The doctors say that all fifteen psychotic guards cited monetary motivation as their primary reason for taking up their line of work. The doctors do not indicate whether or how this differs from the motivation of non-psychotic security guards.
The report advises mental health professionals ‘to collect a work history, including security guard work, among psychotic patients’. It advises the public, in mildly tangled language, that ‘psychotic security guards carrying weapons may be the greatest risk of posing a danger to others’. And for employers, there is this: ‘The question of who should be employed as security guards, especially if weapons will be carried, merits further study.’
Silva, J. A., G. B. Leong, and R. Weinstock (1993). ‘The Psychotic Patient as Security Guard.’ Journal of Forensic Sciences 38 (6): 1436–40.
O?
‘What’s in a name?’ Shakespeare famously asked – but from a detective’s viewpoint, the question is dauntingly broad. A team of scientists based in Switzerland and France undertook a more tightly targeted investigation: what’s in a capital letter O? They spill all in a study published in the journal Forensic Science International.
This was their way of tackling a deep legal worry. Police and other criminal justice authorities struggle, on occasion, to decide the significance of a sample of handwriting. These professionals rely on the two so-called fundamental laws of handwriting: first, that no two people write exactly alike; and second, that no one person writes the same word exactly the same way twice. The problem is that no one knows whether these ‘laws’ are correct. Maybe, just maybe, our system of jurisprudence rests on assumptions that are, like the letter O itself, hollow.
Raymond Marquis at the University of Lausanne’s School of Criminal Sciences, together with three colleagues, took an unflinching look at this possibly gaping hole in the legal system. They examined handwriting samples from three individuals. Collectively, the samples contained 445 handwritten capital Os that the scientists deemed suitable for analysis.
Os, sampled
TV crime dramas have given us a misleading notion about handwriting analysis. The state of the art is substantially that – a traditional art, larded with some nice dollops of rigorous science. Marquis and his team write: ‘Letter shape has not been studied in a global and precise way within the various existing methods; only certain aspects of it have been approached by a variety of geometrical measurements.’
It’s true. No other handwritten uppercase letter has been studied with exactly the same computational rigour that Marquis’s team applied to their chosen letter. Not Y, not M, not C. Not even A.
The team stripped down each capital O, step by step. First, they digitized the O, turning it into a mass of data that would be digestible by any healthy computer. Then they removed the fat from the written lines, paring each particular O down to its own, peculiar, skinny, skeletal shape – a wiggly, quirky contour. They then performed a Fourier analysis, which is a sort of mathematical X-ray. This revealed a series of simple pictures, each showing some simple aspect of that particular O’s personal O-ness – its ellipticality, its triangularity, its quadrangularity, its pentagonality, its hexagonality. Together, these give a good, round, precise picture of that uniquely individual O.
The scientists are excited at what they found. The Fourier analysis did indeed reliably tell them which of the 445 capital Os had been handwritten by which of the three people.
They have not yet answered the big question: can we trust the laws of handwriting analysis? But they’ve got things moving in the right direction. Marquis and his colleagues have achieved, they say pointedly, ‘a step to objective discrimination between writers based on the study of the capital character O’.
Marquis, Raymond, Matthieu Schmittbuhl, Williams David Mazzella, and Franco Taroni (2005). ‘Quantification of the Shape of Handwritten Characters: A Step to Objective Discrimination Between Writers Based on the Study of the Capital Character O.’ Forensic Science International 150 (1): 23–32.
Do Ethicists Steal More Books?
‘One might suppose that ethicists would behave with particular moral scruple’, begins the little monograph, looking you straight in the eye while grinning and snorting, textily. The two co-authors, philosophy professors who specialize in ethics, thus embark on what they call a ‘preliminary investigation’ of their fellow ethics experts.
