The Death of the “Book Review”?

The book review has died. It lives. But it is dead. It is an anachronistic zombie. Let me explain. 

Perhaps some of you are employed in universities that use Digital Measures? I’m sure you are at least savvy enough to imagine precisely the aims of this wondrous digital panopticon. If you have not yet discovered Digital Measures, then rest assured someone, somewhere, is plotting to bring it your university soon enough. In any case, it is a software that promises to measure and value everything you do. And should you have dared to publish a book review, then it will measure it in a way that values it least of all.

Originally when Digital Measures was introduced at my university, it did not even possess a capacity to enter “Book Review” as “work” into one of the literally hundreds of drop-down menus for measuring academic labor. When the issue was raised, there was complete confusion. “What is a book review?” was a serious question. Some thought we meant “peer-review” and couldn’t understand how they could be published. 

Suspicion festered. Everywhere people suspected that some of us were trying to get credit for something twice. 

But then it began to dawn on people that were still some odd academics who published weird antiquarian objects of yore, and thus those were probably peer-reviewed in manuscript form and perhaps this was what was meant by “book review”. We then had to explain by invoking reviews of books in The New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, and the Times Literary Supplement. We showed them reprints from journals, whereby some evinced surprise that journals looked like books, and they confessed that they had not heard of the publications or thought their activities mere journalism. 

Thus, success! Eventually a drop-down menu item was added to the “Professional Service” menu. “Published Book Review” was, however, a bit at sea in the world of “Professional Service,” where there were such serious menu items as “Committees.” For one thing, the book review was published while and everything else was not. That made its location an odd choice. So eventually a compromise was adopted. Published “book reviews” would be entered into the area called “intellectual contributions”. But in the final output of measure, book reviews would not appear anywhere near other publications. And thus it was, at least in Digital Measures, that the genre of “book review” passed into memory. It died, even as it lived.

10 Hz

... and a little review

Primary Care Watch (American Edition)

Media critiques of circumstances for primary care providers are on the rise, doubtlessly as a result of the soon to be implemented A.C.A. Here is one illustration:

 "Primary care is highly respected here. That's not the case anymore in America," said [Grady] Snyder. "In the United States, health care has become more about the business of making money. The personal side of medicine is going away." In fact, Snyder said he wouldn't be surprised if more primary care doctors in the U.S. look for opportunities elsewhere. His own contract expires at the end of June but he's renewing it for another two years.

Much of the critique seems to be directed at hospital profits, regardless of quality care. The Washington Post, for example, observes in a blog post:

The study underscores how ludicrous the incentives are in the American health care system, generally paying doctors for each medical service they provide, even if some of that care is the result of a surgery gone wrong. “If you personalize this and a relative is having heart surgery, which gets complicated by pneumonia, I don’t think we would want a hospital’s profit to go up as a result of that pneumonia,” said study co-author Barry Rosenberg, a partner in Boston Consulting Group’s health care practice. The study does not imply that hospitals intentionally complicate surgeries to bring in more revenue. Most surgeries, about 95 percent, go off without a hitch. What it does suggest to the surgeon, writer and Harvard professor Atul Gawande is that hospitals now see little reason to invest in technologies that would reduce complications when the only prize at the end would be lower income.

Steven Brill's essay "Bitter Pill" publish by Time Magazine is yet another example - and a very good one at that. But maybe - just maybe - there is another question we should be directing at media outlets. Where were you before this? Oh, sure, there were some opinion columnists who took stands on these issues. And the medical and scientific press have been discussing these problems for decades. But the sad reality is that these healthcare problems have been recognizable and growing for decades. Sociologists, historians of medicine, doctors and surgeons, and medical consumers have been talking about these issues for decades. But how often have major media outlets stated "our healthcare is the best in the world for those who can afford it" or "healthcare access and quality in America when compared to other nations declined again" without bothering to go deeper. If you don't remember, just revisit commentaries and analysis of Michael Moore's Sicko to see how willing mainstream and non-mainstream media outlets were to address in a rigorous way points raised in Moore's documentary. Recall these remarks?  

What happens when you wring out a washcloth in *outerspace? *orbiting

Awesome.

