![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brdgt
The final story is my favorite - I knew someone in high school who was a decedent of Phineas Gage.
Dot Earth:Era of Trans-Arctic Shipping Nigh
By Andrew C. Revkin, New York Times blog, July 28, 2009
Since 1553, when Sir Hugh Willoughby led an expedition north in search of a sea passage over Russia to the Far East, mariners have dreamed of such a shortcut. (Willoughby and his crew, apparently asphyxiated by carbon monoxide after sealing up their boat against brutal cold, froze to death.)
In part because of warming and the retreat and thinning of Arctic sea ice in summer, this northern sea route is slowly becoming a reality. Russian vessels have long hauled ore and oil along the country’s sprawling northern coast, but no commercial ships under other flags have passed between Asia and Western Europe. Now, a German company, the Beluga Group of Bremen, has a ship poised to make what appears to be the first such trip, an 8,000-mile shortcut compared with alternate routes. The “Arctic Rush” is on.
One of the company’s 66 ships, the 12,700-ton Beluga Fraternity, designed for a mix of ice and open seas, picked up equipment in Ulsan, South Korea, on July 23 and arrived in Vladivostok on the 25th. Its destination is the docks in Novyy Port, a Siberian outpost. And after that, if conditions permit, it will head to Antwerp or Rotterdam, marking what company officials say would be the first time a vessel has crossed from Asia to Europe through the Arctic on a commercial passage.
Beluga has two other ships carrying goods along the northern sea route this summer, and the expectation is that such trade will expand given projections of Arctic summers with ever more open water and less sea ice. The Northwest Passage through Arctic Canada is of course another such option, although some of its passages, even with warming, can remain clotted with thick ice.
Last year, for the first time in the era of satellite monitoring, both Arctic passages were briefly open at the same time.
This summer’s attempt at an Arctic transit is not the first unconventional transport effort by the Beluga Group. Last year I wrote about its novel use of sails on some ships to cut fuel use.
I’ll post updates as the Beluga Fraternity continues its voyage.
Scientist at Work: Tucker Childs: Linguist’s Preservation Kit Has New Digital Tools
By CHRIS NICHOLSON, The New York Times, July 28, 2009
TEI, Sierra Leone — Jogue, yipe, simoi are three short words for foods in Kim, a language in Sierra Leone that Tucker Childs has been trying, for the past three years, to write down, record and understand.
Kim is a dying language, and Dr. Childs a field linguist. From his base here in Tei, a small fishing village on the Waanje River, he canoes up the narrow waterways that cut across the river’s floodplain, and hikes a few miles inland, to where the last Kim communities remain. Based on recordings taken there, he has devised an alphabet and compiled a dictionary and is finishing a book on the grammar.
Africa has about 2,000 of the world’s 6,000 languages. Many are still unwritten, some have yet to be named and many will probably disappear. For centuries, social and economic incentives have been working against Kim and in favor of Mende, a language used widely in the region, until finally, Dr. Childs speculates, the Kim language has been pushed to the verge of extinction.
It used to be that field linguists like Dr. Childs, a scattered corps working against time to salvage the world’s endangered tongues — more than 3,000 at last count — scribbled data in smeared notebooks and stored sounds on cassette tapes, destined to rot in boxes. But linguistics has gone digital. Dr. Childs now uses a solid-state recorder, and he has applications that will analyze the elements of a vowel in seconds or compare sounds across languages.
Using Geographic Information Systems, software that translates data into maps, he and his research assistants, Hannah Sarvasy and Ali Turay, pinpoint villages that are not to be found on any official map. “There’s a whole bunch of reasons linguists want these languages preserved,” Dr. Childs said, “but for me it’s more an emotional thing. It’s not noblesse oblige, it’s capitalist oblige. These people are totally peripheralized.”
In its new digital form, this kind of research is more accessible. It allows larger projects to share the world’s linguistic heritage with a wider public of teachers and learners, including, when possible, the original speakers.
The aim is not just to salvage, but to revive. Financed by the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project and the National Science Foundation, Dr. Childs’s recordings will find their way, once his study ends and he returns to his post as a professor at Portland State University in Oregon, to a huge data bank in the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.
The director of the endangered languages archive at S.O.A.S., David Nathan, said the school’s Web site, elar.soas.ac.uk, is set to start sharing data at summer’s end. “What we’re trading in with language documentation is a new genre of stuff which doesn’t have any publication channel,” he said.
Until now, anyway. The new genre is really a grab bag that includes audio recordings of conversations and folktales, videos of songs and dances, and text transcriptions. But as with most new genres, this one is coming into the world with birthing pains.
Just getting decent recordings can be difficult. The villages of Nyandehun and Mosenten, for example, are roadless, low-tech places. With more elaborate equipment, batteries fail unexpectedly, miles from an electrical outlet. Humidity and dust creep into machines.
