Month: August 2012

by Gwynn Guilford

Conservation biologist Joshua Drew studied antique shark-tooth weapons to explore shark biodiversity in the waters around Kiribati. Ed Yong relays what Drew discovered:

Drew found that the teeth in the weapons came from 19 species of shark, and that three of these — the spottail shark (Carcharhinus sorrah), dusky shark (Carcharhinus obscurus) and bignose shark (Carcharhinus altimus) — are no longer found in waters close to the islands. The spottail and dusky sharks were among the four species most commonly used to make the weapons, but records suggest that they are no longer found within a few thousand kilometres of the Gilbert Islands.

In line with a common theme of late, shark-finning may be responsible:

It is not clear why the species vanished but Drew says it is “absolutely possible that humans had a role in these declines”. Shark-finning — the practice of hunting sharks for their fins alone, which kills sharks in much greater bulk than ordinary fishing — was first recorded in the area in 1910. However, by that time the practice was probably already well established.

Previous coverage on shark-finning here, here, here, here and here.

by Matthew Sitman

Pivoting off the recent death of Sherman Hemsley, star of The Jeffersons, Shervin Malekzadeh – the son of Iranian immigrants – explains what the show taught him about being American:

Of course The Jeffersons, like its parent show All in the Family, was hardly the usual depiction of the American experience on network television. It waded into treacherous and uncertain waters, pulling its viewers into currents of class and race avoided by most network shows. The confluence of these forces left in its wake vocabulary and expressions unlikely to be taught to us in any ESL or citizenship classes, and impossible to imagine being used on a broadcast network today: Honkey, zebra, nigg—, goin' to the john, she's a fox.

Still, for all that The Jeffersons taught us about what American was and could be, there was also something very Persian and accessible about the show, not least of which was the acid back-and-forth between George and Florence (George: "Florence, your cooking tastes like dogfood." Florence: "That's because I'm cooking for a chihuahua."), an American version of the Iranian custom of matalak goftan, or trash-talking.

by Gwynn Guilford

Head injuries aren't the only thing threatening football players these days. The Daily Climate and Brett Israel explain:

Across the country, deaths of high school football players due to heat nearly tripled from 1994 to 2009 compared to the previous 15 years, according to [climatologis Andrew] Grundstein's study. Heat illnesses in football players have multiple causes, experts say, but as the climate heats up, practices in Georgia – and around the country – are getting watered down just to be safe.

Georgia, which has the country's highest number of heat-related deaths, is experimenting with a new policy to stem the trend. Previous coverage of the helmet discussion here, here, here, here, here and here.

by Chas Danner

Last week a design company in Sweden did an experiment to study the effect of rumor on the Internet. They designed the bizarre screw seen above and then posted it on Reddit with the implication it was a new proprietary screw Apple had designed to keep end users from opening their devices (a certainly plausible idea). While the experiment was hardly scientific, what they noticed points to a severe gullibility among end-readers on the net:

[T]he blogs and newspapers that reported on the screw all fell back on that this was a vague rumor, unconfirmed, but yet discussed what impact the screw could get for the Mac world if it was in use. However, we noticed a difference in the discussions from the readers. While the reporters did not agree fully with that this would happen, pointing out that this was a rumor, readers more clear in their view. Either they perceived the news as truth, or called it fake, no grey zone in between. The split between the two camps, was quite unequal. An estimate would be that 90% regarded the screw as a fact and based all the further opinion on that, only 10% were critical to accuracy.

With each step further away from the source the perception that this would be true increased. On Reddit, where the original entry was made we see it as a 0 mode, the image was posted, nothing more or less. Newspapers and blogs that draws attention to the behavior (Yahoo, Macworld, Wired) takes it with a grain of salt, so the truth factor goes down a bit. The commentators to the articles takes it almost as 100% truth, raising the truth factor bar. The commentators / readers who spins it on in their own social media (Twitter, G[oogle] +, Facebook) defines it as the truth, all doubt is gone.

Certainly helps explain the pervasiveness of Internet rumors, especially the political ones.

by Chas Danner

Univision passes along a scene from Romney's visit to Miami yesterday:

Romney received a warm welcome to Miami Monday on Radio Mambí, a station that caters to Cuban exiles. Romney had an appearance at a Miami juice shop (owned by a convicted drug dealer) later in the day and the host told the GOP candidate, "They’re waiting for you with a mamey and a guayaba — Cuban fruits — here in Miami, do you like those?"

"I am a big fan of mango, papaya, and guava," Romney said. The hosts chuckled and added, "There are mangos there too." We’re not sure if the host and translator laughed with Romney in his moment of candor, at the fact that he added mango and papaya to the list, or that the former is Cuban slang for "vagina."

