Category: Uncategorized

We did some in our household too…

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Maker of Patterns: An Autobiography Through Letters is described thusly on Amazon:

Having penned hundreds of letters to his family over four decades, Freeman Dyson has framed them with the reflections made by a man now in his nineties. While maintaining that “the letters record the daily life of an ordinary scientist doing ordinary work,” Dyson nonetheless has worked with many of the twentieth century’s most renowned physicists, mathematicians, and intellectuals, so that Maker of Patterns presents not only his personal story but chronicles through firsthand accounts an exciting era of twentieth-century science.

What did Daniel laskowski, Amazon customer and reviewer think about these letters?

Spends to [sic] much time in the first person

This is why I love shopping online!

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For folks who imagine themselves to be extra ethical due to eating fish rather than “meat,” What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins may be unwelcome:

Just how exploited are they? One author, Alison Mood, has estimated, based on analysis of Food and Agriculture Organization fisheries capture statistics for the period 1999–2007, that the number of fishes killed each year by humans is between 1 and 2.7 trillion.* To get a handle on the magnitude of a trillion fishes, if the average length of each caught fish is that of a dollar bill (six inches) and we lined them up end to end, they would stretch to the sun and back—a round-trip of 186 million miles—with a couple hundred billion fishes to spare.

However you slice it, it’s a lot of fishes, and they do not die nicely. The leading causes of death for commercially caught fishes are asphyxiation by removal from the water, decompression from the pressure change of being brought to the surface, crushing beneath the weight of thousands of others hoisted aboard in massive nets, and evisceration once landed.

The bulk of the book is a survey of research regarding what we know about fish intelligence and emotional life. First, let’s talk about what a “fish” is.

What we casually refer to as “fish” is in fact a collection of animals of fabulous diversity. According to FishBase—the largest and most often consulted online database on fishes—33,249 species, in 564 families and 64 orders, had been described as of January 2016. That’s more than the combined total of all mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians. When we refer to “fish” we are referring to 60 percent of all the known species on Earth with backbones.

We conveniently classify animals with backbones into five groups: fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals. This is misleading because it fails to represent the profound distinctions among fishes. The bony fishes are at least as evolutionarily distinct from the cartilaginous fishes as mammals are from birds. A tuna is actually more closely related to a human than to a shark, and the coelacanth—a “living fossil” first discovered in 1937—sprouted closer to us than to a tuna on the tree of life.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, less than 5 percent of the world’s oceans have been explored. The deep sea is the largest habitat on Earth, and most of the animals on this planet live there. A seven-month survey using echo soundings of the mesopelagic zone (between 100 and 1,000 meters—330 to 3,300 feet—below the ocean surface), published in early 2014, concluded that there are between ten and thirty times more fishes living there than was previously thought.

Between 1997 and 2007, 279 new species of fishes were found in Asia’s Mekong River basin alone. The year 2011 saw the discovery of four shark species. Given the current rate, experts predict the total count of all fishes will level off at around 35,000.

The smallest fish—indeed, the smallest vertebrate—is a tiny goby of one of the Philippine lakes of Luzon. Adult Pandaka pygmaea are only a third of an inch in length and weigh about 0.00015 of an ounce. If you were to put 300 of them on a scale they wouldn’t equal the weight of an American penny.

Another fish superlative is their fecundity, which is also unmatched among vertebrates. A single ling, five feet long and weighing fifty-four pounds, had 28,361,000 eggs in her ovaries. Even that pales compared to the 300 million eggs carried by an ocean sunfish, the largest of all bony fishes.

An older organism isn’t necessarily simpler. Evolution does not trend relentlessly toward increased sophistication and size. Not only were the largest dinosaurs much larger than modern reptiles, paleontologists have recently unearthed evidence that they were social creatures with parental care and modes of communication at least as complex as those of modern reptiles.

There is a great chapter on fish vision:

But how do fishes perceive what they themselves see? What is the mental experience of a fish, and how might it compare to our own? One way of probing this question is by considering optical illusions. If an animal is unaffected by a visual image that fools us, then it would seem that that animal perceives visual fields in a mechanical way, as a robot might “perceive” them. If, however, they fall for the illusion as we do, it suggests that they have a similar mental experience of what they are seeing.

