Physiology 1 Research Report Example: Fill & Download for Free

Linguists are often erroneously* asked, "how many languages do you speak?" when people find out they're linguists, so thank you for the chance to answer this question. But also: Daunting! Explain your raison d'etre in one Quora response or less.The answer, put most simply and directly (but perhaps cryptically), is that linguists explore how language works.Just to give you some examples, before breaking things down in more detail: This could involve exploring the neuroscience of how language works in the brain; the typology of how different languages achieve similar functions using different formal devices, the developmental psychology of how children language acquisition works and how it can go awry; how language ability stops working in aphasia, Alzheimer's, or due to some other dysfunction; how language works as a bidirectional human-computer interface; how language works when learned later in life in the classroom; how languages change; how language defines various social identities; how language functions in other professions, including politics, law and law enforcement; and, as alluded to in the question, how does one make new, working constructed languages.These days, as with most professions, doing linguistics actually looks like this:The name of this jpeg, young-business-woman-working-on-computer could also be young-linguist-working-on-computerFor a few linguists, it looks a bit more exciting:Field Linguist, K. David Harrison, in the fieldSo, there are lots of different topics involved in exploring how language works. And there are lots of different ways to get paid to do this.Let's take a look at both.JobsThe types of jobs that linguists have are pretty diverse. Here are some examples:ResearchAcademia: Some linguists teach and do research at Universities in Linguistics departments as well as in Psychology, Speech and Hearing Sciences, Cognitive Science and Computer Science departments. Most big Universities have Linguistics departments, but many Universities don't, a dismaying fact for linguists when compared to a discipline like Psychology.Research Scientist: In addition to research at a University, there are other organizations supporting linguistics research including the NIH (e.g., National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders), the NSF, DARPA and where I work, the Department of Veterans Affairs. In Europe there are places like the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, CNRS and BCBL - Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language that fund direct linguistics research far more generously than the US.Corporate Research: A handful of companies (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! to some degree) invest in basic linguistics research. Much of it is focused on stuff like NLP/NLU (see below). Raytheon also has a big Speech Tech research division (Speech, Language & Multimedia).Lexicography: Linguists are the ones that determine what goes in the dictionary and what does not go in. Pissed about literally being acceptable as simply an intensifier (Marc Ettlinger's answer to How do I stop being annoyed by people using literally as an intensifier?)? Blame a linguist, but know that the decision was made based on tons of research.EntertainmentHollywood! There are surprisingly many ways linguists can make a buck in Hollywood that doesn't involve waiting tables. There are the handful of folks (and their society, Language Creation Society) that make languages for movies and shows like Avatar and Game of Thrones, but there are also dialect coaches and linguistic consultants for shows that attempt to have some sort of historical accuracy in the language spoken.Linguistics Pundit: Many big papers have some sort of On Language type column and a few magazines, too. Linguists or pseudo-linguists (e.g., William Safire) write these columns, generally to the delight of prescriptive grammar nerds. Then there are folks like Deborah Tannen who also happens to be an academic, who are in the public eye talking about how we talk to each other.Writing Books: Usually this is done by the academics and researchers above, but not always. An acquaintance wrote this book, for example:High TechLocalization: As companies become more and more global, more and more expertise is needed in taking some product suited for some nation and moving it to another language and culture. Many companies, including Google (e.g., Google Localization Specialist Jobs) hire linguists to help them set up a web presence in some new locale.Natural Language Processing: We interact with computers a lot these days and it sure would be great to do so by just talking. Some day soon we might be able to. Supposedly the xbox one will have a pretty solid natural language understanding interface and Siri and Google Glass depend on this sort of technology, too. While generally CS-heavy, it is often developed through a combination of computer science and linguistics. Things like automated language translation come in to play here, too.Semantic Analysis/Big Data: What's the word on twitter about PRISM (NSA surveillance program)? How do the folks on Quora (product) feel about Justin Bieber (musician)? Figuring out how to sift through the vast amount of big data that is natural language data takes computer science, statistics and linguistics. And presumably PRISM itself involves some decent amount of linguistic sophistication - I'm sure NSA is hiring (Intern Program at the National Security Agency)!Document Management: We have a lot of documents these days. Corporations have a lot more. Linguists can help create automated systems that make sense of