Inquiry, Journey, Discovery

New Challenges, Opportunities as UNH's International Student Population Grows

2012-02-09T09:04:00.000-05:00

The International Services Office, adorned with objects from cultures around the world, is a reflection of the University of New Haven's growing cross-cultural student body.
Photograph by Brandon T. Bisceglia.

It took Fahad Almutairi 16 months to learn English well enough before he was ready to go to college in the United States.

Almutairi, a 20-year-old native of Saudi Arabia, wanted to earn a bachelor's degree in fire protection engineering. He looked at several colleges in the U.S. that offered the program, including the University of Maryland. He chose the University of New Haven, he said, because it was the best.

“Fire protection is popular in Saudi Arabia, but they have no schools with bachelor's [programs],” he said. “There are petroleum companies and oil companies there, so they need fire protection.”

Almutairi began at UNH in the fall 2011 semester. He said the college is perfect for international students, whether they are “African, Arabian or South American.”

Other international students apparently also feel that UNH is perfect for them. According to a report by the Washington, D.C.-based Institute of International Education, UNH had the fourth-highest number of international students in Connecticut in 2011, ranking it behind only the University of Bridgeport, Yale University, and the University of Connecticut.

The international student population at UNH reached 773 in 2011, accounting for more than 12 percent of the university's overall enrollment of 6,385 for the year. International students accounted for just over 10 percent of the total in 2010, or 602 out of 5,949 students enrolled.

The growth rate for international student populations at colleges in Connecticut was 9.4 percent for 2011, nearly double the nationwide growth rate of 5 percent, according to the IIE's report. Overall, there were 10,137 international students at colleges throughout the state.

Karima Jackson, the director of UNH's International Services Office, said that international students bring benefits that domestic students can't get any other way.

“They have something that the American students usually don't have – experience with studying abroad,” she said. “They also bring business and diversity. When we mix, it creates a more whole student.”

The IIE report also emphasizes the economic benefit that international students bring. In 2011 alone, estimated foreign student expenditures in Connecticut reached approximately $300 million. That money is not just spent in the universities. Students spend at local businesses on food, clothing, entertainment, and more.

Jackson only joined the ISO in September, but said she has noticed the increase in students from other countries over her short time there. She said it may be because of several factors, including the recruiting agencies that UNH uses and the trimester schedule that allows some students to graduate more quickly.

The most important factor, she said, are the high-quality programs that the university offers, such as electrical sciences, engineering and MBA.

The ISO's main goal is to help international students maintain the F1 visas they need to attend college in the U.S., but Jackson said they end up helping with all sorts of other issues. Students may need to get drivers licenses. They may have confusion about where to go for academic needs. They may want advice on navigating some uniquely American institution outside the university.

“The list can go on,” she said. “Every day, it's something new.”

One of the difficulties is that there are over a hundred countries for international students to come from, all with different cultural expectations and practices. For instance, Fahd Jadoon, a second-year graduate student in UNH's MBA program who works in the ISO, said that when he first moved to Minnesota from his home of Pakistan, he had trouble finding food that was kosher.

“There were not a lot of international restaurants in the area,” he said.

He later discovered that Minneapolis had a much more diverse offering of foods. He said he feels comfortable now living in the New Haven area, which has a similar wealth of diversity.

Jackson thinks that one of the biggest current challenges for the university is figuring out how to bridge gaps between the international students and their American counterparts. She said she has been working on several outreach efforts to bring different groups of students together, partly by involving other faculty and staff to encourage cultural exchange.

“They [international students] are not being acclimated to the university as well as they should be,” she said.

Jadoon, on the other hand, said that the teachers at UNH do a good job of fostering interaction between students. As an example, he pointed out that teachers will often assign groups of students to work together, rather than allowing them to choose their own groups and self-segregate.

Jackson also has high hopes. She said her office is preparing for more growth, and is looking forward to putting on the International Festival in April. The event will be a chance for groups from all over the world to share their cultures with other students.

Meanwhile, Almutarai says he is already happy to be making new friends. For him, being an international student at UNH is one of the most positive things he's done.

“It's a great experience that you can learn a new culture, learn a new language, and get a bachelor's,” he said.

People Without Cars

2012-02-08T09:04:00.000-05:00

Photograph by Brandon T. Bisceglia.

During the first week of February, reporters from the Connecticut Post wrote about their adventures as they tried to get from assignment to assignment without their cars, placing them at the mercy of the area’s disjointed public transportation system.

I sent the following letter to the editor, which the newspaper published, in response to their stories:

Hats off to the Connecticut Post reporters who spent this week attempting to get around without a car while sharing their observations.

If they had done this project last year, they would have encountered a glaring display of the preference our society gives to automobiles.

Several days after one of the heavy snowstorms, I tried walking down the Boston Post Road in Fairfield to the public library. At every juncture where the sidewalk met a parking lot or road, I encountered colossal mountains of snow, sometimes higher than myself.

These piles were not the product of lax shoveling. The snow had been piled directly into the path of pedestrians to make space for other people to drive and park.

I’m young and healthy, and managed to scale the slippery peaks with some effort. Had I been older or disabled in some fashion, however, I cannot imagine having gotten very far.

This experience wasn’t a fluke. Many bus stops and pathways all over the area are rarely cleared, even when the snow is merely ankle-deep.

It’s hard to avoid the impression that these practices send a clear message: if you’re too poor to own a car, cannot drive for some reason, or choose not to, then you don’t matter as much as the people who have vehicles.

That’s the wrong message for an age in which we need to learn the value of alternative modes of transportation – even if, as I am, you’re among those privileged enough to own a car.

Changes to Liquor Laws Unlikely to Impact UNH

2012-02-04T12:36:00.000-05:00

Photograph by Brandon T. Bisceglia.

A proposal by Gov. Dannel P. Malloy toease Connecticut's restrictions on alcohol sales would be unlikely tohave much of an impact on campus life at UNH.

Currently, stores in the state cannotsell alcohol at all on Sundays or later than 9 p.m. on other days.Bars and restaurants must stop serving alcohol at 1 a.m.

If adopted by the state legislature,Malloy's proposed changes would allow stores to sell alcohol until 10p.m. every day, including Sunday. Bars and restaurants would beallowed to continue serving alcohol until 2 a.m.

Connecticut is one of one of only twostates in the U.S., along with Indiana, that does not allowoff-premises sales of alcohol on Sundays. Georgia had a state ban onSunday sales until last year.

Several UNH students are in favor ofMalloy's proposed changes. “I've always found it incrediblybackwards that alcohol isn't sold on a Sunday,” said UNH studentKathleen Sandin, who grew up in New Hampshire. “I don't drinkpersonally, but to me, Sunday is just another day.”

For the people Sandin knows who do goout and drink, she didn't think much would change. “They usuallyare home by midnight anyways,” she said.

UNH Student Chris Griebert also favorsthe proposals. He referred to the current laws as “puritanical,”and said that the state should not be restricting activities thatwere both “safe and for adults.”

When asked if he thought the laterhours at bars might lead students to drink when they should beresting or doing homework, he pointed out that “limiting accessdoesn't necessarily change peoples' habits.”

UNH policies allow students who are 21or older to possess and consume alcohol in some areas of the campus.According to the student handbook, however, there are multiplerestrictions. Students in residence halls and apartments cannot havealcohol if anyone else in the living space is below drinking age,unless they are assigned roommates. Open containers are not allowedin public areas. Drinking contests are prohibited, as are “commonsource” containers, such as kegs.

Alcohol is generally not allowed aton-campus and athletic events, though the handbook does allowexceptions at some events and provides guidelines for obtainingpermission to serve alcohol.

In addition, students of any age areviolating the university's conduct policy if they are foundintoxicated.

UNH publishes an annual security reportthat includes information on alcohol violations. In 2010, the lastyear for which statistics are available, there were three liquor lawarrests. All occurred in residential facilities. There were also 304liquor law violations that were referred for disciplinary action. Ofthose violations, 275 occurred in residential facilities.

Westport Group to Hold Fourth Annual Darwin Day Dinner

2012-02-01T08:43:00.000-05:00

A recent Darwin Day celebrant with old Charlie.
Photograph by Cary Shaw. Used with permission. All rights reserved.

The Southern Connecticut Darwin Day Committee will hold its fourth celebration of science and humanity on Feb. 11 at the Inn at Longshore in Westport.

This year's Darwin Day Dinner will feature a talk by Rene Almeling, assistant professor of Sociology at Yale University. She will discuss her 2011 book, “Sex Cells: The Medical Market for Eggs and Sperm.”

The event will include a cocktail hour and a full course dinner. There will also be a science quiz during which each table will collaborate on the answers. The table with the highest score on the quiz will win prizes.

“I first learned about the celebration of Darwin Day when the organizers of the event called me to speak, and I think it is a wonderful way to promote science education,” Almeling said in an email interview.

Committee Treasurer John Levin said he feels quite fortunate to have Almeling speak at this year's event.

“Human reproduction has resonance with every person, and the processes are really changing,” he said.

The Darwin Day Dinner is held every year around the birthday of naturalist Charles Darwin, who is most famous for describing the process of biological evolution through natural selection. Darwin was born Feb. 12, 1809.

The first dinner was held in 2009 on what would have been his 200 birthday. Levin said he and several of his friends began organizing the dinners that year after learning that there were celebrations planned in other cities around the world, but none in Connecticut.

Since then, he said the event has grown moderately, drawing 133 people last year.

In previous years, the dinner took place on a Friday; this is the first year it will be held on a Saturday. Aside from that change, Levin said the event will be similar to the earlier ones.

“We think that we've had a winning formula, and as a consequence we have kept that same formula,” he said, adding that no one has had any major complaints or suggested any meaningful changes in past years.

Levin said that Darwin Day as an international phenomenon seems to be growing in subtle ways. He would like to see it eventually become as popular as more recognized holidays that have religious or national themes.

“There's nothing right now really devoted to enlightenment, science or rationality,” he added.

The Darwin Day Dinner is sponsored by The Congregation for Humanistic Judaism of Fairfield County; The Wilton Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers); the Unitarian Church in Westport; and the Norwalk Public Schools Science Department.

The deadline to register for the event is Feb. 3 The cost is $55 per person. Excess proceeds will be donated to the National Center for Science Education.

To learn more about the Darwin Day Dinner or to register, visit www.darwindayct.org.

Tips on Arguing: Necessary and Sufficient Conditions

2012-01-26T18:35:00.001-05:00

The phrase “necessary and sufficientconditions” is one of those pieces of jargon that are used across awide range of fields. It pops up in papers on science, philosophy,mathematics, and even social issues. Knowing what it means can saveyou a lot of undue confusion.

Although the terms “necessary andsufficient” are often used together, they are really two separatethings: necessary conditions, and sufficient conditions. Each has adistinct function.

Necessary conditions are required foran effect to take place. However, they do not guarantee that theeffect will occur. In logic, they can be phrased as “without x,there can be no y.”

For example, a temperature of 32degrees Fahrenheit or below is a necessary condition for snow,because anything warmer will result in rain. But a cold day doesn’talways bring snow. It could just as easily be cold and sunny.

Sufficient conditions, on the otherhand, do guarantee that an effect will occur. They can be phrased as“if x, then y.”

With a sufficient condition, though,the same effect can also occur for some other reason.

If, for instance, the president signs abill given to him by Congress (a sufficient condition), itautomatically becomes a law (the effect).

However, it doesn’t have to happenthat way. The president could veto the bill, and Congress could voteto override his veto. In that case, the bill still becomes a law,even though it wasn’t signed.

The difference between the two types ofconditions may seem subtle, but the distinction has profoundimplications. In the situation of the bill, the president’ssignature is not a necessary condition, because it can be overturnedby another branch of government. Our entire system of “checks andbalances” depends on these careful divisions of necessaryconditions and sufficient conditions.

If you are trying to convince someoneof your position in an argument, you usually want your conditions tobe both necessary and sufficient. It is the strongest indication thattwo events are causally linked, because this kind of condition alwaysleads to the effect, and the effect cannot happen without it.

The application of heat is both anecessary and a sufficient condition for cooking. You can’t cookwithout heat, and heating food guarantees that it will cook. Cookingis, in fact, defined as what happens to food when heat is applied toit. They always occur together.

If you take a little time to learn somecommon academic expressions, you’ll be more prepared when youinevitably encounter the seemingly impenetrable language ofmany documents.

Connecticut's Religiously Intolerant History, Pt. 2

2012-01-10T10:00:00.000-05:00

Anglican Infiltration

A sign outside Christ Episcopal Church in Stratford touts the parish’s distinction as the first permanent foothold for the Anglicans in Connecticut. Early efforts to gain followers in the state were met with discrimination from residents and officials.
Photograph by Brandon T. Bisceglia.

Part 1: Fairfield’s Last Witch Trial

The rise of Puritanism in England was from the beginning an attempt to reform the Church of England and disentangle it from the whims of the monarchy. Like Martin Luther’s protest against the Catholics in the 1500s, the Puritans felt that religious practices should be based primarily on the Bible; they sought to “purify” the church of bureaucracy and human fallibility.

To some extent, keeping the church pure required keeping it separate from government. Different groups of colonists disagreed over how exactly that should be accomplished.

The Rev. Thomas Hooker sparked one of those disagreements. He arrived in the thriving Massachusetts Bay Colony from Holland in 1633 after fleeing his native England, where he had been persecuted for his Puritan theology.

Hooker set up at what is today Cambridge, but quickly found himself at odds with the influential pastor John Cotton over rules determining suffrage. The church hierarchy in Massachusetts Bay first had to approve freemen through a thorough interrogation of their religious experiences before they could vote. Hooker thought that suffrage should be extended to all freemen.

Hooker took his congregation south, founding Hartford in 1636. He gave numerous political sermons, expressing his view that “the foundation of authority is laid in the free consent of the people.”

Hooker’s sermons would become the basis for the Fundamental Orders, the 1639 document that established a framework for the colony’s government and has come to be recognized as one of the earliest constitutions in the world.

Just because there was an official distinction between church and state, however, did not mean that the two were separate. Indeed, the entire reason for keeping them apart was to avoid sullying the church.

The government’s role was still ultimately a religious one: to produce and enforce rules that shaped society so it best reflected Biblical dictates. Though no individual church was in charge of the colony, Congregationalism was the government-sanctioned religion, and legislation was devised to protect that purity.

Along with the rule punishing witchcraft by death, the twelve Biblically inspired laws establishing capital offenses that were put on record in Connecticut in 1642 included other punishments for religious transgressions. The first two on the list said:

- “If any man or woman shall have or worship any God, but the true God, he shall be put to death. Deut. xiii. 6. xvii. 21. Exodus xxii. 2.”

- “If any person in this colony shall blaspheme the name of God the Father, Son or Holy Ghost, with direct, express, presumptuous or high-handed blasphemy, or shall curse in like manner, he shall be put to death. Levit. xxiv. 15, 16.”

According to Benjamin Trumbull’s 1898 “Complete History of Connecticut, Civil and Ecclesiastical,” lower courts around the colony had already been punishing unmarried adults who engaged in sexual relations or “wanton behavior” by fining the convicted parties, whipping them, or forcing them to marry. Trumbull writes that the General Court approved of these practices, “and authorised them [the lower courts], in future, to punish such delinquents by fines, by committing them to the house of correction, or by corporal punishment, at the discretion of the court.”

In practice, the attempt to keep Connecticut’s religious landscape pure could never fully succeed. Quakers almost immediately began settling in the area, forcing the colony to enact a number of laws during the 1600s to prevent the sect from gaining traction.

By the turn of the century, an even more worrisome development was taking shape just over the border in Rye, N.Y. An Anglican missionary group called The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts was set up in 1701 to provide English colonists with greater access to Episcopalian churches and services. Rye was chosen as a strategic entry-point to Connecticut, where the group was especially interested in breaking the stranglehold that the Puritans had on religious life.

The Rev. George Muirson, who headed the Rye mission, took a trip in 1706 along the coast to the edge of the Housatonic River in Stratford, bringing along Col. Caleb Heathcote, an ardent Anglican living in Westchester. They reportedly baptized about 24 people for the church. Muirson and Heathcote were encouraged by this journey, and reported back to England that they expected to have success establishing new parishes in the communities.

They almost immediately ran into trouble, however. Heathcote derided Connecticut’s “odd kind of laws, to prevent any from dissenting from their church, and endeavor to keep the people in as much blindness and unacquaintedness with any other religion as possible….”

A year later, Muirson was invited by some of the people of Fairfield to preach there. He wrote after the trip that the people had been threatened with imprisonment and a fine of five pounds for coming to the sermon. He also noted that the Anglicans in Fairfield had been locked out of the meetinghouse to prevent them from holding services there, despite the fact that they had paid taxes for the building.

Progress came slowly. In Stratford, there were enough Anglicans to start their own church. In 1707, they elected a vestry, thus making them the first organized Episcopalian group in the colony. They asked Muirson to settle with them in the town, but he died before being able to respond.

For the next decade, Connecticut Anglicans languished. Missionaries continued to travel through the area, winning over converts. But there were no ordained ministers residing in the colony, and no physical spaces for Anglicans to meet.

In the meantime, the Puritans saw their vision for a religiously pure society unraveling. The Anglicans’ constant complaints to England concerned Connecticut officials for political reasons. They enjoyed the most autonomous government of all the colonies, having won near-independence through the charter that King Charles II had awarded them in 1662. But they also knew independence could be reversed; it had almost happened in the 1680s, when a brief attempt by English authorities to set up a “Dominion of New England” brought an appointed governor named Edmund Andros to Hartford to take over from the colonists, resulting in the famed “Charter Oak Incident.”

To relieve tensions with the crown, the General Assembly passed the Toleration Act of 1708, which ostensibly gave citizens the right to dissent from the Congregational church, as long as they continued to pay taxes for its support.

In practice, though, the Toleration Act resulted in little tolerance. In 1721, the General Assembly passed a slew of laws to enforce the standards of the Congregational church and prevent other religious groups from gaining further ground. Citizens would be fined if they did not attend an approved church on Sundays. They would be fined if they traveled on Sunday to or from anywhere other than an approved church. They would be fined if they attended any unapproved public gatherings, including unapproved church services. They would be fined for making any kind of disturbance (including loud talking) near a place of worship.

These and related statutes essentially placed minority churches under the authority of the Congregational churches, because these churches controlled local elections, record-keeping and other aspects of law enforcement.

Nevertheless, the tide was turning. In 1722, Connecticut got its first resident Anglican minister. Rev. George Pigot came to the colony, settling in Stratford and splitting his time between that town and Fairfield. Several colonists opened their homes to fellow Anglicans for Pigot’s sermons. The congregations continued to gain clout.

Despite the Tolerance Act, Pigot faced as much discrimination as Muirson and Heathcote had. In a letter to the Secretary of The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts dated Oct. 3, 1722, Pigot wrote:

“I now inform you Sir of what obstructions I met with in my ministry, & they are several, viz.: that of Lieut. Governor Nathan Gold, who is a most inveterate slanderer of our Church, charging her with popery, apostacy, & atheism,—who makes it his business to hinder the conversion of all whom he can, by threatening them with his authority—& who as a judge of the court here, disfranchises men merely for being Churchmen…they have boldly usurped to themselves, & insultingly imposed on the necks of others, the power of taxing & disciplining all persons whatsoever, for the grandeur & support of their self-created ministers.”

In the same letter, Pigot reported on the greatest success – and controversy – his sect had seen so far. The month before, he had been invited to New Haven by the rector at Yale College, Rev. Timothy Cutler. While there, Cutler and several other clergy members at the college declared that they had begun to doubt the validity of Congregational doctrine, and wanted to learn more about joining the Episcopacy.

It was the first time that members of the Puritan clergy had dared to defect. And what a defection! Cutler was one of the most prominent pastors in the colony, in the top position at Yale, the very institution built for the training of the colony’s Congregational ministers.

Later in October, Yale’s Board of Trustees voted to dismiss Cutler and his colleagues. The defectors didn’t mind – three intended to travel to England to receive ordination.

One of those men, the Guilford-born Rev. Dr. Samuel Johnson, would return from his trip overseas to Stratford in 1724, taking over for Pigot, who had moved on to Providence, R.I. On Christmas day of that year, the Stratford Anglicans got the gift they had waited so many years for: a wooden church that would come to be called Christ Episcopal Church was dedicated in the town, with Johnson as its resident priest. He led the parish for the next 39 years.

It would be another 60 years before the formal diocese would be set up in Hartford, and even longer before Congregationalism would lose its legal sway as the state-sanctioned religion. But one thing was for sure: the Anglicans were in Connecticut to stay.

- Part 3 (Coming Soon)

Connecticut’s Religiously Intolerant History, Pt. 1

2011-12-31T23:52:00.000-05:00

Fairfield’s Last Witch Trial

A woodcut illustration from Joseph Glanvill’s “Saducismus Triumphatus or, Full and Plain Evidence Concerning Witches and Apparitions,” published posthumously in 1681 in London. The book purported to provide proof of witches’ magical powers, and attacked skeptics of these abilities. Glanvill’s text would become influential during the Salem Witch Trials a decade later.Public domain image.

When the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life ranked states using data from its comprehensive 2007 U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, only 57 percent of respondents from Connecticut and Rhode Island reported that they believed in God with “absolute certainty,” placing it second-to-last in the country. The state placed similarly low in all other rankings.

Today’s religious landscape is almost the complete opposite of what it was in the 17th century, when Connecticut was the quintessentially theocratic state. The Calvinists who founded the colony steeped their everyday lives in religiosity, and saw the tools of government as extensions of their god-given duty to secure religious purity in society. The Congregationalist Church was for more than a century the state-sanctioned religious institution; all other belief systems, including other sects of Protestant Christianity, were officially disenfranchised and unofficially derided as atheistic abominations.

Life in a theocracy could be difficult for those outside of the state church’s good graces. Those who broke with the sanctioned practices of the official belief system would be ostracized by the community. They could find themselves unable to participate in civic life. They could even be prosecuted under those state and local statutes that enshrined religious intolerance.

The separation of church and state was incrementally accomplished over generations, often as a reaction to specific policies that had negatively impacted Connecticut’s own residents.

‘By the lawe of God of this colony thou deservest to dye’

The Calvinists, who were variously called “puritans” and “pilgrims” (a reference to John Bunyan’s allegorical moralist tale, “The Pilgrim’s Progress’), were products of a Europe that had been torn apart a century earlier by some of the bloodiest sectarian wars the world has ever seen. They sought to establish a society where they could practice their own brand of religious fundamentalism without interference.

They also believed in education. The most prominent among them were men versed in laws and letters. They built the earliest colleges in the colonies. They kept up with the scientific revolution in Europe and the emerging value it placed on empiricism and induction.

This led to some strange combinations of belief and skepticism. Connecticut’s citizens thought that Satan had direct influence in the world, and that witches had gained supernatural powers by creating pacts with the evil being.

Connecticut’s government was at the forefront of witch persecution. Numerous trials took place in the state during the 1600’s, including the first recorded execution for witchcraft in the U.S. in 1647.

