Recent quotes:
When scientific conferences went online, diversity and inclusion soared | Careers | Chemistry World
‘Factors including cost, gender, career stage and geographic location were evaluated,’ the study authors explained. ‘Virtual conferences demonstrated a clearly discernible and, in some cases, orders of magnitude improvement across nearly all metrics.’Private Schools Are Indefensible - The Atlantic
The most astonishing of Gallagher’s admonitions was this: “While I often arrive at the office well before 8:00 a.m., that does not mean a parent should ever be waiting for me in the vestibule, parking lot, or outside my office door.” This is what prosecutors in murder cases call “lying in wait.” Gallagher’s email made it clear that parents had been trying to thwart others’ college prospects in order to enhance their own children’s odds. He sent his missive shortly before winter break, which in private schools is the equivalent of a Friday news dump. It was the kind of school communication that simultaneously put bad actors on notice and reassured the other parents that evil was not triumphing. Inevitably, every parent in the senior class was freaked out that their own children might have been targeted. After the break, the school’s head, Bryan Garman, sent a follow-up email reiterating the policies Gallagher had announced. He also reminded parents that the college counselors would not “respond to any inquiry for student records” for other people’s kids. The parents’ behavior, Garman said, had become “increasingly intense and inappropriate” and had included “the verbal assault of employees.” But these transgressions were placed within a therapeutic context of acceptance and nonjudgment. College admissions, he wrote, “can stretch the patience and emotional capacity of parents.” (If you want to know if you’re rich, try behaving badly and see if someone in authority will apologize for stretching your patience and emotional capacity.) By the end of the school year, two of Sidwell’s three college counselors had quit.Rigged card game 'Swap' sheds light on perceptions of inequality - ScienceBlog.com
Regardless of how many cards were exchanged and which version they played, winners were twice as likely as losers to describe the game as fair. When cards were exchanged to favor the winner, however, winners found the game less fair – an effect that became more pronounced when two cards per round were traded. In fact, the winners’ perceptions of the game’s fairness declined more sharply than losers’ as their advantage increased – “indicating that winners’ perceptions are more sensitive than losers’ to a system that is rigged in their favor,” according to the paper. Researchers termed this the “Warren Buffett effect,” because Buffett and some other billionaires advocate to pay higher taxes. “A possible reading of our results is that winners want the playing field to be tilted enough to guarantee the outcome but not so much that the game appears hopelessly rigged in their favor,” Macy said.The Best Activities To List On A Resume Are Classist -- Science of Us
What was bananas, however, is how that rate skewed by gender: the lower-class male got just one callback, the lower-class female five, the higher-class woman three, and the higher-class man thirteen. That means the blue-blooded James had a 16.25 callback rate, while his nearly identical siblings had a paltry 3.83 callback percentage.boring cars for boring people
according to Kelley Blue Book, silver remains the color of choice for luxury vehicles. A full third of all luxury vehicles are silver; another 30 percent of them are diamond, crystal, snow, powder, cream, or some other version of white.Army officer from Alabama nails it: 'I'm offended that everyone is offended by something!' - Yellowhammer News
I’m offended that because I’m a white male, people automatically classify me as privileged, regardless of knowing where I’ve come from or what I’ve been through. I’m offended that our First Amendment has turned into freedom of speech [just as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone’s feelings]. I’m offended that people assume I’m racist because I believe in economic development by way of Capitalism and a free-market economy. I’m offended that people who are too afraid to ask for food stamps, disability, or unemployment (because they don’t want a handout) are probably the ones who could use it most, yet the majority of recipients who do in fact receive handouts abuse their “privilege” and continue to make frivolous purchases.Roof can't look outwards without seeing his own sickness
Black people view everything through a racial lense. Thats what racial awareness is, its viewing everything that happens through a racial lense. They are always thinking about the fact that they are black. This is part of the reason they get offended so easily, and think that some thing are intended to be racist towards them, even when a White person wouldnt be thinking about race.Clarence Thomas on cross burning's noxious odor
Thomas wrote in dissent that the O’Connor majority erred in finding that cross-burning could have any legitimate expressive value deserving of First Amendment protection. “In our culture,” he wrote, “cross-burning has almost invariably meant lawlessness and understandably instills in its victims well-grounded fear of physical violence.” He added: “A conclusion that the [Virginia] statute prohibiting cross-burning with intent to intimidate sweeps beyond a prohibition on certain conduct into the zone of expression overlooks not only the words of the statute but also reality.”KKK leader still marked at UNC
