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Academic Insights for the Thinking World
What are those super-fast, reddish, fuzzy-looking, centipede-like things? It would sure help hapless entomologists if people would provide just a teensy bit more information when asking, ‘What is it?’ sorts of questions. Helpful clues include things like: where you live, where you saw it, etc.
This Day in World History – Sometime around September 23 each year, Earth reaches the autumnal equinox, the point when the sun stands directly above the Equator and daylight and dark are roughly equal. (The day, of course, marks the autumnal equinox in the Northern Hemisphere. South of the Equator, it is the vernal, or spring, equinox. March 23 is the spring equinox in the Northern Hemisphere and the autumnal equinox in the Southern.) These astronomical events did not go unnoticed by ancient peoples.
Below, you can listen to Professor Peter Atkins of Lincoln College, Oxford, talk about On Being: A Scientist’s Exploration of the Great Questions of Existence. This podcast is recorded by the Oxfordshire Branch of the British Science Association, whose regular SciBars podcasts can be found here.
By Steven A. Cook
As Cairo’s citizens drove along the Autostrad [last] week, they were greeted with four enormous billboards featuring pictures of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. With Turkish and Egyptian flags, the signs bore the message, “With United Hands for the Future.” Erdogan’s visit marks a bold development in Turkey’s leadership in the region. The hero’s welcome he received at the airport reinforced the popular perception: Turkey is a positive force, uniquely positioned to guide the Middle East’s ongoing transformation.
This Day in World History – In the fatal climax of months of turmoil, six women and two men were hanged in Salem, Massachusetts, after having been found guilty of witchcraft. The eight were the last victims of a witchcraft hysteria that gripped Salem and other towns in Massachusetts in 1692. The tumult began in February 1692, when several young girls began to behave strangely and complained of physical torments. Soon, the girls were accusing women in the village of being witches. Witchcraft was a capital offense at the time, and colonial leaders set up a court to investigate. In all, about 140 people—86% of whom were women—were accused of witchcraft in Salem.
By Sue Arthur
Memories of your summer holiday may be fading, but the latest update of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography seeks to rekindle the summer—or at least summers past—with one of the new additions from its latest update, published today. For forty years Reginald Dixon (1904-1985) played the Wurlitzer at the Tower Ballroom, Blackpool, turning a former cinema organist into a recording star, known worldwide for his signature tune, ‘I do like to be beside the seaside.’ Here Dixon’s biographer, Sue Arthur, describes the man who became ‘Mr Blackpool’, and the interwar resort he helped to make a national attraction.
We all play three roles in every moment of our lives. As actors we move, speak, push and pull, make decisions, and otherwise engage in any number of activities animated by our goals and desires. As receptors we use our senses to listen, smell, touch, get pushed and pulled, and react emotionally to other people. As witnesses we observe everything going on around us, analyzing, synthesizing, describing, explaining, and understanding the world in which we live.
I decided to stay at sea for at least two more weeks. The history of the word frigate is expected to comfort Germanic scholars, who may not know that, regardless of the language, the names of ships invariably give etymologists grief. In English, frigate is from French, and in French it is from Italian, so that the question is: Where did Italian fregata come from? Naturally, nobody knows. Although the literature
By Lynda Mugglestone
Spin is one of those words which could perhaps now do with a bit of ‘spin’ in its own right. From its beginnings in the idea of honest labour and toil (in terms of etymology, spin descends from the spinning of fabric or thread), it has come to suggest the twisting of words rather than fibres – a verbal untrustworthiness intended to deceive and disguise. Often associated with newspapers and politicians, to use spin is to manipulate meaning, to twist truth for particular ends – usually with the aim of persuading readers or listeners that things are other than they are.
By Corey Robin
Ross Douthat, the conservative New York Times columnist, and Dan Savage, the liberal sex columnist, recently had a Bloggingheads conversation about sex, lies, and videotape. It’s a fascinating discussion, mostly because of what it reveals about the conservative mind and its attitude toward sex.
By Sydney Beveridge
Some of the earliest detailed census data on education came from 1850 when the census reported information about school attendance. For many decades, the census focused on literacy rates, which we discussed in part two of the back to school series.
By the mid-1900s, data on educational attainment emerged (elementary school, high school, college, etc.), adding new insight into education
This Day in World History – While hiking through the Alps on the Italian-Austrian border, Erika and Helmut Simon, a German couple, spotted a brown shape in a watery gully below them. Scrambling down to investigate, they realized that they were looking at a human head and shoulder. Assuming the body was a climber who had been killed in a fall, they reported their find to authorities. The body was removed with a jackhammer and tourists made off with some of its clothing and the tools that were found with it.
By Julie MacLeavy
In recent years, governments of both the right and left have been involved in debates over the best way to deliver public services. Whereas during the post-war period it was widely accepted that state provisioning of infrastructure, health, education and social services was the best way to ensure the well being of citizens, in the latter decades of the twentieth century the market was claimed to be a better way of delivering public goods and services because it was associated with competition, economic efficiency and consumer choice. Commitment to the market entailed a qualitative shift in welfare provision, whereby welfare was based less on a model in which the state counters the market and more on a model where the state serves the market.
We, the editors of OUPblog, field a lot of questions about “the Press.” Sometimes, these questions aren’t even questions, just statements of misinformation or confusion such as:
I thought you just published textbooks…
But Oxford University Press is in Oxford…
OUPblog is amazing! (Oops, how’d that one slip in there…)
Professor Jeff Lockwood answers a reader’s question regarding Cave Crickets: ‘The cave crickets belong to the Family Rhaphidophoridae. Technically they’re not ‘true’ crickets (like field crickets), but they’re close enough. In fact, they’re truer crickets than beasts like the Mormon cricket.’
By Richard Landes
In the years before 2000, as the director of the ephemeral Center for Millennial Studies, I scanned the global horizon for signs of apocalyptic activity, that is, for movements of people who believed that now was the time of a total global transformation. As I did so, I became aware of such currents of belief among Muslims, some specifically linked to the year 2000, all predominantly expressing the most dangerous of all apocalyptic