The "water nymph" of the Yucatan Peninsula

The find has been named Naia, Greek for "water nymph".

"Pristine prehistoric skeleton of teenage girl found in underwater cave"

by

Sheryl Ubelacker

May 16th, 2014

CTV News

The pristine skeleton of a teenaged girl who lived about 13,000 years ago, discovered in a deep, water-filled underground cavern in the sprawling cave system in Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, is providing archeologists with an unprecedented glimpse into the history of the early inhabitants of the Americas.

Given the name Naia, Greek for "water nymph," the remains of the 15- or 16-year-old girl were found at the bottom of the boulder-strewn, underwater chamber dubbed Hoyo Negro -- "black hole" in Spanish -- along with the scattered bones of 26 large animal species, among them sabre-tooth tigers, giant ground sloths and cave bears.

"Sealed off by water and darkness for over 8,000 years, it is a time capsule of the environment and human life in central America at the end of the Ice Age, when glaciers across the globe trapped massive amounts of water as ice and sea level was far lower than it is today," said American paleontologist Jim Chatters, head of an international research team investigating the site and its archeological treasures.

 Chatters, the first scientist to study the prehistoric skeleton known as Kennewick Man that was found in Washington state in 1996, described Hoyo Negro as being like a miniature of California's La Brea tar pits, "only without the tar and with considerably better preservation."
At the time of Naia's death, the caves would have been dry and accessible, he told a media teleconference. "Perhaps seeking fresh water in the dark passages, animals and at least one human fell into this inescapable ... trap."

Naia's remains were discovered in 2007 by three Mexican cave divers exploring an underwater cavern, deep in the Yucatan jungle about eight kilometres from the Caribbean coast. In a 50-metre-deep sinkhole within the cavern, the girl's skull was resting on a boulder, "laying upside-down with a perfect set of teeth and dark eye sockets looking back at us," said diver Alberto Nava.

After the divers reported their find to the National Institute of Anthropology and History in Mexico, a consortium of 16 scientists and cave explorers from Mexico, the U.S. and Canada was formed in 2011 to photograph and document the site, and to collect fossilized flora and fauna samples for testing.

"A big part of it has just been trying to map the locations of things and get the shape of the tunnels and cavern, and mapping locations of human bones and animal bones," said Ed Reinhardt, a professor of geography and earth sciences at McMaster University in Hamilton who is part of the research team. His role is studying microfossils, such as those of single-celled animals, and water salinity, within Hoyo Negro.

But beyond the stunning discovery of Naia's skeletal remains in her watery grave, reported Thursday in the journal Science, is what DNA from her bones is telling researchers about the origins of the Western Hemisphere's first peoples and their link to modern-day native Americans.

Based on carbon-dating and other chronology testing, the researchers estimate "the small, slight" girl lived between 12,000 and 13,000 years ago.

DNA was extracted from one of Naia's teeth and scientists sequenced what's called mitochondrial DNA, which is passed from mother to child.

The results show the girl is related, maternally at least, to today's native Americans, meaning both would trace their lineage to Beringia -- the land masses on either side of the ancient land bridge now covered by the Bering Sea that was used by prehistoric people to migrate from northeast Asia into what is now Alaska and southward into Central and South America. Those first migrants have been dubbed the Clovis people.

Whether all early inhabitants of the Americas came across the Bering land bridge or somehow migrated from elsewhere in the world remains a controversial question because of the differences in skull shape and facial features among prehistoric fossilized remains discovered across the Americas and modern-day indigenous populations.

Naia's skull shape and facial features are considered "Paleoamerican" and differ from native Americans living today in the Western Hemisphere.

"Because she exhibits the distinctive Paleoamerican skull and facial features, the study shows for the first time that Paleoamericans with these distinctive features can have Beringian ancestry," said Deborah Bolnick, a genomic anthropologist at the University of Texas at Austin.

