Sarah Chinski is selected essay winner and will go to NEAF

Her trip should be a lot of fun...congratulations.

"Astronomy selects 2014 Youth Essay Contest winner"

Seventeen-year-old Sarah Chinski of Marion, Iowa, wins a trip to the Northeast Astronomy Forum & Telescope Show with her entry for Astronomy’s 2014 Youth Essay Contest.

by

Karri Ferron

February 28th, 2014

Astronomy

The editors of Astronomy magazine have selected 17-year-old Sarah Chinski of Marion, Iowa, as the winner of Astronomy’s 2014 Youth Essay Contest. For her entry on what she loves best about astronomy, Sarah will receive an all-expenses-paid trip for her and a parent to the Northeast Astronomy Forum & Telescope Show (NEAF), one of the world's premier astronomy expos.

Sarah caught the Astronomy staff’s attention with a thoughtful essay about her appreciation of the vast wonder astronomy evokes in people. “We as humans are quite curious creatures. … The study of astronomy gives us a chance to indulge that curiosity, to learn about something bigger than this isolated world in which we exist,” she wrote. “Not only is our curiosity satisfied, but we all gain a broader realization of what is important in the world by studying astronomy. As the beloved rascal Calvin (from the Calvin and Hobbes comics) once said, ‘When you look into infinity, you realize that there are more important things than what people do all day.’”
Sarah became interested in astronomy in a way that probably isn’t all that surprising for her generation: through a science-fiction video game, where she could drive around on fictional foreign planets and make observations. Soon she was reading up on black holes, comets, and nebulae. And because passive experience wasn’t enough for her, she invested in her first telescope last year, and her favorite object to study at the moment is the Moon.

But Sarah hopes lunar study won’t end in her backyard. After exploring fictional planets in a video game and our lone natural satellite with her backyard, she has discovered what she is meant to do: add to the ever-changing and expanding knowledge of the infinite universe.

And Astronomy’s editors think NEAF will be a perfect place to continue to cultivate Sarah’s ambitions. For her hobby enjoyment, NEAF features more than 115 vendors selling all kinds of astro-equipment. But it’s the speakers that her family and the staff think will leave Sarah inspired. This year’s lineup includes Alan Stern, principal investigator with the New Horizons mission to Pluto; Matt Greenhouse, NASA project scientist with the James Webb Space Telescope; Ken Kremer, NASA/JPL planetary ambassador; David J. Eicher, Astronomy editor; and many others. Astronomy workshops, daily solar observing, STARLAB planetarium shows, classes for beginners getting into astronomy, and astronomy events for kids will round out the schedule.

“NEAF is just the type of event an amateur astronomer and budding scientist like Sarah should attend,” says Eicher. “Astronomy is excited to provide her with this opportunity, and I hope it inspires her pursue her passion for exploring the wonders our universe has to offer.”

Astronomy [website]

The Rockland Astronomy Club, Inc.

Knowledge of your demise...wanna know?

"A blood test to predict imminent death? Would you want to take it?"

by

Melissa Healy

February 28th, 2014

Los Angeles Times

Here are some findings that could scare you to death: In a study published this week, Finnish and Estonian researchers report that they have identified specific levels of four chemicals circulating in the blood that offer a reliable signal that death is near. The four harbingers of death can be readily detected in a blood sample, and are even predictive when seen in apparently healthy people, their new study shows.

It's not just a life insurance saleman's dream. The study, released this week in the journal PLOS Medicine, suggests that several potentially deadly conditions -- cancer, cardiovascular disease and a welter of non-vascular causes of death -- may share signs, and even origins, that have been hidden in plain sight. If readily detectable physiological clues--called "biomarkers"--could give warning of many dangerous conditions at once, a single blood test might provide a person early warning of a deadly threat, while it could still be averted (or at least delayed).

That said, a blood test to predict death is far from ready for prime time. This is an early effort to glean better ways to screen for and diagnose diseases, not to give notice that the Grim Reaper is stalking you.

For now, however, the "death biomarkers" might make you think twice before giving up a vial of your blood. The four horseman of an individual's apocalypse were narrowed down from a list of 106 candidate biomarkers--all lipids, proteins and metabolites circulating in the blood. They are: alpha-1-acid glycoprotein, albumin, very low-density lipoprotein (VLDL) particle size, and citrate.

