Relevant History

Giving STS a good name...

Wonkette reports that a Dartmouth professor

is suing her class for discrimination, as she revealed in a series of regrettable and bizarre emails that promptly ended up all over Dartmouth blogs. Priya Venkatesan (Dartmouth '90, MS in Genetics, PhD in literature) emailed members of her Winter '08 Writing 5 class Saturday night to announce her intention to seek damages from them for their being mean to her.

Looking at that academic pedigree, I immediately started to worry. Sure enough, she was teaching STS. Her book, Molecular Biology in Narrative Form "is a groundbreaking, interdisciplinary study that shows a connection between molecular biology and French narrative theory."

With many new insights on the link between science (in the form of DNA, a set of codes) and literature (in the form of language, another set of codes), this book looks at modern experimental science within the framework of semiotics. Priya Venkatesan reveals the extraordinary parallel between the work of scientists and the work of narratologists who develop narrative paradigms and analyze literary texts. Molecular Biology in Narrative Form will be a useful resource for scientists and literary theorists interested in the epistemological workings of science, as well as, anyone that desires to explore the linkages between scientific theory and literary analysis.

Two things come to mind. First, didn't Lily Kay and Tim Lenoir do exactly this about 15 years ago? Or does the project just bear a strong resemblance to George Landow's Hypertext, with its argument for unexpected parallels between computer science and literary theory?

And... suing her students? Huh?

[To the tune of Times Online, "The Bugle - Episode 16 - Afghanistan in a zen state of chaos," from the album "The Bugle - Audio Newspaper For A Visual World".]

My new favorite writer

Tony Zirkle is a lawyer running for Congress in Indiana. He's got a rhetorical style that-- well, it's hard to describe. Imagine Hunter Thompson on meth, trying to simultaneously channel Buckminster Fuller, Huey Long, and Jerry Falwell, with a little Unity Mitford-level Nazi-loving crazy thrown in for good measure:

What goes around, sometimes comes around, and sometimes a Zulu massacre comes right back in a dot com a few generations later to taunt a people in a new, more efficient destroying form of the same song, different dance hate speech. If addiction prone blanches can’t get their act together, then all of us who have a shred of justice in our spine may one day have to debate the idea of giving them what their ancestors gave to the natives, the author or whom is still honored with placement on the $20 bill…

If history can not produce one mono-syllabic tax cut king to stick his fluking harpoon between the porn Tiamat's oeilles, then perhaps history will one day send a homeless vet to attempt a confoundation of those incognoscenti who think they're wise. I'm starting to feel very strongly that a lot of very bad events are going to happen to me in the very near future for writing this.

The man in running for Congress. Give that a minute to sink in.

Could he even see the keyboard when he wrote that? I wish I could write with that kind of zest.

He also recently gave a speech to the American National Socialist Workers Party. According to the AP, he said "he did not know much about the group [emphasis added] and that 'I'll speak before any group that invites me.'"

Perhaps the fact that it was Hitler's birthday, and that the stage was decorated with a Nazi flag, large portrait of Adolf Hitler, and sparkly cardboard "Happy Birthday" draped across the podium could have provided the smallest of clues? Unless it was also Zirkle's birthday, in which case the confusion is understandable.

Man, I hope he gets elected.

[via Sadly, No]

[To the tune of Led Zeppelin, "The Battle of Evermore," from the album "Led Zeppelin (Disc 2)".]

Technorati Tags: writing

My children are insane

Yes it is hot today, but the pool is 68 degrees!

The impact of the Hajj

In David Lodge's great novel Changing Places, Euphoric State University professor Morris Zapp declared that "travel narrows." He was a world-renowned Jane Austen scholar, he said, precisely because he had never been to England: his lack of interest in the real England let him focus more sharply on the novels, and made him a better critic.

This attitude may hold true for literature (or not), but Slate reports on an interesting recent study (available here) suggesting that Muslims who make the pilgrimage to Mecca "came back with more moderate views on a range of issues, both religious and nonreligious, suggesting that the Hajj may be helpful in curbing the spread of extremism in the Islamic world."

The study looks at a group of 1,600 Pakistanis who applied for visas to go on the Hajj. As Slate explains, Pakistani visa policy creates a group that's a social scientist's dream:

In 2006, nearly 140,000 applicants vied for 80,000 visas through the Pakistan government's Hajj program. In order to decide who gets to go, the government holds a lottery. As a result, among the visa applicants, there's a group of people randomly selected to participate in the Hajj and a comparison group of would-be pilgrims who applied but didn't get to go. The two groups look very similar—the only systematic difference is that applicants in one group won the lottery and those in the other group didn't. If the Hajjis come back from Mecca more tolerant than those who didn't get to go, therefore, we know it's the result of the Hajj, not something else.