Also, some linguists have had trouble mastering the new machines. “For most linguists, audio is just an inconvenience on the way to transcription,” Mr. Nathan said. In the past, he added, “the quality would be so bad, it was really just evidence that they had gone there, a talisman that they had gone to the field.”
The relationship between linguistics and technology goes deeper than what format the sounds are recorded in. Dr. Childs, who remembers working with computers as large as a room when he was a doctoral student, said that theories of language often shaped themselves to resemble the tools at hand.
In the beginning, he said, linguists imagined that the mind processed language with many rules and little in storage. “What happened over time was that more and more stuff was moved into the lexicon, was listed there, and that sort of paralleled developments in the computer industry of storage getting cheaper,” he said.
S.O.A.S. is not alone in trying to document endangered languages. The Max Planck Institute in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, has been operating an archive for 10 years. Dagmar Jung, a linguist in Cologne, Germany, is working with the elders of the Beaver, or Dane-Zaa, tribe in the Canadian provinces of British Columbia and Alberta to gather material and make it accessible through a community portal. “It’s there for later generations,” Dr. Jung said. “But it’s not user-friendly for the moment.”
Beaver speakers do have access to some recordings of their songs and stories online. Gary Oker, 49, a former chief of the Dane-Zaa, said putting recordings of elders online was part of a project to take traditional world views and make them part of the present. Dane-Zaa youth were involved throughout the process, from producing the recordings of elders that went online, to using them later as references in school.
Although he saw his language slipping away, he said that as the young people had “taken an oral tradition and documented it in many forms,” the contact had made them “prouder of their history and who they are.” The stories, he said, helped them learn their identity and how they related to the land.
Because of oil and gas development, Mr. Oker said, “our environment is changing so quickly, we need to capture as much as we can.” Even if the language is lost, he said, “the wisdom can be transmitted.”
Of course, online resources are useful only to communities with Internet access. Communities without that access, like the Kim, still require books to be printed, and recordings to be copied onto CDs or tapes.
Holding more promise are programs that put electronic dictionaries on mobile phones. James McElvenny, a linguist at the University of Sydney, has led the development of software to help revitalize vanishing languages. Mr. McElvenny has been working with Aboriginal groups like the Dharug of Sydney to give learners, many of them no older than 16, a portable reference that supplies the definition and the sound of words that are otherwise no longer spoken, because Dharug is a dead language.
“A lot of the older members are technophobic,” he said, “but the kids are really getting into it.”
As for Kim, these efforts may be too late. A language, like a person, usually ages before it dies. Four people have died since Mr. Childs’s project began, and the 20 fluent Kim speakers are all over 60.
“People today can’t speak Kim because their parents didn’t speak it to them,” said Fasia Kohlia, one of Kim’s best speakers. “Parents used to call their children to breast-feed in Kim — ‘kun moga, kun moga, kun moga,’ ” she said. But when she had children, she called to them in Mende.
Brain Power: In Battle, Hunches Prove to Be Valuable
By BENEDICT CAREY, The New York Times, July 28, 2009
The sight was not that unusual, at least not for Mosul, Iraq, on a summer morning: a car parked on the sidewalk, facing opposite traffic, its windows rolled up tight. Two young boys stared out the back window, kindergarten age maybe, their faces leaning together as if to share a whisper.
The soldier patrolling closest to the car stopped. It had to be hot in there; it was 120 degrees outside. “Permission to approach, sir, to give them some water,” the soldier said to Sgt. First Class Edward Tierney, who led the nine-man patrol that morning.
“I said no — no,” Sergeant Tierney said in a telephone interview from Afghanistan. He said he had an urge to move back before he knew why: “My body suddenly got cooler; you know, that danger feeling.”
The United States military has spent billions on hardware, like signal jamming technology, to detect and destroy what the military calls improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.’s, the roadside bombs that have proved to be the greatest threat in Iraq and now in Afghanistan, where Sergeant Tierney is training soldiers to foil bomb attacks.
Still, high-tech gear, while helping to reduce casualties, remains a mere supplement to the most sensitive detection system of all — the human brain. Troops on the ground, using only their senses and experience, are responsible for foiling many I.E.D. attacks, and, like Sergeant Tierney, they often cite a gut feeling or a hunch as their first clue.
Everyone has hunches — about friends’ motives, about the stock market, about when to fold a hand of poker and when to hold it. But United States troops are now at the center of a large effort to understand how it is that in a life-or-death situation, some people’s brains can sense danger and act on it well before others’ do.
Experience matters, of course: if you have seen something before, you are more likely to anticipate it the next time. And yet, recent research suggests that something else is at work, too.
Small differences in how the brain processes images, how well it reads emotions and how it manages surges in stress hormones help explain why some people sense imminent danger before most others do.
Studies of members of the Army Green Berets and Navy Seals, for example, have found that in threatening situations they experience about the same rush of the stress hormone cortisol as any other soldier does. But their levels typically drop off faster than less well-trained troops, much faster in some cases.
