Academia has already been greatly damaged by post-modernists and an extreme leftist bias over the past few decades, but fortunately math and science have been spared, to date. Those days may be coming to an end, though, as Christina Hoff Sommers warns about the potential Title IXing of science, based (ironically) on shoddy science (similar to the “comparable worth” myth).
3 thoughts on “This Would Be A Disaster”
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It would.
It’s not sexism it’s appropriate “dumbism” and I say that as a white male dumb guy when it comes to some math (more precisely integration and differential calculus, and of course most above that which is an awful lot of stuff). I still feel sorry for my higher level maths teacher in high school, he deserved better than a student like me yet he never gave up and I passed on a technicality (two errors in the questions of the exam paper itself, crazily enough I seem to recall I got one of them right in the way the question was intended to be understood but wasn’t correctly formulated — but I think a lot of people did that ^_^;).
Some of the other students in class were simply awesome at math, they were the ones who truly belonged there (and no surprise they both went straight to US universities on scholarships, both Asian, one Chinese [but not from China] and one Indonesian). They were math rock stars ^_^ and didn’t even need paper.
Actually there was a Chinese girl as well (yet again not from China itself) who was almost as good as those two but she wanted to be a marine biologist. Oh and an English one that at least beat me and most other boys in class. The Jews I knew in school (and those were the only ones I knew were Jews) were either one year above or below my year so I have no idea about them but I don’t think they took higher level math (same family both female).
And that sort of gets my rant back on the topic of the article: why are people trying to force females into something they don’t want to choose for themselves? They are doing their best to remove freedom of choice from women as well as men.
I wouldn’t worry about it Rand. In my experience, half the staff at most scientific and technical organizations are utter mediocrities anyway, so they may as well be female mediocrities as male.
Wednesday, April 2, 2008 marked the end of Electricity as we Know It, when the ECE Faculty of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with only two dissenting votes, voted to support the University of Wisconsin Faculty Senate resolution to ask that the new high-voltage power line to Madison be placed underground.
What is the big deal about putting the line underground? The technology to do this exists, but it is more expensive and the company building the line doesn’t have experience with it, making it a technological and economic risk, and the fight against the line and the fight to put it underground will undoubtedly delay it. The objection to the above ground line is that it is ugly and will kill birds and bats and will pollute the view from a nature preserve run by the University.
The shortage of transmission capacity has strained the electric grid to the breaking point as evidenced by the Midwest Blackout of a few years ago, and according to the DOE, the losses in transmission have increased from 5 percent in 1970 to 9.5 percent in 2001. Our department is supposed to have nationally-recognized experts on the engineering aspects of the power grid and the public policy implications.
The sentiment in the meeting was, “If people want to pay for the underground line, why not bury it”, not mindful that there is no provision for the City, the County, or the University to subsidize the line to meet the aesthetic criterion, and imposing a higher cost on the line will tip the economics towards burning more fuel rather than gain more power by transmitting it more efficiently.
The line is supposed to go along our Beltline Highway, not a corridor of natural beauty. What are people going to demand next, that wind turbines go underground on account of the aesthetics and the threat to birds?
The Faculty of the University is living in a glass house throwing stones when the University operates a coal-fired central heating and steam-generation plant for A/C that consumes up to 500 tons of coal per day. You usually think of a university as “soft industry”, not a hard, dirty, polluting industry, but 70 percent of our HVAC energy usage goes for makeup air of laboratory fume hoods, so what that coal does is develop treatments for childhood cancer and unlock the mysteries of stem cells.
April 2, 2008, people, that date marked the End of Electricity as We Know It.