blake johnson

Lawrence Summers, president of Harvard, jumped back into the national spotlight this weekend after making some controversial remarks at a conference last friday. His speech discussed the gender gap in the sciences in academia and new research which offers some possible explanations. One of these explanations is that men may have an innate genetic advantage over women in the sciences.

Coverage of this issue differs widely between the national/international media like BBC News and the The Harvard Crimson. Something that the national media is leaving out is that Summers apparently followed his comment about innate differences with the statement: “I’d like to be proven wrong on this one.”

The impetus for Summers comment is recent research which shows that the variance in science test scores is greater for men than for women. Consequently, there are more men that are really good at science, but also more men that are really bad at science.

This controversy seems awfully reminiscent of what Steven Pinker shows in The Blank Slate: modern society displays great resisitance to any explanation which is based on genetics rather than on social factors. That is not to say that in the particular case of women in science social factors are unimportant. But, clearly there are differences between men and women, and if there are factors which make men more inclined toward science, we should try to discover what those factors are, rather than ignoring them.

Phyllis iPod spoof
Originally uploaded by bjohnson00.

I saw an article on Wired about companies doing spoofs of the iPod ads for Christmas cards and such. I thought I’d try my hand at doing one to see how hard it is. I’d say the result is pretty good, wouldn’t you?

Peter Kiedrowski Wedding
Originally uploaded by bjohnson00.

The son of the best man at my parent’s wedding got married on New Year’s Eve. Here’s Phyllis and me right before we headed out to the ceremony.

IMG_0859
Originally uploaded by bjohnson00.

Here’s a photo of Phyllis and I outside of the Ely Cathedral. I visited Phyllis over my Thanksgiving break.

I am becoming a bit nervous about Apple’s future. They are sitting on some great products, but I’m not sure that Apple’s current strategy is in its best long-term interests. My particular concern is with Apple’s unwillingness to liscense their DRM technology to other device manufacturers. I love the AAC codec and I love the iTunes Music store… but the music industry has too much power to be limited to a single distributer. There is a lot of music out there which is not available through iTunes, and if people cannot get the music they want from iTunes, and when cheap and good alternatives to the iPod exist, people will drift away from Apple’s iPod/iTunes music platform.

I am fully aware that the iPod is the best-selling portable music player currently on the market, and that Apple is reaching out to those that cannot afford an iPod with the iPod Shuffle, but I think pretty soon Apple is going to have to open up the AAC format to other distributers, or else risk eroding it’s market share.