nation: Germany

I’ve argued that the visual aids used in computer programs designed to help us learn new languages are ethnocentric, generic, and uninformative.  Since then, I have been working on an alternative to these images, compiling a database of culturally organized images called the Culturally Authentic Pictorial Lexicon (CAPL).

What strikes me as both a student and a professor of language and culture is that the visual world differs so greatly across cultures and even minor differences are telling in how we organize and perceive our world. Color is one of the easiest ways to find differences in cultures. I have previously discussed the linguistic and cognitive differences of color, but now I want to show some simple examples of color in culture through analysis of various postal systems.

In China, the postal system uses a deep hunter green:

(source)

 In Japan, it is a bright red, much like England.

England:

(source)

Japan:

(source)

 In Germany, it is a bright yellow (think DHL):

(source)

In Russia, it is a lighter but similar shade of the deep postal blue in the U.S.

Russia:

(source)

 The U.S.:

(source)

This example of postal systems is an easy way to illustrate how color becomes one of the central ways to communicate and, although the same message is shared across cultures, the path to that message varies through color.

Michael Shaughnessy is an Associate Professor of German and Chair of Modern Languages at Washington & Jefferson College.  In addition to German language, literature, and culture, he has a professional interest in educational technology, especially the authenticity of multimedia imagery.  His book German Pittsburgh (Arcadia Publishing) highlights the contributions of German speaking immigrants to our area.

Does American prosperity translate into long retirements?  Not compared to other developed countries in the world.  Flowing Data borrowed OECD numbers on life expectancy and age of retirement to calculate the average number of years in retirement for men and women across many different countries.  The portion of each bar with the line is the average number of years working, while the non-lined portion represents years in retirement.

Largely because of life expectancy, women enjoy more years than men in all states except Turkey, but the number of years varies quite tremendously, from an average of zero years for men in Mexico, to an average of 26 years for women in Austria and Italy.  The United States is way down on this list, not doing so well relatively after all.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Photographer Peter Menzel has a habit of displaying people’s lives in illuminating ways.  Previously we highlighted a project in which he went around the world asking families to pose in front of their house with all of their stuff.  He now has a book, Hungry Planet, featuring photographs of families posting with a week’s worth of food.  It tells a fascinating qualitative and quantitative story of cultural gastronomical difference.

Go to Menzel’s website for more information.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

The new “manned-up” VW Beetle is in the news again and J. Dawn Carlson, a PhD Candidate at UC Berkeley, asked us to write about it.  We covered it in July of 2010, but figured this was a good excuse to revisit the post.

The VW Bug was introduced in 1938 for economical, powerful, fast, and sustained driving on the German Autobahn.  Later it jumped shores and became an icon of the California surfer lifestyle:

The New Beetle, however, introduced in 1998, quickly became associated with women because of its bubbly body and pastel colors. Feminized products, however, don’t sell well with men (or some women) because femininity is stigmatizing.  Accordingly, the Beetle is re-vamping its image; it’s getting a “sex change” for 2011.  Brit S. pointed us to a story in the Anaheim Examiner detailing this surgery.  Jim Cherry writes:

New Beetle is about to get a testosterone injection. A mean-looking chopped top, 200 H.P. motor, widened stance, and a larger interior will transform the quintessential chick car into a rock-hard rock star.

So being mean-looking, wider, and larger (with a Porsche engine) are all equated with masculinity, a characteristic that will supposedly improve the cars appeal to men (and non-girly women).  Here’s what the new testosterone-injected Beetle will look like (in red, of course):

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Deeb K. sent in a story from the New York Times about who does unpaid work — that is, the housework, carework, and volunteering that people do without financial compensation. Based on time-use surveys by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), this chart shows how many more minutes per day women in various nations spend doing such activities compared to men:

Childcare stuck out as an area with a particularly large gap:

On child care in particular, mothers spend more than twice as much time per day as fathers do: 1 hour 40 minutes for mothers, on average, compared to 42 minutes for fathers…On average, working fathers spend only 10 minutes more per day on child care when they are not working, whereas working mothers spend nearly twice as much time (144 minutes vs. 74) when not working.

The full OECD report breaks down types of unpaid work (this is overall, including data for both men and women):

The study also found that non-working fathers spend less time on childcare than working mothers in almost every country in the study (p. 19). And mothers and fathers do different types of childcare, with dads doing more of what we might think of as the “fun stuff” (p. 20):

Source: Miranda, V. 2011. “Cooking, Caring and Volunteering: Unpaid Work around the World.” OECD Social, Employment and Migration Working Papers, No. 116. OECD Publishing.

Katrin sent us a link to a image at GOOD that illustrates the geopolitics of first-person shooter video games. The image was created by a group at Complex to illustrate the way that the changing actual political landscape can be seen in the nationality of villains in video games. Peter Rubin, of Complex, explains, “Gone are the days of all FPSes being either World War II or sci-fi; in the new milennium, developers are on the hunt for enemies that are speculative but still plausible.”

