Red Herring Research Articles

On repression, and avoiding red herrings.

In this response to Otgaar et al. (2020), we point out that their concern with the notion of unconscious repression is a classic example of a red herring, as it has never been endorsed as an explanation of recovered memories. We also note that Otgaar et al. have misunderstood the purpose of our article (Brewin, Li, Ntarantana, Unsworth, & McNeilis, 2019). Its aim was to demonstrate that many of the claims made by psychologists about the public's views on memory do not rest on sound methodology. Beliefs about repression featured as one example, but it was not our objective to establish what the public do think about repression. We welcome Otgaar et al.'s additional data but regret that they have repeated the basic error we highlighted, the reliance on a single questionnaire item to assess beliefs about highly complex topics. Nevertheless, their and our findings clearly indicate that understanding of the public's views on repression remains extremely limited, and insufficient to meaningfully contribute to legal processes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Abdominal Pain, a Red Herring for Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children (MIS-C): A Case Report

Abdominal Pain, a Red Herring for Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children (MIS-C): A Case Report

WITHDRAWN: Commentary: Anomalous Coronaries: Zebras and Red Herrings

WITHDRAWN: Commentary: Anomalous Coronaries: Zebras and Red Herrings

Climate Litigation: The Red Herring of Tools for Mitigating the Effects of Climate Change

Despite their good and morally admirable intentions, advocates of climate litigation are too ready to trumpet its benefits without frankly assessing its limitations as a mitigation tool. The purpose of this paper is to prove one core thesis: climate litigation suffers from particular limitations or weaknesses that render it incapable of making any meaningful contribution to the mitigation of emissions in a timely, effective and comprehensive manner.

A Review of Overlapping Landscapes: Pseudoreplication or a Red Herring in Landscape Ecology?

Identifying the spatial scale at which a species or population most strongly responds to habitat composition and configuration is known as scale-of-effect and is a fundamental pursuit of landscape ecology. In conducting scale-of-effect studies, it is common to measure habitat in landscape buffers of varying sizes surrounding sample sites. When sample sites are in close spatial proximity to one another, these landscape buffers will overlap. Researchers commonly worry that data generated from these overlapping landscapes, and subsequently used as predictor variables in statistical modeling, represent a form of pseudoreplication that violates the assumption of independence. Here, we review the concept of overlapping landscapes and their theoretical and practical implications in landscape ecology. We suggest that the perceived problem of overlapping landscapes is distinct from more important issues in landscape ecology, such as a robust sampling design complete with a discrete assessment of spatial autocorrelation. Through simulation, we demonstrate that changing the amount of landscape overlap does not alter the degree of spatial autocorrelation. Yet, in reviewing over 600 journal articles, we found that a third (29%) of the studies perceived overlapping landscapes as an issue requiring either changes in sampling design or statistical solutions. Researchers concerned with overlapping landscapes often go to great lengths to alter their sampling design by removing or aggregating sites. Overlapping landscapes remain a prevalent concern in landscape ecology despite previous studies that show that overlapping landscapes are not a violation of independence and represent an oversimplification of the statistical concerns of spatial autocorrelation. The concern over overlapping landscapes as a form of pseudoreplication persists in landscape ecology, but acts as a potential red herring detracting from more relevant concerns of proper sampling design and spatial autocorrelation in ecological studies.

School Nurses on the Front Lines of Healthcare: Red Flags and Red Herrings: Improving the Recognition of Bruises and Burns Associated With Physical Abuse in School-Age Children.

Through a series of case scenarios, this article describes the assessment and management of suspected physical child abuse presenting as bruises and burns. Although it is not uncommon for school-age children to have accidental injuries, recognizing patterns associated with physical child abuse and understanding red flags for abuse is vital. Failure to recognize injury patterns suspicious for physical child abuse, and thus failure to intervene appropriately, may leave children at risk for more serious injury or death.

Diagnostic delay due to anti-tubercular therapy in Crohn's disease: A red herring?

