"How Men’s Emotions Are Preventing Gender Equality at Work"

"“Women in the workplace” positions women as foreigners in someone else’s terrain. Despite the fact that men are known to dominate group conversations in the workplace, where women still hold only14.6 percent of executive office positions, we insist that maybe women are the ones not taking control of their professional situations. Despite mountains of quantitative data suggesting that women are at a disadvantage, these stories continue to focus on women adjusting their behavior at work to get ahead. But several new pieces of evidence suggest that women’s behavior at work is far less worrying than men’s...

The most upsetting thing about these findings, perhaps, is the number of men who will see them as a personal attack rather than a professional opportunity. “What makes it difficult is that the men who are most in denial about sexism are sometimes the least likely to admit that they feel threatened by women in the workplace," Sheppard says, referring to the study participants she worked with. "

http://www.psmag.com/business-economics/wah-wah-why-dont-you-cry-a-little-more-you-little-man-jk-stfu

also, the url. #MasculinitySoFragile.

Men really have to start taking responsibility. Please please please please please.

(credit to DK)

Related: holding doors for men makes them sad

"Plight of the Funny Female"

"For decades, this response stumped psychologists. When they would ask men and women what they looked for in their long-term partners, both genders would say they wanted someone “with a good sense of humor.” It was only when researchers pressed their subjects on what they meant, specifically, by “sense of humor,” that the sex difference became clear. Women want men who will tell jokes; men want women who will laugh at theirs.

In 2006, psychologists Eric Bressler and Sigal Balshine showed 210 college students images of two equally attractive members of the opposite sex. Underneath each photo, they pasted either funny or not-funny statements supposedly authored by the person. Female participants said they wanted the funny man, rather than the unfunny one, as a boyfriend, even when they thought the funnier man was less trustworthy. The men did not care about the women’s funniness either way...

It’s possible that men are indifferent to their partners’ funniness precisely because funny women are smarter. There’s some evidence that men are less attracted to women who are smarter than they are. In a study out this month inPersonality and Social Psychology Bulletin, when men were introduced to women they were told had outperformed them on an intelligence test, they rated the woman as less attractive and were less likely to say they wanted to date her.

These biases have a chilling effect on women. The idea that women aren’t supposed to make jokes can trigger stereotype threat, a phenomenon in which simply telling someone that their “group” tends to be bad at something hinders that individual’s performance. Told that their humor isn’t wanted, many women don’t bother...

If funniness is an implement of power, women deserve access to it, too."

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/11/plight-of-the-funny-female/416559/

I mean, I have a super irreverent sense of humor (that you might see in some of my posts) and I am constantly saying silly and absurd things because, tbh, I find a lot of the connections I make in my head really amusing. But I definitely feel that being a jokester decreases the degree to which people perceive me as feminine/attractive. It's very similar to being openly clever or intellectual or knowledgeable; these are not sexy things to be if you are also a woman.

"THE ANCIENT GREEKS SACRIFICED UGLY PEOPLE"

"In early Greek history, during times of plague or famine, when the precarious agrarian societies started to fear for their survival, each Greek town would elect its ugliest inhabitant, known as the pharmakos. ("Ugly" in this case probably meant deformed in some way, and certainly from the fringes of society. An aristocrat with a big nose would not qualify.) For a while, this person would be fed at public expense with the most exquisite delicacies available at the time—figs, barley cakes and cheese. Afterwards, he or she (or they – some places, like Athens, would choose two lucky uggos, a man and a woman) would be driven through the town while being violently smote with leeks and wild plants by a wrathful mob. This ugly unfortunate's fate largely depended on the town’s own tradition. In some places he or she was merely cast out of the city, while in others the pharmakos would be stoned to death, burned, or thrown off a cliff.

How popular was this ritual? In some places, so popular that it became annual...

The related word pharmakon, which later originated the English word "pharmacy," meant both poison and medicine. This reflects the ambiguous role of the unfortunate pharmakos: he held the guilt for all the evils that had affected society, but he was also its savior."

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-ancient-greeks-sacrificed-ugly-people

I'm wondering about definitions of ugly, and its relationship to health/medicine. I'm writing this from a coffeeshop in downtown Chicago and it's so strange to sit here in 2015 and think about how much of our society is still influenced by the ancient Greeks. I'm about to walk over to a class on the medical school campus, where students will still take the Hippocratic Oath when they graduate.

"Brown as Dirt"

"Zimring shows how the discourse of urban hygiene dovetailed perfectly with old-fashioned American racism. Whiteness and cleanliness—now a major civic virtue— were construed as one and the same...

After reading Zimring’s account, it becomes hard to avoid spotting the resonances of that racist assumption everywhere in contemporary America. Think of it next time you hear talk of “white trash” or “dirt poor.”"

http://www.psmag.com/books-and-culture/how-the-language-of-racism-is-related-to-the-language-of-cleanlinesseven

Related: peak whiteness

"Once more, with feeling: Santa’s magic, children’s wisdom, and inequality"

"All harmless fun and existential comfort-food. But we have two problems that the Santa situation may exacerbate. First is science denial. And second is inequality. So, consider this an attempted joyicide...

