Blogs

Hey all.  I know I have spoken at length about my friend who is a teacher in a Philly High School.  I have created this post so that she can comment with a brief introduction and some facts about the school where she is a teacher.  She'll be popping in to share some of her ideas with us!

Given the guided introduction to scientific literacy Kaye provided us on Tuesday evening , hopefully not only the Mawtyrs in the room and on the screen will be interested in giving a close-reading to the recent Science magazine article on The Pseudoscience of Single-Sex Education. Particularly interesting in this regard is Jane McAuliffe's response to the report: that women's colleges "buck the trend" of women avoiding science.....

During this week's class when we broke into small groups and discussed some of the ethics behind modifying the bodies of young children.  Our group came to the conclusion that the most ethical thing to do would be to allow the child to wait until they were 18 to get a surgery if that was what they wanted. I thought that it would be interesting if we explored this idea outside of a western context.  For Instance, would we have the same answers to these questions if we were talking about an intersex kid in a place like Bangladesh?  In other countries, what would be the priority of the parent in making the decision about surgery for their child, the gender identity of the child or the ability to be physically percieved as normal, especially in a place where the gender binary is concrete?  In the United States there is stigma attached to intersexuality but it is far less severe than other parts of the world.  

Again, thinking about our readings outside of a Western context, in examining whether or not women choose low risk jobs, could you even begin to make a similar study in another country?  I don't think it is fair to make these assumptions about testosterone and career choice without looking at statistics in a global context.  There is no way to fully measure how much culture influences these assumptions about testosterone and career choice, but it is obvious that women avoid high risk jobs in other parts of the world because of more than testosterone. 

I had a lot of issues with the study we read on gender differences in testosterone and financial risk aversion.  One of the bigger issues I saw was the sample population they used.  Though they defend their choice of participants ideal for this study, since they were already familiar with financial risk, were fairly demographically homogenous, and provide some measure of risk among professional financial decision makers.  However, this group may also be overly homogenous in testosterone levels, offering only a sliver of possible data.  They report that other studies have found correlations between testosterone and career choice, and concede that greater testosterone among the subjects may reflect the greater risk-taking in that industry.  The selectivity of this sample is incredibly problematic to the generalization of their data.  Such selective sampling cannot generalize to the general population.  This is also true of the negative correlations they found.  Though there may be a negative correlation in the part of the population distribution represented by the sample, the relationship between variables may not be the same elsewhere in the distribution. For example, for the figure below, if you sample between a population with X values between 70 and 80, the X-Y relationship will appear to have a negative, linear correlation.  However, if the whole population distribution of X is represented in the sample, it becomes clear that this is not the case.

The button for inserting links deems to not be working at the moment (I can see it but I can't click on it...). I think I'm serendip-challenged. But anyway -- all these readings about testosterone reminded me of an episode of This American Life that deals with this topic.

Act 1 is about a guy who stops producing testosterone and explains how his life changed, Act 2 is about a transgender individual who is taking testosterone, Act 3 involves the staff of TAL all getting their personal testosterone levels checked and discussing what those numbers mean to them, and the final act is from a mother, talking about her son (reminded me of Kaye's assertion that raising 3 sons gives her some insights into this stuff!).

So I remember in the very beginning of this semester the topic of gender popped up in class. The question 'is gender discrimination still an issue' was brought up but we didn't have time to discuss about it in depth. So here is a link to the  video my friend showed me that I thought would be interesting for everyone to watch.

It's a trailer of one of the films that are in the 2011 Sundance Film Festival - 'Miss Representation'

http://vimeo.com/18985647

I was lucky enough to be invited by my daughter, who's been involved for the past week in  "Occupy Philadelphia," to attend a Meeting for Worship @ the base camp, hosted by Philadelphia Central Monthly Meeting this past Sunday morning. I have been a Quaker for 25 years, and most of my worshipping has been done in musty-smelling meetinghouses. This service was remarkable, in my experience, for being 1) in the open air 2) in the center of Philadelphia, with tourists and visitors mulling around --sometimes walking among-- the worshippers.  A worship space w/ no walls! It was also remarkable because we began in the dark and, an hour later, @ noon, were all sitting in the light.

It was perhaps most remarkable, though, because @ the rise of Meeting we used the "people's microphone," an innovation that arose when the first group to "Occupy Wall Street" was unable to get permission to use a sound system. It works like this: one person speaks--a brief, concentrated phrase (one of the nice benefits here is the distillation that happens), something like "I am Anne Dalke"--and it is repeated by 70 voices strong, all shouting, "I am Anne Dalke." Then I say, "I have been a Quaker for 25 years," and they all shout, "I have been a Quaker for 25 years."

Reflect here on what's working, and what needs working on, both for you as an individual learner and for the class as a learning community. What might you do differently, and what can we do, to to improve y/our learning?

I feel like I have experienced a lot in only 2 months. I have never really been in an environment where discussion is so open and productive as it is in ESEM. I think over the past weeks our class has grown to become comfortable with one another and we always end up running out of time every class period. I think Serendip is ingenious but I still feel like some of classmates continue to be hesitant about what they post on here. This class has allowed me to improve the way I interact with people and how to create ideas from one's thoughts instead of just recieving information from a teacher. I also learned how to frame my questions so it's asking a more general question that can be built on when I post my thoughts on the internet. I think my writing needs more work in ways like how to argue more effectivly and how to reach a larger audience. I can't wait for the rest of the semester.

The excerpt below is taken from an interesting article from the Gawker by Ryan Tate in the Censorship and Authoritarianism section:

"The internet allowed people around the world to express themselves more freely and more easily. With the App Store, Apple reversed that progress. The iPhone and iPad constitute the most popular platform for handheld computerizing in America, key venues for media and software. But to put anything on the devices, you need Apple's permission. And the company wields its power aggressively.