Wednesday: Hili dialogue

January 11, 2017 • 6:30 am

Good morning: it’s Wednesday, January 11, 2017. It’s also National Hot Toddy Day, but it’s a bit late here since the temperature will rise above freezing today: up to 44°F (a tropical 7° C). But there will be rain, too. It’s also German Apples Day, or Tag den Deutschen Apfels, and perhaps a German reader can explain that one.

I’m feeling a bit under the weather, and posting will likely be light today. On this day in 1908, the Grand Canyon National Monument was created, and, in 1922, insulin was first used to treat a human patient. In 1946, the Republic of Albania was declared, with Enver Hoxha naming himself president. (Other infamous Albanians include Mother Teresa.) Finally, in 1949 the first regular television broadcasting began with station KDKA in Pittsburgh.

Notables born on this day include Nicolas Steno (1638; see WEIT), William James (1842), Calvin Bridges (1889; a fly geneticist and one of my heroes, see below) and Carroll Shelby (1929, this is for Stephen Barnard, who owns a replica Shelby Cobra). Here’s a picture of Stephen in his souped up car, in which I got a ride in 2015 (see photos and info here and here):

p1080442-1

Here’s Calvin Bridges, a crack Drosophila geneticist in the T. H. Morgan lab (Morgan was the mentor of my Ph.D. advisor’s advisor, Th. Dobzhansky). His work was important in showing that chromosomes were the carriers of genes. He was also renowned for his strikingly good looks and his womanizing, and died at 49 from syphillis. I’m not sure what is going on in this photo with the tilted microscope:

mbl_copeland-bloom_bridges_photo12-web

Notables who died on this day include Francis Scot Key (1849), Thomas Hardy (1928), Alberto Giacometti (1966), Sir Edmund Hillary (2008), and David Nelson (2011). Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is worried about the welfare of mice in winter, but not because she’s a humanitarian (mousitarian)?:

Hili: Are they going to survive this cataclysm?
A: Who?
Hili: What do you mean “who”? My mice.
dsc00002a
In Polish:
Hili: Czy one przetrwają ten kataklizm?
Ja: Kto?
Hili: Jak to kto? Moje myszki.

Monica Crowley’s book pulled by HarperCollins

January 10, 2017 • 12:16 pm

UPDATE: Readers have noted in the comments that Crowley also stands accused of plagiarizing parts of her Ph.D. dissertation in international relations at Columbia University. Politico reports (and gives examples in their piece:

Crowley submitted her dissertation, titled “Clearer Than Truth: Determining and Preserving Grand Strategy: The Evolution of American Policy Toward the People’s Republic of China Under Truman and Nixon,” in 2000 in partial completion of her Ph.D. in international relations at New York’s Columbia University. Today, the thesis is kept on microfilm at the University of Michigan and accessible via ProQuest, an academic database.

By checking passages in the document against the sources Crowley cites, focusing on paragraphs that come before and after footnotes of key sources in her bibliography, we found numerous structural and syntactic similarities. She lifted passages from her footnoted texts, occasionally making slight wording changes but rarely using quotation marks. Sometimes she didn’t footnote at all.

Parts of Crowley’s dissertation appear to violate Columbia’s definition of “Unintentional Plagiarism” for “failure to ‘quote’ or block quote author’s exact words, even if documented” or “failure to paraphrase in your own words, even if documented.” In other cases, her writing appears to violate types I and II of Columbia’s definition of “Intentional Plagiarism,” which are, respectively, “direct copy and paste” and “small modification by word switch,” “without quotation or reference to the source.”

It’s not clear whether this could lead to the revocation of her Ph.D., but it seems more serious than plagiarizing in a trade book. Again, this may be small-time malfeasance to the Trumpites, but if her degree is revoked it could have serious impications for her appointment on the National Security Council.

