Links - 17th June 2019 (2)

'Gender gap in STEM'? Women are majority of STEM grad students and they earn a majority of STEM bachelor's degrees - "according to several measures, women are actually slightly over-represented in STEM graduate programs and earn a majority of STEM college degrees. A lot depends on how we define “Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM)”... If the CGS category “Health and Medical Sciences” is included as a STEM field (e.g., graduate degrees in Nursing, Kinesiology, Occupational Therapy, Health Sciences, Physical Therapy, Physician Assistant, Pharmaceutical Sciences, Nutrition Sciences, Environmental Health, Audiology, etc., see Appendix D “Taxonomy of Fields of Study”) there are slightly more women currently enrolled in STEM graduate programs (335,346) in the US (master’s and doctoral degrees) than men (326,846).... In a 2014 report, the Bureau of Labor Statistics included “Health Occupation” jobs as one of its categories for “STEM Employment in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) occupational groups,” and that group had the largest number of STEM jobs among the four main occupational groups in May 2013... from 2004 to 2014. In total during that 11-year period, more women (2,924,660) earned bachelor’s degrees in science and engineering fields than men (2,890,904) in the academic fields the NSF defines as “Science and Engineering”: Agricultural sciences, Biological sciences, Computer science, Earth/atmospheric/ocean sciences, Engineering, Mathematics/statistics, Physical sciences, Psychology, and Social sciences... If there is any “national crisis that will be deeply detrimental to America’s global competitiveness,” I think y0u could make a stronger case that it’s a crisis related to the declining share of college degrees earned by men and the persistent and increasing “college degree gap” favoring women than any “crisis” related to a female gender gap in only certain STEM fields like computer science and engineering."

OLPC’s $100 laptop was going to change the world — then it all went wrong - "The $100 laptop would have all the features of an ordinary computer but require so little electricity that a child could power it with a hand crank. It would be rugged enough for children to use anywhere, instead of being limited to schools. Mesh networking would let one laptop extend a single internet connection to many others. A Linux-based operating system would give kids total access to the computer — OLPC had reportedly turned down an offer of free Mac OS X licenses from Steve Jobs. And as its name suggested, the laptop would cost only $100, at a time when its competitors cost $1,000 or more... OLPC pushed the laptop’s cost to a low of $130, but only by cutting so many corners that the laptop barely worked. Its price rose to around $180, and even then, the design had major tradeoffs... As OLPC’s full-scale launch slipped to 2007, and its $100 price tag faded away, Intel shipped the first Classmate PCs to Brazil and Mexico... Bender thinks OLPC might have struck more deals if it had focused less on technical efficiency. “Every conversation we ever had with any head of state — every time — they said, ‘Can we build the laptop in our country?’” he says. “We knew that by making the laptop in Shanghai, we could build the laptop [to be] much less expensive. And what we didn’t realize was that the price wasn’t what they were asking us about. They were asking us about pride, not price. They were asking us about control and ownership of the project.” OLPC had created a computer that could withstand dust and drops, but it hadn’t accounted for political messiness... Ames says the real question isn’t whether laptop programs help students, but whether they’re more effective than other programs competing for the same money."
Why TED talks should all have followups in a few years about whether their promises came true

Cancer researchers may have accidentally found genetic cure for baldness - "When the cells were removed in mice, they became bald. And deleting a gene in the cells turned the mice hair white.Associate Professor of Dermatology Dr. Lu Le at UT Southwestern Medical Center said: “Although this project was started in an effort to understand how certain kinds of tumors form, we ended up learning why hair turns gray and discovering the identity of the cell that directly gives rise to hair.”"

Daring underwater porn star shoot goes horribly wrong when SHARK takes a bite out of her foot - "Plucky Molly Cavalli donned a barely-there one-piece swimsuit to film a 'shark cage' promo for adult entertainment company Camsoda."

Husband reveals he slept with his wife's dead body in their bedroom for SIX DAYS after she lost cancer battle - and says everyone should do it - "A GRIEVING husband who slept next to his wife's dead body in their bedroom for six days says he couldn't bear to see her taken off to a mortuary in a bodybag.Letting agent Russell Davison's wife Wendy died at their home in Derby after a ten-year battle with cervical cancer... Wendy, 50, was diagnosed with cervical cancer in 2006 - just after the couple's joint 40th birthday - and was told three years ago she had six months to live.But she shunned chemotherapy and radiotherapy and embraced "natural health", Russell said."

