Received: from mx02.globecomm.net (mx02.globecomm.net [206.253.129.31]) by email.mcmail.com (9.9.9/8.8.8) with ESMTP id OAA03915 for ; Mon, 10 Aug 1998 14:49:35 +0100 (BST) Received: from maelstrom.stjohns.edu (maelstrom.stjohns.edu [149.68.1.24]) by mx02.globecomm.net (8.8.8/8.8.0) with ESMTP id JAA02633 for ; Mon, 10 Aug 1998 09:49:56 -0400 (EDT) Message-Id: <199808101349.JAA02633@mx02.globecomm.net> Received: from maelstrom.stjohns.edu by maelstrom.stjohns.edu (LSMTP for OpenVMS v1.1a) with SMTP id <4.6F8F801C@maelstrom.stjohns.edu>; Mon, 10 Aug 1998 8:22:11 -1300 Date: Mon, 10 Aug 1998 08:22:10 -0400 From: "L-Soft list server at St. John's University (1.8c)" Subject: File: "SCI-CULT LOG9806" To: Ian Pitchford X-UIDL: 1200625b8cac487296ccb03d4c2689ed X-PMFLAGS: 33554560 0 ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 1 Jun 1998 09:38:32 +0000 Reply-To: Ian.Pitchford@scientist.com Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Comments: Authenticated sender is From: Ian Pitchford Subject: BSPS annual conference details MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT The British Society for the Philosophy of Science Annual Conference 1998. Theme: 'The Concepts of Cognitive Science' Hosted by: The Department of Philosophy, at The University of Reading, Reading, UK. Friday 18th- Sunday 20th September, 1998. ____________________________________________________________ Provisional Conference Program and Registration form appear below. 1) Provisional Conference Program Friday September 18th 1.00 p.m. Lunch 2.00 Session 1: Peter Gibbins (Executive Director, Digital VCE): 'Philosophical Toys' 3.15 Tea, Coffee & Biscuits 3.30 Session 2: Stathis Psillos (The London School of Economics): 'Abduction: Between Conceptual Richness and Computational Complexity' 4.50 Session 3: John Barnden (University of Birmingham): 'Metaphor and Mental States' 6.30 Dinner 8.00 A demonstration of Reading University's Robots, by David Keating (Dept. of Cybernetics) Saturday September 19th 8.00 Breakfast 9.00 Session 4: Peter Millican (University of Leeds): Title TBA. 10.15 Session 5: Andy Clark (University of Washington, and University of Sussex): 'Systemic Boundaries and Cognitive Scientific Explanation' 11.30 Tea, Coffee & Biscuits 11.45 Session 6: Graduate Presentations 1.00 Lunch 2.00 Session 7: Wes Sharrock (University of Manchester): 'Cognition and Discourse' 3.15 Tea, Coffee & Biscuits 3.30 Session 8: Ruth Michaels (Princeton University): 'Counterfactual Analyses of Causal Relevance and the Qua Problem for Mental Properties' 4.30 Session 9: Paul Schweizer (University of Edinburgh): 'Realization and Reduction in Cognitive Science' 6.30 Conference Dinner Sunday September 20th 8.00 Breakfast 9.00 Session 10: Graduate Presentations (if there are enough) 10.15 Session 11: Robert Kowalski (Imperial College, London): 'The Role of Logic in Multi-Agent Systems' 11.30 Tea, Coffee & Biscuits 11.45 Session 12: Donald Gillies (King's College, London): 'Interactions Between Philosophy of Mathematics and Computing' 1.00 Lunch 2) Conference Registration Form All prices are in pounds sterling. Please complete and return the form (by post, not email) to the address at the bottom of this message before August 1st. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- REGISTRATION FORM (PLEASE TYPE OR USE BLOCK LETTERS) Name (including preferred title):______________________________________ Address for correspondence:____________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________ Telephone:____________________ e-mail: _______________________________ (All Fees listed below include Conference Registration Fee). Option A: Ensuite Accommodation for Friday & Saturday, plus Conference Dinner, all other meals, and refreshments): 155.00 pounds sterling Option B: Standard Accommodation for Friday & Saturday, plus Conference Dinner, all other meals, and refreshments): 135.00 Option C: Non-Residence Fee (includes refreshments, but not meals, unless specified): Friday 15.00 Saturday 20.00 Sunday 15.00 (OR: Special Rate for all 3 Days:) 40.00 Meals: Friday Lunch 9.00 Friday Dinner 11.00 Saturday Lunch 9.00 Conference Dinner (Saturday) 20.00 Sunday Lunch 9.00 Total. I enclose payment of Please delete as appropriate: Non-vegetarian/vegetarian/vegan Payment: Payment can be either by cheque or by credit card (Overseas applicants please note that payment must be by credit card). Please make cheques payable to 'The University of Reading'. Credit card payment must be by either VISA or MASTERCARD. Please state your cardholder number, card expiry date, your name (as it appears on the card), and your full address. Please also include your signature. Return this completed form by mail (_not_ email, please) to me at the address below, before August 1st 1998. While it may be possible to process registration forms after this date, these will be subject to a 15 pound late registration fee. Note that no initial acknowledgement of receipt of this form will be sent. The details of your accommodation, along with a conference programme, will be forwarded to you before September 1st. Conference organiser: John Preston, Dept. of Philosophy, The University of Reading, Reading RG6 2AA. Tel. (0118) 931 8325, Fax. (0118) 931 8295, email: BSPS98@reading.ac.uk For further details, see the conference webpage: http://www.dur.ac.uk/~dfl0www/bsps/Events.html#conf ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 1 Jun 1998 13:32:24 +0000 Reply-To: Ian.Pitchford@scientist.com Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Comments: Authenticated sender is From: Ian Pitchford Subject: Kennewick Man MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Judge orders inspection of ancient bones PORTLAND, Ore. (Reuters) - A federal judge ordered that scientists be allowed to inspect remains of an ancient human skeleton that some believe could shed new light on the continent's early human history. At the same time, U.S. Magistrate Judge John Jelderks laid the groundwork for removing the so-called Kennewick Man from the custody of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which has been harshly criticized for its handling of the remains. Jelderks issued the ruling after a series of incidents and disclosures that he said "raised serious questions concerning both the physical security and scientific integrity" of the nearly complete 9,300-year-old skeleton. The bones, discovered in a muddy river bank in central Washington nearly two years ago, are at the center of a battle between Native Americans, who want to bury it, and scientists, who want to study it. Scientists were outraged by the recent disclosure that Indian tribes -- possibly inadvertently -- took some of the skeleton's remains from the closely guarded laboratory vault where they are kept and buried them with other unrelated bones in a private ceremony. Jelderks, in an oral ruling issued after a hearing, told the scientists and the corps to agree on a neutral repository where the skeleton could be housed. And he ordered that the bones be made available for inspection by independent scientists not connected with the case, including anthropologist Jim Chatters who was the first to determine the age of the skeleton after its discovery. Scientists are intrigued by the Caucasoid features of Kennewick Man, one of the oldest skeletons ever found in the United States. They believe the skeleton may be evidence of a people that predated or coexisted with the ancestors of today's Native Americans. Tribal leaders in the region, who call the skeleton the Ancient One, claim the bones are rightfully theirs under a federal law that requires the repatriation of Native remains and artifacts. Paula Barran, a lawyer for the scientists, said her clients were happy with the order allowing the bones to be inspected. She said she was confident the two sides could agree on a neutral repository by a July 1 deadline set by Jelderks. Attempts to reach government lawyers after the hearing were unsuccessful. ___________________________________________________ _____________________________________________ Ian Pitchford - Email: Ian.Pitchford@mcmail.com Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/ University of Sheffield, 16 Claremont Crescent SHEFFIELD S10 2TA, United Kingdom. Tel: 0114 222 2961 Fax: 0114 270 0619 _____________________________________________ Online Dictionary of Mental Health http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/psychotherapy/ InterPsych: Mental Health Debate on the Internet http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/InterPsych/inter.html _____________________________________________ ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 1 Jun 1998 22:01:45 +0000 Reply-To: Ian.Pitchford@scientist.com Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Comments: Authenticated sender is From: Ian Pitchford Subject: Recovered Memories MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT List-members around the world may be interested in these selections from recent Canadian newspapers: THE GLOBE AND MAIL Editorial Remember those justice forgot Wednesday, April 15, 1998 Recovered-memory therapy was one of the most pernicious trends to sweep North America in the late 1980s and early 1990s, fracturing thousands of families and leading to hundreds of arrests and financially crippling lawsuits...we are calling on Justice Minister Anne McLellan to order an inquiry into all convictions based on this internationally discredited therapeutic theory...Recognizing battered-woman syndrome provided a retroactive defence to women charged with murdering their partners. A similar consideration should be extended to people who were convicted based on another syndrome that has, in this case, been discredited. We aren't the only ones arguing for such a review. Late last month, Alan Gold, president of the Criminal Lawyers Association made a similar appeal in a letter to the Justice Minister. He asked her to "conduct an inquiry into this entire category of convictions, with a view to releasing forthwith all those prisoners who would not have been convicted but for the testimony of 'recovered memories.' " As Mr. Gold said, "an urgent and powerful need exists" to act on this matter without delay. THE TORONTO SUN May 4, 1998, Monday Hysterical Lies of the Mind George Jonas ...As Gold points out in his letter to Justice Minister McLellan, "There was never any legitimate reason for regarding such alleged memories as trustworthy; but by this point in time it is perfectly clear that they are not." Though few in the scientific community disagree, the law is stuck in a previous groove. Media fashions may be changing, but several Canadian prisoners of gender politics are still in jail. To this day people wonder how could Germans, a highly civilized people, surrender the best traditions of their society to the pseudo-scientific ravings of Nazi zealots. Perhaps we should wonder no more. We, too, have surrendered some of our legal system to pseudo-scientific ravings. Luckily, our victims number only hundreds, not millions, and most are still alive. We can yet repair the damage. THE GLOBE AND MAIL Saturday, May 9, 1998 False memory's victims languish in jail Syndrome discredited but convictions still stand By Kirk Makin, Justice Reporter ...Some simply lack the wherewithal to show that the psychiatric theory upon which they were convicted -- known as repressed memory by its supporters and false-memory syndrome by its detractors -- has taken a drubbing in scientific and legal circles...The stories first began to surface in the late 1980s: accounts of sexual depravity and ritual abuse so terrible that the victims had apparently buried them in their subconscious for years or decades...An increasing number of psychiatrists, psychologists, sociologists and lawyers began to take a hard look at repressed memory. Perhaps the most dramatic development came when psychiatric associations in several countries issued warnings that false memories could be induced by overzealous therapists. The justice system responded swiftly. In the past two or three years, criminal convictions have dropped dramatically in the United States and Canada in cases where there is no solid evidence to corroborate the "recovered memories" of a purported victim. It all leaves those who remain in prison as members of an exclusive, soon-to-be-defunct club. THE OTTAWA CITIZEN Sunday 10 May 1998 Blind-eye syndrome ...[I]t is so disturbing that Justice Minister Anne McLellan has refused to call a special inquiry into the cases of people convicted of sexual abuse on the basis of so-called recovered memories...Since sexual abuse convictions based on "recovered" memories peaked in the late 1980s and early 1990s, scientific opinion has shifted against the syndrome, tending now to view them as the unreliable and dangerous product of therapeutic suggestion...Many in the field now consider "recovered" memory to be itself a psychological affliction, and call it "false memory syndrome"... Even now, in the face of overwhelming evidence that the vast majority of, if not all, recovered memories have no basis in reality, many feminists still refuse to admit that innocent people might be in jail because of the false memories of the people who supposedly were abused by them...The sheer scope of the injustices perpetrated by the theory of "recovered" memories clearly justifies a special inquiry. _____________________________________________ Ian Pitchford - Email: Ian.Pitchford@mcmail.com Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/ University of Sheffield, 16 Claremont Crescent SHEFFIELD S10 2TA, United Kingdom. Tel: 0114 222 2961 Fax: 0114 270 0619 _____________________________________________ Online Dictionary of Mental Health http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/psychotherapy/ InterPsych: Mental Health Debate on the Internet http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/InterPsych/inter.html _____________________________________________ ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 2 Jun 1998 01:05:14 -0700 Reply-To: wderzko@pathcom.com Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Walter Derzko Subject: Prevailing Brain theory challenged-consequences ? X-cc: List New Product , List Brkthr-L , List Discovery MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit The attached press release from INFORMS caught my attention --what do you think the consequences might be ? Walter Derzko Director Brain Space (formerly the Idea Lab at the Design Exchange) Toronto (416) 588-1122 wderzko@pathcom.com ================================================ Brain Space # 98-336 Prevailing Brain theory challenged The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) For Immediate Release BRAIN SURGEON NOT REQUIRED--Expert in Artificial Intelligence Challenges Dominant Theory About the Human Brain LINTHICUM, MD, May 27 – Asim Roy is neither a brain surgeon nor a neuroscientist. But the Arizona State University Professor of Operations Research and Information Systems maintains that those developing the next generation of artificial intelligence are ignoring an alarming fact: Their basic presumption, modeled on the human brain, is false. "The next scientific revolution that will introduce learning robots, seeing machines, and talking machines will be based on scientists' understanding of how the human brain learns," he explains. "The trouble is, a wide body of science happens to be wrong. And unless scientists face the facts, progress on these marvelous inventions will slow to a crawl." At stake, he maintains, is how powerful and independent the next generation of robots will be. Prevailing theory, he maintains, will leave us with robots that require "babysitting" - an inordinately large amount of human input to accomplish their tasks. What's necessary, he says, is machines that are autonomous. Drawing on an unusual background for research in this field - operations research, which is better known for developing Wall Street trading models and airlines' yield management systems - Dr. Roy has created mathematical models to fill the gap. Ongoing Debate Dr. Roy started questioning the classical theories of brain-like learning two years ago. The questions turned into a crusade. Since then he has argued with scholars in imposing subspecialties like cognitive science, computational neuroscience, and artificial neural networks. The exchanges have taken place over the Internet and in two open debates, first at the International Neural Network Conference (ICNN'97) in Houston in April, 1997 and earlier this month at the World Conference on Computational Intelligence (WCCI'98) in Anchorage, Alaska. Only recently has Dr. Roy seen other scientists - most notably Professor Christoph von der Malsburg of Ruhr- University in Germany, a pioneer in the field - acknowledge his position. A classic, flawed theory Prevailing thought draws on the teaching of Donald Hebb of McGill University, Montreal, a pioneer theoretician who postulated a mechanism by which the brain learns to distinguish objects and signals, add, and understand grammar. According to Hebb, learning involves adjusting the "strength of connections" between cells or neurons in groups of cells known as neural networks. Hebb's followers extended his idea about brain-like intelligent learning systems with 2 concepts: 1.Autonomous systems. Each neuron is a self-adjusting cell that changes the strengths of its connections to other neurons when learning so that it makes fewer errors when it repeats a task. These neurons are viewed as "autonomous or self-learning systems. " Scientists used this idea to derive "local learning laws," or mathematical formulas believed to be used by neurons. 2.Instantaneous learning. These scientists also presumed that learning in the brain is "instantaneous" - as soon as something to be learned is presented, the appropriate brain cells use their "local learning laws" to make instant adjustments to the strength of their connections to other neurons. When learning is complete, the brain discards its memory of the learning example. This theory of "memoryless learning" excited scientists and engineers worldwide because it allowed them to envision simple brain-like learning machines that wouldn't need huge amounts of computerized memory. Stumbling block The major stumbling block for future technology, says Dr. Roy, is that none of these learning methods reproduce the external characteristics of the human brain, principally its independent way of learning. Therefore, methods based on these classical ideas require constant intervention by engineers and computer scientists - providing network designs, setting appropriate parameters correctly, and so on - to make them work. This drawback is severe, he maintains. Instead, says, Dr. Roy, scientists must admit that their constructs diverge from the human brain and return to the original model. Drawing on the way the brain actually works, he has used operations research to create autonomous learning algorithms that are more human-like because they don't require ongoing input. Dr. Roy is confident his challenge will prevail. "The best model those who study artificial intelligence have is still the human brain," he says. "Up until now, we've done an adequate job copying its workings. We have to do a better job." Dr. Asim Roy is the author and co-author of numerous articles on artificial intelligence, including "A Neural Network Learning Theory and a Polynomial Time RBF Algorithm," which appeared in the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks; "Iterative Generation of Higher- Order Nets in Polynomial Time Using Linear Programming, " which also appeared in that journal; "An Algorithm to Generate Radial Basis Function (RBF)-like Nets for Classification Problems," Neural Networks; "A Polynomial Time Algorithm for the Construction and Training of a Class of Multilayer Perceptrons, " Neural Networks; "A Polynomial Time Algorithm for Generating Neural Networks for Pattern Classification - Its Stability Properties and Some Test Results," Neural Computation; and "Pattern Classification Using Linear Programming," ORSA Journal on Computing. *** Contact Barry List, PR Director, (410) 691-7852; (800) 4INFORMs; (410) 358-7162h; barry.list@informs.org The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) is an international scientific society with 12,000 members, including Nobel Prize laureates, dedicated to applying scientific methods to help improve decision-making, management, and operations. Members of INFORMS work primarily in business, government, and academia. They are represented in fields as diverse as airlines, health care, law enforcement, the military, the stock market, and telecommunications. ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 2 Jun 1998 21:19:37 EDT Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Valdusek@AOL.COM Subject: Re: Tonality Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit In a message dated 98-06-01 00:46:56 EDT, you write: > The meaning of the findings remains controversial. The Canadians > believe that the simplest explanation for their work is that the > musical scales that are found in societies around the world are not > cultural artifacts but natural apparitions- The infants' responses > are "entirely consistent with dominance of musical scales with > simple frequency ratios throughout history and across cultures," > they write. We need some experiments with Peking Opera. How come so many westerners initially find it discordant. Do Western and Chinese babies like it? Val Dusek ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 3 Jun 1998 12:25:26 +0000 Reply-To: Ian.Pitchford@scientist.com Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Comments: Authenticated sender is From: Ian Pitchford Subject: Male and supermale MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Cohen, P. (1998). Male and supermale. A fly with a giant Y chromosome has shed new light on the sex war. New Scientist, 30 May, p. 13. ___________________________________________________________ IN THE evolutionary battle of the sexes the male's Y chromosome was a genetic casualty. A geneticist studying flies has shown that because males don't share the genes on this chromosome with females, it undergoes unusual selective pressure. The result helps explain why the Y chromosome in many species evolved to be a puny chromosomal stump with few active genes. In most species, sexes play different roles. Females must produce offspring, while males focus there energy on sperm production and on competing with other males to inseminate females. Yet, despite their differences, the two sexes share most of their genes. "It's like trying to build a Jeep and a racing car from the same parts," says William Rice of the University of California at Santa Cruz. "Evolution is forced to make some compromises so the same part serves the needs of both machines." The exception is the Y chromosome which only males posses. It carries genes for the male reproductive system, and in theory could be packed with genes that boost male fitness. Instead it contains large amounts of useless DNA and in many species is also very short compared with other chromosomes. To understand why the Y evolved in this way, Rice genetically engineered fruit flies so that 99 per cent of their genes were passed to male offspring on the equivalent of a giant Y chromosome. This genetic material was unaffected by any selection that might have benefited females. Using genetic tricks to allow males to reshuffle their genes rapidly, Rice accelerated the evolution of this "super Y". After 41 generations, the result was dramatic. For example, Rice's flies had far more success in mating, amounting to a 24 per cent increase in mating fitness. Those adaptations beneficial to males don't naturally accumulate on the Y, says Rice, because of the effect they have on females, "What is good for the male isn't necessarily good for his mate," he says. Females from matings with the super Y males suffered over a 50 per cent drop in survival and fertility (*Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences*, vol 95, p.6217). In Rice's experiments, the females weren't able to adapt to the changes because fresh females were brought in for each generation. In natural situations, females would evolve countermeasures. If males develop a more persuasive mating technique, for instance, females might evolve to respond to different courting cues. This way, says Rice, each "improvement" of the Y soon becomes obsolete, and the chromosome accumulates useless and defunct genes, relics of the genetic war between the sexes. _____________________________________________ Ian Pitchford - Email: Ian.Pitchford@mcmail.com Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/ University of Sheffield, 16 Claremont Crescent SHEFFIELD S10 2TA, United Kingdom. Tel: 0114 222 2961 Fax: 0114 270 0619 _____________________________________________ Online Dictionary of Mental Health http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/psychotherapy/ InterPsych: Mental Health Debate on the Internet http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/InterPsych/inter.html _____________________________________________ ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 3 Jun 1998 12:56:19 +0000 Reply-To: Ian.Pitchford@scientist.com Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Comments: Authenticated sender is From: Ian Pitchford Subject: Comedy MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT I came across this paper during a recent literature search on Darwinism and psychology. Those Darwinians really are dreadful. Ian __________________________________________________________ Clark, A.W., Trahair, R.C., & Graetz, B.R. (1989). Social Darwinism: A determinant of nuclear arms policy and action. Human Relations, 42(4), 289-303. ___________________________________________________________ 679 adults completed a questionnaire about their view of the world, their preferred nuclear defense policy, and their political activity. Results show that Ss with a low adherence to a world view of social Darwinism (SD) favored nuclear disarmament and a nonbelligerent defense policy, whereas Ss with a high adherence favored nuclear arms and a belligerent defense policy. Results also show that, irrespective of a benign or hostile world view, Ss' feelings of learned helplessness erected a barrier to political action. However, Ss lower on SD overcame the barrier and engaged in more political action than Ss higher on SD. Findings demonstrate the importance of SD as an ideology determining preferred nuclear arms policy and political action and commitment. _____________________________________________ Ian Pitchford - Email: Ian.Pitchford@mcmail.com Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/ University of Sheffield, 16 Claremont Crescent SHEFFIELD S10 2TA, United Kingdom. Tel: 0114 222 2961 Fax: 0114 270 0619 _____________________________________________ Online Dictionary of Mental Health http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/psychotherapy/ InterPsych: Mental Health Debate on the Internet http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/InterPsych/inter.html _____________________________________________ ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 4 Jun 1998 01:03:18 -0700 Reply-To: wderzko@pathcom.com Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Walter Derzko Subject: The next Tamagotchi --the Lovegety X-To: List -Creativity X-cc: List IDFORUM , List de Bono , LIST ODN Toronto , List ODCNET MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit >From New Scientist, May 30th, pg 17 Blind Date After the Tamagotchi, the latest pocket technology from Japan is "Lovegety", which aims to get lonely hearts fixed up with blind dates. -a thumb-sized transmitter-receiver. -"When a man' s Lovegety picks up a signal from a women's lovegety (and vise versa) less then 10 meters away, it starts beeping and flashing, encouraging owners to talk to each other." -warning --don't mix up models Can you think of other uses ? 