They could add steps to the bottom and make it a park.
Four houses near me were condemned because it looked like the hill was going to slide down. I think the owners had to eat the loss. But now the houses are for sale after some bolstering.
Why would the owners continue to pay property taxes on the sinkhole? What's the government going to do, seize it? Or would the owners somehow be risking their other properties?
You'd probably go into default with the city and maybe wreck your credit? I'm not sure.
But it's never fun to have government dare you to break their rules.
People stop paying property taxes here and just abandon property.
If it's condemned and the land is such that it's unusable for anything else, I'd think the county assessor could and should mark its value down to zero.
Then someone could fence and/or sign it off to reduce or eliminate liability?
I don't know that any city would compensate them for the loss of equity of course. Maybe FEMA.
If you buy mine subsidence insurance, you get paid if an abandoned mine eats your house.
Oh, if "condemned for insurance purposes" means insurance pays for the totaled house, that seems like most of the loss. I imagine insurance doesn't cover lost land value though.
A couple of homes fell off a new development nearby and as I understand it everyone is pointing fingers. The developers did a bad job, but the city approved the development, but the city gets sued if they don't approve developments, so houses fall into ravines.
It sounds like the homeowners would have gotten paid by their insurance companies. I can't imagine our municipality buying them out. Its not like there is a fund set aside for that.
7/9: Right. The issue is, who gets sued when someone climbs over the fence and injures themselves? Even if the home owner takes appropriate steps, it's still on their watch to deal with the lawsuit.
I'm not imagining the city buying them out. I'm saying the city should accept the donation of the land, and make plans to keep it safe.
I guess I didn't make that part clear - my understanding is there's no way for the homeowners to discharge or donate the land.
Sometimes when people strip mine land, they donate it to the Boy Scouts or similar.
Anyway, here the main push is to make it harder for owners to divest themselves off worthless land. It's mostly absentee landlords with houses that are not repairable for cost effective amounts forcing the city to pay for demolition.
IMO localities differ in whether their default behavior is decent or shitty, partly driven by budgets, partly driven by local history. Decent/exploitative is orthogonal to being effective (or not) at achieving outcomes.
If there's no money to to remediate asbestos or build a new water treatment plant, then actions that protect the city and cause bad outcomes are easier.
Radley Balko's columns about code enforcement in Tennessee were eye-opening to me, I had only previously seen either bad behavior in service of profit or actions that were basically malicious flailing. Well-organized malice without a profit motive was new to me.
Lots of places, rich and poor, are fine-- nobody will write about a real-life Lesley Knope.
They should just combine their properties and turn it into a quarry or shooting range or climbing gym. All three, potentially.
When a house exploded a number of years ago, we did take over the property, but that's because it was on an unbuildable floodplain.
Dive spot. Cemetery. Alligator farm. Possibilities are endless.
At least there was some possibility that a flood would extinguish the fire after an explosion.
Someone is releasing alligators into the local rivers here.
12: You think if there's a fence with plentiful signs saying "Danger, sinkhole, do not enter," and someone enters anyway and is injured, they'll get anywhere suing the owner?
Radley Balko's columns about code enforcement in Tennessee were eye-opening to me, I had only previously seen either bad behavior in service of profit or actions that were basically malicious flailing. Well-organized malice without a profit motive was new to me.
God. Back when I watched TikTok there was someone living in a benighted part of I think Missouri where the city had people driving around regularly issuing citations and fines for untidy lawns as if it was an HOA. The TikToker was only renting but was still liable for the fines. And apparently this was all legal!
Right now our California elected leaders are acting like the biggest crisis in insurance is that people can't get coverage in fire zones, including to rebuild after they were burned out. They just reluctantly agreed to let the rates be higher for the people in the fire zones, but rates in fire-safe zones are hugely up too and they don't seem to put nearly the focus on us, the majority.
This was the local news version of the TikTok story. Raytown, MO, a KC suburb.
24: That says you shouldn't enter if you are a sinkhole.
There was a local article here about real estate investors using code enforcement to put pressure on owners to sell houses that were good candidates for flipping.
Some funding just came through that will support a very small group home (4 beds) for people with developmental disabilities, to be run by an area non-profit. Which is great!