Bolnick said the physical differences between them are likely due to evolutionary changes that occurred either in Beringia or in the Americas over the last 9,000 years, rather than the two groups having separate origins.

"Mitochondrial DNA for this individual does not exclude the possibility of separate ancestry for some Paleoamericans, but our results provide no evidence for an early migration to the Americas from other regions of the world -- southeast Asia, Australia or Europe -- as some have proposed," she said.

"Instead, our results suggest that Paleoamericans and contemporary native Americans both have Beringian ancestry."

Reinhardt of McMaster said Hoyo Negro, which is now off-limits to the public because unauthorized divers have disturbed the artifacts, said the cathedral-like site is breathtakingly beautiful, with crystal-clear water surrounded by white limestone walls.

But for Naia, who may have been seeking fresh water in the cavern and accidentally plunged into the sinkhole and could find no escape, it must have been a terrifying experience, he said.

"When we're diving the site, it's spectacular, but the reality is this pit was a bit of a house of horrors in the sense that you would drop and perhaps survive the fall but not have any light. You wouldn't know the extent of the cavern. You'd be in a pool of water (at the bottom), kind of thrashing around trying to get out.

"Yeah, it would have been a pretty awful way to die for sure."

Venus Express is doomed

"Venus Express Prepares For a Destructive Mission End"

by

Keith Cowing

May 16th, 2014

SPACE REF

After eight years in orbit, ESA's Venus Express has completed routine science observations and is preparing for a daring plunge into the planet's hostile atmosphere.

Venus Express was launched on a Soyuz-Fregat from the Russian Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on 9 November 2005, and arrived at Venus on 11 April 2006.

It has been orbiting Venus in an elliptical 24-hour loop that takes it from a distant 66 000 km over the south pole - affording incredible global views - to an altitude of around 250 km above the surface at the north pole, close to the top of the planet's atmosphere.

With a suite of seven instruments, the spacecraft has provided a comprehensive study of the ionosphere, atmosphere and surface of Venus.

"Venus Express has taught us just how variable the planet is on all timescales and, furthermore, has given us clues as to how it might have changed since its formation 4.6 billion years ago," says Hakan Svedhem, ESA's project scientist.

"This information is helping us decipher how Earth and Venus came to lead such dramatically different lives, but we've also noticed that there are some fundamental similarities." Separated at birth?

Venus has a surface temperature of over 450*C, far hotter than a normal kitchen oven, and an extremely dense, choking mixture of noxious gases for an atmosphere. But from the mission's infrared survey of the chemical composition of the rocky surface, we have learned that Venus might have once had a plate tectonics system like Earth, and even an ocean of water.

Just like Earth, Venus is losing parts of its upper atmosphere to space and Venus Express measured twice as many hydrogen atoms escaping out of the atmosphere than oxygen. Because water is made of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom, the observed escape indicates that water is being broken up in the atmosphere.

Today, the total amount of water on Earth is 100 000 times that on Venus. But because the two planets are about the same size and formed at the same time, both may have had similar amounts of the precious liquid in their early years.

Meanwhile, the spacecraft's cameras have tracked thousands of features in the cloud tops some 70 km above the planet's surface, including an enormous swirling vortex at the planet's south pole that shares similarities with hurricanes on Earth. The spacecraft also recorded bursts of lightning - identified by their electromagnetic signature - generated in clouds of sulphuric acid.

Studies of the planet's 'super-rotating' atmosphere - it whips around the planet in just four Earth-days, much faster than the 243 days the planet takes to complete one rotation about its axis - also turned up some intriguing surprises. In one study, average wind speeds were found to have increased from roughly 300 km/h to 400 km/h over a period of six Earth years.

Conversely, a separate study found that the rotation of the planet had slowed by 6.5 minutes since NASA's Magellan, which completed its 5-year mission at Venus 20 years ago, measured it. However, it remains unknown if there is a relationship between the increasing wind speeds and the slowing rotation.

