Thursday, May 26, 2005

100 million missing women

Clearly, even Nobel Prize winners such as Amartya Sen (the darling of the Indian leftists) start with a conclusion and force-fit data to support it. Easy then to guilt governments and people with "empirical evidence"

Read on...

Wednesday, May 25, 2005

Taj Mahal

Here are some awesome photos of the Taj contributed by a member of a site I visit regularly. Enjoy!

Monday, May 16, 2005

In defence of Lawrence Summers

Here is a fine article on the controversy, written by one of the most incisive commentators around. I had the "privilege" of being called sexist for having forwarded this article with a positive comment. But my view - that we should all aim for equality of OPPORTUNITY, not equality of OUTCOME - remains unchanged.

Summers Shows World Is Full of Cowards: Michael Lewis

Feb. 24 (Bloomberg) -- Intelligent men have long sensed that the wise course in the face of female fury is to hide until it passes. The tendency to duck and cover isn't a form of respect. It's a form of condescension: Hold your breath long enough and they'll calm down, or move on to another target. In this sense the women outraged over Larry Summers's remarks about women in science are correct to be upset. But they are upset for the wrong reasons. Summers is about the only man in the discussion who has attempted to treat them with respect, by speaking to them as equals, who, he presumed, cared as much as he did about what was true and what was not.

Anyone with an interest in this surprisingly long-running saga -- and I can understand why many might have moved on --should be sure to read the full transcript of Summers's Jan. 14 remarks. (See http://www.president.harvard.edu/speeches/2005/nber.html ).
They are interesting, and not just because they are now famously controversial. They are thoughtful, and, more importantly, designed to stimulate thought.

One thing that seems to separate Summers, who has led Harvard University since 2001, from just about every other university president in the land is that he has the nerve to create discussion. To be interesting.

Avoiding Limelight
The job of running a big prestigious university is a shadow of its former self, and you have to wonder a bit about anyone who would want to do it these days. At the top of the job's requirements is the ability to move through the world, from dawn to dusk, without making too strong an impression on it -- without stirring up any kind of passion at all.

You spend so much time sucking up to people for money, pretending to respect employees because you can't fire them, and avoiding the real, and thus controversial, issues of the greater society, that you must go to sleep at night wondering why you took the job in the first place. Any impulse you might have had toward intellectual leadership -- to grapple seriously with big questions, to fight the fights worth fighting -- you learn to quell.

Using Science
But Summers is different. He can afford to cause a bit of trouble -- in part because he is in full possession of a first- rate mind, in part because Harvard has $23 billion in the bank, in part because he has a track record of accomplishment that includes a stint as U.S. Treasury secretary. And in his speech to the National Bureau of Economic Research's Conference on Diversifying the Science and Engineering Workforce, he makes an interesting suggestion.
Not, as the more hysterical critics want you to believe, that he thinks women are inferior to men. Not that he is convinced women are generally less capable in science and math. What he says -- and his meaning could not be clearer -- is that HE DOES NOT KNOW why women are underrepresented in science. But, he suspects, science itself is trying to tell us something about the problem.

As he put it, ``It does appear that on many, many different human attributes -- height, weight, propensity for criminality, overall IQ, mathematical ability, scientific ability -- there is relatively clear evidence that whatever the difference in means -- which can be debated -- there is a difference in the standard deviation, and variability of a male and female population.''
The ideas floated by Summers might be proved right, or might be proved wrong. What they weren't was intellectually dishonest, or lazy. The president of a great university was examining a social problem seriously, as a man who intended to solve it. His argument is nuanced but the spirit in which he makes it is clear: He is hoping to increase the number of women on science faculties.

Emotion Meets Science
To do that, Summers argues that you must understand the reason for their relative absence, which may not be simply, as a lot of people want badly to believe, a matter of pure sex discrimination.

And yet, a full six weeks later, the collective response from the academy is still captured by Nancy Hopkins, a biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who walked out in the middle of Summers's speech. She couldn't stay and listen, she told the Boston Globe, because if she had, ``I would've either blacked out or thrown up.''