Except a rumor then got spread saying something to the effect of "shady liberals are getting funding from Joe Biden's American Recovery Project to build a 'forensic group home' in your neighborhood that will house dangerous criminals who can't be placed in jails because they were able to plead not guilty by reason of mental deficiency."
Said rumor has since been discounted - its just a regular group home, nothing carceral about it - but it got a lot of people angry in the meantime with lots of stigma being thrown around at vulnerable people. That they were so explicit in linking Biden to fears of neighborhood crime is what really grinds my gears, because that shows it was a political hit and not just an unfortunate misunderstanding.
"They should do something about all the homeless people before they build this housing project [specifically for the homeless]!" - real thing said in Millbrae
Yeah, people on that street are already mad about the new homeless shelter five blocks over, and there has also been a pretty bad streak of overdoses lately, which isn't helping. They were already primed to believe the worst.
Sounds like you have a bit of a "corridor" considered the least politically risky place to put shelters and supportive housing?
Where I am they found a motel to buy at a spot where the city limit literally forms a right angle, and no residential on either of the in-town sides.
Sounds like you have a bit of a "corridor" considered the least politically risky place to put shelters and supportive housing?
Yup, that's our ward. I try to make the case that it should come with commiserate investment to offset the reputational damage and keep it nice for families. It would be nicer to fix all our broken sidewalks, for example, or the city could decide to spring for the swimming pool replacement needed in our local park.
18:
He has a substack also, this particular thing doesn't appear there to judge frpm headlines. He's interesting, hardcore libertarian but not blind and likes people.
My 4 year old learned about sinkholes and asked me about them. I told them we don't have them here but they are common in Florida. Now he plays a game where his cars go to Florida and fall into a sinkhole. He calls it the Florida game.
Wait until he finds out about quicksand.
Florida Sinkhole is Florida Man's Batcave.
"commiserate [sic] investment"
Couldn't sinkhole owners donate their land to a university geology department? It seems like a good spot for study and experimentation.
There's already the Devil's Millhopper, a much larger sinkhole, in that same city. But maybe Ben Sasse's consultants figure a new sinkhole will save money or reduce homosexuality or something?
They have to pay taxes and liability insurance on it forever, I guess?
Of course not. They can always sell it to a private buyer at market rate. If that went down since they bought it, well, that happens for lots of reasons.
More seriously, I can imagine lots of situations where the local government or a third party should be on the hook for making whole a homeowner whose property was destroyed by natural causes in a very general sense, and lots of situations where no one should, and it seems to me like a sinkhole could easily be in either category. Like, was the sinkhole caused by changes in the water table caused by human activity? Was there an environmental review process before building the house? Was there supposed to be? Etc.
* People with money speculate in property in an area where sinkholes, floods, fires, tornadoes happen.
* If the people with money lose their money before they can sell their property to some greater fool before the sinkholes, floods, fires, tornadoes happen, the local government makes them whole because they are Too Precious To Fail, and/or speculating in property should be risk-free.
Socialism for affluent property rentiers can appeal to many :-).
«I was incredulous with the jerkiness of local government. My friend was slightly condescending to me, saying that they can't imagine it ever going any other way»
The local politicians usually understand well that their popularity depends on keeping local taxes low for the majority of residents, and the majority of residents think "Fuck YOU! I got mine" as to the "the homeowners who have now moved away, are stuck with this land".
I think I'm part of the youngest generation that will have any members who feel discomfort when a man wears a hat indoors in public.
I feel a cap is a lesser problem than an actual hat.
I was, relatively late in life, a convert to tie-wearing. I am now apparently the last person on the planet who wears a tie without a suit. I have bought some very nice ties lately out of the discount bin for less than 10 bucks.
My head is too big for hats. My father, who also had a disproportionately large head, wore hats well. I wonder if it's because he was short.
||
People who know things about Chinese history: what do you think about this?!?! https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-chinese-history/article/was-there-an-administrative-revolution/AD2E74A82073AAEAA5105E946BA17823
>
It reminds me of the anonymous review at the center of "The Last Scholar."
