Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2015 August 28

= August 28 =

What university rankings are relevant to choose the right degree at the right place?
What university rankings are relevant choose the right degree at the right place? I'd consider choosing a different degree, if that implies a better education. --Jubilujj 2015 (talk) 01:53, 28 August 2015 (UTC)
 * That depends entirely on what your goals are, and what part of the world you are located in. -- Jayron 32 02:17, 28 August 2015 (UTC)
 * For a better chance of a good job after university, try Oxbridge in the UK or an Ivy League university in America. ( A contrasting view is that you will get a better general education by travelling the world for three or four years. )  We have an article on College and university rankings that you might like to read.    D b f i r s   16:01, 28 August 2015 (UTC)

Why take a more expensive name brand drug when a less expensive generic drug is available?
Is there any valid reason why a patient would want/need to take a name brand drug, when a generic is available? Likewise, is there any valid reason why a doctor would require (prescribe) a patient to take a name brand drug, when a generic is available? I mean, are the two really the same? Or are there some differences? I specifically avoided putting this question on the Science Help Desk, because I didn't want a lot of scientific/pharmacological type of replies. Thanks. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 06:01, 28 August 2015 (UTC)
 * I think placebo and its validity is relevant from the patient's perspective. Marketing methods of drug companies might be relevant from the doctor's viewpoint. The difference between the generic and the branded drug is often a matter of the production licence/copyright having expired and the ability of any drug company to make a generic version of a previously branded drug. Bad Pharma by Ben Goldacre might offer some interesting further reading. Richard Avery (talk) 06:32, 28 August 2015 (UTC)
 * Yeah see Pharmaceutical marketing and for example. Nil Einne (talk) 07:26, 28 August 2015 (UTC)
 * The excipients (i.e., the ingredients other than the actual drug or drugs) are frequently different. The patient could be allergic to, or have some other issue with, one or more of these ingredients. Also at least in the U.S. sometimes brand-name drug manufacturers have rebate/discount programs, which, when taken into account, can in some cases make the brand-name drug cheaper than a generic version (or at least an insured patient's copay; this is a whole topic in itself). And there's always individual preference. Some people have an aversion to generic drugs because they perceive them to be of lower quality. In developed countries with adequate regulation of drugs, generic drug manufacturers are required to demonstrate that their product is functionally identical to the brand-name version, so they should be interchangeable. There have been occasional incidents where this was found not to be the case. One example a few years ago was a delayed-release generic version of bupropion that did not release the drug at the proper rate. --71.119.131.184 (talk) 06:41, 28 August 2015 (UTC)
 * This is of interest. Apparently, expensive drugs work better than cheap ones. Or, at least, people think they do - so they do. 64.235.97.146 (talk) 12:35, 28 August 2015 (UTC)


 * Besides the above mentioned issues, (and as 71.119 already hinted) there is also the question of whether the quality control standards at generic drug manufacturers match those at name brand drug manufacturers. There may be systemic studies of the issue that other refdesk responders may know of, but here is an article, which shows why this is at least a concern. Abecedare (talk) 17:36, 30 August 2015 (UTC)

Follow up question
Generic drugs are basically dirt cheap (when compared to the name brand drug). Thus, how do the name brand drugs manage to command such an exorbitantly high price in the marketplace? How does the market (economics) "allow" for that? Also: When the generics start to come out, why doesn't that put the name brand drugs, essentially, out of business? With such huge price differences, how do the name brands even manage to stay (compete) in the market at all? Thanks. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 14:35, 28 August 2015 (UTC)
 * Actually, prices on name brand drugs often fall once generic versions become available. This is one reason why name brand drugs are initially so expensive... the company that produces a drug wants to get maximum profit while they still have the patent on it. Blueboar (talk) 14:57, 28 August 2015 (UTC)


 * The price may fall from its original name brand price. But, the price doesn't drop so low as the generic brand price.   Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 15:14, 28 August 2015 (UTC)


 * Part of it is because people are used to a certain brand and trust it. Once the patent expires, and generic alternatives become available, the patent owning company has a big head start in terms of reputation. But probably the main reason I think is related to Pharmaceutical marketing. Remember that the people who prescribe these drugs (medical professionals) are generally not the people who have to pay for them. Pharmaceutical companies spend a lot of money to influence doctors. - Lindert (talk) 14:52, 28 August 2015 (UTC)


 * This is anecdotal, but my sister's endocrinologist insists that she get the brand-name version of levothyroxine (for hypothyroidism) as it is supposedly better manufactured, with a more reliable dose. She had not responded well at first on a generic. (The drug is dispensed in micrograms, and apparently what is tested is the entire batch as it is made, not the mode dosage of individual pills.  Again, this is what my sister reports her doctor as saying.)  My mother and I both take the drug as well, but our doctors have said the generic is fine. μηδείς (talk) 17:18, 28 August 2015 (UTC)