So what did the researchers find? As they report,

[P]articipation in the Hajj increases observance of global Islamic practices such as prayer and fasting while decreasing participation in localized practices and beliefs such as the use of amulets and dowry. It increases belief in equality and harmony among ethnic groups and Islamic sects and leads to more favorable attitudes toward women, including greater acceptance of female education and employment. Increased unity within the Islamic world is not accompanied by antipathy toward non-Muslims. Instead, Hajjis show increased belief in peace, and in equality and harmony among adherents of different religions. The evidence suggests that these changes are more a result of exposure to and interaction with Hajjis from around the world, rather than religious instruction or a changed social role of pilgrims upon return....

Our results tend to support the idea that the Hajj helps to integrate the Muslim world, leading to a strengthening of global Islamic beliefs, a weakened attachment to localized religious customs, and a sense of unity and equality with others who are ordinarily separated in everyday life by sect, ethnicity, nationality, or gender, but who are brought together during the Hajj. While the Hajj may help forge a common Islamic identity, there is no evidence that this is defined in opposition to non-Muslims. On the contrary, the notions of equality and harmony tend to extend to adherents of other religions as well.

Why is this?

While it is difficult to isolate what drives the impact of the Hajj, the evidence suggests that exposure to Muslims from around the world during the Hajj is important. While we find that Hajjis do not acquire greater formal religious knowledge, they do gain experiential knowledge of the diversity of Islamic practices and beliefs, gender roles within Islam, and, more broadly, the world beyond Pakistan. The Hajj’s impact on such knowledge and on some of the tolerant attitudes toward other groups tends to be larger for those traveling in smaller groups, who are more likely to have a broad range of social interactions with people from different backgrounds during the Hajj. Hajjis also show the largest positive gain in their views of other nationalities for Indonesians, the group they are most likely to observe during the Hajj other than Saudis. Hajjis’ changed views toward women also reflect the exposure channel since the Hajj offers Pakistani pilgrims a novel opportunity to interact with members of the opposite gender in a religious setting, and to observe interactions across the sexes among Muslims from nations which are more accepting of such interactions.

As with computers, so with religion: user experience and interaction is everything.

Technorati Tags: religion, sociology

Workplace this morning

All I'll say is, Tom Friedman got a more polite reception at Castilleja

Two protesters threw pies at Tom Friedman during a speech at Brown University:

The incredible thing is, the guys missed. So much for smashing global capitalism, dudes. (The girls at Castillja would have nailed it. They would have practiced. Of course, they also would have been expelled in a nanosecond, but at least they wouldn't have the shame of being tossed out of school for attempted pie-throwing.)

The other thing is that this gesture, while perhaps entertaining, and enough to earn you honors marks if you're a performance art major at Yale, isn't nearly as powerful, as, say, Matt Taibbi's takedown of The Earth is Flat, the best piece of snarky criticism this side of Adam Gopnik's review of Matrix Reoladed. A sample:

It's not for nothing that Thomas Friedman is called "the most important columnist in America today."... Friedman is an important American. He is the perfect symbol of our culture of emboldened stupidity. Like George Bush, he's in the reality-making business. In the new flat world, argument is no longer a two-way street for people like the president and the country's most important columnist. You no longer have to worry about actually convincing anyone; the process ends when you make the case.

Unlike the pie guys, Taibbi hits his target.

[via Gawker]

[To the tune of Willie Nelson, "Always On My Mind," from the album "Always On My Mind".]

From My Life as a Quant

Whenever I have a new problem to work on-- in physics or options theory-- the first major struggle is to gain some intuition about how to proceed; the second struggle is to transform this intuition into something more formulaic, a set of rules anyone can follow, rules that no longer require the original insight itself. In this way, one person's breakthrough becomes everybody's possession. (Emanuel Derman, My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance, p. 48)

[To the tune of Grateful Dead, "The Mighty Quinn," from the album "1991-04-05 - The Omni".]

Technorati Tags: physics

On NPR

Cyrus Farivar quotes me at the end of his latest NPR Morning Edition piece, "High-Tech Pen Makes Note-Taking Easier."

In my sound bite, I reveal that I like paper because it's harder for me to break paper than the screen on my Nokia N95.

I played the piece for my kids this morning before I took them to school. At the end of it, my son came up to me and said, "You know, Dad, you really do drop your stuff a lot." Gee, thanks kid.

[To the tune of Handsome Boy Modeling School, "The Projects (PJays)," from the album "So...How's Your Girl?".]

Technorati Tags: end of cyberspace, media

I'm back

Made it home safely. I left Changi Airport at 6 pm Singapore time on Sunday, and arrived in SFO at 8 pm PST. So that's about 17 hours' travel time, I think.

Since everyone put their windowshade down right after takeoff, I was in darkness the whole flight. So in a sense I missed a day. Kind of strange, but probably not as dislocating as having seven hours of daylight.

Technorati Tags: Malaysia, SQ002, Singapore

Giant baby at Changi Airport

For some reason, this giant screen with an photo advertisement featuring a baby really captivated me.

The baby sees all!

Okay, they're calling my row. Gotta go!

Technorati Tags: airport, Changi, Singapore