your documents, get the gist of what they're about and organize and retrieve them when necessary.Language Testing: There are two routes you can go here. First are companies that do language proficiency testing, and in particular, there's a move towards doing automated phone-based testing. An obvious application would be to score the English ability and accent for applicants to a call center. You can also work on figuring out how to test native speaker's ability in their native language. Companies here include Pearson and ETS.Linguistics in Other FieldsForensic Linguistics: Joe Devney is definitely the expert here (e.g., For what legal cases have linguistics played a big role?). Linguists can be involved in a lot of different dimensions of a law case, from interpreting the language of contracts to identifying if someone is drunk based on their voice.Politics: Language and politics is a pretty niche business, but I worked at a think tank (Rockridge Institute) that did that sort of research and gave a talk or two. John McWhorter is another example of someone who does this.Language and CultureTranslation: Translation involves appreciating a lot of the subtleties of two of more languages and figuring out how to translate from one to the other. Translation services is a big business and has been for a while. We'll see how much of it ends up being taken over by high-tech and automated translation.Language Revitalization and Documentation: Language are dying, and dying fast. So, there is a market for linguists to help groups -- Native American tribes, for example -- revitalize and or document these threatened languages.Language and HealthSpeech Pathology and Audiology: Generally, this requires a separate degree in Speech Path or AuD, but there isn't too much differentiating this field from linguistics. Indeed, many of the profs at Speech and Hearing Science departments have Linguistics PhDs. Speech pathlogists can work with children (many work for school districts, for example), aphasia/stroke patients and older adults.Hearing Aids: Hearing aids are big business in the US and building a better hearing aid will often involve understanding how humans perceive speech since that's the sounds people generally care about most. Linguists do research for hearing aid companies as well as fittings and so on; sometimes a SP/Aud degree is also needed.Language as a tool for diagnosis: An emerging niche field, but the one I'm going to end with because I think it's an interesting area ripe for research. The way you talk changes when you suffer from Alzheimer's, traumatic brain injury and possibly things like depression and schizophrenia. This may lead to powerful tools for preliminary diagnostic tools without the need of a doctors office visit. Just talk into your smart phone and have an algorithm, written by a linguist, figure out next steps.There are surely more; reply in comments with any additions and I'll add to this list.How We Explore How Language WorksLinguistics has been called the most scientific of the humanities and the most humanistic of the sciences.** As a science, linguistics therefore involves a lot of the same day-to-day stuff that various sciences do, but you're often working with people.Collect DataI collect data by doing behavioral experiments and neuroscience imaging studies. Audiologists might collect an audiogram from a patient. Others might collect data by sucking in large corpora, like twitter feeds or a cache of legal documents, into databases. Sometimes linguists go into the field (e.g., somewhere where a language or dialect is to be studied) and conduct interviews. These days, you can use things like online surveys and Amazon Mechanical Turk to collect speaker behavior information as well. Some linguists may be involved in measuring certain properties of speech (e.g. acoustic analysis). Others might spend their time reading up on Grammars of specific languages, investigating how others have documented how languages work.A Plethysmograph, for collecting physiological information about the volume of air in the lungs, which can be used to study speech production.Analyze and Report the DataThese two steps are pretty similar across all fields of work. Everyone that doesn't work alone has to analyze and communicate what they're investigating whether it's an expense report or a building plan. So, the linguist may have to be a statistician, neuroscience data cruncher, quantitative researcher, data scientist, data analyst and so on. Ideally a linguist's background in working with languages will help him/her make sense of the generalizations found by the relevant analyses.Then, whether it's a powerpoint deck for your boss or an article for a journal, a report filed for a patient or an email to a client, linguists have to communicate their findings to those that care. Oftentimes, there will be stats or graphs involved.Example charts and graphs from a recent paper.Act on the DataThis is relevant to some linguists (e.g., speech pathologist) more than others (academic) but based on the findings a linguist might recommend or enact some change. This might include a treatment or hearing aid. Or it might mean a change in some wording on a website, adding some key words, or updating a Social graph based on an analysis of users' dialects. With a company like Lexicon Branding, it might mean helping a company name a product based on your findings. Or it might mean adding a new word to the dictionary if you work for Oxford University Press (Ben Zimmer).A hearing aid fitting may be the result of an analysis of speech perceptionResearchAgain, this is relevant to some (e.g., research scientist) but not as much to others (e.g., localization). I'll