![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brdgt
Scientist at Work | James W. Pennebaker: He Counts Your Words (Even Those Pronouns)
By JESSICA WAPNER, The New York Times, October 14, 2008
James W. Pennebaker’s interest in word counting began more than 20 years ago, when he did several studies suggesting that people who talked about traumatic experiences tended to be physically healthier than those who kept such experiences secret. He wondered how much could be learned by looking at every single word people used — even the tiny ones, the I’s and you’s, a’s and the’s.
That led Dr. Pennebaker, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas, down a winding path that has taken him from Beatles lyrics (John Lennon’s songs have more “negative emotion” words than Paul McCartney’s) all the way to terrorist communications. By counting the different kinds of words a person says, he is breaking new linguistic ground and leading a resurgent interest in text analysis.
Take Dr. Pennebaker’s recent study of Al Qaeda communications — videotapes, interviews, letters. At the request of the F.B.I., he tallied the number of words in various categories — pronouns, articles and adjectives, among others.
He found, for example, that Osama bin Laden’s use of first-person pronouns (I, me, my, mine) remained fairly constant over several years. By contrast, his second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahri, used such words more and more often.
“This dramatic increase suggests greater insecurity, feelings of threat, and perhaps a shift in his relationship with bin Laden,” Dr. Pennebaker wrote in his report , which was published in The Content Analysis Reader (Sage Publications, July 2008).
Kimberly A. Neuendorf, a professor of communications at Cleveland State University who has extensively studied content analysis, agreed with that assessment. Mr. Zawahri, she said, “is clearly repositioning himself to provide a singular platform for his opinion” and “reaffirming his status as an important individual in the dynamic.”
Because it is hard for the human brain to count and compare all the I’s, a’s and the’s in a sample of speech or writing, Dr. Pennebaker had to invent a software program to do it. The program, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC, pronounced luke), contains a vast dictionary, with each word assigned to one or more categories.
There are social words (talk, they), biological words (cheek, hands, spit), “insight” words (think, know, consider) and dozens of other groupings. LIWC compares a text sample to its dictionary and, within seconds, provides a readout of how many words appear in each category.
To test-drive the program, Dr. Pennebaker, a pioneer in the field of therapeutic writing, asked a group of people recovering from serious illness or other trauma to engage in a series of writing exercises. The word tallies showed that those whose health was improving tended to decrease their use of first-person pronouns through the course of the study.
Health improvements were also seen among people whose use of causal words — because, cause, effect — increased. Simply ruminating about an experience without trying to understand the causes is less likely to lead to psychological growth, he explained; the subjects who used causal words “were changing the way they were thinking about things.”
Dr. Pennebaker, 58, has conducted numerous studies since then, all of them demonstrating that it’s not just what we say that matters but how we say it. Where traditional linguistics “is really more interested in context, how sentences are put together and what a meaningful phrase is,” he said, “our approach is simply counting words.”
In study after study, the articles and pronouns, which text analysts often call “junk words,” have proved crucial.
For example, Dr. Pennebaker has found that men tend to use more articles (a, the) and women tend to use more pronouns (he, she, they). The difference, he says, may suggest that men are more prone to concrete thinking and women are more likely to see things from other perspectives.
Jeffrey T. Hancock, an associate professor of communication at Cornell, uses word counting to study language and deception, particularly on the Internet.
Liars, he says, use more “negative emotion” words (hurt, ugly, nasty) and fewer first-person singulars. “These very simple dimensions have emerged again and again,” he said, “despite the fact that there were 40 years of research before this.”
Dr. Pennebaker says that because speech patterns are akin to a personal signature, his software might be used to identify authors of anonymous blogs and e-mail messages, and as supporting evidence in legal testimony. But he acknowledges that it cannot be definitive; too much depends on probability.
“In the language world, everything is probability,” Dr. Pennebaker said. “But in our legal system, we have real problems with understanding probability. Everyone has problems with probability.”
Still, the technique is drawing attention from a variety of sectors. Dr. Pennebaker has received a grant from the Army Research Institute to study the language of social dynamics, particularly how leaders use language. Joseph Psotka, a research psychologist at the institute, said that over time, this kind of study “could be very helpful for training and leadership development, but precisely how we don’t know yet.”
Dr. Pennebaker’s program has been translated into several languages, with an Arabic version in the works; Dr. Pennebaker notes that his Qaeda analysis was constrained by its reliance on English translations.
