Good morning. I'll
try not to mess up sending this message.
A bit more
on married names.
A new study
led by a UNLV psychology professor shows that a wife's choice of surnames may
influence perceptions of her husband's personality and the distribution of
power in the marriage.
In a
three-part study conducted in the U.S. and the U.K., Rachael Robnett and her
coauthors concluded that men whose wives retain their own surnames after
marriage are seen as submissive and less powerful in the relationship.
"We
know from prior research that people high in hostile sexism respond negatively
to women who violate traditional gender roles," Robnett said. "Our
findings show that they also apply stereotypes to nontraditional women's
husbands."
My guess
is that this is strongly affected by
educational and income levels. The
conclusions come out of three separate studies, two with American
undergraduates (139 at one university, 144 at the same university) and one with
(72) community members in southeast England.
I'm not sure I'd give this piece a lot of credence. These kinds of studies rely way too much on
American undergraduates—and often undergraduates at distinguished universities,
which means they're even less representative of the population at large than if
they were drawn from the full spectrum of American higher education. And 72 people from the community in southeast
England isn't exactly a broad-based sample, either.
It has
never dawned on me that a husband might be more submissive and less powerful
when his wife keeps her pre-marital surname.
I suppose maybe "less powerful" when contrasted with a
"traditional" marriage where the man rules the roost. In which case, I'm perfectly happy with the
perception of "less powerful."
I wonder
about same-sex couples. If one takes the
last name of the other, is that person also "less powerful"? I asked a gay friend what the name-taking
pattern is with gay couples. Not
surprisingly, he reports that it's a matter of personal preference: some hyphenate their names, some take the
name of the partner, and some keep their own names.
* * *
"I am asked if I think university stifles
writers. My opinion is that it doesn’t
stifle enough of them." - Flannery
O'Connor
Apart from
how that might apply to me, which I choose not to believe, I do run across some
to whom I believe it does apply. In a
web publication that I otherwise usually enjoy, I ran across these sentences in
an article about the poet Larry Levis.
In
youth, the fractal truths of poetic despair can be thrilling, an opportunity to
experiment with weltschmerz out of
measure with what one actually feels or knows, binging of new books and ideas
that both build up one’s sense of self and guard from outside incursion. One begins to control the terms on which
other people’s language comes through, something that’s at once empowering and
isolating.
I have read those sentences several times and I don't know
what he's talking about.
* * *
There are,
I am sure, hundreds if not thousands of medical terms with which I am
unfamiliar. I learned one this year,
however, that validated a phenomenon I had long thought possible but one for
which I didn't know there was any medical term or description: dying of a broken heart.
A friend
at lunch one day last spring was telling us how his parents, in their early
90s, had died 6 weeks apart. His mother
died first; his father died six weeks later, of a broken heart. The medical term is takotsubo cardiomyopathy,
also known as apical ballooning syndrome or stress cardiomyopathy (according to
the Mayo Clinic). "The symptoms of
broken heart syndrome are treatable, and the condition usually reverses itself
in days or weeks." But in some
cases it can be fatal. It has all the
symptoms of a heart attack, but it's not, it's an abnormality in the left
ventricle. The vast majority of the
victims are women (about 90%). (But not
in my friend's case. I know of another
case, also a man, a long-time University of Minnesota attorney, who—I learned
later from his son—appeared to have died of a broken heart, also after his wife
had died.)
The term
is a(n odd, to me) combination of Japanese and Greek; the phenomenon was first
described in Japan in 1990. Tako tsubo
are pot-shaped octopus traps; if you look for a picture of them on the web,
they look to me like tall jars I'd use as a planter. I didn't explore how they are used to trap
octopuses—or why one would want to trap them.
Life seems
to be full of events that could precipitate takotsubo cardiomyopathy; according
to the Mayo Clinic, the list includes:
"news of an unexpected death of a loved one, a frightening medical
diagnosis, domestic abuse, losing — or even winning — a lot of money, strong
arguments, a surprise party, having to perform publicly, job loss, divorce,
[and] physical stressors, such as an asthma attack, a car accident or major
surgery." Given that list, I'm
lucky to have escaped the problem! I've
had several of those happen to me, including strong arguments, a surprise
party, divorce, major surgery—and, of course, the worst, Krystin's death. I think that the notion of dying of a broken
heart is, in common understanding, death shortly after the death of a
long-loved spouse. By that standard,
fortunately, I'm not at risk.
