Month: April 2014

That’s the title of a new book by Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, offering an account of the American Revolution from the perspective of Britain’s leaders. In an interview, he claims many will be surprised by his portrait of King George III:

The reader will indeed find many attractive qualities in George III.  He was the first British monarch to have a real interest in science.  He was the greatest collector of art since Charles I.  He knew more about the navy than any king since James II.  He was an intensely religious man who spent long hours with his family in devotion.  He disapproved of the sexual immorality which so common among his contemporaries and he was faithful to his wife unlike George I and George II.

George III has long been the subject of revisionist historians in Britain.   It has almost gone too far.  My portrayal is more nuanced.  George III was not a tyrant who was responsible for the policies that led to the American Revolution.  He had little to do with colonial policy.  However, after the Boston Tea Party, he became the leading war hawk and may actually have helped to perpetuate the war by several years.  He wanted to continue after Yorktown.  It was revelation to me that he felt so passionately that Britain would cease to be a great power if it lost America.

The reasons O’Shaughnessy believes the British lost to the upstart Americans:

They initially believed that resistance would be largely confined to Massachusetts.  They greatly underestimate the ability of ordinary citizens to be able to confront a professional army.  However, their greatest error was in assuming that the majority of Americans supported Britain.  Their views while mistaken were defensible since were encouraged in their beliefs by loyalist Americans.  This was indeed a civil war and a foreign war in which it was difficult to interpret popular opinion when the situation was fluid and when many did not openly express their sympathies.  The contempt for citizen soldiers was held most strongly by officers who had served in America during the French and Indian War.  It may have been partly a product of imperial and social superiority but it was also a more modern vice of professional elitism and the belief that regular citizens could not be trained to the standards of those who had made the army a lifelong career.

(Video: An interview with O’Shaughnessy)

A new study found that books with anthropomorphized animals may teach children fewer facts:

Over two experiments, the researchers tested preschool- and kindergarten-aged kids’ knowledge of a few obscure animals—cavies, oxpeckers, and handfish—by reading books about the animals with them and then asking questions. Some books contained realistic pictures and descriptions, some cartoon drawings and humanized language (e.g., “mother cavy tucks her babies into bed in a small cave”), and some a mix.

While all kids learned something about the three animals from whichever book they read, those who read the realistic books ended up with a better factual understanding of the creatures. Those who read the anthropomorphized books didn’t learn as much and also had a harder time reasoning about the animals.

Study author Patricia Ganea talked about how the results have been misinterpreted:

People have gone crazy out there. They think we are saying, don’t read books that interweave fantasy with reality. That’s not the message from this.

It’s if you want your children to learn more facts about animals, it would be better to use books that are more realistic. Of course parents should read a variety of books to their children. Fantasy is important for their imagination and their cognitive development. … I think [this study is important] because it may have implications for our use of picture books as a tool for science education. Studies say picture books are an excellent tool for giving kids knowledge about the world. You can have a five- or six-year-old learn important biological concepts. So our work suggests if you want to establish foundations for a more accurate scientific understanding of the world early on, you use factual books.

Katy Waldman defends talking animals:

Sometimes, an overly anthropomorphic view of animals can be harmful, as when people get mauled by bears because they regard them as cuddly human friends in bear suits. But to the extent that humanized characters are both more accessible to and more likely to inspire empathy in young readers, I don’t see how they could be construed as bad for kids, the animal kingdom, or even science.

Scaffolding familiar traits onto alien subjects is a powerful way to promote learning, one that children do naturally from the age of 12 to 24 months. And imaginative play—the type where you pretend a badger gets jealous of her baby sister—has cognitive benefits: “If you want your children to be intelligent,” Albert Einstein once said, “read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”

In our second round of videos from the Nigerian-American author of The Bright Continent, Dayo addresses the distorted influence that foreign aid has on African countries:

In a followup, she considers the impact of Chinese investment in particular, as well as how the “colonial hangover” affects the African aid dynamic:

A summary of Dayo’s book from Kirkus:

Distinguishing “lean” from “fat” economies, the author, a Knight Law and Media Scholar at Yale, observes that Africa is perhaps uniquely well-prepared for a future marked by scarcity. In a time when global food needs are expected to rise by 70 percent by 2050, “African agriculture holds an obvious value proposition for the rest of the world—one that defeats local poverty and hunger at once.” In other words, making [Africa] a world breadbasket will both enrich the continent and keep people from starving. Yet, as she notes, there are numerous structural impediments to effecting this green revolution, not least the lack of irrigated farmland and of the technology needed for irrigation, to say nothing of larger problems such as inefficiency and corruption.