Diagnostic delay due to anti-tubercular therapy in Crohn's disease: A red herring?

'More than one red herring'? Heterogeneous effects of ageing on health care utilisation.

We study the effect of ageing, defined as an extra year of life, on health care utilisation. We disentangle the direct effect of ageing, from other alternative explanations such as the presence of comorbidities and endogenous time to death (TTD) that are argued to absorb the effect of ageing (so-called 'red herring' hypothesis). We exploit individual level end of life data from several European countries that record the use of medicine, outpatient and inpatient care and long-term care. Consistently with the 'red herring hypothesis', we find that corrected TTD estimates are significantly different from uncorrected ones, and their effect size exceeds that of an extra year of life, which in turn is moderated by individual comorbidities. Corrected estimates suggest an overall attenuated effect of ageing, which does not influence outpatient care utilisation. These results suggest the presence of 'more than one red herring' depending on the type of health care examined.

New books & media

New books & media

Calcified triticeal cartilage: a red herring

Calcified triticeal cartilage: a red herring

Clientelism's Red Herrings: Dead Ends and New Directions in the Study of Nonprogrammatic Politics

Research on clientelism often starts from a shared puzzle: How can clientelism be a viable electoral strategy if voters can renege on their commitments to politicians? The standard solution proposed is that politicians resolve this commitment problem with voters through monitoring and enforcement. But there has been startlingly little evidence of individual-level monitoring and enforcement in the recent literature, and many studies now document the use of clientelism even where politicians are aware that the commitment problem remains completely intractable. When read together, recent studies suggest that the focus on resolving the commitment problem is a red herring. Instead, it is increasingly clear that clientelism does not need to be monitored and that the commitment problem does not bind as politicians choose their electoral appeals. New puzzles, motivated by advances in the recent literature, deserve comparatively more attention in future research.

The U.S. Killing of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani: Of Wrong Trees and Red Herrings, and Why the Killing May Be Lawful after All

The general wisdom is that the United States violated international law when it killed Iranian General Qasem Soleimani at Baghdad International Airport on 3 January 2020. Most commentators discussed the killing under the aspect of pre-emptive self-defence. However, in its report to the UN Security Council the United States made no mention of pre-emptive self-defence or an imminent armed attack. Much of the “imminent threat” and “imminent attack” rhetoric employed by President Trump and other U.S. government officials seems to have been geared towards a domestic audience and the question of the President’s war powers under the U.S. Constitution. It may be for this reason that U.S. Attorney General William Barr called the concept of imminence “something of a red herring” when defending the Soleimani strike as “a legitimate act of self-defence.” It thus seems that the majority of commentators have been barking up the wrong tree when they very skilfully showed that the United States did not have a right to pre-emptive self-defence because there was no imminent armed attack. This paper follows a different lead, examining whether the killing was lawful as an act of self-defence against a continuing series of attacks against the United States by Iran. It shows that this argument can constitute a credible justification of the killing of General Soleimani under international law. Much, however, hinges on the facts. Without detailed knowledge of the facts no final and conclusive legal assessment of the killing can be made. The cautious reaction to the killing by Germany and other States did not mean that they considered the killing outright unlawful under international law. On the contrary, it seems that these States considered the U.S. justification of self-defence at least plausible, but that they did not have sufficient information on the facts to come to a final legal assessment.

Vaping, lung damage, and cytopathology: A new twist in the medical mystery: Accumulating evidence has clarified the role of cytopathology in the diagnosis of vaping-associated lung injuries and implicated vitamin E acetate as a likely culprit.

Vaping, lung damage, and cytopathology: A new twist in the medical mystery: Accumulating evidence has clarified the role of cytopathology in the diagnosis of vaping-associated lung injuries and implicated vitamin E acetate as a likely culprit.

