I married a communist

2011-03-20T08:41:00.000-04:00

Dear scholar,

We noticed that you have published an article in the journal Crime media cultere, so we kindly invite you to submit an article to our journal "Cross-cultural Communication" (CCC), which is a peer-reviewed petroleum journal published quarterly by Academic Journals (http://www.cscanada.net; Http://www.cscanada.org). All the manuscripts are required to be written in English, and they should be submitted as attachment to ccc@cscanada.org or caooc@hotmail.com . The preferred format for the manuscript is APA, although the MSWord format is also acceptable. Note that the submission deadline for the first issue is May 20, 2011. Our objective is to inform author s of the decision on their manuscript(s) within four weeks. Instruction for authors and other details are available on our website: http://www.cscanada.net/index.php/ccc .

Ha ha. There is no journal Crime media cultere. A petroleum journal? Who wold pose APA and MSWord as contrasting members in the category of format?

But: what is the purpose? This isn't sophisticated enough to actually be doing a pay-journal scam, and the web page above isn't even in grammatical English. Cui bono? Hm... are they targeting foreign academics trying to break into English language publications?

I finally read "I married a communist"

2011-03-17T16:32:00.000-04:00

Away in Turkey while on maternity leave, every night before dropping off to sleep I'd read another half page. Yes, the Philip Roth book. It was really good. The opening parts of the book describe the appeal of fighting against corporate domination and for a world free of wage slavery. But a marriage is the centerpiece of the book, not communism, and it doesn't really matter whether communist Ira is fighting against unfair labor practices or whether he's active in some other up-hill social battle, because in the end, his quirky marriage to a film star both protected him initially from being blacklisted and later did him in. It's a powerful story.

Although H is a Roth fan (once had to get up in the night and to go a 24 hour bookstore to get the next Roth novel on his list), he wasn't happy with the book -- felt that Roth had only the most basic understanding of what communists were trying to do in mid-20th century American. "He doesn't really understand that era" H said (contrary to the book's back page blurbs).

But now H is like Ira -- he's married and drawn into the demands of married life, including the total absorption required to help me take care of two little boys, now almost one year old, who never take the cute off.

No comments allowed unfortunately because of spam; you can always email me.

Two findings pertinent to evolutionary psychology

2010-09-02T12:16:00.000-04:00

Finding 1

Male Abusers Often Sabotage Birth Control With Partners

The evolutionary psychologists must like this phenomenon, since they frequently claim that male partner violence is an extreme form of mate-guarding, and the goal of mate-guarding is to exploit the female's reproductive resources, and the goal of that is getting your genes into the next generation...

Finding 2

At this summer's meeting of the Association for Psychological Science (in Boston), the symposium on evolutionary psychology found that there are geographical areas of the world where men are more (slightly more) interested in monogamy and committed relationships than are women. The primary area where reversal of the more common gender pattern happens currently is subsaharan Africa, mainly because women are relatively open to mon-monogamy and apparently more aware of the disadvantages of being tied to one partner. This goes against all those evo psych people who say women must be more needy of pair bonding because they need male resources. So what's different in Africa -- women are often economically self-sufficient; and males have few opportunities to be the sole provider for a family; or put differently, there isn't a large disparity in income/resource potential between genders.

What is out in that big world anyways?

2010-09-02T10:45:00.000-04:00

The Aftermath of the Flotilla (comments by Anna Baltzer)

2010-06-07T12:00:00.000-04:00

Anna Baltzer emailed her mailing list, annas_peacework_palestine@yahoogroups.com :

The Aftermath of the Flotilla

Last night marked one week since Israel's attack in international waters on the Mavi Marmara Turkish humanitarian ship bound for Gaza, killing nine. One by one, the hundreds of witnesses aboard the vessels have been returning home to tell their stories after being stripped of any and all footage. By confiscating all non-military evidence of the incident, Israel has been able to successfully dominate the narrative, at least in the US where news of the attack had begun to dwindle by the time witnesses were released. One wonders, if Israel is conveying the whole story of what happened that night, why eliminate every single other piece of documentation? What does Israel have to hide?

According to hundreds of eyewitnesses, the Navy shot at the boat and threw tear gas and sound bombs before boarding the ship, and then hit the ground shooting. The videos released by Israel show those aboard the ship attacking soldiers with sticks. Israel claims that the deaths were an accident, that the soldiers were startled by the sticks and thus forced to shoot people to defend themselves.

Now let's put things into perspective. In 2005, the Israeli Army removed 8,000 ideological settlers from Gaza, many of them kicking and screaming with sticks and rocks in hand. The Army managed not to kill or even shoot a single one of them. Do sticks from Turks hurt more, or is it not about the sticks at all?

As Dr. Norman Finkelstein pointed out, Israeli officials met for an entire week prior to the flotilla to plan precisely what they intended to do. The Israeli Ambassador to the US Michael Oren himself stated that the Mavi Marmara was simply "too large to stop with nonviolent means." It's hard to believe that this was an accident.

While the world focuses on the flotilla and Gaza, Israel's restrictions on Palestinian rights in the rest of Palestine continue to tighten. On Friday, soldiers surrounded the Old City in Jerusalem to prevent Muslim men from praying at Al-Aqsa mosque. Only those younger than 15 or older than 40 were allowed through. Hundreds of men gathered outside the metal bars installed by the Army around the city gates. Frustrated, many men sat down to wait to pray on the sidewalk, but soldiers on horseback pushed through the crowd, forcing the men to scatter.

It's important to note that many Palestinians wait for years to receive a permit to visit Jerusalem for just one day. Sometimes the permits are valid only for a few hours. I saw a woman in Beit Sahour whom I'd met in Syracuse last Fall. She said it's easier for her to travel to New York than to go 10 miles away to Jerusalem. She said often permits are sent to the wrong village and families fall over themselves to get the permit to the right person in time, often failing. At the gates, some men argued with the soldiers, close to tears, not knowing if they would ever get another chance to realize a life-long dream of praying at their country's holiest site.

Eventually, hundreds of men began to gather next to the wall of the Old City and across the street. If they could not enter, they would pray as close as they could. As the call to prayer rang out (at least sound can overcome walls), a noticeable calm came over the space as they bowed down in unison. The soldiers stood over the group, some filming with cameras. In the middle of the group were an olive tree and a young child who stood by himself, watching.

When the prayers ended, those who hadn't brought prayer mats wiped the dirt off their foreheads and gathered with others across the street where an imam had started to speak. Lara, a Palestinian delegate in our group translated bits and pieces of what he said.

The sermon was about the importance of compassion and justice in Islam. There they were, being denied their religious freedom, and they were talking about compassion. The imam asked that their prayers be accepted even though they could not be in the house of God. At one point, he raised his finger and called out the following: "Someday, we will live in a place where it doesn't matter what color your skin is, or where you're from." With every sentence the group resounded in a collective "Amen."

After the prayers, hundreds of women and older men poured out, one of whom told me he'd seen a man beaten by the Army for calling out against Israel's attacks on the flotilla. This is likely precisely what the Army wanted to avoid by keeping Muslims from congregating at the mosque, and they had been largely successful, at least so they thought.

Just as I was turning to return to the hotel, I heard a chorus of women's voices coming from inside the city walls. Soon a large group of women emerged carrying a Turkish flag and singing out familiar calls for justice and praising those who gave their lives to free Gaza. The soldiers thought that keeping the men out would be enough, but they had underestimated the women.

Israel has also underestimated the international civilian community, which continues to speak out. Day and night, we watch protests around the world unfold one after another, seemingly stronger and larger by the day: Japan, Paris, India, Oslo, Australia, and beyond. This is being called "Israel's Kent State."

Far more significant than protests is the fact that worldwide disapproval has been transforming into concrete rejection of normalization with Israel, including major victories for the Palestinian movement for boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) on Israel until it complies with international law.

This past week, the student body at Evergreen College voted to divest from "Israel's illegal occupation." Before she was run over by Israeli soldiers in a US-made Caterpillar bulldozer in Gaza, Rachel Corrie had attended Evergreen. Along with divesting, students have voted for a "Caterpillar free" campus. You can support the students by clicking here.

A week before the flotilla, Italy's largest supermarkets COOP and Nordiconad announced a boycott of the Israeli produce company, Carmel Agrexco. Four days later, Deutsche Bank (Germany's largest bank, worth more than $1 trillion) announced divestment from Elbit Systems, an Israeli firm that supplies technology for Israel's military, settlements, and Wall (as well as the Wall between the US and Mexico). Deutsche Bank was one of the company's largest share-holders.

The next day, it was announced that Sweden's largest national pension funds were also divesting from Elbit. (Norway did the same more than one year ago.) Going a step further, the Swedish Port Workers Union announced last Wednesday that it would temporarily stop handling Israeli cargo in response to the attacks on the flotilla.

On the same day, Britain's largest union, Unite, passed a unanimous motion "to vigorously promote a policy of divestment from Israeli companies" and to boycott Israeli goods and services as in "the boycott of South African goods during the era of apartheid."

Then yesterday, the Pixies canceled their upcoming concert in Israel in response to Israel's attack on the flotilla. Musical artists Klaxons and Gorillaz canceled as well. This on the heels of cancelations by Santana, Gil Scott-Heron, Snoop Dog, Sting, and Elvis Costello.

These are but a few of the BDS victories that have happened just in the last month. The movement that officially began in 2005 crossed its first threshold in 2009 (having gained in four years the same momentum it took the BDS movement against South Africa 20 years to achieve), but 2010 has brought it to a new level.

Last month marked 62 years since 80% of the families in Gaza were displaced during Israel's creation, the Palestinian Nakba. And this week marks 43 years since Israel occupied the Gaza Strip and West Bank. The Occupation has been in place 70% of Israel's life-span so far. It is not temporary. And it is but one part of the problem. Along with Israel's discrimination against Palestinians within Israel's de-facto borders and outside historic Palestine, the Occupation will not be stopped voluntarily by Israel. As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said: "Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed." I spoke with a member of Boycott from Within (Israelis supporting the Palestinian BDS Call) paraphrased a common phrase during the anti-Apartheid struggle in South Africa: We will bring them to their senses, or we will bring them to their knees. For Israel, as was the case for the South African Aparthe! id government, the former has simply never worked.

For photos, more reports, and info on Anna's book, DVD, and upcoming speaking tours, visit www.AnnaInTheMiddleEast.com

My gorgeous twins -- born April 8, 2010

2010-06-03T15:32:00.000-04:00

So cute, so smart already. We play imitation games; both babies are already trying to make human sounds.

I like this picture of the hands upraised...

It's worth reading to the end of Joseph Stack's suicide note

2010-02-18T23:47:00.001-05:00

In It Can Happen Here: America On the Brink, self-proclaimed patriot, ardent capitalist and business school professor Bruce Judson (see his blog) begs all who will listen or read his book that the U.S. must rectify the last 30 years of income inequality or face the prospect of riots in the streets, political instability, terrorist acts from disenfranchised and impoverished Americans with nothing left to lose, and the end of America as we know it (see buzzflash book review here ).
Judson says we need universal health care and aggressive social works program (similar to the 1940's New Deal) in order to head off unrest. Hm. Bring on the unrest! But do we have boots in the street yet? Do we have desperate people with nothing left to lose committing acts of violence?

Well, as of today, we at least have flying your plane into an IRS building.

The media are generally spinning Joe Stack's suicide note as insane ramblings. It's worth reading and making up your own mind, here. But if you don't have the time or inclination, at least check out his final two sentences:

The communist creed: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.
The capitalist creed: From each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed

Not very rambling. Pretty sane.

Yes, I am eccentric... I should live near like-minded others

2010-02-13T13:50:00.000-05:00

Last fall H and I moved to Cambridge, MA, escaping the misery and noise of the Boston student ghetto where I had regrettably purchased a condo at the height of the housing bubble in 2003.

The joys of Cambridge are many, although in my "leave the house only for 20 hours a week on campus" third-trimester pregnancy state, a primary enjoyment (after the blissful quiet) is the Cambridge City public access TV station, that airs shows like Democracy Now, Free SpeechTV, and quirky offerings were high school students explain why they chose a particular famous portrait as the inspiration for their self-portrait for their photography class.

Because Cambridge is so famously politically liberal, I was prepared to join neighborhood campaigns against corporate excesses, but thus far the only flyer in our mailbox asking us to join a neighborhood movement has been a campaign to prevent our elderly African American neighbor from raising chickens (now an illegal practice, but he was grandfathered due to his 40 year chicken raising history).

They provided an email to "complain" and I thus wrote:

I live on [street] where my neighbor (who my husband and I chat with) raises chickens. I have never been inconvenienced by the chickens and I object to the campaign to forbid my neighbor to raise them.

In my view, we need more gardening and raising of (manageable) animals, not less. I grew up with chickens and roosters crowing next door in Los Angeles in the 1960s. Raising one's own chickens is a healthy alternative to factory farming. Children's exposure to farm animals in the first 3-5 years of life decreases their chances of acquiring allergies. When my twins are born next month, I will certainly try to expose them to my neighbor's chickens (well, I mean, in a year or so). I realize that very few urban dwellers want to raise chickens; given that raising chickens can be seen as a community service, the grandfathering clause is a sound one.

A little too much time on my hands? Maybe I should find a way to put up barriers so the comment page of this poor blog isn't the dumping ground for marketing bots.

The summer of my medical tourism, Part III

2009-12-31T13:40:00.000-05:00

There's a big topic looming for this blog. "Is going overseas for egg donation -- some could call it fertility tourism -- something leftists do?"

I've put off this topic for months now, given that H and I returned from Cyprus, pregnant, in late August 2009.

I've felt compelled, all this time, to address this topic because this blog isn't just "All About Moi" or "Procrastination for writing a journal article" or "My Pregnancy Journal" or "Yet another psychology professor's blog." I choose the quirky name "I married a communist" for some kind of purpose, so from time to time there should be something about how being associated with the political far left influences one's daily life or at least internal monologues.

H already had this discussion with one of his communist friends, a sometimes reader of this blog. I hear they mused about the topic but didn't come to a conclusion.

But I've come to some tentative conclusions, after conversations with friends, on two topics: Is it okay to be the wealthy foreigner throwing money around in a less-developed country? Did I exploit a woman from an under-developed country by purchasing a part of her body?

Is it okay to be the wealthy foreigner? Yes: I have a choice where to spend my money -- why not spend it in a developing country?

In the world I want to live in, disparities in wealth would be sufficiently small that there would be no economic motivation for anyone to build a hospital in poor country X with the hope of bringing in overseas clients from wealthy country Y. Am I acting to continue global wealth inequalities by participating in fertility tourism? I'd enjoy hearing comments from globalization experts, but here's what I've gleaned from some diverse readings: Many experts are saying we need less *aid* and more *trade.* When wealthy countries directly give money/resources to poor countries, it breeds corruption. 'Free' money incites competition to confiscate the give-away.

Regular tourism isn't an ideal wealth-creating industry because it can sequester locals in dead-end jobs of being maids and gardeners. Medical tourism is hard work. Yes, there may be a rich capitalist in Turkey who is making extra money off of his investment in Istanbul's Jinemed hospital, but Jinemed doesn't just serve rich tourists -- it's a vibrant city clinic. Medical tourism has the advantage of training locals for the whole necessary panoply of medical professionals, doctors, nurses, technicians etc. The prenatal/fertility clinic in Cyprus that did my invitro sees several infertile foreign couples per day, but still most of their work is with Cyprus locals. The day of my embryo transfer we waited while a dozen or more Cypriots gathered to attend/celebrate a birth, as my doctor was also their obstetrician. So locals benefit from the presence of the expertise that was partially funded by the wealthy tourists.

The feminist angle: Poor women's bodies have always been exploited -- by man and by wealthier women. Did my action of buying a woman's eggs contribute to that?

There are certainly some delicate issues here.

In the realm of buying a piece of someone's body, egg donation seems to me to be on the more benign side, for the following reasons:

Because women produce about 400 eggs in a life-time, I bought a replaceable piece of a woman's body. Not as benign as purchasing blood, but no where near as drastic or life-influencing as buying a kidney.

Side-effects are rare (between 1 in 500 and 1 in 1,000), but span the spectrum from an easily-cured infection to infertility. Because of the rare chance of an extreme negative outcome like infertility, in Cyprus, women are encouraged to be egg donors only if they have already had all of the children they want. I was told my donor was married, 25 and already had the 3 children she desired (3 children is the average for Turkey/Cyprus).

One reason I choose Turkey/Cyprus as the place for egg donation was that I had read some exploitative stories about Eastern Europe, where young women are drawn in from the country side to the supposedly glamourous, fast-paced cities, housed in dormitories, given little compensation, treated like egg-donation machines, and thrown aside when they had a negative outcome. In contrast, Cyprus is a small island that doesn't leave room for the phenomena of women leaving rural areas to go to the big city where bereft of family support they can be exploited by ruthless organ middle-men. (But see this story about eggs of Eastern European women being sent to Cyprus.)

An angle I know less about is the Islamic side. Under Islam, egg and sperm donation are not permitted, being t is tantamount to adultery. For historical reasons including influence from Greece, Cyprus has never been as Islamic as Turkey (it takes work and locomotion to hear a call to prayer). Still, because the citizenry is Islamic, egg donation is not something to openly discuss. Women do it privately. In order to continue to be allowed to legally provide egg/sperm donation, the clinics have to be careful to avoid scandals, and thus need to be scrupulous about medical care and treatment of their egg donors.

Finally, the communist/internalist perspective. Classically, communists are opposed to nation states (the communist anthem is the "International"). Even in a utopian, egalitarian society, there will be infertile women who want the chance to become pregnant via egg donation, and there will be fertile women who don't mind being a donor, either for some extra cash or for just for the secret joy that they gave an infertile woman the gift of pregnancy.

I think often of the "Cypriot Beauty." Did my clinic (a Cyprus clinic, not run by overseas organizations) tell her that implantation worked, in my case? Will she wonder about the twin boys that are her genetic offspring, growing up half-way around the world? I imagine that in the future we'll visit Cyprus as a family, and my sons may feel their Eastern Mediterranean roots. Comrade, thank you.

Obama, controlled by aliens...

2009-12-02T22:21:00.000-05:00

Like many ever hopeful reformists , last January I liked Obama.

But during his televised address about sending 30,000 troops to Afghanistan last night, I had the sinking impression that he was being controlled by aliens.

What a capitalist tool, I thought, in horror.

I'll use this space to let a better writer, and more politically expert commentator, put my feelings into words.

December 1, 2009 The Obama Puppet -- The world's least powerful man

opednews.com Paul Craig Roberts

[Paul Craig Roberts, a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal]

It didn't take the Israel Lobby very long to bring President Obama to heel regarding his prohibition against further illegal Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian land. Obama discovered that a mere American president is powerless when confronted by the Israel Lobby and that the United States simply is not allowed a Middle East policy separate from Israel's.

Obama also found out that he cannot change anything else either, if he ever intended to do so. The military/security lobby has war and a domestic police state on its agenda, and a mere American president can't do anything about it.

President Obama can order the Guantanamo torture chamber closed and kidnapping and rendition and torture to be halted, but no one carries out the order.

Essentially, Obama is irrelevant.

President Obama can promise that he is going to bring the troops home, and the military lobby says, “No, you are going to send them to Afghanistan, and in the meantime start a war in Pakistan and maneuver Iran into a position that will provide an excuse for a war there, too. Wars are too profitable for us to let you stop them.” And the mere president has to say, “Yes, Sir!”

Obama can promise health care to 50 million uninsured Americans, but he can't override the veto of the war lobby and the insurance lobby. The war lobby says its war profits are more important than health care and that the country can't afford both the “war on terror” and “socialized medicine.”

The insurance lobby says health care has to be provided by private health insurance; otherwise, we can't afford it.

The war and insurance lobbies rattled their campaign contribution pocketbooks and quickly convinced Congress and the White House that the real purpose of the health care bill is to save money by cutting Medicare and Medicaid benefits, thereby “getting entitlements under control.”

Entitlements is a right-wing word used to cast aspersion on the few things that the government did, in the distant past, for citizens. Social Security and Medicare, for example, are denigrated as “entitlements.” The right-wing goes on endlessly about Social Security and Medicare as if they were welfare give-aways to shiftless people who refuse to look after themselves, whereas in actual fact citizens are vastly overcharged for the meager benefits with a 15% tax on their wages and salaries.

Indeed, for decades now the federal government has been funding its wars and military budgets with the surplus revenues collected by the Social Security tax on labor.

To claim, as the right-wing does, that we can't afford the only thing in the entire budget that has consistently produced a revenue surplus indicates that the real agenda is to drive the mere citizen into the ground.

The real entitlements are never mentioned. The “defense” budget is an entitlement for the military/security complex about which President Eisenhower warned us 50 years ago. A person has to be crazy to believe that the United States, “the world's only superpower,” protected by oceans on its East and West and by puppet states on its North and South, needs a “defense” budget larger than the military spending of the rest of the world combined.

The military budget is nothing but an entitlement for the military/security complex. To hide this fact, the entitlement is disguised as protection against “enemies” and passed through the Pentagon.

I say cut out the middleman and simply allocate a percentage of the federal budget to the military/security complex. This way we won't have to concoct reasons for invading other countries and go to war in order for the military/security complex to get its entitlement. It would be a lot cheaper just to give them the money outright, and it would save a lot of lives and grief at home and abroad.

The US invasion of Iraq had nothing whatsoever to do with American national interests. It had to do with armaments profits and with eliminating an obstacle to Israeli territorial expansion. The cost of the war, aside from the $3 trillion, was over 4,000 dead Americans, over 30,000 wounded and maimed Americans, tens of thousands of broken American marriages and lost careers, one million dead Iraqis, four million displaced Iraqis, and a destroyed country.

All of this was done for the profits of the military/security complex and to make paranoid Israel, armed with 200 nuclear weapons, feel “secure.”

My proposal would make the military/security complex even more wealthy as the companies would get the money without having to produce the weapons. Instead, all the money could go for multi-million dollar bonuses and dividend payouts to shareholders. No one, at home or abroad, would have to be killed, and the taxpayer would be better off.

No American national interest is served by the war in Afghanistan. As the former UK Ambassador Craig Murray disclosed, the purpose of the war is to protect Unocal's interest in the Trans-Afghanistan pipeline. The cost of the war is many times greater than Unocal's investment in the pipeline. The obvious solution is to buy out Unocal and give the pipeline to the Afghans as partial compensation for the destruction we have inflicted on that country and its population, and bring the troops home.

The reason my sensible solutions cannot be effected is that the lobbies think that their entitlements would not survive if they were made obvious. They think that if the American people knew that the wars were being fought to enrich the armaments and oil industries, the people would put a halt to the wars.

In actual fact, the American people have no say about what “their” government does. Polls of the public show that half or more of the American people do not support the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan and do not support President Obama's escalation of the war in Afghanistan. Yet, the occupations and wars continue. According to General Stanley McChrystal, the additional 40,000 troops are enough to stalemate the war, that is, to keep in going forever, the ideal situation for the armaments lobby.

The people want health care, but the government does not listen.

The people want jobs, but Wall Street wants higher priced stocks and forces American firms to offshore the jobs to countries where labor is cheaper.

The American people have no effect on anything. They can affect nothing. They have become irrelevant like Obama. And they will remain irrelevant as long as organized interest groups can purchase the US government.

The inability of the American democracy to produce any results that the voters want is a demonstrated fact. The total unresponsiveness of government to the people is conservatism's contribution to American democracy. Some years ago there was an effort to put government back into the hands of the people by constraining the ability of organized interest groups to pour enormous amounts of money into political campaigns and, thus, obligate the elected official to those whose money elected him. Conservatives said that any restraints would be a violation of the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech.