Thanks, all. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 17:29, 30 August 2015 (UTC)

Maximum behavioral differences between men and women
I am inclined to reject a recent article about Ashley Madison as plainly false, based solely on what it says. If I were to believe it, only 0.03% of the real users of Ashley Madison were female, and all the rest were men - and my gut tells me that such a difference between the sexes is impossible, so the hackers must have removed the women from their dump, or the authors of the article misinterpreted the computer data. To illustrate, 0.003% of males seek sex reassignment surgery, according to transsexual, while at least 0.05% are thought to identify as female. So unless androgen-blocking drugs have a highly reliable tendency to squelch people from looking at Ashley Madison, there should be more transsexuals identifying as female on the site than the reported number of active women.

But it does make me wonder what the largest observed difference in behavior really is. I know this is a tough question to ask because often many other people will get on and try to enforce sex differences in behavior (e.g. Osama (film)). Even in the Ashley Madison signups it can argue that the fear of external pressure would have conributed, so it's hard to say where a 'pure' figure would be applicable. Something like sexual orientation implies something vaguely in the neighborhood of a 20:1 (or is it 2:1?) difference may be possible innately, but that too is hard to say is a pure measurement. Still... is there a way that people have tried to analyze this? Wnt (talk) 12:39, 28 August 2015 (UTC)
 * I don't really know what you're talking about, but I am inclined to reject your initial assertion that the article (the Gizmodo one, not the Yahoo one) is "plainly false". The person who wrote it spent many hours analysing the leaked data and came up with the conclusion that "Out of 5.5 million female accounts, roughly zero percent had ever shown any kind of activity at all." Who are you to query that scholarly finding, when you've done no such analysis of any kind yourself? --Viennese Waltz 12:50, 28 August 2015 (UTC)
 * Objection - some blogger self-publishing data analysis, even if vaguely credible, is not any sort of "scholarly finding". SemanticMantis (talk) 14:54, 28 August 2015 (UTC)


 * I thought it was common practice for such sites to falsely inflate the number of female profiles in order to "bait" male users. I think there was even a lawsuit to that effect against a site, at one point. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 14:27, 28 August 2015 (UTC)


 * Warning first link in OP autoplays video - even on a fairly locked-down browser - check your speakers before you click (my ears!) SemanticMantis (talk) 14:54, 28 August 2015 (UTC)


 * Of course you know behavior differences are utterly snarled up with nature vs. nurture, both in the specific case and in the wider cultural norms. This paper looks at gender differences in personality traits across different countries and cultures, this Nature paper was headline fodder when it came out , coming to the amazing conclusion that men and women respond to sexual stimuli differently. Here's one about hormonal influence in cognition . Here's one on hormonal and behavior effects on infection differences . Here's one about sex differences in response to the always fun major histocompatibility complex - . I don't know if any of those are "maximal" to you, but at a skim there's plenty of documented behavior differences, sometimes they pile up. The one on effects in different countries and personalities is probably the most relevant/interesting, because it is one of the few I can find that attempts to understand and control cultural variation. SemanticMantis (talk) 15:04, 28 August 2015 (UTC)

For what it's worth, the author of the Gizmodo article has withdrawn the claim, saying that the logs represent the contacts of 'facilitator' bots with various members, and has no idea how many males and females communicated. Wnt (talk) 23:44, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

Coast Guard on US Navy ships
Looking for a response to Joseph A. Spadaro's suggestion that a court case can't exist when the defendant is not there (to defend himself), I checked one of my favorite-named articles, United States v. Approximately 64,695 Pounds of Shark Fins (where the fins were the defendant), and was surprised to read that the original seizure was performed by a Coast Guard crew working from a Navy boat. Why would this situation arise? If commanders deem it appropriate to have Fife in the area, why wouldn't they want it to have a Navy crew? Or if commanders deem it appropriate to have a Coast Guard crew performing these operations, why wouldn't they have them use a Coast Guard vessel? Nyttend (talk) 14:35, 28 August 2015 (UTC)
 * The Navy and Coast Guard cooperate and coordinate use of vessels and personnel. As noted in the first paragraph of the article United States Coast Guard, the President and/or Congress has the authority to move command of Coast Guard assets to the Navy in times of war.  It also works the other way on a smaller scale; naval assets (either personnel or vessels) can be transferred from Naval command to Coast Guard command as well, I can't find the specific example you note, but here is an official press release from 2001 noting exactly such an event. So yes, the Coast Guard are sometimes given command of Naval Vessels to staff with Coast Guard personnel.  -- Jayron 32 15:21, 28 August 2015 (UTC)