In the past two years, an Army researcher, Steven Burnett, has overseen a study into human perception and bomb detection involving about 800 military men and women. Researchers have conducted exhaustive interviews with experienced fighters. They have administered personality tests and measured depth perception, vigilance and related abilities. The troops have competed to find bombs in photographs, videos, virtual reality simulations and on the ground in mock exercises.
The study complements a growing body of work suggesting that the speed with which the brain reads and interprets sensations like the feelings in one’s own body and emotions in the body language of others is central to avoiding imminent threats.
“Not long ago people thought of emotions as old stuff, as just feelings — feelings that had little to do with rational decision making, or that got in the way of it,” said Dr. Antonio Damasio, director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California. “Now that position has reversed. We understand emotions as practical action programs that work to solve a problem, often before we’re conscious of it. These processes are at work continually, in pilots, leaders of expeditions, parents, all of us.”
Seeing What Others Miss
The patrol through Mosul’s main marketplace never became routine, not once, not after the 10th time or the 40th. A divot in the gravel, a slight shadow in a ditch, a pile of discarded cans; any one could be deadly; every one raised the same question: Is there something — anything — out of place here?
Clearing a road of bombs is one of the least glamorous and most dangerous jobs on the planet. It is also one of the most important. In May, coalition forces found 465 of them in Afghanistan and 333 in Iraq. The troops foiled more than half the traps over all — but about 10 percent of the bombs killed or maimed a soldier or a Marine.
“We had indicators we’d look for, but you’d really have to be aware of everything, every detail,” said Sergeant Tierney, whose unit was working with the Iraqi police in that summer of 2004.
In recent years, the bombs have become more powerful, the hiding places ever more devious. Bombs in fake rocks. Bombs in poured concrete, built into curbs. Bombs triggered by decoy bombs.
“On one route sweep mission, there was a noticeable I.E.D. in the middle of the road, but it was a decoy,” said Lt. Donovan Campbell, who in 2004 led a Marine platoon for seven months of heavy fighting in Ramadi and wrote a vivid book, “Joker One,” about the experience. “The real bomb was encased in concrete, a hundred meters away, in the midst of rubble. One of my Marines spotted it. He said, ‘That block looks too symmetrical, too perfect.’ ”
Lieutenant Campbell had the area cleared and the bomb destroyed.
“Unless you know what rubble in that part of Iraq looks like, there’s no way you’d see that,” he said. “I had two guys, one we called Hound Dog, who were really good at spotting things that didn’t fit.”
The men and women who performed best in the Army’s I.E.D. detection study had the sort of knowledge gained through experience, according to a preliminary analysis of the results; but many also had superb depth perception and a keen ability to sustain intense focus for long periods. The ability to pick odd shapes masked in complex backgrounds — a “Where’s Waldo” type of skill that some call anomaly detection — also predicted performance on some of the roadside bomb simulations.
“Some of these things cannot be trained, obviously,” said Jennifer Murphy, a psychologist at the Army Research Institute and the principal author of the I.E.D. study. “But some may be; these are fighters who become very sensitive to small changes in the environment. They’ll clear the same road every day and notice ridiculously subtle things: this rock was not here yesterday.”
In a study that appeared last month, neuroscientists at Princeton University demonstrated just how sensitive this visual ability is — and how a gut feeling may arise before a person becomes conscious of what the brain has registered.
They had students try to pick out figures — people or cars — in a series of photos that flashed by on a computer screen. The pictures flashed by four at a time, and the participants were told to scan only two of them, either those above and below the center point, or those to the left and right. Eye-tracking confirmed that they did just that.
But brain scans showed that the students’ brains registered the presence of people or cars even when the figures appeared in photos that they were not paying attention to. They got better at it, too, with training.
Some people’s brains were almost twice as fast at detecting the figures as others’. “It appears that the brain primes the whole visual system to be strongly sensitive to categories of visual input,” kinds of things to look for, said Marius V. Peelen, a neuroscientist at Princeton and a co-author of the study with Li Fei-Fei and Sabine Kastner. “And apparently some people’s visual system processes things much faster than others’.”
Something in the Air
A soldier or Marine could have X-ray vision and never see most I.E.D.’s, however. Veterans say that those who are most sensitive to the presence of the bombs not only pick up small details but also have the ability to step back and observe the bigger picture: extra tension in the air, unusual rhythms in Iraqi daily life, oddities in behavior.
“One afternoon I remember turning down a road in Baghdad we were very familiar with, and there’s no one out — very creepy for that time of day,” said Sgt. Don Gomez, a spokesman for the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, who took part in the invasion and later, in 2005, drove a general in and around Baghdad.
Trash was heaped in a spot along the street where Sergeant Gomez and other drivers in the convoy had not seen it before, so they gave it a wide berth.
“We later called it in to an explosives team and, sure enough, they found one and detonated it — the thing left a huge crater,” he said.
As the brain tallies cues, big and small, consciously and not, it may send out an alarm before a person fully understands why.
