We're trying to come to grips with four or five months of unread academic blogs, so instead of fleshed out posts you get link dumps. We, in turn, get the marginal satisfaction of cleaning out dozens of haphazardly saved, unfiled bookmarks. Or as we like to call it, "the highlight of our week."

* We went back and forth about whether advertising data about the persuasive role of imperfection justifies its own post. The upshot for rhetorical practice is the old rhetorical insight, which goes back at least as far as Vico, that being too polished makes the audience distrust the speaker. The theoretical upshot might be something about how human sensibilities are deeply anti-utopian at just about every register. But that's pretty thin, so no full post.

* Powerpoint poisons everything, Lincoln at Gettysburg edition.

* Chimps scream for help. They also change their screams based on the amount of danger they're in and whether a more powerful chimp is around who can help: "This shows there is more flexibility in their vocal communication than previously thought"

* Asking readers to vote on top 10 lists has to be the hackiest way of generating blog traffic known to man or angel. And yet - as Lacan tells us - knowing how a trick works does nothing to undermine its effectiveness. PsyBlog's got a poll on the 10 most brilliant social psychology studies ever. Sigh.

* Grading with a red marker is our passive-aggressive way to get back at students.

Previously:
* The Lacanian Unconscious Vs. Pop Second-Wave Feminist Psychology That Ruins Peoples Lives
* Anger Helps You Think
* Neural Nets See Things The Way We Do, Vulnerable To Basic Optical Illusion

The Japanese took some time off from creating the freakiest robots known to humanity to create this gorgeous video, a scaled down version of the hi-def version that they're promising to release soon:

The real downer? It was done in a Burbank studio.

References:
* Earthrise video [Pink Tentacle]
* Earthrise, Earthset [pinktentacle3 / YouTube]

Previously:
* Second Life Brain-Computer Interfaces And The Fermi Paradox [Video]
* Humanity Now Actually Begging To Be Destroyed By Robots [Video]
* The Things We Can Do - 3D Images Of The Brain's Architecture

These are the times that we wish we had an mp3 blog, because as near as we can tell the British hotties from Electrovamp are still nowhere to be found on Hype Machine. We would post them and then the Internets would belong to us. Alas we run an academic blog frequented by a half dozen or so humanities scholars, so all we can really expect is schoolmarmish tsk-tsk'ing:

After the jump, the third wave feminist version of the song. Don't load this up at work. Seriously.

PsyBlog calls out Fahrenheit 9/11 for being bad argumentation and open propaganda, and then goes on to ask why Bush still lost:

Some saw it as a brilliant indictment of the lead-up to an unjust war. Others saw it as unfounded liberal/left-wing propaganda designed to give the Democrats a boost in the lead-up to the 2004 US presidential elections. At the time Dr Kelton Rhoads, an expert in the psychology of persuasion, wrote a piece detailing the psychological techniques of persuasion used by Moore in Fahrenheit 9/11. Although I wrote a summary of Rhoads' article, due to website re-organisations it got lost so I'm reposting it here as it provides a good introduction to propaganda techniques... "...is Fahrenheit documentary, or is it propaganda? Call it as you will. For my part, I see a consistent, effective, and clever use of a range of established propaganda tactics. If only a few of these tactics were used, or if the attempt to deceive weren't as apparent, I might equivocate...I feel safe in applying the rule: if it flies, walks, swims, and quacks like a duck, it's a duck."... So if Fahrenheit 9/11 was such a successful piece of propaganda, how come George Bush went on to win the 2004 presidential election?

In a different post the suggestion is made that Moore failed because he wasn't subtle enough. That's probably part of the answer. Rank propaganda is probably not effective for capturing undecided citizens in the context of deliberative controversies (and there's an interesting rhetorical analysis to be done about battles to label argumentative texts as "propaganda"). But agitprop is still wildly effective for rallying people around the flag when they want to be rallied - Hitler's Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl was effective and not exactly subtle. So why didn't F9/11 manage to rally the Democratic troops to go out and outvote the Republicans?

It seems at least part of the answer has to be that both sides had unreformed propaganda working to get voters to the booths. Goodnight has been pushing this line for at least a couple of years in the context of his broader work on celebrity advocacy in deliberative politics. His paper in the American Behavioral Scientist on F9/11 as the mirror-image of The Passion of the Christ is to the point here, and the PDF of his presentation at the Lear Center is here. So there are at least a few reasons to be suspicious of PsyBlog's potentially heartening "people will see through bad propaganda" declaration.

