Hot link spam part 2

[firecat]

They stuck real-time translators into fMRI machines to try to figure out how they can do such a complex task. They found out a little but not as much as they hoped. Meanwhile, translators talk about some of the more difficult aspects of the job.

Word order is a particular problem in fish meetings, which Miles said she dreads. In a long sentence about a particular variety of fish, and in a language where the noun – the name of the fish – comes towards the end, the interpreter is left guessing about the subject of the sentence until it's completed.

http://gizmodo.com/inside-the-weird-brains-of-real-time-translators-1660521550
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I've heard of most of these words but not all, and I had no idea in some cases that they were considered native to one side of the pond or the other (e.g. "jaywalk" is American, "dodgy" is British).
http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/the-fourth-untranslatables-month-summary.html
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Kelli Dunham writes brilliantly about Heather McAllister, Brittany Maynard, and assisted suicide
http://www.xojane.com/issues/assisted-suicide-heather-macallister-brittany-maynard
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Here is a comic that seems to do a pretty good job of explaining asexual orientation.
http://everydayfeminism.com/2014/10/5-myths-and-misconceptions-about-asexuality/
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Jonah Soolman is a nutritional counseling practitioner who works in the Health at Every Size paradigm. He attended the Cardiometabolic Health Conference, at which various procedures and products aimed at "weight loss" were much discussed. He writes: "Following this paragraph is my list of key moments from the conference. By default, I was going to group them by disease state, but given the circumstances perhaps it is more appropriate to categorize them by the emotional state they created." The headers for the article are "Interesting," "Startling," "Disappointing," "Frustrating," "Horrifying," "Infuriating," and "Made Me Want To Throw Something."
http://www.soolmannutrition.com/2014/10/cmhc/
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Paintings of migraines by artists who experience them.
http://dangerousminds.net/comments/migraine_headaches_depicted_by_artists

Comments

[jesse_the_k]

Ding ding ding! You've achieved 100% link transportation: six new tabs in my browser here! Perfect mind, such curation!

[jinian]

I found a quotation I love about fMRI research in the book I'm reading right now:

When, on the news or in a magazine, we hear or read something like, “The hippocampus lit up as subjects looked at photographs of . . .” we are learning something about as specific as a TV traffic reporter scanning from a helicopter and being able to say only, “The heavy traffic is somewhere in northern New Jersey.”
-- Daniel Bergner, _What Do Women Want?_

The book is pretty good otherwise, too, debunking a lot of the really terrible ev-psych junk you see around pop culture.

[firecat]

Hee! I'm glad to know you think it's a good book, because the title makes me want to run screaming.

[jinian]

Oh yes.

[selki]

I commented over on the Soolman link. Thanks.

[selki]

It's still in "your comment is waiting moderation", oh well. Here's what I said:
Having been on a non-health-related mailing list where a real live physicist! who had lost weight! lectured us over and over with just that sort of “formula”, for our own good, you know … I hear you. He didn’t care that he hadn’t studied much about long-term weight loss or epigenetics or whatever, or that some of us could point to real harm done by weight stigmatization. He’d had the leisure to exercise and the financial resources to eat particular foods, and he was a smart guy, so OBVIOUSLY “food eaten + exercise = your weight” and we were just being “self-defeating” with our stupid stories and facts and studies he didn’t have time for.

[firecat]

Good comment. Yeah, experts are not immune to Dunning-Kruger Syndrome. What really galls me is when doctors (who are not specialists in nutrition) do that.