52: I know nothing of Dykstra and haven't read on Qing administration as such, but everything in the review is consistent with what I know. In particular this claim on the Veritable Records,
The author never justifies the book's reliance on the Shilu and the Huidian or explains her strategies in using them. Qing scholars know that these are problematic sources--they were compiled by the Qing court to serve political purposesand this on the secret memorial system
The Qing court, unlike its Ming predecessors, relied heavily on the non-routine channel of confidential palace memorials sent directly to the throne to acquire and triangulate crucial information about important affairs across its vast territories and to monitor and control its provincial officials.I've encountered before.
"I didn't choose this career to be bored with what I was reading and writing, so I went down the rabbit hole. . . . Working on my manuscript in the wake of the 2016 U.S. election, I developed a compelling--almost obsessive--curiosity about the relationship between information, control, and crisis."
The best part of the review is (arguably) the very end:
Dykstra's Conclusion provides a timely lesson for our field. In response to the disillusionment about routine, she claims, a desire for the extraordinary began to capture the imagination of Qianlong-era officials. To illustrate this point, she quotes a 1740 edict, which discusses the problems that emerged as a result of provincial governors' pursuit of extraordinary achievements. Dykstra has taken this edict out of context, wrongly translated most of it, and misinterpreted it. But the first part deserves attention. Here is my translation:
Recently, provincial governors and governors-general often assume that performing basic responsibilities is not sufficient for them to catch the attention of the emperor or the public, so they extend their imagination to experiment with significant reforms. If their programs achieve any little success, they can request recognition of merits ... People like these, occupying important offices, hope to use their achievements to show their proactive attitude. If they succeed, they get merits; if they fail, they do not get reprimanded. But in terms of their basic responsibilities such as promoting agriculture, collecting taxes, storing provisions, famine relief, etc., they never do them well. (QLSL 5.7.22.2, vol. 123)
An analogy can be made to the Chinese history field today. When we judge a work of history, or teach students to write papers or theses, do we value and reward only those offering grand and sensational stories? Or do we still care about the basic standards of historical research, such as diligently studying one's sources, faithfully representing them, respectfully engaging with existing scholarly works, backing claims with evidence, and trying to be as factually accurate as possible? In this age of misinformation, if we allow our desire for the extraordinary to run unchecked, we will soon face a full blown "crisis of competence."
Juxtaposition with my previous comment is left as an exercise for the reader.
55: Dykstra:
people seemed very confused by my assumptions and claims about the evolving character of late imperial administration.Because, apparently, they were wrong.
after spending a very short period working in the First Historical Archives (FHA), I suddenly became able to place a document in time simply by looking at it, without even starting to read. Any scholar with time in the FHA can probably do this. And the patterns go below the surface level, to the structural and the formulaic as well. There is simply something different about a Qianlong-era document and its Guangxu-era counterpart.The explanation that occurs to me is that the documents look different because the officials were differently trained in the exam system, which substantially changed over this period. In particular, the applicant pool exploded, without commensurate increase in examiners.* This presumably would lead both applicants and examiners to optimize for rapid examination, patterns easily recognized at a glance.
My only thoughts:
1. Is this perhaps someone who got a mistaken idea of their scholarly chops by getting a self-funded PhD, like Naomi Wolf?
2. It's interesting that the review translates 內閣 as Grand Secretariat - I assume that is the standard translation in Qing context, but in modern Chinese and Japanese it's just "cabinet". In particular I wonder whose idea "Grand" was.
Dykstra:
One of my current fascinations is the moon jar form. I've been working in a ceramics studio for about three years now, and I'm finally starting to throw larger vessels.Wiki:
Usually jars are made in a stable shape due to their wide bottom and smaller mouth, but moon jar has a wider mouth than the diameter of the bottom, causing instability, making it feel like the jar is floating in the air.
Trebly on topic, happy Moon Festival, reprobates. May you choke on sugary flour products.
Donuts? I guess I could go to the actual Chinese bakery. But they call it "The Pink Box" and I still find it too amusing.
I thought the moon festival pastry was the mooncake.
Ah, I see now it's probably called the Grand Secretariat reflecting that it was the body surrounding the six Grand Secretaries, 內閣大學士, and the character "big" (or grand) is definitely in that title. ("Cabinet Great Scholars", in my over-literal translation, and probably anachronistic as 內閣 was only later made into the standard translation for the Western concept of cabinet.)
