Rotundus.com

That was the title of a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. One thing that's not too surprising reading the article is the list of areas of study of those with Ph.D.s mentioned in the article who are on food stamps:

• medieval-history
• humanities
• English (4x)
• film studies
• communications, performing arts, and the humanities

Basically they seem to be more or less jobs whose employment prospects seem largely limited to working within the academic world.

Then there's the note about the composition of the group - "most of whom are women with children" - which seems to be code for not-science-and-engineering. (Amongst female-majority departments it seems fairly reasonable to exclude biology Ph.D.s from the list of the impoverished).

How bad are things for those with graduate degrees?

Last year, one in six people—almost 50 million Americans, or 15 percent of the population—received food stamps. ... Of the 22 million Americans with master's degrees or higher in 2010, about 360,000 were receiving some kind of public assistance

Converting that later line to a percentage works out to 1.6% of graduate degree holders being on something like food stamps, about 1/10 of the rate in the general population.

I'd guess that a lot of the problems are to do with the change in breakdown of college populations over the past few decades:

Over the past 25 years the total number of students in college has increased by about 50 percent. But the number of students graduating with degrees in science, technology, engineering and math (the so-called STEM fields) has remained more or less constant. Moreover, many of today’s STEM graduates are foreign born and are taking their knowledge and skills back to their native countries.

Maybe there is a limit to the number of English professors a country can realistically support? And with college tuition in the states continuing to climb, it might be enough to get potential English majors to reconsider going to college and stop that cycle, thereby resulting in a glut in the market.

That's the sort of question that a recent article brings forth: NY boy, 13, wants to stay on girls field hockey squad; officials say his skills are too good. What's the boy's argument?

Keeling's fight appears to be a rare example of a young man seeking to take advantage of Title IX, a 40-year-old U.S. government law enacted to provide women equal access to athletic opportunities. There are no boys' high school field hockey teams anywhere on Long Island, or, for that matter, in most of the country.

That seems to be more or less the same arguments used to get women to play on men's teams, although as the article later notes, and as seems to be the case with many an "equality" program, it's not really about equal treatment:

The problem, according to Edward Cinelli, the director of the organization that oversees high school athletics in Suffolk County, is that state education law won't allow it. He cited a provision that says administrators are permitted to bar boys from girls' teams if a boy's participation "would have a significant adverse effect" on a girl's opportunity to participate in interschool competition in that sport. Officials say Keeling's skills are superior to the girls he plays against, creating an unfair advantage.

Saying that you have to suck badly enough to play on a school team sounds like an incredibly bizarre selection criteria.

You could recognize male and female gender differences and keep separate male and female teams, not allowing for players to switch teams, or you can simply eliminate the distinct teams. (Apparently, the International Olympic Committee allows players to switch if they've been on gender hormone treatments for at least two years amidst a few other requirements). Of course eliminating the dual male and female teams would probably lead to women being almost entirely excluded from play (and even more frequently excluded from winning). However it seems the only real way to achieve "equal" treatment in the manner suggested by both this boy's case and the more common female-playing-on-male-team.

On a somewhat related note, the article Interlopers Run Amok: Guys Crash Road Races for Women:
They Come in First, Are Dissed at Finish; For Meeting Fit Females, 'It's Hard to Beat' is a fairly amusing read. I'm somewhat amused by crazy races like the French Marathon du Medoc in which participation involves racing in costume from one wine-tasting to the next along a marathon route (and maybe one of these years I'll even be crazy enough to try it), but I don't think I'd ever want to race the Disney's Princess Half Marathon which the aforementioned Wall Street Journal article opens with.

Barack Obama speaks out and declares support for same-sex marriage - no real surprise there. I'm not sure what to make of the following sentence of the article though:

Obama said he had long supported civil unions but his position on same-sex marriages had been evolving because of the powerful traditions and religious beliefs attached to the word marriage.

My personal view is that given government acceptance and support of common-law relationships combined with the current state of family law and no-fault divorce the government has de-facto been out of the marriage business for some time - reserving only the term. If this is listed as due to "religious beliefs" attached to the terms why not let the religious institutions deal with whatever they want to call marriage and instead get the government out of the marriage business?

Mice That Eat Yogurt Have Larger Testicles

This was a follow-up to a study that suggested that "yogurt, more than any other food, helped to prevent age-related weight gain." Interestingly the yogurt-eating "animals had 10 times the active follicle density of other mice." And as the title of the article suggests they also found a few other things of interest.

Africa’s Child Health Miracle: The Biggest, Best Story in Development

"New statistics show that the rate of child death across sub-Saharan Africa is not just in decline—but that decline has massively accelerated, just in the last few years." (HT: MR)

AT&T Chief Regrets Offering Unlimited Data for iPhone

"Mr. Stephenson said he worried about services that could replace the company’s own offerings. For example, free Internet-based messaging services like Apple’s iMessage are eating into the company’s revenue from text messages. ... Mr. Stephenson added that Skype, the Internet-based phone service, was becoming a more viable voice service as data networks improved, which also poses a threat." Perhaps these should be seen more as a sign that the charges for specific services should be in line with the costs to actually provide said services rather than one type of service effectively subsidizing another? (Although for cell minutes vs. Skype, the call placed via the voice network rather than the data centre is probably better able to handle a poor connection due to the quality of service features built in).

The Maritimes have no business in show business

"In 2008, [the film] industry generated a negative direct gross domestic product (GDP) in New Brunswick. You didn’t read that wrong. For every dollar of industry output, the GDP created in New Brunswick was a negative $0.16. ... Driving this negative GDP was the fact there was 76 cents worth of government subsidies on products and production in the industry for every dollar worth of direct output."

Does temporary foreign workers program create second class of labourers?

I can't say that I object to quite a bit of immigration, but paying such workers 15% below market rates as this legislation does seems rather questionable.