African nations, she argues, can overcome these difficulties. For example, she cites the case of the region of Somalia known as Somaliland, which, against all the odds, has in the last two decades “held four peaceful rounds of elections, established a central bank, printed its own currency, and built an elaborate security apparatus.” Announcing a distaste for the word “development,” Olopade writes persuasively of the need for Western-style aid that is adapted to local customs and institutions, allowing for a mix of traditional and modern, market-based solutions to address challenges such as the lack of credit and the uneven distribution of resources. For all those challenges, she argues, the various “maps” of Africa—technological, commercial, agricultural, natural—all point to a wealth of possibilities to help “build wealth, strengthen formal institutions, and aid the least fortunate.”

Buy the book here.

(Archive)

In a review of the new book Making Hispanics: How Activists, Bureaucrats, and Media Constructed A New American, Claude S. Fischer traces the term from the 1970s:

Activists had previously stressed their national origins and operated regionally – notably, Mexicans in the southwest (where the term “Chicano” became popular for a while) and Puerto Ricans in the northeast. But the larger the numbers they could claim by joining together, the more political clout, the more governmental funds, and the more philanthropic support they could claim.

Pumping up the numbers was particularly important given their latent competition with African-American activists over limited resources and limited media attention. Some pan-ethnic term promised to yield the biggest count. Spanish-language television broadcasters, notably Univision, looked to expand their appeal to advertisers by delivering them a national market. … They could then sell not medium-to-small Mexican-, Cuban-, or Puerto Rican-American audiences to advertisers, but one huge Hispanic-American audience.

Making the term official as a census category helped both activists and entrepreneurs. Previously, the Bureau of the Census classified Latin Americans as whites with distinct national origins, usually poorly measured. The activists pressed the census bureau, as did some politicians, to provide as broad a label as possible and count everyone who might conceivably fit the category, including, for example, the African-origin Dominicans (although not the French-speaking Haitians nor the Portuguese-speaking Brazilians). This pressure led to the 1980 formulation, used ever since, in which the census asks Americans whether or not they are “Hispanic” separately from whether they are white, black, Asian, or Indian.

Yesterday, the International Court Of Justice ruled that Japan must halt its Antarctic whaling program:

The verdict came four years after Australia petitioned the UN court to rule that the expeditions in the icy waters of the Antarctic were not, as Japan has long claimed, for scientific research, since meat from the hunts is sold in Japanese supermarkets and restaurants. … The ruling has brought an abrupt end to the Antarctic hunt, but it doesn’t necessarily spell an end to Japan’s whaling program. Experts believe the verdict leaves Japan with a choice: to abandon whaling – a centuries-old tradition in some coastal communities – or devise a new, scaled-back program that culls fewer whales and has a more clear-cut scientific brief. A third, and least likely, option for Japan would be to risk yet more international opprobrium by joining Iceland and Norway in ignoring the International Whaling Commission’s moratorium on commercial whaling.

“So is this the end of Japan’s whaling industry?” asks Derek Mead:

Japan has said it will accept the decision, but it’s important to note that the ruling is specific to Japan’s argument for issuing whaling permits for the Antarctic. Japan still has legal permits to whale in the North Pacific, and it’s possible that the country could try to rework JARPA II to fit more specific scientific goals.

Still, it’s a big blow, and in any case, the writing’s been on the wall for awhile. A key poll in 2012 found that the vast majority of Japanese citizens do not consume whale meat, and that young people were even less likely to be consumers. Combined with the finding that the industry is largely propped up by government subsidies, it seems evident that the whaling industry isn’t economically sustainable.

But Jake Adelstein and Nathalie-Kyoko Stucky note that Japan’s whale eaters won’t run out of meat any time soon:

The Mainichi Shimbun pointed out that Japan would need to rethink its plans to resume commercial whaling but thankfully the ban would have little effect on those with a yen for eating whale, pointing out that “research whale” only accounted for 20 per cent of the meat circulating in Japan. This is good news for the sea mammal gourmand. Whale specialty restaurants like Ganso Kujirya in Tokyo’s Shibuya ward are unlikely to be affected by the ban in the short term, and given the warehouse supplies Japan’s whale-eating culinary culture could survive even long after certain breeds of whale are extinct.

Lastly, Joshua Keating explores the weird membership of the International Whaling Commission:

As UCLA political scientist Christian Dippel noted in a recent study of the body, membership in the IWC is open to any country, and today most IWC members have no commercial interests in whaling whatsoever. IWC members include landlocked countries such as Switzerland and Luxembourg on the anti-whaling side, and Malawi and Mongolia on the pro-whaling side.

Not surprisingly, many of these countries often seem less motivated by protecting whales or respecting Japan and Iceland’s cultural heritage then by selling their vote to the highest bidder. … Dippel’s research found a clear pattern of Japan increasing foreign aid to countries that supported its position on whaling. On the flip side, it turns out whaling doesn’t pay. Because of decreases in aid from Western countries, the net economic impact of becoming a pro-whaling is, on average, negative.