“Function words vary between one language and another and reveal a lot about another culture,” he said.
Dr. Psotka said counting and categorizing the words used by a foreign speaker could provide clues about “the subtle attitudes, not just the meaning of the words — to get a sense of whether or not negotiation or discussion is going smoothly.”
Dr. Pennebaker has also turned his word-counting machinery toward the presidential campaign (at wordwatchers.wordpress.com), and he likes to look at age-old questions like whether Shakespeare had a co-playwright, who wrote the Federalist Papers and even whether a couple will stay together.
“The more similar they are in terms of language,” Dr. Pennebaker said, “the more likely they are to be together several months later.”
Thinking Anew About a Migratory Barrier: Roads
By JIM ROBBINS, The New York Times, October 14, 2008
SALTESE, Mont. — Dr. Chris Servheen spends a lot of time mulling a serious scientific question: why didn’t the grizzly bear cross the road?
The future of the bear may depend on the answer.
The mountains in and around Glacier National Park teem with bears. A recently concluded five-year census found 765 grizzlies in northwestern Montana, more than three times the number of bears as when it was listed as a threatened species in 1975. To the south lies a swath of federally protected wilderness much larger than Yellowstone, where the habitat is good, and there are no known grizzlies. They were wiped out 50 years ago to protect sheep.
One of the main reasons they have not returned is Interstate 90.
To arrive from the north, a bear would have to climb over a nearly three-foot high concrete Jersey barrier, cross two lanes of road, braving 75- to 80-mile-an hour traffic, climb a higher Jersey barrier, cross two more lanes of traffic and climb yet another barrier.
“It’s the most critical wildlife corridor in the country,” said Dr. Servheen, grizzly bear recovery coordinator for the federal Fish and Wildlife Service, of the linkage between the two habitats.
As traffic grows beyond 3,000 vehicles a day, crossing a road becomes extremely difficult. The 13 miles of Interstate 90 here, where grizzly bears would most likely cross, has 8,000 to 10,000 vehicles a day, and so is impermeable much of the time. And it is not just bears — wolves, wolverine and a host of other species roam here.
In recent years scientists have come to understand the marked changes brought by the roads that crisscross the landscape.
Some experts believe that habitat fragmentation, the slicing and dicing of large landscapes into small pieces with roads, homes and other development, is the biggest of all environmental problems. “By far,” said Dr. Michael Soulé, a retired biologist and founder of the Society for Conservation Biology. “It’s bigger than climate change. While the serious effects from climate change are 30 years away, there’s nothing left to save then if we don’t deal with fragmentation. And the spearhead of fragmentation are roads.”
Fragmentation cuts off wildlife from critical habitat, including food, security or others of their species for reproduction and genetic diversity. Eventually they disappear.
There are some four million miles of roads affecting 20 percent of the country, and in the last 10 years the new field of road ecology has emerged to study the many impacts of roads, and how to mitigate the damage.
“Roads are the largest human artifact on the planet,” said Dr. Richard T. T. Forman, a professor of landscape ecology at Harvard, who brought road ecology from Europe to the United States. He is the editor of the definitive text on the field, “Road Ecology: Science and Solutions” (Island Press, 2003).
One of the first projects in this country to ameliorate the effect of roads was on Florida’s Alligator Alley on I-75. A series of 24 underpasses restored water flow to the Everglades and allowed wildlife to safely migrate. The changes reduced the mortality of Florida panthers — of which there were only around 50 — from 4 per year to 1.5.
Now, the number of ecologically sensitive road designs built or under way in the country is in the hundreds. In Amherst, Mass., salamanders emerge from hibernation in the mud on the first rainy night of April. “They come up and go screaming across the street to their breeding pond and have an orgy,” Dr. Forman said.
So many were being killed that locals stopped traffic on the night they emerged to let them cross safely. In 1987 engineers placed a tunnel under the road, with two fences to funnel the amphibians to the crossing.
The gold standard for wildlife-friendly roads is in Banff National Park in the mountains of western Canada. The country’s major highway, Trans-Canada 1, passes through the park, and with 25,000 vehicles per day, wildlife vehicle collisions were very frequent.
There are 24 crossings (all but two underpasses) and they have reduced collisions with ungulates by 96 percent and all large mammals by 80 percent.
In the last few years the concept has become an integral part of roads, helped by a 2005 federal transportation bill that mandated green road design. “You name it, there’s something being done, even with insects,” said Dr. Patricia Cramer, a research biologist at Utah State University who surveyed hundreds of domestic projects.
