Logic that you only hear in faculty meetings

Our school requires PhD faculty to teach 2 courses per semester.

Many top research schools require 1 course per semester, or less, from their top researchers.

Therefore we should reduce our teaching load.

Hmmmm, how many hidden assumptions can you find in that statement?

Things I've learned from grading students' papers

• Viewing someone's public Facebook profile without their written permission is a violation of their privacy. (At least if it's a University doing the looking.)
• Posting something on Facebook (such as bragging about breaking a University's rules) is the same as confessing in a courtroom and is absolutely dispositive.
• Corporations have good reasons for gathering information on their customers, it's for the customer's own good, and the fact that it may conceivably have a theoretical misuse is irrelevant, because they've said they won't misuse it, so they won't.
• Copyright doesn't apply to the performance of a play if it's performed outdoors.
• Bragging about breaking a University's rules can't be used against the student if the rulebreaking or cheating takes place off-campus.
• You can copy a copyrighted work, as long as the amount copied is less than 100%.
• Once a company has your data, they can use it for any purpose whatever, regardless of why it was originally collected. This is legal, so by definition it is ethical and there is no rational basis for objecting.

This is why it's so hard to go to work some mornings....

Dear Snowflake

Dear Snowflake:

As part of our course on programming, I assign various programming projects for you to do. I understand that my students are still learning, and this is an introductory class. Part of what you are learning is how to solve problems and how to track down problems in your programs. Because you are still learning how to do this, I am available to provide assistance if you get stuck on solving a problem, don't understand what the error message is telling you, don't understand why you're getting the wrong results, etc.

Sometimes I am in the middle of doing something else when your email arrives. In this case, I might send off a quick note pointing out some obvious problems to get you started on finding a solution, and hope you can take it from there; or if not, that you will contact me with a more thorough exploration of the problem after removing some of the most obvious issues.

However, just to be clear: I assigned this to YOU, not the other way around. Therefore, when you email me back and the extent of your communication is "It's still not working," I take that as an interesting anecdote, but not something that obligates me to drop what I'm doing and provide further assistance. Likewise, your suggestion that I might want to take another look at the code is, depending on my mood, somewhere on the amusing-to-annoying continuum, but again, not something that requires any action on my part. The point of the exercise is not to determine whether I can write the program. I already got the program running. I wrote all of it, including the extra-credit portion, before I gave the assignment, as a check that i wasn't making the assignment too big or too difficult. (I still err sometimes, but it's about as much on the too-small/too-easy side as too-big/too-hard, so I'm OK with that.)

I will be happy to provide further assistance. Your email should begin with your best diagnosis of the problem, what tests you have conducted that led you to that conclusion, and what you have already tried in solving the problem. This doesn't have to be elaborate. A description of "I can't open the input file, and I've tried following the example in the text; here's my code, is this the right syntax?" is a perfectly reasonable request. "It's not working, fix it" is not.

Inequality, opportunity, and IQ

Email to Andrew Sullivan:

You wrote:

My point was that growing inequality will be very, very hard to prevent or restrain in the face of these factors.

Nice job of proving Doug's point. [Ed. note: Doug's post is here.]

Right now our educational system is, for the relatively affluent, mostly pretty good and in some places very good. For the poor, the average quality is lower, and in some places, the schools are a sad joke. And of course, a better basic education leads to the opportunities for better college education, etc.

When we're providing good-quality basic education across the board, and the reward structure in our society is less tilted toward "them that has, gets; them that hasn't gets left behind," maybe we can have the discussion about how much of the remaining inequality is unalterable.

But are you seriously suggesting that the current huge and widening inequality in our society is because the affluent are simply smarter than everyone else, without regard to anything else? My, how convenient. After all, if the problem is that the poor and unemployed are just stupid, well, what can you do?

