Maybe we should outlaw ownership of guns by men?

It has been pointed out many times that there is one almost perfect correlation in the US’s mass shootings: it’s not that they’re done by Muslims (that would be laughably false, if it weren’t a conclusion that is harming innocents). It’s that almost all of the mass shootings are done by men. Soraya Chemaly points out something that is almost as terrible: most of their murder sprees begin with killing women and children.

As Huffington Post reporter Melissa Jeltsen wrote last year, “The untold story of mass shootings in America is one of domestic violence.” According to a conservative estimate by the FBI, 57 percent of the mass shootings (involving more than four victims) between January 2009 and June 2014 involved a perpetrator killing an intimate partner or other family member. In other words, men killing women intimates and their children and relatives are the country’s prototypical mass shooters; these killings are horrifyingly common. In fact, on Sunday, while the world watched in horror as news poured out of Orlando, a man in New Mexico was arrested in the fatal shooting deaths of his wife and four daughters.

Even when intimate partners are not involved, gender and the dynamics of gender are salient. According to one detailed analysis, 64 percent of the victims of mass murders are women and children, and yet the role that masculinity and aggrieved male entitlement plays is largely sidelined. Schools, for example, make up 10 percent of the sites of mass shootings in the U.S., and women and girls are twice as likely to die in school shootings. Gyms, shopping malls and places of worship are also frequent targets, and are similarly places where women and girls are predictably present in greater numbers.

Also chilling is how we look the other way.

The Washington Post reported Monday that “although family members said Mateen had expressed anger about homosexuality, the shooter had no record of previous hate crimes.” But that depends on how you categorize domestic violence.

There are people who think domestic violence doesn’t even count as violence. The Bible condones beating your wife, so do some factions in Islam, and there are always idiots who argue that rape in marriage is impossible.

It makes me wonder how much courage it takes for a woman to enter into any kind of relationship with a man.

Make Britain Great Again?

It’s become obvious recently that the political world has descended into madness. I thought the American elections were an embarrassment, but it seems that some people, to persuade others that the United Kingdom ought to leave the European Union, thought that the best argument they could make was to sail boats up the Thames and splash water on the boats of the people who think they should remain in the Union. On the scale of the great naval battles in English history, it was no Trafalgar.

I thought it was all pretty silly, especially when I saw who was leading the Brexit Armada.

admiralnigel

Oh, jebus, the gormless Nigel Farage. I cannot take this seriously.

Do you think he bought the double-breasted blue blazer just for this event, because he thought it was what all the high-class yachting types wear?

Oh, Apple!

Apple had a keynote yesterday. I did not pay attention — I usually wait for products to hit the market, and then wait a year or two for prices to come down before caring much about the latest gadget — but they did something embarrassing. They made a big deal about an app called “Breathe”. It’s a mindfulness app, and they plugged it with a great big quote on the screen.

choprasaying

DEEPAK BULLSHITTING CHOPRA? Apple thinks a Chopraesque silly app for the Apple Watch is worth highlighting in one of their high hype twice-yearly keynotes? Well, that tells me something: that I don’t care what else was announced. It must have been mighty feeble to leave room for Chopra.

And then, it’s a mindfulness app, which has clearly become the pseudoscience fad of the year.

The value of Chopra’s own ideas and recommendations are dubious—to the point that some of his Tweets have been deemed indistinguishable from bullshit. And according to some experts, mindfulness apps are just as questionable. “Science behind mindfulness apps shows most don’t help or work,” tweeted Harvard psychiatrist John Torous, who is also the editor-in-chief of the JMIR Mental Health journal. Torous later told Fast Company that these types of apps are increasingly being investigated by experts. “These companies are very bold in their claims, and very quiet when things don’t work,” he said. “It is premature to say the mindfulness app space is well-validated at this time.”

This is actually a problem with most “mental health” apps, which a study in Nature earlier this year determined can sometimes give improper advice that makes people’s conditions worse. A 2015 study by Institute of Health & Biomedical Innovation at the Queensland University of Technology in Australia looked at 606 mindfulness apps and determined that only 23 actually taught mindfulness techniques. The rest were just timers or reminders—most of them told users to stop what they were doing and breathe.

Yeah, if you’re in the market for an app that will remind you to breathe, maybe you need this thing.

Otherwise, I haven’t seen much to distinguish mindfulness from mindlessness.

One of those days…

I was up half the night with a toothache, so I’m off to the dentist for an emergency fix. I’m lucky — I have dental insurance. I’ve known people who suffered with this kind of thing for months before being able to get in and get taken care of, because America.

Then after that, there’s a vigil on campus for the Orlando victims — 4:30 in the student union. If you’re in the area, you’re welcome to stop by. We’re having this event also because America.