They looked at 20 FPS games from the past decade (unfortunately, they give no details about how those 20 games were chosen

The selected titles:

Return to Castle Wolfenstein (2001): Germany
Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Desert Siege (2002): Ethiopia
Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Island Thunder (2003): Cuba
Delta Force: Black Hawk Down (2003): Somalia
Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Jungle Storm (2004): Colombia
Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon 2 (2004): North Korea
Joint Operations: Typhoon Rising (2004): Indonesia
Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon 2: Summit Strike (2005): Afghanistan
Delta Force Xtreme (2005): Chad
Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter (2006): Mexico
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (2007): Russia/Afghanistan
Army of Two (2008): Somalia/Afghanistan/China/Iraq
Frontlines: Fuel of War (2008): Russia/China
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009): Russia/Afghanistan/Brazil
Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising (2009): China/Russia
Singularity (2010): Russia
MAG (2010): Russia/China/India
Army of Two: The 40th Day (2010): China
Homefront (2011): Korea (They don’t specify if it’s North or South Korea)
Operation Flashpoint: Red River (2011): China

Anyway, it provides a nice little illustration of the way that global politics seeps into this element of pop culture, as well as a snapshot of nations currently perceived as rivals or even enemies of the U.S. — a mixture of old tensions (Russia, Germany), ongoing anxiety about China, and emerging focal points.

Cross-posted at Jezebel.

Andi S.-R. noticed an interesting segment in a German textbook used to teach English. In the last few years, 12th-grade English classes have started including a section about gender, so textbooks have added chapters on the topic. Andi found a supplement from Klett, one of the major German publishers of educational materials, provided a supplement for covering gender that included a brainstorming exercises. While the idea was to foster discussion about gender stereotypes, Andi questions whether the sample comments provided as examples would help with that goal or would prime students to focus on stereotypical behavior by providing it as a model:

A second section helpfully suggests “bitchiness” as a quality students might associate with girls:

Again, the idea is to promote discussion, an excellent goal. But Andi succinctly points out the potential pitfalls of such a superficial approach:

…it’s unclear how students are supposed to know if these are “views” or “facts”, and having a discussion based on gut-feeling alone seems only likely to reinforce and teach as “facts” those stereotypes the students are familiar with, anyway.

Nearly two years ago I wrote a post about the discovery that the president of Jacksonville State University blatantly plagiarized large segments of his dissertation. Yet his Ph.D. was not revoked, nor did he lose his job or face any discipline, as far as I know.

Another case recently came to light. Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, Germany’s Defense Minister, admitted plagiarizing part of his dissertation. Flowing Data posted this graph, created by Gregor Aisch, that visualizes the extent of the plagiarism. The taller bars represent regular text, while the shorter bars are footnotes. The dark red bars are direct plagiarism; the bright red ones are “other” plagiarism, which I can’t explain to you because the page about it is in German:

In this case, however, status didn’t outweigh the plagiarism. The University of Bayreuth, where he earned his J.D. degree, revoked it; over 20,000 academics signed a petition to Chancellor Merkel complaining about her continued support for Guttenberg; and he ultimately resigned.

UPDATE: Reader Kat asked that I provide the link to the original source, GuttenPlag Wiki. Kat explains,

The dissertation was NOT run just through a computer programme- it was posted on the internet and then people “crowd-sourced” passages to find where they were really from.

Secondly, there is another good graphic that I believe you should include in your post lower down on the page I posted above:
– Black are pages on which one source was plagiarized
– Red are pages with plagiarism of more than one single source
– White are pages where SO FAR no plagiarism has been found
– Light blue are the index and annexes

In total Baronet zu Guttenberg plagiarized 76.34 % of his dissertation (annexes and index were not included to compute this percentage).

Thirdly: The entire dissertation was VERY likely written by a ghost writer. Guttenberg was a Member of Parliament the entire time when the PhD was allegedly “written” (copy and pasted).

Here is the image she desscribes from the GuttenPlag Wiki page:

And reader Ellen says,

I took a crack at the German explanation of the “other plagiarism” and I think it refers to instances where the source was incorrectly cited, quotation marks were conveniently forgotten and other things of that nature. In other words, plagiarism that isn’t directly copied and pasted.

I suspect the academic world would be horrified by the results if someone had time to sit down and systematically run dissertations through anti-plagiarism software.

UPDATE 2: Kat sent along another link that makes the degree of plagiarism even more obvious. It shows in thumbnail form each page that has plagiarism, and you can click on the thumbnail to see a side-by-side comparison of the original and Guttenberg’s dissertation. The updated Wiki page indicates that over 94% of pages were plagiarized. Finally, she clarifies what “other plagiarism” means:

• A source text in a language other than German was translated word by word, with no quotation marks. The translation was made by the “Wissenschaftliche Dienst” (Science Service) of the Bundestag (German equivalent to CRS). So he illegally let them do research for his PhD (claiming it was for his work as MP)
• plagiarism of structure: The structuring of an argument or an index or a graphic e.g.
• Alibi footnote: There is a footnote, but it is insufficient. For example, a huge passage is an actual quotation, but the footnote and citation marks make it look as if only part of the sentence is a direct quote.
• Shake & Paste: The text is made up of fragments of another text which were rearranged.