Will there always be some inequality? Of course. But I'm not aware of any serious work on the issue suggesting that intelligence is "infinitely alterable." Stop knocking down straw men. Yes, we need to focus on education. Yes, we need better metrics than dollars spent per student and the perverse incentives of No Child Left Untested. Yes, absolutely. And we shouldn't expect better schools to bring about Utopia tomorrow. But if anything, a better focus on education, on bringing failing schools up to where they ought to be, would decrease inequality. Or at least make the face of success look a little less Anglo-Saxon.

I teach freshman-level courses at a public urban university, and my classes have too many smart students who can barely read, have never learned math, and have no idea what study habits are. They're going to school while also supporting themselves, and sometimes extended families, at low-wage jobs in crumbling neighborhoods. Oddly enough, they seem to have more problems than the students who come out of better school systems and are able to devote themselves to school full time. I've had more than one bright, promising student in my office explaining that they like being in school but can't afford it; or their child care fell through; or they have to care for an uninsured parent who fell ill.

When those students have the same opportunities and resources that you and I take for granted, we can talk about inequality due to differences in intelligence. Sure, there will always be some. But you cannot seriously believe that's what's causing the "growing inequality" of the last three decades.

Science policy questions for the election season

NancyP over at Pam's has a very good post about questions we should be asking the candidates about their policies on science and technology.

I think I'd want to add one or two, but I also think it's late in the day and I'm tired, so I'll let it percolate a bit before I post.

Conversation with a friend

An email exchange with a friend of mine, regarding this article, and this reply. His comments are in Times Roman, mine in Arial.

A midwife for one's thoughts; another for whom one can provide the same service: Basis of a good conversation.

--Nietschze

Here's my major beef with the article (and it's a point that the replier gets to as well, at least obliquely). The article writer says:

"Above all, these changes would require looking with fresh eyes on the landscape of academic disciplines, and noticing something surprising: The great wall dividing the two cultures of the sciences and humanities has no substance. We can walk right through it."

To which I say: funny that your idea about walking through the science/humanities wall involves turning the humanities into a science. I don't mean to sound all boundary-policing for the sake of boundary-policing here, but I do think the article is guilty of arguing for a merger of science and literary criticism where the exchange of methods seems to be entirely one way: from science, to the humanities and never the other way. He makes a good case for WHY we should study literature (one I totally agree with), but he doesn't really say what -- if anything -- the study of literature might offer scientific study.

I'm not sure how much of it is just that that's not the point he's making right now, i.e. is that another article for another day. And he led off with the observation that hmmm, the sciences seem to be obtaining new knowledge, new insights into our nature and condition, and moving forward in a way that literary criticism isn't; what are they doing that we're not?

And going a bit beyond what he said... If literary criticism is barely surviving on its own, if it doesn't have much to offer itself, well...what DOES it have to offer scientific study? (Though you touch on some of this below.)
==================
His basic point about how most lit. critics view the human brain is true to. This, I think, is the biggest current divide between humanities and the "hard" sciences. (Or at least it's what my nueroscientist friend Stephen and I end up screaming at each other about over drinks every few months . . . ) The sciences now favor an almost entirely biological account of human coginition/development/ability ("It's biological, it's genetic, it's physiological, etc."), while since at least the late 60s forward, English speaking literary academics have generally favored a social constructionist approach. (The middle ground here would be the 70s feminism articulation of the difference between biological sex [do you have a penis or a vagina?] and socially constructed gender [Having a vagina means you must wear dresses and play with dolls . . . ], while the extreme of this position, an extreme which I myself am uncomfortable accepting, is Judith Butler's explosion of the sex/gender binary, where she argues that nothing exists before or outside of language and that EVERYTHING is gender, EVERYTHING is socially constructed and there is no biological "sex" that's not already caught up in culturally constructed meanings.])

If she's going to make that argument, then she has to explain why the vast majority of societies throughout history have associated having a penis with physical strength and aggression. Is a preference for blue rather than pink culturally constructed? Almost certainly. Does it therefore follow that NOTHING is biological? I, for one, am far from convinced.

