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Currently Happening Presently Now: ENDGAME

9/10/14

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Rodin, J., & Schwartz, P. (2010). Scenarios for the future of technology and international development.

Schwartz, P., & Randall, D. (2003). An abrupt climate change scenario and its implications for United States national security. CALIFORNIA INST OF TECHNOLOGY PASADENA CA JET PROPULSION LAB.


 


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Currently Happening Presently Now: EUGENICS

9/4/14

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Seltzer, W. (1998). Population statistics, the Holocaust, and the Nuremberg trials. Population and Development Review, 511-552.

Drawing on a variety of sources, the article examines how population statistics were used by the Nazis in planning and implementing the Holocaust and how the data systems that gathered these statistics and other information were also employed to assist in carrying out the Holocaust. This review covers experience in Germany, Poland, France, the Netherlands, and Norway. Attention is also given to the role played in this work by some of those then professionally active in demography and statistics. The use and impact of perpetrator-generated Holocaust mortality data and other estimates of Jewish losses presented at the Nuremberg trials are then described. Finally, present-day implications of the historical experience under review are discussed.

Aly, G., & Roth, K. H. (2004). The Nazi census: Identification and control in the Third Reich. Temple University Press.

Lee, R. (2004). Official Statistics and Demography in the Third Reich. In Bevölkerungslehre und Bevölkerungspolitik im „Dritten Reich “ (pp. 101-124). VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften.

Siddoway, M. The Indian Wars, Eugenics, and Statistics: A Broader View of Scientific Racism Before the Outbreak of WWII.

Racial theories figured to devastating effect in the Ïndian Wars" of the American West, and a half-century later in the "Final Solution" in Nazi Germany. Arguments surfaced from the across the political spectrum in late 19th century America in support of eradicating the native population. When the Minneconjou followers of Chief Big Foot were shot down at Wounded Knee Creek in 1890, marking the end of the war on the plains, US laws were already excluding immigrants on the basis of race and ethnicity. The British anthropologist Francis Galton coined the term ëugenics" in the 1880's. The US eugenics movement was very strong through the early part of the 20th century and was followed closely by adherents in Europe. Sterilization and miscegenation laws appeared in numerous states. Two of the most prominent figures in the history of statistics, Karl Pearson and Ronald Fisher both held positions in England as Professors of Eugenics in the decades before the start of WWII. By the mid 30's, when National Socialism was tightening its grip on Germany, eugenics had become a fixture in the intellectual landscape in the US and Europe. The rigor that mathematics brought to the eugenics movement through the development and study of statistics made it all the more accepted as a serious branch of science. In this talk I will look a little wider than Stefan Kühl did in his excellent book on the links between American eugenics and National Socialism by including discussion of American racial attitudes during the Ïndian Wars" and the possible role that mathematics played in legitimizing the broader eugenics movement before the outbreak of WWII.

Kraly, E. P., & McQuilton, J. (2005). The ‘protection’of Aborigines in colonial and early federation Australia: the role of population data systems. Population, Space and Place, 11(4), 225-250.

This paper reveals the role of population data systems in the governmental management of Aborigines and Aboriginal communities in Australia during the colonial era, and the first several decades after federation in 1901. State control over Aboriginal affairs was paramount during this period. In varying degrees, each of the Australian states implemented policies and programmes concerning Aboriginal persons and communities in the areas of settlement and geographical mobility, employment, marriage and cohabitation, health, criminal activities, voting, and the education of children. Each of these areas of management suggests an important role of population statistics and data systems. This paper considers the colony, then state, of Victoria as the first in a series of case studies. Archival methods are used to examine records concerning Aboriginal policy and administration. In Victoria, the call for evidence and reports on the conditions of Aborigines is heard often throughout historical records of communication between colonial representatives and governors, and subsequently between state parliamentarians and Chief Protectors. The distribution of rations and blankets to Aborigines and the regulation of movement in and out of reserves similarly were monitored using demographic accounting and registration systems. The forced removal of Aborigines to reserves in some areas, and the prohibition of half-caste persons from reserves in other locales, notably Victoria, were administered by the larger reserves through population registration and the recording and tabulation of information about individuals and families. The policy to treat Aborigines of ‘pure blood’ differently from persons of mixed heritage, and hence to maintain an official classification of lineage, similarly required population registration and classification of Aboriginal persons for legal, administrative and managerial purposes. This research contributes to the growing scholarly literature on the role of population data systems in the infliction of human rights violations.

