Month: December 2010

by Chris Bodenner

"It does not scare me because I believe in the intelligence of the American public," Oprah Winfrey, on Palin running for president.

(Hat tip: Taegan Goddard)

by Conor Friedersdorf

Gregg Easterbrook captures how big it is:

Just a century ago, even after people considered themselves advanced owing to developments like powered flight, it was not known that any other galaxies existed. Our Milky Way was considered the totality of creation. In 1923, the existence of galaxies beyond the Milky Way was proven. Initial estimates were that there might be as many as a few dozen additional galaxies — a number then viewed as stunning. The latest estimate, from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, is 100 billion galaxies. The count is expected to rise.

Star estimates have risen in concert. A century ago, even the best-informed believed the Milky Way contained perhaps a few million stars. By the 1960s, astronomers contended the Milky Way held a billion stars, a number many found hard to believe. By the 1980s, the estimate had grown to 40 billion stars. Today it’s thought the Milky Way contains at least 90 billion stars and perhaps as many as 400 billion. Many other galaxies are likely to contain similar numbers. Recently, researchers led by Yale University cosmologists proposed there exists at least three times as many stars as previously thought. The Yale estimate is 200 sextillion stars, a 2 followed by 23 zeroes.

200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000!

by Patrick Appel

Jesse Bering explains how religion and reproduction relate:

[Michael] Blume’s research … shows quite vividly that secular, nonreligious people are being dramatically out-reproduced by religious people of any faith. Across a broad swath of demographic data relating to religiosity, the godly are gaining traction in offspring produced. For example, there’s a global-level positive correlation between frequency of parental worship attendance and number of offspring. Those who "never" attend religious services bear, on a worldwide average, 1.67 children per lifetime; "once per month," and the average goes up to 2.01 children; "more than once a week," 2.5 children. Those numbers add up—and quickly.

The lesson Bering draws:

The whole situation doesn’t bode well for the "New Atheism" movement, in any event. Evolutionary biology works by a law of numbers, not moralistic sentiments. 

by Patrick Appel

From Jonathan Bernstein's START postmortem:

Republicans did accomplish something by fighting on New START.  They chewed up quite a few hours of Senate floor time, a very valuable commodity in the lame duck session, and really throughout the 111th Congress.  Now, there's really no way of knowing what exactly they gained by doing that.  However, had they agreed to a quick vote on the treaty, there would have been more time for the Democrats to confirm judges and executive branch appointments; more time for appropriations bills, and perhaps to give a more sustained effort on the omnibus appropriations bill; and more time for any of the other unfinished business on the Democratic agenda. 

So I wouldn't be quick to conclude that it was a mistake for Republicans to fight this one out, even if they took a (very minor) PR hit in losing. 

by Chris Bodenner

Our inbox saw a deluge of long and passionate emails on this thread from last week. Some final thoughts from readers:

Thank you for posting responses from students. I cringed reading the original English 101 post even though I caught the writer's dry humor and end of semester exhaustion. I frankly think that being an exemplary professor is just about impossible, and I know that teaching is not the highest priority for many university faculty, myself included.

Like all professors, I was a student for many many years. It's been 17 years since I finished my PhD but I have not forgotten what it feels like to be a student, nor what it feels like to be completely mystified by the power relations in academic departments, especially between faculty and students. I can remember being asked to revise writing or to write differently. What I don't remember is having any kind of specific guidance about how to improve and how to adapt my writing to academic style. It's a rare faculty member who will do that for a student, mostly because most professors do not know anything about how writing develops, nor how to teach it if if they did.

Another writes:

I'm usually not one to defend English professors, but all three of these reader responses seemed unfair. I think the first reader is misguided. Professors aren't tired of the books students are writing about. Rather, they get frustrated at the visible lack of effort or creativity. The problem isn't reading about The Great Gatsby; it's getting a stack of 50 papers in which 45 make the same lazy point.

For example, I recently graded papers on Thomas More's Utopia (I'm a PhD student in history). Even though I've read Utopia several times, I still love this work, and think it is one of the most fascinating texts in the Western canon. It is also a work that has been interpreted in literally thousands of different and conflicting ways – the possibilities are endless. This is why it's so frustrating when all but a few papers have the same vapid argument- something close to "Thomas More wrote Utopia as a comment on society." All this shows is that the student read the dust jacket. For many of them it's not about "new intellectual discoveries," but rather just turning something in. While I'm not saying every student should deeply care about every assignment (because Lord knows I don't), you have to cut the professors some slack on this one.

Another:

It seems that English professors can't win. Either they care too much about today's society – indoctrinating their students with anti-Bush propaganda etc. – or they don't care enough. Given the highly politicized environment right after 9/11, I'm guessing most didn't want to say something that could potentially get them in trouble. If anything, it's decades of conservative complaints about academia and people like David Horowitz, who draws up yearly lists of the country's "most dangerous" professors, that deter literary scholars from commenting on something like 9/11. Those who didn't like what the professors had to say, would angrily cry out that he or she should stick to teaching literature.

