Stereotype threat: scaling up the interventions May 22, 2013

Great stuff.

For example:

A controlled, incremental and systematic approach to the application of interventions is a possible path to scaling up interventions. For example, PERTS(http://www.perts.net/home/PERTS.php), created by doctoral students Dave Paunesku and Carissa Romero of the Department of Psychology at Stanford University, features such an approach. This method uses the Internet to deliver interventions to students. Teachers volunteer to have their students go to computer terminals to complete the interventions in a standardized fashion on designated days. As the procedure for delivering the interventions is highly controlled, the treatment message is given as intended, minimizing the potential for error. Interventions delivered in this manner have yielded reliable increases in GPA in studies of thousands of students across the country—particularly for low-performing ones.

6 Women Scientists Who Were Snubbed Due to Sexism May 20, 2013

6 Women Scientists Who Were Snubbed Due to Sexism (by Jane J. Lee, 5/19/13, for National Geographic Daily News)
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“Despite enormous progress in recent decades, women still have to deal with biases against them in the sciences.”
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“…Today’s women scientists believe that attitudes have changed, said Laura Hoopes at Pomona College in California, who has written extensively on women in the sciences—’until it hits them in the face’.” Bias against female scientists is less overt, but it has not gone away.

“Here are six female researchers who did groundbreaking work—and whose names are likely unfamiliar for one reason: because they are women…”
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Just some of (unfortunately many,) many relevant FP posts:

Minimal Posters – Six Women Who Changed Science. And The World.

Lost Women of Science

Professor Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell

New ‘Geography of Hate’ project maps hate speech on Twitter May 13, 2013

A new project called ‘Geography of Hate‘ gives detailed information about the geographic distribution of hate speech on Twitter. According to The Verge:

the interactive map charts ten relatively common slurs across the continental US, either by general category or individually. Looking at the whole country, you’ll often see a mass of red or what the map’s creators call a “blue smog of hate.” Zooming in, however, patches appear over individual regions or cities; some may be predictable, while others are not. . .

Unlike many other studies, for example, the tweets weren’t collected and analyzed algorithmically — a method that could accidentally collect non-derogatory uses of these terms. Instead, the team first searched through a year’s worth of geotagged tweets for words, then had a group of students at Humboldt State University look at each one. Only tweets they found explicitly negative went on the map: a derogatory use of the word “dyke” would be added, for example, but one reclaiming the term for a gay pride parade would not. In total, the map charts about 150,000 negative, slur-filled tweets.

Since the map looks at only geotagged tweets, it’s not a pure representation of Twitter, but this is standard practice for such mapping. Hateful tweets are weighted by the total number of tweets in an area, so you’ll see the proportional number of slurs, not just areas with the largest number of Twitter users.

 

The information is incredibly interesting (and eye-opening!), the map is user-friendly, and there’s loads of information available about the study’s methodology. Go check it out!

Favouritism and discrimination April 23, 2013

Discrimination today is less about treating people from other groups badly, DiTomaso writes, and more about giving preferential treatment to people who are part of our “in-groups.”

The insidious thing about favoritism is that it doesn’t feel icky in any way, Banaji says. We feel like a great friend when we give a buddy a foot in the door to a job interview at our workplace. We feel like good parents when we arrange a class trip for our daughter’s class to our place of work. We feel like generous people when we give our neighbors extra tickets to a sports game or a show.

In each case, however, Banaji, Greenwald and DiTomaso might argue, we strengthen existing patterns of advantage and disadvantage because our friends, neighbors and children’s classmates are overwhelmingly likely to share our own racial, religious and socioeconomic backgrounds.

For more, go here. (Thanks, S!)

Micro-Inequities: 40 Year Later April 21, 2013

There’s a good discussion of micro-inequities over at Psychology Today, cross-posted on NewAPPS. The post starts with the history of the concept, then moves on to adducing examples of micro-inequities (drawn from What is it like to be a woman in philosophy?), and to drawing connections with implicit bias research. It’s worth the read.

