Author: Worlding

Posted on

The persistence of gender pay inequity

For all the progress made on women’s rights, one measure of inequality still stands out: Females earn less than males, even in the same occupations. Closing this gender gap will require changing the way employers think about work.

It’s hard to overstate how far women have come in the last century. They are now almost as active in the labor market asmen, and equally or even better educated. They account for about half of all law and medical school enrollments, and lead men in fields such as biological sciences, pharmacy and optometry.images-1

Still, women have yet to reach the same level of pay. As of 2010, the annual earnings of the median full-time, full-year female worker stood at 77 percent of the median male’s — up from 56 percent in 1980 but still far from parity. For college graduates, the number was an even lower 72 percent.

Why the persistent difference? U.S. data provide two clues. First, the gap increases with age: Women start their careers close to earnings parity with men, then fall behind over the next several decades. Second, wage differences are concentrated within occupations, meaning that women earn less not because they choose lower-paid professions.

The earnings gap is most pronounced in occupations such as law that place a premium on the willingness and ability to work long hours, be in the office at specific times and build face-to-face relationships with co-workers and clients. In these professions, the penalty for working part time or taking time off — to give birth or care for a child, for example — is particularly large. Small differences in time away or in hours translate into large differences in pay.

Consider the case of women with master degrees in business administration. At 10 to 16 years into their careers, they are typically earning only 55 percent of what men do. Child bearing is a primary reason for the divergence. A year after giving birth, women’s workforce participation rate declines 13 percentage points. Three to four years later, the decline increases to 18 percentage points. In other words, many MBA moms try to stay in the fast lane but ultimately find it unworkable.

The huge value that so many employers place on a standard work schedule affects more than the careers of women. Anyone who, for whatever reason, needs to take time off or work flexible hours gets penalized. The broader economy suffers when businesses are unable to make full use of highly educated and productive people.

To be sure, some professions may never be able to offer much flexibility. Merger-and-acquisition bankers, trial lawyers and the U.S. secretary of state have 24/7, on-call-all-the-time jobs. That said, the universe of such jobs is probably smaller than it appears.

Many professions that once tied people to specific hours are finding ways to reduce the cost of flexibility by making employees more substitutable. Veterinarians, optometrists, pharmacists, pediatricians, anesthesiologists and primary-care providers are shifting from self-employment to group practices and corporate ownership structures that allow them to cover for one another. Smaller veterinary practices that once required staff to have weekend, night and emergency hours are giving way to larger regional hospitals. Such changes often occur because of increased economies of scale, or in response to pressure from employees.

 

More at: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-21/close-the-gender-pay-gap-change-the-way-we-work.html

Posted on

Narcotic use rising among those expecting

Doctors are prescribing opioid painkillers to pregnant women in astonishing numbers, new research shows, even though risks to the developing fetus are largely unknown, says the New York Times.images

“Of 1.1 million pregnant women enrolled in Medicaid nationally,nearly 23 percent filled an opioid prescription in 2007, up from 18.5 percent in 2000, according to a study published last week in the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology. That percentage is the largest to date of opioid prescriptions among pregnant women. Medicaid covers the medical expenses for 45 percent of births in the United States.

“The lead author, Rishi J. Desai, a research fellow at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, said he had expected to “see some increase in trend, but not this magnitude.”

“One in five women using opioids during pregnancy is definitely surprising,” he added.In February, a study of 500,000 privately insured women found that14 percent were dispensed opioid painkillers at least once during pregnancy. From 2005 to 2011, the percentage of pregnant women prescribed opioids decreased slightly, but the figure exceeded 12 percent in any given year, according to Dr. Brian T. Bateman, an anesthesiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, and his colleagues. Their research was published in Anesthesiology.Dr. Joshua A. Copel, a professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences at the Yale School of Medicine, said he was taken aback by the findings, which come even as conscientious mothers-to-be increasingly view pregnancy as a time to skip caffeine, sushi and even cold cuts. Continue reading “Narcotic use rising among those expecting”