Besides, those complaining about paper topics aren't complaining because those topics are boring, but because the papers on those topics tend to be a) intellectually lazy (if you're writing on Gatsby and the American Dream, you need to put down the Cliff's Notes, read the damn book and perhaps go to class once in a while) or b) an opportunity to grandstand about a pet issue like political correctness (Huck Finn) or abortion ("Hills Like White Elephants").

Another:

I think the largest problem, and what I see most from my students, is fear.  Students are terrified to express their own thoughts and hide the fear in wordiness and bad grammar.  Working with students one-on-one has allowed me to ask students what they mean in a particularly wordy sentence.  I am never surprised at how simple and elegant their thoughts tend to be, if only they would not be scared to express those thoughts.  I think it is the professors who must take responsibility for this fear.

Another:

As a graduate student who grades undergraduate writing in History every single quarter, I can confidently say that I've never met an academic, student or faculty, who expects undergraduates to write about a subject with a mastery of the field.  In fact, we don't expect students to even like our subject (though you always have that fantasy that you could be the one who makes the student see why analyzing law codes from the Tang Dynasty is the coolest thing in the world).

What we lament about student writing is the lack of any ability to write a cohesive sentence, or paragraph, or paper.  Many students, even at top-tier universities, simply cannot put together a thought on paper.  They often do fine verbally, in a class setting.  But they can't do it in a paper.  We get papers every single quarter that read like monologues from some Theatre of the Absurd piece.  There is no subject-verb agreement.  They don't know how to use pronouns.  They write in sentence fragments.  The spelling is atrocious.  Sometimes they write in text-speak ("U can c y Julius Cesar got kild.  4 real.").  I would defy anyone to read not only one paper like that, but over 50, several times a year, and not have to occasionally have a laugh with a colleague.  It's the only thing that keeps us sane.

Another:

Your reader has no clue what goes on at most universities in America.  First, universities have already specialized the writing class far more than that.  Students typically have their choice between "Business Writing", "Science Writing", "Social Science Writing", "Humanities Writing" and more.

Second, NOBODY gets FORCED into a "liberal arts" degree program.  The single most popular major is business.  Humanities programs are tiny.  The core curriculum is about 20-30 percent of your degree program, with humanities being a tiny portion of that.

Look, profs get to read lots of student papers.  A small portion of it is great.  Some of it is meh.  And some of it is godawful crap.  And the way we maintain our sanity after 20 years of that is making fun of some of the crap we have to read in our jobs.

by Conor Friedersdorf

As the guardians of America's airports put travelers through naked body scans and invasive patdowns, ponder this:

Houston businessman Farid Seif says it was a startling discovery. He didn't intend to bring a loaded gun on a flight out of Houston and can't understand how TSA screeners didn't catch it. Nearing the height of last year's Christmas travel season, TSA screeners at Bush Intercontinental Airport somehow missed a loaded pistol, one that was tucked away inside a carry-on computer bag. "I mean, this is not a small gun," Seif said. "It's a .40 caliber gun."

Seif says it was an accident which he didn't realize until he arrived at his destination. He says he carries the glock for protection but forgot to remove it from his bag. He reported the incident as soon as he landed, shocked at the security lapse. "There's nothing else in there. How can you miss it? You cannot miss it," Seif said. Authorities tell ABC News the incident is not uncommon, but how often it occurs is a closely guarded government secret. Experts say every year since the September 11 attacks, federal agencies have conducted random, covert tests of airport security. A person briefed on the latest tests tells ABC News the failure rate approaches 70 percent at some major airports. Two weeks ago, TSA's new director said every test gun, bomb part or knife got past screeners at some airports.

Two thoughts. 1) Perhaps if this sort of thing wasn't covered up, and we heard about it everytime TSA staffers failed to catch weapons, the resulting embarassment would improve their performance more than whatever method now being used. 2) I've got to submit to naked scanners and pat downs when they can't even catch weapons going through the x-ray scanners they've already got?

My faith in the ability of government to decide what should be kept secret and what shouldn't is now even closer to nil.

A sandwich delivery courier dressed as Father Christmas waves as he cycles through central London on December 22, 2010. By Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images.

by Conor Friedersdorf

One school of thought contends that balance is paramount: a contested matter demands that the reporter gives equal space to "both sides," presents the debate to readers, and allows them to make up their own minds.

"We report, you decide!"

