thesocialsciences.com

From Justin E.H. Smith

I recently spelled out some of the reasons why I remain doubtful about the prospects for transforming marriage, worldwide, into a gender-indifferent institution. (It is only the worldwide perspective that interests me.) I have not heard, in reply, any substantive arguments against the reasons I give for my doubts, and I have therefore decided that it might be a good idea to try one more time, and this time to make my call for serious engagement more explicit. I would sincerely like to know whether there is something I am missing.

I have been alarmed to see a sort of orthodoxy emerge as if out of nowhere over just the past few years (many of you will be old enough to remember when, in the not-so-distant past, Andrew Sullivan was condemned as a betrayer and a domesticator of the gay spirit for his powerful defense of same-sex marriage in Virtually Normal; I hope no one will try to tell me that everyone who condemned him at the time was, wittingly or un-, an enemy of human rights). This orthodoxy, like its opposite and indeed like all orthodoxies, presumes that any questioning of it amounts to hostility. There is no room in either of the prevailing orthodoxies that have formed around the controversy over same-sex marriage for someone like me: someone who supports marriage equality, but doubts, based on a thorough but admittedly incomplete reading of historical and anthropological scholarship, that the concept of marriage is in fact flexible enough to ever be transformed in such a way that marriage will cease to be heterosexual by presumption.

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From David P. Barash, The Chronicle Review

“No fair! No fair!

“No fair” must rank among the loudest and most readily evoked complaints. Nor is the din of inequity limited to children. Consider the widespread anger generated by the Wall Street and AIG bailouts: Regardless of whether they were justified as national policy, those and other departures from perceived evenhandedness have a long history of rousing departures from citizen complacency, and even from civility. Ditto for outrage over executives getting outsized bonuses and golden parachutes while the rest of us are left to soldier on as best we can.

In evolutionary terms, what’s going on here?

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From Matthew Reisz, Times Higher Education

It is widely agreed, by both insiders and outsiders, that something has gone wrong with much academic writing.

A great deal of it, says Anthony Haynes, the author of Writing Successful Academic Books and visiting professor at both Beijing Normal and Hiroshima universities, is ruined by “a kind of learned inability. No one is born writing sentences laden with adverbs.”

John Cornwell, director of the Science and Human Dimension Project based at Jesus College, Cambridge, has worked as a journalist and written a number of best-selling books about the papacy. He is firmly committed to the value of academic rigour and believes that “there are aspects of academic work and publishing that aren’t for a wider readership, but still need to be done”. Yet he also believes that “much academic writing suffers from rigor mortis”.

The publisher Andrew Franklin takes a similar line. He runs Profile Books, which he defines as “a classic trade publisher”, in the sense that its list is “aimed at people who want to read our books rather than have to read them”. About half are written by academics. Whatever the subject matter, he says, “the writing is always a crucial factor in publishing decisions”.

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From Robert McCrum, Guardian

Guy Deutscher is that rare beast, an academic who talks good sense about linguistics, his chosen field. In his new book, Through the Language Glass (Heinemann), he fearlessly contradicts the fashionable consensus, espoused by the likes of Steven Pinker, that language is wholly a product of nature, that it does not take colour and value from culture and society. Deutscher argues, in a playful and provocative way, that our mother tongue does indeed affect how we think and, just as important, how we perceive the world.

An honorary research fellow at the University of Manchester, the 40-year-old linguist draws on a range of sources in the book to show language reflecting the society in which it is spoken. In the process, he explains why Russian water (a “she”) becomes a “he” once you have dipped a teabag into her, and why, in German, a young lady has no sex, though a turnip has.

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From Eurozine

In “Fact and Fantasy: The Body of Desire in the Age of Posthumanism”, Renée C. Hoogland (2002: 214) argues that “in the increasingly technologized age of posthumanism, bodily matters are, quite simply, too substantial to be left to the ‘empirically’ inclined minds of natural scientists”, and therefore calls on cultural theorists to take up the weighty issue of bodily matters. Recent developments indicate, however, that bodily matters are more and more coming under the ambit of the “strategic” and “security” inclined minds populating military institutions and government administrative offices, in ways perhaps far more troubling and disturbing in all of its potential and real implications. In the post-9/11 context of the war on/of terror, one can scarcely overemphasize the dangerous possibilities signalled in this shift. Dangerous, in that bodily matters are being taken up by institutions primarily concerned with the defence and security of the nation-state in an increasingly biopolitical architecture of power.

