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Academic Insights for the Thinking World
Charles Darwin’s five year voyage aboard H. M. S. Beagle and subsequent life work are as widely known as any events in the history of the biological sciences. His wide ranging bird work has been overshadowed by drab small birds he discovered in the Galapagos Islands–the Galapagos, or Darwin’s, finches.
The current issue of the OHR invites diverse authors to share their experiences listening to and learning from LGBTQ lives. This week, we bring you a short interview with one of the contributors, Marion Wasserbauer, whose article “‘That’s What Music Is About—It Strikes a Chord’: Proposing a Queer Method of Listening to the Lives and Music of LGBTQs” suggests that music is an integral tool for listening to a narrator’s voice.
Dementia, from the Latin demens, is a persistent disorder of the mental processes marked by memory disorders, personality changes, and impaired reasoning. It affects 47.5 million people worldwide, and there are 7.7 million new cases annually. This year’s Dementia Awareness Week (15-21 May 2016) aims to bring recognition and awareness to this neurological illness.
All over the world, populations are changing. People are living longer, and older people are forming a larger percentage of the global population. Baby boomers are retiring and improved health care has extended life expectancy. At the same time, as globalisation and urbanisation break apart familiar social and family structures, more older adults are living alone or without social support.
We are currently living through a period when “antisemitism” seems to be on the rise in Europe, and is now a hot topic of debate in Britain, because of a few clumsy statements by some prominent Labour politicians (along with a very few statements that do appear to have an actual antisemitic animus).
The second series of the BBC Radio 4 dramatization of the novels of Émile Zola (Blood, Sex and Money) is just coming to a close. The central theme of the present series is Sex. Sex is all-pervasive in Zola. It encapsulates the themes of desire, pleasure, and perversion; and it is inseparable from Zola’s social themes.
Philosophers of science are in the business of explaining the special features of science, like the unifying power of scientific explanation and the wonderful sense of understanding it produces. We try to explain the amazing success of modern scientific theories, the structure of inductive inference in the science, and extract systematic positions – like realism, constructivism, and empiricism – from the evidence of theoretical success.
This week, the 61st Eurovision Song Contest, more affectionately Eurovision, will be broadcast to a global audience (including for the first-time a live telecast in the United States) with 42 countries competing in a series of semi-finals before the final, live show on 14 May. Established in 1956 as part of the then-fledgling European Broadcast Union, the contest has continued to grow in popularity and some would argue in cultural significance.
News of amazing breakthroughs that can – maybe – help solve pressing societal problems in healthcare, energy, economic development, and other areas arrives daily. Yet problems persist, because breakthroughs become useful only if they are integrated with other aspects of the situation.
Unlike tyke, bitch can boast of respectable ancestors, because its Old English form (bicce) has been recorded. The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology notes that bicce is obscurely related to Old Icelandic bikkja (the same meaning). The OED online never uses the phrase obscurely related, and this is a good thing, for this verbal formula, which so often occurred in the past, is itself obscure.
In an op-ed published in the New York Times titled “Why You Hate Work”, Schwartz and Porath highlighted Gallup data that revealed that only 30% of employees in the US and 13% across 142 countries feel engaged at work. Noting the high rate of burnout, they declared that for most of us, work is a depleting, dispiriting experience that is getting worse.
The discussions about Brexit have centered around the question of whether it is in the national interest of the United Kingdom to remain in the EU or to leave it. It appears today that the British public is split about this question, so that the outcome of the referendum remains highly uncertain. The question of whether it is in the interest of the EU that the UK remains a member of the union has been discussed much less intensely.
Global population is aging rapidly. Over the next four decades the number of individuals aged 60 years and older will nearly triple to more than 2 billion in 2050 (UN, 2013). Mindful physical exercise has become an increasingly utilized approach for improving psychological well-being and is defined as “physical exercise executed with a profound inwardly directed contemplative focus.”
The OUPblog celebrated its tenth anniversary last summer and – over the course of the last decade – has gone from strength to strength. In order to help the blog continue to flourish, our focus will be on expanding our community and growing our discipline specific content. Most of all, we will endeavor to inform and entertain you, the regular reader, as you are what makes the OUPblog so special.
Addiction is not a condition that springs to mind when we think of afflictions of the elderly, and yet it probably should be. Until now, alcohol or substance abuse among older patients has received relatively little attention, either as a clinical focus or as a research initiative. But we can no longer afford to neglect this growing cohort of affected individuals.
Tango is a multidimensional art form including music, dance and poetry. It grew out of the confluence of cultures in the Río de la Plata region in South America and has since had over a century-long history. Here are ten things that you might not know about Argentine tango music.