(Hat tip: Andrew Kaczynski)

Update from a reader:

Just to be clear, papaya is the slang for vagina or more accurately, cunt.  The Cubans call the fruit "fruta de bomba".  Before I knew this I sent a Cuban waiter in Puerto Rico into paroxysms of embarrassment by trying to order "papaya fresca".  Since he didn't understand that I was trying to get fresh papaya instead of canned, he had to keep asking me what I was saying and I kept repeating "papaya fresca" louder and louder.  The poor guy's face resembled a fruta de bomba by the time he figured out what I was after.

by Patrick Appel

Nicole Gelinas wants Romney-Ryan to eliminate the biggest two:

Employers’ paying for workers’ health care out of money that they would otherwise pay in salary makes it impossible to create a real market for individual health insurance. Only when the majority of working Americans see how much health insurance actually costs for the little that they get, and stop thinking of it as a perk of working for the Man, will we finally see real health-care reform. The result would be a system in which people used their own money to buy health care on an open market, just as they buy almost everything else. (Congress would still have to take some protective measures, such as outlawing price discrimination—a doctor’s or hospital’s charging different prices for customers depending on their insurance profiles.)

The mortgage-interest deduction also distorts the American economy. Between 2000 and 2007, mortgage debt doubled, and the government subsidized much of that borrowing. People could buy houses that they couldn’t afford and justify the purchases by saying they were lowering their taxes. Washington’s treatment of mortgages has created a vicious cycle, with cheap debt pushing up house prices and requiring still more cheap debt to fund home purchases.

Drum, who provides the chart above, doubts Romney and Ryan will trim tax expenditures significantly. Howard Gleckman takes Ryan more seriously:

Like Romney, Ryan won’t say exactly how [he will cut back tax deductions, credits, and exclusions]. But unlike the man at the top of the ticket, I get the sense Ryan can’t wait to do so. In our 2009 interview, he spoke with great enthusiasm about how he’d defeat the lobbyists who protect these tax breaks. 

by Patrick Appel

Nate Cohn notes that "Romney’s road to the White House runs through seniors" and that "to win in 2012, he’ll need to do even better than McCain":

With Obama just south of 50 percent, Romney needs to consolidate undecided voters with reservations about Obama’s performance. But by creating additional routes for Obama to reach 50 percent, the Romney campaign is taking a colossal risk. Romney posses no credible route to the presidency without a double-digit victory among voters older than 65 years old, but history, the polls, and conventional wisdom all suggest that a prolonged debate about changes to Medicare could put such a margin in jeopardy. Whether the Romney campaign has an effective response remains to be seen, but if they don't, they've probably lost.

Despite potential loses among seniors, Cohn argues in a later post that Romney hasn't suddenly lost Florida:

It turns out that Florida isn’t a giant retirement community worth 29 electoral votes: 78 percent of Florida voters were younger than age 65 in 2008. That’s surely older than the country and the other battlegrounds—but perhaps not by as much as you might think. Seniors were 16 percent of the electorate nationally in 2008, so seniors were a 37 percent larger share of Florida the electorate than they were nationally. That is a meaningful difference, but it’s not such a large difference that we would expect Florida to move from, say, a toss-up to lean-Obama while all the other states remained locked in their prior positions.

An earlier look at Medicare politics here.

by Zoë Pollock

Benjamin Hale interviewed Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, an influential figure in the study of bonobos and language. She claims that her apes are better linguists because of how they were raised:

The cultural transmission that has happened here goes far beyond anything that has happened in other ape projects. This is because of the “for real” inclusion of apes into the human world and the human familial system. Language is a way of being and living, and their lives here are based on human values, morals, and family. We do not have “subjects,” we have “relatives.” They eat, sleep, and live with us. Even the Gardners, who prided themselves on their method of “sign immersion,” put Washoe in a cage at night. Teco sleeps with me. I am there as much for him as any mother is there for her child, and in many cases more. This is the critical variable; this method fosters the identification required with others for rapid self-learning of language. 

Hale's essay on the history of ape language research is paywalled at Harper's.

(Photo: An orphan bonobo with its surrogate mother. By Issouf Sanogo/AFP/Getty Images)

by Patrick Appel

TPM bats down the allegations:

The Romney campaign said Ryan had nothing to do with the trades in the first place. They were part of a Russell 1000 index fund that automatically traded stocks as part of a pre-set formula. Ryan’s disclosure forms include several similar trade patterns at various points throughout the year. In a statement provided to TPM through the Romney campaign, Larry Gaffney, the independent accountant for the partnership who handled the trades in question, said the stocks were out of Ryan’s control.