How did the researchers glean the possible significance of these four? They ran the carefully collected blood samples of 9,482 Estonians between the age of 18 and 101 through a scan that used nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, to make measurements of the 106 biomarker candidates in each. Over a median follow-up period of just over five years, 508 of the randomly chosen Estonian subjects died of various causes. The study's authors compared the biomarker levels of both groups in an effort to identify those that were more common in the dead and less common in the living.

The four biomarkers stood out as unusually common among the dead, and less common in those that survived the five years of follow-up. The researchers created an index of the four measures. They found that compared to a person whose index fell in the bottom 20% of the observed range, the individual whose biomarker index was in the top 20% was 19 times more likely to die in the five years after his or her blood sample was drawn.

Even when the researchers stripped out all participants who had diabetes, cancer or cardiovascular disease, they found that the biomarkers predicted death over the five-year period in apparently healthy people as well. The researchers then repeated their test of biomarkers on a separate population--8,444 Finnish men and women between 24 and 74. The biomarkers were equally predictive of death in this  "validation group."

All of which makes you wonder: Would you want to know?

“The Epic of Gilgamesh” and the flood

"Marina Warner on 'Gilgamesh,' the flood and what remains"

by

David L. Ulin

February 27th, 2014

Los Angeles Times

“Myths, like inquisitive children, keep asking: why?” Marina Warner observes in an essay posted at the London Review of Books. “They answer with stories of origin and destiny, luck and catastrophe.”

If anyone should know about this, it would be Warner. A professor at England’s University of Essex, she may be our foremost authority on fairy tales. This is not, lest we think otherwise, kids’ stuff; what Warner is after, rather, is what we might call the substance of our imaginative DNA.

“Stories come from the past but speak to the present (if you taste the dragon’s blood and can hear what they say),” she has written. “… I hope, I believe that literature can be ‘strong enough to help’, to borrow Seamus Heaney’s wonderful comment about poetry.”

I share that belief, in literature as a source of solace, understanding, even (or especially) when it seeks to disturb.

This is part of the point of Warner’s essay, which uses accounts of the flood in various cultures, from Mesopotamia to the Bible, to riff on what we leave behind us, on the value of what remains. That there are so many flood stories, she suggests, does not indicate “one single universal deluge — this is accepted now even by Biblical scholars.” And yet, in the overlap of narratives, we learn something about our desire for history to cohere.

Writing of George Smith, who discovered “The Epic of Gilgamesh” in the 19th century, Warner observes that “his joy was occasioned above all by the independent corroboration the poem offered to the historicity of the Bible. He was a fervent Christian and longed, as many did, for archaeology to prove the scriptures’ reliability.”

Now, however, “Gilgamesh” stirs a different sort of promise — that of rediscovery. When Smith first shared it with the public in 1872, Warner points out, it “was the first time the ‘Epic of Gilgamesh’ had been heard and understood after an interval of two thousand years: the longest sleeper ever among the world’s great poems.” What this means, she continues, is that we read it as representing a kind of “double history, as an ancient epic and a modern narrative poem.”

This is important, for it allows us imagine “Gilgamesh” as both story and artifact, to understand that its survival was not inevitable but a function of fortune, luck. That, in turn, reminds us of just how random our pattern making efforts are, reliant on a “jumble of stone bits and pieces,” on the serendipity of what survives.

What will linger after we have disappeared, Warner wonders, and what will it say about who we were?

“The tablets dug up at Nineveh happen in shape and size to resemble mini-iPads,” Warner notes. "If our ‘tablets’ are still there in the mud in four thousand years’ time, and humans are still around, they’ll have a hard puzzle in front of them, should they wish to recapture our words, our laments, our tweets.”

