Les Liens du Samedi

[highlyeccentric]

Current and stale affairs, hot and cold takes: -

• M. Rambaran-Olm, Anglo-Saxon studies, academia and white supremacy. I've largely been watching from the sidelines as the ISAS goes through this convulsion (I am not an Anglo-Saxonist myself), but if you read one piece out of it, read this one.
  
• Freedman, Itkowitz, and Samenow (WaPo), NOAA staff warned in Sept 1 directive against contradicting Trump. Lie about the weather to avoid embarrassing the President, very normal behaviour.
  
• Justin McCurry (Guardian), Fukushima: Japan will have to dump radioactive water into the Pacific, minister says.
  
• Donna Page (Newcastle Herald), Morrison government ducks Senate's PFAS inquiry demand.
  
• Hannah Ryan (Buzzfeed Aus), Indigenous people could be deported if new law passes, lawyers have warned. The law in question is a character test for visa holders; we have already seen a few cases of people with Indigenous Australian heritage, born overseas, falling afoul of the visa system.
  
• Jamie Seidel (News.com.au), In for a roasting: Australia on the brink of 'apocalyptic' conditions.
  
• Kristie Sexton-McGrath (ABC Far North), 'Dogs balls' shrump to be recognised as new species, but colloquial name to remain.
  

Good News:

• Markus Mannheim (ABC), Canberra to house one of Australia's biggest batteries as ACT weans off fossil fuels.
  
• Bianca Hall (SMH), Temporary reprieve for ancient Djab Warrung trees. Only temporary good news, but it's something.
  

Longer political analysis

• Ben Wellings (Conversation AU), A Dog's brexit: Johnon's missteps about to send weary voters to another election as EU divorce gets ugly. This is out of date, now, in Brexit Years.
  
• Ben Hillier (Overland), Why this Tamil family from Queensland is at risk. Actually breaks down the legal situation of the #hometobilo family. (TL;DR their best hope is that, because the girls were born in Aus, they are legally stateless - their lawyers argue that the older girl, who is the subject of the case, cannot be deported.)
  
• Clive Hamilton (Conversation AU), Why Gladys Liu must answer to parliament about alleged links to the Chinese government.
  

Longer other - cultural, historical, miscellaneous

• Simons, Sullivan, and Johnson (The Conversation AU), Fewer casual positions and less out-of-hours work could help retain early career teachers.
  
• Tuohy and Edwards (SMH), The four-day fallacy: busting the myth of part-time working mums.
  
• Jen Gunter, Why does the department of ob-gyn at the University of Utah offer a premarital exam for women?
  
• Jane C. Hu, Woman frustrated by dick pics makes her own filter.
  
• Lara Soneschein (Overland), What we mean when we say Never Again.
  
• Holly Barrow (Electric Lit), How Brexit Could Destroy the UK Publishing Industry:
  

  In a briefing on Brexit, the Society of Authors argues against the visa salary requirements of £30,000 for long-term migrant workers and £35,000 for indefinite leave to remain: “Authors in the UK earn an average of just £10,500 per year. The proposed threshold therefore does not reflect the ‘skills’ of writers or the cultural sector at large. Salary level is not an appropriate measure of skill or wider contribution to the UK’s social and economic life.” This emphasis on salary failing to represent skill highlights the necessity of reviewing the visa routes and the failure of immigration policy to consider vast cultural benefits—benefits that far exceed financial input. Reducing migrants to their salary not only diminishes their talent but also insults British authors who fall significantly below the warped perception of what it is to be “skilled.”

  
  
• Jennifer Ouellette (Ars Technica), Cubed wombat poop, why your left nut runs hot, among Ig Nobel winners. Possibly my favourite:
  

  Medical Education

  Citation: Karen Pryor and Theresa McKeon, "for using a simple animal-training technique— called 'clicker training'—to train surgeons to perform orthopedic surgery."

  This 2016 study focused on two specific surgical tasks: "tying the locking, sliding knot" and "making a low-angle drill hole." The authors wanted to test the effectiveness of "acoustic feedback" on the learning process—typically used by animal trainers—which prior studies indicated might also work on human behavior and could be superior to traditional demonstration techniques. "The clicker serves as a conditioned reinforcer that communicates in a way that is language- and judgment-free," they observed. The result: the clicker-trained group of medical students took more time to learn the tasks than the control group, but they were better at performing the tasks precisely. And when it comes to surgery, precision is paramount.

  
  
• Specific cluster on age of puberty:
  
  • Mona Chalabi (Guardian UK, 2013): Why is puberty starting younger?. Key data (from 'the study published today', which is infuriatingly not actually cited in this article) is that in a 2013 study of American girls, age of puberty measured by breast tissue development was only a few months earlier than in the 1990s. Also cites the German study c. 2010 which is responsible for the long-range stats from 1860 to 2010.
    
