What did you have for breakfast this fall morning?

Now that mornings are cooler, for breakfast people are choosing hot oatmeal with milk instead of cold cereal.

Oatmeal is made by cooking rolled oats, as are shown above. A variety of flavored instant varieties can be found in American supermarkets. They can be prepared by adding boiling water and waiting a minute or two, or mixed with cold water and microwaved. (I prefer to keep bulk oatmeal around, and add my own cinnamon, raisins, and sweetener). Are any other grains processed and used similarly for breakfast elsewhere? Yes!

Last year in Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid’s book Mangoes & Curry Leaves (Culinary Travels Through the Great Subcontinent) I read that:  

“Flattened rice, also known as rice flakes, is called chira or poha in northern India, aval in southern India. It’s rice that’s been cooked and then run through rollers and flattened into flakes. The flakes are a pale grayish white and fairly soft, rather than crisp. Sold in clear plastic bags, they keep well. Chira is very quick to reconstitute and requires no boiling, so it’s a godsend for cooks in very hot weather or in a big hurry.”

Here in Boise (at India Foods on Fairview Avenue) I found two-pound plastic bags of both thin and thick poha for sale. Thin poha (shown above) is the rice analog of instant oatmeal. 

Other ground-up grains like grits (from corn) and Cream of Wheat (farina) also are common breakfast foods. Porridge is the more general term, and it appears in stories like Goldilocks and the Three Bears. 

What do these breakfast cereals have to do with public speaking? In storytelling you have to begin with what your audience is familiar with, and then take them elsewhere.

Images of Goldilocks and a bowl of oatmeal both came from Wikimedia Commons.

Public speaking was the most common fear for twin women in Virginia

Back in 1992 the Archives of General Psychiatry published an article written by K. Kendler, M. C. Neale, R. C. Kessler, A. C. Heath, and L. J. Eaves titled Genetic Epidemiology of Phobias in Women (Interrelationship of agoraphobia, social phobia, situational phobia, and simple phobia). You can find an abstract at PubMed, or read the full text here.

They asked a sample of 2163 women who were in the Virginia Twin Registry a series of 16 questions about four categories of unreasonable fears that were severe enough to interfere with their lives (phobias), and listed their results in Table 1. I’ve shown those results above in a bar chart. (Click on it to see a larger, clearer view). Those fears were grouped into four categories:

AGORAPHOBIA
Being in Crowds - 6.6%  
Going out of the house alone - 4.1%
Being in open spaces 0.9%

ANIMAL PHOBIA
Snakes - 5.5%
Spiders - 3.3%
Bats - 1.6%
Insects - 1.0%

SITUATIONAL PHOBIA
Other high places - 7.4%
Airplanes - 4.7%
Other closed places - 3.7%
Bridges - 3.1%
Tunnels - 2.9%

SOCIAL PHOBIA
Giving a speech - 9.4%
Meeting new people - 4.4%
Using public bathrooms - 1.9%
Eating in public - 1.6%

The most common fear was giving a speech (social), followed by other high places (situational), being in crowds (agoraphobia), snakes (animals), and airplanes (situational).

They did a very detailed analysis, which I’m not going to try to summarize here, to find influences of genetic and environmental risk factors,. An image of the Kessler Twins came from Wikimedia Commons.

Putting numbers into context with a browser tool - The Dictionary of Numbers

On May 15th Randall Munroe blogged about an interesting new extension for the Google Chrome web browser called the Dictionary of Numbers:

“It searches the text in your browser for quantities it understands and inserts contextual statements in brackets. It might turn the phrase ‘315 million people’ into ‘315 million people [≈ the population of the United States]’.”

I illustrated it using a grayed version from one of Randall’s Xkcd cartoons that apparently parodied the recent monster movie Pacific Rim. So far I’ve been using Firefox, so I have not tried Dictionary of Numbers yet.

Funneling your big ideas through a small vocabulary

Explaining hard ideas simply always is a challenge. Almost two years ago I blogged about Communicating clearly to nontechnical audiences - the grandmother test. This week on The Eloquent Woman blog I read Denise Graveline’s post, Big ideas don’t need big words. But, where do you find the small ones?

Denise mentioned one solution - a recent tool called the Up-Goer Five Text Editor that was created by Cambridge geneticist Theo Sanderson. He was inspired by one of Randall Munroe’s Xkcd cartoons that tried to explain the Saturn V moon rocket using just the ten hundred (thousand) most common English words. (That cartoon may have come from an earlier one about the Simple English Wikipedia). Up-Goer puts a red underline below each uncommon word you use, and thus invites you to reconsider that choice.  

