Links for 6-30-2008

The comics rawked last week! Gracie signed off as the engineer on plans for the bike ramp she constructed for her brother Baldo and his friend. Gracie, you are awesome! Read the strips for June 24 and 25, too. I want more Gracie with my Baldo!

The Chronicle News Blog reports that India will now have quotas for faculty positions at its prestigious engineering universities, for members of the so-called lower castes and classes. You can tell we really are living in a global society; the same whiny rhetoric about how the entry of those unmeritorious Others will destroy all we hold sacred you get in the U.S. pops right up in this context, too. Just read the comments.

Revised data tables are available now for the 2006 Survey of Earned Doctorates. You need to request them, NOW. Fairer Science explains why.

Alia Sabur is the overachiever of the year. No, the century! Millenium?? Take that, you wackaloons who whine about how women can't do math 'cause their brains are all full of estrogen. She's brilliant, has a thing for social justice and mentoring young girls, and she's pretty, not that that matters, as Jerry Seinfeld might say. Hat tip to Physioprof!

William Saletan explains why the search for a biological basis of homosexuality not only won't help convince evangelical wackaloons that it's normal - it might make things even worse. He ends with this chilling summary:

Liberals are slow to see what's coming. They're still fighting the culture war. The Toronto Star, like other papers, finds a neuroscientist who thinks the new study "should erode the moral judgments often made against homosexual preferences and rebut any argument that it is a mere a lifestyle choice." Well, yes. But then what? The reduction of homosexuality to neurobiology doesn't mean your sexual orientation can't be controlled. It just means the person controlling it won't be you.

Via the AWIS Washington Wire, a report in Inside Higher Ed about salary gaps for faculty.

Numerous studies evidence a gender-gap in faculty salaries, even when other variables, beyond bias, are controlled. Many explanatory theories look at events over a lifetime but a recent study suggests that women faculty begin their careers at a salary disadvantage. The study, "Pay Inequities for Recently Hired Faculty, 1988-2004," found men and women hired into four-year colleges started at comparable salaries. The exception to this trend: research universities, where women start out earning an unexplainable 9 percent less than men. For all full-time faculty as opposed to those just starting their careers, there is a 5 percent gap in favor of men. For both the early career and full faculty groups, controls were used to reflect disciplines, years since bachelor's degree, research productivity and a range of other factors, with the goal of focusing on "unexplained" wage gaps. The study also found some evidence of a salary gap in favor of new black and Latino professors. An unanswered question is where black and Latina women fall in this study.

The quote is from the Washington Wire synopsis of the article, not the article itself.

George Carlin and seven dirty words...dude, the world really needs more people like you, or at least fewer with easily offended tender sensibilities.

And that's all the links I feel like rounding up today.