WhirledView

Tierney Knows What Women Want

by CKR

I’m very wary of the experiments that economists do. They set up a situation that supposedly simplifies their variables and ask their subjects to make choices, usually involving rewards of extremely small amounts of money. There are all kinds of ways this sort of thing can go wrong, not least that the subjects are frequently undergraduates taking the professors’ courses. I’m not even going to start going down the path of enumerating the pitfalls.

So when the soon-not-to-be-quoted John Tierney of the NYT tries to discern "what women want" (ohmigod) from one economic study, I’ve got my doubts. But some points are worth considering before the link decays.

"Even in tasks where they do well, women seem to shy away from competition, whereas men seem to enjoy it too much," Professor Niederle said.

At least the implied putdowns cut in both directions. But the professor (female) sees women as “shying away” while conservative pundit Tierney suggests that they may be displaying good sense.

Tuesday Wildflower and Lizard Blogging

by CKR

We're partaking of the southwestern heat wave, so I got out early this morning to water, even before the lizards were out and around. A gazillion of them live in my rockwork, and they've been very active all week, particularly in the warming-up times as the sun burns out the nighttime cool before the washed-out midday heat. There are several different types, and I'm just realizing that I picked up a new bird guide over the weekend but forgot that my reptile and amphibian guide has gone missing.

We got a quick look at each other a couple of days ago. This morning, as I was taking some plant photos, the next one came out to warm up.
I think she is a swift, and I'm saying "she" because she is broad enough to be an eggy female.

The New York Times Bucks a Trend

by CKR

We all know by now that the New York Times plans to put its opinion pieces and other material behind a subscription-only firewall in September. Large parts of the rest of the world are moving in the opposite direction.

The UK’s Wellcome Trust, a funder of biomedical research, will require in October that papers on its funded projects be deposited in PubMed Central. Le Centre national du recherche scientifique (CNRS) maintains a free archive of its papers and others. The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Royal Library are developing a network of databases called Digital Academic Repositories. The Berlin Declaration on open internet access to scientific results has been signed by 56 organizations in 17 countries.

In the private sector, Celera Genomics is ending subscriptions and will deposit its data on the human genome in the publicly available GenBank (via 6 May issue of Science).

All science. Perhaps newspapers operate on different principles. More and more newspapers and magazines have been moving to web subscription policies. Their information is perishable in a way that scientific results are not. But this judgement is being made by people whose previous business judgements have resulted in lower readership and lower advertising revenue.

When Will We Ever Learn?

By PHK

Todd Greentree, recently retired American diplomat and former professor at the U.S. Naval War College who is writing a book on small wars, recently spoke at the May 16 session of the World Affairs Forum. This Santa Fe-based international affairs organization emphasizes small group discussion on current foreign affairs issues critical to Americans.

Mr. Greentree’s presentation and the ensuing discussions were so thoughtful that I decided to highlight a few ideas discussed that sunny afternoon.

America’s Continuing Amnesia

First and foremost, every new generation of Americans fails to learn from its elders the basic requirements for fighting and winning small wars. We are seemingly incapable of learning the lessons even of our own history. Yet, the U.S. has fought in far more small or irregular wars than it has in traditional state-vs.-state conflicts like World Wars I and II. Moreover, the U.S. is far more likely to fight irregular wars in the future.

Blame Pakistan’s Imran Khan and the Bush Administration, Not "Newsweek"

By PLS

There have been many disturbing allegations that interrogators at Guantanamo and other prisons under U.S. supervision have desecrated the Muslim holy book. That anyone would have grounds to believe such allegations fills me with shame.

But how can any reasonable person not entertain the possibility that officials permitted to hurt and humiliate human beings might also maltreat a sacred text? The Bush administration, from top to bottom, has created a climate of credibility for these allegations.

Koran abuse would be reprehensible under any circumstances. Yet previous allegations have prompted little more than muttering and mild protest. Some ten days ago all hell broke loose.

Since then at least 15 people have been killed. Property has been destroyed. Newsweek, the double-crossed messenger, has been unfairly vilified all over the world, most reprehensibly by the Bush administration and its op-ed allies. I, for one, think Newsweek had no reason to retract or apologize, and I will elaborate on this in another article.

Meanwhile, what explains the escalation in violence?