For Brain Box "Statistical Power is Truth Power"

In a really excellent essay, "Brain Box" argues that too-much scientific analysis relies upon under-powered data collection:

If you were previously content with 20 participants for fMRI, then perhaps you should recruit 40. If you have always relied on 100 cells, then perhaps you should collect data from 200 cells instead. Yes, these are arbitrary values, but there is nothing arbitrary about improving statistical power. And you can be absolutely sure that the extra time and effort (and cost) will pay dividends in the long run. You will spend less time analysing your data trying to find something interesting to report, and you will be less likely to send some other research down the miserable path of persistent failures to replicate your published false positive.

I would add to this point that too little attention is paid to the actual interpretations attached to the statistical findings. Recall Danziger's comments about statistical analysis in his Constructing the Self:

In the older kind of practice one manipulated experimental conditions in order to test hypotheses about the processes going on in individual psychophysical systems. Now, the direct purpose of experimentation was to make predictions about how certain variations in conditions affected the response of an abstract individual. Because in practice such an individual was statistically and not psychologically real, questions of psychological inference very easily became transformed into questions of statistical inference.... 

It seems to me that statistics are the major problem for philosophers and sociologists of science. Statistics work perfectly but it is not transparent that their object transcends statistics. Putting it differently, statistics would work as well in a Freudian paradigm of self-hood as they could in a neurochemical paradigm of self-hood. I am sure that there are any number of statisticians who could identify even more profound cases.

COLLOQUIUM ON THE HISTORY OF PSYCHIATRY AND MEDICINE

Department of Postgraduate and Continuing Education, McLean Hospital and the Center for the History of Medicine, Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Ware Room, fifth floor, Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical Area

Open to students of history and those valuing a historical perspective on their professions. 

4:00 P.M.—5:30 P.M., September 19, 2013
The Spread of the Lamaze Method of Childbirth 1940s-1970s: Ideologies and Poiitics

Paula Michaels, Ph.D.: Lecturer in Modern History, Monash College

4:00 P.M.—5:30 P.M., October 24, 2013: The Crackers and the Trick Cyclists:  The Treatment of Mental Disorder in Royal Air Force Flying During the Second World War

Lynsey Shaw, B.A. (Hons.), M.Sc.: D. Phil. Candidate in the History of Medicine, The Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, University of Oxford

4:00 P.M.—5:30 P.M., November 21, 2013: From the Parachuting Psychologist to “Mental Health and Psychosocial Support”: Humanitarian Mental Health Interventions Since the 1980s

Ilil Benjamin, M.A.: Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Science and Technologiy Studies, Cornell University

4:00 P.M.—5:30 P.M.m December 19, 2013: Good Spirits and Strong Bodies:  Mental Health Treatment in Syria 1903-1961

Beverly Tsacoyianis: Assistant Professor of History, University of Memphis; Doctoral Candidate, Washington University in St. Louis

For further information contact David G. Satin, M.D., Colloquium Director,
phone/fax 617-332-0032, e-mail:  david_satin@hms.harvard.edu

Barbaric Rage & Love

I have rather enjoyed Barbaric Rage & Love's motivations for blogging about neuroscience, evolutionary biology, art, and culture.

Barbaric Rage & Love is meant to ask questions, raise issues, consider possibilities. I don't have any answers. I'm searching too. This is all so new. Universal Darwinism, evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, consciousness studies, neurolaw, functional magnetic resonance imagery, genomics, memetics -- most of these and more only started in the last quarter of the twentieth century, or even more recently.

Obvious I don't agree with the triumphalism - but I must also say that I really admire the enthusiasm, curiosity, and boldness. Blogging as a reflection of the "public self" can offer a surprising intimacy for total strangers.

E. O. Wilson has two cents on math

In the Wall Street Journal, E. O. Wilson suggests that math, while useful, is not essential for good science. He writes:

Over the years, I have co-written many papers with mathematicians and statisticians, so I can offer the following principle with confidence. Call it Wilson's Principle No. 1: It is far easier for scientists to acquire needed collaboration from mathematicians and statisticians than it is for mathematicians and statisticians to find scientists able to make use of their equations.

This imbalance is especially the case in biology, where factors in a real-life phenomenon are often misunderstood or never noticed in the first place. The annals of theoretical biology are clogged with mathematical models that either can be safely ignored or, when tested, fail. Possibly no more than 10% have any lasting value. Only those linked solidly to knowledge of real living systems have much chance of being used.