Are fishes fooled by optical illusions? Well, in a captive study of redtail splitfins—small fishes that originate from highland Mexican streams—they learned to tap the larger of two disks to get a food reward. Once they had mastered the task, the scientists presented them with the Ebbinghaus illusion, which consists of two disks of the same size, one of which is surrounded by larger disks, making it appear smaller (at least, to human eyes) than the other, which is surrounded by smaller disks (see Figure 1). The splitfins preferred the latter disk.

Similarly, an earlier study found that redtail splitfins also fall for the more familiar Müller-Lyer illusion, in which two identical horizontal lines appear to have different lengths

So fish do see more or less the same way that we do! How about hearing. Here’s one from the Department of the Science is Settled:

And yet, as recently as the 1930s, scientists believed that fishes were deaf. This prejudice probably arose from the fact that fishes lack an external hearing organ. With our human-centric view of the world, such a lack could only mean one thing: no hearing. Now we know better: fishes don’t need ears, thanks to water’s incompressibility, which is why water is an excellent conductor of sounds. It is not until we peer inside a fish that we find structures modified and recruited for producing and processing sounds. Karl von Frisch (1886–1982), the Austrian biologist famous for his discovery of the dance language of honeybees, was also a devoted student of fish behavior and perceptions. Decades before he became the corecipient of the Nobel Prize in 1973 for his contributions to the emergence of ethology (the science of animal behavior), von Frisch was the first to demonstrate hearing in fishes. In the mid-1930s, he devised a simple but ingenious study in his lab with a blind catfish named Xaverl. He did this by lowering a piece of meat on the end of a stick into the water near the clay shelter in which Xaverl spent most of his days. Having an excellent sense of smell, Xaverl would soon emerge from his hiding place to retrieve food. After a few days of this routine, von Frisch began to whistle just before delivering the food. Six days later, he was able to lure Xaverl from his lair just by whistling, thereby proving the fish could hear him.

Not only can they hear, but they can learn about music:

Ava Chase, a research scientist at Harvard University, was interested to see if fishes could learn to categorize sounds as complex as music. She conducted an experiment using three pet store–bought koi named Beauty, Oro, and Pepi. Chase set up a sophisticated apparatus in the fishes’ tank that included a speaker at the side for presenting sounds, a response button on the bottom that fishes could push with their bodies, a light that signaled to the fish that his response had been recorded, and a nipple near the surface that dispensed a food pellet when the fish swam up and sucked it after a “correct” response. She then trained the fishes by rewarding them (with a food pellet) when they responded to a certain genre of music and not rewarding them for responding while another genre emanated from the speaker. She found that the koi were not only able to discriminate blues recordings (John Lee Hooker guitar and vocals) from classical recordings (Bach oboe concertos), but that they could generalize these distinctions when presented with new artists and composers for each genre.

They have taste and smell:

The sophistication of the smelling organs of fishes varies greatly, but the basic design is shared among all the bony fishes (the 30,000 or so fish species that are separate from the sharks and rays group). Unlike those of other vertebrates, fishes’ nostrils do not do double duty as organs of smell and openings for breathing; they are used exclusively for smell.

A sockeye salmon can sense shrimp extract at concentrations of one part to a hundred million parts water, which translates in human terms to five teaspoons in an Olympic-size swimming pool. Other salmon can detect the smell of a seal or sea lion diluted to one eighty billionth of water volume, which is about two-thirds of a drop in the same pool. A shark’s sense of smell is about 10,000 times better than ours. But the champion sniffer among all fishes (as far as we know) is the American eel, which can detect the equivalent of less than one ten millionth of a drop of their home water in the Olympic pool. Like salmons, eels make long migrations back to specific spawning sites, and they follow a subtle gradient of scent to get there.

game. Female sheepshead swordtails from Mexico can discriminate the smell of well-fed males from hungry males of their species—two- to three-inch denizens of tropical rapids—and you can probably guess which they prefer: all else being equal, a well-nourished fish is a more resourceful one, which makes him the better sperm donor. Female swordtails do not discriminate the odor of well-fed females from hungry females, suggesting they are responding to male sex pheromones and not merely to food-based excretions.

Taste buds are also more numerous in fishes than in any other animal. For instance, a fifteen-inch channel catfish had approximately 680,000 taste buds on his entire body, including fins—nearly 100 times the human quota.

There are weakly electric fishes that can sense using electrical pulses.. They also may enjoy the sensation of touch. But can they feel pain?

