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Posts tagged: my contributions

The publishers Springer and IEEE are removing more than 120 papers from their subscription services after a French researcher discovered that the works were computer-generated nonsense. Over the past two years, computer scientist Cyril Labbé of Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France, has catalogued computer-generated papers that made it into more than 30 published conference proceedings between 2008 and 2013. Sixteen appeared in publications by Springer, which is headquartered in Heidelberg, Germany, and more than 100 were published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), based in New York. Both publishers, which were privately informed by Labbé, say that they are now removing the papers.

Among the works were, for example, a paper published as a proceeding from the 2013 International Conference on Quality, Reliability, Risk, Maintenance, and Safety Engineering, held in Chengdu, China. (The conference website says that all manuscripts are “reviewed for merits and contents”.) The authors of the paper, entitled ‘TIC: a methodology for the construction of e-commerce’, write in the abstract that they “concentrate our efforts on disproving that spreadsheets can be made knowledge-based, empathic, and compact”. (Nature News has attempted to contact the conference organizers and named authors of the paper but received no reply; however at least some of the names belong to real people. The IEEE has now removed the paper).

Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers : Nature News & Comment

If you are wondering how this happens, it is because academic jargon echolalic, and phrases become stock phrases, hat computer programs can replicate things that sound enough like the real near nonsense articles that take hours to decipher. Because understanding all the jargon and insider phrasing is supposed to be a sign of aptitude and experience in the field, no one on these journals dares voice the idea that these technobabble articles are actually nonsense for fear of being seen as just not knowledgeable enough to “get” all the complicated insular language. As a result every just kind of glances at these things, sees the words that look right, and nods it along.

Non-peer reviewed journals are of course more susceptible, but because of the culture of jargon and drivel and fear of sounding not in the know enough, even supposedly peer reviewed journals fall pray to these revealing hoaxes.

At least they were removed before some professor assigned them to their students to analyze for class.

During the act of reading engaging fiction, we can lose all sense of time. By the final chapter of the right book, we feel changed in our own lives, even if what we’ve read is entirely made up.

Research says that’s because while you’re engaged in fiction—unlike nonfiction—you’re given a safe arena to experience emotions without the need for self-protection. Since the events you’re reading about do not follow you into your own life, you can feel strong emotions freely.

[…]

The key metric the researchers used is “emotionally transported,” or how deeply connected we are to the story. Previous research has shown that when we read stories about people experiencing specific emotions or events it triggers activity in our brains as if we were right there in the thick of the action.

New study by Dutch researchers confirms previous theories that reading fiction makes you a better person by expanding your capacity for empathy.

Also see how storytelling makes us human.

(via explore-blog)

I would be interested in seeing a similar study done with other narrative media. Graphic novels, manga, and comic books, seem to follow the description of an empathic work that does not follow your life and allows you to experience the emotions of others.“ And it is still a reading experience. But I feel like taking it further into television and movies might be bordering on poor scholarship. By the same token, what of short stories? Short short stories? Flash fiction? Fan fiction drabbles? (For the purposes of fiction prose, a fan fiction that is 200k words would, I assume, be no different than original fiction of the same sort…)

I would be really interested to see this kind of work replicated with video games - particularly video games of different levels of linearity and plot. Does having your choices impacting the story change the level of empathy or immersion? In which direction? Certainly even a running around and chasing butterflies in skyrim or building houses in the Sims can make us "lose all sense of time,” but what of the claim of empathy?

I feel like the study almost demands to be done with different types of games, what with the claims out there in the news that video games cause the opposite of empathetic growth.

I just worry about researchers outside of the gaming community lumping something relatively freeform, or prized for its freeform play with a more story and character driven game.

I suppose I am similarly curious if the study found the increase in empathy for fiction to be true regardless of the material. Does Lolita and American Psycho produce the same increased empathic skills as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest or even something more mainstream like Harry Potter?

