Skype instead of APA? December 31, 2010

There’s a really interesting and potentially important discussion over on Leiter of the idea of replacing APA interviews with Sykpe. Lots of good stuff there, but readers of this blog may be especially interesting in Rebecca Kukla’s comment:

Here’s one that hasn’t been mentioned; there’s a gender issue here. Some time earlier this term there was an interesting and lively thread on this blog about interviewing in hotel rooms and its differential impact on women, and there was much talk about how neither hotel rooms nor tables in noisy ballrooms were ideal, how suites were too expensive, etc. Skype interviews completely eliminate that whole hornet’s nest. (I’m assuming no department is going to turn the webcam on the faculty lounging about semi-clad in someone’s bedroom.) This seems to me to be a pretty big advantage.

And here’s another, perhaps more contentious gender consideration: There are lots of good reasons to think that women have it harder during interviews when it comes to appearance and self-presentation. We know that women get judged by their body type more than men do. At the same time, many people have suggested that women have no really good interview clothing options – we don’t have a stock professional uniform like men do. It’s really easy for women to come off as too femme, too dressy, too butch, too casual, too sexy, too dowdy, etc. during an interview.

In a skype interview, you only see someone’s head and maybe their upper torso, typically. You have way less sense of their general body shape, and you don’t really have much of a sense of their style. It’s really not too hard to look neutrally professional from the shoulders up! Of course, at the on-campus stage, women will show up with their whole, clothed bodies on display. But then there is much more information to go on. These initial interviews are all about quick first impressions, which is just where we would expect there to be problems of the sort I am pointing towards.

The more I think about it, the more I find the idea of women might be interviewed without anyone really having a sense of their style or body shape totally exciting and liberating. And no more stupid uncomfortable, expensive interview shoes in the middle of winter! Woo-hoo! I know this sounds frivolous, but I suspect it may make a real difference to the fairness with which female candidates are assessed.

And look, these things may not be as big of an issue for men, but surely it is all to the good if there is less potential for one’s judgments about ANY candidate to be biased by impressions of their style, height, fitness level, etc. And surely men don’t especially love having to sit on someone’s bed or in a noisy ballroom for their interviews either.

UK legal aid cuts likely to affect women more than men December 30, 2010

The Guardian recently reported that proposals to cut legal aid in the UK are likely to have a greater impact on women, according to the Ministry of Justice’s own equality impact assessments.

Take family cases, like disputes about contact and residence of children; injunctions against ex-partners; the division of financial assets; applications for maintenance; and divorce.  The proposals mean that legal aid will be restricted to cases where forced marriage, international child abduction or domestic violence is proven. According to the Guardian, ‘domestic violence’ for these purposes will only include physical violence, not psychological abuse. They report that the Ministry of Justice believed it had to ‘…restrict the definition of domestic violence to one that could be demonstrated through “clear, objective evidence”.’

Another of the most worrying proposals is complete removal of legal aid from education cases, including those where – say – a disabled child has been incorrectly assessed for support, or has been refused admission to a school.  The factors they list in support of this removal are that the importance of the issues is relatively low – “some financial claims; some issues arise from personal choices, e.g. conduct at school” and that people can represent themselves because the tribunals are “accessible to lay people”.

And note that – from what I can tell – withdrawal of legal aid doesn’t just mean no representation, it means no right to legal aid in getting advice, either.

Is your car insufficiently feminine? December 28, 2010

Then get it some car lashes.

Thanks, J-Bro!

Sharing information about the APA December 26, 2010

Brian Leiter has put up a series of posts that separates out interviews, travel and sessions.  It’s a good place to check for information and/or to post it, queries, etc.

Everyone remains very welcome to post here.  Thanks to all who have so far.

Rats! Someone I was looking forward to seeing just wrote to say he won’t make it to Boston. Apparently the flights from Atlanta to Boston are cancelled until Tues.

I just checked my local airport. Though the airport says that flights are subject to a 15 minute delay, it omits telling one about the flights that are not taking off at all. I did find out that all the continental flights to Boston after the 1:17 pm one are cancelled.

The Boston Globe talks about hundreds of flight cancellations. Boston.com has information about flights; you need just to know the carrier and where it is leaving from. The APA site has the same announcement about the office being closed for the meeting.

If you have any information about what people are doing about interviews, sessions missing speakers and so on, do let us know. You are also most welcome to moan about missed meetings, hours in airports, panics about interviews and so on.

The Sunday Cat visits a day early December 25, 2010

to celebrate the particular naughtiness of English pussies cats.