If your level of mathematical competence is low, plan to raise it, but meanwhile, know that you can do outstanding scientific work with what you have. Think twice, though, about specializing in fields that require a close alternation of experiment and quantitative analysis. These include most of physics and chemistry, as well as a few specialties in molecular biology. 

I confess that I'm glad someone has said this - I loath that dreaded acronym STEM! But I do wish Wilson had followed up with something equally obvious. While math may matter less than meets the eye for scientists, being a good writer matters more than practically anyone wishes to see for everyone. In short, I'd be all for talking about STEW (Science, Technology, Engineering & Writing), especially because STEW gets at the underlying flaw in throwing STEM into the same pot. Hah!

Putting it differently, I cannot think of any famous scientist who was not also in the first instance a competent writer. Then why do we permit generations of undergraduates studying STEM subjects to undervalue the importance of writing and reading?

Median Specialist Compensation in American Medicine (1995 & 2008)

B. Sigsbee (2011) p. 924

B. F. Skinner Short Film

Revue acéphale

[ ... a variation on a pet theme of mine, written up a good little while ago, to be put up somewhere else. this never happened, 

so here it goes.]

“Our thoughts ... were so far mainly focused on the subject of neurology, and more specifically the human nervous system, and there primarily the central nervous system. [...] We selected from prompt action the most complicated object under the sun – literally.”

These second-thoughts – for, there might have been less complicated objects, it seems, but ones more productive to think with - in late November 1946 were making their way into the hands of mathematician Norbert Wiener, the chubby MIT prodigy with a faible for anti-aircraft-defense as well as, evidently, the central nervous system. To no avail, we must assume. Complicated or not, Wiener famously would bring these various objects together, notably in a 1948 treatise (equally famous), titled: Cybernetics. Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. And so would (occasionally at least) the sender, as it were, of above soul-searching message, and quite despite it: physicist John von Neumann, hardly a lesser figure himself and he too a man of many talents - his unfinished, posthumous The Computer and the Brain (1958) would only cap off a far-flung oeuvre .

Maverick thinkers both of them, both Wiener’s and von Neumann’s names, to be sure, have come to stand for many things: dawn of the information age, the figure of the cyborg, game theory, artificial intelligence, ‘non-modern’ ontologies and more – a great many narratives of departure, incision and transformation. The one that interests me here, you may have guessed it, has to do (but not quite) with that most complicated object under the sun, the brain; and to be precise, with its history. This history too, in one way or another, is a story prominently featuring these two cyberneticists above, whose scandalous equation of men and machines, of brains and computers, has been eagerly embraced by a great many scholars in order to – whatever the case may be - celebrate, castigate, frame, or (at its best) historicize our own, contemporary condition: a condition that has everything, or at least a lot, to do with the brain – and its science.

Music and the War on the Nerves

Dr James Kennaway

Dr James Kennaway studied at LSE and the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine before completing a Master's at King's College, London and a PhD at UCLA in 2004. Since then he has worked at the University of Vienna, Stanford University and the Viadrina University in Frankfurt-an-der-Oder, Germany.


When I started work on my book Bad Vibrations: The History of the Idea of Music (link) as a cause of disease on the strange story of medical fears about music, I assumed that the story was more or less over by 1945. The crushing military and ideological defeat of Nazism, with their notions of ‘degenerate music’, did not, however, mean the end of the debate on music as a medical threat. Not only was the Cold War fertile ground for paranoia about music’s effects, it was also a period in which serious work was done to attempt to establish music as a deliberate means of inflicting harm of people’s physical and mental health via the nervous system. Pavlovian and Behaviourist conceptions of reflex action were used to promote a view of music as a trigger of neurological responses that could be manipulated by those in power. Moreover, it soon became clear to me that our own times are the real Golden Age of anxiety about music and its medical impact. The internet has provided scope for the development of many new (and old) theories about the supposed impact of certain kinds of music on physical and mental health. More alarmingly, it also seemed that after outlining innumerable nineteenth and twentieth-century accounts of fears about music, my book would have to end with music that was actually doing people serious harm in the context of acoustic weapons and the systematic use of music in torture. This blog post takes a look at the bizarre and worryingly topical question of the use of music in the ‘war of nerves’.

