I say this with all the love and patience I have left....

AMERICAN EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM!

YOU CAN BITE ME!!!

George Washington University Drops U.S. History Requirement — for History Majors!

//n 2016, GW implemented a new funding formula, allocating money to the various departments based on the number of students enrolled in that major's classes. Each school receives $301 for every student in a class, incentivizing majors like history to offer classes that will be popular.

Indeed, enrollment in history has dropped since 2011, when there were 153 history majors. Only 72 undergraduate students majored in history in 2015, while 83 did so in 2016, the Hatchet reported.

Some of the updates make sense — while it is good to require students to study a foreign language, it might not be necessary for history. The electronic capstone might be less rigorous than a traditional thesis, but it would make sense to allow students to build a website focused on their concentration of history, for instance.

Dropping the U.S. or European history requirement is different in kind, and much less excusable. The new requirements still mandate at least one introductory course, of which American history, world history, and European civilization are options — as well as "Approaches to Women's History." Nevertheless, this introductory requirement may be fulfilled by scoring a 4 or a 5 on the Advanced Placement exams for U.S., European, or world history.

In addition to this one required introductory course (which may be satisfied by women's studies), the major requires an introductory seminar, eight to ten upper-level history courses, and a thesis or capstone project. Before the changes, students had to take two courses focused on Europe and North America. Now, they can avoid them altogether.

"I think an important change in the history major has been to make our major actually reflect the field of history the way that historians study it now," Denver Brunsman, an associate professor of history and director of undergraduate services for the department, told the Hatchet. "In the past — and I think our old standards reflected this — it was very common to have students take a class in American history, in European history and maybe, just maybe, something else, another part of the world."

While a focus on other countries is laudable, it is important for students to understand their historical and intellectual heritage. If the history department were to become stiflingly closed to studying other regions of the world, that would indeed be a problem. But requiring a general knowledge of America's roots (and those include Europe's history) is natural and should be expected, especially of history majors.

Rather, this move seems to fit with the trend of rejecting the study of Western heritage as somehow oppressive and close-minded. Indeed, students at Yale University recently petitioned for the removal of a class because studying "Major English Poets" would create "a culture that is especially hostile to students of color." Stanford University students rejected a petition for a Western heritage course in April. The University of Wisconsin-Stout even removed historical paintings because they might traumatize students.

In July, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) issued a report showing that less than one-third of highly ranked colleges and universities in America actually require students pursuing a degree in history to take a single course in American history. Only 23 undergraduate history programs at 75 colleges and universities in the study required a U.S. history course.//

Trigger Warnings and Literature.

Isn't there something weird - something that speaks to cognitive dissonance - that restrictions on what can be shown on television, which is accessible to children, have been removed, while college students are seeking to censor the literature that generations of students have read?

Are we creating a generation who are out of touch with reality and can't distinguish between fiction and their own life?

Or is it just another tool in the Fascist-Left's toolkit of repression?

The term “trigger warning” has its genesis on the Internet. Feminist blogs and forums have used the term for more than a decade to signal that readers, particularly victims of sexual abuse, might want to avoid certain articles or pictures online.

On college campuses, proponents say similar language should be used in class syllabuses or before lectures. The issue arose at Wellesley College this year after the school installed a lifelike statue of a man in his underwear, and hundreds of students signed a petition to have it removed. Writing in The Huffington Post, one Wellesley student called it a “potentially triggering sculpture,” and petition signers cited “concerns that it has triggered memories of sexual assault amongst some students.”

Here at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in March there was a confrontation when a group of anti-abortion protesters held up graphic pictures of aborted fetuses and a pregnant professor of feminist studies tried to destroy the posters, saying they triggered a sense of fear in her. After she was arrested on vandalism, battery and robbery charges, more than 1,000 students signed a petition of support for her, saying the university should impose greater restrictions on potentially trigger-inducing content. (So far, the faculty senate has promised to address the concerns raised by the petition and the student government but has not made any policy changes.)

At Oberlin College in Ohio, a draft guide was circulated that would have asked professors to put trigger warnings in their syllabuses. The guide said they should flag anything that might “disrupt a student’s learning” and “cause trauma,” including anything that would suggest the inferiority of anyone who is transgender (a form of discrimination known as cissexism) or who uses a wheelchair (or ableism).

“Be aware of racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, and other issues of privilege and oppression,” the guide said. “Realize that all forms of violence are traumatic, and that your students have lives before and outside your classroom, experiences you may not expect or understand.” For example, it said, while “Things Fall Apart” by Chinua Achebe — a novel set in colonial-era Nigeria — is a “triumph of literature that everyone in the world should read,” it could “trigger readers who have experienced racism, colonialism, religious persecution, violence, suicide and more.”//

Scholarly malpractice, again...

...or why you can't trust the folderol that passes for sociological data or "the attraction of orderly falsehoods."

Again, I do not excuse those who resort to cheating.  But as the consumer of these publications, we should be worried, because this system essentially selects for bad data handling.  The more you manipulate your data (and there are lots of ways to massage your data so that it shows what you'd like, even without knowing you're doing it), the more likely you are to come up with a publishable result.  Peer review acts as something of a check on this, of course.  But your peers don't know if, for example, you decided to report only the one time your experiment worked, instead of the seven times it didn't.

It would be much better if we rewarded replication: if journals were filled not only with papers describing novel effects, but also with papers by researchers who replicated someone else's novel effects.  But replicating an effect that someone else has found has nowhere near the prestige--or the publication value--of something entirely new.  Which means, of course, that it's relatively easy to make up numbers and be sure that no one else will try to check.

Most cases are not as extreme as Stapel.  But if we reward only those who generate interesting results, rather than interesting hypotheses, we are asking for trouble.   It is hard to fake good questions, but if the good questions must also have good answers . . . well, good answers are easy.  And it seems that this is what the social psychology profession is rewarding.