Such mitigation is especially critical for 21 protected species for which highway mortality is a major factor in survival, including the lynx and the desert tortoise.
Ending direct mortality, though, is only one aspect of road-caused fragmentation.
The jury is still out on how well restored connectivity works to keep a diverse gene pool and maintain long-term viability. A study in California, along the 16-lane Santa Monica Freeway (one of the busiest in the country, with 150,000 vehicle trips per day), found that bobcats and coyotes used existing underpasses — not designed for wildlife — to get to the other side. The highway, however, crowded home ranges together; the newcomers were fiercely challenged and did not stay long enough to breed.
The importance of preventing or undoing fragmentation has led to a swarm of environmental groups taking on connectivity — preserving the ability of wildlife to move — as an issue. Dr. Soulé, for example, is a founder of the Wildlands Project, an effort to protect corridors on large landscapes.
One reason the issue has gotten attention is that it involves human safety. One million to two million wildlife-vehicle collisions occur each year, costing insurance companies more than $1 billion. Some 200 people are killed.
The increasing impermeability of roads comes as the climate changes and the need to cross roads become more crucial.
Vegetation communities here are projected to migrate north, which means grizzlies will need to be able to follow. “Shrub fields where berries are is a good example,” Dr. Servheen said. “If dry weather wipes them out, the bears need to go elsewhere.”
The problem is they might not be able to follow. “We’ve boxed them in” with roads, he said.
Roads have ecological impacts besides fragmenting habitat. Warm asphalt and rain that washes to the shoulder nourish roadside grass, and along with salt used to de-ice roads, the grass attracts deer and other wildlife. As deer get clobbered, they in turn attract predators and scavengers, like bald eagles, which then get hit by cars.
But the downside of mitigating road impact, said Trisha White, the director of the Habitat and Highways Campaign for Defenders of Wildlife, is thinking that it heals all wounds. “The biggest danger is thinking that we can put in new roads with crossings and things will be just fine,” she said. “There are so many more impacts. Nothing could be more incorrect.”
Still, crossings do help. Dr. Servheen has set up heat- and motion-sensitive cameras under two highway bridges here where bears could cross under I-90, but they have not yet captured grizzlies using these crossings. But, he is hoping that somehow bears will move south.
“Another population will make the species more resilient to change,” he said. “Whether it’s a reduction in genetics or climate change, it will help with survival.”
Oklahoma Is Sued Over Required Ultrasounds for Abortions
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, The New York Times, October 11, 2008
OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — An advocacy group is suing over an Oklahoma law that prohibits a woman from having an abortion unless she first has an ultrasound and the doctor describes to her what the fetus looks like.
In the lawsuit filed Thursday in Oklahoma County District Court, the Center for Reproductive Rights says that the requirement intrudes on privacy, endangers health and assaults dignity.
The law, set to go into effect on Nov. 1, would make Oklahoma the fourth state to require that ultrasounds be performed before a woman can have an abortion and that the ultrasounds be made available to the patient for viewing, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a health research organization based in Washington. The other states are Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi.
Backers of the lawsuit say Oklahoma is the only state to require that the ultrasound screen be turned toward the woman during the procedure and that the doctor describe what is on the screen, including various dimensions of the fetus.
Elizabeth Nash, public policy associate with the Guttmacher Institute, said the Oklahoma law appeared unique in that its intent was that the woman seeking an abortion view the ultrasound images.
Lawmakers overrode Gov. Brad Henry’s veto to pass the anti-abortion legislation in April. Mr. Henry, a Democrat, said he vetoed the bill because it did not exempt victims of rape or incest from the ultrasound requirement.
State Senator Todd Lamb, a Republican, said supporters of the law hoped that it would curtail abortions in the state.
“I introduced the bill because I wanted to encourage life in society,” Mr. Lamb said. “In Oklahoma, society is on the side of life.”
Mr. Lamb said he believed the lawsuit would stand a constitutional test. He disagreed with arguments that it forces a woman to view the ultrasound. The law says women may avert their eyes during the ultrasound.
“This bill provides more information to a mother,” he said.
The lawsuit against the state was filed on behalf of Nova Health Systems, doing business as Reproductive Services in Tulsa.
One provision of the law prohibits women from collecting damages based on claims that a baby born with defects would have been better off aborted. Abortion rights activists have said they fear that the provision could allow doctors to withhold information about abnormalities in the fetus that could lead to complications after birth.