References:
* 9 Propaganda Techniques in Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 [PsyBlog]
* The backlash against Fahrenheit 9/11 [PsyBlog]
* The Passion of the Christ Meets Fahrenheit 9/11 [G. Tom Goodnight]
*

Previously:
* What Isn't Argument?
* Habermas: The Ideal Speech Situation Is A Bad Model For The Ideal Speech Situation
* Social Science Partisan Attacks Critic For Lack Of Social Scientific Rigor

Yowsers:

The immense fossilised claw of a 2.5m-long (8ft) sea scorpion has been described by European researchers. The 390-million-year-old specimen was found in a German quarry, the journal Biology Letters reports. The creature, which has been named Jaekelopterus rhenaniae, would have paddled in a river or swamp. The size of the beast suggests that spiders, insects, crabs and similar creatures were much larger in the past than previously thought, the team says. The claw itself measures 46cm - indicating its owner would have been longer even than the average-sized human. Overall, the estimated size of the animal exceeds the record for any other sea scorpion (eurypterid) find by nearly 50cm.

In other news, we're never leaving our studio again. We don't trust these scientist people. Today they say "extinct." Tomorrow they say "yeah, our bad - turns out it was just unextinct enough to eat a large child."

References:
* Man-sized sea scorpion claw found [BBC]

Previously:
* The Things We Can Do - Science Photography Awards Announced
* The Things We Can Do - 3D Images Of The Brain's Architecture
* IIS Begs Science: Please Stop Making Robots That Creep Us The Hell Out

We didn't really know that there was a good criticism of Google Books, but apparently there is. Is it anywhere as good as what Google's doing to promote open knowledge? Not so much, no.

* Did you know that Google has a YouTube channel with almost 200 videos of authors, politicians, and innovators that have given talks on their campus? The most viewed video is that of a vulgar anti-Semitic populist, but the rest are pretty money. E.g. Steven Pinker:

* Robert B. Townsend at the American Historical Association blog unloads on Google Books for a lot of reasons that seem nit-picky to us. But he's writing on the AHA blog and we're not, so what do we know?

* The online International Literary Quarterly has published their first issue. It appears to have some sort of Scottish theme, if you're into that sort of thing.

* We've been remiss in not posting Lifehack's list of their favorite TED presentations earlier. We're probably going to have to post something about that Chris Anderson long tail talk the next time we do a "structure of the blogosphere" post. But in the meantime, there's nothing on this page that is not filled with pure awesomeness.

Previously:
* Open Knowledge Roundup - Cal And MIT Have How Many Lectures Up Now?
* Engineer Builds Self-Aware Robots That Learn And Self-Replicate. Umm... What? [Video]
* Rhetoric Not So Much With the Revolution Thing

You have got to be fucking kidding us:

Nearly two-thirds of Americans believe the federal government had warnings about 9/11 but decided to ignore them, a national survey found. And that's not the only conspiracy theory with a huge number of true believers in the United States. The poll found that more than one out of three Americans believe Washington is concealing the truth about UFOs and the Kennedy assassination - and most everyone is sure the rise in gas prices is one vast oil-industry conspiracy. Sixty-two percent of those polled thought it was "very likely" or "somewhat likely" that federal officials turned a blind eye to specific warnings of the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Only 30 percent said the 9/11 theory was "not likely," according to the Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll.

Retards.

Conspiracy theories are parasitic on sound epistemic and deliberative norms. Persuasive conspiracies that have gotten some social traction are marks of cultural and deliberative degeneration, a particularly dangerous detour in Burke's guilt-purification-redemption cycle. The pomo defense of conspiracy theories - that they're disruptive intrusions into hegemonic discourse that work by "just airing some questions" - was already untenable theoretically. Following Burke, persuasion simply doesn't work that way. It works through a relatively well-described process of attempted identification and then - when that identification fails - either scapegoating or self-mortification. Perusasion through disidentification is a contradition in terms.

Now that one of the dumbest conspiracy discourses ever is the hegemonic discourse, the already untenable defense of conspiracy theorization has also become empirically incoherent.

