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Culturally Embedded Abuse

In Cameroon, some mothers heat wooden pestles or coconut shells over a fire, then use them to pound and iron the budding breasts of their pubescent daughters. BBC News (June 23, 2006) reports that a quarter of girls in the country undergo the practice of 'breast ironing,' which mothers believe protects their daughters from unwanted sexual advances-which in turn could lead to early marriage and prevent them from completing school. Not only is the pain excruciating, physicians say the practice damages the girls' still-developing bodies. Experts suggest that parents simply talk plainly with their daughters about sex. The Association of Aunties, a group of teenage girls, has created a television campaign to oppose the practice.

[word watch]
graffadi

noun: The co-opting of street art for corporate advertising.

A recent case, Punk Planet (March/April 2006) reports, was Sony's street art ad campaign for the PlayStation Portable, which splashed neighborhood walls with cartoon-style paintings of doe-eyed youths playing with the gadgets. Some graffiti artists, set on protesting corporate creep and gentrification, attacked the big business by renaming the company 'Fony' or covering the images in red paint. Ironically, Sony wouldn't stand for vandalism of its vandalism and speedily sent out clean-up crews to erase the defacements.

I Wanna Talk Like You

It has long been anticipated that America's regional dialects would simply die off, a side effect of the ubiquity of the mass media. Smithsonian (Oct. 2006) reports that despite our increasingly cookie-cutter society, however, our language idiosyncrasies are here to stay. In fact, the Atlas of North American English, which plots speech patterns in the continental United States and Canada, found that dialects are more pronounced than ever. It seems that we don't really model our speech on radio and television-we just want to sound like our friends.

Power Walking

Consider for a moment that every footstep generates six to eight watts of energy-energy that simply scatters into the ether.

Researchers are trying to find a way to capture that ambient force and turn it into a workable power source. Originally, it was a military idea aimed at lightening soldiers' gear, reports OnEarth (Fall 2006). To eliminate the need to carry a rechargeable battery for communication devices, researchers created a type of generator that can be embedded in soldiers' boots and translate kinetic energy into electrical current.

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