Category: Human rights

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Sunday Spam: crepes and maple syrup

As just fed to my son, in fact.

The execution of Troy Davis and the death penalty

I donated to the Innocence Project and the (US) National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, for what it’s worth.

Fukushima Disaster: It’s Not Over Yet

The impact of both radiation and fear of radiation on Japanese society, although it feels a little shallow. I’d love to read this argument from the perspective of a Japanese person.

Debunking the Cul-de-Sac

Struggles to come up with anything nice to say about cul-de-sacs, frankly, unless you are in the business of selling either cars or fuel for them. Oh, they’re quieter. Other than that, cul-de-sacs suck.

Queen of the Kitchen

A Christmas-time fairy story by Karen Healey. So you know it’s got a tough-minded teen girl, New Zealand, and magic. Several of my favourite things.

Chemotherapy doesn’t work? Not so fast…

Science Based Medicine reviews the real position of chemotherapy. It works as the primary treatment for a fairly small number of cancers, it doesn’t work much at all for some cancers, and much of the time it is part of several treatments (radiotherapy, surgery).

On Feminism and Virtue

Sady Doyle reflects on the extent to which being a feminist makes you a better person: potentially not much.

The Great American Bubble Machine

Goldman Sachs: always there to turn a functioning market into a speculative bubble, and thence to profit. Highlights include 100 million people entering hunger in 2007 due to speculation on food and oil futures. This was via Tim O’Reilly, who went down to the Occupy Wall Street protests because even rich small-government types do (or ought to) have a beef against Wall Street.

Disability Culture meets Euthanasia Culture: Lessons from my cat

On the normalisation of euthanasia in animals, to the point where vets can’t advise on what death of natural causes is like, and its relationship to euthanisa in humans. I was thinking about this issue over the last few years, most recently after a vet euthenised my parents’ elderly pet horse after what my father, who works in the meat industry and has seen hundreds if not thousands of animals die—and some seriously negligent treatment of animals for that matter—described as the worst suffering he’d ever seen. So, I don’t have a lot to say about Tony’s death, but it did make me think about how animals die.

Certificates and “authorities”

The certificates that identify websites for secure web browsing, that is. Basically, it’s a mess. There are about 400 organisations that are trusted by browsers to sign the identities of secure websites, they get hacked quite a bit, and some of them are careless at best about security.

Movin’ Meat: Instinct vs Expertise

An ER doctor puzzles over why a neurosurgeon isn’t taking a certain fracture seriously. Unlike a lot of stuff I link here, this is less about systemic concerns and more just an interesting story.

The iPad, the Kindle, and the future of books

From early last year, more in my attempt to understand publisher perspectives on ebooks. I’m in an interesting place on this, reading both in the open source/copyright reform world which tends to accept and embrace the tendency of the sale value of intellectual property to fall to zero or nearly so once distribution is cheap (see for example Copyfight on ebook prices rising), and librarians, publishers and authors who aren’t so hot on that happening to books.

Anyway, now I know what the agency model is.

Do We Need A New Nirvana? Does Modern Music Suck?

Joel Connolly (my brother-in-law, and a band manager) thinks audiences need to wise up to existing awesome music, basically. It’s a longer version of what he said to Bernard Zuel early in the month.

Above reproach: why do we never question fidelity?

I like this style of inquiry. Basically, the question is that everyone agrees that infidelity (not having multiple partners, but having multiple partners without being honest about it) is unethical. But should we? Is this sometimes part of oppression?

Every so often, asking these questions of human relationships is important. (Note that the writer, also, doesn’t have an answer.)

Increasing Barriers to College Attendance Through ‘Optional’ Extracurriculars

Something I’ve wondered about for ages, as Australian universities, which largely admit students based on pure academic performance, are constantly criticised for not moving to the US model, which takes into account the whole person, yadda yadda. As long as the whole person has time in their life for charity work, sports teams, student politics etc. To me, US college applications often sound like high schoolers applying for a Rhodes scholarship straight out of school. Not that raw exam scores don’t incorporate endless privilege, but extracurriculars do not in any way ameliorate that.

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Sunday Spam: hot banana bread

These are, largely, in reverse order of reading, that is, most recent first. Interesting that that tends to be a thematic ordering too.

Right-wing memes ahoy – “pregnancy is not a disease”

Right wing argument: pregnancy isn’t a disease. Therefore contraception shouldn’t be among funded medical services.
Response: pregnancy is [affiliated with/causes] illness for some women. Therefore contraception should be among funded medical services!

Uh, don’t buy the framing, responders! Says Tiger Beatdown. The end.

7-Year Old Transgender Child Refused Proper Bathroom Visits in School

Child identifies as boy. Parents, doctors and peers recognising child’s gender identity. School superintendent knows better. Unhilarity ensues.

This is what I said a feminist mother looks like:

  • Part One: the questionnaire, demographics, key themes and becoming feminists
  • Part Two: the impact of motherhood on their feminism
  • Part Three: being surprised by motherhood
  • Part Four: defining their feminist parenting
  • Part Five: the difficulties with being a feminist parent

    • This is a summary of a conference presentation Blue Milk gave on her long running 10 questions about your feminist motherhood series. I know that I keep going on about Instapaper, but these were handily divided up into bite-sized blog entries and I was still too lazy to read them before.

    Pink Scare

    A roundup of a series of incidents in which a huge comment storm has been created around a boy dressing as a girl or in girl-marked clothes. Not really novel if you read about this stuff a lot, a good summary either way, particularly the historical context about when and where young children have been expected to be strongly gender-marked.

    What revolution? Why haven’t women pushed harder for caring work to be valued?

    Blue Milk again, on the not-always-perfect marriage of patriarchy and capitalism, summarising Nancy Folbre. Of particular note Higher paid women benefit from their ability to hire low-wage women to provide child care and elder care in the market.
    Film review: “The Help,” a feel-good movie for white people
    The Help has become such a by-word for race fail in my circles that I hadn’t even heard what the basic plot was. Consider this a useful primer: what the plot is, what the problems are. Now you don’t have to see the movie.

    Gaddafi Should Be Tried At The Hague

    Not a surprising opinion for Geoffrey Robertson, but perhaps not everyone has read Crimes Against Humanity. Actually I haven’t read it all the way through either, because I have it in the cheap Penguin edition with teeny tiny writing and a stiff spine, and it’s still too heavy to hold in one hand. Must look into Kindling.

    Anyway, back in to Gaddafi: British Prime Minister David Cameron made a serious mistake this week by insisting that the fate of the Gaddafis should be a matter for the Libyan people. That was the line George Bush took after the capture of Saddam Hussein, as a rhetorical cover so that the death penalty could be imposed on the Iraqi despot by politically manipulated local judges.
    Australians don’t fully understand what is being done in their name

    While we’re in the thematic section marked unsurprising opinions from lawyers active in human rights, Julian Burnside. Why do we do this? What is it about our national character that explains such cruel, illogical behaviour? Simple: the politicians do it for political gain, and most Australians do not fully understand what is being done in their name.

    I’m worried he’s wrong.

    Why Political Coverage is Broken

    Jay Rosen’s keynote address at New News 2011, focussing on the marketing of news to politically interested readers. We’re all insiders, considering how this will play to the voters, as if they aren’t us.

    How the World Failed Haiti

    Well, partly it’s a Wicked Problem (high stakes, one chance to solve it, no good model, no correct solution, no or little ability to fix things after the fact, etc), but one focus of this particular article is that while Bill Clinton himself is potentially a good advocate and ally for Haiti, the people the Clintons tend to hire aren’t so much, perhaps. They tend to be experienced political operatives, not experienced disaster relief workers. (Also, even people specialising in development aren’t the same people who are good at disaster relief.)

    Learning to love my baby

    Jessica Valenti’s daughter was born extremely premature after a traumatic emergency Caesearean following pre-eclampsia and HELLP. She doesn’t think it’s a problem that her feelings towards her daughter were complex and that loving her was scary. She condemns though, factors that made her feel that this made her a terrible person.

    Review: The Red Market by Scott Carney

    The Red Market is the market in bodies, body parts and blood. This is a book review, not the book itself (The Red Market: On the Trail of the World’s Organ Brokers, Bone Thieves, Blood Farmers, and Child Traffickers), which goes on the to-read list.

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    Ethics of Free Software community research

    Most of this entry is exactly a year old today and it’s just sat around in draft form all that time. Since I posted something similar on Geek Feminism about research into women in tech and similar topics, I thought I’d get it out there.

    In January 2009 a researcher named Anne Chin of Monash University Law emailed the chat list for the linux.conf.au 2009 conference asking for research subjects to be interviewed about licencing and Open Source software. There were several responses criticising her use of HTML email and Microsoft Word attachments. I’ll leave the specifics of this alone except that people should be (and probably are) aware that this is almost always an unknowing violation of community norms.