Posted on

Arts job report

What are the latest employment figures for working artists—both full-time and their moonlighting counterparts?Keeping My Day Job: Identifying U.S. Workers Who Have Dual Careers As Artists is the third installment in the National Endowment for the Arts’ Arts Data Profiles, an online resourceoffering facts and figures from large, national datasets about the arts, along with instructions for their use. Arts Data Profile #3 reports on employment statistics for U.S. workers who name “artist” as their primary or secondary job.imgres

According to the NEA, “The analysis springs from the Current Population Survey (CPS), a nationwide, monthly survey of 60,000 American households, conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The CPS is the primary source of U.S. labor statistics, as well as other data on volunteering, poverty, computer and Internet use, arts participation, and more.

“The big picture – In 2013, 2.1 million workers held primary positions as artists. A primary job is defined as one at which the greatest number of hours were worked. In that same year, an estimated 271,000 workers also held second jobs as artists. Twelve percent of all artist jobs in 2013 were secondary employment.

“Unemployment trends – For primary artists, the unemployment rate was 7.1 percent in 2013, compared to 6.6 percent of all U.S. civilian workers, but higher than the 3.6 rate for all professionals (artists are grouped in the professional category). This is an improvement over the 9 percent jobless rates in 2009 and 2010, but well above the pre-recession unemployment rate of 3.6 percent in 2006. Architects and designers were among the hardest hit occupations. While both have halved the 10-11 percent unemployment rates they faced in 2009, neither is back to pre-recession employment rates of 1-3 percent. By contrast, musicians have faced a steady unemployment rate of 8-9 percent since 2009, much higher than the 4.8 percent jobless rate in 2006. Continue reading “Arts job report”

Posted on

Post-american studies

images-1

Academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small.

That adage received a curious twist after the American Studies Association voted in December to boycott Israel’s higher-education institutions to protest its treatment of Palestinians.

A symbolic and nonviolent gesture is what Matthew Frye Jacobson, a former president of the association, called it in a recent interview, adding, “If that’s not allowable, then what is?” Within a month, however, the presidents of more than 100 colleges and universities denounced the resolution. “Academic boycotts subvert the academic freedoms and values necessary to the free flow of ideas,” Drew Gilpin Faust of Harvard wrote in a statement echoing what the other presidents said.

Since then, the controversy has spilled into statehouses and even Congress. A bill introduced in February in the House of Representatives would make an institution that participates in such a boycott ineligible for certain funds. Legislators in at least seven states have introduced similar bills or proposed resolutions condemning academic boycotts (the Illinois effort was voted down in committee last week).

The association’s protest has also provoked larger questions about American studies. Has a discipline that in the 1950s and 1960s was a model of bold interdisciplinary inquiry — fusing literature and history, sociology and economics, popular culture and ethnography — changed, or degenerated, into a bastion of ideological militancy? Continue reading “Post-american studies”

Posted on

The popularity of death studies

At Kean University, students are dying (as it were) to get into Norma Bowe’s class “Death in Perspective,” which has sometimes carried a three-year waiting list. images-2WSJ Online reports that “On one field trip to a local coroner’s office, Dr. Bowe’s students were shown three naked cadavers on metal tables. One person had died from a gunshot, the other from suicide and the third by drowning.

“The last corpse appeared overweight but wasn’t; he had expanded like a water balloon. A suspect in a hit-and-run case, he had fled the scene, been chased by police, abandoned his car and jumped into the Passaic River. On the autopsy table, he looked surprised, his mouth splayed open, as if he realized he had made a mistake. As the class clustered around, a technician began to carve his torso open. Some students gagged or scurried out, unable to stand the sight or the smell.

“This grim visit was just one of the excursions for Dr. Bowe’s class. Every semester, students also leave the campus in Union, New Jersey, to visit a cemetery, a maximum-security prison (to meet murderers), a hospice, a crematory and a funeral home, where they pick out caskets for themselves. The homework is also unusual: Students are required to write goodbye letters to dead loved ones and to compose their own eulogies and wills.

