Signs & portents

The Times has released their rankings of the world reputation for various universities. The news is rather depressing.

Overall, the US continues to dominate the rankings, with seven of the top 10 places and a total of 76 institutions in the top 200 – one more than last year and 45 more than any other nation. The UK has 31 representatives, followed by the Netherlands with 12.

But the US’ dominance of the rankings masks a picture of decline.

Although the US ultra-elite at the summit of the rankings have generally managed to consolidate their positions – with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology rising two places to fifth and the University of California, Berkeley moving from 10th to ninth – many more American institutions fell than climbed the table.

“If you only give a casual glance at the top 200, you’re likely to think it’s just a round-up of the usual suspects,” says Ruby. “Yes, many of the big names of US higher education head the list – the ‘super-brands’ still dominate, and they will continue to do so while they attend to core business and protect their image as elite research-based institutions.

“But when you look more closely, most of the flagship US public universities are slipping down.”

How can this be? Slipping? Us? I believe it.

And that’s exactly what’s been happening, according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. Public universities and colleges in nearly every state have seen their state funding decline sharply. Nationwide, states are on average spending 28 percent less this year than they did in 2008, a decrease of $2,353 per student. As a result, colleges and universities have had to raise tuition, make changes that undermine educational quality, or usually both.

Not surprisingly, the changing position of American universities mirrors the larger political economy of the United States: a few “super-brands” at the top (which educate the sons and daughters of the world’s elite) continue to stay at the top while most of the others (which are supposed to educate the children of the American working-class) are falling behind, both nationally and internationally.

Meanwhile, our Republican masters will consider all this a good thing, and propose more cuts to put those eggheads in their place, and consider more demands to include religious dogma in our science classes, and replace objective sources of information with more right-wing think tanks that give them the answers they want to hear.

Fascinating logic

Manboobz finds an explanation for the shortage of women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields. It’s because women are inferior, of course. It’s written by a guy going by the name “IHaveALargePenis”, which just screams academic authority.

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So what’s the problem for women? Many jobs require discipline and stamina.

Many fields have horrible deadlines and any person not finishing their work on time can slow an entire project and become the weakest link. When you’re holding up something that thousands of people are working on, relying on, etc and they’re all waiting for you, not fun. Additionally you’ll be pushed to do overtime, heavy overtime. When it comes to software development for example, in the last few months leading up to release, you’ll be better off bringing extra clothes and a sleeping bag to work. This can apply to virtually all other fields in different ways for different reasons.

OK, that’s nice. As someone who teaches in a STEM field, however, my experience has been that the women, in general, are more likely to be responsible and get their work done on time than men (this is a broad generalization, of course: some women are slackers, some men are meticulous and focused). Somehow IHaveALargePenis thinks the demands of a field predispose it to favor men, when I’d suggest the opposite is true.

But then, men must be just plain smarter than women?

Women and men study differently. Women are great and memorizing but don’t focus on understanding. This is why there’s a relatively equal amount of girls/boys in STEM the first year, but then it significantly favors the boys as time passes. The problem is that women do great on tests, but don’t bother to understand that knowledge, which is fairly important later on and everything you learn will be used in the future (as you move from first to 4th year). This is why girls have been doing better (or so it seems) ever since standardized tests.

Errm, I don’t do standardized tests. In fact, quite the opposite: as students progress from the multiple choice/short answer tests I give to first year students to their senior year, I rely increasingly on open-ended essay tests and take-home exams so that I can better evaluate their deeper understanding. Women do just fine on such exams. In fact, my upper level courses are packed with women, they’re always the majority, and when I look at my grade distributions, women sort out towards the top of the class.

I’m a little confused, though: IHaveALargePenis first claims that STEM curricula favor men over women, but that women are favored by the standardized tests he claims are in use. Which is it?

At this point, IHaveALargePenis’s neurons must have been exhausted, because he lapses into even more degenerate idiocy.

What exactly is there to attack? There’s 50% more women in college than men. Women have infiltrated every major out there outside of STEM. Do you know how HUGE STEM is? Let me tell you how huge it is. Go look up any non STEM focused University out there (MIT or Standord) and check the faculty for STEM or other majors. You’ll find out quickly that the entire STEM curriculum has fewer faculty than a single major like business.

