Gender-specific and gender-neutral pronouns A gender-specific pronoun is a pronoun associated with a particular gender, such as a pronoun denoting female or male. Examples include the English third-person personal pronouns he and she. A gender-neutral pronoun, by contrast, is a pronoun that is not associated with a particular gender, and that does not imply male or female. Many English pronouns are gender-neutral, including they (in both plural and singular uses). Many of the world's languages do not have gender-specific pronouns. Others, however – particularly those which have a pervasive system of grammatical gender (or have historically had such a system, as with English) – have gender-specificity in certain of their pronouns, particularly personal pronouns of the third person. Problems of usage arise in languages such as English, in contexts where a person of unspecified or unknown sex is being referred to, but the most natural available pronouns (he or she) are gender-specific. Overview[edit] English[edit] In 1789, William H.
How running 'may preserve thinking skills' 2 April 2014Last updated at 19:55 ET By Helen Briggs BBC News Exercise is good for the brain as well as the heart Aerobic exercise in your 20s may protect the brain in middle age, according to a US study. Activities that maintain cardio fitness - such as running, swimming and cycling - led to better thinking skills and memory 20 years on. Scientists say the research, reported in Neurology, adds to evidence the brain benefits from good heart health. Cardio fitness is a measure of how well the body absorbs oxygen during exercise and transports it to the muscles. Researchers at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, tested almost 3,000 healthy people with an average age of 25. Continue reading the main story “Start Quote This is one more important study that should remind young adults of the brain health benefits of cardio fitness activities such as running, swimming, biking or cardio fitness classes” End QuoteDr David JacobsUniversity of Minnesota, Minneapolis Total fitness
176, Amy Hempel Amy Hempel does not enjoy interviews. She quotes her friend Patty Marx: “I’m not good at small talk; I’m not good at big talk; and medium talk just doesn’t come up.” Talking about the self is both unseemly and unnerving, she feels, and dissecting her own deliberate process of composition through, in her words, “pointy-headed questions,” tends to provoke her exasperation. This makes for an elusive interview. However, over a humid June weekend at her home last year, Hempel behaved as a polite and gracious host who pointed out the sights and chatted about movies, politics, and theories of pet care, but nonetheless wanted very much to be doing all of it away from the tape recorder. Talking about writing, in particular, meant noticing how Hempel loves to quote, at length, those friends and writers dearest to her—and how much she prefers their words to her own. Oh, I have a form of that, I’d say. What were you reading back then? I can’t remember much of it. No, no. Yes, but I didn’t know any.
5-Year-Olds Can Learn Calculus - Luba Vangelova The familiar, hierarchical sequence of math instruction starts with counting, followed by addition and subtraction, then multiplication and division. The computational set expands to include bigger and bigger numbers, and at some point, fractions enter the picture, too. Then in early adolescence, students are introduced to patterns of numbers and letters, in the entirely new subject of algebra. A minority of students then wend their way through geometry, trigonometry and, finally, calculus, which is considered the pinnacle of high-school-level math. But this progression actually “has nothing to do with how people think, how children grow and learn, or how mathematics is built,” says pioneering math educator and curriculum designer Maria Droujkova. “Calculations kids are forced to do are often so developmentally inappropriate, the experience amounts to torture,” she says. This turns many children off to math from an early age.
Psychologists Have Uncovered a Troubling Feature of People Who Seem Nice All the Time This week, a Texas mother pointed out that a high school geography textbook was painting a misleading picture of slavery — and the publisher acknowledged she was right and immediately moved to correct the text. Mother Roni Dean-Burren was surprised to learn McGraw Hill Education's ninth-grade textbook World Geography seemingly lacked any reference to the brutal conditions endured by black people captured and sold in the Atlantic slave trade, BuzzFeed reports. Her concerns were subsequently mirrored by tens of thousands of Facebook users. The questionable section of the textbook, titled "Patterns of Immigration," reads "The Atlantic slave trade between the 1500s and the 1800s brought millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations." In a video posted to Facebook, Dean-Burren explained precisely what was wrong with that section — the term "worker" omits mention of the vile, coercive nature of slavery.