A state law making witchcraft a capital offense that was passed in 1642 explicitly referenced passages from the Bible: “If any man or woman be a witch, that is, hath or consulteth with a familiar spirit, they shall be put to death. Exodus xxii. 18. Levit. xx. 22. Deut. xviii. 10, n.”

By the end of the 17th century, however, colonial jurisprudential culture had shifted, placing a greater emphasis on evidence that made witch trials increasingly difficult to prosecute.

In 1692 – the same year as the famous Salem witch trials – a new wave of witchcraft accusations from threatened the lives of several Fairfield County women.

The troubles began when Katherine Branch, a servant in the Stamford home of former selectman Daniel Wescot, started having epileptic-like “fits.” Wescot suspected Branch was possessed by witchcraft, and soon Branch began naming names: Elizabeth Clawson of Stamford. Mary and Hannah Harvey, Mary Staples, and Goody Miller, all of Fairfield. Finally, Mercy Disborough of Compo, now part of Westport. Several of the accused were known to have had rocky relationships with the Wescots.

The initial investigation called for a committee of five women to examine the accused for “devil’s marks.” These were marks supposedly placed on the witch’s body by Satan so that he could drink the witch’s blood. If a birthmark was considered suspicious, a pin would be stuck through it to see if it would bleed. If it didn’t, the woman might be a witch.

Clawson passed this first examination, but Disborough did not.

A special trial was set up on Sept. 14 in Fairfield. Bills of indictment against Clawson and Disborough were presented to a grand jury, while charges against the other women were dropped. Disborough’s indictment, transcribed by Secretary John Allyn, said she had “familiarity with satan the grand enemie of God & men & thes by his instigetion & help thou hast in a preternatutal way afflicted & don Harm to the bodyes & Estates of sundry of their Ma[jesties] subjects…for which by the lawe of God of this colony thou deservest to dye.”

Clawson and Disborough had both pleaded not guilty to the crime. To determine if they were actually witches, the jury needed more evidence. The accused women agreed to be tested by having their hands bound to their legs and being tossed into the water, the theory being that water would refuse to accept a witch. If they floated, it was evidence of guilt.

On Sept. 15, the two women were given the water test. According to Allyn’s notes, several witnesses testified that they both floated.

Meanwhile, a contingent of Clawson’s friends from Stamford rallied to her defense. Seventy-six people signed a letter vouching for Clawson’s good character.

The jury deliberated, but was unable to come to a conclusion in either case, and decided to send the case to the General Court in Hartford (then the state’s highest court).

The ministers of the court, who had plenty of experience with the prosecution of witches and were aware of the hysteria sweeping through Salem, were not convinced at all by the evidence. They returned their official opinion on Oct. 17 with four findings:

1. "The endeavor of conviction of witchcraft by swimming is unlawful and sinful, and therefore it cannot afford any evidence.”

2. "Unusual excrescences found upon their bodies ought not to be advanced as evidence against them without the approbation of some able physicians.”

3. "Respecting the evidence of the afflicted maid (the witness claimed to have been bewitched)…we cannot think her a sufficient witness; yet we think that her affliction being something strange, it well deserves a further inquiry.”

4. "As to the other strange accidents—as the dying of cattle, etc., we apprehend the applying of them to these women as matters of witchcraft to be upon very slender and uncertain grounds."

The General Court did not choose to question whether witches actually existed, but they did demand a higher standard of evidence than the trial in Fairfield had produced.

The group in Fairfield reconvened, and on Oct. 28, found Clawson innocent. Disborough, however, was convicted.

In the first half of 1693, petitioners on behalf of Disborough approached the General Court, calling the decision against her illegal. The Court appointed a commission consisting of Samuel Wyllys, William Pitkin, and Nathaniel Stanley to review the documents of the case.

The commission, reaffirming the General Court’s earlier skepticism, acquitted Disborough and decided that further witch trials should be avoided altogether. They cited the horror that had occurred in Massachusetts the year before, saying that the epidemic of litigations in Salem were “warning enof, those that wit make witchcraf t of such things wit make hanging work apace.”

No witches were convicted in Connecticut after that, though a few trials continued to take place until 1697. Many citizens still believed that witches walked among them, consorting with Satan and possessing children. The law against witchcraft was never repealed; instead, it was quietly expunged from later revisions of public acts.

Disborough escaped execution. She faded into relative obscurity, popping up only occasionally in public records from the early 1700’s. She had been subjected to dangerous and humiliating tests, put in jail and sentenced to death, but had narrowly managed to gain her freedom. In this early test of state-sanctioned religion, Connecticut had taken a small step toward reform.

Part 2: Anglican Infiltration

Part 3: (Coming soon)

Relics of Industry: The Rapidayton Gas Pump

2011-12-26T10:56:00.000-05:00

This rusting Rapidayton gas pump stands in front of an unused building at the end of my street in Fairfield.

Rapidayton pumps were once common in the East and Midwest. They were produced by the Dayton Pump & Manufacturing Co. in Dayton, Ohio.

The company was started in 1908 by Frank M. Tait, a master of utilities throughout the first half of the 20th century. Inspired by his early interaction with Thomas Edison, Tait took over what would become the Dayton Power & Light Co. in 1905. At one time or another, Tait managed public utilities all over the U.S.

Rapidayton pumps ended after the company was changed in 1955 to the Tait Manufacturing Co. The assets of the Dayton Pump & Manufacturing Co. were used to create the Frank M. Tait Foundation, which sits today on North Main Street in Dayton.

The year that this pump was installed is unclear. There are only three digits available for the total purchase price, meaning the pump was built with the assumption that a full tank of gas would never cost more than $9.99.

Photographs by Brandon T. Bisceglia.

IBM strategist advocates ‘new mindset’ for corporate communications

2011-12-20T08:28:00.001-05:00

IBM Communications Strategist and former business journalist Steve Hamm talks to UNH gathered students in the Vlock Center for Convergent Media Dec. 7 about the new opportunities that global communications are opening for businesses and media. Photograph by Brandon T. Bisceglia.

Corporations are shifting away from talking about themselves toward sharing ideas with people around the world, IBM Communications Strategist Steve Hamm on Dec. 7 told a class of University of New Haven students in the Laurel Vlock Center for Convergent Media in Maxcy Hall.

Hamm spoke to communications majors taking a copy editing course taught by adjunct Professor of Communications Mike Bazinet about his view that both journalism and public relations in the U.S. are broken at a time when a flood of disorderly information has created a great need for writers’ narrative talents. He urged the students not to be pessimistic, saying that there are also more opportunities than ever for positive change in both fields.

“The landscape has been utterly transformed in just a matter of years,” he said. It’s shocking – just shocking.

Hamm should know. He worked in journalism for decades before joining IBM two years ago. He wrote for the Bristol Press in Bristol, Conn., the San Jose Mercury News, and Businessweek. He has written several books, most recently publishing a book honoring IBM’s centennial anniversary. He also writes for IBM’s “A Smarter Planet Blog.”

Hamm witnessed the decline of Businessweek firsthand, from being the top business publication in the world in the late 1990s to when it “essentially went out of business” in 2009. He said he changed roles because he knew that journalism was struggling and he wanted to work with a large organization where his writing would have more influence.

Hamm said, though, that there are also problems emerging in corporate communications, precisely because of its relationship to journalism.

“The old model was: you strategize around finding a journalist interested in telling your story, invest time to develop a relationship with them, understand the market, build stories, pitch them, and then they’d be published,” he said.

Increasingly, Hamm said, journalism has lost its emphasis on explanation and narrative. He said that stories on business news websites like Marketwatch.com are a jumble of sometimes-contradictory snippets without any kind of depth.

“In a world of tremendous complexity, we’ve got news in tiny bits,” he said.

One of the things that Hamm and his colleagues at IBM have been working on to overcome the collapse of in-depth reporting is to recreate deep conversations about ideas through newer media, such as social networking sites. To do that, corporations are expanding their focus of constituents as shareholders and customers to include governments, universities, other companies – and employees.

That is one of the aims behind “A Smarter Planet Blog” and its related Facebook page, “People for a Smarter Planet.” Both sites include discussion with writers and researchers who work for IBM, but also bring in perspectives from all over the world.

One recent innovation was to have “Smart Fridays,” during which people studying interesting phenomena explain their research through a series of posts on the Facebook page. In one recent series, a researcher showed that the height of high-heeled shoes fluctuates with the economy. In hard times, heels tend to get higher, while in prosperous times they get lower.

The conversation, while not specific to anything that IBM does, generated about 1.4 million hits in a few hours.

Hamm sees these types of crossover conversations as a positive step for corporate communications. “One thing corporations must do is say, ‘here’s our knowledge,’ and become a hub around networks to create a feedback loop of learning and influencing. These are the most valuable things in the world, where value can be created.”

Hamm said that no one, including IBM, has quite figured out how to take full advantage of the explosion of information technologies available. That is why it is vital for people from different walks of life to share ideas with one another and try new things.

“Communication is not the frosting on the cake. It is the cake now,” he said. “It is part of the core of what societies need to advance.”

The Year of the Protest

2011-12-15T08:49:00.000-05:00

2011 has been the stage for a resurgence of a classic tactic for political reform: the protest. Although there are rallies of varying sizes around the world each year, few have had the numbers or tenacity to wield significant influence. This year, though, they provoked the toppling of governments, the breakdown of civil society, and violent suppressions that sometimes backfired. The last time such a wave of demonstrations gripped so many countries at once was during the student movements of 1968, more than 40 years ago.

Here is a month-by-month look at key moments in some of the year’s protests:

January: Tunisia

Tunsia was the first – and perhaps the most successful – uprising in what later became known as the Arab Spring. Civil activists began protesting against government corruption, unemployment and restrictions on freedom after the self-immolation of street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi on December 17, 2010. Bouazizi had committed the act because of treatment he had received by a municipal official. President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was forced to resign on Jan. 14, and peaceful elections were held in October.
Public domain photograph.

February: Egypt

In this Feb. 4 photograph, protesters flood the streets of Alexandria, Egypt, to call for the end of President Hosni Mubarek’s 30-year rule. Millions of protesters, many of them utilizing social media to organize their movement, held a stand-off against Mubarek’s regime for several weeks. Mubarek announced he would step down on Feb. 11, after members of Egypt’s military began refusing to crack down on demonstrators. The military, after taking over the provisional government, sparked a new wave of protests that claimed similar abuses under the new regime. Mubarek now faces trial for premeditated murder, and several rounds of contentious elections are under way.
Photograph courtesy of Al Jazeera/Jamal Elshayyal. Some rights reserved.

March: Yemen

Protesters march on the university in the capital of Sana’a in Yemen on March 1, 2011. Inspired by Tunisia, Egypt and other nearby movements, demonstrations in Yemen began over similar concerns about government corruption and unemployment. Yemenis were also upset over proposed changes to Yemen’s constitution to extend the length of terms for the president and legislators. President Ali Abdullah Saleh originally rejected demands from the protesters. But after months of crackdowns and defections, the government was left in shambles, and Saleh signed an agreement on Nov. 23 to resign within 30 days.
Photograph courtesy of Al Jazeera English. Some rights reserved.

April: India

It all started with activist Anna Havare announcing that he would undertake a “fast until death” beginning April 5 that would last until India’s government enacted substantial corruption reforms. Hazare’s supporters, undertaking the practices of nonviolent resistance first championed by Gandhi, began a series of protests in New Delhi and elsewhere that called for the passage of the Jan Lokpal bill, which, if enforced, would further many of the protesters’ goals. Hazare was arrested in August, but mass outrage ensued, and he was released again and allowed to continue his hunger strike. The bill finally passed at the end of August, and Hazare ended his fast, though he has continued to push for more reforms.
Photograph courtesy of Pranav21391. Some rights reserved.

May: Spain

High unemployment, new austerity measures, and a government that people feel is more responsive to business interests than average voters sparked major protests in May throughout Spain that have been referred to as the 15-M Movement. The largest demonstrations took place as elections neared in May. The President of the Regional Electoral Committee of Madrid declared the gatherings illegal, but that increased the discord. In this picture, tens of thousands of protesters gather in Puerta del Sol in Madrid on May 20 to camp out until after the end of the elections, in which the ruling Spanish Socialist Worker’s Party lost to the populist People’s Party.
Photograph courtesy of Fotograccion. Some rights reserved.

June: Greece

Greek debt was at the center of the Euro crisis this year. The country’s sovereign debt problems resulted in the passage of numerous austerity packages in exchange for bailouts and protections from other European nations. The collapse of the Greek economy was met with violent reactions from citizens, who began a series of strikes and protests in May. The anti-austerity demonstrations became more and more pronounced, reaching a crescendo in June, when the Greek parliament voted to accept the European Union’s plans to put the financial system back in order. In this June 6 photograph, people gather in Syntagma (Constitution) square outside the parliament building.
Photograph courtesy of Protonotarios. Some rights reserved.

July: Malaysia

The Malay people are not well-known for mass demonstrations. But there has been growing unrest in recent years to the ruling coalition in Malaysia, Barisan Nasional, which has won every federal election since 1957. Tens of thousands of sympathizers with minority and opposition groups, organized by the Coalition for Clean and Fair Elections (known as Bersih), marched in Kuala Lampur on July 9 to demand elections reforms. Only limited protesting is allowed in Malaysia, and there were threats of police intervention prior to the march. Water cannons and tear gas were used to disperse protesters, of whom 1,600 were arrested. In November, the lower house of Malaysia’s parliament passed a ban on street demonstrations that was roundly condemned by pro-democracy groups.
Photograph courtesy of Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved.

August: Chile

Students have been protesting Chile’s private education industry, asking for greater investment and control by the state in public education. Several waves of contention have swept the country. The first was in reaction to a proposal by then-Education Minister Joaquín Lavín’s proposal to increase funding for non-traditional universities, which have been known to exploit legal loopholes to make profits. More proposals followed, with each bringing a new wave of demonstrations. On Aug. 25, unions organized a major strike and protest that they estimated drew about 600,000 protesters throughout Chile in response to crackdowns on students and reforms that they said fell short. These marchers were in Pichilemu that day.
Photograph courtesy of Diego Grez. Some rights reserved.

September: Libya

Rebel supporters celebrate the fall of Libya’s capital, Tripoli, to anti-Gaddafi forces on Sept. 8. The country’s uprising began in February as part of the Arab Spring, then devolved into a civil war that drew the backing of NATO. Throughout the year, rebels and Gaddafi allies battled from city to city, with both sides seeing early victories. Finally, the rebels captured the remaining holdout cities. They found Gaddafi hiding in Sirte in October, and, in a controversial move, killed him without a trial.
Photograph courtesy of Ammar Abd Rabbo. Some rights reserved.

October: Occupy Wall Street

A group of protesters angered by income inequality set up camp in New York City’s Zuccotti Park, in the shadow of Wall Street’s skyscrapers. Hundreds of camps sprang up across the U.S. and the rest of the world. The occupiers were joined frequently for marches and demonstrations by others sympathetic to their causes. Their popularity spiked on Oct. 15, when coordinated protests were held in cities around the planet. A month later to the day, the encampment at Zuccotti Park was broken up by police. Camps across the U.S. and elsewhere were subject to crackdowns of varying severity, but protests and some camps continue.
Photograph by Brandon T. Bisceglia.

November: Syria

Sporadic protests inspired by the Arab Spring popped up in pockets of Syria at the beginning of the year. In March, mass demonstrations began taking place in opposition of the dictatorial rule of President Bashar al-Assad, the end of his Ba’athist Party’s control, and a lack of constitutional government. Assad's camp clamped down on protests with military force, serving only to ignite further uprisings and international concerns. In an unprecedented move, the Arab League approved near-unanimous sanctions against Syria in November. The United Nations estimates that about 5,000 people have been killed in the conflict so far.
Photograph by Syriana2011. Some rights reserved.

December: Russia

Tens of thousands of protesters demonstrated in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russia, over allegations of vote-rigging and ballot fraud in parliamentary elections by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s ruling United Russia Party, which clung to its shrinking majority despite electoral dishonesty. Putin himself is running for president in an election set for March in 2012. Protesters light flares in the chilly Moscow darkness in this Saturday, Dec. 10 photograph.
Photograph by Pavel Golovkin, courtesy of Cryptome.org.

Read more about protests:

- Occupy New Haven: an Operation in Progress

- Occupying Wall Street After Dark

- Grassroots Astroturfing and Political Terrorism

The Strands of Zen in Western Culture

2011-12-10T01:55:00.001-05:00

Photograph by Brandon T. Bisceglia.

The Japanese adaptation of Buddhism known as Zen can seem out of place in Western societies. Those who subscribe to cultural moral relativism believe that unique historical circumstances shape moral values in different cultures, and therefore there are no universally-shared values. They would suggest that the difficulty Westerners have in understanding Zen – particularly its avoidance of reason as a means of working out ethical issues - is evidence of that gulf in universal values.

To say that Zen eschews reason, however, is an oversimplification of the practice. If examined in its nuances, Zen does defy cultural relativism by appealing to numerous values that have appeared in cultures all over the world. Its elusiveness is not unique to peoples of the West – it is counterintuitive by nature.

Reason looms large in the traditions of Western philosophy. Plato and Aristotle both placed a man’s reasoning abilities in a position above other aspects of his character (1, 2). Zen appears to evade reason - to actively sabotage it.

Yet these philosophical expressions all have commonalities that become visible at a more granular level. Plato sees reason as a moderating force that promotes the best possible functioning of the other faculties; a man “will always desire so to attemper the body as to preserve the harmony of the soul (3).” The ultimate aim, to Plato (and Aristotle) is ultimately to live as fruitful a life as can be attained.

Zen’s goal, if it can be said to have one, is similar. T.D. Suzuki says that Zen moves one step beyond reason to break free of the mental constraints of abstract concepts and concentrate on “life as it is lived (4).” Zen does not deny reason a role in life. Suzuki says that practitioners have their own doctrines, but that these do not come directly from Zen, because Zen has no “sacred books or dogmatic tenets (5).”

Zen’s insistence on constantly breaking free from conceptual constructs has similarities to philosophical strains of doubt that have appeared throughout the millennia. In ancient Greece, Pyrrho of Elis first developed a form of systematic doubt that came to be known as skepticism. Pyrrho discovered that he could find vulnerabilities in every philosophical argument. According to Historian Jennifer Michael Hecht, he thought that “since we can know nothing for certain, we must behave as such…We thus stand aloof from life and thereby achieve peace of mind (6).”

Later skepticism integrated its processes into academic philosophy by introducing an important check on the assurance of any conclusion. Carneades of Cyrene made provisional belief acceptable by suggesting that, although nothing could be known, careful scrutiny could show that one conclusion was more likely than another (7).

Carneades’ caveat made it possible for academia and science to maintain their long-term intellectual flexibility. The provisional approach to knowledge admits that, far from being absolute, reason has limitations. It is a deeper concession that there are always more things we do not know than things we do know. It is also profoundly Zen, with echoes in the writings of Suzuki and others.

Other movements in Western cultures continuously strived to break free from old patterns of thinking. Freethinking, transcendentalism, and some elements of postmodernism all contain threads of doubt that, to varying degrees, challenge conceptual paradigms.

Hecht says that American’s introduction to Zen also had an impact on the development of psychotherapy as some eminent professionals, such as Mark Epstein, imported the practice of meditation (8).

Western ideas have also resonated with Eastern thinkers. The Zen story “Not Far From Buddhahood” specifically tells of a student reading a passage from the Biblical Book of Matthew to Gasan. Gasan’s response to the passage is, "That is excellent. Whoever said that is not far from Buddhahood (9)."

It is nevertheless the case that Zen is difficult to understand. Yet Suzuki points out that this is not a problem that only Westerners encounter. Zen is, by nature, “extremely elusive as far as its outward aspects are concerned; when you think you have caught a glimpse of it, it is no more there; from afar it looks so approachable, but as soon as you come near it you see it even further away from you than before (10).”

All systems of doubt can be elusive. Hecht says that there is a narrative to doubt that involves communication and integration across cultures throughout history, including in the case of Zen. However, she says, the elusiveness of these traditions has commonly been portrayed in terms of a “mere collection of shadows on the history of belief (11).” Zen’s Western counterparts may be overshadowed by other philosophical systems, but they remain a robust and vital part of those cultures. And Zen itself is engaged in a productive exchange with that milieu.

References:

1. Plato. The Republic. Translated by Sir Henry Desmond Pritchard Lee. (Plain Label Books, 1955) chap. ix
2. Aristotle. The Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by David Ross. (Oxford University Press, 200) Book X, chap. vii, 194
3. Plato. The Republic. Translated by Sir Henry Desmond Pritchard Lee. (Plain Label Books, 1955) chap. ix, 573
4. Suzuki, Daisetz Teitaro. An Introduction to Zen Buddhism. (Grove Press, 1954) Chap. ii, 45
5. Suzuki, Daisetz Teitaro. An Introduction to Zen Buddhism. (Grove Press, 1954) Chap. ii, 38
6. Hecht, Jennifer Michael. Doubt: A History. (New York: HarperCollins, 2003) Chap. i, 41
7. Hecht, Jennifer Michael. Doubt: A History. (New York: HarperCollins, 2003) Chap. i, 43
8. Hecht, Jennifer Michael. Doubt: A History. (New York: HarperCollins, 2003) Chap. x, 473
9. Senzaki. “Not Far From Buddhahood.” 101 Zen Stories. (Kessinger Publishing, 2004) 16
10. Suzuki, Daisetz Teitaro. An Introduction to Zen Buddhism. (Grove Press, 1954) Chap. ii, 43
11. Hecht, Jennifer Michael. Doubt: A History. (New York: HarperCollins, 2003) Introduction, ix

Tips on Arguing: Primary and Secondary Sources

2011-12-07T09:09:00.001-05:00

When you’re conducting research foran essay, a debate, or a report, you will often come across multiplesources of information about the same event or topic. How can youtell which of these to use?

One of the most tried-and-true methodsfor “ranking” information is to distinguish between primary andsecondary sources.

A guide to research published by theUniversity of Maryland says that primary sources “are from the timeperiod involved and have not been filtered through interpretation orevaluation. Primary sources are original materials on which otherresearch is based.”

Examples of primary sources includethings like eyewitness accounts, photographs, newspaper articles fromthe time and place you’re researching, and physical objects (bones,pottery, coins, and so forth).

Primary sources are considered the goldstandard in all academic research, as well as in journalism. Thereason is simple: if you get your facts second-hand, you have no wayto be sure that they’re accurate.

Secondary sources do have uses, though.Encyclopedias like Wikipedia are considered secondary sources; theypull information together from primary sources to give an overview ofa topic. In this way, secondary sources can help someone to learn thebasics of a new subject.

These kinds of sources are also greatplaces to get commentary and analysis, because they often draw frommultiple viewpoints or discoveries and make connections betweenideas.

The quality of a secondary source canbe tough to judge, which is why citations are so vital. If there arereferences, then the reader can go back and look at the primarysources that were used to find out whether or not the secondarysource is accurate.

A simple example is Wikipedia’s entryfor “primary source.” The first sentence of the entry says,“Primary source is a term used in a number of disciplines todescribe source material that is closest to the person, information,period, or idea being studied.” After that, there appear twocitations: one links to the University of Maryland’s definition.You can go to the original definition, and see that althoughWikipedia’s wording is slightly different, the idea is accurate.You can be confident in this case that Wikipedia didn’t just makeit up or leave out important information.