I
forwarded the definition and discussion of takotsubo to a biologist
friend. He wrote back.
It
is very similar to the well known medical phenomenon of willing oneself to
death. This phenomenon occurs in many
situations, however as with takotsubo cardiomyopathy, it is most prevalent in
couples who have been together for a long time (usually decades) and the second
member of the couple dies very soon after the death of his/her partner.
The
cause of death is almost always listed on the death certificate as
cardio-pulmonary-renal failure, a total system collapse. What makes it fascinating to me is that there
is usually nothing wrong physically with the person, they just "decide"
to die. This unusual but not rare
ability to consciously shut down the three essential body systems points to the
nervous system as the causal mechanism.
In other words, the person mentally wills him/herself to death. We know something about the ability of the
brain to reduce heart and breathing rates and change brain wave activity in
persons such as Buddhist monks and Sufi masters however there has been little
or no research on this unusual ability to shut down the body and die. One obvious reason for the paucity of studies
is this is a one off event which cannot replicated in a laboratory
setting. Although there is no current
explanation for this phenomenon, I find the ability of the brain to cause the
body to die to be completely fascinating.
I told him
that I did, too—but that I wasn't even close to willing any such thing!
* * *
Maybe you
noticed that (Professor) William Baulmol (Princeton, NYU) died last May. Some of you may say "William
who?" Those of us in higher
education who look at finances and economics know his name well—but his
findings affect all of us.
Baulmol
was one of the world's foremost economists who did innovative work in several
areas, but what higher education knows him best for is "Baulmol's cost
disease." That's a(n unnecessarily)
pejorative descriptor of an unavoidable phenomenon in economics. It's not an obvious development until you
think about it.
In essence, the cost disease describes what happens when
efficiencies in certain sectors of an economy (e.g., manufacturing) lead to
higher productivity, which in turn leads to higher wages. In a number of fields, however, it isn't
possible to increase productivity, or at least not by much. The classic example: it took four players to perform a Mozart
string quartet when Mozart wrote it and it still takes four players in
2017. You can't improve productivity by
reducing the number of players to two or three.
Concert-goers would not be pleased and one suspects the quality of the
music might not be too great.
At the same time, as wages are going up in fields that
improve productivity, they have to go up in the others (e.g., music
performance) as well—or everyone who might perform a Mozart string quartet will
instead take a different job with a much higher wage. (True, some musicians would engage in their
art no matter the wages, but there would surely be far fewer of them if they
were only paid half or a quarter of what others in the economy were
making.) So wages go up even in fields
that don't increase productivity.
The cost disease affects a wide array of labor-intensive
human endeavors beyond music performance, such as teaching, nursing, doctoring,
lawyering, etc. Can you increase
"productivity" in teaching?
Sure, just increase class sizes.
If you're interested in quality, however, you can't do that. Same in higher education, whether teaching or
research. How do you increase the
productivity of the horticulturalist or microbiologist in the lab? Give them more to do? Similarly, you can offer classes with 500
students (and the University did that when I was an undergraduate), but the
quality of the learning won't be high and the student experience stinks. (The University has eliminated those huge
classes, last I knew.) You can also have
graduate seminars with 25 people—but that won't be a seminar and the students
aren't going to learn what they should by intensive peer and faculty
interaction. You could also have more
patients per nurse in a hospital or clinic, but I doubt many of us would be
happy with that "increase" in productivity. At the same time, nurses and teachers need to
be paid competitive market salaries—or there wouldn't be anywhere near enough
of either.