Flattery just awakens me to the greater potential for failure

I get so much hate mail that I’ve become numb to it — I check it out in case there are grounds for amusement in it, and then automatically hit delete. Delete, delete, delete, delete…and sometimes I get lazy and just “select all” and then delete once. And then every once in a great while, I get a nice email, which mainly stirs up feelings of puzzlement. I have to stare at it and try to decipher the words, and all the while I’m wondering whether I’m being trolled or set up, or whether I’m being blasted with sarcasm. I can take the hate in stride nowadays, but pleasant email gives me a sensation akin to a stifled hiccup or sneeze, and it’s a little distressing.

I think there’s probably something wrong with my head after too many years of this. I should probably get therapy, but if I started caring what the assholes said about me it might be fatal.

Anyway, just because it’s unusual, I include the content of the message below.

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I must be a lousy teacher

Because my student evaluation of teaching scores are pretty good. Not the best, but OK. And SETs are terrible ways to assess teaching.

These kinds of evaluations are ubiquitous in the US university system, and they kind of drive me crazy: we’re expected to report the details of these numerical scores in our annual reports, I’ve been in meetings where we drone on about the statistics of these things, and of course everyone is expected to get above average scores on them. Personally, I find them totally useless, have no idea how to get a number 5 to a number 6, and basically ignore (except when making my yearly bureaucratic obeisance) the trivial 5 question numerical, so-called “quantitative” part of the student evaluations. What is far more useful are the short comments students get to make on the form: that actually tells me what parts of the class some students disliked, and what parts they found memorable and useful.

I’m not alone. Others find them useless, for good reasons.

There is one important difference between customer evaluations of commercial and educational service providers. Whereas with commercial providers ratings are unilateral, ratings are mutual in the education system. As well as students evaluating their teachers, instructors evaluate their students – such as by their exam performance. In US studies, these ratings have been found to be positively correlated: students who receive better grades also give more positive evaluations of their instructors. Furthermore, courses whose students earn higher grade point averages also receive more positive average ratings.

Proponents of SETs interpret these correlations as an indication of the validity of these evaluations as a measure of teacher effectiveness: students, they argue, learn more in courses that are taught well – therefore, they receive better grades. But critics argue that SETs assess students’ enjoyment of a course, which does not necessarily reflect the quality of teaching or their acquisition of knowledge. Many students would like to get good grades without having to invest too much time (because that would conflict with their social life or their ability to hold down part-time jobs). Therefore, instructors who require their students to attend classes and do a lot of demanding coursework are at risk of receiving poor ratings. And since poor teaching ratings could have damaging effects at their next salary review, instructors might decide to lower their course requirements and grade leniently. Thus, paradoxically, they become less effective teachers in order to achieve better teaching ratings.

The article goes on to show that by several criteria, what student evaluations actually assess is the easiness of a course, and how little the students are challenged by the material.

There’s more to it than that, of course. My campus has a lot of faculty who have won teaching awards, and we have a reputation for being demanding and resisting the trend towards grade inflation, and I know many of them are getting their high SET scores by being engaging and enthusiastic and making students think. Those are important aspects of teaching. But we ought to also be measuring faculty effectiveness at teaching the material, and those little forms don’t do it.

Because student ratings appear to reflect their enjoyment of a course and because teacher strategies that result in knowledge acquisition (such as requiring demanding homework and regular course attendance) decrease students’ course enjoyment, SETs are at best a biased measure of teacher effectiveness. Adopting them as one of the central planks of an exercise purporting to assess teaching excellence and dictating universities’ ability to raise tuition fees seems misguided at best.

Now throw in the fact that SETs are systematically biased against women faculty and that students tend to downgrade minority faculty (they are reflecting cultural biases all too well), and you’ve got a whole grand tower of required makework that doesn’t do the job, and also reinforces trends that we all say we oppose.

We’re all gonna die of cancer

Not this again. CNN is running another article about “X causes cancer!”, where in this case X is coffee. Not regular coffee, just very hot coffee. That is, coffee served at a temperature high enough to cause painful burns might also increase the incidence of esophageal cancer.

Huh. OK. You know, living causes cancer. Epidemiological studies like the one cited are important for identifying possible problems, but your whole life is a great long exercise in risk management where you balance doing things against cowering in terror. We have to consider realistic assessment of risk. So I was going to actually read the study (the short summary given is that an analysis of a thousand studies found that “drinks consumed at very hot temperatures were linked to cancer of the esophagus in humans”, but no numbers were given), but CNN screwed up: their link to the study goes to a paper on the carcinogenicity of pesticides in the Lancet instead. I thought I’d rummage around and try to find it myself, but instead I found this editorial in the latest issue which was pretty good, much better than yet another study that finds a superficial cancer link. So I’m including the whole thing right here.

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