Below are the 5 most recent journal entries recorded in evesarena's LiveJournal:

Friday, July 18th, 2008
8:36 pm	I've been reading (off and on) on the women in academic science question. (Namely, why are there so few female science professors, nature or nurture?) Most recently, I read an article about Title IX maybe coming to science and the debate between Steven Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke. Overall, I think my reaction tends to be, thank the gods I'm not in social science, because then I would have to deal with this plethora of contradictory, probably crappy, hideously abundant data all the time. It's kind of like, say, the Bible (no offense everyone): seems like you could find anything you liked in that literature if you looked and stretched hard enough. Though admittedly, Pinker and Spelke made at least one directly contradictory assertion about the data on a specific point. And it's funny, while I'm inclined to agree with Pinker's side (that nature plays a non-zero role in the ratio of male: female science profs) I was also disposed to look for flaws in his arguments, largely because earlier this year I attended a talk by Ben Barres, a transgendered neuroscience prof at Stanford, much of which was a fairly pointed and hostile jab at Steven Pinker, who had somewhat attacked Barres. (for details, see Barres' wikipedia article references) Anyway, he presented interesting and fairly strong evidence to support the hypothesis that there is no aptitude difference between men and women, and that there is bias and discrimination. (which doesn't so much address the point of whether there's a difference in interest. I also encountered an article that suggested that women tend to avoid science not because men are better at it than they are, but because they're better than men at non-science jobs.) And he quoted enough of Pinker to make Pinker look irresponsible or worse in his presentation of data. My own opinion was that Pinker, in the debate I read, was glib but oversimplified badly, making responses that sounded good but assumed negligently. So I guess I agree with with Barres: since Pinker is undoubtedly intelligent, he must be too caught up in ideology or controversy to respect the truth as it deserves. My other main reaction was to the suggestion, supported by some amount of data depending on whom you believe, that women are more likely to prefer working with people over objects than men. And the jobs that are most geared toward the object-oriented? Physics, chemistry, computer science... and I'm thinking, huh, yep, I'm in chemistry, and what's more, I like to work odd hours when nobody's around. Guess I'm just weird like that. Also, I continue to be unconvinced that the people who tend to argue this point, namely social or life scientists, necessarily have the greatest understanding of what it takes to be an excellent hard scientist (not that I know either--let me know if you do!) which is really what the debate is about. (A related note, I'd be interested to compare the hours expected of PhD students in the various fields. My adviser expects 60/wk, which is relatively low for my field.) I suspect hard work is the majority of it, and I'm not at all sure the extreme outlier intelligence is a requirement outside of math or theoretical physics. Nor am I sure that risk-taking, however that breaks down between genders, and I've heard both sides (from, guess who, Barres and Pinker) is a requirement either. Anyway, I'm curious to hear opinions on all this... should science be Title IX'd, so that to get federal funding there must be an equal number of men and women in a department? Any social sci people offended and out for blood? (Comment on this)
Monday, November 13th, 2006
10:35 pm	today's small mystery How the hell can a random government group send email from my account without me knowing? Here's what happened: I'm applying for an NSF graduate fellowship. I gave them my email address and the emails of my recommenders. It told me to click on a button to send emails to my recommenders asking them to submit letters for me. These emails apparently came from my yale account. WTF? Is that possible or allowed? ps, Here's to having the best possible adviser! thank you, Ann! Also, to luck! Because I had to think up a possible graduate thesis project on my own, and just happened to find the perfect paper: preliminary results, of great importance to society, published in 2004 and never followed up, despite the fact that I could imagine some next steps. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, May 14th, 2006
12:44 am	two shows Last night, I saw the Warsaw Village Band. I'm not sure what to say about the music, except that it was pretty odd and I liked it. What I really liked were the outfits. Some publicity photo made them look pretty dowdy. In person, they were perhaps trying less to be seductive than any other musicians I've seen, but they were young and definitely not, well, dowdy. They were all wearing clothing that seemed to have extraneous straps and buckles, but subtly so. Two of the guys wore cargo pants. The guy playing approximately bodhran with a wide martial arts stance and a drum in his face wore a small tambourine dangling from his belt in a harness that reminded me of a linzertorte. I don't know what the purpose of it was (it didn't seem to be designed for a quick draw, and I don't think he ever played it.) The guy playing jazzed up tupan with a cymbal and an optional triangle attachment made of an old drumstick and gaff tape wasn't wearing cargo pants, but had ankle length pieces of fabric with cargo pockets dangling from his belt down the outside of each leg. Perhaps he stored the triangle there, I never saw. The three women wore shapeless clothing with no skin showing and didn't smile, and the waif in the middle came on in a hood with a ruff of back gauze trimmed with silver around her neck. The other two women had wild hair and looked a bit witchy. All three sang staring into space with this weird intense focus while the men quietly rocked out behind them. Between that and the sea-green, chartreuse and red lighting, it was certainly visually memorable. Tonight, I saw another version of All's Well. It had less entertaining Italians than the Yale Rep version (which I recommend), but wins the all-time best use of bananas prize. (Comment on this)
Thursday, March 9th, 2006
6:41 pm	notes from the death march through organic chemistry. (or something.) To all you science folks, and, what the hell, the non-science folks too: An Inquiry Does thermodynamics disturb you? Do you get nightmares about the second law thereof? How many creative works have you encountered (say, plays or novels, probably) in which thermodynamics was portrayed as something to worry about in the dark depressing hours just before dawn? (uhta, the most troubled hours in the Old English day. Is there a more recent poem or something, "the darkest hour is just before dawn"?) I'm thinking of, say, Diane Duane's books, or Tom Stoppard's Arcadia. Do people ever get worked up about this in life, or just in art? (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, January 29th, 2006
1:10 am	another step down the slippery slope Well, I'm not at all sure how this works, but, uhh, hi everyone! I have a livejournal. Wow. Don't expect me to post much. If I do, it'll probably be rants about chemistry or the history of the English language. For instance, guess what neorxenawang means in Old English. Paradise. Does that sound heavenly to you? Where does that word come from, and where did it go? Sorry, not an inspired rant, but it's the weekend, and I'm tired. Maybe they'll get better with practice. Goodnight! that's a lot of mood options. do people ever try to collect them? The one I wanted wasn't there: intrigued. I guess I could type it in, but what the hell, it wasn't that accurate anyway. (1 Comment |Comment on this)