Historian Levi Roach on the global activity of the Vikings | History Extra Podcast - History Extra - "They probably are quite warlike. But there's no indication that these early contacts suggests that they're more warlike than anyone else. And it's a famous early medieval saying that if a Frank is your neighbor, he is not your friend. And this led one modern scholar to point out quite rightly that for most Europeans of at least continental Europe in the early Middle Ages, the Franks were the real Vikings, that they were raiding across their borders. We know that kind of border raids, and cattle raiding is endemic and all sorts of things. That's probably what offers dyke [Ed: ???] between England and Wales and tend to stop...
One of the things that makes the Vikings seems scarier, if you will, to go back to some of these ideas we have of them being more violent and more aggressive. It's probably less than they actually were than they seem scarier than other Christians doing these things. And that they were willing to do things that Christians wouldn't, they were happier to sack churches, they were happier to ignore a saint, to attack on a Saint's feast day or on Christmas or things like this. So they're not playing by the standard rules. But the sense is that once they settle they fairly quickly start doing so because it's actually in their own interest to integrate in terms into the local socio political scene...
[In 1066 for the invasion] They’re French-speakers. In fact, the English sources just call them French, they don't really see them as being distinctively Viking, although the Normans are aware of this, and the idea and the myth remains of these kinds of origins, they’re quite proud of it. But by 1066 that’s long since"

Historian Jonathan Fennell on Soldiers During WW2 | History Extra Podcast - History Extra - "In the middle of the Normandy campaign, a lot of stuff written in the British army in Normandy, and there's a sense of, kind of mid July that the troops are utterly exhausted. And this comes through in censorship reports. And so very quickly, senior commanders start to get welfare amenities to the continent. And so one week, you have a letter saying, no one's had a shower in weeks... we’re running out of cigarettes. And no one has clean clothes... morale is terrible. And then the following week, you see, they have all these things and morale has bounced back. So you do see this kind of em, this dynamic interaction between command and the ordinary soldier, when the censorship summaries report that things are problematic, almost always about a week later, or two weeks later, you see that that problem has been fixed in that unit... one of the things that they really tried to stress at the start of the Normandy campaign was to bring censors over with the initial landings, because the commanders want to know what the troops were experiencing. And they recognize that morale matters. So how do you assess morale, get the censors in...
The closer to danger, I say combat… that these soldiers are during the war, the more left leaning their vote tends to be. So New Zealand airmen taking greater risks with their life over the skies of Europe in 1943 are more likely to vote for the New Zealand Labour Party than a New Zealander training in Canada to fly a plane, or a New Zealander training back home in New Zealand to learn how to fight. So it's quite consistent. And I guess it does appear to be a very consistent set of experiences across the Commonwealth"

Professor Tom Devine on the Scottish Clearances | History Extra Podcast - History Extra - "So here you have this extraordinary development, that by the middle decades of the 19th century, to external observers, at least, a society which was even more industrialized than England, by the census of 1851. In 1851, 41.6% of English men were employed in mining or manufacturing. In Scotland, it was 43%. That made Scotland the most industrialized society on Earth, in the middle decades of the 19th century"

Was I Right to Call the Cops on a Black Man Breaking Into a Car? - The New York Times - "The federal government, in 2016, warned that a blanket policy against providing housing to people with criminal records could violate the Fair Housing Act, because of its disparate impact on minority applicants... most sex offenders, so far as we can tell, don’t reoffend; and there are good reasons to be wary of sex-offender registries, which arguably increase homelessness among former offenders without seeming to reduce recidivism"
Maybe it's racist to send black people to prison

The Future Is Here, and It Features Hackers Getting Bombed – Foreign Policy - "After blocking a cyberattack that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said was launched by operatives working on behalf of the militant group Hamas, the IDF carried out an airstrike in Gaza targeting the building in which the hackers worked, partially destroying it. The strike appears to be the first time that a nation’s military has responded in real time to a cyberattack with physical force."

Think College Is Expensive? Wait Until It’s Free - "The college-for-all crowd maintains that in addition to increasing a person’s earning potential, university experience has positive spillover effects that are important but hard to quantify. College students make new friends and enjoy new experiences. College graduates are better communicators, commit fewer crimes, and supposedly make more-informed political choices. Increased college attendance is also supposed to promote upward mobility and meritocracy—the American dream. The more college graduates, the better, right? And if the college-educated make our society more prosperous in the long run, what’s wrong with increasing government subsidies to cover everyone’s tuition costs? Well, plenty, according to Richard Vedder, an economic historian at Ohio University whose new book on higher education, “Restoring the Promise,” is due out later this year. It’s a follow-up to his 2004 tome, “Going Broke by Degree,” and it argues that federal subsidies aren’t the solution to rising college costs—quite the opposite... college costs have risen whenever student aid was made more generous. He doesn’t expect it to be any different this time. Tuition is only about 20% of the total cost of attending college. If tuition is subsidized, he expects colleges will raise nontuition costs... "a majority of people going to college are not poor. Even at state universities, a majority of the students are from moderately affluent, upper-middle-class families.”... “Forty percent of our kids who go to college don’t graduate. We have a tremendous dropout rate, much bigger than the high-school dropout rate. These kids are saddled with a certain amount of debt and their earnings prospects are barely equal to that of a high-school grad.”... there’s a strong case that the country is already being flooded with college graduates. Even with an unemployment rate below 4%, the number of college graduates is growing faster than the number of jobs requiring a degree"