What's your Drinking Personality?

The BBC is running a fluffy piece on peoples drinking personalities. It seems a psychologist, Dr. Glenn Willson, has observed the behavior of 500 Brits while at bars and pubs and found that their body language belies their personality. The good doctor has determined that their are eight distinct "drinking personalities". No more, no less.

From the article:

THE JACK-THE-LAD

This "peacock" is conscious of his image and will drink a bottled beer, or cider.

He is inclined to be confident and arrogant, and can be territorial in his gestures, spreading himself over as much space as possible, for example, pushing the glass well away from himself and leaning back in his chair.

If he is drinking with friends, he would be unlikely to welcome approaches from outside the group, unless sycophantic and ego-enhancing.

So, what's your drinking personality? I think I am clearly the "Ice Queen."

Image via the BBC.

Classnotes

As more graduates process down aisles of their fair arcadian quads, auditoriums or the halls of a grander building, it can be nice to peruse the Classnotes section. The diversity of reported experiences can be fascinating. From our alma mater's class of 1985: SP wrote, "I'm presently an artist's model in Scotland and 'mother' to three gerbils." What a good balance to the enlarged extraterrestrial-like infant photos! SP's highlight is directly above a note from Tip D., the Commanding Officer of the VFA-103 Jolly Rogers that was deployed onboard the USS Eisenhower and flying in support of the NATO Coalition in Afghanistan. "Before reaching the Middle East, his squadron enjoyed trips to Rome and Cyprus. ..." And on the next page, from JA: "I'm surviving in the Michigan recession. To keep things interesting our first baby is on the way, due about the time this issue of the magazine comes out." That was spring 2007. Let's hope the family's doing well.

Of course, beyond serving as a source of potential networking and curiosity-satisfying, the Classnotes section lets us compare blogs. Here's a link to a blog written by an informational management specialist working for State.

Gentle readers, we'd be delighted if you shared one of your favorite Classnotes, fiction or nonfiction.

Open Acess Journals

Dan and Bridget have decried the costs associated with accessing primary research in many journals. Despite the fact that publishers charge authors to publish, advertisers, and subscribers for their services, they balk at the idea of having to provide the public with free access to the research that we have supported with our tax dollars. (some) Publishers have also demonstrated that they are not above publishing "advertorial" journals for pharmaceutical companies if the price is right. Specifically I am referring to Elsevier's publishing of the bogus "Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine" for Merck. But alas, I digress...

Open access journals like those published by the Public Library of Science offer an alternative to the collection racket that is the traditional publishing industry. Unfortunately publishing in these journals lacks the prestige associated with many of the more famous traditional journals. This may be changing though. The discovery and description of ancestral primate Darwinius masillae appears not in Science or Nature but rather PLoS ONE, the flagship journal from the Public Library of Science. The fact that the article's authors elected to publish findings of this magnitude in an open access journal may mark the beginning of a change in publishing industry.


Darwinius masillae via: Franzen JL, Gingerich PD, Habersetzer J, Hurum JH, von Koenigswald W, et al. 2009 Complete Primate Skeleton from the Middle Eocene of Messel in Germany: Morphology and Paleobiology. PLoS ONE 4(5): e5723. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0005723

Inaccessible education

In the NY Review of Books, Columbia University humanities professor Andrew Delbanco writes, "Higher education has always been a mirror of American society—and, for the moment, at least, the image it reflects is not a pretty one." The effectual exclusion of talented potential students from pricey programs concerns not only individuals' freedom of choice, but American competitiveness. In a May 14 review, Delbanco looks at the undergraduate financial situation with an institutional focus. That education-as-equalizer is the exception, rather than the American norm, is nothing new. Delbanco's perspective offers current insight into the positions of stakeholders including professors, potential and real students, and the state. We'll assume he was paid more than the nearly incredible 10 dollars per hour many student jobs pay. So, vive la différence?

A sock party: better than a wedding party and a search party

Sliding from boots into sandals, with joyful abandon we toss over our shoulder wool socks and their liners. Yet perhaps it is premature to store the liners with the ugly sweaters. A Political Puppet Party could put the liners to good use! Sock liners could don an interpretive disguise of sprezzatura, or be decorated to represent a member of the Belarusian Central Rada, or a certain Cold War-era Latin American regime leader. Coy puppeteers wary of the danger of trivializing atrocities could come costumed or not. Just put us on the guest shortlist, please.

Yay

From USA Today:

President Obama's new budget would eliminate most money for abstinence-only sex education and shift it to teen pregnancy prevention — a U-turn in what has been more than a decade of sex education policy in the USA.

About fraking time.

What diplomats!

LYSISTRATA: Good day, Lampito, dear friend from Lacedaemon! How well and handsome you look! what a rosy complexion! and how strong you seem; why, you could strangle a bull surely!
LAMPITO: Yes, indeed I really think I could. 'Tis because I do gymnastics and practice the 'kick dance.
LYSISTRATA: And what superb bosoms!
LAMPITO: La! You are feeling me as if I were a beast for sacrifice.
Lysistrata, Act I, Scene I

Lysistrata reminds us how to get a good start in terms of solidarity: a warm greeting that affirms strength and beauty (and also attracts the audience) but doesn't take offense at a smart retort. On this subject of solidarity --and attention, now that we caught yours-- various news agencies have been reporting on the week-long Kenyan women's political protest that is a "sex strike," organized by women's NGOs such as Women's Development Organisation. A male Kenyan legislator is reported to be upset. Moving on... International news media coverage of similar protests in the recent past highlights diverse agents and causes. Headlines have featured Cameroonian women angered by crop destruction (2003), Pereiran (Colombian) wives and girlfriends of "gang members" appalled by violence (2006), and Naples women opposed to men using dangerous fireworks (2008). Radical, longer-term activisms, such as the one based upon the booklet Love Your Enemy?, have taken their own place in history and the present. The anti-misogyny that roots such a (sub-)movement brings to mind the great risk some women assume to participate in attention-getting abstinence. Looking ahead, it will be interesting to see how changes in economic status and the general social construction of reality are reflected in the motivation, composition, strategy and achievement of these (in)actions that can be ever so diplomatic.

Robots versus Poachers

National Geographic is running an interesting article on the efforts of wildlife officials in the US to catch poachers using robotic decoy animals as bait. The robots mimic the behavior of wild animals and are much more resilient than their non-metallic counterparts. The obvious next step here is to make robotic animals that actually arrest the poachers themselves.

On a related note Talk of the Nation's Science Friday had a good segment on animal CSI yesterday.