Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2012 January 5

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January 5

Black slavery in Bangladesh

Could it be possible that Bangladesh used to have black slaves during the British Raj? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.92.155.82 (talk) 01:27, 5 January 2012 (UTC)

Well, I'm not an expert on this stuff, but by the time there was a British Raj, Britain had outlawed slavery. This article implies that some slavery did persist, but it doesn't say anything about African slavery in particular. Many things are "possible" but it doesn't sound like it was a very common thing under the Raj. --Mr.98 (talk) 01:56, 5 January 2012 (UTC)

From 1698 on, the Omani-Zanzibari Arabs had the largest role in Indian Ocean slave trading, but I don't know of any reason why east Bengal would have been a strong market for them... AnonMoos (talk) 03:28, 5 January 2012 (UTC)

Measure of Science

There is GNP and GDP and other measurements for market values in economics. is there any similar measurements for science and knowledge of a country? Flakture (talk) 07:18, 5 January 2012 (UTC)

The OECD's PISA survey tests high-school students' educational knowledge and skills[1] and includes an assessment of scientific knowledge[2]. The EFA development index measures a nation's education system[3] (The Human Development Index also includes education.) Various people have attempted to measure/estimate average national IQ (see IQ and the Wealth of Nations, IQ and Global Inequality). There are also a lot of polls/surveys conducted internationally to find people's knowledge of various topics. --Colapeninsula (talk) 10:29, 5 January 2012 (UTC)

Education, people's knowledge and skills. how about progress? scientific progress, that at last give somewhere the pivotal role in one field and it's progress.Like NASA's role in space science. I know, it's not about value numbers, actually It's about the outputs. Outputs can say where is the success. We should have some progress measures for, for example if our scientific research funds had the real cost. and something like it. How about progress? Flakture (talk) 12:57, 5 January 2012 (UTC)

There are lots of metrics for measuring science and technology. The search term you want is "science and technology indicators". They include things like number of people with various types of degrees, number of patents files, amount of public and private capital put into science, amount of revenue generated by science for the private sector, etc. It's fairly mind-numbing and like all metrics, it's not clear which of them are really important and which are artifacts of other things (patents filed, for example, can mean high productivity or it can mean a highly permissive patent system mixed with a highly litigious legal context, or both). The OECD publishes a ton of research on this stuff. This appears to be their latest summary report.

Separately, there is a field known as scientometrics but it's more about citation analysis, I think, than what you're looking for. --Mr.98 (talk) 13:04, 5 January 2012 (UTC)

There's always "List of Nobel laureates by country". Just remember to delist the non-scientific prizes. Gabbe (talk) 20:04, 5 January 2012 (UTC)

Though that is a particularly crude method to try and gauge a nation's scientific output, especially given the temporal dimensions of it. (Hans Bethe is listed both as German and American, even though he did his prize work in Germany in the 1930s, but was a nationalized American by the 1960s, when he got the award. How much does that tell us about German science in the 1930s or American science in the 1960s? Not a whole lot as a data point.) --Mr.98 (talk) 02:46, 6 January 2012 (UTC)

yea that's true but when we have for example GNP ,we're not talking about who won and who lost. but actually how was the efforts outcome. country, state, even agency and so on. Flakture (talk) 08:09, 6 January 2012 (UTC)

Official status of the Hungarian language between 1849 and 1867

After the Hungarian defeat in 1849, did the Hungarian language have any official status at all in the Kingdom of Hungary until the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867? Calle Widmann (talk) 07:40, 5 January 2012 (UTC)

I found Geopolitics in the Danube region: Hungarian reconciliation efforts, 1848-1998 by Ignác Romsics and Béla K. Király which talks about the Hungarian Nationality Resolution of 1849 (p.54), which suggests (if I read it correctly) that all the national languages were to be treated as equal. I have to admit however, that I know next to nothing about Hungarian history and may have got the wrong end of the stick. Alansplodge (talk) 17:52, 5 January 2012 (UTC)

