We propose a relationship between sensory modality, numerical formatting, and performance on a survey simulating healthcare decision-making. We examine the current literature on aural health literacy, and specifically aural literacy coupled with health numeracy. We then create a survey instrument called the Bhala test for this purpose and demonstrate that it is moderately internally consistent and provides results that correlate with the NUMi assessment, a widely accepted measure of health numeracy. The quantitative information provided in the Bhala test has two treatments, percentage and natural frequency formats, in an effort to determine which format is easier for subjects to use in decision-making. The Bhala test is administered to a convenience sample of Mechanical Turk workers in a randomized comparative structure. The results do not support the hypothesis that numerical formatting affects subjects’ ability to make healthcare decisions. By comparing these results to previous studies on numerical formatting, we provide evidence to support the notion that sensory modality is an essential component of numeracy, and that aural numeracy should be considered separately from print numeracy.

The Ultimatum Game is a two-person, multiple-strategy game widely used in the experimental social sciences to demonstrate the human propensity for costly punishment in response to inequitable treatment. The game serves to provide quantitative evidence for a diversity of fairness norms across cultures. The play of the game and its interpretation offer nuanced views of the nature and importance of quantitative literacy. Its use in a writing seminar connecting quantitative literacy and social justice is described.

In this paper we describe how we combine computational and mathematical models to form virtual fish to explore different hypotheses about the impact of centra. We show how we create simulation models using a combination of a mathematical model of a fish-like robot using caudal fin propulsion, a propulsion model, and an optimizer, to explore the impact of centra under various scenarios. The optimizer uses the mathematical model to construct valid configurations of the digital robot and uses the utility function and propulsion model to evaluate the performance of each configuration. The evaluations are used to explore the adaptive landscape and find high-performing configurations. Our results show that the high-performing configurations have both increased (flexural) stiffness of the tail and higher tailbeat frequencies.

Although essays on the death of the essay abounded in the early twentieth century, Ned Stuckey-French demonstrates in The American Essay in the American Century that what was dying was “a particular kind of essay and the America of which it had been a part.” One thread of his book recounts the transition from the fireside musings and ambling meditations of essayists in the “Genteel Tradition” through the jaunty, vigorous, and largely urban reflections of popular newspaper “colyumnists” and magazine essayists to the emergence of E. B. White as “arguably the greatest American essayist of the first half of the twentieth century.” StuckeyFrench argues that White’s 1940s columns for Harper’s, subsequently collected in One Man’s Meat, “signaled a breakthrough for the American personal essay.” White’s essays combined the “warmth, selfdeprecation, and irony” of his writing for The New Yorker with “more serious” thinking “possessed of a greater sense of citizenship.” Reviewing that book, Irving Edman declared, “Mr. White is our finest essayist, perhaps our only one.”

Essays of Futures Past Robert Root (bio) The American Essay in the American Century. Ned Stuckey-French. University of Missouri Press. http://press.umsystem.edu. 272 pages; cloth, $60.00. Although essays on the death of the essay abounded in the early twentieth century, Ned Stuckey-French demonstrates in The American Essay in the American Century that what was dying was "a particular kind of essay and the America of which it had been a part." One thread of his book recounts the transition from the fireside musings and ambling meditations of essayists in the "Genteel Tradition" through the jaunty, vigorous, and largely urban reflections of popular newspaper "colyumnists" and magazine essayists to the emergence of E. B. White as "arguably the greatest American essayist of the first half of the twentieth century." Stuckey-French argues that White's 1940s columns for Harper's, subsequently collected in One Man's Meat, "signaled a breakthrough for the American personal essay." White's essays combined the "warmth, self-deprecation, and irony" of his writing for The New Yorker with "more serious" thinking "possessed of a greater sense of citizenship." Reviewing that book, Irving Edman declared, "Mr. White is our finest essayist, perhaps our only one." Tracing the arc of the American essay from Washington Irving to E. B. White, Stuckey-French provides a thorough and enlightening overview of largely forgotten figures: Genteel essayists Nathaniel Parker Willis, Fanny Fern, Donald Grant Mitchell (who wrote as "Ik Marvel"), and George William Curtis; influential colyumnists Christopher Morley, Don Marquis, Franklin Pierce Adams (F. P. A.), and Heywood Broun. These writers are relevant in their own right and significant as White's precursors: when he began writing from his saltwater farm in Maine, he was well aware of Ik Marvel's farm book Wet Days at Edgewood (1865) and the equally bucolic Adventures in Contentment by "David Grayson" (another pseudonymous essayist), and he gave due homage to Morley and Adams, who had published his poetry in their columns, and especially Marquis, whom he expressly imitated in some very powerful political essays. Stuckey-French's perceptive and wide-ranging review of the American essay's evolution encourages tracking down and perusing a number of these writers. The second thread of the book, masterfully interwoven with the essay's history, traces the transformation in American culture in the same period. "The American Century," according to Stuckey-French, "encompassed roughly the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the first four of the twentieth," a sixty-year span in which American culture changed radically. The decline of the agricultural economy and rural life style, the rise of the middle class, the faster pace of urban life, "evolving text technologies"—all these created a different audience for the essay and required a different kind of essayist. Stuckey-French is astute in his assessment of this transformation and its influence on the essay, as well as of the essay's contribution to the transformation. By chronicling the parallel shifts in American society and intellectual thought and in the American essay over six decades, Stuckey-French suggests ways that social, political, and commercial shifts impact the literature created in a culture. He offers a corrective to the narrower perspectives of ideology and class that arise, often unacknowledged, in literary criticism. In the case of the essay, a continuous debate about the death of the essay tended to be energized by the aesthetic or sociological politics of the critics taking sides. Cultural conservatives defined the essay largely in terms of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century stereotypes, continuing a kind of critical life support to a form of the essay practiced by earlier masters, most notably Charles Lamb. Cultural progressives argued for either a more journalistic emphasis on reportage and research or for a more polemical emphasis on opinion and advocacy, preferring articles and editorials over essays. The rise of the middle class altered perspectives. Where the division between an elite culture of the educated and wealthy and the "folk" culture of the working class had once been more pronounced, the advent of radio, film, and popular newspapers and magazines generated a demand for commercially viable literature and the creation of what has...

