Kirsten Mortensen's blog

If you’ve ever planted tulip bulbs, you’ve probably noticed that unlike daffodils, tulips tend not to come back stronger year after year.

Constance Casey, writing in Slate, explains why.

She’s talking about hybrid tulips, of course. I have some species tulips planted in my front garden and they’re amazing. I’ll post a photo when they bloom. But of course they are shorter and less showy than the hybrids.

Technorati Tags: tulips, gardening

In the Guardian, Jonathan Freedland, aka Sam Bourne, discusses why writers choose to publish under pen names.

Technorati Tags: writing, pseudonyms

Okay, here are the caveats I can count:

* Study size is small.
* Tanning beds, not actual Real Live sunlight.
* There’s something weird about administering prescription psychotropics as a “control” in a study. Weirdos.
* Dermatologists? Not exactly where I’d look for expertise on bio-neurology.

But. Aside from that. Have you ever noticed that sitting in the sun makes you feel good?

I sure have.

This may explain why.

Technorati Tags: tanning, sunlight

Is Wikipedia as accurate as the Encyclopaedia Britannica?

If you think you know the answer, be sure to read this piece in TCS Daily by Robert McHenry, former Editor in Chief of the latter publication.

Technorati Tags: Wikipedia, Encyclopaedia Britannica

New research being published by Nature has found that intelligence is correlated to how the brain develops in adolescence.

Brain scans of 307 children

showed that the cortices of all the children’s brains thickened during childhood before thinning again.

The cortices of the smartest 7-year-olds in the group, as an example, started out thinner than average but thickened until age 11 or 12 before thinning. Cortex thickening in children with average IQ, in contrast, peaked at about age 8, and displayed only gradual thinning afterwards.

This could reflect a longer developmental window for high-level brain circuits, the researchers said.

Isn’t it interesting that we think of the proverbial geek as maturing more slowly than his or her less-intellectually-gifted classmates . . . perhaps there’s a bit of biology behind the stereotype . . .

Technorati Tags: intelligence, brain development

I’ve been looking at this New York Times op-ed, “To All the Girls I’ve Rejected,” by the dean of admissions and financial aid at Kenyon College, Jennifer Delahunty Britz, trying to figure out what to excerpt to pass along the gist of the article.

I’ll so my best, but if you’re registered with the NYT, or can stomach registering, I recommend you read the whole piece.

The piece is a heartfelt examination of the difficulties women face in gaining admission to colleges today.

Last week, the 10 officers at my college sat around a table, 12 hours every day, deliberating the applications of hundreds of talented young men and women. While gulping down coffee and poring over statistics, we heard about a young woman from Kentucky we were not yet ready to admit outright. She was the leader/president/editor/captain/lead actress in every activity in her school. She had taken six advanced placement courses and had been selected for a prestigious state leadership program. In her free time, this whirlwind of achievement had accumulated more than 300 hours of community service in four different organizations.

Few of us sitting around the table were as talented and as directed at age 17 as this young woman. Unfortunately, her test scores and grade point average placed her in the middle of our pool. We had to have a debate before we decided to swallow the middling scores and write “admit” next to her name.

But here’s the kicker.

Had she been a male applicant, there would have been little, if any, hesitation to admit. The reality is that because young men are rarer, they’re more valued applicants. Today, two-thirds of colleges and universities report that they get more female than male applicants, and more than 56 percent of undergraduates nationwide are women. Demographers predict that by 2009, only 42 percent of all baccalaureate degrees awarded in the United States will be given to men.

We have told today’s young women that the world is their oyster; the problem is, so many of them believed us that the standards for admission to today’s most selective colleges are stiffer for women than men. How’s that for an unintended consequence of the women’s liberation movement?

The piece goes on to look at some related issues, such as why colleges strive for gender balance in their admissions, and asks

What are the consequences of young men discovering that even if they do less, they have more options? And what messages are we sending young women that they must, nearly 25 years after the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment, be even more accomplished than men to gain admission to the nation’s top colleges?

