Isn't It Ironic?
thusspakezuska | April 8, 2008I just had to share this very recent comment with you all:
I would actually very much like to avoid this blog (and a few others), but the ScienceBlogs channels - which I prefer to having to subscribe to each and every blog individually - won't let me do so. I usually just skip over the posts, but if there is any way to stop the "content" here from cluttering up my feeds, I'd appreciate hearing about it.
Lazy, whiny, insulting misogyny asking for help in maintaining the lazy, whiny, misogynistic state - you gotta love it. That takes balls, I suppose - if by balls you mean arrogant whiny…
thusspakezuska | March 11, 2008A reader recently emailed me about Sociological Images. What a great blog!
WHY: What with the kids these days being all media-saturated, a good image is often more effective for getting a point across than all the citations, repetition, or jumping up and down and saying "really I swear" can ever do. This blog is a space for us to share those really fantastic images.
OUR AUDIENCE: We assume that you, our audience, are sociologically-inclined folks. So we do not typically include a lengthy sociological interpretation of the images.
DIALOGUE: We are aware that images are polysemic and that…
thusspakezuska | February 15, 2008If you are, you may want to read this article over at ScienceCareers. It's very informative, with a link or two to some resources, and what's even cooler, it features quotes from Mrs. Whatsit (named "Abigail" in the article) and Sciencewoman (named "Mary")!!! Good stuff.
p.s. hat tip to my Sciblings on the back channel for letting me know about this!
thusspakezuska | January 31, 2008Raise your hand if you've been to diversity camp!
You know - sometime during the academic year, your department head or dean announces there's going to be a diversity meeting/seminar/retreat. People grudgingly attend, they do some exercises to maybe show them just how prejudiced they actually are, they're told Diversity is Good!, and there's a little talk about how they can be more supportive of diversity. Everybody goes home feeling like they wasted an hour or day or weekend of their lives, and nothing substantially changes. No one has addressed why resistance to diversity is so…
thusspakezuska | January 28, 2008Here's the paradox: there are differences between men and women that manifest themselves in engineering practice, so diversity is good, except there aren't really any differences between men and women that matter in engineering practice, so diversity doesn't matter to the profession. Huh? Who's making these contradictory arguments, and why?
There's a research report on gender in technology by Wendy Faulkner (you can download it from here) which examines this remark:
Women into engineering campaigners often claim that women bring a different approach to engineering.
Do women have better…
thusspakezuska | January 17, 2008Just yesterday I posted information about a new resource on recruiting women and girls into information technology. Ironically, the same day American Public Media ran this story about Jean Bartik, one of the original "computers".
Yesterday in San Francisco, Apple released its new computer, the MacBook Air. The notebook has an eighty gigabyte hard drive, is a mere three quarters of an inch thick and weighs three pounds. Dick's guest today can certainly put that achievement into perspective. Jean Bartik's first job was as a "computer" - a human one. She went on to help program one of the…
thusspakezuska | December 3, 2007
Ask a Scienceblogger asks: " What's the deal with "virgin birth" (parthenogenesis)?"
Many people, when they hear "virgin birth", think of the Virgin Mary. But all good Catholics know that Mary, Queen of Heaven, is not a true example of parthenogenesis. Really - do you imagine that the Catholic church would let a mere female lay sole claim to giving birth to the God-child? God had to send his "Holy Spirit" down to help Mary along and cuckold poor Joseph. Mary may be the Handmaid of the Lord and the Vessel of Selfless Service but no pope is going to give her sole credit for Jesus.
No,…
thusspakezuska | November 4, 2007Ladies, all these years you've been using blenders and understood them as belonging to the category "kitchen gadget".
But when he uses the manly new stainless steel RPM blender, it's not a kitchen gadget, it's a tool!
Or so the manly man on HGTV's "I Want That! Kitchens" informed viewers this afternoon.
It was a beautiful spot on the show. We saw the happy nuclear family at home, mom reading to the kids, and dad - dad practiced a few karate kicks for the camera. That helped establish his manliness for us, prior to us seeing him in the kitchen using that gadget - I mean, the new RPM…
thusspakezuska | October 19, 2007The latest Watson news is that Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory has "suspended [his] administrative responsibilities...pending further deliberation by the board." Watson, meanwhile, has begun the "Did I say that? No! I didn't mean it!" apologia that usually follows when some noted figure catches hell for being more frank about his or her racist views than the public is used to.
He also said that "to all those who have drawn the inference from my words that Africa, as a continent, is somehow genetically inferior, I can only apologize unreservedly. That is not what I meant. More importantly…
thusspakezuska | October 10, 2007From the Chronicle of Higher Education, Home-Schooled Students Rise in Supply and Demand:
"Home schooling often really allows students to develop a passion," says Sabena Moretz, associate director of admissions at Richmond. "With a traditional high school, most of the time you don't see a kid who's gotten so excited with the history of Monticello or got themselves onto an archaeology dig."