just report my own experience since I don't know what others do:I spend about 1-2 hours/day, on average, reading and sifting through new journal articles. Each week, I go through about 500 abstracts from journals as diverse as Nature and Science to Journal of the Acoustical Society and of America and Cerebral Cortex, covering some fraction of the new research going on in linguistics. I'll save about 20 articles, skim a handful and carefully read a couple. When I'm actually writing, I'll usually read about a dozen papers that are new to me and skim a few dozen more.There is a ton of new research on language and it's a very exciting field to be in right now. Neuroscience methods have advanced to where we can take techniques honed in researching more basic functions like vision and apply them to understand how the brain processes language. Big data and technology now allows us to look at language from a large-scale quantitative perspective with projects like Google Culturomics. Interest in social networks is tightly enmeshed with understanding the spread and use of language. Human-computer interfaces have advanced to the point where there is only one place left to go - talking to our computers - and we're getting pretty close. And with the globalization of the world economy, understanding how to best communicate with each other is more important than ever.So, there's lots for a linguist to do.And I haven't even begun to explain what linguistics is...* Erroneous because fully learning a second, third or fourth language is not a prerequisite for exploring how language works. Chomsky, for example, famously is only fluent in English and has some passing familiarity with Hebrew.** The internet tells me that Alfred L. Kroeber, founder of the UC Berkeley Anthropology department, actually said this about Anthropology. Since the first linguistics department in the western hemisphere was founded at Berkeley by an anthropologist before it was folded back into Anthropology ten years later, we'll just call it a draw.

Alligators are primarily dwellers of freshwater habitats like rivers, lakes and wetlands. So, they are not expected to have suitable physiological mechanisms to survive in highly saline marine environments. However, it is not uncommon for alligators to venture into the estuaries for short times. Saltwater or esturine crocodiles - a close relative of the alligators are physiologically adapted to saline environment, thanks to the presence of buccal salt glands, which excrete excess salt. Alligators on the other hand, have low tolerance for salinity due to the absence of these organs. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), alligators can survive in sea-water for few hours to few days.However, there are reported sightings of alligators in sea-water, probably the ones which went wayward due to water currents. For example, a team of researchers from Georgia Department of Natural Resources spotted a 5-foot alligator 20 miles off the coast of Georgia in 2010. Surprisingly, it was still alive. There were also occasional sightings of alligators which washed ashore on beaches from the ocean.Sources:Alligator found 20 miles out to sea swimming with whalesAmerican Alligator (Alligator mississippiensis)7-foot alligator emerges from the ocean in South CarolinaDo alligators live in the ocean?

Strap in 'cos at ~2000 words this one is fairly long.The notion that mice could handily emulate human physiology has always strained credulity. After all, a mouse is a short-lived, four-legged, nocturnal, burrowing rodent. It beggars the imagination that the evolutionary selection forces that shaped its physiology remotely resemble those that shaped that of humans. It then follows that mouse physiology likely offers little by way of concordance to that of humans. And yet since post-WWII, the role of mice, and to a lesser extent, rats, has only become more deeply embedded in biomedical research.There are two parts to this predominance of mice and other rodents in experimental biomedical research; one, how this came about in the first place, and two, why it continues to remain the norm. As is often seen in history, the first resulted from the accidental confluence of a series of historical precedents in the first part of the 20th century while the second is dictated by prevailing cultural and economic imperatives in biomedical research, a process where the longer it continues, the more the ensuing historical precedence assumes perceived importance. A utilitarian mindset that presumes the expediency of such animals also helps sustain the process.Amateur mouse fanciers turned breeders, the rediscovery of Mendel, the birth of mammalian genetics, the creation of the modern scientific infrastructure: the chain of early 20th century events that led to mouse predominance in experimental biomedical researchIn the early decades of the 20th century, Abbie Lathrop, a mouse and rat fancier, was breeding fancy mice and rats on her Massachusetts farm and unusually for that time and especially given her non-scientific background, she kept excellent breeding records to boot.Around the same time, after languishing in obscurity for >3 decades, the rediscovery of Mendel's now famous pea breeding experiments jump-started American genetics research, creating a confluence of right resources, right finding and right timing since Lathrop's treasure trove of inbred and quasi-inbred mouse strains proved a godsend for mammalian genetics pioneers such as William Ernest Castle who were then just beginning their careers. In turn, Castle trained the next generation of world famous mammalian geneticists such as George Snell and Clarence Cook Little.Little