Pathology, Skating, Revolt, Emotion, Crash
Every day, The Browser selects and summarises the five best articles from across the web on every imaginable topic. Here, instead we turn our attention to the world of academic writing and have selected five papers from different disciplines worth your attention.
Those without institutional access to some of the publications below might be interested in this additional paper. For previous editions see: Academic
Analysis Of A Building Collapse
Malcolm Hollis | Journal of Building Appraisal | 6 November 2006 | U
Autopsy of a death, but the corpse is a collapsed office block. The paper is an impersonal, technical walkthrough of the forensic process of finding the cause of the cave-in, which occurred in 1995 and killed four. The conclusion: original faults in the construction were ironically worsened by attempts to strengthen the structure to modern construction standards, leading to its disintegration
(6,239 words or DOI: 10.1057/palgrave.jba.2950045)
Bias In Figure Skating Judging
Leanne C. Findlay and Diane M. Ste-Marie | Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology | 2004 | MP
Figure skating judging is a delicate balance between aesthetic and athletic assessments made at high speed. This study of six experienced Canadian judges — under the old 6.0 system — found that the high cognitive load needed often led them to take mental shortcuts based on the skater's reputation. In short, if the skater was known to the judge, her ordinal ranking and technical score were higher
(7,221 words or DOI: 10.1123/jsep.26.1.154)
The Emancipation Of America
Jaime E. Rodríguez O. | The American Historical Review | 1 February 2000 | MP
"American Revolution" primarily brings the US to mind, but the settler societies of the western hemisphere each had distinct revolutionary contexts. Spanish America was multi-racial, but unequal; the British were white-only oligarchs; the French Caribbean experienced full-scale slave revolt. These past racial and economic dynamics can be traced in the contours of the present Americas
(10,382 words or DOI: 10.1086/ahr/105.1.131)
Body Maps Of Emotions
Lauri Nummenmaa et al. | PNAS | 27 November 2013 | U
Many emotions are linked with physical feelings in our bodies — hearts pounding, spines shivering, feet freezing. This study had 773 participants from Taiwan, Finland, and Sweden draw body maps of sensations for 13 different emotions. Based on their results, they argue there are "distinct and culturally universal bodily sensations", which has implications for generating consciously felt feelings
(4,926 words or DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1321664111)
Bus Crash Severity
Seyed Alireza Samerei et al. | Journal of Safety Research | February 2021 | U
Buses are involved in only 1% of all road accidents, but their large carrying capacity increases losses. This paper analyses 13 years of data from Victoria, Australia and finds influential factors on severity include day of week, visibility, driver age, type of crash — pedestrian or vehicular — and number of vehicles. The average fatality rate in the dataset was 2.7% with a 34.3% rate of serious injury
(7,911 words or DOI: 10.1016/j.jsr.2020.12.004)
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