There are some good reasons to expect that fishes are sentient. As vertebrates, they have the same basic body plan as mammals, including a backbone, a suite of senses, and a peripheral nervous system governed by a brain. Being able to detect and learn to avoid harmful events is also useful to a fish. Pain alerts animals to potential damage that may lead to impairment or loss of life. Injury or death reduces or eliminates an individual’s reproductive potential, which is why natural selection favors the avoidance of these dire outcomes. Pain teaches and motivates animals to avoid a noxious past event.

Fish love opioids enough to qualify as true Americans:

The trouts’ negative reactions to the insults were dramatically reduced by the use of a painkiller, morphine. Morphine belongs to a family of drugs called opioids, and fishes are known to have an opioid-responsive system. Their behavior in response to it here is consistent with their experience of relief of pain by the drug.

Lynne Sneddon used what I consider to be a most convincing way to examine pain in zebrafishes: she asked if they were willing to pay a cost to get pain relief. Like most captive animals, fishes like stimulation. For instance, zebrafishes prefer to swim in an enriched chamber with vegetation and objects to explore rather than in a barren chamber in the same tank. When Sneddon injected zebrafishes with acetic acid, this preference didn’t change; nor did it change for other zebrafishes injected with saline water (which causes only brief pain). However, if a painkiller was dissolved in the barren, unpreferred chamber of the tank, the fishes injected with the acid chose to swim in the unfavorable, barren chamber. The saline-injected fishes remained in the enriched side of the tank. Thus, zebrafishes will pay a cost in return for gaining some relief from their pain.

The author describes that fish consciousness and

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A friend of a friend purchased a $6,500 miniature reproduction of the Fearless Girl statue as a gift for her husband and then had him pose with the “symbol of empowerment and encouragement” for some Instagram fame. From the artist’s web site:

20% of the net proceeds will be set aside as a non-profit donation. Once the edition has sold, a decision will be made determining the best allocation for these funds. Funding from any and all Fearless Girl reproductions may be amassed for a special program designed to promote one or any of the gender diversity goals Fearless Girl stands for:

To support women in leadership positions, the empowerment of young women, women’s education, gender equality, the reduction of prejudice in the work place through education, equal pay and the general well-being of women.

(She quit her career upon marriage, so actually it was the husband’s earnings that paid for the “gift”. And the money was earned working for a sanctimonious Silicon Valley company that grew to success with almost no female employees in any positions directly related to generating revenue. That said, the couple can be said to be an example of “gender equality” if we reference “Gender equity should be measured by consumption, not income?“.)

Readers: The wife in this couple is beyond the age of likely fertility. So it will just be two adults with a sizable Fearless Girl statute in their home (i.e., no “young women” will be regularly inspired by this statue). What kind of conversation do you think it will spark among their guests? (100 percent loyal Hillary voters, I think!)

Related:

• “Bank Behind ‘Fearless Girl’ Statute Fined $5M For Underpaying Women And Minorities” (Forbes), regarding State Street Corp.

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Having enjoyed Dear Committee Members (see “Exploring the twisted personality that can result from tenure”), it was time to sample The Shakespeare Requirement, also by Julie Schumacher.

This is a more conventional novel about life on campus in the English department, which is being pushed into the margins by more successful departments such as Economics. Some samples…

[from an orientation for new TAs brochure] Remind them not to sleep with the undergraduates, even when undergrads are older/hotter/more desirable than the norm. No drugs or drinking with the undergrads, especially hard drugs while inside the building.

[English Department Chair] Fitger shrugged. He had no sympathy for [fellow professor] Tyne, who had been slapped with a six-week sentence for making a remark about a fellow faculty member’s vacation in “Sodomy Springs,” but he didn’t blame him for trying to avoid the training. The university’s sensitivity sessions resembled Maoist reeducation camps: one was expected to recant, to weep, to offer up several bones to be broken, and to emerge gleaming with a proselyte’s commitment to reform. There were other correctives for Tyne that Fitger would have prioritized and recommended, starting with a psychiatrist and a skilled barber.

[Economics professor] Roland strode past. He didn’t generally work with the undergraduates, whom he found to be undisciplined and unprepared for education. They could be ferocious on the one hand, ready to burn their higher-ups in effigy for the slightest misstep; and on the other hand they claimed to be terribly sensitive, ever dreaming up new ways in which they believed themselves to have been harmed. It was the era, Roland thought, of the student-as-victim: one’s social status increased according to the extent to which one imagined oneself damaged and wronged. Here was a group of the oppressed right now, playing foosball and eating junk food in a corner. They wanted trigger warnings and petting and coddling—when what they needed, Roland thought, was a kick in the ass.