The Nationality Act of 1849 was enacted by Hungary's revolutionary parliament just a month before the defeat of the revolution. It ceased to have any validity after the revolution's defeat. However, before the revolution, in 1844, the Hungarian Diet had declared Hungarian the official language of the kingdom. The power of that Diet to legislate for the kingdom (at the emperor's pleasure) was accepted by the imperial government at the time, and as far as I can tell, this declaration was not revoked after the revolution. So, although the Hungarian Diet was suspended and the country lacked an autonomous government after 1849, Hungarian should have remained the official language within the kingdom. That said, the kingdom lacked an autonomous government, and the official language of the prevailing imperial government was German. So the main official application of Hungarian would have been in municipal governments within the kingdom and perhaps in its courts of law. Marco polo (talk) 18:58, 5 January 2012 (UTC)

Not sure about the situation between 1849 and 1867, but in some previous centuries, the official language of the government of Hungary was neither Hungarian nor German, but Latin... AnonMoos (talk) 05:15, 6 January 2012 (UTC)

Michael D. Higgins knee operation in 2004?

Recently-elected Irish President Michael D. Higgins broke his knee in Colombia in 2010, but when he was seeking the Labour Party nomination to contest the Presidency back in September 2004, a contemporary RTÉ news report stated,

"There's been speculation for months about whether Michael D Higgins would run for the Presidency. Today, he told Labour TDs and Senators that he was willing to do so, that his recent knee operation wouldn't prevent him, and that it would be good for the party and for the presidency to have a contest." — Youtube recording

Does anyone know anything about this knee operation in (circa) 2004?

1. Why did he need the operation?
2. Did he acquire a limp as a result of it, or did he only begin to limp in 2010?
3. Was it the same knee that he broke in 2010?
4. [Bonus question] If it was the same knee, have the 2004 operation and the 2010 fracture combined to make him limp so much nowadays?

— O'Dea (talk) 07:52, 5 January 2012 (UTC)

It seems unlikely, given that nobody had any information when you asked this exact same question twice before. Warofdreams talk 16:17, 5 January 2012 (UTC)

When the fish does not nibble, the patient angler casts again. — O'Dea (talk) 21:44, 5 January 2012 (UTC)

Whatever -- maybe you should face up to the fact that nobody here except you knows or cares anything about the matter. Time to try a different strategy. AnonMoos (talk) 05:10, 6 January 2012 (UTC)

I wouldn't go quite that far. I'd say nobody here knows anything about the matter (and that ought to be apparent by now). It's not a question of not caring; if we had any info, we'd surely care enough to provide it to the OP, because we're here to be of service to the extent we're able to. -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 05:56, 6 January 2012 (UTC)

Well, it seems that no one cares to the extent of being willing to conduct significant research on the matter (as opposed to being slightly interested in reading the results of such research by someone else)... AnonMoos (talk) 06:53, 6 January 2012 (UTC)

Nobody's cared to do so, so far. And maybe nobody will. Probably nobody will. Not all questions get answers, because respondents answer the questions that interest them, and some subjects don't seem to interest many or any people on boards like this. That's just the way it is. But it's a bit rude to invite people to come here and ask whatever questions they like, and then tell them that, not only do we know nothing about the matters they raise, but we don't care either. That last bit is about the most off-putting thing I've seen here - but maybe you intended to put the OP off, which would be an odd attitude for a volunteer to have. Nobody dragooned you into answering questions here, Mr Moos. -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 08:21, 6 January 2012 (UTC)

Also known as a "knee-jerk reaction". Here's the problem for the OP: Assuming he's googled the subject already, we're unlikely to find anything new through that same process. And unless someone just happens to know about it already, it might well remain unanswered here. But if the OP can pin down a date for that 2004 comment, he might be able to find it in print somewhere, perhaps in a newspaper's archive. Or maybe the subject has a website which will field questions. It really comes down to, "How badly does the OP want to find out?" ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 10:19, 6 January 2012 (UTC)

It could be considered rather rude for O'Dea to mechanically cut-and-paste the same question multiple times. I feel no personal pressure to do any extensive research to answer the question, but I do feel it's rather relevant to point that O'Dea is on the borderline of spamming right now, and future repetitions could push him over the edge. AnonMoos (talk) 12:30, 6 January 2012 (UTC)

