Patricia S. Bowne

June is Bustin’ Out

Posted on June 1, 2015 by Pat Bowne

(We sang that song in chorus last year and let me tell you, it’s not as easy as you’d think)

June is a big month for me, with three stories coming out!
“Lock’s Half” and “Young Varkh” are two folktales from the manuscript of Fountain Girl, but who knows if they’ll still be in there after the summer’s cuts – so get them now while you can. They were issued June 1 in the Northlore Series Folklore anthology, a huge compliation of new Scandinavian folk tales. Spend a week in fantasy northwoods and know that some of your money went to support wolf conservation in Europe. Amazon Link here

I also have a short story, “The Adjunct,” coming out in the June issue of Fantasy Scroll. A part-time anatomy teacher takes a gig that probably should have been avoided in this one. I had a great time writing something that was really in my wheelhouse. You’ll get an idea how long ago I sold it if they’ve left the announcement about National Adjunct Walk-out Day (February 25, folks, mark your calendar for next year) in my biography. Here’s the link to watch

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A Science Prof’s Take on Trigger Warnings

Posted on May 20, 2015 by Pat Bowne

Brute Reason has an interesting post this morning about how people use trigger warnings. However, it becomes less convincing when it discusses the academic setting. Here’s where I started to shake my head:

When people condescendingly claim that college students who ask for trigger warnings are trying to “avoid challenging material,” they are–perhaps intentionally–conflating two meanings of the word “challenging.” Triggering material is emotionally challenging. …

Do we really go to college to encounter this type of “challenge”? No, college coursework is intellectually challenging. The challenge is understanding the nuances of complicated arguments or literary devices. The challenge is connecting ideas together in a way that flows and makes sense, finding patterns in the texts, defending your opinions using evidence from the book. The challenge is being willing to entertain an argument that you personally disagree with, to examine it from all sides.

Read more: http://freethoughtblogs.com/brutereason/2015/05/19/a-list-of-ways-i-have-used-trigger-warnings/#ixzz3agJJYOp1

This dichotomy doesn’t work for me, and here’s why.

I teach Pathophysiology. I teach about liver cirrhosis to students whose favorite uncle died of it, and about heart failure to students whose grandma is in hospital with it. More than once, I’ve taught about cancer to students who were currently battling it. I taught about pancreatic cancer the week my mother died of it, and about Parkinson’s right after my father died of that. I don’t get to avoid these subjects if they’re triggering, and neither do my students; they cannot learn to predict what emergencies might arise during cancer treatment without discussing cancer. In some cases I can make adjustments, like the time I rephrased an assessment to be about liver cancer instead of cirrhosis for a particular student or learned not to use the phrase ‘cell suicide’ when we discuss apoptosis, but there’s only so much of that I can do.

The triggering content is integral to pathophysiology, not just because a nurse or doctor needs to know about diseases but because one of the skills of the profession is that of thinking analytically about emotionally triggering topics. My students understand this. We work towards it together. I can feel the relief in the classroom when we move from the image of a patient to creating a flow chart of his condition, and how after making the flow chart we all look at the patient differently. The disease hasn’t changed, but now we can explain it and anticipate what will happen and how to minimize its awfulness.

It’s true, my students are a special case. They’re studying to be heroes, to look unflinchingly at things that horrify other people, to get blood on their hands and save lives. What I teach them is essential knowledge for their chosen careers; a student who doesn’t attend the cardiac unit, or is too triggered by it to learn the material, may not pass the NCLEX or succeed in medical school. So how can I expect to generalize from them to other college students, or policies in general? Well, the other people who write about trigger warnings all seem happy to generalize from humanities courses to the rest of us. And don’t we often have the same students? Nursing majors and pre-meds take humanities courses, where some of them probably give their profs grief about trigger warnings.

So here are my generalizations.

I think students come to college to learn both information and ways of thinking about it that will give them power. The students leaving my class have power over disease that they did not have when they entered the class – the power to look at it analytically, as a series of cause-effect relationships in which they can intervene. But they also came into the class with power. They came in with the determination to intervene, and accepted that to do so they must face these topics straight-on.

That determination, I think, is key to their success. It’s why I don’t use the term ‘trigger warning’ in Patho, though I make it clear what content will be discussed every day. To identify course topics as ‘trigger warnings,’ I think, could send the wrong message and undercut the determination I want to encourage. Do you really want to put yourself through the class on that disease? it would ask, when the message I want to send is, How can I help you develop power over this topic?

