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.