52
This shit is wild and heads will roll. The scandal is Dy/kstra is a historian at Yale (with a PhD from UCLA), and the book is published by Harvard. At this level it's looking like serious malfeasance bordering on complete dishonesty on her part. Also, this is either serious nepotism or complete incompetence on the part of Harvard's review process. She as at Caltech for 6 years before going to Yale, not sure if reading between the lines she didn't or wasn't going to get tenure. If so she failed up majorly.
Paint her critics as "woke", wait until a Republican gets in the White House, and then find a way to tunnel herself into the State Department based an appointed position.
Or, the CIA if she can't be trusted to speak in public.
I remember the thread about the bad "transracialism" paper and how amazing it was to trace out the different stages of collective failure. The author of that paper had had more committee members than usual for her dissertation (I think 5 or 6?) and two of them turned on her and denounced her after the paper blew up. These were her advisors. So many people have fucked up here.
(Here is where I admit that I fully expected to see my graduate institution's name come up in this controversy on one side, and am blown away that it actually appears on the other side, as it were. If someone wanted to hatchet-job my dissertation, it would be so easy that you could do it with a rubber Li'l Lumberjacks My First Hatchet. Fortunately it was in literature and so no one cares.)
If anyone wants a dissertation idea in literature, you can have mine. It's "I think the whale in Moby Dick symbolizes something but I don't know exactly what."
The historians I know (who are not China experts) think it's terrible that the book author wasn't given space to reply in the same issue.
People on the internet and people at home say you should make oatmeal without milk. We ran out of milk today, so I tried it. It tasted better with the milk.
Usually, when we're out of milk, I use powdered milk.
I've been thinking about buying a goat so I have milk on the hoof.
73: it is indeed terrible! I wonder how that went down. Has the author responded yet in another forum?
73: Is that normal with book reviews? Or only when it crosses a threshold of reaming?
I don't remember authors getting to reply in the same issue being standard when I was in history, except obviously if it was a forum on the book. It doesn't sound like a good practice to follow either.
I mean, these are career-ending accusations of misconduct. It's not just a book review. I think it's reasonable to allow an author to respond to that, and I feel like I've seen it more than once before, but maybe I'm tripping?
What's the boundary where bad work becomes misconduct? She's not being accused of plagiarism, for example. But I do see it is a lot more indicting than your average bad review, so I can see the case regardless.
She is being accussed of systematically misrepresenting sources, in some cases it seems to the point of fabrication. I would hope definitely carerr-ending. (Assuming the review is accurate, of course.)
73, 77
The author will respond in the January issue of the magazine and the press has refused to comment. Word is two more negative reviews will come out of the book in the next few months.
The bigger scandal is how this passed peer review. Harvard U Press has a lot to answer for.
Looking at her CV this does seem to be a case where once someone is anointed as a the next big thing scholarly rigor drops away. She's had multiple extremely prestigious fellowships given by institutions that should be able to vet academic incompetence or fraud.
Q/iao showed his work in a way that it will be very hard for her to come up with an adequate explanation. She could go down the "critical theory/what is meaning/death of the author" route, but Qing historians don't play.
I will eventually finish reading the review* but calling some of the work "misinformation" seems different than pointing out where it's faulty, based on a thin evidentiary base, misunderstands the sources, etc.
*It seems to have gone mastodon viral, which is saying something given how mastodon isn't the most viral platform. I saw it there, read about a third of it, and had to go back to what I was doing. It was a very twitter-like experience!
This sort of scathing, career-ruining review is highly unusual coming from a pre-tenure assistant professor. George Q/iao is sticking his neck out, trashing an up and coming super star is risky. To make the article free access in an otherwise paywalled journal can also cost about $1200. Q/iao or someone was really insistent this review be widely accessible.
Maybe they got a pharmaceutical company to pay the fee? That works sometimes.
Yeah, 86 makes me wonder if he's expressing a widely-held opinion among Chinese-speaking scholars, like where people have been complaining about her on Chinese-language academic social media for years. You'd want to have some sense that this review would be well-received by at least some important figures before going scorched earth like that.