Magellan's radar survey of the planet revealed that its surface was heavily altered in the past by a large number of volcanoes. But Venus Express has provided tantalising hints that the planet may well be still geologically active today. One study found numerous lava flows that must have been created no more than 2.5 million years ago, just yesterday on geological timescales, and perhaps much more recently.

Indeed, measurements of sulphur dioxide in the upper atmosphere have shown large variations over the course of the mission. Although peculiarities in the atmospheric circulation may produce a similar result, it is the most convincing argument to date of present-day active volcanism.

Now, after eight years in orbit, the fuel supplies necessary to maintain the elliptical orbit are running low and will soon be exhausted. Thus, routine science operations concluded this week, and the spacecraft is being prepared for one final mission: to make a controlled plunge deeper into the atmosphere than ever before attempted.

"We have performed previous short 'aerodrag' campaigns where we've skimmed the thin upper layers of the atmosphere at about 165 km, but we want to go deeper, perhaps as deep as 130 km, maybe even lower," says Patrick Martin, Venus Express mission manager.

"It is only by carrying out daring operations like these that we can gain new insights, not only about usually inaccessible regions of the planet's atmosphere, but also how the spacecraft and its components respond to such a hostile environment."

This 'experimental aerobraking' phase is planned for 18 June - 11 July, during which time some limited science measurements with the spacecraft's magnetic field, solar wind and atom analysing instruments will be possible. Also, temperature and pressure sensors will record the conditions that the spacecraft is experiencing.

"The campaign also provides the opportunity to develop and practise the critical operations techniques required for aerobraking, an experience that will be precious for the preparation of future planetary missions that may require it operationally," says Paolo Ferri, head of mission operations.

Aerobraking can be used as a way of getting into orbit around planets without having to carry quite so much fuel, thus reducing the launch mass.

It is possible that the remaining fuel in Venus Express will be exhausted during this phase or that the spacecraft does not survive these risky operations. But if the spacecraft is still healthy afterwards, its orbit will be raised again and limited operations will continue for several more months, fuel permitting.

However, by the end of the year, it is likely that Venus Express will have made its final descent into the atmosphere of the planet, bringing a fantastic scientific endeavour to an end. "Venus Express has penetrated deeper into the mysteries of this veiled planet than anyone ever dreamed, and will no doubt continue to surprise us down to the last minute," adds Hakan.

Venus Express [Wikipedia]

"Fashionable" "Blow-up"

"Blow-Up and the photography revolution"

Antonioni's portrait of the Swinging Sixties set the template for the hell-raising photographer. A new exhibition in Vienna explores its lasting influence on photography.

by

Tim Burrows

May 17th, 2014

The Telegraph

 Is there another film that seems to crystallise a moment in time as perfectly as Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up? Viewed today, it seems like a heightened “Greatest Hits” compilation of London’s swinging period: the buoyant Herbie Hancock soundtrack; the Yardbirds gig, complete with a cameo from a young, crimson-pouted Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck smashing up his guitar; Jane Birkin’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it full-frontal nude scene that ushered in more lenient censorship in cinema.

A new book and exhibition at Vienna’s Albertina gallery seek to delve deeper into the context of the 1966 film, with a mix of photographs from the film’s set, shots that inspired the film, and works that were influenced by it such as Richard Hamilton’s Swingeing London III, a screen-printed version of the epochal image of Mick Jagger handcuffed to art dealer Robert Fraser. “It was a time of social revolution,” says the documentary photographer Don McCullin, who was hired by Antonioni for £500 to provide the famous shots of Vanessa Redgrave with her mystery man in Charlton’s Maryon Park. “That’s why Antonioni chose to come to England, I suspect – he saw it as an uptight country that was suddenly breaking open like a paper bag.”
Antonioni was fascinated by London’s fashion photography boom – in particular, the “black trinity” of David Bailey, Terence Donovan and Brian Duffy, gobby London photographers who matched sex with spontaneity in a string of shoots for such publications as Vogue, Queen, and Harpers Bazaar. They were immortalised in Francis Wyndham’s 1964 Sunday Times article, “The Model Makers”. “The only thing between you and the girl is the camera. A three-legged phallus,” explained Bailey, in a quote that reads like an elevator pitch for Blow-Up.