“Sure, it’s morbid. But graduates of Dr. Bowe’s death class and others like it across the U.S. often come away with an important skill: the ability to talk frankly about death. Continue reading “The popularity of death studies”

Posted on

Weighty academic issues

Overweight professors across academe describe battles to achieve self-acceptance, full inclusion in academic life, and genuine respect from students and colleagues. Vitae reports that:

“Some struggle daily to navigate campus spaces that don’t comfortably accommodate their size. Some stand in front of classrooms and wonder whether their bodies influence how students perceive their minds. Some say they have trouble adhering to exercise plans or healthy eating habits because their jobs come with lots of research and little structure.Yet larger professors often grapple with these concerns in isolation and silence. On a national level, discussions of obesity have become increasingly common—and, at times, increasingly contentious. But many fat professors, along with allies in the emerging field of fat studies, feel that colleges and universities have yet to hold productive conversations on the topic, especially when it comes to “fat shaming” and how size influences hiring, tenure, and promotion decisions.

“The situation for fat academics has worsened as our national discourse about obesity has ramped up,” says Christina Fisanick, an associate professor of English at California University of Pennsylvania.Fisanick has tracked the discourse for some time, in part because she herself has struggled with obesity. (Due to a binge-eating disorder, her weight has risen as high as 353 pounds; it’s now down to 228.) Writing in 2007 for Feminist Teacher, she pointed out that the few fat professors depicted on film are treated farcically: Think of Sherman Klump in Eddie Murphy’s remake of The Nutty Professor, for example, or the unnamed (but Colonel Sandersesque) biology professor played by Robert Kokol in Adam Sandler’s The Waterboy. These images, according to Fisanick, affect students’, professors’, and administrators’ expectations of what a scholar should look like.Fisanick’s piece also hinted at a question that many fat academics have found themselves asking: Will they face bias in job interviews or in tenure and promotion decisions? Continue reading “Weighty academic issues”

Posted on

It’s rejection season

Enrollment at American colleges is sliding, but competition for spots at top universities is more cutthroat and

images-1

anxiety-inducing than ever.In the just-completed admissions season, Stanford University accepted only 5 percent of applicants, a new low among the most prestigious schools, with the odds nearly as bad at its elite rivals.

As the New york Times reports, “Deluged by more applications than ever, the most selective colleges are, inevitably, rejecting a vast majority, including legions of students they once would have accepted. Admissions directors at these institutions say that most of the students they turn down are such strong candidates that many are indistinguishable from those who get in.Isaac Madrid applied to 11 colleges, a scattershot approach that he said is fairly typical at his private high school, Bellarmine College Preparatory in San Jose, Calif. Students there are all too aware of the long odds against getting into any particular elite university. “It was a crazy amount of work and stress doing all those essays by the deadline and keeping up my schoolwork, and waiting on the responses, and we had more than $800 in application fees,” he said.Mr. Madrid, 18, got a taste of how random the results can seem. He was among the 95 percent turned away by Stanford, but he got into Yale, which he plans to attend, and he admitted having no real insight into the reasons for either decision.Bruce Poch, a former admissions dean at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif., said he saw “the opposite of a virtuous cycle at work” in admissions. “Kids see that the admit rates are brutal and dropping, and it looks more like a crapshoot,” he said. “So they send more apps, which forces the colleges to lower their admit rates, which spurs the kids next year to send even more apps.” Continue reading “It’s rejection season”

Posted on

Wealth gap is worse than you think

Economists Emmanuel Saez, of the University of California–Berkeley, and Gabriel Zucman, of the London School of Economics, are out with a new set of findings on American wealth inequality, and their numbers are startling. Wealth, for reference, is the

value of what you own—assets like housing, stocks, and bonds, minus your debts. And while it certainly comes up from time to time, it has

images-1

tended to play second fiddle to income in conversations about America’s widening class divide. In part, that’s because it’s a trickier conversation subject. Wealth has always been far more concentrated than income in the United States. Plus, research suggested that the top 1 percent of households had actually lost some of its share since the 1980s.That might not really have been the case.