84.1: you could write an entire bad monograph on Harvard's proliferation of East Asian publications, series and sub-series. I have no idea what their full org chart would look like and which acquisitions editors manage which lines. One of my closest friends works there in a different department and I suppose I could ask them if I were truly curious.
I shudder to think how many full days I would have wasted reading about this on Twitter/Mastodon/blogs in the 00s. Now I just comment here and scroll through soothing lists of books.
I really wonder how long the review took to write.
Like this looks like it's a fight over whether you need Chinese language competency to be a scholar of Chinese history, or whether going to fancy schools and knowing lots of theory means you can be successful without being able to read Chinese well. And I'd guess that this is not a new point of contention in the field, though perhaps this book is unusually egregious and so it's a chance to escalate an argument that's usually not out in the open like this.
Looking at her CV this does seem to be a case where once someone is anointed as a the next big thing scholarly rigor drops away. She's had multiple extremely prestigious fellowships given by institutions that should be able to vet academic incompetence or fraud.
As more and more of academia gets jealous of venture capital and tries to get in on funding big innovators, it becomes increasingly viable to just commit fraud that's appealing to those people who wish they were funding fun things like Elizabeth Holmes or SBF instead of boring scholarship. For an example in math the guy with the largest pure math grant in the history of the UK, and then got chosen by the government to do a bunch of their grant decisions, is basically a fraud. But he knows how to convince the people with the money that he's doing really big exciting things!
https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/news/pressreleases/2015/march/solving-the-worlds-hardest-unsolved-maths-problems.aspx
https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/news/nottingham-academic-advises-government-on-mathematics-research-investment
Like this looks like it's a fight over whether you need Chinese language competency to be a scholar of Chinese history, or whether going to fancy schools and knowing lots of theory means you can be successful without being able to read Chinese well.
Yeah, he never quite says "she doesn't understand Chinese well enough to do work like this" but it's very clearly implicit in a lot of what he does say. It's not just language, though; a lot of his criticisms are about her not seeming to understand the sources on a broader level than just the text.
88: I heard that some Chinese-speaking historians were circulating proofs of the review at least a few days before it was published (according to a colleague's historian spouse).
"Misconduct" is a loaded word, sure, but (as we've discussed here many times) there isn't a clear-cut standard whereby humanities scholarship needs to be retracted. I think that if this were a major scientific paper and someone found this many errors, misunderstandings, and misrepresentation of data, they'd be calling for a retraction. I think the review author is clearly implying that the book should not have been published and ideally should not stay in print, because its value as a source is almost nil if not negative, and because the author doesn't follow accepted scholarly practice for citation and sourcing, making the arguments unwise for anyone else to engage or build upon. Writing such a book is "misconduct" in the sense that it's an egregious failure to do the basic parts of your job and to uphold minimal standards of academic integrity, even if that is due to gross incompetence rather than clever villainy. I'm comfortable using the term casually in an online discussion, I guess. I'm also an asshole.
I think I'm more sensitive to the usage of "misinformation" than "misconduct" because of our current information environment. Asserting something that's wrong and misleading and not supported by your sources probably is misinformation, but I think of the word almost exclusively in a broader political context. Because I'm weird, probably.
It might be misinformation but not disinformation, if I'm remembering the distinction correctly.
God save us from all these amoral strivers. Also, you can be a scholar of Chinese history without knowing Chinese? Am I understanding that correctly?
In my grumpier grad student days, I thought there was too much history or history-infused work that made claims unsupported by its sources, and not enough discussion of the problem in reviews. But a lot of that had to do with different judgment calls about how much you can infer from a thin source base rather than getting things really wrong about a topic where there are lots of sources. I can think of a couple of cases in US history where someone wrote about an immigrant group or international relations and/or war and seemed oddly satisfied with never learning the non-English language involved, even though it seemed like there were sources in those languages too.
I imagine she's perfectly fluent in modern Chinese, but Qing bureaucratic Chinese is a different enough beast that it needs deep engagement on its own terms to interpret competently. Sort of like N. Wolf and "death recorded".
