RD.net to be re-revamped!

[pErvinalia]

He's going to Mozambique you, LP.

[pErvinalia]

You do seem to be accumulating evidence of cockupness, I grant you, but I will leave any satisfaction to be gained by exposing it to you Heather. If it was me I would walk away, but there you go..

hitch.jpg

Off topic but, it didn't stop him being a spectator (indeed an apologist) to stupidity in regards to Bush and the invasion of Iraq.

[charlou]

You do seem to be accumulating evidence of cockupness, I grant you, but I will leave any satisfaction to be gained by exposing it to you Heather. If it was me I would walk away, but there you go..

hitch.jpg

Off topic but, it didn't stop him being a spectator (indeed an apologist) to stupidity in regards to Bush and the invasion of Iraq.

He was in favour because he didn't want to be a spectator to the atrocities he believed Sadam responsible for.

[pErvinalia]

Well he was an idiot then, wasn't he? Either way, a douche on the political front.

[lordpasternack]

Also - as for hearing one side of the story - don't underestimate Cornwell's talent for backtracking.

This is from RDFRS's original Complaint (para 29, page 7):

29. By early Summer, 2010, the legal impediments that had prevented RDFRS from

operating The Store itself were eliminated and the Executive Director and Trustees decided to

transfer The Store’s operations from UBP to RDFRS. In connection with this decision, RDFRS had a

number of meetings with Timonen and Norton and requested access to the financial books and

records of UBP. Norton and Timonen complied with this request, at least in part, and delivered

QuickBooks files for UBP to Dr. Cornwell in or about June 2010.

My emphasis.

Josh's team then pointed out that if there were legal impediments in place prior to early summer 2010, preventing RDFRS from operating the store - then they weren't legally entitled to the proceeds of said store. They would, by their own admission, have been attempting to pull a fast one with the Charity Commission. To be contravening the conditions of their charitable status.

Faced with this rebuttal - instead of coughing nervously and receding - RDFRS changed their story significantly - as noted in the Motion for Terminating Sanctions (page 7&8):

mx term sanctions p7+8.png (30.49 KiB) Viewed 3059 times

It wasn't that legal impediments were lifted - it's that they'd realised that there'd been no legal impediments all along! And they'd just realised that salient fact after receiving a slap in the face from lawyers about their original narrative. And since they merely believed that they had been trying to trick the Charity Commission - they were obviously still entitled to the store's proceeds.

And I would also add - when asked to provide evidence regarding what was believed by whom, based on what advice, about the legality of RDFRS operating the online store in-house - RDFRS failed to provide any such evidence. None. So not only could Cornwell not get a simple story straight - she couldn't flesh it out with an ounce of evidence. It just doesn't bode well.

And it's also interesting that Cornwell seems to attempt to build a narrative suggesting that RDFRS had taken the initiative to start running the store for themselves, when, by their own admission in the same complaint - "On or about May 22, 2010, Timonen notified Plaintiffs he was ceasing all work for them." That was, late spring, 2010.

It would have been rather convenient if real legal impediments preventing them operating the store really had evaporated, coinciding with or just following Josh's resignation, and his cessation of operating the store - wouldn't it have? And convenient that they reached a decision to transfer the store's operations from UBP to RDFRS... after UBP had already ceased operating it...

Although they do maintain one interesting fact throughout: what they saw of the Store's books is what Josh handed over to them voluntarily. Josh had complete custody of the financial records prior to handing them over to RDFRS, and could have simply destroyed the books in their entirety and claimed that he'd lost them. That's at least worth bearing in mind...

[lordpasternack]

Funny... I didn't even know that "evolutionary psychology" was enough of a subject for reputable institutions to deliver PhDs in... and if it disappeared from or went unmentioned in he bio, how likely is it?

I can't say for sure. One would obviously have to ask relevant parties if they could provide such information.

[pErvinalia]

Why wouldn't evolutionary psych be a degree? Of course it would. Either way, it might be just shorthand for what she specialised in. A PhD is essentially about applying the philosophy of science to any subject. You can do a PhD in any narrow science discipline you want, and even in some psuedo-science disciplines like Economics.

I state that my Honour's degree was in Rainforest Ecology, even though there is no such department at my university (there is (or at least, was) an Ecology department there).

[Calilasseia]

Temporary derail for a moment.

