ANTITUSSIVE

The next subject of my utter contempt is the fair-weather friend, or is it fiend, and his victim. If I must make a hate list of criminals officially categorized as "non-heinous", I would confer the top prize to this fiend, and award the second-place trophy to his user-friendly victim.

Yes, there exists a veritable dynamics in this predator-prey relationship. The complexity can get pretty complicated it deserves a separate course in psychology. The symbiotic relationship can occur between and among friends or couples, anything with an opportunistic species of bacteria on one end and a willing fool on the other.

Friendly users and user-friendly folks, how to distinguish them? Let's deal with the users first.

***

A fairly good sign of a potential user is the level of phoniness he or she exhibits in his or her tendency to bootlick.

Of course there’s a thin line between being polite and being phony, but you would know a phony when you see or hear one. All you have to do is observe carefully and trust your instinct. Does his or her mouth spew blatant falsehoods just to make you feel nice? Does the person act like he or she is your number one fan even in cases where you totally suck? Tickled pink by the corniest joke ever delivered on earth, i.e., the one emanating from your mouth? Believe me, chances are he or she is either too naïve or just being plain obsequious.

In short, is he or she a pleaser, more of a yes-man than a genuine rah-rah guy? Is he or she too accommodating for comfort? Trust me, you’re in the same room with a bottom-kisser. No wonder you could hardly breathe: There's a toady blowing a lot of hot air!

Filipinos have a nice term for these creatures: “sipsip” (leech). Now true leeches do suck blood for survival; it’s in the annelid worm's nature. But when human beings do the sucking, they are plain vampires.

By contrast, non-users are true to themselves. They lay their cards on the table at the outset. They are not ruled by the game of putting one's foot forward, always out to impress lest the first impression fails to be everlasting indeed.

If they need to avoid offending anyone, non-users choose kindness as the better part of the truth, but they never overdo it. It's one thing to be diplomatic, tactful, discretionary and restrained, and quite another to be groveling and invariably pathetic. I would like to say that being a user is more of being an animal than being human, but that would be unfair to animals, to steal a quote. It is stooping too low, one wonders why bootlickers don’t get back pains. It is an unimaginative form of lying because it is pretty obvious both to the distant observer and the one being fawned upon.

***

Now the latter - the willing victim - needs a special kind of verbal harassment as well. The problem with this type of person is, he or she knows all along and knows all too well that kowtowing comes with some strings attached. But he or she falls for the trick anyway.

A willing prey is guilty of what shrinks call co-dependency. You can trust him to lend you all his savings. You can treat him like a doormat; you already have his permission even before you ask. This species wants to feel needed, feel martyred, because there's a gaping hole in his psyche that needs to be filled or else he'd collapse like a dead star. But such a foolish type of martyrdom deserves the jail, or to be a cannon fodder, more than it deserves canonization.

As helpless and pitiful as they are at first blush, false martyrs, too, deserve utter contempt for the things they refuse to accept about themselves: That they have the right to be loved and accepted for who they are, and not according to how people around them would like them or need them, or tell them how they are useful. That just for being born human, they automatically have the right to self-worth, and everyone must give them that much.

Unfortunately, these victims of the object-oriented wrongly pin their hopes of happiness, fulfillment and self-worth on someone just as weak, and for the wrong reason. And because their twisted logic happens to be fulfilled by the infectious virus of the opportunistic, they fall ill from the infection of being thusly validated. "I need to be needed," they say, so we can only say in dismay, "Congratulations, dear, you have finally met your match!"

This way, user-magnets are also guilty of addiction, their drug being self-delusion, plus the lies being peddled by the person to whom they've become attached, the significant other fulfilling that void. As in all addictions, people revolving within this self-centered pair's orbit get adversely affected, even get used, in the process. In literary circles, this laughable pairing may also qualify as some sort of poetic justice for the rest of us. Indeed, there is something Shakespearean about the rest of us being able to exclaim, "Truly they deserve each other!"

***

There’s probably a Doc Martens-kisser in all of us, so conventional wisdom, I imagine, would let this crime get off the hook so easily. Between the accused and the co-accused, it's the same law of the jungle operating here: Be nice to people if they are nice to you; who knows, they might be of some use to you at some future date?

That's precisely what's so infuriating about users and the used: They reduce people into useful objects. They make a travesty of loving relationships, turning these into a pathetic state of "transaction," as another writer beautifully said.

***

It's a sad, sad world when it is a world populated by the user and the used. People befriend people because of selfish agenda. There is a kind of "selfish selflessness" in it, as an American poet-laureate sagely puts it. Relationships, even entire organizations, can be infected by this particularly appalling dynamic. A seemingly balanced state of affairs, however, suddenly tips after a friendship turns sour, after somebody wakes up and realizes that, hey, it's all about a "transactionalized" thing, nothing more.

It never occurs to a lot of people that human instinct may be predatory some of the time, but being decent, at least to oneself, is the better part of being human.

Someone said "Never lend a friend money, books, or CDs if you don't want a friendship to end." Whoever said that, he is surely as selfish as he is sagacious. What's a friend for, anyway, if he's not someone you can lean on in time of need? On the other hand, what's a friend for if all he sees in you is an ever-ready cash without the need for a PIN number, a sounding board that echoes only the things you want to hear, and a cheering squad of one nincompoop - all rolled into one?

Look around you and, with a little dose of sensitivity, it wouldn't take an animatronics expert to see the people guilty of such an illicit affair. I Need You, You Need Me is their national anthem, How Am I Supposed to Live Without You? their favorite theme song. For indeed, if one of the two dies out on the other, it would mean instant death. Goodbye, co-dependency. Hello, black hole!

***

How then do we deal with the user and the used more properly? Well, I guess, the best thing we can do is leave them at their game. The last time I checked, the world's constitutions have yet to legislate true friendship, true love, and devotion. Besides, like they always say, it's impossible to make the blind see or wake up someone who's awake, unless you're some kind of messiah.

All kinds of phonies thrive in dishonesty and lies; therefore, only their exposure to the truth would kill them. Thank goodness fawning people and their willing victims have a way of outing themselves without us lifting a finger. They have a certain capacity to self-destruct in due time. We are preternaturally pissed off for the longest time, but we are saved from the messy job of convicting them in a fair trial.

7.5.2004

# posted by Resty Odon @ 11:09 AM 0 comments

A new study will change how you generate ideas and decide who's really creative in your company.

These days, there's hardly a mission statement that doesn't herald it, or a CEO who doesn't laud it. And yet despite all of the attention that business creativity has won over the past few years, maddeningly little is known about day-to-day innovation in the workplace. Where do breakthrough ideas come from? What kind of work environment allows them to flourish? What can leaders do to sustain the stimulants to creativity -- and break through the barriers?

Teresa Amabile has been grappling with those questions for nearly 30 years. Amabile, who heads the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at Harvard Business School and is the only tenured professor at a top B-school to devote her entire research program to the study of creativity, is one of the country's foremost explorers of business innovation.

Eight years ago, Amabile took her research to a daring new level. Working with a team of PhDs, graduate students, and managers from various companies, she collected nearly 12,000 daily journal entries from 238 people working on creative projects in seven companies in the consumer products, high-tech, and chemical industries. She didn't tell the study participants that she was focusing on creativity. She simply asked them, in a daily email, about their work and their work environment as they experienced it that day. She then coded the emails for creativity by looking for moments when people struggled with a problem or came up with a new idea.