So the source of his argument for the inferiority of women in STEM is basically that there are more men than women in the field, therefore women must have less aptitude. But now he claims that there are many more women in college than men (although I think his 50% is off; my university is a liberal arts college, which historically tends to attract more women, and we have roughly a 60:40 distribution of women:men). Doesn’t that imply by his own reasoning that women must be smarter than men?

I hate to inform IHaveALargePenis of a fact that might cause some shrinkage for him, but we also have more women than men in our biology and chemistry disciplines, although physics and math are still male-dominated; computer science here is interesting because we have more women than men on the faculty. The trends are all going in a way that IHaveALargePenis is going to find very uncomfortable: enrollments by women in STEM are going up, relatively. If I thought like IHaveALargePenis does, I’d have to conclude that men are dumber than women, and getting dumber year by year (fortunately, I don’t think like he does).

I don’t even understand his last point — it makes no sense at all. Since when are MIT and “Standord” [sic] non-STEM focused? What does the size of the faculty in different disciplines have to do with his issues? I can tell you that the math discipline at my university has more faculty than the psychology discipline does, but far fewer majors…and that’s because math has to teach service courses that provide classes to students across many disciplines.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there were more business than science faculty at some universities — business is a popular major. So? What does that have to do with the relative merits of men’s and women’s brains?

I’m afraid that IHaveALargePenis must learn to focus on understanding, rather than spewing words on a page. Perhaps the fact that he has a penis indicates that he also has some mental deficiencies? I’m going to give his paper an F.

Knowledge is not a business

This summary of the corruption of higher ed strikes a chord with me.

In their Fall 2012 article in Dissent, Aaron Bady and Roosevelt Institute Fellow Mike Konczal reveal what higher education used to mean and how it was systematically destroyed. Bady and Konczal transport us to 1950s-’60s California, where bipartisan support for a University of California system built the state into a land of prosperity and innovation, a burgeoning middle class sent its children to college for free, and progressive Republicans happily funded education to support inclusion and social mobility for California’s next generation. In 1960, the Donahoe Act, or the Master Plan for Higher Education, represented California’s commitment to educate anyone who wanted to be educated. Despite the concurrent trends of racism, sexism, and American imperialism that pervaded that era, California’s higher education system was a golden example of what America could achieve.

So what happened? Where did it go? In 1966, Ronald Reagan was elected Governor of California and began dismantling the promising work of the past 20 years. Previously, admission had been free, except for a few relatively small fees, but the Reagan government lifted regulations on how much schools could charge in fees, allowing costs to skyrocket. Also, incentives were created for colleges to accept out-of-state students, who would pay higher fees. Both of these strategies shifted the financial responsibility for higher education onto students rather than the state. The process of culturally redefining higher education as not a right, or a public good, but an investment, subject to the whims of the marketplace and corporate capitalism, had begun.

Oh, also…goddamn you, Ronald Reagan, I wish there were a hell so you’d be burning in it.

But weren’t their brains “pretty much normal”?

Brains develop; they go through a process of change and refinement that is dependent on interactions with the environment. As ought to be obvious, then, brains are going to be exquisitely sensitive to their inputs. This state suggests all kinds of interesting experiments we’d like to perform on human fetuses and infants — except that good scientists also pay heed to ethical constraints. Other social institutions may lack such inhibitions, though, and go out and do the experiments for us: witness the case of Romanian orphanages.

Romania has had orphanages for centuries. But its orphan crisis began in 1965, when the communist Nicolae Ceaușescu took over as the country’s leader. Over the course of his 24-year rule, Ceaușescu deliberately cultivated the orphan population in hopes of creating loyalty to — and dependency on — the state. In 1966, he made abortion illegal for the vast majority of women. He later imposed taxes on families with fewer than five children and even sent out medically trained government agents — ‘The Menstrual Police’ — to examine women who weren’t producing their quota. But Ceaușescu’s draconian economic policies meant that most families were too poor to support multiple children. So, without other options, thousands of parents left their babies in government-run orphanages.

By Christmas day in 1989, when revolutionaries executed Ceaușescu and his wife by firing squad, an estimated 170,000 children were living in more than 700 state orphanages. As the regime crumbled, journalists and humanitarians swept in. In most institutions, children were getting adequate food, hygiene and medical care, but had woefully few interactions with adults, leading to severe behavioural and emotional problems. A handful of orphanages were utterly abhorrent, depriving children of their basic needs. Soon photos of dirty, handicapped orphans lying in their own excrement were showing up in newspapers across the world.

