It's the mobile phones-and-number-remembering thing all over again

Can it be true? Can GPS really cause Alzheimer's?

No. Of course it can't. And the paper doesn't say that. Hell, the article doesn't say that. Of course, the Daily Tech is one of those sites that tends not to overegg the pudding too often, but every site that reports on breakthroughs in science gets a little overenthusiastic at times. So why pose the question? Because I fully expect to see a plethora of reports making just that claim in the days to come. There are already a few darkly hinting at such things; I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to dig them out.

But on the report itself (or, rather, the report of the report), I'd like to vent my spleen for a few moments.

First of all, though it doesn't mention it, watchers of science will be familiar with the concept of the hippocampus adapting itself; the 2003 Ignobel award for medicine was conferred on those who showed that taxi drivers have a bigger hippocampus than most.

It makes sense, therefore, that there'd be some degree of atrophying in those whose need for spatial awareness in the context of navigation is diminished. But... memory problems? Really?

I'm not denying the possibility. However, one has to remember that regular travel beyond one's home home town is a recent innovation; far too recent for the brain to have adapted itself. It's for this reason that I find the concept of a diminished capability somewhat hard to swallow. The most I'd be willing to accept is that our memories have improved, and that GPS goes some way to resetting that capability to pre-car levels.

Of course, Alzheimer's was hardly a problem a couple of hundred years ago; people died long before the brain had a chance to melt for the vast majority of people.

I'll just make one point about 'memory' in this context; presumably the researchers are familiar with the work others have done in field, and have therefore read the paper on cabbies and their enlarged hippocampus. One has to wonder, then about this line from the above report:

researchers are unsure as to whether using spacial strategies causes the hippocampus to grow, or if having a "robust" hippocampus causes an individual to use spacial strategies

I'm no neurologist, but even I know that the brain is a massively more complex organ than we understand, and that however much the hippocampus is associated with spatial strategies, there's a lot more to the tale than that. Are taxi drivers masters of memory, capable of memorising pi to a godzillion digits at a single sitting? Are inveterate GPS users always leaving the house with no pants? I doubt it.

Correlation is not Causation

Surveys are wonderful things. They show us that Ireland has one of the highest rates of alcohol consumption in Europe, and that The Irish are amongst the happiest people in Europe. Must remember these two the next time I come across one of the ridiculous 'a causes b' stories that seem to periodically infest the media.

Will American English Become the Internet's Lingua Franca?

It started as a simple question on IRC; "is the correct spelling anonymizer or anonymiser"? A simple question, but one that set me a-pondering.

Conventional wisdom, of course, dictates that if you're in the States or its hegemony, you use the z; if you're not, you use the s. But it's not really that simple. The OED, for example, has long championed the use of '-ize', much to the chagrin of many (your humble servant included). I'm not entirely clear on the reason for this antipathy towards the US' preferred spelling, even my own. It's tempting to put it down to a latent anti-Americanism, but for an Irish lad such as I there are 800 years' worth of reasons to be more anti-British than anti-American. Actually, I have my own thoughts on this matter, but to go into them here would be to drive this tract, already off-course, veering off the edge of the Cliffs of On-Topic.

Smithers, Release the Teenagers

breakingnews.ie tends to be fairly sloppy as a rule with their attention to detail; at least once a week they come up with a particularly inelegant phrase that soon disappears when someone who knows the English language reads it. This, though, will probably stick around, but in case it doesn't, the headline is

Teenagers freed in hunt for Polish man's killer

 The confusion -- if confusion there is for anyone except me -- revolves around the word 'in' and its relation to the word 'hunt'. It suggests a level of causation... but why am I explaining this? It's obvious.

Anyway, I suspect 'confusion' is too strong a word; while the sentence can be interpreted in two ways, there's really no doubt as to what the headline writer meant. Even so, it made me titter.

Missing the Point

I just finished reading an article in the October 1 issue of Cancer and Biology Therapy (pdf) on the ethics of cancer research. Not the article I was expecting, I must confess; I was imagining some poor doctor struggling with the dilemma of making half the terminal patients in his study a control group. Or something along those lines. No; the problem Scott E. Kern has with cancer researchers is that they're a bunch of lazy bastards who are letting patients die.

Death of the Late Mr. Jones

I picked Mr. Jones totally at random. Don't worry about it. If you're at all concerned about the Mr. Jones who lives in the flat upstairs, I'm not talking about him.

I was reading a news item about the esteemed leader of the opposition here in Ireland, and in between bouts of fist shaking and random imprecations, I wandered over to the party web site to see what manner of spin they put on Mr. Kenny's words. There was no mention of it. However, something did catch my eye in his biography; "he was first elected in a by-election following the death of his late father Henry Kenny".

Keeping Abreast of the Latest Research

I confess, gentle reader, that I wasn't entirely sure how to approach this story. There were three options available to me; I could titter, I could sneer or I could take it seriously.

Well, first of all, there was little to no chance of my not tittering. Not least because I get to use the word 'titter'. But to sneer or not to sneer? In the end, I opted for both. And, therefore, for all three.

Oops. Or, Rather, Hooray!

Boy, is my face red.

Barely a day has passed since I revelled in the arbitrary nature of the English language, and I find out that my example was nonsense. The possessive-before-gerund rule, which I thought perhaps to be the work of some drug-addled, charismatic loon, exists for a reason. My fevered fancies were of this wild-eyed, bedraggled prophet convincing his fellows of a way of speaking that he received from a chorus of trees, but instead it's there for the ultimate raison d'etre for any rule of grammar: to clarify.

Thoughts on My Using the Genitive Before Gerunds

A short while ago I hinted elsewhere about my uncertainty with regard to the legitimacy of the grammatical rule about pronouns preceding gerunds. Thanks to Language Log, the situation for me has become a little more complicated.

For a start, it seems that the rule — if rule it be — is a little more all-encompassing than I realised. It's not just pronouns that must take the possessive; it's nouns, too. This is news to me. I've no idea where I first encountered the rule, but since that happy day I've been in no doubt that it was only pronouns that it applied to.

Sesquipedalians of the World, Interosculate!

Those who've been following such things recently will be aware that the Baltimore Sun recently got some flak from one of its readers about using the word 'limn' in one of its headlines. The latest to mention this is  The Boston Globe, and in their piece Erin McKean suggests that an

element of showoffishness is present in many uses of rare words. It would be peculiar if the all-too-human desire for status — the motivation behind name-dropping, wearing luxury brands, listening to obscure bands, or checking in to velvet-rope places on Foursquare — didn’t manifest itself in word choice, as well

 I'm not saying that this is unfair but it isn't, I think, the whole story.

Welcome

Welcome to Sciencophile, the blog of one lad in Ireland who, it must be said, isn't a scientist. My purpose in starting this is to consolidate all my thoughts on matters scientific, be they heretical, mainstream or just plain uninformed. This is, of course, my way of trying to get a cheap education, in that I'm hoping that knowledgeable people will correct my misconceptions and set me on the path to enlightenment.

This blog was set up as a spinoff of sorts from my original blog, when I realised that my original effort was becoming a bit scattershot in terms of what it was covering. More details on this can be found here.