Since there are few topics about academic etiquette than get me as excited as the norms of citations, I was quite fascinated by Joseph Reagle’s blog entry on the topic, a discussion that spanned a summary of Helen Nissenbaums’ work on the subject to his own wrangling with how he should recognize others who have independently reached similar conclusions as his own.

Citations fascinate me because they are one of the few tangible inscriptions that reveal just how much of our work is indebted to others; it is “stimergic” (and if you don’t know what that is, read Joe’s entry as his moral wrangling over citations had to do with this term, his use of it and the discovery that someone else came up with it also). Despite the fact that all disciplines use them, we use them slightly distinctly. Lawyers use them in lawyerly-like ways: they cite the crap out of everything (it is kinda annoying but kinda helpful) and this makes total sense: they are covering their asses (lawyers know how to do this well), they are following the logic of their own practice as case law is quite citational, and well, law professors usually have one if not two research assistants, and this I am sure helps them in covering their citational bases.

Another big difference in practices of citations is between a conventions that includes the name of the person you are citing in the body of the text and those that stuff all that data in a footnote. I can’t stand the later convention, not only because it is a pain in the neck to have to go back to the footnote JUST to see who the heck the author is citing but I think the credit should be right there, springing off the page so that the politics of collaborative recognition are, well, very evident (and I do understand that if you are citing a buttload of folks, that sometimes it is just better to do that in footnotes and sometimes with history they are citing way to may folks to really do it effectively in the body of the text).

Joe raises some fundamentally thorny questions of who and how do we cite given that we may come up with an idea with the power of our own little brains, only to find out (gasp) that others, past and present and very unknown others, say something similar. On the whole, I tend to try to make clear, as Joe did in the example he provided, where I am totally taking the idea from someone to apply to another idea of mine and where I have an independently crafted idea and I am citing others so as to support my own position, which usually only strengthens my own argument. And what I find is that just because a cohort of folks may be working on similar topic (open souce, hackers), since we do so from our own perspectives and methods, most of the research will be “original,” though not as much as we tend to perform to our superiors. Also I sometimes find myself with an idea, which I consider as my own, but where I am so in need of a citation because it is an idea that seems at an intuitive level to be right on but it is hard to truly substantiate with the data I have (I am in that position right now and am desperate to find someone who says what I say and thus have a means to support what otherwise seems like a lofty idea…)

And in fact, one thing that bothers me about citations is that we don’t seem to take seriously that the date of publication may not just tell us when something was published but help us gauge if something can become “dated.” What I mean is that when (and I guess if) I publish my book on hackers and Debian, it will not be a reflection not of some timeless aspects of hacking but firmly based out of the time period (roughly 10 years give or take 3 or 4) that I was either researching and writing about the topic. And while you can and should cite folks who wrote stuff in the past because that stuff still matters (a lot of what Steven Levy says for example still holds water) a lot changes. And yet I can’t stand how folks then cite someone as “wrong” when in fact all that went wrong is that time does what it does best: MOVE FORWARD and social phenomenon change along with the passing of new moons. This is not as likely to happen in the hard sciences but sure as heck happens with anything in the so-called human realm (which is why it bothers me that the social sciences and humanities model our citational and journal practices so similarly to the hard sciences, when it seems there are enough differences to warrant more differences than there are but that is a whole other topic). So now I try to note where my analysis diverges because the context so radically changed and really leave critique for those things I can safely and fairly disagree with on its own terms.
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Is your idea of an awesomely good time writing, over the course of 15 hours, a series of haikus? Are you an academic? Or do you write about things academic ? Well if you answered yes then do join this contest and I guess you should do it for the love of haiku writing and not the prize because, well 10 bucks from the Itunes store is not a huge pot of virtual gold, and anyway, I know a lot of readers of this blog are pretty anti Ipod/Itumes for DRM but many are also into haikus so… go for it.

I am trying to get Seth Schoen to submit his now world famous haiku though it is a “little” long.

Since I am mostly a right brain person (so that writing a haiku is excruciatingly painful), I will not submit my own haiku but at least I am wrapping up an article on a haiku (and yes it is Seth Schoen’s haiku).

Wathching this video I was reminded that the image can quite often trump the power of the written word. Made by anthropologist Michael Wesh, I could not help but smile at his visual essay on the web, even though I am not all that rah-rah over Web 2.0 and the unbelievable proliferation of …. everything …. . But I immediately identified with most of the images and so there was something quite comforting in seeing a set of images that if nothing else, captures the everyday experiences of many folks hunched over their computers for hours everyday.

