The new economics of college vs. trade school...or no school

This is something that people have been struggling with for awhile, but as this article from the New York Times says, the current economic crisis is putting it into sharp perspective: a lot of kids are being pushed to go to college when in fact it may not be the best choice for their future.

College degrees are simply not necessary for many jobs. Of the 30 jobs projected to grow at the fastest rate over the next decade in the United States, only seven typically require a bachelor’s degree, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Among the top 10 growing job categories, two require college degrees: accounting (a bachelor’s) and postsecondary teachers (a doctorate). But this growth is expected to be dwarfed by the need for registered nurses, home health aides, customer service representatives and store clerks. None of those jobs require a bachelor’s degree.

Professor Vedder likes to ask why 15 percent of mail carriers have bachelor’s degrees, according to a 1999 federal study.

“Some of them could have bought a house for what they spent on their education,” he said.

Read the article...

Even though I was someone who excelled in college, and even went to graduate school, I am in fact a strong proponent of the idea that college is unnecessary for a lot of people. I think this was brought home even more for me the year that I worked as a college teaching assistant. The push for four-year colleges is almost starting to feel like a racketeering job.

I think we in the U.S. need to move past the stigma of not having a college degree being equivalent to being a slacker or stupid or unmotivated. If anything, they are smarter for not automatically buying into the system, they are more motivated to start contributing to the workforce, and more goal-oriented than their college-bound counterparts who often view college as an extension of high school.

How women should ask for a raise

A couple of years ago I read the study that discussed how women who ask for raises are seen as pushy and it usually doesn't go so well as for men. So how do we not come off as pushy, but still receive equal pay, I thought. FINALLY someone has done a study to try and figure out the answer. From the New York Times:

The work by Ms. Riley Bowles and her peers suggests that women in the work force can use specific advice. Here are some of their suggestions:

BE PROACTIVE If you believe you deserve a raise, don’t sit around and wait for someone to notice. “A lot of women, and this is quite commonly found, think, ‘As long as I work really, really hard, someone will notice and they will pay me more,’ ” said Karen J. Pine, a psychology professor at the University of Hertfordshire in Britain and co-author of “Sheconomics” (Headline Publishing Group, 2009). But “people don’t come and notice.”

You also want to think about the best time to approach your boss. It may make sense to approach him or her after an annual performance review, said Evelyn F. Murphy, president of the WAGE Project, a nonprofit organization, who runs negotiation seminars for women. “Or, if you just took on a major responsibility or won an award.”

BE PREPARED Doing your research pays, literally. A study found that men and women who recently earned a master’s degree in business negotiated similar salaries when they had clear information about how much to ask for.

But in industries where salary standards were ambiguous, women accepted pay that was 10 percent lower, on average, than men. “In our experiments, we found that with ambiguous information, women set less ambitious goals,” said Ms. Riley Bowles, who ran the study. “They asked for less in a competitive negotiation and got less.”

That theory also holds in other areas where there aren’t set expectations, like executive bonuses and stock options. “You get bigger gender gaps in those less standard forms of pay,” she added.

Read more at the New York Times...

Using lasers to map archaeological sites

My day job involves laser technology, so this was a nice intersection of study and work. From the New York Times:

in the dry spring season a year ago, the husband-and-wife team of Arlen F. Chase and Diane Z. Chase tried a new approach using airborne laser signals that penetrate the jungle cover and are reflected from the ground below. They yielded 3-D images of the site of ancient Caracol, in Belize, one of the great cities of the Maya lowlands.
In only four days, a twin-engine aircraft equipped with an advanced version of lidar (light detection and ranging) flew back and forth over the jungle and collected data surpassing the results of two and a half decades of on-the-ground mapping, the archaeologists said. After three weeks of laboratory processing, the almost 10 hours of laser measurements showed topographic detail over an area of 80 square miles, notably settlement patterns of grand architecture and modest house mounds, roadways and agricultural terraces.
“We were blown away,” Dr. Diane Chase said recently, recalling their first examination of the images. “We believe that lidar will help transform Maya archaeology much in the same way that radiocarbon dating did in the 1950s and interpretations of Maya hieroglyphs did in the 1980s and ’90s.”

Read the full story

Possible male contraceptive in ultrasound

A research team thinks it may be able to stop sperm production for up to six months using ultrasound, the same instrument used to look at fetuses in the womb, an often-occurring side effect of sperm:

University of North Carolina researchers, working with a $100,000 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, think that delivering a single dose of ultrasound to the male reproductive organs can stop sperm production for six months, after which time production fires up again.

Perhaps the best part: it's non-hormonal, low-cost, and once treated the man has to do/remember absolutely nothing to remain infertile for up to half a year. Such an inexpensive and widely available method of stopping sperm production long-term -- but not permanently -- has plenty of appeal in the first world, but could be a serious boon for developing nations dealing with overpopulation and poverty.

The work is still preliminary, but the team is pushing forward with more clinical trials aiming to tweak the technique for optimum safety, as well as the greatest effect. In the meantime gents, we don't recommend any attempts at self-medicating with unattended ultrasound machines. As with any experimentation that requires you to take off your pants, we recommend you let the professionals get a bit further along in the lab before trying this at home.

Read Popular Science Story

Read BBC story

Mayans had plumbing too

Everybody gets to share!
http://news.discovery.com/earth/mayan-plumbing-more-than-a-pipe-dream.html

he New World’s earliest known example of engineered water pressure was discovered by two Penn State archaeologists in the Mayan city of Palenque, Mexico.

“Water pressure systems were previously thought to have entered the New World with the arrival of the Spanish,” the researchers wrote in a recent issue of the Journal of Archeological Science. But this water feature predates the arrival of Europeans.

The city of Palenque was built around the year 100 in a constricted area with little land to build on and spread out to. By the time the city’s population hit its zenith during the Classic Maya period from 250-600, Mayans had saved precious urban space by routing streams beneath plazas using aqueduct-like structures. 

The pressurized water feature is called Piedras Bolas Aqueduct, a spring-fed channel on steep terrain.  From the tunnel’s entrance to its outlet 200 feet downhill, the elevation drops about 20 feet and its diameter decreases from 10 feet near the spring to about a half a foot where the water emerges. This combination of a downhill flow and sudden channel restriction pressurized the water, shooting it from the opening to an estimated height of 20 feet.

The researchers don’t know for sure how the Maya used the pressurized water, but they have a couple of ideas. One possibility is they used it to lift water into the nearby residential area for wastewater disposal.Another possibility, and the idea the researchers used as their model, was as a fountain.

A similar feature was found in the city’s palace. 

Neanderthal/Human mutant = most of us!

WE are the missing link!

http://news.discovery.com/human/neanderthal-human-interbreed-dna.html