Icosian Reflections

…a tendency to systematize and a keen sense

that we live in a broken world.

IN  WHICH Ross Rheingans-Yoo—a sometime economist, trader, artist, expat, poet, EA, and programmer—writes on things of int­erest.

Parental Leave
feminism, gender, workplace, family
note: Discussion of heterosexual, two-parent, biological family structures is not meant to imply that there aren't other valid and prevalent ways of raising children, because there are. I'm just focusing on mother-and-father families for the moment, as the plurality case. Single-parent families, and adoptive families, especially ones with two fathers, are a whole different matter.

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Today (a few days ago) from the NYT's Upshot column: When Family-Friendly Policies Backfire.

In Chile, a law requires employers to provide working mothers with child care. One result? Women are paid less.

In Spain, a policy to give parents of young children the right to work part-time has led to a decline in full-time, stable jobs available to all women -- even those who are not mothers.

Elsewhere in Europe, generous maternity leaves have meant that women are much less likely than men to become managers or achieve other high-powered positions at work.

Family-friendly policies can help parents balance jobs and responsibilities at home, and go a long way toward making it possible

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October 31 Bucket o' Links: "Links, Explosions, and People Talking" Edition
college, feminism, harvard, links, space, metaart, cs things

Welp, Friday post goes out on Sunday NO shut up it's still saturday is that how this daylight savings thing works HRMPH. (It's not.)

Anyway, I'm in the middle of writing some stuff about a topic that's almost certainly going to end up being controversial, and I've decided to publish some of it, and I'll get around to doing the part where I actually say things later. Anyway, that's a work in progress; here's a finished linkwrap!

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First, meta of metas, if you like my takes on (some subset of) the week, maybe also check out other people's linkwraps that have come out in the last day or so:

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October 17: Bucket o' Links, "Back on the Wagon" Edition
feminism, science, harvard, education, links, ross does art

Well, I said I was going to do this as a regular thing, and then did only two before stopping. So here's an attempt to un-stop. It's a day late, but that's better than never, right?

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According to a Harvard FAS report (as reported in the Crimson), there are now more students at Harvard studying "Engineering and Applied Sciences" than "Arts and Humanities". But fear not that we're losing our liberal-arts soul; there are still half again as many students in NatSci than SEAS, and more students studying Social Sciences than SEAS and NatSci put together.

Graph shows decreasing numbers of concentrators in 'Social Science' and 'Arts and Humanities', and increasing numbers in 'Science' and 'SEAS' over the past nine academic years. 'Special concentrations' is also graphed, but remains vey close to 0 throughout.

personal disclosure: As a student jointly in Computer Science and Math, I'm counted as one tally-mark each in SEAS and NatSci, over my strenuous objections that "the science of computation" is as much an 'applied' science as is "the science of arithmetic". But that's a topic for another day.

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One of the awesome benefits of the House System at Harvard (think kind of like Hogwarts's house system, except

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