“Anti-choice activists will stop at nothing to prevent a woman from getting an abortion, but trying to manipulate a woman’s decisions about her own life and health goes beyond the pale,” said Stephanie Toti, staff lawyer in the U.S. Legal Program of the Center for Reproductive Rights and lead lawyer on the case.
“Governments should stop playing doctor and leave medical determinations to physicians and health decisions to individuals,” Ms. Toti said.
Fossil Fish Shows Complexity of Transition to Land
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD, The New York Times, October 16, 2008
In a new study of a fossil fish that lived 375 million years ago, scientists are finding striking evidence of the intermediate steps by which some marine vertebrates evolved into animals that walked on land.
There was much more to the complex transition than fins morphing into sturdy limbs. The head and braincase were changing, a mobile neck was emerging and a bone associated with underwater feeding and gill respiration was diminishing in size — a beginning of the bone’s adaptation for an eventual role in hearing for land animals.
The anatomy of this early transformation in life from water to land had never been observed with such clarity, paleontologists and biologists said in announcing the research on Wednesday.
The scientists said in a report being published Thursday in the journal Nature that the research exposed delicate details of the creature’s head and neck, confirming and elaborating on its evolutionary position as “an important stage in the origin of terrestrial vertebrates.”
In that case, the fish, a predator up to nine feet long, was a predecessor of amphibians, reptiles and dinosaurs, mammals and eventually humans. The fossil species was named Tiktaalik roseae, nicknamed “fishapod” for its fishlike features combined with limbs similar to tetrapods, four-legged land animals.
The new research on the head skeleton of Tiktaalik (pronounced tic-TAH-lick) was conducted primarily at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia.
“The braincase, palate and gill arch skeleton of Tiktaalik have been revealed in great detail,” said Jason Downs, a research fellow at the academy and lead author of the report. “By revealing new details of the pattern of change in this part of the skeleton, we see that cranial features once associated with land-living animals were first adaptations for life in shallow water.”
Several skeletons of the fish were excavated four years ago on Ellesmere Island, in the Nunavut Territory of Canada, 700 miles above the Arctic Circle, by a team led by Neil H. Shubin, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago and the Field Museum. The Devonian-age rocks containing the fossils indicated that the fishapod lived in shallow waters of a warm climate. It may have made brief forays on land.
Since the discovery was reported in 2006, Dr. Downs and two specimen preparators, C. Frederick Mullison of the academy and Bob Masek at Chicago, spent more than a year prying deeply into the skulls of several fishapod skeletons. The results were also analyzed by Dr. Shubin and two other co-authors of the report, Ted Daeschler of the academy and Farish Jenkins Jr., an evolutionary biologist at Harvard.
“Our work demonstrates that the head of these animals was becoming more solidly constructed and, at the same time, more mobile with respect to the body across this transition,” Dr. Daeschler said.
Dr. Shubin said that Tiktaalik was “still on the fish end of things,” but it neatly fills a morphological gap and helps to resolve the relative timing of this complex transition.
For example, fish have no neck but “we see a mobile neck developing for the first time in Tiktaalik,” Dr. Shubin said.
“When feeding, fish orient themselves by swimming, which is fine in deep water, but not for an animal whose body is relatively fixed, as on the bottom of shallow water or on land,” he added. “Then a flexible neck is important.”
One of the most intriguing findings, scientists said, was the reduction in size of a bony element that, in fish, links the braincase, palate and gills and is associated with underwater feeding and respiration. In more primitive fish, the bony part of what is called the hyomandibula is large and shaped like a boomerang. In this fossil species, the bone was greatly reduced, no bigger than a human thumb.
“This could indicate that these animals, in shallow-water settings, were already beginning to rely less on gill respiration,” Dr. Downs said, noting the specimen’s loss of rigid gill-covering bones, which apparently allowed for increased neck mobility.
In the transition from water to land, the researchers said, the hyomandibula gradually lost its original functions and, in time, gained a role in hearing. In humans, as in other mammals, the hyomandibula, or stapes, is one of the tiny bones in the middle ear.
As Dr. Daeschler said, “The new study reminds us that the gradual transition from aquatic to terrestrial lifestyles required much more than the evolution of limbs.”