Eric Schwitzgebel, of the University of California, Riverside, and Joshua Rust, of Stetson University in Deland, Florida, surveyed almost three hundred attendees of a meeting of the American Philosophical Association. Tell us, they asked in a variety of ways, about the ethical behaviour of ethicists you have known. Schwitzgebel and Rust offered candy to anyone who agreed to complete the survey form. They report that ‘a number of people stole candy without completing a questionnaire or took more than their share without permission’.
The ethics experts in aggregate indicated that in their experience, on the whole, ethicists behave no more ethically than do other persons. The paper, published in the journal Mind, pauses for just a moment to suggest a broader context. ‘Police officers commit crimes’, it says. ‘Doctors smoke. Economists invest badly. Clergy flout the rules of their religion.’
Schwitzgebel also wrote a study, on his own, called ‘Do Ethicists Steal More Books?’, which elbowed its way into the face of readers of the journal Philosophical Psychology. He drew up lists of philosophy books – some specifically about ethics, others not. Then, using information available through computer networks, he examined the status of every copy of those books in nineteen British and thirteen American academic library systems.
Schwitzgebel looked separately at what happened to newish books (Buchanon’s Ethics, Efficiency and the Market; Baron’s Kantian Ethics Almost Without Apology; Hurd’s Moral Combat; and suchlike bestsellers), and to older ones (Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics; Kant’s Critique of Judgment; Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil; and other beloved masterworks).
It was roughly the same story. The ethics books, whether youthful or aged, went missing more often than did the not-quite-so-relentlessly-about-ethics books.
The youthful, ‘relatively obscure, contemporary ethics books of the sort likely to be borrowed mainly by professors and advanced students of philosophy were actually about 50% more likely to be missing’. The aged, ‘classic (pre-1900) ethics books were about twice as likely to be missing’. (For those older books, Schwitzgebel looked only at the American libraries, muttering that ‘the British library catalog system proved impractically unwieldy’.)
More recently, Schwitzgebel has written in his blog about what he calls ‘the phenomenology of being a jerk’. He identifies two important components of jerkhood. ‘First: an implicit or explicit sense that you are an “important” person.’ ‘Second: an implicit or explicit sense that you are surrounded by idiots.’
To determine whether you yourself might be a jerk, Schwitzgebel suggests, look at those two simple criteria. He adds the almost mandatory thought: ‘I can’t say that I myself show up as well by this self-diagnostic as I would have hoped.’
Schwitzgebel, Eric, and Joshua Rust (2009). ‘The Moral Behavior of Ethicists: Peer Opinion.’ Mind 118: 1043–59.
–– (2010). ‘Do Ethicists and Political Philosophers Vote More Often Than Other Professors?’ Review of Philosophy and Psychology 1: 189–99.
Schwitzgebel, Eric (2009). ‘Do Ethicists Steal More Books?’ Philosophical Psychology 22 (6): 711–25.
Twelve
It Must Mean …
Something
In Brief
‘Descartes and the Gut: “I’m Pink Therefore I Am”’
by D. G. Thompson (published in Gut, 2001)
Some of what’s in this chapter: Foul words for referees. • The decline of public insult in London • How beats the poet’s heart, electrically • The the the the the the the the the the the, in order • The scholar’s colon • Bad highlighting • Dude • Bob, by the look of him • Gówsü; Déznep; Wítaw; Th�
�bonf; Mávquawpûnt; Stisk • ’Meaning’ meaning ‘meaning’
The Curse of the Referee
Do swear words have predictable effects on football referees? A team of Austrian scientists tackles that question in a study called ‘May I Curse a Referee? Swear Words and Consequences’. Stefan Stieger, of the University of Vienna, together with Andrea Praschinger and Christine Pomikal, who describe themselves as ‘independent scientists’, published their report in the Journal of Sports Science and Medicine.
Football referees enforce the laws of the game set forth by the sport’s governing organization, FIFA (the Fédération International de Football Association). The pertinent regulation is FIFA’s Law 12 (‘Fouls and Misconduct’), whose very last section – Section 81 – simply says: ‘A player who is guilty of using offensive, insulting or abusive language or gestures must be sent off.’