Nor are they the only ones.  My own profession loves nothing more than a neat story, particularly if your thesis is backed up With the Amazing Power of Science.  Which is how Jonah Lehrer got so successful.  Like millions of other readers, I loved his books: he has a great narrative gift.  In hindsight, I should have remembered that life rarely makes a great narrative.

I won't defend Lehrer either, though I can easily imagine the pressure he felt, if not the decision he made under that pressure.  He'd signed a contract to write a book on a great topic that hadn't been well-covered before: creativity.  Unfortunately, it seems that the reason it hadn't been well covered is that it's an impossible topic with very little solid evidence to discuss.  The demand for neat, compelling stories was much greater than the supply of same.  Jonah Lehrer filled that unfortunate gap--and that's why we bought his books. 

Epistemic Closure in the Echo Chamber of the Leftist Academy.

You know that it must be bad when it's noticed by a San Francisco Chronicle columnist:

Political activism has drawn the University of California into an academic death spiral. Too many professors believe their job is to "advance social justice" rather than teach the subject they were hired to teach. Groupthink has replaced lively debate. Institutions that were designed to stir intellectual curiosity aren't challenging young minds. They're churning out "ignorance." So argues a new report, "A Crisis of Competence: The Corrupting Effect of Political Activism in the University of California," from the conservative California Association of Scholars.

The report cites a number of studies that document academia's political imbalance. In 2004, for example, researchers examined the voter registration of UC Berkeley faculty. They found a ratio of 8 Democrats for each Republican. While the ratio was 4:1 in the professional schools, in more political disciplines, the ratio rose to 17:1 in the humanities and 21:1 in social sciences.

Over the last few decades, the imbalance has grown. The report (found at sfg.ly/HjXiyV) noted, "The most plausible explanation for this clear and consistent pattern is surely that it is the result of discrimination in the hiring process."

UC Berkeley political science Professor Wendy Brown rejected that argument. (Yes, she hails from the left, she said, but she doesn't teach left.) The reason behind the unbalance, she told me, is that conservatives don't go to grad school to study political science. When conservatives go to graduate school, she added, they tend to study business or law.

"If the argument is that what is going on is some kind of systematic exclusion," then critics have to target "where the discouragement happens."

OK. Freshmen sign up for courses that push an agenda of "social justice." Most professors may try to expose students to views other than their own, but others don't even try. The message could not be clearer: In the universe where politics and academia converge, conservatives are freaks.

That's how ideologues self-replicate.

The fallout isn't simply political. The association scolds argue, "This hiring pattern has occurred just as the quality of a college education has sharply declined."

Campus reading lists require trendy books instead of challenging authors, like Shakespeare, who can draw students deeper into the English language. Teach-ins are notoriously one-sided. College graduates today are less proficient as readers than past graduates. The National Center for Education Statistics found that only 31 percent of college graduates could read and explain a complex book. In 1961, students spent an average of 24 hours per week on homework; today's students study for 14 hours per week.

At the same time, grades have risen. "Students often report that all they must do to get a good grade is regurgitate what their activist professors believe," quoth the report.

While she had not read the report, Brown doesn't dispute that today's students have trouble writing a "deep, thoughtful essay" about a passage from Hobbes or Milton Friedman.

"If Shakespeare were required, I would be thrilled," Brown stressed. But: "Don't pick on liberals for this." Universities have cut back on core requirements because students, parents and alumni revolt.

That may be, but in ideologically lopsided academia, there aren't enough voices to stand up for educating students about, say, the U.S. Constitution. Besides - this is me, not the report - in pushing protests, faculty essentially have assured students that they already know enough to occupy Sacramento. Only a third of them can read and explain complex material, but students already know better than lawmakers and voters how best to pay for education. Why study?

The proof is in academia's acceptance of this imbalance. The old, discredited excuse about why women didn't work in management that I heard when I was young - because they didn't want to - now somehow works for the left when it comes to conservatives and academia.

As for UC administrators, "A Crisis in Competence" concludes, "far from performing their role as the university's quality control mechanism, (they) now routinely function as the enablers, protectors, and even apologists for the politicized university and its degraded scholarly and educational standards."

Like so many other ailing institutions, they don't know how to change to save themselves.

Here is the report of the National Association of Scholars. The report offers these observations:

Moral and legal considerations show how the politicization of the classroom damages democratic government and the integrity of public life, but what is lost important for the purposes of this report is that politicization has devastating effects on the quality of teaching and research. Put simply, a college education influenced to any significant degree by political activism will inevitably be a greatly inferior education, and the same holds for academic research. Political activism will tend to promote shallow, superficial thinking that falls short of the analytical depth that we expect of the college-educated mind.The habits of thought that it promotes are in every respect the exact opposite of those we expect a college education to develop. There are many reasons why this must be so.

Results Over Process

First, political activism values politically desirable results more than the process by which conclusions are reached. In education, those priorities must be reversed. The core of a college education is disciplined thinking – thinking that responds to evidence and argument while resisting the lure of what we might wish were the conclusion. Disciplined thinking draws conclusions only after it has weighed the facts against all the plausible explanations of those facts. Strong political beliefs will always threaten to break down that discipline and bend the analysis in a direction that political considerations urgently want it to go.

Stunted Intellectual Curiosity

Second, the fixed quality of a political belief system will stifle intellectual curiosity and freedom ofthought when it dominates a classroom. In any worthwhile college education, a student’s mind musthave the freedom to think afresh and to follow wherever facts or arguments lead. But this freedom of
movement is constrained when the end process of thought has already been fixed in advance by apolitical agenda. Students will never learn to think for themselves if their thought processes must alwaysconclude by fitting into a particular set of beliefs. Intellectual curiosity is the indispensable prerequisitefor analytical power and depth: you cannot reach the latter unless you have the former. Strong political
commitments that dominate the classroom will stunt intellectual curiosity, and that can only mean that
they will also stunt the analytical power that is a crucial goal of college education.