 

some of whom may be enraged by a persistent insistence on gender inconsistency:

Under-Appreciated Heroes December 24, 2010

David’s posted a link to an excellent story calling attention to the people who should have captured the media attention in 2010, but who didn’t. (I’m pulling it out from comments to make sure it doesn’t get missed.) Two of them are particularly relevant to this blog, but really all of them are:

Under-Appreciated Person Two: Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. The only African leader who appears with any regularity on our TV screens is the snarling psychopath Robert Mugabe, spreading his message of dysfunction and despair. We rarely hear about his polar opposite.

In 2005, the women of Liberia strapped their babies to their backs and moved en masse to elect Africa’s first ever elected female President. Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf was a 62-year-old grandmother who had been thrown in prison by the country’s dictators simply for demanding democracy. She emerged blinking into a country trashed by 14 years of civil war and pillaged by dictators – but she said she would, at last, ensure that the Liberian state obeyed the will of its people.

In the face of a chorus of cynics, she did it. She restored electricity for the first time since 1992. She got the number of children in school up by 40 per cent. She introduced prison terms for rapists for the first time. Now she is running for re-election in a fully open and contested ballot. I look at her and I think of all the women I have seen by the roadsides of Africa, carrying impossibly heavy loads on hunched backs – and I know what they will achieve when they are finally allowed to…

Under-Appreciated People Four: The Saudi Arabian women who are fighting back. Women like Wajehaal-Huwaider are struggling against a tyranny that bans them from driving, showing their face in public, or even getting medical treatment without permission from their male “guardian”. The streets are policed by black-clad men who enforce sharia law and whip women who express any free will.

Saudi women are being treated just as horrifically as Iranian women – but because their oppressors are our governments’ allies, rather than our governments’ enemies, you hear almost nothing about them. Huwaider points out that her sisters are fighting back and being beaten and whipped for it, and asks: “Why isn’t the cry of these millions of women heard, and why isn’t it answered by anyone, anywhere in the world?”

Lesbians earn more than straight women December 23, 2010

And it’s not entirely clear why. (Thanks, E!)

Tampon Crafts December 23, 2010

There’s a whole mad website devoted to them!

Includes tampon blow gun, menorah, nativity scene, iTampon (introduced around the time of the iPad).

In case you missed it… December 23, 2010

this week has been a big one in online feminist activism against rape apologists. I’m not a twitterer, and I’ve been very busy, so I haven’t followed all of it. The short version is that Michael Moore and Keith Olbermann made extremely dismissive and false claims about the rape allegations against Julian Assange. Blogger Sady started a twitter feed devoted to the topic. All hell broke loose. Finally Rachel Maddow had Moore on her show and he changed his tune. For a much better overview, see here. For Sady’s own perspective, see here.

It’s those chimps again! Updated December 21, 2010

They are on CNN and the NY Times, along with a press release R sent to us.  And before you get upset, notice that “fallacy” is used as a category for this post.

The NY Times tells us that young  female chimps play out a motherly role:

Young female chimpanzees like to play with sticks as if they were dolls, according to a new study in the journal Current Biology.

Although both juvenile male and female chimpanzees were seen playing with sticks in Kibale National Park in Uganda, females were more likely to cradle the sticks and treat them like infants.

Some chimps will even build little nests for the sticks.

CNN says

It’s just days till Christmas, and many young girls around the world will be thrilled to find little dolls under the tree to play with.

But there’s new evidence that it’s not only human girls who enjoy playing with imaginary babies — young apes may be showing the same behavior.

A research paper published Tuesday has found what its authors say is the first-ever evidence that young female chimpanzees in the wild “play” with sticks as if they are dolls.

“We find that juveniles tend to carry sticks in a manner suggestive of rudimentary doll play,” they write in the current issue of Current Biology. “And, as in children and captive monkeys, this behavior is more common in females than in males.”

Get it?  Being a mother is natural for female primates and the chimps show that.  So give up already on dolls for boys, unless they are soldier dolls or police and fireman dolls and other manly dolls like that.  From the press release:

The two researchers say their work adds to a growing body of evidence that human children are probably born with their own ideas of how they want to behave, rather than simply mirroring other girls who play with dolls and boys who play with trucks. Doll play among humans could have its origins in object-carrying by earlier apes, they say, suggesting that toy selection is probably not due entirely to socialization.

Here is the problem, however.  first of all, one and only one colony of chimps has been observed manifesting this behavior, according to the press release.  Secondly:

“We have seen juveniles occasionally carrying sticks for many years, and because they sometimes treated them rather like dolls, we wanted to know if in general this behavior tended to represent something like playing with dolls,” says Wrangham, the Ruth Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard. “If the doll hypothesis was right we thought that females should carry sticks more than males do, and that the chimpanzees should stop carrying sticks when they had their first offspring. We have now watched enough young chimpanzees to test both points.”

But one person’s inference to the best explanation (which is what this quote may illustrate) is another’s fallacy of affirming the consequent.  To get the first and better label, we’d need to have some reason for thinking that it employs the best explanation or at least a very good one.  But does it?