"The diary study was designed to look at creativity in the wild," she says. "We wanted to crawl inside people's heads and understand the features of their work environment as well as the experiences and thought processes that lead to creative breakthroughs."

Amabile and her team are still combing through the results. But this groundbreaking study is already overturning some long-held beliefs about innovation in the workplace. In an interview with Fast Company , she busted six cherished myths about creativity. (If you want to quash creativity in your organization, just continue to embrace them.) Here they are, in her own words.

1. Creativity Comes From Creative Types

When I give talks to managers, I often start by asking, Where in your organization do you most want creativity? Typically, they'll say R&D, marketing, and advertising. When I ask, Where do you not want creativity? someone will inevitably answer, "accounting." That always gets a laugh because of the negative connotations of creative accounting. But there's this common perception among managers that some people are creative, and most aren't. That's just not true. As a leader, you don't want to ghettoize creativity; you want everyone in your organization producing novel and useful ideas, including your financial people. Over the past couple of decades, there have been innovations in financial accounting that are extremely profound and entirely ethical, such as activity-based costing.

The fact is, almost all of the research in this field shows that anyone with normal intelligence is capable of doing some degree of creative work. Creativity depends on a number of things: experience, including knowledge and technical skills; talent; an ability to think in new ways; and the capacity to push through uncreative dry spells. Intrinsic motivation -- people who are turned on by their work often work creatively -- is especially critical. Over the past five years, organizations have paid more attention to creativity and innovation than at any other time in my career. But I believe most people aren't anywhere near to realizing their creative potential, in part because they're laboring in environments that impede intrinsic motivation. The anecdotal evidence suggests many companies still have a long way to go to remove the barriers to creativity.

2. Money Is a Creativity Motivator

The experimental research that has been done on creativity suggests that money isn't everything. In the diary study, we asked people, "To what extent were you motivated by rewards today?" Quite often they'd say that the question isn't relevant -- that they don't think about pay on a day-to-day basis. And the handful of people who were spending a lot of time wondering about their bonuses were doing very little creative thinking.

Bonuses and pay-for-performance plans can even be problematic when people believe that every move they make is going to affect their compensation. In those situations, people tend to get risk averse. Of course, people need to feel that they're being compensated fairly. But our research shows that people put far more value on a work environment where creativity is supported, valued, and recognized. People want the opportunity to deeply engage in their work and make real progress. So it's critical for leaders to match people to projects not only on the basis of their experience but also in terms of where their interests lie. People are most creative when they care about their work and they're stretching their skills. If the challenge is far beyond their skill level, they tend to get frustrated; if it's far below their skill level, they tend to get bored. Leaders need to strike the right balance.

3. Time Pressure Fuels Creativity

In our diary study, people often thought they were most creative when they were working under severe deadline pressure. But the 12,000 aggregate days that we studied showed just the opposite: People were the least creative when they were fighting the clock. In fact, we found a kind of time-pressure hangover -- when people were working under great pressure, their creativity went down not only on that day but the next two days as well. Time pressure stifles creativity because people can't deeply engage with the problem. Creativity requires an incubation period; people need time to soak in a problem and let the ideas bubble up. In fact, it's not so much the deadline that's the problem; it's the distractions that rob people of the time to make that creative breakthrough. People can certainly be creative when they're under the gun, but only when they're able to focus on the work. They must be protected from distractions, and they must know that the work is important and that everyone is committed to it. In too many organizations, people don't understand the reason for the urgency, other than the fact that somebody somewhere needs it done today.

4. Fear Forces Breakthroughs

There's this widespread notion that fear and sadness somehow spur creativity. There's even some psychological literature suggesting that the incidence of depression is higher in creative writers and artists -- the de-pressed geniuses who are incredibly original in their thinking. But we don't see it in the population that we studied.

We coded all 12,000 journal entries for the degree of fear, anxiety, sadness, anger, joy, and love that people were experiencing on a given day. And we found that creativity is positively associated with joy and love and negatively associated with anger, fear, and anxiety. The entries show that people are happiest when they come up with a creative idea, but they're more likely to have a breakthrough if they were happy the day before. There's a kind of virtuous cycle. When people are excited about their work, there's a better chance that they'll make a cognitive association that incubates overnight and shows up as a creative idea the next day. One day's happiness often predicts the next day's creativity.

5. Competition Beats Collaboration

There's a widespread belief, particularly in the finance and high-tech industries, that internal competition fosters innovation. In our surveys, we found that creativity takes a hit when people in a work group compete instead of collaborate. The most creative teams are those that have the confidence to share and debate ideas. But when people compete for recognition, they stop sharing information. And that's destructive because nobody in an organization has all of the information required to put all the pieces of the puzzle together.

6. A Streamlined Organization Is a Creative Organization

Maybe it's only the public-relations departments that believe downsizing and restructuring actually foster creativity. Unfortunately, I've seen too many examples of this kind of spin. One of my favorites is a 1994 letter to shareholders from a major U.S. software company: "A downsizing such as this one is always difficult for employees, but out of tough times can come strength, creativity, and teamwork." Of course, the opposite is true: Creativity suffers greatly during a downsizing. But it's even worse than many of us realized. We studied a 6,000-person division in a global electronics company during the entire course of a 25% downsizing, which took an incredibly agonizing 18 months. Every single one of the stimulants to creativity in the work environment went down significantly. Anticipation of the downsizing was even worse than the downsizing itself -- people's fear of the unknown led them to basically disengage from the work. More troubling was the fact that even five months after the downsizing, creativity was still down significantly.

Unfortunately, downsizing will remain a fact of life, which means that leaders need to focus on the things that get hit. Communication and collaboration decline significantly. So too does people's sense of freedom and autonomy. Leaders will have to work hard and fast to stabilize the work environment so ideas can flourish. Taken together, these operating principles for fostering creativity in the workplace might lead you to think that I'm advocating a soft management style. Not true. I'm pushing for a smart management style. My 30 years of research and these 12,000 journal entries suggest that when people are doing work that they love and they're allowed to deeply engage in it -- and when the work itself is valued and recognized -- then creativity will flourish. Even in tough times.

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/89/creativity.html

# posted by Resty Odon @ 9:31 AM 0 comments

Thu Dec 9, 4:57 PM ET U.S. National - AP

By RICHARD N. OSTLING, AP Religion Writer

NEW YORK - A British philosophy professor who has been a leading champion of atheism for more than a half-century has changed his mind. He now believes in God — more or less — based on scientific evidence, and says so on a video released Thursday.

At age 81, after decades of insisting belief is a mistake, Antony Flew has concluded that some sort of intelligence or first cause must have created the universe. A super-intelligence is the only good explanation for the origin of life and the complexity of nature, Flew said in a telephone interview from England.

Flew said he's best labeled a deist like Thomas Jefferson, whose God was not actively involved in people's lives.

"I'm thinking of a God very different from the God of the Christian and far and away from the God of Islam, because both are depicted as omnipotent Oriental despots, cosmic Saddam Husseins," he said. "It could be a person in the sense of a being that has intelligence and a purpose, I suppose."