If we are going to apply something designed for precision like the scientific method to something as vague and hand-wavy as “fiction” and “empathy” then we might as well go all the way, no?

ourlightsinvain:

revisionist lay criticism for shakespeare is so popular both as like, word-of-mouth truisms — “romeo and juliet isn’t REALLY about love, everyone gets it ALL WRONG, what it’s REALLY about is—” (which is like the literary equivalent of urban legends about hidden legendary pokemon in pokemon red) — and well-meaning but ill-advised attempts to make the supposed canon ‘edgy’ and ‘relatable,’ no shakespeare’s not dry and irrelevant he’s REALLY relevant he’s SUPER relevant!  and entertaining too!  it comes off as kind of a fearful tryhard bleat, ineffectual flailing in the face of losing kids to paranormal ya and video games.  which.  the works of william shakespeare are many things but strictly textually relevant to the life of the average american teenager is not one of them.  so good luck with that

actually what gets on me more is the common (in fandom and some starry-eyed lit departments) and hopeful claim that shakespeare is or was ~SUBVERSIVE~: usually pointing to the obvious and common elements of  tongue-in-cheek homoeroticism and genderbending/crossdressing in his plays.  which.  uh, again, values dissonance.  it’s not that he was flouting taboo, it’s that sociohistorical ‘progression’ even within the same or related cultures is, well, fictitious, but moreover is not actually a linear march from some nebulous state of conservatism to some nebulous state of progressivism with a few setbacks and regressions; the sexual morals of london of shakespeare’s time weren’t the sexual morals of today’s london, and they certainly weren’t the sexual morals of today’s united states.  there’s a big difference between asserting that the staging of shakespeare’s work can be harnessed to some progressive purpose in the present day US against our particular shades of puritanical morals and asserting that they were radical purely on grounds that they might make rick santorum uncomfortable.

one can’t just decide that the things one likes and finds personally empowering are intrinsically radical and subversive on a macro, historical level because one wants them to be

… well, one certainly can, as evidenced by the vast majority of tumblr.  but.   but it’d make me PEEVISH ok

There are definitely valid concerns in this post. For one, assuming that society is inevitably marching from some more primitive state to some more advanced and enlightened state, and that all things can me placed somewhere on this path is not only simplistic and wrong, but rooted in racism and imperialism and very problematic.

The idea that the mores of one era and place can be at all mapped on to those of another is also a really problematic thing, and is an issue in both lay and academic criticisms - don’t think folks in ivory towers are immune from the inability to see the times so differently.

This comment interests me on a meta critical level, though, because that at least since the Romantics, every single movement I can think of has found a way to claim Shakespeare as if not the first of their canon, as a fore runner, or predictor of it - I have read naturalist claiming Shakespeare was a revolutionary in naturalism. Modernists and existentialists were fond of calling him the first modernist or the first true tragedian since the Greeks and thus the founder of their movement. Looking for a foundation in Shakespeare is practically a requirement at this point for a new field of theory and criticism or a new school of play writing. Everyone tries to stage Shakespeare as per the dictates of their favorite school of drama.

So this is very far from either new or lay.

Before I continue, I should note I am by no means very well studied in Elizabethan England nor do I claim to have read, let alone studied, all of Shakespeare’s writing.

But to claim that Shakespeare wasn’t at all subversive is something I question. Yes, it is very true that gender bending would have not been seen as something at all subversive - rather as a kind of sly bit of comedy for a theatre where all parts are played by men anyway. Plays were subject to censor, and Shakespeare’s own family were subject to arrest for religious and/or political reasons. So he was very much aware of the politics of the age. Plays were also “vulgar” entertainment - they were specifically made to appeal to the non-elite as well as the educated. In that sense alone, the Marxist readings of Shakespeare have grounding. In a sense, his play’s contemporary success means he had a good finger on the pulse of his contemporary politics of the “masses” and the elite.

His plays are also noted for breaking with the “standards of drama” of the day. Someone more versed in Elizabethan drama can tell you more, but some contemporary critics noted that he seemed to want for knowledge of convention and knowledge of the canon. That alone can be taken as subversive. People often called him a “natural, unlearned genius” though that comment probably gained popularity due to the Romantics love of that kind of thing.

But it is also important to remember that when a piece of literary criticism mentions “Shakespeare” they might be referring to the canon of Shakespeare’s writing, rather than the man himself. And any arguments they make about the text thus no longer depend one bit on the man himself, and become very easy to divorce from time and place. The gender bending in Shakespeare might not have been subversive for the Globe stage in the 1500’s, but if an all women’s Shakespeare troop preforms the Twelfth Night for an AIDS benefit, suddenly the genderbending becomes very subversive. It’s part of what happens when you allow for Death of the Author - it also kind of kills the original context. (OP did touch on this)

Which takes me to the part I take issue with the most in the original post.