By JESSICA WAPNER, The New York Times, October 14, 2008
James W. Pennebaker’s interest in word counting began more than 20 years ago, when he did several studies suggesting that people who talked about traumatic experiences tended to be physically healthier than those who kept such experiences secret. He wondered how much could be learned by looking at every single word people used — even the tiny ones, the I’s and you’s, a’s and the’s.
That led Dr. Pennebaker, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas, down a winding path that has taken him from Beatles lyrics (John Lennon’s songs have more “negative emotion” words than Paul McCartney’s) all the way to terrorist communications. By counting the different kinds of words a person says, he is breaking new linguistic ground and leading a resurgent interest in text analysis.
Take Dr. Pennebaker’s recent study of Al Qaeda communications — videotapes, interviews, letters. At the request of the F.B.I., he tallied the number of words in various categories — pronouns, articles and adjectives, among others.
He found, for example, that Osama bin Laden’s use of first-person pronouns (I, me, my, mine) remained fairly constant over several years. By contrast, his second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahri, used such words more and more often.
“This dramatic increase suggests greater insecurity, feelings of threat, and perhaps a shift in his relationship with bin Laden,” Dr. Pennebaker wrote in his report , which was published in The Content Analysis Reader (Sage Publications, July 2008).
Kimberly A. Neuendorf, a professor of communications at Cleveland State University who has extensively studied content analysis, agreed with that assessment. Mr. Zawahri, she said, “is clearly repositioning himself to provide a singular platform for his opinion” and “reaffirming his status as an important individual in the dynamic.”
Because it is hard for the human brain to count and compare all the I’s, a’s and the’s in a sample of speech or writing, Dr. Pennebaker had to invent a software program to do it. The program, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC, pronounced luke), contains a vast dictionary, with each word assigned to one or more categories.
There are social words (talk, they), biological words (cheek, hands, spit), “insight” words (think, know, consider) and dozens of other groupings. LIWC compares a text sample to its dictionary and, within seconds, provides a readout of how many words appear in each category.
To test-drive the program, Dr. Pennebaker, a pioneer in the field of therapeutic writing, asked a group of people recovering from serious illness or other trauma to engage in a series of writing exercises. The word tallies showed that those whose health was improving tended to decrease their use of first-person pronouns through the course of the study.
Health improvements were also seen among people whose use of causal words — because, cause, effect — increased. Simply ruminating about an experience without trying to understand the causes is less likely to lead to psychological growth, he explained; the subjects who used causal words “were changing the way they were thinking about things.”
Dr. Pennebaker, 58, has conducted numerous studies since then, all of them demonstrating that it’s not just what we say that matters but how we say it. Where traditional linguistics “is really more interested in context, how sentences are put together and what a meaningful phrase is,” he said, “our approach is simply counting words.”
In study after study, the articles and pronouns, which text analysts often call “junk words,” have proved crucial.
For example, Dr. Pennebaker has found that men tend to use more articles (a, the) and women tend to use more pronouns (he, she, they). The difference, he says, may suggest that men are more prone to concrete thinking and women are more likely to see things from other perspectives.
Jeffrey T. Hancock, an associate professor of communication at Cornell, uses word counting to study language and deception, particularly on the Internet.
Liars, he says, use more “negative emotion” words (hurt, ugly, nasty) and fewer first-person singulars. “These very simple dimensions have emerged again and again,” he said, “despite the fact that there were 40 years of research before this.”
Dr. Pennebaker says that because speech patterns are akin to a personal signature, his software might be used to identify authors of anonymous blogs and e-mail messages, and as supporting evidence in legal testimony. But he acknowledges that it cannot be definitive; too much depends on probability.
“In the language world, everything is probability,” Dr. Pennebaker said. “But in our legal system, we have real problems with understanding probability. Everyone has problems with probability.”
Still, the technique is drawing attention from a variety of sectors. Dr. Pennebaker has received a grant from the Army Research Institute to study the language of social dynamics, particularly how leaders use language. Joseph Psotka, a research psychologist at the institute, said that over time, this kind of study “could be very helpful for training and leadership development, but precisely how we don’t know yet.”
Dr. Pennebaker’s program has been translated into several languages, with an Arabic version in the works; Dr. Pennebaker notes that his Qaeda analysis was constrained by its reliance on English translations.
“Function words vary between one language and another and reveal a lot about another culture,” he said.
Dr. Psotka said counting and categorizing the words used by a foreign speaker could provide clues about “the subtle attitudes, not just the meaning of the words — to get a sense of whether or not negotiation or discussion is going smoothly.”