1) If programmable, it might make a neat business toy "an interest- matchmaker" --I'm randomly searching for all people who are interested in ...[fill in the blank] ...it's likely to make for interesting elevator rides. 2) Or at a conference --"as a business matchmaker"--getting buyer and seller together. 3) Or "a mood detector"--I'm in a lousy mood today--don't bug me if you know what's good for you!! Walter Derzko Director Brain Space (formerly the Idea Lab at the Design Exchange) Toronto (416) 588-1122 wderzko@pathcom.com Walter Derzko Director Brain Space (formerly the Idea Lab at the Design Exchange) Toronto (416) 588-1122 wderzko@pathcom.com ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 4 Jun 1998 10:11:33 +0000 Reply-To: Ian.Pitchford@scientist.com Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Comments: Authenticated sender is From: Ian Pitchford Subject: Neurobiology of Personality: BBS Call for Commentators MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Below is the abstract of a forthcoming BBS target article on: NEUROBIOLOGY OF THE STRUCTURE OF PERSONALITY: DOPAMINE, FACILITATION OF INCENTIVE MOTIVATION, AND EXTRAVERSION by Richard A. Depue and Paul F. Collins This article has been accepted for publication in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS), an international, interdisciplinary journal providing Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial current research in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences. Commentators must be BBS Associates or nominated by a BBS Associate. To be considered as a commentator for this article, to suggest other appropriate commentators, or for information about how to become a BBS Associate, please send EMAIL to: bbs@cogsci.soton.ac.uk or write to: Behavioral and Brain Sciences Department of Psychology University of Southampton Highfield, Southampton SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/bbs/ http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/ ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/BBS/ ftp://ftp.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/pub/bbs/ gopher://gopher.princeton.edu:70/11/.libraries/.pujournals If you are not a BBS Associate, please send your CV and the name of a BBS Associate (there are currently over 10,000 worldwide) who is familiar with your work. All past BBS authors, referees and commentators are eligible to become BBS Associates. To help us put together a balanced list of commentators, please give some indication of the aspects of the topic on which you would bring your areas of expertise to bear if you were selected as a commentator. An electronic draft of the full text is available for inspection with a WWW browser, anonymous ftp or gopher according to the instructions that follow after the abstract. ____________________________________________________________________ NEUROBIOLOGY OF THE STRUCTURE OF PERSONALITY: DOPAMINE, FACILITATION OF INCENTIVE MOTIVATION, AND EXTRAVERSION Richard A. Depue, Cornell University Department of Human Development Laboratory of Neurobiology of Personality and Emotion NG21 MVR Hall Ithaca, New York 14853 rad5@cornell.edu Paul F. Collins, University of Oregon Department of Psychology Eugene, Oregon 97403 pcollins@oregon.uoregon.edu KEYWORDS: personality, extraversion, dopamine, incentive motivation, neurobiology behavioral sensitization, heterosynaptic plasticity ABSTRACT: Extraversion has two central characteristics: 1) Interpersonal engagement consisting of affiliation (enjoying and valuing close interpersonal bonds, being warm and affectionate)and agency (being socially dominant and enjoying leadership roles, being assertive, exhibitionistic and having a sense of potency in accomplishing goals) and 2) Impulsivity, which emerges from the interaction of extraversion and a second, independent trait (constraint). Agency is a more general motivational disposition including dominance, ambition, mastery, efficacy, and achievement. Positive affect (a combination of positive feelings and motivation) is closely associated with extraversion. Extraversion is accordingly based on positive incentive motivation. Parallels between extraversion (particularly its agency component) and a mammalian approach system based on positive incentive motivation implicate a neuroanatomical network, and is neurotransmitter in the processing of incentive motivation. A corticolimbic-striatal-thalamic network (a) integrates the salient incentive context in the medial orbital cortex, amygdala, and hippocampus; (b) encodes the intensity of incentive stimuli in a motive circuit composed of the nucleus accumbens, ventral pallidum, and ventral tegmental area dopamine projection system; and (c) creates an incentive motivational state that can be transmitted to the motor system. Individual differences in the functioning of this network arise from functional variation in the properties of the ventral tegmental area dopamine projections, which are directly involved in coding the intensity of incentive motivation. Animal evidence suggests that there are three neurodevelopmental sources of individual differences in dopamine: genetic, "experience-expectant", and "experience-dependent processes". Individual differences promote variation in the heterosynaptic plasticity that enhances the connection between incentive context and incentive motivation and behavior. Our psychobiological threshold model explains the effects of individual differences in dopamine transmission on behavior and their relation to personality traits. -------------------------------------------------------------- To help you decide whether you would be an appropriate commentator for this article, an electronic draft is retrievable from the World Wide Web or by anonymous ftp or gopher from the US or UK BBS Archive. Ftp instructions follow below. Please do not prepare a commentary on this draft. Just let us know, after having inspected it, what relevant expertise you feel you would bring to bear on what aspect of the article. The URLs you can use to get to the BBS Archive: http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/bbs/ http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/Archive/bbs.depue.html ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/BBS/bbs.depue ftp://ftp.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/pub/bbs/Archive/bbs.depue gopher://gopher.princeton.edu:70/11/.libraries/.pujournals To retrieve a file by ftp from an Internet site, type either: ftp ftp.princeton.edu or ftp 128.112.128.1 When you are asked for your login, type: anonymous Enter password as queried (your password is your actual userid: yourlogin@yourhost.whatever.whatever - be sure to include the "@") cd /pub/harnad/BBS To show the available files, type: ls Next, retrieve the file you want with (for example): get bbs.depue When you have the file(s) you want, type: quit _____________________________________________ Ian Pitchford - Email: Ian.Pitchford@mcmail.com Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/ University of Sheffield, 16 Claremont Crescent SHEFFIELD S10 2TA, United Kingdom. Tel: 0114 222 2961 Fax: 0114 270 0619 _____________________________________________ Online Dictionary of Mental Health http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/psychotherapy/ InterPsych: Mental Health Debate on the Internet http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/InterPsych/inter.html _____________________________________________ ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 4 Jun 1998 20:00:00 -0700 Reply-To: wderzko@pathcom.com Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Walter Derzko Subject: Burger Cash X-To: List Market-L List X-cc: List Cybermind MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Burger King and Mondex launched a trial yesterday to test affinity smart cards. In the near future,we might be able to program them for certain purchases. i.e. I want by children to buy healthy food vs. junk food. Interesting implications..using de Bono's PMI I can see some positive points +1) control of spending +2) record of spending +3) a benefit for parents to urge their kids to eat right in the school cafeteria etc. +4) will they become collectables in the future like Swatch Watches? +5) can you personalize it with a picture i.e your own brand I also see negative ones -1) will there be a black market for rogue "buy-anything" card? -2) will these fetch a premium or be traded in school yards like Spice Girl trading cards today? -3) will someone offer a service to re-programme cards? -4) fraudulent use of cards ? some interesting points !1)what if you loss a card? !2) how high should card limits go ? What can you add? Walter Derzko Director Brain Space (formerly the Idea Lab at the Design Exchange) Toronto (416) 588-1122 wderzko@pathcom.com ======================================================== Background reading on Mondex card trial ( BW)(MONDEX-USA/BURGER-KING) Burger King Corp. and Mondex USA Launch Smart Card Test in New York Area; Joint Test Allows Consumers to Earn Loyalty Points Toward Free Meals Business Editors/Computer Technology Writers & Retail Reporters LONG ISLAND, N.Y.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 3, 1998--Burger King Corp. and Mondex USA today kicked off a joint test that allows Burger King(R) restaurant customers to use Mondex electronic cash and earn loyalty points toward free food items -- all using a single, reloadable Mondex smart card featuring the Burger King logo. This is the first time in the United States that Mondex cards can be obtained and reloaded directly at a merchant's store location. This is also the first time that Mondex USA is testing an on-chip loyalty program. The test is being conducted in four Long Island-area Burger King restaurants and will last approximately six months. "Our focus is on delivering the best-tasting food to our customers, and now we are exploring ways to improve convenience to our customers as well as offer a reward for their loyalty to our brand," said Marianela Aran, vice president, Brand Research and Development for Burger King Corp. "By offering Burger King-branded Mondex cards from within our restaurants in this test, we hope to learn how smart cards appeal to our customers." "We are thrilled to work with Burger King on this creative application of Mondex," said Janet S. Crane, president and CEO of Mondex USA. "We hope to learn how the value proposition grows for both consumers and Burger King when we combine loyalty and cash on a single card and issue it directly from the restaurant. We think this new concept will deliver convenience to customers, and bring the card to the top of their wallets." The Burger King Mondex card is the size of a credit card and can fit easily into consumers' wallets. Card-dispensing devices directly inside the restaurants allow Burger King customers to obtain Burger King Mondex cards loaded with $10 or $20 of Mondex value. Customers order their meals in the traditional fashion and pay using their Burger King Mondex cards. The customer confirms the payment and the amount is deducted from the card. Value-loading devices within the restaurants allow cardholders to reload Mondex value using their ATM cards. Customers receive one loyalty point for every dollar spent. Points are stored on the chip automatically at the time of purchase. Loyalty points can be redeemed as follows: 10 points -- free breakfast value meal; 15 points -- free WHOPPER(R) sandwich value meal; and 20 points -- free value meal of the customer's choice. The loyalty points will be issued for purchases made during the test period and will be redeemable at the participating restaurants for approximately six months after the test. Later this summer, the Burger King Mondex cards can be used at the drive-thru window at two of the participating test restaurants that are equipped with drive-thru service. The Burger King test is the first joint project conducted by all owners of Mondex USA. The Chase Manhattan Bank will process the Mondex transactions on behalf of the other six owners of Mondex USA. Chase has also upgraded seven of its ATMs in the area to load Mondex value. The owners of Mondex USA, separately and as a group, plan to test other distinctive value propositions in 1998 that will motivate card use in the U.S. marketplace. "Chase will leverage our technical experience in launching the New York City Mondex program to move the Burger King program forward on behalf of all the owners of Mondex USA," said Ron Braco, senior vice president and electronic commerce executive of The Chase Manhattan Bank. "We are delighted that De La Rue Card Systems has been chosen for this test," said Guy Robb, director of Product Management for De La Rue. "Our unrivaled experience in payments and loyalty makes us an ideal partner where reliable, innovative services are demanded." De La Rue has provided the smart card POS terminals for the test. Gemplus manufactured, personalized, and customized the Burger King Mondex cards being used. Giesecke & Devrient America Inc. supplied the smart card dispensing machines located within each Burger King test restaurant. Headquartered in San Francisco, Mondex USA was formed in April 1997 and is owned by seven U.S. financial service organizations: The Chase Manhattan Bank, Citibank Universal Card Services, First Chicago NBD, MasterCard, Michigan National Bank, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co. (NOVUS), and Wells Fargo. Mondex purchase transactions are "chip-to-chip" and do not require centralized clearing or settlement of purchases. Burger King Corp. and its franchises operate more than 9,600 restaurants in all 50 states, 55 countries and in international territories around the world. In fiscal year 1997, Burger King had systemwide sales of $9.8 billion. Burger King is a subsidiary of Diageo, plc, one of the largest branded consumer products businesses. To learn more, visit both companies' web sites at burgerking.com and mondexusa.com. --30--jr/sf* CONTACT: Burger King Corp. Kim Miller or Charles Nicolas, 305/378-7277 or Mondex USA, San Francisco Janet Otsuki, 415/645-6919 KEYWORD: NEW YORK CALIFORNIA INDUSTRY KEYWORD: COMPUTERS/ELECTRONICS COMED TELECOMMUNICATIONS FOODS/BEVERAGES RESTAURANTS RETAIL PRODUCT -- Notice of Copyright and General Disclaimer -- (c) 1998 Business Wire. All of the releases provided by Business Wire are protected by copyright and other applicable laws, treaties and conventions. Information contained in the releases is furnished by Business Wire`s members who are solely responsible for their content, accuracy and originality. All reproduction, other than for an individual user`s reference, is prohibited without prior written permission. Business Wire is a membership organization whose members are solely responsible for the accuracy and originality of the content of the material distributed. All comments directed to the content of the material or requests for redistribution of a specific release should be directed to the contact persons identified in the text. For more information on distribution rights, please contact Deborah Pickering at (212) 752-9600 or email deborah@bizwire.com. Walter Derzko Director Brain Space (formerly the Idea Lab at the Design Exchange) Toronto (416) 588-1122 wderzko@pathcom.com ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 6 Jun 1998 11:00:59 +0000 Reply-To: Ian.Pitchford@scientist.com Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Comments: Authenticated sender is From: Ian Pitchford Subject: Science in Public MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT A new book has just been published entitled *Science in Public: Communication, Culture and Credibility. Written by Jane Gregory and Steve Miller from University College, London, the book asks whether an understanding of science is important, and what are the issues involved in communicating it? In recent years the scientific literacy of the general public has gained unprecedented currency as a social issue. *Science in Public* examines the history of communicating science from the 18th century through Michael Faraday and Thomas Huxley and on to the present day. Its detailed contemporary case studies offer insights into the communication and understanding of science. Plenum Press, May 1998, ISBN 0-306-45860-8 stlg18.15 _________________________________________________________ SCAN, Issue 42, May 1998. _____________________________________________ Ian Pitchford - Email: Ian.Pitchford@mcmail.com Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/ University of Sheffield, 16 Claremont Crescent SHEFFIELD S10 2TA, United Kingdom. Tel: 0114 222 2961 Fax: 0114 270 0619 _____________________________________________ Online Dictionary of Mental Health http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/psychotherapy/ InterPsych: Mental Health Debate on the Internet http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/InterPsych/inter.html _____________________________________________ ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 6 Jun 1998 11:00:59 +0000 Reply-To: Ian.Pitchford@scientist.com Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Comments: Authenticated sender is From: Ian Pitchford Subject: Association for Science Education MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT SCAN, Issue 42, May 1998. Association for Science Education in 1999 ______________________________________________________________ The ASE Annual Meeting claims to be the largest conference for science educators in Europe. In 1999 on 7-9 January it will return to Reading [UK]. Before the main programme there will be an international programme of conferences starting on Monday 4 January: Monday/Tuesday: Information and Communication Technology Monday: Modelling Tuesday: International Networking Wednesday: Science and Technology Education; Environmental Education. Many of the themes will be in evidence in the conference proper. For more information contact Michael Brookman, Director of Conferences, ASE, College Lane, Hatfield, AL10 9AA, UK. Email: ase@asehg.telme.com http://www.ase.org.uk _____________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________ Ian Pitchford - Email: Ian.Pitchford@mcmail.com Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/ University of Sheffield, 16 Claremont Crescent SHEFFIELD S10 2TA, United Kingdom. Tel: 0114 222 2961 Fax: 0114 270 0619 _____________________________________________ Online Dictionary of Mental Health http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/psychotherapy/ InterPsych: Mental Health Debate on the Internet http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/InterPsych/inter.html _____________________________________________ ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 6 Jun 1998 11:00:59 +0000 Reply-To: Ian.Pitchford@scientist.com Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Comments: Authenticated sender is From: Ian Pitchford Subject: Science on Stage and Screen MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Science on Stage and Screen *SCAN: Science Awareness Newsletter* Issue 42, May 1998. ________________________________________________________ The Wellcome Trust has launched a new competition in an attempt to bring medical science to life through drama, film or multimedia. If you have an innovative idea for science communication you would like to turn into reality, the Science on Stage and Screen competition could provide financial support. Winners of the Science on Stage and Screen competition will receive up to stlg 40,000 ($64000) to develop an audiovisual or dramatic production illuminating some aspect of medical science. Awards will be made in three categories: film, video and television; performing arts; and multimedia. Three awards are likely to be made in each category. Completed entries must be received by 6 July 1998. For an application form and further details, contact Lorna McAllister, Wellcome Trust, Science on Stage and Screen, Medical Film and Video Library, The Wellcome Trust, 210 Euston Road, LONDON, NW! 2BE, UK email: l.mcallister@wellcome.ac.uk http://www.wellcome.ac.uk. ______________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________ Ian Pitchford - Email: Ian.Pitchford@mcmail.com Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/ University of Sheffield, 16 Claremont Crescent SHEFFIELD S10 2TA, United Kingdom. Tel: 0114 222 2961 Fax: 0114 270 0619 _____________________________________________ Online Dictionary of Mental Health http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/psychotherapy/ InterPsych: Mental Health Debate on the Internet http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/InterPsych/inter.html _____________________________________________ ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 7 Jun 1998 10:22:42 +0000 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Robert Maxwell Young Subject: Darwin's Millennium Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" With ever-greater apologies for cross-posting James Cuthbert Department of History and Philosophy of Science Free School Lane Cambridge CB2 3RH > > DARWIN'S MILLENNIUM -- University of Southampton > > > > The First Science and Culture Conference > > > > An international multidisciplinary conference hosted by the > > School of Research and Graduate Studies, Faculty of Arts, > > University of Southampton > > > > JULY 3-5, 1998 > > > > KEYNOTE SPEAKERS > > > > John Dupre (Birkbeck/Exeter) > > George Levine (Rutgers University) > > James Moore (Open University) > > Adam Phillips > > Harriet Ritvo (MIT) > > > > This conference will enquire into the processes and effects of > > Charles Darwin's 'dangerous' ideas from the mid-nineteenth century > > onwards. Biologists, historians, literary critics, philosophers and > > psychologists will discuss a wide-range of topics including: breeding, > > the nature of the 'human', literary interpretation and scientific method, > > the progress of science, reductionism, relativism and culture theory. > > > > The Conference will launch a new faculty MA in Culture and History of > > Science to start on September 1998. > > > > Conference Organisers: Lucy Hartley and Cora Kaplan > > For details of the programme please contact: > > Darwin's Millennium, Department of English, > > University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ > > > > Tel: 01703 593409 - Fax: 01703 592859 > > Email: jej1@soton.ac.uk > > Website: www.soton.ac.uk/~darwin > > > > ***************************************************************** > > > > > > > > DARWIN'S MILLENNIUM > > > > The First Science and Culture Conference > > The University of Southampton July 3-5, 1998 > > (Avenue Campus) > > Conference Booking Form A > > > > > > (A) DETAILS > > _________________________________________________________________________ > > Name: > > _________________________________________________________________________ > > Department: > > _________________________________________________________________________ > > University: > > _________________________________________________________________________ > > Telephone no: Fax no: Email: > > _________________________________________________________________________ > > > > (B) REGISTRATION PACKAGE - Please tick relevant boxes > > _________________________________________________________________________ > > > > (i) 3 day (incl. coffee, lunch and tea for Fri, Sat, Sun 75 ( ) > > OR > > (ii) 1 day (incl. coffee, lunch, and tea) 30 ( ) > > _________________________________________________________________________ > > > (C) ACCOMMODATION PACKAGE - Please tick relevant boxes > ___________________________________________________________________________ > > (i) 3 day (2 nts bed & breakfast plus Friday evening meal) 55 ( ) > > (ii) 3 day (2 nts ensuite b & b plus Friday evening meal) 85 ( ) > ___________________________________________________________________________ > > > > (D) CONFERENCE DINNER - Please tick relevant box > > _________________________________________________________________________ > > > > 3 course meal with wine (approximate cost) 25 ( ) > > ________________________________________________________________________ > > > > TOTAL > > ________________________________________________________________________ > > > > Special dietary requirements: ------------------------------------------- > > Do you require parking? Yes/No > > > > Please make cheques payable to University of Southampton, and return by > > Wednesday, 17 June 1998 to Janet Jackson, Conference Secretary, >Department of > > English, University of Southampton. > > > __________________________________________ In making a personal reply, please put in Subject line: Message for Bob Young Robert Maxwell Young: robert@rmy1.demon.co.uk or r.m.young@sheffield.ac.uk 26 Freegrove Rd., London N7 9RQ, Eng. tel.