Forget the 1 percent. The winners of this race, according to Zucman and Saez, have been the 0.1 percent. Since the 1960s, the richest one-thousandth of U.S. households, with a minimum net worth today above $20 million, have more than doubled their share of U.S. wealth, from around 10 percent to more than 20 percent. Take a moment to process that. One-thousandth of the country owns one-fifth of the wealth. By comparison, the entire top 1 percent of households takes in about 22 percent of U.S. income, counting capital gains.

While the super-rich have risen, the merely affluent have barely budged. As shown on this next graph from Saez and Zucman, the share of wealth belonging to the top 1 to 0.5 percent of households has remained about level. The 0.5 to 0.1 percent have tacked roughly an extra percentage point onto their piece of the pie. The relative gains have been eaten up by the elite—the 0.1 percent and even the 0.01 percent. Continue reading “Wealth gap is worse than you think”

Posted on

Disabilities and college life

New college students with disabilities are often insecure.

As InsideHigher Ed reports,”Navigating a complicated bureaucracy for the first time with far less institutional support than they had in high school, these students often must overcome stigma and ignorance surrounding their disabilities and advocate for themselves, which they’re often not used to doing. The alternative: risk not getting the tools they need to succeed academically. That’s difficult enough. But some people make it harder.

“I literally had a professor say, ‘Well, I’ve never had a student of that kind before, so I don’t know what to do,’ ” one college employee said here Tuesday at the American College Personnel Association’s annual conference. “But the student was standing right there ready to take their test. It felt so violating.”At a session here exploring what students with physical and psychological disabilities have to say about their collegiate experiences, it was clear that professors have a lot of learning to do.

“I have faculty who are more dismissive of something like bipolar disorder than they would be of something like cerebral palsy,” one attendee said. Because the affliction is psychological rather than physical, she said, “they don’t see it as being as challenging.”But the student affairs and services staff in the room blamed themselves, in part. One person admitted it’s “embarrassing” that his small private college does not offer any disabilities service training to workers in the campus writing center.

Continue reading “Disabilities and college life”

Posted on

But I’m no artist

imagesWho, exactly, is an artist? Many claim the title, with little to back up their assertion. We’ve all met people who define themselves as artists, but have yet to actually produce any actual art.

A new study finds that, surprisingly, the reverse is also true. It identifies a large group of Americans who have every right to call themselves professional artists, but for some reason avoid doing so.

“Our findings suggest that there are significant numbers of individuals who are engaging in the production of artistic work, but are not embedded within the art world,” Jennifer Lena of Columbia University and Danielle Lindemann of Rutgers University write in the journal Poetics. “This lack of embeddedness is fundamentally important to their self-definition.”

The researchers analyzed some puzzling data from the Strategic Arts Alumni Project, a large, nationwide survey of people who attended arts schools in the U.S. (The vast majority, 81 percent, are alumni of an arts-related undergraduate program. Sixteen percent studied an arts-related discipline in graduate school, and three percent attended a high school for the arts.)

Some of this difference could be written off as simple error. In addition, some of the arts-related professions listed (such as “curator” or “arts educator”) were outside the definition of “professional artist.”

Nevertheless, more than one-quarter of the self-described musicians and architects were in this “dissonance group,” along with 20 percent of dancers and choreographers and 18.5 percent of graphic designers. Continue reading “But I’m no artist”

Posted on

Teaching climate change with art

University courses on global warming have become common, and Prof. Stephanie LeMenager’s new class here at the University of Oregon has all the expected, alarming elements: rising oceans, displaced populations, political conflict, endangered animals.

The goal of this class, as reports the New York Times, “is not to marshal evidence for climate change as a

imgres-2

human-caused crisis, or to measure its effects — the reality and severity of it are taken as given — but how to think about it, prepare for it and respond to it. Instead of scientific texts, the class, “The Cultures of Climate Change,” focuses on films, poetry, photography, essays and a heavy dose of the mushrooming subgenre of speculative fiction known as climate fiction, or cli-fi, novels like “Odds Against Tomorrow,” by Nathaniel Rich, and “Solar,” by Ian McEwan.

“Speculative fiction allows a kind of scenario-imagining, not only about the unfolding crisis but also about adaptations and survival strategies,” Professor LeMenager said. “The time isn’t to reflect on the end of the world, but on how to meet it. We want to apply our humanities skills pragmatically to this problem.”

“The class reflects a push by universities to meld traditionally separate disciplines; Professor LeMenager joined the university last year to teach both literature and environmental studies.

Her course also shows how broadly most of academia and a younger generation have moved beyond debating global warming to accepting it as one of society’s central challenges. That is especially true in places like Eugene, a verdant and damp city, friendly to the cyclist and inconvenient to the motorist, where ordering coffee in a disposable cup can elicit disapproving looks. Oregon was a pioneer of environmental studies, and Professor LeMenager’s students tend to share her activist bent, eagerly discussing in a recent session the role that the arts and education can play in galvanizing people around an issue.To some extent, the course is feeding off a larger literary trend. Novels set against a backdrop of ruinous climate change have rapidly gained in number, popularity and critical acclaim over the last few years, works like “The Windup Girl,” by Paolo Bacigalupi; “Finitude,” by Hamish MacDonald; “From Here,” by Daniel Kramb; and “The Carbon Diaries 2015,” by Saci Lloyd. Well-known writers have joined the trend, including Barbara Kingsolver, with “Flight Behavior,” and Mr. McEwan.

Continue reading “Teaching climate change with art”

Posted on

Brain fountain of youth

imgres-1

Shannon, a 14-year-old who lives in Massachusetts, has amblyopia, a condition sometimes referred to as “lazy eye.”

You can’t tell by looking at her, though. Unlike some amblyopic patients, whose eyes visibly wander, Shannon simply has extremely poor eyesight.

Patients’ best hope for correcting amblyopia is before they turn about 8 years old. Those who don’t get treatment early enough—or for whom treatment doesn’t work—usually end up living with the problem forever.

Shannon is one of those people. Her entire life, she’s worn glasses with a thin non-prescription lens on one side, and a thick corrective lens on the other. As a toddler, her parents tried to make her wear therapeutic eye patches, but she would fling them off.

A few months ago, Shannon enrolled in a clinical study at Boston Children’s Hospital for which she’s taking donepezil, a drug that’s typically used to treat Alzheimer’s. Donepezil is a cholinesterase inhibitor, meaning it increases the amount of acetylcholine circulating around nerve endings. It’s been shown to improve memory function in some patients with dementia.

But of course, Shannon doesn’t have memory problems. Her team of doctors is instead using the donepezil to encourage her brain to learn new skills as quickly and nimbly as an infant’s would. Shannon’s vision has improved markedly over the past four months, her mother told me by phone. Continue reading “Brain fountain of youth”

Posted on

Seniors moving right

U.S. seniors — those aged 65 and older — have moved from a reliably Democratic group to a reliably Republican one over the past two decades.

Gallup reports that “from 1992 through 2006, seniors had been solidly Democratic and significantly more Democratic than younger Americans. Over the last seven years, seniors have become less Democratic, and have shown an outright preference for the Republican Party since 2010.

“In 1992, 53% of senior citizens, on average, identified as Democrats or said they were independents but leaned Democratic, while 39% identified as Republicans or leaned Republican, resulting in a 14-percentage-point Democratic advantage in seniors’ party affiliation. Last year, 48% of seniors identified as or leaned Republican, and 45% Democratic, a three-point Republican advantage. The full 1992-2013 party affiliation trends for seniors and younger Americans are shown on page 2.