In preparing for the film, the Italian director sent a detailed questionnaire to these and other London-based fashion photographers, resulting in the movie’s snap-happy protagonist, Thomas. The film became an intricate process of art imitating pop life. After Bailey himself declined to appear in the project, Terence Stamp was lined up to play Thomas, but lost out after Antonioni caught David Hemmings in a Dylan Thomas adaptation in Hampstead. It opens with an American photographer shooting the model Donyale Luna on an east London rooftop. The interiors were shot at the studio of John Cowan, with Sixties supermodels Veruschka, Peggy Moffitt and Jill Kennington posing for a baiting Hemmings. (Kennington says the direction in the movie was more restricted than in real-life shoots – “We had to stand where we were told, we couldn’t run around the studio.”)

"For me, [that period] was all about collaboration," Kennington says. "I heard Bailey could be rude but I didn't work with him much. People like John Cowan, Helmut Newton and Terence Donovan would give you creative freedom as a model. If you got closely involved, working on a spread was like making a mini-movie."

 Blow-Up isn’t a simple glorification of the photographer-as-hellraiser. It also highlighted the political and social ambiguities that resonated during the Sixties boom. At the film’s start we see Thomas leaving a Peckham dosshouse; later we see him leafing through a book of hard-hitting street photography, which was actually a collection of Don McCullin’s early work.

“David Bailey and me go back a long time, but I did streetwalking and slept in hostels with down and outs, while he of course slept with all the great beauties – we were as different as chalk and cheese,” says McCullin, now 79, who photographed atrocities in Vietnam and Biafra during the period. “If I’d gone into the fashion world it would have destroyed me because I would have had too many affairs. Bailey was a very strong person and kept control.”

Perhaps to ensure an authentic naivety in the shots, Antonioni did not tell McCullin that there was a body in the bushes when he was shooting in Maryon Park. “The whole thing left a cloudiness over the plot for me,” he recalls. “I just thought he wanted me to take a picture of these bushes – even I found it a bit confusing. Some sticklers have bemoaned technical inaccuracies such as the ludicrously quick speed with which Thomas's shots are supposed to have been made in the darkroom. But the romance shone through, influencing photographers such as Mario Testino, Hans Feurer and Miles Aldridge to set up studios in London ever since. Model Jill Kennington, too, moved on to photography after her career in front of the camera.

In many ways, Blow-Up was an uncannily prescient film. Antonioni understood the importance of the sudden shifts in fashion and pop in the 1960s, blurring the line between reality and fiction in a way that seems to have presaged our own self-referential age. Yet to this day the film remains an enigma, to even those who had a hand in making it: "To me it seemed like a fruit salad: it had a bit of this and a bit of that," says McCullin, who is still working at 79. "I've seen it about twice in my life and I am still left in a quandary as to what it's all about." It is perhaps exactly this mystery that has seen the film endure.

David Bailey [Wikipedia]

Terence Donovan [Wikipedia]

Brian Duffy [Wikipedia]

Blow-Up [Wikipedia]

The really, really big dinosaur

"'Biggest dinosaur ever' discovered"

by

James Morgan

May 16th, 2014

BBC News

Based on its huge thigh bones, it was 40m (130ft) long and 20m (65ft) tall.

Weighing in at 77 tonnes, it was as heavy as 14 African elephants, and seven tonnes heavier than the previous record holder, Argentinosaurus.

Scientists believe it is a new species of titanosaur - an enormous herbivore dating from the Late Cretaceous period.