And:

Lack of Openness to Competing Ideas

Fourth, political activism and academic thought are polar opposites in the way they deal with alternative explanations. When an academic scholar is becoming persuaded that a difficult research problem can be solved in a particular way, he or she knows that the next step must be a careful look at all the plausible alternative explanations, to see if any of them works as well. But this cannot be a perfunctory process: each of those other possibilities must be given the very best shot, and the most sympathetic
hearing. Academics know that they must do this if they are to develop new knowledge that will withstand the scrutiny of other experts in the field, and the test of time. This is the essence of the disciplined thinking that they seek to instill in their students.

But political activists tend to have a very different attitude to alternatives to their own convictions: they must be defeated. They do not deserve sympathetic consideration, for they are at best wrong, at worst evil. A genuinely academic thinker must be able to believe for a moment that his own preferred explanation is wrong, so that he can look very hard at the case for other explanations, but that is almost a psychological impossibility for the political or social activist.

With all due respect, affirmative action has been a corrupting influence on everyone...

...What about the non-minority students who don't get to have their professors write dissertations for them?

How do they feel about the value of degrees given to minorities if this kind of thing is "normal"?

Abraham H. Miller writes:

When I read Thomas Sowell’s column (March 13, 2012) about an African American graduate student in mathematics at a prestigious university who had his dissertation written for him, I was shocked. Not because after spending more than three decades in academia I didn’t know such things existed. I just didn’t know they existed in mathematics and, perhaps, the real sciences. I thought that kind of intellectual corruption was confined to the social sciences and humanities.

So familiar am I with the process of writing dissertations for black students that I believe I can claim to know the professor who thinks he invented it. In fact, he alleges to have devised the euphemism to cover it up, which he “brilliantly” called “heavy editing.” Were he to come forth and accept recognition for this achievement, it would be the singular and most palpable accomplishment of his academic career.

To be a black graduate student and be constantly reminded that your race results in the special privilege of having a dissertation written for you does nothing for your self-esteem. To survive in this kind of intellectually abusive environment, one must turn against it. One must deny its legitimacy. If one weren’t radicalized before, one most certainly is radicalized afterward.

This explains Derek Bell’s critical race theory. Bell knew that he was not qualified to teach at Harvard. He proposed a theoretical standard by which Harvard was not qualified to judge him. Barack Obama’s admission to Columbia University remains a mystery. He became the president of the Harvard Law Review without ever having written an article for it. Obama knew that he was where he was because of his race. He too embraced a cultural explanation of a different reality and a political radicalization that affirmed that reality.

The ego must defend itself. We are not about to be objective about our limitations. We are going to rationalize our experiences. If we are found wanting, we are going to denounce the standards that make it so.

From the "Creating the Christ in Your Image" file...

...also file under "It must be getting near Easter if these kinds of stupid stories are being published in the mainstream press"....

...feminist scholar speculates that Jesus was a hermphrodite:

Dr Susannah Cornwall claimed that it is “simply a best guess” that Jesus was male.

Her comments, which are bound to provoke fury in some quarters, were published in response to the ongoing debate about women bishops in the Church of England.

Dr Cornwall, of Manchester University’s Lincoln Theological Institute, describes herself on her blog as specialising in: “Research and writing in feminist theology, sexuality, gender, embodiment, ethics and other fun things like that.”

In her paper “Intersex & Ontology, A Response to The Church, Women Bishops and Provision”, she argues that it is not possible to know “with any certainty” that Jesus did not suffer from an intersex condition, with both male and female organs.

In an extraordinary paper she says: “It is not possible to assert with any degree of certainty that Jesus was male as we now define maleness.

“There is no way of knowing for sure that Jesus did not have one of the intersex conditions which would give him a body which appeared externally to be unremarkably male, but which might nonetheless have had some “hidden” female physical features.”

Dr Cornwall argues that the fact that Jesus is not recorded to have had children made his gender status “even more uncertain”.

She continues: “We cannot know for sure that Jesus was male – since we do not have a body to examine and analyse – it can only be that Jesus’ masculine gender role, rather than his male sex, is having to bear the weight of all this authority.”

Groundless claim - check

Stupid non-scholarly opinion - check

Provocatively insulting - check

The timing is during Lent - check

Bingo! This is one of those insulting stories the media always publishes sometime before Easter.

Update:

On her blog, Conway snippily corrects the article.

She didn't say "hermaphrodite," she said "intersex."

Also, Jesus' sexuality matters because the intersex have always been discriminated against, and the best way to cure that is to ignore the fact that Jesus wasn't apparently discriminated against for being "intersexed" which entitles her to speculate that he was "intersexed."

Brilliant.

The Dysfunction of the Academic Class.

This is an interesting reflection on how the narrowing ideological focus of academic specialization in the subject of History, and the concomitant narrowing of the ideological diversity of professional historians, has enervated the ability of history to inform public debate. Here are a some excerpts:

In a ruling likely to be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, the Montana Supreme Court last month upheld the state constitution's prohibition on corporations directly spending on state campaigns. For those concerned with academic matters, the case is important for reasons quite unrelated to political debates about Citizens United. In a significant case involving history (the Montana court relied heavily upon the scholarship and words of historians to reach its conclusions), all the books cited were more than 35 years old. And that wasn't a coincidence: the kind of U.S. history relevant to influencing legal and public policy debates increasingly has been banished from an academy obsessed with scholarship organized around the race/class/gender trinity.

A quick summary of the decision: the Montana court ruled that "unlike Citizens United, this case concerns Montana law, Montana elections and it arises from Montana history," requiring the justices to examine "the context of the time and place it was enacted, during the early twentieth century." To provide this necessary historical background, the Court repeatedly cited books by historians Helen Fisk Sanders, K. Ross Toole, C. B. Glasscock, Michael Malone, and Richard Roeder. The Court also accepted an affidavit from Harry Fritz, a professor emeritus at the University of Montana and a specialist in Montana history, who affirmed, "What was true a century ago is as true today: distant corporate interests mean that corporate dominated campaigns will only work 'in the essential interest of outsiders with local interests a very secondary consideration.'"

