Rotundus.com

UND refuses to reopen case of expelled student: Fargo 24-year-old never arrested or charged in sexual assault allegation

In short, the police found that the woman who'd accused this guy of rape had lied and filed criminal charges against her, but the university has rejected the option of hearing an appeal to the expulsion they handed him upon hearing her allegation.

Retiring Boomers Find 401(k) Plans Fall Short

This crowd, incidentally, also makes up a rather large fraction of voters. They seem likely to account for a large fraction of those who don't want cuts to benefits.

Have It Your Way? Purist Chefs Won’t Have It

The opposite of the-customer-is-always-right approach. Assuming that I know the sort of behaviour I'm likely to encounter in a particular place I'm not sure that I've got a massive problem with this. Typically the specialties are likely to be made better anyways.

After CEOs have daughters, women employees’ wages go up

It's a not-yet-published study looking at corporations in Denmark over the course of 12 years: "... when male CEOs had daughters, their female employees' wages went up 1.3 percent while their male employees only gained .8 percent raises. So the birth of a daughter effectively shrunk the male-female wage gap by .5 percent on average." The article notes that (presumably privacy regulations mean) that the same sort of data likely couldn't be obtained for Americans. It does note that previous research found "that U.S. legislators were more likely to vote more liberally on women's reproductive issues if they had daughters." and that having daughters also made parents more likely to adopt feminist attitudes.

TD Economics says mothers who have taken time off for parental leave face a consistent wage gap of about three per cent for every year of absence. The difference is proportionally more severe for mothers who have taken multiple leaves.

... Depreciation of skills is thought to be one factor why mothers who take parental leaves would see smaller salaries, TD said. But economists behind the study also said employers are using the frequency of parental leaves as a signal for how committed women are to their jobs.

Source: The Montreal Gazette

The article also cites TD deputy chief economist Beata Caranci as saying that "The research leads us to conclude that exits from the labour force — most often related to family or motherhood, not gender — are the culprit behind this unexplained wage gap". Yet, I'm not sure how that fits with another study that claims that

Women are more likely than men to leave the labor force within every age cohort. Furthermore, women are more likely than men to leave the labor force for reasons other than family within every age cohort. Therefore the conventional explanation that these differentials in exit behavior are a result of childbearing by women is incomplete.

Source: Anne E. Preston, Why Have All the Women Gone? A Study of Exit of Women from the Science and Engineering Professions, The American Economic Review, Vol. 84, No. 5 (Dec., 1994), pp. 1446-1462

A later article notes that any wage losses actually disappear within a few years, something that I actually find to be a little bit surprising given the comparative lack of work experience in whatever profession they were engaged in. (This isn't intended to claim that being a stay-at-home mom isn't work - it is - but rather that this type of work likely differs quite a bit from the sort of employment that they'd be engaged in outside the home).

Food sold in recycled cardboard packaging 'poses risk'

I'm still a bit skeptical of some forms of recycling. Here's another reason to be cautious: "Researchers found toxic chemicals from [mineral inks from] recycled newspapers had contaminated food sold in many cardboard cartons." This also doesn't yet factor in any negative environmental impacts from the processing, just the health risks to the consumer.

Money, Sex and Happiness: An Empirical Study

A study of 16,000 adults: "The paper finds that sexual activity enters strongly positively in happiness equations. Higher income does not buy more sex or more sexual partners. Married people have more sex than those who are single, divorced, widowed or separated. The happiness-maximizing number of sexual partners in the previous year is calculated to be 1."

Feminist Groups Call Conservative Women 'Nutty' and 'Whores,' Media Ignores

"NOW endorses liberal male candidates over conservative females, despite bemoaning lack of women in politics."

U.S. government funds mosque renovation and rehabilitation around the world

Why be critical of this if you also want tax deductions for donating to any church?

No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make it.

- Simone de Beauvoir