That's certain possible, but I still think the subtext here is that even her modern Chinese is nowhere near fluent. I could be wrong, but I think that's what explains the vehemence here.
It's a tonal language. Almost impossible to learn is what I've heard.
She has a rarely-updated Wordpress still up! This from 2019 suggests at least proficient Chinese, if maybe not completely fluent
The interview in 55 is interesting in context of the review. Lots of potential red flags about the quality of her scholarship that get quickly passed over.
Her rank at Yale appears to be assistant professor, so I do wonder about the possibility that Caltech denied her tenure.
In Chinese, the words for "threat" and "opportunity" are pronounced almost the same.
Unless things have changed, tenure decisions are usually made within seven years of becoming tenure-track, so it looks like she could have left before the review. Caltech doesn't have a history Phd program as far as I can tell, so one could argue that a someone might leave to go to a school with more support for humanities. But I would think you'd want tenure first because most schools will then start you with tenure after you move.*
*Unless you teach journalism in North Carolina or Texas, apparently.
The part in the interview where she talks about deciding to write this book instead of revising her dissertation for publication, and how people advised her against doing that, is particularly interesting.
It does kind of seem like a "rising-star hotshot who bit off more than she could chew" story rather than being, like, deliberately fraudulent. But as others have said those lines are pretty hard to draw in the humanities.
Yale is particularly weird about tenure timelines. Up until very recently it took 10 years to go up for tenure (since reduced to 9, lol), and you get promoted to associate before tenure. It's all very strange.
All the discussion about investigations and heads rolling and whatnot is very weird to me, because it doesn't seem like the accusation is that she committed misconduct, she's just really, really wrong. And at least in my experience, people are really, really wrong in the peer-reviewed, published literature all the time, and there are absolutely zero negative consequences for it. Sometimes someone else will write a paper pointing out that something is wrong, but (and I know this because I tend to write such papers) most academics frown on this and view it as impolite or uncouth to point out that someone else is wrong. Sometimes people who are really, really wrong about something band together and start a whole little subfield around it where they review each other's work and they all go on happily being wrong together. The idea of academia as a self-correcting system with consequences for being wrong sounds very nice to me, but it's not at all the world I live in.
I think my institution is the only one weird enough that no associate professor has tenure, only full professors do.
Also:
George Q/iao is sticking his neck out, trashing an up and coming super star is risky.
Maybe high risk, but potentially high reward too. It's quite a performance of dazzling erudition and rhetorical skills, it's already gone viral, and it dedicates all that flash to the service of humility and methodical rigor. It's self-positioning as much as it is disinterested advocacy for truth, obviously.
108
Yes that stuck out to me too. With her dissertation there was presumably some quality control. Undertaking a dissertation-length research project with zero supervision while being a TT assistant professor is insane. My guess is she had no idea exactly how far over her head she was. She likely workshopped an interesting (though unsupported) idea with non experts (historians of science?) who thought it was interesting and then ran with it. Again, this is where it should have died in the peer review process of the manuscript.
My guess is she's reasonably proficient in Modern Chinese, but Qing-era vernacular is something else, not to mention Qing era official documents. She would have to know classical Chinese and be familiar with a highly technical jargon and the incredibly complex political system of the Qing court and bureaucracy, which it sounds like she wasn't. (It would be like being a historian of the medieval Vatican and not knowing Latin, medieval Italian, or the structure and politics of the Catholic Church.)
Anyways, I think 101 hits the nail on the head. She can't read Qing era sources to the proficiency necessary to do her work. The second link is almost as damning as the original review.
https://twitter.com/zoeding_/status/1706651091063214394?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
Brochure from the publisher; instructions for authors. Not via HUP's acquisitions personnel directly, I think, although their publicity division seem to manage publicity for the books. (I'm not trying to defend HUP at all, but I've bought enough of those Asia Center publications that I grew curious about who is actually vetting manuscripts.)
Eddie Vetter checks the books on grunge.
Undertaking a dissertation-length research project with zero supervision while being a TT assistant professor is insane.
This must be one of those humanities / sciences distinctions, because I would have said that not doing that -- at the very minimum -- is a guaranteed recipe for failure to get tenure. The whole point of the tenure track, in the fields I understand, is to prove that you can do unsupervised, high-quality work (and supervise the work of others).
