I overslept this morning due to the craziest dream. I’d written a great account of it, but I had the misfortune of hitting “create post” when my internet was spazzing out.. and I lost that great literary piece and that bit of my life. All I can remember now is the vivid image of my own wrist without flesh, an upset father, a creepy stalker man, a beautiful woman whose mother was belittling here, a cousin, and a necklace.

Anyway, the test is over, its time to clean up, go out, and be merry.

Mr. Donut! Now in stop-action delightfulness.

This is adorable. I wonder if it’s his favorite movie?

Prime example of how med students are guilted into doing community service:

“I know you’re all up to your eyeballs in MCBM, but please take a 2 minute study break to read about this opportunity.

[Student org] has established a partnership with a local charter school that is in desperate need of tutors. They’ve lost two of their core science teachers this year and their kids are scrambling to try to learn Chemistry and Biology with long-term substitutes (not easy).

We’re trying to set up a program where we’ll send tutors to the school twice per month for an hour. The kids need help in the following subjects:

Chemistry, Biology, Physics, Algebra II, Pre-Calculus, Geometry

Since nobody here can pretend they did poorly in math or science in high school, I hope you can all donate an hour or so of your time every month to these kids!”

ilovenyao:

45 Breathtaking Examples of Slow Shutter Speed Photography @ SmashingApps

Chinese “blow-up” bra with “God’s Hand” technology. Pretty funny digital enhancements too, the flowers on the bra really “grow” during the pumping activity.

I always wondered where those letters to the North Pole actually went.

The nerdier version of the same story. Pretty crazy stuff.

Link to another interesting article with more explanations rather than just stats, this is my condensed version:

“In 1960, the labor force participation of female college graduates in their twenties and thirties was low: only 39 percent of 30-to-34-year olds were employed and 47 percent of those employed were teachers; 73 percent had children at home… But beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s, young women’s expectations of their future labor force participation changed radically. Rather than follow in their mothers’ footsteps, they aimed to have careers, not just jobs.

… Adding to the possibility of a greater investment in professional careers was the availability of the contraceptive “pill.” Women could better plan their futures. With a resurgence of feminism, young women also felt more empowered. They had greater guarantees by the government that job discrimination by employers against women would not be tolerated… Since 1980, the wage premium for a college degree has risen, especially for women.

… It also could be that the rise in divorce rates since the 1960s and women’s greater responsibility for children have prompted women to see an investment in college as an insurance policy for their future financial lives.

… Another aspect in the reversal of the college gender gap, rather than just its elimination, is the persistence of behavioral and developmental differences between males and females. Boys often mature more slowly than girls. In grades K-12, boys tend to have a higher incidence of behavioral problems (or lower level of non-cognitive skills) than girls. Girls spend more time doing homework than boys. These behavioral factors, after adjusting for family background, test scores, and high school achievement, can explain virtually the entire female advantage in getting into college for the high school graduating class of 1992, the authors figure. It allowed “girls to leapfrog over boys in the race to college.” Similarly, teenage boys, both in the early 1980s and late 1990s, had a higher (self-reported) incidence of arrests and school suspensions than teenage girls.

… Women’s relative numbers in college have increased ever since the 1950s, with a pause when many men went to college to avoid serving in the Vietnam War. The decline in the male-to-female ratios of undergraduates in the past 35 years is real, and not primarily due to changes in the ethnic mix of the college-aged population or to the types of post-secondary institutions they attend.”

Link to an article that has a few explanations and consequences for one of our lecturers’ comment about men being outnumbered by women in earning postsecondary school degrees. Here’s a quickie excerpt of the stats:

“But then things changed. More and more women began to go to college. By the 1980s, the majority of new freshman each year were females, and since then the gender gap has only grown. Between 1970 and 2000, the overall number of women enrolled in postsecondary institutions grew by 136%, while their numbers in professional school grew by a whopping 853%.

… In 2004, 9.9 million women were attending the nation’s accredited postsecondary schools, compared to only 7.4 million men.

… By 2020, some studies say that 156 women will earn B.A.s for each 100 men. “