Faced with a question that science might address -- indeed is busy trying to address -- this scientist preferred to respond with pure emotion. She took a scientific hypothesis and turned it into a political weapon. If we lived in a braver world, one in which people were willing to stand up to other self-dramatizing people who long to see themselves as ``victims,'' Professor Hopkins would have become, briefly, a figure of fun, and then been forgotten.
Running for Cover

Instead a lot of people have rallied to her side and done what they needed to make sure she did not suffer another fainting spell. The Harvard faculty has come close to generating a vote of no confidence in Summers. The presidents of Stanford, Princeton and MIT have written a joint letter chastising him (thus keeping the peace with their own faculties). The air is thick with cowardice.

All sorts of people who might have stood up and defended Summers have remained silent. At this point no one cares any longer whether the questions raised by the president of Harvard were interesting or dull, worth investigating or discarding. All that matters now is that Larry Summers is ``controversial.''

A number of people say they worry about the effects of his remarks on girls who might hope one day to become scientists. Never mind that the number of girls who will know of Summers's remarks is now multiplied a thousand times by the noise created by the professors who wish they wouldn't hear them. Any girl thinking of making a career in academe who reads Summers's speech would, I hope, be encouraged that there is still one university president with the guts of a leader. She might even be stimulated to address his questions, scientifically. To contact the writer of this column:

Michael Lewis in Berkeley, California at mlewis1@bloomberg.net.


Saturday, May 14, 2005

send a msg to God - from Slate.com

this is a great article from Slate, written shortly after the Dec 2004 tsunami - avoid it if you are not the agnostic type.

Send a Message to God He has gone too far this time.
By Heather Mac DonaldPosted Monday, Jan. 10, 2005, at 11:59 AM PT

In the wake of the tsunami disaster, it's time for believers to take a more proactive role in world events. It's time to boycott God.

Centuries of uncritical worship have clearly produced a monster. God knows that he can sit passively by while human life is wantonly mowed down, and the next day, churches, synagogues, and mosques will be filled with believers thanking him for allowing the survivors to survive. The faithful will ask him to heal the wounded, while ignoring his failure to prevent the disaster in the first place. They will excuse his unwillingness to stave off destruction with alibis ("God wasn't there when the tsunami hit"—Suketu Mehta) and relativising ("for each victim tens of thousands yet live"—Russell Seitz), even if those excuses contradict God's other attributes, such as omnipresence or love for each individual life.

Where is God's incentive to behave? He gets credit for the good things and no blame for the bad. Former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft is fond of thanking God for keeping America safe since 9/11; Ashcroft never asks why, if God has fended off terrorist strikes since 9/11, he let the hijackers on the planes on the day itself. Was God caught off guard the first time around, like the U.S. government? But he is omniscient and omnipotent.

So slavishly do his worshipers flatter God that they give him credit for things he didn't even do. Let a man rape and murder a child, and it's the man's offense; but if someone tends to the sick or shares his wealth, it's God's hand at work. The Most Rev. Gabino Zavala from the Los Angeles Roman Catholic Archdiocese rejects any suggestion that God forsook the tsunami victims, according to the Los Angeles Times, but he credits God with the subsequent charity: "You can see God in the people's response—how they're reaching out."

It is a sad fact of human relations that unqualified adulation often produces from the adored one contempt and a kick in the chops, rather than gratitude and kindness. Apparently, the same applies to human-divine relations.

So, let the human race play hard to get. Imagine God's discombobulation if, after the next mass slaughter of human life, the hymns of praise and incense do not rise up. He checks the Sunday census; the pews are empty. Week after week, the churches and mosques are unattended; the usual gratitude for his not wiping out even more innocent children does not pour forth.

He starts to worry. Has he gone too far this time? Maybe he should've exercised his much heralded powers of intervention, the same powers that his erstwhile worshipers presupposed every time they prayed for him to cure a cancer victim, or get them into law school.

And so, no longer guaranteed an adoring public, he starts to make nice. He calls back avalanches poised to wipe out whole villages; he brings rain to drought-stricken communities; he cures fatally handicapped babies in the womb, or prevents such flawed conceptions before they happen. He presents tokens of his love to malaria victims and children paralyzed by auto accidents. Africa blooms with peace and prosperity.

It might not work. But the "I'm rotten-You're divine" syndrome isn't too functional, either. It's worth a try; there is nothing to lose.

Heather Mac Donald is the author of Are Cops Racist?