The Saturday cat is so privileged that he totally disrespects the Sunday cat’s space May 18, 2013

If you’re anything like me, you get annoyed by the way the phrase “check your privilege” – while it can sometimes be used to make a really important point – is so often employed to shut down disagreement, carve lines of moral superiority, and do all sorts of other similar and similarly conversationally shitty things. But do you know what? You need to check your getting-annoyed-at-blogosphere-trope privilege. And do you know who else needs to check their privilege? These fucking cats.

 

19 Cats Who Need to Check Their Privilege

 

“This cat doesn’t realize there are kitties with no paws, because he is ableist.”

Gender-neutral interventions

What are your favourite gender-neutral interventions that in fact help women in philosophy? The two I’m most excited about at the moment are principles of chairing discussions:

1. The One Question Per Question rule– those with multiple questions can have additional ones added to be back of the queue.

2. Favouring not those who raise their hands first, but those who haven’t been heard from yet– helps all those who may be a bit more hesitant to raise their hands, and (combined with rule 1) leads to a greater diversity of views being heard. Also helps immensely in interdisciplinary settings, because in some fields the convention is not to raise your hand until you actually have a question in mind (!).

Berlin Leftists’ New Target: Barbie Dreamhouse May 17, 2013

Berlin Leftists’ New Target: Barbie Dreamhouse (WSJ article by Mary M. Lane, 5/17/13)
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“Workers of the World Unite to Fight ‘Pinkified’ Resident, Stiletto Chairs”
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…”It would be a huge danger for capitalism if working men and women were united, so one of the best ways to divide and conquer the workers is by enabling men to over-sexualize women and by preoccupying women with sexualizing themselves,” said group leader Michael Koschitzki, 27 years old. “This is why we need to oppose Barbie.”…

“Barbie has been around for over 50 years. Can you show me that’s really held back society with all the positive changes for women?” asked Jörg Niepraschk, a father of two girls he brought to the Dreamhouse for a preview on Tuesday.

“The Junge Linke adamantly say “yes,” arguing that Barbie is a symbol of proletariat repression and a consumerist society set in place by power-hungry capitalists…

“The Junge Linke argue that Barbie’s “pinkified” personality cultivates a desire in girls to focus on looks instead of careers and spend their cash on expensive beauty products…
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One of many wonderful papers that quickly come to mind is Sandra Bartky’s “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power”. (Click here for a PDF copy posted on the web for now.)

Mary Wollstonecraft Conference May 16, 2013

The organisers are pleased to announce a one day conference on the Social and Political Thought of Mary Wollstonecraft to be held on Thursday 30th May (9am-5pm) at Birkbeck College, London.

While long admired as an inspirational and visionary feminist writer, only recently has Wollstonecraft been rediscovered as an important and innovative philosopher and political theorist in her own right. The papers in this gathering explore Wollstonecraft’s ideas both in relation to other female writers of the period and as providing valuable insights into issues of contemporary political relevance such as the nature of rights and the accommodation of cultural diversity.

Everyone is extremely welcome. If you have any queries about the event please
contact Alan Coffee (alancoffee@alancoffee.com).

Speakers:

Barbara Taylor (London)

Quentin Skinner (London)

Susan James (London)

Sandrine Bergès (Bilkent)

Lena Halldenius (Lund)

Martina Reuter (Helsinki/Jyväskylä)

Alan Coffee (London)

Location: Room B36, Main Building, Birkbeck College, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HX

Further details are available here.

This looks like a great event! – Monkey

Men speak about randomization and causal inference May 15, 2013

Workshop on Randomization and Related Topics in Causal Inference in Medicine 

 

Stephen Senn (Centre de Recherche Public de la Santé, Luxembourg)

“Being a Statistician Means Never Having to Say You’re Certain”

David Papineau (Department of Philosophy, King’s College, London)
“What Kind of Causes Do Randomized Trials Tell Us About?”

George Davey-Smith (MRC Centre for Causal Analyses in Translational Epidemiology, Bristol)
“Origins of ‘fair tests’ of treatment in the late 19th century: how and why”

John Worrall (Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method, London School of Economics)
“On the the Epistemic Virtues of Blinding”

Alexander Bird (Department of Philosophy, Bristol)
“From Mill’s Method of Difference to Randomization in the Logic of Comparative Trials”

Alison Wylie 2013′s Distinguished Woman Philosopher May 14, 2013

The Society of Women in Philosophy has chosen Prof. Alison Wylie to be the recipient of the award for 2013.  Wylie will be honored at the traditional panel session held by SWIP at the Eastern APA in honor of the DWP award winner.  Readers may be familiar with Wylie’s scholarship in philosophy of science, feminism, and standpoint theory, her sundry successful efforts to mentor women in the field, her service to Canadian and American philosophical organizations, or her recently concluded editorship of Hypatia which involved many of her own initiatives.  I could go on!  Congratulations, Alison, and see you in Baltimore at the session in your honor!

Here’s hoping the Michael J Fox Show is awesome

Induction suggests that it’s difficult to anticipate the quality of a TV show or movie based on the quality of the trailer (Watchmen, I am looking directly at you). So I’ll hedge what I say here to this: the trailer for the new pilot The Michael J Fox Show looks pretty awesome.

By all accounts it’s a show that will center around a disabled character (Mike Henry) portrayed by a disabled actor (Michael J Fox). As far as I know, that’s a first – at least on a mainstream US network. Of course, it’s unlikely that a show like this would be possible if Fox hadn’t been famous before he became disabled. But still, it’s a step in the right direction – and might pave the way for other, more varied representations of disability in TV and film. (A girl can dream, yeah?)

And from the looks of it, the show seems to be aiming for a great tone – one that laughs openly at ‘tragic overcomer’ tropes and embraces the everyday ups, downs, humor, and general ridiculousness that can come with being disabled. Here’s hoping it’s awesome. At the very least, I like the trailer.

How Anonymous began fighting rape and rape culture

Read about it here. (Thanks, Mr Jender!)

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!

The Sunday cat finds dog-training in action. May 11, 2013

Poor dear doggy!

These are wild cats, the smallest ones to be found in Africa.
Neither the cat nor the dog is responsible for the music. Consider turning the sound off.