"Short Cuts"

by

Marina Warner

March 6th, 2014

Vol. 36 No. 5

London Review of Books

In the most ancient stories of the Flood the gods are annoyed by humans making a racket and keeping them up at all hours: these gods are unreconstructed adults who don’t hold with negotiating but relish inflicting punishment, while humans are lawless, partying teenagers. The poem Atrahasis, written down at some point between 1702 and 1682 BCE by ‘Ipiq-Aya, Junior Scribe’ (we know his name!) tells how Enlil, the father god, starts his regime of terror against humanity by plugging the springs and bolting the earth and the air and the sea. The ground dries up, the seed corn rots, and famine and plague are visited on the nuisance noisemakers:

    The dark pastureland was bleached,
    The broad countryside filled up with alkali …
    Their faces [become] cover[ed] with scabs (?) like malt,
    Their faces looked sallow,
    They went out in public hunched

(Stephanie Dalley’s translation.) The poem is uncannily prescient about extreme weather events around the world (storms, droughts), the rise in global mean temperature and the threat to water resources in so many places.

Myths, like inquisitive children, keep asking: why? They answer with stories of origin and destiny, luck and catastrophe. In the epics from Mesopotamia, which are written in Akkadian (the script that looks like wading birds’ skittering feet on the ebb tide sand), a prolonged drought precedes the great flood which Enlil and his fellow deities then decree. The story seems to have originated in the fertile basin of the Tigris and Euphrates, where locals were accustomed to swelling rivers and rising tides, rich in alluvial deposits. It dramatises the symbiosis of land use and water flow, and the danger to survival if that relationship is disturbed. In the Epic of Gilgamesh the king is a culture hero, who builds a magnificent walled city, founds a library and, above all, digs wells.

In other epics from Babylon and Sumer, the gods set out expressly to cure overcrowding by exterminating (almost) everybody – a religious rationalisation of disaster. In other, less nasty stories, the Deluge brings to an end the immortality that human beings once enjoyed in the image of the gods. The book of Genesis seems to know its antecedents, and although the mortalising aspect has disappeared from the surface of the Bible version of the Flood, traces of the plot seem to linger on in the extreme longevity of Adam (930 years). Noah, who is the favoured survivor in the Judeo-Christian version, is already 600 years old at the time of the Flood and he carries on afterwards (as do Methuselah et al), for the Bible, unlike its Babylonian forerunners, doesn’t establish in so many words that post-diluvian life expectancy has been shortened. From this angle, the myth of the Flood is another attempt to understand the reality of death, and the dangers of extreme weather are metaphorical means to tell a just-so story about ordinary human lifespan, not the subject of the myth itself (the story of the Fall isn’t about the apple).

Andrew George, the editor of the Oxford Classics Epic of Gilgamesh, writes that ‘in the main the function of the poem is not to explain origins. It is more interested in examining the human condition as it is.’ For Thorkild Jacobsen it is a ‘story of learning to face reality, a story of “growing up”’. In this respect Gilgamesh is existential in spirit, whereas the flood story in the Bible is religious: God is put back into the picture and his actions justified in ways not found in the ancient epics. The gods are called dogs and flies, like ‘parasitical scavengers’, Andrew George writes; their eternal realm clogged with dust.

Versions of the Flood from around the world record memories of different disasters, not one single universal deluge – this is accepted now even by Biblical scholars. But the different accounts share several dramatic elements: the figure of the one man who is chosen to survive, the extraordinary hope placed in the building of a boat, its measurements and vast size, and the processes of caulking and stocking it. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the ark is a six-decker vessel; in the Bible, the specs seem so exact they inspired many believers to attempt to make models. Atrahasis is the name of the hero who is spared and wins eternal life in the poem that Ipiq-Aya, Junior Scribe, pressed into the wet clay with his reed pen. In Gilgamesh, the survivor is called Uta-napishti, and Gilgamesh meets him when he is travelling to the underworld in order to bring back from the dead Enkidu,the wild man whom he loves. But the half-divine hero fails, and although he is told how to pick a magic coral-like plant from the seabed, which will guarantee his immortality, he loses it when he is bathing in a pool: a snake comes by and takes it.

The Babylonian Noah tells Gilgamesh how he survived the rains; in Atrahasis he sees in a dream that he must build an ark; in the later Gilgamesh, the counsellor god Enlil whispers the warning in secret:

    Load the seed of every living thing into your ark,
    The boat that you will build.