Recognizing that sense of passion is what led Virginia Commonwealth University to create two engineering scholarships this year for home-schoolers, says Russell Jamison, dean of the engineering school. "We…
thusspakezuska | September 11, 2007Young Female Scientist asks her readers to rank their undergraduate and graduate institutions on a scale of 1 to 10, "10 being the most egalitarian and synergistic even with conflicting opinions from strong personality types (probably doesn't exist), 1 being the most sexist, demeaning, lawsuit-deserving place in the world". She wants people to name names - not their own, but that of their institutions.
In the four comments she got, nobody named names.
Apparently people - women? - do not feel safe enough to call out their departments and institutions on their sexism. What if someone…
thusspakezuska | August 30, 2007As a graduate student at MIT, my daily commute took me past a construction site bordered by the sort of concrete dividers you see along highways. It was a pretty long stretch of concrete dividers, and on it someone had energetically spray-painted the following in large, excited letters:
UNLEASH THE FURY OF WOMEN AS A MIGHTY FORCE FOR REVOLUTION!
This caused me much disquiet every time I passed by. Would people think I was one of those furious women? Who were those furious women and what were they furious about? What in hell would happen if their fury was unleashed? It did not bear…
thusspakezuska | August 19, 2007Have you read the Nature editorial? Have you read my earlier post about it? Maybe what you are wanting is a deeper textual analysis of the editorial itself. You've come to the right place.
Men [sick]
Our 1869 mission statement is out of date.
That's what the bitchy, complaining women are making us say.
It was 1833 when the English polymath William Whewell first coined the word 'scientist'. Over subsequent decades, the word gradually replaced such commonly used terms as 'natural philosophers' and 'men of science.
Scientist, you see , actually means "men of science". So even if we changed…
thusspakezuska | August 16, 2007By way of the daily Chronicle of Higher Education, I learned that Nature has made a quantum leap into the...well...sort of into the early part of the 20th century.
In an editorial published online this afternoon, the journal announced that it would amend its mission statement, which appears each week next to its table of contents.
The original statement, which dates to 1869, says that Nature's mission is, among other things, "to aid scientific men themselves, by giving early information of all advances made in any branch of natural knowledge throughout the world."
In these tres modern times…
thusspakezuska | August 13, 2007I am so happy for Debbie Schwartz.
I read in my paper this past weekend that Debbie has given her laundry room "the star treatment"!!!!!
What can this mean? Why, let me tell you:
Her super-capacity washer and dryer sit on marble floors and bask in the light of twin bronze chandeliers. A Romanesque sculpture stands on one of the wide polished marble counters designed for folding laundry. The large room has the same cabinets as her gourmet kitchen and a tile stall to dry delicates. There's even a garden view.
Oh my! But wait, that's not all! Debbie, you see, longs for the fresh scent of…
thusspakezuska | August 9, 2007It's called "social desirability bias". And the voting public suffers from it.
It leads likely voters to "underestimate their own prejudices when talking to survey takers", says Dalton Conley in the Chronicle Review.
We know we are supposed to treat all candidates the same, regardless of race or gender. So that's what we say when they ask us. But when we go to the polls, something happens. It's not that people walk into the voting booth and say "no way I'm voting for a woman!" No, they think "national security is really important to me" and they somehow convince themselves that the…
thusspakezuska | July 31, 2007Absinthe has an announcement on her blog about a new online support group for junior female particle physicists.
There is a new online discussion group aimed at junior female particle physicists (up to and including the postdoctoral level). The group allows junior females to talk openly and anonymously with other junior female particle physicists from around the world about career issues that are important to them. Most particle physicists at the junior level are based at large laboratories in Europe and the US. The unique work environment at these labs can lead to workplace issues and…
thusspakezuska | July 9, 2007Remember that fascinating study that almost certainly applied to females? Jake at Pure Pedantry has a very interesting analysis to offer on it.
I do like the way he deconstructs the statistics and delineates the difference between statistically significant and practically significant. However, he missed the boat on the gender issue. He, too, talks about eldest children, as if all children were male. This is very annoying.
I would really like it if people would be clear about when they are talking about research that was done only on men and research results that apply only to men.…
thusspakezuska | July 9, 2007One of the perks of being a Scienceblogger is getting a free subscription to Seed Magazine. Last week, issue 11 August 2007 arrived, and I happily began sampling its good stuff. There's a new feature this month called "Incubator" that tries to "capture the multifacted nature of science itself - from the minutia of the bench, to the personalities behind them, to the oversized ideas that propel us forward." One item included in the new feature is Workbench, a photo of a "scientist's natural hangout". The inaugural, and annotated, full-page photo is of the desk of 3rd-year grad student…
thusspakezuska | June 29, 2007There's a debate going on among my Sciblings about atheism: is it or is it not a civil rights issue? Matthew at Framing Science is of the opinion that it is not, and apparently thinks people like Richard Dawkins are giving atheists a bad name. Jason at Evolutionblog writes the following:
Atheists don't face a public image problem because of the books of Dawkins and Hitchens. They face a public image problem because of the bigotry and ignorance of so many religious people. Not all religious people, certainly, as the strawman version of their arguments would have you believe. But a much…