In a landmark experiment in 1997, researchers at the University of Iowa had people gamble on a simple card game. Each participant was spotted $2,000 and had to choose cards from any of four decks. The cards offered immediate rewards, of $50 or $100, and the occasional card carried a penalty. But the game was rigged: the penalties in two of the decks were modest and in the other two decks were large.
The pattern was unpredictable, but on average the players reported “liking” some decks better than others by the 50th card to the 80th card drawn before they could fully explain why. Their bodies usually tensed up — subtly, but significantly, according to careful measures of sweat — in a few people as early as about the 10th card drawn, according to the authors, Dr. Damasio; his wife, Dr. Hanna Damasio; Dr. Antoine Bechara; and Dr. Daniel Tranel.
In a study published in May, researchers at King’s College in London did brain scans of people playing the gambling game used in the University of Iowa study. Several brain regions were particularly active, including the orbitofrontal cortex, which is involved in decision making, and the insula, where the brain is thought to register the diverse sensations coming from around the body and interpret them as a cohesive feeling — that cooling sensation of danger. In some brains, the alarm appears to sound earlier, and perhaps more intensely, than average.
Gut feelings about potential threats or opportunities are not always correct, and neuroscientists debate the conditions under which the feeling precedes the conscious awareness of the clues themselves. But the system evolved for survival, and, in some people, is apparently exquisitely sensitive, the findings suggest.
Mastering the Fear
One thing did not quite fit on the morning of Sergeant Tierney’s patrol in Mosul. The nine soldiers left the police station around 9 a.m., but they did not get their usual greeting. No one shot at them or fired a rocket-propelled grenade. Minutes passed, and nothing.
The soldiers walked the road in an odd silence, scanning the landscape for evidence of I.E.D.’s and trying to stay alert for an attack from insurgents. In war, anxiety can run as high as the Iraqi heat, and neuroscientists say that the most perceptive, observant brain on earth will not pick up subtle clues if it is overwhelmed by stress.
In the Army study of I.E.D. detection, researchers found that troops who were good at spotting bombs in simulations tended to think of themselves as predators, not prey. That frame of mind by itself may work to reduce anxiety, experts say.
The brains of elite troops also appear to register perceived threats in a different way from the average enlistee, said Dr. Martin P. Paulus, a psychiatrist at the University of California, San Diego, and the V.A. San Diego Healthcare System. At the sight of angry faces, members of the Navy Seals show significantly higher activation in the insula than regular soldiers, according to a just-completed study.
“The big question is whether these differences perceiving threat are natural, or due to training,” Dr. Paulus said.
That morning in Mosul, Sergeant Tierney gave the command to fall back. The soldier who had asked to approach the car had just time enough to turn before the bomb exploded. Shrapnel clawed the side of his face; the shock wave threw the others to the ground. The two young boys were gone: killed in the blast, almost certainly, he said.
Since then, Sergeant Tierney has often run back the tape in his head, looking for the detail that tipped him off. Maybe it was the angle of the car, or the location; maybe the absence of an attack, the sleepiness in the market: perhaps the sum of all of the above.
“I can’t point to one thing,” he said. “I just had that feeling you have when you walk out of the house and know you forgot something — you got your keys, it’s not that — and need a few moments to figure out what it is.”
He added, “I feel very fortunate none of my men were killed or badly wounded.”
TierneyLab - Putting Ideas in Science to the Test: The Curious Case of Phineas Gage, Refocused
By Benedict Carey, The New York Times, July 22, 2009
The medical literature is punctuated with gruesome, anonymous case studies but one of the most ghastly images of all comes with name: Phineas Gage, a Vermont railroad worker who, in 1848, was skewered through his brain by an iron bar the size of large fireplace poker in an explosion. Gage survived, became an object of medical fascination, and images of his impaled skull (preserved at Harvard University) later landed in textbooks to illustrate the function of the frontal lobes. With his frontals mangled, the once-reliable Mr. Gage became a lout and wastrel. Or so the textbook version goes.
Now, a Maryland couple has come forward with what experts believe to be a photograph of Mr. Gage, post-accident, and it is a striking reminder that there was a man behind the medical case. The iron bar did not lodge in Mr. Gage’s skull – it passed through – and the person staring out of the photograph looks far from seriously disabled. He looks like the actor Christopher Reeve in his prime, minus an eye. In an article accompanying the image in the Journal of the History of Neuroscience, Malcolm Macmillan, a psychologist at the University of Melbourne, describes the process and raises the question, Who was Phineas Gage after the accident? No one really knows, as Dr. Macmillan has pointed out in a series of papers. Mr. Gage was changed, all right, but he lived another 11 years, held several jobs, and was not so easy to fit into the “wastrel” mold given him by textbooks after his death.
“The facts about the real Phineas may have a slight resemblance to the modern pre-accident representation, but he can hardly be recognized in the post–accident picture,” Dr. Macmillan writes, in one of his papers.
The photo and its possible implications demonstrate that medical history, even when it names names and preserves bones preserved, can be just as steeped in folklore as the oral kind.