Remembering what is right

According to Pessimism about moral testimony, it is objectionable to form moral beliefs by deferring to another. This paper motivates Pessimism about another source of moral knowledge: propositional memory. Drawing on a discussion of Gilbert Ryle’s on forgetting the difference between right and wrong, it argues that Internalism about moral motivation offers a satisfying explanation of Pessimism about memory. A central claim of the paper is that Pessimism about memory (and by extension, testimony) is an issue in moral psychology rather than moral epistemology. That is because it is best explained by appeal to claims about the constitution of moral knowledge as a state of mind, rather than requirements on belief formation. The paper also provides reason to suspect that the focus on testimony is something of a red herring.

Beautiful penitent whore: the desecrated celebrity of Mary Magdalene

ABSTRACTMary Magdalene is a superstar: a character of perennial cultural fascination in the East and the West, embodying the classic dichotomy of virgin and whore. In this article, I examine her as a celebrity and a film star, using the way in which star studies examines the sources of meaning in a star image, and celebrity studies understands cultural impact and the circle of affect, in order to encompass and analyse Mary Magdalene’s complex and contradictory elements. This is an interdisciplinary encounter with Mary Magdalene, from the perspectives of theology, church and art history, feminist film and media studies, celebrity and popular culture. My aim is to provide a means for productive analysis of her unique complexity, when her meaning is obscured and distorted by ideological and cultural red herrings.

Whataboutery

A person points to a situation, A, and says that A is morally repugnant; A ought to be condemned; we should do something about A. In response, another person says, “Well, what about B? B is analogous to A in that it is equally morally repugnant. If we ought to condemn and do something about A then we should also condemn and do something about B.” This “what about” response is an argumentative strategy, sometimes called “whataboutery” or “whataboutism.” In popular discussion, whataboutery is condemned as a fallacy, in particular an instance of the tu quoque fallacy. I will present an analysis of whataboutery showing that, to the degree that this is a fallacy, it is a red herring. But this argumentative move cannot always be dismissed as fallacious. Sometimes the imputation of fallacious reasoning attempts to cover over political commitments.

You Were Never Here by Kathleen Peacock

Reviewed by: You Were Never Here by Kathleen Peacock Kate Quealy-Gainer, Assistant Editor Peacock, Kathleen You Were Never Here. HarperTeen, 2020 [400p] Trade ed. ISBN 9780063002517 $17.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9780063002531 $9.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R Gr. 7-10 When seventeen-year-old Cat returns to Montgomery Falls after five years, she's shocked to discover that her childhood friend Riley has been missing for three months, though the golden-boy jock people talk about seems like a far cry from the nerdy OCD sufferer she knew. Riley's older brother is convinced something nefarious happened to Riley and begs for Cat's help, knowing that she has the power to see people's deepest desires and fears just by touch—a power that Cat can barely control and that tore her and Riley apart in the first place. When a nearly dead girl is found in a river with no memory of what happened to her, Cat realizes she has to harness her visions to figure out who or what is attacking kids in Montgomery Falls. Paced with precision and rife with red herrings and blind alleys, this deliciously taut thriller delivers both in its supernatural intrigue and its ultimate exploration of the banality of human evil. Cat is a fully fleshed out character in the throes of late adolescence, struggling with family dynamics, future plans, and two potential love interests, and that all plays out organically next to the unfolding mystery. It's refreshing, too, that her abilities are not a given in their accuracy or interpretation, and her visions can be influenced by her own insecurities and perceptions, giving her character a relatable vulnerability. The revelation of the killer is not surprising, but Cat's narrow escape from him is edge-of-your-seat material. [End Page 97] Copyright © 2020 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Imperial Emotions: The politics of empathy across the British Empire by Jane Lydon

