An opinion column by Caitlin Flanagan in the NYTimes today, entitled “Hysteria and the Teenage Girl,” maps out for us why it is that girls experience “hysterical reactions” to stress more often than do boys, especially in the pressure-filled teenage years. She lists separate episodes in which groups of girls or young women from various cultures—two [...]
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November 12th, 2011 We have to be grateful that CNN is drawing attention to issues of race in Silicon Valley. Or do we? The cable network’s documentary “The New Promised Land: Silicon Valley” airs tomorrow, and if it hones in on structural and institutional racism in American computing and electronics industries, great. The world of high tech R&D is [...] August 29th, 2011 An article in Sunday’s New York Times magazine, focused on lithium-ion battery makers in Michigan, does a nice job of laying out the many factors involved in creating manufacturing jobs for Americans. In “Make or Break,” author Jon Gertner describes prevailing business models that discourage the slow-return, incremental investments needed to bring new factories into [...] February 9th, 2011 Interesting: A paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Cornell researchers Stephen J. Ceci and Wendy M. Williams has gained a great deal of media attention, as these things go. Reading the coverage, I’d say we’re definitely a culture split between those who want to put gender bias behind [...] January 25th, 2011 If President Obama was an ordinary orator, I’d be placing bets on the number of times “innovation,” “education” and just plain “technology” will come up in the State of the Union tonight…with side-bets on “future” and “tomorrow.” But as an eloquent stylist, he’ll likely avoid the sort of redundancy that makes for good speech-based gambling fun. (Or, [...] December 8th, 2010 Be Afraid: China’s “stellar” performance on recent standardized tests, described in yesterday’s New York Times (“Top Test Scores from Shanghai Stun Educators,” by Sam Dillon), is apparently another sign that America is being “out-educated.” We are at our very own “Sputnik” moment, President Obama tells us, our nation once again threatened by the academic attainments [...] October 12th, 2010 Natalie Angier’s angry words about the term ”STEM” in her New York Times column last week (“STEM education has nothing to do with flowers”) are still puzzling to me. She made a few good points: The use of acronyms can indeed lead to confusing and exclusive language. STEM education agendas, simply by grouping certain academic or research activities [...] June 8th, 2010 Thank you, John Tierney! Through your efforts, essentialist thinking about gender and intelligence may keep its hold on Americans for a while longer. Tierney suggests in today’s NY Times “Findings” column that we look with skepticism on a new Congressional proposal to require workshops on gender equity for all those receiving federal science research funding. The [...] May 17th, 2010 I could be projecting here, but it seems to me that 2-year colleges are getting a lot more media attention these days. The coverage brings bad news or good news by the day, depending on how you see the role of higher ed in America. On the worrying side of things for me is a growing conservative enthusiasm [...] |
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