Dot Earth:Era of Trans-Arctic Shipping Nigh
By Andrew C. Revkin, New York Times blog, July 28, 2009
Since 1553, when Sir Hugh Willoughby led an expedition north in search of a sea passage over Russia to the Far East, mariners have dreamed of such a shortcut. (Willoughby and his crew, apparently asphyxiated by carbon monoxide after sealing up their boat against brutal cold, froze to death.)
In part because of warming and the retreat and thinning of Arctic sea ice in summer, this northern sea route is slowly becoming a reality. Russian vessels have long hauled ore and oil along the country’s sprawling northern coast, but no commercial ships under other flags have passed between Asia and Western Europe. Now, a German company, the Beluga Group of Bremen, has a ship poised to make what appears to be the first such trip, an 8,000-mile shortcut compared with alternate routes. The “Arctic Rush” is on.
One of the company’s 66 ships, the 12,700-ton Beluga Fraternity, designed for a mix of ice and open seas, picked up equipment in Ulsan, South Korea, on July 23 and arrived in Vladivostok on the 25th. Its destination is the docks in Novyy Port, a Siberian outpost. And after that, if conditions permit, it will head to Antwerp or Rotterdam, marking what company officials say would be the first time a vessel has crossed from Asia to Europe through the Arctic on a commercial passage.
Beluga has two other ships carrying goods along the northern sea route this summer, and the expectation is that such trade will expand given projections of Arctic summers with ever more open water and less sea ice. The Northwest Passage through Arctic Canada is of course another such option, although some of its passages, even with warming, can remain clotted with thick ice.
Last year, for the first time in the era of satellite monitoring, both Arctic passages were briefly open at the same time.
This summer’s attempt at an Arctic transit is not the first unconventional transport effort by the Beluga Group. Last year I wrote about its novel use of sails on some ships to cut fuel use.
I’ll post updates as the Beluga Fraternity continues its voyage.
Scientist at Work: Tucker Childs: Linguist’s Preservation Kit Has New Digital Tools
By CHRIS NICHOLSON, The New York Times, July 28, 2009
TEI, Sierra Leone — Jogue, yipe, simoi are three short words for foods in Kim, a language in Sierra Leone that Tucker Childs has been trying, for the past three years, to write down, record and understand.
Kim is a dying language, and Dr. Childs a field linguist. From his base here in Tei, a small fishing village on the Waanje River, he canoes up the narrow waterways that cut across the river’s floodplain, and hikes a few miles inland, to where the last Kim communities remain. Based on recordings taken there, he has devised an alphabet and compiled a dictionary and is finishing a book on the grammar.
Africa has about 2,000 of the world’s 6,000 languages. Many are still unwritten, some have yet to be named and many will probably disappear. For centuries, social and economic incentives have been working against Kim and in favor of Mende, a language used widely in the region, until finally, Dr. Childs speculates, the Kim language has been pushed to the verge of extinction.
It used to be that field linguists like Dr. Childs, a scattered corps working against time to salvage the world’s endangered tongues — more than 3,000 at last count — scribbled data in smeared notebooks and stored sounds on cassette tapes, destined to rot in boxes. But linguistics has gone digital. Dr. Childs now uses a solid-state recorder, and he has applications that will analyze the elements of a vowel in seconds or compare sounds across languages.
Using Geographic Information Systems, software that translates data into maps, he and his research assistants, Hannah Sarvasy and Ali Turay, pinpoint villages that are not to be found on any official map. “There’s a whole bunch of reasons linguists want these languages preserved,” Dr. Childs said, “but for me it’s more an emotional thing. It’s not noblesse oblige, it’s capitalist oblige. These people are totally peripheralized.”
In its new digital form, this kind of research is more accessible. It allows larger projects to share the world’s linguistic heritage with a wider public of teachers and learners, including, when possible, the original speakers.
The aim is not just to salvage, but to revive. Financed by the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project and the National Science Foundation, Dr. Childs’s recordings will find their way, once his study ends and he returns to his post as a professor at Portland State University in Oregon, to a huge data bank in the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.
The director of the endangered languages archive at S.O.A.S., David Nathan, said the school’s Web site, elar.soas.ac.uk, is set to start sharing data at summer’s end. “What we’re trading in with language documentation is a new genre of stuff which doesn’t have any publication channel,” he said.
Until now, anyway. The new genre is really a grab bag that includes audio recordings of conversations and folktales, videos of songs and dances, and text transcriptions. But as with most new genres, this one is coming into the world with birthing pains.
Just getting decent recordings can be difficult. The villages of Nyandehun and Mosenten, for example, are roadless, low-tech places. With more elaborate equipment, batteries fail unexpectedly, miles from an electrical outlet. Humidity and dust creep into machines.
Also, some linguists have had trouble mastering the new machines. “For most linguists, audio is just an inconvenience on the way to transcription,” Mr. Nathan said. In the past, he added, “the quality would be so bad, it was really just evidence that they had gone there, a talisman that they had gone to the field.”