+44 171 607 8306 fax.+44 171 609 4837. Professor of Psychotherapy and Psychoanalytic Studies, Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies, University of Sheffield. Home page and writings: http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/academic/N-Q/psysc/staff/rmyoung/index.html Process Press publications: http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/process_press/ 'One must imagine Sisyphus happy.' - Camus ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 7 Jun 1998 11:52:17 -0700 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: "Michael Gregory, NEXA/H-NEXA" Subject: Darwin's Millennium Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Date: Sun, 7 Jun 1998 10:22:42 +0000 From: Robert Maxwell Young James Cuthbert Department of History and Philosophy of Science Free School Lane Cambridge CB2 3RH DARWIN'S MILLENNIUM -- University of Southampton The First Science and Culture Conference An international multidisciplinary conference hosted by the School of Research and Graduate Studies, Faculty of Arts, University of Southampton JULY 3-5, 1998 KEYNOTE SPEAKERS John Dupre (Birkbeck/Exeter) George Levine (Rutgers University) James Moore (Open University) Adam Phillips Harriet Ritvo (MIT) This conference will enquire into the processes and effects of Charles Darwin's 'dangerous' ideas from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. Biologists, historians, literary critics, philosophers and psychologists will discuss a wide-range of topics including: breeding, the nature of the 'human', literary interpretation and scientific method, the progress of science, reductionism, relativism and culture theory. The Conference will launch a new faculty MA in Culture and History of Science to start on September 1998. Conference Organisers: Lucy Hartley and Cora Kaplan For details of the programme please contact: Darwin's Millennium, Department of English, University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ Tel: 01703 593409 - Fax: 01703 592859 Email: jej1@soton.ac.uk Website: www.soton.ac.uk/~darwin ******************************************************************* DARWIN'S MILLENNIUM The First Science and Culture Conference The University of Southampton July 3-5, 1998 (Avenue Campus) Conference Booking Form A (A) DETAILS _________________________________________________________________________ Name: _________________________________________________________________________ Department: _________________________________________________________________________ University: _________________________________________________________________________ Telephone no: Fax no: Email: _________________________________________________________________________ (B) REGISTRATION PACKAGE - Please tick relevant boxes _________________________________________________________________________ (i) 3 day (incl. coffee, lunch and tea for Fri, Sat, Sun 75 ( ) OR (ii) 1 day (incl. coffee, lunch, and tea) 30 ( ) _________________________________________________________________________ (C) ACCOMMODATION PACKAGE - Please tick relevant boxes ___________________________________________________________________________ (i) 3 day (2 nts bed & breakfast plus Friday evening meal) 55 ( ) (ii) 3 day (2 nts ensuite b & b plus Friday evening meal) 85 ( ) ___________________________________________________________________________ (D) CONFERENCE DINNER - Please tick relevant box _________________________________________________________________________ 3 course meal with wine (approximate cost) 25 ( ) _________________________________________________________________________ TOTAL _________________________________________________________________________ Special dietary requirements: ------------------------------------------- Do you require parking? Yes/No Please make cheques payable to University of Southampton, and return by Wednesday, 17 June 1998 to Janet Jackson, Conference Secretary, Department of English, University of Southampton. __________________________________________ In making a personal reply, please put in Subject line: Message for Bob Young Robert Maxwell Young: robert@rmy1.demon.co.uk or r.m.young@sheffield.ac.uk 26 Freegrove Rd., London N7 9RQ, Eng. tel.+44 171 607 8306 fax.+44 171 609 4837. Professor of Psychotherapy and Psychoanalytic Studies, Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies, University of Sheffield. Home page and writings: http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/academic/N-Q/psysc/staff/rmyoung/index.html Process Press publications: http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/process_press/ 'One must imagine Sisyphus happy.' - Camus ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 8 Jun 1998 14:04:53 +0000 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Robert Maxwell Young Subject: guides to the internet for psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, psychiatry, neurology, history & philosophy of science, etc.; archives of on-line writings Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" There are various guides to the internet and archives at http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/guides.html Here is a list of them: E-mail Forums and Web Sites on Psychoanalysis, Psychotherapy & Related Topics More Interesting E-mail Forums, Web Sites & Useful Information Even More Interesting E-mail Forums and Web Sites History, Philosophy and Social Studies, Science, Medicine and Technology Internet Research Aids, Philosophy Forums and Some Classic Texts Web Sites for On-line Newspapers, Magazines, Journals, Books, Search Engines etc. St John's University E-mail Forums POLI-PSY Political Science of Psychology and Psychiatry CD for Controlled Drinking/Drug Use Information of interest to subscribers to Human Relations, Authority and Justice forum Discussions on Bowlby's Attachment Theory Concepts of Self, Person, Personal Identity Disability within a Social and Relational Context for Web Guide Burying Freud - Discussions on the Nature and Validity of Psychoanalysis InterPsych: The Internet Mental Health Organization Software for Psychiatry and Abnormal Psychology Internet Journals Book Reviews International Philosophical Preprint Exchange Psychology Preprints Psychiatry Sites on the Web Neuropsychology Central Neurosciences on the Internet These have been compiled by Ian Pitchford and me. Additions and corrections welcome. Web sites with extensive archives and recent essays: Psychoanalysis and the Public Sphere/Free Associations: http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/rmy/fa.html Science as Culture: http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/rmy/sac.html Human Relations, Authority & Justice (includes writings on group relations): http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/HRAJ/home.html Process Press (includes several texts f recent psuchoanalytic books): http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/process_press/ Writings of Staff of Sheffield Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies: http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/staffw.html International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations: http://www.sba.oakland.edu/ispso __________________________________________ In making a personal reply, please put in Subject line: Message for Bob Young Robert Maxwell Young: robert@rmy1.demon.co.uk or r.m.young@sheffield.ac.uk 26 Freegrove Rd., London N7 9RQ, Eng. tel.+44 171 607 8306 fax.+44 171 609 4837. Professor of Psychotherapy and Psychoanalytic Studies, Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies, University of Sheffield. Home page and writings: http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/academic/N-Q/psysc/staff/rmyoung/index.html Process Press publications: http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/process_press/ 'One must imagine Sisyphus happy.' - Camus ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 8 Jun 1998 17:40:44 +0000 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Robert Maxwell Young Subject: New email forum on Darwin and Darwinism Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Darwin and Darwinism is a forum for discussion of any and all matters concerned with evolution. This means Darwin, his life and theories, Darwinian scholarship, including other approaches to evolution in the past and present. It is also intended to include findings, debates, concepts and philosophical disscussions about Darwinian ideas in other disciplines, including, for example, Darwinian psychology, social science, epistemology and the relevance of Darwinism to moral, cultural, social, political and ideological matters. One of the aims of the forum is to provide a place where different disciplines and points of view which often do not make much contact can debate in a single space. This means that sharp disagreements are very likely. The forum leaders are determined that these will be condicted in a civil manner. Forum Moderator: Robert M. Young Editor, _Science as Culture_ robert@rmy1.demon.co.uk Co-Moderator: Ian Pitchford Ian.Pitchford@mcmail.com Research Student, University of Sheffield To join the forum, send an email message To: listproc@sheffield.ac.uk Body of message: subscribe darwin-and-darwinism yourname __________________________________________ In making a personal reply, please put in Subject line: Message for Bob Young Robert Maxwell Young: robert@rmy1.demon.co.uk or r.m.young@sheffield.ac.uk 26 Freegrove Rd., London N7 9RQ, Eng. tel.+44 171 607 8306 fax.+44 171 609 4837. Professor of Psychotherapy and Psychoanalytic Studies, Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies, University of Sheffield. Home page and writings: http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/academic/N-Q/psysc/staff/rmyoung/index.html Process Press publications: http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/process_press/ 'One must imagine Sisyphus happy.' - Camus ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 8 Jun 1998 18:33:11 +0000 Reply-To: Ian.Pitchford@scientist.com Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Comments: Authenticated sender is From: Ian Pitchford Subject: Hearing on Kennewick Man MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT June 7, 1998 Congressional committee to hear debate over old bones law By Mike Lee Herald staff writer The federal law that attempts to balance religious rights of American Indians with the desire to explore the past goes before a congressional committee Tuesday. And the debate over rights to the Kennewick Man skeleton cuts right to the center of the national controversy. The list of speakers expected to testify at the hearing includes a tribal leader and a scientist from the Mid-Columbia, both embroiled in the Kennewick Man controversy. The hearing before the House Resources Committee in Washington, D.C., is aimed at answering sticky questions about dealing with human remains that may be scientifically significant. It's all part of an ongoing effort to settle how the United States should handle bones and other remains that can't be directly linked to a specific modern people. The controversy will get more attention when a national law review committee convenes in Portland later this month. And it's a debate intensified by Kennewick Man, a 9,200-year-old skeleton found in Columbia Park in 1996. A federal judge is trying to sort out whether scientists can study the bones or if American Indians can rebury them without more study. U.S. Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash., introduced a bill last fall that would permit study of Kennewick Man and "clarify" what many think is a vague American Indian graves protection law. A major tenet of Hastings' proposal is to use "sound science" to determine who is most closely linked to remains, rather than relying on the place the remains were found. He argues current law doesn't give scientists enough leeway. The tribes don't agree, countering that the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 affords them vital religious and cultural protections. Testifying on behalf of the tribes will be W. Ron Allen, president of the National Congress of American Indians, and Armand Minthorn, vice chairman of the cultural resources commission for the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation. Antone Minthorn, Umatilla board of trustees chairman, said Friday that the tribes are opposed to Hastings' legislation. "The tribes have been working with NAGPRA law and it's been successful so far," he said. "The tribes are concerned that (Hastings' bill) guts the law, waters it down." Katherine Stevenson, with the National Park Service in Washington, D.C., is scheduled to talk about the government's concerns with Hastings' bill, said Interior Department spokeswoman Stephanie Hanna. Specific issues she will raise were not available Friday. Scientists scheduled to testify are Vincas Steponaitis, president of the Society for American Archaeology, Richland anthropologist Jim Chatters and Phillip Walker, anthropology professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Scientists generally agree the intent of the NAGPRA - protecting Indian graves and remains from abuse - is laudable. But many say vague wording has worked against science and stymied some attempts to learn more about the past. Walker, who served on the national committee that resolves NAGPRA disputes, lobbied for the law when it was passed in 1990. He's speaking on behalf of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, which counts 1,500 members. He said eight years of trying to use the law have made it clear that, "There are areas of NAGPRA where we could use clarification." And he supports Hastings' bill because it "improves the consistency of scientific recording of remains recently discovered on federal land," by allowing study of some remains to determine cultural affiliation. "By clearly defining under what conditions studies can be done, (the bill) will eliminate problems that have arisen because of inconsistencies in the way that federal agencies have interpreted NAGPRA's provisions for scientific research," he said. Chatters said Hastings' bill better balances the rights of Indians who belong to tribes and those who don't. He said nontribal Indians rely on scientific study for information about their past - including the study of diseases that affect their culture. "There are some really incredible valuable things we can learn from the dead," he said. In a separate development, the national NAGPRA review committee meets June 25-27 in Portland to tackle an issue that ties into the Kennewick Man case - what to do with remains that can't be linked to modern peoples. The seven-member panel meets two or three times a year around the country. It's by chance that their next meeting is in Portland, just a few days after a Kennewick Man case mediation session there, said Francis McManamon, chief archaeologist for the National Park Service. The committee is not dealing specifically with Kennewick Man - but some of the issues it covers are closely related. Said McManamon: "One question is to whom might (Kennewick Man) be culturally affiliated? If the remains turn out to be of that substantial age, then making a connection between a modern tribe and (the bones) is difficult." The NAGPRA review committee has taken up the complicated cultural question before without coming to a solid resolution, McManamon said. Copyright 1998 Tri-City Herald. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. _____________________________________________ Ian Pitchford - Email: Ian.Pitchford@mcmail.com Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/ University of Sheffield, 16 Claremont Crescent SHEFFIELD S10 2TA, United Kingdom. Tel: 0114 222 2961 Fax: 0114 270 0619 _____________________________________________ Online Dictionary of Mental Health http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/psychotherapy/ InterPsych: Mental Health Debate on the Internet http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/InterPsych/inter.html _____________________________________________ ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 8 Jun 1998 19:35:56 +0000 Reply-To: Ian.Pitchford@scientist.com Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Comments: Authenticated sender is From: Ian Pitchford Subject: Mindsnatchers MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Fred Crews in the current New York Review of Books (cover date: June 25, 1998) writing about ``The Mindsnatchers'' -- Budd Hopkins, David Jacobs, John Mack, Whitley Strieber: Not surprisingly, abduction reports began multiplying just when, in the 1980s, false memories of ``repressed'' or ``dissociated'' incest trauma became a national epidemic. Abduction memories and memories of ``forgotten'' childhood sexual abuse are conjured in exactly the same way, by applying an unsubstantiated psychodynamic theory to the images unearthed by hypnotherapy, dream analysis, and assorted techniques for stimulating and guiding fantasy. Although the sex abuse specialists see recollections of alien contact as screen memories for incest while the abductionists take the opposite view, they are all playing the same noxious game. But this parallelism could also give us pause for optimism about the likely fate of the abduction fad. Thanks to the harm it has caused and the attention it has drawn to pseudoscientific notions about the mind that were shared by judges and juries only a few years ago, the recovered memory movement in now in retreat, and the therapists, who swelled its ranks are nervously waiting to be sued by some of the awakened `retractors'' whom they deceived. There is every reason to expect a similar end to the scare over extraterrestrials. _____________________________________________ Ian Pitchford - Email: Ian.Pitchford@mcmail.com Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/ University of Sheffield, 16 Claremont Crescent SHEFFIELD S10 2TA, United Kingdom. Tel: 0114 222 2961 Fax: 0114 270 0619 _____________________________________________ Online Dictionary of Mental Health http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/psychotherapy/ InterPsych: Mental Health Debate on the Internet http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/InterPsych/inter.html _____________________________________________ ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 9 Jun 1998 08:37:54 +0000 Reply-To: Ian.Pitchford@scientist.com Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Comments: Authenticated sender is From: Ian Pitchford Subject: Breakdown of the standard model in physics--Pomona versi MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-transfer-encoding: Quoted-printable Date: Mon, 8 Jun 1998 17:59:34 -0400 (EDT) From: Norman Levitt ______________________________________________ WS/ID 46. SITUATED KNOWLEDGES: CULTURAL STUDIES OF 20TH CENTURY PHYSICS. =A0=A0=A0=A0=A0 How do physicists make sense of the world? This course tak= es an =A0=A0=A0=A0=A0 interdisciplinary approach to understanding the constructi= on, =A0=A0=A0=A0=A0 development, acceptance, and interpretation of scientific = theories. =A0=A0=A0=A0=A0 Writings by literary critics, anthropologists, philosopher= s, =A0=A0=A0=A0=A0 historians, sociologists, feminist science studies scholar= s, and =A0=A0=A0=A0=A0 physicists provide the basis for studying several fields o= f 20th =A0=A0=A0=A0=A0 century physics including quantum theory, relativity, chao= s theory, =A0=A0=A0=A0=A0 quantum field theory, and particle physics. No mathematics= or science =A0=A0=A0=A0=A0 background is required. Staff (Pomona). --From a Women's Studies course description in the 1997-98 catalogue of Pi= tzer College in Claremont, California.=A0 The course is taught at Pomona Colleg= e, another school within the complex of Claremont Colleges. __________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________ Ian Pitchford - Email: Ian.Pitchford@mcmail.com Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/ University of Sheffield, 16 Claremont Crescent SHEFFIELD S10 2TA, United Kingdom. Tel: 0114 222 2961 Fax: 0114 270 0619 _____________________________________________ Online Dictionary of Mental Health http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/psychotherapy/ InterPsych: Mental Health Debate on the Internet http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/InterPsych/inter.html _____________________________________________ ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 9 Jun 1998 08:44:10 +0000 Reply-To: Ian.Pitchford@scientist.com Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Comments: Authenticated sender is From: Ian Pitchford Subject: Breakdown of the standard model in physics--Pomona versi MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-transfer-encoding: Quoted-printable Date: Mon, 8 Jun 1998 17:59:34 -0400 (EDT) From: Norman Levitt WS/ID 46. SITUATED KNOWLEDGES: CULTURAL STUDIES OF 20TH CENTURY PHYSICS. How do physicists make sense of the world? This course takes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the construction, development, acceptance, and interpretation of scientific theories. Writings by literary critics, anthropologists, philosophers, historians, sociologists, feminist science studies scholars, and physicists provide the basis for studying several fields of 20th century physics including quantum theory, relativity, chaos theory, quantum field theory, and particle physics. No mathematics or science background is required. Staff (Pomona). _______________ >From a Women's Studies course description in the 1997-98 catalogue of Pitzer College in Claremont, California.