Evolutionary psychology is a somewhat controversial subject at the moment. One of the reasons for this, is provided by some seriously contentious work performed by Randy Thornhill and Craig T. Palmer, which was discussed in the Times Higher Education Supplement way back in 2000. That work centred upon an attempt to devise an evolutionary reason for the existence of rape, and involved an extrapolation from insects to humans that quite a few scientists would consider wholly untenable. Of course, since the discipline is still in its infancy, one might expect some early papers in the field to be, shall we say, less than ideally rigorous, since the entire discipline was itself 'experimental' (in the sense of voyaging into uncharted waters) at its birth. The passage of time has seen the discipline struggle to emerge from under those initial clouds, and quite a few of the more hardline empiricists in more traditional biological fields have been vocal in their critique thereof. One or two even have even castigated Thornhill and Palmer for engaging in rampant speculation and fantasising with respect to their papers on the emergence of rape, and that's before we see people such as Susan Brownmiller wade in and effectively accuse the two of peddling rape apologetics, which should alert readers here to how those two authors are held up as examples of how not to do science by evo-psych critics, one or two of those critics having used Thornhill and Palmer's work as a stick with which to beat the entire discipline.

Trouble is, there is some decent work being pursued in the field, but that work is attracting far less attention because it doesn't lend itself to sensationalist headlines. However, part of the problem is that there is a tendency for evo-psych researchers to apply the same sort of naive adaptationism that Gould was critical of in conventional evolutionary biology back in the 1970s. Of course, Gould's critique of naive adaptationism in evolutionary biology has now become part of the Modern Synthesis, but it seems that some people in evo-psych have yet to catch up with this. Indeed, Gould himself was highly critical of applying evolutionary thinking to psychology on this basis, and contended that the existence of spandrels undermined a central premise lying at the heart of evolutionary psychology. This, of course, can be deduced from relevant sources, and useful search terms here include "exaptation", for those interested in searching for relevant papers, a term which of course Gould himself coined. Indeed, this paper:

The Spandrels Of San Marco And The Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique Of The Adaptationist Programme by Stephen Jay Gould and Richard C. Lewontin, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Part B, 205: 581-598 (21st September 1979) [Full paper downloadable from here]

is probably the paper to read on the subject as a starting point, with respect to critique of naive adaptationism, and will inform the reader extremely well with respect to the current evo-psych controversies, despite being written a good long while before the papers in evo-psych that have resulted in the academic artillery exchanges.

As to whether Cornwell has made any seminal contributions thereto, well, I invite those who are interested to ferret through the literature, and determine whether or not she's an active participant in the forward thrust for knowledge, or merely one of the ancillary staff.

[Calilasseia]

Before letting everyone go free finally from the tangential diversion above, I find it a source of joy that I can inject scientific papers even into a thread such as this.

[lordpasternack]

Before letting everyone go free finally from the tangential diversion above, I find it a source of joy that I can inject scientific papers even into a thread such as this.

[Robert_S]

Before letting everyone go free finally from the tangential diversion above, I find it a source of joy that I can inject scientific papers even into a thread such as this.

Obligatory OT comment about "inject"

[JimC]

Why wouldn't evolutionary psych be a degree? Of course it would. Either way, it might be just shorthand for what she specialised in. A PhD is essentially about applying the philosophy of science to any subject. You can do a PhD in any narrow science discipline you want, and even in some psuedo-science disciplines like Economics.

I state that my Honour's degree was in Rainforest Ecology, even though there is no such department at my university (there is (or at least, was) an Ecology department there).

Mine was on "Competitive interactions of larval Anurans"

[Rum]

I never managed the lofty heights of a PhD, but I did an MA (common as muck these days I know..). My submission was , 'Barriers and Opportunities in transforming supplied local government services to a commissioned model'.

Really exciting stuff!..actually from a political perspective it was. Capitalism enters local government.

[pErvinalia]

Why wouldn't evolutionary psych be a degree? Of course it would. Either way, it might be just shorthand for what she specialised in. A PhD is essentially about applying the philosophy of science to any subject. You can do a PhD in any narrow science discipline you want, and even in some psuedo-science disciplines like Economics.

I state that my Honour's degree was in Rainforest Ecology, even though there is no such department at my university (there is (or at least, was) an Ecology department there).

Mine was on "Competitive interactions of larval Anurans"

I hear Melbourne Uni has a world famous Anurans Department there.

[JimC]

Why wouldn't evolutionary psych be a degree? Of course it would. Either way, it might be just shorthand for what she specialised in. A PhD is essentially about applying the philosophy of science to any subject. You can do a PhD in any narrow science discipline you want, and even in some psuedo-science disciplines like Economics.

I state that my Honour's degree was in Rainforest Ecology, even though there is no such department at my university (there is (or at least, was) an Ecology department there).

Mine was on "Competitive interactions of larval Anurans"

I hear Melbourne Uni has a world famous Anurans Department there.

Actually, at least when I was there, the Zoology department had a large number of people actively doing frog research, in both ecological and evolutionary senses...

Good days, they were, good days...

The place was hopping...