An attorney analyzing the decision, however, probably would have been surprised to see that the works of history upon which the Montana court relied were all published before 1977. She might even have wondered whether the court's reliance on older works suggested that it had ignored newer, perhaps contradictory, publications. But for anyone familiar with how the contemporary academy approaches U.S. history, the court's inability to find recent relevant works could have come as no surprise at all.

And:

One-sided scholarly approaches tend to produce one-sided views on contemporary political and public policy issues. In recent years, controversies in the history departments at Duke and the University of Iowa revealed that neither department had even one registered Republican. Political registration figures are the crudest possible measurement of a faculty's pedagogical breadth, but a partisan ratio of dozens-to-zero raises some troubling questions about the open-mindedness of a department's hiring process. So too did the justifications offered for the imbalance. Iowa's Sarah Hanley rationalized, "I don't think there is a downside [to having a department that, according to a survey done by the local newspaper, had 22 registered Democrats and zero registered Republicans]. If it is a downside, then it would be a downside to have states to be so-called blue or so-called red. It would be casting a pall on the democratic system where people are free to choose." The then-chairman of Duke's history department, John Thompson, dismissed findings that his department had 32 registered Democrats and zero registered Republicans, on grounds that "the interesting thing about the United States is that the political spectrum is very narrow."

This type of comment is exactly what would be expected in an environment characterized by faculty groupthink--the common assumption that all thinking people chose to be Democrats (full disclosure: I'm a registered and partisan Democrat), the law of group polarization producing extreme arguments on the merits of affiliating with the Democrats.

The increasingly one-sided conception of the profession has appeared most distinctly when national historical organizations have placed their members' partisan interests ahead of a commitment to historical ideals. During the second Bush term, for instance, historians were pressing for increased access to government documents from an administration notoriously indifferent to open government. Any claim that the chief purpose of the request was academic rather than political, however, was undermined in 2007, when the American Historical Association approved a "Resolution on United States Government Practices Inimical to the Values of the Historical Profession." The resolution called on all AHA members "to do whatever they can to bring the Iraq war to a speedy conclusion." That was a perfectly appropriate goal for partisan Democrats. But for historians? And why would any administration want to increase access to government documents for a profession whose major national organization demanded that its members seek to undermine a key foreign policy goal of the President?

Similarly, last year during the William Cronon controversy in Wisconsin, the American Historical Association issued an official statement demanding that the GOP withdraw its open-records request, offering the following reasoning. "The purpose of the state's Open Records Law is to promote informed public conversation. Historians vigorously support the freedom of information act traditions of the United States of which this law is a part. In this case, however, the law has been invoked to do the opposite: to find a pretext for discrediting a scholar who has taken a public position. This inquiry will damage, rather than promote, public conversation." Shutting down any inquiry into Cronon, even if it meant advocating a narrowing of the state's Open Records Law, was a perfectly appropriate goal for partisan Democrats opposed to the Walker administration. But for historians?

There are few areas in which the groupthink academy has had a more disastrous impact than the study of U.S. history. One-sidedness has its costs, however, in terms of influence outside the Ivory Tower. Courts or politicians who rely on the opinions of professors who now qualify as "mainstream" U.S. historians do so at their own peril.

The weakness in the scientific method.

This part of the bogus psychology report is interesting:

Many of Stapel's students graduated without having ever run an experiment, the report says. Stapel told them that their time was better spent analyzing data and writing. The commission writes that Stapel was "lord of the data" in his collaborations. It says colleagues or students who asked to see raw data were given excuses or even threatened and insulted.


At least two earlier groups of whistleblowers had raised questions about Stapel's work, the commission found. No one followed up on their concerns, however. Stapel's fabrications weren't particularly sophisticated, the committee says, and on careful inspection many of the data sets have improbable effect sizes and other statistical irregularities. His colleagues, when they failed to replicate the results, tended to blame themselves, the report says. Among Stapel's colleagues, the description of data as too good to be true "was a heartfelt compliment to his skill and creativity," the report says.

The report recommends that the universities of Groningen and Tilburg look into whether criminal charges are appropriate based on the misuse of research funds and possible harm to Stapel's students resulting from the fraud. The University of Amsterdam, where Stapel did his Ph.D., has apparently not been able to determine whether his thesis was fraudulent or not, in part because some of the original data records were destroyed. The committee suggests that the university consider revoking Stapel's degree, however, based on conduct that is "unbecoming" to the degree holder. (The University of Konstanz in Germany revoked disgraced physicist Jan Hendrik Schön's Ph.D. for that reason.)

Notice the weakness with the scientific method - it's based on trust.  Scientists assume that other scientists are playing by the rules.  When they can't replicate the test, they assume that they've done something in the test.

What's also interesting is how Stapel thought that he could get away with the scam for as long as he did.  Students knew that the wasn't doing the studies. Colleagues couldn't replicate the results of his tests. Yet, he published for years, even after a couple of rounds of whistle-blowers had reported him.

You know all those scientific studies that sounded bogus? Well, what do you know...

They were bogus.

Io9 reports:

Every branch of science has its share of "sexy" studies—so called for their supposed tendency to provoke media attention, even in the absence of strong or conclusive findings—but investigations in the field of social psychology are often especially popular targets of the "sexy" label.


Now, prominent social psychologist Diederik Stapel (who earlier this year reported that something as trivial as litter can promote discriminatory behavior) has been outed as one of the biggest frauds in scientific history. Will social psychology be able to recover?

A preliminary investigative report issued on Monday by Tilburg University has concluded that dozens of research papers authored and co-authored by Stapel contain fabricated data.

"We have some 30 papers in peer-reviewed journals where we are actually sure that they are fake, and there are more to come," says Pim Levelt, chair of the committee that investigated Stapel's work. If all of these papers are withdrawn, Stapel's will become one of the worst cases of scientific misconduct in history.

