Category: General

Revised! Resubmitted! Rumoured!

I’m behind on so many things that you might as well call me Mr. Matthew Behind. For example, I have failed entirely to tell you of the resubmission of ‘Rumour Has It,’ the Rumour-cum-Conspiracy Theories paper I wrote for the 2006 AAP which was then reworked and submitted to a journal and received both a glowing and glowering review (from two reviewers, luckily). I worked up my changes and submitted them, although due to some e-mail related ‘mistake’ the revised version has only just reached the editor’s desk.

The rewrite was, I think. a success; the paper is all the better for it. The really, really, really negative review was hard to reconcile with the immensely positive one and I ended up following the positive review’s suggested changes and amendments because the negative one described the paper as unsalvageable.

‘Have You Heard: Rumours and Conspiracy Theories’ has now become ‘Have You Heard: The Reliable Rumour.’ It’s less about Conspiracy Theories now; it focuses on the rather novel thesis that Rumours are examples of normally warranted beliefs and that the pejorative notion of Rumour really refers to the process of Rumour-mongering.

It will hopefully be available in a library near you at some point in the future. Otherwise, if all else fails, the blog (although it would have to fail at a lot of journals before that became a live option ((There is probably a link, auto-magically generated) at the end of this post to some version of the talk you can ‘engage’ with now…))).

05/15/2009

No Retraction, No Surrender

So, the Celtic New Zealand issue rumbles away at the Herald. My letter, a support letter from Paul Moon and yesterday a letter from an archaeologist-cum-astronomer ((I always want to say ‘astrologer’ when I think ‘astronomer,’ which is a weird hang-up and sometimes causes trouble in class)) ((I’m debating the merits and ethics of reprinting the letters here. Should I put them up for all to see, knowing that this might well be considered a breach of copyright? Answers in the comment box, please.)) debunking Doutré and his ‘archaeological method.’

But no retraction, no (as far as I know) responses from Wayne Thompson and thus no closure. Doutré has had his puff piece and now has a nice citation in a national newspaper to use when referencing his own work.

On the plus side, the letters page seems to be the most popular part of the Herald and a lot of people will now be aware that there was a(nother) stupid article printed by our ‘illustrious’ and biggest daily newspaper.

Still, it would be nice to see some social responsibility exercised by the Herald.

One lives in hope.

05/14/2009

Credible Conspiracy Theorising?

The Elsevier scandal, for those of you who don’t know, is a a clear case of pharmaceutical puff masquerading as serious academic peer-review. Elsevier, a publisher of medical journals, published six journal-like publications that were fronts for the pharmaceutical companies to present data in favour of their drugs and thus, presumably, influence doctors to prescribe them. It’s a terrible thing, one that does nothing to improve the image of Big Pharma whatsoever, and seems like a clear case of Conspiracy, with a cabal of, for the ‘The Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine’ Elsevier,’ the publisher and Merck, the maker and supplier of Vioxx, a drug that the ‘The Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine’ devoted its issues to.

[T]he interesting question for me as an academic, is how we should treat Elsevier journals going forth? I really think that the base presumption has to be that if Elsevier was pulling manifestly dishonest stunts like this, it has also been up to lots of borderline unethical activities too. When you see the creation of a complete line of astroturf journals, presumably with the sign-off of senior executives in the company, you aren’t just talking about a couple of bad apples. (Crooked Timber)

The notion that Elsevier is up to other malfeasance isn’t really mere conspiracy theorising; Elsevier has been taken to task for its support of the weapons industry, for example (something that the medical profession in the UK has gone on record about, what with it going against the Hippocratic Oath, an ideal they believe a large medical publisher should also subscribe to).

So what to do?

Finally, I am quite attracted to the idea of registering disapproval when one cites to work that has been published in Elsevier journals. Some boilerplate language along the lines of

Timewaster(2009) finds x to be the case. Although these results were reported in a journal published by Elsevier, the company responsible for deliberately publishing pseudo-journals such as The Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, there is no reason whatsoever to believe that these particular findings are problematic.

might usefully serve to communicate to academics that publishing with Elsevier is a net reputational negative.

05/13/2009

Oh no, not again.

Things continue to get worse: Old Government House, at the University if Auckland, is hosting an exhibition of artwork celebrating Gavin Menzie’s work. Maps has the story.

05/08/2009

The Letter

Well, my letter on the Doutré article saw print in the Herald today. I reprint it here with my own permission.

In a recent article (“Call to save hilltop boulders”) Wayne Thompson presents the idea that there was a pre-Maori Celtic culture in New Zealand as if it were an uncontroversial thesis.

This Celtic thesis claims that when Maori arrived in New Zealand they wiped out a pre-existing Celtic people and co-opted or buried the remnants of the prior civilisation. This view, largely articulated and expounded by one Martin Doutré (who, over the last few months, has published articles in the Franklin e-Local and Uncensored Magazine advancing his ugly and racist history of New Zealand), flies in the face of research into our country’s pre-history. It goes against the work of historians like Michael King and James Belich. It is also contrary to the archaeological, ethnological and linguistic evidence of our best researchers. Thompson presents Doutré as if he is is a credible voice on New Zealand’s pre-history when he is, in fact, not a qualified researcher at all but rather an untrained amateur whose views are entirely discredited.

Thompson’s article is not the kind of quality reporting we should expect of a national newspaper like the New Zealand Herald. I, for one, am disappointed.

05/07/2009

But is it news?

So, Martin Doutré has himself some free publicity for the Celtic New Zealand thesis in today’s issue of the Herald. The evidence; boulders.

Celtic Boulders.

Well, round concretions; about a dozen of them. These concretions, up to 3 metres in diameter, were uncovered about thirty-eight years. The mystery, apparently, is how they ended up on top of a hilltop, because:

“It sparked a lot of mystery over how they got there,” said Mr Doutré. “They were concretion boulders, which can only form in sea sediments, yet they had made it to the top of this high, yellow clay hill.”

That sounds a little interesting, doesn’t it? Boulders in non-normal space ((That should be a prog-rock album name.)) That would suggest that the boulders had been moved, in some way. Could it be that they were moved by human hands?

Geological Society spokesman Bruce Hayward said there was no mystery how the boulders got on thehill.

He said they were 70 million years old and pushed up from the sea floor and the enclosing countryside eroded over time, leaving them exposed.

Well, that seems to squash that part of the thesis.

Doutré (and his ilk) seem to have a problem when it comes to understanding site deposition; sometimes items are part of the landscape because geology, not humanity, put them there. Doutré thinks that because they are on a hilltop that they were placed there. He assumes that location is almost entirely intentional rather than accidental, which is a problem for his entire `archaeological’ method; he cannot tell the difference, by and large, between objects that are placed on a landscape versus objects that happen to be there.

Still, perhaps the boulders, as objects whose presence in the landscape can be explained entirely naturally, can still lend credence to Doutré’s thesis, because:

Some boulders showed ancient etchings of geometric designs similar to those on structures in Britain dating back to 3150BC.

The image in the article isn’t particularly clear; you can see spirals (and what looks like the Bass Clef, which is a remarkable bit of foresight by our `Celtic tangata whenua’) and the like, which somehow suggests that these markings are pre-Maori and of Celtic origin.

Because not only do we all know that there are no spiral patterns in Maori art but, really, that the only people to use the spiral in art were the Celts.

That seems to the argument, it really does.

It’s a little hard to know what to say to such vacuous claims; it’s harder still to know what to say when the Herald publishes blatant puff pieces for such wacky views.

I think a few choice letters to the editor are in order. Get typing.

As I go to press (so to speak): Stephen Judd weighs in.

05/06/2009