 * See: Posse Comitatus Act. The Navy, as a branch of the US Military, is limited by law from conducting certain "Law Enforcement" activities... The Cost Guard, on the other hand, is (during peacetime) explicitly a law enforcement agency (it was originally a branch of the Treasury Dept., although now it falls under the Dept. of Homeland Security).  Now... the Navy has all sorts of nifty gizmos for finding and tracking ships at sea... and the Coast Guard can (and does) call upon the Navy for assistance when necessary.   Thus, they put Coast Guard personnel on Navy ships... the Navy can do the finding and tracking, but they can't perform arrests or seizures... that has to be done by Coast Guard personnel. Blueboar (talk) 15:26, 28 August 2015 (UTC)


 * Messing it up further is that the Navy can and does operate in US "territorial waters" apparently.    IIRC correctly, very few US universities cover much maritime and admiralty law. Amazingly enough, the USNA has courses in maritime law enforcement.   avers that the POTUS has the power to direct the USN to enforce laws on the basis of "Homeland Security" under current US law;    notes the Posse Comitatus Act itself, specifies currently only the Army and Air Force as falling under its stricture, and the rules about the Navy are by act of DoD only. In short - scads of articles thereon, but they all seem to agree that the DoD or POTUS have the power to use the Navy for law enforcement.  Collect (talk) 17:12, 29 August 2015 (UTC)
 * As to why of they are allowed to, they still need the Coast Guard, it's before the CG is specifically trained and required for Maritime Law Enforcement where the Navy is not necessarily. Perhaps it wouldn't have had to be that way, but history has caused that development, and this out persists... -- Jayron 32 02:58, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

Low-angle shots
I think I ended up here from the Pounds of Shark Fins, although I can't remember how...Low-angle shot talks only about images of people. Is the term restricted to images of people, or can it refer to other subjects too? Consider the difference between File:Looking Up at Empire State Building.JPG and File:Empire State Building from the Top of the Rock.jpg; the former image exemplifies a statement in the article, "Psychologically, the effect of the low-angle shot is that it makes the subject look strong and powerful." Would we say that the former image is low-angle, or does it not qualify because it's a building? Nyttend (talk) 15:13, 28 August 2015 (UTC)


 * The examples are all people, but the first sentence and the cited definition make no restriction on subject. The angle of a photo has nothing to do with the nature of the subject. The examples just tend to be human because of WP:BIAS :) Also all the current examples are from famous film scences, and for perhaps the same biases, we don't tend to talk about famous film scenes of buildings, but rather famous film scenes of people. So I say feel free to add some of these low-angle shots of buildings to the article - it would round out the concept better, IMO. SemanticMantis (talk) 15:20, 28 August 2015 (UTC)
 * Talks about the house from Psycho. Ultrahouse 3000 probably added that bit. The Amityville Horror house might use a shout-out, but I forget what that movie looked like. InedibleHulk (talk) 03:15, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

A sculptor's quote
I remember hearing, once, of a famous sculptor being congratulated for the peculiar beauty of one of his works and his humble answer being: "Well, it was in the marble: I just broke the marble so that it could come out" or something like that. The actual wording might be completely different but that was the main idea. Is it possible to find who the sculptor was and the actual words of the quote? Thanks in advance! 46.198.178.231 (talk) 15:35, 28 August 2015 (UTC)


 * Lots of places online give something like this "Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it" - Michelangelo, e.g. BrainyQuote here.
 * Unfortunately, this well-referenced post from QuoteInvestigator chases down the quote and concludes that there is no good evidence that Michelangelo said anything of the sort. SemanticMantis (talk) 15:54, 28 August 2015 (UTC)
 * Another quote commonly attributed to Michelangelo is "I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free." Has there been a similar analysis performed on its origin? Tevildo (talk) 16:00, 28 August 2015 (UTC)
 * The link I gave above is the best de-bunking I've found, and I take it to be a strong indictment against any similar quotes. Brainyquote does have several similar variants, but honestly I don't trust anything they say - they give you a link to cite their shoddy product, but contain (almost) no citations themselves! Wikiquote at least has some decent refs to support their quotes from Michelangelo, but they don't have anything like the quotes in question. SemanticMantis (talk) 16:26, 28 August 2015 (UTC)
 * Looked a bit more at google scholar, and google books . It's a bit telling that the top scholarly hits are from "Journal of pain and symptom management", "European Psychiatry", etc. The books link at least has a few hits to real books about M., but at a skim they look relatively unscholarly, and I couldn't find any that gave a source. Of course the persistence of the "quote" is reasonable - even if he didn't say it, people seem to get a lot of value out of the idea. SemanticMantis (talk) 16:33, 28 August 2015 (UTC)
 * It would seem to be a good capsulation of how a stone sculptor would work. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 17:12, 28 August 2015 (UTC)
 * Let's attribute it to "Pseudo-Michelangelo", in the style of referring to other pseudepigraphical authors as "Pseudo-Aristotle", "Pseudo-Ambrose", "Pseudo-Dionysius", etc. But then, I don't see this style of address used for recent misattributions; does anyone use it for "new" hoaxes anymore?  Nyttend (talk) 18:59, 28 August 2015 (UTC)

