Those three weeks went by in a flash!

[liv]

Haven't managed to post anything since I started back at work after the New Year break. During that time I have:

• Visited angelofthenorth in Cardiff
• Hosted khalinche for a truly delightful couple of days
• Made a flying visit to Cambridge for jack's birthday / engagement party
• Heard a fascinating but rant-inducing talk by Simon Baron-Cohen
• Had a visit from my parents, uncle and grandmother
• Heard a really good talk about the Staffordshire Hoard
• Marked dozens of exam papers
• Seen an urban fox
• Helped represent the Jewish community at a whole bunch of Holocaust Memorial Day events
• Saw Star Wars for the first time (only the original film, now called episode IV, as yet)
• Continued going to the gym regularly with mathcathy

And jack has been staying with me, which is probably the biggest reason for spending less time on the internet than I sometimes like to.

I have built up a huge queue of posts in my head, including my thoughts about many of the above events, but I also want to post about:

• Reviews of Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Infidel, Stephen King's The Liar and Jo Walton's Among Others
• Finishing the 10-day countdown meme
• Answering deep questions people have been posting about relationships
• Answering the final, giant FAQ about getting engaged, namely: what are the political implications of your decision?
• A retrospective of 2010; I always do that, every year, and although it'll be February by the time I get to it I'd feel bad about not doing it at all...

Sorry for the bullet points instead of a post. I am very much enjoying 2011 so far, but wow.

I also have a small logistical problem: there is a sofa. It belongs to my brother's partner. They (brother and SO) want it in the long term. Right now it does not physically fit in their living room. I have no sofa, but I do have plenty of space. My brother and sister-out-law would like to long-term lend me their sofa. Sofa is currently in their flat in Hackney. How do I get the sofa from there to my house in Stoke? I'm happy to throw money at the problem, but, you know, preferably not more than the value of the sofa!

Comments

On the fungibility of sofas

[hairyears]

What this needs is a Virtual Sofa Exchange...

If the sofa is a commodity item (say, a common IKEA design) it could take part in a two, three or n-part exchange of identical sofas in which fewer-than-n sofas actually move the while distance, and the end-point recipients receive locally-sourced sofas that are identical to the distant sofas.

Post this to er... Freecycle? Where do sofa donors and recipients signal their market positions on the Web? This is a problem of communication and intermediation, not long-distance logistics.

Assuming, of course, that the sofa in question is a commodity item and not a distinctive crafted work.

[liv]

LOL! You may well have a point here, and you certainly express it amusingly. My understanding is that Ms Poet wants this specific sofa to be part of her future home, for some reason which I don't know, but assume is good. I think maybe my next step should be to find out how much she does in fact want this very sofa, and therefore how much money / effort it's worth putting in to move it across the country. It's better than a basic IKEA / junk shop job, and it does come from her family, but it may well not be unique, all the same.

[forestofglory]

Yay a fox! Wildlife is very exciting.

I enjoyed Star Wars much more when I was 13 then I do now, but it is still fun and something you should see.

[liv]

I know there are supposed to be lots of foxes in cities, but I've never really seen one up close like that before.

And yes, I can see that Star Wars would make more of an impact when you were young and hadn't seen lots of other films or encountered lots of more sophisticated stories. I'm still quite impressed with how well it stands up, for a film made more than 30 years ago.

[ajollypyruvate]

"I can see that Star Wars would make more of an impact when you were young and hadn't seen lots of other films or encountered lots of more sophisticated stories."
For those of us who saw it in the theatres at first release, it was a significant life event. I'm not sure there was anything comparable, film-wise, at the time.

[ephemera]

(the thing I was about to say stops being relevant when I realise that you mean Stoke-Stoke, not Stoke-Newington Stoke ... um - sorry!)

[liv]

Silly towns having confusing names! I usually write out Stoke-on-Trent in full, but this was a bit of a dashed off post.

[kaberett]

SIMON BARON-BLOODY-COHEN

Right, and in more detail:

so he came to give out the awards at my sixth form's post-A-level-results evening. And he cheerfully stood up there and talked about (not-yet-published IIRC) research that showed that girls weren't any good at science but boys were, and you could tell this from when they were ONE-AND-A-HALF-DAY-OLD BABIES so it MUST be true. And he nowhere, not once, mentioned how large an effect it was or the statistical significance or anything. And there was me, little baby feminist barely believing I could actually do science, and he was going to give me an award for being really fucking good at science, and he was telling a room full of lay people that I was axiomatically shit. (Because he's a clever man. I don't believe he doesn't know what he's doing.)


And then, last year, Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine was published. It is mostly awesome, and I should lend it to you. And there is a chapter in which she totally deconstructs the study he was referring to that night - basically, the entire methodology was woefully flawed in about five major and important ways. And I CHEERED.