Reviewed by: Imperial Emotions: The politics of empathy across the British Empire by Jane Lydon Rob Boddice Imperial Emotions: The politics of empathy across the British Empire By Jane Lydon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. There are two red herrings in the title of this book that must be addressed. First, this is not a book about “empathy”; second, it is not a book that goes “across the British Empire” in its coverage. This is a book about situated and historically specific forms of fellow-feeling in the context of colonial Australia and New Zealand up to the end of the nineteenth century, with a chapter on twentieth-century Australian republicanism at the end. It might be objected that I am nitpicking, but the clarification on these points does not diminish the work’s importance. Indeed, disentangling the specific subject from the generalism of the book’s purported analytical framework helps to make sense of it and to situate its historiographical value. Lydon begins by making a justification for writing about “empathy,” which is acknowledged to be of twentieth-century coinage and unstable definition. Lydon’s subject matter is the “compassionate emotions, today glossed as empathy.” In this usage, Lydon claims to follow Adam Smith’s “inclusive sense of ‘fellow feeling,’” rather than “empathy” as emotional identification. The claim that “Smith’s broad conception of sympathy encompassed what during the twentieth century increasingly came to be called ‘empathy’” is factually inaccurate (2). These beginnings are unnecessary contortions. “Empathy” has no place here. Its introduction is anachronistic. The attempt to narrow down what is meant by it and to conflate it with historical categories risks misunderstanding on two levels. The meaning of “empathy” remains unstable and readers may well interpret what it is meant by it here incorrectly; and surely there is a great risk of obfuscating the historical, situated meanings and experiences of fellow-feeling in context. Lydon’s purpose is to “map” the “political effects” of “emotions such as empathy” in historical context (3), but a) empathy in its wide variety of twentieth- and twenty-first-century meanings is not typically classed as an “emotion” in its own right and b) does not even exist in this particular historical context. It is somewhat surprising in this regard that no mention or use is made of Susan Lanzoni’s Empathy: A history, the useful volume Empathy and Its Limits (Jay Winter’s essay especially), or indeed my own Science of Sympathy. Also missing are earlier works that focus on the contextual particularities of the emotional dynamics here in question, such as Thomas Dixon’s Invention of Altruism, Michael Frazer’s Enlightenment of Sympathy, Ildiko Csengei’s Sympathy, Sensibility and the Literature of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century, or the edited volume Passions, Sympathy and Print Culture.1 All of the above might have lent something to the framing here, and might have saved the reader from having to unpick and clarify this book’s subject matter. Happily, turning to the subject matter, we find a valuable book. Lydon offers an account of the politics of the expansion and limitation of the category “human” in Antipodean settler-colonial context, drawing together contested concepts of humanitarianism and philanthropy in missionary activities and antislavery civilizational politics. These conceptually slippery and historically specific usages are carefully handled, through visual, literary and print-media sources, to carve out a story of emergent fellow feeling that nonetheless preserved racialized distinctions between types of human. It makes for an empirical exemplification of Joanna Bourke’s What It Means to be Human, though Bourke is not cited here.2 This is augmented by an exploration of the politics of intimacy as an expression or technology of imperialism and dispossession, and of evangelical pity as “a modality of power” (19). Most importantly, Lydon’s book mines a deep-seated political framing of colonial context as domestic realm, replete with figurations of family, parenthood and childishness that were made to serve the natural and cultural dominance of the metropole and of whiteness over Indigenous ways of life. Here metaphors of family and manhood, in the context of religious or imperial affiliation, were the emotional tools of subjugation, control, conversion, civilization...

Boolean Function Analogs of Covering Systems

SummaryBob Hough recently disproved a long-standing conjecture of Paul Erdős regarding covering systems. Inspired by his seminal paper, we describe analogs of covering systems to Boolean functions, and more generally, the problem of covering discrete hyper-boxes by non-parallel lower dimensional hyper-sub-boxes. We exhibit how the Erdős problem is a special case of this general setup, where the side lengths of the boxes are primes. We discover that the primes were red herrings. Indeed, given this general framework, we can prove the same results for sequences other than the prime numbers; we only need a weaker asymptotic condition.