____________

Two days ago I reported accusations by CNN about Monica Crowley, former political columnist and Fox News commentator and now poised to become Donald Trump’s senior director of strategic communications for the National Security Council. The accusations involved plagiarism in Crowley’s 2012 book What The (Bleep) Just Happened; the charges were Crowley had lifted without attribution at least 50 passages from sources as diverse as Wikipedia and the Wall Street Journal (see my earlier post for examples.)

Apparently the publisher, agrees that there was misconduct: as CNN just reported, HarperCollins is ditching the book:

“The book, which has reached the end of its natural sales cycle, will no longer be offered for purchase until such time as the author has the opportunity to source and revise the material,” HarperCollins said in a statement to CNN’s KFile.

That’s a polite way of saying that “we’re not publishing this until the plagiarism is gone.”  The “natural sales cycle” stuff is politely disingenuous, as if it’s reached the end of that cycle, why would they publish a revision? CNN goes on:

Publisher HarperCollins said Tuesday that it will stop selling a book by Monica Crowley that a CNN KFile investigation found to have more than 50 instances of plagiarism.

A request for comment from the Trump transition team was not immediately returned. A spokesperson for the Trump transition team told CNN’s KFile Saturday when the initial report was published that they were standing by Crowley.

“HarperCollins—one of the largest and most respected publishers in the world—published her book which has become a national best-seller. Any attempt to discredit Monica is nothing more than a politically motivated attack that seeks to distract from the real issues facing this country,” the spokesperson said.

book-what-the-bleep-monica-crowley_1024x1024
The book at issue

A postmodern holiday: recent nonsense from the humanities

January 10, 2017 • 9:30 am

Reader Loren sent me this video (with an introduction by Noam Chomsky) on some of the shenanigans of postmodern nonsense (yes, I know that not all of the humanities or “science studies” is riddled with this stuff). A lot of the material presented comes from the Twi**er site New Real Peer Review, which is worth following.

Can you recognize the scholars pictured at the end?

You can find a lot of these papers simply by googling the titles. For instance, the paper by Eviatar Zurubabel, which the video summarizes (4:36) as saying “Science and reason are bad”, does in fact claim that. It was in the journal Cultural Sociology, and you can find it here. Here’s its first paragraph:

The realization that ‘reality’ may not be what I had always thought it was, and that our notion of absolute objectivity is ultimately social, blew my mind when I first read Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s classic The Social Construction of Reality (1967 [1966]) as a college senior 44 years ago. And the mechanism most responsible for how we come to view something as objective, I discovered, is the process of reification.

I haven’t looked at all of the papers (I’d go nuts if I had to), but not all of them appear to be completely as characterized. For instance, the paper at 4:49 supposedly arguing “Why ‘Marxian selection’ has better explanatory power than Darwinian selection”, is really about how some sociocultural phenomena need a teleological approach because they’re the result of human “purpose.” That said, I wonder whether any of these papers have made a substantive contribution to human knowledge. Insofar as we’re supporting this research with institutional or government funds, we appear to not be expanding humanity’s knowledge, but propelling the careers of humanities scholars.

I received an angry email the other day from a prominent “science studies” scholar who will remain unnamed, telling me that I had no right to criticize that field because I hadn’t read widely in it, or had a degree in it.  I didn’t respond, but if I had I would have said that I’ve indeed read a great deal of “science studies,” from Popper and Kuhn down to modern days, and I know that a lot of it is worthwhile—the work of Phil Kitcher and my colleague Bob Richards, for instance, both of whom I’ve discussed on this website. But there’s no denying that even today “science studies” is riddled with postmodern nonsense, and you don’t have to have a Ph.D. in the field to conclude that.

