A bit of a boob on YouTube
QUESTION Was YouTube created to share videos of Janet Jackson’s ‘wardrobe malfunction’ at the 2004 Super Bowl?
YES, inspiration for the video sharing platform came from Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl performance with Justin Timberlake in 2004, when her breast was exposed accidentally.
YouTube was founded by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim, early employees of PayPal, to overcome the difficulty of sharing videos online.
Hurley designed the site’s interface and logo. Chen and Karim split the technical duties of making the site work and later divided management responsibilities.
Hurley became CEO and Chen was chief technology officer. Karim retained a share in the company, but went off to work on other projects.
Less than two years later, YouTube was sold to Google for $1.7 billion.
Henry Watson, Basingstoke, Hants.
QUESTION Is Conservative Lee Anderson the first former miner to become an MP?
HUNDREDS of former miners have served as MPs.
However, in 2001, parliamentary journalist Chris Moncrieff bemoaned the fact that the Labour benches were once ‘filled with men who had toiled with their hands: miners, steelworkers, farm labourers’. He found it galling to see a party increasingly stuffed with professional politicians and lawyers.
In 1945, there were 45 Labour MPs who were former miners. Today, there is just one, Ian Lavery, who worked at Lynemouth and Ellington colliery. Two former lawyers and a charity worker are contesting the leadership of the party.
Miners were MPs before the Labour Party was created. Alexander Macdonald, MP for Stafford, and Thomas Burt, MP for Morpeth, were the first in 1874. They stood for the Liberal-Labour movement, a precursor to the Labour Party.
Keir Hardie worked down the mines in Lanarkshire from the age of ten, first as a trapper — opening and closing ventilation shafts for miners — and then as a pony driver and pitman. He won the West Ham South election in 1892, which spurred him to help form both the Independent Labour Party and the Labour Party.
Since Hardie, the hundreds of former miners who have become Labour MPs include former Bolsover MP Dennis Skinner, of Parkhouse Colliery; Blaydon MP David Anderson, a miner at Eppleton Colliery, near Hetton-le-Hole; and former Blyth MP Ronnie Campbell, who worked down the pits for 28 years.
The future Tory chairman Patrick McLoughlin came to national attention when he stood up at the 1984 Conservative Party Conference to announce he was a working miner at Littleton Colliery in Cannock. He was elected MP for West Derbyshire in 1986.
Former coalminer Lee Anderson was the office manager for Ashfield Labour MP Gloria De Piero. He received so much abuse for supporting Brexit that he changed parties and was elected Tory MP for Ashfield last December.
Gary Hayward, Durham.
QUESTION What was the Monster Study, controversial psychological research in the U.S. in the Thirties?
THE monster study was an experiment devised in 1939 by University of Iowa speech pathologist Wendell Johnson.
He wanted to establish whether stuttering could be induced as a result of psychological pressure. A speech therapy pioneer, he had suffered from a severe stutter as a child.
Johnson dispatched a young masters student, 22-year-old Mary Tudor, to the Iowa Soldiers and Sailors Orphans’ Home in Davenport to conduct the experiments.
She selected 22 children, six of whom were normal speakers.
They were subjected to a programme of negative conditioning, beginning with statements such as: ‘The staff has come to the conclusion that you have a great deal of trouble with your speech.’
The results were devastating, with all the children developing speech impediments. After her second session with five-year-old Norma Jean Pugh, Tudor wrote: ‘It was very difficult to get her to speak, although she spoke very freely the month before.’
The research was unpublished, but was available at the University of Iowa under the bland title An Experimental Study Of The Effects Of Evaluative Labelling On Speech Fluency. Students who knew about the study referred to it as the Monster Study because it reminded them of Nazi experiments.
It wasn’t until 1988 that Franklin Silverman, a professor of speech pathology at Marquette University, decided to publish the results, despite being warned it could ruin his career. He felt obliged to do so, stating: ‘Wendell Johnson, of all people, had sanctioned it. He knew the pain of being told that you stutter.’
Mary Korlaske Nixon, a 12-year-old in the study, only discovered what had been done to her in 2001. She wrote to the then 84-year-old Tudor: ‘You destroyed my life. I could have been a scientist, archaeologist or even President.
‘Instead, I became a pitiful stutterer. The kids made fun of me, my grades fell off, I felt stupid. Clear into my adulthood, I still want to avoid people to this day.’
In 2007, seven of the orphans were awarded a total of $1.2 million by the State of Iowa for the lifelong psychological scars caused by the experiment.
Olivia Allen, Norwich, Norfolk.
QUESTION Why was the jawbone of an ass such a popular weapon in the Bible?
FURTHER to the earlier answer, the jawbone of an ass quotation was cleverly used in a wartime poster warning against careless talk.
A man is shown foolishly discussing confidential matters, with the slogan: ‘The jaw of an ass can slay 1,000 men.’
Michael Hafferty, Sunderland, Tyne & Wear. IS THERE a question to which you have always wanted to know the answer? Or do you know the answer to a question raised here? Send your questions and answers to: Charles Legge, Answers To Correspondents, Daily Mail, 2 Derry Street, London, W8 5TT. You can also email them to charles.legge@dailymail.co.uk. A selection will be published, but we are not able to enter into individual correspondence.