Why do men want to explain?
Mansplaining: the phenomenon of men giving an unsolicited explanation of something simple to women. There is a lot of grumbling about it, but can it also be explained scientifically? In Tilburg, research master’s student Astrid Fokkema of Communication Science made an attempt. It is not because men are just different to women, she says to sister newspaper Univers. “A literature study showed that communication differences between men and women are very slight and negligible.”
Could it be that men in general feel that they know something better than others? Fokkema distributed a questionnaire and saw no difference between the answers given by men or women. She did notice that people (male/female) who consider themselves above others are more inclined to offer unsolicited advice.
The third hypothesis: it comes down to the listener, women interpret unsolicited advice more negatively than men. This, indeed, appeared to be the case, but “it doesn’t matter whether the explanation is given by a man or a woman.”
So, the cause of mansplaining has not been found, but Fokkema is not done with the subject yet. She will spend the next few years as a PhD student delving into it. But she will be broadening her research field. “Just like with mansplaining, giving an explanation has lost its innocence in several areas. Terms such as ‘whitesplaining’, ‘momsplaining’ and ‘cissplaining’ have already found their way into our vocabulary. Which factors determine whether someone experiences a certain explanation as insulting?”
Mop becomes robot
Anyone who finds themselves in the buildings of Delft University of Technology in the early hours of the morning, will not come across a cleaner mopping floors but a robot doing the job. Cleaning company Gom has introduced thirty robots to lighten the load for the cleaning team, writes sister newspaper Delta.
They easily finish their work on time, says cleaner Ria to the newspaper. “I can have the robot do the corridor at seven o’clock, and in the meantime, I do the hall.” She is not afraid of losing her job. “Not at all, the robot makes our job easier. It won’t replace me.”
A university wouldn’t be a university if it didn’t use the opportunity to do research. Martijn Wisse, group leader of Robot Dynamics at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, was intrigued by the cleaning robot, Delta writes. They are generally used in factories, where they don’t come across people. Now, together with Gom, a ‘living lab’ has been set up on campus to make the robots more flexible and to teach them to cope better with moving obstacles – such as people.
Golden Age for everyone
How ‘golden’ is the Dutch Golden Age, actually? In recent years, there has been more and more criticism regarding the term used to describe the 17th century – all that economic, political and cultural growth was partly due to the slave trade. Leiden historian Louis Sicking is annoyed with the classic description for another reason: it focuses too much on Holland. “As if everything before that was kind of prehistoric,” he says to the Leiden university newspaper Mare.
Together with eleven colleagues, Sicking wrote a book in which each province was allotted its own Golden Age, “a period of flourishing, of superregional importance.” For Limburg, they chose the middle of the twelfth century. In that period, nobility felt a growing need to speak and read their own language. In Limburg’s many monasteries monks worked on texts. That makes Limburg “the birthplace of Dutch literature for the simple reason that the first literary Dutch work was put into writing there.”
But there was a bit of a dilemma: this region was also important during the time of Charles the Great (768-814). “When Europe became united with much bloodshed, the triangle Aachen-Liège-Maastricht was the centre of European power. Charles had a palace school built there, resulting in education in the ninth century being of a high level.”