Rotundus.com

Harlem churches see gospel tourist boom on Sundays

"The stern warning issued from the pulpit was directed at the tourists — most of whom had arrived late — a sea of white faces with guidebooks in hand. They outnumbered the congregation itself: a handful of elderly black men and women wearing suits and dresses and old-fashioned pillbox hats."

The Islamic World's Quiet Revolution

"... six of the ten largest declines in fertility in absolute terms for a 20-year decade period in the postwar era have occurred in Muslim-majority countries. What's more, four of the six are Arab countries, while five of the six are in the Middle East. No other region of the world comes close in the sheer speed of its transition. ... Holding income and literacy constant, Muslim-majority countries actually seem to have significantly lower fertility levels than non-Muslim ones."

Subtle sexism common at work, experts say

"Chivalrous acts and compliments on female qualities, like mothering or nurturing, studies show, can be just as damaging to women as more blatant sexism and catcalls." - if someone complains about a lack of chivalry here's something to remind them of.

What's Really Making Us Fat?

"It may not be as simple as calories in, calories out. New research reveals a far more complex equation for weight gain that places at least some of the blame on organic pollutants." - slightly more complex would seem to be a more accurate description judging by the rest of the article. Calorie I/O still seems to account for the bulk of weight changes, but it's not the only thing.

That's the title of an article put out as joint work of folks at Yale and NYU. One of the interesting recommendations:

Just as Western schoolchildren perform fire drills, or learn not to speak to strangers, so should children in war zones be drilled in escape and resistance to misinformation. Just such a grassroots effort was launched by Ugandan civil society, albeit too little and too late. ... In retrospect, more and better education and communication earlier in the conflict could have reduced the effectiveness of LRA abduction. It is difficult to imagine UNICEF or education ministries distributing abduction-training curricula to schools. The policy would be a frank admission of their failure to protect, and politically difficult. Nevertheless, in future conflicts, some institutionalized mechanisms for counter-propaganda, escape training, and other countermeasures ought to be a central part of the governmental and non-governmental response to war.

What do you do when you can't really provide adequate protection? How in that case do you gather the political will to implement such a program?

(HT: The Political Science of Child Soldiering in Africa)

In Italian Food, What's Authentic and Does It Really Even Matter?

"Things change, our palates change and what was new today may become the tradition of tomorrow -- a tradition so ensconced that the minute you think of that cuisine you think of the dish, the way pasta with New World tomato sauce or New World polenta immediately makes you think of Italy." - an essay on authenticity.

Mom Faces Jail for Making Son Walk to School

Admittedly 4.6 miles is a bit of a trek, but "her 10-year-old son had been suspended from the bus for a week and she was making him walk to school as punishment"

Greek Crisis Has Pharmacists Pleading for Aspirin as Drug Supply Dries Up

What do you do about healthcare when the country is broke? Something to think about in regard to the long-term sustainability of current healthcare systems.

A Tale of Two Sex Hormones

Taking testosterone (steroids) to boost performance vs. popping estrogen (in this case birth control pills). Should they be treated differently? "Yet, when one compares this sex hormone, testosterone, to the sex hormone now in the news, estrogen, it is hard to see why, on medical and social grounds alone, the one would be severely restricted and the other so freely dispensed that people are ready, not simply to affirm its legality, but to mandate that people and institutions violate their religious faith to purchase it for women who want it."

Are Western Activists Really Reducing Child Labor?

The short answer: No. They may even be making the situation worse. Read the article for more.

From an article entitled The Prestige Chase Is Raising College Costs:

Richard H. Thaler, a former colleague at Cornell and another contributor to the Economic View column, once remarked about an unsuccessful candidate for a faculty position, “What his résumé lacked was five bad papers.” By that, he meant that while the candidate had published several papers containing enough genuinely important ideas to satisfy any rational hiring committee — more than could be said of most faculty members — he had too few to satisfy the bean counters, who fretted about how uninformed outsiders might react to the appointment.

Researchers have responded as expected to these incentives. But the additional papers they’ve written have added little value. The economist Philip Cook and I found, for example, that in the first five years after publication, many fewer than half of all papers in the two most selective economics journals had ever been cited by other scholars.