Dennis Meredith’s career as a science communicator has included service at some of the country’s leading research universities, including MIT, Caltech, Cornell, Duke and the University of Wisconsin. His newest book, Explaining Research: How to Reach Key Audiences to Advance Your Work is the first comprehensive communications guidebook for scientists, engineers, and physicians. Meredith explains how to use websites, blogs, videos, webinars, old-fashioned lectures, news releases, and lay-level articles to reach key audiences, emphasizing along the way that a strong understanding of the audience in question will allow a more effective communication tailored to a unique background and set of needs. In the original post below Meredith looks at how to best use twitter.

While the Explaining Research Web site includes an extensive list of tools to enhance Twitter, there have been major questions about how people can best use Twitter and those tools to their professional benefit. Fortunately, communication experts are now beginning to come up with excellent guidance. Understanding Twitter is particularly important because it has become a ubiquitous communication tool since its launch a mere four years ago. Each minute, about 30,000 Twitter tweets sluice through the Internet, according to the nifty tracking service TweeSpeed. Perhaps like many of you, I’m a Twitter twit—reluctant to leap into this raging torrent without knowing how to “swim,” that is, how to use Twitter to communicate responsibly and advance my work. Although I have a Twitter account, @explainresearch, so far my only tweets have been feeds from my blog The Research Explainer.

Despite, or perhaps because of, its ubiquity, there is an active debate over the value of Twitter. For example, journalist James Harkin declared in an article in the Guardian that social network sites have “created only a deafening banality.” And New Yorker writer George Packer declared on his blog that Twitter is “crack for media addicts.” New York Times reporter Nick Bilton countered such assertions on his blog, citing Twitter’s extraordinary utility in uses from companies scheduling freight deliveries, to an astronaut tweeting answers to science questions from the space station, to Iranians reporting atrocities by their government. And Bryan Howland points out in his essay that, like television, Twitter can be both mindless babble and a useful information tool. What’s more, he says, one’s person’s babble can be another’s information gold.

Indeed, in Explaining Research, I point out that Twitter can provide useful, instant communication among people who are members of a group, field or center, or attending an event— as well as enabling communication with broader audiences such as the public.

One major problem is distinguishing your tweets from the 40 percent that are “pointless babble,” as a recent study found. Also, you need to decide whether you should tweet about your own experiences or concentrate on being an information source. A Rutgers study showed that some 80 percent of twitterers tweet mainly about their own lives. The study dubbed such Twitterers “meformers,” as opposed to “informers” who share information like links to news articles. The Rutgers study findings provide the first rule of successful tweeting: be an informer. The study found that the informers had significantly more friends and followers than did the meformers. Twitter itself has recognized the value of being an informer rather than a meformer by recently changing the basic question above its posting box from “What are you doing?” to “What’s happening?”

Besides attracting lots of followers, a major sign of tweeting success is getting “retweeted,” that is, having other people pass along your tweets. Perhaps the best set of tips for maximizing retweeting comes from viral marketing scientist Dan Zarella. His “Nine Scientifically Proven Ways to Get Retweeted on Twitter” were outlined by Fast Company writer Dan Macsai. Zarella’s tips are

* Use links to other sources in your tweets, and shorten those links with bit.ly, which yields particularly short URLs
* Use words and phrases that encourage retweeting, such as “you,” twitter,” “retweet,” and “please”
* Avoid idle chitchat in your tweets. Such chitchat is marked by words such as “game,” “going,” “haha,” and “lol”
* Use more “intellectual” words rather than simple ones
* Use punctuation marks such as colons and periods, but not semicolons
* Offer breaking news with your tweets
* Use proper nouns and third-person verbs, as is done in headlines
* Don’t insert negative emotions, sensations, swear words, or self-references
* Tweet in the afternoon and late in the week

A potentially troublesome Twitter issue—which you can actually turn to your advantage—is tweeting by audience members during your talks. While you might find this backchannel chatter disconcerting, speaking coach Olivia Mitchell, explains in her free ebook How to present with Twitter (and other backchannels) how to benefit from such tweeting and harness it to enhance your talks. She suggests simple steps to avoid being roasted by tweeters and respond to negative tweets; how to build a “Twitter team;” and how to use Twitter and other backchannels to encourage audience participation. There are even tools that enable you to tweet from within your PowerPoint slides and monitor the backchannel. Communication expert Denise Graveline also offers some excellent tips on using Twitter, including how to learn from Twitter hecklers.

As experts continue to offer such insights, swimming in the Twitter stream will undoubtedly become a more comfortable and productive experience.

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks a Reagan and the Tea Party Movement. See Lim’s previous OUPblogs here.

