Shy people often avoid situations that force close contact with other people. They worry that something they say or do will make others laugh at them.

But some people worry much more than others about being the target of laughter. These people are frightened. They suffer from an emotional disorder called gelotophobia. That long name comes from the Greek language. The word Gelos means laugh, while phobos means fear.

Victor Rubio is an expert on human behavior at the Autonomous University of Madrid. He says people laugh at others for many different reasons. He says being laughed at causes a fear response in the victim. That fear leads the victim to avoid social situations.

Gelotophobia limits the way they lead their lives.

Victor Rubio was among researchers in a huge international study about laughter. The researchers wanted to understand the difference between normal shyness and true gelotophobia. Another goal was to measure the fear of being laughed at within different cultures.

A team from the University of Zurich led ninety-three researchers from many countries in search of answers. The researchers surveyed more than twenty-two thousand people. They used questions provided in forty-two languages. Their findings were reported in the scientific publication Humor.

Some of the people questioned said they felt unsure of themselves in social situations. But they hid their feelings. Others said they avoided social situations where they had been laughed at before. People also admitted to differing levels of fear that they themselves were the targets of other peoples laughter.

The researchers measured and compared all these reactions. Fear of being laughed at, being made fun of, is a common emotion. But the researchers learned that these feelings differed from nation to nation. For example, the study found that people in Turkmenistan and Cambodia are likely to hide insecure feelings when they are around others’ laughter. But people in Iraq, Egypt and Jordan who feel they have been victims before may avoid such situations.

People in Finland were the least likely to believe that people laughing in their presence were making fun of them. Only eight and a half percent of Finns said they would — compared to eighty percent of those questioned in Thailand.

What would you think? You can comment at voaspecialenglish.com.

And that’s the VOA Special English Health Report.

(Adapted from a radio program broadcast 09Dec2009)

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Breaking News: Iowa State Department Faculty Acknowledge ID Played Role in Gonzalez’s Tenure Denial – http://www.evolutionnews.org/2007/05/isu_department_faculty_acknowl.html

Science or Myth? Rodger Dehart A Documentation History of Events The Burlington-Edison Committee for Science Education http://www.scienceormyth.org/discoveryinstitute.html

They devour their own. Dr. Richard Steinberg, who holds two Ph. D.s in biology, was persecuted by bigoted Darwinists within the scientific community. As editor of “Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington”, a scientific publication associated with the Smithsonian Institute, he was forced to step down as editor, had his office at the Smithsonian taken away, had to turn in his keys, had research money withheld and was even “shunned”. Closed minded, fellow scientists refused to respond if he spoke to them and wouldn’t even greet him in hallways. Why? Because he allowed an article, approved by a panel of scientists, to be published which promoted intelligent design rather than the religion of Darwinism. He didn’t write the article. He simply allowed it to be published. If these actions had been taken by Christians against an evolutionist it would have been a front page story! Sternberg, Smithsonian, Meyer, And The Paper That Started It All – http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command.

Are Atheists Hijacking Academic Freedom? Why some might consider Ben Stein’s new movie to be political dynamite. The theory of intelligent design (ID), holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process such as natural selection. ID is thus a scientific disagreement with the core claim of evolutionary theory that the apparent design of living systems is an illusion. There are folks working overtime to deny scientists who disagree with the core claim of evolutionary theory the right to pursue the scientific evidence for intelligent design theory. But there is more to this than meets the eye. English Chick Cartoon Tracts – http://www.chick.com/catalog/tractlist.asp Chick Publications P.O. Box 3500 Ontario, Calif. 91761-1019 (909) 987-0771 Ph. (909) 941-8128 Fax

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ABSTRACT

JoVE: an Open-access library of experimental videos to revolutionize biomedical research and scientific publishing.

Biomedical research has reached a level of complexity that is matched only by the complexity of the living species under investigation. Contrasting the rapid advancement of scientific research itself, scientific communication still heavily relies on traditional print journals. Print journals however, lack the necessary characteristics to allow enable an effective transfer of knowledge, which is significantly impeding scientific progress. Addressing this problem, the Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE, www.jove.com) implemented a novel, video-based approach to scientific publishing, based on visualization of experimental studies. Created with the participation of scientists from leading research institutions ( e.g. Harvard, MIT, and Princeton ), JoVE provides solutions to the "bottleneck" of the contemporary biological research: transparency and reproducibility of biological experiments. JoVE has so far released 9 monthly issues that include over 150 video-protocols on experimental approaches in developmental biology, neuroscience, microbiology and other fields. To facilitate integration of video into scientific publishing, JoVE has developed a distributed video-production network to assist scientists with filming and editing of their experiments.