The relationship between linguistics and technology goes deeper than what format the sounds are recorded in. Dr. Childs, who remembers working with computers as large as a room when he was a doctoral student, said that theories of language often shaped themselves to resemble the tools at hand.
In the beginning, he said, linguists imagined that the mind processed language with many rules and little in storage. “What happened over time was that more and more stuff was moved into the lexicon, was listed there, and that sort of paralleled developments in the computer industry of storage getting cheaper,” he said.
S.O.A.S. is not alone in trying to document endangered languages. The Max Planck Institute in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, has been operating an archive for 10 years. Dagmar Jung, a linguist in Cologne, Germany, is working with the elders of the Beaver, or Dane-Zaa, tribe in the Canadian provinces of British Columbia and Alberta to gather material and make it accessible through a community portal. “It’s there for later generations,” Dr. Jung said. “But it’s not user-friendly for the moment.”
Beaver speakers do have access to some recordings of their songs and stories online. Gary Oker, 49, a former chief of the Dane-Zaa, said putting recordings of elders online was part of a project to take traditional world views and make them part of the present. Dane-Zaa youth were involved throughout the process, from producing the recordings of elders that went online, to using them later as references in school.
Although he saw his language slipping away, he said that as the young people had “taken an oral tradition and documented it in many forms,” the contact had made them “prouder of their history and who they are.” The stories, he said, helped them learn their identity and how they related to the land.
Because of oil and gas development, Mr. Oker said, “our environment is changing so quickly, we need to capture as much as we can.” Even if the language is lost, he said, “the wisdom can be transmitted.”
Of course, online resources are useful only to communities with Internet access. Communities without that access, like the Kim, still require books to be printed, and recordings to be copied onto CDs or tapes.
Holding more promise are programs that put electronic dictionaries on mobile phones. James McElvenny, a linguist at the University of Sydney, has led the development of software to help revitalize vanishing languages. Mr. McElvenny has been working with Aboriginal groups like the Dharug of Sydney to give learners, many of them no older than 16, a portable reference that supplies the definition and the sound of words that are otherwise no longer spoken, because Dharug is a dead language.
“A lot of the older members are technophobic,” he said, “but the kids are really getting into it.”
As for Kim, these efforts may be too late. A language, like a person, usually ages before it dies. Four people have died since Mr. Childs’s project began, and the 20 fluent Kim speakers are all over 60.
“People today can’t speak Kim because their parents didn’t speak it to them,” said Fasia Kohlia, one of Kim’s best speakers. “Parents used to call their children to breast-feed in Kim — ‘kun moga, kun moga, kun moga,’ ” she said. But when she had children, she called to them in Mende.
Brain Power: In Battle, Hunches Prove to Be Valuable
By BENEDICT CAREY, The New York Times, July 28, 2009
The sight was not that unusual, at least not for Mosul, Iraq, on a summer morning: a car parked on the sidewalk, facing opposite traffic, its windows rolled up tight. Two young boys stared out the back window, kindergarten age maybe, their faces leaning together as if to share a whisper.
The soldier patrolling closest to the car stopped. It had to be hot in there; it was 120 degrees outside. “Permission to approach, sir, to give them some water,” the soldier said to Sgt. First Class Edward Tierney, who led the nine-man patrol that morning.
“I said no — no,” Sergeant Tierney said in a telephone interview from Afghanistan. He said he had an urge to move back before he knew why: “My body suddenly got cooler; you know, that danger feeling.”
The United States military has spent billions on hardware, like signal jamming technology, to detect and destroy what the military calls improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.’s, the roadside bombs that have proved to be the greatest threat in Iraq and now in Afghanistan, where Sergeant Tierney is training soldiers to foil bomb attacks.
Still, high-tech gear, while helping to reduce casualties, remains a mere supplement to the most sensitive detection system of all — the human brain. Troops on the ground, using only their senses and experience, are responsible for foiling many I.E.D. attacks, and, like Sergeant Tierney, they often cite a gut feeling or a hunch as their first clue.
Everyone has hunches — about friends’ motives, about the stock market, about when to fold a hand of poker and when to hold it. But United States troops are now at the center of a large effort to understand how it is that in a life-or-death situation, some people’s brains can sense danger and act on it well before others’ do.
Experience matters, of course: if you have seen something before, you are more likely to anticipate it the next time. And yet, recent research suggests that something else is at work, too.
Small differences in how the brain processes images, how well it reads emotions and how it manages surges in stress hormones help explain why some people sense imminent danger before most others do.
Studies of members of the Army Green Berets and Navy Seals, for example, have found that in threatening situations they experience about the same rush of the stress hormone cortisol as any other soldier does. But their levels typically drop off faster than less well-trained troops, much faster in some cases.
In the past two years, an Army researcher, Steven Burnett, has overseen a study into human perception and bomb detection involving about 800 military men and women. Researchers have conducted exhaustive interviews with experienced fighters. They have administered personality tests and measured depth perception, vigilance and related abilities. The troops have competed to find bombs in photographs, videos, virtual reality simulations and on the ground in mock exercises.