In 1966, Ronald Reagan won his first political campaign in a landslide victory against the two-term Democratic Governor of California, Edmund Brown. What is sometimes forgotten is that the preceding Republican primary had been a highly contested one. According to Reagan, it was “very bitter at times, largely because of the lingering split between conservatives and moderates in the state party.” The intra-party attacks became so heated that state Republican chairman, Gaylord Parkinson, proposed the Eleventh Commandment: “Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican,” a rule that Ronald Reagan obeyed ever since because the intra-party strife he experienced in his first political contest left him with a bitter taste in his mouth. Henceforth, his political career was dedicated to building coalitions and fitting as many people as he could squeeze under the Republican tent.

Forty years later, on the day on which Reagan would have celebrated his 99th birthday, Sarah Palin called on his memory when she delivered the keynote address at the first National Tea Party Convention in Nashville, TN, rehearsing a litany of bumper sticker lines that the Old Gipper would have approved. But Sarah Palin is no Ronald Reagan.

While like Palin, Reagan exuded charm and a common touch; unlike Sarah Palin and the general tenor of the Tea Party movement, he was not categorically, viscerally, or paradoxically anti-establishment. While Sarah Palin has admitted to being a pittbull with lipstick, Ronald Reagan was no pittbull. He was as as mellow and as measured as politicians came. He didn’t feel dispossessed or victimized. And if he felt it, he never showed the one sentiment – even if it had been legitimate – that permeates the Tea Party Movement: anger. Red, hot, seething, Glenn Beck Fury.

Most illustratively, Sarah Palin and the Tea Partiers do not believe
in the 11th Commandment. Next week, Palin is off to campaign for Texas Governor Rick Perry against his primary challenger, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson. Palin has already campaigned against Dede Scoozzafava running for election in NY 23, where she had supported Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman because he had “not been anointed by any political machine.” At Nashville, she reiterated her support for intra-party competition: “Despite what the pundits want you to think, contested primaries aren’t civil war. They’re democracy at work, and that’s beautiful.”

Democracy at work – grassroots movements without the backbone of a machine – has too often, in a dominant two-party system such as the US is, meant politicians out of a job. To survive after the surge of populist disaffection at a recession has subsided and to be more than a spoiler in elections, the Tea Party Movement must, paradoxically, go mainstream. And it should take it from a icon they have wrongly called their own. Ronald Reagan pulled the various factions of the Right together under a large, fusionist electoral tent that delivered him to victory. Sarah Palin and the Tea Partiers are trying to do the reverse and (perhaps inadvertently) break this tent up in a battle for ideological purity. If Reagan helped to turn a movement into a winning electoral coalition for three decades, the Tea Partiers are exerting a centrifugal force on the Right that may well counter-balance the considerable anti-Democratic bias going into the 2010 elections.

Gordon Thompson is Professor of Music at Skidmore College. His book, Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop, Inside Out, offers an insider’s view of the British pop-music recording industry. In the post below he looks at February of 1965. Check out Thompson’s other posts here.

Forty-five years ago in February 1965, British pop music rattled recording sales charts with a second wave of performers who followed in the footsteps of the Beatles, the Dave Clark Five, the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, the Animals, and more. Among the many new sounds broadcast either by the BBC or by the growing number of pirate radio stations that winter were recordings by the Who, Herman’s Hermits, and the Ivy League. Such was the nature of the British music and recording industries that a convenient myth emphasized the authenticity and self-sufficiency of these bands; however, reality held something rather more complicated.

Among the many that flocked to London to join the music revolution came two youngsters by bus from Birmingham who hoped to make their living as songwriters. To support themselves while they established publishing reputations, they found a niche as performers and session musicians in the booming recording industry. Terry Kennedy of the music publisher Southern Music renamed the young John Shakespeare and Ken Hawker as John Carter and Ken Lewis and eventually added Perry Ford (née Bryan Pugh) to create a song-writing and performing trio.

February saw the Who’s first single, “I Can’t Explain” slowly rise in the charts in a crisp Shel Talmy production (see last month’s blog); but the American artist-and-repertoire manager had needed to maximize the constraints of the three-track recording facilities at Pye Records. With limited ability to overdub vocals and the desire to keep the sound clean, he brought in Carter, Lewis, and Ford as backup singers so that guitarist-composer Pete Townsend could focus on his playing. Their high-falsetto, Beach-Boys-like vocals helped the Who and Shel Talmy create a touchstone of sixties-British-pop records.

Talmy represented only one of a growing number of independent artist-and-repertoire managers, a new echelon that financed, made, and sold their own recordings rather than take salaries from a record company. Mickie Most had established his importance the previous year with the Animals’ “House of the Rising Sun” and he now saw possibilities in the toothy grin and nasal voice of the young Peter Noone, renamed “Herman” in imitation of an American cartoon character. The recording reality of Herman’s Hermits found session musicians like Vic Flick (the guitarist whose distinctive sound appears in the early James Bond films) playing on their singles. Not only were Carter and Lewis also involved in the recording of Herman’s Hermits’ “Silhouettes,” but they had also written and performed on the disk’s flip side, “Can’t You Hear My Heart Beat.” This record now joined “I Can’t Explain” on the British charts.