Efforts to correct this situation were hampered by the mythology of the government that the deplorable state of these childrens was not caused by institutionalization, but that the ill, weak, mentally retarded children were placed there because of their prior condition. This wasn’t just an opportunity to explore the effects of early socialization on children’s development, but also an ethical obligation to determine the causes of their problems.

This is how the Bucharest Early Intervention Project was launched, a study that tries to examine how social neglect affects children placed in Romanian state orphanages. The answers were obvious, despite state denials: we’ve known for years, at least since the work on Harlow’s monkeys, that the primate brain needs extensive interaction with responsive and caring conspecifics to mature properly. And that’s what they’re finding: these poor desperate children have been damaged and are suffering thanks to long-term policies of social impoverishment.

What they found was unsurprising: children’s brains can be harmed by growing up in the harrowing setting of a state orphanage (read the full story to get the picture of just how awful these particular orphanages could be):

In the Hilton Hotel in Bucharest, with representatives from several Romanian ministries and the US ambassador in attendance, the researchers reported that, as expected, the 136 children who started in institutions tended to have diminished growth and intellectual ability compared with controls who had never lived outside of a family. But there was a surprising silver lining. Children who had been placed in foster care before the age of two years showed significant gains in IQ, motor skills, and psychological development compared with those who stayed in the orphanages.

Oh, and were their brains “pretty much normal”? Nope. You have to be very careful interpreting MRI data, but they got some dismaying results.

As the children got older, the researchers gave them brain scans (renting out time with a private clinic’s MRI machine, one of only a handful in the country). These scans showed that, at around the age of eight, the children who grew up in institutions have less white matter, the tissue that links up different brain regions, compared with those in foster care. The researchers looked at the children’s genomes, too, and found that those who lived the longest in orphanages tend to have the shortest telomeres, the caps on the end of chromosomes that are related to lifespan.

It’s a depressing story, not just because the fate of these children is so sad, but because the availability of strong scientific data that explains what needs to be done to correct the problem seems to be affecting government social policy very, very slowly or not at all.

Bugchicks?

It’s a good cause. Send two young women around the country to play with bugs for our entertainment.

Follow us as we film the incredible insects and spiders of America! This coast-to-coast journey will take place with a vintage sofa that will be placed in different ecosystems across the country. At each stop we will inspire you to “get off the couch” to explore America’s backyard wilderness and the most diverse animals on the planet….

We specialize in fun, quirky educational videos. Nature programming has been leaning toward fear and myth lately, which we find alarmingly sad. The natural world is mind-blowing; we don’t really need to embellish it.

Oh, yeah, there are a few cable tv networks that once upon a time were all about educating us entertainingly and have since abandoned all pretense. Let’s hope the Bugchicks don’t follow suit and create a program about Nazi ghost bugs deposited in pawn shops and hoarder piles by UFOs.

No, they won’t! This is going to be cool!

Obvious poll is obvious

A poll in Kentucky is asking…

Should state science education standards require the teaching of evolution?

Yes 60%

No 36%

I don’t know 3%

The answer is that if you want to be prepared to attend a good university, or it you want to be an informed citizen of the world, yes, you should be taught evolution in high school. If your dream job is selling popcorn for minimum wage at Ken Ham’s Ark Park* for the rest of your life, you’re probably OK without it.

*Note: Ark Park jobs currently don’t exist, and probably never will.

For the children

If patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels, that implies that there are others; god is a common one, since no one can gainsay you if you claim that an invisible inaudible superbeing told you what to do. But the very worst, the most contemptible, the most cowardly hiding place for rascals and swindlers and liars is ducking down behind the backs of children.

David Cameron, the UK Prime Minister, has announced sweeping new censorship rules applied by default to the internet in the UK. I had no idea you people on the other side of the pond were electing such sanctimonious prigs. But he dredged out all the familiar pretexts and buzz words for imposing “family-friendly filters” on everyone. (Warning to everyone: when a politician uses the word “family”, they always mean their version of family, which is usually white, middle-class or better, and patriarchal. A single black woman raising three kids, or a pair of homosexual men with a child, or a whole clan of an extended family raising sons, daughters, nephews and nieces under one roof do not count as “family”, but are instead aberrations that must be remolded into a conventional form.)

He said: “I want to talk about the internet, the impact it is having on the innocence of our children, how online pornography is corroding childhood.

“And how, in the darkest corners of the internet, there are things going on that are a direct danger to our children, and that must be stamped out.