As the entry goes on, it offers morecitations – 31 in all, plus links to other outside sources, similarentries, and so on. This robust suite of references is what makesWikipedia a valuable tool, because you can find hundreds of primarysources collected in one place.

Teachers have probably warned youagainst citing Wikipedia. They’re right to do so, but not becauseWikipedia is deceitful or inaccurate (it does occasionally makemistakes, but so does everyone). The reason you shouldn’t cite itis that it is academically lazy not to read the primary sources foryourself.

Sunrise on the Housatonic

2011-12-04T11:03:00.001-05:00

The sun rises over the opposite banks of the Housatonic River from the Stratford boat launch as clouds roll across the sky, refracting the light. The reflection turns the waters a purplish hue, streaked by birds plying the river in the distance. Photograph by Brandon T. Bisceglia.

Undermining Journalism

2011-11-30T15:36:00.002-05:00

How the Media's Attempt to Adapt Could Kill it Instead


The heart of the New Haven Register's newsroom remains a place of active collaboration, for now. Photograph by Brandon T. Bisceglia.

CNN laid off approximately 50 editors,librarians and photojournalists in a surprise announcement on Nov. 11as part of a three-year restructuring effort seeking to bring thecompany in line with changes in “technology and workflow.”

“Technologyinvestments in our newsrooms now allow more desk-top editing andpublishing for broadcast and online,” Jack Womack, the company'sSVP of domestic news operations, wrote in a note to staff explainingthe layoffs. “This evolution allows more people in more places toedit and publish than ever before.”

Womackcontinued that CNN management had considered the impact ofuser-generated content, social media and CNN iReporters (who createcontent based on prompts that the news agency provides) as part ofthe assessment.

CNN's layoffs are hardly shocking. Theyare only the latest in a decade-long series of changes to theAmerican media landscape that have squeezed professional journalistsinto smaller and smaller corners. The closing of foreign bureaus, theshift to 24-hour online news cycles, and the increased reliance on“citizen journalists”: these are all symptoms of a systemicproblem with the structure of news gathering and reporting.

The near-consensus is that under thecurrent business model, the expense of producing news is too high tobe sustainable. The solution for many agencies has been to trim - orsometimes gut - the newsroom while filling the gap with contentcreated by nonprofessionals.

In that context, CNN's move tooutsource its news function to unpaid users makes a certain sense.Video and audio recording technologies are now prolific and familiarto millions of people. Although the production quality of a videoshot on an iPhone may not be polished enough for an advertiser'sneeds, they are perfectly suited for the two-minute throwaway storythat a cable news agency can use to keep itself fresh on a slow day.Moreover, it is cheaper and faster than sending a reporter out intothe field to cover an event that may be over by the time she or hearrives.

The layoffs prompted a satirical reaction from “The Colbert Report” host Stephen Colbert, whopointed out that CNN iReporters do not get paid.

“They get something even better:badges. Which I assume are redeemable for food and rent,” he said.He went on to promote his own user-generated video feature, whichincluded footage of a colonoscopy, a goat, and a man waiting for abus.

Colbert's comedic commentary revealed adarker side to this kind of corner-cutting. Volunteers, as eager asthey may be, have different incentives guiding them, some of whichmay be suspect. Even those who mean well often lack the legal,ethical and technical knowledge of paid professionals. And with fewertrained reporters and editors responsible for curating content thatthey have not generated themselves, the depth, accuracy, andcredibility of news can more easily be undermined.

The danger in cutting corners is thatit can undercut the very relevance of journalism altogether.

The Shrinking Newsroom

Al Santangelo, news editor at the New Haven Register, has witnessed first-hand the slow collapse of thetraditional newsroom.

Half of the offices of the Registerare empty, like miniature ghost towns built out of cubicles. Thebusiness department is gone. The former design office is an emptyroom. The award-winning sports department used to stretch across oneend of the newsroom, but now consists of four desks and a television.

Santangelo says that the newspaper makesa profit of millions of dollars each year. Yet it could still facefurther consolidation. There is talk of ditching the newsroom.Reporters would file stories remotely. Instead of printing the paper in-house, production of the actual paper would be outsourced to another location.

His workplace is being stripped in partbecause the paper's parent, the Journal Register Company, filed forbankruptcy in 2009. Two years later, the Journal Register Company istrying to rebuild its profitability under what CEO John Paton, whotook over after the bankruptcy, calls a “digital first, print last”model.

When the Registerwas under family ownership, which lasted until the 1980's, the amount of money his paper makes would have seemed profitable. As part of a conglomeratedriven by shareholder interests, however, the question shifts fromone of absolute profitability to whether those profits are rising orfalling. It also matters less how an individual publication is doing;profitability for the company is determined by the sum of its parts.In the The Journal Register Company's case, that's more than 350multi-platform products in 992 communities.

“Not all of those publications makemoney,” says Santangelo. “Unfortunately, the ones that do end upsubsidizing the others.”

The Journal Register Company released achart Nov. 28 with its vision for the reorganization of the NewHaven Register. It's not all bad news: a dedicated investigativereporting team will be created, and several dedicated beats are beingadded.

Much of the reorganization, though, isreminiscent of the shift that CNN and other news agencies have taken.It calls for aggregation of statewide content, linking out to othercontent providers, audience-contributed content, and partnershipswith local outlets.

It is not likely that any of thesesteps will lead to much hiring. The investigative and beat reportingteams will be made up of long-standing employees who used to serveother functions in the newsroom, according to the Journal Register'spress release.

For instance, the Register'sformer Business Editor, Cara Baruzzi, will be shifted to head up anew “breaking news team.” On top of covering the area's news,this team will also have responsibility for delivering “aConnecticut-wide curated breaking news report by linking out to otherinformation sources – including The New Haven Independent,members of The Register’s Community Media Lab and sourcestraditionally viewed as competitors.”

The idea behind sharing content fromcompetitors, says Santangelo, is to create a one-stop shop for theonline reader, who would no longer have to jump around from source tosource to find out what is going on in the state.

Santangelo is skeptical about thewisdom of that approach, however. He freely admits that such asharing scheme allows other organizations to have the exact samebreadth of content on their own sites. When asked what would preventpeople from going to any of those other sources, he shrugs.

“Nothing. There's no loyalty on theInternet,” he says.

Just around the corner from the bustling newsroom at the New Haven Register, emptied cubicles sit in darkness. Photograph by Brandon T. Bisceglia.

Duplication and Verification

The practice of sharing news storiesbegan long before the Internet. The Associated Press wire service is,in essence, a mechanism to allow papers to share news. It has becomea staple of the newspaper industry because individual papers rarelyhave the resources to send reporters to faraway sites to cover everymajor breaking story.

The AP saves news agencies costs thatmight otherwise be prohibitive, and this is the key to its long-termsuccess. However, it and other sharing schemes open news agencies toa potential worry: they cannot independently verify the content thatthey receive.

This trade-off was not much of aproblem for newspapers with a local focus through most of thetwentieth century. Many communities had multiple papers competing forthe same audience, and they did not share with one another. Thiscompetition led to incentives for each paper to protect itsreputation by being both fair and accurate. The wire services weremainly reserved for stories outside of the paper's coverage area.

The culture began to shift toward theend of the century. Cable news channels that ran 24 hours a day hadmore space to fill than they could with the amount of content theycould afford to produce. Media mergers turned former competitors intocolleagues and changed the profit motive.

Then the Internet put the pace ofdemand for continuous updates into high gear. For large mediaconglomerates, it simply made no business sense to send three or fourreporters to cover the same story when one could run it acrossmultiple platforms.

What makes business sense, though, isbased on a monthly or yearly calculation often made by people wholive out of state (or out of the country). The reputations of the oldjournalistic institutions were built on presumptions that they wereintegral to the communities in which they existed and would be aroundfor decades to come.

In that old world, the uniqueobservational capacities, background knowledge, and community ties ofeach reporter were valuable commodities. If a reporter from newspaperA wrote about the same event as a reporter from newspaper B, eachpaper could tout the different creative angle that its reporter wouldbring to bear on the story. The reader could compare differentversions and learn things from one story that the other might miss.

More importantly, the reader couldcompare the facts in each story. If there was a contradiction, itwould hurt the reputation of the paper that failed to properly vetits product. This created an incentive for both parties to be honestand careful about what they published.

In the brave new world of digitalmedia, these incentives have largely disappeared. The encouragementof sharing to prevent story duplication leads news organizations tocite one another as a stand-in for independent verification, whichcan exacerbate the spread of misinformation.

This game of “telephone” blew up inthe face of media professionals in June, when an unverified tip frompolice about a mass grave in Liberty County, Texas produced a rash ofreporting by major media outlets the world over. The mass grave didnot exist.

In an investigation by WNYC’s On theMedia, it was discovered that the original story came from KPRC,Houston's Channel 2. Liberty County police called the station about atip they had received from a psychic. They were planning to check itout. Someone in the newsroom posted to Twitter the following message:“Dozens of bodies have been found in Liberty County. Join us forKPRC at 5 p.m. for the latest information."

The Twitter post did not mention asource. Nor was it vetted; the news team had not yet visited thesupposed grave site to verify the information.

From Twitter, Reuters picked up thestory, citing KPRC as the source. The New York Times citedReuters as its source. London’s The Guardian ran the Reutersversion as well. SkyNews, the BBC and others also passed it around.

One newspaper that did not rely on themedia’s rumor mill was the Houston Chronicle, which neversaid that the story was anything more than an unconfirmed report.

“I don't know how anyone in theirright mind or with an iota of professionalism in their veins couldhave reported such a thing, absent any confirmation from anybody,”said Chronicle reporter Mike Tolson in an interview with OTM host BobGarfield.

If the worldwide reporting debacle isany indication, Tolson and his colleagues represent a dying breed.The pressures are strong to get a story out now, without firstplacing a call to a local source for confirmation or sending someonedown to check things out.

Many long-time reporters are all tooaware of how the change of pace hampers their ability to vet stories.Hartford Courant reporter Christine Dempsey, who has been inthe business for 25 years, said in a recent panel discussion withjournalism students at the University of New Haven that she oftenfeels uncomfortable with the quality of her fact-checking these days.

She said she had not made any majorblunders she knew of. But, she added, “I’ve felt like I waswalking a tightrope sometimes.”

Message Manipulation

Dempsey has a legitimate cause forconcern. Time and resources are becoming increasingly scarce forsmaller teams of editors and reporters, even as the amount ofinformation they have to contend with is growing at an exponentialrate.

At its heart, journalism is aboutselecting the most relevant information. The flipside is that, bynecessity, some information is discarded or ignored.

Journalists have developed a number ofethical standards and rules of thumb to make the selection processeasier. The system is not perfect, of course. The “equal time”rule may give people on different sides of a conflict a chance tohave their views aired, but it can also create a perception of falsebalance. By giving the same space to mainstream and fringe views, theaudience may come away with the perception that both views havesimilar factual weight or popular support.

These heuristic issues are troublesome,and journalists spend a lot of time debating about how best toresolve them. All of the possible solutions involve spending moretime on stories.

Meanwhile, the newsroom is moving inthe opposite direction. It is being facilitated in this process byindividuals and groups with their own agendas who submit materialdesigned to fit the mold of news production.

Public relations offices are notoriousfor writing stories “for” reporters, even though it violates theethical standards of traditional journalism to reprint a pressrelease verbatim. But overtaxed journalists can easily be lulled intobelieving that getting a slanted story out is better than notproducing anything.

The UK charity Media Standards Trustdeveloped a website called Churnalism.com in 2011 to combat thepractice of reprinting press releases. Its “churn engine” allowsreaders to paste stories and find out how much of them are graftedfrom press releases.

Independent filmakerChris Atkins developed some fake news releases of his own and sentthem out to the press after speaking with Martin Moore, director ofthe trust. One story explained a new "chastity garter" thatcontained a microchip that would send text messages to a woman'spartner if she was cheating on him or her. The story became “mostread” on the website of the Daily Mail,and made headlines across the US and the UK before the hoax wasrevealed.

Slanted reporting need notcome from outside sources. In the US, FOX News and MSNBC arewell-known as mouthpieces for the political right and left,respectively. Though their audiences are smaller than thecontroversies that surround them, a growing proportion of thepopulation turns to them for news that fits their views. The Internetis also a great boon for the echo chamber, in which people can seekinformation that confirms their preconceived notions without havingtheir biases challenged.

Media fragmentation has ledto a further erosion of an adherence to facts or fairness. Thewidespread adoption of these ideologically-driven approaches toreporting is relatively new, and determining their influence is adaunting task. Older people still overwhelmingly consume middle-of-the-road media from network television and newspapers. Theymay not agree with everything printed in their local papers, but theyare used to formats that stress accuracy over assertion.

Veteran journalists likeDempsey and Santangelo are also loathe to violate the news gatheringvalues they were taught. For the moment, they act as a bulwarkagainst a tide of editorializing.

New Normal?

What about younger people,many of whom are growing up in a world where selective exposure isthe norm? Can they distinguish between objectivity and spin, and dothey care?

The relative prosperityof left- and right-leaning blogs and online news sites is onediscouraging indication of a trend toward greater polarization. TheHuffington Postis unabashedly liberal, while Andrew Breitbart and James O'Keefe havemade their marks by promoting a conservative agenda.

Though politicallypartisan media has always been lurking on the edges of society, itsnew-found prominence has been accompanied by a remarkable willingnessto dispense with standards of objectivity for the sake of rocking theproverbial boat. O'Keefe in 2009 sparked a national debate over whatit means to be a journalist when he released a video purporting toshow him and college student Hannah Giles getting advice from workersat the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Nowdevising ways to hide sex trafficking and and avoidtaxes.

The corruption that O'Keefeand Giles uncovered may have been real. However, their methods of“news gathering” were disingenuous, unethical, and broke laws inseveral states.

Attorneys general inCalifornia and Massachusetts, the District Attorney's office inBrooklyn, and the US Government Accountability Office all conductedinvestigations into ACORN's actions. In the process, they reviewedthe unedited versions of O'Keefe's and Giles's videos. In every case,they found the videos to be heavily doctored and thus absolved ACORNof any wrongdoing.

The truth did not matter toO'Keefe or Giles. They were out to attack ACORN for what theyperceived to be a left-wing agenda.. They succeeded in devastatingthe organization, causing it to file for Chapter 7 liquidation in2010. Most of its offices were closed.

O'Keefe was the mastermindbehind the project, and he convinced Giles to pursue it with him tofurther her own career. When the story became a national sensation,she appeared on FOX News's “The O'Reilly Factor,” where host BillO'Reilly called her an “undercover reporter.” He characterizedACORN's lawsuit against Giles as a “revenge play,” without everoffering the agency's rationale for its actions.

During the interview, aclearly excited Giles said she had always “wanted to be aninvestigative journalist.” Now, with the nationally recognizedfigure of O'Reilly validating her actions, she was surely convincedshe had done what every good reporter should in the pursuit of astory.

And perhaps, with the newnorm allowing newsmakers to violate every journalistic ethic, shewill find a place to thrive. Such a norm would benefit the businessowners, who know that sex and scandal pad the profit margins,regardless of how it's created. It would benefit public relationsfirms, because they can more easily infiltrate a media culture thatdoesn't concern itself with telling the whole story. It would benefitpolitical ideologues, who prefer propoganda to balance.

The only question, then, willbe: who will serve the public once the old guard dies off?

Greenhouse Gases Reach All-Time High

2011-11-27T00:52:00.001-05:00

This NASA image shows the nearly ice-free McClure Straight in northern route of the Northwest Passage in August 2010. The famed passage was almost completely clear, with the exception of a band of ice in the straight (far left).
Image: NASA/GSFC/Jeff Schmaltz/MODIS Land Rapid Response Team. Some rights reserved.

Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide reached an all-time high of 389 parts per million in 2010 and rose at a faster pace than in previous years, according to a report issued Nov. 21 by the World Meteorological Organization, the U.N.’s weather agency.

The WMO's Greenhouse Gas Bulletin says that global CO2 levels are now 39 percent higher than they were at the start of the industrial revolution in 1750, when levels were at approximately 280 ppm. Those concentrations had remained relatively stable for 10 thousand years previously, according to climate researchers.

Carbon dioxide levels rose at a rate of 2.3 ppm between 2009 and 2010. That was faster than the average rate during the previous decade of about 2.0 ppm per year, and a significant acceleration compared to the average during the 1990s, when concentrations rose about 1.5 ppm per year.

The annual WMO report assessed the burdens and rates of several other greenhouse gases that are released by human activity, including methane and nitrous oxide. Methane is considered the second-most potent contributor to global warming. It increased 158 percent since 1750, from 700 parts per billion to 1808 ppb in 2010. Nitrous oxide increased 20 percent over the same period, from 270 ppb to 323.2 ppb.

“The three primary greenhouse gases are not only closely linked to anthropogenic activities, but they also have strong interactions with the biosphere and the oceans,” the report said.

WMO Deputy Secretary-General Jeremiah Lengoasa said in an interview with the Associated Press that although human emissions of greenhouse gases are directly related to increasing temperatures, there is a time lag between the two.

“With this picture in mind, even if emissions were stopped overnight globally, the atmospheric concentrations would continue for decades because of the long lifetime of these greenhouse gases in the atmosphere," he said.

At least a small amount of that carbon will not be locked back into the earth for hundreds of thousands of years.

The WMO report comes on the heels of a summary report on risk assessment issued Nov. 18 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which warned that, under the groups “high emissions scenario,” the frequency of hot days will increase by a factor of 10 in most regions of the world.

“Likewise, heavy precipitation will occur more often, and the wind speed of tropical cyclones will increase while their number will likely remain constant or decrease,” said Thomas Stocker, Co-chair of Working Group I in the summary.

Another study released in the Nov. 24 issue of the journal Nature provided the first evidence that the duration and magnitude of the current decline in Arcitic sea ice seem to be unprecedented for the past 1,450 years. Previously, the extent of ice loss was only known for last four to five decades, and questions remained about how much loss was due to natural variability. The researchers used land-based core samples to develop climate proxies so they could estimate the extent of the ice over a much longer period. The results suggest that Arctic ice loss is indeed being driven by manmade warming.

It remains to be seen whether the slew of new studies will make a difference in the stalled international negotiations to develop a comprehensive strategy to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which expires next year. Governments begin meeting for the seventeenth meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change on Tuesday in Durban, South Africa.

Countries met in Copenhagen in 2009 and again in 2010 in Cancún, Mexico to hammer out a new agreement, but made little progress toward a comprehensive treaty anything like Kyoto. The U.S., by far the highest per-capita emitter in the world, was the only nation out of 192 members never to ratify the treaty.

The Birds

2011-11-20T16:48:00.001-05:00

A humongous flock of birds made a racket in the trees at the edge of Ash Creek in Fairfield on a cloudy afternoon this week.

When my wife and I heard the clamor from our kitchen, we went to the backyard to see what was happening. There we witnessed hundreds of birds perched on practically every branch of three or four trees, chattering with one another.

The chirping lasted for almost half an hour. Then, as suddenly as they had arrived, the flock took flight in near-unison, leaving only silence in their wake.

You can listen to a portion of the chirping and the moment of flight by clicking on the player below.

Podcast Powered By Podbean

Photographs by Valeria Garrido-Bisceglia.

Important Books: The Pilgrim’s Progress

2011-11-16T09:22:00.001-05:00

Engraving from ThePilgrim's Progress, published in London, 1778.

Pilgrim enters thewicket gate, opened by Good-Will. Public domain image.

John Bunyan’s seventeenth-centurybook is the allegorical tale of Christian, a humble pilgrim, on hisjourney from the town of Destruction to the Coelestial City, whereGod resides. In its day, this classic sold more copies than any otherbook except the Bible. It was particularly popular among the settlersof the colonies in New England, who commonly referred to themselvesas "pilgrims."

Bunyan's book was meant to be adefense of his religious beliefs, and was written for the most partwhile he was in prison for refusing to conform to the mandatedAnglican practices of the time. His Calvinist/Lutheran brand ofreligiosity assumed that it was the privilege of an elect group toenter into God's court - a group primarily composed of the poor andoppressed.

Many of his characters were meant torepresent other sects of Christianity. He took frequent jabs at theQuakers and the Catholics. Over and over, The Pilgrim's Progressrefutes the values of the elite culture of Bunyan's time, which wasswiftly moving towards the naturalistic/materialist worldview thatput England in a prime position for the Industrial Revolution.

Thefirst book, which follows Christian exclusively, was so popular thatimitations and fake sequels sprang up all over. There were somecriticisms, though, concerning Christian's leaving his family behind(there were many women in Bunyan's congregation), as well as theesoteric nature of some of the symbolism used. In response to allthese pressures, Bunyan wrote a second part, wherein Christiana andChristian's four children traverse the Way. This volume is typicallyincluded along with the first book in modern printings.

Thesecond part attempts to explain the meanings behind Christian'stravails while demonstrating the roles that women, children andothers could play according to Bunyan’s theology. It suffers fromcertain faults, particularly in its allegorical style, which becomesstrained and even nonsensical at times. Nevertheless, the two tractsare integral to one another. The first is captivating, and the secondis necessary.

The Proper Role for Skepticism on Climate Change

2011-11-14T09:19:00.001-05:00

Multiple groups of scientists havetracked the rise of temperatures on Earth over time. Workingindependently, they end up with results that are largely in agreementwith one another. Prominent physicist and skeptic Richard Muller hasnow added his own analysis to the mix, and found that it conforms tothe warming trend seen here. Image courtesy of NASA EarthObservatory/Robert Simmon.

Another high-profile skeptic of globalwarming has changed his mind.

Physicist Richard Muller announced atthe end of October that his team at the University of California atBerkeley completed an analysis of climate data reaching back over 200years. Their conclusion? The Earth has warmed about 1 degreeCelsius since 1950. Their findings, which are available online in adraft paper, confirm what the National Academy of Sciences and otherscientific groups have been saying for years.

Muller's findings are nothing new toclimatologists, and they may not convince the entrenched climatechange deniers who are more interested in ideology than observation.For the majority of non-expert fence-sitters, though, Muller's workis extremely important, precisely because it shows the proper rolefor skepticism in climate research.

Muller is a respected scientist.Although his skepticism about the evidence for climate change haslong been used by climate change deniers to bludgeon their opponents,he was more interested in pursuing the facts. He had worried thatsome weather stations (where the raw data on climate is collected)were more sophisticated or accurate than others. He had worried thatthe rise of massive cities in the past century could have skewed someof the results.

These were legitimate questions for ascientist to look at. Even though other teams of climatologistsclaimed they had accounted for such factors, there is nothing wrongwith replicating research. That is one of the cornerstones of thescientific method. It's the reason science is more useful than simplebelief: no matter who does the experiment, they will get the sameresult.

Muller was prompted to embark on thisstudy after the 2009 “Climategate” fiasco, in which aninternational team of climatologists were accused of changing data tofit with their understanding that the world was warming.Investigations into the team's activities by multiple groups,including the British government, revealed that their data was solid.Nevertheless, politicians and average people, especially in theUnited States, were increasingly convinced that the world might notbe warming. Muller's study puts that scandal to rest.