Music as a Weapon

The use of music in warfare, to give courage to one side and intimidate the other, has been a recurring theme in many cultures. In some ways, of course, the military use of music goes back at least to Joshua’s trumpets at the battle of Jericho. However, the emergence of sound as a serious weapon has depended on recording and amplification technology and is still perhaps in its infancy. The German media theorist Friedrich Kittler pointed to the military roots and connections of much modern media technology, noting for example, that radio broadcasting was merely an extension of the military communication systems of World War One without the ability to speak back. Audiotape, stereo sound and many other developments also owed their origins in large part to the military. As he put it, ‘The entertainment industry is, in any conceivable sense of the word, an abuse of army equipment’.

The development of acoustic weapons has often occurred in response to particular military and political circumstances, most notably the American experience in Vietnam, the British in Northern Ireland and the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. It is no coincidence that such techniques have been pioneered by democratic states, where there is greater incentive to develop means of causing pain and controlling others that do not look bad when featured in the media. Weapons with science fiction names such as Beams, Blast Wave, Bullets, Curdler Unit and Deference Tones have been created and marketed. Some of them use ultrasound, that is, sound lower than 20 Hz per second, below the limit of human hearing and therefore beyond the realm of music. Others, however, use music to inflict physical and psychological harm, potentially damaging the health of those affected. Although media coverage of the subject tends to veer from hysterical technophobia to smirking trivialization, acoustic weapon are making progress.

The American use of music as a weapon in Vietnam was most famously exemplified in the scene in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now in which General Kilgore has Wagner played from assault helicopters. This was by no means artistic license, but reflected the practical military reality of ‘audio harassment’ in the war. Since the end of the Vietnam War, the most well known use of music as a psychological weapon was during the American siege of the Vatican embassy in Panama in 1989 when US troops in Panama played music at Vatican embassy to flush out the ousted dictator Manuel Noriega. A few years later, the American authorities played Nancy Sinatra’s ‘These Boots were Made for Walking’ at the disastrous Branch Davidian Cult siege at Waco, Texas. The ‘War against Terror’ has been a boom time for the developers of acoustic weapons, especially the Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD), which is sold both to concert organizers and to the military, a striking example the emerging entertainment-military complex. The LRAD has been used to repel so-called ‘looters’ in New Orleans in the chaotic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and to control crowds at protests in Pittsburgh.

Deep History vs. Big History

In a rather remarkable demand for serial contextualization in "Big History", David Armitage writes of deep history:

Big history in all its guises has been inhospitable to the questions of meaning and intention so central to intellectual history. This is not simply for the banal reason that the big historians usually scrutinize such a superficial slice of recorded history at the end of their grand sweeps: the skin of paint on the top of the Eiffel Tower, in Mark Twain’s marvellous metaphor. Nor is it just because human agency dwindles in significance in the face of cosmological or even archaeological time. It is due, for the moment at least, to the essential materialism of the two main strains of big history, what we might call the biologistic and the economistic tendencies.

The biologistic tendency is neurophysiologically reductive: when all human actions, including thought and culture, can be explained by brain chemistry, reflections approximate to reflexes. In the economistic strain, intellect is assimilated to interests. Each age simply “gets the thought that it needs”. For instance, whether it’s Buddhism, Christianity or Islam in the Axial Age, it’s all the same in the end: simply the product of the problem-solving capacity of some rather clever but needy chimps. In these regards, at least when it treats the questions of most concern to intellectual historians, deep history can appear to be somewhat shallow.

Oh, it’s so mainstream now.

You’re unlikely to have missed Alissa Quart’s op-ed piece ‘Neuroscience– Under Attack’ the other week in the New York Times. Indeed it has caused, or so it appears, some considerable stir in and beyond the tiny (one assumes) sub-universe of the social-media-sphere peddling in ‘neuro-doubt’; appreciations in the more visible online formats – including Psychology Today, The New Yorker, or NPR - were quick to celebrate the news that, apparently, ‘neuro-criticism’ now must have ‘hit the mainstream’. The ‘backlash has begun!’