Here’s a taste:

Rowe noted that micro-inequities often had serious cumulative, harmful effects, resulting in hostile work environments and continued minority discrimination in public and private workplaces and organizations. What makes micro-inequities particularly problematic is that they consist in micro-messages that are hard to recognize for victims, bystanders and perpetrators alike. When victims of micro-inequities do recognize the micro-messages, Rowe argues, it is exceedingly hard to explain to others why these small behaviors can be a huge problem.

Thanks, S!

Bias Against Foreign-sounding names April 17, 2013

A case is going to tribunal. (Thanks, N!)

“Accidental racist” April 11, 2013

I first heard the song on Tues, when I was foolish enough to act on my mild curiosity about what Limbaugh is saying. The person talking – perhaps Medved – was criticizing the song for implying that it’s the white guys who own all the blame & guilt. His critique was line by line. I just looked at a tape of The View’s discussion. It was pretty positive but not very specific.

SO YOU CAN DECIDE FOR YOURSELF!!

Below is a audio tape with a picture of the singers, and then the tape of the view.

L.L. cool J and Brad Paisley:

Fat shaming from Peter Singer April 10, 2013

Peter Singer – perhaps unsurprisingly – has some opinions about fat people.

Things don’t bode well from the beginning:

We are getting fatter. In Australia, the United States, and many other countries, it has become commonplace to see people so fat that they waddle rather than walk.

That’s objective rational discourse right there. But it gets better. Singer’s main argument is that people who weigh more should have to pay more to fly. Says Singer:

I am writing this at an airport. A slight Asian woman has checked in with, I would guess, about 40 kilograms (88 pounds) of suitcases and boxes. She pays extra for exceeding the weight allowance. A man who must weigh at least 40 kilos more than she does, but whose baggage is under the limit, pays nothing. Yet, in terms of the airplane’s fuel consumption, it is all the same whether the extra weight is baggage or body fat.

And you can imagine how it goes from there. Fat people cost more. Fat people are a drain on resources. Fat people should have to pay for it. He concludes:

Many of us are rightly concerned about whether our planet can support a human population that has surpassed seven billion. But we should think of the size of the human population not just in terms of numbers, but also in terms of its mass. If we value both sustainable human well-being and our planet’s natural environment, my weight – and yours – is everyone’s business.

So clearly what we should do is make sweeping generalizations about “the overweight”. Then we should engage in some not-very-subtle fat shaming, in which we blame individuals for what is clearly a social phenomenon, and demand more money from those who can often least afford it. Flying can then become just another thin privilege.

While we’re at it, we should probably charge disabled people more to fly, given the extra airline resources it can take to get them to and from their assigned seat, and the extra weight of any assistance devices they might need. We will probably, for similar reasons, also charge the elderly more. And don’t even get me started on parents that travel with children.

Or we could try not listening to Peter Singer. That works too.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nature (a follow up) April 9, 2013

Earlier we posted about the special issue of Nature for International Women’s Day, and there are some follow ups in the most recent issue. I thought readers might be especially interested in the letter from Tina M. Iverson (Vanderbilt), Sexism: A revealing experiment; the variance, corresponding to when her first name was available to reviewers, in her personal experience obtaining grants fits very well with the data on implicit bias we often discuss.

Surely, the sample size is small, and the replicates low, but the results are still striking and fit well with a larger pattern.

Mixed blessing? Machine grading April 7, 2013

from the NY Times:

EdX, the nonprofit enterprise founded by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to offer courses on the Internet, has just introduced such a system and will make its automated software available free on the Web to any institution that wants to use it. The software uses artificial intelligence to grade student essays and short written answers, freeing professors for other tasks.

To be sure, the artificial intelligence doing the grading is far better than the old computational style. But one might well want to see much more before one lets it grade.

The comments are very interesting because they illustrate a certain dislike of change, I think. The news doesn’t have to lead to doom and gloom.