Deniers still have some wiggle room.Muller says that he still isn't sure whether or not the planet'swarming is being driven by humans, and his study did not answer thatquestion.

There will still be plenty of peoplewho claim that global warming is entirely natural and that humanemissions of carbon dioxide don't matter. It's sad that such a beliefpersists despite the fact that scientists have known for centuriesthat greenhouse gases change atmospheric temperatures. It was all theway back in 1896 that Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius firstpointed out that human emissions of carbon dioxide were warming theEarth.

Mounds of evidence have built onArrhenius's findings over the last hundred years. The basic mechanismthat causes warming has never been contradicted, only refined.

There are still real scientificquestions to pursue. Will warming lead to increased clouds thatoffset some of the heat on the ground? Will reservoirs of methane (aneven more potent greenhouse gas) trapped in frozen lakes push warmingpast some “point of no return” as the lakes thaw? How much carbondioxide can the oceans absorb, and how will that impact sea life?

These problems are being worked on byscientists now. They may overturn some of our current understandingof the details, but they won't change the fundamental role of humanemissions.

In the meantime, the rest of us need tostop fighting about whether or not global warming is real. The wholetime that we've been embroiled in an unproductive ideological battle,the planet has been changing. We need to start applying skepticism tothe right questions about how we will deal with a reality that doesnot care if we believe in it.

Though Aristotle Supported Slavery, His Philosophy Would Abolish It

2011-11-04T08:35:00.000-04:00

The hands of the marble statue “The Greek Slave,” carved in 1844 by Hiram Powers. Photograph by Zack Lee. Some rights reserved.

Aristotle allows for slavery in his classic account of virtue. Some philosophers criticize Aristotle’s ethics as inconsistent for this reason. However, Michael J. Sandel, the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government at Harvard University, argues that Aristotle’s criteria are strong enough to reject slavery on their own grounds. Sandel is correct: if applied rigorously, slavery would not persist under Aristotle’s specifications.

Aristotle’s position on slavery hinges on two requirements: necessity and suitability to nature. Slavery is necessary in that society needs a division of labor to function. It is suitable to some peoples’ natures in that they are “capable of becoming…the property of another, and if he participates in reason to the extent of apprehending it in another, though destitute of it himself (1).”

The function of society does demand a division of labor, but it can be accomplished without the institution of slavery. Many countries operate without slaves today under democratic regimes. Men share child-rearing responsibilities with their spouses. Labor-saving technologies have reduced the time it takes to perform many household activities. Low-wage jobs offer compensation for even the bottom tiers of workers (though other inequalities persist in this system).

Aristotle could not have known of the societal institutions and technologies that have eroded slavery. They had not yet been developed in his time. Examples of advanced slave-less cultures were hard to find. As Sandel notes, “It’s worth recalling that these injustices persisted for more than two thousand years after Aristotle wrote (2).”

Aristotle’s second requirement is teleological; it posits that at least some people are naturally suited to slavery. But it also acknowledges that not all enslaved people are suited for that kind of a life. “Not all those who are actually slaves, or actually freemen, are natural slaves or natural freemen,” he writes (3).

To sort the natural from the unnatural slaves, Aristotle proposes a practical test. Sandel describes this as seeing “who chafes in the role or tries to flee (4).”

Few groups throughout history have actually offered slaves the ability to choose their position. Part of the perceived “suitability” to slavery was instilled via a systematic oppression by the ruling classes that went beyond mere physical abuse. In post-Civil War America, “freed” slaves faced a lack of education, a lack of money, and a forced segregation that blocked access to opportunities – what sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois called “the problem of the color line” in 1903 (5).

Du Bois found many freed slaves to be more destitute in their new condition. He also pointed out, however, that a small proportion of African Americans were already excelling. He expected the number of blacks who succeeded to rise as American institutions and attitudes continued to reform (6).

Today, enough former slaves have demonstrated abilities to reason and participate in the polis to convincingly suggest that no human is naturally suited to slavery. If any twenty-first century American was placed in slavery, he or she would no doubt “chafe in the role.” Coercion, which Aristotle says is a sign of injustice, would have to be applied to create a new slave class. It would fail the test of justice under his own rubric.

Sandel points out that teleological reasoning like Aristotle’s might in fact lead to a more powerful indictment of slavery than that of the modern liberal ethic in that it would also claim some freely chosen jobs to be unjust, because they are “so dangerous, repetitive, and deadening as to be unfit for human beings (7).”

Sandel’s example shows why teleology, at least when applied to certain aspects of human life, remains a powerful tool for moral philosophy. Its emphasis on purposes are open to being revised based upon the introduction of new empirical evidence, which can shape our understanding of what the inherent natures are of peoples and institutions.

Aristotle’s philosophical shortcomings are less the result of Aristotelian inconsistency and more the result of limits to the perspectives available in ancient Greece. Only now that societies have tried living without slavery is the evidence available that it is neither necessary nor natural.

References:

1. Aristotle. The Politics. Translated by David Ross. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1925) Book I, chap. v, 1254b
2. Sandel, Michael J. Justice: What’s the Right Thing To Do? (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009) 200
3. Aristotle. The Politics. Translated by David Ross. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1925) Book I, chap. vi, 1255b
4. Sandel, Michael J. Justice: What’s the Right Thing To Do? (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009) 202
5. Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt. The Souls of Black Folk. (Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co.; [Cambridge]: University Press John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A., 1903) XXXI
6. Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt. The Souls of Black Folk. (Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co.; [Cambridge]: University Press John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A., 1903) 101-102
7. Sandel, Michael J. Justice: What’s the Right Thing To Do? (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009) 203

Occupy New Haven: an Operation in Progress

2011-10-31T22:17:00.000-04:00

The main Occupy New Haven encampment consists of several dozen tents nestled in a corner of the Hew Haven Green. Hundreds of protesters have shown up for some of the group’s events, and many come and go throughout the day. Only a minority have made the space their temporary home.

A village of tents has arisen on the New Haven Green. Its inhabitants each has a slightly different reason for being there. They all share one thing in common, though: dissatisfaction with growing social disparity.

This is Occupy New Haven, a local offshoot of the global Occupy Wall Street protest movement that began Sept. 17 in Zuccotti Park, New York City. It has its own local flavor to it.

It's Personal

“Moose” declines to give his real name. He, like several others in his community, is wary of the media.

He wears a sign draped around his neck that reads, “Department of Hornland Security. When asked why he wears it, he pulls out a makeshift horn and blows into it like a megaphone.

Moose says he moved to New Haven from New Hampshire nine years ago. He graduated from UNH in 2006, but is currently unemployed. So is his fiance, who attained a master's degree in psychology. They're saddled in over a hundred thousand dollars in student loans.

“I have a hard time identifying the difference between that and indentured servitude,” he says.

Not too long ago, he points out, finishing an undergraduate degree was considered a major accomplishment. “Now a bachelors degree is the equivalent of a high school diploma,” he says.

Moose and his community plan to occupy downtown New Haven indefinitely. To do that, they have had to make a concerted effort to prepare and sustain themselves. They've developed more than ten committees to handle various tasks, from legal issues to safety to music.

The New Haven group has benefited from its later start compared to the first Occupy Wall Street encampment, says Moose. They have a permit from the city to be there. They began planning their supply needs before they moved to the green. They have an amicable relationship with the police.

They also have a much more expansive space. Zuccotti Park is a mere 33,000 square feet, or .076 of an acre. The New Haven Green is 16 acres. The camp only covers an out-of-the-way corner of the green. The area, surrounded by old New England-style churches and apartments, is idyllic for an occupation.

A sign decries the differing rules that govern student loan debts and bailouts for large businesses.

A Community Vision

Hundreds of people have shown up at some of Occupy New Haven's rallies. Some come and go freely throughout the day. Only a relative few stay overnight in several dozen tents strewn across the grass.

Ninety-nine percent of the time, the 99 percent are not protesting; they're searching out supplies, having individual conversations, eating and sleeping. On a Friday afternoon, a meeting of 25 or so convenes near the Information tent. They sit in a circle on the ground or in lawn chairs.

One wonders if there should be more regular meetings. A debate ensues over whether to move some meetings to earlier times or keep them later to allow for people getting out of work to come. Someone asks if smaller meetings could take place throughout the day.

A woman at the outskirts of the circle notices that a car in the street is being towed. She stands up and calls, “Mic check!”

“Mic check!” the others around her call out in unison, using the group amplification tactic called the “human megaphone.”

“Someone’s car is getting towed,” she says. The group repeats the sentence. Everyone looks out to the street, but no one moves to claim the car. The meeting continues.

The occupiers have a number of makeshift public institutions, such as this “library.”

Afterward, Amanda Taylor returns to the Comfort tent to sort clothes and blankets. As a member of the Comfort Committee, it's her job to manage the inventory.

She takes her task seriously. The days are getting colder, and there are incoming donations to sort and distribute.

Taylor grew up in North Stonington, and this is the first time she's been to New Haven. She has felt the sting of economic inequality. Her family had little money when she was growing up. She didn't go to college because she couldn't afford it.

In New Haven, though, she learned just how wide the economic gap can get.

“I'd never seen a homeless person before,” she says. “It's really sad. People aren't homeless in North Stonington.”

Some of the clothing donated to the Occupy New Haven group, she says, now go to the local homeless community, many of whom spend most of their time at the New Haven Green.

Taylor is glad to be helping others in a tangible way, even as she struggles with her fellow protesters to spur action from the most powerful in society.

Comfort committee member Amanda Taylor takes stock of some of the demonstrators’ supplies.

Organizational Networking

Win Heimer is trying to coordinate Occupy New Haven with its correlate in Connecticut's capital, Occupy Hartford. He is not a member of either, but he wants to support both with supplies and services.

Heimer is a union representative with the Alliance for Retired Americans, and part of the Greater Hartford Central Labor Council.

Several unions across the country have joined in demonstrations. The worldwide phenomenon that began near Wall Street is combating economic injustices that Heimer says he's been fighting against for a long time.

Heimer and his associates at a local union have arranged buses between New York, New Haven and Hartford. He says he is hoping to find a biodiesel generator for the encampment on the green.

Heimer is careful not to try to push the groups in a particular direction, however. Everyone prefaces their statements by saying they do not speak for the group, including him.

“This movement has just started. We have to see where it goes,” he says, adding, “hopefully it will bring changes that benefit our children and grandchildren.”

A message of peace decorates the medical tent.

Martina Crouch, a New Haven resident, is also hoping that the movement brings changes. She says she joined because she found people who thought like she did there. Then she realized that the protests could become a launching pad for something greater – a community conversation.

A number of the Occupy New Haven demonstrators note that they view their role in movement as an opportunity for local change. Crouch agrees with that sentiment. In this sense, one of the main themes of the their protest sounds like twenty-first century version of a distinctly New England tradition: the town hall meeting.

She says that the media cannot possibly portray the culture of the occupiers as well as experiencing it firsthand.

“Whatever preconceptions you may have,” she says, “you should come down and see what it really is.”

Occupy New Haven has become a microcosm, a society within a society. For Crouch and her tent community, that in itself is a great success.

“These protests brought people together,” she says.

Signs are carefully arranged on the ground in one corner of the encampment when they’re not being used.

All photographs by Brandon T. Bisceglia.

Community Colleges Benefit Everyone: Letter

2011-10-27T08:28:00.000-04:00

A painting in the HCC cafeteria celebrating the college's diversity. Photograph by Brandon T. Bisceglia.

I wrote this letter to the editor in response to an opinion piece by Housatonic Community College President Anita Gliniecki arguing that cutting funding for community colleges is a proposition that is "penny wise and pound foolish." My letter appeared in the Oct. 26 edition of the Connecticut Post:

Housatonic Community College President Anita Gliniecki should be applauded for her defense of community college funding.

I worked my way through HCC, paying for classes out of pocket with the money I earned at a full-time job. It was only because of HCC's low cost that I was able to afford to go back to school.

This spring I graduated with highest honors, a 4.0 GPA and a broad range of new skills. My efforts paid off in the form of scholarships and awards that allowed me to afford to transfer to the University of New Haven.

My experiences at HCC also instilled in me a strong connectedness with the wider community. Community colleges may be better equipped for this than private colleges, because nearly everyone enrolled comes from surrounding municipalities. They share a common stake in the region.

HCC has grown by thousands of students in the past five years. During every year in that same period, state block grant funding has stayed flat or been cut.

An economic impact study completed in 2008 showed that the college contributes $283.9 million each year to the economies of Fairfield and New Haven counties, far more than it receives in state funds.

Having HCC in downtown Bridgeport has made a huge difference in revitalization. Recall what it was like in 1997, the year that HCC relocated to Lafayette Boulevard.

We should all be grateful for the opportunities offered by community colleges. Short-term cuts will only lead to long-term losses for everyone.

More: Read Anita Gliniecki's letter.

Reporters talk tech changes in news at UNH

2011-10-26T09:53:00.001-04:00

Professional journalists speak tostudents in the Vlock Center for Convergent Media Wednesday about theways that their work has been changed by the Internet and mobiletechnologies. From left to right: Hartford Courant reporterChristine Dempsey, Connecticut Post columnist MariAn GailBrown, Madison, CT Patch.com editor Patricia McNerney. Photograph byBrandon T. Bisceglia.

Three veteran journalists from aroundConnecticut visited UNH Wednesday evening for a panel discussion withstudents about the challenges and opportunities that new technologieshave brought to their field.

Hartford Courant reporterChristine Dempsey, Connecticut Post columnist MariAn GailBrown, and Madison, CT Patch.com editor Patricia McNerney sharedtheir experiences and fielded questions from a packed audience in theLaurel Vlock Center for Convergent Media in Maxcy Hall.

The two-hour discussion was titled“News Writing and Editing for Traditional and Social Media,” andwas hosted by Adjunct Professor of Communication Michael Bazinet aspart of the copy editing course he is teaching this semester.Students from other journalism courses also attended.

Dempsey described how the process ofreporting had changed dramatically in the 25 years she has been doingit. She said that when she used to arrive on the scene of a breakingstory, she would have to look around for a pay phone to call hereditor.

“Now they have these smart phonesthat can do anything but slice bread,” she said.

McNerney, whose publication existsentirely online, agreed that mobile devices had altered her reportingpractices. She said she had “the most amazing experience injournalism” during Hurricane Irene this summer, because she wasable to report on what was happening in her hometown of Madison whilestaying at a friend’s house in Wallingford by using informationother residents posted or sent her.

Volunteers are key information sourcesfor McNerney. “The readers start to tell you what to report,” shesaid.

Brown pointed out that the Internet had“invigorated” print newspapers, too, by helping them to keep upwith television and radio.

“Because of the Internet and ourwebsites,” she said, “we’re constantly updating our stories,which is rejuvenating our papers.”

The panelists warned, however, that notall of the changes brought about by new technologies have beenpositive. Brown noticed a disturbing pattern while covering the trialof Steven Hayes, who was given the death penalty in 2010 for a brutalhome invasion and murder in Cheshire. Whenever reporters heardsomething they thought was newsworthy, they would tweet it, often inunison. She said the furious tweeting of reporters could send avisual signal to jury members to pay more attention to certain partsof the trial, possibly affecting the way they thought about the case.

For Dempsey, the increasing pressure toget news out as quickly as possible sometimes makes her uncomfortablethat she might not have checked her facts thoroughly enough first.She said she had not made any major blunders she knew of. But, sheadded, “I’ve felt like I was walking a tightrope sometimes.”

McNerney said that, in the face of afaster news cycle, reporters need to continually remind themselvesthat they have a mission beyond entertainment as society’swatchdogs.

“Are we fulfilling our traditionalrole as the fourth estate?” she asked.

Despite all of the changes, thepanelists agreed that many of the fundamental aspects of theirprofession remain the same. Dempsey said that strong writing skillswere still absolutely essential. McNerney concurred, noting thatPatch.com requires prospective reporters to take a writing test, justlike traditional newspapers.

She recommended that journalismstudents avoid focusing only on print, broadcast or web content.

“Don’t think of yourself as aone-dimensional reporter,” she said.

Tips on Arguing: Vet Your Facts

2011-10-23T23:39:00.000-04:00

Vetting your facts simply means looking into them. It may sound like this should go without saying, but failing to double-check a source is one of the most common ways that misinformation spreads.

Internet databases and search engines have given people access to more information than ever. But not all information is created equal. Public relations departments disguise their self-advertising to look like news stories. Poltical groups shape the presentation of facts to fit their agendas. Groups peddling pseudo-science publish their own journals, and conspiracy theorists sometimes make stories up out of whole-cloth.

Even if you are using a well-respected source, there is always a chance that human error will creep in. If you read New York Times articles that are more than a few days old, you may see corrections posted at the bottom of the page. It’s not because they weren’t careful the first time around – it’s because new information has overturned a previous statement, or new sources have provided further details.

There are several ways to get your facts straight, though none is foolproof. Whenever you can, you should always use a primary source over a secondary one. Primary sources tend to be more accurate and deliver more nuances.

Cross-checking is a simple way to make sure your facts are legitimate. If one source says A is true, find a different source – one that is independent of your first source - and see if it says the same thing. If your second source says that B is true, you’ll have to do more research to figure out which is closer to the truth.

If you’re drawing facts from scholarly journals or books, go through their references. Did the “fact” about Thomas Jefferson’s beliefs come from a document he wrote or from Wikipedia? If it came from Wikipedia, it might be correct – but the chances for error are higher.

Another tool often used by researchers to determine whether a given scholarly article is widely accepted by the academic community is to find out how many times it’s been cited by other papers. The more citations, the more likely it is to be useful information.

Unfortunately, there is no perfect way to vet your facts. Eyewitnesses remember things inaccurately. Typing, writing, and speaking mistakes are common. Personal biases can cloud even the most intelligent person’s assessment of a situation.

Vetting your facts is, however, the best way to minimize your own errors. It doesn’t mean that you’ll get everything right, but it will prevent you from getting a whole lot of things wrong.

Occupying Wall Street After Dark

2011-10-21T20:12:00.000-04:00

The Occupy Wall Street protest in Zuccotti Park does not end when the sun goes down. Hundreds of people, from curious onlookers to news crews, mill in and around the sliver of green space near Manhattan’s World Trade Center.

An infrastructure has evolved around the site to compensate for various needs. It’s a little like a tiny island nation in an ocean of concrete and glass.

All around the rim of the park are signs. Some are specifically related to protest events. Others carry some of the social messages that members want to express.

Those who stay in Zuccotti Park as the winter closes in face numerous challenges. They must eat, sleep, clean up after themselves and keep warm, all while maintaining the momentum of the movement many are hoping to spark.

All photographs by Brandon T. Bisceglia.

Around UNH: Parrot Carving

2011-10-18T09:01:00.001-04:00

This carved wooden parrot is from the Upper Sepick river region of Papua New Guinea. The 12-inch bird, painted with red, white and black pigments, is on display in Dodd's Hall at the University of New Haven in Connecticut. Photograph by Brandon T. Bisceglia.

Video: Jazz for Peace Plays World Artist Network Benefit

2011-10-13T19:43:00.000-04:00

Jazz for Peace front man Rick DellaRatta. Photograph by Brandon T. Bisceglia.

The nonprofit Jazzfor Peace Foundation played a benefit concert for the World Artist Network on Sept.17 at the Acoustic Cafe in Bridgeport.In this clip, the band pays tribute to Thelonious Monk’s rendering of the 1929song, “Just You, Just Me.”

To Encourage Scientific Literacy, Reward Citizen Scientists

2011-10-07T23:51:00.000-04:00

Citizen scientists have been making contributions for centuries. This 1843 microscope was used by amateur naturalist Caroline Bucknall Escourt while her husband, a British military officer, was stationed in the Canadian colonies. Photograph courtesy of the Canadian Science and Technology Museum. Some rights reserved.

Two new planets outside our solar system were discovered using data from NASA's Kepler telescope. But not by scientists.

The discoverers were citizen scientists participating in an online project called Planet Hunters, which was set up specifically to allow members of the public to sift through Kepler's information. Six of these volunteers were listed as authors in the Sept. 22 paper about the planets, published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The Planet Hunters are only the latest in a series of non-scientists who've made important contributions to science. A team of video-gamers playing a competitive protein-folding simulation game called Foldit also in September worked out the structure of a protein belonging to the Mason-Pfizer monkey virus, an HIV-like virus that causes AIDS in monkeys. It took them three weeks to do what professional scientists had been working on for years.

The value of harnessing public participation through games and projects is not lost on the scientific community. Hundreds of project websites can now be found with a simple Google search. Scientific American recently added an entire section to its website devoted to citizen science.

Yet science literacy remains low among non-scientists. The National Science Foundation concluded in a 2006 report that “most citizens do not have a firm grasp of basic scientific facts and concepts, nor do they have an understanding of the scientific process. In addition, belief in pseudoscience seems to be widespread, not only in the United States but in other countries as well.”

A low level of literacy matters. Take this year's Republican candidates. Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann was roundly repudiated by scientists and pundits after she claimed to have met a woman who said her son's mental retardation was caused by the HPV vaccine. Texas Gov. Rick Perry made his illiteracy known on several occasions, with dubious comments about both evolution and climate change.

These people want to be president. They already command high offices, where they no doubt deal with science-related subjects on a daily basis.

Speaking about Congress on WNPR's “Where We Live,” Princeton Physicist and New Jersey Rep. Rush Holt recently noted, “There are 435 people in the House and 420 don’t know much about science and choose not to.”

Ultimately, though, it is the voters who elect leaders. They can't possibly hold politicians to account about science without first understanding it themselves.

Citizen science may be a way to close the knowledge gap, if incentives are put in place to raise its profile and spur interest. That's why an award, given once a year at an ostentatious ceremony, should be established for an individual or group who contributes significantly to the advancement of science.

No such award currently exists. Groups that organize citizen science have prizes, but the citizens themselves have no reward other than fulfiling their passions for discovery.

Rewarding citizen science would break down one more perceived barrier between the “elite” researchers and everyone else. Recognition is known to be a driving force among professional scientists. Their careers are built on getting their names published and receiving awards from their colleagues. We expect scientists to want these rewards. Why wouldn't anyone else want the same thing?

Introducing competition could have added benefits for scientic literacy. Science works because its core dynamics—not its methods or techniques per se—are rooted in pitting intellects against one another,” said Thomas W. Martin, an Honors Faculty Fellow at Barrett Honors College at Arizona State University in Tempe, Ariz. in an essay (that, incidentally, won an award) for Seed magazine in 2007. “Science eventually yields impressive answers because it compels smart people to incessantly try to disprove the ideas generated by other smart people.”

The MNARS paper took a small step toward rewarding the volunteers from Planet Hunters by giving them the status of co-authors. It's a small, but rarely taken, step.

Most importantly, perhaps, is the fact that citizen scientists may end up making huge contributions in the coming years. As Astronomer Phil Plait wondered on his “Bad Astronomy” blog: “Will the first exoEarth be found by a professional astronomer, or instead by some science enthusiast who decided one day to check out this Planet Hunters thing?”

It's a question we should all be seriously considering.