For example, in one minute of Googling, I found the journal Catalyst (subtitle: “Feminism, theory, technoscience”) with a paper last year having this title and abstract. And there are many others:

“El tabaco se ha mulato”: Globalizing Race, Viruses, and Scientific Observation in the Late Nineteenth Century

Jih-Fei Cheng

Abstract

This article traces the earliest identified recorded descriptor for viral infection: the racialized Spanish expression “el tabaco se ha mulato” (“the tobacco has become mulatto”). The phrase appears in the late nineteenth-century travel writing of French colonial scientist Jules Crevaux, written as he journeyed through post-Spanish Independence Colombia and observed the demise of the once-thriving tobacco industry. I theorize the literary translations and visualizations, or what I call “visual translations,” of the phrase across scientific and historical texts that cite Crevaux to track the refraction of racial, gender, and sexual discourses in virology. I argue that the phrase refers to the historically dispossessed Indigenous and Black subjects of the nascent Colombian republic and their resistance to subjection when forced to work the tobacco fields.  The article historicizes virus discovery at the juncture between science, nation-building, global industrialization, and the disciplining of race and sex under the long shadow of Euro-American empire.  Drawing upon Ed Cohen’s concept of “viral paradox,” Nayan Shah’s notion of “strangerhood,” and Mel Y.  Chen’s framework for thinking about “queer animacies,” I deconstruct the visual, conceptual, and etymological roots of the phrase “el tabaco se ha mulato” to argue that the expression renders the virus as both “queer” and “strange” to the nation. The virus signifies the mulato subject as a stubborn challenge to racial hierarchies and to the host-guest-parasite relation, both of which are foundational to the social organization of the nation and polis. This signification insistently refuses the human/non-human binary that undergirds racial regimes and biological conceptions of life. In turn, I expand historical thinking about race, submit that pandemics result from global industrial resource extraction rather than merely poor hygiene, and offer a framework for “queer decolonizing.”

Virtually every paper in the three issues of that journal has an equally impenetrable and jargon-ridden abstract. I’m amazed that people get paid to write this stuff; it’s as if writing this way confers you membership in some secret and elite club with its own secret jargon.

Readers’ wildlife photos

January 10, 2017 • 7:30 am

Reader “Siggy in Costa Rica” (his posting handle), sent us these photos from his eponymous country; his notes are indented.

These are Red-legged Honeycreepers [Cyanerpes cyaneus], one female and 3 males, helping themselves to some bananas on my patio. [JAC: note the extreme sexual dimorphism!]

dsc03846-the-banana-thieves-share
And a closeup of a male.

dsc03315-red-legged-honeycreeper-%28cyanerpus-cyaneus%29-share

A Rufous-tailed Hummingbird (Amazilia tzacatl) stretching its wings:

dsc01204-rufous-tailed-hummingbird-%28amazilia-tzacatl%29-outside-my-kitchen-window-share

A Rufous Nightjar (Caprimulgus rufus) [JAC: can you spot it?]:

dsc03201-rufous-nightjar-%28caprimulgus-rufus%29-share
And finally, an amblypigid, or whip scorpion [JAC: these, like spiders, are arachnids], that needed a to be escorted out of the house.

SONY DSC

 

Tuesday: Hili dialogue

January 10, 2017 • 6:30 am

It’s January 10, 2017, and National Bittersweet Chocolate Day. (And yes, I’ll keep the science posts coming.) It’s also the day that President Obama will deliver his “farewell address” in Chicago (I saw the huge line of people waiting to get tickets on Saturday). Say what you will of Obama, but you must admit that the guy had class, tried his best to promote a liberal agenda, and that, no matter how much you disliked him, you’ll long for his return within six months.

Historical events seen to be thin on the ground in early January. On this day in 1776, Thomas Paine published his famous pamphlet Common Sense, which helped fire up Americans to fight for their independence from mean Britain. And—I did not know this—Wikipedia notes this about the pamphlet: “As of 2006, it remains the all-time best selling American title, and is still in print today.” On this day in 1863, the London Underground opened, with the first stretch between between Paddington and Farringdon; the cars were wooden carriages, lit by gas and hauled by steam locomotives (underground!) On this day in 1920, the treaty of Versailles, signed on November 11 of 1918, finally took effect. And on this day in 1984, the US established diplomatic relations with the Vatican, relations that had been prohibited since 1867 by a Congressional law resting on America’s anti-Catholic sentiments.