Dr. Pennebaker has also turned his word-counting machinery toward the presidential campaign (at wordwatchers.wordpress.com), and he likes to look at age-old questions like whether Shakespeare had a co-playwright, who wrote the Federalist Papers and even whether a couple will stay together.
“The more similar they are in terms of language,” Dr. Pennebaker said, “the more likely they are to be together several months later.”
Thinking Anew About a Migratory Barrier: Roads
By JIM ROBBINS, The New York Times, October 14, 2008
SALTESE, Mont. — Dr. Chris Servheen spends a lot of time mulling a serious scientific question: why didn’t the grizzly bear cross the road?
The future of the bear may depend on the answer.
The mountains in and around Glacier National Park teem with bears. A recently concluded five-year census found 765 grizzlies in northwestern Montana, more than three times the number of bears as when it was listed as a threatened species in 1975. To the south lies a swath of federally protected wilderness much larger than Yellowstone, where the habitat is good, and there are no known grizzlies. They were wiped out 50 years ago to protect sheep.
One of the main reasons they have not returned is Interstate 90.
To arrive from the north, a bear would have to climb over a nearly three-foot high concrete Jersey barrier, cross two lanes of road, braving 75- to 80-mile-an hour traffic, climb a higher Jersey barrier, cross two more lanes of traffic and climb yet another barrier.
“It’s the most critical wildlife corridor in the country,” said Dr. Servheen, grizzly bear recovery coordinator for the federal Fish and Wildlife Service, of the linkage between the two habitats.
As traffic grows beyond 3,000 vehicles a day, crossing a road becomes extremely difficult. The 13 miles of Interstate 90 here, where grizzly bears would most likely cross, has 8,000 to 10,000 vehicles a day, and so is impermeable much of the time. And it is not just bears — wolves, wolverine and a host of other species roam here.
In recent years scientists have come to understand the marked changes brought by the roads that crisscross the landscape.
Some experts believe that habitat fragmentation, the slicing and dicing of large landscapes into small pieces with roads, homes and other development, is the biggest of all environmental problems. “By far,” said Dr. Michael Soulé, a retired biologist and founder of the Society for Conservation Biology. “It’s bigger than climate change. While the serious effects from climate change are 30 years away, there’s nothing left to save then if we don’t deal with fragmentation. And the spearhead of fragmentation are roads.”
Fragmentation cuts off wildlife from critical habitat, including food, security or others of their species for reproduction and genetic diversity. Eventually they disappear.
There are some four million miles of roads affecting 20 percent of the country, and in the last 10 years the new field of road ecology has emerged to study the many impacts of roads, and how to mitigate the damage.
“Roads are the largest human artifact on the planet,” said Dr. Richard T. T. Forman, a professor of landscape ecology at Harvard, who brought road ecology from Europe to the United States. He is the editor of the definitive text on the field, “Road Ecology: Science and Solutions” (Island Press, 2003).
One of the first projects in this country to ameliorate the effect of roads was on Florida’s Alligator Alley on I-75. A series of 24 underpasses restored water flow to the Everglades and allowed wildlife to safely migrate. The changes reduced the mortality of Florida panthers — of which there were only around 50 — from 4 per year to 1.5.
Now, the number of ecologically sensitive road designs built or under way in the country is in the hundreds. In Amherst, Mass., salamanders emerge from hibernation in the mud on the first rainy night of April. “They come up and go screaming across the street to their breeding pond and have an orgy,” Dr. Forman said.
So many were being killed that locals stopped traffic on the night they emerged to let them cross safely. In 1987 engineers placed a tunnel under the road, with two fences to funnel the amphibians to the crossing.
The gold standard for wildlife-friendly roads is in Banff National Park in the mountains of western Canada. The country’s major highway, Trans-Canada 1, passes through the park, and with 25,000 vehicles per day, wildlife vehicle collisions were very frequent.
There are 24 crossings (all but two underpasses) and they have reduced collisions with ungulates by 96 percent and all large mammals by 80 percent.
In the last few years the concept has become an integral part of roads, helped by a 2005 federal transportation bill that mandated green road design. “You name it, there’s something being done, even with insects,” said Dr. Patricia Cramer, a research biologist at Utah State University who surveyed hundreds of domestic projects.
Such mitigation is especially critical for 21 protected species for which highway mortality is a major factor in survival, including the lynx and the desert tortoise.