When O'Dea asked this question on 20 November and again on 28 November, he got exactly zero responses both times. Nothing at all from anyone. I grant you that those non-responses were in themselves prima facie evidence that nobody knows anything about it. But sometimes, we need someone, just one person, to speak up and say explicitly "Sorry, I know nothing about this". That fills a gap, whereas a complete lack of response leaves the gap unfilled, begging for some answer. Now, he's finally got an answer, but one that says we don't care. Not just that we don't know, but that we don't care. And you're accusing him of rudeness? For daring to pose again a question that not one single person (myself included) bothered to answer the last two times he asked. We tell our children "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again". So I'm giving him 10 out of 10 for persistence, but you seem to see that as a bad thing. What am I missing here? -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 12:59, 6 January 2012 (UTC)

One oft-repeated gripe on the talk page is, "If you don't like a given question, don't answer it." I would broaden that "don't like" to "don't know". In general, everyone saying "I don't know" to every question they don't know the answer to, does not seem productive. However, if a question gets repeated, it's worth pointing out where it was already answered (if it was), or to point out that no one has answered it. To say that "no one here cares" makes unwarranted assumptions about other editors. Maybe a given user doesn't care. But another user might actually care - but just not care enough to do the kind of research needed. I couldn't find anything about it in google as such. But maybe there's a biography page for this guy somewhere that would talk about the 2004 surgery. There's always the meager possibility that someone who hadn't seen the question before might know the answer this time around. But it kind of gets to the point where the OP needs to do his own research. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 13:11, 6 January 2012 (UTC)

As I said above, it's empirically observable that no one has cared enough to do any significant research on the matter (beyond basic Googling). AnonMoos (talk) 14:32, 6 January 2012 (UTC)

This article edit from the 13th says something about a "shattered Colombian kneecap".[4] What, pray tell, does that mean? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 11:24, 6 January 2012 (UTC)

Yeah that's awkward wording there. He shattered his kneecap in Colombia in October 2010 [5]. A paywalled Irish Times article about the accident is quoted in a forum post here.--Cam (talk) 13:24, 6 January 2012 (UTC)

This Irish Times snippet indicates two knee replacement operations in June 2004. An Irish Independent article here says the 2004 surgery was on both knees. (Knee replacement often leaves the kneecap intact.)--Cam (talk) 14:01, 6 January 2012 (UTC)

Original poster of question here. It is surprising how nasty some responders have been. I certainly have researched this myself online. My thinking in re-posting was that passers by who might know the answers, or who remember the news stories from years ago that are now difficult to locate or are behind paywalls, and who did not see my earlier postings, might see this later one. That is what I meant by "the patient angler casts again". There are people who know a lot of information that is not necessarily easily trackable online. I am one of those who can answer questions from experience, just not this one. My other thoughts are that if you don't like my question, you are contributing nothing by moaning about it, you can simply pass on by and ignore it, and of course it is not spam — spam is another phenomenon entirely — and I have not seen a rule against posing a question again when some time has passed. This reference desk is posited on the assumption that people don't know something and others are here to help. If you are too sour to participate in that generous spirit, I assure you I have no interest in you. Finally, thank you to User:Cam for that snippet about both knees. — O'Dea (talk) 12:52, 7 January 2012 (UTC)

Whatever -- if you have something new or different to ask, then go ahead and ask it, but just mechanically cutting-and-pasting in exactly the same whole long convoluted boilerplate spiel yet again another time is verging on being disruptive, and I really don't care what you think of me for pointing this out. AnonMoos (talk) 14:40, 7 January 2012 (UTC)

Fui per desertum super alces sine nomine. — O'Dea (talk) 17:22, 7 January 2012 (UTC)

Alvin Goldman (1967) and requirements for knowledge

Hey all. I don't know how many philosophers we have around here, but I'll give it a go. In 1967 Alvin Goldman published a paper entitled "A Causal Theory of Knowledge". About midway through the paper, he describes how a subject S, if he is to qualify as "knowing" a proposition P, must be able to recount details of a causal chain between P and his belief in P. In Goldman's own words:

A correct reconstruction is a necessary condition of knowledge based on inference. To see this, consider the following example. A newspaper reporter observes p and reports it to his newspaper. When printed, however, the story contains a typographical error so that it asserts not-p. When reading the paper, however, S fails to see the word 'not', and takes the paper to have asserted p. Trusting the newspaper, he infers that p is true. Here we have a continuous causal chain leading from p to S's believing p; yet S does not know p [because] his reconstruction of the causal chain is mistaken. But, if he is to know p, his reconstruction must contain no mistakes. Though he need not reconstruct every detail of the causal chain, he must reconstruct all the important links.