This is mind-boggling stuff, and what’s more, it’s only the beginning. It will be years before we fully understand what the hell’s going on, and years more before we can temper it. Which means that a whole generation of kids will grow up in a world so warped we won’t even know how to help them cope with it.

Technorati Tags: women, college admission

A study of 700 people suggests that those who consider themselves lucky are no more likely to win lottery prizes than those who don’t.

But self-described “lucky” people do catch breaks, because they also tend to be extroverted and open, so they’re more likely to pick up cues and recognize opportunities. Consider this experiment, also conducted by Richard Wiseman at the University of Hertfordshire in England:

Wiseman had volunteers count the number of photographs in a newspaper. Lucky subjects were more likely to notice on page two the half-page ad with the message in large bold type: STOP COUNTING–THERE ARE 43 PHOTOGRAPHS IN THIS NEWSPAPER.

There’s a lesson there somewhere, and if I’m lucky I’ll figure it out :-)

Technorati Tags: luck

This strikes me as eminently sensible: construct a “skeleton of formal regulation” to keep the true sociopaths in check, but otherwise rely on peoples’ self-regulation — which springs from our innate tendency to empathize with others — to keep our behavior on the straight and narrow.

The article proposing this was written by Anjana Ahuja for the UK Times, and includes the observations of Professor Paul Zak of California’s Claremont Graduate University in California. Zak “cites a fascinating study”

in which two daycare centres adopted different approaches with late parents. One centre merely reminded parents that turning up late inconvenienced the teacher, who had to stay behind. The other centre imposed a $3 fine. After several weeks, the “ penalty” centre was reporting more latecomers.

What seems to have happened is that the fine “replaced the social undesirability of inconveniencing the teacher.”

My interpretation, now: People began interacting with the rule and its consequences, instead of managing their relationship with the day care center’s teachers. But it was their relationship with the center’s teachers that had the most potential to influence their behavior.

The use of regulation to curb unwanted behavior often strikes me as a fool’s errand. It makes people feel like they’re accomplishing something, but so often the result is piles of unintended consequences, red tape, stultifying bureacracies.

There’s probably not a person living in America today who hasn’t encountered some stupid regulation that perhaps seemed to make sense when it was enacted, but is downright bizarre in execution.

So now we add the possibility that such regulations might not even work.

Gets you wondering, doesn’t it?

Technorati Tags: regulation

You know what they are, now you know what they’re called:

Event dresses are usually unveiled at weddings, awards ceremonies, gala balls and important state events. They soar to the heights and plumb the depths. To borrow the words of renowned broadcaster Jim McKay, host of the now-defunct ABC’s Wide World of Sports, event dresses are about “the thrill of victory, and the agony of defeat.”

(As you may recall, defeat was epitomized by ski jumper Vinko Bogataj’s stunning and unforgettable crash down the slopes of Oberstdorf in the former West Germany in 1970. If you’ve ever failed at an event dress, it’s not a bad analogy.)

Whether successes or failures, some event dresses remain memorable long after the champagne flutes have been drained and the guests have gone home.

The article is by Hilary Cunningham, cultural anthropologist at the University of Toronto, and appears online courtesy the Toronto Star.

Technorati Tags: event dress

Here’s a companion piece to the Eliza Doolittle post I wrote yesterday.

“The grey squirrel of grammar” is the pairing of “there is” with a plural subject, e.g. “there’s five plates on the table.” Like the North American squirrels that now make Britain home, it’s here to stay, says Michael McCarthy, writing in The Guardian. But he’s okay with that. He sees it as an example of acceptable bad grammar — it’s not worth getting fussed about since we all understand what is being said.

He’s a bit tougher, however, when it comes to written language or constructions where bungled grammar interferes with clarity . . .

Technorati Tags: grammar