Science & Society
I like stirring, so here is this recent University Press Release (27 January 2009):
'Censoring' language is key to female survival in the boardroom
New research from the University of Reading argues that women leaders have to be language experts to survive the rigours of the boardroom.
Women learn to censor their language to be accepted by their male colleagues but the effort for some could be too much, and is part of the reason why women remain seriously under-represented in UK boardrooms.
I like stirring, so here is this recent University Press Release (27 January 2009):
'Censoring' language is key to female survival in the boardroom
New research from the University of Reading argues that women leaders have to be language experts to survive the rigours of the boardroom.
Women learn to censor their language to be accepted by their male colleagues but the effort for some could be too much, and is part of the reason why women remain seriously under-represented in UK boardrooms.
"It is in the realm of the public interest for society to help support our efforts," Harold Varmus, Nobel laureate and one of the co-chairs of Obama's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, said during an interview on NPR's All Things Considered.
Varmus said that many important decisions that will be made - weapons treaties, energy, health care - are going to be informed by science, "and it is the responsibility of scientists not simply to work in a lonely tower in the pure exercise of curiosity but also to connect with societal goals."
My favorite…
If you have a 401K, you've seen what happens when confidence abandons the stock market. If people didn't trust financial leaders and institutions before, they certainly do not now. Paola Sapienza (Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University) and Luigi Zingales (Un iversity of Chicago Booth School of Business) have created the Chicago Booth/Kellogg School Financial Trust Index and they have published the first set of results today. They say their research shows just how deep America's declining trust runs and how strongly it contributes to the country's…
People have found plenty to criticize in the last year but if we look at the last few decades, there is actually a lot more American equality - in overall happiness. Which is really looking at the glass half full.
That's not to say there are more happy people - it's about the same as 1970 - but it instead means that the 'happiness' gap, the levels of discontent between unhappy and happy people, has become smaller. The research published by University of Pennsylvania economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers in the Journal of Legal Studies says that the American population…
Researchers at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health have released findings identifying factors that affected evacuation from the World Trade Center (WTC) Towers after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. A research methodology known as participatory action research (PAR) was used to identify individual, organizational, and structural/environmental barriers to safe and rapid evacuation.
PAR is a research approach in which the researchers actively engage and collaborate with members of the study population on all phases of the project -- from study design to the…
In a Times News Review interview, Marcus du Sautoy, our new Oxford University Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, says:
I became a mathematician and not a scientist because science often goes wrong .... You do an experiment 100 times and you get the same result. You do it for the 101st time and something different happens. No one would be my lab partner at school because all my experiments went wrong. Maybe I’m a bad choice for this job.
This set me thinking. Maybe some high-school sciences tudents are intimidated by the thought of an experiment as "something you've got…
When comparing players in baseball, it's difficult to cross even modern 'eras' because conditioning and strategies have changed. 6'2" shortstops are relatively common now but unheard of even 30 years ago. Likewise, American football has undergone strategic shifts that are easily recognizable, with the West Coast Offense less in vogue but a 3-4 defense coming back into popularity as compared to 20 years ago.
Soccer, what Europeans insist on calling football because it is actually played with feet and a ball(*), hasn't changed as dramatically, says research team from the…
A high-quality glossy titled, "What Really Happened To Dinosaurs?", is making the rounds, thanks to CEO Ken Ham and the good people at Discovery Institute.
Dinosaurs, in addition to being Adam and Eve's first choice for every flag football game in the Garden, are also apparently the foremost of weapons used to indoctrinate children in the fallacy of evolution. And it gets better.
The two main thrusts of the booklet: Dinosaurs could not have died out before people appeared because dinosaurs had not previously existed; and death, bloodshed, disease, and suffering are a…
I have watched two so far of a BBC2 TV series The City Uncovered with Evan Davis, of which the three parts are:
Banks and How to Break Them: Evan returns to first principles, and explains exactly how a bank is supposed to work. (R)
Tricks with Risk: In the second of his series of documentaries on modern finance, Evan Davis heads into the world of the City's risk professionals – the derivatives whizzkids, and hedge fund managers.
When Markets Go Mad: Evan Davis looks at the roots of the current crisis.
What is interesting is how the big financial institutions rely on mathematics models, of…