Snapshots from a Latin American country (iii)

During the rainy season here, there are two kinds of rain — the mild but extended rain, and the more common brief but profuse downpours, accompanied by thunder and lightening. A few years ago, the power would fail frequently during such storms but that’s no longer the case in the cities, although it’s still the case in rural areas.

A few days ago, we spent a while away from the city, when one such storm began. My Tía, concerned about driving back along an inundated dirt track in a small car sin doble tracción, spoke to a local and asked her if she thought the rain would last long. “No, niña,” the woman replied, “si es pura rayería.”

–IP

Snapshots from a Latin American country (ii)

Someone has taken to painting signs at various points along a city block that read:

NO VOTAR BASURA

y

no orinar

In Spanish, “b” and “v” are bothed pronounced as /β/ (a voiced bilabial fricative), so misspellings of words that use either letter tend to be misspelled in virtue of the swapping of one letter for the other.

Driving past, there was some amused speculation amongst the family as to whether the sign was written as political propaganda, eco propaganda, or simply by a disgruntled homeowner.

–IP

Snapshots from a Latin American country

Said of a fool, or a foolish thing, by a Spanish-speaking Arab: “Sos una bandeja! Que bandejada!”

Also, I am currently in what is probably the only country in the world where it possible to have a Plaza Palestina on the Avenida Jerusalen without massive civil unrest.

It’s nice to be back to my Spanglish life.

–IP

Green card as sexual coercion tactic

A US immigration official is charged with coercing sex in exchange for offering to provide a green card to an immigrant woman.  It is alleged that he used the offer of the green card combined with threats of deportation and detention of her and her family, to coerce sex acts.  According to the article, corruption in the immigration agency is “rampant”.

–IP

Cute Tot has a favourite word

Cute Tot is not quite two, and has a fondness for the word “Mine!“, always said very definitely in italics and with a capital letter, with a hint of a giggle. Her mother, who shall henceforth be known as the Gumptionous Flatmate (an eptithet of praise, in my personal scheme of things), tries to prompt her to learn people’s names and call them by those names.

So my first morning in the flat, we all came into the kitchen, sleepy and bleary-eyed for breakfast. The Gumptionous Flatmate addresses her daughter thus “Look, Cute Tot, who’s that?” (indicating me). Cute Tot smiles and says “That’s Mine.”

–IP

An observation of debatable import

Have you ever noticed anything about the names academics and teachers pick for their example characters in papers and handouts? “Example characters” being those pseudonyms picked for examples or word problems, as in:

Alice has 5 marbles. John has 12. Charlie has 17. How many marbles do John, Alice, and Charlie have altogether?

Some people give feminine names to half(ish) their characters, and masculine names to the other half(ish), as in the example above. Others give masculine names to all or nearly all their characters.

Most university academics in the US and UK that I have encountered use only Western names, such as Ann, Fred, Kate, George, etc. My school textbooks were a bit better on cultural diversity of names. There were Western names, and also names like Parvati, Rajesh, Jorge, etc.

What, if anything, does this indicate? I don’t want to make a huge meal out of it, but part of me can’t help thinking that the tendency to “normalise” Western men, when it occurs, is somewhat indicative of a general social trend.

I do remember thinking, as a child, “Why do they put these weird names in my math textbook? Ann or Bob would be easier.” It didn’t occur to me that most English-speaking Westerners probably think my real name is “weird”. It also didn’t occur to me that math textbooks can teach more than just that. And it didn’t occur to me that the Parvatis and Rajeshes and Jorges in the class shouldn’t have to feel they’re weird.

When you’re writing examples, you pick the first name that comes to mind. I am rather surprised to think that there are people who can write a whole paper full of examples, and never once think of a feminine or non-Western name. I also wonder if the people who make half of their examples feminine and half of their examples masculine do so out of a deliberate attempt to be egalitarian, or do so without thinking about it.

Sometimes in my science lectures, I can’t help noticing gendered language. I’m sure it’s not deliberately gendered, the vast majority of the time. It’s interesting that it works out that way though. And I do wonder how much of that is that women simply are largely invisible to those particular academics.

–IP

On garden paths and what I want to be if I grow up

There are times when we realise things about ourselves that other people have known for ages.

In my first term at university, I came home from my first Logic lecture and burst into tears because I was convinced that it was hard and I couldn’t do it. But it was required course so I went back. Three weeks later I was reading everything I could get my hands on that had formal semantics in the title. When I started computer science, I again panicked about it being new and hard, and then found that I loved hearing about logic and language processing from three openly antagonistic perspectives. I knew I would enjoy linguistics, but I hadn’t yet found the kind of linguistics that really made me buzz.

