rate than younger women. A mother who is 35, for example, is four times more likely than a mother who is 20 to give birth to twins...More at the Salon article. Image via.Better-educated, richer parts of the country do produce more twins than anywhere else. Connecticut, for example, is the wealthiest state in the union (its residents made an average of $56,272 per capita in 2008) and it ranks in the top three when it comes to education (35.6 percent of its residents held a bachelor's degree). It's also in the top three for the availability of IVF clinics, with 2.52 per 1 million residents. And its twinning rate—43 for every 1,000 live births—is third in the nation...
...it turns out that black mothers are more likely to have twins than those of any other racial group. It has been known for decades that levels of FSH production differ among subpopulations in the U.S. and overseas. Black women in African countries produce more FSH than anyone else, and they have the highest fraternal twinning rate in the world. Women in East Asian countries, on the other hand, have the lowest FSH-levels and produce few twins.
90% of people can't search a web page
[According to a search anthropolist at Google] 90 percent of people in their studies don't know how to use CTRL/Command + F to find a word in a document or web page!..From Alexis Madrigal's column at The Atlantic.
"90 percent of the US Internet population does not know that. This is on a sample size of thousands," Russell said. "I do these field studies and I can't tell you how many hours I've sat in somebody's house as they've read through a long document trying to find the result they're looking for. At the end I'll say to them, 'Let me show one little trick here,' and very often people will say, 'I can't believe I've been wasting my life!'"
Crocoite
The name comes from the Greek krokos, meaning “saffron,” a reference to the bright red-orange color of the mineral, which typically forms prismatic crystals sometimes two or more inches in length...Source.
Its chemical formula is PbCrO4... The mineral was first described scientifically after its discovery in the 1760s in Berezovskoe, a gold-mining district on the east slope of Russia’s Ural Mountains. Frank Mihajlowits mined the specimen above in the 1970s at the Adelaide Mine in the Dundas area of Tasmania, Australia... the Honorable Sir Guy Stephen Montague Green, proclaimed the adoption of crocoite as the mineral emblem of Tasmania...
Zoo animals went bonkers before the earthquake
From a report in the Washington Post:
It happened a little before 2 p.m. Primate keeper K.C. Braesch was standing just a few feet away when Iris emitted a loud, guttural cry, known to scientists as belch-vocalizing. Iris then scrambled to the top of her enclosure...I love stories like this.
...a gorilla, Mandara, shrieked and grabbed her baby, Kibibi, racing to the top of a climbing structure just seconds before the ground began to shake dramatically. Two other apes — an orangutan, Kyle, and a gorilla, Kojo — already had dropped their food and skedaddled to higher turf...
The 64 flamingos seemed to sense the tumult a number of seconds in advance as well, clustering together in a nervous huddle before the quake hit. One of the zoo’s elephants made a low-pitched noise as if to communicate with two other elephants. And red-ruffed lemurs emitted an alarm cry a full 15 minutes before the temblor, the zoo said. During the quake, the zoo grounds were filled with howls and cries. The snakes, normally inert in the middle of the day, writhed and slithered. Beavers stood on their hind legs and then jumped into a pond. Murphy the Komodo dragon ran for cover. Lions resting outside suddenly stood up and stared at their building as the walls shook. Damai, a Sumatran tiger, leaped as if startled but quickly settled down. Some animals remained agitated for the rest of the day, wouldn’t eat and didn’t go to sleep on their usual schedule...
President Obama's summer reading list
A variety of sites are discussing the books President Obama has chosen to read during his vacation at Martha's Vineyard. Here's some commentary from the National Review:
I hope nobody gets hold of my reading list. More at the link. And his reading selections from previous years is depicted in a graphic here.
Image credit: Zoe Pollock.
According to reports from the Los Angeles Times and the AP, Obama purchased five books on his trip to the Vineyard bookseller Bunch of Grapes: Marianna Baer’s Frost, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Daniel Woodrell’s The Bayou Trilogy, Emma Donoghue’s Room, and Ward Just’s Rodin’s Debutante. The second wave came when, according to Alexis Simendinger, White House aides listed for reporters the three books Obama brought with him to the Vineyard: two more novels — Abraham Verghese’s Cutting for Stone and David Grossman’s To the End of the Land — and one nonfiction work — Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration...Good grief. He's on vacation, and being criticized for reading fiction and mysteries. Lighten up.Assuming that Brave New World and Frost are for his daughters, this leaves six books that are presumably for presidential consumption, and they may constitute the oddest assortment of presidential reading material ever disclosed, for a number of reasons. First, five of the six are novels, and the near-absence of nonfiction sends the wrong message for any president, because it sets him up for the charge that he is out of touch with reality...
Beyond the issue of fiction vs. nonfiction, there is also the question of genre. The Bayou Trilogy has received excellent reviews, but it is a mystery series. While there is nothing wrong with that per se, not every presidential reading selection is worth revealing to the public...
The Grossman novel, which is about an Israeli woman who hikes to avoid hearing bad news about her soldier son, could create complications for Obama on the Israel front. Grossman is a well-known critic of Israeli policy towards the Palestinians, so reading this novel will likely not assuage those concerned about Obama’s views on the Middle East. While the fiction-heavy aspect of the list is something new, the liberal authors should come as no surprise. Obama, like other Democratic presidents, has tended to read mainly liberal books, although he could stand to gain some insight from conservative ones...
This year’s list suggests that Obama needs to consider the messages sent by his reading more carefully. According to Mickey Kaus, the Obama list is “heavy on the wrenching stories of immigrant experiences, something the President already knows quite a bit about.” For this reason, Kaus feels that the list reveals an intellectually incurious president. Either that, or it is “a bit of politicized PR BS designed to help the President out.” In that case, he notes, “it’s sending the wrong message.” Either way, the annual book list should be a relatively easy way to make the president appear to be on top of things and in control. This year’s list, alas, reveals a president who appears to be neither.
I hope nobody gets hold of my reading list. More at the link. And his reading selections from previous years is depicted in a graphic here.
Image credit: Zoe Pollock.
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