“I’m not making this speech because I want to moralise or scaremonger, but because I feel profoundly as a politician, and as a father, that the time for action has come. This is, quite simply, about how we protect our children and their innocence.”

You are a moralizing scaremonger, you ass.

I am so tired of hearing “innocence” touted as a virtue; it’s always used as a synonym for ignorance. These people treat experiences and novelty and adventure as “corroding childhood”, when that’s what childhood is — exposure to a great big complicated world where everything is new and the unusual is to be savored and the forbidden is begging to be exposed. Every kid’s goal is to be “corrupted”…that is, to become an adult and to have exciting new opportunities. Some of that involves sex. If you really want to skew children’s views of the sexual world, bring them up with the idea that it’s a filthy, dangerous horror that needs to be walled away from curious minds.

I’m sure Cameron remembers growing up in a world without the internet; I know I do. Does he remember buddies smuggling pages torn out of Playboy so school, and everyone huddling over them at recess? How about the myths about sex kids told each other on street corners? Reading National Geographic for the photos that showed exotic women with bare breasts? We weren’t innocent then, and we were struggling frantically to lose what little innocence we had.

With my kids, who grew up with the internet, we were totally open: they all got hand-me-down computers from me as soon as they were old enough to type, and one year I gave my oldest boy the present of a big spool of CAT-5 and connectors and a crimping tool, and he wired up all the household computers so everyone could get the internet in their bedrooms (this was before wi-fi was commonplace). We had no restrictions on their access, and we also respected their privacy; we didn’t snoop, we didn’t ask, we didn’t monitor, we didn’t control. I suspect they all ran across porn intentionally or accidentally, yet somehow, they all grew up to be decent, moral, sensible human beings.

Yet, when these bluenoses decide to protect children from “direct danger”, they go after the internet. Hey, how about doing something about the fact that one in six children lives in poverty, or that thousands of London children are malnourished, or that 5% have been victims of child sexual abuse? Or how about the fact that American drone strikes are causing horrific civilian casualties, killing children as well as terrorists? Those are stories that really corrode childhood, that demolish innocence and trust.

But maybe that’s the next step. After you’ve established that you can censor breasts and penises from the internet, it’s an easy transition to eliminating stories about priests raping children (that’s pornographic, after all), and then cutting out those embarrassing stories about starving children with neglect, and then government policies that lead to the murder of children? Why, horrors, we can’t let the kiddies know about those! It’ll give them nightmares!

If you’re really serious about protecting children, the formula is to foster their creativity, encourage them to be independent, teach them to explore and learn, and also provide them with security so they have a refuge they can voluntarily enter when they need to. Children brought up in a dark box learn to live in a dark box. Children brought up in the light learn to illuminate the world.

Mississippi madrasas…with a poll

The reminiscences of right-wing kooks are so very different from mine.

As a young child I remember very vividly reciting the Pledge of Allegiance and also morning prayer. When you talk about the “good old days” those are visions that come to my mind.  Of course those are things that have been taken away but Mississippi has decided otherwise.

I remember vividly how as a young child my school forced me to sit through the droll anecdotes of that old chucklehead, Paul Harvey. The first year I was just stupefied; gradually I came to despise that voice and its smug moralisms. For some reason, the public schools all thought the affected mannerisms of a conservative snake oil salesman were perfectly appropriate to blast at students every goddamned day.

Don’t get me started on the pledge of allegiance. I started out reciting that thing when I was very young, but got progressively annoyed at the very first line, once my vocabulary was good enough to know what the words meant: I’m pledging allegiance to a flag? WTF? I wasn’t even an atheist yet when I decided that was nonsense, and every morning I’d rise, put my hand on my heart (so I’d fit in), and say nothing. Then I stopped with the hand on the heart. Now I only rise because in the usual venues where this is done now, sitting would mean staring at the butt of the person in front of you.

Prayer would have been intolerable. Even before I was aware that I was an atheist, this business of pretending to talk to god made me very uncomfortable.

When I hear people babble about the “good old days” of school it always seems to be these memories of rote and ritual and reinforcement, stuff that is the antithesis of learning. Me? My magic school moments were learning about logarithms (seriously, mind blown), doing geometry with a compass and straightedge, algebra, and trigonometry.

So when some gomer tells me his vision of education was reciting the same words over and over, I’ve got him pegged already: he didn’t learn him nothin’.