I think it would have been good, however, to include at least a small splash of the dysptopic in this representation, because even for its biggest enthusiasts, I imagine there is always a set of frustrations and downsides, like for example, taking over 3 weeks to catch up with your blogroll (and mine is pretty modest) because of this extreme explosion of well … everything… and all the organzing tools like tagging and citation software while are really “cool” in that gadget-gizmo sense are just not enough to soften the downsides of a really heavy (information-over) load.

Technology and science are, at times, part of some solution. But once unleashed in the world, they can also perpetuate problems and act as barriers.

I just finished two articles that have addressed this conundrum in provocative ways and I recommend both to read just for the sake of reading as they are written stunningly well and if you teach a course related to science, technology, medicine and society, these two would make excellent introductions to the importance of critically dissecting science, technology, and medicine (and I think you could unpack them for hours and hours, which is very helpful if you are looking to fill up some time).

One, Happy Meal is by the author of the immensely popular Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan. In the article he starts with the simple suggestion of trashing most fast/junk/processed food in favor of whole foods, notably plants. But then he delves into the much more complicated topic of the science of nutrition, making a pretty sharp critique of the field, especially for 1) its reductionism 2) and the ways in which the food industry mobilizes nutrition data it is favor and often to the detriment of furthering the goals of real nutrition.

After I posted the link on an IRC Debian channel, I had a pretty heated conversation with a number of Debian developers about the nature of science and how one goes about critique it (and mobilizing data to make counter-claims). As often is the case, we ended up arguing over the merit of his attack (though everyone agreed that his food suggestions were quite sound, and I find this disjuncture pretty interesting), as some felt like his attack on the science of nutrition went too far. I did not feel like his article was anti-science or alarmist but saw it as attacking a particular configuration of nutrition science (the reductionism, the inability to admit more complexity, and the turning away from common sense principles), which carry with it serious consequences in the so-called real world. He offers a critical edge that I think does not attack the principle of science generally (after all, he is using the techniques of skepticism and he marshals plenty of scientific data, like studies on omega 3s and 6 to make his point, though he does not only employ the rhetoric of science, which I think is key to understand his critique too) but just what is sees as a particularly problematic rendition of it that is especially problematic for nutrition (though I am sure many of his critiques are easily transfered to other domains).

Here, for example, is an attack on reductionism:

If nutritional scientists know this, why do they do it anyway? Because a nutrient bias is built into the way science is done: scientists need individual variables they can isolate. Yet even the simplest food is a hopelessly complex thing to study, a virtual wilderness of chemical compounds, many of which exist in complex and dynamic relation to one another, and all of which together are in the process of changing from one state to another. So if you’re a nutritional scientist, you do the only thing you can do, given the tools at your disposal: break the thing down into its component parts and study those one by one, even if that means ignoring complex interactions and contexts, as well as the fact that the whole may be more than, or just different from, the sum of its parts. This is what we mean by reductionist science.

And muses on the effects of this narrow path:

No one likes to admit that his or her best efforts at understanding and solving a problem have actually made the problem worse, but that’s exactly what has happened in the case of nutritionism. Scientists operating with the best of intentions, using the best tools at their disposal, have taught us to look at food in a way that has diminished our pleasure in eating it while doing little or nothing to improve our health. Perhaps what we need now is a broader, less reductive view of what food is, one that is at once more ecological and cultural. What would happen, for example, if we were to start thinking about food as less of a thing and more of a relationship?

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But you will see here that he reaches into scientific facts so that he is not throwing out the bathwater with the baby:

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It is weird when spam arrives in your folder with a free speech self-justification:

Name: nude girls | E-mail: jenna@haze.com | URI: http://nudefreexxx.com/ | IP: 195.175.37.6

“Spam e-mails should be, should not be outlawed – Or: can, can not be outlawed, are examples of persuasive speech topic variants.”

I am not a big watcher of T.V. (though I do manage to get my fix of the daily show, colbert, and more recently heroes, thanks to the good ol’ internet) but i am a big fan of good commercials. Because a good commerical is, let’s face it, hard to pull off. You have like less than a minute to say something and more important, have it be memorable; and that is why 98% of ads are creative disasters. But I really appreciate the other 2% and try to see the movie that displays all the best ads of the year, which I did this past weekend.