If the competition between these and other recordings were not enough, Carter and Lewis with Ford released their own recording produced by Terry Kennedy and under the name, “The Ivy League.” They had released their first records as Carter-Lewis and the Southerners (with a young Jimmy Page on guitar) and had established a reputation among London’s music community for reliability and precision. On their “Funny How Love Can Be,” they brought their distinctive falsetto voices to bear upon a tune accompanied by some of the finest session musicians of the day, including guitarist Big Jim Sullivan and drummer Clem Cattini.

That disk would go to number eight on British charts, as would “I Can’t Explain,” while Herman’s Hermits would reach number three with their release. On the 11 and 25 February editions of the BBC’s Top of the Pops, Herman’s Hermits and the Ivy League would mime to their records with the Who doing the same on ITV’s Ready, Steady, Go! on 26 February. Of course, mimed performances allowed the continuation of the conceit that bands did everything on their records and the public consumed this myth eagerly.

Martin Benjamin is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Michigan State University.  Joy Curtis, R.N., is Professor Emerita of Nursing and Ombudsman Emerita at Michigan State University.  Together they wrote, Ethics in Nursing: Cases, Principles, and Reasoning, 4th edition.  The book provides a useful introduction to the identification and analysis of ethical issues that reflects both the special perspective of nursing and the value of systemic philosophical inquiry.  In the post below we learn about the history of the nurse-doctor relationship.

During the earliest period of nursing history, nursing and medicine developed independently and had little contact until recognition of the medical value of bedside nursing brought them together in the late nineteenth century.  With the development of the modern hospital came the introduction of the trained nurse, and patters of relationships in hospitals developed that affect current nurse- physician relationships.  Physicians developed the medical staff, but as a part of that staff, they were not employed by, subordinate to, or responsible to the hospital administration.  Physicians could and did, however, issue orders directly to nurses.  The nursing staff’s position was quite different from that of the medical staff.  Nurses were employed by, subordinate to, and directly responsible to the administration.  Thus, nursing developed under the dual command of physicians and hospital administrators.  The two lines of authority severely limited and complicated the decision-making role of a hospital nurse.

The Nightingale plan for nursing schools, which included instruction in both scientific principles and practical experience, appeared in the United States in 1873.  Unfortunately from American nursing, the schools had no endowment or financial backing, and hospitals quickly seized the opportunity to gain inexpensive student nurse labor.  Nursing education was essentially an apprenticeship, and, as late as the 930s, student nurses received little formal instruction in some hospitals.

Under the dominance of male doctors and administrators, schools of nursing grew, and they were not noted for encouraging nurses to think critically and for themselves.  Students entered nursing schools already expecting that women would defer to men, and therefore, that nurses would defer to doctors.  Adding to the traditional subordination of nurses to physicians, nursing school faculties often culled out overly questioning and rebellious students.  The students’ socialization and education taught them to be deferential.  Many diploma schools included the study of textbooks such as L. J. Morison’s Steppingstones in Professional Growth, published in a revised edition in 1965, which tells the student to cultivate loyalty, prudence, willingness, and cooperation since the physician has the right to expect such qualities.  Further, the nurse must follow orders and uphold the physician’s professional reputation.  Expected by society and trained by the nursing school to act as subordinates, most nurses behaved acordingly.

Yet tradition and nursing education alone cannot be blamed for the dominance of physicians and the deference of nurses.  In the late 1970s, Beatrice and Philip Kalisch argued that a physician who seems himself as an independent, omnipotent man with mystical healing powers relates to coworkers as he does to patients and therefore insists that nurses and other health care providers serve him in his “so-called captain of the ship role.”

The relegation of nursing to the subordinate position in the nurse-physician relationship limited collaboration between the two professions.  Empirical studies showed that physicians were at the center of the decision-making process and that nurses carried out those decisions.  In 1968, psychiatrist Leonard Stein described nurse-physician relationships in terms of a doctor-nurse game in which a nurse must appear to be passive.  In this game any suggestion a nurse makes to a doctor must be masked in such a way as to seem as if it were his idea, and a doctor may not openly seek advice from a nurse.  The historical legacy of nurse-physician relationships, while affecting specific nurses and doctors in various ways, gives decision-making power to a doctor and requires passivity (or biting one’s lip) of a nurse.  If a nurse and physician deviate from this pattern, the exchange of information and recommendations must occur in such a way that the doctor still appears to lead, the nurse to follow.

A study published in 1985 reports, among other things, that the “doctor-nurse game” described by Stein nearly 20 years earlier was still being played.  A resident interviewed for the study commented:

I have seen nurses, who really knew a lot more than an intern, kind of gently guide him [the intern] into making the right decision…They make some very good decisions and make some very helpful suggestions sometimes..It is like trying to guide the ship without actually taking hold of the wheel…There are nurses who are good at that.

