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Why do people defend unjust, inept, and corrupt systems?
Reviewing laboratory and cross-national studies, the paper illuminates four situations that foster system justification: system threat, system dependence, system inescapability, and low personal control. …
Says Kay: “If you want to understand how to get social change to happen, you need to understand the conditions that make people resist change and what makes them open to acknowledging that change might be a necessity.”
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Pillow Robot Smacks You When You Snore | Strange Snapshot of the Day | Life’s Little Mysteries
Scientists at Waseda University in Tokyo have created a robot that smacks you in the face if you snore during sleep. Scientists say the robot can manage sleep apnea. Sleep apnea is a common disorder in which a person has one or more pauses in breathing, or takes shallow breaths, while they sleep, disrupting a normal sleep cycle.
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The Design of Science: 10 Great Research Graphics | Wired Science | Wired.com
While almost any geological map is a thing of beauty, this one is notable for its subject matter: permeability. Colors correspond to the ease with which fluids can flow through rock and soil. Thanks to satellite imagery, the map reaches to a depth of 300 feet below Earth’s surface, deeper than any previous permeability map. …
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World’s Smallest Steam Engine Is Size of Fog Droplet | Wired Science | Wired.com
The microengine doesn’t use parts found in traditional Stirling engines, which are super-efficient devices pioneered in 1816 by the Scottish clergyman Robert Stirling. Those use heated gas to push a piston, then draw the piston back as the gas cools. The microengine borrows the same principles of heating and cooling a material to perform work.
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Baby Sloth Orphanage: The Cutest Place on Earth | Wired Science | Wired.com
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Daily Kos: Not just Newt Gingrich: Mitt Romney profited from Freddie Mac too
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President’s Commission on the Status of Women 1961-1963
Fifty years ago, on December 14, 1961, President John F. Kennedy created the President’s Commission on the Status of Women. With a growing interest in women’s rights, this group was to explore issues and make proposals. This group helped set the stage for many of the legal changes in the 1960s and 1970s…
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Reed v. Reed: Why It’s Important to Women’s History
In 1971, Reed v. Reed became the first U.S. Supreme Court case to declare sex discrimination a violation of the 14th Amendment…
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Universal Declaration of Human Rights | About.com Women’s History
On December 10, 1948, the United Nations Assembly passed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, appointed to the United Nations by her husband’s successor, Harry S Truman, was not only a key lobbyist for this document, she wrote much of it herself.
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Blackstone’s Perspective | About.com Women’s History
In the 19th century, American and British women’s rights — or lack of them — depended heavily on the commentaries of William Blackstone which defined a married woman and man as one person under the law…
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Judith Sargent Murray | About.com Women’s History
She wrote one of the earliest known essays on feminism — published a year before Mary Wollstonecraft’s famous book on women’s rights. She also wrote about politics, religious, and moral subjects, and her letters are a charming introduction to what life was like just before and soon after the United States became a nation…
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This Woman’s Tale Of Ordering Abortion Drugs On The Internet Is The Most Depressing Story Ever
According to Newsweek, the abortion pill RU-486 has gained in popularity in recent years, not because taking pills is super fun, but because pro-life activists scare the shit out of people.
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The Hollywood Reporter in the wake of their complete dismissal of women in both its writer and director roundtables has done a 360 and put together a whole cover on the lack of women directors and other women in power in the business. While the package is interesting (while not saying anything we didn’t already know), I just wish that this didn’t seem like such a fix up for their earlier ridiculousness.
While we might want to celebrate the successes of women in Hollywood cause it is so much more fun than talking about all the work that needs to be done (trust me, I know), we must continue to push and make people aware of the disparities. Part of the problem is that no one wants to believe that things are so bad. But it is bad.
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Mary Wollstonecraft’s image is beamed onto Palace of Westminster | Life and style | The Guardian
Statues don’t tend to get much publicity in the UK – unless it is Trafalgar Square’s fourth plinth – but this campaign, called Mary on the Green, does raise questions about the number of women immortalised in stone. Of the 5,193 public outdoor sculptures of famous people in the US, for example, only 394, or less than 8%, are of women, compared with 4,799 of men…
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Sometimes a bunny is just a bunny | Pharyngula
[DON'T read the whole thread. -L]
…I hate the phrase “pick your battles”, because that’s not what the person who says it actually means. They don’t mean that one should establish what battles they do and do not want to fight based on their own experiences, but that which battles are valid or not rely on the approval of the person saying “pick your battles”.
There’s also something in there that, if this were TVTropes, I would be tempted to call “Feminists Can’t Multitask”: the idea that a feminist cannot, for example, combat gender discrimination in the workplace and also call out subtle forms of sexism. The thing is, yes we can. Not only can we do both, but I think feminists do a damn good job of ascribing appropriate degrees of interest in both things. That’s why gender discrimination gets legislation and Subtly Sexist Bunnies get a “hey, isn’t this kinda sexist?” offhand remark.
