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    • Supreme Court of India Recriminalizes Gay Sex

      In a disturbing ruling, the usually progressive and interventionist Supreme Court of India has recriminalized gay sex, on non-interventionist grounds. 

      Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code holds that whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal commits an unnatural offence. There are two issues here: first, the law itself, and second, the interpretation of the law to include gay sex as being "against the order of nature."

      In 2009, the Delhi High Court struck down Section 377, stating:

      We declare that Section 377 of the IPC, insofar as it criminalises consensual sexual acts of adults in private, is violative of Articles 21 [Right to Protection of Life and Personal Liberty], 14 [Right to Equality before Law] and 15 [Prohibition of Discrimination on Grounds of Religion, Race, Caste, Sex or Place of Birth] of the Constitution.

      We hold that sexual orientation is a ground analogous to sex, and that discrimination on sexual orientation is not permitted under Article 15.

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    • Academic journals as ‘brands’

      Yet another interesting piece in the Guardian on academia: Nobel-prize winner (in medicine) Randy Schekman declares he will no longer submit papers to ‘luxury’ journals such as Nature, Science and Cell. His main argument: 

      These journals aggressively curate their brands, in ways more conducive to selling subscriptions than to stimulating the most important research. Like fashion designers who create limited-edition handbags or suits, they know scarcity stokes demand, so they artificially restrict the number of papers they accept. The exclusive brands are then marketed with a gimmick called "impact factor" – a score for each journal, measuring the number of times its papers are cited by subsequent research. Better papers, the theory goes, are cited more often, so better journals boast higher scores. Yet it is a deeply flawed measure, pursuing which has become an end in itself – and is as damaging to science as the bonus culture is to banking. 

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    • More Good News on the Whole Robot Overlord Front

      Nice article in today's NY Times here about MOOCs not doing all that Thomas Friedman (cf. his entirely predictably earlier puff piece) had quite hoped.

      If the links don't work, just reset your browser history and they will open up. Here's a nice bit:

      But the pilot classes, of about 100 people each, failed. Despite access to the Udacity mentors, the online students last spring — including many from a charter high school in Oakland — did worse than those who took the classes on campus. In the algebra class, fewer than a quarter of the students — and only 12 percent of the high school students — earned a passing grade.

      The program was suspended in July, and it is unclear when, if or how the program will resume. Neither the provost nor the president of San Jose State returned calls, and spokesmen said the university had no comment.

      But like "conservatism" for the Republican party, for academic administrators MOOCs apparently aren't something that can ever fail us, but rather only something we can fail.

      Mr. Siemens said what was happening was part of a natural process. “We’re moving from the hype to the implementation,” he said. “It’s exciting to see universities saying, ‘Fine, you woke us up,’ and beginning to grapple with how the Internet can change the university, how it doesn’t have to be all about teaching 25 people in a room.

      “Now that we have the technology to teach 100,000 students online,” he said, “the next challenge will be scaling creativity, and finding a way that even in a class of 100,000, adaptive learning can give each student a personal experience.”

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    • Why do we (academics) blog?

      Last week the Guardian had an interesting piece on academic blogging. The authors, academic bloggers themselves, conducted a small-scale study with 100 academic blogs as their sample set, in order to identify the main trends in what academic bloggers really write about. It is often said that blogging is an outreach/impact tool for academics, to reach out for the educated public at large, but this is not what came out of this study. The results were interesting: 41% of the posts were on what the authors call ‘academic cultural critique’, i.e. “comments and reflections on funding, higher education policy, office politics and academic life.” A similar number (40%) were dedicated to communication and commentary about research. The remainder 20% focused on other aspects of academic practice, such as teaching and career advice.

      Now, clearly the wide majority of these posts were not written for ‘the public at large’ as their target audience. While some of the research communication (40%) could well be geared towards non-specialists, the authors of the piece seem to suggest that most of them were of a ‘researcher-to-researcher’ kind of communication. Is this worrisome? Does this mean that academic blogging is failing to deliver?

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    • How well-meant efforts can fuel skepticism about climate change, evolution and vaccines

      In a series of experiments, the developmental psychologists Paul Harris, Kathleen Corriveau and Melissa Koenig have shown that young children are more confident about the existence of unobservable scientific entities than they are about the existence of unobservable (semi-)religious entities. 5-year-olds in the Boston area, for example, were more sure about the existence of germs and oxygen than they were about the existence of God and Santa Claus. The experimenters were surprised by this finding, and replicated in several settings, including children from religious households in Spain who were sent to religious (Catholic) schools, and children from a Mayan community in Mexico (Santa was replaced by local spirits that people widely express belief in). As I will show below the fold, a plausible explanation for why children are less confident about religious entities is that the testimony to religious entities differs from that of most scientific entities. It that’s true, we need to rethink how to spread and promote the acceptance of “controversial” scientific ideas like climate change, the safety of vaccines, and evolutionary theory. For, as I will argue, some well-meant efforts to promote such ideas may actually backfire and fuel skepticism. 

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    • Hyperemployment and gender (guest post)

      Gordon Hull sends us this guest post:

      —

      Writing at the Atlantic, Ian Bogost develops the concept of “hyperwork” to describe the constantly-on conditions of work in contemporary society.  The gist of the argument is that we (technology users, anyway) are overworked because we are doing a lot of jobs.  As he puts it, “No matter what job you have, you probably have countless other jobs as well. Marketing and public communications were once centralized, now every division needs a social media presence, and maybe even a website to develop and manage. Thanks to Oracle and SAP, everyone is a part-time accountant and procurement specialist. Thanks to Oracle and Google Analytics, everyone is a part-time analyst.”  And that’s before we get to try to manage email.  Most of these extra jobs aren’t paid, but the loss of money is not nearly alarming as the loss of time.