Later, however, Goldman describes a different example:

I know now, for example, that Abraham Lincoln was born in 1809. I originally came to know this fact, let us suppose, by reading an encyclopedia article. I believed that this encyclopedia was trustworthy and that its saying Lincoln was born in 1809 must have resulted from the fact that Lincoln was indeed born in 1809... I remember that Lincoln was born in 1809, but [no longer] that this is stated in a certain encyclopedia. I no longer have any pertinent beliefs that highly confirm the proposition that Lincoln was born in 1809. Nevertheless, I know this proposition now.

Is that not merely stating that S ("I") can reconstruct only a very small part of the causal chain ("I remember it" -> "I must have once learnt it from somewhere" -> "I believe it")? In which case, surely this particular S cannot be said to be able to recount "all the important links" in the causal chain? 1967 was a long time ago; I'm sure someone will have already made this objection, but I could really use some hints in pinning it down :) Thanks, - Jarry1250 ^{[Deliberation needed]} 10:18, 5 January 2012 (UTC)

I'll have a think, but others may want to read Gettier problem for background before answering from their deep intuition and so forth. IBE (talk) 12:23, 5 January 2012 (UTC)

Also: Causal Theory of Knowing. The Gettier problem article discusses the exact issue also. IBE (talk) 13:39, 5 January 2012 (UTC)

On reflection, after reading the relevant bits of those articles, and the paper itself (JSTOR only, sadly), I don't quite think you are correct. Clever, but you should look at p369, where he says that the "appropriate" knowledge-producing causal processes include 1. Perception; 2. Memory; 3. Causal chains, reconstructed by inferences; and 4. All of the above (ie. combinations thereof). I think that means memory is taken to be outside the chain, and is used as a primary datum: I remember Abe Lincoln's birthdate --> previous me is a reliable source --> I can take previous me's word for it. That's what I remember thinking anyway, and it sounded good at the time, IBE (talk) 14:27, 5 January 2012 (UTC) But that was previous me talking, and I just had to fix one of his typos. Don't trust him. IBE (talk) 14:29, 5 January 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, much appreciated. I shall exchange that critique for one based on his usage of memory as a separate criterion for memory. - Jarry1250 ^{[Deliberation needed]} 19:30, 5 January 2012 (UTC)

I knew this would be study-related, but it looks like I may have given direct help with someone's homework. Please advise us next time if the paper forms a core part of an essay you are writing. IBE (talk) 02:07, 6 January 2012 (UTC)

There is a canon which confines a curse to fifty lines

From Hilaire Belloc's Lines to a Don:

There is a Canon which confines

A Rhymed Octosyllabic Curse

If written in Iambic Verse

To fifty lines.

Is there? Or was he bluffing? Marnanel (talk) 13:02, 5 January 2012 (UTC)

I don't know for sure that there is no such canon, but it would have been characteristic of Belloc to make this up. John M Baker (talk) 14:50, 5 January 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, that passage reeks of poetic sarcasm so strongly I'm surprised it's not a limerick. --Ludwigs2 04:11, 6 January 2012 (UTC)

Clarification of the Role of Super Delegates in the Republican Primaries

This paragraph from the article on Superdelegates is a bit unclear to me:

For Republicans, in 2012, there are potentially 3 superdelegates in each state, consisting of the state chairman and two RNC committeemen/women. However, certain states either don't have superdelegates, or they do, but the votes are bound by the results of the state vote. In 2012 there are a total of 132 Republican superdelegates.

Do the Republicans have super delegates with more voting power as the Democrats do? --CGPGrey (talk) 15:40, 5 January 2012 (UTC)

There's a clearer explanation further down the article: "In the Republican Party, as in the Democratic Party, members of the party’s national committee automatically become delegates without being pledged to any candidate. In 2008, there are 123 members of the Republican National Committee among the total of 2,380 delegates to the 2008 Republican National Convention. There are three RNC delegates (the national committeeman, national committeewoman, and state party chair) for each state. Despite this similarity in procedure, the term "superdelegate" is generally used only about Democratic delegates, although there are exceptions."