=A0 The course is taught at Pomona College, another school within the complex of Claremont Colleges. _____________________________________________ Ian Pitchford - Email: Ian.Pitchford@mcmail.com Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/ University of Sheffield, 16 Claremont Crescent SHEFFIELD S10 2TA, United Kingdom. Tel: 0114 222 2961 Fax: 0114 270 0619 _____________________________________________ Online Dictionary of Mental Health http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/psychotherapy/ InterPsych: Mental Health Debate on the Internet http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/InterPsych/inter.html _____________________________________________ ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 10 Jun 1998 10:19:21 +0000 Reply-To: Ian.Pitchford@scientist.com Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Comments: Authenticated sender is From: Ian Pitchford Subject: SKEPTICS MAG HOTLINE MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT "I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them." --Baruch Spinoza The Skeptics Society is a scientific and educational organization of scholars, scientists, historians, magicians, professors and teachers, and anyone curious about controversial ideas, extraordinary claims, revolutionary ideas and the promotion of science. SKEPTIC MAG ONLINE is designed to bring you weekly updates of what we are doing. These will include media updates, critiques and commentary on current events, ongoing investigations, upcoming lectures at the Skeptics Society Caltech Lecture Series, updates on our annual conference, what's scheduled for the next issue of the magazine, and other timely information. PLEASE SPREAD THE WORD! Tell your critically thinking friends and colleagues about SKEPTIC MAG HOTLINE. Joining is FREE. To subscribe, just send an e-mail to join-skeptics@lyris.net (to "unsubscribe", send an e-mail to leave-skeptics@lyris.net). Note: we do NOT release the e-mail addresses of members to any other organizations. -------------------+ SKEPTIC MAGAZINE +------------------- When you join the Skeptics Society you also receive a subscription to Skeptic magazine. Learn what the world's leading scientists and experts have to say. Read investigative reports on pseudoscience, succinct summaries of both sides of contemporary controversies, and guides for further investigation. Skeptic magazine devotes more space to opposing views than any other forum for reader's responses. Skeptic also provides reviews of noteworthy books and articles of related interest. Skeptic is a must read for curious minds. Some of the comments we've receieved from Skeptic Magazine readers: "...the best journal in the field." --Stephen Jay Gould, Harvard University "...stimulating and provocative..." --Carl Sagan, Cornell University "...a first rate job promoting...science & rationality" --John Rennie, Editor-in-Chief, Scientific American "One of the top 10 best new publications.'' --Library Journal "clearly superior...gutsy!" --Edward O. Wilson, Harvard University, winner of two Pulitzer prizes "Skeptic kicks ass." --Penn Jillette of "Penn & Teller" Each issue of Skeptic covers a special theme in depth, and also a wide variety of social, scientific, and pseudoscientific controversies, written by top experts in the field. There is an extensive reader forum feature where our readers can voice their ideas at length. Book reviews and a news section keep our readers on top of the latest developments in the field. Skeptic is an international publication from Millennium Press, also available to institutions as well as university, college, and public libraries. Skeptic is carried by all major bookstore chains in the U.S. and around the world. Special topics have included: * Can History be a Science? * The God Question * The Environment * Evolutionary Psychology * Evolutionary Ethics * Holocaust Revisionism * Conspiracy Theories * Cryonics * The Recovered Memory Movement * Evolution & Creationism * God & Cosmology * IQ, race & Intelligence * HIV-AIDS Skeptics * Pseudomedicine, such as homeopathy and therapeutic touch All our back issues are available. Ask us for a complete list. INTERNET SPECIAL: Subscribe to Skeptic magazine and save! Subscribe for $25.00 (student rate $20.00) instead of the normal $35.00. (Foreign country rates are $45.00 instead of the normal $55.00.) Just e-mail your Visa or Mastercard number and expiration date, plus your name, address, and phone, and we will do the rest. (You can also fax, call, or mail your order. See below for contact info.) The Special includes an Automatic Subscription Renewal each year so you do not have to bother renewing (just like Internet carriers automatically bill customers with their credit card numbers -- the wave of the future for all magazines -- and, of course, you can cancel any time). In addition to our lecture and conference speakers and the cutting edge articles in Skeptic Magazine, we also maintain a catalogue of scientific and skeptical books that are discounted for members. Get the facts, sharpen your debating skills and deepen your knowledge of modern controversies ---------------------+ SKEPTICS IN PERSON +--------------------- * Caltech Lecture Series The Skeptics Society sponsors a monthly lecture series at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California. If you're not local to Southern California, the lecture tapes are available in both audio and video for a modest fee. * Annual Skeptics Society Conference Every year we also host a scientific conference centered around a major theme. The conference is especially popular with out-of- towners who enjoy the opportunity to exchange ideas with other like- minded individuals and the opportunity to meet the conference speakers. * Less formal meetings The Skeptics Society also sponsors social events to allow members to meet and mingle, and conducts scientific trips for research and educational purposes. We host an annual awards ceremony recognizing outstanding contributions to the cause of critical thinking and the promotion of science. ----------------------------------------+ A NON-PROFIT EDUCATIONAL ORGANIZATION +---------------------------------------- The Skeptics Society is a member-supported 501(c)(3) non-profit scientific and educational organization. While we are largely supported by membership/subscription fees and tape and book sales, we do welcome tax-deductible donations. Your donation dollar goes a long way since we are volunteer organization with very low overhead. ---------------------------------+ OTHER ONLINE SKEPTIC RESOURCES +--------------------------------- Our award-winning Web site includes sample articles from Skeptic magazine, a very active discussion area, and more. Join us at . We also have an FTP server at ----------------------------------+ CONTACTING THE SKEPTICS SOCIETY +---------------------------------- Subscriptions orders, changes of address, advertising requests, manuscripts, and correspondence should be addressed to: Skeptic, P.O. Box 338, Altadena CA 91001. Our Phone: 626/794-3119, Fax: 626/794-1301 E-Mail: skepticmag@aol.com Thank you for your interest in the Skeptic Society. As we are primarily subscription supported your interest and (hopefully) support is greatly appreciated in our efforts to combat irrationality and pseudoscience in space and cyberspace, in reality and virtual reality. Michael Shermer Publisher, Skeptic magazine Director, Skeptics Society Author, WHY PEOPLE BELIEVE WEIRD THINGS Adjunct Professor, History of Science, Occidental College _____________________________________________ Ian Pitchford - Email: Ian.Pitchford@mcmail.com Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/ University of Sheffield, 16 Claremont Crescent SHEFFIELD S10 2TA, United Kingdom. Tel: 0114 222 2961 Fax: 0114 270 0619 _____________________________________________ Online Dictionary of Mental Health http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/psychotherapy/ InterPsych: Mental Health Debate on the Internet http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/InterPsych/inter.html _____________________________________________ ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 10 Jun 1998 12:37:49 +0000 Reply-To: Ian.Pitchford@scientist.com Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Comments: Authenticated sender is From: Ian Pitchford Subject: The Emotional Brain MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Paradiso, S. (1998). Review of *The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life*, by Joseph LeDoux. New York, Simon and Schuster, 1996.* American Journal of Psychiatry*, 155(4), 570. ______________________________________________________ Of all the ways I thought to begin this comment on Joseph LeDoux's book, the most appropriate seems a brief account of my feelings when reading it. *The Emotional Brain* reads like a novel with a plot as thrilling as those of Agatha Christie; however, the book is about hard science. In his more-than-20-year-old career as a neuroscientist, Joseph LeDoux has made great contributions to the understanding of brain regions involved in the generation of emotions. He has developed his efforts in a thorough examination of the functional role of the amygdala through behavioral observations and anatomical studies in the animal. With *The Emotional Brain* LeDoux ties together his and other investigators' experience and scientific facts to develop a comprehensive theory of emotion, awareness, and consciousness - that is, a theory of mind. A most intriguing aspect of the book is the explanation of the emotional life from the perspective of phylogenetic evolution. Evolutionary old systems in the brain, including the one producing defensive behaviors in the presence of danger, are present in the human as well as the non-human animal brain. These systems are considered the factory of emotions. One of these phylogenetically old regions is the amygdala. Most of the process of producing emotion occurs without the participation of consciousness. The way the amygdala is wired with other brain areas explains why it is possible to react to danger even before one is conscious of exactly what is happening. The amygdala receives sensory inputs from the sensory cortexes by way of the thalamus before these reach the associative cortex. Conscious feelings are generated when the signal reaches the prefrontal regions of the brain. This view makes emotions less elusive to scientific investigation because they can be studied the same way that cognitive processes are. LeDoux states that "what differs between the state of being afraid and the state of perceiving red is not the system that represents the conscious content but the systems that provides the inputs to the system of awareness." There are specific classes of emotions that are likely mediated by several neural substrates. LeDoux points out that emotion is a label, a conventional way of thinking about functions of the brain and the mind. There is no system dedicated to "perception" but an olfactory, a visual, and an auditive system; the systems used to defend against danger or for procreation - sexual pleasure - are different. These constructs are fundamental for contemporary thinking about the brain and mind of patients with psychiatric disorders. They furnish the conceptual framework for examining disorders with disrupted emotion, including anxiety, depression and schizophrenia. Psychiatrists of every background will find *The Emotional Brain* interesting and stimulating. By describing several experiments and accounts about past and present theories of emotion, LeDoux lays out the basis for understanding the brain, combining neurobiology and psychology without prejudice. In this age of extreme specialization in psychiatry, we need unifying theories of brain functioning that overcome narrow positions of a mindless brain or a brainless mind. SERGIO PARADISO, M.D., PH.D Iowa City, Iowa _____________________________________________ Ian Pitchford - Email: Ian.Pitchford@mcmail.com Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/ University of Sheffield, 16 Claremont Crescent SHEFFIELD S10 2TA, United Kingdom. Tel: 0114 222 2961 Fax: 0114 270 0619 _____________________________________________ Online Dictionary of Mental Health http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/psychotherapy/ InterPsych: Mental Health Debate on the Internet http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/InterPsych/inter.html _____________________________________________ ========================================================================= Date: Wed, 10 Jun 1998 13:21:23 +0000 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Robert Maxwell Young Subject: Download hundreds of books, many free X-To: psa-public-sphere@sheffield.ac.uk Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Subject: Download hundreds of books, many free Attention all Readers: The 1stBooks Library is proud to announce a new public service that provides free 'virtual' books to members of Book Clubs, Reading Groups, and lovers of classic literature everywhere. 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Wells Cost is $ 0.00 Anne of Green Gables By Lucy Maud Montgomery Cost is $ 0.00 Around the World in 80 Days By Jules Verne Cost is $ 0.00 __________________________________________ In making a personal reply, please put in Subject line: Message for Bob Young Robert Maxwell Young: robert@rmy1.demon.co.uk or r.m.young@sheffield.ac.uk 26 Freegrove Rd., London N7 9RQ, Eng. tel.+44 171 607 8306 fax.+44 171 609 4837. Professor of Psychotherapy and Psychoanalytic Studies, Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies, University of Sheffield. Home page and writings: http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/academic/N-Q/psysc/staff/rmyoung/index.html Process Press publications: http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/process_press/ 'One must imagine Sisyphus happy.' - Camus ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 11 Jun 1998 18:13:00 +0000 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Comments: Authenticated sender is From: "R. Antoszewski" Subject: Thousands of books free In-Reply-To: <199806101221.AAA12177@predator.xtra.co.nz> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Hi, You might be interested that thousands of books, classics, scientific, poetry, etc are waiting under: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/booknew.html All free, the list is updated almost every day. Regards - Roman Antoszewski ------------- Laingholm, Titirangi, Auckland, New Zealand tel/fax [64] [9] 817 3690; mobile: 025 284 7207 e-mail: antora@xtra.co.nz OR antora@ihug.co.nz homepage: http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~antora ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 11 Jun 1998 19:55:11 +0000 Reply-To: Ian.Pitchford@scientist.com Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Comments: Authenticated sender is From: Ian Pitchford Subject: Aliens in America MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Date: Thu, 11 Jun 1998 09:59:33 -0400 (EDT) From: Norman Levitt >From "Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace," by Jodi Dean (BA Princeton, PhD Columbia) (Cornell University Press). "No abductee has ever been given a parade. Compared with astronauts they are victims not heroes. Many are taken into space, chosen in accordance with some unknown criteria rather than through competitive tests with clear, objective standards. Some stay at home, and space and its alien inhabitants come to them. Again, though, they are chosen, a select group. The criteria for their selection are no doubt unfathomably demanding. Why else would the aliens be able to find American women fit for the rigors of space when NASA had such trouble locating women qualified enough to be astronauts?" ("Aliens in America," p. 102) One must resist the temptation to infer that J. Dean is the spiritual descendent of Dean J. Swift. She seems to be completely in earnest. Norm Levitt ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 12 Jun 1998 12:01:46 +0000 Reply-To: Ian.Pitchford@scientist.com Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Comments: Authenticated sender is From: Ian Pitchford Subject: Galileo Online MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Nature 393 p.501 Galileo Galilei's pesrsonal manuscripts, in which he wrote down the ideas, calculations and drawings that led to his theory of mechanics, can now be viewed on the Internet. It is believed to be the first historical scientific document of such significance to be made available in this way: http://www.imss.fi.it/ _____________________________________________ Ian Pitchford - Email: Ian.Pitchford@mcmail.com Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/ University of Sheffield, 16 Claremont Crescent SHEFFIELD S10 2TA, United Kingdom. Tel: 0114 222 2961 Fax: 0114 270 0619 _____________________________________________ Online Dictionary of Mental Health http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/psychotherapy/ InterPsych: Mental Health Debate on the Internet http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/InterPsych/inter.html _____________________________________________ ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 13 Jun 1998 07:56:04 -0400 Reply-To: bradmcc@cloud9.net Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: "Brad McCormick, Ed.D." Organization: AbiCo. Subject: Re: Galileo Online (and on trial...) X-To: Ian.Pitchford@scientist.com MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Ian Pitchford wrote: > > Nature 393 p.501 > > Galileo Galilei's pesrsonal manuscripts, in which he wrote down the > ideas, calculations and drawings that led to his theory of mechanics, > can now be viewed on the Internet. It is believed to be the first > historical scientific document of such significance to be made > available in this way: > > http://www.imss.fi.it/ Yes, this is lovely and useful. The Institute and Museum of the History of Science of Florence's website contains lots of other Galileo material, including what is surely another of the key documents in the history of the social construction of modern science (and the modern world...), Galileo's recantation: http://galileo.imss.firenze.it/museo/a/eabiura.html [snip] "Eppur si move!" \brad mccormick -- Mankind is not the master of all the stuff that exists, but Everyman (woman, child) is a judge of the world. Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / bradmcc@cloud9.net 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA ------------------------------------------------------- Visit my website ==> http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/ ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 14 Jun 1998 15:52:58 +0000 Reply-To: Ian.Pitchford@scientist.com Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Comments: Authenticated sender is From: Ian Pitchford Subject: [part 2] Harris Comes Out MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Where did the notion that categories oppress us come from? The extreme individualism of the 1960s surely played its part, as well as the idea popularized by the human potential movement that we must, above all else, "express" ourselves and flaunt our true personalities even in the face of intense peer pressure and social disapproval. And yet queer theorists rail against the very possibility of extreme individualism, of a fixed self, dismissing a unique, sui generis personality as a sentimental "construction" and advocating instead both a mercurial sexuality and a "fluid," "destabilized" identity. Despite their emphatic denial of the uniqueness of the self and their assertions that "the fiction of the autonomous individual has been roundly trounced," their entire project of social rehabilitation is based on the most intransigent concept of bourgeois individualism, on the apotheosis of the incendiary radical who, by sheer dint of will, defies a repressive, homogeneous society and remakes himself according to unthinkably advanced paradigms of sexual behavior. The theorist's rejection of the unique self as an illusion promoted by a society that indoctrinates and controls its citizens is itself rooted in a romantic, almost Byronic belief in the very individuality they take great pains to expose as a fraud, a hoax of consumerism, of a world of stultifying mass conformity. Just as queer theorists nurse the illusion of their radicalism even as they leap like lemmings off the same bookshelves, so they adopt the platform of crusading populists at the same time that they behave like elitists, dismissing, with a withering degree of superciliousness, criticisms from the general reader about their insularity and social irrelevance. When an editor of a Boston gay weekly complains that gay studies, which are now staffed by "third-tier academics," have become "cliquish, . . . self-consciously obtuse and virtually unintelligible," the members of QStudy-L rally together in high dudgeon, reject their self-appointed roles as the champions of the dispossessed, and look down their noses at the huddled masses of gay plebeians, who are accused of being "anti-intellectual," "reactionary," and "idiotic." The subscribers to the list even claim that they are being persecuted by their own kind, consigned to the rice paddies by the assimilated mob, likening their self-imposed isolation to the ostracism caused by homophobia itself and sniffling about how "the anti-intellectualism of much queer culture continues to astound and hurt me." The moment queer theorists are attacked by the hoi polloi as solipsistic snobs who make little or no effort to communicate with the very people they claim to be defending, the mask of anxious Marxist compassion is ripped off and the illiterate rabble is put in its place like an insubordinate servant, a rustic boob who dares to speak out of line and challenge his social superiors. For a group as proud of its marginality as queer theorists, who claim to have resisted assimilation "into a totalitarian Theocracy or Heterocrasy," much can be gleaned from the way it treats its own margins, the loud-mouthed curmudgeons who continually trample on the cardinal philosophic tenets of postmodernism. Loose canons are epidemic among all listserves and are particularly vocal on QStudy-L, as in the case of the irrepressibly caustic Jon Silverbear, who calls other subscribers the "Central Committee on the Official Queer Margin," or in the case of the occasional bewildered naif who straggles onto the list and unwittingly tosses around such politically charged terms as "perverted" and "decadent" in reference to those who engage in sado-masochism or undergo "sex realignment" surgery. After repeated jabs at the group's sacred cows -- in particular, at the queer theorist's cult of the transsexual, the divine androgyne, the pagan Goddess of marginalization -- members band together like a lynch mob to blackball the perpetrators of such sacrilegious acts and organize what amounts to a cyberspace stoning, hurling a barrage of e-mail at the heretics of queer theory and ultimately driving them humiliated from their ranks. They organize campaigns to "dump" the offending apostates, hound Jon Silverbear back into his lair, and insist that dissenters who refuse to toe the party line "should be banned from the list" and "take [their] intrusions elsewhere," given that they are unable "to dialogue in a responsible manner" and to adhere to "the charter of the space as a place where queer is honored." What we see on QStudy-L is the formation of a new status quo, the status quo of the weird, a mythical society that exists only in cyberspace and on university campuses where the disenfranchised and the abnormal -- the "queer" -- have been elevated to positions of power and bourgeois respectability and the dull, normal, straight white people have been relegated to the margins. Having swapped places with the oppressed, privileged members of the real world are now ground beneath the heel of the new dominant culture of the "weirded out," as one man proudly refers to himself, a mercilessly discriminating caste of pariahs that disempowers its minorities as unjustly as the racist, sexist, and homophobic "totalitarian patriarchal regime" disempowers blacks, women, and gays. In their questionable treatment of their own marginal groups, whom they railroad from their midst without a fleeting thought to the principles of democracy or the sanctity of free speech, their true colors are revealed: the status quo of the weird is not a real minority but just the dominant culture making love to itself, savoring the thrill of make-believe oppression while continuing to behave as despotically as the dominant culture always behaves. Far from protecting the rights of the silenced few, it stamps out dissent, censors minority positions, and legislates conformity to the minute anti-canon of sacred texts written by queer theorists' real oppressors, not Dead White European Males, but the unchallengeable politburo of postmodernist Big Brothers who dictate every word and every e-mail they write. -- Daniel Harris Daniel Harris is the author of The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture. His work appears in Harper's and Salmagundi. He is presently working on a new book, The Aesthetics of Consumerism. (Daniel Harris is online at DHarris624@aol.com) _____________________________________________ Ian Pitchford - Email: Ian.Pitchford@mcmail.com Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/ University of Sheffield, 16 Claremont Crescent SHEFFIELD S10 2TA, United Kingdom. Tel: 0114 222 2961 Fax: 0114 270 0619 _____________________________________________ Online Dictionary of Mental Health http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/psychotherapy/ InterPsych: Mental Health Debate on the Internet http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/InterPsych/inter.html _____________________________________________ ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 14 Jun 1998 15:52:58 +0000 Reply-To: Ian.Pitchford@scientist.com Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Comments: Authenticated sender is From: Ian Pitchford Subject: Hoax: Queer Theory MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-transfer-encoding: Quoted-printable Date: Fri, 12 Jun 1998 16:17:14 -0400 (EDT) From: Norman Levitt ____ The Chronicle of Higher Education Thursday, June 11, 1998 Fake Submission to Mailing List Sets Off a Debate About Queer Theory By LISA GUERNSEY Another fictional postmodernist has sneaked into academic discourse, this time striking on an e-mail discussion list about queer theory. Daniel Harris, a New York author, pulled off the hoax months ago by posting "translations" from a make-believe French theorist on QSTUDY-L. Members of the list found out only this week that they had been reading -- and some of them had been responding to -- the works of a fake. Mr. Harris reveals his prank in the forthcoming issue of The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review, and a copy of his article has already been posted to the list. Mr. Harris, who is gay, said in an interview Wednesday that he wanted to bring attention to what he sees as the jargon-laden and misguided field of queer theory. His deception raises memories of an earlier one staged by Alan D. Sokal, a physicist at New York University who provoked controversy throughout academe when he posed as a postmodern scientist in the spring 1996 issue of the peer-reviewed journal Social Text. None of the editors caught the spoof, and it was published alongside