[during a literature class] Fitger had snapped in response to a student’s question: Why would any writer bother to make stuff up? Because, Fitger answered, reality was bleak and often unbearable, their puny lives a meaningless trudge toward the blank vault of death.

For the past dozen years, via some obscure and unwritten agreement, Stang had taught only on Tuesdays and Thursdays, while most of the other professors taught three, if not five, days per week. “What about the schedule?” “My Women in Literature class isn’t over this semester until four-fifteen,” she said. “As you probably know, I’m a single parent. I don’t want to teach after three-thirty.” It was only reasonable, Stang said, that the department adopt a family-friendly attitude and give scheduling precedence to professors with children. Fitger had started making a note on his pad of paper, but paused to look up. “Isn’t your son at least in high school?” He remembered running into Helena Stang at the grocery store over the summer, and seeing her arguing with a sullen, heavily tattooed young man among the frozen foods. “Rudy is sixteen,” she said. But a child was a child, and as a mother she had particular duties and responsibilities that made it difficult for her to be on campus, whether for class or for a meeting, after 3:00 p.m.

A big part of the story concerns a student who becomes pregnant after a one-night encounter with a member of her Bible study group. She and her fellow Christian are planning to get married. The secular university staff encourage the girl to choose the single-mom-with-child-support-cash lifestyle instead. After the faculty have persuaded the bride to leave her groom at the altar:

[Administrator] Fran nodded. She had thought about trying to talk Angela out of the wedding but decided against it. Marriages weren’t forever these days; and maybe it was preferable, legally or for insurance reasons, for Thurley to own up to what he had done.

Fran asked if she needed a lawyer—Ms. Matthias would definitely find one for her—or if she wanted help extracting money or maybe some pints of blood or a testicle from Trevor L. Thurley. … Fran limited herself to a subtle murmur of response, quelling what otherwise would have been a thorough condemnation of the sanctimonious son of a bitch who had knocked Angela up, then tried to bully her into a misogynistic excuse for a wedding. … Fran indulged in a brief agnostic prayer that Trevor would be denied access to any and all modes of transportation—cars, vans, buses, bicycles, camels, scooters—and that any contact between his family and Angela’s would consist only of generous, regular installments of cash.

[Note that Schumacher teaches at the University of Minnesota and that her own state caps child support revenue at approximately $405,000 (over 18 years; neighboring Wisconsin offers unlimited child support profits). It is unclear exactly where “Payne University” is located.]

The core action of the book concerns a guy who refuses to abandon his belief that English majors need to study Shakespeare for a full semester. Schumacher gives us a portrait of the traditional literature scholar:

For forty-two years, Dennis Cassovan had carefully sidestepped all things controversial at Payne. He had arrived on campus in 1968, an introverted, anxious assistant professor who had evaded the draft due to a spindly right leg—polio, contracted at the age of four. The senior faculty had warned him, soon after his hire, against becoming embroiled in “student-centered unrest”; overwhelmed with teaching and nearly sleepless following the birth of his son—a squalling, furious, elfin creature, all mouth and fists—Cassovan had kept his head down, spent every spare second on his research, and been awarded tenure and a contract for his first book by the end of the war. Over the years, austere neutrality had become a character trait and a default. Aloof but unfailingly civil, Cassovan had accepted as inevitable the cultural shifts in the discipline in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. He had tried to be open-minded when dealing with the department’s theorists (though he wished they could write); the creative writers (though he wished they had standards); and those who would fill their syllabi with sociological studies, television shows, discussions of sexual mores, food, politics, animals, fashion, and popular culture. Cassovan assumed that students benefitted from a breadth of electives and from scholarly perspectives beyond his own—as long as these whimsical alternatives didn’t threaten the core.

Cassovan closed his eyes for a moment, feeling ill. The very marrow of the discipline would be expunged.

And what might Payne’s young literary scholars study instead? Bracing himself, Cassovan returned to the course catalog. Upcoming classes included Aliens and Outlaws, Marxism 2.5, The American Soap and the Telenovela, and The Literature of Deviation. How was a student to make any sense of it? Shakespeare was the cornerstone, the fountainhead.

If Fitger’s intention was to sweep beneath the carpet of oblivion the heart of the discipline in which Cassovan had long labored…No: Cassovan had taught at Payne for more than four decades, and he was not at a loss for strategies and resources. The arms are fair, he thought, when the intent of bearing them is just.