The study complements a growing body of work suggesting that the speed with which the brain reads and interprets sensations like the feelings in one’s own body and emotions in the body language of others is central to avoiding imminent threats.
“Not long ago people thought of emotions as old stuff, as just feelings — feelings that had little to do with rational decision making, or that got in the way of it,” said Dr. Antonio Damasio, director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California. “Now that position has reversed. We understand emotions as practical action programs that work to solve a problem, often before we’re conscious of it. These processes are at work continually, in pilots, leaders of expeditions, parents, all of us.”
Seeing What Others Miss
The patrol through Mosul’s main marketplace never became routine, not once, not after the 10th time or the 40th. A divot in the gravel, a slight shadow in a ditch, a pile of discarded cans; any one could be deadly; every one raised the same question: Is there something — anything — out of place here?
Clearing a road of bombs is one of the least glamorous and most dangerous jobs on the planet. It is also one of the most important. In May, coalition forces found 465 of them in Afghanistan and 333 in Iraq. The troops foiled more than half the traps over all — but about 10 percent of the bombs killed or maimed a soldier or a Marine.
“We had indicators we’d look for, but you’d really have to be aware of everything, every detail,” said Sergeant Tierney, whose unit was working with the Iraqi police in that summer of 2004.
In recent years, the bombs have become more powerful, the hiding places ever more devious. Bombs in fake rocks. Bombs in poured concrete, built into curbs. Bombs triggered by decoy bombs.
“On one route sweep mission, there was a noticeable I.E.D. in the middle of the road, but it was a decoy,” said Lt. Donovan Campbell, who in 2004 led a Marine platoon for seven months of heavy fighting in Ramadi and wrote a vivid book, “Joker One,” about the experience. “The real bomb was encased in concrete, a hundred meters away, in the midst of rubble. One of my Marines spotted it. He said, ‘That block looks too symmetrical, too perfect.’ ”
Lieutenant Campbell had the area cleared and the bomb destroyed.
“Unless you know what rubble in that part of Iraq looks like, there’s no way you’d see that,” he said. “I had two guys, one we called Hound Dog, who were really good at spotting things that didn’t fit.”
The men and women who performed best in the Army’s I.E.D. detection study had the sort of knowledge gained through experience, according to a preliminary analysis of the results; but many also had superb depth perception and a keen ability to sustain intense focus for long periods. The ability to pick odd shapes masked in complex backgrounds — a “Where’s Waldo” type of skill that some call anomaly detection — also predicted performance on some of the roadside bomb simulations.
“Some of these things cannot be trained, obviously,” said Jennifer Murphy, a psychologist at the Army Research Institute and the principal author of the I.E.D. study. “But some may be; these are fighters who become very sensitive to small changes in the environment. They’ll clear the same road every day and notice ridiculously subtle things: this rock was not here yesterday.”
In a study that appeared last month, neuroscientists at Princeton University demonstrated just how sensitive this visual ability is — and how a gut feeling may arise before a person becomes conscious of what the brain has registered.
They had students try to pick out figures — people or cars — in a series of photos that flashed by on a computer screen. The pictures flashed by four at a time, and the participants were told to scan only two of them, either those above and below the center point, or those to the left and right. Eye-tracking confirmed that they did just that.
But brain scans showed that the students’ brains registered the presence of people or cars even when the figures appeared in photos that they were not paying attention to. They got better at it, too, with training.
Some people’s brains were almost twice as fast at detecting the figures as others’. “It appears that the brain primes the whole visual system to be strongly sensitive to categories of visual input,” kinds of things to look for, said Marius V. Peelen, a neuroscientist at Princeton and a co-author of the study with Li Fei-Fei and Sabine Kastner. “And apparently some people’s visual system processes things much faster than others’.”
Something in the Air
A soldier or Marine could have X-ray vision and never see most I.E.D.’s, however. Veterans say that those who are most sensitive to the presence of the bombs not only pick up small details but also have the ability to step back and observe the bigger picture: extra tension in the air, unusual rhythms in Iraqi daily life, oddities in behavior.
“One afternoon I remember turning down a road in Baghdad we were very familiar with, and there’s no one out — very creepy for that time of day,” said Sgt. Don Gomez, a spokesman for the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, who took part in the invasion and later, in 2005, drove a general in and around Baghdad.
Trash was heaped in a spot along the street where Sergeant Gomez and other drivers in the convoy had not seen it before, so they gave it a wide berth.
“We later called it in to an explosives team and, sure enough, they found one and detonated it — the thing left a huge crater,” he said.
As the brain tallies cues, big and small, consciously and not, it may send out an alarm before a person fully understands why.
In a landmark experiment in 1997, researchers at the University of Iowa had people gamble on a simple card game. Each participant was spotted $2,000 and had to choose cards from any of four decks. The cards offered immediate rewards, of $50 or $100, and the occasional card carried a penalty. But the game was rigged: the penalties in two of the decks were modest and in the other two decks were large.