Niederman, Derrick, and Boyum, David. What the Numbers Say: A Field Guide to Mastering Our Numerical World. (New York: Broadway Books/Random House, 2003). 288 pp. Hardcover, ISBN 978-0-7679-0998-3. Paperback, 978-0-7679-0999-0. Available as an eBook. Blastland, Michael, and Dilnot, Andrew. The Numbers Game: The Commonsense Guide to Understanding Numbers in the News, in Politics and in Life. (New York: Gotham Books/Penguin, 2009). 192 pp. Hardcover, ISBN 978-1-5924-0423-0. Paperback, ISBN 978-1-5924-0485-8. Available as an eBook. Popular books on quantitative literacy need to be easy to read, reasonably comprehensive in scope, and include examples that are thought-provoking and memorable. In contrast to textbooks, popular books can dispense with exercises and structure, and instead offer an informal voice and an inviting style. In this genre John Allen Paulos’ Innumeracy is widely regarded as a classic. However, Paulos' book is out of date, and it takes a whimsical approach to many topics. The goal of this review is to acquaint the reader with two more recent entries into the genre. What the Numbers Say by Derrick Niederman and David Boyum takes an expansive view of quantitative literacy. The Numbers Game by Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot, on the other hand, focuses on reasoning surrounding statistics and uncertainty in contemporary society. The Numbers Game is a revised American edition of The Tiger That Isn’t, which grew out of a BBC radio program, More or Less.

The bodies of fish change shape over propulsive, behavioral, developmental, and evolutionary time scales, a general phenomenon that we call "reconfiguration". Undulatory, postural, and form-reconfiguration can be distinguished, studied independently, and examined in terms of mechanical interactions and evolutionary importance. Using a combination of live, swimming fishes and digital robotic fish that are autonomous and self-propelled, we examined the functional relation between undulatory and postural reconfiguration in forward swimming, backward swimming, and yaw turning. To probe how postural and form reconfiguration interact, the yaw turning of leopard sharks was examined using morphometric and kinematic analyses. To test how undulatory reconfiguration might evolve, the digital robotic fish were subjected to selection for enhanced performance in a simulated ecology in which each individual had to detect and move towards a food source. In addition to the general issue of reconfiguration, these investigations are united by the fact that the dynamics of undulatory and postural reconfigurations are predicted to be determined, in part, by the structural stiffness of the fish's body. Our method defines undulatory reconfiguration as the combined, point-by-point periodic motion of the body, leaving postural reconfiguration as the combined deviations from undulatory reconfiguration. While undulatory reconfiguration appears to be the sole or primary propulsive driver, postural reconfiguration may contribute to propulsion in hagfish and it is correlated with differences in forward, and backward, swimming in lamprey. Form reconfigures over developmental time in leopard sharks in a manner that is consistent with an allometric scaling theory in which structural stiffness of the body is held constant. However, correlation of a form proxy for structural stiffness of the body suggests that body stiffness may scale in order to limit maximum postural reconfiguration during routine yaw turns. When structural stiffness and undulatory frequency are modeled as determining the tail's undulatory wave speed, both factors evolve under selection for enhanced foraging behavior in the digital fish-like robots. The methods used in making these distinctions between kinds of reconfiguration have broad applicability in fish biology, especially for quantifying complex motor behaviors in the wild and for simulating selection on behavior that leads to directional evolution of functional phenotypes.

