"Academics launch rival inquiry Committee for Academic Freedom will examine [whether Jason Arday’s] employment at Cambridge met expected standards" (Times) I’ll submit my own assessment of Arday's illiterate thesis. It failed to meet expected standards for PhD, let alone a Cambridge professorship.

Held to higher standards. Left off invitations. Pointed to as “diversity” but ignored. These are just some of the hundreds of examples of devaluation women faculty in the United States shared with computational social scientist Katie Spoon. These experiences, more common for women than men, are to blame for the higher rate of attrition for women faculty, Spoon and colleagues report in a new analysis. Learn more: scim.ag/4hOhcH1 @NewsfromScience

Economist @MazzucatoM: "If bankers, estate agents and bookmakers claim to create value rather than extract it, mainstream economics offers no basis on which to challenge them, even though the public might view their claims with scepticism. Who can deny Lloyd Blankfein when he declares that Goldman Sachs employees are among the most productive in the world? Or when pharmaceutical companies argue that the exorbitantly high price of one of their drugs is due to the value it produces? Government officials can become convinced (or ‘captured’) by stories about wealth creation, as was recently evidenced by the US government’s approval of a leukemia drug treatment at half a million dollars, precisely using the ‘ value- based pricing’ model pitched by the industry – even when the taxpayer contributed $200 million dollars towards its discovery." Read more: evonomics.com/value-of-every…

Interacting with attractive women makes men stupid. The researchers found that even a few minutes with the attractive woman was enough to make the students slower and less accurate on the test. The more attracted they were, the worse their results. They also studied the effects on women students of being in the company of handsome men, and found the test scores were unaffected. sciencedirect.com/science/ar…

Cornell just produced a massive new report on higher education noting that companies have a “jarring” skepticism of higher ed thanks to a new generation of degree holders who lack key skills like handling uncertainty, compromising, and absorbing feedback. Faculty also report that incoming students, despite four years of undergraduate education, are “underdeveloped” in these relational or interpersonal skills. This is a serious crises in higher education and the report calls for a greater need for conflict-resolution training. We need to do a better job training our students to deal with these issues. These are traditionally the skills students developed in higher education. I loved college because it challenged me, sparked debate, and required me to grapple with complexity. This should be an essential part of college--inside and outside the classroom. chronicle.com/article/compan…

Cauchy was a legitimist and a coward, he refused to abide by the new regime after the failed July revolution in 1830 and flew to Germany. He was a rich ass who emigrated to evade tax. He would be delighted to know his results can be used to generate infinite imaginary money.

A trader turned one month into a four thousand percent return when the world shut down. two years earlier he stood at Google and named, out loud and on camera, every kind of person you should stop taking advice from. His name is Nassim Taleb. he traded options for twenty years and then quit. he wrote a book about the events nobody sees coming and it sat on the bestseller list for thirty six weeks. he said in print before 2008 that the banking system was built to collapse, and then it collapsed. in the first quarter of 2020 Universa, the fund he advises, returned over four thousand percent while everything else fell apart. He opens with one question you can ask about any person alive, and once you have heard it you cannot stop applying it. then he runs it through profession after profession in front of the room. some pass. most do not. he never stops to check whether the people sitting in front of him are in the group he just convicted. Watch the moment near the end when someone asks him about people who sell ideas and never pay for them. he stops talking about theory and tells a story about a famous writer who walked out on him mid sentence, told the world she hated markets, and lived in a seventeen million dollar house. he says her name out loud. Google left it in. Sixty minutes, free since 2018. nobody is selling you anything and there is no shorter version.

Voyager 1 probe, launched 1977, is now so far from Earth that a radio signal travelling at the speed of light takes over 22 hours to reach it, & it is sending data back from interstellar space on a power source the size of a car battery @ScienceBlogs scienceblog.com/t-the-voyage…