Quickies
Quickies: Burkini banning, teacher salaries, and pooping jellyfish
- The burkini is banned in Cannes, France for the most Islamophobic, misogynistic reason – “To make matters worse, Cannes’ Head of Municipal Services Thierry Migoule made the unfair connection with Muslim women who wear the burkini to those who pledge allegiance to terrorist organizations.” From Alex.
- How gender bias affects teachers’ salaries – “The attitude that men aren’t fit to interact with young children, and that women are better suited to be teachers because of their so-called inherent maternal instincts, still manifests itself today, especially since the percentage of male teachers goes up significantly in middle school and high school. But this is due to bias, as well, and a harmful assumption that teaching gets harder as you teach older children.”
- Pooping comb jellies just upended evolution – “The animals were long thought to live without an anus, but new videos of them pooping show that biologists were not ready for this jelly.”
- Why it’s so hard to tell if a country is really rid of polio – “The waiting period depends a lot on the quality of surveillance—the less sensitive your system is, the longer you’d have to wait to be sure the disease is gone. But the solution isn’t waiting longer—it’s collecting more accurate data.”
I follow polio eradication quite closely, partly because eradicating such a disease is an Apollo level achievement (and I was too young to be following events during smallpox eradication) and partly because both my parents were affected by polio in childhood – one caught polio (but was not crippled by it), the other’s family fled the city for months to avoid an epidemic. (Guess what – my parents weren’t anti-vax.)
I follow http://www.polioeradication.org/Dataandmonitoring/Poliothisweek.aspx and I’ve been recording the results in a spreadsheet since the start of 2015. Prior to this setback, 2016 was running at 50% of the rate of 2015, which was the best year ever, having been a stunning 25% of the rate of 2014. (However 2013 and 2014 were worse than 2012).