Passive Discrimination, My Ass

Harvard Chief Defends His Talk on Women
By SAM DILLON, The New York Times, January 18, 2005

The president of Harvard University, Lawrence H. Summers, who offended some women at an academic conference last week by suggesting that innate differences in sex may explain why fewer women succeed in science and math careers, stood by his comments yesterday but said he regretted if they were misunderstood.
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Science Tuesday - Dietary guidelines and cracked knuckles

Nine Servings of Fruit and Vegetables?
By MARY DUENWALD

The new dietary guidelines for Americans released last week are more detailed than ever, distinguishing, for example, between whole and processed grains and between trans fats and healthy vegetable oils.

They are also more demanding. They raise the daily goal for fruit and vegetable consumption to nine servings from five, for instance, and challenge Americans who want to control their weight to get as much as 60 to 90 minutes of exercise on most days.

But many busy Americans may be stumped by how exactly to manage that.

"I try to eat right and I do get exercise," said Lawrence Cunniffe, a social worker in San Francisco, "but if these are daily standards, I really don't know how I would live up to them."
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REALLY?
The Claim: Frequent Knuckle Cracking Can Lead to Arthritis
By ANAHAD O'CONNOR

THE FACTS Like the wail of a cellphone in a dark theater or the shriek of fingernails on a blackboard, the sound of another person's knuckles cracking can be an annoyance. It can also have consequences for the person doing the cracking, though studies show that urban legend notwithstanding, arthritis is probably not one of them.
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More Creationism creaping into schools

Dover braces for 'intelligent design' battle: Telling biology students of concept divides town
Tuesday, January 18, 2005, BY JIM LEWIS, Of The Patriot-News

DOVER - Eugene Hildebrand, a retired steel-plant painter, laments the lack of God in America's classrooms as the eggs and toast on his plate at the Route 74 Diner grow cold.

Used to be, teachers would read Bible verses in class. But judges and lawsuits have removed religion from the classrooms, and what do you have? he asks. Swearing on TV, guns in schools, moral decay that shocks the 73-year-old Dover man.

"We're taking Bibles to the jails now," he says ironically. "If they teach a little more about religion in schools, they wouldn't have guns in schools, policemen in schools. If they don't want God in schools, they're idiots."

But he's encouraged by a recent decision by the Dover Area School Board to counter the teaching of evolution with the theory of "intelligent design" in the high school's ninth-grade biology course.

The board voted 6 to 3 in October to read a one-minute statement to those classes that calls evolution "a theory" in which gaps "exist for which there is no evidence." Intelligent design, the statement says, is "an explanation of the origins of life that differs from Darwin's view."

Eleven parents have filed a federal lawsuit challenging the board's decision. But that won't stop the statement from being read to students this semester, perhaps as early as this week, according to a spokesman for the Thomas More Law Center, a conservative Christian law center that is representing the school board.

Dover is the first school district in the country to require teachers to introduce intelligent design in science classes.
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