More: Read The Shakespeare Requirement

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I helped with a project for the Massachusetts Maritime Academy and learned that tuition, room, and board is $26,000 per year for four years compared to a starting salary of $120,000 per year (to be on a ship for 6 months per year). A graduate from two years earlier said that he has paid off all of his loans and now is shopping for a house and an airplane. Within five years, the pay can rise to $180,000 per year. After that, the sailor is qualified to be a captain and earn $240,000+/year, but these jobs are scarce and cannot be obtained immediately or by everyone. The true dream job is to be a harbor pilot (see “Earn $400 per hour in a government-regulated job“), but these may require family connections.

How are the gender wars doing at the academy? “About 5 percent of the cadets are women,” said the recent graduate. Why so few when the school offers such a great ROI? “A woman doesn’t need to go out in 80-knot weather to spend a third mate’s pay.” [I think that he was referring to marriage, but under Massachusetts family law, she will be able to spend approximately one third of the paycheck after a brief unmarried encounter.]

The above salaries are for U.S.-flagged cargo ships, which are required to have 75 percent American crew members (all unionized). Foreign-flagged cruise ships pay half as much. There wouldn’t be any U.S.-flagged ships at all if not for government regulations that restrict foreign-flagged vessels from certain kinds of operations and also direct payments from the U.S. military, which wants military cargo to go on U.S.-flagged vessels. Note that U.S.-flagged does not mean U.S.-owned, U.S.-built, or U.S.-managed. My source is working on a container ship that was built in South Korea and is owned and operated by Maersk.

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The women I know who are most likely to characterize Dr. Christine Blasey Ford as a liar are business executives who compete with men for jobs. The men who say that they believe Dr. Ford tend to be lower income, lower status guys who wouldn’t be worth targeting under #MeToo, for family court profits, etc. This cannot be a partisan issue because nearly everyone in Massachusetts is a Democrat.

Here’s Janice Fiamengo, a literature professor at the University of Ottawa, in a YouTube lecture on Dr. Ford:

I was shocked by the woman herself. By her whole demeanor.

This is a professional career woman? With that little-girl croaky voice and poor-me face and the trembly “I’m going to cry at any moment” narration supposedly because of the trauma of reading out a prepared script about something discussed in therapy and rehearsed dozens, if not hundreds, of times with a legal team and other advisors.

A trauma that required putting two doors on a big costly house.

Yes, this is the elite professional woman that feminism has created after 50 years of nonstop grievance-mongering.

Let’s assume that Professor Fiamengo has correctly characterized the impression given by Dr. Ford. I.e., that viewers of her testimony will be more likely to see women as helpless damaged victims.

Who is hurt by that? Women who compete with men! They don’t want an employer choosing to hire a man because of a belief that a woman might be terrified to get on an airplane to see a customer and/or need an extra day on either end of a trip to dose herself with benzodiazepines and wine. If the kind of experience that Dr. Ford says she had is common, typically unreported (at least in a job interview), and leads to decades of damage, why would an employer want to take a chance on hiring such a person?

So the executive women that I know are hoping to be promoted to CEO, not seeking to be pitied for having been born with XX chromosomes, and a TV parade of female victims does not help them to get that CEO job.

What about women who work for enterprises that run quota systems for women? Or women who are in primarily female occupations that are demanding higher pay? They may benefit from the perception that women are victims in need of assistance. This will help ensure the continuation of the quota system and/or the opening of taxpayer wallets to pay out some more cash.

The analysis gets a little more complex for men. Any man can potentially get a boost in status by being a knight in shining armor rescuing a victimized female. And it is pretty much free of cost in the case of Christine Blasey Ford to mumble some words of disapproval as Rapist Kavanaugh is confirmed. The low-status, low-income guys can potentially enjoy a career boost if competing women are seen as fragile and damaged and when job openings are created by the #MeTooing of high-status men. The high-status, high-income men, though, are vulnerable to attacks from anyone who wants to make a #MeToo allegation (and, locally, also to predation in Massachusetts family court).

So I’m wondering if there is an element of “vote your checkbook” here. People who will get a boost in income and status via Christine Blasey Ford being believed will believe her. People who will suffer a career disadvantage if Dr. Ford is believed will think she is a liar.

Readers: What have you seen? Where is the liar/not-liar line falling among the people you know and what factors correlate with their position?