Now, a few years on, I picked my linguistics courses this year on the basis of what fit my timetable, and on the basis that some empirical research methods couldn’t hurt (the courses I really wanted to do where all held at the same times as my required courses).  So I didn’t expect to become quite so captivated  by the course I picked.  And now I’m awake at night wanting to take apart the cogs and wheels of every linguistic study I’ve read to see how the numbers work, where they come from, what they mean. I want to hold each token in my hand and watch what it’s doing and why. I want to know its formal purpose, but I also want to know its social purpose. What do we pay attention to? But more precisely, how does we pay attention to it? How do we pick up on the things that signal social and linguistic differences? How to we process that stuff? Where does variation come into it, and why?

The week before submitting my project I was working 10+ days on 5 hours of sleep while feeling crap. What I wanted to do most was go to bed for at least a week. But after that, what I most wanted to do was find out what the next result was. I’m not sure I could have maintained that kind of drive and focus in those circumstances with philosophy or computer science or even with another branch of linguistics. I still just want to go back to my numbers and my tokens — to tinker with the little cogs and wheels, and maybe supplement them with formal semantics and garden paths and parsers.

I have to make some serious decisions in the next two weeks or so. I have to decide where I’m going with this stuff in terms of dissertations. I think I know now I’m not really a straight philosopher. I’ve tried it on for size, I’ve enjoyed it. I’ve spent hours upon hours thinking about philosophical stuff. But I need my numbers and cogs and wheels and facts. Which makes me a scientist, I think. As for informatics, I think I just don’t really care enough about the artifical intelligence models and cognitive science models. At least not right now. Maybe I just don’t know enough about them — that’s always a possibility. But I want to know what real people do with real language. I expect philosophy and informatics to continue playing a part in what I do, but I’m thinking that right now, linguistics is what I want to focus on.

Does that make any sort of sense?

–IP

Haredim and burqas

Via Holly at Feministe, I find out that a number of women in Israel from the ultra-Orthodox Jewish movement known as haredim have adopted hijabs and burqas as part of the modest dress code. Unfortunately I can’t seem to find an English version of the whole Haaretz article — the blog posts cite or link the Hebrew article, and Holly links to partial translations, but I can’t seem to find a whole translation. Can anyone point me in the right direction?

–IP

A question of identification

I’m feeling mostly better. I am sufficiently better as to be getting some work done, and when I’m feeling not-up-to-work I am up to reading. I’m reading Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, and have come across a wonderful passage in which the author describes his introduction to geometry:

He draws two lines side by side and tells us these are parallel lines. And the magical and mysterious thing is that they never meet. Not if they were to be extended to infinity, not if they were to be extended to infinity, not if they were extended to God’s shoulders. And that, boys, is a long way though there is a German Jew who is upsetting the whole world with his ideas on parallel lines.¹

Is it Einstein? Johnny von Neumann is also the right time period.

–IP

¹McCourt, F. 1996 Angela’s Ashes. London: HarperCollins Publishers. pp 169-70

“Unscientific” does not mean “controversial”

No, really, it doesn’t. I looked both words up in a dictionary just to double check, and nope, they don’t mean the same thing:

Unscientific:

1. not scientific; not employed in science: an unscientific measuring device.
2. not conforming to the principles or methods of science: an unscientific approach to a problem.
3. not demonstrating scientific knowledge or scientific methods: an unscientific report.

Controversial:

1. of, pertaining to, or characteristic of controversy; polemical: a controversial book.
2. subject to controversy; debatable: a controversial decision.
3. given to controversy; disputatious.

(Courtesy of Dictionary.com*)

Scientists shouldn’t be afraid of tackling contravertial issues. Science shouldn’t be limited by social controversy. Academic freedom means being able to talk in a scholarly manner about things that may be controversial. And yes, if you are a scientist, then offering an unscientific opinion about science is unscholarly.

What science should be limited by is science. That is, science should be limited by the definition of what constitutes scientific research. If a study is unscientific and unscholarly, then it’s not science. If something is not scientific, then scientists shouldn’t be concened about it (in their scientific capacity).

What am I talking about?

James Watson. Larry Summers. The IQ debates. Jensen and Galton. Is-science-PC discussions. The perennial is-gayness-genetic question. Intelligent Design, for that matter. But specifically I’m taing about the reaction to James Watson’s genes-in-mouth debacle.

I was disappointed. Not by James Watson, because frankly, it’s not as if we didn’t know before that he’s chauvinist down to his bootstraps. I was dissapointed by all the people who defended him on the basis of academic freedom, that thus win prizes for phenomenally missing the point of academic freedom.

Quoth Watson:

James Watson provoked widespread outrage with his comments to The Sunday Times, which quoted the 79-year-old American as saying he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing says not really.”

He told the paper he hoped that everyone was equal, but added: “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true.”

Watson was later suspended from his post at Cold Springs Harbour Lab, and uninvited by at least one university a which he was scheduled to give a lecture.