Cowan, R. S. (1972). Francis Galton's statistical ideas: the influence of eugenics. Isis, 509-528.

Dilettante that he was, it seems unlikely that Galton would have suffered the pains of discovery if he had not been strongly motivated; his motivation was, as we shall see, largely political. Galton pursued statistics because he believed that statistics would solve the problem of heredity and that heredity, once understood, could be used to resolve the political and social conflicts that plague the race of men. For Galton this was a real political program, not just empty rhetoric. He sincerely believed that statistics could be used to construct the perfect eugenic state.

Louçã, F. (2009). Emancipation Through Interaction–How Eugenics and Statistics Converged and Diverged. Journal of the History of Biology, 42(4), 649-684.

The paper discusses the scope and influence of eugenics in defining the scientific programme of statistics and the impact of the evolution of biology on social scientists. It argues that eugenics was instrumental in providing a bridge between sciences, and therefore created both the impulse and the institutions necessary for the birth of modern statistics in its applications first to biology and then to the social sciences. Looking at the question from the point of view of the history of statistics and the social sciences, and mostly concentrating on evidence from the British debates, the paper discusses how these disciplines became emancipated from eugenics precisely because of the inspiration of biology. It also relates how social scientists were fascinated and perplexed by the innovations taking place in statistical theory and practice.


Habermann, H. (2006). Ethics, confidentiality and data dissemination. Journal of Official Statistics, 22(4), 599.

Last year, a New York Times article regarding tabulations the U.S. Census Bureau provided to another agency, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, highlighted certain statements and allegations. The article drew comparisons to actions in the Census Bureau’s past, and suggested the Census Bureau—by providing statistical data, which did not reveal any individuals—had acted in bad faith, violating the trust under which it collected the census from individuals and households. The article compared the preparation of extracts for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to the work that the Census Bureau did in 1942 for the War Department, specifically the Army’s Western Defense Command in San Francisco, during World War II, for the purposes of relocating the Japanese community living in the west coast. The comparison between the tabulations the Census Bureau provided to the Department of Homeland Security and the work it did for the army rekindled long-standing doubts and allegations about the Census Bureau’s commitment to the confidentiality protections of the Census Law, and the extent to which statistics are used to the detriment of certain populations.

Okamura, R. Y. (1981). The myth of census confidentiality. Amerasia Journal, 8(2), 111-120.

Seltzer, W. (2005). Official statistics and statistical ethics: Selected issues. International Statistical Institute, 55th Session.

Seltzer, W., & Anderson, M. (2005). On the use of population data systems to target vulnerable population subgroups for human rights abuses. Coyuntura Social, 32, 31-44.

Seltzer, W., & Anderson, M. (2008). Using population data systems to target vulnerable population subgroups and individuals: Issues and incidents. Statistical Methods for Human Rights, 273-328.

This chapter focuses on (a) presenting and discussing concepts and perspectives needed to understand how population data systems have been misused to target individuals and population subgroups, (b) presenting a review of instances, sometimes in the context of major human rights abuses, where population data systems have been used for such targeting, where such efforts were initiated, or where such targeting has been seriously contemplated or suspected, (c) a brief review of a range of safeguards that can help to prevent or reduce the impact of such misuses, and (d) in light of the material presented, a discussion of the role and responsibilities of government statistical agencies and their staffs and the statistical profession more generally.



 


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Currently Happening Presently Now: STORYTELLING

9/2/14

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Sugiyama, M. S. (1996). On the origins of narrative. Human Nature, 7(4), 403-425.