Well, many feminists have argued that research like this simply borrows models from human behavior and then finds them (surprise!) in untutored nature.  But maybe there are quite different explanations.  We know that animals can copy one another.  (Anyone who dealt with the blue tit coordinated assault on bottle tops in England had evidence that birds can copy one another, and this can easily occur in social animals.  Blue tits are not born with bottle top lust.)  On the face of it, the stick carrying behavior has caught on in a group of female chimps.

For the behavior to catch on, there almost certainly has to be some reward.  It could be an inherited tic of some sort, but let’s suppose it is the result of copying rewarding behavior.  What would the reward be?

NPR talked to a primatologist at Emory University who advances an alternative explanation for different choices in young chimps and human children; it may be just a difference in energy conservation, with males more willing to expend energy in play:

Another primate researcher, Kim Wallen at Emory University in Atlanta, would like to see more evidence. For instance, Wrangham’s study includes a picture showing a young female chimp carrying a stick. Is she really cradling it like a baby?

A 9-year-old female chimp carries a stick, seen just below her left arm.

 

“This doesn’t happen to look like that to me,” Wallen says. “This looks like pausing to reconnoiter before shuffling off into the woods.”

As for whether that difference comes from biology or culture, Wallen prefers to say that biology produces a bias, which is channeled by experience.

“For example, the bias could be something as simple as increased energy expenditure in males and less energy expenditure in females,” he says.

But environment — and culture — could channel that difference in energy toward specific ways to play. And so we get trucks for boys and dolls for girls. Maybe, even, among chimpanzees.

The State of Education in the USA: Grump! December 21, 2010

The thing that makes me despair most – and feel most ashamed – comes with the realization that the country is full of people who cannot cope with conditional sentences.  There are more important things to worry about, perhaps, but solving them tends to rely on people getting beyond simple assertoric sentences.

Sometimes I know in advance that I really shouldn’t try.  E.g., from about 2 months ago:   I didn”t know if  Jones did A last week, and I wanted to communicate the following thought to the person answering the phone:  if he didn’t do it  last week, could he do it this week?  Hopeless.  I don’t know why I tried.  I knew in advance I’d freeze the human system, as it were.  I think the thought was that if I asked for him just to do it this week, I might well pay a lot to have the same thing redone.  It was about cleaning an apartment I sometimes use, but hadn’t used for a while.

This afternoon I discovered that I had given a store the wrong address for a present.  So I used web communication to ask the store to reroute it.  Sherry said that they would try, but it wasn’t always possible.  So I said, “If it can’t be rerouted, could it just be held at the fedex facility.”  Arrgghh.  How could I have done it!?!

She typed, “Which do you want?”  and it took 20 minutes to repair the damage.

There’s a lovely passage in Descartes Med I which is about how some people think an all powerful, all good God could not be a deceiver.  Descartes in effect responds that still if God were all that great, then he wouldn’t…  I may try again to get a whole class to try to reason with a conditional.

GLBT Presidents in Higher Ed December 21, 2010

From the Chronicle of Higher Education:

A small but growing group of openly gay and lesbian college presidents will make its official debut at a March meeting of the American Council on Education. But the group publicly introduced itself on Friday with a Web video, which features several of its members and their partners.

And the video from youtube:

Petition to declare ‘Corrective Rape’ a hate crime December 20, 2010

“Corrective Rape” is a term used to describe when a male rapes a lesbian with the aim of ‘turning’ her heterosexual!

This heinous crime is prolific in South Africa, especially in the “townships”. ..We call on the South African government to declare “Corrective Rape” a Hate-Crime that is punishable by the harshest sentences!

To sign, go here. (I assume there’s a reason the petition is written in the way that it is. Nonetheless, I altered the first sentence before signing since, as written, it was not true of me.) Thanks, Jender-Parents!

A philosopher in the NY Times, again! December 20, 2010

Where O where is habituation?  I mean, after repeated exposure to something, isn’t one’s reaction supposed to get less?  Well, maybe the fact that this article has me depressed rather than angry is a sign of habituation.  In any case, it is a well know philosopher on the real science of mind. 

The real science has nothing to do with fMRI experiments, of course.  And here’s why not:

 it provides little insight into psychological phenomena.  Often the discoveries amount to finding stronger activation in some area of the brain when a psychological phenomenon occurs.  As if it is news that the brain is not dormant during psychological activity!  The reported neuroscience is often descriptive rather than explanatory.

And that’s just false, I say, having skimmed through the first 70 articles Academic Search brought up, besides having some background here.  The “it’s just about brain location” argument has been floating around for about 10 years, and it certainly seems problematic.  Even a cursory glance shows that the claims are often implicitly or explicitly comparative.  And they also invoke some knowledge of the functions of the areas of the brain in question.