“By comparison, younger Americans, those aged 18 to 64, shifted from +1 point Democratic in 1992 to +8 Democratic in 2013, and tended to show greater Democratic advantages from 2006 to 2013 than prior to that. The changes in younger Americans’ party affiliation generally follow those among the broader U.S. adult population between 1992 and 2013.

“Senior citizens’ changing political preferences are also apparent in their recent presidential vote preferences, according to Gallup’s final pre-election polls. Senior voters favored the Democratic candidate in each election from 1992 through 2004, including a 17-point margin for Bill Clinton in 1992, the highest among age groups. In each of the last two elections, by contrast, seniors were the only age group to support the Republican candidate over Barack Obama. Continue reading “Seniors moving right”

Posted on

Twelve steps backward

Say you’ve been diagnosed with a serious, life-altering illness or psychological condition. In lieu of medication, psychotherapy, or a combination thereof, your doctor prescribes nightly meetings with a group of similarly afflicted individuals, and a set of 12 non-medical guidelines for recovery, half of which require direct appeals to God. What would you do?imgres-1

Writing in The Atlantic, Jake Flanagan states that “Especially to nontheists, the concept of “asking God to remove defects of character” can feel anachronistic. But it is the sixth step in the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous—the prototype of 12-step facilitation (TSF), the almost universally accepted standard for addiction-recovery in America today. “From its origins in the treatment of alcoholism, TSF is now applied to over 300 addictions and psychological disorders: drug-use, of course (Narcotics Anonymous), but also smoking, sex and pornography addictions, social anxiety, kleptomania, overeating, compulsive spending, problem-gambling, even “workaholism.”

“Although AA does not keep membership records—the idea being pretty antithetical to the whole “anonymity” thing—the organization estimates that as of January 2013, more than 1 million Americans regularly attended meetings with one of roughly 60,000 groups. Dr. Lance Dodes, a recently retired professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, estimates about 5 million individuals attend one or more meetings in a given year. Indeed the 12-step empire is vast, but Dodes thinks it’s an empire built on shaky foundations. In his new book, released today, The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry (co-written with Zachary Dodes), he casts a critical eye on 12-step hegemony; dissecting the history, philosophy, and ultimate efficacy of TSF, lending special scrutiny to its flagship program. “Peer reviewed studies peg the success rate of AA somewhere between five and 10 percent,” writes Dodes.

“About one of every 15 people who enter these programs is able to become and stay sober.” This contrasts with AA’s self-reported figures: A 2007 internal survey found that 33 percent of members said they had been sober for more than a decade. Twelve percent claimed sobriety for five to 10 years, 24 percent were sober for one to five years, and 31 percent were sober for under a year. Of course, those don’t take into account the large number of alcoholics who never make it through their first year of meetings, subsequently never completing the 12 steps (the definition of success, by AA’s standards). Continue reading “Twelve steps backward”

Posted on

Not divergent enough

imgres

Divergent isn’t perfect. And I am not referring to the film’s dystopian world, wherein society has been split into six “factions”—the smart (erudite), the peaceful (amity), the truthful (candor), the selfless (abnegation), the brave (dauntless) and the outcasts (the factionless).

As Natalie Mitchell writes in the MS Magazine blog: “I am referring to the fact that it does not, as with most mainstream dystopian narratives, go far enough in its critique. Divergent does not include enough representations of those who would be (and are) factionless in the real world (people of color, trans people, disabled people, non-heterosexuals), does not adequately decry violence (especially sexualized and interpersonal violence) and, finally, does not go beyond the same old story that the real “happy ending” is finding a (hot) guy to love.

“However, I still loved the book. And I loved the film. Would it have been great to have a woman of color cast as Tris? Of course. But Shailene Woodley does a phenomenal job as the hero who defies social norms, and Christina, her best friend, (played brilliantly by Zoë Kravitz) is no Rue (hero Katniss’s friend inThe Hunger Games) (As an added bonus, Woodley is sharing laudable divergent views on Twilight as promoting toxic relationship models.)