Ranking UNH

2011-09-30T08:46:00.000-04:00

U.S. News & World Report placed the university on its list of “tier one” colleges for the second year in a row. But are the numbers all they’re cracked up to be?

If you believe the hype, UNH may have entered a new era of prestige.

U.S. News & World Reports has ranked the university 110 among regional colleges in its 2012 listing of “Best Colleges,” landing it a spot for the second year among the “top tier” in the “Regional Colleges – North” category.

The category includes colleges that offer a full range of undergraduate programs, but few doctoral programs. Colleges with doctoral programs are listed in a separate national category.

Just what do the rankings say about the quality of the institution, though?

In a press release for UNH Today, President Stephen H. Kaplan reasoned that UNH's rise in the U.S. News rankings was due to “substantial investments toward expanding academic programs, enhancing student life and creating state-of-the-art campus facilities,” which have “helped us attract more high-achieving students and world-class faculty.”

Alice Aleksandrovich, a senior who is double majoring in English literature and political science, has noticed some major improvements during her tenure at UNH. “It’s more technologically advanced than when I started,” she says. “The bookstore, health services, tutoring and other student services are also much better.”

Aleksandrovich still thinks there’s room for improvement, though. She says she would like to see more housing built, especially for sororities and fraternities. She also says that too much of the material in the library is outdated.

UNH’s sustained presence on the “Best Colleges” list is certainly beneficial for the university. U.S. News is the most popular resource in the nation for comparing colleges. Being in the top tier means greater exposure among students and parents researching prospective colleges.

Perhaps more importantly, it means greater exposure within the community of academic institutions. There’s an irony to making the list: since 25 percent of a regional college’s ranking is determined by the assessment of other college presidents, simply being on the list makes it more likely that a president who has never actually seen the campus will have a favorable view of UNH.

U.S. News has come under increasing criticism in recent years for the ways in which it judges schools. In February, New Yorker Staff Writer Malcolm Gladwell slammed U.S. News for using prejudicial criteria. He called the reputation factor a “self-fulfilling prophecy.”

“When U.S. News asks a university president to perform the impossible task of assessing the relative merits of dozens of institutions he knows nothing about,” wrote Gladwell, “he relies on the only source of detailed information at his disposal that assesses the relative merits of dozens of institutions he knows nothing about: U.S. News.”

Gladwell pointed out that other proxies for quality U.S. News uses to measure the success of a college - such as professor salaries or admissions selectivity - have little to do with student engagement, the single most important predictor of a student’s success at college.

Gladwell also noted that U.S. News omits some criteria, such as cost, in its rankings. He writes: “at a time when American higher education is facing a crisis of accessibility and affordability, we have adopted a de facto standard of college quality that is uninterested in both of those factors.”

The U.S. News rankings have led people astray in the past. “Most students and parents think the rankings are important,” says Victor Rios, a double major in English and journalism in his second semester at Quinnipiac University in Hamden. “For me, I fell into that spell when I applied.”

Quinnipiac has ranked well in U.S. News. It took the number 11 slot this year. Rios says, however, that some professors allow too much leniency with assignments and due dates. He feels that the college hasn't done as much to foster his intellectual abilities as he had expected.

Rios and Gladwell aren't the only ones who have problems with the U.S. News algorithm, and a few organizations have even attempted to assess college quality on their own terms. In 2009, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a nonprofit education group, launched its “What Will They Learn?” survey. It measures whether colleges require students to take courses in seven “key subjects:” composition, literature, foreign language, U.S. government or history, economics, mathematics, and natural or physical science. A grade from A to F is assigned to the institution.

If Rios had used ACTA's rankings instead of U.S. News's, he would have gotten an entirely different impression. There, UNH gets a grade of B and Quinnipiac gets a grade of C.

In addition to his academic dismay, Rios, who was born in Mexico, says that he has been uncomfortable with some of the unintentional prejudices he's encountered.

“People I’ve talked to who work there say that the school understands the problem, and is trying to mitigate it,” he says. Nevertheless, he felt unwelcome when he first came to the campus.

Diversity is often an important piece of college life, especially if you happen to be in a minority group. Only 1 percent of Quinnipiac's population consisted of international students last year. At UNH, on the other hand, these students comprised 7 percent of the student body. U.S. News lists this information, but does not weigh it as part of a college's rank.

Professor Karen Isaacs, who teaches journalism and English at UNH and Housatonic Community College in Bridgeport, warns against placing too much emphasis on rankings.

“In any school, you're going to have exceptional departments and weaker departments. And you can get outstanding students anywhere,” she says.

She says that students need to find what they're comfortable with.

Regardless of whether U.S. News is an accurate guide or not, UNH seems poised to continue its ascent. According to UNH Today, the class of 2015 has higher SAT scores and GPA's than previous years. “The average GPA has continued to increase over the last six years,” says the press release.

Isaacs has been teaching at UNH off and on for about 20 years, and she agrees that the university is on a positive track. “I've seen enormous increases in the quality of the students,” she says.

This article originally appeared in The Charger Bulletin.

Tips on Arguing: The Moving Goalpost

2011-09-20T09:56:00.000-04:00

Imagine that you’re playing a game of football, and you make afield goal from the 10-yard line. Now imagine that the refereedecides not to count your kick. Instead, he orders the goalpost to bemoved back an additional ten yards. You make the goal again. Hedecides it’s still not good enough, and has it moved back anotherten yards.

Would you think this was fair?

In argumentation, “moving the goalpost” refers to a similartactic. Your opponent gives a certain criteria for you to meet, orasks for certain evidence. Then, once you provide it, he or she changes thecriteria. It’s an extremely common fallacy, and one that canperpetuate a false controversy for years.

Perhaps the most famous modern example of moving the goalpostexists in the anti-vaccination movement. Concerns over whethervaccines cause autism actually began in the late 1990’s, in GreatBritain. According to Michael Fitzpatrick, a British physician andauthor of several books and articles on the subject, the controversybegan with a research paper published by a gastroenterologist namedAndrew Wakefield and twelve co-authors (ten of whom later issued apartial retraction) in the journal The Lancet (whichformally retracted the entire article last year).

The study looked at twelve children, nine of whom were autistic,who had experienced a form of intestinal inflammation that Wakefieldspeculated during a press conference was caused by the MMR vaccine.The media seized on it. Many subsequent studies thoroughly debunkedhis claims, but by then it was too late – the seeds had beenplanted in popular culture.

As the aftershocks of Wakefield's claims rippled throughthe U.K., he brought his concerns to the U.S. Only this time, theblame wasn’t laid on MMR; it was placed instead on a preservativecalled thimerosal, which contained a small amount of mercury. Theargument was that because mercury is a known neurotoxin, it could becausing damage to a child’s normal development. This neglected thefact that the dose of mercury was well below dangerous thresholds. Italso ignored the fact that there was no causal evidence to suggest aconnection.

But that didn’t matter. The goalpost had effectively been moved.

Despite further research that found no link between thimerosal andautism, the U.S. government finally conceded to have the preservativeremoved from most vaccines in the early 2000’s. Autism rates, asone would expect, were not affected.

Eventually, critics of vaccines had to drop this second line ofargument. That hasn’t made them any more reasonable, however. Overthe past few years, they’ve built a whole new campaign around theidea that vaccines contain a debilitating cocktail of “toxins.”Antivaccinationists now target this brew as the cause of autism.

In a 2008 article for the blog Science-Based Medicine,surgical oncologist David Gorski unpacked, piece-by-piece, theemptiness of that approach: “for example, they either ignorantly orwillfully confuse ethylene glycol (antifreeze, which is not invaccines) with polyethylene glycol (a polymer of ethylene glycol, achemically different compound which is in some vaccines and is alsoin a number of skin creams, tooth paste, and medications, includinglaxatives)…they’ll also rant on and on about formaldehyde,neglecting the fact that most people are exposed in a single day tomore formaldehyde…than babies are exposed to from their entirevaccine schedule.”

Although Gorski and others have the facts on their side, they’reunlikely to convince the opponents of vaccines, no matter how muchproof is provided. As long as the goalpost keeps being moved, itremains impossible to score.

Toxic Runoff Creates "Rainbow Street" in Fairfield

2011-09-06T19:01:00.000-04:00

When Hurricane Irene slammed intoConnecticut on Aug. 28, the widespread flooding it brought alongshorelines and rivers was hard not to notice.

What may have been less apparent tosome people were the contaminates it dragged off the land withreceding flood waters.

The pollution was obvious on KenardStreet in Fairfield, though.

At approximately 11 a.m., the tiny roadthat abuts the construction zone of the new Metro North railroadstation was inundated with several feet of water from Ash Creek,which runs through the area.

As the water drained, it leftbrightly-colored stains across huge swaths of the pavement. Afluorescent sheen of yellows, blues, and pinks marked where the creekhad crept across the road (see video above).

As anyone who has owned an old carknows, those stains are caused by motor oils and similar wasteproducts. They are known as nonpoint source pollution.

According to the EnvironmentalProtection Agency, nonpoint source pollution is the leading cause ofwater quality problems. Billions of dollars are spent every year totest and treat water to make sure that the fish that swim in it, theplants that grow in it, and the humans who drink it all stay healthy.

Nonpoint source pollution becomes worseas urbanization occurs, because soils that once absorbedand neutralized contaminants are replaced by blacktop and othernon-porous surfaces. The pollutants sit there, building up until itrains or snows, at which point they're deposited in rivers, lakes –or Long Island Sound.

The Fairfield Metro North complex is aprime example of urbanization. Last summer, the hillside near KenardStreet was occupied by a grove of trees. All of them were removed aspart of the development project.

The view now consists of giant piles ofcontaminated soil dug up by construction equipment. The mounds becamea point of consternation for the town after officials realized thatthe millions of dollars it would cost to remove the soil was notaccounted for in the project's budget.

In the meantime, the exposed mounds(and the machines moving them around) contribute their own pollutantsto the mix of runoff every time it rains or floods.

Although $7.5 million in additionalfunds approved by the town on Aug. 31 will pay for cleanup of thesoil, Hurricane Irene has already siphoned her fair share of toxicmaterial back into Fairfield's waters. That cost is much moredifficult to quantify.

Hurricane Irene Brings Floods

2011-08-28T16:09:00.002-04:00

A weakening-but-dangerous Hurricane Irene tore through southwestern Connecticut Sunday morning, dumping between five and six inches of rain in an area that had already been saturated by previous storms. The highest winds arrived at almost the same time as high tide, which had already been exacerbated by the new moon. The counterclockwise motion of the storm shoved water into Long Island Sound, compounding the problems.

Mandatory evacuations were ordered for beachfront properties in Fairfield, Conn., where several houses collapsed as flood waters crested. Since I live only shortly further inland along the banks of Ash Creek, I checked the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) floodplain maps for our area the night before the hurricane.

The garden in my backyard was within the 100-year flood zone, as was the end of the street, which terminates in a construction area for the new Metro North train station. These sections, as you can see in the video below, ended up under water.

Our house, fortunately, was sufficiently high up on the slope to avoid inundation.

Parsing the Paranormal Debate

2011-08-24T18:56:00.005-04:00

UFO? Photo by Håkan Dahlström under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License.

The Connecticut Post published a front-page article on Aug. 13 about a local paranormal research group’s activities. After it appeared, an exchange ensued through the newspaper’s opinion section, with skeptics decrying the article and true believers insinuating that the skeptics were close-minded.

Seeing that the vitriol wasn’t subsiding, I jumped into the fray. The Post published my letter, which follows, on Aug. 23:

Unlike some of the skeptical commenters who appeared in the You Said It section throughout last week, I wasn't offended that the Connecticut Post published a front-page article about the Orange-based paranormal group Smoking Gun Research Agency (SGRA).

Regardless of my own skepticism regarding the paranormal, the local nature of the group and its growing popularity within the community make it a newsworthy subject.

The piece was disappointing in one major way, though: it failed to examine the standard of "evidence" for some of the SGRA's claims.

However professional-sounding it may be, the SGRA uses long-debunked pseudo-scientific tools and methods in its investigations. It also employs psychics, not one of whom has ever been able to demonstrate any ability that a well-trained magician or mentalist couldn't perform.

The SGRA's staff members "screen all material" before adding it to their library, according to the article. Yet SGRA's online library includes a title on global conspiracy by David Icke, who famously proposed that a race of shape-shifting "reptoids" from the constellation Draco were secretly controlling human civilization by posing as world leaders.

The evidence for most paranormal phenomena is scant at best. Nevertheless, I do think that paranormal research is important, as long the work is rigorous and scientific.

An open mind accepts new evidence -- after critical scrutiny. The SGRA's bar is apparently much lower than that.

Tips on Arguing: Decorative Statistics

2011-08-17T08:44:00.002-04:00

At the end of 2008, National Public Radio commentator Frank Deford railed against a growing trend among sports aficionados that he found downright annoying.

“It's getting harder for the statistics freaks in all sports to dream up anything original,” he said. “And so I began to notice that a whole new category of stupid records was now being created.”

Deford went on to list some of the most convoluted stats he had come across, such as the following:

“’He's the only pitcher in’ - get this – ‘the last 4,113 to debut with 10 strikeouts and no walks.’”

Whoever came up with the above statistic had to work hard to make it sound impressive. And it might be effective for the casual observer, who is likely to see the words “only pitcher” followed by a large number and assume that this “record” is significant.

But look a little more carefully, and the emptiness behind the number becomes apparent.

The most glaring problem here is the seemingly arbitrary range of 4,113 pitchers. This pitcher’s record would be meaningful, if, say, it was the first time it had ever happened. That’s apparently not the case, or else the author of the statistic would have said so. Chances are that the reason the statistician picked 4,113 as a starting point is that pitcher number 4,114 had the exact same record (or better).

It turns out that 4,113 isn’t even a big number when put into context. The website MLB.com lists over 1,100 current pitchers in Major League Baseball alone – never mind the other leagues. Granted, not every one gets replaced every season. Still, it only takes a decade at most to see 4,113 new pitchers.

That’s the nature of all decorative statistics: they’re relatively mundane numbers that are tweaked to look more impressive.

Decorative statistics are rife in the sports world, but they can be found in other arenas as well.

Take movies. The 2009 film Avatar was heralded as the highest grossing movie of all time, at approximately $761 million in domestic sales, according to Boxofficemojo.com.

It is the highest, until you adjust for inflation. Measured in today’s dollars, Gone with the Wind weighs in at over $1.6 billion in domestic sales, blowing those Na’vi out of the water. Avatar doesn’t even make the top ten.

Senators Make Headway by Talking Across the Aisle

2011-08-09T13:51:00.006-04:00

Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn. Photograph by Medill DC.

Discussions in Congress generally take on one of three forms. The most common is the individual monologue. Another tactic is the choreographed “conversation” between two or more members of the same political faction. This gives the illusion of a dialog, while promoting a single point of view.

The rarest form of discussion, though, is my favorite. In it, politicians of differing political stripes talk to one another and try to find their commonalities. I particularly enjoy it because it forces both sides to be more rational and honest.

There were two instances of this third kind of exchange in the last weekend of July, when the nation appeared to be on the edge of default, that stuck with me. On July 30, Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) gave a detailed presentation, replete with charts, on the way that governmental structure contributes to the deficit. He said he'd found multiple savings through common sense, including increasing electronic services to reduce the amount of paper printed by the federal government. He was particularly incensed that the bills proposed by Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner and Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid were both equally disingenuous, because they were calling a reduction of the overall increase in spending “cuts.”

“We have all these programs that are broke, and we have a discussion about the debt ceiling, but we are not talking about what is the real problem,” he said.

“What are the problems?” Coburn continued. We have 100 different programs with 100 sets of bureaucracies for surface transportation alone. Why do we do that? Why have we not fixed it? That is a question the American people ought to be asking.”

A moment later, Senator John Kerry (D-MA) asked if Coburn would “yield for a question.” He agreed with Conrad about the inefficiency of governmental structure, and then pointed out that Coburn himself had been a member of the “Gang of Six” senators who had developed a bipartisan fiscal strategy in the form of a “grand bargain.”

Kerry asked Coburn “if it is not fair and accurate to say that the so-called Gang of Six...came together with an understanding that we needed balance in the approach to satisfy both sides and build a critical mass. That balance requires cuts. We have to put the big items – big ticket items on the table, and that means Social Security, reforming it for the long term; Medicare and Medicaid, which are unsustainable on their current paths; defense, where we have to find a handle on some of the procurement and expenditures. The Senator [Coburn] has joined in this. We have to close some tax loopholes and have tax reform and find some level of revenue at an appropriate ratio that allows us to fix this. That is where the problem has been. There is a group of folks in the House who have insisted no revenue at all.”

“Quite frankly,” Coburn responded, “I am willing to work with my colleagues. I have been out there. I said we have to move and eliminate some of these loopholes; we have to reform the tax code. I am willing to take heat from my side on that.”

“What I am not willing to take anymore is a Senate that will not work on the details of the specific problems,” he said. “What I am trying to do is outline where the problems are.”

Coburn explained that he didn't consider Washington's fiscal troubles a partisan problem. “Our deal is that we don't have the courage to actually make the cuts listed in here. We don't have the courage to eliminate the waste, and we don't have the courage to eliminate the duplication. Why? Because every one of these programs has a political backing. We are politicians. Unfortunately, too often, we are that instead of statesmen. It is time for us - both sides - to lead this country, to lead the country in a vision of here is the real truth of our problem.”

“We need to be doing the right things at the right time for the right reasons, considering that we make sure we take care of those who need it and demand participation from everyone else,” he added.

Kerry redirected Coburn's attention to the debt ceiling. “I am trying to help us get out of this predicament where we have a couple days before the United States defaults,” he said. “Everything the Senator has said is worthy of inquiry.”

“Isn't the key to resolving this crisis and not defaulting our ability to be able to come together on a sufficient trigger or some sufficient mechanism that guarantees we are actually going to deal with this in a similar fashion to what the Senator is raising?” Kerry asked.

“I don't disagree that those negotiations are going on as we speak,” Coburn said. “I am not a party to them.... We are not going to decide that. That will come to us for a decision. Look, I worked for a long number of months with my colleagues from the other side of the aisle. I put my name on a bill that doesn't fix it, but it was something to get us moving. It is better than where we are today. I agree with the Senator. But that is not good enough. We are not good enough yet to be where we need to be if we are actually going to solve the problem.”

A second inter-party exchange occurred on July 31 when John McCain (R-AZ) invited Dick Durbin (D-IL) to have a “colloquy” with him.

“Does the Senator from Illinois believe we are close to an agreement?” McCain asked.

“I hope so,” Durbin said.

Illinois Senator Dick Durbin. Photograph by Adam Fagen.

“Does the Senator from Illinois agree that, most likely, that agreement will not have an increase in taxes associated with it, at least in the short term?”

“I hope not.”

“You hope so?”

Durbin clarified: “I hope there is revenue included in any agreement.”

“Well, everything I have heard is that the agreement does not have tax increases in it. Has the Senator heard differently, being in the leadership?” McCain wondered.

“I honestly am not party to this,” Durbin replied. “But I can tell the Senator, as the Gang of Six and fiscal commission [Durbin sat on both commissions], we believe everything should be under consideration to reduce our national debt.”

“So I assume that would also mean the Senator from Illinois would advocate another stimulus package?” McCain countered.

“I wish to make sure we have some stimulus to the economy to create jobs and help those out of work find work with training and education,” Durbin said.

“So one would have to assume that the Senator from Illinois believes the last stimulus package was successful, which was, counting interest, over $1 trillion,” McCain said. “The Senator from Illinois and others who advocated the stimulus package and the administration said, 'If we pass this, unemployment will be a maximum of 8 percent. This will stimulate our economy and create jobs.'”

“Do you know what the Senator from Illinois and others are saying now?” he continued. “'It was not enough, that it was not enough, that we didn't make the deficit larger.' Because certainly nothing in the stimulus package was paid for. So I hope the Senator from Illinois understands – the American people understand – that just spending more money has failed and failed miserably.”

Durbin met McCain's challenge with one of his own. “I think one of the real bedrock beliefs among Republicans is that if we cut taxes, particularly on the wealthiest people in America, the economy will prosper. We hear that over and over,” he said.

“Didn't we try that experiment under President George W. Bush? Didn't the debt of the United States double under the President - and he left a shambles behind him, 2.3 million jobs lost in the first three months of President Obama's administration because of this failed economic policy which the Senator continues to espouse; that if we cut taxes on the rich, America is going to get wealthier. Haven't we tried it? Where are the jobs?”

McCain agreed. “The spending that went on in the previous administration was not acceptable and led to the deficit. But I would also say, speaking for myself, I voted against the Medicare Part D because it was not paid for. I voted against the earmark and porkbarrel spendings which were abundant as every appropriations bill came to the floor and dramatically increased spending in the worst way, wasteful and corrupt way, I will say. I am proud that at least some of us said: 'If we don't stop this spending and get it under control, then we are going to face a serious problem.'”

However, he added, “it has gotten a lot worse – a lot worse – since the last election. You can't keep up B-I-O-B. You can't keep up Blame It On Bush.”

As Kerry had done the day before, Durbin steered the conversation toward the matter immediately at hand. “Does the Senator believe that defaulting on our national debt for the first time in our history, which has been the threat looming over us from the House Republicans and others for a long period, is good for America's economy?”

Durbin pointed out that one of McCain's colleagues “on the floor from the State of Pennnsylvania has come in and said, 'Listen, defaulting on the debt is not that big a deal.' It can be, in his words, 'easily managed.' Does the Senator from Arizona agree with that thinking?”

“As the Senator may know,” McCain answered, “I came to the floor a couple days ago and made the comment that the Senator from Illinois and I are in agreement.”

“We can prioritize for a while where we want what remaining money that is left,” he said. “But the message we send to the world – not just our markets but to the world – that the United States is going to default on its debts is a totally unacceptable scenario and beneath a great nation.”

As for the tactic by House Republicans to force passage of a balanced budget amendment, McCain said “it was not only a wrong assessment; I think it is not fair to the American people to say we can pass a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution through the Senate at this time.”

“I would just say it pains me to say I agree with the Senator from Arizona, but I do,” Durbin said.

“We both feel threatening the debt ceiling is not in the best interests of the United States and both of us feel that holding out the threat that if we don't pass a constitutional amendment, we can't let the economy continue is not a good-faith bargain.”

Before they finished, McCain and Durbin agreed on one further point: they both wished that Senators would engage in cross-party exchanges on the floor more frequently.

That would be a bipartisan deal I could get behind.

Important Books: The Voyage of the Beagle

2011-08-04T08:32:00.001-04:00

Darwin was extremely interested in geology. He produced this drawing of a “volcanic bomb” from the island of St. Helena in The Voyage of the Beagle. “Not only their external form, but, in several cases, their internal structure shows in a very curious manner that they have revolved in their aerial course,” he writes.

In the conclusion to his book, The Voyage of the Beagle, Charles Darwin writes, “it appears to me that nothing can be more improving to a young naturalist, than a journey in distant countries.”

He couldn’t have known at the time just how true those words were - for himself. The observations he made while sailing with the English ship H.M.S. Beagle would provide an underpinning for Darwin when he later formulated his theory of evolution.