The Board of Trustees decreed that the new “Carolina” Hall must feature a historical marker that “explains Mr. Saunders’ contributions to UNC and the State of North Carolina,” the circumstances that led an earlier Board of Trustees to name the building for him and the reason why the current board has chosen to remove his name.Google chairman gets called out for cutting off a woman while talking about diversity at SXSW
"Given that unconscious bias research tells us that women are interrupted a lot more than men, I'm wondering if you are aware that you have interrupted Megan many more times," she asked, which immediately prompted a round of cheers and applause from the packed room. On her part, Smith, a former Google executive, seemed unfazed. "It's an interesting thing, unconscious bias," Smith said. "It's something we all have and it's something we have to really debug."The "Criminal" Justice System
In 2014, the Boston Municipal Court System, for a city of 645,000 people, issued about 2,300 criminal warrants. The Ferguson Municipal Court issued 9,000, for a population 1/30th the size of Boston's.Riding the bus free (when white) in Australia
Nearly two-thirds of the volunteers’ pleas were successful, but the rate at which they were granted differed greatly across ethnicities. White participants were given a lot more leeway than black ones: 72 percent of white subjects were allowed to stay onboard, while only 36 percent of black ones were. The rate for South Asian subjects was around 50 percent, and for East Asians it was 73 percent.Sex-based disparities in language used in reviews
Abrasive alone was used 17 times to describe 13 different women, but the word never appeared in men’s reviews. In fact, this type of character critique that was absent from men’s reviews showed up in 71 of the 94 critical reviews received by women.American Rhetoric: Robert F. Kennedy -- Statement on the Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.
We can do well in this country. We will have difficult times. We've had difficult times in the past, but we -- and we will have difficult times in the future. It is not the end of violence; it is not the end of lawlessness; and it's not the end of disorder.But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings that abide in our land.Income chasm in Minnesota
Since the 1970s, the city’s minority population has swelled, and segregation has worsened, particularly in its schools. About 62 percent of black students attend high-poverty schools, compared with 10 percent of white students. Beyond Minneapolis, the state of Minnesota has one of the largest gaps in black-white student achievement. Recently, WalletHub analyzed the black-white gap in census indicators such as household income, homeownership and educational attainment. It ranked Minnesota as the worst state for financial inequality.Meet the .001%, the UNHW
The explosion of wealth among ultra high net worth (UNHW) individuals around the world has made all of this possible. According to a new study from UBS and Wealth-X, there are 211,275 people in the world who could be considered ultra high net worth, with assets totaling north of $30 million. The approximate amount of wealth controlled by this group is estimated at just under $30 trillion. And while the number of UHNW people grew by 6% since 2013, their assets grew by 7%.How whites turned Alabama red because of a black president
The election of Obama, and white Alabamans’ visceral distaste for the president (88 percent voted against him in 2008), created a massive shift in the state’s politics. For many years, white voters had often split their tickets, voting Republican in federal and gubernatorial contests but sticking with the Democrats in legislative campaigns. Hubbard realized that, by nationalizing Alabama’s 2010 state races and putting Obama on center stage, he could bring that to an end. Hubbard himself had always been careful never to speak in explicitly racial terms. (Not all of his Republican colleagues were so circumspect. In 2010, a state senator named Scott Beason was caught on a wiretap referring to black Alabamans as “aborigines.”) Now, he didn’t need to explicitly invoke race—he only needed to mention Obama. As the state GOP put it in one ad, “After 136 years, the Democrats have brought us Obama, Pelosi, government health care, liberal policies, higher taxes, and wasteful spending.”Suddenly, even entrenched white Democrats like Lowell Barron, who’d been in the Senate for 28 years, found themselves in trouble. “People weren’t voting against me in 2010, they were voting against that black man in the White House,” says Barron. “They were pretty specific about it, only they didn’t refer to him as a black man.” Some Republicans concede as much. “Anybody who denies that Barack Obama’s unpopularity in Alabama didn’t help Republicans come to power is just not being truthful about it,” Republican State Senator Cam Ward told me.The transformation of Alabama politics was nearly instantaneous. Prior to the 2010 election, the Alabama House had 60 Democratic members, 34 of them white and 26 black. Afterward, there were 36 Democrats—ten white, 26 black. Meanwhile, in the Alabama Senate, the number of black Democrats remained seven, while the number of white Democrats fell from 13 to four.How many "angelic" teenagers do you know?
