I left academia because I wanted to make a difference. I went to graduate school for the normal reasons: I’d done well in school, I didn’t really want to get a job, and I needed to learn how to free my mother from the eternal torments of the demon Mephisto. For a while, everything was great. I slept in, worked late, and made excellent ramen. I loved being a part of the laboratory: running experiments, writing up results, and especially making...
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Can China Get a Handle on Pollution? What Does that Mean for Climate Change?
In the northern city of Harbin, China, air quality was so bad ten days ago that concentrations of particulate matter reportedly reached 1000 micrograms per cubic meter at their peak, exceeding the World Health Organization's daily safe levels by a factor of 40 and shrouding the city in a fog so dense that commuters had trouble finding their way and a numbers of schools were forced to close. As China's pollution has reached intolerable levels,...
The Token Woman on Hiring Committees: time for a change
Policies and practices set up to avoid discrimination in the past have a tendency to expire. Remember, 'Don't Ask Don't Tell' was originally set up to protect gay service-members within the US forces. Similarly, the often unofficial rule of having one woman on hiring committees has reached its expiry date. Primarily as a result of effective equality and diversity campaigns in the 1980s and early 1990s, many departments instituted either an...
Monday Linkage: gender x
The world is buzzing with news that Germany has introduced a 'third sex'- or, the option to leave a child's gender as indeterminate. This raises a slough of questions and long-overdue discussion. Speaking of gender, Californians are debating a new law in California (AB 1266) that would allow trans-gender students to choose their preferred gender pronoun and identity. Critics worry that it would result in a violation of privacy (most of the...
Get Ready to Rumble….. NSA vs. State
OK, so it's not exactly Ali vs. Frazier, but NSA and the State Department are not happy with each other. From this morning's Cable at Foreign Policy, Yochi Dreazen reports: Secretary of State John Kerry touched off the furor when he said some of the NSA's overseas surveillance efforts -- which also included tapping into tens of millions of calls in France and Spain -- had been carried out without the Obama administration's knowledge or explicit...
Friday Nerd Blogging: When Life Imitates Art
Happy Day After Halloween, folks. Resist the urge to steal your kid's candy. Once again, the internet is a magical place:
Thursday Morning Linkage
Aside from major sporting events, there have been a few items of import in the news. Health A new polio outbreak in Syria is endangering the drive for global eradication Climate Change A 2012 story that I missed, a drive to replace dirty cook stoves in India using experimental methods failed India not keen on addressing hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) -- a short-lived greenhouse gas -- through the Montreal Protocol Washington, Oregon, California, and...
Tuesday Linkage
Drones are on the international agenda this week, with Pakistan excoriating the US at the General Assembly and with human rights heavyweights Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch launching a new and scathing joint report. OpenGlobalRights, OpenDemocracy's global-south-oriented human rights wing, is having a number of interesting articles on the Responsibility to Protect Doctrine: here, here and views on the subject from India here. New...
Why I Didn’t Quit Academia
There have been a spate of posts about why folks have quit academia.... so much so that Dan Drezner issued this challenge: Has anyone written a "Why I Haven't Quit the Academy" post yet? — Daniel Drezner (@dandrezner) October 27, 2013 So, I decided to figure out why I did not quit. Sure, looking backwards from where things stand now, it would have been a mistake to quit. Things have worked out really well for me, but that was hardly...
Duck and Cover when Cyber Doomsday Comes
“The current blackout is a result of a cyber attack” “It will happen” Ominous words from the National Geographic channel and their premier movie this weekend. Not really sure how the news reporter can still report given the aforementioned blackout, and also not sure why toilets cease to work when you lose power, but the point is taken. We are all at the mercy of roving mobs of vigilantes because of the dangers of a cyber attack. I am counting...
Monday Linkage: Roma and race links
The recent 'Maria' case- involving a young blonde girl taken from a Roma family and found to be the daughter of a Bulgarian Roma couple- has inspired greater scrutiny of Roma communities. More specifically, there have been subsequent cases of children taken from their Roma families because they did not 'look' Roma; however subsequent DNA tests confirmed the children to be the 'legitimate' biological children of their parents. A recent...
Halloween in Turkey
Halloween is not celebrated in Turkey. Yet if they were celebrating Halloween, Turks who support democracy, secularism, human rights, and the rule of law would not have a hard time finding a haunted house. The country seems like a haunted house. This group of Turks, “modern bandits” in the eyes of the Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan, have long been fearful of Turkey’s future. Now they are even more alarmed. And there is good reason for that. A...