Flew first made his mark with the 1950 article "Theology and Falsification," based on a paper for the Socratic Club, a weekly Oxford religious forum led by writer and Christian thinker C.S. Lewis.

Over the years, Flew proclaimed the lack of evidence for God while teaching at Oxford, Aberdeen, Keele, and Reading universities in Britain, in visits to numerous U.S. and Canadian campuses and in books, articles, lectures and debates.

There was no one moment of change but a gradual conclusion over recent months for Flew, a spry man who still does not believe in an afterlife.

Yet biologists' investigation of DNA "has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce (life), that intelligence must have been involved," Flew says in the new video, "Has Science Discovered God?"

The video draws from a New York discussion last May organized by author Roy Abraham Varghese's Institute for Metascientific Research in Garland, Texas. Participants were Flew; Varghese; Israeli physicist Gerald Schroeder, an Orthodox Jew; and Roman Catholic philosopher John Haldane of Scotland's University of St. Andrews.

The first hint of Flew's turn was a letter to the August-September issue of Britain's Philosophy Now magazine. "It has become inordinately difficult even to begin to think about constructing a naturalistic theory of the evolution of that first reproducing organism," he wrote.

The letter commended arguments in Schroeder's "The Hidden Face of God" and "The Wonder of the World" by Varghese, an Eastern Rite Catholic layman.

This week, Flew finished writing the first formal account of his new outlook for the introduction to a new edition of his "God and Philosophy," scheduled for release next year by Prometheus Books.

Prometheus specializes in skeptical thought, but if his belief upsets people, well "that's too bad," Flew said. "My whole life has been guided by the principle of Plato's Socrates: Follow the evidence, wherever it leads."

Last week, Richard Carrier, a writer and Columbia University graduate student, posted new material based on correspondence with Flew on the atheistic www.infidels.org Web page. Carrier assured atheists that Flew accepts only a "minimal God" and believes in no afterlife.

Flew's "name and stature are big. Whenever you hear people talk about atheists, Flew always comes up," Carrier said. Still, when it comes to Flew's reversal, "apart from curiosity, I don't think it's like a big deal."

Flew told The Associated Press his current ideas have some similarity with American "intelligent design" theorists, who see evidence for a guiding force in the construction of the universe. He accepts Darwinian evolution but doubts it can explain the ultimate origins of life.

A Methodist minister's son, Flew became an atheist at 15.

Early in his career, he argued that no conceivable events could constitute proof against God for believers, so skeptics were right to wonder whether the concept of God meant anything at all.

Another landmark was his 1984 "The Presumption of Atheism," playing off the presumption of innocence in criminal law. Flew said the debate over God must begin by presuming atheism, putting the burden of proof on those arguing that God exists.

# posted by Resty Odon @ 10:51 AM 0 comments

(Filed: 19/07/2003) Tel.uk

As the Heritage Lottery Fund decides whether to pay £20 million to save Raphael's Madonna of the Pinks for the nation, Peter Mandler and Lottery Fund chairman Liz Forgan explain what can be done about the new 'art drain'

Any day now the Heritage Lottery Fund will announce its decision on a grant to the National Gallery in the region of £20 million in order to buy Raphael's Madonna of the Pinks. The choices are stark.

Under threat: Raphael's Madonna of the Pinks

Either this ransom is paid from public funds to the trustees of the Duke of Northumberland, or it gets on a jet plane to reside for ever at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Either way, the Duke wins what he considers to be his just deserts: the full market value for the painting. And why shouldn't he?

In a robust self-defence in The Daily Telegraph in January, the Duke listed his many voluntary contributions to the public weal, but insisted that in the end he had a right - and his trustees a legal duty - to dispose of his private property on the open market just as he wished.

We seem in these matters to have reverted to "Victorian values" - it's my property and I'll do what I like with it. In this case, the Duke argues that he will use the money earned to protect other parts of the "national heritage" (his houses and estates at Syon and Alnwick), but it's his decision whether and how to do so.

The idea of "national heritage" as something in which the public has a real stake, and not just a peek loaned to it by noblesse oblige, has gone by the board. Yet not that long ago the dukes were on the other side, begging the nation to embrace their houses and pictures as "national heritage". A little history is in order to remind us why they thought that then, why they've changed their minds since, and what we ought to do about it now.

Until the end of the 19th century, only a few radicals dared to suggest that the aristocracy's possessions were anything but their private property. When Americans began to buy up the choicest works of art around 1900, and some little protests were kicked up in aesthetic circles about the "art drain", the dukes were outraged that anyone would dare even to discuss their personal transactions.

"Mind your own business," they said, and the public more or less accepted this state of affairs. The only "control" on export was the willingness of the public to stump up the full market price, and charitable bodies such as the National Art Collections Fund and the National Trust tried - often unsuccessfully - to raise funds for the purpose.

All changed over the course of the 20th century, for one main reason: tax. To pay for the world wars and the welfare state, governments jacked up the rate of inheritance tax. Among those hardest hit were aristocrats with a lot of capital (mostly in the form of land and art) and little income. Art lovers saw their chance.

Shouldn't the most mobile forms of capital - pictures especially - be regarded as "national heritage" and therefore exempted from inheritance tax if unsold, to keep them in the country? Aristocrats were slow to respond to this argument. The tax exemption would have to be paid back when the asset was sold, so what was the point of having it?

Gradually, as the rates for inheritance tax (then known as estate duty) crept up and up, to a top rate of 75 per cent by 1946, the aristocrats came to embrace the idea, at least as a survival strategy. They stopped saying "mind your own business" and learned to speak the new language of "national heritage".

"When a man's house is scheduled as a national monument, he ceases to be a householder in the ordinary sense of the word," argued the Marquess of Salisbury in 1953, seeking more tax exemptions.

From the 1950s to the 1980s, a formidable body of such exemptions was built up for property defined as national heritage. These exemptions pleased the owners, who got relief from very high tax rates, and they pleased the public, who got a stake in the "national heritage" and secured it against export.

Since the 1980s, of course, all tax rates have come down, and the dukes have changed their tune. It is once again worth their while to sell, so they want to sell. The Duke of Northumberland wants to go back to being "an ordinary householder", who can do what he likes with his private property.

That is fair enough. It is dukes doing what they do best - protecting the long-term interest of their estates - just as it was in their interest to play the "national heritage" card when taxes were high. But in the meantime, the rest of us - the nation whose heritage it is - have taken our eyes off the ball.

When in the 1950s government briefly considered placing controls on the export of works of art, it was thought that the tax system was doing the job and no further controls were needed. The "export licence" scheme only set up an early warning system, giving the government notice when owners proposed to sell for export their important works of art.

But sales of this kind were less likely to arise so long as high taxes meant that owners kept very little of the proceeds. When owners did sell, they often sold to the national collections, thanks to a largely informal system whereby owners were let off some of the tax if they sold to national collections instead of to foreigners. This bribe, sweetly dubbed the "douceur", meant that selling to national collections at a discount was the best way to realise capital.

With tax rates lowered, the system no longer works. Owners can pay all the inheritance and capital gains tax owing and still reap a substantial sum from a foreign buyer; in the case of the Raphael, the Duke of Northumberland may get £27 million after tax. National collections can't compete at that level, and at lower rates of tax the "douceur" is too low to give them much leverage.