The same “protectors” of “free speech” had no objection to the Israel Lobby's passage of the “hate speech” bill, which has criminalized criticism of Israel's genocidal treatment of the Palestinians and continuing theft of their lands.

In less than one year, President Obama has betrayed all of his supporters and broken all of his promises. He is the total captive of the oligarchy of the ruling interest groups.Unless he is saved by an orchestrated 9/11-type event, Obama is a one-term president.Indeed, the collapsing economy will doom him regardless of a “terrorist event.”

The Republicans are grooming Palin. Our first female president, following our first black president, will complete the transition to an American police state by arresting critics and protesters of Washington's immoral foreign and domestic policies, and she will complete the destruction of America's reputation abroad.

Russia's Putin has already compared the US to Nazi Germany, and the Chinese premier has likened the US to an irresponsible, profligate debtor.

Increasingly the rest of the world sees the US as the sole source of all of its problems. Germany has lost the chief of its armed forces and its defense minister, because the US convinced or pressured, by hook or crook, the German government to violate its Constitution and to send troops to fight for Unocal's interest in Afghanistan. The Germans had pretended that their troops were not really fighting, but were were engaged in a “peace-keeping operation.” This more or less worked until the Germans called in an air strike that murdered 100 women and children lined up for a fuel allotment.

The British are investigating their leading criminal, former prime minister Tony Blair, and his deception of his own cabinet in order to do Bush's bidding and provide some cover for Bush's illegal invasion of Iraq. The UK investigators have been denied the ability to bring criminal charges, but the issue of war based entirely on orchestrated deception and lies is getting a hearing. It will reverberate throughout the world, and the world will note that there is no corresponding investigation in the US, the country that originated the False War.

Meanwhile, the US investment banks, which have wrecked the financial stability of many governments, including that of the US, continue to control, as they have done since the Clinton administration, US economic and financial policy. The world has suffered terribly from the Wall Street gangsters, and now looks upon America with a

critical eye.

The United States no longer commands the respect it enjoyed under President Ronald Reagan or President George Herbert Walker Bush. World polls show that the US and its puppet master are regarded as the two greatest threats to peace. Washington and Israel outrank on the most dangerous list the crazy regime in North Korea.

The world is beginning to see America as a country that needs to go away. When the dollar is over-inflated by a Washington unable to pay its bills, will the world be motivated by greed and try to save us in order to save its investments, or will it say, thank God, good riddance.

Engrossing, stimulating Mad Men

2009-11-26T14:09:00.002-05:00

One of my extended family members who enjoys Mad Men, a favorite show chez nous, wrote me:

I watched the DVD's special features Part 1 on the 2nd wave of feminism or "humanism" as Gloria Stein aptly puts it. The last point that is made by a California professor (forget name) she says that women need to support each others' choices, a philosophy I've always loved being a mostly "stay at home." Here's the thing that's sticking in my craw, literally everyone interviewed speaks as if current commercial advertising is any different. On commercial TV today do you ever see a guy doing laundry? The man is only viewed as a landscaper, SUV driver, beer drinker or a buyer of jewelry. For sure business women are included, but they're still shopping for mops on the weekends. Look at all the male cooking shows on the Food Network, yet you never see a man cooking on a commercial unless he's barbecuing. They only man who cleans up on TV is the Sham-Wow guy.

This email made me realize: Yes, social roles and gender customs have changed immensely; and the content of TV shows has changed also; but ads have changed less than has society -- why?

Back in the mid-90s my psych undergrads did a content analysis (for a course project) of ads shown during a prime-time TV show (Beverly Hils 90210). They documented with precise counts that ads depicted women house cleaning and grooming, and almost never showed women in a traditionally male occupations. Ads for men were more career-related (the one grooming product for men concerned grey hair and balding).

So why are ads behind-the-times? Why aren't ads keeping up with dynamically changing gender roles? It seems that advertising is inherently "conservative" in the sense of needing to uphold the values of a prior generation, but why? I've read or thought about two explanations:

1. When ads try something more socially progressive, they don't appeal to as large a percentage of the population, because they strongly turn off whatever segment is actually socially conservative (say 20%). When socially conservative ads are aired, there are fewer negative responses to the ads, because these ads showing older social roles are at least familiar to the rest of the population. So pushing the progressive message is a larger net cost. The example of this that I've read is a somewhat distinct issue, but let me refer to it: Mainstream magazines, such as Cosmopolitan, have specific monetary concerns about featuring an African American woman on the cover. Supposedly, these covers lead to a drop in magazine purchases for that issue. One analysis of this drop is that a cover model of the dominant ethnicity stands for all women, but a cover model of a minority ethnicity is understood (by everyone) as primarily referencing the minority ethnicity. The analogy I'm making is: an ad which incorporates traditional gender roles can be understood as applying to everyone (even those who embrace modern gender roles), but an add for contemporary gender roles only applies to the population subset who embrace the contemporary roles.

2. Displaying traditional gender roles creates more anxiety and feelings of low self-worth in viewers, and these feelings drive viewers to buy the advertised products to remediate anxiety about dirty houses, wrinkles, not keeping up with the Jones, owning low-status products, etc. Displaying progressive role models in non-gender stereotypical activities sgnals "I'm okay you're okay" and reduces the need to buy products.

Other ideas?

What goes through your head when you're 4 months pregnant but not the genetic mother of your child?

2009-11-14T23:02:00.002-05:00

Conversations go through your head.
Well-meaning friend: So have you had your amnio?
me: No, the doctors don't recommend it.
WMF: But -- you're so old --?
me: (smugly) But my eggs aren't.

OR: conversations I imagine might happen but don't.
Doctors: You're beyond the normal child-bearing age and we just don't know how your body will respond to pregnancy.
But: Didn't happen. Not a hint of any message of that kind. Instead, just cheery, upbeat, professional attitude and compliments on my "good" (low) blood pressure and overall health.
(These imagining probably reflect my underlying fear: I put career before motherhood for two decades, shouldn't I pay the penalty of childlessness? Or at least, shouldn't others expect me to? I'm upsurping male privlege. Got married at 42 and had my first child at 47.)

OR: conversations between me and H:
Me: I didn't recognize that the black guy was Lightman's longtime FBI protector. I'm so glad our daugher won't inherit my prosopagnosia.
H: But I'm sad she won't inherit your genius brain.
Me: She'll have your genious brain. And she'll have my nurture.

OR: conversations between me and myself:
Me: You've got uneven cognitive profile. Sure, you have some wonderful itellectual strengths, but you're half-way to Aspergers. Do you really want to risk on your child an unhappy roll of the genetic dice?
Myself: No, I don't. This is the best thing. The eastern mediteranean beauty with H's 1/4 German Jew and 3/4 Anglo Saxon brit. What will she look like...?
Me: Merely 5 years ago you wanted to be the genetic mother. Now you don't care. Now you even say its better this way. What changed?
Myself: As the years go by you focus on what you really want given what is possible. I've always thought environment was more important than genes. I'm now living my intellectual commitments.

The Hyatt Regency Cambridge.... A really beautiful hotel...

2009-10-30T20:57:00.004-04:00

I've loved the view of you across the river from where I work. You're lovely. But not lovable.

Dear Hyatt Regency Cambridge,

In the past, my University, Boston University, has used the Hyatt Hotel for the year-end party for the psychology dept, for several years in a row. I'm hoping BU will join Governor Patrick in boycotting the Hyatt over its firing of housekeepers when they protested working conditions.

I have written Boston University to ask them to join the boycott.

Background for readers:

start with:

WBUR story

or

Hotel workers' website

And when you're driving down Memorial Drive, give a honk and thumbs up to the women now jobless after 20 years.

Their replacements are being paid minimum wage. I guess they thought these deserved more than that.

What's the solution? Pay more for hotel rooms so that workers can earn a living wage? Or: what if hotels didn't have to make a profit? Imagine.

Game Theory -- best strategy for Prisoner's Dilemma used in advice column for real life situation

2009-10-11T08:17:00.004-04:00

According to a science writer interviewed on NPR a few weeks ago, one of the few members of Congress who is also a scientist had to step into a heated battle with his fellow lawmakers who wanted to gut approved funding for research on "Game Theory" -- because those congressmen thought the government was being asked to fund a project on sports.

But game theory isn't that obscure. When responding to a blog item about how to deal with a roommate who reneged on a deal regarding who gets to keep the living room futon, the poster bah humbug cited lessons from the Prisoners' Dilemma and described "Tit-for-Tat", the strategy that beat out competitors, as described in Axelrod's Tit-for-Tat and Generous Tit-for-Tat.

Should we classic cooperators read about game theory to learn how to deal with classic defectors?

The dream of socialized medicine

2009-10-04T00:18:00.003-04:00

One of my few commenters wrote:

"OMG. next you're going to say you're in favor of SOCIALIST medicine!"

Yes. I'm also a utopian dreamer.

One of my fantasies is that the U.S. would adopt some type of public health care system. I urge policy makers to draw on the last decades of ideas about health care that have been worked out in the other advanced democracies -- Canada, Japan, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, Italy, Israel and and so on. (this wikipedia article has a good overview of the publically-funded health care systems in developed countries).

Socialized medicine typically means that "the government owns the means of providing medicine" as in the VA hospitals in the U.S. Rather than focusing on the definition of "government ownership" I focus on the idea that we the people own the government and thus we the people own the means of providing medicine. The VA and other publicly owned health care systems such as the UK system have many flaws, and these need to be worked on.

In my view, the health care system should be a non-profit organization supported by taxes. We need more preventative medicine, which is neglected in fee-for-service programs, but could be a big part of a health care system which is like public education -- free for all.

Health care should not be a for-profit business, because the profit motive is incompatible with caring about people's well-being. Two exceptions to this statement:

1. In the immediate future, I do accept that elective medicine, like lasik surgery and in vitro fertilisation, can be run on a pay-for-service model, such as what I purchased in Turkey this last August 2009.

2. In the far future, I dream of a society in which working for financial profit has diminished or disappeared for most people. People will work for intellectual and social rewards, as do many people in creative endeavours (bloggers, writers, artists, poets) and in fields like education.

I would also be in favor, as a good starting point, of Obama's initial plan that the same health care system that currently provides for congressman and senators be available to all Americans.

Even some non-advanced countries and non-democracies have free for all medical systems. I was very impressed by my experience with walk-in health care in Beijing in spring 2008: no appt necessary, no waiting. I walked in and saw a doctor after a 5 wait, and paid nothing for what was essentially an emergency room visit (I did pay for pharmceuticals needed to treat a rapidly worsening staph infection). Free, even though I was a foreigner. I marveled.

Are young people today angry about being handed a despoiled planet?

2009-09-23T10:26:00.003-04:00

According to "Power Shift O9" they are, as in this quote from Power Shift:

Thousands of young people will rally across the United States this Fall for the Power Shift '09 Regional Summits: 11 massive gatherings to exercise the political power of young voters and ask President Obama and Congress to pass a clean energy jobs plan by December to rebuild our economy, end our dependence on dirty energy, and bring America lasting security.

It's a wonderful image...

In the devastated world of 2055, watch 'archive' footage from 2008.... and ask why?

2009-09-20T21:38:00.004-04:00

When the Yes Men tell me to jump, I ask, How High? They told me to spread the word about their new movie.

Here's a video clip...

Boston has the best fertility centers in the world -- why go to Turkey and Cyprus?

2009-09-12T14:56:00.006-04:00

The summer of my medical tourism, Part II

In discussing the book and film Money Driven Medicine, Bill Moyers put it this way: America excels at rescue medicine, but it it not clear it if does more standard care as well as other countries.

Agreed. If I was in a near-fatal accident or developed an unknown form of cancer or a puzzling disease, yes, I want Dr. Gregory House's cutting-edge innovation to save me. Sure, I'd want to benefit all the high technology the richest country on earth can buy.

But if I need a procedure that takes less than 10 minutes of operating room time and no anesthesia AND is labor intensive in terms of doctor visits and monitoring AND is expensive because its elective and still relatively new -- like IVF with egg donation -- America medicine has only the following to recommend it:

Three weeks to get an appointment

Waits of 15 minutes to 2 hours to see your doctor

Huge amounts of paper work, dozens of required tests that are not actually necessary for your procedure but are there because of over-regulation and because hospitals/doctors get paid per procedure they perform.

What about costs?

The financial consideration can't be ignored: IVF with egg donation top out at $30,000 for everything, and includes me doing the hard work of finding a donor (at least for the clinics I contacted). In Turkey, they find the donor for you, and the whole thing is $10,000.

$30,000 and hours waiting to see your doctor, vs. $10,000, and you call and chat with your doctor any time, same-day appts...? Its not a hard decision.

I wrote the following to a friend who couldn't understand why I would voluntarily travel to what he considers a third-world country for a medical procedure.

Dear W,

My experience with the hospital in Istanbul and Cyprus was very positive. The treatment is *better* here than in the U.S. In the U.S., they don't want you as a patient. They are too busy and to concerned with making a profit. To make a profit, they have to keep patient volume high and minimize labor costs, meaning minimize time customers spend with medical personnel. It took me 4 days and 4 messages left at Boston IVF for them to finally call me when I was at home. Why? They refused to answer their phone because that is too costly. Their operating procedure is that they only call you, so you have to be at home or by your cell phone when they call. Would you voluntarily opt for that treatment if there was something better around?

In the U.S. hospitals, each hospital visit is many hours because you can wait 2 hours to see your doctor. Doctors in the U.S. use psychological propaganda to convince US consumers to expect this. I was so used to this treatment that I was shocked to get to Jinemed and our doctor met with us at exactly the appointed time. I wondered, why bother to haul books to read in the waiting room if they meet with you right away?

Whenever I had a question about what I was going thru, my Turkish friend would say, just call Munip, and she'd bring out her cell phone to call him on his cell phone. She would actually have a conversation with him right then! I was shocked. You can't call your doctor in the U.S. and expect to get him/her on the phone.

The day after my transplant treatment, I was obsessed by finding all the web pages I could to compare what I went through for the prior two weeks and what the best practices are at the leading medical fertility centers in the U.S. My doctors did everything that the U.S. centers brag that the do. Except one thing -- at Chicago Advanced Fertility center, they require that you rest on your back for 1 hour after transplantation so that eggs are not dislodged. In Cyprus, they made me not move for 3 hours, and gave me and H our private recovery room.

Question for readers: Why does Chicago Advanced Fertility allow/require women to vacate after 1 hour of bed rest?

The transplant itself is very simple. They only have to do a few things: grade the embryos, pick the best ones, and deposit them under ultrasound guidance in the uterus. Skill is required to know how to do this, but the Cyprus and Istanbul doctors may do this several times a day for a decade. If they make a mistake, no pregnancy. That is the worse that can happen.

[I wrote this last sentence to W because one of his concerns was: in a foreign country, what if they "mess you up" -- how could you sue and expect compensation?]

The procedure is as easy for the woman as an examination of the uterus with ultrasound. I was not given any anesthetic because it is uncomfortable, not painful. It is barely more complicated than a pap smear.

Final reason to go overseas: Its just easier. Here's how easy: I got a next-day appt. at Jinemed for my first consultation.

July 20 -- first consultation at Jinemed August 4 -- H gives sperm and they mix it up with the Cypriot Beauty August 7 -- embryo transfer August 8 -- I'm free to fly home or do whatever

Length of entire process: 20 days

What about payment? There was no 30 minute consultation with a finance officer. I began taking medicine and had 3 doctor visits before I ever paid a penny (via wire transfer from the U.S.). I never showed a single piece of identification, not a passport, nothing. I never filled out a single form until I signed a consent form for the transplant 5 minutes before the transplant.

During the 2 weeks before the transfer while my doctor was monitoring me with ultrasound every 4 days for the thickness of the edometrial lining, my Turkish friend wanted me and H to go sight-seeing with her in Didem, a 10-hour bus ride from Istanbul. My doctor said we could go for 5 days and I could be checked by his doctor in near-by Izmir! Amazing.

Bill Maher gets it right

2009-08-11T01:57:00.005-04:00

"… over the last 30-odd years, the Democrats have moved to the right, and the right has moved into a mental hospital. So what we have is one perfectly good party for hedge-fund managers, credit-card companies, banks, defence contractors, big agriculture and the pharmaceutical lobby - that’s the Democrats. And they sit across the aisle from a small group of religious lunatics, flat earthers and Civil War re-enactors … who actually worry that Obama is a socialist. Socialist! He’s not even a liberal! ... Democrats are the new Republicans” (Real time with Bill Maher June 19).

Yeah, if only. If only Obama all along had been a closet socialist and when he won election in November 2009, stripped off capitalist lackey covering and showed his true colors, to govern for 4 years implementing a program of reform the likes of which this country hasn't seen since, say, the Nixon era.

Its amusing... how did socialism get to be a bad word? I understand how communism became loaded with negative imagery because of 1950s-70s cold war rhetoric, and because of the authoritarian policies of the governments in Eastern Europe; but socialist? The socialists made Europe the relatively benign place to live that it is today (see this book).

The summer of my medical tourism

2009-08-10T11:09:00.005-04:00

Can a communist and his wife go overseas as medical tourists? Part 1.

I didn't actually feel that I was a medical tourist until the day after my procedure. After a week in Cyprus, H and I returned to Istanbul, with me carrying 5 creatures inside me.

H: "They're not really creatures, are they?"

me: "Okay. They're developing organisms."

Our dear Turkish friend Y met us at the airport to ferry us back to her apt where we would spend another two weeks before my return to my teaching semester in the U.S.

Y: "All my friends are calling me about the procedure, it will be illegal in Cyprus now, tomorrow, any day now, I was worried you didn't get it. They say it must be controlled, it's not right to have it different in Turkey and Cyprus."

Egg and sperm donation are illegal in Turkey like other predominantly Moslem countries. But it is illegal because the egg and sperm are not married to each other. In vitro fertilization with one's own eggs and one's husband's sperm is legal.

But I'd gotten it -- or *them*. My team in the operating room had been ebullient during the 10 minute transfer, no hint of any dawning regulation dimming their light bulbs. The energy was crackling in that room of vaguely glimpsed hospital equipment, an incubator pushed to the side, green walls. The young doctors and nurses under the guidance of their sage, Dr. S., were on a medical high. In these 10 minutes with my legs spread and all eyes on the ultrasound image, they were reaping the rewards of their years of studying, the privations of their family to send them to school, the hard work to build this clinic and make Cyprus and egg donation a top Google hit -- it was all coming to fruition as they reveled in the chance to create life.

Dr. S. normally speaks through a translator, but because of the importance of the moment he gave me some of his English. Full-five fingered palm spread, his eyes were black with glee: "Five embryos!" He exclaimed. And then he was down to business with the goop on my belly and wand (or whatever?) inside me, checking out the blastocyst landing zone: "çuk guzell!"

That's what he'd said 4 days before when before when the 4 estrogen patches on my ass had pumped my endometrial lining up to a young woman's 10 mm (from my old lady's starting place of less than 4).

çuk guzelle, what you say when the food is delicious. Güzelleme is a beauty parlor.

My mind was still reeling. Nurse A. has asked how many embryos we wanted transferred -- 3 or 4? Some couples only want 2, some only 1. If more than 2 embryos develop, embryo reduction is medically advised. Singleton births are the safest.

"I trust the doctor to decide," I'd said. Like the other egg donor recipients, I didn't want twins, but I didn't want another childless year. And whoa, he decided.

But even now I don't know for sure: Did he *transfer* 5 embryos, or had the petri dish *revealed 5 good embryos*? H would be happy, his sperm mixed well with the ova of the Cypriot beauty (as we called her).

A young doctor of the team appeared on my left to explain with his good medical school English, "It is very important for us now that you are relaxed." I relaxed as best as I could with the fullest bladder of my life (per Nurse A's instructions).

The team exhorted and exclaimed in Turkish the whole time and sooner even than I had imagined, those sweet words came from the buxom nurse who comforted/steadied me on my right side, "All finished now."

Climax over. The team was climbing down departing amidst their goodby's of "good luck" and "bon chance."

They got me onto the moving bed. Dr. S. himself joined the others to help roll me out of the operating room. His black eyes above his surgical mask bored deeply into mine for the 5 seconds before I was safely in the hallway. His final phrase: "12 days, blood test, every day same medication!" He may even have mimed 10 + 2 fingers for me, I can't remember, I just remember those black eyes, staring through the rims of my glasses, gleeful and triumphant, communicating something powerful and wordless to me or to something in me; high on life.

Every woman has a Daphne

2009-07-09T08:49:00.004-04:00

Lucinda Rosenfeld asserts, "Every woman has a Daphne in her life—a so-called “best friend” whose seemingly effortless successes never fail to make her feel like a Huge Loser." (See book review on Jezebel)

I don't have a Daphne in my life.

No one makes me feel like a huge loser.

I realize that some women do have a Daphne. Has the author done something useful by asking women to talk about these dysfunctional "friendships?"

The larger question for us to ask is: what gender issues make these dysfunctional relationships more common for women than for men? Is this due to women's famous low self-esteem? Is it influenced by consumer culture? Do elite males (all males? elites in general?) encourage this, on the idea that having women fight each other detracts them from fighting for equality with men, or fighting against classism or fighting for a more just society? (This is on analogy to the Marxist analysis of why it is helpful for the ruling class to encourage racism: The bosses grin as low-income whites and blacks wrestle over crumbs rather than uniting to overthrow an unfair social structure.)

The overall strategy to figuring out why the Daphne-Wendy dilemma exists can be the lawyer's strategy: "cui bono" -- who benefits, or follow the money.

If you have a dysfunctional friendship, it must be benefiting you in some way. So ask: how is it benefiting you?

My worry is that women distract themselves from achieving goals and reaching fulfillment because of the competitive game with other women. Social relationships are important, but so is developing your own interests and goals. Books like Rosenfeld's "I'm so happy for you" send the message that intense preoccupation with social relationships is necessary and socially normative. [Women's social ability is indeed awesome -- decades preoccupied with anything leads to intense skill; see examples in Baron-Cohen's book.]

Give that dyad a rest and get a hobby or join a cause. When you have some status via your achievements, friends will come.

West meets East

2009-07-06T23:09:00.013-04:00

These are called "The Boss" and "Contacts."

These icons were designed by Liu Young who was born in China and educated in Germany . Please click here for more visual jolts.

Blue --> Westerner
Red --> Asian/Chinese

No taxation without representation

2009-07-03T16:56:00.003-04:00

In June 1992, as a young psychology professor, I participated in a home-stay in the Palestinian Town of Beit Sahour, along with American undergraduates from Occidental College.

I chatted at length with a local psychology professor who was studying teens' construction of sexuality. I read his technical reports and saw that Palestinian teens' knowledge was reminiscent of a 1970s America. The intro psych textbook used at Beit Sahour university was an Arabic translation of the classic American text by Atkinson and Hilgard's Introduction to Psychology. The textbook I saw seemed a home-made job, with printed Arabic, but the pictures had been pasted in without captions translated. I wondered if this literal translation of an American text was the best way to teach psychology. Wouldn't one want to construct a book grounded in themes and examples from Arab or Palestinian society?

We Americans stayed in the homes of the town's Christian Palestinian middle class. We spent hours talking with members of the families; our students did clean-up project with teens from a high school. The kitchens had modern appliances; "my" family was eager to show me the video of their eldest daughters' wedding. I walked the dusty streets, gazing at the beautiful countryside. This wouldn't be a bad life, I thought to myself.