(John Gardner’s version, 1984.) The animals do enter two by two in some versions, but here the ark is a sperm bank, a granary. The Epic of Gilgamesh was deciphered from cuneiform tablets in the British Museum which had been excavated in the Library of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh. Thousands of chunky manuscripts, chipped, friable and defaced, more like knapped flints than books, were dug out of the alluvial strata by Henry Layard and Homuzd Rassan in the 1850s and laid out on trays in the museum. George Smith was an engraver of banknotes for Bradbury’s, the printers, which specialised in playing cards and had the commission from the Mint to issue banknotes. The workshop was near the museum and the story goes that George took to haunting the Assyrian collections in his lunch hour, until he caught the eye of the keeper, who asked him what he was doing, coming so regularly. ‘I am reading,’ he replied. So this startling decoder was set to work on the jumble of stone bits and pieces until one day he cried out in ecstasy and ran round the room tearing off his clothes. George Smith had found Tablet XI of the Epic of Gilgamesh, which told the story of the Flood, and his joy was occasioned above all by the independent corroboration the poem offered to the historicity of the Bible. He was a fervent Christian and longed, as many did, for archaeology to prove the scriptures’ reliability. Later that year, 1872, he delivered a paper to the Society for Biblical Archaeology, and read out the account of the flood from the epic. This was the first time the Epic of Gilgamesh had been heard and understood after an interval of two thousand years: the longest sleeper ever among the world’s great poems. Four years later, Smith died in Aleppo at the age of 36.

The work’s interrupted chronology, so different from the destiny of the Upanishads or even Homer, gives Gilgamesh a double history, as an ancient epic and a modern narrative poem. The most recent rendering, by the OuLiPian poet Philip Terry, is simply called ‘DICTATOR’. Terry has pared it down, in keeping with cuneiform’s prime usage in legal documents and accountancy, to the bare life of contemporary business-pidgin, known as Globish.

    Six day | and sev | en night
    the wind | cry and | the storm | roll through | the land
    After | seven | day … | the storm | break off | from the | battle
    which like | a wo | man la | bour to | give birth
    The sea | grow qui | et the | storm still | the big | water | stop …
    I look | out at | the day | and all | be still
    All the | people | lie dead | … in | the dirt* (?)
    *or ‘water’
    The ground | be like | a great | flat roof
    I op | en the | window | and light | fall on | I face
    I sit | down and | cry …
    The tear | flow down | I face

More of the epic would be discovered under the sand as time went on. In 1990 Stephanie Dalley added more lines to her edition from newly recovered pieces, but most of what’s left has probably been smashed in the course of the Iraq wars. It seems proper that a place of fire and dust, its skin scarred by warfare, should be the origin of the story of the Flood today: devastation in negative, flood and drought bound together.

In Genesis, Yahweh resolves to exterminate man, since ‘every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.’ The judgmental tone doesn’t help clarify current thinking about managing water, or the stewardship of resources in general. On the one hand, it gives the impression that floods have always happened so no need to act differently now; on the other, only nutters believe that floods are visiting vengeance from heaven upon us. The secretary of state for the environment can play the calm, pragmatic rationalist who refuses to be swayed by superstitious fanatics. This is a case in which the underlying blueprint for a narrative – the story of the Flood – is sending the wrong signals.

The tablets dug up at Nineveh happen in shape and size to resemble mini-iPads. If our ‘tablets’ are still there in the mud in four thousand years’ time, and humans are still around, they’ll have a hard puzzle in front of them, should they wish to recapture our words, our laments, our tweets.

The Epic of Gilgamesh [Project Gutenberg]

"Starlog" magazine is available for free at Internet Archive

Internet Archive...

Starlog was a monthly science-fiction film magazine published by Starlog Group Inc. The magazine was created by publishers Kerry O'Quinn and Norman Jacobs. O'Quinn was the magazine's editor while Jacobs ran the business side of things, dealing with typesetters, engravers and printers. They got their start in publishing creating a soap opera magazine. In the mid-1970s, O'Quinn and high school friend David Houston talked about creating a magazine that would cover science fiction films and television programs.

