MAGGIE WITTLIN Column
Archive
Smooth Criminals
Fifteen thousand inmates of a maximum security
prison in the Philippines, including 1,000 death row residents, are donating
their head and chest hair to help mop up the country's worst ever
oil spill. More than 200,000 liters of industrial fuel leaked when a tanker sank
on August 11. The spill has affected more than 40,000 people, causing families
to flee suffocating air pollution in the area. The Coast Guard will create a
barrier to contain the oil slick using sacks of chicken feathers and human hair
tied to bamboo poles.
The inmates are shaving just about everything to help the villagers. "This is a contribution even though it's a small part," a 37-year-old drug smuggler told Reuters. Now that's the talk of an upstanding citizen.
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Of Every Tree of the Garden Thou Mayest Freely Eat
In a study that gives a whole new meaning to the name "700 Club," researchers
have concluded that women who use religious media resources?whether television,
radio, or books?are more likely to be obese than women who do not. Purdue
sociologists Ken Ferraro and Krista Cline analyzed data that tracked the
religious practices and body mass indices of more than 2,500 people over the
course of eight years. They found that use of religious media increased
incidence of obesity by 14 percent among women. However, women who attended
religious services often were less likely to be obese than those who didn't
regularly haul themselves to their local house of worship. In 1988, Ferraro
published a paper with the claim that states with larger populations claiming
religious affiliations, especially states with large numbers of Baptists, had a
high level of obesity. Apparently consuming large quantities of religious
television is as bad as consuming large quantities of church bake sale
goods.
Boys Will Teach Boys
It's often best to learn under someone of the
same sex, according to a new, controversial study by Thomas Dee, a professor of
economics at Swarthmore. Dee analyzed test scores and survey results taken from
almost 25,000 eighth-graders in 1988 and concluded that when a woman leads a class, girls have higher
achievement and boys perform worse than when they are taught by a male teacher.
(Currently, about 80 percent of teachers in U.S. public schools are women.)
Dee's research is published in the journal Education Next, which is put
out by the Hoover Institution, a think tank founded on
libertarian principles. Dee said he also discovered that a teacher's gender
influenced attitudes towards student behavior: Female teachers were more likely
to see boys as disruptive, and male teachers were more likely to see girls as
inattentive. Come on, Dee, maybe that's not a question of perception. It's just
how middle school kids flirt.
Nun Sense
A new study out of the University of Montreal has shown that there is no single "God spot" in the brain.
Rather, a host of areas are employed during a mystical experience. To locate
spirituality neurologically, researchers subjected 15 cloistered Carmelite nuns
to fMRI brain scans while they were asked to relive a mystical experience. Since
God doesn't arrive on command, even when science beckons, the researchers
couldn't demand that the subjects achieve a true mystical experience. Citing
past studies where actors asked to enter a specific emotional state showed the
same brain activity as people actually experiencing the emotion, the researchers
noted that a dozen different brain regions went into action when the nuns did
their thing, including areas that normally govern self-consciousness, emotion,
and body representation.