For evidence that culture produces credulity, consider the results of a study that showed most four-year-old children understood that Old Testament stories are not factual. Six-year-olds, however, tended to believe the stories were factual, if their impossible events were attributed to God rather than rewritten in secular terms (e.g., “Matthew and the Green Sea” instead of “Moses and the Red Sea”). Why? Belief in supernatural or superstitious things, contrary to what you might assume, requires a higher level of cognitive sophistication than does disbelief, which is why five-year-olds are more likely to believe in fairies than three-year-olds. These studies suggest children have to be taught to believe in magic. (Adults use persuasion to do that, but teaching with rewards – like presents under a tree or money under a pillow – is of course more effective.)...

Believing in Santa because we can’t disprove his existence is a developmental dead end, a backward-looking reliance on authority for determining truth. But so is failure to believe in germs or vaccines or evolution just because we can’t see them working.

We have to learn how to inhabit the green boxes without giving up our love for things imaginary, and that seems impossible without education in both science and art...

Beyond worrying about how Santa rewards or punishes them individually, if children are to believe that Christmas gifts are doled out according to moral merit, than what are they to make of the obvious fact that rich kids get more than poor kids? Rich or poor, the message seems the same: children deserve what they get."

https://familyinequality.wordpress.com/2015/12/18/once-more-with-feeling-santas-magic-childrens-wisdom-and-inequality/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Vox%20Sentences%2012.18.15&utm_term=Vox%20Newsletter%20All

"The Sharecropper’s Daughter Who Made Black Women Proud of Their Hair"

"A’Lelia Bundles, Madam Walker’s great-great-granddaughter, helped uncover Walker’s unique legacy in her detailed biography, On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C. J. Walker, which was published in 2001. The title of Bundles’ book was pulled from one of Walker’s famous statements about her journey from poverty to success: “I am a woman who came from the cotton fields of the South. From there I was promoted to the washtub. From there I was promoted to the cook kitchen. And from there I promoted myself into the business of manufacturing hair goods and preparations. I have built my own factory on my own ground.”...

One of the earliest and best-known businesses to make hair products explicitly for African Americans was run by Rebecca Elliott. During the 1880s, Elliott’s concoctions often relied on the not-so-subtle implication that the most desirable hair belonged to white people: Her Nutritive Pomade supposedly made hair “soft, straight and silky,” and one of the company’s most expensive products was Cheveline, a hair-straightening formula. In contrast, Sarah’s focus was on growing healthier hair and the financial opportunities this might provide for herself and others...

“She was very masterful at using the media; she bought ads in black newspapers all over the country,” Bundles says. “Moving to Indianapolis was strategic, in that it was the crossroads of America, and all the trains passing through meant that it was very easy to ship her products. Indianapolis also had three black newspapers, so the black Pullman porters on all those trains going through would pick up these papers and sell them in places like Boston, San Francisco, Detroit, or Atlanta.” As her network of sales agents increased and profits continued to grow, Walker also hired two young attorneys and drafted the articles of incorporation for her company, with the corporation’s initial capital stock worth $10,000.

Once in Indianapolis, Walker continued her tradition of social philanthropy, getting more involved with the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) and donating $1,000 for a new “colored YMCA” project, a huge sum at the time. “I think that contribution was critical for raising her profile,” Bundles says. “It became this great inspirational narrative of a woman who had worked as a washer woman and now had given a thousand dollars to the YMCA—that really catapulted her. Madam Walker moved beyond just being a person who was good at selling hair-care products; she realized her power to use these resources for social, cultural, and political causes.”"

http://msmagazine.com/blog/2015/09/09/the-sharecroppers-daughter-who-made-black-women-proud-of-their-hair/

"Pilot Episode 2 - Morning Program"

"In this episode of Pilot, we take a satirical look at the way public radio often treats "exotic" holidays--and apply that voice to Christmas."
https://soundcloud.com/stephaniefoo/pilot-episode-2-morning-program

"Hope"

"As we struggled to envision a hopeful future for public education, one of my classmates wondered aloud, “How can we even talk about the future when we have no idea what a just world looks like?” In this moment, I was struck by the fact that within the Christian tradition, we do have an idea of what a just world looks like: through the Bible’s descriptions of the kingdom, through the work of theologians that stretches across millennia, and through the stirrings of our own hearts in community and in contemplation...

How might you bear witness to the outpouring of love present in God incarnate? How might you respond to incarnation’s invitation to imagine the the kingdom of God in our world now? It is my hope that your answers to these questions may not remain abstract; Jesus was born to a particular woman on a particular night, a striking assurance that any single action, even one that we feel in the moment is inconsequential, can be imbued with exquisite grace."

http://episcopaldigitalnetwork.com/yacm/2015/12/10/hope/

So, I am not a religious person, but I resonate with the ideas here (and it's helping me on my journey of understanding the thing that is religion and faith, which felt so absurd to me when I was 9 and realized that I had been believing in God the same way I'd been believing in Santa Claus)

*"Sonder: The Realization That Everyone Has A Story"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkoML0_FiV4&app=desktop

Ayyy this is gorgeous.

"How to Be a Good Classicist Under a Bad Emperor"

"when we’re truly honest, we see that for many the study of Classics is the study of one elite white man after another. The same texts that are for us sources of beauty and brutality, subjects of commentary and critique, are for these men (and they really are almost exclusively men) proof of the intellectual and cultural superiority of white maleness...

The next four years are going to be a very difficult time for many people. But if we’re not careful, it could be a dangerously easy time for those who study ancient Greece and Rome. Classics, supported by the worst men on the Internet, could experience a renaissance and be propelled to a position of ultimate prestige within the humanities during the Trump administration, as it was in Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Classics made great again.

This is my call to arms for all classicists. No matter how white and male Classics once was, we are not that anymore. In spite of the numerous obstacles that remain, our field is now more diverse than ever, and that is something to be proud of...

Predictably, [the manosphere writer] Quintus Curtius has an extremely limited understanding of “how things were like in previous eras.” His stated goal is “to remind readers of the glories of leadership, character, and masculine virtue that can change their lives” — so of course, his understanding of antiquity is of a world inhabited by only a few extremely elite men. He has no sense of or interest in social history, cultural history, women, slaves, children, and broad historical trends. The ancient world is reduced to a textbook model for leadership, character, and masculine virtue...

It is time for Classics as a discipline to say to these men: we will not give you more fodder for your ludicrous theory that white men are morally and intellectually superior to all other races and genders. We do not support your myopic vision of “Western Civilization.” Your version of antiquity is shallow, poorly contextualized, and unnuanced. When you use the classics to support your hateful ideas, we will push back by exposing just how weak your understanding is, how much you have invested in something about which you know so little."

https://eidolon.pub/how-to-be-a-good-classicist-under-a-bad-emperor-6b848df6e54a#.4pwofttn6

The author ends with a list of specific ideas for action for members of the classics community

I found this when friend of mine posted it, a friend who is a white female classicist, a woman who grew up in a mostly-white area, spent all of college in latin and greek courses and whose first job was at a private school for grades 6-12 that centered its curriculum around a strong classics education (in the 2010s...) (luckily she wasn't there anymore during this election, I can't imagine...). And she has still managed to find her way to an intersectional feminism. The good ones are out there.

FB: "classicists are uniquely positioned to fight back against the self-mythologizing of the Alt-Right." (p.s. written by a Princeton grad)

"People Who Sleep Late Are Actually Smarter And More Creative"

"To you, there’s nothing to wake up for but so much to stay awake through. That’s when your ideas happen, your bursts of energy explode and your moments of peace come over you: when there are no distractions, no plans and no obstacles in your way but the expanding horizon of light."

http://elitedaily.com/life/people-sleep-late-smarter/1283697/

EXACTLY.
I'm not too into the title or literally anything else that is said in the article - people have chronotypes, so they are going to experience different parts of the day differently - but I love how this is stated because is exactly my experience of life. The best stuff happens in my head late at night. And I'm useless in the morning, so why do I want to be awake for that?

"What if, when Petunia Dursley found a little boy..."

"Let’s tell a story where Petunia Dursley found a baby boy on her doorstep and hated his eyes–she hated them. She took him in and fed him and changed him and got him his shots, and she hated his eyes up until the day she looked at the boy and saw her nephew, not her sister’s shadow. When Harry was two and Vernon Dursley bought Dudley a toy car and Harry a fast food meal with a toy with parts he could choke on Petunia packed her things and got a divorce...

Petunia snapped and burnt the eggs at breakfast. She worked too hard and knew all the neighbors’ worst secrets. Her bedtime stories didn’t quite teach the morals growing boys ought to learn: be suspicious, be wary; someone is probably out to get you. You owe no one your kindness. Knowledge is power and let no one know you have it. If you get can get away with it, then the rule is probably meant for breaking.

Harry grew up loved. Petunia still ran when the letters came. This was her nephew, and this world, this letter, these eyes, had killed her sister. When Hagrid came and knocked down the door of some poor roadside motel, Petunia stood in front of both her boys, shaking. When Hagrid offered Harry a squashed birthday cake with big, kind, clumsy hands, he reminded Harry more than anything of his cousin.

His aunt was still shaking but Harry, eleven years and eight minutes old, decided that any world that had people like his big cousin in it couldn’t be all bad. “I want to go,” Harry told his aunt and he promised to come home."
http://ink-splotch.tumblr.com/post/106737310659/what-if-when-petunia-dursley-found-a-little-boy

This was a perfect insomnia read. There was so much humanity and magic in Harry Potter, it just spills everywhere.

"The Students Professors Must Reach"

"Met with unexpected compassion, the self-righteous bully dissolved, revealing the vulnerable, self-doubting young person beneath. After he stopped crying and pulled himself together, he was able to listen to what my wife was trying to teach him. Knowing that his professor cared about him, he persisted in the course and ended it a better writer than he had started.

One of the blind spots of professors is that almost all of them were excellent students. School was typically a series of triumphs from kindergarten on. This can make professors unaware of how scary and frustrating college can be for young people, especially those who came from under-resourced schools that didn’t prepare them well for the experience. It’s pretty easy to teach the young people who are well-prepared for college, are confident that they have every right to be there and have faith that they will succeed in their educational goals. The real challenge for faculty — the one that separates the best teachers from the average ones — is connecting with and supporting the students who are none of those things."

http://www.samefacts.com/2015/11/education-2/a-favorite-teaching-story/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Vox%20Sentences%2011.23.15&utm_term=Vox%20Newsletter%20All

Helping people who aren't like you.

Related: How nepotistic are we?

"Brain-manipulation studies may produce spurious links to behaviour"

"In work with rats and zebra finches, neuroscientist Bence Ölveczky of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and his team found that stimulating one part of the brain to induce certain behaviours might cause other, unrelated parts to fire simultaneously, and so make it seem as if these circuits are also involved in the behaviour.

According to Ölveczky, the experiments suggest that although techniques such as optogenetics may show that a circuit can perform a function, they do not necessarily show that it normally performs that function. “I don’t want to say other studies have been wrong, but there is a danger to overinterpreting,” he says...

Ölveczky accidentally damaged one animal’s motor cortex while injecting the drug. He decided to use a toxin to permanently destroy that portion of the brain to see whether such a lesion would have the same effects as the temporary disruption. When the researchers tested this rat ten days later, they were surprised to find that it could still press the lever correctly, despite having not performed the task since the damage occurred. The observation suggested that the damaged circuit was never actually involved in the behaviour in the first place; without practice, the brain cannot simply switch to using a different circuit. The researchers concluded that their muscimol experiment had shut down multiple circuits, some of which were involved in the lever-pressing behaviour...

Ölveczky suggests that regions of the brain are so intertwined that suddenly changing one region — such as Nif — sends ripples through the rest of the system, which affects behaviours that are not normally dependent on the region.

http://www.nature.com/news/brain-manipulation-studies-may-produce-spurious-links-to-behaviour-1.19003

This is really relevant for me to read right now, and it makes a lot of sense.

Similar experience that I had: I was using these specially designed synthetic receptor-drug pairs (DREADDs and CNO, if you are in neuroscience), which are supposed to be neuro magic because the receptor isn't supposed to respond to anything that is naturally in the brain and the drug isn't supposed to activate anything besides the synthetic receptor. So you get a mouse and you edit its genome so that it makes this synthetic receptor in the neurons you are interested in, and then you inject it with the drug and theoretically JUST those neurons are going to be activated or inhibited (depending on the type of synthetic receptor you use). But, we found that at really high doses of the drug the animal would start to behave different - even if it didn't have the synthetic receptor in its genome. So, obviously, the drug was doing extra stuff and also controls are full of information.

As I'm writing this, I'm starting to think really, actually, aaahhhh, about designing my graduate research and being in charge of projects and not just the big, fun theoretical projects you would come up with in undergrad but, like, the actual nitty-gritty of "how many different control groups am I going to need and if there might not be room in the mouse habitat right now, could I run just one of the control groups at first to see if I actually need the others?". And now I'm thinking, when I do these kinds of inducible gene expression techniques, should I also just test one where I do something permanent as an intense positive control? And how do I design that so it doesn't include all of the counfounds...

"A Little Boy Stood Up To A Catcaller In The Best Way"

""That is not nice to say to her and she didn't like you yelling at her," a little boy passing by with his mother and sister told the harasser, according to Price. "You shouldn't do that because she is a nice girl and I don't let anyone say mean things to people. She's a girl like my sister and I will protect her." 

When Price thanked the little boy, whose words encouraged the harasser to leave, he simply replied, "I just wanted to make sure your heart was OK.""

http://mic.com/articles/129034/a-little-boy-stood-up-to-a-catcaller-in-the-best-way

Ahhhh I'm dying of melty joy smiles. Yes! 

"Crying with laughter: how we learned how to speak emoji"

"“The fact that English alone is proving insufficient to meet the needs of 21st-century digital communication is a huge shift,” says Grathwohl. When one of his dictionary colleagues suggested using an emoji instead of the word “emoji”, “lightbulbs went off”. (This hints that he also thinks in emoji.) Until recently, Grathwohl, who is 44, avoided using emojis altogether because he worried that he would look as if he “was trying to get in on teen culture. I felt inauthentic. But I think there was a tipping point this year. It’s now moved into the mainstream.” Not only does he use emojis – his favourite is the ghost, which he uses in place of “I”, sharing as he does a first name with Caspar the Friendly Ghost – but his mother sends him emoji-laden messages, too...

The “face with tears of joy” is themost used, representing 20% of all UK and 17% of all US emoji use. It has overtaken the standard smiley-face emoji in popularity, which may mean that emoji users are moving towards exaggeration or irony or fun, or that all this emoji use has brought everyone to a higher emotional plane."

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/nov/17/crying-with-laughter-how-we-learned-how-to-speak-emoji

I love emoji but I am totally non-fluent. 

"80 BOOKS NO WOMAN SHOULD READ"

"I did just read Esquire’s list of “The 80 Best Books Every Man Should Read” when it popped up on my Facebook feed. The list is a reminder that the magazine is for men, and that if many young people now disavow the “binaries” of gender, they are revolting against much more established people building up gender like an Iron Curtain across humanity. Of course, “women’s magazines” like Cosmopolitan have provided decades of equally troubling instructions on how to be a woman. Maybe it says a lot about the fragility of gender that instructions on being the two main ones have been issued monthly for so long...