Stories consist largely of representations of the human social environment. These representations can be used to influence the behavior of others (consider, e.g., rumor, propaganda, public relations, advertising). Storytelling can thus be seen as a transaction in which the benefit to the listener is information about his or her environment, and the benefit to the storyteller is the elicitation of behavior from the listener that serves the former's interests. However, because no two individuals have exactly the same fitness interests, we would expect different storytellers to have different narrative perspectives and priorities due to differences in sex, age, health, social status, marital status, number of offspring, and so on. Tellingly, the folklore record indicates that different storytellers within the same cultural group tell the same story differently. Furthermore, the historical and ethnographic records provide numerous examples of storytelling deliberately used as a means of political manipulation. This evidence suggests that storyteller bias is rooted in differences in individual fitness interests, and that storytelling may have originated as a means of promoting these interests.

Sugiyama, M. S. (2001). Narrative theory and function: Why evolution matters. Philosophy and Literature, 25(2), 233-250.

There can be little doubt that narrative emerged in human prehistory. Language, an obvious prerequisite for storytelling, is likely to have emerged by at least 50,000 and possibly 250,000 years ago, depending upon whether one places one’s trust in archaeological or anatomical evidence. The most reasonable estimate is offered by Geoffrey Miller, who points out that, given its universality, the language faculty must have emerged by the time ancestral Homo sapiens began migrating out of Africa approximately 100,000 years ago. Although the oldest known written narrative (The Epic of Gilgamesh) dates back only 5,000 years, the written literary traditions of many ancient cultures are known to be rooted in longstanding oral traditions. The fact that many modern foraging peoples have rich and complex oral traditions further suggests that the emergence of narrative is not linked to the development of agriculture 10,000 years ago. Moreover, other forms of symbolic expression, such as the cave paintings, Venus figurines, and engraved bone and antler that have been found at various sites throughout Europe, date back approximately 30,000 years, and rock paintings in Australia may date back even farther. Since humans were physiologically capable of speech long before they began producing these artifacts, storytelling is likely to be at least as ancient as these other representational forms. Indeed, one scholar situates the “dawn of the oral tradition” within this period (Pfeiffer, p. 189). Given, then, that modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) have been in existence for approximately 100,000 years and are the only hominid species or subspecies known for certain to exhibit storytelling behavior, we can safely say that oral narrative is a product of our hunting-and-gathering past, likely to have emerged between 30,000 and 100,000 years ago. The universality of narrative is further testimony to its being an ancient cognitive phenomenon. Literate or not, all known cultures, past and present, practice storytelling. Moreover, all normally developing humans acquire the ability to process and generate stories: studies of Western children indicate that the ability to tell stories emerges spontaneously between the ages of two-and-a-half and three, and children as young as thirty months can distinguish between narrative and non-narrative uses of language. In contrast to reading, writing, and arithmetic, no special education is required for narrative competence to develop, nor is there any evidence that oral literacy is acquired through contact with other cultures; although subject matter is often exchanged between groups, the practice of storytelling itself arises independently among even the most isolated peoples. Nor does any type of culture have a monopoly on narrative sophistication: the stories of hunter-horticulturalist societies are no less observant, insightful, or artful than those of agrarian or industrial societies.

Sugiyama, M. S. (2001). Food, foragers, and folklore: The role of narrative in human subsistence. Evolution and Human Behavior, 22(4), 221-240.

Narrative is a species-typical, reliably developing, complex cognitive process whose design is unlikely to have emerged by chance. Moreover, the folklore record indicates that narrative content is consistent across widely divergent cultures. I have argued elsewhere that a storyteller may use narrative to manipulate an audience's representations of the social and/or physical environment to serve his or her own fitness ends. However, my subsequent research suggests that such manipulation results from a broader selection pressure which narrative effectively alleviates: information acquisition. By substituting verbal representations for potentially costly first-hand experience, narrative enables an individual to safely and efficiently acquire information pertinent to the pursuit of fitness in local habitats. If this hypothesis is true, narrative should be rich with information useful to the pursuit of fitness. One class of information integral to the accomplishment of this task is foraging knowledge. In this paper, then, I present evidence that foraging peoples use narrative to transmit subsistence information: specifically, I demonstrate how various narrative devices (e.g., setting, description, mimicry, anthropomorphism) are used to communicate foraging knowledge.