legitimate pieces in a special issue on the "science wars." QSTUDY-L has become an electronic salon for more than 1,200 people interested in queer studies. It often includes postings from researchers questioning conventional definitions of homosexuality. Sometimes it has explored what hidden meanings might be signified by various body parts. So last December, when Mr. Harris -- then an anonymous subscriber -- posted a synopsis of the ideas of the mythical Marie Fran=E7oise de Ricci, nothing seemed amiss. De Ricci, according to Mr. Harris, wrote about men who "like to pretend that they are orifice-free" and who, therefore, "present a suffocatingly patriarchal homogeneity of signification that prevents interpretation." De Ricci's ideas didn't make a huge splash, but they did stir some discussion. Four subscribers posted responses, providing their own interpretations of her ideas. A half-dozen others sent private e-mail messages to the anonymous sender, some of them asking where they could find the French writer's works. Only one subscriber -- a professor at the University of Nancy, in France -- called Mr. Harris's bluff. She did so in a private e-mail message in December, and she kept quiet about it. "I was using that hoax to make a simple point," Mr. Harris said in the interview. "What I want people to take note of are the ideological objections I have to queer theory." His objections echo some of the ideas raised by Mr. Sokal, who sought to show that when postmodernism was applied to science, the result was nonsensical and full of jargon. In the article, Mr. Harris says he wanted to do more than take a another jab at postmodernism. He says that he first wanted to call attention to what he sees as the insulated, elitist environment of QSTUDY-L -- a group whose members, he says, are so keen on the ideas of critical theorists that they can't see past a fake one. Further, he argues that queer theory "has some potentially destructive effects on gay studies itself." Queer theorists often disparage labels like "gay" and "straight," arguing that such categories narrow the scope of a person's potential sexual preferences. But Mr. Harris contends that dismantling the categories would weaken the political power of gay people in their attempts to lobby for fair treatment. Gay activism is one theme of Mr. Harris's most recent book, The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture (Hyperion, 1997), in which he argues that if gay people become too mainstream, they will lose their sense of what it means to be gay. Just after the news of Mr. Harris's spoof hit QSTUDY-L, subscribers began to post their reactions -- and some jumped into the debate about how to achieve gay political power. "I don't think a political fight need depend on 'labels,'" wrote a list member from Buenos Aires identified only as "J.L.S." But many others were just plain peeved that Mr. Harris had staked out their Internet enclave as a place to make his point. "Not only do I find Harris's position tiring, but also somewhat two-faced," wrote a subscriber named Robert. "He was (is?) on this listserv about a year or a year and a half ago trying to sell his book, over and over, until people asked him to stop." A graduate student at Yale University named Tavia Nyongo Turkish tried to set the hoax in context: "Are we surprised that Harris was able to 'impersonate' a theorist on line? Alan Sokal has already proved that he could get a fake article past peer-review. Harris set himself a significantly easier challenge, especially given the malleability of identity on the Internet. Is this supposed to be a bombshell?" Maybe not. But Mr. Harris is enjoying it. He said Wednesday that he was most tickled by some of the posts that have appeared since the veil came off. A few of them continue to refer to De Ricci's ideas, apparently accepting them as worthy of discussion, regardless of whether De Ricci is real or fake. Terry Goldie, a professor of English at York University, wrote: "Interestingly, this faux theorist is saying things somewhat similar to the most interesting observations of Leo Bersani" -- a professor of French at the University of California at Berkeley. "But then," he added with tongue in cheek, "Harris probably also created Bersani." Background stories from The Chronicle: * "A Physicist's Spoof of Postmodernism Has Stirred Debate on Line," 6/25/96 * "Journal Editors Debate Significance of Literary Hoax," 5/31/96 * "Alan Sokal, Author of Hoax, Feels Vindicated by Response," 6/28/96 * "Article on 'Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity' Revealed as Hoax," 5/24/96 Colloquy: * Join a debate on the issues raised in this article _________________________________________________________________ Copyright =A9 1998 by The Chronicle of Higher Education _____________________________________________ Ian Pitchford - Email: Ian.Pitchford@mcmail.com Centre for Psychotherapeutic Studies http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/ University of Sheffield, 16 Claremont Crescent SHEFFIELD S10 2TA, United Kingdom. Tel: 0114 222 2961 Fax: 0114 270 0619 _____________________________________________ Online Dictionary of Mental Health http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/psychotherapy/ InterPsych: Mental Health Debate on the Internet http://www.shef.ac.uk/~psysc/InterPsych/inter.html _____________________________________________ ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 14 Jun 1998 15:57:07 +0000 Reply-To: Ian.Pitchford@scientist.com Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Comments: Authenticated sender is From: Ian Pitchford Subject: [Part1b] Harris comes out] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT When they are not poking holes in orifice theory, subscribers to QStudy-L are constantly splitting hairs over the unequivocal definitions of key terms like "sexuality," "queer," "straight," "identity," "orientation," and "gay culture," all of which are dismissed as "disintegrating categories" that have become so amorphous and subjective that a crippling relativism soon paralyzes the entire discussion. The participants founder in a quagmire of imprecise terminology that prevents them from using with any degree of confidence such seemingly self-evident but nonetheless treacherously inexact expressions as "the gay and lesbian community" ("there are at best many 'gay and lesbian communities'"); "normal" ("there is no single 'normal'"); "center" ("there are multiple 'centers'"); "queer culture" ("there are 'many' queer cultures"); "transgendered" ("there are nearly as many . . . definitions for the word 'transgendered' as there are people"); or even a perfectly straightforward word like "butchness" ("there are many, many kinds of butchness"). These mad lexicographers lapse into a maniacal state of semantic hysteria as every word in their vocabulary turns out to be a trap, a meaningless sinkhole that swallows up even the simplest pronouns in a morass of contradictory definitions: "who is 'we'?", "my 'I' may be different from your 'I'," and "what do you mean by 'you'?" The contemporary theorist views his relativism as a frontal assault on the old-fashioned empiricist's naive belief in an ascertainable "reality" but in fact this monomaniacal obsession with incoherence and "multiplicity" is characteristic of a type of uncompromising pedant even more puritanical than the most reactionary of humanists. The new linguistic radicals are not revolutionaries so much as disillusioned absolutists, closeted traditionalists who cling to an inflexibly literal notion of language that is intolerant of even the slightest degree of ambiguity and holds words to standards of exactitude they were never intended to meet. Postmodernism embodies a conservative not an innovative strain of Western culture, and its fixation on linguistic anarchy is fueled by the tantrums of the disheartened precisianist enraged by the failure of his incontrovertible schemes to maintain irrefutable scientific consistency. The collapse of categories also serves an explicitly ideological function: the stubborn refusal of words to adhere to the unrealistic standards of postmodern perfectionism suggests that there is no such thing as "gay" and "straight" but only murky gradations of indeterminate desires, the infantile polymorphousness practiced by many of the list's self-styled "sex radicals" who pride themselves on being nothing less than sexual chimeras, unclassifiable beings like male lesbians, "transgendered female-to-male queer skinheads," "afro- american post modern post black skaterboy[s]," and, as the transsexual Kate Bornstein once put it, "a het guy who did the gender-change thing and became a grrl, a lesbian grrl at that." Attacking the integrity of compartmentalized erotic preferences like "heterosexual" and "homosexual" enables the postmodernist to tar with the same brush everyone from the bus driver and the plumber to the beautician and the unmarried Sunday school teacher, homosexualizing even the most stalwart of bigots, indicting them all for crimes against nature, the victims (or beneficiaries) of "destabilized binaries," of "the elision of the articulation of cultural categories." Deconstructing "labels" is the key plank of the linguistic agenda of the contemporary gay theorist who attempts to conscript in the cause of perversity implausible recruits who are encouraged to eschew the tedium of the missionary position, abandon the fib of "your genderedness," and wallow instead in a "wonderful sociosexual brew of shifting sliding slipperiness." The gay theorist's nearly sensual delight in linguistic chaos serves another ideological function. Words cannot maintain their well-policed boundaries not only because sexual desire itself cannot be controlled and contained, prevented from spilling over into the unregulated realm of the illicit, but because postmodernists strive so conscientiously, with such an anguished sense of white guilt, to use only the most inclusive and democratic of expressions that pay homage to all minorities, thus exploding the myth of a homogeneous, univocal America. The philosophical quirks of deconstruction dovetail with the politically correct emphasis on ethnic pluralism so that the hallowed concept of diversity, of a world splintered into a rainbow coalition of oppressed groups, provides additional fodder for the theorist's conviction that semantic order and logic are only enticing illusions for racist simpletons. Every time a member of QStudy-L is reckless enough to make an unqualified reference to "we" or "the gay community," some self-appointed multicultural Cassandra pops up like a Jack-in-the-Box and barks out an objection that this deceptively simple term excludes from the "semiotic salad" the usual suspects -- blacks, women, bisexuals, transsexuals, and drag queens. The linguistic preoccupations of contemporary theory have been conflated with the sociological obsessions of multiculturalism, and the result is an almost evangelical effort to use baggy abstractions compendious enough to encompass even the most rarefied and exotic of marginal groups, much to the detriment of the whole process of communication. The systematic dismantling of categories and the orchestrated campaign to "get rid of gender" represent an entirely new political strategy in the history of the gay pride movement. During the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, we embraced our homosexuality, reclaimed it as something we should be proud of, wearing our "labels" emblazoned across our chests like Congressional Medals of Honor, citations for sexual heroism that we displayed as ostentatiously as doddering Legionnaires display bronze stars and red ribbons. Now in the 1990s, these once glamorous labels have been stigmatized as "destructive, misleading, and false," emotional obstructions that stunt our psychological "growth," preventing us from breaking free of social expectations and reinventing ourselves in the futuristic image of such febrile creations of the postmodern imagination as "a lesbian heterosexual, a heterosexual lesbian, a male lesbian, a female gay man, or even a feminist sex radical." We have come full circle from the days of the closet when, much like the contemporary gay theorist, we avoided labels at all cost, erasing our homosexuality, disclaiming it as a destructive liability, fleeing our proclivities like frightened dogs flee tin cans tied to their tails. The liberated homosexual of the 1970s would have been dismayed to hear that there is no such thing as homosexuality, that it is a "construction," a "myth," a pure linguistic convenience that provides an at best tenuous foundation for something as pivotally important as the entire gay pride movement. What postmodernists fail to recognize is that categories like "gay" and "straight" serve an important function. In the days of the Love That Dared Not Speak Its Name, labels provided us with a means of achieving unity, a banner behind which to organize, to converge into the "community" reviled by politically correct academics as a kind of latent Aryan conspiracy, an orchestrated act of middle-class apartheid, of white male chauvinism. Certainly it is true that putting people into categories like "gay" oppresses or at least limits them, but it is also true that it gives them power and political cohesion, that it strengthens their collective resolve to fight back against homophobic campaigns to strip them of their basic civil rights. The queer theorist's quixotic vision of a label-less polymorphous utopia, in which carefree hedonists "challenge the compulsory male-female binary" and play a dizzying round of sexual musical chairs, changing partners, proclivities, and even genders at will, is a politically inexpedient pipe dream. Such unrealistic visions could potentially jeopardize the gay liberation movement and deal a significant blow to our solidarity, turning back the clock on gay rights to an era in which avoiding labels was a dire professional and emotional necessity, not the arid intellectual pastime of bed-swapping academics who relish the euphoric pleasures of self-erasure while ignoring their dangers. [CONTINUED] ========================================================================= Date: Sun, 14 Jun 1998 15:57:07 +0000 Reply-To: Ian.Pitchford@scientist.com Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Comments: Authenticated sender is From: Ian Pitchford Subject: [Part1a] Harris comes out MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT HARVARD GAY AND LESBIAN REVIEW Daniel Harris: Queer Theory Hoax HARVARD GAY AND LESBIAN REVIEW, June 1998 QSTUDY-L By Daniel Harris (DHarris624@aol.com) Proponents of the educational value of the Internet often wax enthusiastic about its remarkable ability to build what they refer to -- with an air of civic pride -- as "community." On college campuses in particular, the Worldwide Web functions as a cyberspace salon or electronic coffee shop that enables atomized intellectuals to overcome the isolation of the library and participate in a desktop global village that links colleagues they might overwise never meet, let alone talk to. A case in point are the over 15,000 e-mail "listserves" that allow specialists scattered across the world to post queries, solicit papers, announce conferences, share research, debate, kvetch about departmental politics, and simply chit-chat with thousands of other academics in their particular area of expertise, from British poultry science and contaminated soil analysis to chaos theory and artificial neural networks, from fresh-water fish ecology and the dilemmas of the lesbian library worker to feminist sci-fi and the literature of the Indian diaspora. "QStudy-L" is the major listserve for the discussion of the fashionable new field of "queer theory," a subject that encompasses topics as bewilderingly diverse as "dildo scholarship," "anti-assimilationist Gramscian Queer Boy theory," trucker porno theory, "gender liminality" theory, "liberatory queer skinhead" theory, and "TG theory" (i.e., transgendered theory). Every day swarms of impassioned e- mails fly back and forth about issues that become the source of angry vendettas in which adversaries crucify other list members, bickering about "the queer subversion of heteronormativity," "the culturally constructed aura of the phallic signifier," "the culture of the dildo," "the figuration of the lesbian tongue," "the gay male aestheticization of masculinist signifiers," and the mysterious "act of performing lingual sex on the clitorized ear of the reader." Like street gangs fighting over the same turf, various factions spar about ideologically suspect terminology or tsk-tsk over minute infractions of Internet etiquette, such as using all capital letters, which "CREATES THE IMPRESSION OF YELLING," or flooding the list with an inordinate amount of e-mail, thus behaving like "list hogs," the ubiquitous Chatty Cathies who frequently monopolize the discussion. Far from building community, queer theorists often seem hell bent on destroying it: "dude, you wouldn't know a liberatory assertion of non-oppositional subjectivity if it jumped up and bit cha," "I found this reply to Kate repulsively insensitive," and "you are a whore of politics -- a monster of psychotic disturbance. The garbage which spews out of that fuck hole you call a mouth reveals a simple, whimpering bitch with shit for brains." There is road rage on the information superhighway where our PCs have become bumper cars that swerve recklessly through traffic, ignoring speed limits, careening through stop signs, and smashing gleefully into our opponents. Little did the Internet's pilgrim fathers realize that many cyberspace junkies would use this ostensibly wholesome educational tool to give free rein to anti-social impulses that flourish under the cover of anonymity and the safe distance afforded by machines, which provide a license for rudeness and aggression. The electronic town hall meeting turns out to be, not an ingenious forum for bringing together like- minded scholars, but a Hobbesean campus where intellectual predators engage in e-mail sword-play on their mouse pads, attacking each other for indulging in discourses that are "seriously undertheorized," "heuristically problematized," and "polluted by essentialist gender ideology." The myth that the Internet builds "community" is often accompanied by another misconception: that it is democratic, that it gives a voice to the voiceless, empowers the powerless, and provides an inexpensive soapbox for those who have limited access to the media and therefore no other way of getting their point of view across. In fact, however, after slogging through thousands of e-mail "queeries," as they are called, one realizes that there is a reason that the silenced are silent: they often have nothing to say. When they finally acquire a voice, the voice that speaks is usually not their own but Kristeva's, Foucault's, and Derrida's, authors that have spawned whole schools of doting epigones who, far from taking advantage of the uncensored freedom of the Internet and speaking what's on their minds, engage in an act of nonsensical ventriloquism, a servile impersonation of the reigning gurus of postmodern gender theory. The subscribers to QStudy-L channel these writers like A.Z. Knight channels Ramtha=FE, a 35,000-year-old spirit that this former housewife fr= om Washington State has taken the precaution to copyright in order to safeguard her intellectual property from unscrupulous marauders from the astral plane -- which is more than one can say for the unpatented Judith Butler and Jacques Lacan whose disembodied spirits are now fair game on the open market and are channeled by legions of their followers, who shamelessly plagiarize their arcane jargon and theoretical obsessions. Just how easy it is to mimic the voice of the voiceless can be seen in an experiment I myself conducted in channeling a mythical French "subjectivist" named Marie Francoise de Ricci, the author of "Towards a Theory of the Absent Orifice: Labial Engenderings and Oral Antecedents," a work inspired by Judith Butler's seemingly phantasmal but nonetheless quite genuine essay "The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary."= I posted two passages from my uncopyrighted spirit's forthcoming opus on "orifice theory" which I composed more or less as a Rorschach blot of postmodern cliches, a suggestive but utterly opaque quilt of theoretical slogans culled from the e-mail of the other QStudy-L subscribers: I'd be curious about your responses to the following quotation from an article by the French subjectivist Marie Francoise de Ricci . . . Do you find mher constructivist leanings on the issue of the masculinist body accurate or is she guilty of heteronormative exclusivity? For instance, I frankly do not believe that the following pertains to the way either gay men or lesbians engender, construct, and subjectivize their bodies. Do you agree? The translation is mine and I apologize if it's a little rough: ---- Males and females construct and engender their orifices in entirely different ways that often culminate in the extreme incoherence of a fractured self, a disintegrating "I," thus shattering the bourgeois myth of an intact subjectivity. The hermeneutics of the male orifice are obscurantist, for males would like to pretend that they are orifice-free, that they are unpunctured -- indeed, unpuncturable -- a univocal hegemony of meaning, all muscle, all sinew, a seamless convexity created through a willful erasure of disjunctures and interstices, a radical objectification and materialization of the will that presents to the world a myriad of arcane and illegible inscriptions. The hermeneutics of the female orifice, by contrast, present a plethora of narratives. The woman's orifices are entirely legible. A plurality of meaning prevails to which the male presents a suffocatingly patriarchal homogeneity of signification that prevents interpretation and, similarly, misinterpretation. The male body defies language; the female body invites it. ------------------------ In her second contribution to orifice theory, entitled "The Inverted Orifice," my rhapsodic alter ego continued this Lewis Carroll collage of capricious nonce words and sibylline utterances about the heterosexual's body as "an impervious shield of phallic intentionality," "a prisoner of hegemonic categories" which are subverted by the homosexual's "transgressive force of resexualizing radicalism that turns the male into a leaking container of meaning, a destabilized sign that spills forth its seething, irrational core of compromisingly feminine signification." A number of people responded, both privately and publicly, to de Ricci's delirious lucubrations: one told me that he "find[s] these quotes and your observations fascinating" and that he believes that De Ricci's work "has much to offer Queer Theory"; another pointed out a "hole" in her analysis of male orifices, given that heterosexual men are often penetrated by fingers and tongues, if not by "phallic signifiers"; another concurred wholeheartedly about the heterosexual's bashful denial of his "orificiality"; and another took issue with the whole premise of "Towards a Theory of the Absent Orifice": It sounds to me as though De Ricci herself is interested in fragmenting the renewed unifying strategies of bourgeois subjectivity, and is setting up an argument in which differently signifying/investing gay bodies, transbodies, cyberbodies, vampire bodies etc. could all play roles. What bothers me about all this talk is the willingness among many gay males to accept the idea that sex is all about orifices, penetration and receptivity in the first place, which to me just reifies heteronormativity. What ever happened to displacements of that system from feminist metaphoricities (active enveloping, engorgement etc.) or from cyborg or vampire imaginaries (non-porous skin, anti-organicity, surfaces -- including that which was previously thought through as internality)? Could we queer the system that insists on seeing things as either holes or poles? Only one contributor, a professor of sociology at the University of Nancy in France, recognized that de Ricci was neither a "constructivist" nor a "subjectivist" but an outright hoax, a monkey tapping on a typewriter, brandishing faddish academic shibboleths whose sole purpose is to enable the browbeaten disciples of Eve Sedgwick and Leo Bersani to -- as one member somewhat sophomorically put it -- "think big." ========================================================================= Date: Tue, 16 Jun 1998 02:07:11 EDT Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Axel Thiel Subject: Wtr: [PSYCHHST] graffiti-research Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: multipart/mixed; boundary="part0_897977232_boundary" This is a multi-part message in MIME format. --part0_897977232_boundary Content-ID: <0_897977232@inet_out.mail.aol.com.1> Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII --part0_897977232_boundary Content-ID: <0_897977232@inet_out.mail.aol.com.2> Content-type: message/rfc822 Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit Content-disposition: inline Return-Path: Received: from rly-zb04.mx.aol.com (rly-zb04.mail.aol.com [172.31.41.4]) by air-zb02.mail.aol.com (v44.13) with SMTP; Tue, 16 Jun 1998 02:04:09 -0400 Received: from VMS.DC.LSOFT.COM (vms.dc.lsoft.com [206.241.13.27]) by rly-zb04.mx.aol.com (8.8.5/8.8.5/AOL-4.0.0) with ESMTP id CAA02536; Tue, 16 Jun 1998 02:04:05 -0400 (EDT) Received: from PEAR.EASE.LSOFT.COM (206.241.12.19) by VMS.DC.LSOFT.COM (LSMTP for OpenVMS v1.1a) with SMTP id <2.64069DDD@VMS.DC.LSOFT.COM>; Tue, 16 Jun 1998 2:03:16 -0500 Received: from HOME.EASE.LSOFT.COM by HOME.EASE.LSOFT.COM (LISTSERV-TCP/IP release 1.8c) with spool id 6433914 for PSYCHOHISTORY@HOME.EASE.LSOFT.COM; Tue, 16 Jun 1998 02:04:25 -0400 Received: from imo25.mx.aol.com by home.ease.lsoft.com (LSMTP for Windows NT v1.1b) with SMTP id <5.FFC80E4C@home.ease.lsoft.com>; Tue, 16 Jun 1998 2:04:24 -0400 Received: from ARCHIVE1@aol.com by imo25.mx.aol.com (IMOv14_b1.1) id CEEKa03745 for ; Tue, 16 Jun 1998 02:03:21 -0400 (EDT) X-Mailer: AOL 3.0.i for Windows sub 74 Message-ID: <2820f66f.35860aaa@aol.com> Date: Tue, 16 Jun 1998 02:03:21 EDT Reply-To: Historical motivation utilizing psychoanalytic principles +forum+ Sender: Historical motivation utilizing psychoanalytic principles +forum+ From: Axel Thiel Subject: [PSYCHHST] graffiti-research To: PSYCHOHISTORY@HOME.EASE.LSOFT.COM Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-transfer-encoding: quoted-printable int.work-group on graffiti-research: On request available: "A short history of writing=3Dgraffiti",85 pages central facts,publicatio= ns with sub-chapters: vocabulary of writing graffiti-synonyma dead writers names`list female writers names`list factors pro/anti-graffiti industrial influences "A short history of visually documentable human communication"30 pages abbreviated summary with central publications from graffiti-research and writing(since ca.1970) in prep:"Vocabulary of graffiti-research"(vol.3)at 130 pages(to be publis= hed at 150) No.30 of "Einf=FChrung in die Grafitti-Forschung/introduction to graffiti= - research"just being published(205 pages) No.31 in prep. No.32 in prep. A.Thiel(coordination) Kassel(Germany) ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ To stop receiving this list, send email with any subject and any message body to PSYCHOHISTORY-SIGNOFF-REQUEST@HOME.EASE.LSOFT.COM. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ --part0_897977232_boundary-- ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 20 Jun 1998 17:04:25 -0400 Reply-To: bradmcc@cloud9.net Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: "Brad McCormick, Ed.D." Organization: AbiCo. Subject: The Truman Show X-To: H-NEXA@H-NET.MSU.EDU X-cc: abeauchamp@grolier.com, vlashua@grolier.com, geedel@aol.com, rom2@columbia.edu, louisfors@aol.com MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit [Please excuse, anybody who's on both the lists to which I'm posting this....] "We accept the reality of the world with which we are presented -- It's as simple as that." I went to a movie-theater today, and saw _The Truman Show_. Peter Weir has, as with _The Last Wave_, done a good job on a significant theme. I would propose to the academic community that this movie (which, perhaps, a fairly wide public shall see...), offers a unique opportunity to teach the basics of a phenomenological/hermeneutical social self- understanding (I would further propose that this opportunity be taken seriously, since such opportunities do not often come along). The film is, in my opinion, *begging* for a sequel, in which the "show" continues, but with the cameras pointed at the crew in the control room, into which Truman would enter. The film could also have used a dedication line something like: This film is dedicated to Edmund Husserl Or, perhaps: This film is dedicated to Alfred Schutz (whose _Collected Papers_ contains a lovely essay on alternative realities and Don Quixote (or maybe there are two essays)). In the spirit of _Cloise Encounters of the Third Kind_ (where Francois Truffaut was given a role), _The Truman Show_ could also have included roles for Peter Graves [Mission Impossible] and Patrick McGoohan [The Prisoner]. "Be seeing you!" \brad mccormick -- Mankind is not the master of all the stuff that exists, but Everyman (woman, child) is a judge of the world. Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / bradmcc@cloud9.net 914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA ------------------------------------------------------- Visit my website ==> http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/ ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 22 Jun 1998 09:07:13 -0700 Reply-To: wderzko@pathcom.com Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Walter Derzko Subject: Creativity Consortium Meeting on Agent-Mediated Learning X-To: List MG-ED-DV X-cc: List Cybermind , List Innovation Mgmt Network , List Market-L List , List tacit-l MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Creativity Consortium Meeting on Agent-Mediated Learning Date: Wednesday June 24, 1998 Location: Ontario Club, 5th Floor Commerce Court South, corner Bay & Wellington, Toronto, Ont. Canada Time: 6:15 registration, networking, cash bar, light hot snacks; 7:00 pm presentation, demo, discussion Cost: $40 guests; $30 members; $20 students Proceedings: available; embargoed till Aug 1998. call (416) 588-1122 for details and to order Pre-registration: Call Walter Derzko at 588-1122 by Monday June 22, 1998 at (416) 588-1122 Panel: Karen Andersen, NewsEdge; Walter Derzko, Brain Space on Agent-Mediated Learning ================== This month's Creativity Consortium talk will focus on mining ideas using intelligent agents. Karen Andersen, NewsEdge; NewsEdge as a search tool ========================================== There are tremendous advantages to receiving relevant news when you are using mission critical applications and actively engaged in making business decisions - as opposed to just 'doing news' as a discreet activity a few times a day. News should inform business decisions not just business people. Karen Andersen, Account Executive at NewsEdge Canada, with 7 years of experience in the news and information industry, will discuss how NewsObjects adds immeasurable value by placing news where workers spend their time. For information, knowledge and corporate resource managers who need to integrate breaking news and business information directly into internal financial, customer, competitor or enterprise information management systems, NewsEdge NewsObjects is a knowledge integration toolkit that delivers on the promise to seamlessly integrate up-to-the-second news and business information directly into the workflow, as well as the look and feel, of mission-critical applications. NewsEdge Corporation is the leader in global news and current awareness solutions for business. NewsEdge Corporation helps business people find the most important, relevant stories from an overwhelming volume of daily news, enabling them to act on the most current information possible. NewsEdge Corporation is headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts with sales offices throughout North America, Europe and Japan. For more information, visit our web site at http://www.newsedge.com. Walter Derzko, BrainSpace; 3-D Visualization using Siftware ============================================ So, what does one do with news feed that gets steamed to your desktop? Current traditional grid and chart presentation methods are too limited for viewing complex result sets with many different variables. Data visualization is the latest emerging trend for analysis of large volumes of detailed data. As an adjunct of reporting and data mining, visualization tools (Siftware) gives the end user the ability to comprehend tens of thousands of items in a single view. Walter Derzko will explore various classes for "siftware" tools and provide demos of the different Siftware Tool Types below: 1) Anomaly, Red-flag or deviation Detection 2)Classification - predicting an item class based on historical data using various possible methods such as :Decision trees, Rules, Neural networks, Rough sets, Genetics or evolution algorithms, Nearest Neighbour, Fuzzy Logic or combinations 3) Clustering - finding groups of related items 4) Concept generation 5) Data Cleaning and Transformation 6) Dimensional Analysis 7) Estimation - estimating continuous value 8) Link Analysis - finding relevant links or dependencies 9) Statistics 10) Suites - tools handling multiple discovery tasks 11) Summarization or abstraction 12) Text Mining 13) Visualization Walter Derzko Director Brain Space (formerly the Idea Lab at the Design Exchange) Toronto (416) 588-1122 wderzko@pathcom.com ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 25 Jun 1998 19:26:25 EDT Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Valdusek@AOL.COM Subject: Re: New York Times Science Reporting Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit MAGAZINES & JOURNALS A glance at the July 6 issue of "The Nation": What's wrong with science reporting in "The New York Times" As technology has grown more important, "The New York Times" has put more emphasis on stories about health care, the environment, medicine, biology, physics, and mathematics. Those stories, however, are often biased and tend to side with corporate powers, writes Mark Dowie, a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. One of the biggest offenders, Mr. Dowie writes, is Gina Kolata, one of the newspaper's top science reporters. Based on conversations with scientists whom Ms. Kolata has quoted, Mr. Dowie says that she decides what her articles will say even before she conducts interviews. She also tends to misquote sources and to misrepresent scientists' research, causing many scholars to shy away from the press, he writes. Although many scientists have written angry letters to the editors about her stories, and reporters from "Business Week," "The Wall Street Journal," and "Science" magazine have questioned her methods and conclusions, editors at the "Times" have done nothing to discipline her, Mr. Dowie writes. Ms. Kolata, however, says that her reporting "speaks for itself," he writes. The article may be found on line at http://www.thenation.com Fowarded by Val Dusek ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 25 Jun 1998 20:51:17 -0400 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Norman Levitt Subject: "Nation" on G.B. Kolata ( MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII I forward, for your convenience, the piece mentioned by Val Dusek. For my money, G.B. Kolata is an excellent science journalist. She is being reprimanded by Mr. Dowie for failure to follow the party line on such matters as food irradiation and silicone implants. (With respect to the latter, see M. Angell, "Science on Trial.") It seems to me that she is more sinned against than sinning. Norman Levitt ---------- Forwarded message ---------- What's Wrong With the New York Times's Science Reporting? BY MARK DOWIE ______________________________________________________________ When the world was engaged in a cold war and the most challenging issues of our time were overseas, the nation's newspaper of record, the New York Times, demonstrated an exemplary commitment to foreign coverage. The Times foreign desk, from which rose today's executive editor, Joseph Lelyveld, was as impressive as that of any media outlet in the world. If its foreign reportage could be faulted, it was for the reason the Times could always be faulted--its reflexive allegiance to the powers that be. The same assessment could be made over the years of the paper's performance in times of hot war, political scandal or domestic crisis. Although the paper was too often aligned with the establishment, and coverage of strife, civil discord or the gate-of-the-day could always be criticized for implied political positions or nitpicked on details, readers were as well informed by the Times as by any other single medium. As America evolved into a technological culture, science became an increasingly important beat. Times editors came to see the paper's scientific role as central to its purpose, as sound science became central to sound policy. Thus, over the past three decades, coverage of health, environment, medicine, biology, even physics and mathematics, has expanded exponentially in the Times's pages, where national giants of science writing--most notably Walter Sullivan, a Times legend who made science writing an art form--have made their mark. But there is a problem at the Times that needs to be corrected if the paper is to attain the same status in science as it has in foreign and domestic coverage. In science, even more than foreign or domestic political coverage, the paper tends to side with power--in this case corporate power. And much of the problem is centered around the work of one very talented and controversial science reporter, Gina Kolata. Kolata is an ace. When it comes to developing sources, procuring documents, researching complex data and breaking a hot story in clear and dynamic prose, she has few peers. "She has all the equipment," says an admiring Times colleague. And as her May 26 Science Times article comparing the behavior of plague bacteria to HIV attests, she is capable of demystifying the most arcane matters of science. Even her detractors describe her as "brilliant," "talented," "insightful" and "gifted." Since 1987 Kolata, who holds a master's degree in mathematics from the University of Maryland, has written more than 600 articles for the Times, many of them front-page blockbusters. Her stories routinely stir controversy and influence public policy, and upon occasion have had huge commercial impact. Few are the science conferences, journals or Web sites where her name is not heard or seen. On more than one occasion she has been mentioned as heir to the mantle of Sullivan. So why are so many of her associates at the paper, including her admiring colleague, so upset with her? And why is she held in such low esteem by so many scientists? The answer, surprisingly enough, has very little to do with a recent episode that landed Kolata on everyone else's front page--her floating of a book proposal within hours after releas-ing a hyped story on May 3 about a couple of promising cancer drugs. Although the story stimulated spicy e-mail among science writers across the country, in the context of her eleven-year career at the Times it is seen as a misdemeanor. Professional disrespect has in fact accumulated gradually as a consequence of her reporting on some already heated topics: AIDS research, silicone breast implants, breast cancer, food irradiation and environmental hormones (endocrine disrupters). Deconstruct her stories, source by source, quote by quote, and a familiar pattern begins to emerge. Upon re-interviewing the people she cites, it becomes evident that she appears to have decided before making her first call what her story will say. Her questions are suggestive, her tone combative. In the interest of the appearance of balance, sources of all persuasions are interviewed. But their quotes are carefully selected, at times modified to substantiate the predetermined position. Those scientists who disagree with her are either ignored, dismissed or trumped by someone anointed with higher authority--which usually means a longer string of initials after their name. The sources who agree with the author generally outnumber those who don't by a factor of five or six. If Kolata's reporting faults were only a reflection of her own journalistic shortcomings, that would be bad enough. But to the extent that they reflect the attitudes of the Times as an institution, they suggest a Times policy toward coverage of controversial products of technology that is anti-environment, pro-corporate and fundamentalist in its approach to scientific inquiry. It should be noted here that Kolata was offered ample opportunity, by phone and fax, to answer scores of specific questions related to this report. She provided a few minor facts in writing. But on the subject of this story her only spoken comment, made by phone from her desk at the Times, was "my reporting speaks for itself." AIDS Coverage Kolata established herself as a controversial reporter with her coverage of AIDS research, a mini-beat she assumed in the late eighties when the disease was raging through the country and activists in New York were picketing the home of Punch Sulzberger and the offices of the Times. The paper of record, they said, was ignoring a national epidemic, reporting only government press releases about research and writing off the severity of AIDS with an editorial that said "the disease is still very largely confined to specific risk groups. Once all susceptible members are infected, the numbers of new victims will decline." In 1989 Kolata decided to challenge "parallel track" research. Parallel track permits clinical trials of experimental drugs on people--for example, those with full-blown AIDS--who would not qualify as subjects for ordinary trials because they are too sick or have taken other drugs. Although Anthony Fauci, AIDS czar at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Food and Drug Administration both approved parallel track experiments, Kolata questioned the policy and the science. She was particularly disturbed by underground research being conducted by two activists in California named Martin Delaney and Jim Corti. Delaney and Corti were, with the assistance of ordinary clinicians, testing an experimental drug called "Compound Q," which had given hope to thousands of terminally ill AIDS patients. On occasion an experimental subject would die--quite predictably, Delaney and his collaborators believed. "They all had AIDS," Delaney says. But Kolata consistently reported the deaths as a failure of research, attributing them to the drugs, even after being told by attending physicians that most of the subjects had died of unrelated or pre-existing causes. Twice, Delaney says, Kolata misrepresented his description of the research; he also claims that she repeatedly distorted his quotes. "And I spent hours with her, on the phone and in person," he says. Eventually Delaney wrote to Times editor Max Frankel to complain, making it clear that he would be pleased to see his letter in print. Neither the letter, nor a correction, ever appeared. "Good reporters want to get the story right," Delaney says. "Kolata wanted to get the story she wanted to get." In her AIDS stories Kolata established a method that would become familiar to her readers. She found a few rigid and predictable ethicists and two or three prominent research physicians at reputable institutions upon whom she could rely to rail against parallel drug experimentation, and she quoted them repeatedly throughout her articles. It was nearly impossible for uncredentialed activists like Delaney and Corti to withstand that sort of condemnation. One such source she quoted at length was Dr. Douglas Richman, a prominent research physician at the University of California, San Diego, who had expressed reservations about parallel track. Richman came to realize, however, that Kolata was distorting his remarks "for her own purposes." He wrote to Dr. Fauci at the NIH, who had also been quoted, and said, "Although I believe it is important for investigators to try to educate the public and to honestly express their beliefs, I am now clearly aware that Ms. Kolata is not the medium through which to do this." That letter also found its way to Max Frankel's desk, but never to the pages of the Times. And no one at the paper replied. Later Fauci himself reread Kolata's articles and realized that he too had been misrepresented by her. Fauci was quoted in the Village Voice as saying that some of Kolata's articles included "misrepresentations" or had "blown findings out of proportion," but the criticism had no noticeable effect on her career at the Times. Rather, it appears that she was invited to select another topic and given free rein to reapply her unorthodox reportorial methods. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 25 Jun 1998 20:54:09 -0400 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Norman Levitt Subject: "Nation" on G.B. Kolata II (fwd) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: QUOTED-PRINTABLE =09 =20 Breast Implants and Breast Cancer=20 The topic she chose was silicone breast implants. Breast implants are a contrarian's dream topic because there are two distinct sides, both of which have sharpened their arguments during ten years of massive litigation against Dow Corning, Bristol-Myers Squibb and other manufacturers of the product. Pick either side and you're a contrarian. Stories from the middle ground get less attention. =20 Re-reading Business Week, Newsweek and most daily newspaper coverage of silicone breast implants, one finds a fairly balanced depiction of a now familiar story from the corporate-medical complex: Manufacturer launches exciting new product despite troubling animal research. Adverse reactions are reported, but dismissed, either as anomalies or the result of bad medical practice. Over the years complaints pour in from surgeons and their patients--in this case describing implant ruptures, silicone migration, connective tissue diseases and other disorders. Documents are discovered showing that manufacturers knew of hazards before the product was launched. Litigation ensues. People in misery blame manufacturers. Manufacturers blame product liability lawyers. Cautious reporters wait for juries to decide. =20 But Kolata didn't wait for verdicts. She weighed in with the manufacturers, repeating many of the arguments they had made in court, and when juries ruled for the plaintiff, as many did, she reported that they were willfully ignoring scientific verities. To substantiate her position, she quoted Dr. John Sergent saying, "I don't know a single, high-quality immunologist who is convinced that there is a definable disease related to implants." She did not mention that Sergent was a highly paid expert defense witness for Dow and Bristol-Myers, and she went on to write scathing criticism of doctors who accepted fees for testifying on behalf of plaintiffs. =20 To her credit Kolata found and exposed a few sleazy doctors who took patient referrals, and fees, from plaintiff attorneys in return for opinions that favored their clients. But from her expos=E9 of their behavior she concluded that the entire case against Dow and others lacked merit and that a handful of trial lawyers had driven a perfectly decent company into bankruptcy. The presence of predatory lawyers and doctors does not, however, negate the possibility that a product might be damaging. Upon examining the evidence, juries found Dow Corning so guilty so often of corporate malfeasance that the company was forced into joining a settlement, for $4.2 billion, with the entire class of women who believe their lives have been ruined or compromised by breast implants. =20 Yet Kolata chose to side with the company. "A Case of Justice, or a Total Travesty? How the Battle Over Breast Implants Took Dow Corning to Chapter 11" blared the June 13, 1995, headline over Kolata's article about the bankruptcy, much of which read like Dow PR. An advertisement the company ran in a dozen major newspapers during May 1995 claimed that "plaintiffs attorneys have spawned a whole new industry from suing implant manufacturers." In her June report Kolata bemoaned "a legal juggernaut [that] can take on a life of its own...and bring a large and thriving company to its knees." If Kolata missed the rather obvious point, intimated by Dow's CEO in Chemical Week magazine, that the company's bankruptcy was intended to delay the remuneration of claimants, investors did not. The first quarter after bankruptcy was declared, Dow earnings broke all company records, and the stock has soared with the rest of the market. =20 While researching a separate breast implant story that ran on June 22, 1995, under the headline "New Study Finds No Link Between Breast Implants and Illness," Kolata contacted Dr. Gary Solomon at the Hospital for Joint Diseases. Solomon had patients who had developed connective tissue disorders following the rupture of breast implants. He was a natural source, and nearby in New York. They spent hours on the phone during which Solomon says he "walked her through nineteen published studies on the relationship between silicone and joint diseases." Recalls Solomon, "One of the studies I mentioned was negative. The others all indicated problems with silicone. Ms. Kolata reported the negative, accurately I might say, and ignored the other eighteen. And she quoted me citing the report in a way that made me sound as if I believed there was no problem with breast implants." =20 Solomon was furious. "She chose to ignore sound science that disproved her point and grossly misrepresented my position. I went back and reread her articles and it became clear that she had made up her mind about breast implants four years earlier." Solomon wrote a letter to the editor, addressed directly to executive editor Joseph Lelyveld, describing his experience with Kolata. There was no answer, and his letter never ran. Nor did a correction. In fact, the next time Dr. Solomon saw his name in the Times was in an article under Kolata's byline "lumping me together with physicians who charge exorbitant patient fees and side unfairly with breast implant plaintiffs." =20 Evidence of Kolata's harsh treatment of those who disagree with her can also be found in her October 1, 1997, review of an HBO documentary about breast cancer. A few days before HBO aired the film, the producers sent four videocassette copies to the New York Times. Although Kolata was not sent a copy, TV critic Caryn James sent hers to Kolata. Rachel's Daughters: Searching for the Causes of Breast Cancer portrays the pilgrimage of six women with breast cancer