Random links
- Is a Woman in Brazil Better Off than a Woman in the U.S.?
- One sentence that I found interesting: "Unlike in the U.S. and Western Europe, childcare, for example, does not pose the same career challenge; a robust network of relatives combined with inexpensive domestic help give BRIC/UAE women multiple shoulders to lean on." What happens to that "robust network of relatives" as time wears on and more women enter the workforce (and likely have fewer children)? It seems like the sort of short-term productivity boost that you might expect - not something sustainable over the long-term.
- Why Science Majors Change Their Minds (It’s Just So Darn Hard)
- "Studies have found that roughly 40 percent of students planning engineering and science majors end up switching to other subjects or failing to get any degree. That increases to as much as 60 percent when pre-medical students ... are included, according to new data from the University of California at Los Angeles. That is twice the combined attrition rate of all other majors." The article suggests that part of the problem might be attributable to a "proliferation of grade inflation in the humanities and social sciences" which it argues doesn't exist to the same extent in the sciences. Another issue is the highly theoretical focus of numerous classes as well as their cumulative nature. Would more projects solve this or is this to some extent sort of inevitable?
- France Can’t Afford to Give Up Nukes, Utility Chief Says
- "France, which gets more than three-quarters of its electricity from nuclear energy, would need to invest somewhere in the vicinity of $544 billion to build new fossil fuel power plants to replace lost generating capacity if it shut down its reactors. That, he said, would have to be financed by a doubling of the price of electricity and would bring a 50 percent increase in France’s greenhouse gas emissions." (And, of course, those fossil fuel power plants seem more likely to kill you than nuclear)
- Cooking in the classroom
- Doesn't sound like a bad idea although how cooking "encourages students to treat each other respectfully" any more than any other subject might is something I'm a bit confused about.