Part of the reason for the biological emphasis is that with advances in technology, we can answer questions we couldn't even ask a few years ago. So yes, it seems like everywhere you turn around there are new biological insights. Look at what happened after Darwin published. His central idea was that species could develop and change over time, through a natural process of selection; that the environment could make the same kinds of decisions familiar to any livestock breeder; and the implication that all life descended from a common ancestor.

This was a revolution in biology, and there was a rush to apply Darwin's ideas EVERYWHERE, including places they didn't apply--thus Social Darwinism, etc. With time, the excesses were worked out, and scientists recognized that this application is valid, that one is just silly, and the other is a useful metaphor that shouldn't be taken too far.

We're currently in the early explosion stages of a biological revolution. There are things we've thought of as social that may turn out to have very strong biological components. There may be some things that go the other way. But we haven't mapped out the limits of the new knowledge yet.

(At one time, 'everyone knew' that ulcers were caused by stress....until the role of heliobacter pylori, a bacterium that lives in the gut, was discovered. Stress still has an effect, but only because stress tends to weaken the immune system, and in America, stressed-out people are more likely to eat foods that H. Pylori thrives on, and smoke too much, thus producing plenty of extra stomach acid to irritate already-irritated tissue, etc.) Likewise, 'evolutionary psychology' has given us some useful insights into how seemingly anti-survival traits such as self-sacrifice, altruism, generosity, etc., actually lead to better chances of group survival. It's also made some risible claims that can't be taken seriously, and aren't, even within the field.
==========================
And for me? Personally? I've been struggling most of this year with Butler's position, the full adoption of which is still very much in vogue in literature departments. I think Butler's wrong. Mostly because I don't think that my friend Stephen is an idiot. And I don't think that the advances or observations of Stephen's field are entirely bunk. That said, I am ENORMOUSLY suspicious of strict, biological (or genetic) essentialism. This gets us back to that other article that Sullivan linked to that we discussed recently, which you said (and which I agreed) veered a little close to "some people are simply, inherently unfit to learn, so let's not let them go to college and oh isn't it funny how all the people who are fit to learn and go to college all look white and male, just like me."

I agree with you here. Yes, biology influences us, in ways we're not aware of and don't fully understand. That doesn't mean biology is destiny, though. Antidepressants affect the levels of serotonin in the brain. But SO DOES COGNITIVE-BEHAVIORAL THERAPY. Yes, ultimately it's all encoded in the physical matrix somehow (otherwise you're postulating a source of thought external to the body), but that doesn't mean the physical level is the most convenient (or ethical) place to intervene. Perhaps love can ultimately be explained in terms of biochemistry and neurons firing--but as anyone who's been in love can tell you, it's not *just* that.

=================
I think biological essentialism (the body or someone's physiology or genetics being read as their unalterable, inescapable fate) is a bad, bad, bad, super scary thing. And me thinking that isn't based in namby-pamby, soft humanities psuedo-science. It's based in the empirical evidence of history. I mean, slavery comes to mind ("These dark skinned people have smaller brains and therefore smaller mental capacity, oh and they also have higher pain tolerance, so obviously they were meant for heavy labor . . . ") as does the Holocaust ("These people have the wrong eye color/hair texture/skin color/nose shape/whatever and are therefore deserving of elimination.")

The problem is, simple indicators have been used to stand in for other traits, or generalizations have been applied without regard to the possibility of exceptions. Suppose we do extensive research and find, lo and behold, that the IQ of the average black person really is 2 points lower than the average white IQ. Do we therefore stop giving scholarships to blacks, since "they're not as smart as whites?" Of course not. Group averages say nothing about individual talents or temperaments, and (as in this example) the magnitude of the difference is insignificant. The relationship between brain size and IQ is poorly understood, if it exists at all. Not only has there been an overreliance on science, there's been an overreliance on BAD science. In the long run, science is self-correcting--but in the short run, can be misused as much as anything else.
==========
And so science's hard turn to serious biological essentialism scares the fuck out of me. (As Eve Sedgwick, one of those evil postmodern namby-pamby literary scholars that the article bemoans says, You ever notice that there are all these scientific studies to find the 'cause' of homosexuality? But none to find the 'cause' of heterosexuality? What else do we try to find the 'causes' of? Hmm . . . the common cold, liver cancer, lukemia, ALL THESE THINGS THAT ARE PROBLEMS, THAT WE WANT TO ERADICATE.)