was an excellent entrepreneur who took some mouse colonies from Lathrop's farm and ended up creating a rodent breeding facility at Bar Harbor, Maine, that over the subsequent decades morphed into the Jackson Laboratory, even today a pre-eminent global source of lab mice, rats and other experimental animals.Snell's research on those pioneering inbred mouse strains led to the discovery of the Major histocompatibility complex - Wikipedia. Having inbred mice with a single MHC haplotype proved not just crucial for this discovery but was also handy to use to maintain segregated mouse colonies, a key tool necessary for reducing confounding variables in biological experimentation.Meantime, the US emerged post-WWII as the wealthiest nation in the world and set about establishing the scientific research infrastructure and agenda that pretty much every other country ended up replicating in some shape or form.Vannevar Bush laid the groundwork for an unprecedented policy of government funding of scientific research and development in Science, the Endless Frontier, his 1945 report to the US president.Implementation of this policy over subsequent decades made the NIH and, to a lesser extent, the then-newly formed NSF, behemoths of US biomedical research funding. Such R&D funding at US universities transformed them into preeminent centers of scientific research.Legislative acts such as the GI bill further empowered US universities to train and graduate a scientifically trained workforce, a process that has only grown in the subsequent decades creating a workforce glut that academia can barely absorb.Guinea pigs had come to dominate biomedical research from the late 19th century. However, guinea pig colonies were expensive to maintain; they bred in small numbers, availability of few inbred strains meant that uncontrollable variables were introduced into each experiment, their housing and feed were expensive. In contrast, mice are relatively hardier, and easier to breed, feed and house.Mouse (and rat) animal husbandry thus proved far easier to standardize at an industrial scale and replicate in universities and other research institutions in the post-WWII years. The knowledge, expertise and influence of people like Little played no small role in the spread of mouse and rat as the models of choice in experimental biomedical research.Back then the American economic model was much better at fostering competition so other lab animal suppliers such as Charles River, Harlan and Taconic soon emerged, creating the current industrial pipeline of lab animal supply, consisting largely of mice and rats, that currently dominates biomedical research.In short, the fundamentals favored post-WWII predominance of mice and rats in biomedical research. Where the earlier guinea pig predominance left its mark on the English language, they have themselves long since ceded ground to mice and rats (below from 1).In a way, the baton passing from guinea pig to mouse as the pre-eminent animal model also represented the torch passing from Europe to the US as the global biomedical research leader. Where even into the 1920s, widespread acceptance of research findings required the imprimatur of European researchers, typically French or German, post-WWII till date it's the US all the way.Cul-de-sac or the mouse that roared: Be it ever so counter-productive, prevailing historical, cultural and increasingly economic imperatives dictate mouse predominance in experimental biomedical researchFollow the money. Cliched, overused and yet it remains on the nose for explaining mouse predominance in biomedical research.The industrialization of molecular biology since the 1980s has only served to further accelerate and deepen this predominance. For example, as the technological capability to knock-out and knock-in genes became easier starting in the late 1980s, the trend began among the powerful stakeholders within the scientific community such as the granting agencies, and scientific journals and their peer reviewers to initially seek, then to insist and lastly to demand that results of in vitro cell culture knock-out and knock-in studies be validated in vivo.The by then well-established industrial pipeline of inbred mouse strains easily stepped in as the obvious choice for such in vivo tests. That started off a new wave of creating mouse strains with various genes knocked-out or knocked-in, a trend that continues unabated till date.Thus as molecular biology took off, mouse animal husbandry expanded, further cementing its predominance, creating hundreds of new genetically engineered mouse strains, strains whose study now consumes the entire careers of thousands upon thousands of biomedical researchers studying various physiological systems.Biochemists to endrocrinologists to all manner of other specialists who'd previously used molecular biology tools to study their favorite molecules and processes at the cellular level using in vitro cell lines now swarmed into the mouse husbandry business, creating unique mouse strains, maintaining their colonies and studying them while specialists in other fields such as developmental biology and immunology had already glommed on to the mouse model decades earlier.While developmental biologists still hedge their bets and continue using fruit flies, nematodes and even zebrafish as model experimental organisms, from about the 1970s many immunologists went all in wedding themselves to their mouse models so much so that grotesquely, knowledge of mouse immunology is today miles ahead of knowledge of human immunology.To add insult to injury much of that vaunted knowledge rests on shockingly shaky grounds. Consider just one example, perhaps the