Reliably, such people will continue to babble on, confirming my initial impression.

First and foremost though, why was the Pledge of Allegiance axed?  Because of the words “under God.” It’s based on our country and the fact that we are Americans who proudly belong to the United States of America.

When, exactly, was the pledge of allegiance “axed”? The last time I went to a school assembly they had us recite it (I didn’t). I’ve seen it done at sports events. As I said above, when I wasn’t even an atheist I found it objectionable for its tediousness and for the bizarre demand that we swear loyalty to a piece of cloth. Besides, the “under god” bit was tacked on during the Cold War and wasn’t even in the original version.

Having an open mind, I have always thought no matter what side of the fence you are on with the bible, “In God We Trust” is in everyone’s pocket; atheist or not.  Show me an atheist who doesn’t have at least a penny in his or her pocket.

From a penny to a $100 bill, “In God We Trust” is clearly marked on every unit of U.S.Currency.  If it’s good enough for our money, by golly it’s good enough for our schools.

I…what?

Do we atheists have an alternative? If some form of currency valid in the US did not say “In god we trust”, would theists refuse to use it? Would carrying it in any way imply that you were an atheist?

This argument, stupid as it is, is actually rather interesting. Our constitution plainly states that the government may not establish any religion — yet here’s a Mississippi loudmouth declaring that “In god we trust” on money imposes a religious belief on its bearers. Thanks, guy, for declaring it unconstitutional!

So again, if it was deemed so bad for schools, why was it not removed from our currency? My point being, it should have never been removed in the first place, but some atheists want it removed from all currency.  We live in the United States of America and we base many of our principles on the Holy Bible.  If I moved to Japan I wouldn’t be complaining that my God was not being allowed in my child’s school and I sure wouldn’t complain about theirs.

Clearly, it should be removed from our currency, especially when it’s seen as an explicit endorsement of religion by the government. It’s also apparently damaging our educational system, since Mr Redneck here obviously had a substandard education, since he got through it all without comprehending the rudiments of logic and without learning any history. Sorry, bozo, but those religious phrases haven’t been removed, but were actually added in the 1950s; the founding principles of our country were not based on the Bible at all, but on the Enlightenment.

These guys always make me feel like a conservative. They harken back to the days of Joe McCarthy — they can’t see beyond the barrier of the Red Scare — while I fondly think it would be nice if we returned to the principles of Jefferson and Madison (sans the evil excuses for slavery, that is).

Anyway, what’s got the idiots in Mississippi fired up now? Their governor just signed a law requiring public schools to allow students to pray publicly over the morning intercom, and at various school events. You know, I evolved into an atheist gradually, only becoming aware of it in my teen years, but if they’d started my morning with some sanctimonious ass yammering godly nonsense at me every day, BAM, flaming militant atheist in kindergarten.

Of course they have a poll to go with their ignorant noise, and of course, since it’s Mississippi, you can predict exactly how it’s leaning.

Would you have an issue with allowing prayer back in your child’s school?

No 80.37%
Yes 18.87%
I don’t care either way 1%

You mean this stuff helps?

Sue Black recounts her experiences as a woman in computer science.

Carrying out research for a PhD in computer science and going to academic conferences I was very much in a minority as a woman. The ratio was around 2:8 female to male, or lower, and sometimes this made things a bit uncomfortable. I remember going to one conference where, after being told by my supervisor that I needed to network at conferences, I approached a couple of guys during a break to discuss the previous session. I plucked up courage and said something friendly about the last speaker to start a conversation with them. They looked me up and down, and then started talking to each other as if I hadn’t said anything. I stood there feeling really silly, realized after about thirty seconds that they were going to continue to ignore me, and then walked away feeling absolutely mortified.

I had a few other encounters similar to this, and of course some good ones too, but I never felt completely at ease in that type of situation. That was until I went to a conference in Brussels for women in science. This time there were about one hundred women and two men. As I walked into the conference room and stood looking around wondering where to go and sit, a woman came over and started talking to me. We had a great chat and joined a conversation with some other women, probably about why we were at the conference and what we hoped to get out of it. What an amazing difference. I met some truly amazing, inspiring and supportive women. That conference changed my life.

I had thought that it was me, and my lack of social skills, that was preventing me from enjoying academic life to the full. Now I realized that wasn’t the case.

Read the whole thing. You know that stuff about women doing it in high heels and backwards? Try getting a Ph.D. as a single parent with 3, later 4, kids.