You can see both characteristics in a study in Science that we commented on here.**  The studies may provide very rich hypotheses.  For example, a comparison between borderline and non-borderline people looked at the insula, which apparently becomes very active as one senses norms are being violated.  Interestingly, seriously borderline people seemed able to register when they transgressed against someone else, but not when someone transgressed against them.  That’s quite the opposite of what their behavior suggests, and so may indicate a more global way in which they are missing cues. 

A lot of work is being done on the differences between people who have had strokes, do have alzheimer’s, and more.  Here again there are comparisons.  If one wants to find the cause and then the cure of some condition, a comparison between the with and the without conditions seems like a very good idea.

This is not to say there are no just complaints.  There are studies with too few samples, along with, it seems safe to say, very sloppy ones.  And disability theorists may indict a normalizing that goes on with the result that the neuroatypical are seen as inferior.  The latter is very serious. 

Burge starts off talking about science journalism’s reports of brain studies.  There’s certainly a lot to complain about there.   But it isn’t clear that the philosopher has understood the difference between the journalism and the science.

 

***My apologies to anyone who tried the link before thurs pm and went to an entirely different study on the sense of self.  The studies are equally telling against Burge; you can find the sense of self  here.

If you go, please go gently December 20, 2010

Death of a Spouse is a new blog that has been started by someone who has recently lost his wife.  It’s an attempt to deal constructively with his own grief while actually helping other people.

It aims to provide information and to convey what this person has learned, which often amounts to unanticipated problems he is trying to solve.

The author, whom I know,  lives in quite a conservative world.  I don’t think now is the time to try to change that.  We have discussed whether the blog is heteronormative.  That his first reaction was “What’s that?” might give you an idea of where he is from.  I don’t think “spouse” is heteronormative, since it seems to me to have been effectively co-opted.

In fact, some people might find it a useful resource, or some of us might  have some good ideas of how to make it more so.  It’s very new and so could probably go in all sorts of different ways.

So have a look if you are interested.

In Search of Gender Balanced Textbooks December 19, 2010

Are there any textbooks out there, suitable for an undergrad course (intro or advanced) in metaphysics, which include a respectable number of papers by women philosophers (i.e. more than a token one or two)? I’ve been hunting around Amazon and other sites for a little while and there’s a depressing consistency to the over-representation of men in all the books I’ve found so far.

Your suggestions, especially if you have experience trying to teach a metaphysics course with a decent gender balance in the reading list, are most welcome. Of course I’ve already had a look at the excellent Women’s Works project, but so far that hasn’t turned up something like an edited collection that could serve as the primary text for an undergrad course.

Gendered Conference Campaign T-Shirts! December 19, 2010

The 21st Century Monads have made “I Like to See the Ladies”/Gendered Conference Campaign T-Shirts! Buy them here.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a sea of these at the APA? Don’t know if they’d arrive on time, but it’s worth a shot! (Thanks, Kris!)

The Sunday Cat is sad for all the freezing countries/states December 19, 2010

In fact, we saw half of this before, but not Simon has finished it!



So long, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” December 19, 2010

By a very satisfying vote of 65 to 31, the U.S. Senate voted today to repeal the 17-year-old ban on gays serving openly in the military.  I know, this paraphrasing is complicated by the fact that gay service prior to these 17 years wasn’t unfettered, either.  But the goofy torture of this benighted bill was that it acknowledged how wrong Reagan-era pursuit of purging gays from the military was, while affirming, with the presidential seal, that men and women who find enforced closeting to be demeaning and undignified are ‘correctly’ punished for exercising the ordinary privilege of laying claim to their identities.

Christmas Trees Not So Harmless December 17, 2010

“Reminders of Christmas can make religious minorities feel ill at ease — even if they don’t realize it. When people who did not celebrate Christmas or who did not identify as Christian filled out surveys about their moods while in the same room as a small Christmas tree, they reported less self-assurance and fewer positive feelings than if they hadn’t been reminded of the holiday, according to a new study.” The full news story is here.

The researcher Michael Schmitt, a social psychologist at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada said, the presence of the tree caused non-celebrators and non-Christians to feel subtly excluded.
“Simply having this 12-inch Christmas tree in the room with them made them feel less included in the university as a whole, which to me is a pretty powerful effect from one 12-inch Christmas tree in one psychology lab,” said Schmitt. Study participants did not know the study was about the effects of Christmas trees.

The reference “Identity moderates the effects of Christmas displays on mood, self-esteem, and inclusion
Identity moderates the effects of Christmas displays on mood, self-esteem, and inclusion,”
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (November 2010), 46 (6), pg. 1017-1022. It’s here.

We’ve always had a Christmas Tree in our department common room and we have thought of it as harmless. Perhaps it’s time to reconsider.