Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World

March 2012

Book thumbnail image

SciWhys: How do organisms develop?

By Jonathan Crowe
Each of our bodies is a mass of cells of varying types – from the brain cells that give us the power of thought, to the cardiac cells that form our heart and keep our blood circulating; from the lung cells that take in oxygen from the air around us, to the skin cells that envelop the organs and tissues that lie within. Regardless of their ultimate function, however, each of these cells has come from a single source – the fertilised egg. But how can the complexity and intricacy of a fully-functioning organism stem from such humble beginnings?

Book thumbnail image

Greeks launch revolt against Turkish rule

This Day in World History
Chafing from four centuries of rule by the Ottoman Empire and taking advantage of the Ottoman army’s need to suppress a rebellious local official, the Greek organization Filike Etaireia ( “Friendly Brotherhood”) launched revolts across Greece on March 25, 1821. While it took years for the Greeks to win independence, the day the revolt began is still celebrated as Greek Independence Day.

Book thumbnail image

What one atheist learned from hanging out with creationists

By Jason Rosenhouse
In May 2000 I began a post-doctoral position in the Mathematics Department at Kansas State University. Shortly after I arrived I learned of a conference for homeschoolers to be held in Wichita, the state’s largest city. Since that was a short drive from my home, and since anything related to public education in Kansas had relevance to my new job, I decided, on a whim, to attend.

Book thumbnail image

Mad Men and the dangerous fruit of persuasion

With the season premiere of AMC’s Mad Men coming this weekend, we thought we’d use this opportunity to introduce you to one of the most highly respected scientists in the field of Persuasion. As a matter of fact, many people consider Dr. Robert Cialdini as the “Godfather of influence”. What better way to do that then provide you with the foreword he wrote to a just-released book, Six Degrees of Social Influence. Enjoy his words below and enjoy the premiere.

Book thumbnail image

Handel conducts London premiere of Messiah

This Day in World History
On March 23, 1743, composer George Frideric Handel directed the first London performance of his sacred oratorio, Messiah. While the composition has become revered as a magnificent choral work—and a staple of the Christmas holiday season—it met some controversy when it first appeared.

Book thumbnail image

Name that cloud

By Storm Dunlop
World Meteorology Day marks a highly successful collaboration under the World Meteorological Organization, involving every country, large or small, rich or poor. Weather affects every single person (every living being) on the planet, but why do people feel meteorology is not for them? Why do they even find it so difficult to identify different types of cloud? Or at least they claim that it is difficult. The average person, it would seem, looks at the sky and simply thinks ‘clouds’. (Just as they look at the night sky and think nothing more than ‘stars’).

Book thumbnail image

Carbon dioxide and our oceans

By Jean-Pierre Gattuso and Lina Hansson
The impact of man’s fossil fuel burning and deforestation on Earth’s climate can hardly have escaped anyone’s attention. But there is a second, much less known, consequence of our carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. A large part of human-caused CO2 is absorbed by the world’s oceans, where it affects ocean chemistry and biology. This process, known as ocean acidification, is also referred to as “the other CO2 problem”.

Book thumbnail image

It’s World Water Day! What are you doing to help?

Is staggering population growth and intensifying effects of climate change driving the oasis-based society of the American Southwest close to the brink of a Dust-Bowl-scale catastrophe? Today is International World Water Day. Held annually on 22 March, it focuses attention on the importance of freshwater and advocating for the sustainable management of freshwater resources. We sat down with William deBuys, author of A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest, to discuss what lies ahead for Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas and Utah.

Book thumbnail image

A quiz on the Great Sea — the Mediterranean

The Trojan War. The history of piracy. The great naval battles between Carthage and Rome. The Jewish Diaspora into Hellenistic worlds. The rise of Islam. The Grand Tours of the 19th century. The mass tourism of the 20th. We may have missed World Maritime Day on March 17, but we can still admire the watery wonder of the sea and its peoples. And now a quick quiz on the history of the Mediterranean…

Book thumbnail image

Three Conversations with Computers

By Peter J Bentley
What better way to spend an afternoon than having a friendly chat? My three friends are online chatbots – Artificial Intelligence software designed to analyse my sentences and respond accordingly. All I do is visit a specific webpage, then type into a box in my Internet browser and they reply, just like chatting online to a human. These three (jabberwacky, iGod and ALICE) are some of the more advanced chatbots out there, the result of decades of research by computer scientists to try and achieve intelligence in a computer.

The Seasons, part 2. From three to four, summer.

By Anatoly Liberman
The ancient Indo-Europeans lived in the northern hemisphere (see the previous post), but, although this conclusion is certain, it does not follow that they divided the year into four seasons. Our perception of climate is colored too strongly by Vivaldi, the French impressionists, and popular restaurants. At some time, the Indo-Europeans dominated the territory from India to Scandinavia (hence the name scholars gave them). They lived and traveled in many climate zones, and no word for “winter,” “spring,” “summer,” and “autumn” is common to the entire family; yet some cover several language groups.

Book thumbnail image

Nadir Shah enters Delhi and captures the Peacock Throne

This Day in World History
On March 21, 1739, Nadir Shah, leading Persian (Iranian) and Turkish forces, completed his conquest of the Mughal Empire by capturing Delhi, India, its capital. He seized vast stores of wealth, and among the prizes he carried away was the fabled Peacock Throne.

Book thumbnail image

A Keatsian Field Trip

By Richard Marggraf Turley, Jayne Elisabeth Archer and Howard Thomas
“What if the field in Keats’s ode was (cue drum roll), not an allegorical field, not a cipher for, say, St Peter’s Field in Manchester (the location of the Peterloo Massacre), nor a mythic site of bucolic languor, but an actual Winchester field …

Book thumbnail image

Dangerous ignorance: The hysteria of Kony 2012

By Adam Branch
From Kampala, the Kony 2012 hysteria was easy to miss. I’m not on Facebook or Twitter. I don’t watch YouTube and the Ugandan papers didn’t pick up the story for several days. But what I could not avoid were the hundreds of emails from friends, colleagues, and students in the US about the video by Invisible Children and the massive online response to it.

Book thumbnail image

War, truth, and the shadows of meaning

Louis René Beres
It is time to look behind the news. Operation Iraqi Freedom is now officially concluded; U.S. operations in Afghanistan are reportedly moving in a similar direction. More generically, however, debate about combat strategy and tactics remains ongoing.

Book thumbnail image

Why spring is the season of hope

By Anthony Scioli
Spring and hope are intertwined in the mind, body, and soul. In spring, nature conspires with biology and psychology to spark the basic needs that underlie hope: attachment, mastery, survival, and spirituality. It is true that hope does not melt away in the summer; it is not rendered fallow in autumn nor does it perish in the deep freeze of winter. But none of these other seasons can match the bounty of hope that greets us in the spring. My reflections on hope and the spring season are cast in terms of metaphors.