But once you start talking about business and livelihoods, other perspectives appear. The father of "my" family took me to his shop. He ran a building/construction store, kind of home-depot packed into one storefront room. Tools, building materials filled every available space. Somehow we began talking about the tax revolt of 1986. Because my parents were Palestinian activists, I'd heard of this years before as a college student, but it was good to hear of it from someone who participated.

"You know we pay taxes to the Israelis" -- four syllables, "Iss-rah-eee-lees" -- pronounced as quickly as one. "We pay for our own occupation. So we said No." And I remember what my parents had said: a letter sent to every American senator and congressman declaring a refusal to pay taxes to an illegal occupation. How could taxes be levied on a people who had no rights of citizenship, no right to even build a home? And not a mention of the revolt in the American press. All those carefully mailed letters sunk without a sound.

"So what happened when you all refused to pay taxes? What did the Israelis do?"

"They came and took everything, it was an empty room." And he flung out his arms to encompass the room and conjure up images of bear metal shelves and a cracked dusty concrete floor.

With his lip curled and his angry face, it seemed that even 6 years later he keenly felt the pain of that lost merchandise, of rebuilding back his stores of building supplies while still paying taxes to the occupiers.

I wish non-violent resistance would work. I wish that every suicide bomber would imitate the Buddhist monks who protested the Viet Nam war, and just light himself on fire (or detonate his bomb) in an empty city square or farmer's field, rather than cause others' deaths along with his own on a crowded bus. But I'm not the one who had my store stripped or my father imprisoned or my sister forced to give birth at a checkpoint en route to the hospital. My house and my kids' school haven't been bulldozed. My students don't have to read hasty translations of another country's psychology textbooks.

I've been getting a lot of email about a "new" move to boycott Israeli products. But hasn't the idea of disinvestment been around for a long time? And it hasn't worked. But if something different is happening now -- if there can finally be nonviolent resistance, praise be to the Universe.

I found the statement by Radhika Sainath, of The Electronic Intifada, arguing for a boycott, particularly powerful.

Upgrading from boyfriend to Husband

2009-06-16T00:20:00.003-04:00

Recently my friend A.K., an Israeli graduate student, forward me the the following geeky riff on the time-honored theme of men vs. women which appears to have made the rounds a year ago.

> Dear Tech Support,
>
> Last year I upgraded from Boyfriend 5.0 to Husband 1.0 and noticed a distinct slow down in overall system performance, particularly in the flower and jewelry applications, which operated flawlessly under Boyfriend 5.0.
>
> In addition, Husband 1.0 uninstalled many other valuable programs...

Find the rest of the original post here.... with males in particular fighting back about the short-comings of the many gf models here.

But before I had even thought to google around, my own response typed itself out.

Dear A.,
I have never seen that particular letter to Tech Support, very funny, thanks for sending.

Still, I can't really relate to her complaints. For various reasons, for years I never had the resources or system configuration to purchase Husband 1.0. I thus spent many years using different versions of the boyfriend program. All of them ran the undesirable applications like the Beer and Sports apps that Desperate ran into with Husband 1.0. Excuse my language, but Boyfriend 5.0, 6.0, etc were shitty programs. They were buggy, crashed the system almost daily, and required constant maintenance. its true that they sometimes did run the flower and jewelry applications, but those just didn't compensate for the overall drain on system resources and my worry that because boyfriend programs are traded around so often, they would have viruses. I spent a lot of time talking with girl friends about patches and work-arounds. I surfed the internet for advice about how to get better performance, but information is just too conflicting. I wondered if my system was basically incompatible with the boyfriend program.

What a relief when I finally upgraded to Husband 1.0. It was a big risk because of the huge cost and the fact that once installed, the husband program can not be uninstalled without exorbitant fees and the possibility of permanent system damage. But right from the beginning, Husband 1.0 was a big improvement over the Boyfriend program. Especially in the first year of use, Husband 1.0 installed no undesirable programs. I know other users were having difficulty with NBA 5.0 and NFL 3.0, but my version never ran those. Then in years 3, I started seeing Baseball 2305 being run, and in year 4, Basketball 89. However, I consider that the hours spent with these apps running in the background is acceptable 'downtime' given Husband 1.0's generally stellar performance, lack of system crashes and low drain on system resources. Indeed, Conversation 8.0 runs perfectly, and Housecleaning 2.6 has always had adequate performance. As an unexpected bonus, Husband 1.0 recently acquired a grocery shopping module and has began to run Cooking 1.0, 2.3 and 4.4. I clearly will not need a Husband upgrade given the versatility of 1.0.

I definitely wish I'd upgraded from Boyfriend earlier. I wonder if the rumors about Husband 1.0's bad performance are just an attempt by satisfied users to keep demand from rising, given that only limited copies of Husband 1.0 are available, so much so that plenty of users are eager to use the uninstalled versions?

Today Obama characterized end of American slavery as occurring thru non-violent means

2009-06-04T10:28:00.004-04:00

What about John Brown, famous abolitionist, freedom-fighter and terrorist? What about the Civil War?

Modern Day Slavery

2009-06-04T10:08:00.003-04:00

A lot more needs to be done to stop sexual slavery of children and adult women. The following spam showed up in my inbox today; The people said to be '14-20' years are coerced. Abduction, forced labor and rape are against the law. How to end human trafficking should be one of the biggest topics of the modern day. See the blog at change.org for more info. Can't a sting operation be planned, given that the slave owners promise to deliver slaves "at YOUR REGION" -- or maybe the Russian mafia is just too scary.

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Difference between novelists (writing is object d'art) and scientists (information uptake is key)

2009-06-01T11:46:00.007-04:00

Married to a former Eng prof who is now a novelist/playwright, I often get exposed to the contrast with two ways of thinking, which I end up trying to assimilate to some characterization as in my headline.

Here's a recent example.

The end-of-evening entertainment is whatever H has ordered from Netflix. This is a good thing for me as I lack H's encyclopedia knowledge of film running from popular to obscure. After a lot of Goddard movies (or "I am curious yellow" only dimly remembered because I fell asleep) last spring, we are into something more accessible: In Treatment.

I can have fun with this engaging shrink show just for Gabriel Byrne, but as one of my psychotherapist friends said, this is the best show about psychotherapy, so less energy wasted squirming and sighing over unrealistic popularizations a la Lie to me.

Whatever we're watching, whether it's the Goddard, Swedish foreign films, and even In Treatment, I often can't watch the whole thing because my sleep debt accumulated early in my professional career hasn't been paid off yet. So my plea is: let's stop watching now and watch the rest tomorrow. But this is uncomfortable for H.

H: "Let's not watch at all tonight, if you're going to fall asleep half way thru."

For a 2 hour movie, I say ahead of time, "Let's watch one hour tonite and one hour tomorrow."

H: "No, I prefer to watch the whole thing, so let's just do it when we have enough time."

I infer: for him, what's important is to get the whole experience, because that's the intention of the author/artist. For me, I'm okay with obtaining the information and the enjoyment while I'm watching.

Second example: reading printed matter.

H insists on "no skipping around" in a book and reading ahead is something decent people don't even joke about.

But most of my reading is journal articles. When I read a journal article, I'm in information-uptake mode, and often go straight to figures and tables after the abstract because I want to make up my own mind about the message. The author is providing information, not crafting an experience for me. I could skip around in the article; read one page now and take it up again next week.

So I propose:
The artistic/creative personality values the creation of an object d'art, with the aesthetic experience being diminished if it deviates from the intended form

For the scientist, information uptake is key, and the need to approximate the holistic experience designed by the author is less important.

What I do, as a scientist, is what I will call "transfer of a reading/watching habit" (borrowing from cognitive studies on transfer of information processing habits, such as the "script transfer hypothesis" which I'm working on with a grad student). I take my information-uptake habit from science reading, and transfer it to TV/films (and sometimes even novels).

Anyone else transfer their information uptake habits?

Women in tight dresses riding bikes in Amsterdam

2009-05-31T09:02:00.006-04:00

Check out these photos of men in business suits with briefcases on bikes and every other possible type of attire simply because bikes are the way to get around in Amsterdam.

And note the bloggers' commentary on how anomalous these scenes would be in the U.S.

The obvious inference is: in the U.S., biking is for exercise or leisure, not work/commerce. But why? Cars are expensive and who wants to battle the parking?

Yesterday I rode up on a skirt to the building where I would be giving a presentation at a conference (on my campus). Conference attendees were outside smoking and talking in between sessions and watched as I locked my bike and helmet and put on my badge to get in to the building. Why a skirt? Combination of look passably nicely dressed for conference, AND enjoy nice weather (no nylons; flat sandals).

Yes, I knew I am an anomaly. But I had just had a lovely 20 min ride in our currently great Boston weather. To shake off the negative social evaluation of being non-normative, I browse the scenes from Amsterdam (or think back fondly on biking in Beijing as in my prior blog post).

But check out this photo from chic cyclist.

Still remember, a decade ago, one of my students returned from a summer school where some of the profs knew me from grad school. Those profs had one question about me, "Does she still rider her bike?" "Still --" because I'm no longer a grad student?

Why is biking an okay commuter option for students but not the over-40 crowd?

I came up with the following reason for why biking is leisure, not a commuting option in the US:

The profit margin from from promoting biking for commuting is smaller than the profit margin that can be derived form promoting biking for leisure.

Or are there just too many other factors in U.S. culture that together converge to produce the striking contrast documented in the Amsterdam bike pages?

My Office Burned Down

2009-05-22T21:34:00.002-04:00

My office burned down. I was restless at home, unable to go to my familiar place. Limped around my husband's office. A day later mine was back, beautifully pristine, but every file drawer empty, desktop spotless.

Barely another blink. My office was crammed full again, but filled with old crap. I wandered around like a time traveler, picking up this or that item from 2006. Worse than the real thing, sea of silly notes, names that were once important, barely begun projects that I know are now beautiful, now finished.

But where is my real office? The one my father said was joined to my hip when I last traveled home. It's just in my brain, now, my brain that strikes, refuses to work without external memory. And that special kind of memory, long term.

I could try to reconstruct. Scattered CDs claim they have some of these projects in various stages. Collaborators and students can send me the manuscript drafts I once sent them. Unless its all returned intact from the magic of the clean room. I live in limbo.

Pack of six lean black women just raced by my window!

2009-04-20T11:45:00.004-04:00

Six Black Women in the lead -- one doesn't see that very often, tailed by a lone white woman. Then a long gap, and the other white women appeared.

Ok, why focus on their race? ha ha. No pun intended. I dunno... Not an everyday sight, that's all. And now the men are sweeping by.

Yeah, I've complained that H and I live in a student ghetto and major homelessness hangout with raucous partyers and drunks making noise all night long.

But once a year there's another kind of raucous yelling on our street -- The Boston Marathon!

Huge burst of cheers -- what could that be? Who'd get more cheers than the Ethiopian female frontrunners?

OMG -- a guy with amputated legs, running on steel limbs!!! I'll try to find pix.

Update. Couldn't fit a pic of the amputee running on steel legs, but this report about amputees in the wheelchair category is pretty chilling (*15*):

Minard is one of 15 Iraq war veterans - all double amputees - slated to compete tomorrow in the Boston Marathon. They are part of the Achilles Freedom Team of Wounded Veterans, run by the New York-based Achilles Track Club, which works to help disabled men and women compete in mainstream athletic events.

Should we expect more workplace shootings in today's economy?

2009-04-19T09:52:00.004-04:00

One of the bloggers I frequently read (indeed, her blog is my home page -- great mix of psychological insight, wit and lighter fare) will be speaking on the Today Show about the important topic of "layoff etiquette." This involves things like:

What etiquette dilemmas do the unemployed and their still-employed friends face? What awkward situations have you encountered because of a friend's unemployment, or your own?

Discussion of the 10,000 laid-off per day are big in my household write (oops) now because H .... no he wasn't laid off or even threatened with such (H doesn't work outside the home) is writing a play which is set in 'The Present" against the back-drop of the current economic crisis. The play features a workplace shooting (or at least the threat of one, final act not completed yet).

So my brain has been spinning the etiquette question a couple different ways.

What should one do if a friend who lost their job confesses that they are so tired of the unfairness of our current economic system that they want to go postal -- the bosses need to pay too, etc, like the old rhyme from the rank and file in Vietnam, "Turn the guns around, shot the bosses down"... Advise them to work for change in a nonviolent manner? Why shoot yourself in the foot (head) just to have the satisfaction of killing your boss first?

There is a provocative book that says that workplace shootings are a way that frustrated workers vent their anger at an unjust social system,

from wikipedia:

Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond is the title of a book by Mark Ames, which examines the rise of office and school shootings in the wake of the Reagan Revolution, and compares the shootings to slave rebellions....Ames argues that "killing sprees" at U.S. workplace and schools are acts of political insurgency rather than ordinary crimes or the actions of disturbed individuals.

Indeed, Mark Ames also wrote a story on this last month: "Workplace Massacre in Alabama: Did Endless Downsizing and Slashed Benefits Cause the Rampage?"

Ames writes: "But of all the inexplicable circumstances surrounding the murder spree, one of the oddest has to be the way Alabama authorities went from focusing hard on solving the shooter's motive to suddenly dropping the issue like a hot potato and running away from the scene of the crime, as if they didn't like what their investigation produced..."

Product Placement -- in short stories??

2009-04-04T14:14:00.003-04:00

I still vaguely remember the first time I heard about the nefarious, evil and disturbing practice of product placement. Was this 20 years ago? The prospect was being discussed that not only might we have ads at 10-minute breaks during TV shows, but the TV show producers would receive payment (or at least free products) if they positioned these products actually on their show. Wow. Like - someone drinks a coke, and that's an ad! But it still didn't seem possible. That stuff only happened in exaggerated scare-ya stories, like the book 1984. Then the idea loomed that it could even happen on movies, which were suppose to be ad-free, since we paid admission to see them. How dare they! And how manipulative!l

What a yawn those concerns seem today.

And how successful is that product-placement meme. There are always new boundaries to break. A tavern in Boston (and Harpoon Brewery?) is sponsoring a short-story contest for anyone who can incorporate the proper name Harpoon into their story (and the words pint, pen and Bukowksi, who was the most flagrantly alcoholic of the past centuries of alcoholic writers).

I do like the short-story contest idea, but not in order to sell products. There could be contests around things we care about -- recovery from alcoholism, for example. But could such stories increase any one's profit margin?

H said he couldn't submit to the contest. He wants to smash capitalism, not take his cut.

me: We must live in the world we want to change?

I suggested one could insert Harpoon as a character's name. Harpoon Bukowski, an acoholic's nickname, ha ha. Pint doesn't have to refer to a pint of beer. It's simply a unit of measurement -- you've eaten a pint of ice cream, right? Harpoon Bukowski could make a reference to his pint-sized daughter trying to write, barely bigger than her pen.

H: No, it's still product placement

It's interesting that all one's needs is $1,000 bucks (approx) and a website and one can sponsor a short-story contest. I've given away plenty more than a thou in charity of various forms. I've gotta tell my do-gooder parents about this idea...

Anger at management bubbling over -- Scenes from Goddard's Tout Va Bien

2009-04-02T11:28:00.003-04:00

Some of you movie connoisseurs may know about "Tout Va Bien," also known as "All Is Well." This is Jean-Luc Goddard's fictional account of the labor disputes and strikes by French workers in 1968.

The real-life version updated to 2009 is now appearing in towns across France...

Caterpillar bosses held hostage
Lizzy Davies in Paris
April 2, 2009
FRENCH bosses were given a fresh reminder of the dangers facing them during the economic downturn this week as angry factory workers in Grenoble barricaded their offices and took four managers hostage.

Protesting against job losses and meagre redundancy payouts, local employees of the US firm Caterpillar decided to take matters into their own hands and locked their superiors inside the plant's management headquarters.

The latest in a surge of "bossnappings" across the country, the incident aimed to bring a more satisfactory conclusion to the recently announced round of blood-letting in which more than 700 workers are to be laid off.

"We are holding them in the director's office," Benoit Nicolas, a union official, said during the stunt, or sequestration, as it is known in France. The hostages included Nicolas Polutnick, the factory director, the head of human resources, and the head of personnel. "They are a little shocked," Mr Nicolas said.

The bossnapping was a clear sign of France's reawakening industrial restlessness amid the financial crisis.

Far from a one-off, the Caterpillar crisis was the third since last month. Last week the head of a factory run by the US chemicals giant 3M was held for 24 hours in a meeting room.

The chief executive of Sony France, Serge Foucher, had to spend the night in a conference room as workers blocked exits with tree trunks, demanding improved redundancy packages.

Bossnapping is regarded as the ace card played by a workforce at the end of its tether.

Obama did something right -- may be serious about fighting slavery

2009-03-29T10:09:00.005-04:00

Its been disappointing to hear that Obama is continuing the Bush administration's war plans, although they retired the phrase "War on Terror." This raises the fear that there was no change to believe in.

But good news came in recently from Change.org. Change.org combines social networking (complete with friend requests) with social activism of the typical liberal kind, for which I am a softie (even though my communist husband says they make things worse by supporting the current regime, ok....). Anti-human-trafficking blogger Amanda Kloer, who works full time as an abolitionist, writes:

Obama Nominations Lou de Baca as Traffkicking Office Head

This week President Obama nominated long-time, tenacious human trafficking prosecutor Lou de Baca to lead the State Department's Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, a position sometimes called "America's Anti-Slavery Czar"..... de Baca's background is heavily focused on labor trafficking... I am thrilled that President Obama chose de Baca, demonstrating a strong commitment to making that office serious about fighting trafficking. He is an amazing prosecutor, a dedicated anti-trafficking professional..

I just taught a class on international sex trafficking to my developmental psychology class and may post more here shortly. What are your questions?

Loss of a first language

2009-03-28T10:06:00.005-04:00

For the last decade one of my research projects has been bilingualism. A key question is loss of fluency of the mother tongue for children of immigrants, and what family socialization and other practices lead to maintenance. English almost always becomes rapidly the dominant language for children who arrive in the U.S. by age 9. Mixed dominance occurs for arrivals between age 10 and 16, and first language superiority (and low acquisition of English) then is the most frequent (although not universal) fate of older immigrants.

I just stumbled across an interesting piece of short fiction which dramatizes in a couple handful of words events from age 5 to 25 and the disparate language learning trajectories of child and parents. Enjoy!

By Samuel Lee

my foreign mouth embarrassed the teachers. my jumbled words gave people sad faces. so wrong these words of mine. even the mentally retarded girl would not talk to me. just looking at my garbled mouth made her slap herself. and my writing. oh no. my writing made the teachers cry. shaking their heads. all the time.....

Communism: a viable alternative?

2009-03-17T20:21:00.003-04:00

As the epoch of liberal capitalism and the free market falls apart, the question of an alternative must be re-opened
by Bernard Keenan

Let's get one thing out of the way to begin with: history is back in fashion. A generation on from Francis Fukuyama's claim that the fall of the Soviet Union marked the "end of history", the epoch of liberal capitalism and the free market fell apart in spectacular style during a few short months last autumn. As jobs disappear and anger rises, the bare bones of ideology that prop up the present system are exposed.

The speedy panic with which our governments agreed to throw billions of pounds away to restore "confidence" suggests that the dream is over and we are awakening to a strange new socialism, in which an increasingly authoritarian government has taken public control of financial capitalism in order to save it from itself. We read today that equal pay reviews no longer matter. Migrants are left to starve on the streets as the government heads off the far right by pandering to it. And so it's precisely now that the question of an alternative must be re-opened.

Against this backdrop, Birkbeck College this weekend hosted a symposium on the idea of communism. Originally planned as a meeting of philosophers and those who enjoy hearing their debates, the unexpected material circumstances of history instead gave the event a genuine sense of urgency. Even the BBC came to hear Slavoj Zizek, Alain Badiou, Jacques Ranciere, Michael Hardt, Toni Negri, and others speaking on the possibilities and challenges of reinventing the communist ideal today.

The conference was happily free of dogmatism. No one on the stage was there to represent a particular party or doctrine. There were disagreements, but at heart was a simple proposition. Communism is an idea that has been with us in different forms for thousands of years, as Terry Eagleton pointed out. The task is now to think what the concepts of egalitarian voluntarism, self-organisation, common ownership of common means of production, abolition of class-structured society, and freedom from state power can mean today.

It's a bold statement, declaring oneself a communist. The cultural revolutions of 1968 were the beginning of the end of the party-state, when programmatic communism was replaced by a more postmodern, abstract idea of "the left". Freedom of thought and nomadic thought undid the old certainties of Marxist political knowledge. No one has quite figured out how to replace them, and this perhaps more than anything else can account for the current weakness of the left, even as capitalism is in crisis: what is to be done?

First, the question of the role of the state and the economy remains open. While Judith Balso, Toni Negri and Alain Badiou insist on creating new political movements at a distance from the state, Zizek and Bruno Bosteels point to the experiences of Bolivia and Venezuela as contemporary proof that by taking power, a progressive radical movement can survive even against overwhelming reactionary forces. For Zizek, to reject the idea of a revolutionary state in the absence of a clear alternative is a cop-out.

However, such considerations all seem to beg the question of how to organise. It is difficult to imagine a new Communist party, but without one, the idea of communism remains just that: a quasi-religious article of faith. This was perhaps Eagleton's point when he observed that it is not so difficult to imagine a communism of scarcity, foisted upon us by disaster rather than rapture.

Perhaps the true question is: why communism? It does no harm to remember that for Marx, communism was not something anachronistic and programmatic. Marx insisted on the simple idea that we and no one else are responsible for remaking the world. Communism can only be enacted from what really exists. The party-states attempted to bend society to match some abstract idea. A true philosophy of communism cannot provide all the answers, because it has not yet encountered the problems.

Separating the promise of communism from the disasters of the 20th century is no easy task. But it feels necessary. Already we know that choices will have to be made and sides taken. Impending ecological disaster suggests that this could be our last chance to do so. If another world is possible, it will happen in action, not abstract theory. The first choice is very simple: to begin.

Letter from China; movie "Obama Deception"?

2009-03-17T08:37:00.004-04:00

On one of my last evenings in China during my sabbatical in Spring 2008, I was collecting data on emotional expressions by sitting outside a small classroom as my participants filled out a survey (all in Mandarin; thank you my dear English major assistants), and on completion they gave me a shy thank you or tried out some English, and I handed over a 10 yuan note -- except one student stayed and sat on plastic chairs with me and talked for the remaining hours as my participants came and went. We later went to a restaurant and he helped me order and we talked for 2 more hours and 2 days later I was on a plane for Hong Kong...

Hi, Prof.
How are you going these days? Sorry for that long time we have not touch since I was always immersed in routines that I confronted. During the past half year, I fortunately involved in Olympic Games in Beijing 2008 and enjoyed nearly 2 month over there. Also, I as exempted into the Hong Kong Model United Nations 2009 in HK this year. All of the above I mentioned extremely enlarged my view of point on global business and borden my perspective of international politics. Here I have some experience to share with. Wish it would not bring extra burdens for your busy teaching calendar.

Congratulations for the world hero Barack Obama inaugurated as the US president this year. As most of friends, I was excited for the victory of democracy and free humanity. However, at the same time, I still remember the point you taught me that the corruptness really exists in great American. Your assertion, frankly speaking, shocked me and even influenced my sense of worth positively. Never had I expected the US---the dream land of freedom and equality in the world---has such a big problem in recent years.

After that moment, I had the desire to explore the truth. I talk to my foreign tutor in my university, who is also a good friend of mine, how you feel about China and why you leave your homeland at the age of 60. Unexpectly, he response with a negative voice that US is not a perfect place and he can felt the vigor emerging in China. Similarly, I felt the regret from the bottom of his heart and that impulse my curiosity toward the deeper research in the different and similarity between China and the US.