To test adaptation hypotheses about the evolution of animals, we need information about the behavior of phenotypically-variable individuals in a specific environment. To model behavior of ancient fish-like vertebrates, we previously combined evolutionary robotics and software simulations to create autonomous biomimetic swimmers in a simple aquatic environment competing and foraging for a single source of food. This system allowed us to test the hypothesis that selection for improved forage navigation drove the evolution of stiffer tails. In this paper, we extend our framework to evaluate more complex environments and hypotheses. Specifically, we test the hypothesis that predator-prey dynamics and the need for effective foraging strategies, operating simultaneously, were key selection pressures driving the evolution of morphological and sensory traits in early, fish-like vertebrates. Three evolvable traits were chosen because of their importance in propulsion and predator avoidance: (1) the number of vertebrae in the axial skeleton, (2) the trailing edge span of the caudal fin, and (3) the sensitivity of the sensory lateral line. To produce variable offspring, we used a genetic algorithm that rewarded parents with high fitness, allowing them to mate randomly and combine their mutated gametes. Offspring were then instantiated as autonomous embodied robots, the prey. These prey were chased by a non-evolving autonomous predator. Both kinds of robots were surface swimmers. The prey used a control architecture based on that of living fish: a two-layer subsumption architecture with predator escape over-riding steady swimming during foraging. The performance of six different prey robots in each generation was judged with a relative fitness function that rewarded a combination of high speed, rapid escape acceleration, escape responses, and the ability to stay away from the predator while at the same time staying close to the food source. This approach, which we call biomimetic evolutionary analysis, shows promise for investigators seeking new ways to test evolutionary hypotheses about biological systems.

Reviewed by: A Family of Strangers Robert Root (bio) A Family of Strangers. By Deborah Tall. Sarabande Books, 2006. 309 pages, paper, $16.95. I thought I knew what to expect in Deborah Tall's third nonfiction book. I had read The Island of the White Cow, a memoir of living on a remote island off the coast of Ireland, and From Where We Stand: Recovering a Sense of Place, a book about learning to live in central New York State, where she taught at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. I admired her as a nonfictionist of place and knew that the book would include her powerful essay "Memory's Landscapes," which had been originally published in Tikkun and which I would reprint in an anthology I was editing. So I was eager for her book to come out and had no doubt that I would find much to admire about the book. In fact, it far surpassed my expectations. It isn't a typical memoir, although its issues are reminiscent of other memoirs about family. In this one a daughter curious about her father's family history knows that she is expected to settle for his claims that he was orphaned young and remembers no family other than the one that adopted him. But the daughter is persistent about uncovering what she comes to realize is not forgotten but secret and she is alert to opportunities to get past her father's guardedness. She suspects that one of the bonds between her parents is a willingness to close the doors to the past and withhold information. She only meets her maternal grandfather when he's aged and frail and on his deathbed, only learns of certain aunts when she overhears her parents discussing their deaths. She continues her research after her father's death and, through the help of his newly discovered first cousin, begins to [End Page 175] find out more and more about the family. In time living relatives turn up and she establishes ties to them. Eventually she continues her search in Europe in the little village of Ladyzin, in the Ukraine, where her family originated. She finds she is tied to a web of people that throughout her life she never knew existed and to a community of eastern European Jews her father never told her about. In a bare-bones outline like this the book seems to tell a not-unfamiliar story, the search for family history. At one point Tall, after discussing the ways her parents are typical of their generation, declares, "I am likewise typical of my generation—genealogy is the second most popular hobby in the nation, after gardening." Genealogical research is detective work, the discovery of clues, the systematic search for artifacts and evidence, the serendipitous blundering onto vital details, the summarizing of the case. And to a certain extent this is what the book does. We follow the author's quest from her childhood suspicions that there's more to her family history than what she's been told through her incremental gathering of evidence to a point where she knows she is debunking myths and contradicting her father's testimony. She writes that her questioning "feels like a violation of the shell of oblivion my father erected around himself." She realizes that she is "finding what he never wished to make known, even to himself," and observes, "It is like having a secret from him, about him." Memoir often arrives at this point, the moment where the memoirist violates an unspoken compact with a parent, discovers aspects of a parent's life that had been withheld, placed off-limits, undisclosed—at least, or perhaps especially, from children. These are not necessarily dark, terrible secrets, and possibly the information has been inadvertently withheld—at one point Tall recognizes in her daughter's outrage over the discovery of an unknown relative in her father's family that she and her husband have also been unintentionally unforthcoming about their own history and that her daughter's reactions replay hers from a generation earlier—but the information is always a revelation of the unknown, and it changes the way the investigator views...