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...with exceptions coming only in the humanities, divinity, and education. That January, Harvard’s then-President Lawrence H. Summers shone an inadvertent spotlight on the issue by delivering a now-infamous speech suggesting “innate” gender differences as a possible explanation for the scant number of female scientists and mathematicians at the top of their fields. The firestorm these comments generated put pressure on Harvard and its embattled leader to demonstrate a greater commitment to diversifying Harvard’s ranks. Task forces and committees convened, diversity offices were formed, and reports commissioned...
...others who witnessed Graf in command, Kaprow was an independent Navy outsider not subject to Graf's orders. Questions continue to swirl about how Graf not only retained her command but kept getting promoted despite reports from eyewitnesses like Kaprow. Graf has declined interview requests, and there has been scant support offered for her by Navy colleagues on naval blogs or elsewhere. An admiral expressed concern on Friday over what he called a "lynch mob" mentality about the case, as even conservative talk-show host Rush Limbaugh weighed in: "This woman sounds like a real Cruella...
There were a lot of factors behind these two distinct survival profiles - the most significant being time. Most shipwrecks are comparatively slow-motion disasters, but there are varying degrees of slow. The Lusitania slipped below the waves a scant 18 min. after the German torpedo hit it. The Titanic stayed afloat for 2 hr. 40 min. - and human behavior differed accordingly. On the Lusitania, the authors of the new paper wrote, "the short-run flight impulse dominated behavior. On the slowly sinking Titanic, there was time for socially determined behavioral patterns to reemerge...
...bigger than others, at least in circumference. The Earth's equator is 24,901 miles around. The perimeter of the Arctic Circle, by contrast, is just 9,945 miles, and if you stand five feet from the North Pole, the circumference you inscribe as the Earth rotates is a scant 31.4 feet. Yet in all of those places, it still takes 24 hours to complete a single rotation. (The fact that points along the equator move faster than others is the reason NASA and the European Space Agency put their launch pads in Florida and French Guiana, respectively; fire...
...like rubber and features like counterweights be built into the architectural designs to allow buildings to bend and sway rather than break during temblors. Haiti, by contrast, lets its buildings rise with little if any input from engineers and plenty of bribes to so-called government inspectors. Structures have scant reinforcement and are often set on weak foundations. That's why 13 of 15 federal ministry buildings pancaked in the Jan. 12 earthquake - and why, in 2008, 91 students and teachers died when their school in a Port-au-Prince suburb collapsed. The school's owner was convicted of involuntary...