Of COURSE Shakespeare’s canon is relevant to today’s youth. How could it be relevant and critical to every art movement up through the 20th century and suddenly stop?

How are two teenagers, restricted by their parents generations war, stuck in a city plagued by gang violence, caught up in a youthful passion turned tragic NOT relevant to inner city kids? Did you miss West Side Story?

How is Othello and Merchant of Venice not important to students facing discrimination today? Are there no more young women whose lives are controlled and constrained by men?

I mean, here, have a screenshot from a mid 1990’s cartoon from a franchise still making millions in the box office.image

image

He does the whole quotation, but I am not going to subject anyone to more of that animation style. I mean, you’ll be pretty hard pressed to find a Jewish High School in this country that doesn’t make it’s students read that play and discuss it on length. Or HERE is a link to a Key and Peele sketch from this year on Othello, for that perspective.

By the way, OP, I mean you no ill will, if you even read this - this post was stuck in my drafts for who knows how long basically until I had the brain power to get around to typing until I had an excuse to make everyone look at 1990’s animated Hank McCoy.

resurrecttheliving:

Scientific explanations of witch hunts/trials tho. Like, yeah, no, none of these weird, specific signs and symptoms have any cultural relevance worth uncovering and studying, we can just attribute it all to molds and ticks. You figured it out, science. Great job.

image

I can’t speak more broadly to like, all witch trials ever, but like, Reginald Scot in the 1500’s basically was like “witches are either nuts, have convinced themselves of lies, catholic and thus stupid, or scammers. I am now going to go undercover and learn how to do every street magic known in england to prove it.” It resulted in a really cool first book of stage and street magic, but also, more relevant - people were totally saying it was BS from way back.

But- but like. Again, I have only really read up on Salem, but, some of that shit sounds just like modern UFO encounter stuff. Bright lights descending from the sky, slowly drawing people in, people feeling stuck in place, glowing balls of light that zoom into peoples bodies, floating cows… I mean, it was uncanny reading it because it was the same stuff that in the 1960’s people were like “this is obvious cold war paranoia”.

So I mean, I am not saying it is aliens, I actually think it is more likely to be this science stuff.

Which is not to say that science explains any of the little yellow birds or specific narratives from black slave traditions that got corrupted by a gaggle of girls or any possible folk or witchcraft that may or may not have been happening, or the sexualization of women’s bodies and the assumption that any abnormality on a women’s body was satanic and evil. Or the fact that a lot of the complaints sound like sexual fantasies/fears or illicit affairs or jealousies - that there is some element of Enlightenment masculine fear over the unknown working itself out here… these are probably still things worth looking at critically.

Like it is really a very shallow reading of social history to think that humans can’t be pushed by just social pressures to do something like this. I mean, even if maybe one or two cases in one or two places had something to do with ergot or something, that wasn’t the case in salem - where if you look at the documents is all about grievances and vengeance and a community that was all into knowing everyone’s business and also remaining all prim and proper about it.

I think things like sleep paralysis and migraine aura and maybe some fear hallucinations and the occasional bad wheat stalk might have added to the fury of it all or even been the spark in some places, but racism and religious passion and national fervor were more than enough kindling. I mean. The testimonies in Salem talk constantly about a “Black Man” in place of the word Devil, and the Black Man is also sometimes said to look like an Indian, and then the Witches fly off with the slaves to a pow wow in the woods. That is not ergot. 

All that being said, farmers’ reporting seeing weird shit* at night has sounded very similar for over 300 years and maybe there is science causes in there to.

Or aliens. Don’t despair Mulder, it could still be aliens.

*here is a sample, from Cotton Mathers contemporaneous reporting in Wonders of the Invisible World -

“John Pressy testify’d, That being one Evening very unaccountably Bewildred, near a field of Martins, and several times, as one under an Enchantment, returning to the place he had left, at length he saw a marvellous Light, about the Bigness of an Half-Bushel, near two Rod out of the way. He went, and struck at it with a Stick, and laid it on with all his might. He gave it near forty blows; and felt it a palpable substance. But going from it, his Heels were struck up, and he was laid with his Back on the Ground, Sliding, as he thought, into a Pit; from whence he recover’d, by taking hold on the Bush; altho’ afterwards he could find no such Pit in the place.”