Then explain, please, why so many psychologists (particularly those coming at it from an analytic viewpoint) working on the origins of homosexuality are themselves gay. Do they want to eradicate themselves? Is it the stereotype we used to joke about in social work, that you become a therapist because you want to figure yourself out? You're right to point out the effect of heteronormativity, that the default normal state of human beings is hetero and anything else is a deviation from that, so we should find out what causes that divergence. I'm not quite as willing to assume the motives are hostile, though the effects can be just as pernicious.
========================
Or, to put it another way, I guess what bothered me about the article was it's blind, uncomplicated faith in empiricism and the scientific method. And to make my case why that's a problem, I'll actually turn to a scientist, not a humanist. I'm thinking here of Stephen J. Gould's THE MISMEASURE OF MAN, specifically the part where he goes back and re-does all of that 19th century Philadelphia scientist's studies on the cranial capacity of various races, and finds out that the guy was wrong. That he fudged his data to make it fit the racist worldview that he wanted to argue for. And of course, Gould points out that he himself might be making mistakes that are fudging his own data to try and support a non-racist, multicultural worldview that's currently in vogue.

Through the 50's to 60's, ecologists & biologists looking at animal behavior theorized that aggression had a large survival payoff, that the most aggressive animals would tend to have the best survival characteristics. The field was, at the time, dominated by men. As more women came into the field, they started asking questions about cooperation as a survival strategy, about whether it might be equally valid or even superior in some cases. After all, many species show cooperative strategies: wolves hunt in packs, primates are very social, etc. And lo and behold, they found evidence to support that. The men who asked the questions earlier weren't stupid, weren't corrupt, weren't evil. Their worldview led them to ask certain questions, and as we both know, the way you ask the question has a large influence on what answer you find. Someone with different assumptions asked different questions...and found new results.

There are any number of studies from the 50's and before, comparing the various races & so forth, and finding that southern Europeans are flighty and undisciplined, Africans are a bit simple and childlike, etc., always with the amazing coincidence that the northern European or Scots-Irish (depending on who was doing the ranking) was the most advanced group, with all other groups inferior in some ways.

Today, of course, it's impolite to suggest that there might be ANY difference of ANY kind. I'm not sure which extreme is more annoying. (Is it just a coincidence, for example, that cultures in climates with a short growing season have a much greater sense of time urgency, of 'don't put it off, do it now,' than parts of the world with a more benign climate? That cultures where it's colder, so people are usually dressed in more layers, have a stronger nudity taboo? And what if it turns out that members of certain ethnic groups really are slightly more outgoing, or whatever, than some other groups. Explain how that means I should treat the person across from me any different, please.)

Over the long run, science is self-correcting. Mistakes get flushed out, re-examined, discarded. The same principle applies in the humanities as well. Case in point: The romanticized view of plantation life exemplified by "Gone with the Wind" was based largely on a scholarly historical study on the life of southern blacks before the civil war. (The name of the study escapes me at the moment...it was considered THE standard work in its day.) It wasn't a polemic, it was good, solid, primary-sourced scholarship. And it strongly indicated that most plantation slaves really didn't have it all that bad, and though there was a lot of hard work involved, they were essentially well treated.

