Some people don’t know how to handle bad weather

It’s cold out there. So cold that last night, I got this weather alert:

The Stevens County Sheriff is advising NO TRAVEL in Stevens County. It is unsafe to travel and roadways are blown closed with hard packed snow. The County plows will not go out until the wind goes down. Again, NO TRAVEL ADVISED IN STEVENS COUNTY until conditions improve.

That’s right, it was so cold and blizzardy that the snow plows weren’t running. So we waited to hear what the university was going to do. And we waited. And waited. UMM’s official policy is to send out notices about any class cancellations due to weather by 5am on the day of the affected classes, so of course we get notice at…5am this morning. The university is opening 2 hours late, so morning classes are cancelled (which doesn’t affect me or my students at all).

I can understand the dilemma. University schedules are tight; unlike the public schools, which can simply add extra days to the end of the school year to make up snow days, any lost classes are just that, lost. Students are paying good money for those classes, and our curricula are often fairly tight, so losing a day without a makeup can mean some critical subject isn’t as well covered in lecture.

On the other hand, dying or getting injured on hazardous roads blows an even bigger hole in the learning experience.

I think university administrators are quite aware of the conundrum. You’d think students would be aware, too — they’re paying $12,000/year for these classes, you’d think they’d express some resistance or at least hesitation about wanting classes shut down.

Not at the University of Illinois. Some students really, really wanted a snow day. What do they think this is, sixth grade? They got so irate about the fact that the chancellor did not cancel classes today, that they took to Twitter to complain bitterly about having to go to school…and very quickly the complaints descended into sexist and racist remarks about the chancellor, who is a woman of Asian descent.

Don’t do that, children.

College students are adults. You weigh the consequences. UMM is largely a residential school, so it’s not a big deal when we have to stay open during bad weather…but some students do commute, and are going to have a more difficult time. I say, think about your personal circumstances and do what you have to do; you can’t make it to class without putting yourself in peril, then don’t. I have students who’ve written to say that they can’t make it, and that’s all right, I understand and won’t penalize them. I’ll help them go over the material if they stop by my office later.

That’s how adults handle these little setbacks.

But if you’re pissed off because the university tells you that you don’t get a day off from school, a day you’ve already paid for, so pissed off that you start ranting like this:

@goombatoomba
Asians and women aren’t responsible for their actions #FuckPhyllis

@AndreiAndreev33
It’s going to be -27 without wind chill tomorrow morning and I have class at 8 #FuckPhyllis #Cunt #Bitch #Whore

@kimiskis
phyllis can go shove tomorrow’s weather up her wideset vagina. #fuckphyllis

@kelsbear9
In a room with Phyllis Wise, Adolf Hitler, and a gun with one bullet. Who do I shoot? #fuckphyllis

You know, I don’t think the university would be out of line to add an additional requirement that you take a course in Remedial Humanity before they allow you to graduate.

I’ve been doing it wrong

Xavier Di Petta and Kyle Cameron are 17 and 19 years old, and they’re making very good money out of Twitter. $44,000 a month? On Twitter? Tell me your one weird tip for doing this, please.

They met hustling on YouTube when they were 13 and 15, respectively, and they’ve been doing social media things together (off and on) since. They’ve built YouTube accounts, making money off advertising. They created Facebook pages such as "Long romantic walks to the fridge," which garnered more than 10 million Likes, and sold them off. More recently, Di Petta’s company, Swift Fox Labs, has hired a dozen employees, and can bring in, according to an Australian news story, 50,000 Australian dollars a month (or roughly 43,800 USD at current exchange rates). 

But @HistoryInPics may be the duo’s biggest creation. In the last three months, this account, which tweets photographs of the past with one-line descriptions, has added more than 500,000 followers to bring their total to 890,000 followers. (The account was only established in July of 2013.) If the trend line continues, they’ll hit a million followers next month.

OK, but how? They’ve got several twitter accounts that regularly post popular material, and they build up the stats and then sell them off. I don’t even understand the business of selling twitter accounts — doesn’t it mean that the personal nature of the account is completely missing?

It’s not just @HistoryInPics, either. They’re also behind @EarthPix, which has similarly staggering stats, and several comedy accounts that they’re in the process of selling that I agreed not to disclose. They’ve got at least five accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers and engagement metrics that any media company would kill for right now.

How do they do it? Once they had one account with some followers, they used it to promote other ones that could capitalize on trends they saw in social-media sharing. “We normally identify trends (or create them haha). We then turn them into a Twitter account,” Di Petta said in an IM conversation. “Share them on established pages, and after 50,000 – 100,000 followers they’ve gained enough momentum to become ‘viral’ without further promotion.”

Huh? I have 140,000 followers on twitter right now! Time to take over the world!

Except…as the story goes on, it becomes quite clear that the secret of their success is parasitism. They don’t actually create any content: they just monetize this abstract entity called ‘traffic’, and yes, they do create traffic. But the way they do it is to steal photographs taken by talented photographers and dump them at regular intervals on twitter without attribution, and most importantly, without paying their content creators. If they actually had to make micropayments to the people who provide the material that drives interest and builds the traffic they’re selling, their profits would take a nosedive.

They can’t even be bothered to acknowledge who created the images.

“It would not be practical,” he said. “The majority of the photographers are deceased. Or hard to find who took the images.”

One writer took the time to track down the names of the photographers for a couple of the images they used: it took four minutes. I don’t think their profit margins are so thin that they can’t do that.

I can sort of see the temptation. Use Google’s image search, and it dumps thousands of images on any topic right into your lap, and some of them are so ubiquitous, have so many sources, that it’s hard to trace them back to the one original source. I’ve used ‘generic’ images myself, but I’ve been trying hard to include source information for most of them nowadays — all the Friday Cephalopods, for instance, get a link to the photographer or online source.

I guess I’m going to have to give up my idea of getting rich off my twitter account. All it contains are my words, rather than the art and information at high density produced by swarms of unsourced, talented people around the world. Darn it.

Henry Gee is gently, delicately, softly chastised

Nature has posted a rebuke to one of their employees for outing a pseudonymous blogger.

We would not normally comment on a point of view expressed by an employee in a personal capacity and in their personal time. However, as Nature was mentioned in a recent personal Twitter post by a Nature editor, it is necessary for us to clarify our views and policies. Firstly, we are pleased that the editor in this case has apologised to Dr Isis for the language used and for the fact that her identity was revealed. We also wish to make clear that both the language and behaviour are contrary to Nature’s principles and codes of editorial practice, and indeed contrary to the practices of all our editors. We encourage civility and respect on social media by our employees, and hope for similar standards from those we interact with. Blindness to the status of research authors is enshrined in our editorial selection policies and practices, as is the respect for, and protection of, anonymity. We take our responsibilities to our authors and reviewers seriously and we protect the identities of anonymous reviewers, manuscript authors or authors of magazine articles. Our policies on anonymity are detailed on our author and reviewer services pages: http://www.nature.com/authors/index.html. We continue to listen to reactions and are carefully considering the issues. The history and circumstances are complex, so we will not be commenting further on the specifics at this time.

The only comment directed at the offending employee begins with “we are pleased”. Wait, did I say “chastised” and “rebuked”? My error. I meant to say “lovingly stroked.”

This is how Nature‘s reputation gets dethroned, you know.

How Grantland totally failed

The only thing keeping me from assuming that Grantland, which published that awful outing of a transgender woman, is a haven of unethical wankerism, is that one of their writers, Christina Kahrl, seems to get it.

It was not Grantland’s job to out Essay Anne Vanderbilt, but it was done, carelessly. Not simply with the story’s posthumous publication; that kind of casual cruelty is weekly fare visited upon transgender murder victims in newspapers across the country. No, what Hannan apparently did was worse: Upon making the unavoidable discovery that Vanderbilt’s background didn’t stand up to scrutiny, he didn’t reassure her that her gender identity wasn’t germane to the broader problems he’d uncovered with her story. Rather, he provided this tidbit to one of the investors in her company in a gratuitous “gotcha” moment that reflects how little thought he’d given the matter. Maybe it was relevant for him to inform the investor that she wasn’t a physicist and probably didn’t work on the stealth bomber and probably also wasn’t a Vanderbilt cut from the same cloth as the original Commodore. But revealing her gender identity was ultimately as dangerous as it was thoughtless.

What should Grantland have done instead? It really should have simply stuck with debunking those claims to education and professional expertise relevant to the putter itself, dropped the element of her gender identity if she didn’t want that to be public information — as she very clearly did not — and left it at that. “That would have been responsible,” transgender activist Antonia Elle d’Orsay suggested when I asked for her thoughts on this road not taken. It’s certainly the path I would have chosen as a writer making this sort of accidental discovery, or would have insisted upon as an editor.

The editor of Grantland, Bill Simmons, on the other hand…ouch. He’s got a long, long mea culpa out that at least clearly admits that they screwed up, but also admits that the problem runs very deep.

Before we officially decided to post Caleb’s piece, we tried to stick as many trained eyeballs on it as possible. Somewhere between 13 and 15 people read the piece in all, including every senior editor but one, our two lead copy desk editors, our publisher and even ESPN.com’s editor-in-chief. All of them were blown away by the piece. Everyone thought we should run it. Ultimately, it was my call. So if you want to rip anyone involved in this process, please, direct your anger and your invective at me. Don’t blame Caleb or anyone that works for me. It’s my site and anything this significant is my call. Blame me. I didn’t ask the biggest and most important question before we ran it — that’s my fault and only my fault.

So it was run past more than a dozen editors at Grantland, and none of them had a problem with the fact that it was all about othering a trans woman, a woman who killed herself over the story? Wow. Grantland really sucks.

He’s also still making excuses for Caleb Hannan.

As for Caleb, I continue to be disappointed that we failed him. It’s our responsibility to motivate our writers, put them in a position to succeed, improve their pieces as much as we possibly can, and most of all protect them from coming off badly. We didn’t do that here. Seeing so many people direct their outrage at one of our writers, and not our website as a whole, was profoundly upsetting for us. Our writers don’t post their stories themselves. It’s a team effort. We all failed. And ultimately, I failed the most because it’s my site and it was my call.

That’s nice. Right. As he explains, Hannan was writing this long independent piece on a putter that didn’t gel for them until he added this twist that the designer was exposed as one of those weird trans people, making it supposedly compelling and interesting…to a large team of editors that didn’t include one member of the trans community. Yeah, Grantland has a big problem, but that doesn’t excuse Hannan at all.

I’ll also point out the assessment of the article by Boing Boing. The story wasn’t that good; it relied on bringing out a string of gotchas culminating in the big weird reveal of a dead trans woman.

Another thing: critics keep saying that Hannan’s article was great storytelling, hiding terrible ethics. No. It’s a lurid mess. It’s written and paced like a 90’s-era daytime TV thriller, copying the structural and sensational qualities of other works without caring for how and why they work.

As for me, I continue to be disappointed that Grantland failed Dr V.

What the heck is wrong with Caleb Hannan?

Hannan is a sports writer who was writing a story about the design of a golf putter. Not my cup of tea, but OK, there are interesting physics and ergonomic issues there. Unfortunately, his story got side-tracked from the relevant and interesting and into the destructively personal by his bigotry.

The designer of the golf club was a Dr V. It was clear from their communications that Dr V was rather pretentious and committed to maintaining her privacy, insisting that any story be about the product not the developer, but she was also extremely helpful, making a custom club for Hannan and giving him help in using it. The club is apparently very good*, so it’s quality wasn’t misrepresented…but Hannan does some background work and discovers that Dr V had lied about her qualifications.

That’s legitimate for a journalist to do. A story about a mysterious designer who isn’t everything she claims to be, but has designed some great sports equipment? Sure. That’s a reasonable story.

But, sad to say, the story he wrote is centered rather differently, and reveals a great deal about Hannan’s biases and preconceptions. In an interview with another source, he learns something he considers horrible.

He was clearly trying to tell me something, which is why he began emphasizing certain words. Every time he said “she” or “her” I could practically see him making air quotes. Finally it hit me. Cliché or not, a chill actually ran up my spine.

“Are you trying to tell me that Essay Anne Vanderbilt was once a man?”

It took a moment for him to respond.

A couple of guys making air quotes about personal pronouns, and a “chill” running down his spine at the discovery that Dr V was a trans woman? I wonder if Caleb Hannan has figured out yet why Dr V was so insistent on keeping her self out of the story. Could it be because that’s how so many people react to her identity?

But no, Hannan just discovered that he now had a great hook for his story.

What began as a story about a brilliant woman with a new invention had turned into the tale of a troubled man who had invented a new life for himself.

Hannan told Dr V what he was going to publish. She was rightfully furious. If the science behind this putter was bogus, that would be reason for her to be angry at being exposed, but I’d support Hannan’s decision to publish it — using false credentials is news. But instead what was going to be a key point in this story was the unwilling outing of a trans woman, and especially given Hannan’s attitude that this was something “weird”, that should have been off-limits. Yes, tell me if someone is faking a degree from MIT. But a trans woman is not faking being a woman; she’s also not doing that for personal profit, but is instead entering a life of peril and contempt, as Hannan’s reaction shows.

Before the story was published, Dr V, Essay Anne Vanderbilt, committed suicide.

Caleb Hannan went ahead and published the story, complete with personal information about the woman, using masculine pronouns, referring to her by her previous name, and with the appalling gall of closing the story by calling it a “eulogy”. You would think having your subject kill herself over what you were doing would make you rethink; maybe go back and remove the sensationalism out of respect for the dead, and maybe recognize the magnitude of your bigotry and realize that you were letting that all hang out in the story, too. But no; he just went ahead and outed a dead trans woman against her will, and his editors also didn’t see a problem with printing it.

Oh, I know what’s wrong with Caleb Hannan. He doesn’t have a speck of conscience or empathy.

Melissa McEwan has an excellent summary of the unconscionable Mr Hannan’s actions. It was just a “strange” story to him, but it was Dr V’s life.

Here’s another good piece on this story: Dr. V Is Dead, Caleb Hannan Is Celebrated: Why We Can’t Accept Lazy, Transmisogynistic Journalism. A bit at the beginning really captures the depth of Hannan’s thinking.

A few hours later, when Wire editor Bill Wasik suggested on Twitter that Hannan’s investigation of Dr. V’s work and life contributed to her death, he replied “ouch.”

“Ouch.” A woman driven to suicide by Hannan’s article, and he says, “ouch.”

*The quality of the club is complicated. He raves about it at first, but then later says that maybe it was psychological — he thought it was great when he thought the designer was a physicist, but now it’s just gathering dust in his garage. He doesn’t consider the other side of the psychology: that maybe he’s avoiding using it since discovering that the designer was trans, and he clearly finds that creepy.

Like Snow White’s mom

The Kellers, those big name media people who punched down at a woman with cancer, are never going to live it down. I have been entertained by many take-downs on the internet (none of which will perturb the Kellers in their little bubble of arrogance), but one I particularly liked was Christie Aschwanden’s dissection of their errors. She hit on several major problems that I initially missed.

It’s Bill Keller’s complete failure to see the woman he saw fit to criticize that has ignited rage and charges of sexism. ("Whiny woman making a big fuss about cancer. Shush! Go pet your therapy dog!" tweeted Susan Orlean.) His grand (though by no means novel) ideas about death and dying blinded him to the human being he sought to exploit for his argument’s sake. He violated the journalists’ ethical obligation to treat the ill people they write about with respect and sensitivity. As a result, he didn’t open the discussion about dying that he’d intended, but instead provided the internet with one more example of female invisibility in the face of a powerful man with a big idea.

I wonder if we’ve been conditioned by that familiar Disney trope of the dead mother as a generic symbol of privation, with no specific consequences and no details about the individual. Women are supposed to die offstage so the hero can get on with his or her journey!

One thing I also found striking is that we talked about these same themes in my cancer class last semester — the problems with the ‘war’ model of cancer research, the ethics of dealing with death, etc. — and my students showed more awareness, sensitivity, and intelligence on these subjects than Bill Keller.

A conference gets cancelled

This is unfortunate: a SF con scheduled for Chicago this March had to cancel after a disagreement with the hotel.

We regret to inform you that Chi-Fi 2014 will not be taking place at the Westin Chicago River North as planned. After several meetings with the staff of the Westin, we had concerns about the ability of their staff to create a welcoming and accepting atmosphere towards our attendees. A senior Westin employee referred to our staff, attendees, and guests as “freaks,” and hotel staff expressed their disapproval of our anti-harassment policy. As we want to put the safety and enjoyment of our guests and attendees first, we requested that the hotel make changes to ensure that our attendees and guests be treated with the same respect as any other Westin hotel guests. By mutual decision, we agreed to part ways with the hotel. We wish to make clear that these views were expressed by staff of the Westin Chicago River North and do not reflect the opinions of the Westin brand or Starwood Hotels. We are grateful to certain individuals working for Westin and Starwood who have been supportive throughout these discussions. Our organization does not condone any sort of retaliatory actions against either Westin or Starwood.

“Freaks”? And why would the hotel want to argue with a policy that discourages harassment?

Oh, well, I’m disappointed with the Westin Chicago River North — a very unprofessional place, apparently — but am impressed with the management of the con. They’re rescheduling for 2015, and it sounds like the kind of event that cares about its attendees, and I hope they are well-attended.

Where a rational conversation about guns ought to start

The newspaper of record reflected the disease last night. They had an article about the man killed over texting during the previews at a movie that included this ridiculous paragraph.

The killing underscored the increased debate about when to use smartphones in public. In October, the singer Madonna was spotted texting during the Lincoln Center premiere of “12 Years a Slave.” That led Tim League, chief executive of Alama Drafthouse, a Texas-based chain of boutique cinemas, to post on Twitter that she was banned from watching movies at his theater.

No, it did not underscore that debate. It underscored the debate over whether we should continue to allow armed assholes to wander the streets freely. You know, that real issue that no one in America, including the New York Times, wants to deal with, because the proponents of armed assholery like to kill you if you disagree with them.

(By the way, if you go read that article now, you’ll discover that it has been cleansed of that astonishingly stupid paragraph.)

It’s about time the US had a rational discussion about gun control, though. It’s way past due, and the weird aversion to changing the way we manage guns has to be overcome. So here are my suggestions for a start.

  • Repeal the second amendment. All right, we don’t actually have a mechanism to strip that sucker out of there, but we can override it with a new amendment. Face it, the second amendment stinks: it’s an 18th century relic, it’s ambiguously worded (it’s about militias, people), and somehow stupid Americans have it fixed in their brains that the Constitution is sacred magic — all they have to do is shout, “Second amendment!” and we’re supposed to dissolve into accommodating bits of gelatin before them. We can criticize and revise the Constitution, you know; if you revere the Founding Fathers, you should at least still recognize that they thought an informed citizenry was important. You’re supposed to think, not just follow rules.

  • Regulate gun ownership. Regulate the heck out of it. I live in a state where all liquor sales, even of wine and beer, have to be made through state-licensed stores — but I can order a freaking AR-15 through reddit. This is absurd. End all the loopholes, including the gun show provisions. All gun sales must be made through strictly licensed dealers, with extensive background checks, and all gun sales must be made in person with photo ID and a permanent record made. Make gun ownership public: anyone and everyone can look up who owns guns and where the guns are.

    If you are a responsible gun owner who needs the tool for hunting deer, this should be no burden at all on you. I’m very suspicious of people who insist that their possession of a deadly weapon must be secret and untraceable, and that they must be allowed to buy it from the skeevy guy operating out of a trailer.

  • You have no right to carry a gun in any public place. No more concealed carry permits. No more “stand your ground” laws. Only authorized agents of the law should be carrying weapons in public, and even there, not all of them should be armed, and those who are, should be clearly and obviously armed. You’re packing heat in a movie theater? Fuck, WHY??.

  • End the “gun collector” excuse. I don’t believe the pretense that you’re merely building a historical archive, that you’re simply gathering Americana of note. Collect bottles or hubcaps, instead. If you must insist that you’re creating a museum, OK…then you won’t object if every weapon in your collection is thoroughly and irreversibly modified to be non-functional: firing pins removed, solid plugs placed in the barrel, mechanisms locked in place with a nice glop of super-glue. If you have religious reasaons that they must be functional, go collect old hand grenades and undetonated bombs. You’ll expunge yourself from the population soon enough.

    We have no problem recognizing that if you have a bale of marijuana in your garage you’re in the business of dealing, not just recreationally consuming, drugs. If you’re accumulating an arsenal of deadly weapons, this isn’t for your personal enjoyment any more, you’re up to nefarious purposes.

  • No more “self defense” excuse. The only people we need to defend ourselves from are the jerks who carry guns. And guns are a lousy instrument for self-defense — they’re indiscriminate and irreversible, they tend to punch holes in objects and people that we didn’t intend to punch holes in, and there are no take-backs after you punch a hole in someone by mistake.

    You want to defend yourself? Take a martial arts course. Too unathletic to do that, like me? Support your local police and have a phone by your bedside.

  • Change the culture. You may think you’re a macho stud when you swagger down the street with a pistol at your hip, but the rest of us think you’re a pathetic asshole who is not just stupid, but a real danger to others. The rest of us have to get that message across to the NRA membership.

    There are very few legitimate uses for guns by general citizens — hunting, target shooting — and none of those require assault rifles, secrecy, or huge stockpiles of guns and ammo. If you actually have a practical use for the gun as a tool, I can respect that and have no problem with it, just like people who have a use for a tractor. But you know, it’s a tool with a specific purpose, and the nitwits who want to extend that purpose to being a constant presence in our lives are overcompensating losers.

Now, cue the stupid people declaring their love of guns in the comments, and accusing me of being a commie. I’ll prime your anger by telling you right off the bat that if you love guns, you are a sick, pathetic, twisted dingbat, and I won’t care about your arguments.

Shut up and die already. No fussing.

The appalling privilege and bad taste of the well-off rears its ugly head again. Bill Keller, former executive editor of the New York Times, took the time to pen an op-ed to shame cancer victims who speak too militantly of their disease. In particular, he singles out Lisa Bonchek Adams, a cancer patient who blogs and tweets and writes poetry about her disease and treatment, as somehow…unseemly. He contrasts her public battle with the resignation of his father-in-law.

In October 2012 I wrote about my father-in-law’s death from cancer in a British hospital. There, more routinely than in the United States, patients are offered the option of being unplugged from everything except pain killers and allowed to slip peacefully from life. His death seemed to me a humane and honorable alternative to the frantic medical trench warfare that often makes an expensive misery of death in America.

I can respect that choice; everyone should have the freedom to die with dignity. But where Keller becomes an obnoxious ass is in his implication that a calm death is an ideal for everyone, and that there is something enviable about going gently, and then he dares to question whether Adams’ campaign has been a public service. Guess what, Bill Keller? You don’t get to question how a cancer patient gets to live. I appreciate what Adams writes, and what Jay Lake writes, and what every person who wrestles with this terrible disease chooses to say or not say. It is their choice.

Keller knows he’s treading on shaky ground here, since his wife apparently wrote something similar for the Guardian (I can’t read it because the Guardian yanked it) asking, What are the ethics of tweeting a terminal illness?. I’d rather ask, what are the ethics of telling someone with a terminal illness that it is unethical to talk about it? So for backup he asked Steven Goodman of Stanford Medical School for an opinion.

“I’m the last person to second-guess what she did,” Goodman told me, after perusing Adams’s blog. “I’m sure it has brought meaning, a deserved sense of accomplishment. But it shouldn’t be unduly praised. Equal praise is due to those who accept an inevitable fate with grace and courage.”

Oh, so the problem is that a cancer patient is being “unduly praised”? Where? How? What is an inappropriate level of praise, and is it being given here? If someone compliments Adams on her writing or her courage, is Dr Goodman or Mr Keller going to tut-tut them and ask them to be more reserved? Or is the finger-wagging going to be restricted to cancer patients who lack the decorum to be “calm” and “go gently” into death?

What Goodman should have said in response to that request for an opinion is, “Who the fuck are you, Bill, to stand in judgment over how a cancer patient deals with their disease?” And then somebody should have slapped him with the ethics of airing his distaste for a person who chooses to not go gentle into that good night on the pages of the New York Times. The ugly spectacle is all Keller’s.

How do you measure willingness to rape?

I was sent this horrifying data table: an awful lot of people think there are circumstances in which force is legitimate to use in order to get sex.

whenisrapeOK

Now an interesting twist. The source for that table is defunct, but someone else bought the url fearus.org and has put together a fairly detailed analysis of the claims. Before you jump to the conclusion that it was some MRA trying to debunk it, though, read the analysis: it’s substantial and impartial. The original study by UCLA researchers does exist, but it’s more complex than this oversimplified version can accurately reflect.

The actual data contained answers that were on a 5-point scale, rather than just a simple yes/no, so there’s some crunching going on here. But let’s crunch it some more.

Excerpts from the paper reveal that only 24% of men categorically rejected all use of violence against women…so apparently, about 76% of us considered some of those circumstances a possible reason to rape. That is disturbing.

Also disturbing: only 44% of the women categorically rejected all uses of violence against them. So 56% have absorbed the idea that they can be at fault for leading men on? Weird.

Anyway, the fearus site is an interesting effort to dig into the original data. It’s a little off — it seems obsessed with the idea that it is a gross error to simplify a 5-point scale to a yes/no answer — but it does make the excellent point that it is disgraceful that it is so difficult to get access to the original, published scientific data.