The five-year expedition, under the command of Captain Robert FitzRoy, had two official purposes: to conduct a charting survey of the South American continent, and to run chronometric readings around the planet. Darwin acted as the crew’s naturalist, collecting specimens of plants and animals everywhere the ship traveled. He took copious notes concerning the geology of the places he visited.

During the trip he explored the shores of Brazil, the high plains of Patagonia, the fjords of Tierra del Fuego, the Chilean Andes, the deserts of Peru, as well as Tahiti, New Zealand, and Australia.

The Voyage of the Beagle is arranged in roughly the same chronology as that of the survey itself. There were some places, such as Montevideo, that Darwin journeyed to more than once; he often consolidates these portions of the trip into a single chapter, which can make the order of some events confusing.

The book reveals that Darwin was thinking deeply about the origins of the world’s species long before he formalized his most important theory. Most famously, he was confounded by the wealth of rare creatures to be found in the Galapagos Archipelago. With palpable astonishment, he writes:

“Why, on these small points of land, which within a late geological period must have been covered by the ocean, which are formed by basaltic lava, and therefore differ in geological character from the American continent, and which are placed under a peculiar climate, why were their aboriginal inhabitants, associated, I may add, in different proportions both in kind and in number from those on the continent, and therefore acting on each other in a different manner – why were they created on American types of organization?”

Darwin would answer his own question two decades later.

In addition to his meticulous descriptions of creatures and their habitats, Darwin recorded numerous observations of the cultural practices in each region where he went ashore. Many of these are personal anecdotes, told through the lens of an educated Englishman brought up at the height of the empire’s success. He comments approvingly of the productive potential of Brazil’s untouched landscape, and lauds the Chileans for their industrious mining efforts.

Still, Darwin bucked many of the commonly held beliefs of his own time. He continually laments the injustice of slavery throughout the narrative, and points out how, in some regions, the European settlers enjoyed a high standard of living by conscripting natives as low-wage laborers. Although he typically views “civilized” men as superior to “savages,” he seems to prefer the effort by many in his time to bring modernity to indigenous populations, rather than simply taking them over.

Although the book is primarily a scientific endeavor, the enthusiasm that Darwin felt towards the natural world comes across strongly through his storytelling. For instance, when crossing the Pacific, he was fascinated by the role of corals in building atolls and barrier reefs. He writes of these structures:

“We feel surprise when travelers tell us of the vast dimensions of the Pyramids and other great ruins, but how utterly insignificant are the greatest of these, when compared to these mountains of stone accumulated by the agency of various minute and tender animals! This is a wonder which does not at first strike the eye of the body, but, after reflection, the eye of reason.”

Both that wonder and that ability to reason are on full display in The Voyage of the Beagle.

Tips on Arguing: Don't Exaggerate

2011-07-26T08:22:00.000-04:00

Image by Brandon T. Bisceglia.

Arguments lend themselves to hyperbole, especially when they become heated. You’ve probably had an experience similar to this: you’re trying to prove a point to a friend who refuses to see the err of his or her ways. Out of frustration you begin to exaggerate the details of the situation, until your case begins to look like a matter of life-and-death. You finally convince the other person.

But as you walk away, a voice in the back of your mind tells you that your friend now has an over-inflated and oversimplified sense of the argument – that you’ve given him or her an inaccurate picture.

There’s a real danger to allowing the facts to get blown out of proportion. Like the children’s game of telephone, the next person your friend talks to is likely to get an even more warped version of the story than the one you told. After a few iterations, the idea itself may become utterly ridiculous to those who hear it – and the people who tell it may look like nuts.

Debates in the summer of 2009 over the nature of government-sponsored health care are a classic example of this. Folks on the political right who could have made viable arguments to defend their beliefs based on economics, constitutional principles, and common sense instead turned to exaggeration in order to rile the emotions of the electorate.

The result? Comparisons of president Obama’s administration to Nazism. Claims that Britain would have allowed Stephen Hawking to die, rather than pay to treat his amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) – despite the fact that Hawking is British. Protests about non-existent “death panels.” And ultimately, the complete loss of respect for the legitimate activists in the conservative arena, whose well-reasoned objections got drowned in the din.

It can be difficult to rein your arguments in when you feel passionate about something. If you don’t do it, though, you run the risk of undermining the validity of your entire position. Staying rooted firmly in the facts and avoiding uninformed speculation will, in the end, do more of a service for your argument than any overblown rhetoric.

The Inanity of Ethnicity

2011-07-16T08:02:00.000-04:00

My wife was born in Uruguay, a Spanish-speaking constitutional republic with one of the most historically stable governments in South America. Uruguayans live in an European culture; all of the native populations were long ago eradicated from the Eastern banks of the Rio de la Plata.

My wife can trace her own family's lineage back to Spain, France, and other areas in Western Europe.

After a childhood in the capital of Montevideo, she spent significant portions of her youth in Italy and England, studying at Cambridge before coming to the United States.

In some ways, her time in Europe has distanced her from others who were born in Uruguay. Her accent is unaccountable - a truly global amalgam cobbled together of grade-school English lessons by Spanish-speaking teachers, training in the formal British style, and extended exposure to American idiom.

In other ways, though, she retains the vestigial traditions of her youth. When Uruguay's players became the only non-European team to advance to the semi-finals at the World Cup in 2010, she was as glued to the games as any fan at the Plaza Independencia. (Soccer is huge in Uruguay - they hosted and won the first-ever World Cup in 1930.)

At Branch Brook Park in Newark, NJ during the annual cherry blossom festival.
Photograph by Brandon T. Bisceglia.

I am, on the other hand, more of a mutt. Although the bulk of my ancestors come from a virtual continental tour of northern and Western Europe, my father's side of the family also contains a dab of Native American. By any genealogical standard, my wife is the "dominant" European-American, and I am the ethnic minority.

Yet that is not how our society perceives us. I have pale skin, light brown hair, and a southern New England lilt. She has (slightly) darker skin, black-brown hair, and that inexplicable-but-unmistakable accent.

In this country, she receives the designation of "Hispanic," and I get labeled as the Caucasian. Never mind that neither of those terms has any logical meaning - we have to put something on the Census form.

When people meet us they immediately tailor their questions to their presumptions about our backgrounds. This occurs whether we're speaking with other "Hispanics" or "Caucasians."

Does that make us part of the growing trend of "interracial" marriage in the United States? As it is, first-generation Hispanic immigrants tend to view themselves as "white" at a higher rate than their own children do, making the question that much more intractable.

That these arbitrary (and often inaccurate) characterizations are still so entrenched into and codified by our institutions bothered me long before I got married, but they’ve grown more irksome to me since then. I didn’t fall in love with a Latina – I fell in love with a specific human being, unlike any other.

It is vital that we retain a historical memory of our past traditions, of course. It is helpful to know where you come from in order to understand the circumstances into which you are born.

But I also believe that each of us should be free to chart our own course from there. Ethnic identifications assure you of nothing about a person. I was born in Connecticut, yet I drink yerba mate, a caffeinated drink that's as popular in Uruguay as coffee is here. My wife, however, prefers uncaffeinated chamomile tea. Q.E.D.

Important Books: The Feminine Mystique

2011-06-30T08:25:00.000-04:00

Betty Friedan in 1960. Photograph by Fred Palumbo, World Telegram staff photographer. Courtesy of Library of Congress New York World-Telegram & Sun Collection.

The Feminine Mystique was the seminal book of the women’s movement of the 1960’s. Journalist Betty Friedan exploded a myth that had seeped into post-war American culture: that a woman’s greatest potential could be found in the role of housewife and mother, and that the pursuit of any other goals would detract from this glorified position in society.

A housewife and mother herself, Friedan had begun to notice in the late 1950’s that many of the women she spoke to felt trapped and useless, though they couldn’t explain why. Many were middle-class, college-educated, with well-off husbands, healthy children, and beautiful homes in the growing suburbs. They had everything that they had been told they should want as women, most having voluntarily left college and career to start families. Yet they were, as Friedan noted, “desperate.”

The Feminine Mystique systematically deconstructs the image of the “happy housewife hero,” exploring its roots in pseudo-psychology, advertising, and the residual sexual segregationist attitudes that had pushed back against the suffrage movement that won women the vote in the United States in 1920. The mystique, she argues, encourages self-imposed cultural oppression.

Just underneath the veneer of the mystique, however, much darker trends were forming: increases in suicides, alcoholism, tranquilizer use, and other problems. Friedan argues in the book that these propensities were damaging not only to women, but to men and society as a whole.

At times, Friedan lets speculation carry her a little too far. She blames the mystique for the increasingly “overt manifestations” of homosexuality in men, positing that it causes women to engage in a “passive, childlike immaturity which is passed on from mothers to sons…” At one point, she even wonders whether the apparent rise in psychological disorders such as autism are a product of the mystique (though she is careful in this instance to point out that the experts suspected that earlier and better diagnosis was the most likely explanation).

Such speculation only shows that Friedan was, as she says of Sigmund Freud’s own mistaken explanations of Victorian women, “a prisoner of his culture.” Homosexuality was still listed in medical texts as a psychological disease, and autism was only beginning to be understood. On most matters, the book is perceptive and challenging – and did such an apt job of putting words to the inexpressible malaise so many women at the time were feeling that it helped spark a major social revolution.

Tips on Arguing: Avoid Hypocrisy

2011-06-21T08:28:00.001-04:00

Hypocrisy is generally defined as saying one thing while doing something that contradicts it. It can be summed up in the phrase, “practice what you preach.”

Safeguarding against hypocrisy is a boost to any argument you make. When you profess to believe in something, people will look for concrete examples of that belief. If they see that you aren’t following your own example, then they may conclude that you have some other motive for what you say, such as getting money or support from a certain group.

Just because someone acts hypocritically doesn’t mean that his or her argument is invalid. A smoker who discourages her children from smoking has good reasons for doing so. Those reasons are not cancelled out by the smoker’s habit.

Hypocrisy does, however, tend to undermine the arguer by complicating his or her claims, and that’s why it helps to avoid acting contradictorily.

Avoiding hypocrisy can be more difficult than it sounds at first. In the course of our lives, we frequently change our positions on multiple issues. Someone who is a heroin addict at 18 but becomes a drug counselor at 28 might be accused of hypocrisy. Strictly speaking, though, the accusation would be wrong – the former addict’s change of action would be consistent with his change of opinion.

There are also different levels of hypocrisy. For example, the Connecticut Post published an assessment of Bridgeport Mayor Bill Finch’s “greenness” on Earth Day. Finch was quoted as saying that he liked taking the train to keep his carbon footprint low. Yet according to the article, Finch had opted to fly (a much less fuel-efficient method of travel) on three out of five trips over the past year to Washington, D.C. He only took the train twice.

If this is a major hypocrisy, another note from the article could be thought of as a minor contradiction: Finch’s family composts most of their biodegradable waste. On the day that the reporter was in his home, though, there were some cornhusks in the trash.

If the occasional item misses the compost pile, does it negate the vast majority that makes it in?

Finch admits that he’s “not perfect.” Perhaps in the quest to eliminate hypocrisy, it’s best to realize that his statement applies to all of us.

Did the Dutch Influence America's Governmental Institutions?

2011-06-15T09:19:00.004-04:00

New Amsterdam, the early Dutch settlement that would later become New York as it appeared in 1651. The drawing appeared in Arnoldus Montanus's "De Nieuwe en Onbekende Weereld" in 1671.

Although the Netherlands had begun to colonize the North American continent as early as 1609 (1), they remained a minority ethnic enclave in the New York and New Jersey areas throughout the pre-unification days preceding the Revolutionary War. They were already under British rule by the time of American Independence, and had adjusted somewhat to certain English sentiments.

Many Dutch colonists nonetheless retained some of the ideas brought from their former homeland. Furthermore, American merchants, intellectuals, and politicians were well aware of Dutch culture, and the colonies had been on friendly terms with Holland for much of their history. Such contact and knowledge carries with it a high likelihood that the process of American nation-building was influenced by Dutch precedents. John Adams himself wrote that, “The originals of the two republics [Dutch and American] are so much alike that a page from one seems but a transcript from the other...” (2)

During the Revolutionary War, the Dutch colonists were instrumental in the patriots’ victory. In his article “The Dutch-American Guerrillas of the American Revolution,” William Marina notes that “the most accurate appraisal is that the Jersey Dutch Whig majority was solidly in favor of defending American rights.”

“Early in 1775,” he says, “New Jersey was one of those states that made the transition from Royal to revolutionary government ‘without the firing of a gun.’” (3)

Despite years of good relations with England, the Netherlands also sided with the Americans during the fight for independence. George M. Welling explains in his book The United States of America and the Netherlands:

“The city of Amsterdam in the meantime, however, started its negotiations with the Americans in secret. A plan was drafted for a treaty of trade and friendship to become effective as soon as Holland would recognize the independence of the United States. But by then relations between Holland and England had deteriorated still further on the issue of the Dutch trade with the rebels. When England got hold of a copy of the secret treaty, it used it as a pretext to declare war on the Netherlands.” (4)

Holland was the second country (after France) to join the battle on the American side, and it was the second to officially recognize American Independence, in 1782 (5). From both inside and out, the Dutch played a pivotal part in the actual effort that made the U.S. a sovereign society in the first place.

When the war ended and America was left with the task of constructing a constitution for itself, all delegates, including those from New York and New Jersey, contributed. The Dutch colonies had been lost to the British in 1664 (6). However, these colonists stayed connected to Holland and did not forget some of the peculiar institutions they had brought with them. One freedom this ethnic group had brought which did not exist in England was the free press. This concept was one of the tools used to spark and fuel the Revolution, and later made it into the first Amendment of the Bill of Rights (7).

Also present in the First Amendment are the words: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…’ (8) Although religious tolerance was promoted in a few other colonies, the level of religious liberty granted by the Constitution most closely follows the precedent set by New Netherland. According to Eric Foner, author of Give Me Liberty: An American History, “Most striking was the religious freedom that attracted to New Netherland a population far more diverse than the Chesapeake or New England… Religious toleration was extended not only to Protestants but also Catholics and, grudgingly, to Jews.” (9)

Some sources have attributed a myriad of other early American institutions to Dutch origins. In 1915, The Nation published a review of a paper written by H. A. Van C. Torchiana titled “Holland: An Historical Essay.” Torchiana is said to have enumerated a number of colonial inheritances:

“Even in American pre-national and colonial days, ‘we find a certain unity of political ideas’ – freedom of religious belief, proclaimed by William the Silent in 1577; ‘no taxation without representation,’ enunciated by the Netherlands in 1477; a comprehensive school system supported by taxation, easily traced in Holland to the thirteenth century and made general after the Reformation; written Constitutions, of which the Union of Utrecht, made in 1579, was one; and the supremacy of the judiciary, which in the low countries was a fixed principle in the time of Charles V.” (10)

Critics meanwhile have downplayed the strength of the connections between the American and Dutch societal developments. Sydney George Fisher argued instead that American institutions were the organic and unique products of individual circumstances. He believed that conscious influence on the Constitution by Dutch example is highly overrated:

“If it really had been an imitation from the Dutch, there would be some evidence of it in the debates of the Constitutional Convention. The Dutch resemblance would have been urged by some as a reason in its favor and by others as a reason against it. Afterwards, when the Constitution was before the people for adoption and closely discussed and criticised in numerous pamphlets and newspapers, the Dutch imitation, if there had been one, would have been surely referred to either by friends or by enemies.” (11)

Americans may not have had the Netherlands specifically in mind when they formed their new government. Even so, it is clear that Holland had at least an indirect impact on the American system. After all, Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution guarantees “every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government.” (12) Years before, the Netherlands had been the first to pioneer such a foundational administrative style.

References:

1. Eric Foner. Give Me Liberty! An American History. Seagull Edition, Volume 1. (New York: Norton and Company, 2006) 74
2. Adams, Charles Francis. The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States. Vol. VII. (Boston: Little, Borwn and Company, 1852) 400
3. William Marina. “The Dutch-American Guerillas of the American Revolution.” May 1, 1983.
4. George M. Welling. The United States of America and the Netherlands.
5. Ibid.
6. Eric Foner. Give Me Liberty! An American History. Seagull Edition, Volume 1. (New York: Norton and Company, 2006) 83
7. Constitution of the United States of America.
8. Ibid.
9. Eric Foner. Give Me Liberty! An American History. Seagull Edition, Volume 1. (New York: Norton and Company, 2006) 75-76
10. Paul Elder. “Origins of American Institutions.” Published in The Nation. October 28, 1915. 523
11. Sydney George Fisher. The Evolution of the Constitution of the United States. (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippencott, 1897)
12. Constitution of the United States of America.

Mineralogy at Sterling Hill

2011-06-07T08:32:00.000-04:00

This is the first of three pieces about the Sterling Hill Mining Museum. This article focuses on the mineral collection. The next post will explore the history of the mine, and the final installment will explain what visitors can expect to find at the museum today.

I am fortunate to be married to someone who shares my enthusiasm for science. This year, my wife and I spent a weekend at the Sterling Hill Mining Museum in Ogdensburg, NJ for our two-year anniversary.

The museum is located on the grounds of what was formerly one of the most productive zinc mines in the state. It is also the “world capital” of fluorescent minerals – the area has produced over 80 varieties, and others may still be buried, undiscovered, in sections of the hillsides.

When operation costs drove the mine out of business in the 1980's, it was converted into a center for education about history and science. The primary focus is on geology and mineralogy, but there are displays to teach visitors about such things as chemistry, and the Ellis Astronomical Observatory also makes its home on the property.

In addition to minerals from the local mines, Sterling Hill hosts a huge collection of rare and interesting minerals from all over the world, many of them fluorescent.

On Friday night, we were treated to a tour of the mines by longtime museum volunteer Bill Kroth, followed by a session at the telescope he runs. On Saturday, we again visited the museum.

Willemite (Zn2SiO4) is the most common fluorescent mineral found in the Sterling Hill mine. Indeed, the predominance of this form of zinc silicate ore makes the Franklin and Sterling Hill mines unique.

A large sheet of willemite (green) with fluorescent calcite (red) from the mine.

A slab of sphalerite (ZnS), garnet and hornblende found 900 feet below ground in the Sterling Hill mine. Sphalerite is one of the main precursors of willemite. It is transformed through one of two means: by oxidation in a siliceous (silicon-rich) environment, or by alteration from hydrothermal veins. New Jersey's willemite was made via the latter process.

Willemite lining the walls of the mine.

Scheelite (CaWO4) from Trumbull, CT. The fluorescence is due to tungstate ions.

Meionite (Ca4Al6Si6O24(CO3)) from Grenville, Quebec. It fluoresces yellow in short-wave ultraviolet (UV) light, and red in long-wave UV light.

One of several unusual malachite (Cu2(CO3)(OH)2) samples. This piece originated from Lubumbashi in the Haut-Katanga Province of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The area is known for its copper, in which malachite typically forms.

Fluorite (CaF2) embedded in calcite (CaCO3) from the Nikolaeskiy mine in Dal'negorsk, Primorskiy Kray, Russia.

This calcite specimen comes from the Romanian mining town of Cavnic.

The Deadliest Chemical

2011-06-02T00:08:00.005-04:00

It's in your home, in the air, and in virtually every aquifer on the planet. It contributes to the spread of diseases and the destruction of weather disasters. It directly kills thousands of people each year.

Several municipalities have tried and failed to ban dihydrogen monoxide (DHMO) over the last twenty years. Yet neither the FDA nor the EPA are likely to curtail its omnipresence any time soon.

That's because DHMO is just a rarely used chemical name for water. The effort to ban it was part of a popular hoax perpetrated in the 1990’s meant to demonstrate the public’s lack of scientific knowledge.

In 1994, University of California, Santa Cruz student Craig Jackson advanced the hoax and created what would become dhmo.org, a parody website that approaches water as if it were a dangerous chemical. Among other hazards, the website lists the following reasons to be wary:

- Death due to accidental inhalation of DHMO, even in small quantities.
- Prolonged exposure to solid DHMO causes severe tissue damage.
- Excessive ingestion produces a number of unpleasant though not typically life-threatening side-effects.
- DHMO is a major component of acid rain.
- Gaseous DHMO can cause severe burns.
- Contributes to soil erosion.
- Leads to corrosion and oxidation of many metals.
- Contamination of electrical systems often causes short-circuits.
- Exposure decreases effectiveness of automobile brakes.
- Found in biopsies of pre-cancerous tumors and lesions.
- Given to vicious dogs involved in recent deadly attacks.
- Often associated with killer cyclones in the U.S. Midwest and elsewhere, and in hurricanes including deadly storms in Florida, New Orleans and other areas of the southeastern U.S.
- Thermal variations in DHMO are a suspected contributor to the El Nino weather effect.

Photograph by Brandon T. Bisceglia

What is most interesting about this pseudoscientific approach is that, despite two decades of fame, the joke continues to cause alarm among those who fail to do the most basic background research. According to a 2004 article by the Associated Press, city council officials in the town of Aliso Viejo, California became so concerned about it when a misinformed paralegal brought the matter to their attention, “that they considered banning foam cups after they learned the chemical was used in their production.”

As recently as 2007, the New Zealand Herald reported that Otago Prime Minister Jacqui Dean tried to ban DMHO in her province. She was the second MP in the country to get behind such a campaign without knowing what was really being supported.

Although it was meant to be lighthearted, the DHMO phenomenon bears the typical hallmarks of other serious campaigns that have pseudoscientific foundations. It's a revealing – if frightening - insight into how some politicians and activists operate. Understanding why anti-DHMO arguments make no sense can help us to see how skewing the facts can lead to faulty conclsions.

First, we must break the argument down into its component parts, since it is actually two separate claims. The first is that DMHO is a dangerous chemical, and the second, that it ought to be banned.

While all of the points that Jackson makes on his website are technically correct, they misdirect the reader by needlessly stoking fears that would be uncalled for if one knew the actual nature of the substance. In truth, common sense keeps us safe from many of water’s hazardous effects, while allowing us to enjoy its vast range of benefits.

Take, for instance, the claim that DHMO is found in biopsies of pre-cancerous tumors and lesions. This fact means nothing on its own, but many who read it are liable to conflate correlation with causation, assuming that because it was found in tumors, it must be contributing to disease. Upon closer scrutiny, even the correlation is weak – otherwise one would expect to find that consuming less water would decrease the incidence of pre-cancerous tumors and lesions, which it does not.

This is the same kind of mistake that anti-vaccination proponents make about thimerosal and autism. Removal of the preservative did not cause autism rates to fall, but the assumption of causation remains prevalent among groups opposed to vaccines. Such diversions can have a far higher cost than the risk posed by the products being railed against, as evidenced by the needless resurgence of measles and other preventable diseases in wealthy countries like the U.S. and the U.K.

DMHO does become dangerous in certain situations. Boiling water can burn you; floods, hurricanes, and blizzards (all of which contain a lot of water) have killed thousands throughout history.

Under normal conditions, however, our interactions with water are quite safe. We drink it, bathe in it, and swim in it. If we consider the ratio between our safe encounters with water and the encounters that do us harm, the relative risk is extremely small.