Well. Some other historians looked at this later. And noticed that the work was indeed primary-sourced with original documents--almost all of them from slave holders or slave dealers. So they applied the scientific method and asked what other evidence there might be for that proposition, or what counter-evidence might exist. And in the process uncovered lots of other documentation suggesting the earlier view was wrong.

That was an application of the scientific method to the humanities, with good results. (More on this later.)
===============
I guess what reading Gould taught me was EXTREME skepticism, a wariness of how our cultural programming creeps its way into even what appears to be objective, detached, rational analysis.

And THAT, I think, is what the humanities have to offer the sciences. Experience in looking at the non-technical assumptions, of looking at what's being asked and what's NOT being asked, about what's being taken for granted.

===================
So do I think we need to abandon science or rationality or empiricism? No. Not at all. That way madness lies. Or at least that way George W. Bush and his administration lie. (Which is pretty much the same thing as madness, but that's another rant.) We've got to strive for empiricism and rationality . . . but we also need to be aware of the dangers of assuming that "empirically" staged experiments are perfect. Or that things conducted under the name of "science" are, unquestioningly, captial T "TRUTH."

The difference between science and fundamentalism is that science regards truth as contingent, provisional, and mediated by evidence, refuted by a single counterexample. As long as you remember that, you maintain enough humility to be careful in your conclusions and your statements about Ultimate Cosmic Truth.
=================
I think we desperately need empiricism in the world right now, and literary studies could damn sure use more of it. But the article Sullivan linked to worried me because it seemed ready to worship at the altar of empiricism without acknowledging any of the valid pitfalls/complaints that some scholars in the humanities have raised about it.

Does that make any sense?

Your comments make perfect sense, and I think we agree more than we don't. Now, if I can get up my soapbox for a bit:

I stand by my earlier statement that one of the best preparation for graduate study in the humanities would be a standard first-semester calculus course. NOT because you're going to need to apply the definition of a derivative or prove the chain rule, but because it teaches rigorous thinking and analysis, the habits of thought that you'll need later on.

Its not unlike some of my comments when you've sent me your papers and I've looked them over, and I've had to remind myself that standards of proof are different in the humanities. And the article touched on that, or at least pointed toward it. In lit-crit, it's apparently OK to say, this is what I think, and here's an example, and here's an example, and here's an example. So having established that, let's move on to the next point.

In the sciences, of course, that wouldn't fly. Do I expect that anyone will analyze and comment on Foucault with mathematical rigor? Of course not, though I'd like to see them try. But there are questions the scientific method forces you to ask, that don't seem to get asked in lit-crit:

• Are there other explanations for these observations?
• Do these observations really imply what I think they do? Or could they also be interpreted to support a different hypothesis?
• Are there counterexamples out there that imply something else? (This, I think, is the most important question lit-crit leaves unasked. My own thesis, just a lowly master's thesis at a middle-of-the-road university, spent about a third of its effort looking at possible counterexamples or other explanations and trying to rule them out.)

math training drills into you, again and again, that a set of examples is all very nice, but one counterexample makes them all irrelevant, no matter how many you have or how convenient they are the rest of the time. it teaches you the difference between a theorem and a conjecture, well enough that you never ever confuse them again, and you understand how to tear apart an argument and check it for validity.

No, lit-crit will never ever be at the same level of rigor as mathematics, and it shouldn't try. But as long as it views logical rigor as a symptom of dead white european male hegemonism (I'm sure there are much bigger words to express the same idea more snottily), it's going to be stuck in its own little backwater.

Why Teach?

There's a meme going around, and though I wasn't specifically tagged, this being the blogosphere, I'll feel free to jump in anyway.

Why do you teach? Why is academic freedom crucial to that effort?

Several reasons why I do this.

1) It's important work. I'm preparing students to take their place not only in their careers, but as citizens. That means it's important to hold them to high standards, and to model the sort of behavior I want them to exhibit in society--reliability, honesty, integrity, etc.

2) Let's face it, it's fun. Yes, sometimes the 'performance' aspect gets a little scary--how do I get their attention? How do I keep it? How do I make this interesting? And the feedback--for better or worse--is pretty immediate.