Bulletin Blue Ribbons 2020

Bulletin Blue Ribbons 2020 Deborah Stevenson, Editor Deciding the Blue Ribbons was a whole new experience in 2020; we revamped the procedure to share titles digitally and, of course, worked amid the chaos of a pandemic-disrupted world. It was gratifying to find our enthusiasm undiminished, and in fact we've consciously chosen to go with a generous list this year. Whether for Zoom sharing or private escapism, books matter intensely right now, and it's stirring to see how many stellar titles appeared this year despite the obstacles. PICTURE BOOKS Barnes, Derrick. I Am Every Good Thing; illus. by Gordon C. James. Paulsen/Penguin. 5-7 yrs This first-person self-affirmation celebrates the multiple wonders of young Black boys in rollicking, readaloud-friendly text and rich painterly portraiture. (October) Gay, Marie-Louise. The Three Brothers; written and illus. by Marie-Louise Gay. House of Anansi/Groundwood. 4-7 yrs Gay offers a gentle introduction to climate change as three young brothers trek through a wintry forest; dappled textures and delicate lines imbue solemnity but pops of color and the youngest brother's joyful gamboling suggest hopefulness. (September) Lam, Thao. The Paper Boat: A Refugee Story; written and illus. by Thao Lam. Owlkids. 5-10 yrs This wordless picture book creatively tells parallel stories as it follows a Vietnamese family forced to flee from their home when Communist forces swarm southward after the 1975 fall of Saigon. (July/August) Medina, Meg. Evelyn Del Rey Is Moving Away; illus. by Sonia Sánchez. Candlewick. 5-8 yrs Young Daniela tells of the joy of friendship and the genuine, important grief at parting when her "mejor amiga, my numero uno best friend" moves out of the neighborhood. (September) Novesky, Amy. Girl on a Motorcycle; illus. by Julie Morstad. Viking. Gr. 3-8 Based on the experience of a French journalist in the 1970s, this story follows an intrepid young woman as she travels alone across the world on her motorcycle, experiencing a multitude of countries, people, and possibilities. (September) Sullivan, Mary. Up on Bob; written and illus. by Mary Sullivan. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Gr. K-2 The queen of few-word narratives returns here with a hilarious story of a sausagey dog preparing his bed for naptime and the cat who seeks to make Bob a cushion himself. (January) [End Page 241] Tate, Nikki. Home Base: A Mother-Daughter Story; illus. by Katie Kath. Holiday House. 4-8 yrs Parallel storylines unfold as mother and daughter tackle their respective challenges: Mom scoring a job building a patio and kiddo earning a spot on the baseball team; spare narration and energetic watercolors complement the book's warm, can-do spirit. (March) Underwood, Deborah. Ducks!; illus. by T. L. McBeth. Godwin/Holt. 3-6 yrs When a duck becomes separated from its ducky family, a heated search ensues involving playful visual red herrings and text restricted to a comically histrionic seesaw between "Ducks?" and "No ducks!" (February) Underwood, Deborah. Outside In; illus. by Cindy Derby. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 4-8 yrs The ever-versatile Underwood takes on a very different tone in this evocative, childfriendly contemplation of outside and inside, aided by Cindy Derby's stunning, luminous watercolors. (April) Weatherford, Carole Boston. Box: Henry Brown Mails Himself to Freedom; illustrated by Michele Wood. Candlewick. Gr. 4-8 A compelling combination of poetry and paintings provides a unique retelling of the story of Henry "Box" Brown, tracking the specifics of Brown's tale of escape from bondage while examining the larger horrors and scars of slavery through visual motifs. (May) FICTION Anderson, Sophie. The Girl Who Speaks Bear. Scholastic. Gr. 4-7 This fantastical story is a loving tribute to Russian folklore as it follows a (mostly) human girl and the animals she encounters as she seeks the truth about her family. (February) Brown, Echo. Black Girl Unlimited: The Remarkable True Story of a Teenage Wizard. Ottaviano/Holt. Gr. 9-12 Told with brutal authenticity and tender compassion, this fantastical story dramatically shifts between the past and the present of young Echo as she negotiates her family's intergenerational trauma. (February) Chee, Traci. We Are Not Free; illus. by Julia Kuo. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt...