Dan: I know I messed up.
Cara: Yup.
Jane: Yes you did.
Dan: Now, your mom…I miss your mom. All the time.
Lily: Mom’s gone.
Dan: Oh, honey. I see her every day. I see her in your goodness, Jane. And Cara, your passion. And Lily, you have her eyes. And her smile. So here is what I’m going to do. I am grounding myself for life. And so I will be with you–
Jane: You’re with us every day.
Dan: I’m not going anywhere. See, I got a little confused with Marie. That is over, okay? I kind of lost my head. I got a little stupid, because I love her. No, that’s not…I don’t love her. and that’s not what I meant. I mean, how could I love her? I’ve only known her…
Lily: Three days.
Dan: Yeah. And how can you know in three days? Well, no. Yes I do. I love her. I love her, I love her, I love her. I love her.
Jane: Then go get her.
Lily: We so prefer her to you.
Monthly Archives: February 2013
Why Gender Equality Stalled
A few excerpts from the article:
Women’s labor-force participation in the United States also leveled off in the second half of the 1990s, in contrast to its continued increase in most other countries. Gender desegregation of college majors and occupations slowed. And although single mothers continued to increase their hours of paid labor, there was a significant jump in the percentage of married women, especially married women with infants, who left the labor force. By 2004, a smaller percentage of married women with children under 3 were in the labor force than in 1993.
SOME people began to argue that feminism was not about furthering the equal involvement of men and women at home and work but simply about giving women the right to choose between pursuing a career and devoting themselves to full-time motherhood. A new emphasis on intensive mothering and attachment parenting helped justify the latter choice.
One study cautioned that nearly 30 percent of opt-out moms who wanted to rejoin the labor force were unable to do so, and of those who did return, only 40 percent landed full-time professional jobs. In “The Price of Motherhood,” the journalist Ann Crittenden estimated that the typical college-educated woman lost more than $1 million dollars in lifetime earnings and forgone retirement benefits after she opted out.
Today the main barriers to further progress toward gender equity no longer lie in people’s personal attitudes and relationships. Instead, structural impediments prevent people from acting on their egalitarian values, forcing men and women into personal accommodations and rationalizations that do not reflect their preferences. The gender revolution is not in a stall. It has hit a wall.
When family and work obligations collide, mothers remain much more likely than fathers to cut back or drop out of work. But unlike the situation in the 1960s, this is not because most people believe this is the preferable order of things. Rather, it is often a reasonable response to the fact that our political and economic institutions lag way behind our personal ideals.
Women are still paid less than men at every educational level and in every job category. They are less likely than men to hold jobs that offer flexibility or family-friendly benefits. When they become mothers, they face more scrutiny and prejudice on the job than fathers do.
So, especially when women are married to men who work long hours, it often seems to both partners that they have no choice. Female professionals are twice as likely to quit work as other married mothers when their husbands work 50 hours or more a week and more than three times more likely to quit when their husbands work 60 hours or more.
When people are forced to behave in ways that contradict their ideals, they often undergo what sociologists call a “values stretch” — watering down their original expectations and goals to accommodate the things they have to do to get by. This behavior is especially likely if holding on to the original values would exacerbate tensions in the relationships they depend on.
Our goal should be to develop work-life policies that enable people to put their gender values into practice. So let’s stop arguing about the hard choices women make and help more women and men avoid such hard choices. To do that, we must stop seeing work-family policy as a women’s issue and start seeing it as a human rights issue that affects parents, children, partners, singles and elders. Feminists should certainly support this campaign. But they don’t need to own it.
Work-From-Home Ban at Yahoo!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lisa-belkin/marissa-mayer-work-from-home-yahoo-rule_b_2750256.html
“Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home,” says the memo from HR director Jackie Reses, and reprinted by Kara Swisher on allthingsd.com last night. “We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together.”
No. It doesn’t.
It did 40 years ago, when work and home were separate realms and workers had the luxury of taking care of one at a time. More accurately, men had the ability to take care of work because they knew that women had it covered at home.
It did 20 years ago, when the tools of work were all in the office — all the files and paperwork; the office phone, with the office number, and the cord that didn’t reach beyond the cubicle wall.
It did before there were studies showing that flexibility improves worker productivity, and morale and health.
I had hope for Marissa Mayer. I’d thought that while she was breaking some barriers — becoming the youngest woman CEO ever lead a Fortune 500 company, and certainly the first to do it while pregnant — she might take on the challenge of breaking a number of others. That she’d use her platform and her power to make Yahoo! an example of a modern family-friendly workplace. That she would embrace the thinking that new tools and technology deserve an equally new approach to where and how employees are allowed to work.
Instead she began by announcing that she would take just a two week maternity leave, which might have been all she needed, but which sent the message that this kind of macho-never-slowed-down-by-the-pesky-realities-of-life-outside-the-office was expected of everyone.
Additional Opinions about Yahoo!’s New WFH Policy:
Marissa Mayer is No Fool
http://blogs.hbr.org/schrage/2013/02/marissa-mayer-is-no-fool.html
Recent News in the Age that Estimates We Will Die Younger than Our Parents
Japan Enforces Legal Limit On Waistlines
Excerpt:
Summoned by the city of Amagasaki one recent morning, Minoru Nogiri, 45, a flower shop owner, found himself lining up to have his waistline measured. With no visible paunch, he seemed to run little risk of being classified as overweight, or metabo, the preferred word in Japan these days.
But because the new state-prescribed limit for male waistlines is a strict 33.5 inches, he had anxiously measured himself at home a couple of days earlier. “I’m on the border,” he said.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/06/13/japan-enforces-legal-limi_n_106949.html
51 Uses for Coca-Cola
Excerpt:
1. Remove grease stains from clothing and fabric (I had to start there)
2. Remove rust; methods include using fabric dipped in Coke, a sponge or even aluminum foil.
3. Remove blood stains from clothing and fabric.
4. Make gooey Coke funnel cakes .
5. Clean oil stains from a garage floor; let the stain soak, hose off.
6. Loosen a rusty bolt; pour on some Coke and wait for the magic to happen.
http://www.wisebread.com/51-uses-for-coca-cola-the-ultimate-list
Coca-Cola ad tackles obesity
http://www.usatoday.com/videos/news/nation/2013/01/15/1835981/
The Junk Food Lobby Wins Again
On Tuesday, June 17, 2005, Connecticut Governor Jodi Rell vetoed what would have been the nation’s strongest school-based nutrition law. With one stroke of the pen, she put to rest an extremely contentious three-year battle to rid Connecticut schools of soda and junk food.
http://www.alternet.org/story/22259/the_junk_food_lobby_wins_again
Quote from Clockwork Angel
Sometimes our lives can change so fast that the change outpaces our minds and hearts. It’s those times, I think, when our lives have altered but we still long for the time before everything was altered -that is when we feel the greatest pain. I can tell you, though, from experience, you grow accustomed to it. You learn to live your new life,and you can’t imagine, or even really remember, how things were before.
Normalizing a Pre-existing Non-normalized Table #stackoverflow
When your table has lots of columns that need to be broken out into separate records…
It can be done with a single SELECT statement!
Needless to say, when I found this little gem of a sql statement, I was super excited.
When you have a table structured like this:
UserID | UserName | AnswerToQuestion1 | AnswerToQuestion2 | AnswerToQuestion31 | John | 1 | 0 | 12 | Mary | 1 | 1 | 0
And you want to get a result set like this (split the three data columns into three separate rows):
UserID | UserName | QuestionName | Response1 | John | AnswerToQuestion1 | 11 | John | AnswerToQuestion2 | 01 | John | AnswerToQuestion3 | 12 | Mary | AnswerToQuestion1 | 12 | Mary | AnswerToQuestion2 | 12 | Mary | AnswerToQuestion3 | 0
Use this:
SELECT
Y.UserID,
Y.UserName,
QuestionName = ‘AnswerToQuestion’ + X.Which,
Response =
CASE X.Which
WHEN ‘1’ THEN AnswerToQuestion1
WHEN ‘2’ THEN AnswerToQuestion2
WHEN ‘3’ THEN AnswerToQuestion3
END
FROM YourTable Y
CROSS JOIN (SELECT ‘1’ UNION ALL SELECT ‘2’ UNION ALL SELECT ‘3’) X (Which)
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3678479/split-multiple-columns-into-multip…
(Yes, I realize this table is still not completely normalized, but it’s a step in the right direction.)
Also, a related sql query: if you have a bunch of values in a single column that you need to break out into multiple rows: http://www.sqlteam.com/article/parsing-csv-values-into-multiple-rows
nerdjonistories 