[I′m the IP who opened the discussion] Thank you all for your answers. Even if it wasn′t Michelangelo, it′s a great quote for sure! And I don′t think that it′s a recent missattribution. I′d bet that it has been around for generations. 2A02:582:800:3E00:9075:6533:7A83:310E (talk) 20:13, 28 August 2015 (UTC)
 * I remember exactly when I first heard it attributed to Michelangelo. That was a generation ago.  --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  21:59, 28 August 2015 (UTC)

How about his sonnets? For instance, the line: "The more the marble wastes / The more the statue grows" ?


 * "Michael Angelo conceived of a statue as something complete from the first, but concealed in the marble, and released from its covering by the chisel. This graceful and poetical idea is expressed in a sonnet which was addressed to Vittoria, in which he compares himself to such an unhewn block :

As when, lady mine, With chiselled touch The stone unhewn and cold Becomes a living mould, The more the marble wastes The more the statue grows ; So, if the working of my soul be such That good is but evolved By Time's dread blows, The vile shell, day by day, Falls like superfluous flesh away. Oh take whatever bonds my spirit knows, And reason, virtue, power, within me lay. Michelangelo, sonnet addressed to Vittoria Colonna; tr. Mrs. Henry Roscoe (Maria Fletcher Roscoe), Vittoria Colonna: Her Life and Poems (1868), p. 169. -- Paulscrawl (talk) 07:05, 29 August 2015 (UTC)

Again, his sonnets: The best of artists hath no thought to show Which the rough stone in its superfluous shell Doth not include: to break the marble spell Is all the hand that serves the brain can do. ... Michelangelo, "The Lover and The Sculptor" in ''The Sonnets of Michel Angelo Buonarotti tr. John Addington Symonds ([1877] 1904, second edition), p. 17. -- Paulscrawl (talk) 07:28, 29 August 2015 (UTC)

Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (17th ed., 2003, p. 143) also cites the line from Michelangelo's sonnet reprinted above: "The more the marble wastes / The more the statue grows" - as did the 10th ed. (1919) here -- Paulscrawl (talk) 14:06, 29 August 2015 (UTC)


 * Michelangelo wasn't a jeweler, and "Diamond in the rough" is more of an idiom than a quote, but in the right light, even clay may shine. "Bake the hall in the candle of her brain", and all that jazz. InedibleHulk (talk) 14:32, 29 August 2015 (UTC)

Replicated areas
Why do areas/towns/theme parks/museums which replicate buildings or styles of another country look fake? 94.10.247.39 (talk) 23:49, 28 August 2015 (UTC)
 * In many cases, especially theme park structures, they're not built with original materials, which also doesn't help with the authenticity. But at any rate, they're from another place: they aren't a "native" part of the local built environment, and they just don't fit in.  This opinion page has some additional comments that make a lot of sense.  Nyttend (talk) 00:27, 29 August 2015 (UTC)


 * For one thing, replicating artifacts like the Matterhorn and the Eiffel Tower to full scale could be a bit daunting. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 11:40, 29 August 2015 (UTC)


 * I would consider that to be an example of cognitive bias.
 * A couple of subtle examples: If you have little knowledge of history / architecture, you may be impressed when seeing Castle Neuschwanstein or a random Neo-Gothic church.  If your education tells you that this is just “faux-architecture”, you may still appreciate the design and the fine craftsmanship but you will do so with the proviso of it being a “copy”, built in a different culture and using advanced building methods.  Of course, children (and those of comparable mental age) won´t be aware of this.
 * Matters get more complex when you consider Cologne Cathedral or the Sagrada Familia. Is this Gothic / Gaudi “by numbers”?  --Cookatoo.ergo.ZooM (talk) 13:09, 29 August 2015 (UTC)

Modellers can answer this -- for most "parks" the scale used for a replica is not 1:1 - Disney was proud of  using "false perspective" in reproducing "Main Street", etc.  Collect (talk) 20:30, 29 August 2015 (UTC)