3) It keeps me on my toes. Every semester there's something new to learn. I get a question no one ever asked before. A student asks something that forces me to go out and learn a little more. I find myself reading farther and farther afield, and saying "I can use that in class..." New technologies, new fads, new controversies. It's all good.

4) Because it's an interesting, exciting subject. Seriously. This stuff is just cool. And I get to explain how it works and help other people learn how to do cool stuff with it. How great is that?

And as for academic freedom.... One of the courses I teach is on the societal and ethical impact of computing. We discuss how tech is used and misused, and why it matters. Along the way I usually manage to get at least a few students, on both sides of the aisle, seriously offended. I try to point out inconvenient truths that annoy both sides, and make students who happen to agree with me defend their positions just as rigorously as those who don't. This means I sometimes say some politically extremely-incorrect things at the front of the classroom. Part of education is having one's preconceptions challenged. If I have to start watching what I say and not saying something that someone somewhere might find offensive, I have a much more difficult time being effective. [Do I go out of my way to be offensive for its own sake? No. Do I let it stop me from doing my job? Also no.]

Buried in cables

I currently have yet another workstation set up, this one putting together the disk image for the programming contest in April. My office is beginning to resemble an electronics workshop. Which wouldn't be a bad thing, I guess, if I'd had (or taken) the time to get the end-of-semester piles cleared out from last time.

I can still find my chair, and have a clear space big enough to write on. I guess that's something.

Well, crud.

Just got word back that a conference paper I'd submitted was turned down. The reviews were generally positive, but one reviewer essentially ripped me a new orifice, rating the paper very low, which brought the average rating down beneath the acceptance threshold.

Now that experience--several generally positive reviews and one blistering denunciation--is not in itself all that unusual. It's not universal, but it happens. And reading the blistering reviews, while not always pleasant, is often educational. I've read through blistering reviews that did in fact home in on design flaws, overstated claims, or places where I had, in fact, overlooked something. Not pleasant, but useful. And someone clearly went to some trouble to review the paper, to read it closely. I haven't always agreed with the criticisms, but they are, for the most part, at least mostly fair.

In this case, I can't help wondering. The comments included that I should have included some examples of X (there were 3 in the paper already, wasn't that enough?), should have included some examples of Y (Y being something completely irrelevant to the point I was making), it should have been presented as a case study (I thought it was, though the words "case study" didn't appear in the title, so maybe that point wasn't clear), and that I didn't address any of several other questions (which admittedly were interesting, but were not what the paper was about).

The rest of the blistering criticism seem to boil down to "this wasn't the paper I wanted to read; you should have written a different paper."

And the icing on the cake: My paper was the only one reviewed for this conference by this particular reviewer.

Oh well. The system is what it is, and I knew what it was like when I chose this career. Most of the time it works fairly well, but it's not perfect, and sometimes the imperfections spatter. And if I'd submitted something I thought was marginal and it got accepted because a review got sloppy the other direction, I wouldn't be complaining.

Decisions, decisions...

I'm working on the schedule for next semester, and have hit the perennial dilemma. Based on the number of weeks in the course, etc., our second exam should be at about week 12 or so. But there's this little thing called spring break right then. So the question is, do I hit the students with an exam right before break, or right after?

On the one hand, an exam right before break always feels a bit cruel. On the other, given that it takes a few days after break for students to get back into the groove, you can make a case that an exam after break is cruel, that it pushes them to perform right after they've been away from the material for a while.

Last year we had the exam right after break... I think this year we'll try it before, and see if it makes a difference.

Isn't this thrilling?

Another semester down.

Wow, I hadn't intended to let 3 weeks go by. Long story short: Grading is finished. I had two students plagiarize their final papers for the ethics course (yes, irony is dead). End-of-semester statistics are gathered & turned in, & next semester's Blackboard sites are underway.