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I’ve stopped paying attention to hysterical headlines because… all headlines are now hysterical. Hurricanes do seem to live up to the hype, at least sometimes. What happened with Hurricane Michael? How severe an event did it turn out to be in terms of loss of lives and destruction of property?

What about Disney’s bet that Orlando wouldn’t get hit by a hurricane? Does that need to be reevaluated in light of Hurricane Michael (the strongest in more than 100 years for that section of Florida, right?).

And how is Seaside, Florida doing? (The Truman Show location.) It was planned only in 1985. It is officially 13′ above sea level. They embarked on a big dunes restoration project in January 2018 (story).

[Separately, why do journalists always use the same stock phrases for hurricanes? A hurricane moving at 10 or 15 miles per hour is “barreling toward” a destination. A hurricane does not “contain” winds of 85 knots; it “packs” winds of 85 knots. If hurricanes are becoming more frequent and severe, do we need some new vocabulary to describe them?]

A bad METAR..

KPAM 101719Z AUTO 07075G112KT M1/8SM R14/0600V1000FT +RA FG SQ M 25/25 A2729 RMK AO2 RAB1658 SLP244 CHINO RWY32

(At the Panama City Tyndall Air Force Base, October 10 at 1:19 pm. Wind from the NE at 75 knots, gusting 112 knots. Less than 1/8th of a mile visibility. Between 600 and 1000′ of visibility on Runway 14. Heavy rain, fog, squall (SQ). I don’t know what the “M” after the “SQ” means. Temperature and dewpoint are both 25C. The altimeter setting is a low 27.29. The rain began at 12:58 pm.)

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Dr. Christine Blasey Ford testified that she was permanently damaged by Brett Kavanaugh, suffering from reduced academic performance, an inability to tolerate airline travel (except cross the Pacific to surf destinations in French Polynesia because driving to a California beach would be even more intolerable?), and various other maladies of PTSD (transcript). As a Ph.D. psychologists, she also testified that almost anyone who suffered what she suffered would have similar lifetime damage.

Yet as a matter of policy, the U.S. seeks out immigrants from among would-be “asylees” and “refugees,” each of whom must tell a tale of far more severe assault than what Dr. Christine Blasey Ford allegedly suffered. Consider the Honduran who crosses the border illegally, is apprehended six months later, and then requests asylum. If the Honduran says “two drunk teenagers rolled on me in a bedroom and then eventually I rolled out from underneath them,” it would be “asylum denied,” right?

If Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony is correct, wouldn’t all of the folks we admit based on how badly they were assaulted or abused end up being unable to adapt to life in an advanced economy that requires education and concentration in order to flourish? Shouldn’t we expect them all to be lifetime welfare recipients in virtue of the disabilities that they’ve incurred through PTSD?

Righteous Democrats all #Believe Dr. Blasey Ford (I hope!) and support maximum immigration of refugees/asylees. But if they believe Dr. Blasey Ford what is their rationale for wanting to import millions of people who are so damaged that they can never be self-sufficient?

[What kind of experiences must a person have had in order to be admitted to the U.S. as a refugee? “Immigrants May Be Fed False Stories to Bolster Asylum Pleas” (nytimes, 2011) includes some examples: “Often, the applicant is misled by various actors with a story that is much more compelling,” said Claudia Slovinksy, a longtime immigration lawyer. “Weren’t they soldiers? Wasn’t it a gang rape?” A Santa Clara Law Review article “Telling Refugee Stories: Trauma, Credibility and the Adversarial Adjudication of Claims for Asylum,” notes that a survivor’s story of having been raped twice while in prison was insufficient. Another 2011 article, “The Asylum Seeker” (New Yorker), says that the U.S. is looking for survivors who’ve been both raped and tortured.]

 

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“Facebook Accused of Allowing Bias Against Women in Job Ads” (nytimes):

The job seekers, in collaboration with the Communications Workers of America and the American Civil Liberties Union, filed charges with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on Tuesday against Facebook and nine employers.

The employers appear to have used Facebook’s targeting technology to exclude women from the users who received their advertisements, which highlighted openings for jobs like truck driver and window installer.

Hillary Clinton:

20 years ago, women made 72 cents on the dollar to men. Today it’s still just 77 cents. More work to do. #EqualPay #NoCeilings

Putting these together, we conclude that trucking companies and window installation firms will go out of their way (targeting ads to men only) to avoid paying 23 percent less for qualified labor.

Related:

• “Gender equity should be measured by consumption, not income?“

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