who travel around the country investigating the cause of their disease. The bulk of their inquiry is through dialogue with almost two dozen scientists who study cancer. Yet Kolata's review, titled "Trying to Place Blame When Breast Cancer Strikes," says "the women...are far removed from the universe of scientists." =20 Although breast cancer specialist Dr. Susan Love is quoted on camera saying, "We have no idea what causes cancer," Kolata accuses the women who seek Love's counsel of being "convinced that they were poisoned by their toxic environment." In fact, most of the women return from their quest deeply frustrated by the uncertainty of the scientists they have met. As one 28-year-old woman with a full mastectomy puts it: "The scariest thing was to walk away with no solid answers." =20 Kolata calls this "paranoid thinking" and derides women who regard themselves as Rachel Carson's daughters (Carson died of breast cancer) as emotional paranoiacs who should desert their suspicions that pesticides, radiation, plastics and endocrine disrupters just might bear some relationship to their illness and rely only upon scientists who believe "that when evidence fails to support a hypothesis, the hypothesis should be abandoned" (as opposed to keeping it alive as long as there is no clear proof one way or the other). Kolata closes her review by proposing that a prominent label be placed on the film: "Warning. What you are about to see may be heart-wrenching, but it has little or no basis in fact." =20 When Caryn James forwarded the film, she might not have known that Kolata's younger sister, Judi Bari, had recently died at 47 of breast cancer. However, Bari's long struggle with cancer didn't seem to affect Kolata's steadfast conviction that no environmental factors had been found to explain her sister's death. "Judi strongly believed that her cancer was environmentally induced," recalls her good friend Betty Ball, who says her sister's coverage of cancer--in fact her general stance on environmental issues--was deeply troubling to Bari, a committed forest preservationist who, after successfully opposing several redwood timber sales, was seriously injured in a 1990 car bomb attack. =20 Gina and Judi are the older of three girls raised by politically radical parents in Baltimore, Maryland. "Gina couldn't have turned out more differently," says Betty Ball. "Judi of course stayed true to her parents' politics. She adored them and was close to her younger sister, Martha. But with Gina she had real difficulty. She rarely spoke of her, except on occasion to say, 'I suppose Gina and I were sent here to cancel each other out.'" =20 The Times's review of Rachel's Daughters generated a flood of angry letters, most significantly from scientists who were derided by Kolata as "kindred souls" of the women who interviewed them. "Kolata naively demands 'proof' of the proposed relationship between cancer and toxic environments," wrote Dr. Donald Malins, director of the molecular epidemiology program at the Pacific Northwest Research Foundation in Seattle. "Those 'deeply familiar with science' will recognize that proof and convincing evidence for the highly complex epidemiological relationships...are seldom achieved." Dr. Richard Stevens of Battelle Pacific Northwest National Laboratory observed that Kolata's review was "snide, which betrays an emotional reaction, not a scientific one." Not one letter was published. ========================================================================= Date: Thu, 25 Jun 1998 20:55:32 -0400 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Norman Levitt Subject: "Nation" on G.B. Kolata III MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Food Irradiation Kolata frequently sets up public advocates expressing opinions she considers wrong or ridiculous, as a case involving food irradiation demonstrates. Later, these advocates are contradicted by scientists with "impeccable credentials"--sources Kolata relies upon to counter the woolly-headed notions of environmentalists, disease victims and people like Michael Colby. Colby is executive director of an organization called Food & Water, which, among other things, researches and publicizes environmental and health impacts of food irradiation. Kolata called him in connection with a story that ran in December 1997, knowing from his publications that he was opposed to food irradiation. She also knew that while the founder of Food & Water is a physician (Walter Burnstein), Colby is not. He is thus an impeachable source. "She was so condescending and so belligerent, I had to interrupt the interview several times," recalls Colby, who does not regard himself as an expert. "So I gave her names and numbers of twelve credentialed scientists with serious concerns about irradiation. She quotes none of them." Kolata did call at least one of the sources Colby provided, a Dr. Donald Louria, chairman of the department of preventive medicine and community health at the New Jersey School of Medicine. In the interview Louria raised serious misgivings about the technology. None appeared in the story. A public advocate skeptical of food irradiation who Kolata knew could be troublesome was Dr. Michael Jacobson, executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. CSPI could be dismissed--and was--as "a consumer advocacy organization." But Jacobson has a Ph.D. in microbiology, a fact that would add heft and respectability to whatever he said. After a short interview Kolata reported that Jacobson had told her "he was not concerned about the safety of irradiated food but was worried that meat processors might come to rely on irradiation to sterilize food that they had processed under filthy conditions." "Kolata misinformed her readers," Jacobson says. He says that he in fact told her that he was "strongly opposed to the use of irradiation, an expensive process fraught with dangers...[that would] reduce levels of B vitamins, endanger workers and risk environmental contamination." On December 4, 1997, Dr. Jacobson wrote a terse letter to the Times, complaining about the distortion of his words. The letter never ran, nor did a correction. Environmental Hormones In early March of 1996 four New York Times editors convened by thenchief science editor Nicholas Wade met with Dr. Theo Colborn, Dr. John Peterson Myers and Dianne Dumanoski, co-authors of a forthcoming book about environmental hormones. The book, Our Stolen Future, documents the findings of wildlife biologists who have, over the past quarter-century, found strong evidence that endocrine disrupting chemicals, most of them organochlorines, have affected the health and fertility of hundreds of species of birds, amphibians, fish and the mammals that eat them. The purpose of the meeting was to update Times science editors on a subject they had to date given fairly balanced coverage. The authors presented their findings, which were based on more than 4,000 studies performed by research physicians, endocrinologists, toxicologists and cellular biologists. Dr. Colborn and her colleagues cautiously suggested, in the book and to the Times editors they met, that research should be conducted to determine whether human health and reproduction might in any way be affected by these chemicals. And they proposed a modest set of protective measures that industry and citizens could take in the meantime--things like advising pregnant women not to drink tap water in some parts of the country. When they had completed the briefing, Nicholas Wade, who like Kolata has little patience with presumptive evidence or the precautionary principle, slammed their materials on the table and flew into a rage. "This is not real science.... You are creating an environmental scare without evidence.... You have no credibility," were phrases recalled by the authors. "Wade railed on for at least two minutes," recalls Dumanoski, an award-winning science writer from the Boston Globe. When he was finished with his comments Dumanoski asked him: "Nick, have you read the book?" "No," growled Wade, "I haven't had time." She then asked Philip Boffey, who would be the one to write an editorial if the paper decided to run one, if he had read the book. He hadn't. "This book is an inductive argument that really should be read from beginning to end," cautioned Dumanoski. But the meeting was over. The authors were shaken by Wade's outburst and a little concerned about whom he might assign to cover the issue. Their fears were well founded. On March 19, 1996, two long stories by Kolata appeared in the Science Times section. "Some environmentalists are asserting that humans and wildlife are facing a new and serious threat from synthetic chemicals," reads Kolata's lead, ignoring the fact that Colborn's hypothesis was drawn not from environmentalists but from the work of more than 400 scientists, all of whose names and numbers were provided to the Times. Throughout the main article she uses the "e" word repeatedly to describe Colborn and Myers, though both have doctorates in zoology. And she calls Myers's employer, The W. Alton Jones Foundation, "an environmental group." (The private foundation dedicates only part of its philanthropy to environmental issues.) Kolata invokes the expertise of Dr. Bruce Ames of the University of California, Berkeley, and Dr. Stephen Safe of Texas A&M, as she has often before, to counter Colborn and Myers's hypothesis. Ames is an active adviser to The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC), a corporate-supported "watchdog coalition that advocates the use of sound sciences in public policy." TASSC has about 900 members, 375 of whom are scientists. The rest are executives from the chemical, oil, dairy, timber, paper, mining, manufacturing and agribusiness industries seeking ways to defend their products in media and the courts. TASSC's Web site offers examples of "junk science," alongside a host of entries defending bovine growth hormone, genetically engineered foodstuffs, dioxin, electromagnetic fields and endocrine disrupting chemicals. On the site can also be found almost every article Gina Kolata has written defending a chemical or technology. In 1995 TASSC awarded Kolata its "Sound Science in Journalism Award." Neither she nor the Times lists it among her awards and citations. Stephen Safe's laboratory contracts with chemical manufacturers to assess the toxicity of their products. Kolata quotes him often to authenticate her conviction that it's time to quit doing research on the relationship between organochlorines and breast cancer. Both Safe's and Ames's names were on a list of "experts" circulated to the media by the Chemical Manufacturers Association, the American Crop Protection Association and the American Plastics Council in response to Our Stolen Future. Another name on the list is that of Michael Gallo, a professor of toxicology, whom Kolata quotes in the main piece describing Colborn's work as "hypothesis masked as fact"--a phrase used repeatedly throughout chemical industry briefing materials. Nicholas Wade was given statements supporting Dr. Colborn's hypothesis and recommendations by the former scientific director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, the immediate past chair of the Committee on Environmental Health of the American Academy of Pediatrics and the chair of the National Academy of Sciences' 1993 study of the effects of pesticides on children. If she saw them, Kolata ignored them all. Instead she repeatedly misstated the authors' conclusions in terms that echoed the twenty-two-page press advisory circulated by the Chemical Manufacturers Association. But even the CMA was more generous than Kolata. "We believe Dr. Colborn has raised a concern that deserves a full and complete scientific investigation," read that group's press release. "She is not alone in her theory." Scores of independent scientists wrote to the Times complaining about Kolata's coverage of environmental hormones. None of their letters were printed and not a single correction of Kolata's mistakes was run. In frustration, several scientists contacted media adviser Phil Clapp at the National Environmental Trust in Washington and asked him to prepare a quarter-page ad for the New York Times criticizing Kolata's coverage and quoting some of the people she had interviewed but ignored. Times editors refused to run the ad. What bothered them most was a sentence that read, "Times reporter Gina Kolata...dismisses the widespread worries about endocrine disruption as the concerns of 'some environmentalists' and 'several biologists.'" Negotiations ensued. Change "dismisses" to "reports" and the ad will run, Times advertising officials told Clapp, who reluctantly made the change that neutralized the scientists' central indictment, and for the moment protected Kolata's journalistic reputation. Inside the New York Times The Times has a longstanding reputation for protecting its reporters. David Halberstam, whom President Kennedy tried unsuccessfully to get removed from his Vietnam post because of his critical reporting, says, "The Times has always backed its people until they commit a flagrant, hand-in-the-till offense. It's like a natural instinct." Former Times reporter Gay Talese, who has written a history of the paper (The Kingdom and the Power) disagrees on one count, citing the demise of Robert Shelton and Peter Whitney, redbaited from their desks under the watchful eye of James Reston. But that was the McCarthy era. Times have changed. Halberstam and Talese both agree that the best way to assure institutional protection these days is to avoid persistent anti-corporate reportage, particularly if the subject is scientific or environmental. Recent lessons abound. Environmental reporter Phil Shabecoff learned his in 199091, when Washington bureau chief Howell Raines (now editorial page editor) told him, as Shabecoff recalls their conversations, "New York is complaining. You're too pro-environment and they say you're ignoring the economic costs of environmental protection. They want you to cover the IRS." Shabecoff quit. After Shabecoff left, a young reporter named Keith Schneider assumed his beat, and went on to write articles on dioxin that enraged environmentalists nationwide, particularly those who believed that dioxin represents a serious health hazard. After Schneider and a team of reporters completed a series on Superfund sites that also distressed environmentalists, senior editors in New York called Washington to commend him for the series. It was the first time he had spoken to any of them in the five years he had been with the Times--this despite indignant mail from scientists and a protracted nationwide critique from fellow journalists and journalism reviews chastising Schneider's shallow sourcing and questionable documentation on several stories. As a contrast, award-winning science and environmental reporter Richard Severo, four times nominated by the Times for a Pulitzer Prize, was summarily reassigned to the metro desk after his series exposing Du Pont's selective genetic testing of African-American employees. Severo had already aggravated corporate sensibilities with articles on Agent Orange and General Electric's pollution of the Hudson River. Du Pont was the last straw. Severo chose to fight his reassignment, but after seven years in arbitration, he was unable to regain his desk in the science section. And more recently, science writer Philip Hilts, who has written about eighty stories on tobacco, twenty-five on the front page, was summarily removed from that beat three years ago after one particularly uncomplimentary story about Philip Morris. Hilts, who offered a voice of restraint on topics that Gina Kolata has not, is now at the Boston bureau of the Times. The word inside the Times is that executive editor Joe Lelyveld has an intense interest in science and badly wants the Times to improve its coverage of matters scientific. And I am told he believes that in a technological culture, science more than any subject needs skeptics--in mass media as well as in the scientific community--of all persuasions. But Gina Kolata is not a skeptic, at least not in the best sense of the word. She is instead a faithful apologist for corporate science. Even so, if it were only enviros and few disgruntled scientists criticizing Kolata, one could understand the equanimity of Times editors. But when reporters from Business Week, the Wall Street Journal and her alma mater Science magazine question her methods and conclusions, one might expect the paper of record to take notice. "She caused a panic at every cancer clinic in the country," says San Francisco medical journalist Michael Castleman, describing his experience after the cancer drug story broke. But worse for science reporters is the fact that "she has made scientists gun-shy," according to Castleman. "I'm having a hard time getting any of them to talk on the record," he says, adding, "She's a repeat offender. Every time she covers a controversy, scientists wonder whether we all treat sources as she does." By allowing Kolata to continue reporting as she has, unchallenged by strong counterpoints and a strong editor, the New York Times is compromising its reputation as a balanced and reliable source of science news and commentary. When topics addressed by Times science reporters are literally matters of life and death, readers expect that journalistic practices will be held to the highest standards. Unless priorities change at the Times, the mantle of Walter Sullivan will have to wait for a more worthy heir. ______________________________________________________________ Mark Dowie is at MIT studying the relationship between science and philanthropy. Research support provided by the Investigative Fund of The Nation Institute. ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 26 Jun 1998 08:48:18 -0400 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Ann Stanton Subject: Re: "Nation" on G.B. Kolata ( In-Reply-To: <9806260054.AA07215@norwich.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Thanks to Norm Levitt for forwarding this article. Beyond the article itself (which I had not read, not having access to The Nation) it supplies valuable information about Dr. Levitt's perspective on matters of evidence, parties, and lines. Ann Stanton On Thu, 25 Jun 1998, Norman Levitt wrote: > I forward, for your convenience, the piece mentioned by Val Dusek. For my > money, G.B. Kolata is an excellent science journalist. She is being > reprimanded by Mr. Dowie for failure to follow the party line on such > matters as food irradiation and silicone implants. (With respect to the > latter, see M. Angell, "Science on Trial.") It seems to me that she is > more sinned against than sinning. > > Norman Levitt > > ---------- Forwarded message ---------- > > What's Wrong With the New York Times's Science Reporting? > > BY MARK DOWIE > ______________________________________________________________ > > When the world was engaged in a cold war and the most challenging > issues of our time were overseas, the nation's newspaper of record, > the New York Times, demonstrated an exemplary commitment to foreign > coverage. The Times foreign desk, from which rose today's executive > editor, Joseph Lelyveld, was as impressive as that of any media > outlet in the world. If its foreign reportage could be faulted, it > was for the reason the Times could always be faulted--its reflexive > allegiance to the powers that be. > > The same assessment could be made over the years of the paper's > performance in times of hot war, political scandal or domestic > crisis. Although the paper was too often aligned with the > establishment, and coverage of strife, civil discord or the > gate-of-the-day could always be criticized for implied political > positions or nitpicked on details, readers were as well informed by > the Times as by any other single medium. > > As America evolved into a technological culture, science became an > increasingly important beat. Times editors came to see the paper's > scientific role as central to its purpose, as sound science became > central to sound policy. Thus, over the past three decades, > coverage of health, environment, medicine, biology, even physics > and mathematics, has expanded exponentially in the Times's pages, > where national giants of science writing--most notably Walter > Sullivan, a Times legend who made science writing an art form--have > made their mark. > > But there is a problem at the Times that needs to be corrected if > the paper is to attain the same status in science as it has in > foreign and domestic coverage. In science, even more than foreign > or domestic political coverage, the paper tends to side with > power--in this case corporate power. And much of the problem is > centered around the work of one very talented and controversial > science reporter, Gina Kolata. > > Kolata is an ace. When it comes to developing sources, procuring > documents, researching complex data and breaking a hot story in > clear and dynamic prose, she has few peers. "She has all the > equipment," says an admiring Times colleague. And as her May 26 > Science Times article comparing the behavior of plague bacteria to > HIV attests, she is capable of demystifying the most arcane matters > of science. Even her detractors describe her as "brilliant," > "talented," "insightful" and "gifted." Since 1987 Kolata, who holds > a master's degree in mathematics from the University of Maryland, > has written more than 600 articles for the Times, many of them > front-page blockbusters. Her stories routinely stir controversy and > influence public policy, and upon occasion have had huge commercial > impact. Few are the science conferences, journals or Web sites > where her name is not heard or seen. On more than one occasion she > has been mentioned as heir to the mantle of Sullivan. So why are so > many of her associates at the paper, including her admiring > colleague, so upset with her? And why is she held in such low > esteem by so many scientists? > > The answer, surprisingly enough, has very little to do with a > recent episode that landed Kolata on everyone else's front > page--her floating of a book proposal within hours after releas-ing > a hyped story on May 3 about a couple of promising cancer drugs. > Although the story stimulated spicy e-mail among science writers > across the country, in the context of her eleven-year career at the > Times it is seen as a misdemeanor. Professional disrespect has in > fact accumulated gradually as a consequence of her reporting on > some already heated topics: AIDS research, silicone breast > implants, breast cancer, food irradiation and environmental > hormones (endocrine disrupters). > > Deconstruct her stories, source by source, quote by quote, and a > familiar pattern begins to emerge. Upon re-interviewing the people > she cites, it becomes evident that she appears to have decided > before making her first call what her story will say. Her questions > are suggestive, her tone combative. In the interest of the > appearance of balance, sources of all persuasions are interviewed. > But their quotes are carefully selected, at times modified to > substantiate the predetermined position. Those scientists who > disagree with her are either ignored, dismissed or trumped by > someone anointed with higher authority--which usually means a > longer string of initials after their name. The sources who agree > with the author generally outnumber those who don't by a factor of > five or six. > > If Kolata's reporting faults were only a reflection of her own > journalistic shortcomings, that would be bad enough. But to the > extent that they reflect the attitudes of the Times as an > institution, they suggest a Times policy toward coverage of > controversial products of technology that is anti-environment, > pro-corporate and fundamentalist in its approach to scientific > inquiry. > > It should be noted here that Kolata was offered ample opportunity, > by phone and fax, to answer scores of specific questions related to > this report. She provided a few minor facts in writing. But on the > subject of this story her only spoken comment, made by phone from > her desk at the Times, was "my reporting speaks for itself." > > AIDS Coverage > Kolata established herself as a controversial reporter with her > coverage of AIDS research, a mini-beat she assumed in the late > eighties when the disease was raging through the country and > activists in New York were picketing the home of Punch Sulzberger > and the offices of the Times. The paper of record, they said, was > ignoring a national epidemic, reporting only government press > releases about research and writing off the severity of AIDS with > an editorial that said "the disease is still very largely confined > to specific risk groups. Once all susceptible members are infected, > the numbers of new victims will decline." > > In 1989 Kolata decided to challenge "parallel track" research. > Parallel track permits clinical trials of experimental drugs on > people--for example, those with full-blown AIDS--who would not > qualify as subjects for ordinary trials because they are too sick > or have taken other drugs. Although Anthony Fauci, AIDS czar at the > National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Food and Drug > Administration both approved parallel track experiments, Kolata > questioned the policy and the science. > > She was particularly disturbed by underground research being > conducted by two activists in California named Martin Delaney and > Jim Corti. Delaney