Where Nobody Cares About Gender
1. The submarine fleet could be seen as underwater spaceships.
"'We have a shared interest with the Navy in team resilience,' Brandon Vessey, a scientist with NASA's human research program, told The Associated Press. 'When you stick people together for a long period of time, how are they going to do?' The Navy research that piqued NASA's interest started about five years ago when the Groton-based Naval Submarine Medical Research Laboratory, at the request of the submarine force, began examining ways to make tactical teams work together better. Through observation of submarine crews, the Navy scientists developed a way to evaluate how teams are performing. The study singled out important team practices including dialogue, critical thinking and decision-making and developed a way to assess how teams respond to setbacks."
"Sometimes it is the small things that best reveal shared life experience. When baby elephants are weaned they throw tantrums that rival those of the wildest two-year-old humans. One youngster became so upset with his mother that he screamed and trumpeted as he poked her with his tiny tusks. Finally, in frustration, he stuck his trunk into her anus, then turned around and kicked her. 'You little horror!' thought Cynthia Moss as she watched the tantrum unfold."
3. On the problem of secret code in the criminal justice system.
"We need to trust new technologies to help us find and convict criminals but also to exonerate the innocent. Proprietary software interferes with that trust in a growing number of investigative and forensic devices, from DNA testing to facial recognition software to algorithms that tell police where to look for future crimes. Inspecting the software isn’t just good for defendants, though—disclosing code to defense experts helped the New Jersey Supreme Court confirm the scientific reliability of a breathalyzer. Short-circuiting defendants’ ability to cross-examine forensic evidence is not only unjust—it paves the way for bad science."
4. The brain that shot President Garfield.
"The brain of Charles Guiteau is more than a historical oddity. Scientists at the time of his death thought it could unlock a mystery that had plagued and terrorized humanity from the beginning: What separates a normal man who lives by the law from a man motivated senselessly to murder? Guiteau’s murderous act, his apparent insanity, and the ensuing diagnosis of his brain came at a point in history where society was shifting away from the idea of sin being a black and white question, to one where we recognize there’s a great field of gray obscuring these answers."
5. What if no one cared about gender?
"This is not a future without gender. It’s just a future where gender just isn’t all that important to people... Leckie is a science fiction author, who wrote the books Ancillary Justice, Ancillary Sword and Ancillary Mercy. I called Leckie because the main character in these novels is from a society called the Raadchai, where nobody cares about gender. Raadchai find it deeply confusing to interact with people in cultures that have male and female pronouns. But because English demands such pronouns, Leckie had to figure out how to get across the Raadchai’s lack of gender assumptions — so she just calls everyone “she.” This is something science fiction writers have tackled before. In the book The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Leguin, the people of a sexless society are all referred to as “he.” (LeGuin later talked about regretting this decision). Leckie went the other way.
1. ap.org | @jon_jeckell 2. nybooks.com | @caseyjohnston 3. slate.com 4. nationaljournal.com 5. gizmodo.com
Where Nobody Cares About Gender