For me, the trigger warning issue is one of many that can be minimized by concentrating on OUTCOMES, OUTCOMES, OUTCOMES. Here are my rules, then, for a class without controversy about triggers:

Know what your course is really about, and let students know it coming in. Identify the topics you’re teaching about in the syllabus, and teach about those topics.
Be explicit, constantly, about how what the students are learning will be used in their future courses and careers. If you can’t do this for a topic, leave it out of the course.
Identify the course objectives, based on what students will have to do with the material after they leave your course, and teach those. If you can’t explain how an objective will be related to the students’ future courses or careers, leave it out of the course.
Once you’ve whittled your course down to content and objectives that students really need, lay it out for them in a clear calendar and syllabus. When they take your course, they are going to learn this stuff and how to do that with it. If they don’t want to achieve those goals, they should be taking a different course.
Now you’ve all agreed on what you’re doing, make students your partners in achieving the course objectives. If discussing cirrhosis triggers a student, how does she suggest she can demonstrate her understanding of how liver failure causes its signs and symptoms? The objectives aren’t negotiable, but how she demonstrates them might be.
Recognize how much wiggle room there is in the course. A student can pass my class without passing every assessment. If she has to stay home on bowel obstruction day, it’s her choice. My job is to make sure she knows what day that is, and how serious a hit missing it will deal to her success in demonstrating the course outcomes.
If a student is unavoidably triggered by enough course topics that she cannot demonstrate the outcomes, it’s time to involve her advisor – it’s not just your issue, since you’ve defined a set of course outcomes that are necessary for the student’s success in her program.

That’s it. OUTCOMES, OUTCOMES, OUTCOMES. This is a good time to start thinking about them … or maybe two weeks from now, when we’ve recovered a little from grading finals. I know I’ll be fine-tuning mine, dreaming about that stress-free semester that’s always just over the horizon.

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Use this word: Haze-fire

Posted on May 15, 2015 by Pat Bowne

“haze-fire luminous morning mist through which the dawn sun is shining poetic”

from Landmarks by Robert Macfarlane

George Orwell wrote some good stuff about the project of controlling what people think by controlling their use of language, what words they’re taught and what they’re allowed to say with them. The revision of the Oxford Junior Dictionary to take out words for nature is just a particularly distressing example.

So I bought Robert Macfarlane’s book ‘Landmarks,’ a dictionary-plus-essays volume about lost or almost-lost words for natural phenomena. It’s based in the UK, but I understand there is a US equivalent. Why should we let other people be the ones who change our thoughts by changing our vocabulary? Let’s reclaim nature, one word at a time.

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Useful Pets, get ’em now!

Posted on May 11, 2015 by Pat Bowne

A couple of fantastic commercials, featuring multi-purpose Pet Dog and Pet Cat! No home should be without them.

http://www.adweek.com/adfreak/pets-are-exciting-multi-use-tools-these-fantastic-infomercials-animal-shelter-163663

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Moderating my position

Posted on May 9, 2015 by Pat Bowne

The political compass test - https://www.politicalcompass.org/test

It’s official, I’m a lefty!

I take these political position quizzes every few years, and my position on the issues has barely changed. Yet every year I find myself more and more disaffected with the progressive side of the nation and more prone to take conservative concerns seriously. I block 90% of left-wing talking points posts, and for every blog I stop reading because it’s too conservative, I purge four or five left-wing outlets from my blogrolls.

So what’s going on?

They say people become more conservative as they get older. But my position on the issues hasn’t changed in the past 20 years, so what could that mean?

I think it’s this: every year I find that the type of conversation I have with people matters far more to me than whether we agree with one another. So rather than searching out one political group or another, I look for discussion venues with ferocious moderation policies.

I’m not the only person doing this. In fact, one of the conservative blogs I follow has attracted so many of us liberal commenters that newbies are disgusted, and often accuse the blogger of running a liberal outlet. It’s not true! I disagree with about 60% of what this blogger writes. Some of his hobby-horses make me roll my eyes so hard I get seasick. After the events in Indiana, I had to ignore him entirely for weeks.

But I went back after the OMG GAYZ fit died down, because that blogger maintains a comments section where we are able to say what we really think without being called out or insulted. Communist, atheist, black, white, gay, straight, pagan, Catholic, fundamentalist, muslim and jewish folks speak up there, and I like the conversation.