As a new type of an online open-access productivity tool for biomedical researchers, JoVE adds to the other ground-breaking trends in the communication of scientific information such as the open-access movement and Google Scholar. The following are example of coverage JoVE has received in the scientific and popular press: Nature, The Scientist and WIRED .

Our presentation should be interesting to Google people who work on video, Google Scholar, biomedicine and science-related subjects.

Speaker: Moshe Pritsker, Ph.D.
CEO, Editor-in-Chief, Co-founder

Dr. Pritsker has developed the JoVE idea based on his deep familiarity with current problems of biological research, acquired through more than 10 years of work in this area. He holds a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from Princeton University and an M.Sc. in Chemistry from the Weizmann Institute of Science. Results of his research on stem cells, genomics, bioinformatics and HIV were published in leading scientific journals (PNAS, JBC, Genome Research and Biochemistry) and patent applications. Prior to co-founding JoVE, Dr. Pritsker held a position of post-doctoral researcher at Harvard Medical School/Massachusetts General Hospital.

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Expert: Laura Minnigerode
Bio: Minnigerode earned a Master’s in Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in Cambridge, Mass., and is a credentialed teacher.
Filmmaker: Todd Green

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ABSTRACT

The mission of the Alice project is to increase and sustain the pipeline of computer science graduates, essential to the growth of technology in a global economy.

Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment for building animations in the form of stories, games, and web-ready videos. Alice teaches programming. Alice version 2.0 is in common use. Alice 3.0 is in active development with a projected launch date of August 2009.

Alice 2.0 has been very successful and enjoyed an adoption rate of 10% in US colleges and is expanding rapidly into high schools. We expect Alice 3.0 to surpass this mark considerably.

Alice is a freely available teaching tool designed to be a student’s first exposure to object-oriented programming. It allows students to learn fundamental programming concepts in the context of creating animated movies and simple video games. In Alice, 3D objects (e.g., people, animals, and vehicles) populate a virtual world and students create a program to animate these objects.

Alice 3.0 will also enable teachers and students to work directly with underlying Java code in a Java IDE. The ability to work with code in either drag-and-drop or in Java IDE mode will support an expansion of Alice 2.0’s target populations (previously, high school and pre-CS1) to include CS1 and AP-CS courses. Alice 3.0 is scheduled for alpha and beta testing in a limited number of classrooms during the ‘08-’09 academic year.

http://www.alice.org/

Speaker: Wanda Dann, Alice Director (Carnegie Mellon University)
Dr. Wanda Dann, an active member of the Alice team for the last decade, has recently assumed leadership of the team. She is currently transitioning into a faculty position at Carnegie Mellon University from Associate Professor of Computer Science at Ithaca College. Wanda’s research interests include visualization in programming and programming languages and innovative approaches to introductory programming.
With Dr. Steve Cooper and Dr. Randy Pausch, she has published papers on the use of program visualization in teaching and learning introductory programming. Papers have appeared in ACM’s Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE) inroads, the Computer Science Education Journal, and other related publications. She is co-author of Learning to Program with Alice (2006, Prentice-Hall).
Dr. Dann’s leadership as a computer science educator has been recognized in her various roles as SIGCSE Technical Symposium publications editor, special projects chair, program chair, and symposium chair. She is now a member of the SIGCSE Board.

Speaker: Dennis Cosgrove, Research Scientist (Carnegie Mellon University)
Dennis Cosgrove has worked on the Alice system since its beginnings back in the early 1990s when it was a rapid prototyping tool for constructing head mounted display based virtual environments. He played a key roll in designing and implementing versions of Alice which have striven to lower the barriers of entry to 3D graphics and, more recently, to support a gentler introduction to programming.
As the sole designer and implementer, Dennis has enjoyed unchecked, czar-like control over all aspects of the Alice system since the inception of Alice 3 in February, 2006.
Dennis has co-authored academic papers presented at the ACM I3D, UIST, and SIGCHI conferences.
Dennis was selected as the first Computer Science Department “Undergraduate Education Award” winner at the University of Virginia in 1992. He was also selected as a Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science “Outstanding Member of the Community Award,” as well as an University wide “Andy Award” in 2001.

Speaker: Caitlin Kelleher, Assistant Professor (Washington University in St. Louis)
Caitlin Kelleher is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Washington University in St. Louis. She completed her doctorate at Carnegie Mellon University working with Professor Randy Pausch and spent her undergraduate years at Virginia Tech.
Caitlin joined the Alice project in 1999 when she began as a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon. As part of her dissertation work…

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