The list made me think there should be another, with some of the same books, called 80 Books No Woman Should Read, though of course I believe everyone should read anything they want. I just think some books are instructions on why women are dirt or hardly exist at all except as accessories or are inherently evil and empty. Or they’re instructions in the version of masculinity that means being unkind and unaware, that set of values that expands out into violence at home, in war, and by economic means. Let me prove that I’m not a misandrist by starting with Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, because any book Paul Ryan loves that much bears some responsibility for the misery he’s dying to create...

All those novels by men that seem to believe that size is everything, the 900-page monsters that, had a woman written them, would be called overweight and told to go on a diet. All those prurient books about violent crimes against women, especially the Black Dahlia murder case, which is a horrible reminder of how much violence against women is eroticized by some men, for other men, and how it makes women internalize the hatred. As Jacqueline Rose noted recently in the London Review of Books, “Patriarchy thrives by encouraging women to feel contempt for themselves.”"

http://lithub.com/80-books-no-woman-should-read/

I'm so here for this list. I sometimes want there to be a goodreads just got women and people of color to let each other know how various books will be traumatizing. Not to day "don't read this" but to say "given that you are likely to, here are some things to be prepared for". 

Related: I love this author - another essay by her (men explain lolita to me)

"Your School Shapes How You Think About Inequality"

"Students at racially diverse schools, particularly black and Hispanic students, are more tuned in to injustice than students going to school mostly with kids that look like them.

That's one of the main threads of a new book by Carla Shedd, an assistant professor of sociology and African-American studies at Columbia University...

Black and brown kids going to their neighborhood school, many of them didn't have the concrete experiences to know that maybe their experiences are unequal. Those kids are very different from the kids who leave their neighborhood and go to a school downtown and sit with classmates very different from them. They see what's similar and they see what is different. This is mind blowing for 14, 15 and 16-year-olds who are making sense of who they are. It will form their perceptions of opportunity."

http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/11/14/454858044/your-school-shapes-how-you-think-about-inequality

Related: This American Life episode on students at public school, and students at a private school, that are 3 miles away and their experiences of encountering education, privilege and elite institutions.

"Scientific Utopia: II. Restructuring incentives and practices to promote truth over publishability"

"The persistence of false findings can be meliorated with strategies that make the fundamental but abstract accuracy motive - getting it right - competitive with the more tangible and concrete incentive - getting it published. We develop strategies for improving scientific practices and knowledge accumulation that account for ordinary human motivations and self-serving biases...

High demand for limited space means that authors must strive to meet all publishing criteria so that an editor will do the unusual act of accepting the manuscript. As such, success in publishing is partly a function of social savvy of knowing what is publishable, and empirical savvy in obtaining publishable results...

The research must be published to have impact. And yet, publishing is also the basis of a conflict of interest between personal interests and the objective of knowledge accumulation. The reason? Published and true are not synonyms. To the extent that publishing itself is rewarded, then it is in scientists’ personal interests to publish, regardless of whether the published findings are true (Hackett, 2005; Martin, 1992; Sovacool, 2008)...

We have enough faith in our values to believe that we would rather fail than fake our way to success. Less simple to put aside are ordinary practices that can increase the likelihood of publishing false results, particularly those practices that are common, accepted, and even appropriate in some circumstances. Because we have directional goals for success, we are likely to bring to bear motivated reasoning to justify research decisions in the name of accuracy, when they are actually in service of career advancement (Fanelli, 2010a)...

Once we obtain an unexpected result, we are likely to reconstruct our histories and perceive the outcome as something that we could have, even did, anticipate all along – converting a discovery into a confirmatory result (Fischoff, 1977; Fischoff & Beyth, 1975). And, even if we resist those reasoning biases in the moment, after a few months, we might simply forget the details...

Science is self-correcting (Merton, 1942, 1973). If a claim is wrong, eventually new evidence will accumulate to show that it is wrong and scientific understanding of the phenomenon will change. This is part of the promise of science – following the evidence where it leads, even if it is counter to present beliefs (see opening quotation of this article). We do believe that self-correction occurs. Our problem is with the word “eventually.” The myth of self- correction is recognition that once published there is no systemic ethic of confirming or disconfirming the validity of an effect. False effects can remain for decades, slowly fading or continuing to inspire and influence new research (Prinz et al., 2011). Further, even when it becomes known that an effect is false, retraction of the original result is very rare (Budd, Sievert, Schultz, 1998; Redman, Yarandi & Merz, 2008). Researchers that do not discover the corrective knowledge may continue to be influenced by the original, false result. We can agree that the truth will win eventually, but we are not content to wait...

The problem is not that false results get into the literature. The problem is that they stay in the literature. The best solutions would encourage innovation and risk-taking, but simultaneously reward confirmation of existing claims...
Early-career scientists would get useful information from a systematic review of the degree to which publication numbers and journal prestige predict hiring and promotion."

http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.4251

As a scientist in training, I feel like this was a useful and important thing for me to read. The paper is well structured, and I feel really encouraged by the suggestions. They are really, really interesting.