Under his guidance, I read some books and watched some movies. They are fantastic and you may never know how excited I am right now because I seem to find out something unbelievable and want to share my excitement with you. Money Master, a firm made for recovering the history of American real history that several American President were assassinated for their efforts to be against banking system. OBAMA DECEPTION, wrote by Webster Tarpley and directed by Alex Jones, also a film made recently and I just watched, reveal the secrets behind the executive operation in the US and how the Non-government organizations and off-shore banks control the policy maker. The film advocates the world citizens to stop the establishment of global rules and refuse the dictatorship. This assertion makes people upset, but maybe real. I wonder did you focus on these films and have the same feeling.

In this film, the author quotes what President Thomas Jefferson wrote to the secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin (1802), that “I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the band] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.” I hope it will never appear in US.

Here is my newly assumption. I consider you may be interested in this field and glad to share my points with you. Sincerely wish it would be disturbing. And you do not need to response if you were so busy over there.

Best regards

Readers --Have any of you seen these movies? Advice, comments?

P.S. When I spoke with this student, I talked about the US as a kleptocracy, especially the Bush administration, but I did not mean to convey that kleptocrats only came to power in "recent years."

In which I draw on my knowledge of Evolutionary Psychology to respond to a student journalist

2009-02-25T00:41:00.005-05:00

Dear Professor,

I am writing a newspaper article on how views of relationships and dating differs between genders--specifically at BU where there is a higher percentage of males than females. For example, in the College of Communication there females make up 70% of the school.

1) HOW DO VIEWS OF RELATIONSHIPS AND DATING DIFFER BETWEEN GENDERS?

It sounds like you already have some ideas below this, as listed in 2-5. Your questions in 3-5 would be answered "yes" by psychologists who belong to the field called evolutionary psychology (see David Buss' book, The evolution of desire.) However, the evolutionary psychologists note that this is just a yes "on average". Both genders pursue both short and long-term mating strategies.

Note: I can't condone using terms like girls/guys. Everyone is over 18, so let's refer to women and men.

3) DO GUYS (ESPECIALLY YOUNG COLLEGE MEN) PREFER TO DATE MULTIPLE PEOPLE RATHER THAN BE IN A RELATIONSHIP?

The strongest gender difference in mating strategies appears to be men's greater preference for short term partnerships and casual sex. But you specifically mentioned "young college men." There is no evidence that young college men want to date multiple partners more than older men. Young men can fall deeply and monogamously in love, while older men can enjoy having more than one partner. The strongest age-related change for sex/dating appears with women, not men. With maturity, women are more sexually assertive. While a young woman might feel ashamed and chastened to hear her casual sex partner say, "You better not do this often or you'll get a bad reputation" an older women will find such a statement ridiculous.

4) DO YOU THINK THE RATIO OF GIRLS TO BOYS AT BU MAKES IT HARDER FOR GIRLS TO FIND A STEADY BOYFRIEND?

Seems to be the same question as 5.

5) DO YOU THINK THE FACT THAT THERE ARE MORE GUYS THAN GIRLS AT BU LEADS GUYS TO "DATE AROUND" RATHER THAN CHOOSING TO BE IN A STEADY RELATIONSHIP?

Many researchers have noted that a shortfall in desirable men leads women to accept dating terms that are less than than their ideal, where "dating terms" includes exclusivity and prospect of commitment (see Richard Posner's book Sex and Reason). In a fascinating study published in his book Where have all the liberal gone, James Flynn notes that one group of women in the U.S. has a surprising amount of power to bring men to the altar: Hispanic women. Is this just Hispanic family values? Flynn says no,and points to the large surplus in Hispanic men due to greater male immigration from Latin America. In contrast, African American women have limited ability to insist on marriage, because of the vast shortfall of desirable African American males, given under-employment and incarceration of African American males.

If one wants to extrapolate from these studies to unequal sex ratio at BU, then yes, men at BU have the best market terms. If women at BU don't want to accept those terms, they can easily find better market conditions, by dating outside of BU, sticking with BU but dating women.

2) IN A RELATIONSHIP, DO GIRLS BECOME MORE ATTATCHED THAN GUYS?

I answered this question last because it is the most controversial. Certainly, males want females to believe "yes." And... Based on the evolutionary psychology and market views discussed above (both male dominated fields), one would expect that answer to be yes. But while men are more willing to have multiple partners and casual sex than women are, there is no evidence that they are less attached. Men can become obsessively, crushingly infatuated and fixated, as can women. Women can also be aloof, or be in long term relationships where they are the less-in-love partner.

There's a lot more to be said (and researched) about this. I propose that there are no overall gender differences in the ability to become intensely attached, because, from the evolutionary psychology standpoint, both men and women need long-term (i.e., non-casual) mating strategies. Men need to become attached for 2 reasons. If they are low-status, they need to be obsessed in order to take the "love conquers all" risks that either get them killed or get them laid with possibly a baby on the way (and their genes triumphant) even if shooting their wad was the last thing they did. If they are high-status, they need to be obsessed in order to have the emotional energy to mate-guard. Mate-guarding is helpful to ensure paternity certainty and to protect their investment in a high-quality female (and to justify that investment).

Why females become attached is less clear. The evolutionary psychologists argue it is to obtain male resources, including co-parenting effort; that pair-bonded females out-produced single moms because male would provision meat and so on.

To return to what can be our clearest conclusion at present: the strongest difference in dating behavior for young people continues to be young people's susceptibility to societal dictates of what is expected for each gender. Society still has a double standard, in which women are stigmatized for casual sex and males get points for "scoring." With age, these societal views have a weaker effect as individuals gain confidence to pursue the mating strategies that reflect who they genuinely are.

We need more Darwinian feminists... I volunteered to give a talk on "Feminists read Darwin" at my university when a call for talks was passed around; no word back yet on that...

My former student is founder of "Achieve in Africa"

2009-02-18T00:03:00.002-05:00

I am a former student of yours. I took Developmental Psychology in the Spring of 2007 as a sophomore. In my final year here at Boston University, I co-founded a non-profit organization called Achieve in Africawith another BU student, Alyssa Snow. Starting this organization has been something I have wanted to do ever since I visited Africa two summers ago (as a sophomore) and saw children thirsty for knowledge, but lacking the facilities and supplies needed for a proper education.

The mission of the organization is to give children in Africa the ability to achieve in school by providing the facilities and supplies needed for a proper education.

For pictures and information about this school and the organization, please visit www.achieveinafrica.org.

After graduation in May, I will be traveling to Tanzania in June to oversee construction.
In Swahili, "Pamoja, Tutafaulu." Together, we will achieve.

Brendan Callahan
President/Founder
Achieve in Africa, Inc.
bcallahan@achieveinafrica.org

Iraq War Ends -- revisiting the "July 4 2009" New York Times Spoof

2009-02-16T13:13:00.004-05:00

If you didn't hear about the spoof of the New York Times back in November 2008 (surely there was a lot going on), its worth taking a look, and reading about the press coverage of the goals of the "pranksters" who put it together.

Now, United for Peace and Justice has teamed up with The Yes Men, who spent 6 months to make the 14-page NYT hoax.

They're selling the remaining copies for $50, as a way to raise money for United For Peace and Justice. Call the UFPJ to order a copy.

"I really do not understand what socialism entirely."

2009-02-14T15:43:00.004-05:00

Excerpt from Rate Your Students:

I teach the U.S. history survey, and my students are reading Howard Zinn as one of their texts. They were asked the following question as part of their homework on a Zinn reading:

"Why were workers attracted to socialism? Why did businessmen find it threatening? What did it threaten?"

I got this response: "I really do not understand what socialism entirely. The word seems to be thrown around in literature and politics that I really cannot grasp what it's supposed to mean. So to save myself the agony of doing hours of reading, I'm not going to answer this question. Sorry."

The proffie then reacts in shock along the lines of what are students coming to these days and you can read about that on RYS.

I wonder if that there is something about how socialism is mentioned in the contemporary media (what the student refers to as literature and politics) that created a reaction in this student that is different than if, say, the homework had been about some other political movement: neoliberalism, environmentalism, global warming, intelligent design, etc.

H thought yes: "Socialism is a swear word."

Or: the S word is mentioned rarely, and when it is mentioned, not explained or discussed in a way that the concept can be grasped from context.

Electronic resources and time-sinks of the young and the restless

2009-02-09T09:46:00.005-05:00

"The internet giveth and taketh away"

In terms of giveth, I was wondering if readers had any reaction to this site for teens: "That's not cool" -- advice on how to navigate the electronic social world.

Topics include "where do you draw your digital lines" and "call out cards" (some of these are pretty mean -- are they jokes?)

In terms of taketh away, a sophomore writes about pulling the plug on Facebook. College kids tell me about feeling hurt when a friend greets them in real life with "What's up?" -- the immediate implication is that the friend doesn't know they just broke up with a bf or came out as gay -- with the consequent feeling of rejection: they're not even reading my FB page.

"I couldn't make the final because I wasn't finished with the rock wall back at the dorm"

2009-02-04T23:54:00.007-05:00

(Title from Rate your Students)

Hm.... The students at the university where I teach have a chic apartment complex called "Student Village" which appears to fit the profile of the new luxurious dwellings for undergrads that are being developed across the country. I decided to follow the ink from RYS and check out Time Magazine's photos essay on "The Evolution of the College Dorm."

Indeed, I soon found featured the picture of the rock wall (and description below) at the "Fit Rec" at my very own university! (the campus Fit Rec is too huge, multi-floored and posh for my taste so I canceled my membership after a few months, plus I pay less at Gold's Gym).

From Time:
An Uphill Battle
Tanning salons, pool waterfalls, Mongolian grills, and hot tubs large enough for 15 people are some of the amenities offered at colleges across the country — like Boston University's new 35-foot climbing wall. Sandy Baum, a senior analyst for the College Board, says students are driving the trend: "It's not so much colleges wanting to be country clubs, it's students who want to live in country clubs." At this summer's conference for the Association of College & University Housing Officers, administrators swapped stories about the more outlandish requests they've received. (One tale involved a freshman who wanted to know about housing accommodations for his butler, who had accompanied him to the dorms).

H wanted to know: How much does it cost to live in "Student Village"? Do students who can't afford student village have to either commute from home or live in the (now I realize how aptly named) "student ghetto" of neighboring Allston/Brighton (where in fact we live)? Alston was (strangely) recently named one of the worst places to live in America.

Now, I have never toured the John Hancock Student Village or been closer than seeing it while riding my bike down Commonwealth Ave., but when I went looking for a photo, found this amateur video. The view is so beautiful (and apartment so large) I felt like crying...

I really like Obama, but then, I'm a craven reformist...

2009-01-31T08:54:00.003-05:00

Recent conversation between husband and wife, chez nous:

Me: And then Obama said (I paraphrase), "It doesn't matter whether government is big or small, what matters is if government works!" Wow! And he excoriated those CEOs who make those 40 million a year salaries! He lay into them! I've been complaining about that for years.

H: Yeah, He's telling the CEOs: Stop fucking it up for the rest of us.

Me: The rest of us?

H: The rest of the ruling class! Obama is telling the CEOs, You're being stupid. You're showing too much bling!

Me: Aww... you mean, the CEOs, in their ostentation, are showing the kind of utter disregard for the underclass, the kind of contempt, that would galvanize the oppressed to revolt? Or just such lack of awareness? Marie Antoinette unwittingly put her name on the list for the guillotine when she showed such immense misunderstanding of the class structure of her society, when she told the working poor of Paris that if they didn't have enough bread, they should eat cake.

H: (felt my comparison glossed over too many distinctions and tactfully ignored it) "The problem in America today isn't how much the ruling class pay each other every year, $40 million vs $4 million vs $1 million -- the problem is that they exist."

Me: You mean, Obama is helping, helping mightily, he'll ease some misery at the bottom, he'll let the current rule continue.

H: That's why the ruling class let him become president. He knows his job. If he's good at it, all the better for them.

Karl Marx makes cover of TIME magazine

2009-01-28T08:13:00.005-05:00

But only on the overseas edition -- not fit for domestic consumption?

In fact, only the European edition -- the covers for the U.S., Asia and South Pacific featured the Obama oath of office http://www.time.com/time/magazine/europe/

The story Europeans want to read (or get to read) is (excerpt):

Rethinking Marx
By PETER GUMBEL
As we work out how to save capitalism, it's worth studying the system's greatest critic.

From Washington to Vladivostok, the task of warding off financial collapse and economic depression is now the overwhelming priority for government leaders, central bankers and regulators everywhere. Solutions differ, but all agree that the current situation is both dire and extremely perplexing: nobody younger than 80 has experienced such a rapid decline in global confidence and economic activity. Markets have failed, and in so doing they have destroyed the conventional wisdom about how to run an efficient economy. It's as if an intellectual fog has descended, and the global positioning system has broken down, leaving the world to grope its way out as best it can. "Ask the experts what to do," says Tony Blair, the former British Prime Minister, "and the most honest reply is 'I don't know.' "
Searching the library for ideas, many have rediscovered the 1930s policy prescriptions of John Maynard Keynes, who advocated massive government spending programs of the type now being promoted by U.S. President Barack Obama, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and others. Other great thinkers of the past are also being rediscovered, from Adam Smith to John Kenneth Galbraith. But hovering out there in the fog, unavoidably, is the towering specter of Karl Marx, the grandfather of political economists, whose damning critique of capitalism's inadequacies played an outsized role in world history for a century after his death in 1883... if you leave aside the prophetic, prescriptive parts of Marx's writings, there's a trenchant diagnosis of the underlying problems of a market economy that is surprisingly relevant even today. Marx, too, lived through an era of rapid globalization. (A famous passage in The Communist Manifesto, which he wrote with Friedrich Engels in 1848, is almost uncannily prescient about globalization's costs and benefits.) He was moved by glaring inequalities between rich and poor that are more topical than ever today. He thought work should bring personal fulfillment, and that labor should not be treated as a simple commodity — foreshadowing today's controversies over outsourcing and poor working conditions in developing countries. He wondered whether the middle class would be squeezed out of existence. And he identified how profits were taking an ever bigger share of the economy at the expense of wages, just as they are once again today.

Poetry today: All dressed up with nothing to say?

2009-01-25T17:08:00.003-05:00

There are so many important things we should be discussing. I want to take up a comment by Dan from last month about Robert Hare's book, "Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go To Work." I want to discuss video games to teach economic systems that are alternatives to the free market. I could discuss my new academic studies of Aspergers syndrome. I could discuss how students are smarter than they used to be. We could discuss a million things.

But with those promissory notes, right now let me share something out of the blue: the state of contemporary poetry. I was a bit underwhelmed by the inaugural poem of Elizabeth Alexander, but hey, the themes that can be conveyed in a poem for an incoming president are so highly constrained that its not worth complaining about the poem's tepid content.

But let me complain about this poem, in the highly prestigious magazine, The Atlantic. Its about the secret life of a needle missing in a haystack. Wow. I was inspired to write a response (BTW, I know that poems that rhyme are considered Ewwwww).

All dressed up

I took my peek at poetry today,
Talented dears, you're all dressed up with nothing to say.

I know its art, let's emphasize form,
Until barely glimpsed abstractions become the norm.

We can almost forget, because you write so well,
That at the heart of the act you've so little to tell.

Why so little to tell....? We've been beaten down by the culture (by something?) into apapthy and momentary hedonism? Or poetry is yet another potent stirrer of human imagination and action, so it has had to be neutralized - or housebroken?

Revolution or Reform -- a TV drama?

2009-01-18T13:45:00.002-05:00

Q: Why is the title of your blog "I married a communist"?

A: The title of anything is its highest priced real estate. Words accrue a lot of their meanings from how they are habitually used. Today, the word "communist" evokes the concepts of secret police, authoritarian regimes and the oppression in the so-called former communist countries of Eastern Europe. But there was a time, in the 19th and early 20th century, when communists were understood as the good guys.

Q: So did you really marry one of the good guys?

A: Yes, see photographic evidence at Trotsky's grave.

Q: Aren't you worried that the title will be off-putting to readers?

A: I have readers?! Thank you!

Q: How do your parents feel about you marrying a communist?

A: My parents? They're tickled pink.

Q: Really?

A: My father still remembers the Great Depression. He clips coupons and reminds everyone of the household slogan from my childhood, "We don't buy anything that's advertised on TV." His rejoinder to any story of woe is a shoulder shrug, accompanied by "Well, that's free enterprise for you!"

Q: Mother?

A: Your daughter gets married for the first time at age 42?

Q: Why do you hate free enterprise so much?

A: Any system of social organization will have its advantages and disadvantages, and some individuals will benefit more from one system than from another. I'm in favor of an egalitarian system, for reasons articulated by Rawls and others philosophers (in particular, see the argument called the Veil of Ignorance). Capitalism is explicitly anti-egalitarian (think of the board game, Monopoly). I think humans can do better. Its time to start a dialogue about what kind of society we want to live in.

Q: What about the fact that very few people seem to be interested in criticizing capitalism, even though there are plenty of conversations about improving how humans live?

A: For this question, the old lawyer's strategy of asking "cui bono" applies. Why aren't many people talking about X? Well, whose interest is served by lack of conversation about X?

Q: How to get the dialogue going?

A: I suggest a TV series, of the quality of The Sopranos. The dramatic back-drop is socio-political revolution/reform in America set in the current day or perhaps a few years in the future. There's been financial collapse, rioting -- the country is in crisis. What direction to take? Characters have conflicting views and agendas. Post your comments here about some helpful story lines.

Tax payers lost 700 billion in one drunken pull of the roulette wheel...

2009-01-15T11:04:00.004-05:00

I was skeptical, and indeed, horrified at the thought of giving $700 billion dollars to the banks, but it turned out even worse than anyone thought...

National Public Radio's Tom Ashbrook discusses today how the billions disappeared into bank vaults; no one knows where the money went (some say it went to the Saudis who had invested in the banks) not a dime went for home owners,

Jim Hightower is even harsher. Bankers used the money to buy up small banks, which isn't good for consumers because it reduces competition and means bank fees will be higher than ever. The following is from Hightower's report. Paid subscription needed to read the full thing, so let me excerpt extensively.

Lawmakers meekly rushed out $700 billion for them, a taxpayer gimmie nearly 30 times larger than the one Detroit was seeking. What plan did the bankers present? What explanation did they give of how they'd spend our money?

None. They simply dispatched their designated consigliere, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson (formerly the reigning prince of Goldman Sachs), to hand Congress a three-page ultimatum. It contained not a single specific or promise of results. It was, in effect, a hold-up note.

But that $700 billion was just for openers. It has not been widely reported, but the total Wall Street bailout--counting government loans, stock purchases, debt guarantees, and backdoor handouts by the Treasury and the Federal Reserve--is nearly $8 trillion. That's eight followed by 12 zeroes!

What have we gotten for this gargantuan giveaway? Zip. The rationale for indiscriminately pouring public funds into big banks, investment houses, insurance giants, hedge funds, and the like was that our money would "unclog" the financial markets, allowing credit to flow again to businesses and consumers-as though America is having a plumbing problem and our national treasury is a bottomless vat of Liquid Plumr.

But, guess what? It didn't work. Credit is still not flowing. As a result, an economic crisis has swiftly spread across the country, including a rash of business bankruptcies, construction shutdowns, massive job losses--and, yes, a credit crunch that is crushing auto sales, auto dealers and suppliers, auto makers, auto workers...and Detroit.

The reason that the Wall Street bailout has not worked is quite elementary: Congress and the White House attached no requirement whatsoever that the recipients of our money use it to make loans! It seems that Washington didn't feel that it should "interfere" in the decisions of the financial deities.

Country rubes attending their first carnival sideshow are not this gullible.

With no conditions put on the phenomenal taxpayer windfall they received, the wizards of Wall Street have chosen to spend it selfishly, rather than for any public purpose. They've already used billions to buy out some of their competitors, a perverted use of bailout funds that will reduce our banking choices and raise the bank fees we're charged. Other billions have gone to the banks' big investors, to executive pay, to pad the bottom line, or simply into bank vaults to be hoarded--while America remains starved for capital.

Even more amazing, the very same Congress that harrumphed about trusting Detroit automakers with taxpayer money was not even told where most of the $8 trillion Wall Street bailout went. Which banks got government backing, and how much did each get? That's a secret, Congress was told by the Bushites. What are they doing with the money? We can't tell you, say those who doled out the cash.

Moving from amazing to reckless audacity, Secretary Paulson has even taken the law into his own hands. Last September, he unilaterally, secretly, and illegally nullified a federal law because it was in the way of his unauthorized plan to help big banks take over smaller ones. Hank's autocratic decree allows banks to use offshore tax dodges that Congress banned 23 years ago. This executive maneuver provides an under-the-table tax subsidy for predatory banks wanting public financing to absorb their rivals--a subsidy that will cost our national treasury upwards of $140 billion even as it reduces bank competition.

This is a flagrant usurpation of Congress's constitutional power and a kleptocratic transfer of public wealth by executive fiat. Yet it was met with barely a meow from lawmakers.

Callers to the NPR show are topping each other with their eye-popping accounts of what can be done with $700 billion -- build a high-way across American 4 miles wide, connect every city by mag-lev trains. (Yes, and pay for universal health care? That can be done with a mere 50 billion...)

What's psychology good for?

2009-01-12T23:24:00.005-05:00

Dear Professor,

I'm a reporter at the Boston Globe, looking for someone to interview about the body language of politicians in a recent photo-op at the White House. (I have attached the photo to which I am referring.) Would you be able to speak about this subject matter? At your earliest convenience, I would like to ask you just a few pointed questions over the phone. I'm doing research for a story in the Globe's Ideas section about the significance of the presidents' body language in the photo - what each man's hand placement, stance, positioning, etc says about him and about the context/significance of the event.

I'm disheartened and dismayed. Is this what psychologists are good for? This reporter may as well have been asking me about handwriting analysis --crunched, angular lettering suggests an anxiety prone obsessive, and big loops with dotted hearts signal openness and extroversion.

With all the great brain science research coming out, aren't we a little bit beyond fortune-cookie style thinking? Sure, there are statistical associations between body postures and attitudes, such as arms-crossed correlating with protective stance. But hand position? Scrutinizing momentary postures (hands-in-pockets vs. at side versus loosely held in front) for hints about "what it says about him" is not worthy of the "Ideas section" of a major newspaper, of a blog, or even cocktail party chat. It's just not what psychology is all about.

It takes about 3 seconds inspection of that photo to determine that "each man's hand placement, stance, positioning" was posed by the photographer using their special photography psychology. Thus, any psychologizing is not about the presidents, but is essentially about the impression-management goals/strategies of the handlers. Having all presidents' hands hanging in the same position wouldn't look right; it would be visually stilted and uninteresting. We could make a big stretch and speculate that the photographers wanted to emphasize the presidents' individuality -- but that's a speculation about the photographers' goals, not the personalities of the presidents.

Boston Globe Ideas section? Sure, I got ideas for your section. Big Ideas. Next time you email me, no Mickey-mouse stuff, okay?

if every business was a nonprofit, what would our society look like?

2009-01-03T14:13:00.006-05:00

Three examples I came across recently, for your enjoyment:

There was big public campaign to convince Mattel not to make a brand of dolls aimed at 3-6 year-olds called Pussycat Dolls based on scantily clad females (even worse than Bratz).

Board which meets to provide funding for proposed business venture to manufacture and distribute Pusscat Dolls:

Advocate for Pussycat Dolls: I made a few for the neighborhood girls, and they really liked them. The parents didn't of course.