At least when I was failing out of graduate school, it was stressed that books were not as important as journal articles.
In the humanities, the TT is for publishing your dissertation as a monograph and few spin off articles. Once you get tenure you can either slack off into mediocrity, move into admin, or work on publishing your magnum opus, but that's usually a multiyear process where you can take the time to develop intelligent ideas.
If you're into Realist international relations, you don't need to bother with intelligent. In fact, it's discouraged.
Being either Jewish or antisemitic doesn't hurt.
I think it's hard to get tenure these days* in history if you don't also have a second project in the works that's not your dissertation (if the dissertation is your first book). History, especially if you're in the US studying not the US, requires a lot of travel for research where you might spend months just looking through documents and not having time for much else, so the logistics of doing that while also being a new professor on a tenure clock are part of the reason most people would regard it as a very difficult task. Presumably, you did all that already for the dissertation and further research will be to check things or expand on specific points, not build a project from scratch.
But I guess you could find stuff online and not do much travel and produce something evidentiarily thin and wrong.
*Could end the sentence right there.
If you learn statistical analysis, you can consult.
89, 115: I looked at some of the Harvard series and I wonder if they're all active. A few of them appear to have fewer than 5 publications currently in print, but others have multiple titles in the last year. It does seem like a lot.
I'm under the impression that my eight year old is a great candidate to learn chinese. Can this scholar do fractions on the fly?
"For an example in math the guy with the largest pure math grant in the history of the UK, and then got chosen by the government to do a bunch of their grant decisions, is basically a fraud."
Is there any way fir a non mathematician to understand why?
He walks around with a t-shirt that has "Crisis = Opportunity" written on it.
I wonder if people could become proficient in knowing what the word proficient means.
122: At my institution (which is a respectable R1 but not exactly setting the academic world afire in most disciplines), historians seeking tenure need a book or equivalent number of articles, plus evidence of progress on a second project if the book is based on their dissertation. In the social sciences here (assuming we're counting history in with the humanities), a dissertation-based book would need to represent a substantial improvement on the dissertation in order to "count," plus you would need at least a couple of well-placed journal articles on another topic. (My sub-field was book-centric; other sub-fields in my former discipline are more article-centric.)
I'm on a teaching track for which my research counts not at all, so I published my thinly revised dissertation as a book more or less just for the hell of it (less prestigious academic press but I have a gorgeous cover and I stand by the quality of the work). A colleague hired for a similar TT line at the same time, on the other hand, published a few articles spun off from her dissertation but also researched and wrote a book on an entirely new project.
It's hard to remember since I had other life-disrupting stuff going on, but I'm almost certain that my less-prestigious-but-still-reputable-press required more than two peer reviews, and because I was a first-time book author they required the full manuscript + reviews in advance of contract. My reviewers were experts on my theoretical framework rather than experts on my particular topic, but that's because there weren't many of the latter in my field at the time, and I was basically arguing that most of those who were around were wrong. (They still are, but there are more scholars now taking the position I took, and it would be nice if they cited ms more often.) I suppose this means it's possible I could have gotten away with publishing a book full of errors that my pre-publication reviewers wouldn't have been well positioned to catch, but that seems less plausible in the case presently under consideration.
TIL scholarly books in history and sociology usually have a formal peer review mechanism. I thought it was just "convince a reputable press to publish it" which implies some editorial review or choice by the press but now I know. Are scholars in those fields besieged by requests to review books, I wonder? Sounds like someone is doing a lot of (free?) work for the presses.
131: yes, but it's a (very common) misnomer to describe the work as "free." Most tenure-line faculty have "service" included among their job duties, which means that, as salaried employees, we're expected to do things like referee book manuscripts and journal submissions and review tenure cases and serve on university committees and the boards of professional organizations and on and on.There's a whole cottage industry of seemingly well-intended social media nitwits dedicated to the idea that piece work would be better for scholars. These people are, again, seemingly well-intended and also, again, nitwits.
133: I take your point, but I also think if a press asks a scholar to devote a week of work to a review without offering any pay it's fair to describe it as for free (from the perspective of the press).