"WHITE WRITER"

" It is a cultural moment that has made white writers look in the mirror and wonder if we have been confusing it with a window. White writers are not used to being objectified in this way. One of our conceits has been to imagine ourselves as neutral, objective, and value-free. Yet this sense of “objectivity” is itself constructed, organized, and enforced...

I was proud of my research, my listening, my delving into plays and novels by black writers to attempt the re-creation that McCullers found with “ease”—the room of black people where no white person is present. This, of course, is the hardest work of a white writer, because that is a room we can never enter. Personally, “Shimmer” is a favorite of my novels, but the illusion of success came crashing down one day, some months after publication, when the novelist Jacqueline Woodson took me aside. She mentioned a section, halfway into the story, set in network-TV conference rooms where scripts for “Amos ‘n’ Andy” are being written. Jackie pointed to a scene where one of the black protagonists, a young woman researching her family’s history, comes to believe that her beloved grandfather, a proponent of “uplift,” was once married to a white woman. Jackie explained that this concern about hidden racial mixing was a white anxiety. She told me that black people know the history of slavery and rape, and don’t carry the same concepts of racial purity as white people. That, in fact, I had committed the error I most feared: putting white consciousness into the mind and mouth of a black character...

It may be that the “ease” with which Carson McCullers was able to inhabit any kind of person, in a manner that was recognizable to a reader as sophisticated as Richard Wright, did not come from empathy. No, perhaps it came from the simple fact of having an identity that history had not yet discovered. And, because she didn’t know who she was, she had no place to stand. So she could stand with others who officially did not exist."

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/white-writer?mbid=social_facebook

http://www.clipd.com/movies/37502/30-disney-characters-swap-genders-and-the-results-are-magical?utm_source=fbk&utm_campaign=mob-37502-fa-i-15101310&utm_medium=referral&pid=null#page=17

"Research Shows A Bad Job Can Be Worse For Mental Health Than No Job"

"There have been a myriad of research studies on the stress and  trauma caused by unemployment, showing that it can be just as bad as a divorce or the death of a spouse. Some researchers have taken a closer look and have found that as bad as unemployment can be, workers who are emotionally disconnected from their work and workplace rate their lives more poorly than those who are unemployed...

Researchers suggest that employment policies that are based on the notion that any job is better than none in terms of economic and personal well being may be wrong."

http://financialjuneteenth.com/16538/

We're human beings, not economic robots.

"Move over Shakespeare, teen girls are the real language disruptors"

"As Katherine Martin, head of US Dictionaries at Oxford University Press, has pointed out, if Shakespeare was inventing dozens of new words per play, how would his audience have understood him? Rather, it’s likely that Shakespeare had an excellent grasp of the vernacular and was merely writing down words that his audience was already using.

So if Shakespeare wasn’t disrupting the English language, who was? And how did we get from Shakespearean English to the version we speak now? That’s right: young women.

A pair of linguists, Terttu Nevalainen and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg at the University of Helsinki, conducted a study that combed through 6,000 personal letters written between 1417 and 1681...

In 11 out of the 14 changes, they found that female letter-writers were changing the way they wrote faster than male letter-writers. In the three exceptional cases where the men were ahead of the women, those particular changes were linked to men’s greater access to education at the time...

The role that young women play as language disruptors is so well-established at this point it’s practically boring to sociolinguists. The founder of modern sociolinguistics, William Labov, observed that women lead 90% of linguistic change—in a paper he wrote 25 years ago. Researchers continue to confirm his findings...

we do know that young women tend to be more socially aware, more empathetic, and more concerned about how their peers perceive them. This may translate into a greater facility for linguistic disruption. Women also tend to have larger social networks, which means they’re more likely to be exposed to a greater diversity of language innovations."

http://qz.com/474671/move-over-shakespeare-teen-girls-are-the-real-language-disruptors/

"Why I Identify as Mammal"

"In a world of conscious beings, identity matters. Self-perception plays a vital role in behavior, so the question of how human beings think about themselves in relation to the world is more than simply one of semantics; ways of seeing lead, directly and indirectly, to ways of acting.

Given all that, I choose to identify as mammal.

And this is my reason: Our relationship to the natural world, which is changing in such dramatic ways, is in desperate need of revision. Human exceptionalism — expressed in our treatment, use and abuse of other animals, and in the damage we do to the natural environment — has paved the way for enormous harm. It seems clear, then, that identifying exclusively as human has its pitfalls...

there is a danger in pushing the borders of affiliation so far out that they no longer have any resonance. Placing an emphasis on our mammalian identity is a reasonable compromise between a restrictive anthropocentrism and a vapid all-inclusiveness...

When we acknowledge the inner mammal that we are, we tap into a powerful source of possibility, relatedness and, most importantly, joy. Learning how to relish the singular joys of being a mammal may play a critical role in opening the human mind to more ecologically embedded ways of understanding itself."

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/10/24/why-i-identify-as-mammal/?_r=1

Kind of weird but kind of comforting.