And my favorite of them (that I can find on the internet anway, in less than five minutes) is Big Ad because it is so meta and so riding/riffing off the popularity of the LOTR aesthetic… (there was an especially wacky and wonderful Thai one, in 3 parts, for a face cream cleanser, but I cannot find it…)

Thankfully I don’t have to directly deal with the Wikipedia question till next fall when I am teaching a bunch of students but the debate is totally fascinating and the comments in this Inside Higher Ed article are quite provocative and thought-provoking (if not sometimes downright hialrious).

My Ubuntu-counterpart, Andreas Lloyd, has written a nice response to Lars Risan’s interesting discussion of tensions between Ubuntu and Debian and in it, he visits, with great detail (or as much as a blog post will allow), the limits of launchpad. It is exciting to see more anthropologists conducting in-depth research on F/OSS projects with a keen awareness of the ways technology mediate or make possible certain social relationships. . .

Hope this sticks in Thailand yet spreads to other nations struggling with exorbitant drug costs… Time will tell…

Recently I complained about using dial-up in PR and I believe in response to my post, Joey Hess provided some great tips for making the dial-up experience a little more bearable. He, of course, was providing a set of solution to constraints, which is what the likes of Joey Hess do a lot of their waking (and according to a recent IRC conversation, even dreaming) hours.

I as an academic am not involved so much in the business of finding real hard solutions but when I go to Puerto Rico, that is what I DO spend a lot of time doing. And I came up with 3 solutions this year, 2 of which I was particularly proud of (one of which may be useful to the blog readers), so I thought I would share them here:

As I wrote about a few weeks ago, my mom has been plagued with a problem of choking on her saliva because she is not swallowing. It causes her and those around her a lot of angst. I tired many things but when I stopped trying and just started watching and observing to see when it seemed to be worse, I finally noticed that if she wore her dentures, the problem, while not totally resolved, was like 70-80% better. With her dentures, she would never choke on her spit and often times there would be not spit. I think the dentures changes the shape of her mouth so that she can swallow with less effort. I was pretty proud to notice this because it was the overwhelming problem of the season. Now, there is, of course, another problem. She loathes wearing those teeth and well, it has been a battle to convince her it helps (I think she sort of knows but does not want to admit it) but she is wearing them a lot more than she used to…. Maybe I will come up with a long-term solution to that problem later but I have failed in all of my attempts while still there which stretched from begging, to coy deception, to outright bribery.

So in PR, we have an awesome mutt, who goes by one of three names, Isabela, Gordita (look at her tummy in the pictures to see why we call her “chubster”) and Pucha. She is literally the joy of the house and she truly revels in this role. She is, in fact, like a hovercraft of love , in the sense that she will hover over you, as you are, for example, trying to get work done, and she will whimper, or lift her little paw, or more audaciously butt her head against your hand, until you assume the position and pet her, or preferably hug her. And she wants demands this sort of attention for as long as you can humanely sustain it. Ok this is not the problem part (though it can be a problem when trying to complete work and I usually just give up and give in to her or kick her out of the room). The problem was that the pucha would routinely despoil the same spot on the floor, usually every day, usually in dramatic response to leaving her in the house alone for more than 10 minutes. And I know this is willful because she is otherwise quite potty trained. She just likes to remind those who shower her with affection and love that she wants it to rain harder.

The problem was that she was soaking and thus really rotting the wooden trimming (and poking around led me to discovering the third huge problem, termites, but more on that soon) and this had just had to stop. Giving her a light whallop in her chubby behind never helped (maybe she was too well padded?) and obedience school seemed like way too much effort and money.

Eventually, I just threw her little bed right where she peed, and vualla, she stopped peeing there and thankfully she did not have the cojones to find another spot. I am not sure if this is long-term solution, but for now I am satisfied.

Through the pucha, I found out that the wooden trimming in our house was ingested with termites. This caused a mini-heart attack, because well, termintes are a bitch to eradicate and they are a real problem in the tropics. I called the exterminators just to find out some information on termites and they assured me that once I ripped out the molding (which was my low-tech solution), I would not be putting the other wood in danger by accidentally flinging one of the little chubby white grubs over to another piece of wood and there is a lot of wood at home. Thankfully, since that is unlikely, with some help , I proceeded to tear most of the molding out only to disover a cornupia of bugs living there. It was so so so so so gross, really, gross that of course I am not replacing the trimming with wood but with some other bug-resistanant material. But that will have to wait till another trip.