Sugiyama, M. S., & Sugiyama, L. (2009). A Frugal (Re) Past: Use of Oral Tradition to Buffer Foraging Risk. Studies in the Literary Imagination, 42, 1-29.

Gottschall, J. (2012). The storytelling animal: How stories make us human. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Coe, K., Aiken, N. E., & Palmer, C. T. (2006, March). Once upon a time: Ancestors and the evolutionary significance of stories. In Anthropological Forum (Vol. 16, No. 1, pp. 21-40). Routledge.

Palmer, C. T., Wright, J., Wright, S. A., Cassidy, C., VanPool, T. L., & Coe, K. (2006). The many manipulations of morty mouse: Children's stories and the parental encouragement of altruism. Journal of anthropological research, 235-257.

"The success of the narrative approach first became apparent in the field of the human sciences. From about 1995 onwards, this development was described as 'the narrativist turn', and it soon spread to the social sciences....After a centuries-old tradition of travel stories, it is now the very concept of narrative that has begun to drift from one scientific continent to another: from psychology to education, from the social sciences to political science, from medical research to law and theology or the cognitive sciences....It is thanks to this shift that storytelling has been able to emerge as a technology of communications, control, and power. The narrativist turn of the mid 1990s in the social sciences coincided with the Internet explosion and the advances in the new information and communications technologies that created the preconditions for the "storytelling revival" and that allowed it to spread so rapidly. NGOs, government agencies, and big companies increasingly discovered the effectiveness of storytelling....It is an immersion mechanism, a tool for profiling individuals, a technique for visualizing information, and a powerful way of spreading disinformation...The instrumental use of narrative for the purposes of management and control has, for instance, resulted in denunciations of the fictional contract (which allows us to distinguish between reality and fiction and to suspend our disbelief for the duration of the story) because it transforms readers into guinea pigs and what management calls 'tracked experiences', or, in other words, behaviors that are subject to experimental protocols."
-Christian Salmon, Storytelling: Bewitching the Modern Mind, 2010, page 6-7.

Neuhauser, P. (1993). Corporate legends and lore: The power of storytelling as a management tool. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

Morgan, S., & Dennehy, R. F. (1997). The power of organizational storytelling: a management development perspective. Journal of Management Development, 16(7), 494-501.

Brown, J. S. (Ed.). (2005). Storytelling in organizations: Why storytelling is transforming 21st century organizations and management. Routledge.

Gill, R. (2011). Corporate storytelling as an effective internal public relations strategy. International Business and Management, 3(1), 17-25.

Gill, R. (2011). Using storytelling to maintain employee loyalty during change. International Journal of Business and Social Science, 2(1), 23-32.

Czarniawska, B. (2004). The ‘narrative turn’in social studies. Narratives in social science research, 1-16.

Berger, R., & Quinney, R. (2004, August). The narrative turn in social inquiry: Toward a storytelling sociology. In annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, San Francisco, CA.

Simmons, A. (2006). The story factor: Secrets of influence from the art of storytelling. Basic books.

Papadatos, C. (2006). The art of storytelling: how loyalty marketers can build emotional connections to their brands. Journal of Consumer Marketing, 23(7), 382-384.

Woodside, A. G., Sood, S., & Miller, K. E. (2008). When consumers and brands talk: Storytelling theory and research in psychology and marketing. Psychology & Marketing, 25(2), 97-145.

Hyvärinen, M. (2006). Towards a conceptual history of narrative.

Bamberg, M. (2006). Stories: Big or small: Why do we care?. Narrative inquiry, 16(1), 139-147.

We had fed the heart on fantasy,
The heart's grown brutal from the fare.
-William Butler Yeats, The Stare's Nest By My Window



 


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