Images: POC featured in shots from the crowd at Laketown in The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. Exposure of images has been altered to compensate for the low saturation point of 3D movie shooting as well as generally crappy cinematography.

The second Hobbit movie was pretty terrible. I am not going to pretend otherwise. But this is not a post for me to talk about how Peter Jackson has ruined his reputation and thrown out everything that made the Lord of the Rings great. No, this is a post to point out the one good thing the movie did - better than the production team of the LotR movies and better than most fantasy movies I have seen.

For those of you who don’t know much about Tolkiens original mythos, it was pretty racist. The men of Middle Earth, which is not all of the whole of the world (arda), are white. There are other areas, whose people are described as ‘swarthy’ or 'having dark complexions’ and their military tactics and clothing are taken pretty much directly from East Asian, African, and South-Asian cultures. These races are all, at the time of LotR, sided with Sauron or Evil in some way. In the books, people with these ancestries are pretty universally no good. Here is a page with a good summery of all of the really problematic things as well as the common defenses you might here.

Now, someone could choose to take a very strict to canon approach and say that the population of Lake Town would not have been so diverse, based on Tolkien’s writings. If such a person has voiced such an opinion, though, they probably shouldn’t have gotten to this part of the film because this film was so far from the canon of the books that if this is what you are complaining about kindly rethink your life.

But even, theoretically, if Peter Jackson hadn’t decided to replace his brain with all the Oscars he won for The Return of the King and had made a Hobbit movie that was about as true as to Tolkien as the LotR movies were and even half as good, I still think there is absolutely no reason to choose to preserve that level of racism and racial exclusion in a fantasy work.

The choice to not only include POC in this crowd (however badly the crowd acting was directed), but have them front and center is important. Not that POC had any speaking roles, but they were there, in Middle Earth, playing everyday, non-evil people.

Visually, I personally was plenty represented by the likes of Aragorn, the people of Gondor or the Dwarves (though more female characters would have been nice), so I can’t say what this might mean to a fan of the movies, books, or world who was previously rather conspicuously missing, except under blatantly ethnic-coded costume battling against the heroes in the third film.

But seeing all of the things still going around about Frozen (a fantasy film set in a real-ish place at a ??? time with plenty of historical and geographic inaccuracy that has to reject actual history to not have POC) and Tangled (a fantasy film set in a make believe place at no set time with no canon to reject and no POC) I thought I would point this out, because I hadn’t seen anyone do this yet.

By the way, I think overall, both Tangled and Frozen were infinitely better films than this pile of horse poop. In like every way (this franchise is 5 movies running without passing the Bechdel Test). So it’s even more remarkable that it managed to outdo so many speculative fiction movies on racial representation.

(I will be happy to be proven wrong if someone can find a shot of POC in the LotR movies. There may be some amongst the heavily armored and hidden riders that are impossible to make out on a computer screen…)

Abuse Is Not Kawaii: The many forms of abuse in the Loveless universe.

turn-loose-the-swans:

thepalebride:

In the almost-a-decade I’ve been in the English-speaking Loveless fandom, I’ve noticed a wide range of reactions to the characters and relationships in the series. I’ve had amazing conversations about characterization and motives with some really wonderful people… and on the flip side, I’ve seen a large segment of the fandom who would rather coo over how cute Soubi/Ritsuka is as a pairing than examine the ways it isn’t cute.

I’ll admit that all those years ago, it was the cuteness aspect that got me into Loveless. But I stayed interested because of Kouga Yun’s talent for writing incredibly screwed-up characters realistically, while acknowledging that they’re unhealthy and that their actions have consequences. As an abuse survivor myself, it means a great deal to me to be able to see realistically portrayed survivors in a series I love - and it bothers me that people are so quick to overlook what I feel is one of Loveless’ main draws.

Under the cut, I look at the main abusers in the Loveless universe, and how their actions affect the other characters and the plot.