How much does following this conservative blog affect me?

It hasn’t changed my positions on policies, but it has changed my positions on people. I still disagree with much of what folks at the blog want to accomplish, but I no longer think they’re evil theocrats or corporate lackeys. They’re people, and their concerns are real. We can attack each other’s positions one day and share recipes the next. When I see commenters there engage one another with grace and kindness, I’m ashamed of how snippy I can sometimes be. I practice being more gentle, taking the other person seriously before firing off my buzzword-filled retort.

I still think most left-wing policies are better, but I don’t want to be part of most progressive conversations online. I want charity and forbearance, not condemnation. I want to interrogate my own side’s sacred positions as well as the opponents’. I want to be treated kindly even when I don’t quite agree or haven’t learned this year’s social justice terminology, and I want to talk about people who disagree with us as if they matter too.

And I really, really, REALLY want to get rid of the suspicion that wanting those things makes me less of a progressive.

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Thoughts on watching ‘Nashville’

Posted on April 11, 2015 by Pat Bowne

Nashville is my favorite show, but watching it sometimes feels like that old game where you say a word over and over until it stops being anything except a sound. That word is ‘strong.’

In the Nashville universe, everything you approve of is ‘strong’ and everything you disapprove of is ‘weak’ or done because the person is ‘afraid.’ Particularly, everything Rayna does is ‘strong,’ even when it contradicts what she did in the previous episode. Though I have no problem with this, because Rayna is perfect, I begin to wonder about the idea of strength after the thirtieth time I’ve heard it invoked.

‘Strong’ isn’t just a Nashville thing. Friends kept telling me I was ‘strong’ when I had cancer, even though all I was doing was lying in a hammock. I occasionally tell someone they’re ‘strong’ when I hear about problems they’e overcoming, secure that they will take it as a great compliment. It feels like an almost too intimate, too important comment to throw around a lot – at least that’s how it feels to me, though I see it used on my Facebook feed almost every week.

What does it mean when something becomes a culture’s go-to compliment? If today’s go-to compliment were ‘white,’ as it once was, we’d ask some pointed questions about it. If it were ‘a real man,’ as it once was, we’d have something to say about that.

‘Strong’ is harder to fit into a narrative of recognized prejudice, nor do I want to create a new one for it. All of us are sometimes strong and sometimes weak, but what does it mean when we enshrine our strong moments in a compliment and an identity we’re eager to claim, while discounting our weak moments? Life currently demands a lot of strength, I get that – but so what? Life currently demands a lot of money too, but we don’t compliment our friends by saying they’re ‘rich.’

How would life look if we turned this lens around? What if instead of finding ways to interpret people’s good actions as ‘strong,’ we applauded the parts of those actions that sprung from ‘weakness’? The fact that this seems like nonsense even as I type it just makes me more suspicious that I’ve been brainwashed, and more anxious to try breaking out of the ‘strong=good’ box.

I don’t even know what these words mean any more. I can only conceive of them in relative terms; the ‘strong’ usually overpower the ‘weak.’ That makes me even more nervous about the way we throw ‘strong’ around nowadays, as if we’ve forgotten that.

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‘So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed’ by Jon Ronson

Posted on April 6, 2015 by Pat Bowne

I preordered this book a while ago, and by the time it was delivered I was having second thoughts. I’d seen so many articles about it and excerpts from it that I wondered if there was anything left to be gained from reading the book itself… after reading it I can say there was both more and less in it than I’d expected.

Ronson’s exploration of public shaming romps through a wide variety of groups, from porn tapings to rehabilitation centers. He meets real criminals, people whose sex lives have become tabloid fodder, and characters we are familiar with – and probably should not be familiar with – from twitter pile-ons. Some of the most interesting stuff I’ve seen in articles about the book is not in the book itself, making it read like volume 1.

Basically, Ronson’s message is that when we participate in casual shaming we are part of a monster that can destroy people for minor infractions of unwritten rules – mob justice. Relatively early in the book his focus shifts to what allows the shamed to recover or to go through the experience unscathed, and here is where he begins to really depress me. Almost all the approaches he investigates, from support groups to vigorous self-defense to being shameless to being cautious forever after to paying thousands of dollars for image management services, let the shaming episode take over the person’s life for years after the folks who enjoyed the twitter storm have forgotten all about it, just as Ronson has forgotten the names of people he shamed before writing this book.