Review board: Why create a product that psychologists suggest is harmful AND parents don't like? Next!

Decade-long campaign to pass legislation to remove phlates (a potent teratogen) from nail polish. Manufacturing organizations are under crushing constraints to increase profits or be out-competed. They are thus obligated to direct their energy into fighting health-oriented regulation, hence the reason it took more than a decade for health activists to win their fight to remove phlates from nail polish. But if the goal of manufacturing is to meet human needs, then governing bodies will weigh different contingencies: the needs of humans to have lower cost nail polish vs. the needs of the children of factory workers and nail polish users to be free of phlate-caused birth defects.

Last year, Consumer Reports discussed a tree sapling which is sold via mail with the boast that it grows faster than any other tree, and if you plant it, you'll have a lovely shade-providing tree in your front yard in 6 months. The boast is true. But what isn't said is that the tree is considered an invasive species that threatens native trees and it is even illegal to plant it in some, but not all states.

Imagine that to obtain financial backing to produce a product, you present your business plan to a board of experts who will debate how well your product will serve its intended community.

Note that this is the process I and other academics go through in order to get funding to conduct scientific research. U.S. publicly-financed scientific research has a track record that is unparraeled for innovation and quality, which shows that profit motive is not required for innovation and excellence.

Under a planned economy with review boards:

Board member: Hm, should we approve the business plan to market this lovely weed tree? No, its a dangerous weed. The desire of some home owners to have a quickly-grown tree is not as necessary as the need to protect against invasive species. Not approved. Next!

Under capitalism:

Note: In the U.S., currently no board of experts who evaluate the public good of a produce or service is required to approve a business plan. All that's required is that some capitalists believe they can make money off of it and avoid criminal prosecution for any violated laws or regulations.

Venture capitalists: Hm, the tree is actually illegal in some states, so be careful not to mention this in ads. It does grow faster than any other tree, and we should be able to make a good profit in those states that haven't passed laws against it. People may even buy it even in the places where it is illegal, but that's their fault, not ours, so there won't be any legal liability. Approved!

More info, see this video...

Leave a comment if you'd like to contribute to the blog, "if every business was a nonprofit." Thanks!

How the brain works: Even blatantly insincere flattery makes us feel good...

2009-01-02T15:57:00.003-05:00

sarah said...

I recently came accross your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I dont know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.

Dear Sarah (or Ruth, or Karen, or Elena),

I'm such a sucker for flattery (and feeling good about flattery is so automatic) -- that I feel good even though I know that you say that to all the girls (guys).

You say it because an advertiser pays you to say it. I won't say which one, because then the advertiser would have won my (few) readers' eyeballs.

How do I know you're an advertiser's lackey?

Sarah, you've had 773 profile views in two months, compared to my profile view of half that in 2 years. Yet you don't even have a blog! Why are people so curious about you? Because you post a lot -- your posts are devoid of content, but the average blogger with minimal traffic is still curious about this mysterious flatterer.

And every time you post, you leave a little url after your vague flattery.

I googled your cute empty statement and the exact same sentences, minus your cute typo, have appeared on hundreds of blogs from www.coachingcommons.org to copyrightlitigation.blogspot.com

Now, I'm not one to keep someone from trying to make a living. But one of the wasteful side-effects of the competition that is part of a capitalism economic system is that human beings like you need to earn a living doing what you do: sneaking ads into places where they are not wanted.

When Daddy's tour in Iraq is extended yet again...

2008-12-31T20:48:00.009-05:00

Dear Dr. XX,

Thank you for asking me to consult on aspects of children's socio-emotional development relevant to the Department of Defense's solicitation titled, "Virtual Dialogue Application for Families of Deployed Service Members."

I was appreciative of the fact that the DoD opened with a historical perspective:

The ability to reach out and communicate with loved ones from areas of conflict is better than at any time in history. Nevertheless, the stresses of deployment might be softened if spouses and especially children could conduct simple conversations with their loved ones in immediate times of stress or prolonged absence. Historically, families have derived comfort and support from photographs or mementos, but current technology SHOULD allow for more personal interactive messages of support. Over 80% of American children between the ages of three and five regularly use computers, and 83% of families have a computer in their home. So, computer-based applications would resonate with children and capture their interest and imagination. The challenge is to design an application that would allow a child to receive comfort from being able to have simple, virtual conversations with a parent who is not available "in-person".

It's wonderful that the military is prepared to spend substantial money to improve the well-being of military families. They may hope families will be more tolerant of repeated and prolonged tours if they can speak with a state-of-the-art artificial intelligence.

Still, I confess I am skeptical of the utility of an artificial intelligence program which mimics parental dialogue. Is there any evidence that children age 3-5 will understand that the avatar on the screen is supposed to be their parent? I wouldn't envy the job of a mother who has to train her 3 year old to comprehend this. (Just think of the bright happy forced energy required in "Let's go say good-night to Daddy!") And once children do understand, how will they sort out that this is an artificial intelligence, not really their parent? Recall young children's difficulty with the "appearance-reality distinction" (documented by Piaget and the American developmental psychologist John Flavell). This may create more confusions: where/what is my father?

Great background-story for a dystopian novel: In the early 21st century, when the protagonist was only three, he was beta-tested on a military AI project...

I saw that spouses were mentioned as possible beneficiaries of the proposed product. Would spouses really take comfort from an AI program saying the couple's tender phrases? Or perhaps the topic proposers are remembering a book they read in the 1970s, "Stepford Wives" -- the AI will be better than a human being because it can cater to the fantasies of the left-behind-spouse.

From a research standpoint, the first step in phase 1, "1. Develop metrics to determine user acceptance, usability, and content requirements" should be completed before anything else is attempted. Indeed, a simple questionnaire for armed services personnel could be sufficient to find out whether an AI could "soften the stresses of deployment." I was surprised this hasn't been done -- but indeed, the references section was about what one would expect from an undergraduate term paper -- idiosyncratic, showing little awareness of background research in the relevant scientific disciplines.

One more question: Do you have any thoughts on why the DoD does not simply try to provide (more) real-time video computer connection (as is possible with skype and ichat)?

Sincerely,

HumanProject

Note: I learned about this project by receiving a request to be a consultant, but after googling saw that bloggers have already called it a "Creepy government project."

(And I really wanted to development AIs back when I was a teenager at the dawn of modern computing...)

Happy Year New! And use your card credit to pay those fees legal, you thank

2008-12-29T12:53:00.004-05:00

A good friend who I knew when she was in grad school in Boston used to mess around with visual illusions of the wordy kind -- top-down expectations influencing subjective phenomenology. After 10 years that project got written up, published in Consciousness and Cognition, and now science bloggers are writing about it!

http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/2008/12/how-card-credit-and-you-thank-appear-as.html

Capitalism Short Circuits Our Moral Hard-Wiring

2008-12-21T10:20:00.001-05:00

Published on Thursday, December 18, 2008 by CommonDreams.org
Capitalism Short Circuits Our Moral Hard-Wiring
by Gary Olson
In a recent New Yorker piece, Naomi Klein astutely observes that "The crash on Wall Street should be for Friedmanism what the fall of the Berlin Wall was for authoritarian Communism, an indictment of an ideology." One hopes so. The financial system's collapse in 2008 offers a rare opportunity to question certain underlying assumptions about our state capitalist economy and its neoliberal ideology.

For the last few years I've been writing about neuroscience research which shows that the human brain is hard-wired for empathy, the ability to put oneself in another's shoes. This is the discovery of the mirror neuron system or MNS, a finding some scientists believe rivals what the discovery of DNA meant for biology. The technical details showing how morality is rooted in biology, hardwired into our neural circuits via evolution rather than handed down from on high, lie beyond this article. But our understanding is increasing at an exponential rate and it's compelling. Earlier this year, UCLA neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni's superb book, Mirroring People (NY: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2008, paper) made this important research accessible to the lay public.

However, this is not to underestimate the barriers to the public's appreciation of these findings. At the apex of misunderstanding is the cynical, even despairing doubt about the existence of a moral instinct for empathy. From doctrines of original sin and Ayn Rand to Alan Greenspan and David Brooks, certain intrepretations of human nature have functioned to override empathic responses. In the words of famed primate scientist Frans B.M. de Waal "You need to indoctrinate empathy out of people in order to arrive at extreme capitalist positions."

We know that cultures are set up to reward some people and disadvantage others. Capitalists maintain domination, in part, through subtly but actively creating society's prevailing cultural norms. Antonio Gramsci's writing reminds us that this control is achieved through the mass media, education, religion and popular culture as subordinate classes assimilate certain ideas as "common sense." It isn't that individual deviations don't occur within the interstices of society but generally they don't threaten elite control.

If we assume that the human brain or more specifically, the aforementioned mirror neuron system, is the implicit target of elite propaganda, then the current economic meltdown provides an almost unprecedented opportunity for us.

Perhaps not since the 1930s have our citizens been more skeptical of received wisdom about our socioeconomic system. That is, the carefully manufactured narrative of market capitalist identity and its assumptions about human nature are now thrown into sharp relief.

Not only has economic reality made a shambles of the canonical model of Homo economicus but robust empirical evidence offers promising alternative responses to basic questions about human nature. Parenthetically, other highly regarded cross-cultural studies reveal that the self-interested behavior predicted by the selfishness axiom simply fail to materialize and cooperation is the norm.

Of course there are also predatory and cruel urges within our nature, complete with their own neural correlates and evolutionary origins. But now we know that organizing an alternative to our vicious system of "natural" hyper-individualism will enhance the opportunity for the empathic aspect of our nature to flourish. Social historian Margaret Jacobs captures my optimism with her insight that "No institution is safe if people simply stop believing in the assumptions that justify its existence." Therein lies both our challenge and responsibility.

Gary Olson, Ph.D., is chair of the Political Science Department at Moravian College in Bethlehem, PA. Contact: olson@moravian.edu

How razor-sharp is your wit? Test your skills against the RYS experts

2008-12-17T20:39:00.004-05:00

How did I stumble upon "Rate your students?" Well... I've been pummeled and left for dead countless times on RateMyProfessor.com, rejoindered on "Professors Strike Back!" and even debated the two sites with college journalism students at my uni. So it was natural for me to start hanging out round the campus water cooler.

RYS is the site where I finally accepted that "extreme" is the new edgy, something it took me a while to understand.

Offensive, ridiculous, over-the-top, pin-your-ears-back -- its gotta be extreme to capture eyeballs on today's web. I first heard this (but didn't "get" it)' when my blogging mentor emailed me that I should not have been caterwauling over Sarah Faith Alterman's self-confessed "Americaphile asshole" attitude towards my precious China. Just back from my sabbatical in Beijing, I was mortified at her attitude and sent a big F-U to her and the Phoenix, a much-admired weekly here in Boston (my comment is at the end of her article). My mentor emailed me to pipe down, Alterman's sarcasm was pretty typical for today's humorous, edgy journalism.

My second example was hearing (uh... reading) a lit blogger referred to as "James Wood's fluffer" over in the comments section of Contra James Wood. Now, I myself probably barely know what "fluffer" means, but I know it is, like, really, really insulting -- What if the lit blogger read that??? But if extreme is the new edgy, then the lit blogger maybe grinned, what the hell, more eye balls (and search engines) are grazing on my name, thanks CJW.

But how does one learn how to write edgy? I tell my students you learn by doing -- AND getting feedback.

So here's the game (or the training regimen). You regularly read RYS. You imagine how you would respond to the current "Big thirsty." Maybe even write something. Maybe even send it in. It doesn't make it on the site. And then your eyeballs blow out when you read what did get published.

Now, I don't mean to claim that RYS only posts the nasty, Tabasco-on-the-lip screeching screeds (although I will blog about that in my next post). Frequently, it just prints the funniest stuff, with that ring of truth. First it makes you laugh, then it makes you think about the times when that really happened to you.

Such as: The professoriat's response to "The ideal campus visit." H laughed out loud as I read him gems like.... Nope, can't read just one. Run, do not walk to RYS and read'em all.

Can we shall together? A Found Poem

2008-12-07T09:16:00.011-05:00

To me of 28 years.
Growth 171 see dark, eyes beautiful,
a figure sports.
Formation the maximum.

On character kind,
sympathetic and quiet.
Not for the husband.
Children while are not present.

I live in very beautiful city - Cheboksariy.
My hobbies - music, sports, housekeeping, knitting.
Music, from classical up to modern.
I love sports,
I like to prepare and be engaged in house affairs.

Yet has not met that the man to which could trust and pass on
a vital way to a place and consequently I dream
to get acquainted for serious attitudes
with kind, good, cultural and clever the man.
Where you wash the unique and tender reliable friend??!!

With greater impatience I look forward to hearing from you Masha!!!

Editor's note: Our experts have identified this poem as a low match to the vocabulary and grammar of a human English speaker, and suggest the English was produced by translation from Russian by a computer program.

From HumanProject: Dear Masha. Your poem reminds me of the words of the famous cultural anthropologist Edward Hall, who wrote, "... good art persists and art that releases its message all at once does not."

I am still pondering the meaning of "Children while are not present." I imagine. They are away back home, being taken care of by a woman who is my age, a youngish Babushka, a clerk in a government office. You miss your children and they you, but they know you are hard at the business of using your lovely brown eyes to secure their future.

Masha's email available on request.

New meaning for the phrase "house-to-house fighting"

2008-11-26T22:20:00.004-05:00

My parents have just returned from the Sabeel Conference in Palestine, an especially sobering event because 2008 means 50 years have passed since the Nakba of 1948.

Mom got to see and/or speak with a number of people who have been in the international news. (My mother is the white haired grandmother seated at table in bottom right corner; photo is from Sabeel's slide show on their website).

Fawziya Khurd: My mother spoke with her in her tent in a parking lot in East Jerusalem. She was evicted from her home after settlers occupied it. She is living in the parking lot next to the home she lived in since the mid-1950s, and told my mother she is being fined close to $100 per day for living in a tent in the parking lot. To learn more, see details of Jonathan Cooks' reporting on this story, Who Will Stop the Settlers? in Counterpunch.

Samia Khoury: Mom writes: "When she stood up after Mr. Ben-Eliezer's speech and basically said we the Palestinians accept your apology it was so amazing that I was in tears."

Email from Samia Khoury to Sabeel conference attendees:

A short and small man physically, Josef Ben Eliezar stood tall as he asked for forgiveness from the Palestinians at the Sabeel 7th international conference on the Nakba: Memory Reality and Beyond which took place in Nazareth and Jerusalem (November 12-19, 2008). He shared with the participants his testimony for taking part in the expulsion of the Palestinian population from Lydda and robbing them of their money and personal possessions when he was an Israeli soldier in 1948.

Josef could not live with the reality of that day in July 1948. He realized then that what he was doing to the Palestinians was what the Nazis had done to his family and people before he had immigrated to Palestine after the holocaust. He did not find a listening ear in the newly established state of Israel, and the inhumanity of that war which as a Jew he thought was a war of liberation continued to pursue him until he eventually left the country and settled in England.

I wonder how many Israelis would have the courage and the magnanimity of Josef to admit that they have done the Palestinians wrong, let alone ask for forgiveness. Although his testimony was mostly in front of an international audience, yet there were a number of Palestinians from Jerusalem and Nazareth who heard him loud and clear. I was so moved that I felt I needed to get up and recognize his courage and thank him for his testimony assuring him that we do forgive him. (check out his book The Search)

As people came up to thank me later on for my words, I could not help but wonder how meaningful for the Palestinian people it would have been and how much suffering could have been spared had the Israelis since day one of the establishment of the state in 1948 admitted the wrong and grave injustice that they had inflicted upon the Palestinians, asked for forgiveness, and allowed all who were evicted to return to their homes. A dream that could still be realized if the Jewish people can ponder and act in accordance with the words of their great prophet Micah (6:8) " What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God."

Samia Khoury

"Do unto texters as you would have lecturers do unto you"

2008-11-26T22:11:00.005-05:00

The professors/bloggers over at "Rate your students" think they have a keen eye for edgy writing and expletive-laced colorful rage about the daily inanities of teaching -- and they do. I took up the challenge of responding to this query: "So what do you do about texting in your class" and they included my answer in their line-up -- mine is the third down., beginning: "I teach one of those 100-student things, but since I don't take attendance and my detailed PowerPoint lectures are all on-line, the crowd is cut down to about 70...."

Is homosexuality only "okay" if it isn't your choice?

2008-11-21T23:19:00.004-05:00

As part of giving a lecture on homosexuality in my developmental psychology class, I looked up Lisa Diamond's new book, because in past year's I've had to point out that most of the work on homosexuality is on male homosexuality -- it feels funny to spend an hour on theories of why men become gay addressing a room of 70 students that is 85% female.

I'd read some journal articles by Dr. Diamond and knew she had a book coming out, Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women's Love and Desire.

The following blurb is from University of Chicago Magazine:

Is love "blind" when it comes to gender? For women, it just might be. This unsettling and original book offers a radical new understanding of the context-dependent nature of female sexuality. Lisa Diamond argues that for some women, love and desire are not rigidly heterosexual or homosexual but fluid, changing as women move through the stages of life, various social groups, and, most important, different love relationships.
This perspective clashes with traditional views of sexual orientation as a stable and fixed trait. But that view is based on research conducted almost entirely on men. Diamond is the first to study a large group of women over time. She has tracked 100 women for more than ten years as they have emerged from adolescence into adulthood. She summarizes their experiences and reviews research ranging from the psychology of love to the biology of sex differences. Sexual Fluidity offers moving first-person accounts of women falling in and out of love with men or women at different times in their lives. For some, gender becomes irrelevant: "I fall in love with the person, not the gender," say some respondents.
Sexual Fluidity offers a new understanding of women's sexuality--and of the central importance of love.

See also this review.

While googling around, I stumbled upon the controversy regarding Dr. Diamond and NARTH (National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality). NARTH has been citing Diamond's research as evidence that female homosexuality contains an element of choice, which supports their view that homosexuality can be changed. Diamond contests their misuse of her findings.

"In the Black Hawk Simulator, participants experience flying through a mountain village whilst shooting at enemies"

2008-11-09T00:35:00.003-05:00

In an effort to raise the profile of the US military, a mall in Philadelphia recently became home to the first Army Experience Center. (More from blog.800hightech.com)

Read the Military's own description at http://www.army.mil

See myspace video of kids mowing down simulated villagers.

Columnist Him Hightower criticizes this facility, which is in a huge space at an urban mall.

More videos.

Please comment.

New project with students: Video games and language learning

2008-10-26T01:23:00.001-04:00

In graduate school in cognitive science I studied artificial neural networks and language acquisition, a continuation of my interest in psychology and computer science from college.

As a professor, I became knowledgeable in several new areas during the 1990s. One of these is the question of why adults find it difficult to learn a foreign language, even in an immersion context. To answer this, I have been developing "multi-causal" theory: foreign language learning is difficult because of entrenched and routinized first-language structures, decline in brain plasticity, and decreased motivation to practice the second language because immediate rewards are so low. Adult learners may highly desire the end-state of fluency, just as they value other long-term goals like weight gain or smoking cessation; immediate rewards are minimal. The intervention I propose is a virtual reality learning environment. The virtual world is the place to learn and practice a foreign language with game characters providing language recasts and diverse skill levels. The immediate rewards of video-games (solving puzzles, finding clues) means that language learning is part of making progress in the game. After developing a prototype for foreign language learners, I want to extend the video game language learning project to the problem of literacy acquisition for deaf children. With my colleagues at BU, I argue that deaf individuals have difficulty learning to read because they are being asked to do something unprecedented: learn a second language (and sometimes a first language) via print. But can a language be learned just from print? Language learning is typically thought to depend on social-emotional interaction, which is absent when deaf children struggle to learn language from the printed page. Virtual reality environments can be used to immerse learners in a world where printed material can co-exist with interactions between characters, including interaction of the learner.

I'm currently looking for funding and collaborators and welcome suggestions.

Which one of these is not like the others?

2008-10-25T01:12:00.004-04:00

Below is an unedited email I received from my university Office of Sponsored Programs. Take a look at items 1-4 (see italicized text below).

AGENCY: Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS)/National Institutes of Health (NIH)

PROGRAM: Roadmap Transformative R01 Program (R01)

OBJECTIVES: This program, part of the NIH Roadmap Initiative, provides funding for exceptionally innovative, high risk, original and/or unconventional research with the potential to create new or challenge existing scientific paradigms.

Projects in any area of NIH interest are encouraged. Areas of highlighted need that have been identified through an NIH strategic planning process include: 1) Understanding and Facilitating Human Behavior; 2) Change Complex 3-Dimensional Tissue Models; 3) Functional Variation in Mitochondria in Disease Transitions from Acute to Chronic Pain; 4) Formulation of Novel Protein Capture Reagents; and 5) Providing an Evidence Base for Pharmacogenomics

Proposals must clearly articulate (a) the fundamental issue to be addressed and its overarching importance to the biomedical/behavioral research enterprise, (b) how the studies will either establish new or disrupt existing paradigms, and (c) how the proposed rationale and/or approaches significantly differ from state of the art in the field.

DEADLINES:
Letters of Intent (optional): December 29, 2008
Proposal submission: January 29, 2009
______________________________________________________________

See why the Annals of Improbable Research say that "Soft is Hard"?

Why do people confess to crimes they didn't commit?

2008-10-16T00:13:00.006-04:00

In a discussion of whether Dostoevky deserves to be considered a great writer, the blogger Jim H wrote:

does anyone really believe that Raskolnikov would cop so readily to the murder? Was he that weak? Was his conscience so overwhelming? or was this just a way for D. to end the story in a redeeming, sort of uplifting way he couldn't find it in himself to challenge?

Hm.... the question is a reminder that most people don't understand how easily people confess. Most people are surprised to learn how common is the phenomena of false confessions.

I just lectured on this in today's psychology class and can't get the topic off my mind.

I found I was unusually strident because my undergrads were staring at me with looks of disbelief and incomprehension.

One student said, "Because they want to protect their family?"

Silently... uh... no, that was Stalinist Russia.

The evidence that people confess to crimes they don't commit, and the reasons, were recently laid out by Saul Kassin (journal article, blog report), publication list).

Dear young things, only two in a class of 85 (yes, big classes sucks) indicated that they had heard of the "Central Park Jogger" -- the young female stock broker assaulted and left for dead in 1989. Media hysteria over teens going on "wilding" rampages meant that the usual suspects were rounded up and convicted. Five young black men spent the 1990s in jail and were finally released in 2002 when the real rapist, already in prison for another crime, bragged about the assault to an imate and was found to have been the rapist via DNA evidence.

They confessed because they cracked under the relentless pressure and just wanted the harassment to end.

It doesn't sound plausible, does it -- until you start looking at the data.

About 1/4 of DNA exonerations were for death-row inmates who were on death-row because of false confessions; once you make a confession, its not easily retracted.

Readers, what is the solution to the waste of lives mispent in jail and wrong convictions?

Biking in Beijing -- Like Everest for a climber

2008-10-09T11:15:00.005-04:00

You might think it'd be safer or easier to bike in Beijing, where often "bike lanes" are special side roads necessary to accommodate the packed throng of commuters. But no, me, a veteran Bostonian biker, who bikes in winter, rode my new candy pink girlie bike with a perpetual grimace of fear. Beijing motorists do not have the ethic that the non-motorist (bike or pedestrian) has the right of way. Its all out war there -- those drivers will hit you if you don't get out of the way.