Stieger, Praschinger, and Pomikal performed their research in two steps. First, they obtained some swear words. Then, obscenities in hand, they found some referees who were willing to answer a survey.
The team began by drawing up a list of one hundred potential swear words. They pared the list by recruiting thirteen German-speaking residents of Austria, six women and seven men. Each Deutsch-Lautsprecher evaluated each word, rating both its degree of insultingness and whether it could be properly applied to both men and women. ‘Participants [also] had to rate the insulting content of each swear word. Does the swear word concern the person’s power of judgment (e.g., blind person), intelligence (e.g., fool), appearance (e.g., fatso), sexual orientation (e.g., bugger), or genitals (e.g., crap)?’
The researchers then found 113 game game referees from across Austria, and posed the following situation to each of them: during a stoppage in play, one team’s captain comes up to you and suggests you make a particular ruling. You decline. ‘Hereupon the team captain says … (the swear word mentioned below), turns around and walks [away].’ Do you, the referee, respond by issuing (1) a red card or (2) a yellow card or (3) an admonition, or do you (4) do nothing at all? The referee was asked this for each of the twenty-eight swear words.
Their answers showed a clear pattern. ‘Analyzing all swear words independent of their offensive nature, it was found that 55.7% of the swear words would have received a red card, although Law 12 would have prescribed a red card in all cases.’ Only a very few officials would always, automatically, eject the player.
Digging into the nitty-gritty of the data, the researchers gained two general insights. First, ‘that the decision to assign any card was dependent on the insulting content of the swear word’. Second, that ‘referees would have issued a red card for sexually inclined words or phrases rather than for terms insulting one’s appearance’.
Praschinger, Andrea, Christine Pomikal, and Stefan Stieger (2011). ‘May I Curse a Referee? Swear Words and Consequences.’ Journal of Sports Science and Medicine 10: 341–45.
May We Recommend
‘Swearing as a Response to Pain’
by Richard Stephens, John Atkins, and Andrew Kingston (published in Neuroreport, 2009, and honoured with the 2010 Ig Nobel Prize in peace)
Injury to Insult
Insults just aren’t what they used to be, according to a study called ‘The Decline of Public Insult in London 1660–1800’. The study’s author, Robert B. Shoemaker, teaches eighteenth-century British history at Sheffield University, in the UK.
Professor Shoemaker pored through records of court proceedings from the late sixteenth through the early nineteenth centuries, paying special attention to the insults. Time was, insulting someone in public – or even in private – could easily propel you into court, and thence, if the insult was good or your luck wasn’t, to jail.
Shoemaker charted the number of insult-fuelled prosecutions in the consistory court of London over those centuries. ‘The pattern is clear’, he writes, ‘a massive increase in the late sixteenth century to a peak in the 1620s and 1630s, followed by a collapse ... By the late eighteenth century per capita prosecutions in London had fallen to only one or two per 100,000 per year.’ By the late 1820s, the number of prosecutions had dropped to an insulting one or two, total, per year.
(The high point for legal action, by the way, was 1633, the year Samuel Pepys was born. One can only speculate at how much more colourful his famous diary might have been had Pepys lived a generation earlier, during London’s golden age of insult.)
As the years rolled by, individual nasty words lost some of their power to trigger prosecution. Legal proceedings dealt, instead, with more general allegations. Court documents became less fun to read, with fewer bold, juicy epithets, the accusations now built of mushy phrases such as ‘opprobrious names’, ‘scandalous abuse’, or ‘grossly insulting’.
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries revolutionized the legal handling of insult, Shoemaker suggests in telling us that ‘the very nature, function and significance of the insult was changing over this period’.
He invokes the words of King’s College London historian Laura Gowing. Gowing emphasized that in earlier years, ‘Defamations rarely happened inside private houses, at meals, or within private conversation, but were staged, often in the open, with an audience provided by the witnesses who, “hearing a great noise” in the street, left their work or houses to investigate or intervene ... the doorstep was a crucial vantage point for the exchange of insult.’
