Rotundus.com

Here's an excerpt from The Gender Revolution: Uneven and Stalled, a paper from Stanford's Clayman Institute for Gender Research:

Individualism, encompassing a belief in rights to equal opportunity in access to jobs and education in order to express one’s “true self,” promotes a certain kind of gender egalitarianism. ... To be sure, this ideal has been imperfectly realized, but this type of gender egalitarianism has taken hold strongly. But co-occurring with it, somewhat paradoxically, are strong (if tacit) beliefs in gender essentialism — that men and women are innately and fundamentally different in interests and skills. Almost no men and precious few women, even those who believe in “equal opportunity,” have an explicit commitment to undoing gender differentiation for its own sake.

Google's Self-Driving Car Gets Mixed Reviews

One reporter's experiences with riding in the Google car. I suspect that some of the limitations were due to him actually being a reporter and thus Google operating the car in a more-risk-averse-than-normal manner. Still, there does seem to be some big bugs left to work out as described in the article.

Behavioral economics at Starbucks

"Meantime, though, there’s a way to reduce some of that waste: Charge customers 10 cents for every paper cup they use. As it happens, the company already does just that. It just doesn’t do it in an effective way. ... if Starbucks really wanted to save trees, it wouldn’t offer discounts to people who bring mugs. It would charge a dime to everyone who does not." Of course, as the post also hints at, changing their policy would likely cost them revenue.

In European Crisis, Iceland Emerges as an Island of Recovery

Seems to argue that not adopting the Euro is a key reason why Iceland seems to be recovering more effectively than the Eurozone. Strange then that Iceland is still talking about ditching its currency in favour of the Canadian dollar, when it'd probably have less influence over monetary policy than it would have had if it was participating in the Euro. The article does talk about a lack of investment in businesses as a result of the policies - will have to see what impact these policies have in the longer term.

Does computation threaten the scientific method?

An argument for requiring researchers to release their source code. The interesting bit: "we then performed a reproducibility experiment, which took three years, using the same processed data from eight other companies, the same algorithms in the same programming language, and the same input data, but coded independently. You then get the collage. ... Individually, they all look very convincing but they are significantly different to a geologist, even though they are supposed to be the same. It turned out that these differences are entirely due to latent software defects that have lain hidden, for years in some cases, before being flushed out by this reproducibility experiment." Their figure caption: "Reproducing results gives 9 different answers."

From p. 180 of Stephen Pinker's book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined:

A great principle of moral advancement, on a par with "Love thy neighbor" and "All men are created equal," is the one on the bumper sticker: "Shit happens."

That last principle is one that seems oft forgotten when it comes to public opinions influencing policy.

The trailer from a documentary on the subject of sex-selective abortion / infanticide:

This boy-preference is a phenomena that certain exists in some parts of the world. (Other parts of the world have the opposite girl-preference which you're not too likely to hear about).