Country music encourages faster drinking

One wonders just how the research was conducted in the following study; as reported by Associated Press and published in the Edmonton Sun, December 26, 1988:

Phoenix, Arizona--"Wailing, lonesome, self-pitying music" in country western bars makes drinkers there consume alcohol faster, James Schaefer of the University of Minnesota told a recent gathering in Arizona.

The findings came from a 10-year study by Schaefer and a team of other anthropologists of a bar in Missoula, Montana, a lumber and paper-milling town. The survey was supplemented by study of about 2,000 groups in 65 similar saloons in the Minneapolis area over three years.

Schaefer even wrote a country western song on the subject, beginning, "Joe, don't play that country music.
"I drink more, and think sore, and sing right along..."

"No doubt about it," he said, "country and western can be a prescription for trouble among people with little self-control." One reason, he said, is the lyrics' sad songs of lost love, personal freedom, truck driving and the solace of drinking.

The songs and lyrics of Hank Williams, Jimmy Rodgers, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, Jerry Jeff Walker, Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings were particularly powerful drinking inducements, Schaefer found.

Their songs celebrate heavy drinking by making heroes out of drunkards. In contrast, he said, rock 'n' roll singers don't glorify anything or anyone."

But in the country western bars, slower music went with faster drinking. "Hard drinkers prefer listening to slower-paced, wailing, lonesome, self-pitying music during slow times in the bar," said Shaefer. "They seemed to prefer bold, macho, strong-beat-based music when the action in the bar picks up."

And they use the music as a "mood selection device"--picking out three or four songs on a jukebox, he said. "The music maintains the normative flow of emotions and the rhythm of activity--like the sound track in a movie."

"As the mood and tempo of the songs filtered through the bar, key actors could be seen changing the level and intensity of their drinking activity."

Ice cream melts and beer gets warm in hot weather

And now for something completely different: An item about a major discovery by a reporter rather than by a scientist. The Edmonton Journal is a giant advertising flyer masquerading as a newspaper that's heading in the same direction as the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Tucson Citizen; it will likely fold as a print newspaper and exist as an online-only collection of blogs. An example of the kind of story that frequently gets put on the front page is this ice cream "scoop" by Manisha Krishnan, published on July 11, 2012:

EDMONTON - With temperatures soaring Tuesday to 31 C in Edmonton, concerns about heat stroke and power shortages were top of mind for many.

But the Journal set out to address a couple of other important issues. Specifically, ­what type of ice cream can beat the heat? And how long does it take before a beer sitting in the sun becomes undrinkable?

Armed with samples, a thermometer and cameras, we captured the results of two experiments.

Here is what we discovered:


Experiment 1: Battle of the cones

Objective: Find out how long it takes for ice cream to melt in the sun.

Hypothesis: Treats that are frozen solid, such as Creamsicles, last the longest.

Results: Ice cream is usually great but the sweet, sticky remnants of it running down an enclosed fist is not...

...Experiment 2: Beer blues

Objective: Determine how long it takes for beer to become undrinkably warm.

Hypothesis: Around 15 minutes. Having said that, there are some people who might never find beer undrinkable.

Results: Drinking a cold beer is one of the most enjoyable activities to indulge in on a scorcher. But at what point do those rays start to ruin a delicious drink?

We settled down with a pint of Mill Street Organic Ale on a sunny patio at The Pourhouse Bier Bistro to find out. It was 31 C at 4:15 p.m.

The plan was to record temperature increases every few minutes and ask tester Jorge Lima, 19, to share his thoughts on the taste of the beverage.

The beer came out of the tap at 4 C. Eight minutes later it was up by 11 C.

“It’s still drinkable. It’s not at the temperature you’d want it to be,” Lima said.

By 4:40 p.m., the beer had reached about 20 C.

“It’s getting to the point where it’s not enjoyable any more. You’re just finishing it because you already spent the money,” said Lima, adding that the beer smelled a lot stronger and had a metallic after-taste.

University students are surprised to discover that tourists buy souvenirs to remind them of places they've been

The word "souvenir" is a French word, a reflexive verb (se souvenir de) meaning "to remember." Apparently, University of Alberta human ecology students were unaware of this. As reported by Marta Gold in the Edmonton Journal, April 8, 2012:

EDMONTON - Nothing says “souvenir” like an I-‘heart’-NY T-shirt or a tiny replica of the Eiffel Tower.

Whether you think of them as tacky trinkets or treasured mementos, they indisputably make us think of faraway places and vacation experiences.

A new exhibit at the University of Alberta explores these ideas and the holiday souvenirs that inspire them in a show called “Greetings From ….”

Compiled by fourth-year human ecology students, the keepsakes were gathered from the department’s clothing-and-textiles collection as well as from students and staff.

The items range from the simple and iconic — tourist T-shirts and models of international landmarks — to the handmade and intricate, such as a mask from Venice and a wall hanging from Egypt.

Some are created from indigenous materials by local craftspeople, such as the African coasters carved out of tree bark, while others are cheap imports hawked to tourists, such as the dashboard hula girl from Hawaii.

But interestingly, the cost or quality of the memento has little bearing on its value to the owner, says Megan Strickfaden, the U of A professor who taught the students in a class on material culture in the home and the community.

“It’s really more about the connection they make with those objects.”

That was among the discoveries students made through the project, which required each of them to write a proposal and then vote on a favourite for the class project.

The theme they chose was submitted by student Holly Postma-Strand, who suggested focusing on travel souvenirs – “the kinds of objects people collect, why they collect those objects and how they are important to individuals,” Strickfaden says.

