Chinese National Geography (2007-01)

Cover of Chinese National Geography Magazine issue 2007-01

《中国国家地理》2007年第01期封面

What gender is computer?

A language teacher was explaining to her class that in French, nouns unlike their English counterparts, are grammatically designated as masculine or feminine. "House" in French, is feminine -"la maison," "Pencil" in French, is masculine "le crayon."

One puzzled student asked, "What gender is computer?" The teacher did not know, and the word was not in her French dictionary.

So for fun she split the class into two groups appropriately enough, by gender and asked them to decide whether "computer" should be a masculine or a feminine noun. Both groups were required to give four reasons for their recommendation.

The men's group decided that computer should definitely be of the feminine gender ("la computer"), because:
1. No one but their creator understands their internal logic
2. The native language they use to communicate with other computers is incomprehensible to everyone else
3. Even the smallest mistakes are stored in long term memory for possible later review
4. As soon as you make a commitment to one, you find yourself spending half your paycheque on accessories for it.

The women's group, however, concluded that computers should be masculine "le computer") because:
1. In order to do anything with them, you have to turn them on.
2. They have a lot of data but still can't think for themselves
3. They are supposed to help you solve problems, but half the time they ARE the problem
4. As soon as you commit to one, you realise that if you had waited a little longer you could have gotten a better model

Dear diary, you make me sick

Dear diary, you make me sick
记日记，损健康

导读：不知道你有没有记日记的习惯。常常说记日记是个好习惯，尤其是老师们在对学文的孩子嘱咐要好好锻炼文笔的时候总如是说。却不知这对你的生活没有什么好处，据说不但会引起头痛、失眠、消化方面的疾病，还会造成社交上的笨拙......

Keeping a diary is bad for your health, say UK psychologists. They found that regular diarists were more likely than non-diarists to suffer from headaches, sleeplessness, digestive problems and social awkwardness.

Their finding challenges assumptions that people find it easier to get over a traumatic event if they write about it.

"We expected diary keepers to have some benefit, or be the same, but they were the worst off," says Elaine Duncan of the Glasgow Caledonian University. "In fact, you're probably much better off if you don't write anything at all," she adds.

The study, carried out with David Sheffield of Staffordshire University, was presented on Wednesday at a meeting of the British Psychological Society in Edinburgh.

Cathartic（导泻的，净化的）process
The pair studied 94 regular diarists and compared their health with that of 41 non-diarists. The subjects, all students at Staffordshire University, answered questions about their diary-keeping habits, and filled in a standard health questionnaire.

"We decided to test the idea that writing is cathartic," says Duncan. She claims that her study is the first to investigate subjects who write of their own free will. In most other studies, volunteers are actually asked to write about traumatic experiences in a systematic way.

The researchers asked the diarists recruited to say how often they made entries and for how long they had kept diaries. They were also asked if they had written about anything traumatic.

Statistically, the diarists scored much worse on health measures than the non-diarists. And worst affected of all were those who had written about trauma. "They were most susceptible to headaches and the like," says Duncan.

Ruminative（沉思的，默想的）cycle
Although she does not have proof, Duncan speculates that diarists buck the usual trend because instead of a single, cathartic outpouring to offload trauma, diarists continually churn over their misfortunes and so never get over them. "It's probably better not to get caught in a ruminative, repetitive cycle," she says.

But she acknowledges that her experiment could not demonstrate which came first - the diary writing or the health problems.

In a forthcoming experiment, she hopes to explore this by asking volunteers new to diary writing to report exclusively positive or negative things, to see if the health of the two groups diverges.

(Source: http://www.newscientist.com/)
(Article: http://www.dreye.com.cn/epaper/files/epaper197.html)

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2007年2月14日 上午 11:28:00
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