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"LAWRENCE, NATALIE"
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Planta sapiens : unmasking plant intelligence
What is it like to be a plant? It's not a question we might think to contemplate, even though many of us live surrounded by plants. Science has explored the wonderful ways in which plants communicate, behave and shape their environments - from chemical warfare to turning their predators to cannibalism. But they're nevertheless often just the backdrop to our frenetic animal lives. While plants may not have brains or move around as we do, cutting-edge science is revealing that they have astonishing inner worlds of an alternate kind to ours. They can plan ahead, learn and have rich subjective experiences. They can even be put to sleep. In 'Planta Sapiens', Paco Calvo offers a bold new perspective on plant biology and cognitive science. Using the latest scientific findings, Calvo challenges us to make an imaginative leap into a world that is so close and yet so alien.
Book
Assembling the dodo in early modern natural history
This paper explores the assimilation of the flightless dodo into early modern natural history. The dodo was first described by Dutch sailors landing on Mauritius in 1598, and became extinct in the 1680s or 1690s. Despite this brief period of encounter, the bird was a popular subject in natural-history works and a range of other genres. The dodo will be used here as a counterexample to the historical narratives of taxonomic crisis and abrupt shifts in natural history caused by exotic creatures coming to Europe. Though this bird had a bizarre form, early modern naturalists integrated the dodo and other flightless birds through several levels of conceptual categorization, including the geographical, morphological and symbolic. Naturalists such as Charles L'Ecluse produced a set of typical descriptive tropes that helped make up the European dodo. These long-lived images were used for a variety of symbolic purposes, demonstrated by the depiction of the Dutch East India enterprise in Willem Piso's 1658 publication. The case of the dodo shows that, far from there being a dramatic shift away from emblematics in the seventeenth century, the implicit symbolic roles attributed to exotic beasts by naturalists constructing them from scant information and specimens remained integral to natural history.
Journal Article
Planta sapiens : the new science of plant intelligence
\"Have you ever sat and watched a plant? The very idea itself might seem strange. We like to watch things that move, that do something. But in fact, plants are doing a great deal too--plants behave, as animals do--they are just doing it on a very different timescale. They cannot move about freely like animals do, so they grow into space instead and make new chemicals to interact with the species around them. Not only that, but what causes them to do these things, what drives this behaviour, is far more similar than we humans, with our speedy, animal-centric perceptions, have always assumed. If we learn to look differently, we might be amazed at what we find. We are dismantling the traditional hierarchies of nature: we are becoming increasingly aware of the interior lives of other species and how much we share with them. We are also coming to understand that there are many more ways to be intelligent than we have previously believed. We can't see ourselves as the only, privileged intelligent life on Earth any more. And if we are to save the global biome, we must not. PLANTA SAPIENS opens up the plant kingdom like never before and will transform how you view other forms of life, to see plants as allies in tackling global problems rather than as mere resources; as teachers from whom we can learn about our own minds\"-- Publisher's description.
BOOK
Attempting to Improve the Academic Performance of Struggling College Students by Bolstering Their Self–esteem: An Intervention that Backfired
Theory and prior research suggest that (a) a positive sense of self-worth and (b) perceived control over one's outcomes facilitate constructive responses to negative outcomes. We therefore predicted that encouraging students to maintain their sense of self-worth and/or construe their academic outcomes as controllable would promote achievement. In a field experiment, low-performing students in a psychology class were randomly assigned to receive, each week, review questions, review questions plus self-esteem bolstering, or review questions plus exhortations to assume responsibility and control. Contrary to predictions, the D and F students got worse as a result of self-esteem bolstering and students in the other conditions did not change. These findings raise ethical and practical questions about the widespread practice of bolstering self-esteem in the hope of improving academic performance. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]
Journal Article
Exotic origins: the emblematic biogeographies of early modern scaly mammals
Exotic natural objects brought to Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were mutable and malleable things. They were constructed and assimilated into European world-views in a reciprocal process of change as they moved around early modern Europe. In particular, the provenance of natural objects and the associated rich symbolic resonances were central to their natural histories. The distinctions between Orient and Occident had divided the world since antiquity and were given a range of new senses in this period. The location of these two ‘Indies’, and their relationship to one another, were neither static nor always geographically defined. This article focuses on two rich examples of this natural historical construction in relation to images of the Indies: the Old World pangolin, or scaly anteater, and its New World counterpart, the armadillo. Initially, pangolins were understood as East Indian ‘scaly lizards’, armadillos as West Indian. But from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, their geographical identities and symbolic associations were entangled as these creatures came to embody colonial anxieties and resonances. The ‘India’ of the scaly lizard became the ‘Indies’ of the scaled mammals, both East and West. Examining the reception and treatment of examples such as these in European cabinets and natural histories, offers new insights into European relationships with regions of the world seen as distant and wonderfully bountiful.
Journal Article
Care of bereaved parents after sudden infant death
About 340 infants die suddenly and unexpectedly in the UK every year (Foundation for the Study of Infant Deaths 2005a), and one of the recommendations made in the Bristol Royal Infirmary inquiry final report (Kennedy 2001) was that infants found dead or moribund at home must be taken to emergency departments (EDs) for attempted resuscitation or further investigation. Sudden and unexpected infant death is one of the most stressful events that ED staff can experience, however, and they often lack training in this area even though they are keen to undertake such preparation (Levetown 2004, Ross-Adjie et al 2007). This article therefore discusses the guidelines on providing bereavement care to parents and best practice in EDs.
Journal Article
Best Practices of News and Media Web Design: An Analysis of Content Structure, Multimedia, Social Sharing, and Advertising placements
As more print media move to online, news and media websites have evolved with increasing complexity in content, design, and monetization strategies. In this article, the authors examined and reported the web design patterns of 150 leading news and media websites in six different categories: TV news, online newspapers, online magazines, and technology news, sports news, and business news, using 28 analytics metrics in four dimensions: content structure, multimedia, social sharing, and advertising placements.
Journal Article