Even so -- I thrilled to be biking in Beijing, where I wasn't some anomalous college professor who "still" rides a bike. [Of course, in Beijing, I was the far more anomalous Caucasian on wheels -- didn't see a single other round-eye on a bike in my five weeks until finally saw a couple of tourists on bikes in my last days.]

In Beijing, bikes are the primary vehicles supporting local commerce. Bikes are not just the commuting option for the masses, they are:

how large bottled water for coolers is delivered (with attached cart or special holsters, one per side)

how streets are sweeped (wish I had a pic of that -- its all muscle, biker wields broom and trash stabbing implement against the curb)

how children are picked up from school (bikes too valuable to be given to kids -- picture stern father in black suit, packing one kid on the back and one in front)

how produce is packed in from country side gardens-- all fresh food is commonly just bought sold on the streets; conventional western style grocery stores exist but fruits and vegetables are priced at up to 20 times the rate of street vended goods

and more generally, how goods and products are transported.

In contrast, motor vehicles are not used by industry and business -- too expensive when there are the no-gasoline options of bike wheels and human muscle. Cars are for the middle and upper class (and indeed, there are so many on the road that I can get to the Forbidden City from Beijing Normal University (a 40 minute bike ride) about as quickly as a taxi.

At one point I fantasized that I would bring back photos of these "working bikes" but I also had a full time job to get done in Beijing and thus had to snap what I could on the way to work (while not getting killed). But any photo journalists want to take this up, I'm available for comment and will share my few photos.

Bikes vs. Cars: The Grand Debate

2008-10-09T10:40:00.005-04:00

Alas, were there such a debate. Ok, I had my title fun, back to reality. A reporter wrote me:

"....said you might be interested in helping us out with a discussion about biking in Boston."

Basically, I'm looking for people who are regular cyclists and who can easily discuss the problems that cyclists encounter on the road--for example: crazy motorists, double parked cars and delivery trucks, dooring, oblivious pedestrians who wander into the street without looking for traffic, construction on the BU Bridge, etc.

But I would also need someone who can address the reckless behaviors that some cyclists display, such as riding without helmets, blowing through red lights, failing to use hand signals, wearing headphones, etc.

Ultimately, we would want the two of participants to reach an agreement of ways in which cyclists, motorists, and pedestrians can all utilize Boston’s streets in a safe and productive manner without angering one another.

Would you be interested?

Of course I agreed. My comments:

I am a regular cyclist and advocate biking as an ideal commuter option for Bostonians. Yes, cyclists breeze thru red lights, but we aren't killing 50,000 people a year via vehicle accidents. We aren't polluting the environment. We are the solution, and drivers need to be grateful to us.

Still, I also understand the aggravation experienced by motorists who feel stressed out enough on the road without the extra burden of worrying they're going to accidentally hit a scofflaw bicyclist. I thus urge bicyclists to take drivers' perspectives on the situation. Bicyclists take it for granted that motorists will stop for them, give them the right-of-way, watch out for bicyclists' weaving in between lanes. I urge "be nice to these drivers" - smiles, eye contact, hand-wave of appreciation when they stop for us or wave us on, etc.

Fun Post over at "Contra James Wood"

2008-10-02T00:34:00.004-04:00

Readers,
Read and enjoy

Its an arresting image: the media conspirators plotting to develop the literary critic who will make literary fiction into just another genre -- except no need, because a critic was just then stepping forward (James Wood). It got me thinking about whether this has happened in other arenas.

Hm... maybe... the current political situation?

Just a month ago, the ruling kleptocracy was still riding high, thinking they could keep cronyist pay-outs while proclaiming the rigtheous need to rally the public patriotically around the war against Eastasia -- oops, I mean Eurasia. Then the banks started failing. And failing. And failing. Someone would have to pay. And the public wasn't going to accept McCain now, not after the curtain has been ripped away showing Wall Street graft and mismanagement, not with Sarah Palin's word salad (speaking in tongues?).

There would he hard times ahead. The average American would need to do some belt-tightening, hell, would need to drill new holes in their belts, would need to take pay cuts, and pay, and pay, and pay.

The ruling class realized they needed a new kind of President, the kind they hadn't tolerated since, who, oh, Clinton. They needed someone who would look good on the international stage, someone who could calm the eye-rollers in France, Germany and Italy (those commies). They needed someone who wouldn't constantly have to fight the working class, the middle class, the liberal media elite, the Hollywood bleeding hearts. They needed someone to do their dirty work: ram down the throat of the middle class the hard fiscal reforms necessary to clean up the debacle of Wall Street's greed.... Who... Gather round, start conspiratin'. But did they need to find... They already had 'im: Obama.

In which I am challenged to dig into my encyclopedic knowledge of scientific psychology

2008-10-01T22:03:00.004-04:00

Dear Professor,

I am writing to you because I would like to have your advice on how to find literature or studies on a certain topic and I am having trouble finding them on my own.

When developing a new products/services, there is a phase of the user- based research where the researcher tries to assess the “consumer’s latent needs”. It is said to be more of an art than a science. It usually occurs during an observational session, interview or beta testing.

A “latent need” could be defined as a need that the user has but is unaware of and cannot define when asked. The user frequently only realizes the existence of a “latent need” when she/he is presented with a product which addresses/satisfies the need. In this moment everything becomes that there was an obvious need for this product in the past and it is seemingly “strange” that no one has invented it before. This term is frequently used in marketing terminology. Good examples of these “needs” are: the necessity of being able to store money in a place other than your home or under your bed (BANK), to buy an item for which you do not have all the cash on your person at the time (CREDIT CARD), the ability to temporarily stick notes on all surfaces (POST-Its), etc.

Therefore my question for you is, is there a “psychological term” for a latent need? Have there been any studies regarding this subject?

Dear Z,

Mainstream psychologists have not studied latent needs. However, your question could be rephrased to be a specific variant of a more general topic that has been well studied: the habits of mind which prevent us from being able to see solutions to existing problems. In particular, I recommend Howard Margolis' Paradigms and Barriers: How Habits of Mind Govern Scientific Beliefs

Innovative product ideas like those you mentioned (e.g., Post-its, or think about famous intermittent car windshield wiper) can be understood as creative breakthroughs similar to the scientific breakthroughs discussed by Margolis. You wondered if psychologists have studied latent needs, and if not, why not. You noticed that it is quite interesting and even puzzling why people frequently hadn't noticed their need until the solution was posed, and then apparently suddenly felt the need had been present all along, but had been unnoticed.

To the extent that people don't recognize needs until the solution is presented, I propose that the reason why people apparently hadn't noticed the need before they saw the solution, is the same reason why the solution took so long: because people have mental habits which keep them thinking in a fixed routine. Their mental assumptions about the world entail that the problem doesn't have a solution, so they just keep stepping through their routine. I submit that they grumble, complain, and are annoyed, but the reason they don't look for a solution is not because they don't have a need, but because they haven't conceived of a solution being possible.

Let me illustrate my position with the case of post-it notes. Is it really plausible that no one had previously noticed the need to stick notes to any surface? I suspect masses of people had been annoyed at not having tape handy, were disgruntled by notes falling out of the pages of books or blowing off surfaces. But they assumed this is insurmountable because that had accepted long-standing and true generalizations about how glue works: glue is permanent and detaching a previously glued paper tears and wrecks the material. It was the accidental discovery of a very weak "glue" by chemists at 3M that led to the innovation of post-its.

I thus propose that your question is well-studied by psychologists, but they approach it from the angle of: what habits of mind keep us from seeing solutions to problems. The voluminous psychological work on creativity is only a click away.

Banks failing... Wall St in crisis; Is it finally acceptable to criticize capitalism?

2008-09-30T00:28:00.003-04:00

It wasn't acceptable 6 years ago, when writer James Rossi wote this about After Capitalism: From Managerialism to Workplace Democracy by Seymour Melman

Few topics inspire as much fervor and unprincipled rhetoric as capitalism. Free market barons trumpet the faceless expansion of multinational corporations and lambast any environmental or labor regulation as an undemocratic assault on economic freedom. Critics of capitalism, on the other hand, have become as taboo in mainstream media as frank discussions of sex were during the Production Code.

The latter group boasts Seymour Melman, a professor of industrial engineering at Columbia University, who has long criticized American capitalism as alienating, militaristic, increasingly inequitable, and economically inefficient...

(read rest of review at Human Nature Reviews)

We could build a new society for $700 billion. Don't bail out the banks, buy them. Give home owners new loans. If they don't have jobs, start a public works program -- there's plenty of work to do -- fix roads; clean up the environment, teach school, and 100s of billions to spend to pay salaries.

Sure, I"m not an economist, so let me stop talking and just remind you that there are experts who know how to move us to a better system, we just have to start examining some of our decades-old taboos.

Lol comments from Chronical of Higher Education

2008-09-23T22:56:00.005-04:00

First, the article:

September 21, 2008

College to Compensate Students Who Sued Over Bad Teaching

Bates Technical College, in Tacoma, Wash., will shell out a half-million dollars to 16 former students in its civil-engineering-technician/surveying program who say lousy teaching left them unprepared for their careers, according to an article in The News Tribune, a local newspaper.

Then the commenters got on a roll about law suits. They started small:

Perhaps faculty should sue parents for sending them their children who’ve been badly brought up, are rude and inconsiderate, and often barely literate.

But rapidly showballed into hilarity:

I sued a chinese manufacturer of an outdoor basketball goal for intentional infliction of mental distress based on their assembly instructions. Discovery revealed that they purposefully wrote the instructions in a manner designed to cause tension and anxiety. Specifically, they included diagrams of the same assembly pieces put together in different configurations. And I sued mcdonalds because their fountain drinks were so cold they hurt my teeth. Of course, these are product cases and the article deals with services. Its a whole different ball game on services…I did sue this korean nail parlor for applying an acrylic nail and then filing it so that when I went to pick a piece of ky fried chicken from between my teeth, the nail cut into the gum and the 13 herbs and spices entered the wound creating a really ugly looking sore. It caused people to stare at my mouth when I smiled or talked and when I spoke all of my letter R sounds came out WR, but since the W was silent, nobody noticed that.

In a separate article on a different topic, readers got to see this comment gem:

"The beauty of blogs is that no one has to supply any evidence to support their claims. Most persuasive writing these days (and other days, alas) seems not to be written for people who disagree with the writer but to entertain those who already agree and to piss off those who don’t.” --Dave

Physiological reactivity to loud noises and threatening images correlates with political views

2008-09-19T09:04:00.004-04:00

Science 19 September 2008:
Vol. 321. no. 5896, pp. 1667 - 1670

Political Attitudes Vary with Physiological Traits

Douglas R. Oxley,Kevin B. Smith, John R. Alford, Matthew V. Hibbing, Jennifer L. Miller, Mario Scalora, Peter K. Hatemi, John R. Hibbing

Although political views have been thought to arise largely from individuals' experiences, recent research suggests that they may have a biological basis. We present evidence that variations in political attitudes correlate with physiological traits. In a group of 46 adult participants with strong political beliefs, individuals with measurably lower physical sensitivities to sudden noises and threatening visual images were more likely to support foreign aid, liberal immigration policies, pacifism, and gun control, whereas individuals displaying measurably higher physiological reactions to those same stimuli were more likely to favor defense spending, capital punishment, patriotism, and the Iraq War. Thus, the degree to which individuals are physiologically responsive to threat appears to indicate the degree to which they advocate policies that protect the existing social structure from both external (outgroup) and internal (norm-violator) threats.

New directions in cognitive and affective science

2008-09-14T23:00:00.004-04:00

Clinical doctoral students who wish to be licensed in Massachusetts must have training in cognitive and affective science, broadly construed. It is typical to gain this training by taking a class.

How to get this training? Why, start and maintain a blog on your readings on the topic.

I hereby announce a blog which has both a very specific, immediate purpose and a larger purpose. The immediate purpose is as a forum to discuss a set of important, mostly recent journal articles on cognitive science and especially the intersection between the cognitive and affective sciences. The blog is maintained by a student at Boston University, Kristen Ellard, who will be engaged in reading 3-4 articles each week and writing about her rections to the articles.

As Kristen's directed study supervisor, I invite any interested persons to post comments on her summaries and comments, or to post your own comments on the articles, or post questions about the general topic.

The larger purpose is to determine the usefulness of public blogging of this type. Traditionally, under directed study, a student discusses papers with a supervisor. The drawback here is that the student misses out on the dynamic interaction that accompanies classroom learning. Her writing becomes "writing for the teacher" rather than a broader audience of experts and non-experts. Yet setting up a full online course with multiple participants is not possible due to limited time and resources. The public blog is thus an intermediate step.

If you are interested in this topic and would like to see the readings and Kristen's postings thus far, please visit the blog site:

http://cognitionandaffect.blogspot.com/

List of Books banned by Sarah Palin

2008-09-09T17:17:00.004-04:00

I haven't been able to find the real list... The following is taken from the widely circulated spoof list which was probably just compiled from a list of commonly banned books. I've starred my personal favorites.

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess *
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle *
Annie on My Mind by Nancy Garden
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Blubber by Judy Blume
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley *
Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
Canterbury Tales by Chaucer
Carrie by Stephen King
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller *
Christine by Stephen King
Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Cujo by Stephen King
Curse Hexes and Spells by Daniel Cohen
Daddys Roommate by Michael Willhoite
Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller *
Decameron by Boccaccio
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
Fallen Angels by Walter Myers
Fanny Hill (Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure) by John Cleland *
Flowers For Algernon by Daniel Keyes
Forever by Judy Blume
Grendel by John Champlin Gardner
Halloween ABC by Eve Merriam
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Prizoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling
Have to Go by Robert Munsch
Heather Has Two Mommies by Leslea Newman *
How to Eat Fried Worms by Thomas Rockwell
Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain *
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou *
Impressions edited by Jack Booth
In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak
It's Okay if You Don't Love Me by Norma Klein
James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence *
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
Little Red Riding Hood by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
Lord of the Flies by William Golding *
Love is One of the Choices by Norma Klein
Lysistrata by Aristophanes *
More Scary Stories in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz
My Brother Sam Is Dead by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier
My House by Nikki Giovanni
My Friend Flicka by Mary O'Hara * (Oh come on, this one was never banned!)
Night Chills by Dean Koontz
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
On My Honor by Marion Dane Bauer
One Day in The Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Ordinary People by Judith Guest
Our Bodies, Ourselves by Boston Women's Health Collective *
Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy
Revolting Rhymes by Roald Dahl
Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill Your Bones by Alvin Schwartz
Scary Stories in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz
Separate Peace by John Knowles *
Silas Marner by George Eliot
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. *
Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain *
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain *
The Bastard by John Jakes
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
The Devil's Alternative by Frederick Forsyth
The Figure in the Shadows by John Bellairs
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood *
The Headless Cupid by Zilpha Snyder
The Learning Tree by Gordon Parks
The Living Bible by William C. Bower
The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare
The New Teenage Body Book by Kathy McCoy and Charles Wibbelsman
The Pigman by Paul Zindel
The Seduction of Peter S. by Lawrence Sanders
The Shining by Stephen King
The Witches by Roald Dahl
The Witches of Worm by Zilpha Snyder
Then Again, Maybe I Won't by Judy Blume *
To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare
Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary
Witches, Pumpkins...Halloween Symbols by Edna Barth

I would like to volunteer in Research in your department

2008-09-07T11:11:00.003-04:00

Dear Doctor,
I am Medical Student Graduate from India .I would like to volunteer in Research in your department .I can put 8 hrs daily and make commitment for a year. My sister is in [medical program in your city] doing her DMD program ,that is what fascinated me to volunteer in [your university].
My Crediantials are :
1.Degree :Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of surgery Dec'o7 from Government medical school ,patiala ,India.
2.USMLE Step1- 85 percentile.
3.USMLE Step2- 91percentile.
4.USMLE Step CSA- 9/30/08
5.computer skills :Excel,Microsoft Word ,Power Point presentation,Data management,Windows operting System,Trouble shooting.
With detailed knowledge in medicine , i can prove my selves if given opportunity in your research.
I promise for hard work,commitment and team work.
I am looking forward to hear from you soon.
Thank you so much,
In anticipation,
xxxx

I wrote back

Dear xxxx
I conduct behavioral science research and thus your expertise and interests are too far from mine.

I advise you to read about the research of the different faculty you find in the Boston area. Then pick the faculty whose research you like and write a tailored letter to that person. The tailored-letter approach has a higher probability of success and will also result in a position that matches your interests. In 1999 I received such a request to volunteer in my laboratory from a scientist from Turkey who had recently received her Ph.D. from Istanbul University. She sold family property in order to fund her own way to the U.S., but after working with me for two years she had several English language publications and is now a successful researcher in Turkey. We now continue to collaborate and have a rich binational partnership.

My point is that volunteering can serve to give you valuable training, but established U.S. scientists may not respond to an indiscriminate letter, and may even view it as spam.

Also, you need to write in standard, professional English, which means using standard punctuation (no small i for I, use comma and period correctly).

Good luck with your search,

=================
Readers: How would you answer this mail? Ignore it? Are there websites with information to help foreign scientists make contact with a U.S. researcher? I was wondering how this person obtained my email since he didn't seem to know my name, he apparently only knew my university from the acronym before the edu on my university email. Do you think there are now services that sell the emails of researchers in a certain area?

"Can I ask you a private question?"

2008-09-06T10:55:00.003-04:00

AFter the second lecture in developmental psychology, a tall male student waited for other students to disperse.

Student: "Can I ask you a private question?"

Me: "Ok, go ahead." Wrong. It depends on what it is.

Student: "Now -- I mean no disrepect, but, uh, Do you have children, or, you know, raise them?"

Me: "Uh, no. Why?" Wrong. That's none of your business because its not relevant to the class.

Student: "Oh. Well, I mean no disrepect, I just wanted to know since its the start of the semester, like, where you would be coming from in this class."

Me: "But, the class wouldn't be different if I had children. I guess I might include specific anecdotes about my kids, is that what you mean?"

Student: "I just wanted to know, if the class was going to be more about basic research, or more practical. I meant no disrespect."

The student had his answer and was ready to leave, but something was really wrong. I was upset. I wanted to understand.

Me: "But I wouldn't teach the class any differently if I had children, other than maybe I would include some anecdotes."

Student: "Look, I just wanted to know where you'd be coming from. And so now I understand that its going to be be focused more on science and research."

Me: "But I'm wondering why you thought that the class would be focused on research because I hadn't had children? Where did you get this idea from? Do other professors teach like that? "

Student: "I just wanted to know where you'd be coming from."

Me: "Right. So what's your background, you're not a psych major, right?"

Student: "I am a psych major."

The next class was occupying the room. "Ok, see you later." I walked out into the bright sunlight.

I was upset. What had just happened?

I told the anecdote minutes later to my colleague Dr. B, a developmental psychologist, who responded, "What, as soon as we have kids we just toss the research out the window and prattle on about our experiences?"

At home H had a different take: "What, he assumes that since you haven't had children you're not really able to teach about children? You have to resort to 'research'?"

I was upset because it had been a no-win question:

No, I haven't had children --> so this female professor doesn't have any real-world expertise, the class will just be the stuffy science that she has to describe to back up her statements.

Yes, I am raising (or have raised children) --> so its just going to be a bunch of sentimental stories about her own experiences, nothing based in science.

H: Don't let them ask these questions. It was sexist and a challenge to your authority. Don't think they are your friends. This is your service class. Teach it and get back to what you enjoy, working with individual students on research and teaching small classes.

But the real pain is my from my own sources. I didn't have children because I spent my 20s and 30s obtaining the scientific training to get and retain this very job.

More on China visit (Feb-April 2008)

2008-09-05T10:11:00.003-04:00

The Sept 5 2008 Boston Phoenix published my response to Sarah Faith Alterman's anti-China vitriol, but I guess due to space, they left out my, Edward Said point about how westerners are always the observers and so we can't be the "other" --

Deleted part in bold below.

Very amusing, Sarah, but you dropped some clues that you barely visited Beijing, and are mainly reporting stereotypes and Americaphile asshole dribble. I lived in Beijing for 5 weeks in March-April of this year, and walked, took taxis and the subway, rode the bus and my bicycle all over the city. There are no giant Mao status in Beijing (see discussion about removal of statues, New York Times, April 15, 1988). Your second clue was more subtle: There are no cereal boxes in China! (or very few -- that's our kinda food, girlfriend).

There was one arresting image in your story: about you looking like a retarded pony. But the rest of your "observations" make me wonder where this anger is coming from -- are Americans afraid of China? Resentful; anxious about the future? So much that we vomit mean-spirited bile and say things like this (and I wish I were kidding):

"I should have known that a country that vehemently denied SARS and tried to poison our pets and children might be a little less than forthcoming about the asinine, algae-scented shitshow that is the 2008 Olympics."

You felt affronted that people wanted a picture with you. Yes, this happened to me, perhaps even once per day, but it was flattering and charming (see my photo by googling tourist-attraction-at-summer-palace). Permissions were always asked and there were big smiles all around. So what exactly was your problem?

Is your problem that idea that we, Americans are supposed to be the ones who take pictures of ourselves with the natives -- we pose with giggling black kids in Ethiopia with flies in their eyes, or an ancient, wise toothless Tibetan? We are the lookers, the ones who get to be curious about the "other", not objectified in strangers' photo albums.

Your article has one achievement: A new term for the attitude that Americans are superior and residents of other cultures inferior: "Americaphile asshole." It used to be "Ugly American" and "Boobus Americanus." Great to have a new phrase for the 21st century.

Do we have to read the whole chapter?

2008-09-04T23:29:00.007-04:00

Last month, thinking ahead to the imminent descent of students on the beautiful cities of Cambridge and Boston, Robin Abrahams (aka the Boston Globe's Miss Conduct), wrote her "Advice for Newby Professors" which include the line: "Pretend that you care."

Wow. It got me thinking.... and I was emboldened to post the following to the courseinfo site of my developmental psychology class...

Requests from the Professor: Don't ask me...

Don't ask me whether you have to read the whole chapter. You don't have to read the whole chapter. This is college. You don't have to do anything.

Don't ask me to help you figure out the minimum work needed to get a specific grade. My hope is that you are in class out of interest in the material. If you have a different attitude about the class, I advise you not let me know this.

Don't ask me what will be on the test, because I have already explained this on the syllabus: "Material emphasized in lecture and section will predominate on the test."

Don't ask me whether material in the textbook will be on the tests because the syllabus already says that the tests will emphasize material in lecture. Does this mean that the textbook is irrelevant? No. Material from the textbook which is relevant to themes discussed in lecture and section may appear on the tests. I promise you that we have no plans to test you on obscure facts from the reading in order to reward those students who read the textbooks. I'm sorry that a teacher once did this to you.

Don't ask me to change your grade after class is over unless a clerical error was made. I won't change it even if you'll lose your scholarship and be sent to Iran to submit to an arranged marriage. Yes, I once did change grades for this reason. But you guys wore me out years ago because I felt too empathetic about these issues.

Don't complain to me that there is too much reading, because I will advise you: "Let your interests determine what you read. If some material is boring to you, skip it and look for topics that are relevant to your interests." Don't let me see the look on your face which says that your goal in reading is to be able to take the test (see #2).

Don't ask me how to study because I will say, "I am very skeptical of studying because too often it involves attempts to memorize while avoiding learning" (with the goal being #2). If you are by yourself, emphasize reading for pleasure and to satisfy your curiosity. Try to connect course material and themes to issues in your own life. Group study is a different matter. If you want to "study", join a group of friends and ask each other questions. Each person can take responsibility for a topic and explain it to the others.

