Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks Read Online Free Page B

Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks
Book: Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks Read Online Free
Author: Ken Jennings
Tags: General, Social Science, Reference, Technology & Engineering, Human Geography, Atlases, Cartography, Atlases & Gazetteers, Trivia
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the room, everyone gets quiet.” An athletic seventh grader with long blond hair, Kirsi certainly seemed to be getting her share of attention at the picnic. All night she was orbited by five or six boys a head shorter than her, a nervous jumble of orthodontia and Adam’s apples.
    The “map gap” between men and women is, of course, a staple of gender debate in our culture, the focus of countless unfunny stand-up routines and syndicated columns about men who refuse to ask for directions or women who can’t find the right highway on the road atlas. * But in recent years the issue has moved from the Ray Romano/Erma Bombeck sphere into the laboratories of cognitive psychology, with real scrutiny being given to the question of whether (and why) women and men navigate and read maps differently.
    In 1995, after boys had won six of the first seven geography bees, National Geographic commissioned two Penn State professors, Lynn Liben and Roger Downs, to study the reasons girls were under-performing. They hoped to find the usual anodyne reasons for a performance gap of this kind: that boys were more competitive or girls more anxious or the questions somehow biased. Instead, the results were a little more troubling.
    “Boys as a group do have a little more knowledge about geography than girls as a group,” admits Liben. She hastens to add that a field of fifty-three boys and just two girls does not mean that boys are twenty-six times better than girls—just that “very tiny” differences tend to get magnified by the bee format of slicing off the top finisher at each of several tiers.
    My immediate assumption is that the root of the achievement gap is spatial ability. Tests on gender and navigation have found that women tend to navigate via landmarks (“I turn left when I get to the gas station”) whereas men use dead reckoning (“I still need to be north and maybe a little west of here”), which ties in nicely with the evolutionary perspective: early men went out on hunting expeditions inall directions and always needed to be good at finding their way back to the cave, developing their “kinesic memory,” while women foraged for edibles closer to home, developing “object location memory.” Simply put, men got better at finding places, while women got better at finding things. Fast forward twenty thousand years, and I exasperate my wife by not being able to see my car keys even when they’re sitting on the dresser right in front of me. Meanwhile, I laugh at her tendency to turn a map upside down if it’s not facing the “right” way. “Mindy, turning the map doesn’t actually rearrange the symbols on it in any way,” I will say, rolling my eyes, while she ignores me and silently ponders what a divorce settlement would look like now that we live in a community-property state. But many, many other people are map-turner-upside-downers just like she is. In 1998, John and Ashley Sims invented an upside-down map that would make southward travel easier for non–mental rotators like Mindy. A series of male map executives turned the idea down before a woman heard about it, immediately saw the appeal, and signed on. Three hundred thousand upside-down maps have since been sold. * I wonder if the same factors account for the sudden omnipresence of GPS navigation in cars and smart phones: finally, ladies, a map that will turn itself upside down automatically while you turn! I tend to switch our GPS to the other map view—you know, the one where north actually stays north while you drive—which annoys my wife when she next hops into the car. It’s the cartographic equivalent of leaving the toilet seat up.
    The biological gap “is not huge, but it’s there,” Liben confirms. “It’s maybe the only remaining cognitive difference between boys and girls.” But she cautions that any number of societal factors could be causing those small differences to snowball. “We know that boy babies are tossed around more than girl
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