A local farm worker first stumbled on the remains in the desert near La Flecha, about 250km (135 miles) west of Trelew, Patagonia.

The fossils were then excavated by a team of palaeontologists from the Museum of Palaeontology Egidio Feruglio, led by Dr Jose Luis Carballido and Dr Diego Pol.

They unearthed the partial skeletons of seven individuals - about 150 bones in total - all in "remarkable condition".

By measuring the length and circumference of the largest femur (thigh bone), they calculated the animal weighed 77 tonnes.

"Given the size of these bones, which surpass any of the previously known giant animals, the new dinosaur is the largest animal known that walked on Earth," the researchers told BBC News.

"Its length, from its head to the tip of its tail, was 40m.

"Standing with its neck up, it was about 20m high - equal to a seven-storey building."

This giant herbivore lived in the forests of Patagonia between 95 and 100 million years ago, based on the age of the rocks in which its bones were found.

But despite its magnitude, it does not yet have a name.

"It will be named describing its magnificence and in honour to both the region and the farm owners who alerted us about the discovery," the researchers said.

There have been many previous contenders for the title "world's biggest dinosaur".

The most recent pretender to the throne was Argentinosaurus, a similar type of sauropod, also discovered in Patagonia.

Originally thought to weigh in at 100 tonnes, it was later revised down to about 70 tonnes - just under the 77 tonnes that this new sauropod is thought to have weighed.

The picture is muddied by the various complicated methods for estimating size and weight, based on skeletons that are usually incomplete.

Argentinosaurus was estimated from only a few bones. But the researchers here had dozens to work with, making them more confident that they really have found "the big one".

Dr Paul Barrett, a dinosaur expert from London's Natural History Museum, agreed the new species is "a genuinely big critter. But there are a number of similarly sized big sauropod thigh bones out there," he cautioned.

"Without knowing more about this current find it's difficult to be sure. One problem with assessing the weight of both Argentinosaurus and this new discovery is that they're both based on very fragmentary specimens - no complete skeleton is known, which means the animal's proportions and overall shape are conjectural.

"Moreover, several different methods exist for calculating dinosaur weight (some based on overall volume, some on various limb bone measurements) and these don't always agree with each other, with large measures of uncertainty.

"So it's interesting to hear another really huge sauropod has been discovered, but ideally we'd need much more material of these supersized animals to determine just how big they really got."

Another argument for a "liberal education"

 

"'There's Nothing Liberal About Specializing in Philosophy'"

by

Nick Romeo

May 9th, 2014

The Atlantic

Online courses and crushing student debt are contemporary phenomena, but the arguments they inspire are often variations on older debates. Attacking and defending a liberal-arts education is an old American tradition, one that dates back to Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. In a new book, Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters, Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan, traces the history of these debates in American culture. We spoke recently about how history can clarify contemporary questions about the future of higher education in America.

If you could drop Thomas Jefferson into today’s educational landscape, what would he think about rising student loan costs and an increasingly vocational approach to higher education?

Jefferson would be appalled by the retreat from public responsibility for higher education. He tried to pass taxes to support people without money receiving an education, and he failed. At the same time, he would probably say it’s predictable. This is how wealthy people protect their advantages: by limiting access to higher education to their own children. This creates what Jefferson called an “unnatural aristocracy,” people who have unearned privileges. He would think it’s very sad that people are going into debt to finance educational exploration. He would worry about the possibility that talented people without financial means would be left out of higher education. In terms of a vocational approach, Jefferson was a great believer in studying things that didn’t seem to be immediately profitable.

Ben Franklin criticized the elitism of higher education. He described Harvard as a finishing school where the rich learn obsolete skills and knowledge. What do you think Ben Franklin would make of the current debates about higher education?

