society
drorzel | August 10, 2011The other big gender-disparity graph making the rounds yesterday was this one showing the gender distribution in the general workforce and comparing that to science-related fields:
This comes from an Economics and Statistics Administration report which has one of the greatest mismatches between the tone of the headline of the press release and the tone of the report itself. Nice work, Commerce Department PR flacks.
There are a couple of oddities about this report, the most important being that they appear to have excluded academics from the sample, though that probably depends on how people…
drorzel | August 10, 2011There are two recent studies of gender disparities in science and technology (referred to by the faintly awful acronym "STEM") getting a lot of play over the last few days. As is often the case with social-science results, the data they have aren't quite the data you would really like to have, and I think it's worth poking at them a little, not to deny the validity of the results, but to point out the inherent limitations of the process.
The first is a study of lifetime earnings in various fields that includes this graph showing that women with a Ph.D. earn about the same amount as men with a…
drorzel | August 2, 2011I was just tagging this for the Links Dump, but I thought it deserved better. Fred Clark, blogdom's best writer on politics and religion, is putting together a book-like thing from his blog, and has posted the introduction to the section on creationism:
The oldest book in our Bible contains a hymn of praise to the Creator that rambles on for chapter after chapter. It's the longest such hymn in the Bible, skipping about through all the earth and all the universe with the wide-eyed, giddy enthusiasm of a kind in a candy shop, marveling at all the wondrous things that God has made.
But this isn'…
drorzel | July 20, 2011One of the standard education reform proposals that gets suggested every time somebody brings up the condition of American public education is that teachers should be offered some form of performance incentive, whether in the form of "merit pay" programs on a continuing basis, or bonuses for reaching particular targets. This is one of those ideas that economists swear ought to work, but a new RAND Corporation study found that, well, they don't. This is based on a three-year pilot program run by the New York City school district, which offered selected districts bonuses of up to $3,000 per…
drorzel | July 19, 2011A lot of pixels have been spent discussing this study of grade inflation, brought to most people's attention via this New York Times blog. The key graph is this one, showing the fraction of grades given in each letter category over the last fifty years:
Lots of effort is being put into trying to explain why the number of A's given out has increased so much over this time span, with most of it focussing on the last twenty years or so (see Mad Mike for a plausible but wrong explanation-- the fraction of students going on to graduate school isn't big enough to drive this). I think this is…
drorzel | July 14, 2011Via Jessa Crispin on Twitter, there's a really excellent article in the Paris Review about Harvard and Class:
When I applied, I thought it would be great because I would get to meet lots of smart people. Those were the kinds of people I liked to be friends with, and I thought there would be more of them there. That was the main reason I thought it would be a fun place to be. I don't think I was super ambitious or professional minded or even a very good student.
The thing I figured out soon after I applied was that, on Gilligan's Island, it wasn't the Professor who went to Harvard, it was Mr.…
drorzel | June 21, 2011Via Inside Higher Ed, a professor in New Jersey took the whole social media thing to the next level:
A Fairleigh Dickinson University physics professor is in custody for allegedly running a prostitution website involving about 200 women and more than 1,200 johns, police said Monday.
David Flory of New York City, who teaches on the FDU-Metropolitan campus in Teaneck, was arrested Sunday while sitting in a Starbucks in Albuquerque, N.M., said Lt. William Roseman of the Albuquerque police. Flory, who ran the site mostly from New York, owned a vacation home in Santa Fe, N.M., Roseman said.
Flory…
drorzel | June 6, 2011One of the tabs I opened last week and didn't have time to get to was this Clastic Detritus post about what it takes to get science stories in the media, which is (quoting Michael Lemonick):
I get it that a stories involving science need a little something extra to make it in a magazine like Time or even near the front pages of a mainstream newspaper. Or, put another way:
It should be surprising, important -- or weird and fun, failing the important.
I get it that the average non-scientist out there isn't going to take the time to read an article about "ordinary" science. I get it. Our…
drorzel | May 17, 2011As I noted the other day, we're entering graduation season, one of the two month-long periods (the other being "back to school" time in August/September) when everybody pretends to care deeply about education. Accordingly, the people at the Pew Research Center have released a new report on the opinions of the general public and college presidents about various topics related to higher education. The totally neutral post title is copied from their report.
So, what do they find about general public attitudes? The usual confused muddle:
Cost and Value. A majority of Americans (57%) say the…
drorzel | May 14, 2011SteelyKid is, as I have noted previously, half Korean, a quarter Polish, and an eighth each Irish and German. Her parents are irreligious, the extended family is Catholic (more so on my side than Kate's), and she goes to day care at the Jewish Community Center. In other words, a thoroughly American sort of upbringing. I can't wait to see what she finds to rebel against when she hits the teenage years.