In other words, the Republicans have delegates who can, by virtue of their position, choose freely who to vote for. However, although they are similar to the Democratic superdelegates (not an official term), these Republicans are rarely called "superdelegates". Warofdreams talk 16:25, 5 January 2012 (UTC)

Thank you. --CGPGrey (talk) 16:31, 5 January 2012 (UTC)

Oprah's lucky opportunities

I was reading Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, in which, as the Wikipedia article states, "he discusses how family, culture, and friendship each play a role in an individual's success, and he constantly asks whether successful people deserve the praise that we give them."

Without luring pedants who will snipe that without hard evidence and notarized deposition from Winfrey herself nobody can say anything about it for sure, and supposing that human beings can reasonably speculate without there being an almost sure chance of being wrong, what unique opportunities happened that were there outside Oprah's locus of control to make happen herself, without which her rise to multimillionaire media mogul status would almost surely not have happened? 69.243.220.115 (talk) 17:25, 5 January 2012 (UTC)

It could be argued (though I don't have evidence to quote) that Oprah tapped into a vein of opportunities that just happened to exist at the precise same time as she got the contract for her talk show: people needed to see a young black woman talking to other women about issues that mattered to them. Maybe Zeitgeist would explain it better. --TammyMoet (talk) 17:42, 5 January 2012 (UTC)

You can read Oprah Winfrey, which is very detailed. I don't think her success can be explained by unique opportunities, but by a chain of lucky events. There's her earlier life. In her late teens she got jobs in radio and then television in Tennessee: for a teenager to get breaks like this there must be a large amount of luck and being in the right place at the right time, as well as talent and confidence. Her childhood was a mix of horror and disaster but also supportive childraising from her grandmother. Winfrey seems to have been very precocious, learning to read at an early age and having a talent for memorization, which doubtless led to her her success in her high school speech team, which in turn helped her in broadcasting. She was also an attractive teenager, winning friends and a beauty pageant, and looks depend heavily on luck. Also, spending her teenage years in a community which offered these opportunities (speech team, a black radio station, etc) must have been crucial to her success. --Colapeninsula (talk) 18:02, 5 January 2012 (UTC)

History of a metonym

On the page K Street and its associated talk page, as well as at Wikipedia:Neutral point of view/Noticeboard#K Street, there's been a discussion of how to incorporate the metonymic aspects of K Street (as another name for lobbying) with the street qua street. This would be greatly helped if anyone knew the history of the metonym--when did "K Street" become shorthand for the lobbying industry? And any ideas where one would go about researching something like this, ideally without spending a huge amount of time going through actual archival material? Thanks! Meelar (talk) 19:39, 5 January 2012 (UTC)

Presumably electronic newspaper archives searchable by date would be your best bet. Google News Archives was trying to be that for a while (not sure what it is now). Maybe they should just rename the street "Jack Abramoff Boulevard" -- AnonMoos (talk) 07:01, 6 January 2012 (UTC)

Seeking information on electoral fraud

1. What is the earliest known example of electoral fraud?
2. What are some websites where I can find good, general information on the subject of electoral fraud?--142.166.223.135 (talk) 20:22, 5 January 2012 (UTC)

Election fraud is likely as old as elections. As soon as people realized that access to power depended on the choices made by other people, they would do underhanded things to influence those choices and/or to outright steal elections. The Royal elections in Poland were well known for being corrupt enterprises under the influence of foreign powers who used Poland as a place to hold proxy wars for their own ambitions (i.e. War of the Polish Succession). For much of its history, the papal conclave was under considerable influence from secular princes like the Holy Roman Emperor and the King of France, disputes over these elections and the influences of those princes on what was supposed to be the prerogative of the Cardinals resulted in the Western Schism. Now, admitedly these were not democratic elections, but the electors (the Sejm in Poland and the College of Cardinals in Catholicism) were, in theory, supposed to be free actors in choosing their monarch; in practice they were frequently open to corruption, which cast a shadow over the legitimacy of the electoral process. If there has been an electoral system, it has been defrauded at some point in history. If I have a vote, and someone else has money, you can expect that money will be used to buy my vote. --Jayron32 00:20, 6 January 2012 (UTC)

Certainly common in ancient Rome, where they even had a word for it: ambitus, the crime of attempting to bribe or otherwise influence electors. I'm sure there was fraud in ancient Athens as well. --Colapeninsula (talk) 09:58, 6 January 2012 (UTC)