Obama Puts Science on the Agenda

"Today, more than ever before, science holds the key to our survival as a planet and our security and prosperity as a nation. It’s time we once again put science at the top of our agenda and worked to restore America’s place as the world leader in science and technology." - President Barack Obama

On the topic of integrity in science, the executive office is taking comments until May 13, 2009.

http://edocket.access.gpo.gov/2009/E9-9307.htm

Smart People Really Do Think Faster: I Don't Think So!

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=102169531

Well this is an interesting story that just aired on NPR. It contains some beautiful visualizations of the brain. But, I have to say that my initial reaction is that speed alone is not what makes people smart, although I'm sure smart people do think faster.

Think about it. If you have just the tiniest bit of craziness in your brain, and you think faster, that has to exponentially increase your chances of being totally crazy. It cannot be speed that makes one intelligent, because speed would just create a mass of chaos in your head.

Instead, it has to be the right kind of speed with the right kind of information. There has to be the ability to sort information, slow some of it down, and stop some of it completely.

So now I'm wondering if, like, bi-polar individuals and/or schizophrenics are people whose brains have great speed without the ability to slow or stop or erase the information we need to in order to not have hallucinations and/or paranoia. I've read lots of stuff that says artistic and/or creative people have been known to also be a little bit crazy. (I mean crazy in a loving way, not a derogatory way).

Probably, the creative crazies are just really smart people, with fast brain speeds, who don't enjoin certain kinds of information from traveling throughout their heads.

It reminds me a lot of the Internet, because the Internet lets good stuff proliferate, but it also lets crazy, bad, insane, wrong, and illegal stuff proliferate too.

Why Do We Continue to Use Letters of Recommendation?

Letters of recommendation, as far as I know, have been around since the dawn of man.

Why?

Why do we use letters of recommendation?

Well, the answer is not simple, but the fact that we do use them provides empirical evidence in support of some of Latour's theory.

He states:

"Who will win in an agnostic encounter between two authors and between them and all the others they need to build up a statement S? Answer: the one able to muster on the spot the largest number of well aligned and faithful allies." (1986, Drawing things together, p. 23)

The letters do the work of bringing back things, your allies, and presenting them all in one place for your audience.

Latour states:

"If you wish to go out of your way and come back heavily equipped so as to force others to go out of their ways, the main problem to solve is that of mobilization. You have to go and to come back with the "things" if your moves are not to be wasted. But the "things" have to be able to withstand the return trip without withering away. Further requirements: the "things" you gathered and displaced have to be presentable all at once to those you want to convince and who did not go there. In sum you have to invent objects which have the properties of being mobile but also immutable, presentable, readable, and combinable with one another." (1986, p. 7, Visualization and Cognition).

Thus, I say, we have the letter of recommendation. A service like interfolio.com increases both the immutability and the mobility of these letters.

Here, letters of recommendation are symmetrical to the citations on a reference page. Those citations accomplish the same results, in that they bring the "thing" back to one location, and as they appear in the reference list, have the properties of being mobile but also immutable, presentable, readable, and combinable with one another.

What does Latour say about research, reading, and writing?

Below is one of my favorite quotes from Bruno Latour, and a quote that sustained me during the dissertation process, and that helped me place the dissertation experience in perspective. I thought about this all the time when I was conducting research, talking with advisors, interacting with my family, and writing up my findings.

Begin quote:

What is an account? It is typically a _text_, a small ream of paper a few millimeters thick that is darkened by a laser beam. It may contain 10,000 words and be read by very few people, often only a dozen or a few hundred if we are really fortunate. A 50,000 word thesis might be read by half a dozen people (if you are lucky, even your PhD advisor would have read parts of it!) and when I say ‘read’, it does not mean ‘understood’, ‘put to use’, ‘acknowledged’, but rather ‘perused’, ‘glanced at’, ‘alluded to’, ‘quoted’, ‘shelved somewhere in a pile’. At best, we add an account to all those which are simultaneously launched in the domain we have been studying. Of course, this study is never complete. We start in the middle of things, _in medias res_, pressed by our colleagues, pushed by fellowships, starved for money, strangled by deadlines. And most of the things we have been studying, we have ignored or misunderstood. Action had already started; it will continue when we will no longer be around. What we are doing in the field – conducting interviews, passing out questionnaires, taking notes and pictures, shooting films, leafing through the documentation, clumsily loafing around – is unclear to the people with whom we have shared no more than a fleeting moment. What the clients (research centers, state agencies, company boards, NGOs) who have sent us there expect from us remains cloaked in mystery, so circuitous was the road that led to the choice of this investigator, this topic, this method, this site. Even when we are in the midst of things, with our eyes and ears on the lookout, we miss most of what has happened. We are told the day after that crucial events have taken place, just next door, just a minute before, just when we had left exhausted with our tape recorder mute because of some battery failure. Even if we work diligently, things don’t get better because, after a few months, we are sunk in a flood of data, reports, transcripts, tables, statistics, and articles. How does one make sense of this mess as it piles up on our desks and fills countless disks with data? Sadly, it often remains to be written and is usually delayed. It rots there as advisors, sponsors, and clients are shouting at you and lovers, spouses, and kids are angry at you while you rummage about in this dark sludge of data to bring light to the world. And when you begin to write in earnest, finally pleased with yourself, you have to sacrifice vast amounts of data that cannot fit in the small number of pages allotted to you. How frustrating this whole business of studying is.

And yet, is this not the way of all flesh? No matter how grandiose the perspective, no matter how scientific the outlook, no matter how tough the requirements, no matter how astute the advisor, the result of the inquiry – in 99% of the cases – will be a report prepared under immense duress on a topic requested by some colleagues for reasons that will remain for the most part unexplained. And that is excellent because _there is no better way_.

From Reassembling the Social, pages 122-123