Read More

Amen to all that! (Except to some finer points of your take on Soubi’s psychology, but that’s beside the point right now.) Really, when people start going on about how cute Soubi and Ritsuka’s kisses are and how we need to see more of them in canon, I always wonder if they deliberately ignore the fact that every time that Soubi kisses Ritsuka, he physically restraints him, either by forcefully holding his face still or by trapping Ritsuka’s wrists to prevent him from getting away. Every. Single. One.
And that’s not kawaii.
Especially because Soubi is well aware that Ritsuka is emotionally fragile and ready to go to any length to be loved, as witnessed by his comments during their ride to Goura with Kio or after seeing Ritsuka standing up for his mother after she hurt him during one of her episodes. I totally admit being a  big sucker for shared hugs between them because Ritsuka actually wants to be hugged and to be honest, he *really* needs to be hugged (okay, scratch that, given all that is going on in his life right now, *I* need badly someone to hug him and to tell him that everything is going to be okay), but anything else is really pushing the envelope, and was even pictured this way in the story; even the male Zero called out Soubi on his “friendly" kisses.
But then, Soubi was never pictured as a perfectly nice character to begin with. Someone who is hurting, yes, but also someone who can’t stop himself from hurting others, precisely because he’s hurting.
(Also, ten years in the fandom!? Wow, that’s some staying power!)

The abuse is even more wide spread than this post makes it sound. Nagisa is abusive to both sets of zeroes she creates. She creates human beings, and beyond biological manipulation, she believes she has the right to treat them however she wants. It is more than a mentor-ship relationship, as she plays favorites and tells her “children” to discard their pairs and in general do horrible things to others.

Ritsuka’s doctor treats that relationship inappropriately.

Even in the lighter school chapters, there is rampant abuse. Yuiko is bullied in school and neglected at home - forced to eat convenient store food and entertain herself. It might be less graphic than some of the other abuse, but neglect and bullying have clearly left her with a giant lack of self esteem.

Kio seems to come from an abusive family as well, through the effects of a tradition that sees him excluded from his family. It’s nicely mirroring the abuse in the academy structure of sending young children to fight and maim each other in the name of tradition and sacred bonds.

But what I think the series shows best about abuse is the idea of the cycle of violence. Soubi learns his abusive tendencies from his abusers, and their ruination of his own sense of agency has left him right on the path to becoming an abuser himself. A lot of the pairs we meet seem to have abusive tendencies, either to each other or others they encounter, and we know that the system of preparing them to be a bonded pair is abusive and rewards violence.

Misaki is another example of how abuse in Loveless (realistically) creates further situations for abuse. Misaki was manipulated by Seimei, and more or less neglected by her husband. In the newer chapters, it seems that her memories have been manipulated, either through spells or psychological abuse.

I think Ritsuka’s strength in the series comes from the fact that so far, he has resisted propagating that system of abuse - to the point where he sometimes overextends his compassion. Despite his facade of coldness, he goes out of his way to help people - to defend Yuiko against bullies, even before they become friends, forgive both pairs of Zeroes, and call of battles before inflicted too much harm. He is so concerned with the feelings of others that he denies them to himself. He’s willingness to engage with Soubi despite his own discomfort - to stand up for his mother, despite her abuse towards him. At first, I read this as a victim coming to blame themselves and accept their abuse as “deserved” and I think, at the beginning of the manga, that is a lot of what is going on. But I think as he matures and becomes more sure of himself, rather than let himself become overrun by the world of abuse around him, Ritsuka seeks to understand the pain and mend it where he can. He goes out of his way to avoid causing pain.

I have my own theory as to what the name Loveless means in the context of his manga. “Love” is tied in so heavily with abuse and harm in this series and even more so when it associated with fighter/sacrifice pairs. The rhetoric behind the dynamic is full of emotional and psychological abuse - talk of destiny and ownership, wrapped together in a dangerous package. The only pairs we see have a remotely healthy love for each other (as opposed to abusive love, annomosity, or more of a friendship) are either very new to the dynamic or have actively dissociated themselves from the world of Seven Moons (like the Zeroes.)

Thus, “Love” in the context of names, is linked with abuse and manipulation and power. Look no further than the name “Beloved” whose barer truly loves no one, but manipulates everyone.

His opposite is Ritsuka’s blunt honest and desire to find good in other people. Ritsuka avoids the manipulation and grasps at power that seems to encapsulate the word “love” in much of the Loveless world. By avoiding this kind of poisonous “love” he is Loveless.