A nurse in the same study claimed:

You have to be careful whenever you talk to them [physicians] that you are not telling them what to do.  You have to talk to them in such a way that you are asking their opinion and work in what you want to say without being overbearing or threatening…make them think that the idea is partially in their mind too.

In 1990, Stein claimed most nurses had stopped playing the doctor-nurse game.  But the legacy of the traditional pattern of dominance and deference has continued.  In a 2005 study involving physicians’ and nurses’ perceptions of collaboration and communication, researches found a positive effect on those perceptions following three interventions: “institution of daily multidisciplinary rounds, addition of nurse practitioners, and appointment of a hospitalist medical director.”  Researches concluded, however, that “physicians reported improved collaboration with nurses, but nurses did not improved collaboration with physicians.”

The difference between physicians and nurses in their reports of a collaborative effort is striking.  Physicians may define or view collaboration in a different light than do nurses.  We did not specifically define collaboration for the survey, but it was distinct from communication on the survey.  Perhaps the physicians thought that collaboration implied cooperation and follow-through with respect to following orders rather than mutual participation in decision making.  Although communication is a necessary component, it alone is not sufficient to allow collaboration.  Possibly, communication styles differ between nurses and house staff, so that physicians perceive collaboration whereas nurses feel they (i.e., the nurses) are being ordered to do something.  A second possibility is that nurses did not feel comfortable “challenging” physicians by giving a different point of view.  Or, possibly the input the nurses gave was not valued or acted upon, and thus the interaction was not perceived by nurses as collaboration.

Until the relationship between doctors and nurses can be fully restructured so as to be more collaborative and morally egalitarian, nurses may still have to choose, on occasion between optimally serving their clients and playing the classic doctor-nurse game…

Josh Sides is the Whitsett Professor of California History and the Director of the Center for Southern California Studies at California State University, Northridge.  His most recent book, Erotic City: Sexual Revolutions and the Making of Modern San Francisco, looks at America’s capital of sexual libertinism and a potent symbol in its culture wars.  In the excerpt below Sides introduces the history of AIDS in San Francisco.

Selma Dritz was the last person you would expect to be an expert on the outlandish gay sex scene South of Market.  Born in Chicago to Russian parents in 1917, Dritz finished medical school in 1941 and became the chief resident of the Cook County Contagious Disease Hospital before retiring in 1947 to raise her three children.  She and her family moved to San Francisco in 1949, where they bought a house in the sleepy southwestern edge of the outer Sunset District, and Dritz became a stay-at-home mom for almost two decades.  Once her kids were grown, she got a master’s degree in public health at Berkeley in 1967 and quickly accepted a post as assistant director of disease control for the SFDPH.  As a doctor and a mother, she already knew the terrain well.  “At first,” she later recalled, the work “was the usual standard chasing down of measles, mumps, whooping cough, making sure that children in school had their proper immunizations.”

Very little in Dritz’s daily work routine changed during her first decade at the SFDPH.  To be sure, rates of syphilis and gonorrhea increased, “but that didn’t bother anybody; one shot of penicillin and you were cured.”  But by the end of 1977, Dritz remembered, there was a “complete change”: the number of enteric diseases, typically associated with the fecal contamination of food, escalated dramatically.  Because virtually all of the patients were men, she knew that “these cases weren’t coming from eating establishments.”  Instead, she came to learn, they had been transmitted through the exotic sex taking place in South of Market bathhouses and sex clubs.  When she followed up her observations with close research, the findings were alarming: between 1974 and 1979, the annual number of amebiasis cases in San Francisco had risen from 10 to 250; annual cases of giardiasis had risen from fewer than 2 to 85; annual shigelosis and hepatitis A cases had doubled, and hepatitis B cases had trebled.  By 1980, she estimated that 70-80% of all the patients at the SFDPH Veneral Disease Clinic were homosexual men.  Dritz’s findings paled in comparison to those of Edward Markell, a doctor who conducted research among a sample of Castro District residents in 1982.  Almost 60% of the subjects in Markell’s study tested positive for intestinal parasites.

“Too much is being transmitted,” Dritz warned a group of San Francisco physicians in 1980.  “We’ve got all of these diseases going unchecked.  There are so many opportunities for transmission that, if something new gets loose here, we’re going to have hell to pay.”  Dritz was no scold; she was a consummate professional, and she never indulged in moralistic hand-wringing.  Instead, she immediately reached out to the city’s prominent gay political clubs, gay business associations, and gay physicians to warn them about the threat.  Her professionalism immediately earned her the trust of the gay community, and that of gay physicians in particular.  In her early sixties and nearing retirement, Dritz had unwittingly become – as her children joked – “sex queen of San Francisco” and “den mother of the gays.”