The impression, of course, that the era of untrammeled neuro-fandom is somewhat beyond its peak is probably quite correct - whether or not the New York Times is in fact a good indicator of things becoming ‘mainstream’ (given the flurry of reposts etc in the case at hand, it might be a better indicator of the intellectual universe traversed by the more neuro-minded people); and whether or not things becoming ‘mainstream’ is necessarily a good thing (as a cultural snob might doubt). At any rate, perusing what Quart’s recent intervention seems to have precipitated in terms of ‘backlash’ is, on the whole, somewhat disheartening: almost invariably commentators chose to pick up on the term ‘brain porn’ only, (mis)interpreting the piece as merely condemning as a bad and risible Thing ‘pop neuroscience, coarsened for mass audiences’ and more broadly, the ‘popular press’ and ‘simplified pop’ produced by sensation-mongering and, well, ignorant and unscientific science writers. The Real Neuroscientists here, busy unearthing their unsettling Truths about Human Nature; the public mob there, incapable of understanding and thus poised to distort.

It’s a reassuring and conveniently naive construction, of course - if one that would seem to fall short of everything one might be able to learn about the presumably more intricate mechanisms of knowledge production, neoliberal and otherwise (but especially neoliberal). It’s thinking, one might paraphrase it, as ‘sloppy’ as Naomi Wolf’s. Incapable, it seems, of entertaining even a slightly more complex narrative than there being some problem with the merchants of ‘brain porn’ – which, it’s worth pointing out, include some Big university presses (rather than, as tends to be intimidated, a lot of shoddy ‘science writers’) - much of the recent and rather blinkered ‘backlash’ indeed more properly is labelled damage-control (of course, ‘if we want to understand our minds, from which all of human nature springs, we must come to grips with the brain’s biology’). Quart’s piece admittedly didn’t help it by prominently featuring, and slightly misrepresenting, a Neuron survey from earlier this year as concluding that, apropos those regular-distortions-by-the-media, ‘logically irrelevant neuroscience information imbues an argument with authoritative, scientific credibility.’ The latter proposition was due to McCabe and Castel’s much belaboured ‘Seeing is believing’ (2008); said Neuron authors – without a hint of doubt that indeed neuroscience has ‘profound social and policy implications’ - for their part simply assumed that ‘brain research is now a powerful rhetorical tool’ (plausibly enough), while venturing, for instance, (in a more content-oriented mode of analysis) that a ‘particularly noticeable feature’ in all those popular ‘assimilations’ of neuroscience was ‘the focus on brain optimization’ (something unlikely the fault, one assumes, simply of either short-hand: the ‘media’ or ‘neuroscience’).

Either way, and rather tellingly, the story of popular distortions featured quite prominently in the Quart-aftermath, still further incensed by yet another recent study on the ‘seductive allure’ of fMRI - albeit one geared towards questioning the inherent seductiveness of such visual devices (i.e., ‘The seductive allure of the ‘seductive allure’’). The very prominence of such a somewhat scholastic debate in a putative ‘backlash’ might make it seem trivial enough - and, to be sure, not particularly rising above the popular, common sense (An image is worth a thousand words) or what’s been intuitively grasped, somehow, by every Jesuit counter-reformer and propaganda ministry (Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae etc). More to the point: though largely immaterial, it might tell you just how mainstream the putative ‘mainstream’ really is: Framing things as matters of ‘distortion’ or some psychology of ‘persuasion’ first, and then reducing them to a clever experimental design, would seem to be a strategy squarely in line with the very naturalistic, biologizing tendencies the enemies of ‘brain porn addiction’ allegedly take issue with (the pathology-infused wording itself is revealing in this connection). It certainly would seem to tell you very little indeed about ‘brain porn’; and even less about the cultural and intellectual climate within which it thrives. 

But then again, perhaps small wonder: that ‘larger cultural tendency’ which Quart also gestured at, one ‘in which neuroscientific explanations eclipse historical, political, economic, literary and journalistic interpretations of experience’, barely has been registered by any kind of ‘mainstream’, let alone pondered in ways worthy of the name ‘critique’; it certainly didn’t figure much in the ‘backlash’ of late, and neither did those ‘humanities scholars who question the way that neuroscience has seeped into their disciplines’, as Quart put it. That, of course, might not be a topic of potential mainstream interest; but even for that to become productive, a little more will be required than some ‘pop-neuroscience’ witch-hunt.

GIS & "The Blitz"

This really cool source provides some geographical texture to the impact of the bombing campaign on London during 1940 and 1941. It is staggering. 

 

 

The First Night of the Blitz.

 

 My paper on civilian morale provides some further context.