Souvenirs are particularly interesting because of the “dual conversation” they create, she says.

They’re made or imported to represent a particular city or country, but they have a whole other meaning and significance to the visitors who then buy them — usually, as a reminder of their holiday.

Even though the small Eiffel Tower was likely produced in China and has little connection to anything truly Parisien, to the person who buys it, it represents their actual experience, Strickfaden says.

“No matter what the artifact is, whether it’s inexpensive or expensive, whether it’s handmade or mass produced, it’s still an authentic representation for the person who purchased it, because it represents that moment in time, that experience that that individual had, visiting that culture.”

That came as a surprise to some of the 23 students in the class, she adds.

“I think for the students, they went in being biased, thinking that if something’s made in China it can’t actually represent (another) culture. But, in fact, it can for the individual who’s purchased it.”

The items in the exhibit include 10 from the U of A collection and another 20 or so from students and staff. They include musical instruments from China, a boomerang and didgeridoo from Australia, a doll from Mexico and a kimono from Japan.

Each is accompanied by the story of its origin from the student or staff member who bought it.

“The personal stories are often very quirky, because people acquire things for interesting reasons,” Strickfaden says. “They make connections with those objects after they return home, as well.”

She submitted several of her own souvenirs, including a cookbook she received in Belgium, where she used to live. When she left, friends gave it to her, explaining cookbooks are usually given to teens when they leave home. “They wanted to give it to me because they wanted me to remember Belgium as a home for years to come.”

The kimono was given to her in Japan by the mother of a student she had helped take care of by teaching her in Canada, Strickfaden explains.

Robyn Stobbs, one of the students who helped choose the items from the university’s collection, says working on a project with the entire class and putting an exhibition together was a great experience.

Her own contribution, a small clay flute she picked up in China, was clearly made for tourists — it even came with English and Chinese instructions. “Yet it still has a great deal of meaning to me,” she says.

One of her favourite pieces in the exhibit is a set of beautiful nesting dolls from Russia, she says.

The exhibit runs until May 21 in the main lobby of the U of A’s Human Ecology Building at the corner of 116th Street and 90th Avenue.

It’s open from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. weekdays, Saturdays from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Sundays from noon to 4 p.m. Admission is free.

May 17, 2012 update: I just visited this exhibit, and there's really not much to it. Some of the items are more interesting than others; many of the items are the sort that might strike tourists as exotic, while the natives probably regard them as trinkets of the sort that you can find in any souvenir shop.

Exposure to dumbed-down content in the media can dumb you down

As reported by Misty Harris of Postmedia News on June 15, 2011:

A new study suggests that when people don't think critically about their media consumption, they're in danger of assimilating some of the mental characteristics on display. Specifically, researchers found that if the main character in a screenplay was a total imbecile, and people weren't expressly asked to identify differences between themselves and that protagonist, the participants' own cognitive skills were compromised.

In other words, stupidity appears to be contagious - if only temporarily.

"It's not like a disease, where once you have it, you have it for a long time; we're not saying you'll be impaired the day after reading a stupid story or watching TV," says study author Markus Appel, an associate professor at Johannes Kepler University of Linz in Austria. "But we do show that performance in knowledge tests is susceptible to fictional characters."

Just as video games put players at the centre of the action, Appel says storytelling implicitly asks people to identify with the characters on some level. And just as video games have been (controversially) linked to behaviour, stories can have a transformative effect on people's thinking.

"People are scared of being influenced by aggressive content but there are many other things to consider," says Appel. "There's much more to narratives than just entertainment."

In experiments with 81 people, Appel had different groups read a screenplay that featured either a protagonist whose intellectually abilities were undetermined or one in which the star was an alcoholic, aggressive and intellectually feeble soccer hooligan (think Europe's answer to the cast of Jersey Shore).

Half of those given the latter story were directed to think about ways in which they differed from the protagonist, while the others were given no such instruction before reading the tale.

Afterward, all participants took a general knowledge test, and those who read the story about the idiotic thug did significantly worse, on average, than those who read the story in which the main character's intellect wasn't addressed. The exception was the group that was asked to actively think about the imbecilic character's traits - a process Appel says kept the contagion effect from occurring, and ultimately underscored the value of critical thinking.

Go here to see the abstract of Dr. Appel's article A Story About a Stupid Person Can Make You Act Stupid (or Smart): Behavioral Assimilation (and Contrast) as Narrative Impact in Media Psychology, Volume 14, Issue 2, 2011, pp. 144-167.

Scientists make the shocking discovery that young people imitate the behaviour they see on the screen

If scientists got out more often, they'd realize, as tobacco companies do, that most movies today are made for young adults and teenagers. This is why these companies pay actors to smoke in movies.

On-screen Smoking In Movies Linked To Young Adult Smoking Behavior

ScienceDaily (Oct. 3, 2007) — New study findings show that exposure to on-screen smoking in movies has a strong correlation with beginning to smoke or becoming established smokers among young adults 18-25, a critical age group for lifelong smoking behavior...

Teens Who See More Smoking In Movies May Have Increased Risk Of Becoming Established Smokers

ScienceDaily (Sep. 4, 2007) — Exposure to smoking in movies appears to be associated with adolescents' risk of becoming established smokers who have used at least 100 cigarettes in their lifetimes, according to a new report...

Exposure To Smokers In Movies Increases Likelihood Of Smoking In The Future

ScienceDaily (Jun. 14, 2007) — A new study appearing in the July issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, reports that watching an actor smoke on the big screen may make smokers more likely to continue smoking in the future, and make nonsmokers more favorably disposed toward smoking...