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Wednesday Geek Woman: Audrey Tang ( 唐鳳), Perl hacker | Geek Feminism Blog
Audrey Tang is far and away the most awesome hacker I’ve ever had the privilege to have worked with. She’s best known for creating Pugs, a perl6 implementation in Haskell. Though it’s now semi-retired in favour of the newer implementations that it had a role in inspiring, it represented a huge leap forward and a quantum shift in Perl6 development at a time when enthusiasm around Perl6 was sorely flagging. She was the first CPAN contributor to have uploaded 100 modules. She’s the key figure behind Perl 5′s internationalization, as well as the i18n of many, many other individual pieces of software.
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Changing the Culture of Ocean Science: a DSN core value | Deep Sea News
Glamour magazine, where the HELL are female scientists in your annual “women of the year” awards?
Year after year, you honor female actresses, fashion designers, politicians, activists, athletes and models. You bestow awards on some truly amazing people, who have made it their life’s work to change the world and spread messages of peace, hope, and joy. When have you ever even mentioned science?
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The Sketchbook of Susan Kare, the Artist Who Gave Computing a Human Face | NeuroTribes
The gestures and metaphors of icon-driven computing feel so natural and effortless to us now, it seems strange to recall navigating in the digital world any other way. Until Apple’s debut of the Macintosh in 1984, however, most of our interactions with computers looked more like this: …
How did we get from there to here? …
For the Mac, Kare designed the first proportionally spaced digital font family…
Kare’s work gave the Mac a visual lexicon that was universally inviting and intuitive.
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» How to be a fan of problematic things Social Justice League
Liking problematic things doesn’t make you an asshole. In fact, you can like really problematic things and still be not only a good person, but a good social justice activist (TM)! …
Firstly, acknowledge that the thing you like is problematic and do not attempt to make excuses for it.
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Jailbreak the Patriarchy – Chrome Web Store
Jailbreak the Patriarchy genderswaps the world for you. When it’s installed, everything you read in Chrome (except for gmail, so far) loads with pronouns and a reasonably thorough set of other gendered words swapped. For example: “he loved his mother very much” would read as “she loved her father very much”, “the patriarchy also hurts men” would read as “the matriarchy also hurts women”, that sort of thing.
This makes reading stuff on the internet a pretty fascinating and eye-opening experience…
Running this extension will not trap you outside the asylum. When you install Jailbreak the Patriarchy, you’ll see that there’s a new button in the top right corner of your browser. …
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Soraya Chemaly: Violence Against Women Is a Global Pandemic
What You Can Do About It?
The goal of this year’s 16 Days campaign is simple: to study, make known and help abolish the causes of violence against women. This year, the campaign’s emphasis is challenging militarism.
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I found myself wondering why there were so many women on stage who were talking about feminism when they clearly hadn’t read anything in the field since the 60s. The answer, I think, is that these were women are accustomed to being on panels about feminism at conventions for no other reason than their willingness to speak up and their gender. At a normal convention, this is incredibly admirable; in a space where even saying the “F” word out loud is controversial, there’s a lot you can accomplish just by sharing your experience as a woman and providing a space where these conversations are accepted.
At GeekGirlCon, however, some of these conversations come of feeling like Charlie Brown kicking a football that’s already been removed; the universal support for basic ideas like “Yes, women should be here and should not be harassed” renders them a little lackluster as takeaways. If the goal is for GGC to be a space for girl geeks to strategize for other conventions, this standardization of the party line could be useful. Otherwise, the discussions could really stand to be a little more detailed.
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California legal experts note that under the law the judge could have refused to award support only if one party had been convicted of attempted murder. …The district attorney’s office, however, has taken up Ms. Harris’ cause and has lined up a state representative to introduce a bill to make changes in the law by increasing the range of crimes that would disqualify an ex-spouse from receiving alimony.
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Obama’s woman problem – Salon.com
A question of who should be allowed access to a safe form of contraception is at its root a question of how badly we want to, or believe that we can, police young women’s sexuality. When Obama is talking about his daughters, we know he’s not really basing his opinion on an anxiety that they might suffer the adverse effects of drinking a whole jug of Pepto-Bismol or swallowing 50 Advil, things that any 11-year-old who walks into a CVS with a wad of cash could theoretically do. When he says that he wants to “apply common sense” to questions of young women’s access to emergency contraception, he is telegraphing his discomfort with the idea of young women’s sexual agency, or more simply, with the idea of them having sex lives at all. This discomfort might be comprehensible from an emotional, parental point of view. But these are not familial discussions; this is a public-health policy debate…
Why should we be asked to believe that Obama’s paternity imbues him with more moral authority on the subject of women’s health and reproductive lives…
What’s startling is the degree to which Obama seems not to have learned from any of his past gaffes, how no one seems to have told him – or told him in a way that he’s absorbed – that the best way to address a question of women’s health and rights is probably not by making it about his role as a father.
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More Laura Nyro | Echidne of the Snakes
To celebrate her induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
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Susan Wood Issues Response to Sebelius’s Overruling of Emergency Contraception Access
…former FDA official Susan Wood …[rejected] Sebelius’s claim that more data is needed on safety and label comprehension for the youngest of possible emergency contraception users:…Wood also notes that because the age restriction remains, access for older women remains restricted – emergency contraception is available without a prescription for those over 17, but is still behind a pharmacy counter.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
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