“Would it have been nice if there were a lesbian or trans or disabled primary character in the film? Indeed. But at least there are non-normative body types (Molly Atwood, played by Amy Newbold), leaders of color (Max, played by Mekhi Phifer) and awesome female tattoo artist-renegades such as Tori Wu (played by Maggie Q). How about an ending where the protagonist doesn’t find “true love” in a male that is older, has more power and commits violent acts against her? Yes, that would have been awesome (but Tobias “Four” Eaton, played by Theo James, is certainly worlds better than the likes of vampire Edward Cullen in Twilight).

Continue reading “Not divergent enough”

Posted on

Stereotypes of LGBT affluence

Despite a commonly held belief that LGBT Americans tend to live it up in classy urban neighborhoods, they struggle with disproportionately high levels of poverty compared to straight people.Excerpted below, Nathan McDermott writes in today’s issue of The Atlantic about misperceptions of LGBT wealth and poverty:

imgres

“Who are America’s gays? To hear it as Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia would have it, gays are a privileged set, living it up in cities across the country. As the justice wrote in his dissent to Romer v. Evans—a landmark 1996 case that overturned a Colorado state constitutional amendment prohibiting legal protections for gays and lesbians—“Those who engage in homosexual conduct tend to reside in disproportionate numbers in certain communities.” Even more ominously, to Scalia, they have “high disposable income,” which gives them “disproportionate political power… to [achieve] not merely a grudging social toleration, but full social acceptance, of homosexuality.”

“The pernicious insinuation—that gays and lesbians are one the wealthiest demographics in the country—isn’t a new cliché. Some of the most ingrained public images of LGBT people are their cosmopolitan, highfalutin lifestyle; gays, so the story goes, live in gentrified urban neighborhoods like The Castro in San Francisco or Chelsea in New York, eat artisanal cheese, and drink $12 cocktails.

“But like most stereotypes, the myth of gay affluence is greatly exaggerated.

“In reality, gay Americans face disproportionately greater economic challenges than their straight counterparts. A new report released by UCLA’s Williams Institute found that 29 percent of LGBT adults, approximately 2.4 million people, experienced food insecurity—a time when they did not have enough money to feed themselves or their family—in the past year. In contrast, 16 percent of Americans nationwide reported being food insecure in 2012. One in 5 gays and lesbians aged 18-44 received food stamps in the last year, compared with just over 1 in 4 same sex couples raising children. The LGBT community has made huge political strides over the past decade, but in economic matters they still lag far behind the rest of the country. Continue reading “Stereotypes of LGBT affluence”

Posted on

Rethinking plagiarism

Professors often frame plagiarism as an ethical problem, with a simple solution: don’t do it. imagesAs InsideHigher Ed reports, “For students tempted to plagiarize knowingly, that approach might work. But the academic integrity rhetoric ignores the fact that students sometimes unintentionally plagiarize or misrepresent source material in their work, panelists said Thursday during a session on the topic at the Conference on College Composition and Communication.

“Stephanie Roach, associate professor and director of writing programs at the University of Michigan at Flint, recalled a class discussion about why students misuse sources in their work. Students named all the usual suspects – the assignment was too hard or they ran out of time, for example.

“But Roach was struck by a student who said, “I didn’t think I was that person.” The student had crossed a boundary she’d never thought she would, and Roach wondered how it had happened. The professor said she later mused with colleagues that the war on plagiarism was like the war on drugs, in that academe tells students to “Just say no,” painting a bright line between right and wrong and assuming students have the tools they need to make the right choice.