Don't ask me why you did so poorly on the test when you studied so hard, because I'll say: "No wonder you did poorly if you studied." Studying often leads to poor outcome. Try to read the text and lectures notes for deep understanding, and work with others so you don't get trapped into the illusion of understanding.

Don't ask me what I'm looking for when I grade a course project. This suggests that there is only one reason you would do a project (see #2). Instead, we can discuss what kind of projects will allow you to grapple with themes in the class while answering interesting questions and challenging yourself.

Additional advice

Learn how to think like a developmental psychologist. Often course material may seem obvious to you, but all of the material we'll go over was not obvious at an earlier time in history, so you may want to ask yourself: "From the standpoint of progress in the science of human behavior and development, why was this empirical finding an important breakthrough?"

Woman Stymied In Drive For 'Beautiful Viking Baby

2008-08-24T22:55:00.003-04:00

Listen to Scott Simon's description of a woman who insists on using the same Norweigan sperm donor for her second child because she wants her first child to have a full-sibling.

I agree with Simon's view that it is laudable when someone wants to parent a child of a different race. But Simon might be interested to learn about a study (presented at last weekend's APA conference) showing that full-siblings have less conflictual relationships (less sibling rivalry) than half sibs. The authors claim this indicates that kin selection is at work: we are more altruistic to those who share more of our genes.

See:

Michalski, R. L., & Euler, H. A. (2007). Evolutionary perspectives on sibling relationships. In C. A.
Salmon & T. K. Shackelford (Eds.), Family relationships: An evolutionary
perspective (pp. 230-256). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press

I wonder how the children know who is a half sib. Any thoughts, readers?

Olympics 2008 -- Too much bare female flesh on display for ya?

2008-08-21T10:11:00.002-04:00

Not too much for me.

Some sports commentators have been complaining that we've been getting nothing but endless up-close tours of the bodies of Misty May and Kerri Walsh. (See post by the Neurocritic about increase in TV coverage based on skin uncoverage, and long, informative post at community.feministing.com about sportswriters negative reactions to female gymnasts' bodies).

Let's not complain about seeing all this athletic female flesh. I hope lots of pre-teen and teen girls are seeing the muscular arms on gymnasts and "real sized" breasts. Normally TV is saturated with one type of female body, one that isn't attainable without surgery and unhealthy eating. Now we're finally getting to see another type of body, one that sends a message that women's bodies aren't just sex toys.

After so much bikini exposure to authentic female athletes in swimsuits (think of the chests on those female swimmers), maybe the famous Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue will see the logic of displaying Olympic athletes in swimsuits rather than models.

Every american should watch this film

2008-08-10T00:26:00.005-04:00

"No talking! Shut the fuck up!"

"Head down!"

"What are you dong -- praying? That;s not allowed!"

"On your knees!"

Stress positions. Endless interrogations. Your American captors claim to have a video of you attending a rally for Bin Laden in 2000 in Afghanistan, but you know you were working a wage-slave job in your native Britain. You've got a British accent, but your face is middle eastern, so back on your knees!

No humans should be treated this way. See for yourself.

Official movie site.

Watch the film for free right now.

American Psychological Association meets in Boston Aug 14-18, respects food workers labor negoations

2008-08-07T21:50:00.008-04:00

Although the dues to be a member of APA are sky high, and attending the convention costs almost $300, I'm still going to be attending. My students are giving a poster, and I really enjoy hearing the diversity of big name speakers and attending sessions. And -- it appears that APA is doing the morally right thing to support food workers at the Boston Convention Center.

UNITE HERE Local 26 and the Hotel Workers Rising campaign have asked the public to boycott ARAMARK, a company accused by the The National Labor Relations Board of harassing and intimidating workers.

I learned after receiving an email from Judy Strassburger, APA's Executive Director of Governance Affairs, sent to all APA registered attendees.

Within the past month, we have been informed that ARAMARK, the company that provides food service at the Convention Center, is in negotiations with its employees, members of the Food Services Employee Union, Local 26.

While it is important to note that the Union is not currently on strike, there have been periodic demonstrations at the Convention Center over the summer. It is possible that picketers could be present during our meeting.

The Union communicated to APA that if we were to agree not to have any food served in the Convention Center during our meeting, they would not picket.

The APA agreed to respect the boycott, but was forbidden by its contract with the Convention Center to contract independently to have food served during the meeting. There are few restaurants in walking distance. The decision was thus to provide a free trolley service during lunch time to the restaurants that are beyond walking distance.

So -- I always like bringing a sandwich from home...

What can you do? Stay in union hotels -- "Hotel workers rising" provides this search applet. or list.

Update August 15 2009 -- At the conference, foodworkers were picketing, but for any atendees who hadnt received APA's memo, the dispute and action to take would be unclear. It appears that APA didn't cancel the contract with ARAMARK. There were food concession stands in the exhibit hall. I can understand how difficult it would be to have people attending a meeting from 8 am to 6pm without any food (or coffee) inside the massive building. So one strategy could have been for APA to post signs telling people about the labor negations, inform attendees that if they want to respect the boycott they should bring thermoses and food from elsewhere, or to purchase food at the union hotel next door (The Westin waterfront). Attendees would then make their own choices.

A step more nuanced than "Do onto others"

2008-08-05T13:14:00.006-04:00

The golden rule, "Treat others as you would like to be treated" is a great first approximation. The drawback, as Robin Abrahams has noted, is that not everyone wants to be treated in the same way. In the realm of etiquette, she suggests this formulation:

"Avoid giving offense or alarm; avoid taking offense or alarm."

or: "Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send."

More generous than "do unto others", its like the strategy that beats competitors for Axelrod's cooperation/defection game, "tit for tat plus forgiveness (pdf)"

Should you try to cut into that 3 hour iphone line?

2008-07-21T21:25:00.002-04:00

Lance Arthur stood in line to get an iphone, and stood-up to a someone who slipped in right behind him, thus not waiting 3.5 hours.

The cutter asked, when Lance challenged him, "How does it hurt you?"

Game theorists have shown in several studies that people will pay their own money to punish a cheater.

Sure, businesses often make big profits, but they deserve to, since they put up the money, they took all the risks...

2008-07-20T15:22:00.007-04:00

2008, what a happy year.

With families and communities in misery (see recent journalism on this such as Moyer's pod-casts) following the subprime meltdown, the silver lining to devastated lives is that the American people may wake up to the truth of the business world.

The truth: A large section of the business world is less about deserved gains to those who take risks, than about ruthless greed combined with cleverness: how to secure risk-free methods for accruing wealth through manipulating the legislature and courts to enact regulations such that profits are kept and debs are paid by taxpayers.

Last year, and the year before, political progressives and anti-capitalists like William Greider or dozens, hundreds of other journalists and public commentators have made statements like the above. And they preached hard to the choir. But there's nothing like seeing and living it for believing it.

What is heartening to me, and why I call this a happy year, is the amount of media attention focused on this problem. For example, in his LA Times article, Peter G. Gosselin actually mentions in print the phrase "government-directed economy" as an alternative to markets run by crooks and profiteers:

"For a generation, most people accepted the idea that the core of what makes America tick was an economy governed by free markets. And whatever combination of goods, services and jobs the market cooked up was presumed to be fine for the nation and for its citizens -- certainly better than government meddling. No longer."

Another great article is Harper's cover story (pictured), The Wrecking Crew: How a Gang of Right-wing Con men Destroyed Washington and Made a Killing.

Profit is not essential to innovation, efficiency and growth. Many non-profits thrive around the world. Several government bureaucracies, the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health, do a reasonable job at using committees of expert peers to decide what scientific projects to fund. (Ha ha, they seldom fund mine, so I'm not sayings its a perfect system -- smile -- but I still admire these institutions). Indeed, American science has been the international leader in scientific innovator for decades because of the system of public funding and peer review. This format could be extended to chartering business. Community members, with experts, would decide whether a business would serve the public good.

Alternatives to free markets exist which are humane and fair. Let's open our eyes.

Post a comment if you have links to good articles or podcasts

Got Pecs?

2008-07-12T20:11:00.005-04:00

"Some women report finding the procedure uncomfortable."

Thus spoke the "reading material" provided by the Mammography clinic.

Whoa.... No kidding! Holding my breath to prevent chest movement, I was barely holding on to sanity for those few seconds my tit was being ground between two plates.

Looking at the images with the technician, I was interested to see the darker curve of muscle that formed an arc against the breast bone, next to which the fatty tissue of breast formed a lighter silhouette.

I queried the technician, "Do you think my pectoral muscles are big?"

"Oh, no, they're fine," was her jolly reply.

"But I work out!" I practically stamped my foot.

She tried gamely: "Oh, well, uh, you know, we see a lot of elderly, and they don't have any."

So that's that. One of the milestones of one's 40s, passed.

Gals, I recommend the bench press. Lie flat on your back, and push the bar straight up off your chest. No weights are necessary, the bare bar is 45 pounds and plenty to start with. Note: The photo on the page was the closest thing google image had of breast+pectoral muscles.

Now, there was one more note-worthy aspect of the trip to Brigham and Women's hospital for my first mammogram. When I checked in, they needed to update their records, and asked me two questions I've never been asked before at a doctor's office:

"Religious preference?"

"Atheist," I said automatically. The efficient clerk didn't bat an eye.

"Ethnicity? Like, you could say Irish, or Italian American."

She gave me choices so we'd both be done with a minimum of further explanation. And its pretty obvious to look at me that I'm from that tribe that took 10,000 years to get out of Central Asia.

"Northern European." She had no problem with that designation either.

But I had to wonder why these new questions. The ethnicity question could be part of medicine's gamble that persons whose ancestors originated in different geographical regions have slightly different susceptibility to diseases. For example, if your ancestors lived near the equator, they left you a nice ultraviolet radiation protection kit. Your doctor won't need to freeze off suspicious brown growths on your face, neck and shoulders (my Los Angeles living parents have to go through this a lot). In the U.S.A., if you have the appearance of being a member of an ethnic minority, the stress of guarding against negative evaluation ("microaggresions") puts you at heightened risk of heart disease. So maybe this ethnic info helps --- but some critics say, medical profiling, away. It leads doctors to zero in too quickly on the statistics specific to a certain group, as when a medical team missed a white kid's sickle cell anemia (specific case described in this ppt).

But what about the religious question? Maybe doctors have learned that if someone is Buddhist, let them try temple healing first, given the power of placebo effects. And if someone's an atheist, just give 'em their options straight up, with statistics and empirical evidence laid out in all their glory.

Adult males are a "suspect" if they speak to an unknown child

2008-07-10T09:25:00.003-04:00

For the second day in a row the campus paper BU Today featured this story:

BU Police Issue Sketch of Day-Care Suspect
Likeness sent to area police, child-care centers

Boston University Police have released a sketch of the person who allegedly approached and spoke to a small child at the Boston University Children’s Center on Agganis Way late Tuesday afternoon.

The suspect, a white male about 5 feet, 10 inches tall, with an average build and a high voice, was dressed in khaki shorts, a gray T-shirt, and a white baseball cap worn backwards. He reportedly stopped by the bicycle area of the Children’s Center, which is adjacent to BUPD headquarters, and spoke to a young child in the center’s care. He left the area when a day-care staffer advised him that he would have to check in before he could make contact with a child. The sketch, based on observations of a day-care worker who witnessed the incident, has been sent to local police departments, the Massachusetts State Police, and area day-care centers.

--------------------------------

What kind of assumptions are we making -- that the only reason a male in his mid 30s would chat with a child is predatory?

H said, "As a man, you just learn you're not suppose to talk with children you don't know. Hell, I cross the street when I see kids."

Scott Pare, deputy director of public safety for the University, says the BU Police and other departments are doing everything they can to locate the suspect. “We are reviewing all past reports of field observations,” says Pare. “We are studying videotapes. We have a description, and we are investigating every lead we have.”

I'll make conversation while monitoring for verbal clues

2008-07-08T11:18:00.003-04:00

Given my stunning performance on the Cambridge Face Perception Task, the postdoctoral researcher at the Jamaica Plain Veterans Administration who is looking for prosopagnosics was eager for me to come to the lab. We reviewed my experience of face-perception difficulty and he decided to start off by checking some of skills that often accompany face perception difficulties: gender, age and attractiveness identification. This battery, The Philadelphia Face Perception Battery (pdf), also had an upright only face discrimination task (choose which of two choices was most similar to a target face). Surprise: I was normal on all 4 tasks.

The researcher later emailed me:

From the tests you've taken so far, it seems like you have a moderate form of prosopagnosia that is somewhat specific to facial identity. However, there are a couple tests that you were able to "beat", most likely through employing compensatory strategies.

The stategies were simple: I used skin tone, and fat/thin face shape. On the Philadelphia Battery, I only had to look at three faces and make one decision. In contrast, the CFPT is crazy hard, because on a single trial one is confronted with 7 faces: a target and 6 faces that have to be put in order. I now think that my problem with the CFPT was that there were so many faces that I couldn't pick out similar/differnet features. As I scanned across the row of faces, they all looked equally dissimilar to the target. Consistent with prosopagnosia, I showed no inversion effect (as noted in prior post).

My hypothesis is that my face perception abilties are good enough to process three faces at a time, but I break down under conditions of heavy cognitive demand.

Along these lines: I had some problems watching a DVD last night, La Guerre est finie. It was a black&white 1960s movie about anti-Fascist Communist revolutionaries scuttling back and forth between Spain and France, in French with English subtitles. I couldn't keep straight who was the main character vs. one of at least two other white mid-40s males with short black hair wearing a suit and tie. I've had this problem frequently before, but it seemed really acute in this particular movie. To figure out the political machinations I had to at least know who was the undercover agent from Spain vs. his friend in Paris. I just gave up and fortunately after this first half hour got used to his face and voice enough and the friend had receded in importance so only the main character was mostly in view, etc.

This fits the hypothesis of information overload. My face processing is exacerbated by on-going cognitive demands. The movie was black and white, so it was already a difficult person-detection task because of reduced cues for skin color, hair texture, clothing, AND I had to read subtitles so had less time to even look at the characters.

Yes, I'm mostly a single-channel processor. I dislike concurrent processing and turn off TVs, radios when I need to work, I find even a background babble of speech (like a TV in a distant room) annoying because it tugs at my attention (nonspeech is okay).

So... I have mild prosopagnosia compounded by poor concurrent processing, whaddaya think? And remind me of your name when we meet (smile).

The upright advantage in face recognition

2008-07-04T23:55:00.008-04:00

I haz none.

Are faces processed differently than other objects?

One of the indications that face processing is special -- employs holistic or configurational processing that is more detailed and sophisticated than in ordinary object recognition -- is that people process, recognize and remember upright faces more accurately than inverted faces. This is called the upright advantage.

According to norms provided on the Cambridge Face Perception Task, most people process upright roughly twice as well as inverted faces.

On this test, my ability to process inverted faces was in the normal range -- but I was no better at upright than inverted. I showed no upright advantage.

My husband H took the same test. His inverted score was the same as mine (indeed, I was a few points better than him on inverted faces). But his upright face score was far above normal, in the superior range. Looking at our scores made us realize we were really different face processors. He had something I didn't have.

H and I then together took a couple tests that are available at the website of the Prosopagnosia Research Center at Harvard University. For a basic test of memory of novel faces, H got 100% correct, and I got 52% correct.

For this interesting and fun test of famous faces, H got 100% correct, and I got 72% correct.

After an anonymous poster to this blog told me about the yahoo discussion group, I found Bill Choisser's remarkable website. I really resonated to many of his experiences, such as this one:

I once had a job that involved going to buildings and getting their engineers to show me around. Inevitably they would all wear identical clothes and never have beards or long hair. My "tour guide" would take me to a distant part of the building and then tell me to come get him if I needed him again. When I'd go down to the office, there would be half a dozen guys there, all who looked just like the guy I was looking for. I couldn't just ask for the guy by name because if he was there he would get very upset that I had forgotten him completely in thirty minutes' time.

====

For me, when I'd get back to the place where'd there be half a dozen guys etc., I'd kind of start scanning them, waiting for someone to light up in recognition of me, or maybe I'd get lucky and recognize him based on my my kit of various recognition methods,and somehow hope it'd just work out. In recent years I've tried to anticipate this situation by memorizing the guide's face/outfit in some way before we separated.

I've frequently been stunned that fastfood workers can pick me out of a crowd of people when handing over my sandwich. (Any readers impressed by this?)

Next: I am invited to the Jamaica Plain VA Hospital for more tests...

In some cultures, being called a pimp is an insult

2008-07-04T23:27:00.005-04:00

Recently watched the DVD Iraq in Fragments. (See trailer.) All in Arabic with subtitles, one young man was thrown the slurs, "You mule, pimp..."

What's so bad about a pregnancy pact, anyway?

2008-06-24T10:09:00.007-04:00

Why are local officials so eager to determine if a "pregnancy pact" led to 17 teenagers at Glousester High becoming pregnant in the same semester?

I'd be more impressed with the gumption and drive of these girls if they got pregnant from a pact than if they got get pregnant by accident. But sex and pregnancy are are apparently still seen as moral issues for teen girls. Studies beginning in the 70s showed that the more guilty z girl felt about premarital sex, the less likely she was to use contraception. Like murder, its morally worse to plan for sex than to be swept up by passion.

Which made me wonder outloud during our after-dinner reading/news watching: "Why is a pregnancy pact among teen girls so terrible?"

H ignored me, wrinkling his brow over some oddity in James Wood's The Broken Estate .. or maybe he was reading Pages from the Goncourt Journals.

I persisted, "Is it because the current power structure and rule by elites could topple if people banded together to support each other in making life-changing decisions?"

H snorted. "Because teens are suppose to be at school to get an education, not to do a loser thing like get pregnant."

Me: "Oh. But why is getting pregnant for teens a loser thing..." I was reminded of my awe at young women: they have that incredible power, whenever they want, to become pregnant.

Evolution has prepared teenage women to become pregnant. Its the most natural thing in human biology for a young woman to desire to be a mother. Would we make more progress with our goals as a society if we accepted this, and then started social planning from there?

But H cut short my reverie with a reminder that more is going on than society's lack of understanding of the naturalness of teen pregnancy.

H: "Its because Glousester is a loser town."

I realized I was finally understanding. There are conflicting goals in American culture. These are girls from working class and low-income families. Their cheap labor serves a societal function in this sea-side resort town: inexpensive hotel maids, waitresses, factory workers, and girlfriends. Their presence in the labor force, rather than collecting wellfare as new mothers, has a ripple effect across the economy, keeping wages where elites like to see them: low.

To its credit, the Time Magazine article hinted at what sociologists have long known: Young women will stop getting pregnant when they have something better to do with their lives. 10 years ago Planned Parenthood's slogan was "The best contraception is a future." (Write me if you know if they still use this slogan.) "

In the book Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage, authors Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas uses national statistics backed up with myriad interviews to explain why early pregnancy makes economic and emotional sense for women from low-income families, even though it most certainly does not make economic sense for women from middle-income and high-income families.

Altough economic mobility is possible in our culture, it is statistically unlikely. Women from middle-and high-income families are likely to earn substantial salaries in the future if they avoid early motherhood and continue their education and training. Low-income women have no such future, so there is little economic loss from early parenting. Single-parenting also makes sense, because the pool of available men is not of sufficiently high quality to afford a benefit, since getting married when pregnant means you may need to take care of a low-earning male in addition to a child. (Readers may enjoy Bitch Ph.D's thought-provoking review of this book.)

So what should be done in Gloucester? It all depends on what kind of society you'd like to engineer.

For me, I'd start with getting Medical Director Dr. Brian Orr and chief nurse practitioner Kim Daly back on the payroll. Then let's take some some public planning advice from Europe, which stole the American Dream a few decades ago.

Exploring the Atheist Personality

2008-06-17T23:05:00.003-04:00

" I love the idea of debunking or analyzing the veracity of the common stereotype of atheists. I think this is an excellent direction for scholarship. Furthermore, your results do provide some interesting preliminary evidence."

So wrote Laura King, Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Research in Personality.

"Given the vast increase in public discourse about religion and atheism, and books like those of Dawkins, Dennett, and Harris, this is indeed a good time to be doing scientific work on the types of questions raised in this manuscript. There are interesting questions about whether the stereotypes about atheists are true. Are they indeed immoral, immune to awe experiences, unhappy people? This manuscript therefore opens up interesting questions."

This was the opening paragraph of the review Dr. King obtained from an expert reviewer.

But alas.... research is hard. I think I'm gonna hafta file drawer this paper because I don't have the resources to collect more participants as both King and the reviewer felt was necessary (and I do see their point).

But if the topic interests you, check out the complete paper here, because "preliminary evidence" can still be worth a look.

Trouble recognizing faces?

2008-06-14T14:22:00.007-04:00

Oliver Sacks brought prosopagnosia to public consciousness a few decades with his provocative story about a neurological patient with a temporal lobe lesion in a location we now know as the fusiform face area.

But only recently have researchers begun to study congenital (or developmental) prosopagnosia.

After attending some scientific talks on children and adults who have grown up with this disorder,I began to wonder: Do I have prosopagnosia?

Always on the low-end of the face-perception ability continuum...Examples:

2005. Walking up the stairs in the History building, I was surprised to come upon my former housemate P, who I hadn't seen in a while but who I knew worked in a building a few blocks away. She brightened to see me, and I blurted out, "Hi, P, What are you doing here?"

"What --this is my building, my office is just over there."

So she's not P, but she knows me and I don't yet know who she is. I think she didn't hear the P salutation in the mix of walking up stairs and the unexpected meeting. Hm..

"Oh, I guess I didn't realize your office was here. Well, how are you doing anyway?"

We chatted, and she dropped a name of a mutual friend, and I realized she was S, a political science professor who I'd met a few times at Faculty for a Humane Foreign Policy and she also had showed up to a party at my house.

I felt bad for the awkward exchange because she's someone I like and would like to know more -- what is wrong with me? I resolved to be more careful, told myself not to jump to conclusions when I run into a person in an unexpected context, study people's faces if I expect to run into them again and try to memorize their features.

Imagine the challenges of following the plot when multiple TV characters are of the same race, body type and hair color

I used to call it my problem with the films of the 1940s and 1950s because the males were all whtite and wore suits, and the women had homogenous clothing and hair style. But the intimacy and constant mental sharing of marriage has made me realize that my bad face perception is more than just a quirk, because H has started to say that my problems watching TV are "scary."

At first he doubted I could be as bad I am and had some chuckles at my expense.

When watching TV together, when a promo or clip for a new show would appear, H would say, "Ok, who is that actor? What show did we see him in?"

And for me, its as if I've never seen that actor before. I'll ask for hints. I'll try to think of who matches the gender, height, body type, etc of the unknown actor. I'm then embarrassed to learn its the actress who played the mother on Six Feet Under or someone else whose face I must have seen 50 times. Although I enjoyed Trixie on Deadwood, I had little recognition for her on her brief appearance on Lost.

In an interesting twist, when the actor speaks, I may suddenly realize who it is, just as I'm unimpaired at recognizing friends' voices on the phone.

Distinctive faces help. I'm good with Hugh Laurie, even when he speaks in his British accent.

Early on in a drama, I frequently must ask H for help -- is that the same person now? Which character is that one?

In Battlestar Gallactica, Saul Tigh consorts with the imprisoned Six, and imagines he is seeing the face of his wife Ellen. I was impressed with the subtle means by which the director had conveyed this, asking H after the show, "Did you notice that they made-up Six's face to resemble Ellen?"

H: "No, that was the actress who played Ellen! They changed the actress. You're kidding, right?"

me: Really? They shot back and forth between the two actress' faces?

H: "Now you're scaring me."