Image from deviantart

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From John Allen Paulos, The New York Times

In the realm of public policy, we live in an age of numbers. To hold teachers accountable, we examine their students’ test scores. To improve medical care, we quantify the effectiveness of different treatments. There is much to be said for such efforts, which are often backed by cutting-edge reformers. But do wehold an outsize belief in our ability to gauge complex phenomena, measure outcomes and come up with compelling numerical evidence? A well-known quotation usually attributed to Einstein is “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” I’d amend it to a less eloquent, more prosaic statement: Unless we know how things are counted, we don’t know if it’s wise to count on the numbers.

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From Benjamin Kunkel, n+1

The inherent right to work is one of the elemental privileges of a free people.
—FDR, radio address, 1937

Of all classic capitalist problems—income inequality, imperialism, the class character of the state, and so on—mass unemployment has probably been the one to trouble living Americans least. From the establishment of FDR’s war economy through the end of the so-called golden age of capitalism in the early 1970s, the US matched other major economies in functioning at close to full employment (at least as the term is defined by economic orthodoxy, on which more later). In the troughs of recessions, the unemployment rate might touch 7 percent, but otherwise it wavered between about 3 and 5.5. And even with the onset in 1973 of what Robert Brenner, in the commanding economic history of the period, called the long downturn—a decline across the system in rates of growth and profit, persisting to this day—the US touted a distinctly better record of job creation than its main European rivals. The average unemployment rate for the ’70s came to slightly above 6 percent; for the ’80s, above 7; and for the ’90s, just below 6—a marked deterioration since the end of the golden age, but not bad by international standards. The years from 1997 to 2006 saw an average stateside rate below 5 percent, achieved though this was with the decisive aid of serial financial bubbles.

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From information aesthetics

The Worldbank, an international financial institution that provides leveraged loans to developing countries for capital programs has just released data.worldbank.org, a website that provides free, open and easy access to statistics and indicators about development. While the idea is not particularly novel (think of UNData, Google Public Data, data.gov and many others) the World Bank Data website seems unique by the combination of offering free datasets and indicators as well as a compelling visual interface for open data exploration. Many indicators are also available to developers to create new data applications and visualizations through an Application Programming Interface (API).

The visual dashboard in particular shows a surprising level of visual sophistication and detail, and gives access to economically relevant topics like Education or CO2 emission, or country-specific statistics of countries ranging from the U.S. to Rwanda.

The fact that the information architecture and visual style is contemporary and consistent, that even the smallest data widget offers a direct link to the actual data source, and that the interface is offered in different languages demonstrates the amount of dedication put in this project. However, the vertical axis labels seem to be missing, and the amount of space dedicated to specific data attributes that are almost always “not available” seem to be annoying oversights.

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From Five Books

Your first choice, Introducing Consciousness by David Papineau and Howard Selina, is presumably trying to make a very complex topic accessible by presenting it using graphic art?

Yes, it’s part of the Introducing… series that presents various topics in graphic form, a bit like a comic book. What I liked about this one is that it takes a very complex issue and shows that you do not need to be a great philosopher, or have a very deep understanding of the science, to understand why it’s a complex issue and what the fundamental questions we’re dealing with are. And the truth is that with consciousness we’re still at the point of raising the interesting questions, as philosophers have done for the last 2,000 years, rather than at the interesting, complex, answers stage. Despite being highly approachable, this book is a serious piece of work that gives a great overview of past and current thinking about consciousness, especially from the philosophical perspective. Most books or articles will look at the issue of consciousness from a different angle, and I’ve tried to balance that out in my choices. This particular book was written by a professor of philosophy, David Papineau, in conjunction with an illustrator. So it’s mostly about the philosophy of mind, with particular reference to consciousness, and while it mentions science here and there, that’s really not the main focus: where it mentions the science, this is done to describe potential methodologies with which to address the philosophical questions that have been raised.

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