In June 1981, an article in Morbidity and Morality Weekly Report reported on an unusual pneumonia appearing in gay men in Los Angeles.  This was the first official announcement of the new condition that would become known as AIDS.  Within one month of its publication, Dritz began seeing the first cases of Kaposi’s sarcoma and Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, opportunistic diseases that accompanied the AIDS infection.  Dritz recognized before other did that the sexual revolution, as it had been understood, was over.

That the AIDS epidemic was devastating to San Francisco is very well known.  Yet the full complexity of the epidemic’s impact on the city’s disparate communities and neighborhoods remains elusive and largely unexplored.  The gay male community of the Castro – indisputably the hardest hit in the epidemic’s first twenty-five years – has collectively, and justly, claimed responsibility for telling the story of the epidemic.  Yet despite the legitimate authority of the gay Castro to tell the story of AIDS, their influence has obscured other dimensions of the story.  Peoples’ social and economic class status, race, and location within the city all shaped responses to AIDS in ways that elude quick calcuation.  And the changing epidemiology of the disease after the early 1980s also changed the meaning of the disease for San Franciscans.  In short, the historic devastation to the Castro must be seen in its proper context – as the most affected district of a city in which other affected districts and numerous people were also deeply transformed by the debilitating virus.

By Kirsty McHugh, OUP UK

Link Love comes to you this week from me, Kirsty, in the UK office. I’m looking forward to a relaxing weekend, and I hope you are too (though I hear you Americans have some big football match or something…?). Here’s what I’ve been reading this week.

Is it last orders for the good old British pint glass as we know it?

Going back to the future with steampunk.

The big sporting event in Britain this weekend is the start of the annual Six Nations Rugby Union contest. I’m a big RU fan, so I’ll be digging my Scotland jersey out of the wardrobe in preperation. Former England captain Lawrence Dallaglio talks to The First Post about this year’s tournament.

How do you stop a car with a jammed accelerator pedal?

The Times looks at women desperate to have a baby girl.

The Guardian’s Top Ten Literary Stepmothers.

You can listen to a podcast of Robert Douglas-Fairhurst talk about the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Great Expectations on the Bookhugger website.

There has apparently been a record number of submissions to The Bookseller’s annual Diagram Prize for the Oddest Book Title of the Year.

John Lanchester on why the world of work features in so few modern novels.

Breaking bad news with Twitter Haiku.

Happy 6th Birthday Facebook!

KittenWar: because everyone needs some cuteness on a Friday.

Charles R. Macedo is a partner at Amster, Rothstein & Ebenstein LLP, and the author of The Corporate Insider’s Guide to US Patent Practice, which provides a basic understanding of patent practice in the United States as it relates to both obtaining and enforcing patents. Macedo’s practice specializes in all facets of intellectual property law including patents, trademarks and copyrights.  In the article below he shares advice for patent protection.  Read his other OUPblog posts here. [FN: The author would like to acknowledge the assistance of Norajean McCaffrey and Marion Metelski in preparing this Blog entry]

From 1998 until about a year ago, the law on what type of inventions could be the subject of patent protection seemed pretty clear. If a claimed invention produced a “useful, concrete and tangible result”, the invention was deemed patent-eligible subject matter. Over the past few years, that settled law began to be questioned, and in 2008 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit threw out that test, and invoked a different, more restrictive “machine-or-transformation” test. Last November, the Supreme Court heard arguments in Bilski v. Kappos, where the Supreme Court for the first time in decades is expected to clarify the standard for what processes will be deemed patent-eligible. In prior Oxford Blogs, I addressed some of the questions raised by the Justices at the oral arguments.

While we wait for a decision, life continues to move on, and difficult decisions need to be made on how to proceed with efforts to obtain patent protection in this area. To help guide potential patentees during this interim period, I have put together, with colleagues of mine at Amster, Rothstein & Ebenstein LLP, the following recommended interim steps to be implemented in patent prosecution involving business-related and computer-related inventions in order to minimize risk for the future and increase the likelihood of a patent issuing and ultimately being enforceable down the road.

As a general rule, if possible, it is best to conform to the PTO’s positions on patent-eligibility. By conforming to the PTO’s positions, an applicant is more likely to both expedite a patent application’s likelihood of issuance, and probably be within a safe harbor of what processes will ultimately be deemed patent-eligible.

*Include disclosure to tie the invention to a computer or other machine. For example, if the invention is related to a financial service product which is electronically traded, disclose the computer system used to electronically trade the product. If the invention is related to a product which requires a complex calculation, disclose the computer system that performs the calculation as well as the algorithm used in the calculation.

*Don’t claim software as software. Software can instead be claimed as programming stored on a computer readable medium that is run on one or more processors. Process claims which act on various parts of the computer system (e.g., a processor, a communications portal, a computer readable medium, etc.) are more likely to pass muster. Beauregard claims remain acceptable to the PTO as patent-eligible subject matter.

*Don’t use fancy forms of claims. In Ferguson, the applicant unsuccessfully tried to claim a paradigm which is not one of the four statutory classes of patent-eligible inventions.