O'Quinn came up the idea of publishing a one-time only magazine on the Star Trek phenomenon. Houston's editorial assistant Kirsten Russell suggested that they include an episode guide to all three seasons of the show, interviews with the cast and previously unpublished photographs. During this brainstorming session many questions were raised, most notably legal issues. Houston contacted Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry with the intention of interviewing him for the magazine. Once they got his approval, O'Quinn and Jacobs proceeded to put together the magazine but Paramount Studios, who owned Star Trek, wanted a minimum royalty that was greater than their projected net receipts and the project was shelved. O'Quinn realized that they could create a magazine that only featured Star Trek content but without it being the focus and therefore getting around the royalties issue. He also realized that this could be the science fiction magazine he and Houston had talked about. Many titles for it were suggested, including Fantastic Films and Starflight before Starlog was chosen. (Fantastic Films was later used as the title of a competing science fiction magazine published by Blake Publishing.)

To keep costs down, Starlog was initially a quarterly magazine with the first issue being published on August 1976. The issue sold out and this encouraged O'Quinn and Jacobs to publish a magazine every six weeks instead of quarterly. O'Quinn was the magazine's first editor with Houston taking over for a year and then replaced by Howard Zimmerman when Houston was promoted to the "Hollywood Bureau." Zimmerman was eventually succeeded by David McDonnell.

One of the magazine's milestones was its 100th issue, published on November 1985 and featured who they thought were the 100 most important people in science fiction. This included exclusive interviews with John Carpenter, Peter Cushing, George Lucas, Leonard Nimoy, and Gene Roddenberry. The magazine's 200th issue repeated the format of the 100th issue but this time interviewed such notable artists as Arthur C. Clarke, Tim Burton, William Gibson, Gale Anne Hurd, and Terry Gilliam. Starlog was one of the first publications to report on the development of the first Star Wars movie, and it also followed the development of what was to eventually become Star Trek: The Motion Picture. The magazine was devoted to science fiction films, television series, and books. Many fans of this long-running magazine considered its heyday to have been the 1980s with very little substance to the content in later years and many of its long-time contributors having since moved on. But it continued to boast some top-flight genre journalists, including film historians Will Murray, Jean-Marc Lofficier and Tom Weaver. It was one of the longest-running and most popular publications of its type.

It published its 30th Anniversary issue in 2006. On Wednesday, December 5, 2007 at approximately 11 a.m. a warehouse, operated by Kable News, in Oregon, Illinois containing back issues of Starlog and Fangoria burned to the ground.

Here is issue #1.

And,  here are many more. Unfortunately, they are not in numerical issue order.

STEM re-evaluated

"The truth about the great American science shortfall"

by 

 

Karin Klein

February 24th, 2014

Los Angeles Times

It was confusing when, several years ago, Bill Gates blasted American education for failing to produce enough graduates in science, technology and engineering. Really? Not enough workers in those fields? At the same time that he was making these statements, I knew computer programmers and biologists who couldn’t find jobs and others who were facing stagnating and falling wages.

Yet, as with many positions Gates takes on education — often backed by sizable contributions to bolster his vision — this one took off and clung. Conferences are held on opening more high schools that specialize in STEM: science, technology, engineering and math. There have been suggestions that the nation should cut those pesky humanities departments and liberal arts degrees in colleges and universities. The Obama administration, which has bought into numerous educational shibboleths, has made it a goal to push for a million new STEM graduates in coming years.

Over the weekend, a Harvard researcher finally cast a more critical eye on all the hoopla. The conclusion: While the great STEM shortage isn't wholly myth, it certainly has been mightily overhyped.

Michael Teitelbaum, a senior research associate in the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School, laid out the evidence for journalists Saturday at the USC-hosted conference of the Education Writers Assn:

If there were a big, general shortage of these workers, you would expect to see their wages rising. That hasn’t happened.

There would be relatively low and declining unemployment rates compared with people of similar educational levels. Hasn’t happened.

There should be faster-than-average employment growth, which is occurring in some occupations but not others.

In fact, Teitelbum portrayed the life of a biomedical researcher as practically grim. It takes an especially long time to obtain a doctoral degree in the field, and graduates are not being snapped up for jobs. The wages are lower than average for someone with that level of education, and the jobs tend to be unstable. Engineers start with higher wages, but those quickly flatten, and their jobs are notoriously insecure. Computer and information technology jobs are given to boom-and-bust cycles, but at least during the booms, the salaries are high.