This does not mean, however, that risks ought to be ignored. We are taught from a young age not to stick our hands in boiling water, not to keep electrical appliances near our bathtubs, and to stay indoors during hurricanes. These precautionary measures are important, though they only account for a small piece of the overall picture.

Once we understand the relative safety of water, it appears evident that it should not be banned. Moreover, because the benefits of interacting with water (it is largely responsible for our continued survival) far outweigh the potential risks, such legislative mandates could only cause more harm to citizens than good.

In the case of DHMO, it should also be mentioned that the sheer infeasibility of a ban ought to stop any legislation before it gets off the ground. How does one make rain illegal? It is in exploring this aspect of the process, in fact, where many of the government officials who get duped into campaigning against water find out that they’ve erred.

Pseudoscience is a two-way street; the interpretation of the facts often matters as much as their presentation. If fallacious logic and cleverly cherry-picked facts can lead to unfounded fears about something as obviously benign as water, it should be no surprise that people fall prey to misrepresentations of more complex issues, such as vaccination, evolution and climate change.

Memorial Day Parade Comes to Stratford: Photos

2011-05-31T22:28:00.013-04:00

Stratford veterans wave at onlookers from atop an eagle-adorned float.

Members of the Stratford High band.

Students from Wilcoxson Elementary School carry the fifty states across Stratford.

Cub scouts ride down the street in their pine-box derby racers.

The line of parade marchers passes under the train tracks.

The parade is an advertising opportunity for some local businesses.

Street vendors spend every Memorial Day trekking up and down the streets.

The Creek tribe’s representatives toss candy to children waiting on the sidelines.

The Kickapoo tribe’s bubble machine.

Kids scramble for candy as the parade moves on.

All photographs by Brandon T. Bisceglia

Predictions, Patents and Politics in the Birth of News Radio

2011-05-30T05:15:00.006-04:00

During his lifetime, science fiction writer Jules Verne dreamed up many futuristic technologies that could be used to explore new territories and expand the social progress of the human race. Over and over again, his imagined inventions became reality, often being used in an uncannily similar fashion to the way that he first described them.

One of Verne's most interesting conceptions was that of a new kind of news delivery system that involved reporters reading the news directly to their audiences – what we would now recognize as live news broadcasting. At the time he wrote about this upcoming technique, he placed it a thousand years into the future.

Little did he realize that several inventors were already on the cusp of creating the devices that would lead to the era of radio broadcasting. It would take less than half a century before newsrooms around the world were doing almost exactly what Verne had described. Radio technology would become so popular, in fact, that it would lead to a 40-year battle between two intellectual heavyweights over patent filings that would determine who got credit for the invention.

In 1889, Verne published a fanciful essay in the Forum titled “In the Year 2889” that walked the reader through a day in the life of a news baron named Fritz Napoleon Smith who owned the world's largest daily “paper,” the Earth Chronicle. Smith was so successful in part because he had developed a novel system for delivering the news to subscribers:

“Instead of being printed, the Earth Chronicle is every morning spoken to subscribers, who, in interesting conversations with reporters, statesmen, and scientists, learn the news of the day. Furthermore, each subscriber owns a phonograph, and to this instrument he leaves the task of gathering the news whenever he happens not to be in a mood to listen directly himself. As for purchasers of single copies, they can at a very trifling cost learn all that is in the paper of the day at any of the innumerable phonographs set up nearly everywhere.”

Image courtesy of wondersmith.com/scifi

Verne wrote that Smith had created this system of news delivery in his own era with the aid of “telephony,” which had been developed only one hundred years previously. In both the mode of delivery and the amount of time it would take to become reality he was mistaken.

Alexander Graham Bell had already spoken through the first working telephone to his associate, Thomas Watson, in March of 1876. Verne no doubt knew about the breakthrough, as over a decade had already passed by the time of his story. Although he did not specify how his version of telephony worked, it seems likely that Verne thought of it as a strictly “wired” technology, since that was still the primary way in which electrical impulses were being transmitted at the time.

Indeed, the New York Times reported in 1880 that new uses were being found for the telephone on a constant basis. One such use was involved reporters in Parliament for the London Times reading their reports directly to the compositor in the print office. “As the reporter in Parliament reads,” the article said, “the compositor in the printing office sets the type.”

It would not be a great leap from person-to-person calls to what might be termed a live “conference call” with reporters. Moreover, if Verne had been aware of the ambient way in which radio waves propagate, he is less likely to have posited that the news service could control subscriptions – anyone with a receiver can listen in on radio transmissions for free, rendering Verne's proposed business model obsolete.

There were people working on wireless systems around the time of Verne's publication, though. Nikola Tesla was one such inventor; Guglielmo Marconi was another. These two men would both file patents at the end of the nineteenth century for the key components of the radio.

U.S. Patent No. 645,576, for a “System of Transmission of Electrical Energy” was filed by Tesla in 1897 and approved on March 20, 1900. In it, he described a series of discoveries that he and other engineers had made about the ability of electrical impulses to pass unobstructed through the air. By devising a novel transmission-receiver apparatus with tightly wrapped conducting coils, he found that he was able to make use of this mode of electrical transport. He wrote:

“Expressed briefly, my present invention, based upon these discoveries, consists then in producing at one point an electrical pressure of such character and magnitude as to cause thereby a current to traverse elevated strata of the air between the point of generation and a distant point at which the energy is to be received and utilized.”
Tesla also noted that the devices could be rendered portable. He immediately saw a number of possible applications for his device, including to “transmit intelligible messages to great distances.”

Meanwhile, over in England, Marconi was working on a similar invention. Marconi's Wireless Telegraph Company received its first patent 1896. But when he brought it to the United States in November of 1900, he was rejected by the Patent Office because of Tesla's previous filing. He continued to file revised versions, which were all thrown out.

But Marconi wasn't beat yet. He made connections with investors, including Thomas Edison and Andrew Carnegie, who put their substantial weight behind Marconi's company on the stock market. The Patent Office reversed its decision on Marconi's patent without explanation in 1904, and he went on to win the Nobel Prize in 1911. Tesla sued Marconi in retaliation in 1915.

It was not until 1943 – after Tesla had died – that he finally won recognition for his invention. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld Tesla's patent, in part because Marconi's company was suing the U.S. Government for use of its patents during World War I.

Whether by Tesla or Marconi, the radio had been born. However, its potential in the news world – the application that Verne had envisioned – did not come to pass until several decades after the patent battles had begun.

Then, on November 2, 1920, radio manufacturer Westinghouse's KDKA station used the Associated Press's election returns to broadcast the results of the presidential race between Republican Warren G. Harding and Democrat James Cox from the top of the Pittsburgh Post's building. It was the fulfillment of Verne’s prophecy, a mere thirty years after he predicted it.

Within another decade, the radio phenomenon would be in full bloom. By the end of the century, newsrooms all over the world would look much like Smith’s, with reporters at stations reading live events out to the world as they happened. The news industry would also be populated with a myriad of technologies that Verne never predicted: television and the Internet would dominate the field, producing copious amounts of content for the world’s eager news consumers. In an ironic twist, telephones themselves eventually went wireless; today they represent a burgeoning new platform for news media. Radio, too, thrives among the milieu. Indeed, the world of 2011 is much richer than the world of 2889 that Verne imagined.

Posting More of Less

2011-05-25T08:15:00.001-04:00

I never intended this blog to be a professional endeavor. I created it for finished thoughts, essays, and tidbits that didn’t fit neatly elsewhere.

As a result, my posting is sporadic. Most months, I might add two or three pieces. So far in 2011, there were no updates for February or April.

Thinking about this has led me to a now-common conundrum. As a writer, I prefer to toil in privacy, revising and retooling until the work is as precisely organized I can manage. But if I want to be noticed in the digital culture, I need to be putting out more material in places like this more regularly.

More material doesn’t mean better material; even the best blogs sacrifice finely tuned artful writing for roundups, updates, and links. It doesn’t mean that they’re badly written, and it certainly doesn’t mean that they’re useless. But they do exhibit an “unfinished” quality that was largely discouraged in the days of print culture.

Scarce resources used to restrict authors and publishers from putting anything out that hadn’t been vetted by multiple parties. That’s changing now that everyone with an Internet connection can type up unending missives for free.

The rise of Internet speech has cluttered the field for professional writers of all sorts, making competition stiffer and creating a feedback loop that increases demand for content.

There’s a limit to how much one person can do; past a certain point, even the best writer’s work will begin to suffer if he or she is too stretched.

Many of us cut corners to meet the new demands: a journalist spins one story into five different versions for various platforms. An author blogs parts of the book that he or she is working on, thus drumming up interest in advance of its release.

But most of this content would have been considered a kind of offal in an earlier era. The repetitions, reconfigurations and drafting all used to be part of the private process that would, after much effort, result in a finished public piece. Most of the time, those earlier notes and drafts would get tossed or filed on a dusty back shelf. Today they are front and center – and will be open to scrutiny for as long as the web lasts.

I’ve resisted contributing to this milieu partially because my thinking follows the print paradigm; I want my work to be the best it can be before anyone sees it (except perhaps a trusted advisor or relative).

Perhaps I should change my methodology, though. It may be too twentieth century.

On Wings of Wax

2011-05-23T11:22:00.002-04:00

Flowers for Algernon, Awakenings, and Man's Brief Moments in the Sun

A comparison between the thematic arc of Daniel Keyes's fictional story Flowers for Algernon and the real-life accounts of post-encephalatic patients written by Dr. Oliver Sacks in Awakenings. This was originally given as a presentation for a course in science fiction as literature.

Tips on Arguing: Quote Mining

2011-05-03T08:28:00.002-04:00

Quote mining is the alteration of the meaning of a person’s quote by taking it out of context or removing sections of the quote. It’s a disingenuous way to make it look like something someone said supports your position when, in fact, it does not.

Quote mining is easy to do if you’re creative about it. Consider the following passage:

“One day when we were kids, Charlie spent the afternoon stepping on ants in the driveway. He came into the house that evening with a guilty expression on his face. When his mother asked what was wrong, he admitted, ‘I’m a horrible person. I committed murder today! Poor ants.’”

In context, this passage is about an innocent child coming to terms with the world beyond himself.

Suppose now that you wanted to make Charlie seem more nefarious. By cutting out just a few choice sections, you could twist the meaning:

"He [Charlie] came into the house that evening with a guilty expression on his face. When his mother asked what was wrong, he admitted, ‘I’m a horrible person. I committed murder today!'"

Technically, the new quote is correct - the words are the same as the original. But notice how choosing to remove certain contextualizing phrases has corrupted our understanding of Charlie as a "murderer."

Academic creationists have become notorious for quote mining - so much so that the term came into popular language among scientists in the 1990's to describe how their own quotes were being dishonestly used to suggest that they had doubts about the validity of evolutionary science.

In 1996, biochemist and high-profile creationist Michael Behe published a popular book called Darwin's Black Box, which argued among other things that evolution could not account for certain biological structures, such as the bacterial flagellum. These parts, he claimed, were "irreducibly complex" - that is, if you removed any one piece, the whole thing would cease to function (a presumption that was promptly debunked by other biologists).

Behe tried to shore up his case by including numerous quotes in his book from evolutionary scientists that seemed to show how shaky the science of evolution was. On page 29, he quoted from a paper co-authored by Professor of Evolutionary Biology Jerry Coyne:

"We conclude--unexpectedly--that there is little evidence for the neo-Darwinian view: its theoretical foundations and the experimental evidence supporting it are weak."

Coyne responded quickly. In the February 1997 issue of the Boston Review, he wrote, "I went back to see exactly what Orr [Coyne's co-author] and I had written. It turns out that, in the middle of our sentence, Behe found a period that wasn't there."

What the paper had originally said was: "Although a few biologists have suggested an evolutionary role for mutations or large effect (Gould 1980; Maynard Smith 1983: Gottlieb, 1984; Turner, 1985), the neo-Darwinian view has largely triumphed, and the genetic basis of adaptation now receives little attention. Indeed, the question is considered so dead that few may know the evidence responsible for its demise.

"Here we review this evidence," the paper continued. "We conclude--unexpectedly--that there is little evidence for the neo-Darwinian view: its theoretical foundations and the experimental evidence supporting it are weak, and there is no doubt that mutations of large effect are sometimes important in adaptation."

Coyne added, "By inserting the period (and removing the sentence from its neighbors), Behe has twisted our meaning. Our discussion of one aspect of Darwinism--the relative size of adaptive mutations--has suddenly become a critique of the entire Darwinian enterprise. This is not sloppy scholarship, but deliberate distortion."

Quote mining is effective because few people ever go back to read the original sources. It's easy to do, since all quotes require selecting certain sentences to keep and others to omit. The goal, however, should always be accuracy. Mining for quotes does disservice to the reader, misrepresents the person being quoted, and makes the quote miner look more like a dishonest ditch digger.

What Americans Are Missing

2011-03-24T09:17:00.000-04:00

Left: Jose Socrates (Reuters) Right: Smokey the Cat (Gather)

Portugal’s Prime Minister Jose Socrates resigned Wednesday night after Parliament rejected his proposed austerity measures for the country, prompting renewed worries about sovereign debt in the Euro Zone. The collapse of Portugal’s government means that it may become the third country in the EU after Greece and Ireland to require a bailout from its neighbors.

I decided after hearing about this to check Yahoo! News’s top stories, just to see what they thought the most important things for their readers to know about were. I used Yahoo! as a source because many people I know look there for news, and because it’s targeted at the “average” American audience.

Portugal was conspicuously absent from their feed. What was so compelling that it took precedence over a brewing international debt crisis? Here were the ten “winning” headlines:

- Mysterious moment during NHL game
- Smart, simple skin care tips for guys
- Is Smokey the loudest cat in the world?
- How Elizabeth Taylor became an icon
- Surprising write-offs the IRS allows
- [Michael] Jordan’s cool promise to his college team
- 119-year-old not recognized as oldest
- How Olsen twins created $1 billion empire
- ‘Uglytecture’ flaunts worst of NYC condos
- High tech cloud will cool World Cup fans

Can we say “penchant for frivolity?”

The Orphaned Meme

2011-01-24T19:23:00.002-05:00

Who Says We Get the Government We Deserve?

In a 2008 episode of the Fox suspense series, 24: Redemption, newly-elected American president Allison Taylor stands before the throng to deliver her inaugural speech. In what is meant to be a philosophical moment for Madame President, she trots out an aphorism that has become incredibly familiar in modern parlance:

“In every democracy, people get the government they deserve.”

Taylor gives credit for the quote to the famous French sociologist Alexis de Tocqueville.

She (or, more accurately, the screenwriters) had apparently not done her homework. Although de Toqueville wrote hundreds of pages on democracy, he never penned that particular string of words.

The folks at Fox aren’t the first or only ones to have baselessly perpetuated the myth that this quote belongs to de Tocqueville. A quick Google search reveals that the false credit is bandied in all kinds of blogs, forums, and other niches of the web.

De Tocqueville isn’t the only supposed author, either (though he seems to be the most popular). Suggestions have included such prominent figures as Thomas Jefferson and Mark Twain. Of course, none of these attributions contain citations to primary sources.

So where did the quote really come from?

It’s tough to say, but the line bears a striking resemblance to a quote from a letter written by French politician and philosopher Joseph de Maistre in 1811. His son, Rodolphe, published the letter posthumously in 1853 as part of a collection of his father’s writings called Lettres et opuscules inédits. At one point, de Maistre remarks, “Toute nation a le gouvernement qu’elle merite” (“Every nation has the government it deserves”).

Lithograph of a painting by Pierre Bouillon (1776-1831); lithograph probably by François Le Villain, who was active around the same time. Public domain image.

The original point of the comment seems to have been forgotten. De Maistre had been speaking of the Russian czarist government, not of democracies. He was criticizing the value of written constitutions by pointing out that successive leaders of the Russian state would reverse the policies of their predecessors based on their own whims.

De Maistre would be vexed to see his words used as a call for the people to guide political policy: he was one of the most vocal members of the counter-enlightenment in Europe, and dead-set against the democratic revolutions going on at the time. De Maistre believed in the reinstitution of hereditary monarchy in France, guided by what he thought to be the divine hand of the Christian church. He was a proponent of hierarchical authoritarian government, not democracy.

De Maistre’s critiques of the Russian state blamed the lack of moral education among the clergy for that government’s vicissitude. He wrote:

“Between a Russian pope and an organ-pipe I see no great difference; both emit sound, and that is all. I have repeatedly asked intelligent Russians whether means might not be found to civilize the clergy, to introduce it into society, to get rid of that disfavour which now more than ever attaches to it, and to make it of use for education, public morality, &c.”

He concluded that without the moral guidance of an educated church, the Russian people could not handle the reforms toward Westernization that had become so attractive to the Russian leaders of the era. (St. Petersburg was the capital at the time, and had been built a century earlier as part of a bid to put the country in closer contact with Europe.)

By 1879, six editions of Lettres et opuscules inédits had been printed. That year, The Library Magazine of Select Foreign Literature reprinted a commentary on de Maistre’s letters that had originally appeared in the Quarterly Review; de Masitre’s famously cynical comment was mentioned in both.

Modified versions of this quote begin appearing shortly after the publication of the letters in the second half of the nineteenth century, and were passed around from there in something reminiscent of a protracted game of 'telephone.' It wasn’t long before the words had been twisted to make them sound - as faux-president Taylor intended them to be taken – like a call for citizens living in participatory democracies to be vigilant against corruption.

In 1920, for instance, an article in The Blacksmiths Journal retold a sermon given by Arthur Brisbane decrying the excessive political power being wielded by privately owned railroads in the United States.

“It need not surprise you, for the United States is only just beginning an extremely interesting career of industrial feudalism,” Brisbane said, “with dollars for the soldiers, financiers for generals and a hundred millions of citizens for the ‘conquered populations.’”

Brisbane added that the situation was merely a reflection of Americans’ values: “Do the hundred millions deserve anything better? They do not. People get exactly the government they deserve.”

Similarly, a 1922 edition of the theological publication, the Homiletic Review, featured a discussion on the reasons for the decline of the nation of Judah. In an interesting parallel of de Maistre’s own top-down thinking, the author cited the moral deterioration of religious leadership as the first cause of the ancient culture’s ruin. Ironically, though, the infamous phrase was not invoked in this section of the essay (if it had, it would have aligned closely with de Maistre’s own meaning). Instead, it appeared in its new role, implicating the common people in Judah's decay:

“If good leaders are necessary, so also are good people. It is often said that people get the government they deserve: certainly in a democratic country the government must be a more or less faithful reflection of the tastes and character of the people; for any national catastrophe the latter, no less than the former, must bear a very heavy share of the blame.”

As indicated by this passage, the phrase had already evolved into a popular expression under the changed meaning.

By the middle of the twentieth century, the expression, now completely altered in implication, was being paraphrased by writers of all kinds. One such use occurred in 1942, when science fiction author A. E. van Vogt published a short story called The Weapon Shop.

The main character of van Vogt’s story discovers that an underground society of rebels is engaged in a secret war with the ruling empire in which he lives. As his alliance to the empress dissolves, a member of the rebel faction explains the crux of their philosophy to him:

"People always have the kind of government they want. When they want change, they must change it. As always we shall remain an incorruptible core ...of human idealism, devoted to relieving the ills that arise under any form of government."

This call to action is almost the complete opposite of what de Maistre would have recommended. Yet even under such loose phrasing, the basic syntax and structure bear his mark.

Just because the expression as it's understood today contradicts the original intent doesn't mean that the modern understanding carries any less truth behind it. However, neither de Maistre nor his thoughts should be misrepresented. That kind of decontextualization is the first step to full-blown revisionism.

Tips on Arguing: Naturalistic Fallacy

2011-01-15T10:52:00.000-05:00

Image by Brandon T. Bisceglia

“Whether it’s motivation or some invigoration that you’re looking for, Cell-nique assists in detoxifying and alkalizing your body naturally to enhance your spirit and drive.”

That’s one of many claims made by a “super green drink” manufacturer headquartered in Weston, CT. It’s the kind of claim that we hear more and more these days: “natural cures” are offered in place of scientifically-backed medicines. Foods tout the fact that they contain no preservatives or artificial flavors. Even some cleaning products distinguish themselves as being made from “natural chemicals.”

All of these advertising schemes play on the assumption that because something is natural, it must be better somehow.

But does nature always offer the best solution? Probably not.

First, it helps to realize that the word “natural” simply means “not man made.” If a human modifies it, it becomes artificial.

With that definition in mind, imagine that you want to cross a deep river. You have two options: you can hang on to a piece of driftwood floating near the riverbank, or you can build a raft.

The driftwood might get you to the other side, and it’s definitely natural. But your chances of making it are much, much better with the artificially-made raft.

All-natural clearly isn’t always the most effective or useful policy. Making tools to overcome the limitations of what the natural world can offer is one of humankind’s greatest assets. No one would advocate for going back to all-natural knives (rocks), or all-natural toothbrushes (fingernails).

Nor does all-natural mean healthy. Just consider the fact that cyanide and uranium are both naturally occurring substances. Yet one is a deadly poison and the other is highly radioactive.

Even the claim that some food producers make about using all-natural ingredients is hard to back up. Agriculture is a man-made invention that has literally changed every crop into something different from its wild counterpart through selective breeding over the thousands of years that we’ve been farming. Unless the manufacturers plucked their ingredients from a forest, they too are engaging in an “artificial” process to make their products.

So what does it mean if a product is advertised as natural? Most of the time, absolutely nothing. It’s just another gimmick to hook consumers into paying an extra buck.

New Magazine Fails on Freemason Conspiracies (an open letter)

2010-12-30T13:26:00.004-05:00

An antique door knocker at the Mumford River Masonic Lodge in Douglas, Mass.
Photo by Svadilfari. Published under Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic License.

To the editors of Ideas & Discoveries:

I recently purchased your pilot issue (February 2011), and saw the page on which you asked to hear your readers' "likes and dislikes" of the new magazine. I visited your website, and filled out the survey available there.

But I felt that more needs to be said, especially after reading the dubiously under-sourced feature article titled, "Freemasons: History's Secret World Government."

The article suffers from a litany of serious shortcomings in journalistic standards and basic due diligence that utterly undermine the entire piece's credibility.

Three problems in particular caught my attention:

1. The author is not listed, nor is any information given about her/him. It's not just a point of pride for a writer to have her or his moniker under a headline; it's also a vital reference for the reader. This article is ostensibly about history. Is the author an expert historian in this field - or a historian at all? Is she or he a vetted journalist who covers this field? There's no way to tell.

The reader's lack of knowledge about who wrote the article becomes even more pertinent given the next shortcoming, which is that:

2. The article contains few cited sources or quotes. A journalist is supposed to make the sources - primary documents and interviews - the backbone of the story. Source citation is the basis of a story's credibility. It tells the reader, "Hey, I didn't just make all this stuff up. Here's where I got it from, so you can check for yourself."

Vague references to unnamed "journalists" or "researchers" is only allowable if a fact is tangential to the article's focus. But the "Freemasons" article uses these kinds of unidentified sources to posit central arguments, such as when it points out that "more reports are being published" about the devious plans of secret societies. No examples of these reports are given; no quotes, and no mention of whether any of them are reliable.