"NASA's Bug Repellent Aims to Save Airlines Millions in Fuel Cost"

"as pressure grows to make airliners more fuel efficient and lessen their impact on the environment, eliminating insect contamination is an area that holds a potentially huge payoff for future designs. Aircraft emit 3 percent of greenhouse gases in the U.S., according to the Environmental Protection Agency, and that share is forecast to grow as the government imposes stricter limits on other sources such as automobiles.

In theory, creating aircraft bodies and wings with mirror-like surfaces that can maintain smooth airflow would produce big gains, said Mark Drela, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who specializes in aerodynamics.

“On a jetliner, it’s enormous,” Drela said. “It’s a factor of 10. It’s colossal. It’s like taking your car from 20 miles per gallon to 200.”

When air flows across a typical airliner’s wing, it is turbulent, like tiny crashing waves. If the flow remains smooth, it forms layers of different speeds with minimal drag between them, allowing a marked improvement in efficiency."
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-10/nasa-s-bug-repellent-aims-to-save-airlines-millions-in-fuel-cost?utm_source=nextdraft&utm_medium=email

Also - a solid example of the kinds of impacts that federal research can have. A lot of these materials were probably developed for space projects, or even as basic research in material science. But it has so many potential areas to inform.

"Famous quotes, the way a woman would have to say them during a meeting."

"You will think that you have stated the case simply and effectively, and everyone else will wonder why you were so Terrifyingly Angry. Instead, you have to translate. You start with your thought, then you figure out how to say it as though you were offering a groveling apology for an unspecified error. (In fact, as Sloane Crosley pointed out in an essay earlier this year, the time you are most likely to say “I’m sorry” is the time when you feel that you, personally, have just been grievously wronged. Not vice versa.)"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/wp/2015/10/13/jennifer-lawrence-has-a-point-famous-quotes-the-way-a-woman-would-have-to-say-them-during-a-meeting/

FB: "Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.”
Woman in a Meeting: “I’m not an expert, Dave, but I feel like maybe you could accomplish more by maybe shifting your focus from asking things from the government and instead looking at things that we can all do ourselves? Just a thought. Just a thought. Take it for what it’s worth.”

"IF WOMEN WROTE MEN THE WAY MEN WRITE WOMEN"

"Brett pulled his tank top up over his head and stared at himself in the full-length mirror. He pushed down his jeans, then his boxers, and imagined the moment when Jennifer saw him nude for the first time. His feet were average-sized, and there was hair on his toes that he should probably take care of before tonight. He liked his legs just fine, but his thighs were wide and embarrassingly muscular. He tried standing at an angle, a twist at his waist. Some improvement. In that position, it was easier to see his ass and notice that it was not as pert as it had been at 22. He clenched both cheeks, hoping that tightened its look. He sucked in his tummy and pulled his pecs up high, trying to present them like pastries in a bakery window. Would she like him? Were the goods good enough? He pouted his lips and ran his hands over his thighs, masking their expanse. Maybe."

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/if-women-wrote-men-the-way-men-write-women

This is so well done, in a bunch of different genres,  SO PERFECT . 

FB: So Good -

""Professor,” Stephen began, one well-tanned arm in the air. “What if it’s not really about the boy? What if, like she says, he’s a safely solipsized something else? What if the plaything isn’t the jailbait kid, but the English language itself?”

And just like that, Redgrave knew who her next TA would be. She drank him in, the combination of nubility and fragile academic curiosity and knew he’d fall for her wise advisor act. Kid had mommy issues written all over him."

"How to Eat a Banana"

"I tried to distance myself from “Chinese culture” by moving towards what I thought was its polar opposite: the West. At the age of five I declared myself English and “Christian”, believing God to be the Western version of Buddha. I became determined to improve my English in primary school; I read like I breathed, and I learned to write. I crammed what I thought was “Western”, watching “grown-up” movies with my parents, burning through Star Wars and reading classics I could barely understand (I attempted to read Crime and Punishment when I was 11, and only got through the first five pages, if that was any indication).

In secondary school I discovered a talent for writing and (after a workshop) a fondness for politically-charged drama, culminating in a series of terrible, anti-Chinese plays where the protagonist’s “Western” cousin comes back from the USA to save him. I distinctly recall one scene where the “Western” cousin upended a bowl of “ginseng soup” and stomped on the fake ginseng (red string, as the old me would’ve staged it) while screaming “ROOTS! ROOTS,” while the protagonist’s father, who represented Chinese culture, cowered under the table. The protagonist was by his cousin’s side, clapping. I wrote this at the age of 14...

I learned, pretty early in secondary school, that heterosexual male attractiveness in Singapore was often beholden to white Western norms. We’d set our standards with the traditionally masculine cis white male body as the “normal”, and everything else as abnormal"

"Neuroscience: Tortured reasoning

"The remarks of one official at a HIG-organized conference on torture in Washington DC can be summed up as: how could a new agency, created to both conduct and study torture, replace the decades of practice and perfection attained by the CIA? By adding a scientific component, responded the newly appointed head of the HIG...

This exchange highlights the theme of neuroscientist Shane O'Mara's Why Torture Doesn't Work. Rightly, O'Mara takes a moral stand against torture (forced retrieval of information from the memories of the unwilling). However, instead of simply providing utilitarian arguments, he argues that there is no evidence from psychology or neuroscience for many of the specious justifications of torture as an information-gathering tool. Providing an abundance of gruesome detail, O'Mara marshals vast, useful information about the effects of such practices on the brain and the body...