Over at Harry’s Place, Alec McPherson responded:

I don’t think this was even refusing to allow him to promulgate his wretched views instead of publicly repudiating them, which would be questionable enough. This strikes as silencing him in one field, where he may well excel, because of his opinions in another, which we are told is unrelated. As so often is said in the hallowed pages of Harry’s Place, this is the Stalinist approach to debate.

PZ Meyers commented:

It’s a sign, though, that CSHL will not be administered by anyone willing to assert controversy, and that’s too bad.

It’s worth reading Zuska’s take on the matter, by the way (not quoted because the quotes would be too long, just hop on over and read).

I would argue that Myers and McPherson have simply missed the point of the controversy about Watson’s comments, since it wasn’t the case that Watson was drawing a scientifically justified conclusion. He was just expressing racism. It wasn’t scholarly, it wasn’t scientific, it wasn’t academic. It’s not a matter of academic freedom. In what way is Watson being silenced in genetics? He was suspended from Cold Spring Harbor Lab, that’s true. That was a post he got because of his scientific acheivements, and since his suspension was a response his talking about social policy in an unscientific and unscholarly manner. Suspension may or may not have been the appropriate response, but it hardly prevents Watson from talking about his field in a scientific and scholarly manner, especially since the post he was suspended from was not an academic post but an administrative one. It’s not his scientific career that’s suspended, it’s his administrative tasks.

He was also uninvited to give a lecture, that’s true, but having freedom of speech doesn’t mean people have to give you a platform if they think you will use it for speaking about unscholarly unscientific matter. So yes, one has the right to spout any old nonsense one fancies, but that doesn’t mean you’re automatically entitled to a platform.

I think crying academic freedom in this case is not only misguided, it is also irresponsible. To do so is to conflate science with social policy. Supporting Watson’s unscientific comments while attempting to distance onesself from the sentiment they express does nothing to highlight the fact that his statements were not based in science. Basically, the message is “his comments are valid even if I don’t like them”. But Watson’s comments are not valid — they are prejudice masqerading as science. We should be criticising the lack of scientific rigour in his conclusions and the prejudice that led him to his conclusions. That’s not an attack on academic freedom – it’s upholding scientific standards.
–IP

*Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1). Retrieved October 27, 2007, from Dictionary.com website: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/controversial and http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/unscientific.

When is something sexist? Or, a lesson in precision of language

I keep hearing statements that start with “I’m sorry if this is sexist, but…” which invariably signals that one of two things is about to happen:

1. the speaker is going to say something sexist, they know it is sexist, and they are not sorry.
2. the speaker is not sure whether it’s sexist or not, so they are covering their back before proceeding to say the thing that may or may not be sexist.

In the first case, I feel this person is something of a lost cause. The view they are about to express is incomensurable with any view that incorporates equality as important.

So let’s move on to the second case. It is usually the case that statements starting with “I’m sorry if this is sexist, but…” are sexist, but not always. Just yesterday, a classmate came out with “I’m sorry if this is sexist, but women seem to spend more time with kids than men do so this might explain [insert sociolinguistic phenomenon here].” That’s not sexist — that’s a fact. Satistically, women do spend more time with kids than men do. That’s a sexist situation but not a sexist statement. The statement would be sexist if instead of reporting a fact, it was reporting something that should be the case.

So, how do you know when something is sexist? Well, your Auntie Irrational has helpfully compiled a helpful but non-exhaustive list of ways in which a statement can be sexist. If the view that was going to be expressed matches one of the cases below, it’s sexist.

Sexism by sex-role normativity
This is the case we have just examined. Statements of the form “women/men should do x” where the premise is that it is inherent in the nature of men or women that they should do x. For example “women should stay in the kitchen” and “men shouldn’t show emotion” is sexist, but “women tend to do more domestic tasks than men” is a fact, and therefore not sexist.

Sexism by double standard
This is when a certain standard is applied differently to men and women because certain social attributes are considered to be more important for one sex than for the other. For example, it is sexist to say “mothers shouldn’t have jobs” when the assumption is that the same does not hold for fathers.

Sexism by omission
This is where you disproportionately ignore the presence or contributions of women. For example, if I say “the most influential scientists of the last fifty years are…” and list only male scientists, chances are that I am disproportionately ignoring the contributions of women.

Sexism by pseudoscience and inaccuracy
This is where you make a descrpitive statement of the form “men/women don’t do x” that looks like a fact but is not actually a fact, and implies a degree of social judgement For example, “boys don’t cry” is sexist because it implies that boys shouldn’t cry, even though it is a false statment. “Girls don’t do maths” is sexist for the same reason. (See also Sexism by Sex-Role Normativity.)

Hope that’s been helpful.

–IP

Don’t mind the hairy feminist in the corner…

…She doesn’t pretend to have a sense of humour.

But why is it that the, even in seemingly intelligent considerate adult men, the word “tits” brings out complete childishness?

–IP