More often, "facts" are simply presented without any reference to a source whatsoever. According to the article, 33% of the rebels who fought in the American Revolution were Freemasons. But where did this statistic come from? Certainly not the Census Bureau.

In another section the author writes, "Investigations reveal that many of [Italian Prime Minister Silvio] Berlusconi's policies correspond to the secret society's objectives." No hint is given about what the objectives were, how they were discovered, how they relate to any policies, or even who conducted the supposed "investigations."

The only person quoted directly in the entire article is Jim Marrs, who is variously identified as an "expert on secret societies" and a "researcher." A simple Google Scholar search reveals not one piece of recognized academic writing under his name. Marrs is, in fact, an ex-journalist who now espouses belief in a whole host of conspiracies, from alien abductions to 9/11 denial.

The author’s B.S. detector must not be very sensitive if he or she considers Marrs to be engaged in legitimate research. But that wouldn’t be quite as bad if not for the third shortcoming, which is that:

3. Although the article makes highly controversial claims, it offers practically no dissenting views.

The author’s wording of the article makes it obvious that his or her opinion is that the Freemasons exert a great deal of power and influence (perhaps in a negative fashion) on society. At one point, for instance, the article states (without citing a source) that “Besides Washington, there have been at least 11 U.S. presidents who belonged either to a Masonic Lodge or an affiliated organization.”

If 12 presidents were Freemasons, then 31 were not (43 men have been president: Grover Cleveland is typically counted twice, which is why Barrack Obama is president number 44). A sizeable majority therefore were not initiates.

In a similar fashion, the author mentions that “nine of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence...are openly members of Masonic Lodges, and another five have close ties to a lodge.” If, as the article says, Freemasons really did constitute one third of the rebels at the time of the Revolutionary War, then they made a terrible showing at the signing. Out of 56, they would have represented less than one sixth of the signers - and still only one quarter if you count outside “ties.”

Marr’s statements about cover-ups and the New World Order go unopposed, without the slightest attempt at a counterargument. The author doesn’t even bother at any point to bring in a token skeptic or to propose another perspective. Fringe conspiracy theories are portrayed as commonly accepted knowledge - and all this without a trace of reference.

This is by no means an exhaustive list. I haven’t addressed the veracity of the article, despite the fact that practically every paragraph makes unsubstantiated claims that arouse my suspicions.

To be frank, I don’t recall the last time I saw such sloppy journalism printed on such glossy paper. After reading this one article, I decided not to read any of the others. If the standards are as low as they seem, I don’t feel I can trust any of the content.

My likes are easy to enumerate. I like the concept of Ideas & Discoveries; judging by the design and content, it appears to be intended for a similar audience as "academic" magazines, such as Scientific American and National Geographic (I base this assessment in part on several of the survey's questions, in which the magazine is grouped with these and other popular science periodicals).

I wish there were more publications that provided education on a range of academic subjects that was accessible to general audiences. Your magazine could be among them, too, if it adopted some of the normal practices for maintaining journalistic integrity and accountability.

Until you tighten your editorial guidelines, however, I wouldn’t expect to reach anywhere near that level of credibility. Right now, a place on the rack closer to Weekly World News or the National Enquirer seems more appropriate.

Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,
- Brandon T. Bisceglia.

Continuum 32: The (Mostly) Science Show

2010-12-22T08:58:00.001-05:00

Visiting the CDC / Climate Denial / Culture and Scientific Consensus / Psychic Kids

Students from HCC’s Honors Program stand next to an iron lung during their recent visit to the CDC in Atlanta. Image courtesy of Caysey Welton.

Interview: Visiting the CDC – Every year, HCC offers a special interdisciplinary course for students enrolled in the college’s Honors Program. The topics covered by the seminar change from year to year.

This semester, Professor of Biology Dr. Kathleen Toedt is covering epidemiology – the study of diseases and how they spread.

In mid-November, the students in the class flew to Atlanta, Ga. to visit the headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), where they toured the agency’s on-premises museum.

Climate Denial – Dr. Michael Mann is a professor of meteorology and the director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University. Mann is also the person responsible for the famous “hockey-stick graph” that has become a major target of climate change critics over the past decade.

At the annual conference of the National Association of Science Writers and the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing in New Haven earlier this November, Mann discussed the solidity of climate science and some of the genuine scientific uncertainties that remain.

He contrasts this with the misguided public discourse surrounding the hockey-stick graph and, more recently, with the manufacture of the Climategate controversy in 2009.

Climate Science From Climate Scientists: http://www.realclimate.org/

Culture and Scientific Consensus – Why do people with certain political and social values tend toward a particular set of seemingly unrelated beliefs about what the scientific consensus is on certain issues, while people with a different set of values think the consensus agrees with their perspective?

Dan Kahan is the Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor of Law at Yale Law School. He and his colleagues have looked into something they call “cultural cognition of risk.” What they’ve found is that a person’s cultural values play an important role in determining their assessment of risk, of what scientific consensus is, and even in whether someone is likely to believe an expert’s opinion.

The Cultural Cognition Project at Yale Law School: http://www.culturalcognition.net/

Commentary: Psychic Kids – A&E began airing the second season of a show called Psychic Kids: Children of the Paranormal this November. On the show, children with emotional and psychological problems are given “help” by psychics and mediums, all while being taped to sell to audiences.

Most of the supposed “experts” on the show have little professional experience working with troubled children, and all of them are invested in entrenching the kids that they really are being visited by ghosts or possess psychic powers.

This show demonstrates the harm of unscientific thinking, and takes advantage of the misery of children for a profit.

Skepchick’s letter-writing campaign to end Psychic Kids: http://skepchick.org/blog/2010/11/psychic-kids-letter-writing-campaign-edition/

News – HCC’s Ex-President Dies, World AIDS Day, Metropolitan Museum of Art Trip, Winter Wonderland Ball

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Continuum 31

2010-12-12T22:44:00.004-05:00

Visit the Continuum web page

Executive Positions / Canvassing / Guilty of Date Rape? / Bridgeport's Beloved Socialist

Jaclyn Willis, played by Shamorrow Bember, tells the court the story of the night she was allegedly raped.
Photograph by Brandon T. Bisceglia

Student Senate Updates: Executive Positions/Canvassing - For most of the semester, the Student Senate has operated without most of its executive positions. That finally changed on Nov. 4, when Treasurer Konrad Mazurek became acting President and senator Juleen Moreno was voted as acting Secretary.

The Student Senate also decided to hold a special meeting the following Thursday in response to concerns that the Community Action Network (CAN) had possibly violated certain rules and policies during a demonstration the club held on Oct. 27 to promote Democratic Congressional candidate Jim Himes when he and his opponent, Republican Dan Debicella, were at the college for a debate.

Interview: No Witness - On Nov. 3, HCC's Women's Center and the Performing Arts club cosponsored a production of No Witness, a play that explores the complexities of date rape. Twelve audience members are selected as jurors to render a verdict in the fictional court battle over whether a young man overstepped the line.

This Week in History: Bridgeport's Beloved Socialist - Jasper McLevy was mayor of Bridgeport for 24 years, from 1933 to 1957. He was also a prominent member of the Socialist Party. He was a closer friend to Republicans than Democrats, and was eventually criticized for being too fiscally conservative in city affairs.

McLevy's relationship with the city was deeply intertwined with his sometimes battered identity as a lifelong Socialist. Bridgeport also changed dramatically under his stewardship.

News – Jewish Culture, Frosty the Snowman, Mr. HCC, Musical Talent Show, Toys for Tots, Music Lessons

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Continuum 30: Student Senate / STATWAY / Extracurricular Activities / Yale School of Medicine

2010-11-28T02:44:00.005-05:00

Visit the Continuum web page

Graphic courtesy of actiononaccess.org.

News – FOE Meeting Times, Gettysburg Trip, Ernest Newton, NYC Trip, Music Lessons

Student Senate Updates: The Student Senate continued a painfully slow growth process at its Oct. 21 meeting, inducting its fifth member, Business major Melissa Silver.

The Student Senate also took votes on allocating funds for clubs who had not supplied a budget proposal before the Spring semester deadline. Proposal deadlines had been reopened until Oct. 14.

Most clubs got what they asked for without too much question. The Photography Club, however, was flat-funded $2,000 after several items on their proposal were rejected. The club had been asking for nearly $5,000, nearly twice what any other club had received.

The Art Club was left in the same position, though their initial request was slightly lower.

The clubs may still receive the rest of the funding that they requested. Part of the reason that the Student Senate voted for flat-funding was that the budget proposals were, in Mazurek’s words, “messy.”

Interview: STATWAY – HCC’s Math Department has begun test-piloting a new program for developmental math students that shifts the focus of their studies from algebra to statistics. The program is called STATWAY, and was formulated by the Carnegie Foundation. If all goes well, the college will begin teaching the new program in 2011. The goal then will be to change the way that developmental math is taught in community colleges across the country.

Host Brandon T. Bisceglia speaks about the program with Mathematics Professor Theodora Benezra, who is heading up the research and development team at HCC.

Commentary: Extracurricular Activities – Ever since Beacon Hall opened in 2008, HCC’s enrollment has been increasing. Along with that expansion has come an added demand for more extracurricular events and activities.

Several groups have excelled at meeting this demand. They deserve a bit of praise for that success.

This Week in History: Yale School of Medicine – In November of 1813, the Medical Institute of Yale College opened its doors, making it the first school in Connecticut for the formal training of physicians. The Institute, which would blossom into the now-famous Yale School of Medicine, was the product of a unique agreement between the college and the State.

Medicine at Yale, presented by the Harvey Cushing/John Jay Whitney Medical Library

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Continuum 29: Special - Politics in Connecticut

2010-11-13T05:59:00.004-05:00

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Graphic courtesy of ctlocalpolitics.net

With the 2010 elections just passed, host Brandon T. Bisceglia tells stories from the campaign trail revealing the ways in which Connecticut politicians interact with the people, the press, and each other.

Part 1: The Narrative of Rick Torres

Part 2: Poll Fables

Part 3: A Stolen Laugh

Part 4: An Honest Ad

Part 5: Negativity

Part 6: Lawsuits Don't Matter

Part 7: Millions of Dollars for You

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From Science Friday: March of the Immune Cells

2010-10-29T18:57:00.006-04:00

Science Friday

Reporting in the journal Science, Paul Kubes and colleagues filmed immune cells called neutrophils finding their way to a mouse's wounded liver. The researchers wanted to understand how neutrophils find injuries when bacteria aren't around to signal the damage.

video footage: B. McDonald and P. Kubes, Science, music by SYNTHAR, produced by anna rothschild, flora lichtman

Continuum 28: Behind the HCC Library / Boughton & the Tea Party / Pandemic Flu in Bridgeport

2010-10-24T17:32:00.003-04:00

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Library Associate Jennifer Falasco carefully applies a special glue to the binding of a book that has begun to fall apart.
Photograph by Brandon T. Bisceglia.

Part 1: News – HCC Museum Closing, Veteran’s Center Move, Women’s Opportunities in Math/Science, Men’s Center Open House, ECE Food & Clothing Drive, CJ Club Presents Sarah Tyman, World Music Performance, Psychology Information Sessions, Salem Trip, Transfer Fair

Part 2: Behind the HCC Library – Host Brandon T. Bisceglia speaks with Library Associate Jennifer Falasco to find out how HCC’s library gets and keeps track of its books. Falasco also discusses her lifelong background with libraries, as well as some of the differences between public libraries and academic libraries.

Part 3: Boughton and the Tea Party – Last week Democratic State Party Chairwoman Nancy DiNardo criticized Republican candidate for Lieutenant Governor Mark Boughton because of several Tea Party rallies he’s attended. Boughton’s association with these groups represents a tightening alignment between Republicans and tea party groups – a relationship that may have both positive and negative impacts on the two factions.

Part 4: Pandemic Flu in Bridgeport – On October 11, 1918, pandemic influenza was reported to have infected 147 Bridgeport residents within 24 hours, and had killed the city’s police commissioner. It was the height of the worst flu outbreak the city – and the world – had ever seen. That same day, a new committee was formed to staunch the spread of the disease in Bridgeport. The efforts would come too late for the pandemic, but would inform public health policies into the twenty-first century.

Continuum 27: Club Budgets / Institutional Research / Blasphemy / The Death of County Government

2010-10-20T21:04:00.002-04:00

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Part 1: News – Author Sergio Troncoso, Safe is Sexy, Madonna y El Niño, SCORE

Part 2: Student Senate Updates – The September 23 meeting of the Student Senate produced a lively discussion about the process of securing club budgets, resulting in an extension of budget applications until October 14.

Part 3: Institutional Research – HCC’s official student count for the Fall 2010 semester was 6,197, another all-time enrollment record in a string of records that have mounted since Beacon Hall opened in 2008. Director of Institutional Research Jan Schaeffler talks about the meanings behind the numbers, her dual jobs as researcher and teacher, and other projects she’s working on.

Part 4: Blasphemy - September 30 is International Blasphemy Rights Day. The benefits of the right to blaspheme include the unimpeded dissemination of scientific discoveries, freedom of religious choice, and are even tied closely to the ability to criticize government.

Part 5: The Death of County Government – On October 1, 1960, the Connecticut General Assembly formally abolished the last vestiges of the state’s county government, making it the first in the country to do so. This level of government, though integral to the original formation of the colony, slowly turned into an ineffectual shell of its former self.

Continuum 26: Why We Needed the Constitution / Off-Peak Students / Long Island Express Hurricane

2010-10-05T10:07:00.001-04:00

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Part 1: News & Events - Bridgeport Library Book Sale, The Big E, Banned & Challenged Books, Read Aloud Day, Record Enrollment

Part 2: Why We Needed the Constitution – History Professor Dave Koch’s presentation at the Events Center in celebration of Constitution Day on September 17 tells about some of the major ideas and events that led the United States from independence, to the Articles of Confederation, and finally to a Constitutional Convention.

Part 3: Night & Weekend Students: Many of HCC’s services are only open during traditional daytime hours. Many more activities take place during the day. This leaves night and weekend students underserved and unable to participate in many aspects of student life – a position that is unfair, given that they constitute one of the community college’s target demographics, and that they end up paying for college functions that they cannot use.

Part 4: The “Long Island Express” Hurricane: On September 21, 1938, a category three hurricane plowed across Long Island and slammed into Connecticut, centering between Bridgeport and New Haven. It was the single worst natural disaster to strike the state in recorded history.

Continuum 25: Student Senate Shortage/FEMA/Connecticut’s First Constitution

2010-09-25T04:37:00.001-04:00

Part 1: Events

Part 2: Student Senate Updates – Recruiting Senators, HCC Foundation, Budget Estimates, Revision of Constitution & Bylaws

Part 3: Student Senate Shortage – Many students who served on HCC’s Student Senate last semester have either graduated or moved on to other activities. Only three members were left to run the group’s September 9 meeting. Host Brandon T. Bisceglia speaks with Director of Student Activities Linda Bayusik and Student Senate Treasurer Konrad Mazurek about the push to recruit new senators, and why they feel the Senate is important.

Part 4: News – Albertus Magnus Transfer Agreement, HCC Crime Statistics, Himes Internships

Part 5: FEMA - Last Friday, the Federal Emergency Management Agency denied Connecticut’s request for federal assistance for losses incurred by the June 24 storm that produced a tornado that ripped through Bridgeport’s downtown area. The denial reveals inequities inherent in FEMA’s policies, and questions about its overall usefulness.

Part 6: Connecticut’s First Constitution – On September 15, 1818, Connecticut Governor Oliver Wolcott signed the final draft of Connecticut’s first post-colonial constitution.
- Connecticut Constitutional History, By Wesley W. Horton: http://www.cslib.org/cts4ch.htm

Continuum 24: News/Off to the Americorps/Stem Cells/Benedict Arnold

2010-09-08T19:40:00.002-04:00

Continuum is inaugurating the new school year with a new format! Join host Brandon T. Bisceglia as he delivers news, interviews, and stories related to Housatonic Community College and Connecticut as a whole.

Part 1 - News and Events: Dean of Outreach/Vietnam Course/Welcome Back Party/Clubs/The Big E Trip

Part 2 - Off to the Americorps: Former Student Senate Vice President Chad Hunter discusses his time at the college and his decision to take a year off to serve in the Americorps in California, as well as the drive to serve one’s community.

Part 3 - Stem Cell Commentary: A federal judge recently ordered a temporary ban on public funding for embryonic stem cell research, because of a law passed by Congress in 1996. Connecticut has its own laws that have created clear guidelines for the acquisition of embryonic stem cells, and may serve as a model for updated federal legislation.

Part 4 - This Week in History - Benedict Arnold: On September 6, 1781, Connecticut native and infamous traitor Benedict Arnold led British forces onto shore at the port of New London, in one of the worst battles to occur in the state during the American Revolutionary War.

Anti-Islamic Illogic

2010-08-25T13:18:00.005-04:00

In the hyperbolic rhetoric surrounding the proposed construction of an Islamic cultural center in New York City, some of us seem to have forgotten a few salient facts.

First: the center is in no way a part of ground zero. It's two blocks away. So are numerous other businesses and centers, none of which were asked to pass any kind of "9/11 litmus test."

Deferring to the opinions of the 9/11 victims' families on this issue (no matter whether they support or oppose it) makes little sense in this context. The families are rightly involved in the planning of the land left vacant on the World Trade Center property, but they should not have sway over the use of sections of the city that lay some arbitrary distance away.

Second: The building is private property, paid for with private funds. The proposal violates no law whatsoever. Any opposition is therefore only a ploy for the purpose of capitalizing on emotions.

We hear that this construction is "insensitive" to various Americans. But is it not equally insensitive to subject an oft-maligned minority group to the court of public opinion over something that encroaches on no one else's freedoms?

Third: An Islamic center can only be a "win" for the terrorists if we insist on giving their fundamentalist interpretation of Islam priority over the other 1.57 billion peaceful Muslims living on this planet.

That's what terrorists (of all kinds) really want -- to have their views validated. If you oppose this center, they've already won by defining the terms of the debate for you. It also does a total disservice to those Muslims who have suffered at the hands of terrorists. The numbers of these people dwarf the loss of life on 9/11 (some victims of which were also Muslim).

It is worth noting that the group who first stoked this controversy is itself an extremist Christian organization called Operation Save America, and that their opposition is not simply to the location of this particular center. They have traveled the country, staging protests at Muslim venues of worship (including in my city of birth, Bridgeport), intimidating Muslims, and driving divisive wedges into local communities.

These people consider the Islamic faith an affront to their own religion, and see themselves as confronting a dangerous rival on the verge of taking over their country. This is exactly the same view that extremist Muslims have, and that the Christian crusaders in the early part of the millennium had.

But even if that were not the case, it remains to be demonstrated that the parties involved in this project pose any legitimate threat to American security. Until such a threat is credibly established, it is a myopic worldview that automatically associates these people with terrorists. And if such a threat does become apparent, then the correct line of action to take will be to arrest them, not call them names.

If Republicans truly value the sanctity of individual property rights and the free exercise of religion (as they so often assert), they ought to be fighting especially hard for this work to go forward. Even if they don't like where or why it's being built, the issue is a classic example of the kind of liberty the U.S. Constitution was designed to protect (both from government and mob intervention).

These Muslims are our fellow citizens, and deserve all of the same inalienable rights to the use of their property for the practice of their religion as the rest of us.

The protection of those rights must supersede public sentiment, anti-Islamic fear mongering, or any other form of the current opposition. If we are willing to subjugate our most deeply cherished rights whenever an unpopular private decision is made, then we will be hypocrites. The rest of the world will correctly recognize us as hypocrites. And the real terrorists will have yet more confirmation that they can easily undermine the institutions that we claim as most important to us.

Development Exposed

2010-08-16T21:58:00.015-04:00

When my wife and I moved to Fairfield at the beginning of the summer, we situated ourselves on a quiet street on the shore of Ash Creek. Our particular block bends around to meet with a parallel residential street.

That bend was lined on the far side with a large grove of wild trees and shrub that obscured the skyline beyond. I took particular pleasure in walking on the road beside towering brush that was barely held in check by a chain-link fence.

In the meantime, my parents told us that we had arrived in the town at a lucky moment: the new train station was in the process of being constructed just a few blocks away, easily within walking distance. As a fan of mass transit, I was initially delighted.

But about two weeks ago, while looking out our attic window, I noticed something strange. Off in the distance, I could see water towers and other structures. Previously, the horizon in that direction had been an unbroken sea of green.

Over the course of the next week, the tree line grew thinner and thinner, until just a single band of branches hid the newly stripped land from our street.

Now, even those are gone. In their place is a gigantic pit of stewed dirt, mud, and roots, crisscrossed with tire and tractor marks. The rabbits, possums, squirrels and birds have fled into the adjacent neighborhoods (where they will no doubt perish in the paws of cats and the headlights of cars).

Now that I can see over the ridge, it’s become apparent that this once verdant patch of land is all that separates us from the forthcoming train station. My speculation is that the trees will literally have been paved to put in a parking lot for all of the commuters who can’t find space for their SUVs at the older Fairfield station.

I plan to get confirmation of this in the next few days. If it is true, I’ll soon have a much different view from home: one of blacktop and metal glinting in the sun.

Our block terminates in this gate to a whole new world of development. Beautiful, no?

Construction equipment roams the denuded hillside.

The extensive root systems of felled trees still cling to the dust beneath.

The last carcass rests in the dirt where it was killed.

The tallest thing around is now the street sign. Two weeks ago, I didn’t even know it was there.

When removing natural structures, the workers are careful to preserve the man-made ones.

A long view.

A few finds from the Southport, Connecticut Pequot Library’s annual book sale:

2010-07-25T00:27:00.004-04:00

"Design for the proposed Building for the Department of Agriculture - City of Washington."
Photograph by Brandon T. Bisceglia.

- “The Brass Industry in the United States: A Study of the Origin and the Development of the Brass Industry in the Naugatuck Valley and Its Subsequent Extension Over the Nation,” by William G. Lathrop. (1926)

- “A Pocket Guide to the Common Wild Flowers of Connecticut,” by John E. Klimas, Jr. (1968)

- “The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan, the Forgotten Colony that Shaped America,” by Russell Shorto. (2003)

- “First Principles of Chemistry – Revised Edition,” by Raymond B. Brownlee, et al. (1915)

- “Probability and Statistics for Engineering and the Sciences – 6th edition,” by Jay L. Devore. (2004)

- “Contemporary Medical Ethics,” by Father John F. Dedek. (1975)

- “The First Book of Stories for the Story-Teller,” by Fanny E. Coe. (1910)

- “Annual Report of the Commissioner of Agriculture for the Year 1880,” by the Department of Agriculture. (1881)

- “The New Humanists: Science at the Edge,” edited by John Brockman. (2003)

- “El Gato con Botas – versión del cuento de los hermanos Grimm,” by Eric Blair. (2006)

- “Solid Clues: Quantum Physics, Molecular Biology, and the Future of Science,” by Gerald Feinberg. (1985)

- “The Mayor’s Game: Richard Lee of New Haven and the Politics of Change,” by Allan R. Talbot (signed). (1967)

- “Techniques of the Great Masters of Art,” by QED Publishing Limited. (1987)