The internet does not forget

We all remember this event, in which policeman John Pike casually hoses down students at UC Davis with pepper spray. Not only is it memorable, but if you google “UC Davis” the story is going to pop up on the first page of results.

uc-davis-police-lt-john-pike

The administrators at UC Davis are a bit touchy about the whole incident and wanted to do something about it. So what did they do? They hired one of those shady ‘reputation management’ companies to somehow expunge the story and image from search results, at a cost of at least $175,000. Those things never work, and you’re a fool to try them.

Except…maybe they did accomplish something.

Now when you search for UC Davis, the first results are all about the university’s dodgy, clumsy, ill-planned, and wasteful attempt to whitewash their reputation.

The lesson you should learn is that trying to cover up your sins with worthless SEO is going to only change your search results to a) remind everyone of the bad thing you did, and b) let them know that you’re desperate to cover it up.

Good work, administrators at UC Davis! You’re working hard to further stain the reputation of a very good school.

What are we to do with online comments?

The Guardian takes a look at the problem of online comments, using an enviable database of 70 million comments, which they’ve dug into to try and tease out the sources of the conflicts. I have a database of a bit over 900,000 comments here (and another 800,000 at the sadly gutted comment database at scienceblogs), but unfortunately the way blocks are handled in wordpress means blocked comments are eventually completely purged, so I can’t compare them as the Guardian does. They report that about 2% of all comments are abusive, trolling, or otherwise blockworthy, which sounds about right — that’s probably in the high end of the ballpark of the percentage of filtered comments here. When you look at it through that lens, just the percentage of all discussions of all types that are abusive, you’re typically going to get a very small number.

It’s also the case, although the Guardian didn’t look at this, that the number of abusers is even smaller. There are a relatively small number of obsessive, dedicated individuals who do their damnedest to poison conversations all over the place — I see pretty much the same tiny rat’s nest of tedious trolls popping up in the sites I like to read — so it’s safe to say the majority of humanity is really decent online. Unfortunately, it doesn’t take many to wreck a discussion thread.

That’s especially true for the targets of abuse. Another thing the Guardian finds is that the trolls are focused: they tend to be racist and sexist.

Although the majority of our regular opinion writers are white men, we found that those who experienced the highest levels of abuse and dismissive trolling were not. The 10 regular writers who got the most abuse were eight women (four white and four non-white) and two black men. Two of the women and one of the men were gay. And of the eight women in the “top 10”, one was Muslim and one Jewish.

And the 10 regular writers who got the least abuse? All men.

It’s an interesting series. They’ve made a good effort at identifying the problem, but then they go looking for a solution, and unfortunately, their answer is that they don’t have one. So they throw up their hands and ask their readers to leave a comment suggesting one. Unless that’s a trick to get some more comments to analyze, that doesn’t sound like a good approach. It’s a bit like polling a cancer to ask it how we can make our body a little more pleasant to live in.

I’ll never be able to read Gay Talese without shuddering ever again

creepypeeper

Gay Talese said some stupid things lately, especially that he was never inspired by women journalists, but we’re not supposed to throw him under the bus, because he’s old, and he has written some good stuff. Both statements are true, although it’s not clear how these passes give anyone an out, or much more importantly, when you get them. Is this like the discount you get at the Sizzler for having an AARP card? You’re over 50, so you get 10% off the all-you-can-disgorge gaffe buffet?

But I agree, he should not be thrown under the bus for not reading or enjoying women writers. I suspect he was just being honest — he doesn’t. Was he supposed to lie and say he loved Diablo Cody and Lena Dunham? No! He’s a man of a certain age, uninfluenced by women’s words, and that is who he is.

Although, we might suggest that exploring the wider world of human experience might have been good for him, given his other remarkable publication lately. He’s written a story called “The Voyeur’s Motel”, and it is very well written — you’ll read the whole thing. The one problem is that there is an absence of humanity at its center. It’s as if the person writing it had so mastered the motions of clinical objectivity that he could calmly watch and participate in gross ethical violations of other people’s privacy because he was following a higher calling, the crystal clear rules of journalism, and could then dispassionately describe these activities as just things that happened. A sequence of events. Nothing more.

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I thought this was going to be a useful list

Vox-Day

Vox Day started to make a list of all SJWs — he calls it a complete catalog. Well, good, I thought, it could be handy to know who all the decent people are. Unfortunately, it’s very short, so I think he’s missing a lot of people, and also, weirdly, it includes people like Ben Shapiro, far right fanatic and former editor at Breitbart.