133: Agreed. I very rarely agree to review book or journal article manuscripts anymore because I'm a) not publishing and b) pulling my weight with a lot of other kinds of service, but I'll review in the rare cases I think I'm genuinely uniquely suited to do so.
131: For reviews of full book manuscripts, presses will typically offer you something like $100-200 or twice that amount's worth of books from their catalogue, IIRC. When I agreed to blurb a colleague's edited volume at the last minute, on the other hand, he sent me a very nice candle as a thank you (which was a wholly unnecessary gesture but very nice of him. Hilariously, the two back-cover blurbs are me and my undergraduate advisor).
I reviewed a book on speciation (or maybe just a couple chapters, can't remember) and they never sent me my free copy. I even reminded them!
Also to 131: in the social sciences and humanities, books published by an academic press (or by the academic arm of a press that also publishes for trades like Palgrave or Routledge) have typically been peer-reviewed prior to publication. If they have not, then they are listed in a separate "non-refereed" section of one's CV (this is where one would also list their own published book reviews, trade books, magazine articles, etc).
134: the presses requesting peer review are almost always non-profits being squeezed by universities that want to mine their budgets. At the same time, the presses have the existence of this labor built into their business models. And so, as more and more people are being encouraged to withhold that labor, the presses are facing what could become an existential threat, which, in turn, could become an existential threat to the functioning of certain parts of the tenure track, which is yet another reason the well-intended people calling for a piecework model are nitwits. Anyway, sure, maybe it's "free" labor for the presses, but the people providing that labor are being compensated for the work they do, and the presses aren't profiting off of their labor, at which point I think I lose track of what you mean by "free."
In science you're usually doing peer reviewing for journals owned by massive multinationals with enormous profits.
Yeah, and I wasn't technically supposed to do it as part of my job duties. But I'm easily guilted into doing stuff, so I did.
Anyway, I mostly just referee now if the editor is in my department, then you're sure to get some kind of credit for it.
We've had reviews delayed because they couldn't find reviewers, so I reviewed two papers for karma.
Another review: https://networks.h-net.org/group/reviews/20007641/reed-dykstra-uncertainty-empire-routine-administrative-revolution-eighteenth
126: The whole situation is weird and complicated. The background situation is sort of explained here but to get the real story you should imagine that article written more in the style of the book review we're talking about.
Roughly a very successful mathematician announced a proof of a major result in a long series of difficult to read papers, he then refused to explain it to anyone and started behaving in cranky ways. Eventually it became clear that there was a gaping hole in a key step, and no serious mathematicians think the proof is correct, but the original guy has stood by it and managed to get it published in a journal where he's lead editor. He has a few acolytes who claim to understand the argument. I don't think the original guy was intentionally committing fraud originally, I think he's full of himself and unwilling to admit fault, but it's certainly possible that he was committing fraud the whole time. I think some of his students who claim to understand the proof are mostly just confused (though maybe they knew it was wrong and are committing fraud, who knows).
But this Fese/nko guy instead took the approach where he decided to pretend not only that he understood the proof, but that the ideas in the proof were so revolutionary that they were going to change mathematics and solve a whole bunch of other problems that it has nothing to do with, and then used that to get huge grants, get a bunch of political clout, and move to a fancier richer university. It's extremely likely that he knows he's been spouting BS the whole time and just saw the opportunity to defraud the UK government.
143 Second review, same as the first review. I'm glad I don't do anything important enough to get such energetic takedowns.
145: yeah. Very strong "there but for the grace of god go I" vibes.
Both reviews note reliance on digitized sources. I wonder if the pandemic wasn't part of how this book happened. Given the key collections are in Taipei and Beijing she would have had to secure time and funding for at least 2 weeks' quarantine time. I can imagine a legitimate reliance by necessity on the databases being the top of a slippery slope, perhaps coupled with wider lockdown craziness. (None of which excuses her, much less the press, TBC.)
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To highlight my own lack of proficiency, or even competence, it turns out Wings of Desire is subbed only in Mandarin. No Wenders for me.
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You can still understand Peter Falk and Nick Cave!
"Murder by Death" is a good Peter Falk movie, but Peter Sellers's did a really bad job of cultural appropriation.