There’s another approach he touches on briefly – the Right to be Forgotten. In the US, this seems to face insuperable free speech challenges, and how can somebody be forgotten on an international internet when not all countries recognize their right to delete information?

Then there’s the burn-it-down approach, which involves destroying the standard that people use to shame you. After all, the effectiveness of a pile-on depends on somebody taking the accusations seriously. Look at tabloids’ exposures of sex scandals. Why did some victims lose their jobs or commit suicide, while others went blithely on their way under the burden of public knowledge? Ronson thinks it’s largely because society as a whole decided ‘who cares?’ about other people’s sex lives. While this isn’t as universal as he makes it sound, it’s true that a lot of sexual behavior that would have been tremendously shaming in the past can be faced down nowadays. Most of the vocal proponents of shaming on twitter would themselves be ashamed to not be sex-positive, or to criticize people’s kinks.

What favorite accusation will be defanged next? Will ‘racist’ and ‘sexist’ go the way of ‘pervert?’ And when they do, will we just have reassorted ourselves into the same social groupings, with the same power dynamics, that we had before the internet gave everyone a voice?

This book didn’t present much hope of fighting the monster, short of burning down the standards it invokes, but the book’s very limitations got my mind buzzing about other approaches. Because when people recognize that a monster is out there and as prone to eat them as their enemies, things do start to happen and life gets interesting.

For instance, it made me wonder about internet insurance. How many organizations have long-standing contracts with internet reputation managers? Do their insurance policies cover this potential emergency expense? Are their employees also covered? Given the uncontrollable nature of twitter storms, will they come to be viewed the way actual storms are, and online reputation damage be ranked with having a tree fall on your car?

Will employees ever be in a position to demand clauses in their contract protecting them against discrimination based on twitter storms? Pile-ons, after all, provide an excuse for firing people; the Salaita case comes to mind. What are the ramifications for employment law? Will desirable employees begin to shun companies that fire on the basis of social media, as they now are presumed to shun companies that discriminate against GLBT employees? Will searching someone’s twitter feed become as unacceptable a part of job interviews as asking them about their sexual orientation?

So many questions, so many issues. Thirty seconds’ googling brought up a mess of NLRB guidelines and a whole new batch of legal blogs I’ll be following. But I would have liked to get at least some of this information from the book about it.

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The Martian is just the right mix

Posted on April 3, 2015 by Pat Bowne

I loved The Martian by Andy Weir from the first page to the last.

The Martian is Competent Man fiction. This is the good kind of competent man fiction, too; the competent man takes his competence for granted. His moments of brilliance give him just the right amount of thrill to show us that they happen pretty regularly and his screw-ups are realistic and upset him just the right amount. There’s no undertone of defensiveness in this competent man. When he tells us just how he’s doing something it’s because he wants to record how it works or because he’s thrilled/disgusted with the results, not because he wants us to be impressed with him.

Mixed into this base is just enough of all the other required ingredients for a feel-good SF adventure story. To wit:

Nerd humor
Rebellion against The Man(sometimes puerile)
Loyalty to comrades
Good people working together
Batshit crazy engineering decisions
Big bad weather
Abrasive but brilliant engineers
Potatoes

And then a lot of stuff that goes against the expected tropes:

The public cares, and aren’t presented as ignoramuses
The press do their jobs without becoming villains
Other countries help out
The PR people and administrators are on the right side
Folks in the government agency are helpful

In short, it’s a novel about the world we want to live in – at least, the world I want to live in. Everybody means well, everybody’s Competent and everybody’s honestly doing their best. Anyone who likes Nevil Shute will love it, because it’s the same universe. I’d go further and suggest that almost anybody will love it, period. Go forth and buy.

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Mutiny on campus

Posted on April 2, 2015 by Pat Bowne

This weekend my socks are steamed by a bit of gossip I heard at work. It goes like this:

There’s one job where I work that most of us hate doing, but that needs to be done. The folks in my department are pretty good at bulling through this task maybe 90% of the time, which still leaves us getting the occasional reminder or threat about finishing the last 10%. But apparently there are some people, in some departments, who never do this job at all no matter how much of it has been assigned to them or how much we need it to be completed. And instead of nagging or threatening them – because neither of those has worked – the rumor is that TPTB are going to hire someone to do the job they let slide.