Notables born on this day include Robinson Jeffers (1887), Ray Bolger (1904; the scarecrow in “The Wizard of Oz”), Max Roach (1924), geneticist Walter Bodmer (1936), Sal Mineo (1939), geneticist Godfrey Hewitt (1940), Jim Croce (1943), Rod Stewart (1945), Linda Lovelace (1949), and Pat Benatar (1953). Those who died on this day include Carl Linnaeus (1778, the man who gave us, among other things, the Latin binomial way of designating species), Sinclair Lewis (1951; raise your hand if you’ve read his (and Paul de Kruif’s) Arrowsmith (1925), a novel—perhaps the first about a working scientist—that inspired me to become a scientist), Spalding Gray (2004), and, one year ago, David Bowie.

Arrowsmith (yes it’s overwritten and maudlin in parts, but the code of the scientist it lays out has stayed with me ever since, as well as the crusty but demanding character Max Gottlieb, based on the scientists Frederick Novey and Jacques Loeb). It got the Pulitzer Prize for literature in 1926, but Lewis declined it with these words:

I wish to acknowledge your choice of my novel Arrowsmith for the Pulitzer Prize. That prize I must refuse, and my refusal would be meaningless unless I explained the reasons.

All prizes, like all titles, are dangerous. The seekers for prizes tend to labor not for inherent excellence but for alien rewards; they tend to write this, or timorously to avoid writing that, in order to tickle the prejudices of a haphazard committee. And the Pulitzer Prize for Novels is peculiarly objectionable because the terms of it have been constantly and grievously misrepresented.

Those terms are that the prize shall be given “for the American novel published during the year which shall best present the wholesome atmosphere of American life, and the highest standard of American manners and manhood.” This phrase, if it means anything whatsoever, would appear to mean that the appraisal of the novels shall be made not according to their actual literary merit but in obedience to whatever code of Good Form may chance to be popular at the moment.”

arrowsmith

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is preening her lovely coat:

Cyrus: What are you doing there?
Hili: I’m taking care of myself.
dsc00005-1
In Polish:
Cyrus: Co tam robisz?
Hili: Dbam o siebie.

Carrie Fisher cremated, ashes put in a Prozac-shaped urn

January 9, 2017 • 2:30 pm

The sad death of Carrie Fisher (and her mother Debbie Reynolds on the next day) is leavened by one bit of humor. After Fisher was cremated, her ashes were put in an urn shaped like a big Prozac pill.  Fisher was well known to have suffered from bipolar disorder, and didn’t hide it at all. Now she (or her relatives) have flaunted it in death, knowing that she’d like that.  As the Washington Post reports:

It would seem fitting, then, that as a tribute to the iconic “Star Wars” princess’s equally memorable wit and blunt humor, her ashes were placed in one of her most prized possessions: an urn in the shape of a giant antidepressant pill.

Pictures from the funeral in Los Angeles Friday show Fisher’s younger brother, Todd, carrying a white and green Prozac pill-shaped urn. Todd Fisher told BBC News that he and Billie Lourd, Carrie Fisher’s daughter, “felt it was where she would want to be.”

“Well, Carrie’s favorite possession was a giant Prozac pill that she bought many years ago and she loved it. It was in her house,” Todd Fisher told BBC News after the funeral. “We couldn’t find anything appropriate. Carrie would like that. It was her favorite thing, so that’s how you do it.”

. . . “I am mentally ill. I can say that. I am not ashamed of that,” Fisher said on ABC News.

Over the years, Fisher used humor to cope with her illness. When WebMD asked her what it was like to be the poster child for bipolar disorder, she said, “Well, I am hoping to get the centerfold in Psychology Today.”

“That’s my way of surviving, to abstract it into something that’s funny and not dangerous,” she told People magazine. “It is not an entertainment. I’m not going to stop writing about it, but I have to understand it.”

 Ceiling Cat bless her! Here’s are two tw**ts by a Cher, but not the Cher:

screen-shot-2017-01-09-at-12-38-31-pm