But there are those who lament that approach. For example:

It's depressing to see how often dubious and even outright false health claims, such as the claim that vaccines cause autism… are reported credulously. Often this takes the form of a journalistic convention that is more appropriate for politics and other issues but not so appropriate for scientific and medical issues, namely telling both sides as though they have equal or similar weight… almost invariably there is an anti-vaccine crank like Barbara Loe Fisher, Jenny McCarthy or someone else from Generation Rescue, or someone like Sallie Bernard from SafeMinds cited as though she were on equal footing, scientifically speaking, with scientists who have dedicated their lives to the science of vaccines.

I've just delved deep into a debate of this kind. Its subject is chronic lyme disease. The Chicago Tribune published a story that casts doubt on the diagnosis. "There's little good evidence that chronic Lyme disease exists," the subtitle reads. "Yet doctors are treating it with drugs that put patients and the public at risk." It's rare to see so forceful a conclusion stated in an American newspaper. The piece is savaged here as biased. And it is praised and defended at length here as appropriately skeptical of chronic lyme disease, and refreshingly willing to give the results of double blind studies more weight than the anecdotal assertions of doctors and patients who represent a minority opinion.

Below the defense of the article there appears a dissenting comment that is the most fascinating aspect of this whole kerfuffle. It is written by Pamela Weintraub, features editor of Discover Magazine, and justifies a long excerpt:

This blog and other protests by non-journalists reminds me of patients going to medical journal sites to protest the scientific method. If you don't like the results, just change the methodology to get what you want. Likewise, at the Knight Science Journalism Tracker, the most credible and important source of science journalism peer review, not a single journalist agreed that the story in question represented appropriate journalistic practice, or met the standards of good journalism. Not a single classically trained journalist disagreed with the reviewer, Paul Raeburn, who is himself one of the finest and most credentialed science journalists in the United States. The site was then invaded by voices with knowledge – and especially, by set positions – in medicine, but zero credentials, training, or experience in journalism.

These people rushed in to a space reserved for journalist peer reviewers, to impugn the standards of good journalistic practice endorsed by the journalist peer reviewers, and to insist there was another, better way of doing things: their way, which would rewrite the ethics and guidelines of journalism practice, whole cloth. To wit, these non-journalists feel that they should be enfranchised to peer review journalism along with journalists themselves –and that while they are at it, they should change good journalistic practice and write new rules to suit themselves. This is not going to happen: There is a lot of bad journalism practiced, for instance, the journalism in the Tribune story, but the profession still has standards, still has ethics, still has requirements, still has a set of guidelines to differentiate good work from bad. I don't want to respond much on the science because to me, this is an issue of journalism, pure and simple.

A comment written to discredit the conventions of traditional journalism could hardly do a better job. Strip away all the arguments from authority and you have a woman asserting that the truth of the matter at hand is less important than adhering to the protocol that "credentialed science journalists" have set forth. In her telling, a "peer review" of an article doesn't assess its accuracy so much as whether its authors met "the standards of good journalistic practice." It's a rather stunning confusion of means and ends.

It also implies a consensus about journalistic "rules" that doesn't actually exist. Clearly the editors of The Chicago Tribune thought the story they published was just fine. After reading Weintraub's comment, NYU Professor of Journalism Jay Rosen remarked that "Some day, when kids ask, was there really a priesthood in journalism, did people really think that way," he'd point them to Weintraub's comment. Perhaps most odious of all is Weintraub's remark that "these non-journalists feel that they should be enfranchised to peer review journalism along with journalists themselves." I'm unsure what magic she takes to be conferred by the title journalist, or how exactly one becomes "credentialled" in the field, but among my peers in the press I know very few who regard the work we produce as beyond the capacity of non-journalists to critique, especially if the critics have direct expertise in the subject matter we're writing about. In fact, some of us particularly value outside critiques because we know from long experience that all professions are prone to blind spots, and that a profession meant to inform the public must be especially vigilant in guarding against group think.

Insofar as journalists are owed deference, it springs not at all from their title or credentials. Here at The Atlantic, articles in the print magazine are fact-checked, certain writers have through long hours of reporting developed expertise on certain subjects, and reputations for intellectual honesty have been earned. Non-journalists are perfectly capable of hiring fact-checkers, developing expertise, and building reputations too. The question of who is a journalist and who isn't need never be adjudicated. Longtime readers know that I earned a masters in journalism from NYU. At least at my alma mater, the faculty generally reject the approach to the craft taken by Weintraub, as do most of the journalists I've befriended in the course of my career, and most of the editors that I've worked under.

Judge us not by Weintraub.

by Patrick Appel

Reihan says yes. Bernstein is against the idea:

[W]hat (rightly!) bothers people about the Senate is the malapportionment, not the idea that there are only 100 Senators. And note that most of us feel a lot closer to our Senators than to our Member of the House—because our Senators get so much more publicity than do Members of the House. Increasing the size of the House would, alas, only make that problem worse.