Cody Taylor

hessian notes a Cornell survey, published in the Psychological Bulletin, of 35 years of sociological studies that concludes that women tend to choose non-math-intensive fields for their careers not because they lack mathematical ability, but because they want flexibility to raise children or prefer less math-intensive fields of science. “‘A major reason explaining why women are underrepresented not only in math-intensive fields but also in senior leadership positions in most fields is that many women choose to have children, and the timing of child rearing coincides with the most demanding periods of their career, such as trying to get tenure or working exorbitant hours to get promoted,’ said lead author Stephen J. Ceci… The authors concluded that hormonal, brain, and other biological sex differences were not primary factors in explaining why women were underrepresented in science careers, and that studies on social and cultural effects were inconsistent and inconclusive. They also reported that although ‘institutional barriers and discrimination exist, these influences still cannot explain why women are not entering or staying in STEM careers,’ said Ceci.”

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If you care about Linux in any way, you’ve probably heard that The Linux Foundation has bought Linux.com from Sourceforge. The domain is at the forefront in representing Linux and its community, and they’ve promised to bring fresh, new concepts utilizing technologies that integrate aspects of the social web with its newly launched “ideaforge”.

An anonymous reader writes “A few days ago, Inner Fence released a paid iPhone app called Infinite SMS, which let iPhone users employ Google’s free SMS gateway to send SMS messages without paying their service providers. The resulting surge in traffic on Google’s SMS gateway forced Google to block all third-party applications from using the free SMS feature — including Google’s own GTalk client.”

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rsk writes “For the last few weeks I’ve been experiencing terrible streaming video performance from Netflix on both my Xbox 360 and PC. While my Xbox 360 would at least stream at a lower resolution, my PC cannot seem to avoid 2-hr. buffering times before playback even started. I smelled shenanigans and started digging. With some help finding the debug menu for the streaming video player, I set out to figure out why playback was so slow. It seems that Netflix is significantly throttling Watch Instantly users (on the PC) down to an unusable cap — in my case, 48 kbps — on a per-connection basis.”

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Everybody loves the iPhone, but follow Apple’s strict rules or it’s ‘No soup for you!’

Tweet: @wefollow #yourtag #yourtag #yourtag (replace ‘#yourtag’ w/the tags you’d like to be listed under, example: #blogger – max 3 tags). Hope you enjoy!

Reader Hugh Pickens sends in news from the NYTimes a few days back of what is believed to be a 500-year-old portrait of William Shakespeare, painted 6 years before his death. No existing portrait, that most experts consider to be genuine, was captured during Shakespeare’s lifetime. “It shows Shakespeare as a far more alluring figure than the solemn-faced, balding image that has been conveyed by previous engravings, busts and portraits. ‘His face is open and alive, with a rosy, rather sweet expression, perhaps suggestive of modesty,’ said a brochure for an exhibition opening in Stratford. The portrait came to light when Alec Cobbe visited the National Portrait Gallery in London in 2006 to see an exhibition, ‘Searching for Shakespeare,’ and realized that the Folger portrait, whose authenticity had been doubted for decades, was a copy of the one that had been in his family’s art collection since the mid-18th century, with the family unaware that the man depicted might be Shakespeare. Scientific studies at Cambridge showed that the oak panel on which the Cobbe portrait was mounted came from trees felled in the last 20 years of the 16th century, pointing to a date for the painting in the early 1600s.” For balance, the New Yorker disputes some of the claims in the NYTimes account, and for good measure tosses in another purported Shakespeare portrait from life, this one discovered 3 years ago in Canada.

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Apple on Thursday evening made available to its developer community yet another pre-release of Mac OS X 10.5.7, which stands to be the seventh maintenance and security update to the company’s Leopard Operating system in less than 18 months.

What’s new in this release: * Joystick support on Mac OS X. * Implementation of iphlpapi on Solaris. * A number of 64-bit improvements. * Obsolete LinuxThreads support has been removed. * Many fixes to the regression tests on Windows. * Various bug fixes.

First they came for the teenagers. Could toddlers be far behind? Nope. Warner music is sending takedown notices to YouTube over videos in which babies and toddlers interact with music in adorable ways