    I did, though, think about making some notes on research ethics and Free Software research. A bit about my background: I am not a specialist in ethics. I’m somewhat familiar with ethics applications to work with human subjects, but not from the perspective of evaluating them. I’ve made them, and I’ve been a subject in a study that had made them.

    For people who haven’t seen this process, the ethical questions arising from using human subjects in your research in general covers the question of whether the good likely to arise from the outcomes of the study outweighs the harm done to the subjects, together with issues of consent to that harm. (There are many philosophical assumptions underlying this ethical framework, I don’t intend to treat them here.) Researchers in universities, hospitals, schools and research institutes usually have to present their experimental designs to an ethics committee who will determine this question for them and approve their experiment. Researchers who work across several of these (eg, a PhD student who wants to interview schoolchildren) will need to do several ethics applications, a notable chore when the forms and guidelines aren’t standardised and occasionally directly conflict. Researchers working for private commercial entities may or may not have a similar requirement. Researchers who use animals also have to have ethical reviews, these are done by animal ethics committees, which are usually separate.

    At my university, essentially any part of your research that involves measuring or recording another person’s response to a research question and using it to help answer that question needs a human ethics application.

    The good/harm balance may include very serious dilemmas: is there a health risk to subjects? how will the researcher manage the conflict between maintaining subject confidentiality and research integrity and the good of her subjects or the requirements of the law if she uncovers, say, episodes of abuse or violence? But it also involves less immediately obvious and serious ethical questions. Is this study a giant waste of subjects’ time? is considered a question of ethics by ethics committees, and is in fact the most serious problem for linguistics research, since there’s very seldom an outcome of particular interest to the subjects themselves.

    The study in which I took part a few years back was towards the serious end actually: it was a study into the psychological profiles of people who have an immediate family member who had cancer as a child and involved both questionnaires and a phone interview with a psychologist. Both because the study explored memories of the illness and because the profiling included evaluating depressive episodes, suicidal ideation and so on, it came with a detailed consent form and with information about a counselling service that had been informed of the study and was prepared to work with its subjects.

    In the case of the Free Software community the ethical questions are often more towards the waste of time? end of the spectrum than the more immediately serious end. It’s important to understand that this isn’t necessarily the case though. Here are some more cutting ethical problems:

    • getting findings that expose your subjects and/or their employers to intellectual property claims; or
    • revealing that your subjects are breaching employment contracts in some way (generally also related to IP) and thus exposing them to job loss and possible civil action.

    Getting ethics approval to carry out workplace studies can be fairly hard precisely due to problems like these. But in the rest of this post I will treat the waste of time problem.

    Firstly the basics: are your subjects going to be identifiable in your final reports or to the general public? If not, who will know who they are? Can a subject opt to have their responses removed from the study? When and how? All this should be explained at the start. (Usually if an ethics committee has been involved, there’s a consent form.) If doing a survey look into survey design, in order to construct non-leading questions and such.

    Now, for specifics. Most of them arise from this principle: there are a lot of researchers working, in various ways, on the Free Software community, possibly making it a slightly over-studied group if anything. This places the onus on the individual researcher to demonstrate to the community that their project is worthwhile and that they’re going to do what they say. Thus:

    1. demonstrate some familiarity with the background. Depending on your research level this could mean anything from demonstrating a knowledge of existing anthropological work on Free Software (say, if the research project is for your anthropology PhD) down to at least understanding the essential concepts and core history (say, a project at high school level). This can be demonstrated by research design, eg asking sensible well-informed questions, but actually mostly requires a bigger time investment: making appearances in the community, either virtually or physically, ideally for a little time before asking the community to help you get your PhD/A-grade/pass.
    2. don’t get the community to design your experiment for you. Have a specific goal, more specific than get people to write me lengthy essays about Free Software, and get ideas from that and write about them. In the general case, the ask people incredibly vague stuff and hope they say something interesting technique fails the waste-of-time test.
    3. give your results back to the community. The most common problem with the various surveys, interviews and questionnaires sent to the Free Software community is that responding to them is like shouting into a black hole. It is not unheard of, of course, to see the thesis or essay or roundup that comes out of these, but it is unusual, relative to the number of requests. Most of the time the researcher promptly disappears. Researchers should come to the Free Software community with an explanation of when and where they will make the results of the study available. They should explain the aims in advance unless this would compromise the results. (On that note: Anne Chin is giving a linux.conf.au talk this year.)