“But sometimes they don’t. Students might misrepresent a source because they don’t understand it, or don’t know how to weave it in with their own thoughts, panelists said. And open-source culture, where facts and thoughts easily can be “plucked” from webpages, makes that supposed bright line dimmer still.Valerie Seiling Jacobs, a master of fine arts in nonfiction writing candidate at Columbia University, doesn’t lecture her first-year writing students on intentional plagiarism, she said. She tells students that if they’re going to deliberately misuse others’ work, “then you have bigger problems than I can ever help you solve.”Instead, Seiling Jacobs focuses on inadvertent misuses, which are far more plentiful. Continue reading “Rethinking plagiarism”

Posted on

Oops, NEA budget to be cut

Today the Obama administration announced reductions in the proposed budget of the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) from $154-million to $146-million.  images-1

Writing in the New York Times, Patricia Cohen discusses this historical role in light of a new study on the NEA’s impact:

“Ever since the late 1980s, when the performance artist Karen Finley started playing around with yams and chocolate, the National Endowment for the Arts has come under fire from some conservative lawmakers. Back then the agency was castigated for giving grants to provocative artists like Ms. Finley, whom some critics called obscene.Now House Republicans charge that the endowment supports programming primarily attended by the rich, causing “a wealth transfer from poorer to wealthier citizens.” A new study to be released on Wednesday challenges that assertion, however, and concludes that federally supported arts programs attract people across the income spectrum; the wealthy, yes, but also many below the poverty line.

“The study, by the National Center for Arts Research at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, was specifically intended to test lawmakers’ propositions about arts funding. Last year the House Budget Committee, led by Representative Paul D. Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin, issued a proposed budget for the 2014 fiscal year, which eliminated all funding for the arts endowment as well as the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Continue reading “Oops, NEA budget to be cut”

Posted on

Alpert award to Daniel J. Martinez

Daniel J. Martinez is the Visual Arts recipient of the 2014 Herb Alpert Award.

“Daniel Joseph Martinez is a post-conceptual artist who engages in an interrogation of social, political and cultural mores through artworks that have been described as nonlinear, asymmetrical, multidimensional propositions. His works range from the digital to the analogue, ephemeral to the solid,” the Alpert Foundation today announced.

Daniel Joseph Martinez

Martinez is a Professor in the Department of Art at the University of California, Irvine

The Alpert Award in the Arts is an unrestricted prize of $75,000 given annually to five risk-taking mid-career artists working in the fields of dance, film/video, music, theatre and the visual arts. The prize was initiated and funded by the Herb Alpert Foundation and has been administered by California Institute of the Arts since 1994. The Alpert Award honors and supports artists respected for their creativity, ingenuity, and bodies of work, at a moment in their lives when they are poised to propel their art in new and unpredictable directions. The Alpert recognizes experimenters who are making something that matters within and beyond their field.

 

More information at: http://www.herbalpertawards.org

Posted on

Most see human role in global warming

images

More Americans believe increases in the Earth’s temperature over the last century are due to pollution from human activities (57%) than to naturally occurring changes in the environment (40%).Gallup reports that “The balance of views on this issue is essentially unchanged from 2013, but reflects broader agreement with the idea that mankind is responsible for global warming than was the case from 2010 through 2012, when barely half believed it. Agreement that human activities are responsible has yet to return, however, to the 61% level seen as recently as 2007. This trend comes from Gallup’s annual Environment poll, a nationally representative telephone survey conducted each March since 2001. The 2014 update was conducted March 6-9.

“Americans’ prevailing view that human activity is responsible for global warming doesn’t necessarily translate into concern over the issue. The percentage of Americans worried about global warming (as well as “climate change”) still ranks low relative to other issues, and barely a third expect global warming to pose a serious threat in their own lifetime.In the same survey, Gallup asks Americans to describe their general understanding of global warming, with 33% this year — a record high — saying they understand global warming “very well,” up from 27% in 2013 and triple the level seen in the initial 1992 measure.The proportion understanding the issue “fairly well” has also increased over the long term, from 42% in 1992 to 51% today, while the percentage who don’t understand has dropped by more than half, from 44% to 16%.Leading climate science researchers in the U.S. and globally — including those at the International Panel on Climate Change, a U.N. body that is at the forefront of climate research — are convinced that elevated levels of carbon dioxide and other byproducts of fossil fuel use are the reason the Earth’s temperature has warmed. Continue reading “Most see human role in global warming”