The short answer is that Imran Khan, a Pakistani cricket-legend turned politician, needed a prop for a press conference on May 5. Knowing full well (any Pakistani would) the likely outcome of his charges, he incited the violence for his own political purposes, which is to say, to strengthen his vote bank.

Los Alamos Loses a Director

by CKR

I wrote most of this piece a couple of weeks ago, but I didn’t have the finishing touches on it before Todd Kauppila died. Todd was one of the two people fired for “losing” the classified media that later turned out to be an accounting mistake. He was 41 and is reported to have died from a massive heart attack. My sympathies to his family.

His memorial service was last Friday. You can read about it on the Los Alamos blog.

Today Bill Broad published a piece on the Los Alamos National Laboratory and its interim director, Bob Kuckuck. George "Pete" Nanos resigned a week or two ago.

What originally inspired this post was that Sean Paul used Nanos’s resignation as an example of the power of the blog. I tend to believe that it’s not at all in the category of Dan Rather’s or Eason Jordan’s troubles with the blogosphere. Most likely, the Los Alamos blog had very little to do with Pete Nanos’s move to the Defense Threat Reduction Agency.

I’ve written before about Los Alamos before. If you want background, check out the WordWorth articles linked in that previous WV post.

Los Alamos’s basic problem is that it was formed for a special purpose during World War II and then things just kept happening. They just kept developing bombs and doing lots of other things for the US in the Cold War, and the money kept coming. Then the Soviet Union came apart.

Tuesday Pest Blogging

by CKR

Pest is defined by the Oxford American Dictionary as "an insect or animal that is destructive to cultivated plants or to stored food etc." I would add weeds to this definition, although, the more I think about it, probably pest is to animal as weed is to plant.

Weeds of the West was useful to me this week. Here's a tumble mustard (Sisymbrium altissimum, not at full powers, will be pulled now that I've taken the photo) and another sort of mustard that I can't find in WoW now, although I was pretty sure I had seen it earlier. Amazing how many weeds are mustards--four-lobed flowers, long skinny seed pods, leaves very variable, related to cabbage and brussels sprouts and broccoli. Even the model for plant genome studies, Arabidopsis thaliana, is a mustard. And it's a weed.

This is a flourishing stand of cheatgrass, the weed I have spent the most time with this week. This bed is somewhat shaded and obviously retains more moisture than some others. The cheatgrass has several different growth habits, and the contrast between the height and greenness of the cheatgrass in this bed and in another
tells me what kinds of nice plants will do best in these places. I think there is a drip irrigation system, but I don't know where the emitters are. Subject of a more extensive experiment when I get to the place where I can see the soil in the beds...

That second photo shows something else about cheatgrass. It has many different ways it can grow. I've weeded out some so you can see that when the plants are very close together, they raise their seed stalks vertical. But when they are further apart,
they sprawl.

I can see two things that this adaptability does for cheatgrass: it helps to spread the seeds, launching them on the wind from a thick stand, and dropping them far from an isolated parent; it also allows the cheatgrass to spread its own sort of herbicide to keep other weeds from growing.

Many plants spread chemicals to prevent other plants from growing close to them. Walnut trees are particularly notable, but many trees do it. As a friend said to me, trees hate grass. I suspect that cheatgrass does this for two reasons: it forms almost monocultural stands, and I now see other plants coming up where the cheatgrass was.

WoW tells me that this is woollyleaf bursage (Ambrosia grayi--Ambrosia, the food of the gods???), a perennial. I was suspecting it to be a perennial because the roots on the plants I've pulled seem to continue down to some infinite bursage source. There wasn't much of it when the cheatgrass was there, but now it's showing up.

Organic gardeners and lovers of furry creatures stop here. You will be offended by what follows.

Blog Style and the Valentino Effect

By PLS

Valentino had ‘em swooning in silent movie days. When talkie time came, though, the sheik was a scream, laughable, ludicrous, hopeless. His voice was all wrong.

Now print journalists are trying for crossover appeal in the blogosphere–and finding it ain’t so easy.

Arianna Huffington, she of untold millions and blowing-in-the-wind loyalties, tried opining at great length about this and that in successive fits of electronic bloviating–let’s call it “blovioging.” Evidently she wasn’t having the knock-‘em-over impact she expected, so she called in a rogue’s list of big print names, the heavyweights whose work appears regularly, repeatedly in newspapers and magazines across the country.

Picture a Saudi prince buying up all the horse flesh in sight and expecting to win the Triple Crown.