The chatter about STEM is based on some realities, Teitelbaum said. Engineers might not, as a group, be terribly sought-after, but some specialized kinds of engineers are in hot demand — at least right now. There are regional shortages as well, and people have been less willing to move to another part of the country where the demand might be higher. That might in part be explained by cost-of-living differences — a computer job in the Bay Area’s Silicon Valley, even if it pays 50% more than elsewhere, isn’t seen as a good deal when housing there costs four times as much as in many other places.

But there’s more to that unwillingness to move, according to the conference speakers. Partly that’s an attachment to roots and families in young professionals that was less present in the baby boomer generation. But a big factor is that they don’t trust that the move will result in a long-term job. And who can blame them? Jobs don’t tend to be jobs anymore; they’re contracts, often without benefits, for limited periods of time. Even when they are regular staff positions, people have little confidence that the job will continue. Employers show less loyalty to the people who work for them, and the workforce is responding in kind.

So from where does the STEM hype stem? According to Teitelbaum — who has written a book on the subject, due out in March, titled “Falling Behind?: Boom, Bust and the Global Race for Scientific Talent” — some of it comes from the country’s longtime cycle of waxing and waning interest in science; attention seems to focus on science every 10 to 15 years before slacking off.

The only forces pushing the idea of STEM doom, he said, are those that have something to gain from it. Mostly those are STEM employers — the tech industry, for example — that want to pack the labor force with people to suppress wages, he said, as well as lobby for looser immigration laws so that they can bring in less expensive overseas workers. Joining the chorus are universities that want more funding for science programs, as well as immigration lawyers who see the potential for handling large numbers of work visas.

The Chronicle of Higher Education did an excellent job of reporting on this in November 2013; unfortunately, the publication isn’t read much by the general public.

A lot also depends on what you call a STEM job. Regardless of what the Obama administration says, some of the real need is for technically-oriented jobs that don’t require any sort of college degree. Want to be in demand these days? According to the speakers, the workers everyone wants are trained welders and glaziers.

To error is human, but big mistakes made at the Philosophy Department at CU-Boulder

"Philosophy profs: CU-Boulder shouldn't have shared private info"

They say privacy around complaints keeps perpetrators from public scrutiny, makes whole department look bad

by

Sarah Kuta

February 23rd, 2014
 
Boulder Daily Camera

Some faculty members in the philosophy department at the University of Colorado say they're concerned that three outside consultants tasked with studying the climate of the department were given access to confidential files regarding sexual harassment and discrimination.

University administrators acknowledged the investigators from the American Philosophical Association Committee on the Status of Women Site Visit Program were given access to files within the Office of Discrimination and Harassment that are typically considered confidential.

Administrators said the three investigators all signed a confidentiality agreement, which said they would not disclose what they read without written authorization from the university chancellor.

"In their roles as consultants for the university, the site visit investigators had access to relevant CU employees and relevant documents that helped them assess the climate of the philosophy department," CU spokesman Ryan Huff wrote in an email. "As part of their assessment, the site visit team met with the Office of Discrimination and Harassment director, signed confidentiality agreements and were given access to the ODH files."

Under the Colorado Open Records Act, public institutions are required to deny the inspection of sexual harassment files to the general public. However, CU officials said that because the site team investigators were performing an administrative function for the university, they were not acting as members of the public.

The confidentiality agreements were signed by Valerie Hardcastle, Peggy DesAutels and Carla Fehr, the women who co-wrote a 15-page report released last month describing sexual harassment, bullying and other unprofessional sexualized behaviors within the philosophy department.

The findings of the report led the university to suspend graduate admissions into the department until 2015 and bring in an external chairman.

Members of the department, who said they were told to keep quiet about the report, were shocked when the university released the document publicly last month.

Perpetrators protected from public scrutiny

Professor Michael Tooley said he takes issue with how vague the report is about the 15 complaints filed against members of the department since 2007. Because of the confidentiality agreements, the investigators were not able to describe any specifics of the complaints.

The result, Tooley said, is a report that negatively portrays an entire department.

