To begin at the beginning (the latest beginning), the issue of women’s innate abilities at doing mathematics or science was offered as a possible reason for their under-representation in tenured positions at top universities in these fields, by Larry Summers, economics advisor to President Clinton and erstwhile president of Harvard University, in a speech (which he presciently deemed “provocative”) at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Listing other areas of under-representation (example: white men in the NBA), Summers urges:

These are all phenomena in which one observes underrepresentation, and I think it’s important to try to think systematically and clinically about the reasons for underrepresentation.

With this in hand, he proceeds:
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File this under awesome generalisations:

Face-Off: East vs. West — Zelkowitz 2008 (820): 3 — ScienceNOW

[...]

The eye-tracker confirmed that Westerners tend to dart from the eyes to the mouth and back again. Conversely, the East Asian students fixated on central points in the face, which the researchers believe enables them to view all its information at once, they report today in PLoS ONE. Both groups scored about the same on the recognition and categorization tasks, showing their methods were equally effective in identifying faces, Caldara notes. “In this difference, there is still something common and universal.”

Richard Nisbett, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, says the findings fit with other research on culture and visual perception. Speaking broadly, says Nisbett, people in East Asian cultures tend to prize collectivism and harmony above the individuality valued in Western cultures. These social values are so powerful, he says, that they may influence a trait biologists previously thought was hard-wired in our species.

This post is the first in a series of ruminations that fall under the title offered (“Science and the public”).

An article in the New York Times brings up the fallout from recent resistance to vaccination:

Measles Cases Grow in Number, and Officials Blame Parents’ Fear of Autism – NYTimes.com

More people had measles infections in the first seven months of this year than during any comparable period since 1996, and public health officials blamed growing numbers of parents who refuse to vaccinate their children.

Rather typically, the issue is immediately cast as a confrontation between two warring camps:

The language has changed, but the message is the same. Infectious disease prevention is to be feared. It is against the natural order of things. Instead of “vaccines are against God’s will”, it’s now “vaccines are against Nature’s will.” They’re “unnatural”, not “green”. In the old vernacular, interfering with God’s will could lead to “bad things”, like flood, famine, or other divine punishment. In the new language, it leads to “autism”.

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