We're also in the middle of a blizzard. It must be December.

Various updates

Took the team to the regional programming contest this past weekend, did fairly well... Useful learning for the programming contest we're hosting in April (that I somehow got put in charge of).

Meanwhile, got Eclipse installed and running on my office machine for Java and C++, and located a decent downloadable C++ reference we can install on the contest machines.

Now we just need to work out the details, such as where we're going to put the contestants...

I think we survived

Our accreditation site visit wrapped up yesterday. Because of the rules about the confidentiality of the process, I can't say much more than that, other than woohoo! glad it's over...

Oh, and also, I have not been asked to clean out my office. I choose to take that as a good sign as well.

Misplaced priorities

Sullivan takes a cheap shot at the left regarding the email sent out by the Columbia Queer Alliance about Ahmadinejad's visit.

Ever since Michel Foucault's repulsive embrace of the Iranian revolution, the pomo gay left has had a soft spot for Islamo-fascists.

I'm hardly a fan of Foucault; for the most part, he gets his facts wrong, then reasons poorly from them. And queer studies is hardly the Foucault-worshipping monolith Sullivan implies. Especially since the email he cites begins by refuting his thesis:

"We condemn the human rights violations perpetrated by the Iranian government under the administration of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. We admonish the policies that make same-sex practices punishable by torture and death, as well as those that restrict the freedoms and self-determination of women.

But the point isn't Sullivan's cheap shots, or illogic, of which this is only one example.

What is it that really has the CQA up in arms?

We cannot possibly claim to understand the multiple and diverse experiences of living with same-sex desires in Iran....The construction of sexual orientation as a social and political identity and all of the vocabulary therein is a Western cultural idiom. As such, scholars of sexuality in the Middle East generally use the terms "same-sex practices" and "same-sex desire" in recognition of the inadequacy of Western terminology. President Ahmadinejad's presence on campus has provided an impetus for us all to examine a number of issues, but most relevant to our concerns are the complexities of how sexual identity is constructed and understood in different parts of the world."

That's right. What they're really upset about is that we're using the word "gay," when the current conception of gayness is pretty much a Western concept and so doesn't necessarily apply to people in Iran.

Which is fine, up to a point. The modern conception of "gay" as an identity, referring to a roughly peer-equal affectionate/sexual relationship with someone of the same gender to the exclusion of such relationships with the opposite gender, is a phenomenon of 19th/20th Century Europe. It's certainly not what the ancient Greeks believed; they had strict taboos regarding who could do what with whom, based mostly on class and relative social standing. Likewise with the Romans, who legitimized certain practices but in the context of establishing/demonstrating/enforcing power relationships. (Fone's Homophobia: A History is a useful source here.) Up until at least the 50's or so, men could identify as heterosexual and still carry out certain same-sex acts without threatening their heterosexual identity. As long as they 'acted male,' as it were, there wasn't an issue of being anything other than a heterosexual man.

After kicking this around with a friend of mine (Hi, Harry!) via some emails this afternoon, it finally fell into place what annoys me about the CQA's email. They're right that the term "gay" as we understand it may not be entirely accurate in describing those in Iran (though I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say we have no possible basis for saying anything at all).

But why are we having this conversation now? People are being executed, and we're worried about what adjectives we're using in the newspaper? When the killings stop, I'll be willing to discuss the terminology question.

The phrasing of the letter comes too close for my comfort to the sort of facile moral equivalencing resulting in "Well, Stalin also accomplished a lot of good for Russia." There's an implied moral equivalency that simply isn't there. When there's 2 sentences denouncing public executions (with those executions having the obvious purpose of keeping others terrorized & silenced), followed by a long (and rather condescending) paragraph on how we need to use the academically-correct term, I start thinking someone's priorities are messed up.

People being killed is a more important question, and more important fact, than that the people being killed are being described with the wrong adjective in the media. If believing that marks me as a reactionary old technocrat, then I'll wear that label with pride.