*Don’t use fancy definitions in the specification for terms like “computer readable medium.” It is safer to use the ordinary meaning of a computer readable medium.

*Have “computer implemented processes” include physical structures in the method steps. Try not to use only the preamble to establish that the claimed process is tied to a machine.

*For non-computer implemented inventions, try to tie the invention to other tangible media, and to transform physical objects, e.g., entering into a written or electronic agreement.

*When arguing patentability, try to reference Supreme Court decisions. Merely relying upon the latest Federal Circuit, BPAI or district court decisions may not be good enough down the road if the law changes.

For a more detailed discussion on interim steps see our posting from IP Law 360.

Since no one really knows how the Supreme Court will ultimately decide Bilski, or how the Patent Office and lower courts will interpret the Supreme Court’s decision after it issues, we recommend that it is best to continue to hedge your bets during this period of uncertainty by continuing to seek patent protection for good inventions — particularly if such inventions can be tied to machines or transform matter.

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I recently listened to a podcast from BBC History Magazine in which Neil MacGregor, Director of The British Museum talked about world history.

To paraphrase, he said that in today’s world a Eurocentric view of history is out of place. A measure of that is an exhibit they’ve worked on in which a British viewpoint is the exception rather than the rule.

I think the word geisha also illustrates this changing approach to the study of history; in this case word history.

The Oxford English Dictionary is currently in the middle of revising the dictionary for the Third Edition. Many entries available at the OED online have been brought up to date, but many others have not.

Geisha is one that has not.

Consequently the entry for geisha has as its most recent example citation a quoted dated 1947.

This date is relevant since geisha is a Japanese word and 1947 is only two years after the atomic bombing of Japan and its World War II surrender.

One might not be surprised to find that a dictionary definition of this vintage omits a Japanese viewpoint. Such is indeed the case with the OED Second Edition.

The etymology of geisha there is said simply to be “Japanese” and the definition reads “A Japanese girl whose profession is to entertain men by dancing and singing; loosely, a Japanese prostitute.”

I checked the OED definition for prostitute which had been updated as of June 2007 and I wasn’t surprised to find that prostitutes are expected to do more than dance and sing in their professional capacity.

Other dictionaries delve a little deeper into the etymology of geisha and in so doing expose a little more sensitive treatment of what a geisha might be.

Some break the word geisha in two explaining it as “art person.”

This sits better against the definition of a professional singer and dancer.

The Century Dictionary goes a little further saying geisha is built on words that were once Chinese: the gei means “polite accomplishments” and originally came from a Chinese word ki meaning “an art” or “a profession”; the sha ending conferring a meaning of “one who does” the art.

By Kirsty McHugh, OUP UK

In his book Was Jesus God? Professor Richard Swinburne, the eminent philosophy of Christian religion scholar, probes the key doctrines about Jesus – that he was God Incarnate, atoned for our sins, and rose from the dead – and argues that each has a strong and defensible logical underpinning. In the excerpt from the book below he examines the philosophical argument for believing in God.

Theism, the claim that there is a God, is an explanatory hypothesis, one which purports to explain why certain observed data (or evidence) are as they are. Many scientific or historical hypotheses are explanatory hypotheses: they purport to explain data which the scientist has observed in his laboratory or the historian has discovered in the course of an archaeological investigation. Such a hypothesis is probably true in so far as it is a simple hypothesis which leads us to expect the data which are otherwise unexpected (that is, make it probable that those data would occur, when otherwise it is not probable that they would occur), and fits in with ‘background evidence’ or ‘prior evidence’. Suppose that there has been a burglary: money has been stolen from a safe. The detective puts forward the hypothesis, to explain the money having been stolen, that John robbed the safe. If John did rob the safe, it would be quite probable that his fingerprints would be on the safe, that someone might report having seen him near the scene of the crime at the time it was committed, and that money of the amount stolen might be found in his house. These are data to be expected with some modest degree of probability if John robbed the safe, and much less to be expected if he did not rob the safe; they therefore constitute positive evidence, evidence favouring the hypothesis. On the other hand, if John robbed the safe, it would be most unexpected (it would be most improbable) that many people would report seeing him in a foreign country at the time of the burglary. Such reports would constitute negative evidence, evidence counting strongly against the hypothesis. I shall call evidence of either kind posterior evidence, the consequences to be expected or not to be expected if the hypothesis were true. In so far as a hypothesis makes it probable that we would find all the data we find, and in so far as it would be improbable that we would find these data if the hypothesis were false, that increases the probability of the hypothesis. The more probable it is that we’d find the data if the hypothesis were true, and the more improbable it is that we’d find the data if the hypothesis were false, the more probable the data make the hypothesis.