and Corti were, with the assistance of ordinary > clinicians, testing an experimental drug called "Compound Q," which > had given hope to thousands of terminally ill AIDS patients. On > occasion an experimental subject would die--quite predictably, > Delaney and his collaborators believed. "They all had AIDS," > Delaney says. > > But Kolata consistently reported the deaths as a failure of > research, attributing them to the drugs, even after being told by > attending physicians that most of the subjects had died of > unrelated or pre-existing causes. Twice, Delaney says, Kolata > misrepresented his description of the research; he also claims that > she repeatedly distorted his quotes. "And I spent hours with her, > on the phone and in person," he says. Eventually Delaney wrote to > Times editor Max Frankel to complain, making it clear that he would > be pleased to see his letter in print. Neither the letter, nor a > correction, ever appeared. "Good reporters want to get the story > right," Delaney says. "Kolata wanted to get the story she wanted to > get." > > In her AIDS stories Kolata established a method that would become > familiar to her readers. She found a few rigid and predictable > ethicists and two or three prominent research physicians at > reputable institutions upon whom she could rely to rail against > parallel drug experimentation, and she quoted them repeatedly > throughout her articles. It was nearly impossible for > uncredentialed activists like Delaney and Corti to withstand that > sort of condemnation. > > One such source she quoted at length was Dr. Douglas Richman, a > prominent research physician at the University of California, San > Diego, who had expressed reservations about parallel track. Richman > came to realize, however, that Kolata was distorting his remarks > "for her own purposes." He wrote to Dr. Fauci at the NIH, who had > also been quoted, and said, "Although I believe it is important for > investigators to try to educate the public and to honestly express > their beliefs, I am now clearly aware that Ms. Kolata is not the > medium through which to do this." That letter also found its way to > Max Frankel's desk, but never to the pages of the Times. And no one > at the paper replied. Later Fauci himself reread Kolata's articles > and realized that he too had been misrepresented by her. Fauci was > quoted in the Village Voice as saying that some of Kolata's > articles included "misrepresentations" or had "blown findings out > of proportion," but the criticism had no noticeable effect on her > career at the Times. Rather, it appears that she was invited to > select another topic and given free rein to reapply her unorthodox > reportorial methods. > ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 26 Jun 1998 16:22:45 EDT Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Mart Malakoff Subject: Re: "Nation" on G.B. Kolata ( Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit isn't leavitt the author of higher superstition, which clearly states his approach (not all bad, though its amusing that both leavitt and s aronowitz, his nemesis, cite David Bohm's quantum theory as metaphysical sources---the twain meet) ? sokal also, though 'on the left', used leavitt as a source for his amusing hoax. the Times has been supporting anti-environment journalists for a long time. mart ========================================================================= Date: Fri, 26 Jun 1998 20:59:10 -0400 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Norman Levitt Subject: Re: "Nation" on G.B. Kolata ( In-Reply-To: <199806262036.QAA11072@mail-relay3.idt.net> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII I am indeed the co-author of HS--and I urgently recommend that everyone go out and buy 3 copies. With respect to D. Bohm, let me begin with an anecdote. I once ran into a physicist, English by origin, who happened to have been a grad student of Bohm's when Bohm was at Birkbeck College, U. of London. Bohm went to England, as you may know, as a virtual political exile, having been blackballed from jobs in the US during the height of the witch-hunts as a supposed leftist. He wound up at Birkbeck because that institution was, at the time, a hotbed of British radicalism. The Marxists on the faculty gladly awaited his coming, certain that he would be eager to discuss dialectical materialism and all that with the special authority of a first-rate physicist. Alas, they were to be disappointed: When he showed up, Bohm had virtually no interest in discussing any politics, let alone Marxist theory. As my informant phrases it, "If it wasn't the integral of P dQ, he didn't want to hear abouot it!" That, basically, is my attitude towards Bohms work--especially on the mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics, is: If it isn't the intgral of P dQ, I don't want to hear about. Bohm's deterministic model for QM is fascinating, and a great intellectual achievement. It overthrows the confident conjectures of Bohm Heisenberg, Pauli, von Neumann, and a host of others that no such model could exist, and it does so in an elegant and conceptually quite simple fashion. What influence it will have on the eventual unification of quantum mechanics with general relativity, I don't know. The technical difficulties appear to be substantial, since Bohmian mechanics is invariant under Newtonian, rather than Lorenz, transformation. But then, the technical difficulties, of any approach--superstring theory, non-commutative geometry, and a raft of others--are enormous. Recommended Reading: J. Bell--"Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics" J. Cushing--"Quantum Mechanics: Historical Contingency and the Copenhagen Hegemony" [Warning: despite the alluring title, this is a highly technical book, involving a grad-student level knowledge of the mathematical foundations of modern physics.] D. Wick--"The Infamous Boundary." S. Goldstein--various technical and nontrechnical papers, including a long one in "Synthese" and a recent two-part essay in "Physics Today." As to Bohm's "metaphysics," that is, the mystically-tinged speculations he ventured into late in life--well, as I said, I don't want to hear about it. They're about as interesting to me as Newton's attempts to calculate the End of Days on the basis of Scripture. It's a shame, as I see it, that there's so much confusion between Bohm's late mysticism and his early mathematical work. This, alone, has retarded the development of a serious interest in Bohmian models and their generalizations on the part of theoretical physicists. Nontheless, there is a large tribe of Bohm fans around--including Alan Sokal, who, of course, tied Aronowitz's tail in a knot (as we at last come round to the amusing topic of Prof. Aronowitz.) Whether Aronowitz has been influenced by Bohm's "metaphysics" or what that influence might consist of, I shall not venture to say. Suffice it that, whatever "influence" Bohm may have had, it was exercised on a mind that would find the greatest difficulty computing the integral of x dx. So, whatever each of us may have taken, respectively, from the thought of David Bohm, I gravely doubt that there is much overlap. I should note, however, that Prof. Aronowitz, as I am reliably informed, was just named "Distinguished Professor" at the CUNY Graduate Center. But then, Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize. Norman Levitt On Fri, 26 Jun 1998, Mart Malakoff wrote: > isn't leavitt the author of higher superstition, which clearly states his > approach (not all bad, though its amusing that both leavitt and s aronowitz, > his nemesis, cite David Bohm's quantum theory as metaphysical sources---the > twain meet) ? sokal also, though 'on the left', used leavitt as a source for > his amusing hoax. the Times has been supporting anti-environment journalists > for a long time. mart > ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 27 Jun 1998 13:59:42 -0400 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Adrian Ivakhiv Subject: Re: "Nation" on G.B. Kolata Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" On Thu, 25 Jun 1998, Norman Levitt wrote: > I forward, for your convenience, the piece mentioned by Val Dusek. For my > money, G.B. Kolata is an excellent science journalist. She is being > reprimanded by Mr. Dowie for failure to follow the party line on such > matters as food irradiation and silicone implants. (With respect to the > latter, see M. Angell, "Science on Trial.") It seems to me that she is > more sinned against than sinning. After reading Mark Dowie's seemingly well researched investigative article on the reportage of Gina Kolata, I remain baffled by Norm Levitt's curt & unfair blanket dismissal of Dowie's efforts. Any reasonably educated reader of the article, I would think, should see that Dowie makes some very specific allegations about Kolata's journalistic methods (unfair representation of informants' statements, overreliance on an unrepresentative minority of "experts," etc). Has Levitt read the same article I have? Whose toeing which "party line" here? This is the same problem I had while reading _Higher Superstition_: Gross & Levitt do exactly what they critique others of doing, thereby ingeniously demonstrating how easy it is to abuse (misuse) intellectual authority in our culture. Yet books like _HS_ get taken seriously, at their face value. Are we all party to one continuous hoax here? Adrian Ivakhiv ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 27 Jun 1998 14:58:31 EDT Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Mart Malakoff Subject: Re: "Nation" on G.B. Kolata ( Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: multipart/mixed; boundary="part0_898973911_boundary" This is a multi-part message in MIME format. --part0_898973911_boundary Content-ID: <0_898973911@inet_out.mail.aol.com.1> Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII --part0_898973911_boundary Content-ID: <0_898973911@inet_out.mail.aol.com.2> Content-type: text/plain; name="ALEAVITT.TXT" Content-transfer-encoding: quoted-printable Content-disposition: inline 
   Actually, the 'metaphysics' of Bohm to which I referred was not his Kr=
ishnamurti etc ideas  people might know of, but his deterministic interpr=
etation of QM referred to in High Super.
    I think actually this is tied to the same metaphysics of S Aronowitz =
(which I only know of from a quote in his Jobless Future written a few ye=
ars ago, which seems surprisingly similar to a 60's book by R Theobold on=
 how hi tech would create joblessness).  Aronowitz considers possibilitie=
s for alternative/radical post-capitalistic science such as feminist scie=
nce (eg Ruth Hubbard, B McLintock) and mentions also Hegel ( something ab=
out how one had to avoid static mathematization of reality, which the 'pr=
ocess  logics' of Keith Devlin, or the non-commutative geometry of L. Kau=
ffman (knot theory and logics )  prove   wrong ), as well as Bohm's QM 'e=
nfolded universe'/implicate order views to deal with 'wholeness' as oppos=
ed to some forms of reductionism.
      Determinism and implicate orders, to me are part of the same theory=
, so this might mean the twain meet ---Aronowitz and Leavitt as a quasipa=
rticle pair.

       (I would add that other examples of perhaps some taoist unity of o=
pposites might be Chomsky's relatively conservative views of human sociob=
iology (on genetic determinism, including of language) which often overla=
p those of people like E O Wilson whose politics are not Chomsky's.   Ant=
i-Chomskyists who take a more 'social constructionist' view of language a=
s reality (from Derrida, lacan, to sapir/whorf) also include political op=
posities such as libertarian G Sampson to more left types like J Bruner.)=


     I recently was reading Bohm's book with Hiley---a large collection o=
f papers, many of which appear fairly recent.  From this it doesn't seem =
that he abandoned PdQ for meditation completely (who knows, meditation ma=
y even have helped him survive being banished from Yale, and viewed as a =
crank---some scientists   (or maybe its anti-scientists, i forget) say it=
 can be healthy.)
     I also read the biography of him, by a more 'newage' physicist that =
seemed to indicate he continued doing some physics to the end----most int=
eresting was his ideas on homotopy theory which seem similar to ideas of =
R Penrose (spin nets) L Smolin and others. Also his views on experimental=
 language were interesting----in the sense of 'scientific languages' (see=
 Search for a Perfect Language by U Eco---which describes attempts by Lei=
bniz, Boole, Pierce, etc to come up with 'simple' logical ways of express=
ing ideas----Bohm perhaps wanted to re-arrange common language to make it=
, as an expression of reality, fit in with QM.  B Russel of course also w=
as into this in a way.  It can be noted that continuing in this line, rec=
ent papers connect fuzzy and quantum logics in J. Phys. A, if one views f=
uzzy logic as a common sense form.)

    Several papers in the collection also claim to make Bohm's theory rel=
ativistically invariant, and also consider field theory versions (functio=
nal integral representations).  Some of the ideas here are weird but remi=
niscent of others---the idea that bosons and fermions are actually the sa=
me, the notion that one can view elementrary particles as classical harmo=
nic oscillators in which quantization emerges as a resonance property.  (=
For discussion of resonance, one can see N Leavitt's debate with Aronowit=
z in Cult Studs Times, in which classical postmodern oscillators create s=
peculative bubbles about interaction between QM and social theory.  This =
theory hasn't been quantized however, and its unclear whether they'd be f=
ermi or bose fields, though being postmodern they are probably anyons (fr=
actional spin, because few will believe the whole or even a half truth ).=


     (Speaking of QM, I wonder if anyone has seen P Suppes paper on a new=
 hidden variable theory in Foundations of Physics (97 or so) which claims=
 to get around Bell's theorem.  It seems to require a slightly different =
view of the photon.   There are also the various 'zero-point' theories wh=
ich claim to be able to derive relativity from e&m (some paper in Phys Re=
v A 96).  One can also mention Mendel Sachs work on social relativity, an=
d deriving rel from qm , in Foundations of Physics )

      In summary, i think the metaphysics may be the same ( by metaphysic=
s i mean  a single implicate order which underlies a variety of world vie=
ws----eg Aronowitz' views are duals of Leavitt (see E Witten on superstri=
ngs in Phys Today 97 or 98 .  it could also mean that what is called expl=
icit metaphysics or explicit politics actually is mostly irrelevant.  aft=
er all, leavitt and aronowitz are both profs for example.  ) .     also  =
from my reading  it appears  possible that Bohm's theory has made some pr=
ogress towards relativistic invariance.   (But Perhaps Proca's  1930's th=
eory for massive photons might recur here).

 Whether Aronowitz should compute integrals to improve his understanding,=
 i am undecided.    (As a Radical, maybe he could do this once instead of=
 going to Starbucks or choosing his distinguished professor stationary.) =
 Perhaps he should just do discrete physics instead.   Its difficult to s=
ay what people should know. And, how this relates to any of their other o=
pinions. (For example, if one wants a leftist critique, one can ask why S=
okal went after Soc Text instead of asking how many of his students were =
going to end up on Wall Street calculating potential profit in selling ci=
garettes to Asia.  (see last month's Am Math Monthly for review of the Bl=
ack-Scholes-Diffusion equation, also done as Feynman path integrals in so=
-called econophysics.   Perhaps Bohmian theory will be confirmed first on=
 Wall street.)

    as an aside its interesting that kolata and bari were a particle/anti=
particle pair. kolata i think studied under Yorke of chaos theory fame.  =
and their mom was a graph theory professor.
     i certainly will be buying 3 or preferably 3**n, n=3D No  copies of =
High Super; though obviously norm has to temporarily  loan me the money. =
i want to give them to everyone i do and don't  see.

  mart
--part0_898973911_boundary-- ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 27 Jun 1998 16:04:21 -0400 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Norman Levitt Subject: Re: "Nation" on G.B. Kolata In-Reply-To: <199806271759.NAA21399@mail-relay3.idt.net> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII A careful reading of the Dowie piece reveals its own curious logic. First of all, there is the assumption that reportage can be impeached by coming up with one or two sources who object to the final published product. The proper thing to do, I think, is to examine the spectrum of sources, the relative reliability of various elements, including their biases, which can be ideological as well as pecuniary, and the degree to which the reporter has made an appropriate synthesis. This is something that Dowie fails utterly to do, except to suggest that if Kolata can find a scientist to voice an opinion Dowie doesn't like, that scientist must be merecenary or estabishmentarian or some such. Consider the passage where Kolata's citation of Dr. J Sergent is impugned. "She did not mention that Sergent was a highly-paid defense witness for Dow and Bristol-Myers." This is relevant only if Sergent arguably crafted his opinions to serve the defense case. If, on the other hand, Sergent formulated and pubicized his opinions prior to his involvement with the case, then his fee, whatever it might have been, is immaterial. For what it's worth, the statement of Sergent which raises Dowie's ire--that he doesn't know "a single high-qulaity immunologist" who believes in the silicone-immune disease link, may be hyperbole, but not by an enormous margin. It seems to me from my own research and conversation with people in the field that very few, if nay, unbiased experts (and that includes doctors who are definitely female and feminist) credit this theory. Again, see Angell's book, "Science on Trial." On the other hand, look at the "cautious" reportage on the breast-implant issue which wins Dowie's approval. This is the sort of thing were the reporter reports that the plaintiff said this, the defense said that, and the jury said whatever. It eschews any evaluation of the evidential and logical merits of the case, and recommends giving special weight to the jury's opinon. Whatever might be the virtues of this approach in general, in the matter of the silicone litigation, it's laughable. These cases have become a byword for absurd behavior on the part of juries. They are cases where sympathy for the evident suffering of defendants, antipathy towards large and presumably wealthy corporations, outright scientific ignorance, and susceptibility to the blandishment of hard-charging lawyers have led to ridiculous verdicts. In at least one of these cases, the jurymen have been quoted as saying that there was no good scientific evidence of a link between implants and the subsequent disease, but they felt the plaintiff deserved to be compensated anyway, because she had suffered. At least that jury got the science part right. There is a more general pattern in Dowie: If the idea that X is harmless benefits corporation Y, and if Y says that X is harmless, this must be taken as positive evidence that X is harmful. Whatever a corporation syas in its own self interest must be skeptically examined, to be sure--but the fact that a corporation advocates it doesn't make it wrong. Dowie, however, plays upon the unspoken prejudice--his own and that of his presumptive readers--that corporations or wealthy interests are always automatically wrong--and dishonest--whatever the issue. This may have emotional force, but it has no logical force. Look at Dowies's indictment of the TASSC organization. What evidence does he present of its dishonesty (and therefore, of Kolata's own, since she is often cited in its publicity)? It defends "bovine growth hormone, genetically engineered foodstuffs, dioxin, electromagnetic fields and endocrine disrupting chemicals." Clearly, merely by setting down this laundry-list, Dowie expects to persuade right-thinking environmentalists of the justice of his accusation. Note, however, that on every single one of these issues, with the possible exception of the last (where the jury is still out), the great weight of scientific evidence and opinon is that the ostensible threat is greatly overblown or even nonexistent. The same, of course, applies to the silicone scare and to food irradiation. Why is it that Dowie has such a hard time nailing Kolata on an issue where the evidence is firmly on his side, rather than largely hostile to his case? Of course, this speaks to a larger and very troubling pattern within the environmental movement. It can never bring itself to let go of the idea that an alleged problem is a grave threat. It clings steadfastly to apocalyptic myths, even as all sorts of contravening evidence mounts up. It seems deathly afraid that if it ever accepted that an alleged menace was not so menacing after all, it would simply fall apart. There is a lot of danger here, but its not the danger that the environmental movement will tyrranize our lives and stifle the economy. Rather, the problem is that the movement will lose most of its credibility with scientists, politicians (even sympathetic ones), government, and the general public as more and more false alarms become evident. What happens, then, if a real threat emerges? Who will organize an appropriate response if the natural "leadership", both individual and organizational, has earned itself a well-deserved reputation for gullibililty and dogmatism? Norman Levitt On Sat, 27 Jun 1998, Adrian Ivakhiv wrote: > On Thu, 25 Jun 1998, Norman Levitt wrote: > > > I forward, for your convenience, the piece mentioned by Val Dusek. For my > > money, G.B. Kolata is an excellent science journalist. She is being > > reprimanded by Mr. Dowie for failure to follow the party line on such > > matters as food irradiation and silicone implants. (With respect to the > > latter, see M. Angell, "Science on Trial.") It seems to me that she is > > more sinned against than sinning. > > After reading Mark Dowie's seemingly well researched investigative article > on the reportage of Gina Kolata, I remain baffled by Norm Levitt's curt & > unfair blanket dismissal of Dowie's efforts. Any reasonably educated reader > of the article, I would think, should see that Dowie makes some very > specific allegations about Kolata's journalistic methods (unfair > representation of informants' statements, overreliance on an > unrepresentative minority of "experts," etc). Has Levitt read the same > article I have? Whose toeing which "party line" here? > > This is the same problem I had while reading _Higher Superstition_: Gross & > Levitt do exactly what they critique others of doing, thereby ingeniously > demonstrating how easy it is to abuse (misuse) intellectual authority in our > culture. Yet books like _HS_ get taken seriously, at their face value. Are > we all party to one continuous hoax here? > > Adrian Ivakhiv > ========================================================================= Date: Sat, 27 Jun 1998 16:48:26 -0400 Reply-To: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture Sender: Sci-Cult Science-as-Culture From: Norman Levitt Subject: Re: "Nation" on G.B. Kolata ( In-Reply-To: <199806271859.OAA02130@mail-relay3.idt.net> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII On Sat, 27 Jun 1998, Mart Malakoff wrote: > Actually, the 'metaphysics' of Bohm to which I referred was not his Kr= > ishnamurti etc ideas people might know of, but his deterministic interpr= > etation of QM referred to in High Super. > I think actually this is tied to the same metaphysics of S Aronowitz = > (which I only know of from a quote in his Jobless Future written a few ye= > ars ago, which seems surprisingly similar to a 60's book by R Theobold on= > how hi tech would create joblessness). Aronowitz considers possibilitie= > s for alternative/radical post-capitalistic science such as feminist scie= > nce (eg Ruth Hubbard, B McLintock) and mentions also Hegel ( something ab= > out how one had to avoid static mathematization of reality, which the 'pr= > ocess logics' of Keith Devlin, or the non-commutative geometry of L. Kau= > ffman (knot theory and logics ) prove wrong ), as well as Bohm's QM 'e= > nfolded universe'/implicate order views to deal with 'wholeness' as oppos= > ed to some forms of reductionism. ...... etc. Response: A couple of requests: (1) Care to tell the folks what "homotopy theory" is? (2) What the HELL does Lou Kauffman's application of knot theory to physics (or for that matter, Bohmian Mechanics) have to do with avoiding the "static mathematization of reality?" As we used to say in the Bronx, money (or mathematics) talks, bullshit walks. I close with a little problem from a high-school level math competition. It can be solved without elaborate calculation, using purely classical methods, as in what used to be 10th-grade geometry. Get back to me with the solution and then we'll talk about (omigod!) "static mathematization." Consider a triangle ABC and the inscribed circle, K with radius R . In each "corner" inscribe circles KA, KB, KC, each tangent to two sides and to K . Let their respective radii be denoted RA, RB, RC. Show that RA + RB + RC is not less than R. Norm Levitt -- End --