There is an unfortunate stigma attached to frozen meat, a widely held assumption that it’s inferior to fresh meat. This prejudice runs deep enough that fast-food chain Wendy’s tried to capitalize on it in 2008 with a promise that its burger meat was “Always fresh, never frozen.”
MARCH 8th was International Women’s Day. That seemed to Elsevier, an academic publisher, a good occasion to publish a report looking at the numbers and performance of female scientists around the world. The report, “Gender in the Global Research Landscape”, analysed the authorship of more than 62m peer-reviewed papers published in 27 subject areas over the past 20 years, in 11 mostly rich countries and in the European Union as a whole. The papers and their citations are indexed in Scopus, a database that is run by Elsevier.
In the EU, and in eight of the 11 countries considered, the share of women authors grew from about 30% in the late 1990s to about 40% two decades later. Brazil and Portugal are closest to equality, each just a percentage point shy of it. In Japan, by contrast, barely a fifth of researchers are female—a fact that may reflect the particularly uncool image science has among Japanese schoolgirls.
Women are best represented in subjects related to health care. In nursing and psychology, for example, they outnumber men in several countries, including America and Britain. Less than a quarter of researchers who publish papers in the physical sciences are women. Perhaps as a consequence of this, inventors who register patents are still almost all men. In the places covered by the report the share of patent applications by women ranges from 8% of those filed in Japan to 26% in Portugal. Women are, however, making progress, even in the still-male-heavy world of engineering. Though they constitute only between 10% and 32% of authors of papers in that field in the places the report looks at, the share of those papers in which a woman is the lead author is between 35% and 52%.
All of this is qualified good news. Women do, nevertheless, still suffer from a “leaky pipeline” phenomenon that sees them drop out of scientific careers at a higher rate than men do. At Imperial College, London, regarded by many as Britain’s leading technological university, about 35% of undergraduates are women. But that percentage falls with each step up the career ladder. At the moment, only 15% of Imperial’s professors are women.
Partly, this stems from the fact that when those professors were undergraduates the sex ratio was even worse. But it also reflects the problem of career-building which women face in all areas, not just science. Even in the most progressive countries, they still shoulder the lion’s share of child care and housework. Boosting their numbers in the laboratory will take more than merely convincing girls that science is cool.
President Trump fails to provide evidence that Barack Obama wiretapped him, Hasan Minhaj and Roy Wood Jr. announce Third Month Mania, and Lee Daniels discusses "Star."
The treatment of the ubiquitous correspondent on Korea being interrupted by his children was great. The interview with Lee Daniels brought up some interesting paradoxes about race in America which aren’t commonly discussed.
Trevor and Jordan Klepper sing to "forgotten" Americans, Team Trump threatens to erase climate data, and Alynda Segarra discusses Hurray for the Riff Raff's "The Navigator."
Poignant, but not as strong an episode as usual. I was thinking that Jordan was a horrible washboardist and was shocked that it came back as a topic in the interview. I hope Segarra’s album is awesome, in some sense to make up for my total disinterest in her interview. I sampled some of her music and Spotify and it’s just not my cup of tea.
For Pi day, right? Massive line with news crew though. If rather be at Complex Analysis.
Apparently this is the place to be on Pi Day–the line is clear down the block!
Stopping by the local mini branch and there’s an exciting storyteller with balloons. A fully grown woman amazed a bunch of 1-8 year olds with the ability to climb into a 6 foot yellow balloon and carefully escape. In a terrifically tiny branch library, how can you not but pay attention to 20 kids chanting, cheering, clapping, and generally recreating the sounds of a hurricane from a storybook? It was better than anything I might have otherwise watched on TV tonight.
Annie Bannanie at story hour
Annie Bannanie and Dr. Electric
Annie Bannanie and the 6 foot balloon and the leaf blower
📖 Read pages 55 – 86 of 776 of Learning PHP, MySQL & JavaScript with JQUERY, CSS & HTML5 by Robin Nixon
I’ve been promising myself that I would do some brushing up on programming skills this year and this seems like a fairly reasonable text with some simple examples.
Papa Fred re-enacting a photo from more than 40 years ago.
Exterior of Mijares Mexican Restaurant
A great way to make an entrance to a room: with Mariachis!
I caught some audio of the singing of Happy Birthday as well as a serenade by the Mariachis at Mijares. Apologies in advance for the poor audio quality in a relatively loud and busy room, but it’ll give a small flavor and reminder of the party
The son of a German General becomes part of a mysterious conspiracy to gain hidden Nazi funds.
Directed by John Frankenheimer. With Michael Caine, Anthony Andrews, Victoria Tennant, Lilli Palmer.
I expected far better than this from Frankenheimer and Caine. I didn’t realize until after watching it that it was made in the mid 1980’s. It plays far more like a 70’s plot including the music and the cinematography. I’ve not read the Robert Ludlum novel, though I suspect as is the case for others in his canon that the book was far better than the film version, particularly for late 70’s/early 80’s material.
I watched this as a poorly cropped and overly letterboxed version on Amazon Prime, so the quality was certainly lacking from that perspective.
While there was a reasonable amount of suspense throughout, it’s not the directing that creates the ride, but really the liberally applied music which, while not great, was probably the best part of the experience. Those interested in what sound can do for a plot should study this piece.
In all, the plot was a muddy and convoluted and didn’t play itself out well at all. Tom Cruise’s first Mission Impossible was clearer. Frankenheimer had a few nice films, but it’s middling fare like this that squarely peg him as passable journeyman for most of his career.
Caine had one or two nice quips in the picture and was serviceable, but didn’t have quite the personality that shines through in many other pictures. The overall cast was great, they just weren’t given much in terms of plot or dialogue.
Some of the highlight quotes for me:
[Spotting a car tailing them]
Noel Holcroft: Probably just another Sunday driver. But on the other hand, as it is Tuesday, why don’t you put your foot on the gas and see what happens.
Noel Holcroft: May I suggest, that it is extremely difficult for a man, in a gray flannel suit, to behave naturally, while riding on a horse in the middle of the night, waiting for someone to shoot at you!
Leighton: Oh, dear, oh, dear. Assumption, Mr. Holcroft, is, as they say in my profession, the mother of fuck-up.
Leighton: Naughty, naughty, Mr. Holcroft. You mustn’t speak to strangers. Could be harmful to the health.
Leighton: There’s a lot of villainous characters lurking about. I’m glad to say that most of them are mine.
Noel Holcroft: I have a friend who lives in the country, and it’s supposed to be an hour from 42nd Street. A lie! The only thing that’s an hour from 42nd Street is 43rd Street!