Meikkimaisteri Kun istuutuu Annina Nyholmin, 24, viereen Unicafen pöytään, tulee osaksi häntä ympäröivää makean hedelmäistä tuoksupilveä. Hän on huoliteltu nainen: ripsissä on pidennykset, ranteessa muodikas suurikokoinen rannekello ja hiuksissa tuore leikkaus. ”En kylve kosmetiikassa tai paklaa itseäni päästä varpaisiin, vaikka olen kauneudenhoitoalan ihminen”, Nyholm sanoo. Hän sanoo laittautuvansa aamuisin kuten muutkin suomalaiset naiset, nopeasti. Nyholm kuitenkin eroaa naapuripöytien opiskelijatytöistä siinä, että tietää, mitkä hänen sävyttävän päivävoiteensa 30 eri ainesosaa ovat. Ainesosat tulivat tutuksi ammattikorkeakoulussa, jossa Nyholm on opiskellut estenomiksi, siis kauneudenhoitoalan asiantuntijaksi. ”Epäluuloisuus luonnontieteitä kohtaa karisi, kun laboratoriossa pistettiin purkki pöytään ja alettiin opiskella, mitä siellä on. Kiinnosti niin paljon, että siinä vaiheessa kun hän sai käteensä estenomin paperit, Nyholmilla oli jo opiskelupaikka Helsingin yliopistosta.
Ira Glass Why Americans Are the Weirdest People in the World IN THE SUMMER of 1995, a young graduate student in anthropology at UCLA named Joe Henrich traveled to Peru to carry out some fieldwork among the Machiguenga, an indigenous people who live north of Machu Picchu in the Amazon basin. The Machiguenga had traditionally been horticulturalists who lived in single-family, thatch-roofed houses in small hamlets composed of clusters of extended families. For sustenance, they relied on local game and produce from small-scale farming. They shared with their kin but rarely traded with outside groups. While the setting was fairly typical for an anthropologist, Henrich’s research was not. The test that Henrich introduced to the Machiguenga was called the ultimatum game. Among the Machiguenga, word quickly spread of the young, square-jawed visitor from America giving away money. When he began to run the game it became immediately clear that Machiguengan behavior was dramatically different from that of the average North American. “Yes,” Henrich said.
RP Dicemaster on Shapeways Chuck Stover uses Shapeways' RP tech to crank out some intricate and seriously geeky Dungeons-&-Dragons-type dice, available in a variety of materials but best purchased in stainless steel. "Stainless steel has the heft to roll correctly and feel right in your hand," he writes. Geeky though these are, they're a great example of something that would take you forever to make using conventional methods, if you even could at all; and ones like the spiky pyramid below go for a reasonable six bucks and change. To die four What, you want the dice but don't have any way to carry them? Not to worry: Stover's Shapeways cohort Welsh Designs sells a chainmail dice bag.
Itsestä kiinni Jos konsulttien seurapiiritapahtuma kuulostaa eufemismilta helvetin neljännestä piiristä, helvetissä saa juodakseen kelvollista kahvia. Sillä sellaista täällä on tarjolla, tammikuisena tiistaiaamuna Talentumin luentosalissa Ruoholahdessa. Aamupalatilaisuudessa lanseerataan Pauli Aalto-Setälän ja Mikael Saarisen populaari-tieteellinen kirja, Innostus – Myötämanipuloinnin aakkoset. Sen takakansiteksti lupaa, että kirjan avulla innostamisesta ja innostumisesta saa tehtyä elämänmittaisen rutiinin, joka ”energisoi sinut ja ympärilläsi olevat ihmiset jopa huippusuorituksiin”. Ja niitähän tässä maassa tarvitaan, ainakin jos poliittista johtoa on uskominen: edellisellä viikolla järjestetyssä Selkäranka-seminaarissa pääministeri Jyrki Katainen on moittinut suomalaisia turhasta negatiivisuudesta. Mutta Talentumin voileipien äärellä kielteisyydestä ei ole tietoakaan. ”Mä olen Kataisen puolella. ”Mä pusken uuteen nousuun taas vahvempana / paina, aina, paina / uuteen nousuun aivan kuten aina.”
bravelycreative | Logic gets you from A to B. Imagination takes you everywhere. Albert Einstein Is marijuana withdrawal a real thing? – Malcolm Harris It would be an understatement to say that America has an ambivalent relationship with marijuana. The United States is in the world’s top five per-capita consumer of the drug, yet it treats possession more harshly than most of its international peers. The federal government maintains that marijuana has no accepted medical use, but many of the states that comprise the union have entire regulatory apparatuses built around licensed doctors prescribing weed. And despite all the law-enforcement attention, widespread marijuana use has never registered as a public health crisis. Marijuana withdrawal is a joke, and not a bad one at that. I’ve been what any medical study would classify as a heavy marijuana user for around five years, since I discovered that I was much more invested in my Victorian literature reading when I was high. Since then, I’ve been more or less what you could call ‘always stoned’. When I stopped using over the summer, I did lose my appetite. Visit our new film channel