Franklin probably would have had more sympathy for the anti-college groups today saying, “You don’t need colleges. Go off and learn stuff on your own. You want to be a programmer; you can do that on your own. You want to start a company, you can do that in all these other ways.” Someone with a lot of smarts and chutzpah who goes off and educates himself in his own way—Franklin would admire that. But he was also someone who found narrowness appalling. Someone like Peter Thiel, who is asking kids to leave college for a hundred thousand dollar fellowship, is encouraging them to become ever more narrow, so that they can develop an app to order pizza more quickly or access pornography more easily. All this talent driven into narrower and narrower spheres—Franklin would have found it depressing. Increasing specialization makes us less capable citizens and less able to adjust to changes in the marketplace. Many studies show students choose schools based on their selectivity, the prestige factor. And the vanity of prestige, just wanting to be better than someone else, he hated that.

Many kids in the freshman class at elite schools are from families in higher tax brackets. Are we still rewarding unearned privilege rather than merit?

I think this is a huge problem. A lot of the indices we use for admission favor the wealthy, but we are looking at changing that. We’d like not to favor people who have been trained through expensive classes to do well on testing day, but rather to find people with authentic potential. We try to spend a lot of time finding students who might not find us because they think we are too expensive. Often these students could come here for free and graduate with no loans and do just as well as someone who had all the advantages. We’re also trying to expand our reach with [online courses], and with this platform we’ve reached over 600,000 students in just a year and a half. In the previous hundred years we haven’t offered content to that many people.

Why should a student attend a brick-and-mortar school if they can get similar knowledge at a lower cost from online courses and other online resources?

I think it’s to work and live and play beside other people who are also going through a similar process of learning. Being surrounded by other students and professors who are engaged in research is a hothouse environment for expanding your cultural and intellectual horizons. I’m not naive enough to deny that people also like to be on residential campuses because they often have nice amenities. Taken to an extreme, that’s a real problem. Schools that are trying to entice students with swimming pools and rock bands, I hope they lose their customers. What they’re offering students is a taste of luxury before they have to start working. I think in the future more people will get online credit and certification before coming to a place like Wesleyan for a few semesters rather than four years. Multiplying access points is crucial as long as you’re providing access to a broadening rather than a narrowing of the mind.

So many brochures are full of bromides about the power of a liberal-arts education to expand horizons and transform worldviews. How would you define these intangible benefits?

Well, there are so many bromides, and I think that’s because we are trying to describe something that’s not immediately transferable into cash or some other quantitative measure. I like to say to students that I hope that in college they find out what they really love to do. It’s important not only that they discover what they love to do but also that they develop their skills in that area. This should be measurable. You should see your skills grow in ways that matter not only to professors, but also people who are off-campus. I do think there should be some practical payoff to a broad education, and that’s why I call what I’m describing in the book a pragmatic liberal education. I don’t think it’s just about having a wonderful mind that you explore on Sundays by yourself. It’s also important to become more productive at things that other people recognize as valuable.

A standard defense of a liberal arts education is that it prepares you to succeed in any number of domains because you gain the critical thinking skills to succeed in a range of disciplines. What do you think of this defense of liberal arts?

Well that's key. But you can’t just tell students to go study German literature or philosophy and then figure out how to transfer it once they graduate. That process needs to start earlier. If you're studying German literature, you should be able to explain to someone in computer science what's valuable about it. And the computer scientist should be able to do the same thing to the German literature student. I teach Great Books courses, and if students can't explain why Virginia Woolf or Baudelaire matters in terms relevant to their own lives, I don't think they understand the book. It gets back to that anti-specialization theme. I don't think there's anything “liberal” about specializing in philosophy compared to specializing in business. We don’t want specialists with just technical training. When you have a liberal education, you’re not just a technician. You’re able to move among fields. We don’t want you just to be an academic expert to please a professor. That’s just making believe you’re a mini-professor and you want to grow up to be a big professor.

W.E.B. Dubois thought only the “talented tenth” should receive liberal education. Is only a minority of the population sufficiently gifted to benefit from a liberal education?

