Quick hit with some links

[feuervogel]

Some NYT wanker "dares" discuss science and gender. Dr. Isis explains why this topic bores her to tears (and pokes giant holes in Tierney's "argument" in the process.) Via Zuska, who also links to Boing Boing with more links on the subject.

A dad writes about his four-year-old son playing GTA. It's kind of cute, actually.

People are asking the wrong questions in talking about the societal effects of the porn industry.

Heading back to the US tomorrow, should be home around 10 pm. I think DFS is picking us up; that's the plan as I heard it, anyway. Time to start organizing my suitcase and trying to shove everything inside.

Comments

[tiurin.livejournal.com]

From Isis: "Can we all agree that Tierny pulled this completely out of his ass? Someone who scores in the top 99.9% of an aptitude test is more likely to get tenure than someone who scores in the top 99.1% in the seventh grade? Really?"

Actually, Tierney isn't necessarily wrong here- he's almost certainly right and Isis wrong on this one. JHU, like Duke, has decades of 7th grade data and there's strong evidence that the top 99.99%ile is significantly more likely to earn a doctorate and get tenure than the top 99.5%ile(I forget which journal the paper was in, but it can probably be found online by searching for "CTY" or "SET" or "Study of Exceptional Talent"). It seems probable that the same applies to 99.9% vs. 99.1%, though the differences would be less stark.

The more interesting studies are, of course, the ones which compare male and female students in countries where gender norms are less rigid.

[feuervogel]

On that single point, perhaps, but that does not invalidate her entire argument, which is that Tierney is cherry-picking data that supports the idea that menz is better than wimminz at teh scientisms because of their inherent biology/brain power.

Which is, of course, a load of horseshit. Are there more men than women in science, especially academic science? No doubt. But it's not because of biological differences. It's more likely a result of the rigid gender norms in US society that say girls don't belong in science, and those damn "math is hard" Barbies that are a product of this norm.

Though on that point, we're likely in violent agreement.

[smarriveurr.livejournal.com]

It's more likely a result of the rigid gender norms in US society that say girls don't belong in science, and those damn "math is hard" Barbies that are a product of this norm.

And the representational bias - when a guy is bad at math, it's either because he is bad at math or because he hasn't studied hard enough. When a girl isn't doing well at math, there's often a "reassuring" response that it's not her fault, or she's doing OK, for a girl... Relevant XKCD comic (http://xkcd.com/385/).

For guys, math trouble is framed as a personal failing to overcome, and for girls, it's just a force of nature. No wonder more girls are socialized to give up.

Of course, it doesn't help that math, for example, is unnecessarily terrifying for a lot of people, including teachers of math. I'll never forget my college course for Intro to Logic, where the prof opened up by saying she was terrible at formal logic as a student and hated the topic. Way to set the tone, there.

[feuervogel]

OMG. I'm so glad I never took any classes from her. I thought about taking ethics, but I'd heard she had a biased grading system.

[smarriveurr.livejournal.com]

It was pretty atrocious, and fairly clear that she didn't come by the material cleanly, from the somewhat torturous way she taught it. I imagine if you'd had all the exact same stumbling blocks she did learning it, it might've been helpful, but for someone who figured out De Morgan's law in third grade, it was unnecessarily obfuscatory and unrelated to any reasonable applications. The whole time it was very clear that she was teaching something she personally had to learn by rote and didn't quite understand in fullness. I don't remember much about her grading, though, I was too caught up on her teaching.

[warpig1979.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm gonna pick you up last I checked. I just had a minor panic attack when I looked at the clock and it said it was the 13th, but then I realized it was only 1AM on the 13th so far.

German scientists on dropping the bomb

[beth_leonard]

Totally unrelated to your post, but here's a link I thought you might enjoy:

http://www.aip.org/history/heisenberg/p11a.htm

The US captured a bunch of German physicists and put them all together in a bugged house during the war. The transcripts weren't declassified until the mid 1990's. The link above is them reacting to the news that the US dropped the bomb on Japan.

I thought you might enjoy it for your research. There's links at the bottom of that page I linked to, to more information.

--Beth