So when I brought home a computerized test to diagnosis prosopagnosia, H was enthusiastic. Yes, he'd do it too, what a good idea. I realized he was reacting the way one does when one's disabled spouse finally wants to confront her disability.

Next: My results (and H's) from the Cambridge Face Perception Test.

Tourist attraction at the Summer Palace, Beijing

2008-06-13T10:07:00.000-04:00

Even though it had happened five times before, my instinctive response, when two people approach, gesturing with a camera, is that I am suppose to take *their* picture. The next thing I know they're posing with arms loosely around my shoulders. Ha ha. Wanting to be a good cultural ambassador even though I have deep ambivalence about "my" country, I took off my glasses and visor when they mimed me to do so.

Who are these women? Their padded jackets, demeanor, physiognomy and dark tans suggest they traveled long and hard, all the way from some distant province, for their big tourist visit to Beijing. And what do you do on your once-in-a-lifetime trip to Beijing? You bring your digital camera and take a zillion pics of all the exotic sights in Beijing. And yes, one of the exotic things you may get to see in Beijing is a real live Meiguoren (literally, "M" country -- the letter "M" sounds like America), so run and stand by her and get a shot. H got his own snap in as soon as their friend had gotten two off, remarking that I was their prize marlin.

I ruined the postwoman's day

2008-06-11T09:25:00.000-04:00

I came down to sign for my USPS package in the lobby of my condo, and was squinting in amazement at the large heavy box which I'd had shipped via "ground" from China, marveling that it had arrived in half the estimated 3 months -- no, marveling it had arrived at all. I was pre-occupied with my thoughts on the package, the swirl of memories brought on by the distinctive "China post" stamp, memories of the hour I spent mailing this big box on the day I call "escape from Beijing", April 23, 2008. Still, I noticed some awkwardness in the handoff of pen and signed slip to the postwoman, a tall big-boned woman with a curly, neck-length blond hair, ruddy face, wearing those postoffice uniform shorts on this 90+ scorching day.

Exiting, she had to navigate the door propped ajar by trash-can and commented, "There is something wrong with your door."

I had battled the door yesterday and knew about it.

"Thank you," I mumbled.

Sharply, she said, "What?"

Still gazing at my package, I repeated, "Thank you."

"No, you said something before that, what did you say?"

"I just said thank you."

Her face was a snarl of anger and resentment at me.

The glass door closed between us.

I stared through the glass at her, dumbfounded, unable to move.

She stood watching me, her face glowering, eyes narrowed. She then stalked off to her van, tossing back angry glances. Was she thinking: "You can deny it, but I heard you, you bitch." Or was she scrutinizing me through the glass door, trying to figure out what kind of person was I, what reason did I have, that I would say *that* to her?

Sex and the City -- "Just Say No" to Commodity Porn

2008-06-06T19:02:00.000-04:00

If you have no desire, ever, to see the 'Sex and the City' movie, but would enjoy some schadenfreude at the pain I suffered last night ("life is short -- why am I here?), then read on.

Women came to New York for Love and Labels

Carrie opens the new Sex and the City movie with that line, claiming that's how it all started when she arrived 20 years ago. But in my memory as a confessedly avid watcher, labels weren't so important in the early, banter-rich, go-girl seasons.

Sex and the City challenged the sexual double-standard in a light-hearted, comedic, "go girl" way that first made you laugh, and then made you think (apologies to my pals). This brought me along to root, cheer, and forgive it its other excesses. Samantha unabashedly appropriated traditionally masculine sexual privileges. Miranda counted up her sexual partners, and came up with a number over 40. The girls giggled, cried and chortled over their orgasms -- how many, how often, how reliable, and the men who gave them good or didn't. The show was creative in its discussion of dating: what happens when you meet your boyfriend's mother -- and you click more with her than him? What if you've been without sex so long that you decide to accept the offer cat-called by a construction worker -- and he turns tail and runs in fear? You're trying to climb the corporate ladder, but your boss's wife thinks you're a lesbian, and she so wants a real live lesbian in their social circle -- act the part, or come out as a heterosexual? Should you give up the great sex because the guy is a recovering alcoholic who probably won't actually recover? Is it okay to pass around a guy to your girlfriends because he's really good in bed but otherwise not a keeper? How should you react when your fun one-night stand leaves greenbacks on your bedside table? And myriad timely issues: infertility and adopting a baby from China; breast cancer and chemotherapy; having a child as a single mother and handling a high-end corporate lawyer job; marrying and being the primary breadwinner.

Sure, I recall cringing when the Manolo Blahniks got big in the show, but shoe time and expensive clothes were a quirk, not the main point. The focus on glossy material possessions was slight enough in the TV shows that I could skip over them like annoying ads in a magazine.

But the movie upped the ante, and 20 minutes in, this gal wanted to fold and get out. There's no skipping the ads when the magazine is Vogue. Imagine your eyelids are taped open while an entire Vogue issue pans before you, pages turned in slow-motion.

And as if the conspicuous consumption wasn't bad enough ... consider the, uh, "story line."

In fictional romances, the two lovers must be kept separated during most of the story to build tension and uncertainty about the outcome: will they finally get together? How? How much suffering will they endure before being united? Authors must contrive devices to maintain separation between the lovers. Pride and Prejudice maintained suspense for an entire book because of a misunderstanding that could have been resolved with a simple conversation. In Sex and the City, I writhed in my seat in annoyance over the contrivances that kept Carrie and Big from having the simple conversation that would have saved viewers 2 hours of Carrie's tear-stained, crumpled face.

The reward of romantic union requires the build up of uncertainty. So darn, how to break up the happy cohabitating couple? Let Big get a a few hours of cold feet, and Carrie be so fragile that she over-reacts and flips out.

Being left at the altar -- the disaster of our life?

At the rehearsal dinner, Miranda is recovering from her pain at her spouse's infidelity, and snarls at Big, "You're crazy to get married -- marriage ruins everything!" Third-time groom Big is spooked and calls Carrie for reassurance in the middle of the night, gets it, but remains unsettled.

On the day of the wedding the precious flower girl, enamored of cell-phones, covets and hides Carrie's phone.

Big can't be really bad, because then reunion can't be possible. We've got to string everyone along on a momentary confusion, compounded by over-reaction.

Big calls Carrie repeatedly asking for a chance to touch base. He just needs to see her, he says. With his limousine at the wedding, her veil drops over her face as, not seeing him, she mounts the stairs. Cars honk for him to get rolling out of the way, and he is so agitated he tells his driver to leave the scene. Twenty minutes late, he finally gets Carrie on the phone. He starts to explain, saying something to the effect that he showed up at the venue, but needed to see her and now he's left, but he just needs to talk to her --- Carrie freaks out, taking this as news that he has jilted her at the altar, and faints. Her entourage carts off the wounded bride. Big tries valiantly to explain that he's ready now, but Carrie won't hear that message, and in pain over the assumption that his feet are frozen, she stuns him with her bouquet and the car roars off.

It takes six months for the two to finally talk. The writers' contrivances were pitiful: When Carrie is finally brave enough to go through her voice mail, the sound of Big speaking on the day of the wedding is so painful that she tosses the phone into the beautiful ocean at the lush Mexican resort where she and the girls are spending the paid-for honeymoon. What about letters and emails? At the first news that the cad send her an email, she asks her computer savvy personal assistant to make all messages from him disappear into cyberspace. Because of her huge emotional would, she is too distraught to open physical mail and it piles up in her PO box.

The two finally meet when Carrie has learned that the apt they bought together will be sold and the locks changed. She can't miss out on $400 never-worn shoes, and goes to the apt -- to find Big there with the same thought, cradling the shoes in his hands, looking pained.

They realize they love each other and, thankfully the film rapidly concludes.

Why why why?

In the final 20 minutes, the film adopts an about-face regarding materialism and consumerism. Instead of the lavish 200 guest wedding with designer label dress, Carrie and Big get married by a justice of the peace and have a simple dinner with friends. Craven, unprincipled Panglossian that I am, I was grateful for those crumbs -- yes, we can all be happy if we just learn (a) to start talking to each other, and (b) that love is more important than labels!

Its a case of titillate and moralize. The good life, the fantasy life whose image most excites the children of capitalism, is the life of buying expensive, dazzling products. But to ensure the images don't cloy, revise it all with just minutes of the game to go, with the smarmy moral message that love triumphs over labels. But how can 10 minutes of justice-of-the-peace wedding triumph over 230 minutes of commodities porn?

Back from semester sabbatical in Taiwan and China (Feb-April 2008)

2008-05-24T10:37:00.000-04:00

H and I hiked the great wall for 4 miles from Jinshaling to Simitai, after a three-hour bus ride from the center of Beijing. Because we had planned an overnight stay, I carried upwards of 20 pounds, including laptop. Sometimes I scrambled on hands-and-knees. I didn't just *see* the Great Wall. I hit it, thumped it, rolled it, danced it, cracked it.... And it me.

On the route to publishing in academia, when do you celebrate your achievements?

2008-05-23T21:47:00.000-04:00

The Chronicle of Higher Education "Careers"
column this week features the question of how the partners of academics may have trouble understanding what constitutes academic work. The author describes how the girlfriend of an academic jokingly asks him when he comes home from work, "Did you publish today?"

This got me thinking about a related question: How does an academic decide what type of publication-related accomplishment is worth celebrating? Is publication itself the main thing to celebrate? The Chronicle article made me realize that I've have been explicit about institutionalizing a process for myself and my co-authors. The moment to celebrate is submitting a manuscript to a journal. This is the day when you raise a toast, celebrate, send all the collaborators an email, "The paper is now submitted!!!" They should write back their congratulations and praise. I suggest awed statements like: "that response to reviewers' comments was masterful!" or "this paper kicks ass!" or "after this, people will either have to cite us or stop doing research on X completely!" This is the day where you benefit from rewarding yourself with emotional satisfaction at a job well done and exclaim to spouse, "I submitted a paper today!"

Even just a decade ago, the actual submission process took some hours to do because of printing and xeroxing. Today final submission may still take the good part of a morning because journals use websites like mc.manuscriptcentral.com, which have pages of forms to fill out and documents to upload. I used to celebrated when the manuscript was sitting in outgoing mail. Today, when I press the last "submit" button and receive the automated email of acknowledgment, I celebrate.

Now, why celebrate on submission, and not, say, when one receives the acceptance letter form the editor? The emailed proof from publisher? The journal in print?

Celebrate on your submit-button press because this is the culmination of the prior weeks and months of effort. You've been motivated by this moment -- by the desire to get this paper out of your life so you can make progress on your backlog of other manuscripts and so you can earn the gratitude of the co-authors who wondered when it would be done.

After hitting "submit" you won't hear reviewers' reactions to your work for 3 to 6 months. Even if the answer is "outright accept" (a rare event, as I explain below), it is hard to celebrate completion of project a you haven't worked on since that submit-button was pressed 6 months previously.

In the sciences (and I include the behavioral sciences; psychology is indeed a very "hard" science), out-right acceptance letters are rare. The first reviews may have as many pages as your article, and while they will generally be helpful, the reviewers point out myriad required improvements, new experiments to run, and even criticisms so devastating that at least that reviewer thinks the project should be junked. (Sample comment: "Now that you know how to do the experiments correctly, go and do them.") During the years of trying to publish academic journal articles, we learn that the editorial decision of "encouraged to resubmit if reviewers' objections can be met" is a positive move forward, even a victory. Emotionally, this is difficult to celebrate because of the mountain of effort ahead. Unless only minor revisions are required, I put aside the reviews and may not take them up for months given that by this time I've already been immersed in other projects.

A few resubmissions and possibly even a couple years later, you might get the final acceptance. Yes, celebrate, do. Raise a glass and/or breathe a sigh of relief. But there's been a lot of pain during the revisions, and you've probably been mostly involved in writing other papers, since revisions may not require the full-time effort in the manner of an initial submission.

The initial submission is the act that culminates our effort and is the one that we have direct control over. An acceptance hinges on editors and reviewers and we can't predict when it will occur or how arrdurous any revision requirements might be. Still, our nonacademic partners may not understand why we want to celebrate a manuscript submission rather than publication itself. Give them this essay!

Battlestar Galactica: Why can't it be better?

2007-08-31T00:26:00.001-04:00

H and I just watched the BSG Season 3 Finale after buying blackmarket DVDs from China.

We can now tally up who are the 12 cylons.

The original 7 (3 female)

3 LucyLawless (Dana?) ( her line was boxed)
6 Goldie (often can side with humans)
Sharon/Athena (her model was always weak)
Lebhoen (Starbuck's captor)
The psychologist who was outed and who was a badie on New Caprica and liked fracking Tigh's wife Ellen
The black doctor on The Farm
The weasily guy who appears in the opening

The mysterious 5 (2 female)

Starbuck (not completely revealed yet)
Tory (Laura Roslyn's assistant)
The Chief
Colonel Saul Tigh
Sam from the Caprica resistence

Notes: 5 cylon models are females. All the females are of child-bearing age

Of the 7 males, 2 are middle-aged (60 years old).

The distribution of genders and ages among the Cylon models approximates OUR society's cultural values. Older men have more play time in the show than older women, and they are more numerous among the cylon models than are older women. In fact, no women over age 55 has any role in the show at all (Laura Rosslyn is probably supposed to be around 50-55), while Colonel Tigh has to be at least 60 and Adama at least 55.

While the show is commendable for portraying interesting and strong female characters, only young women are allowed these roles. Laura Rosslyn is an exception and I certainly appreciate her, but she is still younger than the 2 male leads.

Now we learn that the cylons also prefer women who are young. They apparently did not think it useful to create any older women models, while they created 2 older male models.

The cylon also like their white meat and like gentlemen, they prefer blonds. Sure, I think "Six" is hot shit eye candy, but why not find a gorgeous black or hispanic actress?

Its kind of disgusting and much as I like the show, these casting choices make my skin crawl.

I'm waiting for a 65 year old women to get a major role like Adama or Saul Tigh.

Let's start a life together

2007-06-09T16:19:00.003-04:00

Women…We’re either crying because we’re pregnant … or because we’re not.

For years, the threat of pregnancy is there, ignored sometimes, rising to threatening levels at others. In our teens, our twenties, we are caught up in our complicated lives, navigating crises of friends, romantic relationships, school and work. Just living our own life is all-consuming, how could we be ready to create another? Children, yes—later, in the future. For now, we’re relieved to get our period, month after month.

I recall a specific memory, seated on the toilet in the campus apartment I had during my graduate school years, when I made a vow to the Universe: Just let me not be pregnant, and I promise, I swear, I will donate $100 a year to Planned Parenthood for the rest of my life.

Thankfully, my period arrived. Round-the-clock laboratory work, data analysis, paper-writing, and my future career as an academic were not interrupted by an unplanned pregnancy.

A teen-ager in the 1970s, graduating from high school in 1980, I was part of the first generation of women to plan for a career. My parents were feminists and told me that the world had changed. Intellectually precocious and aware of historical injustices against my gender, I was determined that I would be different from the women of prior generations: I would pursue a life of professional work and achievement as aggressively as any male.

It feels poignant, painful and ironic, that as a teenager I so strongly felt my uniqueness, when now, these decades later, I learn I am a cliché: yet another mid-40s female, successful in her career, ready to be a mother, but childless, and “too old” to become pregnant.

Sudden onset of reproductive panic

At age 37 I split with my boyfriend of five years because he was adamant that we have no children. Like other women of my generation, I had to read in Time and Newsweek cover stories and books like Sylvia Ann Hewlett’s Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children that doctors were being urged to tell women that their fertility would decline precipitously after age 38.

Could I be a single mother? How to do it? Anonymous sperm donor, ask a friend? Did I have time to do the normal thing, and just try to meet a man who wanted to have children? Parents and siblings begged me not be a single mother. “Don’t try to have a child, just concentrate on having a good life and be happy” my sister admonished (married with 1 child). “It's really hard” was all my brother could say, his hands full with three children under 5. After many conversations, my mother gave me her emotional support to try to get pregnant on my own.

But had I really been trying to convince my generous, caring, supportive family, or trying to convince myself that single parenthood was for me? I delayed taking steps to get pregnant on my own, even as a close friend did it successfully with the help of an old boyfriend.

At 42 I met the man who would become my future husband (H). He shared my dreams and goals and within a month of meeting we ceased contraceptive use. Statistics on the age-related decline in fertility indicated that my chances of conceiving were low. Perhaps we should have moved immediately to invitro fertilization (IVF). But neither H nor I were ready. It seemed strange to immediately start a medical procedure a few months after meeting. We wanted a chance to try on our own.

Part of being human may be the feeling that we are special. The statistics won’t hold for us. Forty-two year-olds do get pregnant on their own, without medical intervention. Why couldn’t I?

H and I married the month I turned 43. I felt my life as a mother was right around the corner.

TTC (“Trying to conceive”)

I had so many pregnancy “hopes” during the next 2 years. If I hadn’t gotten my period by day 27 of my menstrual cycle, I’d be light-headed with fantasies. I’d imagine announcing the joyful news, calculate the expected due date and start mentally organizing my research projects to accommodate my maternity leave.

But “Aunt Flow” arrived each month without fail. “Well, there’s next month” I’d tell myself. My fertility doctor was encouraging about my prospects because my FSH was still low (indicating good ovarian reserve). “Just keep trying” he said. But after turning 43, a routine test showed an elevated FSH. The good doctor saw a different woman sitting in front of him, a woman with bad numbers. I knew the statistics too, but couldn’t I at least try IVF? No. His recommendation was donor egg.
Dialogue with friends and family continued. Some asked, Why not adopt?

Adopting is a wonderful act. But I actually want to be pregnant. I’ve taught developmental psychology for 16 years. Twice a year I review prenatal development for my students. Can’t I experience it too—feel the fetus kick, pet my belly obsessively, make sure I eat right, give up coffee?

It's rare that adoptive families take home a newborn. Children adopted from abroad may be 1 or 2 years old. It would be ideal to be present for the whole first year of my child’s life. I want to see tiny fingers reflexively curl around everything they touch, and want to see the reflexes disappear as the cortex matures and grasping and orienting come under voluntary control. I’d like to listen to my infant practice babbling, and hear “ba” and “da” syllables turn into first words. It's fine with me not to rear my genetic offspring, but what a joy to know that this little creature shared half of my beloved husband’s genes.

Adoption is often more expensive than donor egg, and carries a lot of uncertainty. Will adoption agencies be able to find a child at all? What trauma and neglect was suffered by the child in the year or two before joining our home? Although pregnancy with donor egg is not certain, it does seem that the egg-donor route is the best for me. With that decision, the next chapter began. To paraphrase the title of the Dr. Seuss book, “Are you my egg donor?”

Who are you, dear girl?

In an older era of human history, I’d be the childless older woman, pitied by others. Or a women whose children had died or been stolen from her to be servants for others. You’d be a young woman or even teen girl, with a newborn but no husband or financial support, desperate for a solution. An infant would exchange hands. Depending on the circumstances of our lives, we perhaps would never see each other again, or perhaps we would remain known to each other. On your side, you’d be filled with pain or just relief, on mine, perhaps uncertainty and caution but also joy, gratitude, excitement.

In the developed world, immense cultural and technological changes separate us from this older era. Birth control and other medical advances have created a situation different from that of prior centuries, and a different type of exchange will take place. Birth control means you won’t conceive and deliver an infant you’re not ready to care for. IVF with donor egg means I could, in principle, bring to life the DNA in the eggs that fail to implant inside your womb each month and are flushed out with “Aunt Flow.” Its strange, scary, science-fictiony, fantastic. Shall we do it?

Who are you? I have some awe to think that I don’t know you now, yet you are out there, living your complicated life. Children yes, but later. I may be old enough to be your mother, and thinking about you living your life—crying, laughing, pensive—I embrace you in my motherly concern. Yet you will have an astonishing, evolutionarily-unanticipated, deep relationship to me. You, young woman, may be the biological mother of my child. Where are you, dear girl? It's time to start a life together.

Hugo Chavez interviewed by Barbara Walters March 17, 2007

2007-03-17T13:55:00.001-04:00

Oh dear. My husband (H) gritted his teeth at the announcement that Hugo Chavez, the innovative, popular leader of Venezuela, would be interviewed by Barbara Walters. He could see too well the spin and misinformation that would dominate the screen.

I watch too little TV and browse too few online political sites. I'd never seen Chavez on TV and insisted we watch. I wanted to learn, and of course I had H to talk me through any inaccuracies.

20/20: Chavez seldom grants interviews, but Barbara Walters got one..

H, snorting: He grants interviews all the time!

20/20: Chavez is making headlines by calling Bush a devil and a donkey.

H, more snorting into the TV: "That's the headline *you* want to make out of him!

Walters: President Chavez, if you could say one thing to the American people, what would it be?

Chavez: Like you, I admire Martin Luther King. Martin Luther King said, "I have a dream." I have a dream also. It is a dream we share together...

20/20 hosts: Well, broken English it was...

Me, snorting into the TV: "Broken English" my ass. Heavy accent, yes -- grammatical errors, didn't spot a single one. And like, what kind of Spanish does Bush speak?

H, too disgusted to speak.

Me, prodding: That was good, didn't you think? Could have been worse?

H: It was typical journalist spin. "Both sides" were interviewed; the wealthy upper-class and some poor people.

[H point: Journalism uses the "both sides interviewed" device to provoke the illusion of balanced coverage; imagine interviewing Hitler on the benefits of slave labor, and then interviewing the incarcerated.]

Me: But the interview with the wealthy did nothing to support "their" side! The upper class said they would basically have to leave soon! If they need to leave the country, it means Chavez is succeeding in making Venezuela a place where it is no longer comfortable to be wealthy!

H: Capital flight.... [Discussion of capital flight from Cuba]

Me: And the 'other side' -- poverty stricken -- certainly those interviews made the point that Chavez' administration is actually alleviating poverty.

H: But they've nationalized almost nothing. They're using the oil revenues to fund reforms. Eventually, they'll need to nationalize. The class war will have to come. But Chavez is going slow, implementing reforms slowly, taking time to build up neighbor councils.

Me: Isn't that good? Building infrastructure so that the working class will have the knowledge, skills and tools for self-governance?

But H was too annoyed with the interview to engage more with me. And then I wanted to see the rest of the Land of the Blind... (ouch -- movie review forthcoming)

Why I married a communist

2007-03-17T13:17:00.002-04:00

Some 3 or 4 hours into our first date, my husband-to-be raised his mug of hot chocolate and looked me in the eye. "Actually, I'm a communist".

Later we'd laugh to remember the steps towards this declaration. Early in the evening he discussed why he didn't vote (it was November 2004), then mentioned his leftist activism, then socialism, then Marxism, and then finally that word that would "elicit large skin conductance responses" on my laboratory equipment.

As it did on my own nervous system.

The evening had been going well. I'd dragged him to a book reading at the First Parish Church in Cambridge where we listened to Steve Pinker and other authors discuss a new collection of science writing. To prolong the evening and to finally have a chance to talk, we walked a block to Tealux in Harvard Square.

He was an English literature professor. He explained that narrative was the route to understanding -- stories were the way to grasp any system's internal logic. I approved, recalling autism researcher Simon Baron Cohen's distinction between empathizing and systematizing. Intellectual conversation. I was stimulated. Later he told me he was scared shitless.

But why did the "C" word provoke in me that happy combination of relief and excitement?

If he was really a Communist -- really a believer in something that this country we live in vilified for decades -- then, in his mind, all my attributes which had been threatening to other blind dates -- feminist, skeptic, career woman, leftist, atheist, rule-breaker, nonconformist -- would have to be okay.

And they were.