So it’s more of a list of people Vox Day doesn’t like.

It is kind of a strange obsession that some of the worst people on the internet have, of maintaining Enemies Lists and threatening to put people on it if they get out of line, as if anyone has ever been intimidated by such a fate, and as if being put on a List was significant. Anyone remember the List Lord of Talk.Origins, Peter Nyikos? I think I was on a few of his Lists. It was mainly good for a laugh.

It’s Paul Nelson Day, again

wafflehouse

Solemn greetings, all. Today, as the more reverent among you know, is Paul Nelson Day. Today is the 12th annual feast day of St Nelson, patron saint of obtusity and procrastination, and we honor his contributions to science by…well, by not doing much of anything at all. You could make grandiose claims today and promise to make good on them tomorrow, a tomorrow that stretches out into a decade or more, I suppose, but that’s too much work. Instead, maybe we should all just shrug and say we’ll think about celebrating later.

Oh, jeez, shrugging? I don’t have time for that. How about if we don’t and just say we did.

I also thought about suggesting waffles as the perfect food for this day, but nah, I’d have to cook them, or go to a restaurant. I’m just going to say “waffles!” and put it off to some other day.

Anyway, if you don’t know the story, Paul Nelson is a creationist who attended the Society for Developmental Biology meetings in 2004, with a poster in which he claimed to have developed this new evo-devoish parameter, Ontogenetic Depth, that supposedly measured the difficulty of developmental complexity to evolve. I quizzed him on it, and specifically asked him to explain how I could measure it in my zebrafish, for example, and he couldn’t tell me, even though he seemed to be saying that he and a student had been doing these ‘measurements’. But he promised to send me a paper he was working on that explained it all. Tomorrow! A tomorrow that never came.

So now we remind him of his failure every year. It’s a good thing to point out to Intelligent Design creationists that they don’t seem to be very good at fulfilling their grand promises.

He seems to sometimes notice that he’s being mocked, at least. Last year, he tried to trot out Ontogenetic Depth 2.0, which was just as impractical and ill-conceived as the first non-existent version. Maybe he’ll have a new beta for us this year, too?

Unlikely. Too much work. Not in the spirit of the day.

Brain done

Today, I…

  • Spent half a class hour working step by step through a cunningly clever linkage problem that most of my students didn’t get…

  • Spent the rest of the hour trying to explain imprinting, slowly and carefully, with diagrams, and left everyone looking like they’d been pole-axed…

  • Tried to race through Beadle-Tatum, Hershey-Chase, Watson-Crick, and Meselson-Stahl (at an introductory level) in the next class.

My head hurts. Need a nap. A civilized country would put naptime in our schedules.

Oh, yeah, Stephen Hsu responded to me, too, and man, ignorance makes my brain hurt even more. I’ll reply to that later.

I’d say “after my nap,” but I have committee meetings to attend instead.

Milo Yiannopoulos is a fraud

Shocking. It turns out that Milo Yiannopoulos is ghost-written. Everywhere. He’s got interns writing his articles, his talks…I wonder if he’s so lazy that he’s got them writing his tweets.

Yiannopoulos confirmed in an interview with BuzzFeed News that he has about 44 interns — a mix of paid and unpaid — writing and conducting research for him. But he denied that other people write stories for him start to finish.

Two people write Breitbart stuff for me, he told BuzzFeed News, but ghostwriting is too great a word. [Nope. Ghostwriting is exactly the word. –pzm] He said that the majority of his interns are researchers and that some write speeches for him. I have two books coming out this year, he said. It’s completely standard for someone with a career like mine to have researchers and assistants and ghostwriters.

A career like his…what career? He is, supposedly, a writer. What he does for a career is write stuff. He doesn’t have any other job. His wikipedia page identifies him as a journalist. He’s employed at Breitbart as their tech journalist — he doesn’t know much about “tech”, but I guess he’s as qualified to be labeled that as “journalist”.

You know, if he were calling himself an astronaut, and it turned out that the only people to step into a rocket were his paid staff and volunteers, It would be fair to call him out on that phoniness. If he said he was a movie star, but had a team of proxies who were doing all his acting for him, I’d wonder why anyone needed him at all. He’s got about as much of a career as a Kardashian, apparently, famous for being famous rather than talented, and mainly his job is posting selfies and preening.

And 44 interns? That’s ludicrous. What is there left for him to do after 44 people have written his text, edited his words, done all the labor of writing?

Worst of all, he’s outsourcing his writing to…goons from 4chan. That explains a lot, actually.