That is why we are seeing today a seemingly uncontrollable rash of alarms over the export of works of art, the most recent being Joseph Wright's portrait of Richard Arkwright junior and Joshua Reynolds's Portrait of Omai. The owners have noticed that the rules of the game have changed, but the public hasn't.

What might be done? If we want to keep the free market, then the Lottery Fund has to pick up the slack and give the national collections the resources to compete. Otherwise there may never be any substantial additions to the national collections ever again.

Alternatively, or additionally, government needs to give the "national heritage" more attention. In the current climate, it's unlikely that tax rates will rise to act as a deterrent to export, although more could be done to make the "douceur" effective even at lower tax rates. So government ought to revisit the whole question of defining and preserving the "national heritage".

What is it? What are the public's rights and responsibilities in relation to it? Are private owners of the heritage just "ordinary" property owners, or do they have responsibilities too? What do other countries do?

If we don't now consider all of these questions, which the high tax regime allowed us to ignore for most of the last century, then we must gird ourselves for another, final "art drain".

*** Peter Mandler is university lecturer and fellow in history at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He is the author of 'The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home'

# posted by Resty Odon @ 9:34 AM 0 comments

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

If walking upright first set early human ancestors apart from their ape cousins, it may have been their eventual ability to run long distances with a springing step over the African savanna that influenced the transition to today's human body form, two researchers are reporting today.

The evolution of physiques for distance running made humans look the way we do now, whether winning a marathon, nursing a strained Achilles tendon or sitting on an ample gluteus maximus in front of the TV.

Endurance running, unique to humans among primates and uncommon in all mammals other than dogs, horses and hyenas, apparently evolved at least two million years ago and probably let human ancestors hunt and scavenge over great distances. That was probably decisive in the pursuit of high-protein food for development of large brains.

The apparently crucial role of running in human evolution has been largely overlooked in previous research. But today, the two scientists, Dr. Dennis M. Bramble of the University of Utah and Dr. Daniel E. Lieberman of Harvard, report in the journal Nature that their analysis of the fossil record found striking anatomical evidence for the capability of prolonged running in the Homo genus, beginning about two million years ago.

"Today, endurance running is primarily a form of exercise and recreation, but its roots may be as ancient as the origin of the human genus," the scientists conclude in the article.

Dr. Bramble, a professor of biology and a specialist in the biomechanics of animal locomotion, said, "Running made us human, at least in an anatomical sense," adding that he and Dr. Lieberman were "very confident that strong selection for running was instrumental in the origin of the modern human body form."

Paleontologists not involved in the research praised the hypothesis as an important insight into the apparent significance of long-distance running in human survival and evolution. But they raised questions about what stimulated the physical transition that led to this human capability.

By two million years ago, Dr. Bramble and Dr. Lieberman noted, early species of the Homo family, notably Homo erectus, had long, slender legs for greater strides. They had shorter arms and a narrower rib cage and pelvis. Their skulls included features to help prevent overheating. A ligament attached to the base of the skull kept their heads steady as they ran.

Although tissues do not fossilize, traces of muscle and tendon attachment points on bones of early species revealed an extensive network of springy tendons along the back of the legs and feet, including a well-developed Achilles tendon that anchored calf muscles to the heel bone. Tendons served to store and release elastic energy during running but were not needed for ordinary walking.

And there was the gluteus maximus, the muscle of the buttocks. Earlier human ancestors, like chimpanzees today, had pelvises that could support only a modest gluteus maximus, nothing like the strong buttocks of Homo.

"Have you ever looked at an ape?" Dr. Bramble said. "They have no buns."

Dr. Lieberman, a paleontologist, explained: "Your gluteus maximus stabilizes your trunk as you lean forward in a run. A run is like a controlled fall, and the buttocks help to control it."

The scientists compiled a list of 26 traits connected with running that early Homo specimens exhibited. It was a result of 13 years of research that started with watching pigs running on a treadmill.

"Dennis and I noticed how the pigs can't hold their heads still while running," Dr. Lieberman recalled. "Any good human runner keeps his head still because of the nuchal ligament, a tendon in the back of the neck."

The scientists learned that all accomplished running animals, modern or fossil, had a mark in the skull where the nuchal ligament had been. They found it in early Homo specimens, but not in Australopithecus, the genus that lived more than three million years ago and included the 3.2-million-year-old Lucy skeleton.

"That was an epiphany for us," Dr. Lieberman said.

Dr. Philip Rightmire, a paleoanthropologist at Binghamton University in New York, said the Bramble-Lieberman hypothesis was "a pretty compelling picture of the importance of running in human evolution, and overall, I'm very impressed."

Dr. Rightmire, who did not participate in the research, said the hypothesis made sense if the evolutionary focus was limited to Africa, particularly the increasingly open grasslands, where ancestral Homo specimens were more likely to have tall, lithe bodies. But "the picture is less clear," he said, among the early Homo erectus migrants out of Africa, many of whom appear to have been small and stocky.

The two scientists speculated in the article and in interviews that running by early human ancestors was more than simply a natural step, so to speak, beyond upright walking. These apelike ancestors, the scientists noted, were walking almost three million years before they became runners and began to assume more modern physiques.

In such ancestors as Australopithecus, the physical characteristics favoring running were either absent or underdeveloped. They had short legs, long forearms and high, permanently shrugged shoulders. The fossil record is scant in the million-year transitional period between most australopithecines and the emergence of Homo erectus.

Somehow, the scientists continued, those early ancestors who developed primitive running attributes must have improved their chances of survival and reproduction. They were not as swift in a sprint for prey as their contemporary four-legged competitors. But their ability to run greater distances than other predators must have been an advantage in making a kill or at least scavenging the kills of their swifter rivals.

In the journal article, the scientists suggested that endurance running "may have made possible a diet rich in fats and proteins thought to account for the unique human combination of large bodies, small guts, big brains and small teeth."

But the scientists conceded that it might be difficult to establish to what extent the running capability proved useful in hunting and scavenging.

Dr. Alan Walker, a paleoanthropologist at Penn State University who has excavated Homo erectus specimens in Africa, said the new research on long-distance running had yet to explain the stimulus for the transition in anatomy and the specific importance of the change to early human survival - whether it might have been for hunting, scavenging or escaping predators.

About one consequence of the evolved running physique there is little doubt. Running came to early Homo at a cost: the loss of physical traits useful for climbing trees for refuge and food. By this time, however, the climate and the landscape were changing, scientists have learned, and the woodlands of East Africa were giving way to arid grasslands and miles of running room.

# posted by Resty Odon @ 8:30 AM 0 comments

November 28, 2004
By ALAN BISBORT

CONNECTICUT must be a Land of Canaan for writers. No other explanation seems plausible for why people in the literary trade have wandered here in such abundance. Philip Roth has lived in Connecticut for many years; Arthur Miller and William Styron for decades. Frank McCourt moved here a few years ago. And Mark Twain, it almost feels, has never left.

Whatever has attracted them to the state, writers have left their mark on more than just paper. Vestiges of their presences can be found in the bricks and mortar, wood and windows, roofs and shutters of the houses where they lived. Some, like Twain's house and Harriet Beecher Stowe's in Hartford and Eugene O'Neill's childhood home in New London, are well-known tourist attractions. But others are more obscure, still standing and available for a drive-by glance for those who know where to look. F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose life in New York, France and Hollywood is part of his legend, spent time in Connecticut. He and his wife, Zelda, lived, and partied, in a small house in Westport at 244 Compo Road South.