      At Cyborgology, my colleague Robin James takes up one point that Bogost does not make: that the new jobs we are all working are, by and large, traditionally jobs held by women or other minorities, for which traditionally “feminine” attributes of caring and nurturing are useful.  She wonders aloud whether the phenomena of hyperwork will thus alter our notions of femininity.

      Another point to which Bogost gestures but that needs more emphasis relates to what Tiziana Terranova, Paolo Virno, Franco Berardi, Antonio Negri and others of the Italian “autonomist” school of thought call “cognitive capitalism,” which is basically a Marxist interpretation and critique of the “net economy.” 

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    • Revolutionary democracy and statist “democracy” (reflections on Mandela pt 2)

      There is a theme I'm seeing over and over in the coverage of Mandela's funeral – in everything from mainstream press, to "expert" commentators both inside and outside the press, and essays on the left. People note how brilliant, effective, humane, democratic, strategic, etc. Mandela was when leading the resistance movement. Then they note that he was less effective, less strategic, less brilliant, less democratic as president. (Those on the left add that he began collaborating with international corporations, imperialist or otherwise disreputable states, etc.) And then they move onto how much this negative  trend has continued and in some cases wonder whether there is a leader who can bring South Africa back to the excitement and progress of the revolution. 

      What is striking is that everyone takes this history to reflect on Mandela, on Mandela's legacy as a person. It is if the main observation is that this guy was great for a time and only good later, to be followed by people who were massively worse. And so we are led to take from this the lesson that we need to find someone who is as he was earlier but able to maintain this disciplined humanity as president.

      No one that I have seen has so much as entertained the possibility that this difference might imply not changes in Mandela, but the difference between democratic voluntary movement coalitions and institutionalized states, even ones with marvelous constitutions like that of South Africa. If we did consider seriously this other possibility – that it is the structures that were the independent variable in this experiment – might we possibly be led to the thought that the way such revolutions are organized is a better model for society than the way states are?

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    • Personal vignettes from the anti-apartheid struggle – (1st of 2 reflections on the passing of Mandela)

      My own involvement in the anti-apartheid struggle began in the mid 1980s when I was a graduate student at Pitt. It was a formative period for me, a time when I was learning to be an activist and organizer, and taking that on as part of my life and identity. throughout that time, Mandela was a symbol more than a real live figure.  We read his speeches and analysis, studied his life. But locked up in prison, he was not someone we interacted with, even from a distance.  Walter Sisulu, Oliver Tambo, Joe Slovo, Ruth First, and many others were the ongoing partners in our thinking.  Numerous less well known representatives came to our campuses and engaged with us directly.  Mandela was this figure on "free Nelson Mandela" posters, but nonetheless important for all that.  Of course this change with his release from prison and the transformation of roles that he took on as a result. In this first post, I want to reflect on the importance that this time had for me, by passing on a few little vignettes.  I invite others to do the same in comments. this might seem odd, talking about my own life on the occasion of the passing of one of the world-historical greats. But as I see it, a good measure of the importance of Mandela lies in the changes he brought about in so many thousands of less significant people like me. 

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    • Wittgenstein and Enactivism

      Let me begin with two of what I think of as an extremely simple, indeed grossly over-simplified, truism. Wittgenstein told us that meaning is use. He also told us that meaning should not be understood as primarily consisting in the relationship that holds between a name and its bearer. My truism is this: Wittgenstein’s two dicta are logically independent. It might be that meaning is use: that is, it might be that ultimately anything I mean has to be explicated in terms of something I use it for.  For instance, it might be that every time I utter ‘cat’, I am doing something cat-related. It may nonetheless be true that the best way to understand the word ‘cat’ is as naming the concept CAT. Conversely, it may be that my utterances of ‘cat’ have to be understood in complex, situationally variable ways, so that the word cannot be explicated as naming anything. Nonetheless, it may be true that meaning is independent of use. In short, one of these dicta is about the communicative and pragmatic aspects of language, and the other about semantics, and though closely related in Wittgenstein’s thought, they are logically independent and they have to be argued for separately.

      In a similar vein, the meaning-is-use claim is logically independent of Wittgenstein’s no-inner-mentality ideology, unless you follow a stolidly behaviourist line of thought. You might think that understanding the meaning of ‘cat’ is a matter of behaving in a certain way with regard to cats. But this has little to do with whether or not you change your inner state when you come to understand ‘cat’.

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    • GMO paper retraction produces yet another Elsevier boycott

      In an earlier post, I suggested that the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology (FCT) should not have retracted a paper that purported to show toxic effects in rats fed GM corn.  Now just over 100 scientists have signed a petition protesting the retraction, stating that the retraction violated the norms of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), of which FCT is a member.  The scientists note concerns about the impartiality of the process (e.g., the the appointment of ex-Monsanto employee Richard Goodman to the newly created post of associate editor for biotechnology at FCT) and assert, "The retraction is erasing from the public record results that are potentially of very great importance for public health. It is censorship of scientific research, knowledge, and understanding, an abuse of science striking at the very heart of science and democracy, and science for the public good."

      The scientists are boycotting the journal's publisher, Elsevier; they will "decline to purchase Elsevier products, to publish, review, or do editorial work for Elsevier."

      This is one more black eye for Elsevier that we can add to the removal of papers from Academia.edu, which Catarina recently blogged about, and the pre-existing boycott of Elsevier, discussed on this blog many times (see, e.g., here,  here, here, and here).