So, yes, I am extremely sceptical of SBC.

oh dear, I've nearly written my planned post as a comment, sorry

[liv]

I actually think in some ways he doesn't know what he's doing. He's clever, in the sense of being academically clever, but he isn't very good at understanding how the world works outside his little ivory tower. True, by this point his naïveté is culpable, because time and time again he's done his nice little bits of academic research and it's been reported in the popular press as "boyz rule, girlz are rubbish!!!!" But I honestly don't think that's his intention when he researches stuff because he finds it interesting, and finds slight differences between male and female subjects.

I got the impression from his talk that he really truly believes that academia is a pure meritocracy, and identity doesn't matter, but people only care about your ideas and the strength of the evidence supporting them. (And on top of that he believes that academia is the only thing that matters, ultimately.) This belief is of course very convenient for him, being a successful academic who just coincidentally happens to be white, cismale, upper middle-class and generally acceptable to the establishment. (For example, one of his arguments during the speech that made me rageous was that Cambridge is such a delightful Utopian establishment that being disabled or autistic doesn't matter a tiny bit if you happen to be brilliant at your subject... Thing is, I'm sure he'd truly, honestly like that to be true.)

I am generally in favour of people following the direction their research takes them, and working outside their core fields. It's a great way to get a new perspective on received ideas, and can have very good results. But it can also lead to situations like Baron-Cohen's, where he's done a whole bunch of research about male / female differences while knowing nothing at all about the field of gender studies. Which leads to the hopeless methodology, and to his giving a whole talk about these observations without ever distinguishing between sex and gender.

To his credit, he did show us some error bars and did tell us that his crucial differences were rather less than the population standard deviations, and didn't try to claim that statistical significance = truth. Even so, Alan Fersht pretty much ripped his stats to pieces in the questions after the session, and Sir Alan is hardly a champion of feminist causes or an expert in social sciences!

I think it's pretty dire that he doesn't realize how much harm he can cause by simplifying his research so that it can be interpreted as girls weren't any good at science. It's a shame that you encountered that kind of thing at a potentially impressionable age. Fine's book sounds like a very valuable counter!

Re: oh dear, I've nearly written my planned post as a comment, sorry

[kaberett]

The hopeless methodology isn't actually just gender studies-related - this is the study I'm talking about, where important problems include:

1. The researcher presenting the stimulus knew the assigned sex of the baby (though the people doing the scoring didn't, but this is still enough to make me uncomfortable)
2. Babies aren't actually very good at focussing on things
3. It's not clear how the mobile in question is obviously sufficiently more mechanical to prove his hypothesis
4. The babies in question were *either* on their back in a cot *or* held in a parents' lap, where it's not clear what proportion of MAAB and FAAB were in each group, changing the angle at which they were looking at the thing, which matters a lot (because babies don't see very well...)
5. Two objects were presented sequentially (babies don't exactly have long attention spans)


Points 1, 4 & 5 are ones that are apparently usually quite carefully controlled for by people doing serious research on newborns.

I note that these problems are better explained and better referenced in the book I cite above :-)


So. I agree that it is dire if he genuinely doesn't realise how much harm he causes, and I think he ought to be a damn sight more careful with his methodology especially as people are willing to point out its flaws to him. And he makes me ragey. And I've just raged all over you. Er. Sorry.

[liv]

You rock. Your entirely justified rage is entirely welcome here, and rage that comes with detailed critique of research papers is making me go all *eyes turning into hearts*

It seems like that incredibly flawed experiment has convinced him sex differences are in part biological in origin (I mean, way to ridiculously over-generalize your data, I've rarely seen anything that egregious in an abstract). And believing that as axiomatic, he goes on and designs loads of other experiments which assume that any male / female differences he observes must be innate. I suspect that assumption leads him to forget to control for lots of really important factors. What a mess.

[kaberett]

Blush, etc. And hurrah for sanctioned rage! And, er, I am not actually a biologist, so please do tell me if I make Egregious Biological Mistakes.

I do look forward to you posting about SBC :)

[ajollypyruvate]

Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine
Thanks for rec! I shall place this on my library list. :)

[ajollypyruvate]

Do you have an equivalent of Starving Students movers? Someone who will haul furniture for a much-reduced rate? Barring that, good friends with a large vehicle.

Would love to see an urban fox. It would be a welcome break from the raccoons, 'possums, and deer!

[liv]

There may be people who will move furniture relatively cheaply, but I don't really know how to find them. And when I survey my friends who are close enough I could ask that kind of favour, I can't think of any who live in London and know how to drive.

See, I think raccoons and opossums are charmingly exotic. It all depends on your perspective!