Ending direct mortality, though, is only one aspect of road-caused fragmentation.
The jury is still out on how well restored connectivity works to keep a diverse gene pool and maintain long-term viability. A study in California, along the 16-lane Santa Monica Freeway (one of the busiest in the country, with 150,000 vehicle trips per day), found that bobcats and coyotes used existing underpasses — not designed for wildlife — to get to the other side. The highway, however, crowded home ranges together; the newcomers were fiercely challenged and did not stay long enough to breed.
The importance of preventing or undoing fragmentation has led to a swarm of environmental groups taking on connectivity — preserving the ability of wildlife to move — as an issue. Dr. Soulé, for example, is a founder of the Wildlands Project, an effort to protect corridors on large landscapes.
One reason the issue has gotten attention is that it involves human safety. One million to two million wildlife-vehicle collisions occur each year, costing insurance companies more than $1 billion. Some 200 people are killed.
The increasing impermeability of roads comes as the climate changes and the need to cross roads become more crucial.
Vegetation communities here are projected to migrate north, which means grizzlies will need to be able to follow. “Shrub fields where berries are is a good example,” Dr. Servheen said. “If dry weather wipes them out, the bears need to go elsewhere.”
The problem is they might not be able to follow. “We’ve boxed them in” with roads, he said.
Roads have ecological impacts besides fragmenting habitat. Warm asphalt and rain that washes to the shoulder nourish roadside grass, and along with salt used to de-ice roads, the grass attracts deer and other wildlife. As deer get clobbered, they in turn attract predators and scavengers, like bald eagles, which then get hit by cars.
But the downside of mitigating road impact, said Trisha White, the director of the Habitat and Highways Campaign for Defenders of Wildlife, is thinking that it heals all wounds. “The biggest danger is thinking that we can put in new roads with crossings and things will be just fine,” she said. “There are so many more impacts. Nothing could be more incorrect.”
Still, crossings do help. Dr. Servheen has set up heat- and motion-sensitive cameras under two highway bridges here where bears could cross under I-90, but they have not yet captured grizzlies using these crossings. But, he is hoping that somehow bears will move south.
“Another population will make the species more resilient to change,” he said. “Whether it’s a reduction in genetics or climate change, it will help with survival.”
Oklahoma Is Sued Over Required Ultrasounds for Abortions
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, The New York Times, October 11, 2008
OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — An advocacy group is suing over an Oklahoma law that prohibits a woman from having an abortion unless she first has an ultrasound and the doctor describes to her what the fetus looks like.
In the lawsuit filed Thursday in Oklahoma County District Court, the Center for Reproductive Rights says that the requirement intrudes on privacy, endangers health and assaults dignity.
The law, set to go into effect on Nov. 1, would make Oklahoma the fourth state to require that ultrasounds be performed before a woman can have an abortion and that the ultrasounds be made available to the patient for viewing, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a health research organization based in Washington. The other states are Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi.
Backers of the lawsuit say Oklahoma is the only state to require that the ultrasound screen be turned toward the woman during the procedure and that the doctor describe what is on the screen, including various dimensions of the fetus.
Elizabeth Nash, public policy associate with the Guttmacher Institute, said the Oklahoma law appeared unique in that its intent was that the woman seeking an abortion view the ultrasound images.
Lawmakers overrode Gov. Brad Henry’s veto to pass the anti-abortion legislation in April. Mr. Henry, a Democrat, said he vetoed the bill because it did not exempt victims of rape or incest from the ultrasound requirement.
State Senator Todd Lamb, a Republican, said supporters of the law hoped that it would curtail abortions in the state.
“I introduced the bill because I wanted to encourage life in society,” Mr. Lamb said. “In Oklahoma, society is on the side of life.”
Mr. Lamb said he believed the lawsuit would stand a constitutional test. He disagreed with arguments that it forces a woman to view the ultrasound. The law says women may avert their eyes during the ultrasound.
“This bill provides more information to a mother,” he said.
The lawsuit against the state was filed on behalf of Nova Health Systems, doing business as Reproductive Services in Tulsa.
One provision of the law prohibits women from collecting damages based on claims that a baby born with defects would have been better off aborted. Abortion rights activists have said they fear that the provision could allow doctors to withhold information about abnormalities in the fetus that could lead to complications after birth.
“Anti-choice activists will stop at nothing to prevent a woman from getting an abortion, but trying to manipulate a woman’s decisions about her own life and health goes beyond the pale,” said Stephanie Toti, staff lawyer in the U.S. Legal Program of the Center for Reproductive Rights and lead lawyer on the case.