Up-Goer Five has inspired tumblr sites like Ten Hundred Words of Science and Up Goer Your Ph.D. I think it’s a useful tool. It can force you into a childlike sense of wonder, like the following seven-minute video description of the Cassini spacecraft’s mission to Saturn and its moons:




Carl Zimmer ranted that Up-Goer Five was useless:

“.... Because an average six-year-old has a vocabulary, by some estimates, of 16,000 words. And an average adult's vocabulary is around 60,000. So Up Goer Five is only useful if you are going to talk to pre-schoolers. For an audience that's any older--even second grade--I can't see how it can help.”

I think Carl’s claim is hilariously xenophobic since it ignores the large number of people learning English as a second or foreign language. I grew up listening to shortwave radio, so I was familiar with how the Voice of America (VOA) uses Special English broadcasts as a teaching tool. The Special English Word Book has just 1580 words. For an example, read or listen to this VOA news item on Mars Rover Marks First Year on Red Planet.

VOA also has a wonderful English in A Minute series that explains idioms like Burn the Midnight Oil:

“Everybody knows that Americans burn a lot of oil. But is there a special oil that they burn in the middle of the night?”

Using simple language can make us laugh though. Sixty years ago Andy Griffith recorded a hilarious six-minute comic monologue about college football:




The title for this post was inspired by Sally James, and the oil drum image was based on this one from Wikimedia Commons.

The Ladder-of-Abstraction and the Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom Pyramid

On September 15th Andrew Dlugan posted on his Six Minutes blog about The Ladder of Abstraction and the Public Speaker. He discussed S. I. Hayakawa’s concept that we think and communicate in varying degrees of abstraction ranging from the concrete (ground) to the abstract (sky).

Andrew also mentioned Roy Peter Clark having discussed how you need to learn to climb up and down the ladder in his book Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer. On the Poynter Institute web site Roy has an excellent 900-word article, Writing Tool #13: Show and Tell. He has another article cautioning writers to Beware the Ladder’s Middle Rungs.

There is a related concept about organizing information called the Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom Pyramid. It was described by Clifford Stoll this way:

“Data isn't information. ... Information, unlike data, is useful. While there’s a gulf between data and information, there’s a wide ocean between information and knowledge. What turns the gears in our brains isn't information, but ideas, inventions, and inspiration. Knowledge—not information—implies understanding. And beyond knowledge lies what we should be seeking: wisdom.”

David Weinberger blogged about a problem with this hierarchy. Some also use more than four levels. In this presentation by Tim Donahue there is a fifth, understanding, added explicitly between knowledge and wisdom. An article by Steve Draper even has seven levels.

I’ve used six levels when teaching internet research, and you can see another ladder version from that post shown below. 

We’re number forty-four!

The Masters In Communication web site has just included this blog in their list Public Speaking 101: The Top Online Resources. They divided those resources into four categories:

46 sites under Public & Professional Speaking
         
25 sites under Presentation Blogs & Tools

9 sites under Speechwriting

21 sites under General Communication & Debate

Joyful Public Speaking was number 44 of the 46 sites in the Public & Professional Speaking category. How big of a deal is this? Not very.

That web site also has what they claim is a Detailed List of Campuses that have a Masters in Communication Program. No universities are listed here in Idaho, which is curiously incomplete since Boise State University has such a program. I know that because I have met one of their students, Jim Poston. In Utah only Westminster College in Salt Lake City is listed, although the University of Utah in that city also has a program. For Oregon only George Fox University and the University of Oregon are listed, although over in Portland both Portland State University and the University of Portland have programs.

Do we all carry around huge sacks of specific phobias?

Specific phobias are extreme and persistent fears and avoidance of specific situations or things like dogs, flying, spiders etc. They are the most common mental disorders in the U.S - in. a year 9% of U.S. adults have a specific phobia.

Now and then I read a truly incredible statistic. On a web page about the extreme fear of dust (amathophobia) there was this gem:

“It is unknown how many experience amathophobia, it has been approximated that nearly 20 trillion adults annually suffer from some sort of specific phobia.”

A trillion is a thousand billion, or one followed by twelve zeroes. What’s my share of that outrageously large number? According to Wikipedia the world population is roughly 7 billion, where a billion is one followed by nine zeroes.

If we divided 20 trillion by 7 billion, we would find a lower bound for the number of annual phobias per person (by assuming everyone was an adult) -  2,857 phobias. Note that we can cancel out nine zeroes before we even enter those numbers in a calculator. That’s a huge sack of phobias for us each  to be carrying around.

Dividing by 365.25 to get the number per day, that’s still almost 8 (7.82) phobias. If we are awake for 16 hours per day, that means a phobia pops up roughly every two hours.  

Today is Friday the 13th, so some people also are thinking about Triskadekaphobia.

When writing a speech you can choose to make numbers comprehensible by describing them per person per day, or huge and incomprehensible if you multiply them by the population of a country or the world.

The image of a woman with a sack came from Wikimedia Commons.