In the case of higher education, at one point our own
Governor Pawlenty touted online education as the path to productivity
gains. Unfortunately, it was another
case of a politician ignoring the inconvenient facts: colleges and universities could have told him
that on-line education is just as expensive, per student, as traditional
in-class delivery of instruction—and in some fields, it's more expensive. (Think
equipment and facilities, staff time in getting the materials and videocast
prepared, etc. A philosophy or history
professor can walk into a lecture or seminar room and begin talking or drawing
students into discussions and maybe have some handouts. For online instruction, imagine the
technology, facilities, and staff time that lies behind putting together the
class.) There's also the question of quality;
my children each took one online course while in college, and they said it was
OK but they wouldn't have wanted to take very many.
So, all you nurses and teachers and musicians out there,
your salaries are what they are in part because of salary pressure from other
industries.
* * *
A dear
friend of mine wrote to me after reading my comments about measuring wisdom;
she told me I was one of the wisest people she knows. I found that startling, because I don't think
of myself as particularly wise. So
several possibilities present themselves:
-- she was just
being complimentary and doesn't really believe it (no, she didn't have to
write, she's not a frequent email user, and she isn't the kind of person who'd
write something like that and not mean it)
-- she doesn't have
very many friends who she thinks are wise, so I look good by comparison (no,
she has plenty of friends who are wise)
-- her perception is
in error (a distinct possibility)
-- my perception is
in error (I suppose it's a possibility, but I'm skeptical)
What this
points up, for me anyway, is that I'm probably better at knowing my weaknesses
than my strengths. The older I get, the
more I understand where I haven't done as well as I should or where I lack
attributes that I admire in others. It
is not as easy, however, to identify strengths without risking puffery. I wonder if other people have this same
challenge.
* * *
Although I
use one daily, I have come to conclude that automobiles are really nasty
devices. A few years ago I wrote this:
Those of us who drive cars know that one must replace tires
every so often because they wear out.
What that means is that billions of microscopic bits of rubber are being
deposited on roads and nearby ground—or floating in the air. Where do all those little bits of rubber
go? Presumably we breathe them in and they
get into groundwater as well as the soil in which crops are grown. In addition, we fill up the container under
the hood with window-washing fluid so we can turn on the wipers and clean dust
and crud off the windshield. Have you
ever looked at the label for that liquid?
It essentially declares the stuff toxic to all living things. So we routinely squirt it onto our
windshields and watch it wash off onto the car and the ground. Again, where is all that toxic substance
going?
And
of course cars also sometimes leak oil and antifreeze and other fluids.
I'd looked at an article describing research on
toxins; the authors warned that evaluating carcinogens and other potentially
toxic substances in isolation was misleading because even at low levels they can
interact and create a greater health hazard than each would alone. I wondered then, and still do, whether that
observation applied to the byproducts of driving cars.
Now
there's research from the Georgia Institute of Technology demonstrating that
cars are even worse for us than I thought.
What the researchers found was (1) what I'd suspected before, and (2)
something I'd never thought of. Auto
emissions might be curtailed, but "one major
source of highway air pollution shows no signs of abating: brake and tire dust. Metals from brakes and other automotive
systems are emitted into the air as fine particles, lingering over busy
roadways."
I
don't fully understand the chemistry of the process; it has to do with the
metals in the dust interacting with sulfate particles "to produce a toxic
aerosol." The gist of the chemistry
is that the metals become soluble because of the sulfate—and thus become
susceptible to absorption by human breathing.
Sulfate has long been associated with adverse health impacts. . .
. The old hypothesis was that the acidic
sulfate burns your lung lining, which in turn leads the bad health
effects. But there is not enough acid in
the air alone to really have that impact.
They collected
air samples above a freeway and from a location 420 meters away from the
freeway and analyzed the chemical content.
What they found was a lot of the metals dissolved or dissolving in the
air. The amount of metals in the air was
less in the area away from the freeway, but there was still enough to be a
potential source of health problems.
"That's the smoking gun," [one of the researchers] said.
"The sulfate essentially dissolves those metals; when you breathe in those
particles, the metals could be absorbed directly into the blood stream and cause
problems throughout the body. For the
first time, a mechanism emerges to explain why small amounts of acidic sulfate
can adversely affect health."
They
also point out that these pollutants will continue to be produced even with
electric cars, which obviously still have tires and brakes.
On that
pleasant note, I again send you my best for the new year.
Gary
No comments:
Post a Comment