A few towns over, Helen Keller lived for years at Arcan Ridge, a sprawling home at 163 Redding Road in Easton she so loved that when it was destroyed by fire in 1946, she had a replica built (dubbing it "Arcan Ridge 2"). She died in her sleep there on June 1, 1968. The house is now on the market for $1.6 million.

James Thurber, whose works include "My Life and Hard Times" and "My World and Welcome to It," spent years of house-hopping through Fairfield and Litchfield Counties before finding contentment in West Cornwall at Great Hollow Road. The actor Sam Waterston now lives in the house.

Ann Petry, whose 1948 novel "The Street" was one of the best-selling works by a Harlem Renaissance writer, lived most of her adult life in a house on Old Boston Post Road in Old Saybrook. She was born and grew up just down the street, in the building that now houses the James Gallery and Soda Fountain (2 Pennywise Lane), a setting that inspired her books, "Country Place" and "A Drug Store Cat."

Malcolm Cowley, the literary editor of The New Republic and a writer who lived at 2 Church Road in Sherman from 1936 until his death in 1989, so loved the area's rural character that he was chairman of the town zoning board for 20 years.

For half a century, James Laughlin, a writer and publisher, ran his influential imprint, New Directions, partly out of his home at 305 Mountain Road in Norfolk. New Directions was the first to publish some of the past century's most important writers in the United States, including Dylan Thomas, Henry Miller, Albert Camus, Arthur Rimbaud, Hermann Hesse, Franz Kafka, Yukio Mishima and Boris Pasternak, as well as American avant-garde poets like Ezra Pound, Kenneth Patchen and Charles Olson (another longtime state resident).

And what other state can boast that it had a novelist and Thoreau scholar for a lieutenant governor? Odell Shepard was elected to that post in 1940. He kept house in Hartford and Waterford for 50 years. Mr. Shepard, a Trinity College professor, also wrote a Pulitzer-winning biography of another literary lion, the transcendentalist philosopher Bronson Alcott, whose ancestral home was in the Spindle Hill section of Wolcott.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Westport

Fitzgerald is in a category all his own.

On June 4, 1920, a small item in The Westporter-Herald announced his bigger-than life arrival in Westport: "F. Scott Fitzgerald, a writer, has leased the Wakeman Cottage near Compo Beach." Fitzgerald, 23, was the toast of Manhattan for his first novel, "This Side of Paradise," published three months earlier by Charles Scribner's Sons. In April, he had married Zelda Sayre, who was 19, and the couple had planned a long New York City honeymoon. By late May, they'd worn out their welcome at two Manhattan hotels or, as the biographer Andrew Turnbull put it, "After several weeks at the Biltmore, the Fitzgeralds were asked to leave, the continuing hilarity of their presence being considered prejudicial to good order and restful nights."

Zelda and Scott climbed in their 1917 Marmon, drove north on the Boston Post Road and stopped in Westport, where Zelda, a swimming enthusiast, liked the proximity to Long Island Sound, while Scott was enamored of a rental property at 244 Compo Road South. This was no simple "cottage," as the local paper put it, but a substantial two-story Colonial structure built in 1780 by William Gray II, a farmer. It eventually came into the possession of William Wakeman, a descendant of Gray.

While living there, Fitzgerald began writing his second novel, "The Beautiful and Damned," in which he described the house: "The gray house had been there when women who kept cats were probably witches. ... Since those days the house had been bolstered up in a feeble corner, considerably repartitioned and newly plastered inside, amplified by kitchen and added to by a side-porch but, save for where some jovial oaf had roofed the new kitchen with red tin, Colonial it defiantly remained."

The Fitzgeralds maintained their party animal reputations during the six months they lived in Westport, entertaining Manhattan friends like the drama critic George Jean Nathan, the theater producer John Williams and Princeton classmates like Edmund Wilson, who said he found the couple "reveling nude in the orgies of Westport," and Alexander McKaig, who in a diary entry for June 13, 1920, noted, "Visit Fitz at Westport ... Terrible party. Fitz & Zelda fighting like mad."

The tempestuous couple joined the Westport Beach Club and were spotted at "wild beach parties" that took place off Hendricks Point, near Compo Beach, according to the biographer James Mellow. Mr. Mellow wrote that the couple "took mad rides along Post Road with abrupt stops at roadhouses to replenish the supply of gin." In the midst of all this, Zelda's parents visited from Alabama, but the couple's behavior and lifestyle drove the elder Sayres home ahead of schedule.

To honor that intense residency, the house now has a plaque that refers to it as the William Gray/F. Scott Fitzgerald House. Though scholars have said it was Mr. Fitzgerald's time in Great Neck on Long Island (1922-24) that laid the foundation for his 1926 masterpiece, "The Great Gatsby," Barbara Probst Solomon, a novelist who spent her childhood in a house near Compo Beach, made a compelling case for Westport at least planting the Gatsby seed.

In a piece in The New Yorker during the Fitzgerald centennial in 1996, Ms. Solomon suggested that the road signs in Westport for Easton and Weston were echoed in "East Egg" and "West Egg," and that Jay Gatsby himself may have been modeled on a millionaire/eccentric who lived near the Fitzgeralds in 1920 and was renowned for lavish Gatsby-style parties.

The current residents, James and Wendy Agah, were aware of the house's notoriety when they bought it two years ago. As they've settled in, the Agahs have familiarized themselves with the Fitzgeralds' lively Westport past. They're particularly amused by "Invented Lives," Mr. Mellow's biography of the Fitzgeralds, the front cover of which shows the couple in front of the house.

"We leave the book out on a table in the front room," said Ms. Agah, who works for a wine auctioneer in Manhattan. "We joke that at 3 a.m. we hear music drifting through the house and figure it's just the Fitzgeralds throwing another party."

The Agahs are normally unfazed by the inevitable curiosity seekers.

"A woman walked right in the house one day, came up to me and asked, 'When does the tour start?'," Ms. Agah said. "We like the history of the house and the area. We like the attention it gets."

Maxwell E. Perkins

New Canaan

A few years after Fitzgerald moved out of Westport, Maxwell E. Perkins, the Scribner's editor who guided Fitzgerald, moved in to New Canaan, a few towns away. Perkins also edited Ernest Hemingway, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and Thomas Wolfe.

In a letter to Fitzgerald on Oct. 18, 1924, Perkins wrote: "I told you we'd bought a house in New Canaan. It has the face of a Greek temple and the body of a spacious Connecticut farm house."

This capacious, eccentric home, located at 63 Park Street half a block from the New Canaan commuter station, was designed and built in 1836 by Hiram Crissey, a local carpenter. Mr. Perkins bought the Greek Revival house in 1924 after it had served as a boardinghouse and private school. He lived there with his wife, Louise, who called it her "investment in happiness," and their five daughters until his death in 1947. Louise stayed in the house until 1965, when she died after falling asleep while smoking in bed, the blaze gutting part of the structure. The oldest Perkins daughter, Bertie, stayed in the house, divided it into four apartments, and then moved to Vermont a few years later, according to Sandra Bergmann, one of the current owners of the house.