Stapel is the researcher behind a number of eye-catching studies which, prima facie, seem to offer provocative insights into human nature. His research topics range from the effects of beauty product ads on consumer self-esteem, to how urban decay (like littered streets) promote stereotyping and discrimination — the latter being a study we reported on here at io9.

Whether these studies are included in the 30+ papers known to contain fraudulent data remains to be seen. Tilburg University has yet to provide a list of which studies contain fudged results, though Stapel's paper on the tie between urban decay and discrimination, published in April in the journal Science, has already been flagged with an expression of concern by the journal's publishers.

Stapel is believed to have acted alone, deceiving colleagues, collaborators, and even PhD candidates for years by providing them with fictitious data. Given Stapel's prominence within the field of social psychology, (not to mention the sheer volume of publications already identified as tainted), its safe to say that the effects of his outing will be far-reaching.

"This is absolutely horrifying," said Laura King, a social psychologist at the University of Missouri in Columbia. "We are talking about research that has major impact in the field of social cognition."

"Our field is one where a great deal of currency is placed on surprising you," says University of Connecticut psychologist Hart Blanton, who expects to have to retract two papers written in co-authorship with Stapel. In an interview with New Scientist, Blanton said that he was concerned about how the field may foster a dynamic that encourages researchers to progress from ""counter-intuitive, to cute, to provocative, to 'defies gravity'".

In a statement issued on Monday, Stapel admitted that he has been committing scientific fraud for years, and expressed regret for casting the field of social psychology—which he describes as "big, interesting, beautiful and strong"—in such an unbecoming light.

"Ik heb gefaald als wetenschapper, als onderzoeker" writes Staple. "I have failed as a scientist, as a researcher."

News like this is enough to make you sick to your stomach. When research becomes a part of the scientific literature, it enters into a conversation with other research that must strive for truth in order to operate effectively. When a study (or thirty) based on fraudulent data are allowed part in that conversation, it not only pollutes the scientific pool of shared information, it treads all over any meaningful information that may have been gained from the study in the first place.

Al Gore and Bill Nye "the Science Guy" teach high school students how to be real scientists...

...fabricate your global warming test results and get lots and lots of government funding!

Watts Up With That attempts to replicate an experiment that Al Gore and Bill Nye tout as being "so easy a high school kid can do it" to prove the truth of global warming.  The result is a rigorous analysis of how important it is to modern climate science to force the data to fit the theory:

Mr. Gore’s Climate 101 experiment is falsified, and could not work given the equipment he specified. If they actually tried to perform the experiment themselves, perhaps this is why they had to resort to stagecraft in the studio to fake the temperature rise on the split screen thermometers.


The experiment as presented by Al Gore and Bill Nye “the science guy” is a failure, and not representative of the greenhouse effect related to CO2 in our atmosphere. The video as presented, is not only faked in post production, the premise is also false and could never work with the equipment they demonstrated. Even with superior measurement equipment it doesn’t work, but more importantly, it couldn’t work as advertised.

The design failure was the glass cookie jar combined with infrared heat lamps.

Gore FAIL.

But, hey, they've got funding!

By the way, Watts Up With That was also responsible for destroying a bit of pseudo-knowledge that I've always cherished, namely that Venus' intense heat is caused by a "runaway Greenhouse Effect."  Apparently, notwithstanding that kinda-cool explanation, it's not; it's caused by Venus' extreme atmospheric density.

Also, one of the commenters at Watts Up With That notes a similar problem with various "high school science experiments" designed to prove global warming/the greenhouse effect, i.e., they don't work.  You can just imagine the teachers and students either figuring that they didn't do the experiment right, and moving along, or fudging the data in order to get the right result, i.e., replicating the scientific method used by scientists in getting grants since time immemorial.

The commenter observes:

Looks like maybe it is not just Al Gore that is misrepresenting the actual results of these high school experiments, but a whole raft of supposed educators. If so, it implicates our entire educational system. How many thousands of times have students tried and failed to replicate the stated experimental results without these failures ever managing to emerge as a challenge challenge to those results? The scandal here could really be huge.

It probably is because, notwithstanding the lip service paid to replication of results and the willingness to invalidate a theory based on an experiment, humans are humans and human nature respects a "magisterium," particularly in this day and age the magisterium of science.

Hey, it's just a movie!

More schlocky history coming from Hollywood:

ROLAND EMMERICH’S film “Anonymous,” which opens next week, “presents a compelling portrait of Edward de Vere as the true author of Shakespeare’s plays.” That’s according to the lesson plans that Sony Pictures has been distributing to literature and history teachers in the hope of convincing students that Shakespeare was a fraud. A documentary by First Folio Pictures (of which Mr. Emmerich is president) will also be part of this campaign.


So much for “Hey, it’s just a movie!”


The case for Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, dates from 1920, when J. Thomas Looney, an English writer who loathed democracy and modernity, argued that only a worldly nobleman could have created such works of genius; Shakespeare, a glover’s son and money-lender, could never have done so. Looney also showed that episodes in de Vere’s life closely matched events in the plays. His theory has since attracted impressive supporters, including Sigmund Freud, the Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia and his former colleague John Paul Stevens, and now Mr. Emmerich.

But promoters of de Vere’s cause have a lot of evidence to explain away, including testimony of contemporary writers, court records and much else that confirms that Shakespeare wrote the works attributed to him. Meanwhile, not a shred of documentary evidence has ever been found that connects de Vere to any of the plays or poems. As for the argument that the plays rehearse the story of de Vere’s life: since the 1850s, when Shakespeare’s authorship was first questioned, the lives of 70 or so other candidates have also confidently been identified in them. Perhaps the greatest obstacle facing de Vere’s supporters is that he died in 1604, before 10 or so of Shakespeare’s plays were written.

“Anonymous” offers an ingenious way to circumvent such objections: there must have been a conspiracy to suppress the truth of de Vere’s authorship; the very absence of surviving evidence proves the case. In dramatizing this conspiracy, Mr. Emmerich has made a film for our time, in which claims based on conviction are as valid as those based on hard evidence. Indeed, Mr. Emmerich has treated fact-based arguments and the authorities who make them with suspicion. As he told an MTV interviewer last month when asked about the authorship question: “I think it’s not good to tell kids lies in school.”

The most troubling thing about “Anonymous” is not that it turns Shakespeare into an illiterate money-grubber. It’s not even that England’s virgin Queen Elizabeth is turned into a wantonly promiscuous woman who is revealed to be both the lover and mother of de Vere. Rather, it’s that in making the case for de Vere, the film turns great plays into propaganda.

More Scientific Shenanigans.

"Sybil" was nonsense.

More Scholarly Malpractice - Arsenic-life Edition.

This is a follow up on a "gosh-wow! Science" post from a year ago about how scientists claimed to have discovered "extra-terrestrial, arsenic-based" bacteria. 

It seems that the claim of "extra-terrestrial" and "arsenic-based" went "pear-shaped" within days of the announcement and the scientists involved adopted the strategy of refusing to comment on criticisms of their paper in science blogs and criticizing the scientists who dared - dared! - to critique their paper in science blogs.

Not that far off from the old idea of "pay, pray and obey."

Suppressing the Heretics, or "Hey - wait a second - weren't we told that all Climate Scientists agreed on Global Warming?"

Powerline describes a bit of science thuggery that doesn't look at all like the pristine free inquiry/free discussion that utopian atheists are always describing:

About six weeks ago Dr. Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama Huntsville (a center for lots of NASA activity and climate research) published an important new paper with William Braswell in the Journal of Remote Sensing entitled “On the Misdiagnosis of Climate Feedbacks from Variations in Earth’s Radiant Energy Balance.” Translated from the scientific lingo, the paper essentially argues that discrepancies between what the climate models say should be happening and what we actually observe happening (namely, the pause in warming over the last decade) means we still don’t have a complete picture of cloud behavior. (This issue is closely related, though not identical, to the post I had up last weekend on Nature’s blockbuster cosmic ray paper.) As Spencer explains on his blog: “Even the IPCC admits the biggest uncertainty in how much human-caused climate change we will see is the degree to which cloud feedback [temperature change => cloud change] will magnify (or reduce) the weak direct warming tendency from more CO2 in the atmosphere.”


Well, you can imagine what happened next. Not content with attacking Spencer and Braswell for their heresy, the Climate Inquisition has forced the resignation of the editor of the Journal of Remote Sensing. Better still, they seem to have given him the full Rubashov treatment and forced a confession:

Unfortunately, as many climate researchers and engaged observers of the climate change debate pointed out in various internet discussion fora, the paper by Spencer and Braswell… is most likely problematic in both aspects and should therefore not have been published.

“Should not have been published.” Even though it passed peer review, and finds lots of company among scientists and other journal articles. And besides, if it’s been attacked on the internet by the climate mafia, then it must be wrong!

You can understand why the Climate McCarthyites want to suppress Dr. Spencer. He’s only been a senior scientist for climate studies at NASA for more than a decade, co-designer of NASA’s satellites that monitor global temperatures, winner of NASA’s Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal, and author of several books on the subject, including Climate Confusion, and The Great Global Warming Blunder.

Here is Dr. Spencer's blog article on the impact of cloud formation on climate change.
 
Watt's Up With That?  points out the distorted understanding of science that underlies the nearly libellous attacks on Dr. Spencer:
 

One point Dr. Pielke touches on related to an orbital decay correction applied to the UAH satellite measurement comes from his first hand experience, and I urge readers to read it fully to get the history. One line from the op-ed in The Daily Climate bothered me in particular:


Over the years, Spencer and Christy developed a reputation for making serial mistakes that other scientists have been forced to uncover.

This my friends, is breathtaking for its sheer arrogance, agenda, and the scuttling of the scientific process in one sentence.

The entire process of science is about building on early incomplete knowledge with new knowledge, and discarding old knowledge in favor of new evidence that is better understood and supported by observational evidence. All scientists make mistakes, it is part of the learning process of science. Any scientist who believes he/she hasn’t made mistakes, has never made a correction, or hasn’t built upon the mistakes of others to improve the science is deluding themselves.

And that crack about “…mistakes that other scientists have been forced to uncover.” is ludicrous. By the very nature of the scientific process, scientists work to uncover flaws in the work of others, and when mistakes and irrelevancies are burned away by this process, what is left in the crucible of scientific inquiry is regarded as the pure product.

By the way, this is the way that science actually works, according to Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions."  Science doesn't advance by persuading scientists to give up their cherished beliefs; it advances by outliving scientists who won't give up their cherished beliefs.  If it is a real scientific revolution, you expect the name-calling from scientists who see their life's work threatened. 

That's why the purported consensus on Global Warming always seemed dubious to me - there was no dissent! But, human beings being human, there had to be dissent, which meant that the consensus was a political artifact and the dissenters were being muzzled, which meant that Global Warming wasn't a project of science, but of politics.
 
Also note that the Leftist supporters of Global Warming theory see the issue as ideological.  The BBC goes out of its way in an article on Dr. Spencer to include his religious background, as if that had any bearing on science:
 

Dr Spencer is one of the team at the University of Alabama in Huntsville that keeps a record of the Earth's temperature as determined from satellite readings.


He is also on the board of directors of the George C Marshall Institute, a right-wing thinktank critical of mainstream climate science, and an advisor to the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, an evangelical Christian organisation that claims policies to curb climate change "would destroy jobs and impose trillions of dollars in costs" and "could be implemented only by enormous and dangerous expansion of government control over private life".

Gosh, he's an evangelical Christian, and we are assured by Richard Dawkins that a person can't be a Christian and a scientist, so what more do we need to know.

Again, according to Kuhn, ideology matters to a certain extent.  Cultural and theological and ideological background may predispose a person to accept a congenial scientific theory.  But that effect applies to everyone, not just Christians.  If we are going to judge the merits of scientific studies on the ideology of the scientists, then it is time to find out how many pro-AGW scientists vote for Democrats and Big Government.

But that way lies madness.

When did the intellectual class stop believing in free speech?

Probably around the time that the intellectual left realized it had lost control of the valves of public discourse.

The American Sociological Association calls for Fox News to censor Glenn Beck for pointing out that Sociologist Frances Fox Piven had called for violent riots along the line of the violent riots in Greece:

As officers of the American Sociological Association, we express outrage at the attacks made on Professor Frances Fox Piven by Glenn Beck in his political opinion show on Fox News.


Dr. Piven, Professor of Political Science and Sociology at the City University of New York Graduate Center who holds a PhD from the University of Chicago, is “widely recognized as one of America’s most thoughtful and provocative commentators of America’ social welfare system…equally known for her contributions to social theory and for her social activism.” [Smith College, Sophia Smith Collection] She has been recognized by her colleagues around the country, who have elected her President of the American Sociological Association, as well as Vice President of the American Political Science Association, and President of the Society for the Study of Social Problems.

Scholars of her caliber, intellectuals of her stature, and especially those who tackle social conflicts and contradictions, mass movements and political action, should stimulate equal levels of serious challenge and creative dialogue. Being called by Glenn Beck one of the “nine most dangerous people in the world,” and an “enemy of the Constitution” is not a credible challenge; it is plain demagoguery.

Despite its lack of substance, Beck’s attacks have resulted in a flood of hate mail and internet postings attacking Professor Piven, including a series of death threats. While it is true that death threats are generally only a form of extremist rhetoric, they indicate an overheated emotional atmosphere that researchers on collective violence call “the hysteria zone.” It is a zone in which deranged individuals can be motivated to real violence against those targeted by demagoguery. History tells us that such things as the attempted assassination of Representative Giffords that resulted in six deaths in Tucson, Arizona can be examples of how abundant, polarizing rhetoric by political leaders and commentators can spur mass murder.

We call on Fox News to take steps to control the encouragement of violence that has run rampant in recent months. Serious and honest, undistorted disagreement and public debate on unemployment, economic crisis, the rights and tactics of welfare recipients, government intervention and the erosion of the American way of life should be supported. We in no way advocate restricting the freedom of speech of political commentators. They in turn should recognize the right of social science researchers to gather and analyze evidence related to controversial topics and to reach conclusions based on evidence, even if such conclusions disagree with widely held beliefs. Where we all should draw the line is at name-calling and invective rising to the level of inciting others to violence.

As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes declared, "The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.” Thus, the right to free speech does not ever include rhetoric that encourages violence against one’s opponents, especially in the current atmosphere of heated political mobilization. We call on Fox News and other responsible media to set the appropriate standards of accurate and honest debate.

Except, you idiots, that Holmes was talking about immediate call for an immediate violent response, such as, "let's go lynch this person now."   Beck's language is no more - and far less - a call for immediate violent action than was the call of leftist demagogues for an violent overthrow of the government.  Or for that matter, it's no more - and far less - a call for immediate violence than Frances Fox Piven's call for Greek-style riots.

Professor Anne Althouse properly points out the class bias in the ASA's statement: Beck is just not the right sort of person to engage in a debate/discussion about Dr. Piven's call for violent riots:

So vigorous debate about Piven's ideas is really important, but it better be the right kind of debate by the right kind of people and most certainly not that terrible, terrible man Glenn Beck. She's very lofty and serious, so, while she should be challenged, she must be challenged only by lofty and serious individuals, and of course, Glenn Beck is not one.

Exactly.  The job of the intellectual class is to lead the unwashed masses into the progressive utopia.  The job of demagogic members of the unwashed is to shut up and listen to their intellectual betters.

Are Fox News Viewers Misinformed?

This is a great example of how the internet undermines the biased academic class.



Via Roger Ho.

The Paul Erhlich Principle applied to Global Warming...

...it isn't science when you ignore the failed predictions.

Paul Ehrlich, of course, predicted that there would be worldwide famines that would reduce world population to an "acceptable level", something like 1.5 Billion.  The fact that India is now exporting food doesn't seem to have put Ehrlich's reputation on the remainder bin of science.

Powerline reminds us that proponents of Global Warming (TM) predicted that snow would be a thing of the past in England.

How did that prediction work out.  Pictures of modern English motorists stuck in the snow on the A3 speak volumes about the predictive capabilities of AGW theory. 

Powerline observes:

It's fun to ridicule the warmists because they are so often wrong, but their errors are in fact significant: a scientific theory that implies predictions that turn out to be wrong, is false. A principal feature of climate hysteria is its proponents' unwillingness to be judged by the standards that govern real science.

In other news, glaciers are retreating because of natural temperature cycles. 

"This doesn't question the actuality, and the seriousness, of man-made climate change in any way," says Matthias Huss, a glaciologist at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, who led the study. "But what we do see is that current glacier retreat might be equally due to natural climate variations as it is to anthropogenic greenhouse warming."

"Equally due"???  So, they would be melting anyway?

You have to admire the opening sentence about the "seriousness of man-made climate change" in light of the equal effect of "natural climate variations." 

A Soviet geneticist in the 1930s trying to avoid being purged for refusing to get in line with Lysenko couldn't have said it any better.



The good news is that we are finding artifacts under retreating glaciers that were left by humans before civilization could ever have generated enough CO2 to cause "global warming."

The reason people say such ridiculous nonsense about history and Catholicism is ...

...that they are being taught that nonsense in High School European AP History.

The Curt Jester relays this discovery from an European AP history textbook:

A high-school textbook used for the AP (Advanced Placement) European History exam equates the Sacraments of the Eucharist and Penance with “high magic” and says that, to combat witchcraft in the 13th century, “the Church declared its magic to be the only true magic.”


The Western Heritage Since 1300 (10th Edition, AP Edition, is published by Pearson Education Inc., publishing as Prentice Hall) is written by Donald Kagan of Yale University, Stephen Ozment of Harvard University, and Frank M. Turner of Yale Unversity.

Attached as a PDF file are the relevant portions of the textbook, which were given to me by a teacher at a Catholic high school that uses the textbook. The teacher, who does not teach history, learned about it from a student who asked her if its account of “Church magic” was true.

An actual AP European History study sheet featuring material from the book. The study sheet is available as a download from http://teacherweb.com/ . The download link is http://teacherweb.com/CA/SantiagoHighSchool/Krueger/AP-Euro-Chapter-14-Student-Notes-Pages.doc .

Sample quote from the book’s Chapter 14, p. 438, under the section title “Influence of the Clergy”:

Had ordinary people not believed that “gifted persons” could help or harm by magical means, and had they not been willing to accuse them, the hunts would never have occured; however, the contribution of Christian theologians was equally great. When the church expanded into areas where its power and influence were small, it encountered semipagan cultures rich in folkloric beliefs that predated Christianity. There, it clashed with the cunning men and women, who were respected spiritual authorities in their local communities, the folk equivalents of Christian priests. The Christian clergy also practiced high magic. They could transform bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ (the sacrament of the Eucharist) and eternal penalties for sin into temporal ones (the sacrament of Penance or Confession). The also claimed the power to cast out demons who possessed the faithful.

In the late thirteenth century, the Church declared its magic to be the only true magic. Since such powers were not innate to humans, the theologians reasoned, they must come either from God or from the devil. Those from God were properly exercised within and by the church. Any who practiced magic outside and against the church did so on behalf of the devil.

And a sample quote from the attached study sheet:

1.

1. Influence of the Clergy

- When the church expanded into rural areas, it: ____________

- There the church clashed with the “cunning folk” who were respected in their communities

- The Christian clergy also performed “magic” by turning bread: __________________

- In the 13th century, the church declared its magic to be the only true magic

- The church argued that: ______________________________________________

- Therefore, magic either: ______________________________________________

- Those powers from God were good and were practiced w/in the church

- Those who practiced magic outside the church: ___________________________

- Attacking these so-called witches was a way for the church to extend its spiritual control

- The princes of the day who wanted: ____________________________________

- Witch trials became a way for the church and princes to realize their power goals

N.B. One of the book’s co-authors, Frank M. Turner, who died last month, also wrote a book on Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman that, according to its publisher, “portrays Newman as a disruptive and confused schismatic conducting a radical religious experiment” and “demonstrates that Newman’s passage to Rome largely resulted from family quarrels, thwarted university ambitions, the inability to control his followers, and his desire to live in a community of celibate males.”

Victor Davis Hanson on College Professors.

A great piece that seems to ring true, present company excepted, of course.

This story is amazing:

The following is a true example of academic parsimony. A colleague of ours proved to be a gruesome murderer — tried, convicted, imprisoned (he died in prison). He took his sabbaticals and summers down in West Hollywood where he picked up young boys, and on at least one occasion decapitated a poor fellow, then disposed of the body in Silence of the Lambs fashion (the head and torso were found 200 miles apart as I recall). How did we learn of that, or, rather, how was he caught?


He naturally turned back in the bloody rental chain saw — hair, gristle, sinews and all stuck in the chain. The rental store owner was told that our professor (of criminology, no less) had “cut apart a dog” that he hit with his car — and so in disbelief turned him in. Beheading someone is one thing; but, my god, getting charged for an overdue chain saw or losing your deposit is quite another.

(Wait reader: you ask, well, smarty-pants Mr. Hanson, how exactly did a supposedly inept professor learn how to chain saw someone’s head off? I confess, I wonder about that still.)

I make an appearance in this section:

Machines always had to work — or else. When it hit 110 and the air conditioning went out in our building, profs sighed and damned “them” who couldn’t even keep us cool. (None had been on a roof at 120 or wondered how a compressor ran at all — or how a guy could spend four hours up there in Sahara-like conditions with all sorts of sockets and wrenches before his skull melted.

And that's why I went to law school.

To err is human, but to really screw things up royally, it takes an expert.

This is an interesting article on the author of a book that points out how often the experts are just plain wrong:

To read the factoids David Freedman rattles off in his book Wrong is terrifying. He begins by writing that about two-thirds of the findings published in the top medical journals are refuted within a few years. It gets worse. As much as 90% of physicians' medical knowledge has been found to be substantially or completely wrong. In fact, there is a 1 in 12 chance that a doctor's diagnosis will be so wrong that it causes the patient significant harm. And it's not just medicine. Economists have found that all studies published in economics journals are likely to be wrong. Professionally prepared tax returns are more likely to contain significant errors than self-prepared returns. Half of all newspaper articles contain at least one factual error. So why, then, do we blindly follow experts? Freedman has an idea, which he elaborates on in his book Wrong: Why Experts Keep Failing Us - and How to Know When Not to Trust Them. Freedman talked to TIME about why we believe experts, how to find good advice and why we should trust him - even though he's kind of an expert.

And I like this one, which I shall dub the "Bart Ehrman Effect."

You found some cases of experts who willingly discarded data that didn't fit with the conclusion they were after?


That is a huge understatement - it is almost routine. Now, let me point out that it's not always nefarious. Scientists and experts have to do a certain amount of data sorting. Some data turns out to be garbage, some just isn't useful, or it just doesn't help you answer the question, so scientists always have to edit their data, and that's O.K. The problem is, how can we make sure that when they're editing the data, they're not simply manipulating the data in the way that helps them end up with the data they want? Unfortunately, there really aren't any safeguards in place against that. Scientists and other experts are human beings, they want to advance their careers, they have families to support, and what do you know, they tend to get the answers they chase.

Check it out.

Via Mark Shea.