most important of all, which stems from the most popular mouse strain used in all of biomedical research in general and in immunology in particular. This turns out to be a strain called C57Bl/6 (2). Prone to obesity, it entirely lacks a whole MHC molecule, the one called I-E, due to a translocation event at some point in its breeding history. Thus, its immune responses could in no way, shape or form be considered representative of those of even a prototypical inbred mouse strain, let alone be considered an adequate surrogate for any human immune response.Of course the most pernicious and stickiest ingress of the mouse and other rodent models proved to be in the drug development and drug approval processes, a choice sped up in the wake of the thalidomide scandal in the early 1960s, with the 1962 passage and implementation of the Kefauver Harris Amendment - Wikipedia, which codified and granted the FDA the authority to approve new drugs for marketing and sale. Rather than their scientific suitability, a cultural dependence on preclinical rodent models has since driven regulator preference for such data and of course, the longer this goes on, the longer the weight of historical precedence accrues perceived importance.We humans are preternaturally talented at outsourcing. Among ourselves, we effortlessly contrive convoluted and seemingly inconspicuous processes that unerringly steer the most undesirable jobs in the economy towards those deemed most undesirable, the poorest and most otherized, among them refugees and immigrants.I'm sure we would likewise seek to outsource our diseases just as easily if we could but we can't. And yet in our uniquely muddled way we've chosen to outsource as much of the risk in drug development to poor benighted animals who have no say in the matter and decidedly cannot provide informed consent, or at least not in a manner or language we could comprehend; muddled because no animal could conceivably be a scientifically adequate surrogate for human physiology, and yet we unabashedly choose to wallow in such a fanciful notion.Why do we do this? Same answer as for so many other human decisions, because we can, being a species just smart enough to cause real and lasting havoc.Thus, mouse strains serving as surrogates for human physiology, regardless that such extrapolations be ever so tenuous, has only become more deeply embedded in biomedical research, with newcomers simply unquestioningly learning the ropes from earlier generations and taking our almost single-minded reliance on mouse models to ever newer heights.Every now and then, a certain amount of caterwauling about the lack of suitability of mice as experimental models bubbles up in the scientific literature. Issues include the inherent limitations of inbred mouse strains in being able to recapitulate basic wild mouse physiology, let alone their ability to emulate those of their human counterparts, how mice are housed, what they are fed, how lack of housing “enrichment” prevents a full manifestation of their “mouse” traits such as foraging.In addition, everything from cage design, ventilation systems, light cycle, temperature and humidity settings to diet to how they are handled are just a few of the factors that profoundly influence the readouts of every single lab mouse experiment. But then prevailing economic, read scientific career, imperatives being what they are, things settle back to the uneasy status quo of mouse predominance.This system is now creaking, sagging and almost hopelessly broken. Mouse husbandry costs are considerable for any biomedical research lab, even more so in this era of ever-shrinking research funding, which only intensifies competition.Rigorous statistical procedures now considered the norm in clinical research such as randomization and blinding continue to remain as alien in experimental animal research as proverbial aliens on planet earth. Even the most basic of standard statistical analyses routine in clinical research such as meta-analyses and systematic reviews remain impossible for experimental animal research data simply because experimental procedures and data collection choices remain unstandardized and thus vary vastly between labs and often even between different experiments within the same lab.Ever increasing pressure to publish plus tight budgets mean that not enough mice per group and not enough repeats of any given experiment have become more the norm than outlier. The possibility that things are stretched almost to breaking point shows up in the form of shoddy, irreproducible data (below from 3).Astonishingly the economics of animal research remain hardly explored even though they could potentially explain every relevant issue about modern biomedical research. Even in that, EU numbers are somewhat easier to find compared to those in the US since the US Animal Welfare Act excludes mice, rats and fish, though it does have other regulations to ensure animal welfare. Thus, of the ~11.5 million experimental animals used in the EU in 2011, ~61% were mice and ~65% of total animal usage was for basic R&D (below from 4).Bibliography1. The Mouse Trap: Can One Lab Animal Cure Every Disease?2. The Trouble With Black-63. Hartung, Thomas. "Food for thought look back in anger–What clinical studies tell us about preclinical work." Altex 30.3 (2013): 275. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/88e1/b6ec27357a21ae7314dbf434098ae665b0db.pdf4. Meigs, Lucy, et al. "Animal testing and its alternatives–the most important omics is economics." ALTEX-Alternatives to animal experimentation 35.3 (2018): 275-305. https://www.altex.org/index.php/altex/article/download/1134/1131Thanks for the R2A, Daniel Kaplan.