Scientists are so adorable when they produce something stupefying and then reveal their over-enthusiastic muffin-like geekiness by giving it a really corny name:

Researchers at Harvard University have taken an important step to mapping the detailed architecture of the brain - the fantastically complex 3D atlas of connections between individual cells in the brains of mice. Using genetic tricks and flourescent proteins they have individually labeled hundreds of individual nerve cells with 90 different colour combinations. The end result they call a 'brainbow'.

Four more images, plus expalatory captions, at the Guardian's site.

References:
* Brainbow mice [Guardian]

Previously:
* Arnold Pouteau's View Of NYC Is Much Better Than Yours
* The Things We Can Do - Science Photography Awards Announced
* Underwater Photographer Having A Lot More Fun Than Us, Also Producing Gorgeous Photos

We really don't have much to say about this beyond the obligatory "this is why it's important for doctors to have rhetorical and argumentative training." But it's about a fallacy that affects judgment in the context of a medical science controversy, ergo:

The most obvious application of judgments about probability comes from the field of medicine. We've discussed a key problem doctors have in communicating with their patients -- many patients don't understand numerical probability. So if a doctor says, for example, "there's a 1 percent chance you'll go blind from this surgery," many patients will systematically misunderstand what that means. One possible way to get around this limitation is to use qualitative statements instead of percentages: "it's extremely unlikely that you'll go blind from this surgery." But, as we'll see, there are problems with this approach as well...

When the condition is seen as more severe, people are significantly more likely to think the doctor believes the condition is more likely to develop -- even though the doctor used the same words to describe the probability... Bonnefon and Villejoubert argue that the doctor-patient relationship is similar: your doctor uses "possibly" in the case of deafness to "soften the blow," not as an honest assessment of probability... Their data backs this argument as well: they asked patients why the doctors chose the word "possibly," and in the case of deafness, they were significantly more likely to say that it was a case of "face management," rather than a judgment of probability.

The post ends up in an admitted deadlock: both qualitative or quantitative descriptions of medical risk are likely to be misinterpreted by patients. A neat little rhetoric of science problem, but one that we're not sure is resolvable in any easy way. It does highlight the inadequacy of medical ethics outs like "the patient should be given as much information as possible." The irreducibly rhetorical nature of intersubjective relationships means that much more than information - and much less information - is being transmitted in a doctor-patient interaction.

References:
* It's possible that your stupidity will affect your ability to understand this post [Cog Daily]

Previously:
* Pentadic Ratios In The Rhetoric Of Addiction
* It Would Be Really Nice If Science Was What Chris Mooney Says It Is (Plus: Climate Scientists Learn The Hard Way That Making Scientific Method Into Collective Identity Is A Bad Idea)
* Neural Nets See Things The Way We Do, Vulnerable To Basic Optical Illusion

We're beginning to suspect that there may be humans among us not strictly interested in the continued dominance of our species:

At least there's no chance of these robots becoming hyper-intelligent or partaking of a functionally teleological metaphysics of self-replication. Because that would be awkward.

References:
* RHex - ROBORAMA.info [roborama / YouTube]
* Engineer Builds Self-Aware Robots That Learn And Self-Replicate. Umm... What? [Video] [IIS]

Previously:
* IIS Begs Science: Please Stop Making Robots That Creep Us The Hell Out
* The Cute Yellow Thin Wedge Of The Coming Robot Wars [Video]
* The Things We Can Do - Science Photography Awards Announced

For the seventh year in a row, we return from NCA with a single, incredibly angry, all-consuming thought: don't read your goddamn PowerPoint slides out loud:

| View | Upload your own

That is all for now. Regular blogging will return shortly, as we cobble together our prospectus from disparate blog posts. Then comes the adviser-side disappointment and rejection. Then comes the vodka, then the tears. Then more blog posts. Good times.

PS - Slide 35. Seriously.

PPS - Also: slide 40.

References:
* Stop Death by PowerPoint [Lifehacker]

Previously:
* Job Call Roundup - Who Got Their Calls Into Spectra On Time? Edition
* Particle Physicists Do It Transparently Through The Rumor Mill (Plus: Promote NCA Open Bar Transparency!)
* Linguists Troubled By Conceit Of Ahistorical, Atheoretical Number Crunching