Ben Muse

King island Today

Great photos of King Island, and the not quite abandoned Eskimo village of Ukivok, circa 2006: Charlene's flikr photostream.

Thanks to David Kingma and Father Louis Renner at Gonzaga for the pointer.

Really Good News From China and Brazil

Clive Cookson reports that there's been a "64-fold increase in [Chinese] peer-reviewed scientific papers since 1981": China scientists lead world in research growth.  Projecting ahead:

Jonathan Adams, research evaluation director at Thomson Reuters, said China’s “awe-inspiring” growth had put it in second place to the US – and if it continues on its trajectory it will be the largest producer of scientific knowledge by 2020.

The Bass River "Road" Net - 1644

Charles Swift was a 19th Century newspaper editor and historian.  His 1884 history of Yarmouth, available on Google Books, has a map of Old Yarmouth in 1644 (Old Yarmouth including the current towns of Dennis and Yarmouth).

The Pilgrims reached Plymouth in 1620.  Written records place English settlers in Old Yarmouth along Cape Cod Bay by 1638-39.

Early on, some began to settle along the upper ponds of Bass River.  Samuel Rider was evidently there about 1639 and Francis Baker on the east side of Follins Pond about 1641.   One person lived close to Nantucket Sound by 1644, and Swift's map shows a road running from north to south on the western side of his map.  Swift doesn't mention other settlers between Follins Pond and the mouth of Bass River, except for Richard Berry who lived near the mouth of the river by about 1649.

Map of Yarmouth (which included what is now Dennis) in 1644 (From Swift via Google Books)

The Google edition is dated 1884, so this is Swift's conjectural map of the area 240 years earlier.  He doesn't describe his sources, but I don't think he had sketch maps circa 1644.  I assume the map is an amalgam of information about the places where early settlers made their homes, a knowledge of the 19th century road system, local tradition, and common sense.  These roads must have been more like primitive trails at this early date.  The map doesn't show any Indian trails.

The main road ran from east to west, a mile or so south of the Bay.  The map shows another road branching south from this, running around the southern side of Mill Pond, and then north and around the northern and eastern sides of Follins Pond.

Compare this to the road net in 1832: The Bass River Road Net - Late 1832.

"Why Does Getting Married Make You Fat?..."

Nicholas Bakalar reports: Study Says Women With Mate Get Heavier.  The Australian study found that:

After adjusting for other variables, the 10-year weight gain for an average 140-pound woman was 20 pounds if she had a baby and a partner, 15 if she had a partner but no baby, and only 11 pounds if she was childless with no partner. The number of women with a baby but no partner was too small to draw statistically significant conclusions.

There is no reason to believe that having a partner causes metabolic changes, so the weight gain among childless women with partners was almost surely caused by altered behavior....

The only explanation offered in the article is pretty weak, women respond passively to their environment:

Maureen A. Murtaugh, an associate professor of epidemiology at the University of Utah who has published widely on weight gain in women. Perhaps, she suggested, a more active social life may help explain why women with partners gain more weight.

“Think of going to a restaurant,” Dr. Murtaugh said. “They serve a 6-foot man the same amount as they serve me, even though I’m 5 feet 5 inches and 60 pounds lighter.”

Uri Gneezy and Jason Shafrin have another explanation (Why Does Getting Married Make You Fat? Incentives and Appearance Maintenance):

Married individuals weigh more on average than non-married individuals. We suggest that exiting the dating market decreases one’s incentive to maintain their appearance and leads to an increase in body weight. We hypothesize that it is most difficult for individuals to exit a traditional marriage, and easiest for individuals to exit if the couple is cohabitating but not legally married....

So, people in a traditional marriage have more security in the relationship, and invest less in appearance as insurance against a return to the dating market. 

Using a 14-year panel data set [from the Netherlands], we test whether or not the ease of exiting a domestic relationship affects weight gain. For men, we find that the type of domestic relationship has little impact on weight gain. For women, however, marriage leads to a 2.4 kg weight gain compared to cohabitating.

This is a weight gain of about five pounds.  In this explanation, men and women are purposeful agents adjusting their behavior in response to changing opportunity costs.

"Capturing Cape Cod History"

Since 2002, writers associated with the Historical Society of Old Yarmouth have been publishing short essays on Cape Cod history, and especially Yarmouth history, in the mid-Cape paper, The Register.  This fall, the society put these together into a book: Capturing Cape Cod History.  Some of the essays have information about the economic history of Bass River.

Bass River in the late 19th Century.  From University of New Hampshire's Dimond Library via David Kew's Cape Cod History web site.