The pattern was unpredictable, but on average the players reported “liking” some decks better than others by the 50th card to the 80th card drawn before they could fully explain why. Their bodies usually tensed up — subtly, but significantly, according to careful measures of sweat — in a few people as early as about the 10th card drawn, according to the authors, Dr. Damasio; his wife, Dr. Hanna Damasio; Dr. Antoine Bechara; and Dr. Daniel Tranel.
In a study published in May, researchers at King’s College in London did brain scans of people playing the gambling game used in the University of Iowa study. Several brain regions were particularly active, including the orbitofrontal cortex, which is involved in decision making, and the insula, where the brain is thought to register the diverse sensations coming from around the body and interpret them as a cohesive feeling — that cooling sensation of danger. In some brains, the alarm appears to sound earlier, and perhaps more intensely, than average.
Gut feelings about potential threats or opportunities are not always correct, and neuroscientists debate the conditions under which the feeling precedes the conscious awareness of the clues themselves. But the system evolved for survival, and, in some people, is apparently exquisitely sensitive, the findings suggest.
Mastering the Fear
One thing did not quite fit on the morning of Sergeant Tierney’s patrol in Mosul. The nine soldiers left the police station around 9 a.m., but they did not get their usual greeting. No one shot at them or fired a rocket-propelled grenade. Minutes passed, and nothing.
The soldiers walked the road in an odd silence, scanning the landscape for evidence of I.E.D.’s and trying to stay alert for an attack from insurgents. In war, anxiety can run as high as the Iraqi heat, and neuroscientists say that the most perceptive, observant brain on earth will not pick up subtle clues if it is overwhelmed by stress.
In the Army study of I.E.D. detection, researchers found that troops who were good at spotting bombs in simulations tended to think of themselves as predators, not prey. That frame of mind by itself may work to reduce anxiety, experts say.
The brains of elite troops also appear to register perceived threats in a different way from the average enlistee, said Dr. Martin P. Paulus, a psychiatrist at the University of California, San Diego, and the V.A. San Diego Healthcare System. At the sight of angry faces, members of the Navy Seals show significantly higher activation in the insula than regular soldiers, according to a just-completed study.
“The big question is whether these differences perceiving threat are natural, or due to training,” Dr. Paulus said.
That morning in Mosul, Sergeant Tierney gave the command to fall back. The soldier who had asked to approach the car had just time enough to turn before the bomb exploded. Shrapnel clawed the side of his face; the shock wave threw the others to the ground. The two young boys were gone: killed in the blast, almost certainly, he said.
Since then, Sergeant Tierney has often run back the tape in his head, looking for the detail that tipped him off. Maybe it was the angle of the car, or the location; maybe the absence of an attack, the sleepiness in the market: perhaps the sum of all of the above.
“I can’t point to one thing,” he said. “I just had that feeling you have when you walk out of the house and know you forgot something — you got your keys, it’s not that — and need a few moments to figure out what it is.”
He added, “I feel very fortunate none of my men were killed or badly wounded.”
TierneyLab - Putting Ideas in Science to the Test: The Curious Case of Phineas Gage, Refocused
By Benedict Carey, The New York Times, July 22, 2009
The medical literature is punctuated with gruesome, anonymous case studies but one of the most ghastly images of all comes with name: Phineas Gage, a Vermont railroad worker who, in 1848, was skewered through his brain by an iron bar the size of large fireplace poker in an explosion. Gage survived, became an object of medical fascination, and images of his impaled skull (preserved at Harvard University) later landed in textbooks to illustrate the function of the frontal lobes. With his frontals mangled, the once-reliable Mr. Gage became a lout and wastrel. Or so the textbook version goes.
Now, a Maryland couple has come forward with what experts believe to be a photograph of Mr. Gage, post-accident, and it is a striking reminder that there was a man behind the medical case. The iron bar did not lodge in Mr. Gage’s skull – it passed through – and the person staring out of the photograph looks far from seriously disabled. He looks like the actor Christopher Reeve in his prime, minus an eye. In an article accompanying the image in the Journal of the History of Neuroscience, Malcolm Macmillan, a psychologist at the University of Melbourne, describes the process and raises the question, Who was Phineas Gage after the accident? No one really knows, as Dr. Macmillan has pointed out in a series of papers. Mr. Gage was changed, all right, but he lived another 11 years, held several jobs, and was not so easy to fit into the “wastrel” mold given him by textbooks after his death.
“The facts about the real Phineas may have a slight resemblance to the modern pre-accident representation, but he can hardly be recognized in the post–accident picture,” Dr. Macmillan writes, in one of his papers.
The photo and its possible implications demonstrate that medical history, even when it names names and preserves bones preserved, can be just as steeped in folklore as the oral kind.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-07-28 06:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-28 08:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-28 08:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-28 08:28 pm (UTC)