Our Monday Gender Issue: Having a woman as the king of an African fishing village can make a big difference. During 2008, a secretary who works at Ghana’s Washington DC embassy got a middle of the night call at her…
It appears that cows prefer robot milkers. Rather than following a human schedule of pre-dawn mornings and late afternoons, the robots respond to what the cows want. Perhaps 5 or 6 times a day, the cows line up in front…
Our Monday Gender Issue: Last year, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who had long opposed female quotas on corporate boards, capitulated. Ms. Merkel’s labor minister, a physician and mother of 6, held firm to demands that her boss accept quotas. Merkel…
Being water stressed means you are unusually vulnerable to a water shortage. Sort of like a household where one emergency can push it over the edge because it spends all it earns, so too with most water stressed nations. That one drought…
Our Monday Gender Issue: In the February 10th issue of the New Yorker, I read “Pronoun Envy” by Anne Carson. Here is the beginning: Pronoun Envy “is a phrase coined by Cal Watkins of the Harvard Linguistics Department in November…
What happens when you combine a $100 student payment with a teacher bonus for high A.P. grades, better lab equipment, free tutoring, Saturday classes and extra teacher training? At one Boston school, the results for the A.P. Statistics exam were:…
Our Monday Gender Issue: “A woman’s place is on home, first, second, and third.” A League of Their Own, 1992 45 years ago, cheerleading and square dancing were the sports we associated with young women while only 1 in 27…
Our Monday Gender Issue: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Nigerian writer, former MacArthur genius, National Book Critics Circle Award winner, author of the book, Half of a Yellow Sun on which a new movie is based, and the person who has given so many…
Our Monday Gender Issue: Good looking men get more start-up dollars than less attractive men. However, all men get more money than women. They receive 93% of all venture capital funding: Hoping to discover why, researchers from Harvard, Wharton and MIT…
Princeton economist Angus Deaton estimates that it will take 500 years for Indian women to reach the height of English women. In The Great Escape, Dr. Deaton explains that a population could be short because of nutrition or disease. When babies…
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