Increasing the Value of a Liberal Education

It’s a big question. I think the American response since Jefferson and Franklin is that it may be the case that not everyone has the intellectual capacity to benefit from it, but everyone should have access to it because it’s very hard to predict who would benefit from it. It’s very easy to predict that people with power and money will try to restrict access so as to protect their own power and money. Broadening access will create some inefficiency. Some people may not get much out of it and will move toward technical training, but others who you might not have expected to benefit will flourish. Giving people access to a liberal education is really essential for citizenship, and that should start before college. Learning critical thinking so people can’t just pull the wool over your eyes should be part of everyone’s education.

Aristotle suggests in The Politics that every subject can be approached from either a liberal or a vocational standpoint. What matters is why you study something, not what you study. So you could study finance in a liberal spirit, or you could study English literature in a purely vocational one. Would you agree with this?

Absolutely. I have some fights with my colleagues because they want to protect certain disciplines and not others. I come to this from Dewey, but it’s in Aristotle too. It’s not the discipline that makes it part of liberal education, it’s the way you approach it. A liberal arts school is not about having lots of classics professors and no economics professors. It’s about teaching the subject in such a way that it broadens students’ perspectives rather than closing them down into specialization. At Wesleyan, for example, I’ve been trying to bring in engineering as a way of thinking and problem solving. Not just as a trade school. I’ve met with some real resistance, but you can teach engineering as part of a liberal education, just as you can teach it as part of technical training.

Education in past centuries was often influenced by religious and civic ideas of virtue. Schools tried to create better people. Is character formation still a legitimate aspiration for a liberal arts college?

It’s a really important part of the college experience. That’s why, when schools try to appeal to the desire for luxury, it’s an educational failing as well as a moral one. I’ve always worked at small institutions, and you can see characters being formed. You can watch students become selfish, narcissistic, narrow people, or you can try to open them up to service, cooperation, and leadership. When things go wrong, when there are instances of dishonesty or violence within the campus community, these are moments to talk to students about their responsibility for one another. If they take responsibility for making their environment a better place to live, that will become part of their lives after they graduate. It’s also important for students to learn how to fail. Often students at elite schools have never had the experience of failing, and that’s a deprivation. These are things that are hard to learn online. 

Are professors biased?

"Professors Are Prejudiced, Too"

by

Dolly Chugh, Katherine L. Milkman, and Modupe Akinola

May 9th, 2014

The New York Times

In the world of higher education, we professors like to believe that we are free from the racial and gender biases that afflict so many other people in society. But is this self-conception accurate?

To find out, we conducted an experiment. A few years ago, we sent emails to more than 6,500 randomly selected professors from 259 American universities. Each email was from a (fictional) prospective out-of-town student whom the professor did not know, expressing interest in the professor’s Ph.D. program and seeking guidance. These emails were identical and written in impeccable English, varying only in the name of the student sender. The messages came from students with names like Meredith Roberts, Lamar Washington, Juanita Martinez, Raj Singh and Chang Huang, names that earlier research participants consistently perceived as belonging to either a white, black, Hispanic, Indian or Chinese student. In total, we used 20 different names in 10 different race-gender categories (e.g. white male, Hispanic female).

On a Monday morning, the emails went out — one email per professor — and then we waited to see which professors would write back to which students. We understood, of course, that some professors would naturally be unavailable or uninterested in mentoring. But we also knew that the average treatment of any particular type of student should not differ from that of any other — unless professors were deciding (consciously or not) which students to help on the basis of their race and gender. (This “audit” methodology has long been used to study intentional and unintentional bias in real-world decision-making, as it allows researchers to standardize much about the decision environment.)

What did we discover? First comes the fairly good news, which we reported in a paper in Psychological Science. Despite not knowing the students, 67 percent of the faculty members responded to the emails, and remarkably, 59 percent of the responders even agreed to meet on the proposed date with a student about whom they knew little and who did not even attend their university. (We immediately wrote back to cancel those meetings.)