By 1973, when the house was sold to its Ms. Bergmann and her husband, Richard, it was falling apart. It was largely through the efforts of the Bergmanns, who have lived in the house for 31 years, that the Maxwell E. Perkins House was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on May 6, 2004. Mr. Bergmann has been chairman of New Canaan's Historic District Commission for 24 years.

"I remember seeing the house for the first time in 1961," Ms. Bergmann said. "It was so overgrown, like an antebellum mansion gone to seed in the South. We knew it as an eccentric-looking house, not because of the Max Perkins connection. We confess that the name meant nothing to us at the time we bought it."

When the Bergmanns purchased the 5,000-square-foot house and two-acre lot, it had been on the market for some time.

"Only an architect would take on such a challenge as this house presented," Ms. Bergmann said. "There was four of everything. Four kitchens, four bathrooms, four front doors, and so on. I started crying when my husband said he wanted to buy it. We lived in one room at a time and it took us seven years to renovate. We inherited a hundred years of deferred maintenance. It sagged right down the middle. The house is now structurally the same from the outside as it was when the Perkins lived here. We tried to leave something from each era in the house. Bookcases Max Perkins had built are still here."

After the Bergmanns moved in, they were invited to a party by Thomas Ashwell, the neighbor across the street and one of Mr. Perkins's publishing colleagues.

"Mr. Ashwell told stories about 'Max' and how it was their running joke that whenever he'd see smoke coming out of the chimney over here they'd say, 'Max must be burning some more of Thomas Wolfe's manuscripts,' " she said.

Today, the Bergmanns run an architecture firm out of this shrine, which in addition to the National Register of Historic Places plaque, sports a plaque for being on the national Literary Landmarks Register, an honor bestowed on May 18, 2002. At the ceremony, A. Scott Berg, author of "Max Perkins: Editor of Genius" (and originally from Norwalk), delivered the keynote address from the steps of the house.

"People come by all the time now because of the Perkins connection," Ms. Bergmann said. "It doesn't bother us. We share the house with everyone."

Thornton Wilder

Hamden

Arguably, the most underappreciated literary home in the state is the one built by Thornton Wilder at 50 Deepwood Drive in Hamden. Wilder, author of the place-obsessed "Our Town," made Hamden his town from 1929 until 1975.

According to the Wilder biographer Gilbert A. Harrison, after graduating from Yale, Mr. Wilder lived with his family in New Haven, using their home on Mansfield Street as a base while he traveled extensively. In late 1927, his novel "The Bridge of San Luis Rey," was published. Within two months, the book had earned $20,000 in royalties; within a year it earned $73,375 and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Mr. Wilder was now famous and at least rich enough to look for land in the New Haven area to build a house where his parents, sisters and he could live. He bought the property in Hamden in March 1929. According to Mr. Harrison, the Wilders referred to their Hamden haven as "The House the Bridge Built."

Though he was a tireless traveler, speaker and teacher, Mr. Wilder, who never married, shared the house for the rest of his life with his sister Isabel, who served as his executive secretary. He died in his bedroom in December 1975.

"He traveled a great deal from the time he left Yale, but Hamden was the center of his life," said Patricia Willis, curator at Yale's Beinecke Library, where Wilder's papers are housed. "It's always been thought that "Our Town" was based on Peterboro, N.H., where he stayed at the MacDowell Colony, but like most of his writing, this play was not site-specific and could have some of Hamden in it, too. "Our Town" was intentionally nonspecific."

Mr. Wilder's home continues to follow his quiet, low-key example. It is still a private residence with no official connection to the author's legacy, no historic plaque to commemorate its famous owner. The unprepossessing, two-story, brown wooden structure rambles like a ski chalet onto the edge of a panoramic promontory, from which Wilder could see New Haven and East Rock, which he called "my dolomite."

"The owners were kind enough to allow Yale to feature the house during Wilder's centennial in 1997," Ms. Willis said.

A separate book could probably be written to explain why Connecticut has been and continues to be a scribbler's Canaan. John Ryden, former director of publishing at Yale University Press, lives just over the New Haven line from Wilder's home. Mr. Ryden once hosted a reading of one of Mr. Wilder's incomplete plays at the press and published a book of poetry by Amos Wilder, Thornton's brother.

"I believe the proximity to New York and Boston attracted many of the writers here initially," said Mr. Ryden, who moved to the state in 1979. "And because they came up here when the area was hardly discovered, they got hooked by the landscape and just could not leave. It's lovely country."

Asked what keeps him here now that he's retired? Mr. Ryden said: "I'm doing some writing."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/28/nyregion/28CONN.html?ex=1102839720&ei=1&en=091b50b6d27b9fa9

# posted by Resty Odon @ 1:49 PM 0 comments

By MICHAEL BECKERMAN Published: November 30, 2004 fter the violinist Mari Kimura's concert at Symphony Space last week, I went to Starbucks with the composer J. Brendan Adamson, the inventor Eric Singer and a "friend" who had played in the concert. "What's that?" asked the woman behind the counter, looking at the friend. "A robot," I said with the sense of cool that comes only when you accompany a robot to Starbucks. Advertisement "What does it do?" she continued, awestruck, since if truth be told, the bot looks something like a blocking dummy on a football field. "It plays music," I said smugly. Our companion, GuitarBot, might have been pleased, but it wasn't connected. And besides, none of its circuits are wasted on pride. "We weren't interested in making robots that played musical instruments," said Mr. Singer, of Lemur (League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots), in the subsequent conversation. "We wanted robots that were musical instruments." GuitarBot will appear again tonight - thrilling the audience as four moving bridges zing up and down its four strings like in a racehorse game at a carnival - in a concert by Mr. Adamson at the Juilliard School. "Robo Recital," it is billed. "No Human Performers." This kind of "posthuman" hype creates everything from shivers of delight (Robots, how neat!) to shivers of fear (What? They don't need us humans anymore?), which have been part of the response to robots since they first appeared in fiction at the beginning of the last century. The delight is richly nuanced: thousands of Web sites tout an array of products like robot pets and robot household servants. You can even rent a robot to make presentations at your next business meeting. The current Sharper Image catalog leads with a classic illustration of the two main types of robots: a humanoid one, which amuses because it does "human" things like grunt and burp, and a household robot vacuum cleaner, which roams self-propelled through your house, picking up dust. A furniture store in SoHo boasts a huge assortment of brightly colored tin robots made in China. And few human characters in recent years have brought more chuckles than the robot duo from "Star Wars." Then there is the dark side of robots, which first appeared in the play that gave them their name, Karel Capek's "R.U.R." (Rossum's Universal Robots). The work, first performed in 1921, deals with a robot factory run amok, much the same plot as in the recent film "I, Robot," based loosely on a book by Isaac Asimov. In these cases, some glitch occurs, a humanlike "ghost in the machine," and all the protections programmed into the mechanical creatures go out the window. In "I, Robot," the mechanisms' stomachs suddenly turned red (indigestion?), and they started throwing people around like popcorn. The message is clear: like the golem, an earlier nonmechanical creature made flesh, a robot can help you, but it can also hurt you. GuitarBot claims its ancestor not in the golem - which, after all, has decidedly human characteristics - but in the ingenious automated machines of the last three centuries. In the mid-18th century, the Maillardet brothers created an astonishing writer-draftsman that could write poetry and do amazing drawings of ships and buildings. Around the same time, Jacques de Vaucanson created his famous defecating duck, which could eat, digest and all the rest. He also created a flute-playing android, which offered 12 tunes, perhaps an ancestor of the robot that recently conducted Beethoven's Fifth Symphony in Tokyo. While audiences may be titillated by the prospect of seeing such devices and their descendants do "human" things, Mr. Singer and Mr. Adamson have something else in mind. Mr. Adamson, in particular, is more concerned with technical issues and the ability of machines to do things that humans cannot accomplish. The flier for his concert prominently displays a quote from the visionary Australian composer Percy Grainger: "Too long has music been subject to the limitations of the human hand and subject to the interfering interpretation of a middle-man: the performer. A composer wants to speak to his public direct."

