New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

The APA responds to Penn State's discriminatory violations of privacy rights

TO: David Gray, Senior Vice President for Finance and Busines

Susan Basso, Vice President for Human Resources

Penn State University, University Park, Pennsylvania

Dear Mr. Gray and Ms. Basso: 

According to an article in the 10 September Centre Daily Times and the 15 September New York Times, a health risk assessment questionnaire that is part of Penn State’s new employee wellness program asks women employees whether they plan to get pregnant in the next year. If the employee refuses to disclose this she is penalized $100 for every month she fails to yield up the information.

By requiring women employees to disclose information about their sex lives, Penn State violates their privacy rights and likely violates their rights under federal law (Title VII and The Pregnancy Discrimination Act, Title IX, privacy law, and equal protection). Highmark, Penn State’s health care provider, targets women employees by imposing on them a special burden of disclosure about their sexual intent. Are male employees required to disclose their intended sexual activity over the year? To avoid paying a fine, is a woman employee forced to lie? And if she has no plans but becomes pregnant accidentally, does that increase her insurance premiums?

Stapel, the 'Lying Dutchman', will publish his diary

Diederik Stapel, also known as the ‘Lying Dutchman’, was the protagonist of one of the nastiest cases of professional misconduct in experimental psychology, amidst a recent surge of such cases. The committee in charge of investigating the extent of his fraudulent conduct has recently announced its conclusions. As could have been expected, it looks very bad, also affecting a number of his collaborators who, due to negligence, unwittingly allowed him to engage in such practices (article here in Dutch).

Stapel now says he feels ‘sadness and shame’, but in a surprising turn of events, he has also been writing a diary since the whole commotion started, parts of which he is planning to publish in book form! (Article in Dutch) Is it “a way to try to make money off of his terrible decisions”, as suggested by Bryce Huebner (to whom I owe the pointer to the article on Twitter)? Or is it a case of someone who is so used to being in the spotlight that any form of public attention is welcome? I don’t know what to make of it, but I suppose one shouldn't be too surprised by his penchant for poor judgment.

The 'moral compass' of babies

In 2007, a study by Hamlin, Wynn and Bloom was published in Nature claiming to show that preverbal babies had what could be described as a ‘moral compass’ (not the authors’ own terms in the article). From the abstract:

Here we show that 6- and 10-month-old infants take into account an individual's actions towards others in evaluating that individual as appealing or aversive: infants prefer an individual who helps another to one who hinders another, prefer a helping individual to a neutral individual, and prefer a neutral individual to a hindering individual. These findings constitute evidence that preverbal infants assess individuals on the basis of their behaviour towards others. This capacity may serve as the foundation for moral thought and action, and its early developmental emergence supports the view that social evaluation is a biological adaptation.

Eat your sidewalk!

A guest post by Iain Kerr of the spurse collective and Gallery 37-A.

EAT YOUR SIDEWALK -- A SIMPLE CHALLENGE: What is the relay between ideas and our everyday lives? The ideas I am think of in this case are those of "4EA" cognitive science (embodied, extended, emergent, enactive, affective), which are central to many of the conversations on this blog. My real question is, if 4EA is offering us an new set of experimental tools how do we make these experiments part of our daily practice? And where could this lead us?

We are embodied, extended, emergent, enactive and affective beings. But just knowing this is simply the beginning of figuring out what it means in terms of it making a real experimental difference to our lives, our habits, our politics, what our houses look like (and so on). Now there are many ways to go about this but I would like to suggest one possible way that I have been part of developing as part of the collective called SPURSE. It’s called Eat Your Sidewalk!, a one week community-wide challenge to do just that. Our hope is that beginning with eating/foraging we can get to questions of the emergent commons, multi-species entanglements, foodways, less consumptive practices and much more...

Now to get this to happen we have set up a kickstarter, and as rewards we are offering a series of great conceptual and material tools -- things like a “code book” to commons making procedures (imagine if Ostrom and Deleuze were in cahoots), or a “cookbook” (the one that follows neatly after the Futurist + Modernist + Anarchist...) -- all the way to experimental dinners and beyond.

Please take a look and support us (or disparage us) as you wish!