But a hypothesis is only rendered probable by data in so far as it is simple. Consider the following hypothesis as an explanation of the detective’s positive data: David stole the money; quite unknown to David, George dressed up to look like John at the scene of the crime; Tony planted John’s fingerprints on the safe just for fun; and, unknown to the others, Stephen hid money stolen from another robbery in John’s garage. If this complicated hypothesis were true, we would expect to find all the positive data which I described, when it is not nearly as probable otherwise that we would find the data. But the data do not make the complicated hypothesis probable, although they do make the hypothesis that John robbed the safe probable; and that is because the latter hypothesis is simple. A hypothesis is simple in so far as it postulates few substances and simply describable properties, few kinds of substances and simply describable properties, including properties of behaving in simple ways. The detective’s original hypothesis postulates only one substance (John) doing one thing (robbing the safe) which leads us to expect the data; while the rival hypothesis which I have just set out postulates many substances (many persons) doing different things.

But as well as the posterior evidence of the kind which I illustrated, there may be background evidence, or prior evidence: evidence which is not a (probable) consequence of the truth or falsity of the hypothesis in question, but comes from an area outside the scope of that hypothesis. We may have evidence about what John has done on other occasions, for example, that he has often robbed safes in the past. This latter evidence would make the hypothesis that John robbed the safe on this occasion much more probable than it would be without this evidence. Conversely, evidence that John has lived a crime-free life in the past would make it much less probable that he robbed the safe on this occasion. A hypothesis fits with such prior evidence in so far as the prior evidence makes probable a theory (e.g. that John is a regular safe-robber), which in turn makes the hypothesis in question more probable than it would otherwise be.

The criteria for assessing the detective’s hypothesis apply generally to assessing hypotheses proposed by scientists or historians. If a scientist’s data are such as he expects to find (that is, are such as it is probable will occur) if his hypothesis is true, that makes the hypothesis more probable than it would be otherwise. If they are such as he expects not to find (that is, are such as it is probable will not occur) if the hypothesis is true, that makes the hypothesis less probable than it would be otherwise. The simpler the hypothesis, the more probable it is; and a very simple hypothesis is a lot more probable than any other hypothesis. And if the hypothesis is concerned only with a narrow field (e.g. the behaviour of a single planet), it has to fit with what we know about the wider physical world (e.g. how other planets behave). For many hypotheses there may be no relevant prior evidence, and the greater the scope of a hypothesis (that is, the more it purports to tell us about the world), the less prior evidence there will be. For a very large-scale theory of physics (such as quantum theory) there will be few physical phenomena apart from those within its scope (which it purports to explain), and so little, if any, prior evidence.

The data (the posterior evidence for theism) to which arguments of natural theology typically appeal include the most general features of the universe: that every particle of matter behaves in exactly the same lawlike way as every other particle (obeys the same ‘laws of nature’, for example, Newton’s law of gravity); that the initial state of the universe (the Big Bang) and the laws of nature are such as to bring about the eventual existence (some 13 billion years later) of human beings; and that these humans are conscious beings (have a mental life of thought, feeling, and choice). In Is There a God? and elsewhere I argue that, in virtue of God’s omnipotence and perfect goodness, it is quite probable that these data would occur if there were a God (because he would bring them about); and very improbable that they would occur if there were no God. The way in which I have spelled out the hypothesis of theism earlier in this chapter has the consequence that theism is a very simple hypothesis. It postulates the existence of one entity (one god, not many gods), with very few very simply describable properties. A person with no limits to his power, knowledge, freedom, and life is the simplest kind of person there could be. Infinite power is power with zero limits. Infinite knowledge is knowledge with zero limits because it involves no limit (except one imposed by logic) to the number of well-justified true beliefs. Perfect freedom means that the person’s choices are unlimited by irrational desires. Eternity means no temporal limit to life. And God being ontologically necessary, meaning that there are no others on whom he depends, obviously fits well with his other properties. It is also simpler to suppose that God has these properties essentially, for that makes God a more unified being; it means that the divine properties not merely do not, but could not, come apart. And it is simpler to suppose that God is what he is solely in virtue of his essential properties; that is, he has no underlying ‘thisness’—for that is a more economical supposition. It means that it is not an extra truth about how things are that this God rather than that God is in charge of the universe. If God does not have thisness, any God in charge of the universe would be the same God as any God in charge of the universe. God being what he is in virtue of the essential properties which I have listed makes God not quite a person in the sense in which we are ‘persons’.

Theism is such a wide-ranging hypothesis (it purports to explain all the most general features of the universe) that there is no prior evidence; all the evidence (whether positive or negative) is within its scope—posterior evidence. So if I am right that theism is a very simple hypothesis, which makes it quite probable that there would be a universe with the most general features which I have described when this would be very improbable otherwise, there is a good argument from this posterior evidence to the probable existence of God. In arguing in this way, I have sought to articulate a rigorous argument of a kind which many philosophers, Christians, Jews, Muslims, and others have been giving for the past two or three thousand years.