Yeesh.

What a week. Last-minute room changes. Dying laptops. Recalcitrant network connections. Misconfigured servers. Uncooperative thermostats. Nonexistent projectors. Filled-to-capacity rooms.

Just another semester underway.

T-Minus and holding

Still a few preparations for the start of classes. Unfortunately, they demand the use of the new podcasting software we're getting on campus. It was supposed to go live Friday. No sign of it yet.

And so it goes.

Ready to go. I think.

After living at my desk the last few days, I think I'm ready to go for the semester.

I'm forgetting something, of course. And I'll remember it late Sunday, for Monday's class.

But I'm certainly enjoying the illusion of being prepared.

Evolution leading to the Industrial Revolution?

I've been meaning to post something about this article from Sunday's Times about a new study suggesting that the rise of the industrial revolution was mostly because of the spread of a certain set of attitudes and behaviors--longer work hours, lower violence, more willingness to save and postpone gratification. No controversy so far.

However, the argument is made that this change was driven by evolution; that European cities were so disease-filled that a large proportion of the population died off annually, to be replaced by new migrants from the countryside. Children of the rich were more likely to survive than children of the poor; thus the surviving population is increasingly represented by the offspring of the rich, perhaps bringing with them behaviors that lead to wealth.

But of course, there are questions he doesn't address. Why were people flocking to the cities, when your chances of foraging outside the cities, admittedly not great, were at least better than in the middle of the disease-infested hell-hole a medieval city was? He notes this didn't happen in Asia because the ruling classes of China and Japan were "surprisingly infertile." Why? And could biological selection account for that large an effect in only a few hundred to few thousand years? He's an economic historian, not a geneticist.

Yes, there have been some intriguing studies suggesting genetic selection over historic time periods (mentioned in the article, which is really worth reading). But all too often I've seen academics read one or two papers from another discipline, misunderstand a key point, and apply that misunderstanding incorrectly in what they fancy is an 'interdisciplinary' paper. As a friend of mine at UNC-Chapel Hill puts it, "Just because you co-authored a paper with a historian, that doesn't make you a historian." And reading a few genetics papers doesn't make you geneticist. My academic specialty is bioinformatics, and I have no pretense at all of being a biologist, or geneticist, or biochemist, though my work (such as it is; I'm primarily an instructor, not a researcher) has touched on all three areas.

An intriguing hypothesis. The book is called "A Farewell to Alms," and comes out next month. I may have to order a copy.

Another small bit of progress

As it turns out, high school students in New Jersey can present (and see) The Laramie Project, a play about the Matthew Shepard case. It sounds like the right decision, even though it took some effort to bring it about.

Yes, it may be uncomfortable in places. Lots of plays do. At least they're trying to tackle real issues. At my own high school, we made a bold decision to present The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. And a real powerhouse of a performance it was, too. [set sarcasm=OFF]

Nice to see there's progress being made.

We'll get right on that

The Catholic Church is now demanding that students at its schools, and their parents, be more devout:

Church leaders headed by Cardinal George Pell yesterday issued an edict to all Catholic schools, demanding that students and their parents be more devout and outlining a plan to lure back thousands of poorer families who have left the system.

Some of the other components of the plan, such as giving preference to Catholic students, seem fairly reasonable, given the institution. The schools are run by the church, and part of their mission is to promote Catholic values; if they want to give preference to practicing Catholics, that's their concern and their right.

But "demanding" people be more devout isn't likely to get far; after all, they've been "demanding" such things for years. As Yogi Berra is reputed to have said, "If people want to stay away, you can't stop them."

Of course, there's a more fundamental problem for the church here... enrollments have been dropping because they're being seen as less relevant, and less credible, with less moral right to make patronizing statements of morality. (The whole thing about preaching divine love while molesting children really has hurt their PR.)

So if they downsize to, oh, zero or thereabouts... well, so what.