But by the eighteenth century, Shoemaker reports, ‘the insult became less public’. Insults moved indoors. Many ‘took place in semi-private locations, such as yards, shops, pubs and houses, where there were not always many witnesses’. Also, ‘there was much less certainty about whether defamatory words automatically destroyed reputations’, and so, ‘correspondingly, the power of insulting words was declining’.
All this tells us something sad about modernization: ‘At a basic level, due to frequent geographical mobility eighteenth-century Londoners did not know or take an interest in the activities of their neighbours as much as they used to.’
In this view of things, public insults declined because modern citizens no longer loved their neighbours.
Shoemaker, Robert B. (2000). ‘The Decline of Public Insult in London 1660–1800.’ Past and Present 169 (1): 97–131.
Measures of Poetry
Poetry is said, by poets, to make the heart flutter and the breath catch. A team of German, Swiss, and Austrian scientists showed that the claim is quite true, at least under certain laboratory conditions.
The researchers tried to describe this lyrically. They sought, they say, ‘to investigate the synchronization between low frequency breathing patterns and respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) of heart rate during guided recitation of poetry’.
Twenty healthy individuals volunteered to spend twenty minutes reading aloud hexameter verse from ancient Greek literature. These volunteers were German speakers. They read a passage from a German translation of Homer’s heart-pounding, breath-forcing epic The Odyssey. In accordance with modern sensibilities, the research protocol was approved beforehand by an ethics committee. The study was published in the American Journal of Physiology – Heart and Circulatory Physiology.
Dr Dirk Cysarz, of the Gemeinschaftskrankenhaus Herdecke in Germany, led the team. He loves studying matters of the heart and lungs, especially the ways in which those organs exhibit rhythm and pacing. Other group members have spent their careers delving, variously, into the mysteries of mathematics, music, and speech problems.
To any volunteer who was unversed in the methods of modern medical experimentation, the recitation would have seemed unexpectedly complex. In ancient Greece, reciting poetry was a simple process. One stood or sat, unencumbered, and spoke. But here, now, there were strings attached. The Greeks, anyway, would have called them strings. We call them electrical wires.
Whilst spouting Homer from the lips, each volunteer was also sending electrical signals straight from his or her heart, via a transducer and wires, to a solid-state elect
rocardiogram recording apparatus.
And that’s not all. The poetry-reciting, electrical-pulse-generating volunteer also supplied streams of information about his or her nasal and oral airflow. Three thermistors were mounted next to the nostrils and in front of the mouth. Thermistors are little electronic devices that measure temperature change – in this case between warm, exhaled air and cooler, about-to-be-inhaled air. Thus were the nuances of breath and pulse documented, forming a record of each volunteer’s poetico-physiological experience.
The scientists gathered up a potentially blooming, buzzing confusion of data. To make sense of it, they used statistical and other mathematical tools that, for the most part, did not exist in the time of Homer: time-series band-pass filtering; Fourier transforms; Hilbert transforms; RR-tachograms.
The result of all this is summed up in the title of their study: ‘Oscillations of Heart Rate and Respiration Synchronize During Poetry Recitation’. Though expressed in somewhat technical language, it accords with the belief of millennia of declaiming poets. The synchronization, we now know, is not perfect. But the project brings us ever-so-slightly closer to understanding poetry, inspiration, and exhalation, by the numbers.
Cysarz, Dirk, Dietrich von Bonin, Helmut Lackner, Peter Heusser, Maximilian Moser, and Henrik Bettermann (2004). ‘Oscillations of Heart Rate and Respiration Synchronize During Poetry Recitation.’ American Journal of Physiology – Heart and Circulatory Physiology 287: H579–87.
Where The –
‘The’ has its place. That, more or less, is the theme of Glenda Browne’s treatise entitled ‘The Definite Article: Acknowledging “The” in Index Entries’.
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