Given that information obtained under torture is rarely reliable (because the victim will generally say anything to make the pain stop) O'Mara recommends an alternative: conversation. Having a conversation with a detainee may yield results comparable, and probably superior, to those obtained from torture. He cites three pieces of evidence."

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v527/n7576/full/527035a.html?WT.mc_id=FBK_NatureNews

"Finding Hope in a Loveless Place"

"To be professionally smart is to concede always to rational science, to polls and confidence intervals. These colleagues, the professionally smart, seemed dismayed that the black woman they’d been brave enough to think smart could believe a President Trump was possible.

They were dismayed but not surprised. Women and black people always have a potential blind spot where race and gender are concerned. It is why we’re so emotional and irrational. We just cannot see past our unscientific claims of racism and sexism to be truly professionally smart. Our models, in the parlance of the professionally smart, are always just a bit skewed.

It’s a shame, too. Because the professionally smart really want evidence that their faith in affirmative action for smart minorities is well-placed. It is a shame with a black woman has as much potential as me and still can’t see past that racial blind spot.

My blind spot was, of course, perfect clarity about how whiteness and racism work.

It is a difficult thing to measure in polls. That’s why there is still great value in systematic collection and analysis of how people experience the world and not just how they tell you they experience the world...

Philosophically, of course, there is a debate about whether there is any such thing as “truth” but politically there is no doubt that there is an agreed upon idea of what constitutes a fact. A social fact, even, as sociologists often call it. How ironic for the great narrative emerging from this election to be so fastidiously addicted to “fake news” that may or may not have swayed the election given how racecraft has shaped the political fabric of this nation, eating truth whenever convenient to make sure that fabric only ever secured white freedoms...

professionally smart people require all members to the club have irrational, exuberant hope. But, the black members have to have the most irrational and exuberant and performative hope. We cannot just scream “yes we can!” We have to scream it even when it is clear that we cannot and no, we will not and no, we are not. We have to pay this tax to the professionally smart because our blind spot is so discomfiting. We come with the baggage of lived experience of racism."

https://tressiemc.com/tmcpublicsociology/finding-hope-in-a-loveless-place/

One of those essays you just want to pull everything from, every other line.

One of those essays that manages to pull together all these amorphous thoughts you have been having and make them solid and then teaches you what they mean and where they come from

Read it all, learn about "racecraft", stare into space for a little while.

FB: "Professionally smart people who claim to know our collective heart really like straight lines. First, there was the enlightenment and then some unfortunate business about colonialism and black ocean bottoms. Then there was freedom and the Great Society and smartphones and the browning of America.

The straight line requires a lot of erasers...

partisanship literally means just voting like lots of other people vote out of loyalty. Racism, in contrast, is a cohesive analytical framework that accounts for the complex ways that identities and ideologies shift over time. One of those concepts is as complex as the phenomenon in question but only one is dismissed outright as foolish. When racecraft is the prevailing responsibility of professional smart people and erasers and line drawers, these kind of inconsistencies don’t matter."

"Climate Change Conversations Are Targeted in Questionnaire to Energy Department"

"former Energy Department employees and presidential transition officials said that while it is normal for presidential transition teams to ask policy questions, it is highly unusual to send out questionnaires. The requests for lists of specific employees involved in shaping climate policy is irregular and alarming, they said, given that on the campaign trail Mr. Trump clearly showed his skepticism of climate change science and his hostility to climate change policy...

Max Stier, an expert on presidential transitions and the president of Partnership for Public Service, a research organization, said: “The new president will come in with new policies that he’ll pursue, but that’s different from identifying civil servants who are responsible for following through on policies set by the previous political leadership. And they’re not going to be effective without working well with the career team.”"

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/09/us/politics/climate-change-energy-department-donald-trump-transition.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&_r=0

I'm trying to hold myself back and stay skeptical of anything that might just be alarmist, we're going to be SUPER sensitive to any of that and the to conspiracy theories, because we believe the worst at the outset.

I could see how maybe a few questions could have been taken out of context, how maybe this questionnaire would be a typical and useful thing. But evidently it is not typical, and in the context of the nascent Trump Administration's other actions, this concerns me.

There are many reasons why the Trump presidency should be a call to arms for scientists to be more present on the public stage, to brush away the old ideas of our purity in our ivory towers and recognize that we are as embedded in society as anyone else. And we have responsibilities to our work.

"Westworld is a good TV show about a terrible video game"

"But this makes it less a criticism of the people who consume mass culture than a commentary on the cynicism of people who create it. If you give players a world without meaningful, positive ways to participate, it’s not surprising when they opt out or tear the whole thing down. As any Sims player who locked their avatar in a box with no bathroom can attest, human beings can be awful to virtual ones. But they can also subvert expectations — like the people who role-play heroic cops in Grand Theft Auto.

As it stands, it’s only robots who exhibit this complexity. Humanity, in Westworld, is beyond saving."

http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/17/13305220/hbo-westworld-is-a-terrible-video-game

I was mildly curious about WestWorld. 

I am no longer.