Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
By now the reactions to Nicholas Kristof’s piece at the New York Times are circulating the Internet. There are good arguments in favor and against blaming professors or the public or both. Rather than take one side or the other I thought it would make sense to give a couple of anecdotes that provide insight into this issue.
By Nicholas Wade
Perceptual portraits represent people in an unconventional style. The portraits themselves are not always easy to discern – the viewer needs to apply the power of perception in order to extract the facial features from the design which carries them. The aim is both artistic and historical.
Humans seem to love attempting to understand the meaning of songs. Back in my college days, I spent many hours talking with friends about what this or that song must mean. Nowadays, numerous websites are devoted to providing space for fans to dissect and share their interpretations of their favorite songs (e.g. Song Meanings, Song Facts, and Lyric Interpretations). There is even a webpage with a six-step program for understanding a song’s meaning.
By Anne Campbell
Getting ready for work the other morning, I was diverted from pouring my coffee by the television news. A comet was about to pass near the sun and might, if it survived, become visible on earth. The professor of astrophysics who had been brought on to explain the details was engaging, enthusiastic and clear. She was a woman. I wondered how many school girls had heard her and been inspired. Fifty years ago, the idea of a woman gaining recognition in such an arcane area of science would have been astounding.
By Glenn Geher and Gökçe Sancak
When it comes to the psychology of long-term mating, there are important differences and similarities that characterize the wants and desires of males and females. Based on extensive past research on the nature of human mating, it turns out that the sexes are more similar than portrayals of the recent research in this area often suggests.
By Martin J. Lubetsky, M.D.
What are the primary changes made by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) in May 2013 in the new DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) diagnostic criteria for Autism Spectrum Disorder and Intellectual Disability?
By Mary Coleman
Finally, in 2014, we are beginning to resolve some of the long-standing controversies in autism and move research is a more fruitful direction.
By Michael D. Matthews
I am posting this article on February 6th. My father was born on this date in 1914, just months before the outbreak of World War I. In many ways the state of the world 100 years ago was not so different from today. Political instability plagued Europe, social change driven by advances in technology was sweeping the world, and yet most people felt a sense of security that the world as they knew it was stable.
By Barbara Malt
Dogs are the noses of modern society. They not only track the scent of prey across a meadow but find lost children, sniff out bombs and drugs, and conduct medical diagnosis. Pigs are good, too; we rely on them to hunt down rare and expensive truffles. Domestic cats can turn in an impressive performance, pawing out the last crumb of tuna sandwich at the bottom of a workbag. But humans?
By Matthew Flinders
If you are reading this blog then you’ve obviously survived ‘Blue Monday’. That is, the day in the third week of January when suicide levels tend to peak and demands for counseling rocket as a result of post-Christmas debt, dashed New Year resolutions, and the inevitable sense that this year is actually unlikely to be much different to the last.
By Hank Giele
In its article ‘UK plastic surgery statistics 2012: brows up, breasts down’, The Guardian reported that 39,000 women underwent cosmetic plastic surgery in 2012: nearly 10,000 breast augments, 4,000 reductions, 5,000 facelifts, 3,000 nose jobs and 3,000 tummy tucks.
By Viki McCabe, PhD
How did the Seattle Seahawks, “the best collection of leftovers this side of the day after Thanksgiving” according to sports writer John Boyle and the “guys who have kind of been thrown aside by other teams, guys with chips on the shoulders” pointed out fondly by former Seahawk wide receiver Brandon Stokely punch the ticket to the 2014 Super Bowl?
By Mel Goodale and David Milner
Vision, more than any other sense, dominates our mental life. Our visual experience is so rich and detailed that we can scarcely distinguish that subjective world from the real thing. Even when we are just thinking about the world with our eyes closed, we can’t help imagining what it looks like.
This YouTube video of a three-month-old polar bear taking his first wobbly steps at the Toronto Zoo was viewed over 4.5 million times in the first four days of it being posted, and is sprouting all over the internet. Something I noticed immediately is that the baby polar bear is mostly crawling backwards. Many (human) infants do the same – crawling backwards for a few weeks before they crawl forwards.
By Anne Cunningham and Jamie Zibulsky
If you want to help a child get ahead in school and in life, there is no better value you can impart to him or her than a love of reading. The skills that early and avid reading builds are the skills that older readers need in order to make sense of sophisticated and complex texts.
By Leonard A. Jason
Names of diseases have never required scientific accuracy (e.g. malaria means bad air, lyme is a town, and ebola is a river). But some disease names are offensive, victim-blaming, and stigmatizing. Multiple sclerosis was once called hysterical paralysis when people believed that this disease was caused by stress linked with oedipal fixations.