When a formal investigation under the Office of Discrimination and Harassment is completed, only the complainant, respondent, chancellor and decision-making authority, often the department chairman or dean, are allowed to read the office's findings.

Only the respondent and decision-making authorities are allowed to know what, if any, disciplinary action is taken because of confidentiality around personnel matters.

Tooley said it's strange that the university has such strict rules about confidentiality around harassment and discrimination, but then gave the site visit investigators access to confidential files.

"On the one hand, they seem to have these very strict rules of confidentiality, and then they allowed these three strangers to come in (and see the files); that seems to be incredible," he said. "I would say that even if it's not illegal, it seems highly unethical."

Tooley said he also wondered why the site team investigators were able to give the number of complaints, but not a breakdown about how many complaints underwent formal investigations, how many of the complaints involved the same offender, and how many investigations resulted in a finding of a violation of policy.

DesAutels, director of the site visit program, declined to comment, citing the confidentiality agreement.

Philosophy instructor emerita Diane Mayer, who is retired, said she wondered why the university can't find a way to protect the identities of complainants, while holding the perpetrators publicly accountable.

The site visit report described a lack of transparency around disciplinary processes, which led to an "extremely harmful rumor mill."

Mayer said if the university could hold perpetrators publicly accountable, it might deter future offenders from acting.

"The actual perpetrators should be held accountable long before some climate study has to be called in to give recommendations and these drastic measures have to be taken," Mayer said. "There has to be some method by which a department can really be punitive about people who are sexual harassers, including if they're tenured. There has to be some way for the university to address these issues ... ."

CU has fired a few tenured professors, for various reasons, in its history. In 2004, the university fired R. Igor Gamow, a tenured chemical engineering professor, for moral turpitude after allegations of sexual harassment and assault.

Lora Blakeslee Atkinson, executive director of Moving to End Sexual Assault, said assuring survivors of sexual assault and harassment that their identities will be protected plays a vital role in the recovery process.

"They're concerned about people finding out, and our culture has a lot of victim-blaming still of survivors," she said. "When survivors feel that they do not have confidentiality, it makes them even more reluctant to report."

CU: Team used a 'broad scale of input'

Attorney Steve Zansberg, president of the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition, said an argument could be made the university was fully within its rights by releasing confidential documents to the site team investigators but then may have violated the open records law when it released the site team report publicly.

Zansberg said if personnel or sexual harassment files, which are exempt from inspection under the law, are summarized or analyzed in a subsequent report, that document is also protected under the law.

He also said releasing the report without releasing the data used to create the report does not give the public, or members of the department, a chance to verify the validity of the report.

"It's incumbent upon them to allow the public to monitor and assess the legitimacy of those findings," he said. "We routinely say that when a government entity affirmatively discloses information and then withholds the data upon which that information was based, that's contradictory to the purposes of having an open records act. It becomes very difficult for the university to say, 'Take these three researchers' word for it.'"

CU spokesman Bronson Hilliard said the university does not feel it has violated the law either in sharing the confidential files with the site team investigators or by releasing the report publicly.

"There's much more material in (the report) besides things that are in the individual files," he said. "The report's writers went out of their way to take a broad scale of input from interviews with graduate students, with faculty, with undergraduates, with the deans, with department chairs."

Hilliard said he hopes victims of harassment and discrimination won't be deterred from reporting.

"I hope that victims would take away . . . that the institution is acting and taking strong actions to remedy situations that might possibly have given rise to whatever it was they complained about," he said. "We want to take actions, we want to take situations that are not working for individuals and groups of people and make them better on the campus."


Women at CU-Boulder philosophy department speak out

Self-perception via the telescope

"Gaze Upon the Internet's First Telescope Archive"

by

Ben Richmond

February 20th, 2014

Motherboard

There has never been an object that changed humanity’s self-perception as quickly or as completely as the telescope. It’s almost impossible to imagine what life was like before it. “How many stars have telescopes revealed to us which did not exist for our philosophers of old!” the philosopher/mathematician Blaise Pascal waxed in Pensées, referring to an era “of old” that was disrupted just 43 years earlier.