# posted by Resty Odon @ 1:27 PM 0 comments

November 28, 2004
By MIREYA NAVARRO

THE 39-year-old yoga instructor was like a lot of women these days: she was unhappy with her body and thought that a little sculpturing by a plastic surgeon would help. But her goal was not the usual smoothing out of facial wrinkles or expanding her bust.

Instead she wanted to achieve her beauty ideal in the most private part of her anatomy - her genitals.

"I was very, very self-conscious about the way I looked," said the woman, who lives in Boston and spoke on the condition that her name not be used, to protect her privacy. "Now I feel free. I just feel normal."

As millions of women inject Botox, reshape noses, augment breasts, lift buttocks and suck away unwanted fat, a growing number are now exploring a new frontier, genital plastic surgery. They are tightening vaginal muscles, plumping up or shortening labia, liposuctioning the pubic area and even restoring the hymen, sometimes despite their doctors' skepticism about the need for such cosmetic measures.

Procedures that once were reserved for problems like incontinence, congenital malformations or injuries related to childbirth are now being marketed by some gynecologists and plastic surgeons as "vaginal rejuvenation," surgical techniques to enhance sexual satisfaction and improve the looks of the genitals.

Even doctors who do not advertise say they get inquiries from patients every month.

"There's remarkably amazing patient interest in this," said Dr. V. Leroy Young, chairman of the emerging trends task force for the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. "This is at that early stage where there's a lot of enthusiasm for it." Dr. Young said his group, the largest organization of plastic surgeons, has not yet started tracking how many doctors are making "gynecologic cosmetic care" or "vaginal rejuvenation" their specialty, but he said that anecdotal evidence suggests that while the numbers may be relatively small compared with other surgeries, demand for genital procedures is growing rapidly.

The most popular of those are tightening of the vaginal muscles, or vaginoplasty, and reduction of the labia minora, called labiaplasty. Doctors who perform the surgeries, which are usually done on an outpatient basis in less than two hours and can cost from $3,500 to $8,000, say that the reasons for the procedures are not always purely cosmetic; some women with large labia, the surgeons said, suffer discomfort wearing tight pants or during activities like bicycle riding.

But primarily, doctors say, aggressive marketing and fashion influences like flimsier swimsuits, the Brazilian bikini wax and more exposure to nudity in magazines, movies and on the Internet are driving attention to a physical zone still so private that some women do not dare, or care, to look at themselves closely.

"Now women shave," said Dr. Gary J. Alter, a plastic surgeon and urologist with offices in Beverly Hills, Calif., and Manhattan who has come up with his own "labia contouring" technique. "Now they see porn. Now they're more aware of appearance."

Dr. Bernard H. Stern, a gynecologist in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., began to focus exclusively on genital cosmetic surgery four years ago and said he had seen his business quadruple this year, to four to five surgeries a day on patients who come from all over the United States and abroad.

"It is lucrative and it has patient appreciation," said Dr. Stern, who has a Web site and runs ads in strip club magazines.

Other doctors who perform genital surgeries as part of broader medical practices say they are seeing at least a handful of patients a month concerned with the aesthetics of the vagina.

Some procedures, like hymen reconstruction, are relatively rare and confined to a minority of women who need to conform to religious or ethnic rules on virginity, doctors said. A greater number of patients complain of stretched vaginal muscles because of childbirth and aging, or inner labia that are too big, too uneven or unsightly.

"The women feel undesirable or unpretty," Dr. Stern said. "Even if nobody sees it, they see it."

The yoga instructor from Boston, who flew to Dr. Alter in Beverly Hills for a labiaplasty four years ago, said she was "asymmetrical": part of her inner vaginal lips extended about half an inch beyond the outer labia.

"The only women I could compare myself to was women in pornographic movies," she said. "They were tiny and dainty and symmetrical. Nobody looked like me."

A 34-year-old housewife from Long Island said a similar problem nagged her through adolescence, marriage and three children. Like other women interviewed for this article, she would speak only on the condition of anonymity because of the private nature of the subject and fear of ridicule.

"It never bothered my husband," she said, "but it was always like `Yuck!' All I know is that what I had I didn't like."

Just two years ago, she said, she could not find a doctor in her area with experience in labiaplasty or who would not play down the problem and try to keep her from seeking a surgical solution.

Last year she went online and found Dr. Edward Jacobson, a gynecologist in Greenwich, Conn., who performed a labiaplasty using a laser technique.

Now, she said, "I look down and I say, that's the way it should be."

But, some doctors warn, buyer beware. Vaginoplasties are often touted as a way to improve sexual satisfaction for women, but Dr. Thomas G. Stovall, president of the Society of Gynecologic Surgeons, the principal group for gynecologic surgeons with academic appointments, said there is no scientific data to back up the claim.

The opposite is true, he said; painful intercourse can result if the vaginal muscles are too snug.

Other possible risks from genital procedures are painful scarring or nerve damage that could result in loss of sensation or hypersensitivity, according to some doctors. But they added that the procedures have a low rate of complications and that their happy customers reject those qualms.

A 41-year-old police officer in Fort Lauderdale who saw Dr. Stern for vaginal surgery last June said that after having four children she thought her vaginal muscles needed improvement, both for her and for her partner.

Like many other genital surgery patients, the officer has had other plastic surgeries, including breast augmentation and liposuction.

"I just felt that I keep myself in shape everywhere else, and this would make me feel better," she said, adding that the surgery has given her more intense sexual enjoyment.

One patient, a 22-year-old college student from Toronto, said she had never had intercourse until after her labiaplasty because she felt "insecure and ugly" about excess labia tissue.

"It's just that when you feel bad about your body, especially this part of your body, it's kind of impossible to let your true feelings and passions show," she said.

Now, after the surgery last May, she said, "I have nothing to hide."

Some sex therapists are troubled that the emphasis on a youthful look in the doctors' ads are creating demand. And some pointed out that there are dissatisfied customers as well.

Dr. Laura Berman, director of a treatment clinic for female sexual dysfunction in Chicago, the Berman Center, said some of her patients complained that they ended up with pain or could no longer be sexually aroused after undergoing some of the procedures. Unlike most other cosmetic procedures, she said, genital plastic surgery has the potential to harm function.

"Any time you're having surgery that involves any kind of intervention in the genitals you're asking for trouble in regard with your sexual function," she said.

Dr. Berman, who this year completed a national survey on the effect of women's "genital self-image" on sexual function, said most women "walk around with a feeling of anxiety about their genitals" because women are not usually brought up feeling confident about that part of the body. "These surgeries kind of play into that," she added. She said her research showed that a woman's comfort level with her genitals affects her sexual enjoyment.