For no obvious reason, three of the four kids she's most likely to play with on the playground when I pick her up in the evening (we play at the JCC for a while before going home, to give Kate…
drorzel | May 3, 2011Kevin Drum notes a growing backlash against education reform, citing Diane Ravitch, Emily Yoffe and this Newsweek (which is really this private foundation report in disguise) as examples. The last of these, about the failed attempts of several billionaires to improve education through foundation grants, is really kind of maddening. It makes the billionaires in question (Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Eli Broad, and the Wal-Mart Waltons) sound like feckless idiots, but I can't tell if that's just bad writing.
The core of the piece is the finding that the districts these guys put money into haven't…
drorzel | April 21, 2011After chasing a bunch of kids with cell phones off of his lawn, Kevin Drum has kicked off a discussion of "multitasking", specifically about whether it's merely a threat, or a positive menace. He points to an interview with Clifford Nass, a researcher who says his experiments show that nobody is any good at doing two things at once. John Holbo at Crooked Timber picks up the discussion and adds a few good points, and there are some others in the comments (CT's comment section being one of the most civilized and erudite in blogdom).
In particular, I think John's comment on satisficing is an…
drorzel | April 19, 2011The New York Times had another article on the environmental impacts of shale gas drilling, which reminded me that I had intended to write something else on the subject after February's post on the fracking panel at AAAS, but never got around to it. The hook for the article is yet another study showing that the environmental questions are more complicated than just the question of how much CO2 is released in burning gas vs oil or coal, with loss and leakage during the drilling process potentially producing a lot of greenhouse gases.
This is, of course, a single study, and includes the…
drorzel | March 22, 2011Kevin Drum re-posts a chart on wind power made by Stuart Staniford showing that the number of new wind power plants installed in 2010 was way lower than in 2009 or 2008:
This is meant as a starting point for discussion about the big economic issues that might've caused this. One of the many, many reasons I'll never make it as a political pundit, though, is that when I see a graph like this, I'm inexorably drawn to speculating about aspects of it that really have nothing to do with the intended point. In this particular case, I look at this graphic and ask myself "Why are there so many wind…
drorzel | March 21, 2011I've been watching a lot of basketball lately, and between the channel-flipping and occasional single-game windows, it has not been possible to use the DVR to avoid seeing commercials. Which means I've seen a lot of the current paradigm of advertising in America, which seems to consist of two main modes:
Smug and "dickish": The main exemplar of this is the Fidelity commercial in which a smug Fidelity customer at a cafe sneers at another customer for not knowing the wonders of his commercial invetment advice provider, but really, just about any investment commercial would do. Sam Waterston for…
drorzel | March 15, 2011It's NCAA tournament time, which is time for everybody to break out the moralizing stories about the pernicious aspects of college athletics that they've been sitting on since the football season ended. The Associated Press (via the New York Times) clocks in with a particularly discreditable entry, a story on a study of racial disparities in graduation rates in major college baskeball:
An annual report by the University of Central Florida's Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport found a 2 percent overall graduation rate increase to 66 percent for Division I players, but showed the rates…
drorzel | March 11, 2011One thing that I thought of while writing yesterday's mammoth post about scientific thinking and stereotypes was the notion of stereotype threat, the psychological phenomenon where students who are reminded of negative stereotypes right before a test tend to score worse than they do when taking the test without the negative reminder. This is a hot topic in education research at the moment, and it seems like EurekAlert throws me about one press release a week relating to the topic (or, at least, it seemed that way before I got too bust to keep up with EurekAlert).
I ended up not throwing it in…
drorzel | March 10, 2011A few more comments on the scientific thinking thing, because it's generated a bunch of comments. As usual, some of them are good points, and some of them have completely misunderstood what I was trying to say. so let's take another crack at it.
While the post was worded somewhat strongly, I'm not really trying to stake out a position diametrically opposed to what Neil DeGrasse Tyson said. In fact, I suspect we agree more than we disagee. We certainly share the same broad goal, namely to see more people thinking more scientifically more often. The difference is really a question of emphasis.…
drorzel | March 8, 2011Everybody's favorite science blogger did a podcast with Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and has been posting highlights of it. One of these, on scientific thinking, has a bit that I don't quite agree with. Tyson says:
I think the, if it were natural to think scientifically, science as we currently practice it would have been going on for thousands of years. But it hasn't. It's relatively late in the activities of a culture. Science as we now practice it...this is a relatively modern, that's been going on for no more than 400 years. And you look at how long civilizations have been around, and you say,…
drorzel | March 3, 2011Brigham Young University dismissed one of its best post players, Brandon Davies, from the basketball team for violations of the university's honor code. Reportedly, this was for sex, which is one of many enjoyable things forbidden by the school's rules, which stem from the principles of the LDS church.
This really kind of sucks, as it further sets up the inevitable Jimmer Fredette backlash, and I really like Fredette, who is a local legend as well as a great player. In their first game without Davies, BYU lost to New Mexico, a team with a fairly mediocre record, and this bodes ill for them in…