  • Mary Lewis (The Conversation UK, 2018): Children aren't starting puberty younger, medieval skeletons reveal. Osteoarcheological evidence suggests children between 990-1550 entered puberty between ages of 10 and 12, same as today (as far as I can tell, this is based on skeletons of children who *died* as adolsecents - the piece doesn't address whether that skews the data). Although the onset of puberty was relatively young, it took much longer for the process of maturation to complete than it does now, probably due to environmental factors such as nutrition.
    
  • Jayashri Kulkarni (The Conversation UK, 2011): Twelve going on 20: are girls reaching puberty earlier. Summarises research to the effect that age of menarch has fluctuated a lot over time; studies as of 2011 suggested that some aspects of puberty, such as breast tissue development, were happening earlier, but the age of menarche had stabilised at around 13, based on UK / NZ research.
  
  
• Sarah Rowe (Archer), Vaginismus and breakups: owning my sexuality.
  
• Lexi Beach (Electric Lit), Why it matters that Amazon shipped The Testamens early. What confuses me about this debacle is that people seem *surprised*? I think I remember something similar with the HP books?
  

Standard disclaimer: list subdivisions are arbitrary and not reflective of the worth of any particular piece in my mind.

Comments

[lilysea]

Hannah Ryan (Buzzfeed Aus), Indigenous people could be deported if new law passes, lawyers have warned. The law in question is a character test for visa holders; we have already seen a few cases of people with Indigenous Australian heritage, born overseas, falling afoul of the visa system.

The idea that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, whom of all Australians have the strongest claim to citizenship, could be deported is...

outrageous doesn't seem strong enough.

[highlyeccentric]

And yet somehow *entirely predictable*

Excellent link round up!

[used_songs]

Hmmm, that clicker training this is fascinating ... but kind of scary. I guess I'm leery of that kind of rote training for human beings.

The article about Anglo-Saxon studies was interesting and very sad. I took a lot of Medieval lit as an undergrad and loved it. It makes me sad that the field is being overrun by racists.

The idea that Indigenous Australians might be barred from their ancestral home is mind-boggling.

And that falsifying the weather info thing to appease Trump? On one level, I get it I guess. I mean, he did basically destroy whole areas of the government because they opposed him. But if you genuinely care about the service you provide and you think it's important and you want your work to be trusted, how can you LIE like that?

Re: Excellent link round up!

[highlyeccentric]

It makes me sad that the field is being overrun by racists.

I think that's not an accurate way to describe what's happening. We as a field* *are* attracting more white supremacist undergrads and independent scholars and perhaps even early career researchers, due to the popularity of our texts with those groups (I still treasure the memory of hearing about how the Old Norse prof at Sydney, when we still had one, had ripped a new one for a prospective doctoral student who casually assumed she must have been a practicing Odinist herself).

(*Ed: I mean medieval studies at large. I am observing the early medieval stuff from one remove)

But. Our texts - especially but not exclusively the early medieval germanic and Celtic stuff - are popular with white supremacists *because that's how they've been studied and marketed for nearly two centuries now*. I specialised in Old English as an undergrad: the field took a bit of a shuffle away from explicit Nazis around the late 1930s, but before that? There's a shit ton of uncomfortable 'pure germanic race' stuff there for the taking. And Old English is a far more conservative field than say, Middle English - your bibliographies won't just have the occasional edition from the 1890s, they'll be FULL of the really old stuff. And Rambaran-Olm is right, aside from shuffling sideways away from some of the literal 1930s Nazis, the field has never really reckoned with All It's Baggage.

And then there's the current scholarly population. The Society isn't being overrun by white supremacists - it may or may not be attracting more now than it was three decades ago, but it's not being overrun. What it IS is stacked full of complacent white people, the kind of racists who think *they* can't possibly be racist, and that peer review is somehow free from bias, and so on.

In this it has much in common with the rest of medieval studies, except that Old English / Early Medieval English history / whatever we're calling it now has *always attracted very conservative scholars*. Seriously. When I was an undergrad, about a decade ago, the concept of very basic feminist history work into, eg, how Old English texts thought about sex and pleasure was SHOCKING AND WEIRD. I read every piece of gender-related OE scholarship that existed for one essay, and that was doable for an undergrad because there was so very little of it. It shouldn't necessarily logically follow that because a field is slow to take up gender studies it is probably racist, but unfortunately... it does. And it is.

Re: Excellent link round up!

[used_songs]

I'm glad to hear that it's not as widespread as I feared. I guess I'm just accustomed to white supremacy blatantly manifesting everywhere.

What it IS is stacked full of complacent white people, the kind of racists who think *they* can't possibly be racist

This is the crux, isn't it? I encounter this a lot among teachers and it's so infuriating because it helps to keep institutional biases in place.

Re: Excellent link round up!

[highlyeccentric]

Oh, I didn't mean 'not as bad as all that'! In fact, I think I meant *worse*. When you said 'overrun by white supremacists', that sounds like the white supremacists are an outside force coming in, but they're... not. The call is coming from within the building, so to speak - the problem isn't a new consequence of the current political climate, it's endemic to the field.