“Governments should stop playing doctor and leave medical determinations to physicians and health decisions to individuals,” Ms. Toti said.
Fossil Fish Shows Complexity of Transition to Land
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD, The New York Times, October 16, 2008
In a new study of a fossil fish that lived 375 million years ago, scientists are finding striking evidence of the intermediate steps by which some marine vertebrates evolved into animals that walked on land.
There was much more to the complex transition than fins morphing into sturdy limbs. The head and braincase were changing, a mobile neck was emerging and a bone associated with underwater feeding and gill respiration was diminishing in size — a beginning of the bone’s adaptation for an eventual role in hearing for land animals.
The anatomy of this early transformation in life from water to land had never been observed with such clarity, paleontologists and biologists said in announcing the research on Wednesday.
The scientists said in a report being published Thursday in the journal Nature that the research exposed delicate details of the creature’s head and neck, confirming and elaborating on its evolutionary position as “an important stage in the origin of terrestrial vertebrates.”
In that case, the fish, a predator up to nine feet long, was a predecessor of amphibians, reptiles and dinosaurs, mammals and eventually humans. The fossil species was named Tiktaalik roseae, nicknamed “fishapod” for its fishlike features combined with limbs similar to tetrapods, four-legged land animals.
The new research on the head skeleton of Tiktaalik (pronounced tic-TAH-lick) was conducted primarily at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia.
“The braincase, palate and gill arch skeleton of Tiktaalik have been revealed in great detail,” said Jason Downs, a research fellow at the academy and lead author of the report. “By revealing new details of the pattern of change in this part of the skeleton, we see that cranial features once associated with land-living animals were first adaptations for life in shallow water.”
Several skeletons of the fish were excavated four years ago on Ellesmere Island, in the Nunavut Territory of Canada, 700 miles above the Arctic Circle, by a team led by Neil H. Shubin, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago and the Field Museum. The Devonian-age rocks containing the fossils indicated that the fishapod lived in shallow waters of a warm climate. It may have made brief forays on land.
Since the discovery was reported in 2006, Dr. Downs and two specimen preparators, C. Frederick Mullison of the academy and Bob Masek at Chicago, spent more than a year prying deeply into the skulls of several fishapod skeletons. The results were also analyzed by Dr. Shubin and two other co-authors of the report, Ted Daeschler of the academy and Farish Jenkins Jr., an evolutionary biologist at Harvard.
“Our work demonstrates that the head of these animals was becoming more solidly constructed and, at the same time, more mobile with respect to the body across this transition,” Dr. Daeschler said.
Dr. Shubin said that Tiktaalik was “still on the fish end of things,” but it neatly fills a morphological gap and helps to resolve the relative timing of this complex transition.
For example, fish have no neck but “we see a mobile neck developing for the first time in Tiktaalik,” Dr. Shubin said.
“When feeding, fish orient themselves by swimming, which is fine in deep water, but not for an animal whose body is relatively fixed, as on the bottom of shallow water or on land,” he added. “Then a flexible neck is important.”
One of the most intriguing findings, scientists said, was the reduction in size of a bony element that, in fish, links the braincase, palate and gills and is associated with underwater feeding and respiration. In more primitive fish, the bony part of what is called the hyomandibula is large and shaped like a boomerang. In this fossil species, the bone was greatly reduced, no bigger than a human thumb.
“This could indicate that these animals, in shallow-water settings, were already beginning to rely less on gill respiration,” Dr. Downs said, noting the specimen’s loss of rigid gill-covering bones, which apparently allowed for increased neck mobility.
In the transition from water to land, the researchers said, the hyomandibula gradually lost its original functions and, in time, gained a role in hearing. In humans, as in other mammals, the hyomandibula, or stapes, is one of the tiny bones in the middle ear.
As Dr. Daeschler said, “The new study reminds us that the gradual transition from aquatic to terrestrial lifestyles required much more than the evolution of limbs.”
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-10-15 07:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-15 07:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-15 08:23 pm (UTC)http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7668838.stm
no subject
Date: 2008-10-15 10:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-15 09:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-15 10:09 pm (UTC)*ETA* The real point is that there is no medical reason to have it, so why make anyone get a medical procedure they do not need.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-16 12:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-16 03:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-16 03:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-16 12:47 pm (UTC)