Now for the bad news. We computed the average response rates for each category of student (e.g., white male, Hispanic female), dividing the number of responses from the professors by the number of emails sent from students in a given race or gender category. Our analyses, which we reported recently in a second paper, revealed that the response rates did indeed depend on students’ race and gender identity.

Professors were more responsive to white male students than to female, black, Hispanic, Indian or Chinese students in almost every discipline and across all types of universities. We found the most severe bias in disciplines paying higher faculty salaries and at private universities. In a perverse twist of academic fate, our own discipline of business showed the most bias, with 87 percent of white males receiving a response compared with just 62 percent of all females and minorities combined.

Surprisingly, several supposed advantages that some people believe women and minorities enjoy did not materialize in our data. For example: Were Asians favored, given the model minority stereotype they supposedly benefit from in academic contexts? No. In fact, Chinese students were the most discriminated-against group in our sample. Did reaching out to someone of the same gender or race — such as a black student emailing a black professor — reduce bias? No. We saw the same levels of bias in both same-race and same-gender faculty-student pairs that we saw in pairs not sharing a race or gender (the one exception was Chinese students writing to Chinese professors).

Did it help to be in a discipline with a greater representation of women and minorities? Again, no. Faculty members in those more diverse disciplines, like criminal justice, were no less likely to discriminate than those in less diverse disciplines, like statistics. Did it help that these were students in the pre-applicant stage, when some believe underrepresented groups enjoy advantageous access to selective opportunities? Again, no. Even before reaching the formal admissions stage, women and minorities faced bias. In sum, each of the supposed hidden advantages of being a woman or minority proved to be no more than a phantom.

We doubt that we, or many professors in our sample, or many Americans generally, intentionally discriminate against women and minorities. But based on our research, we are a little chastened. Good intentions and meritocratic ideals aside, we have work to do.

[Dolly Chugh is an assistant professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business. Katherine L. Milkman is an assistant professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Modupe Akinola is an assistant professor at Columbia Business School.]

Hyperacccumulator plant...Rinorea niccolifera

"New species of metal-eating plant discovered in the Philippines"

May 9th, 2014

ScienceDaily

Scientists from the University of the Philippines, Los Baños have discovered a new plant species with an unusual lifestyle -- it eats nickel for a living -- accumulating up to 18,000 ppm of the metal in its leaves without itself being poisoned, says Professor Edwino Fernando, lead author of the report. Such an amount is a hundred to a thousand times higher than in most other plants. The study was published in the open access journal PhytoKeys.

The new species is called Rinorea niccolifera, reflecting its ability to absorb nickel in very high amounts. Nickel hyperaccumulation is such a rare phenomenon with only about 0.5-1% of plant species native to nickel-rich soils having been recorded to exhibit the ability. Throughout the world, only about 450 species are known with this unusual trait, which is still a small proportion of the estimated 300,000 species of vascular plants.

The new species, according to Dr Marilyn Quimado, one of the lead scientists of the research team, was discovered on the western part of Luzon Island in the Philippines, an area known for soils rich in heavy metals.

"Hyperacccumulator plants have great potentials for the development of green technologies, for example, 'phytoremediation' and 'phytomining'," explains Dr Augustine Doronila of the School of Chemistry, University of Melbourne, who is also co-author of the report.

Phytoremediation refers to the use of hyperacccumulator plants to remove heavy metals in contaminated soils. Phytomining, on the other hand, is the use of hyperacccumulator plants to grow and harvest in order to recover commercially valuable metals in plant shoots from metal-rich sites.

The field surveys and laboratory work of the scientists are part of the research project funded by the Department of Science and Technology -- Philippine Council for Industry, Energy, and Emerging Technology Research and Development (DOST-PCIEERD).

List of hyperaccumulators [Wikipedia]