That’s right. The people who give 90% are dunned for the last 10%, as if we had given nothing at all; and the people who give 0% are rewarded. Seeing this, am I kicking myself for not having done 100% all along, or am I kicking myself for ever having done this task at all? You only need one guess.

This isn’t the first time such a thing has happened. Folks in my division are good little soldiers who plod along at unpleasant, poorly designed tasks while other departments mutiny. Usually the first thing we hear of the mutiny is when administration takes the task away from faculty because we can’t be trusted to do it, at which point we benefit without ever having mutinied – so the story’s more complicated than my initial presentation, isn’t it?

There are always at least three sides to a mutiny. The folks who mutiny against a rule, the folks who want them to follow the rule, and the folks who say ‘Isn’t there a better way to do it, anyway?’ In academia, as opposed to pirate novels, everything moves so slowly that the third group has time to chime in, and thus we progress. I, however, am never on any of these sides, and I honestly don’t know how to feel about that.

I do feel there’s a Royal Academy story in here somewhere, though. What counts as heinous busywork in the Demonology Department, and will demons be the enforcers or the mutineers? Hmm.

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April Fools’ repost from the Royal Academy – Why your diet didn’t work

Posted on April 1, 2015 by Pat Bowne

I first posted this a few years ago, and despite thousands of scientist-hours nobody has come up with a better explanation for the obesity epidemic. Enjoy!

From the Royal Academy Archives

Ten years ago it was fashionable in some circles to assert that so-called ‘reality’ was merely consensus on the part of the people who supposedly defined it for us all – scientists. Of course, anyone who has attended the Royal Academy knows this is utter nonsense. Reality is defined by consensus among Alchemists, and scientists, just like the rest of us, must accept it as given.

Things weren’t always this way. There was a time when Alchemists cared nothing for consensus, and you could hire them to create whatever local changes in reality you could afford. Thus we had princesses who dropped pearls from their lips with every word or slept for a hundred years, princes turned into frogs and swans, and all such stuff. More importantly, we had kings who were invincible in battle, heroes who ran faster than the swiftest horses, walls that came tumbling down, and so forth. And we had people trying to kill one another’s court Alchemists. Eventually, bad luck for the Alchemists came in the form of a peaceful period, under a single ruler who decided that he would best secure his throne by destroying any Alchemists who might be hired to oppose him.

Not being stupid, the Alchemists united to form the Mystic Guild of Alchemists, the bureaucracy to end all bureaucracies. Not only did this organization negotiate with governments on behalf of all Alchemists and enforce the resulting agreements by executing dissenters, it moved with such glacial slowness to approve any changes in the world proposed by its members that most people forgot about Alchemists. But Alchemists still exist among us, and their Guild, while it moves slowly, has a heavy tread. When the Guild approves a change in the world, Alchemists all over the world accept it – the ultimate consensus – and you and I have to live with the results.

What does this have to do with your diet? It’s no secret. All you have to do is look into the Mystic Guild of Alchemy Annals.

If you’re the sort of person who likes reading online patent applications, you’ll love the MGA Annals. You’ll find all sorts of interesting things in there. For instance, in the January 2006 issue you’ll find that enteric bacteria have become almost 25% more efficient at converting branched carbohydrates into simple, readily absorbable sugars. Know what that means for you? It means carrots are fattening now. Your intestinal bacteria will convert them into something you can digest.

In July, 2002, the MGA approved a change in human mitochondrial structure. Have you noticed that it takes you four hours’ worth of exercise to make up for one chocolate chip cookie? You’re more efficient.

Remember when you could lose weight on that cabbage soup? Cabbage is more digestible now (June 2005). Remember when you switched to the grapefruit diet? Hasn’t worked since April 1992.

What is the MGA trying to accomplish? The MGA Annals present reasoning along with their conclusions. And the reasoning that appears behind every one of these changes is the same; starvation. Each of these changes that make us fatter in the developed world is projected to reduce starvation in the undeveloped world. These are interventions on behalf of people who don’t get enough food, who need to get more energy from the food they do get, and who need to do more work with the calories they’ve taken in.

So the next time your diet unexpectedly stops working, or you gain five pounds by just looking at a cheesecake, you can blame an Alchemist. You can think of your waistline as being held hostage by a sinister quasi-governmental organization that will never let you be thin until its agenda has been accomplished. If you want to, you can even come over to the Royal Academy and throw a rock at the Alchemy Building, where our tireless researchers have been making people fatter since 1586.

No need to thank us.