But she and other sex therapists say they recommend less drastic measures, like Kegel exercises to strengthen pelvic muscles, as a way to deal with any insecurities.

Some plastic surgeons, who note that there is no such thing as "normal" female genitals, are scratching their heads.

"It doesn't make a lot of sense to me, to be honest," said Dr. Young, of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, who said he does a small number of labiaplasties in his practice in St. Louis. "I try to discourage most patients."

Even people in the pornographic film industry say there is no universal standard of beauty for genitals and that, in any event, men fantasize about the woman, not any one body part.

Mark Kernes, a senior editor with the trade magazine Adult Video News, said, "I really don't think most men care."

Some doctors said men would be flocking to their offices for their own genital surgery if such procedures as penile enlargement were not fraught with complications and unintended outcomes.

Dr. Alter, the plastic surgeon and urologist, who performs genital surgery on both women and men, said, "With female genital surgery it's predictable, and women are extremely happy."

The housewife on Long Island agreed. "I'm not saying you should do it on a whim," she said. "But if you think it'd make you feel better, why wouldn't you do it?"

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/28/fashion/28PLAS.html?ex=1102841363&ei=1&en=e406419af791eb68

# posted by Resty Odon @ 1:19 PM 1 comments

By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent reuters.uk Fri 19 November, 2004 02:07

REYKJAVIK (Reuters) - What are the words used by indigenous peoples in the Arctic for "hornet," "robin," "elk," "barn owl" or "salmon?"

If you don't know, you're not alone.

Many indigenous languages have no words for legions of new animals, insects and plants advancing north as global warming thaws the polar ice and lets forests creep over tundra.

"We can't even describe what we're seeing," said Sheila Watt-Cloutier, chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference which says it represents 155,000 people in Canada, Alaska, Greenland and Russia.

In the Inuit language Inuktitut, robins are known just as the "bird with the red breast," she said. Inuit hunters in north Canada recently saw some ducks but have not figured out what species they were, in Inuktitut or any other language.

An eight-nation report this month says the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet and that the North Pole could be ice-free in northern hemisphere summer by 2100, threatening indigenous cultures and perhaps wiping out creatures like polar bears.

The report, by 250 scientists and funded by the United States, Canada, Russia, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark and Iceland, puts most of the blame on a build-up of heat-trapping gases from human use of fossil fuels like coal and oil.

The thaw may have some positive spin-offs for people, for instance by making chill Arctic seas more habitable for cod or herring or by shifting agricultural lands and forestry north.

But on land, more and more species will be cramming into an ever-narrowing strip bounded to the north by the Arctic Ocean, threatening to destroy fragile Arctic ecosystems from mosses to Arctic foxes or snowy owls.

ELK SHOCK

In Arctic Europe, birch trees are gaining ground and Saami reindeer herders are seeing roe deer or even elk, a forest-dwelling cousin of moose, on former lichen pastures.

"I know about 1,200 words for reindeer-- we classify them by age, sex, color, antlers," said Nils Isak Eira, who manages a herd of 2,000 reindeer in north Norway.

"I know just one word for elk -- 'sarvva'," said 50-year-old Eira. "But the animals are so unusual that many Saami use the Norwegian word 'elg'. When I was a child it was like a mythical creature."

Thrushes have been spotted in Saami areas of the Arctic in winter, apparently too lazy to bother migrating south.

Foreign ministers from the eight Arctic countries are due to meet in Reykjavik on Nov. 24 but are sharply divided about what to do. The United States is most opposed to any drastic new action.

The U.S. is the only country among the eight to reject the 127-nation Kyoto protocol meant to cap emissions of greenhouse gases. President Bush says the U.N. pact would cost too much and unfairly excludes developing states.

In some more southerly areas of the Arctic, like Canada's Hudson Bay, receding ice means polar bears are already struggling. The bears' main trick is to pounce when seals surface to breathe through holes in the ice.

The Arctic report says polar bears "are unlikely to survive as a species if there is a complete loss of summer-ice cover." Restricted to land, polar bears would have to compete with better-adapted grizzly or brown bears.

"The outlook for polar bears is stark. My grandson will lose the culture I had as a child," said Watt-Cloutier, referring to Inuit hunting cultures based on catching seals, bears or whales.

SALMON, OWLS

Around the Arctic, salmon are swimming into more northerly waters, hornets are buzzing north and barn owls are flying to regions where indigenous people have never even seen a barn.

Watt-Cloutier said indigenous peoples lacked well-known words for all of them.

The Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA) report says that the region is set to warm by 4-7 degrees centigrade (7-13 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100, twice the rate of the rest of the globe. The Arctic warms fast partly because dark ground and water, once uncovered, soaks up much more heat than snow and ice.

"Overall, forests are likely to move north and displace tundra," said Terry Callaghan, a professor of Arctic ecology at the University of Lund, Sweden. "That will bring more species -- birds that nest in trees, beetles that live in bark, fungi."

The lack of words to describe newcomers does not stop at animals and plants. "Words like 'thunderstorm' don't exist because they are phenomena indigenous peoples have never known," said Robert Corell, chair of the ACIA study.

# posted by Resty Odon @ 1:16 PM 0 comments

By Catherine Keenan smw.com.au November 26, 2004

Mums take heart. The most beautiful word in English is mother. But father doesn't even make the top 70.

To celebrate its 70th anniversary, the British Council compiled a list of the 70 most beautiful words in a survey of more than 42,000 people from 102 non-English speaking countries. About 7000 English students in the council's schools were quizzed directly; the rest responded to an on-line poll.

Filling out the top 10 were, in order: passion, smile, love, eternity, fantastic, destiny, freedom, liberty and tranquillity. Down the list were peace at 11, serendipity (24), pumpkin (40), lollipop (42), bumblebee (44), peekaboo (48), kangaroo (50), whoops (56), oi (61), hodgepodge (64), fuselage (67) and hen-night (70).

Only one of the words, cherish (16), was a verb that could not be used as a noun. Mother was the only word that described a relationship between people.

Professor Anna Wierzbicka, of the School of Modern Languages at the Australian National University, suggests that people voted for the top five not so much because they like the words themselves, but because they value the concepts they represent. They would probably have voted for the equivalent words in any language. "For example, when they say passion, they are not really thinking about the English language, they are thinking about things they value in life."

But she says some of the words express concepts that are specific to English, and do not necessarily have exact equivalents in other languages. "For example liberty or freedom. Perhaps even destiny. There are many languages, like Australian Aboriginal languages or Japanese, which wouldn't have words like liberty or freedom."

When we get to hippopotamus (52) or flip-flop (59), however, people seem to be deciding more on the basis of sound than meaning. "But something like hen-night they like not because of its sound, but because they think it's an amusing idea, and they like the amusing idea. And possibly the way this idea is expressed. It's a kind of jocular _expression."

Carmella Hollo, a linguistics lecturer at the University of NSW, says a similar survey was conducted of native speakers in 1980 by The Sunday Times, and the top words were melody, velvet, gossamer, crystal, and autumn.

She says people are generally thought to favour words with m, l, r and n sounds, and to dislike f sounds. This may partly explain why mother tops the list, yet father doesn't rate a mention.

# posted by Resty Odon @ 1:14 PM 0 comments