Michael Brown, 18, due to be buried on Monday, was no angel, with public records and interviews with friends and family revealing both problems and promise in his young life. Shortly before his encounter with Officer Wilson, the police say he was caught on a security camera stealing a box of cigars, pushing the clerk of a convenience store into a display case. He lived in a community that had rough patches, and he dabbled in drugs and alcohol. He had taken to rapping in recent months, producing lyrics that were by turns contemplative and vulgar. He got into at least one scuffle with a neighbor.
Using a different test, Estes asked everyone to answer every question. Both the men and the women got 80 percent right, suggesting identical ability levels. He then tested the students again and asked them, after each question, to report their confidence in their answer. Just having to think about whether they felt certain of their answer changed their ability to do well. The women’s scores dipped to 75 percent, while the men’s jumped to 93. One little nudge asking women how sure they are about something rattles their world, while the same gesture reminds men that they’re terrific.
We found perhaps the most striking illustration of how the connection between action and confidence might play out to women’s benefit in Milan. There we tracked down Zachary Estes, a research psychologist who’s long been curious about the confidence disparity between men and women. A few years ago, he gave 500 students a series of tests that involved reorganizing 3‑D images on a computer screen. […] When Estes had the students solve a series of these spatial puzzles, the women scored measurably worse than the men did. But when he looked at the results more closely, he found that the women had done poorly because they hadn’t even attempted to answer a lot of the questions. So he repeated the experiment, this time telling the students they had to at least try to solve all the puzzles. And guess what: the women’s scores increased sharply, matching the men’s. […]When women don’t act, when we hesitate because we aren’t sure, we hold ourselves back. But when we do act, even if it’s because we’re forced to, we perform just as well as men do.
A review of personnel records found that women working at HP applied for a promotion only when they believed they met 100 percent of the qualifications listed for the job. Men were happy to apply when they thought they could meet 60 percent of the job requirements. At HP, and in study after study, the data confirm what we instinctively know. Underqualified and underprepared men don’t think twice about leaning in. Overqualified and overprepared, too many women still hold back. Women feel confident only when they are perfect. Or practically perfect.
Chinn was a black man in Canton, Mississippi, who in the 1960s
owned a farm, a rhythm and blues nightclub, a bootlegging
operation, and a large collection of pistols, rifles, and shotguns
with which he threatened local Klansmen and police when they
attempted to encroach on his businesses or intimidate civil rights
activists working to desegregate Canton and register black
residents to vote. After one confrontation, in which a
pistol-packing Chinn forced the notoriously racist and brutal local
sheriff to stand down inside the county courthouse during a hearing
for a civil rights worker, the lawman admitted, "There are only two
bad sons of bitches in this county: me and that nigger C.O.
Chinn."
In 1985, 46 percent of incoming freshmen at the 250 most selective colleges came from the top quarter of the income distribution. By 2000, it was 55 percent. As of 2006, only about 15 percent of students at the most competitive schools came from the bottom half. The more prestigious the school, the more unequal its student body is apt to be. And public institutions are not much better than private ones. As of 2004, 40 percent of first-year students at the most selective state campuses came from families with incomes of more than $100,000, up from 32 percent just five years earlier.
Female vice presidents earned 21 percent less than men and female associates made 8 percent less, the former employees claimed. About 23 percent fewer female vice presidents were promoted to managing director of the bank relative to their male counterparts, they said. Those statistics are attributed to an analysis of Goldman Sachs pay data by Henry S. Farber, a Princeton University economist. His samples included all associates and vice presidents in the firm’s New York class from 2003 to 2011 and throughout the U.S. from 2005 to 2011, according to a court filing yesterday.
Amazon.co.uk has taken down a dummy book on its website calling for the company to pay its workers the Living Wage.
The stunt, organized this morning (11th June) by the Amazon Anonymous campaign, placed a "book" for sale on the online retailer, Living Wages for Amazon Workers!, valued at £7.65 - the general Living Wage for the UK – in order to put pressure on Amazon to pay its workers more.
The page was live for nearly two hours before Amazon removed it, by which time it had already received over 100 "reviews" from supporters backing the campaign and calling on the retailer to pay more to its warehouse workers.