“The telescope transformed astronomy,” the science historian Stephen Case told me over the phone. “This is where Copernicus’s models went from being interesting mathematical models to being something we have evidence for.”

Case is wrapping up a PhD at Notre Dame on 19th century British astronomy and our changing perceptions of the stars (Spoiler: They’re just like us!), while also doing the graduate-student grunt work on the internet’s premier pre-1775 telescope archive,   Dioptrice .

Starting in 2009, Marvin Bolt, then of Chicago’s Adler Planetarium, now of the Corning Glass Museum, and Michael Korey of the Mathematisch-Physikalischer Salon, in Dresden, have been recording and cataloging every old telescope they can find—starting with big museum collections like Adler’s, moving outward to English manor houses-turned-historical site, where someone back in the 1600s bought a telescope that’s sat in the collection without much thought since. Splitting his time between Notre Dame and Illinois, Case curates the collection and gets it online. Only a fraction of what they’ve found is up on the site now, but as the researchers get a better sense of what’s still around—some early telescopes were no more than parchment wrapped around a lens—they’re going to start seeing what the telescopes can see.

Okay, so that sounds pretty esoteric, and maybe it is, but the job of documenting the short wonderful life of early refracting telescopes—from 1608 to end of an era in 1775, when achromatic lenses became mass produced—attracted grants from both the National Endowment of the Humanities and the National Science Foundation, mostly because the early telescopes managed to knock the Earth and humanity out of the center of the universe all while those early astronomers were looking into the sky, literally, through a glass darkly.

“The early Galilean telescopes are notoriously difficult to use,” Case told me. “They’re difficult to find things with, and even once you find something with them it’s hard to know what you’re seeing.”

There’s a saying that “Computer science is not about machines, in the same way that astronomy is not about telescopes,” but a history of either science is inextricably tied to the limits of the technology it depends on. That said the limits of that technology is, to some extent, always determined by the user.

“William Herschel, the guy who discovered Uranus, says, ‘Even if you have a telescope as big as I do, you’re not going to see the things that I do because you’re not trained to see the way that I am,’” Case said.

What was Herschel seeing through his telescope? What was Galileo seeing? It’s hazy. For all its historical important, the history of the instrument is less than crystal clear.

The first patents on the telescope were taken out in 1608 in the Netherlands, but before looking up, the telescope was first used for looking around. It was the cutting edge in military surveillance.

“When Galileo gets his hands on a telescope the first thing he does is he makes a gift of it to the Venetians,” Case said. “He says, ‘here, you can see enemy ships approaching.’”
When were they turned skyward? One of Dioptrice’s goals is to answer that question, which takes their scope (ugh) into manuscripts, illustrations and artwork from the 17th and 18th centuries. These questions of what a telescope is for, who is looking through it and what they’re looking for are cultural ones.

“We’re trying to figure out if these were originally seen as scientific instruments or as status symbols. Does your amateur gentleman natural philosopher just want to have one?” Case explained. “What we’re finding is that the telescopes are so ornate—quite lovely, really. They’re fancy, pretty objects. So they might be status symbols that people are buying them. Are they using them for astronomical observations? I don’t know. That also might be sampling bias, of course. If you have a telescope that you bought for looks it’ll stay around for longer than one you’re getting out every night at a university or for you own use.”

Some answers may not come until Dioptrice begins phase two: testing how well the telescopes work. Until recently the only way to do that was taking them apart, which museums are understandably adverse to, so Dioptrice plans to instead use adaptive optics and computer modeling to test them out. A light source is put on one end of the telescope that sends a grid through to the other side, where a wavefront detector watches the other end, and creates a map of the light’s path.

“Then you could model on the computer, say, an image of Venus or Saturn. And run that through the optical path, and this is what, physically, what astronomers could see, and the limits of what this telescope could observe,” Case said.

But according to Case the first step is just collecting all the data they can find. “Let’s be really empirical and really Baconian, and see how many of these instruments are still out there, where they are and what qualities they have,” he said, proving that astronomers speak exactly how you’d hope they would.

The internet might be known for having pornographic versions of absolutely everything that exists, but eventually, it’s also going to have archives of everything too. Naturally some will be porn, too, but at least one is of telescopes.