David Levi Strauss writes frequently for Aperture. He is the Chair of the graduate program in Art Criticism and Writing at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. His new book, From Head to Hand: Art and the Manual, delves into the mysterious process whereby an idea is born in the mind and materialized through the hand in the expression of artwork. In the excerpt below we learn about Ursula von Rydingsvard’s artistic process.

Ursula von Rydingsvard’s sculptures have often engaged and activated the relation between a tool or implement – something used to make something else – and the thing made. She’s found the clarity of this relation most present in the most primitive examples of it, where one rude object impacts another to make an impression. Working into the physical reality of that prime encounter, she uncovers a certain incommensurability of cause and effect: there is always something let over when the work is done, a remainder that may in fact be the beginning of the aesthetic.

I’ve often heard this sculptor speak of the honesty of a given material: the way a certain kind of wood or type of viscera holds up under pressure and over time; the way it takes a cut or weeps when it dries, but especially the way it bears and shows its transformation through labor. She constantly tests the integrity of her materials as she pushes them beyond their defining limits. She is alert to the indwelling potency of organic materials, but insists that they be transformed through work. She understandings the cult of relics (being an irrepressible collector of old, old remnants), but recognizes these things a raw material to be worked, rather than merely contemplated.

In its Greek beginnings, the tool or implement was the organon, “that with which one works.” From there we get to bodily organs as instruments of sense or faculty, and the organic as the entire category of organized bodies (plant and animal), but always in the sens of them acting as an instrument of nature or art, to a certain end. All this comes from the root of work.

Her incorporation of actual organs – the stomachs of ruminants – as sculptural material happened in the late 1990s. When I visited her studio in 1999, Rydingsvard showed me the cow stomachs stored in her refrigerator, packed in salt and shrunken into velvety white wads. As she held the tripe under a faucet, massaging it and filling out its form with water, she described the “exotic landscape” of almost unbearable beauty she had found inside the carcass of a freshly killed cow, “like what one might find under the sea.”

Rydingsvard isolates particular sculptural effects – the way the skin of organs draws tight over striae, or the laminate, sexual (adhering) embrace of a malleable substance after being compressed between two more rigid surfaces – in order to open up the sensuous rapport of a made object to its utility: a waffle iron impresses a grid pattern on cooking batter; a farmer’s plough cuts furrows in the ground; wet laundry is rubbed over the ribs of a washboard; animal hides are stretched on racks to dry. All of these acts have effects based on the zero point requirements of necessity and candor.

The present work can be seen in the context of a number of other sculptures Rydingsvard made after returning from her first trip to Poland in 1985. Though she was raised in a Polish Catholic home, it was never in Poland, but always on the tortured edges of it, always in exile, where memory was both sweet and painful, love was bound up with loss, and labor was mixed with violence. In these dreadful works, especially Ignaz Comes Home (1986), Zakopane (1987), Dreadful Sorry (1987-88), Oj Dana Oj Dana (1989), and Dla Gienka (1991-93), individual repeated members or columns (sometimes alluding to household implements) are distressed, stained, leaded down, even whitewashed. In the latter two works, Rydingsvard’s signature cuts into milled cedar beams line up into series of striations.

But the most direct precedent or seed for this work is Maglownica (1995), in which a 12-foot-high flat paddle formed of four laminated four-by-four milled cedar beams is sheathed in stitched cow intestines. The edges of the cedar paddle are cut into spines or ribs so that the membranous covering is stretched taut as if over bones. The piece was inspired by the rasp-surfaced paddles traditionally used by Polish farm women to soften linen sheets after laundering. As Rydingsvard recalled to Martin Friedman, “the linens were so harsh, it was often difficult to sleep on them, for fear of bloodying yourself.”

Maglownica is a work of tremendous compression, of contained violence and pent-up energy. The critic Michael Brenson has observed that it “suggests the attentiveness of a solitary child observing a world to which he or she does not belong, or perhaps the last moments of a man in front of a firing squad. But this object maintains its ability to react. In fact, like most of Rydingsvard’s creations, it seems ultimately unconquerable.” This resonates with what Rydingsvard said when Dore Ashton asked the artist what her earliest artistic experience had been: “I remember something about unbleached, coarse linen. It would almost take its own form. I remember its being on me, almost like a nightgown – something about light on my body. Maybe I was three or four…outdoors, on the steps.” This is the image I can’t get out of my head, looking at this piece. A row of little girls, standing up straight in their coarse linen wraps before the world, unconquerable.

These sculptures have always seemed to me to arise from a kind of diastrophism, twisting and turning in different directions around a solid core. Whether these repeated inset columns of viscera over cut boards makes one think of snow fallen on furrowed fields or dressings on wounds, they definitely form an embodied passage from one state to another. I see it as passage leading from the memory of innocence to experience, where the unjust torments of matter and memory are transformed through inspired labor, and where, in the final judgment, laborare est orare, labor is prayer.