Society & Culture

All about the Franklins

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With Independence Day almost upon us, here’s a fresh bit of insight on our polymath Founding Father, Pennsylvania’s own Benjamin Franklin.

Author, printer, politician, scientist, inventor, statesman, activist, ambassador: The swath of Franklin’s genius is famously wide. In this blog post published by Oxford University Press, Penn State Franklin scholar Carla Mulford recounts another of the great man’s accomplishments — currency design.

In 1776,  while establishing a wartime postal service, working on the manufacture of saltpeter for gunpowder, writing a peace petition to King George III, and serving as President (roughly, governor) of Pennsylvania, Franklin was called on to design and oversee the printing of a Continental paper currency. Characteristically, the bills he produced managed to gracefully address both a vital pragmatic concern — the danger of counterfeit — and a vital political one — the concept of intercolonial unity.

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Society & Culture

Focus on research: What we need to know about race-neutral policies

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By Liliana M Garces

On Thursday, June 23, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of a race-conscious post-secondary admissions policy at the University of Texas at Austin.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, considered to be the swing vote, joined Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, and Sonia Sotomayor, in a 4-3 decision that affirmed the constitutionality of the race-conscious policy and the university’s compelling interest in the educational benefits of a diverse student body.

At the same time, the decision addressed the need for institutions to continue to assess whether so-called race-neutral alternatives are available and workable, and suffice for achieving the university’s goals.

A large body of evidence shows so-called race-neutral admissions policies are not as effective for attaining racial diversity on campus. They could even exacerbate existing racial inequities.

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Earth & Environment, Science & Technology

Computer program identifies leaves better, faster than humanly possible

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In the video above, Penn State geoscientist Peter Wilf describes a computer program he and colleagues developed that learns, and can classify modern and fossil leaves over 70 percent of the time and place them in the appropriate biological family. By comparison, he says, it can take a carefully trained human two hours to classify just one leaf.

The software actually taught itself botany, learning from a large number of already classified leaves, but developed its own methods for classifying a leaf.  It creates heat maps that place a red marked square onto the image grid to signify features of the leaf that are critical for identification. The problem is, often trained humans can’t figure out exactly why that particular feature is important.

Wilf and collaborators spent nine years refining the program. He hopes eventually to use it to create a more accurate picture of plant evolution.

Members of the news media interested in talking to Wilf should contact Patty Craig at 814-863-4663 or plc103@psu.edu.

Society & Culture

Why the UK’s Brexit vote should matter to Americans

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By Terrence Guay

On June 23, citizens of the United Kingdom will go to the polls to vote on whether their country will remain a member of the European Union. While the outcome will have the greatest impact on residents of Europe, it will also affect the U.S. as well.

And with the latest polls putting the “leave” campaign ahead of those for remaining in the EU, it’s essential that Americans understand just what’s at stake if a “Brexit” were to occur — and why we’re having this debate in the first place.

As a scholar of international business who views European integration as a successful, albeit messy, experiment in peace-building, I appreciate the frustration many in the U.K. have with the way the EU sometimes operates. But is that enough to justify leaving it?

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Society & Culture

What is different in the bilingual brain?

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By François Grosjean

Editor’s Note: This interview, conducted by François Grosjean, originally appeared on the Psychology Today blog, Life as a Bilingual.

Research on the bilingual brain has gone through several stages over the years: the study of aphasic polyglots, experimental work on language lateralization in bilinguals, and now brain imaging studies that examine language processing and neural structures and connections between them. One of the leading researchers in this field is Ping Li, professor of psychology and linguistics at Penn State. He works on the neural and computational bases of language representation and learning and has kindly accepted to answer a few of our questions. We wish to thank him wholeheartedly.

Before addressing the issue of what is different in the bilingual brain, as compared to the monolingual brain, can you quickly go through what is clearly similar?

It may be helpful to say at the outset that we are talking about the human brain, bilingual or not, which is the only brain that can learn and use complex natural languages for communication. No brain of any other species on our planet has language like ours, despite claims that other animals may also have sophisticated communication systems.  Continue reading What is different in the bilingual brain? →