Ask me no questions, I'll tell you no linkspam

[elf]

Was gonna wait until morning. Too many. Linking now.

par_avion That fanfic survey - Beyond Metafandom

ljgeoff still boggled

cesperanza Signal Boost: Why NOT to take the "Neurobiological" Fandom Survey

the_shoshanna signal boost: do not take the "neurobiological" fan fiction survey.

jonquil Survey: further fail (via eruthros)

giandujakiss Signal boost

raine Boosting the signal: Don't Take the Fanfiction Survey

such_heights re. that survey that's going around
such_heights re. that survey that's going around(Same post; different journal; different comments)

copracat Because it's been a very good day

helens78 ew ew ew

Seeking Avalon: PSA: Scientists Behaving Badly

ithiliana Escaping LJ onto Blogs (ahahahaha as if there's a huge difference when blog owners also have LJ)

tablesaw Your Arse Is Showing.

ithiliana I want an icon

elke_tanzer Additional info on the survey you should not take

Lauredhel Ten Steps to a Perfect Fanstorm
(Repeat post; different site; different comments)

Comments

[pine]

*links love*

A couple you might want to add:

Yonmei, writing at Feminist SF - The Blog:
"Fandom to researchers: We are not your lab rats"
http://blogs.feministsf.net/?p=1259

Couple more of the "Ground Zero" exchanges, for those of us who love the trackback/can't stop being researchy:

Dr. Science "Talking about who writes fanfic" July 27, 2009
http://mecurtin.livejournal.com/805503.html

Shaggirl "Rule 34, or: tentacle porn, what tentacle porn?" July 19, 2009
http://shaggirl.livejournal.com/185387.html
==> Special interest for the verbatim post of their letters to her and their interesting and constant revisions of the supposed research <==

Shaggirl "My response to the neuroscientists..." July 20, 2009
http://shaggirl.livejournal.com/185688.html
(in which she refers them to mecurtin, a whole bunch of informative metas *that they obviously did not read*, OTW, and several of the canon texts on fandom LOL, like _Textual Poachers_)

Shaggirl "A response from our friendly scientists..." July 22, 2009
http://shaggirl.livejournal.com/186106.html
(includes responses by Ogi Ogas in comments to other commenters)

Shaggirl's Response to the n/scientists has perhaps the most explicit statement from Ogas of his preconception that men and women (little 2gender problem there) are fundamentally different neurologically, that this can be studied without paying any attention to the social, cultural, or any other contexts, or even psychology... and the most loltastic reply to him, which he ignores:

---

From: [info]ogi_ogas
2009-07-28 09:27 am (local)

chicklet_girl:

Yes, we're interested in understanding some very ancient neural circuits that are different in men and women. We certainly don't have anything useful or interesting to contribute to cultural studies, literary studies, social sciences, or psychology, which we leave to individuals better informed than ourselves! :)

Ogi

From: (Anonymous)
2009-09-01 10:56 am (local)

Neural Circuits...

I don't see how you can really do that without actually studying a sample of individuals (both male and female) who write or read fanfic in a properly controlled setting.

Also, you will probably not be aware that there are also large numbers of asexuals who are involved in fandom.

Nate (who happens to be male)

---

I guess I'll throw these links up at my own journal with a link to your nice roundup. Also, if you want to add my posts to the roundup, they're public.

[gavagai]

On a lighter note, http://www.dreamwidth.org/poll/?id=1139 is pretty great :D

Just a bit of anti-FUD ranting from a female comp. sci. person

[rivenwanderer]

First, I am not at all defending these guys--I think they are skeevy as all get out, and wrongheaded about their research as well. But a meme that I've seen in several places has been "OMG, one of the researchers said he's interested in NLP, isn't that like creepy seduction techniques?" And I don't think that's a valid concern in context.

Looking at the resume in question, it appears in this list of keywords: "data mining, pattern recognition, machine learning, neuroscience, NLP, recommendation engines, trend mining". This is a "look at my Serious Computer Science Research Interests" list, and something the academic world views as basically self-help guru pseudoscience at best would be SO out of place on this list it's not even funny. This guy is a programmer, and he's talking about Natural Language Processing. NLP is an interesting and even potentially useful field within artificial intelligence research; it is not reasonable to malign a person for having "NLP" listed in their CS research interests. A lot of my (female!) CS/AI researcher friends are interested in the AI kind of NLP--and as a feminist geek, I don't like seeing some crap pick-up-artist-speak/pseudoscience linked with unrelated, perfectly reasonable AI research. It just makes CS research sound like even more of a boy's club (not to say that it isn't sometimes, but that's not because your Intro to Java class is going to suddenly turn into a seduction seminar). It sucks that they have the same acronym, but the least we can do is not get the two of them mixed up unnecessarily.

Hm, that is long. Oh well. </rant>

Re: Just a bit of anti-FUD ranting from a female comp. sci. person

[msilverstar]

You speak (type?) truth. Notice that he was not on the team that won the netflx recommender challenge. NLP is good for entity extraction, no big deal.

Re: Just a bit of anti-FUD ranting from a female comp. sci. person

[elf]

Thank you for posting this.

I've been clicking on links for the last three hours, so I have no brain, and am just going to say "Info good! Yay info!" instead of something coherent.

[carmarthen]

I posted a bit about my perception of fans and why I think it's very stupid of researchers to assume fans are stupid:

http://carmarthen.dreamwidth.org/889.html
http://carmarthen.livejournal.com/322144.html

Only tangentially related.

[elf]

Tangents are fine. The purpose of linkspan is to cover, as much as possible, the full reaction, not try to winnow it down to "just the directly-related stuff."

(That said, I'm skipping a lot of "signal boost" posts. Because they are legion. And they mostly say some variant of "OH JOHN RINGO NO... here, have some links.")

[jonquil]

Dr. Ogas is not responding in any of his own threads, but is responding to comments in shaggirl's entry, which he presumably thinks of as a friendlier environment.

DO not miss this withering thread: http://shaggirl.livejournal.com/190853.html?thread=3052677#t3052677
I was forwarded a link to this mess because I teach social research methods - I'm not part of fandom, and so don't have any self-defensive axe to grind. However, this situation is such a dramatic example of bad research design that it was forwarded to me as an example of poor method. And I have to agree with the person who forwarded the link: what a trainwreck.

[elf]

I'm pondering what to do about individual threads, rather than posts. (The post is already linked.) I'm thinking of scrounging up a set of Ogas' more entertaining quotes and the threads they came from, and making a special linkspam post for those.

See, I thought you couldn't beat "I didn't know fanfic had novels!" until I saw "Women enjoying slash is like when men like transsexuals!"

The fail, it is strong in this one.

[marina]

a short essay on the subject of psychology and gender differences in the brain, that might be useful to people with little background in this field, in light of the current trainwreck.