Paul M. Jones

When you control for hours worked, time away for family, occupation, and other critical factors, that "pay gap" goes away. This also reminds me that, although there may be a "glass ceiling" for women, there's also a "glass floor" that they stand on above the truly rough and dangerous jobs.

Men are far more likely to choose careers that are more dangerous, so they naturally pay more. ...

Men are far more likely to work in higher-paying fields and occupations (by choice). ...

Men are far more likely to take work in uncomfortable, isolated, and undesirable locations that pay more.

Men work longer hours than women do. The average fulltime working man works 6 hours per week or 15 percent longer than the average fulltime working woman.

Men are more likely to take jobs that require work on weekends and evenings and therefore pay more.

Even within the same career category, men are more likely to pursue high-stress and higher-paid areas of specialization. ...

Women business owners make less than half of what male business owners make, which, since they have no boss, means it's independent of discrimination.

Via The Gender Pay Gap is a Complete Myth - CBS News.

This is new to me:

Why is memcached not recommended for sessions? Everyone does it!

If a session disappears, often the user is logged out. If a portion of a cache disappears, either due to a hardware crash or a simple software upgrade, it should not cause your users noticable pain. This overly wordy post explains alternatives. Memcached can often be used to reduce IO requirements to very very little, which means you may continue to use your existing relational database for the things it's good at.

Like keeping your users from being knocked off your site.

via NewProgrammingFAQ - memcached - Never Stops For Directions - Memcached - Google Project Hosting.

49 former rocket scientists and astronauts think NASA is doing it wrong:

We believe the claims by NASA and GISS, that man-made carbon dioxide is having a catastrophic impact on global climate change are not substantiated, especially when considering thousands of years of empirical data. ...

The unbridled advocacy of CO2 being the major cause of climate change is unbecoming of NASA’s history of making an objective assessment of all available scientific data prior to making decisions or public statements.

... We request that NASA refrain from including unproven and unsupported remarks in its future releases and websites on this subject. At risk is damage to the exemplary reputation of NASA, NASA’s current or former scientists and employees, and even the reputation of science itself.

The first response from CAGW adherents will be "Not a single climate scientist among them!" Although if they agreed with the CAGW position, it would be "The rocket scientists agree with us!" Via Hansen and Schmidt of NASA GISS under fire for climate stance: Engineers, scientists, astronauts ask NASA administration to look at empirical evidence rather than climate models | Watts Up With That?.

When Kenneth Warden was diagnosed with terminal bladder cancer, his hospital consultant sent him home to die, ruling that at 78 he was too old to treat.

Even the palliative surgery or chemotherapy that could have eased his distressing symptoms were declared off-limits because of his age.

via Sentenced to death for being old: The NHS denies life-saving treatment to the elderly, as one man's chilling story reveals | Mail Online.

Yesterday the Canadian Senate voted 50-27 to abolish the long gun registry. Bill C-19 received unanimous support from Conservative Senators, and some support from Liberals. The bill had previously passed the House of Commons. It became the law of the land today, with the Royal Assent of Canada’s Governor-General.

The bill does not change Canada’s registration system for handguns, which has been in effect since the 1930s. Nor does it change the registration system for certain long guns which have been classified as “prohibited” or “restricted” weapons. Likewise unchanged is Canada’s complicated and burdensome system for licensing gun owners, which was created by a Liberal government in the 1990s.

The registration changes, however, are monumental. Registration records for seven million ordinary long guns are to be destroyed. The government of Quebec has announced that it while file suit to attempt to obtain custody of the 1.5 million registration records pertaining to citizens of Quebec.

...

Canadian gun owners know that much more needs to be done to undo the damage caused the kulturkampf which Trudeau began, and which has burdened Canadians with laws that do nothing to enhance public safety, but whose purpose and effect is to harass and persecute law-abiding gun owners. Bill C-19 is a good first step, and a monumental one.

via The Volokh Conspiracy » Canada abolishes long gun registry.

Obama is *sooo* smart, he should be able to answer this pretty quickly. He was a Constitutional Law professor, after all.

[A] federal appeals court apparently is calling the president's bluff -- ordering the Justice Department to answer by Thursday whether the Obama Administration believes that the courts have the right to strike down a federal law, according to a lawyer who was in the courtroom.

The order, by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, appears to be in direct response to the president's comments yesterday about the Supreme Court's review of the health care law. Mr. Obama all but threw down the gauntlet with the justices, saying he was "confident" the Court would not "take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress."

Overturning a law of course would not be unprecedented -- since the Supreme Court since 1803 has asserted the power to strike down laws it interprets as unconstitutional. The three-judge appellate court appears to be asking the administration to admit that basic premise -- despite the president's remarks that implied the contrary. The panel ordered the Justice Department to submit a three-page, single-spaced letter by noon Thursday addressing whether the Executive Branch believes courts have such power, the lawyer said.

via Appeals court fires back at Obama's comments on health care case - Crossroads - CBS News.

Despite the language in the coverage, it’s not science as a method that people are losing confidence in; it’s scientists and the institutions that purport to speak for them.

Gauchat’s paper was based on annual responses in the General Social Survey, which asks people: “I am going to name some institutions in this country. As far as the people running these institutions are concerned, would you say you have a great deal of confidence, only some confidence, or hardly any confidence at all in them?” One institution mentioned was “the scientific community.”

So when fewer people answered “a great deal” and more answered “hardly any” with regard to “the scientific community,” they were demonstrating more skepticism not toward science but toward the people running scientific institutions.

With this in mind, a rise in skepticism isn’t such a surprise. Public skepticism has grown toward most institutions over the last several decades, and with good reason, as a seemingly endless series of scandals and episodes of dishonesty have illustrated.

In fact, given that Americans have grown broadly more skeptical of institutions in general, it’s not surprising that conservatives are more skeptical of scientific institutions than they were almost 40 years ago. What’s surprising is that liberals have grown less skeptical over the same period. (Perhaps because scientific institutions have been telling them things they want to hear?)

Regardless, while one should trust science as a method -- honestly done, science remains the best way at getting to the truth on a wide range of factual matters -- there’s no particular reason why one should trust scientists and especially no particular reason why one should trust the people running scientific institutions, who often aren’t scientists themselves.

via Skepticism in science rises--Glenn Harlan Reynolds - NYPOST.com.

Sometime last year computers at the U.S. Social Security Administration were hacked and the identities of millions of Americans were compromised. What, you didn’t hear about that?  Nobody did.

The extent of damage is only just now coming to light in the form of millions of false 2011 income tax returns filed in the names of people currently receiving Social Security benefits. That includes a very large number of elderly and disabled people who are ill-equipped to recognize or fight the problem.

But don't worry, ObamaCare won't be like that. Via I, Cringely » Blog Archive The $30 billion Social Security hack - I, Cringely - Cringely on technology.

I’m not a guy who does hype, so I’m going to lay it out straight: You’ve got a job right now as a PHP guy? Leave it and come work for me at Parchment.

It has better pay than you’re getting now.

It has better hours than you’re working now.

It has better management than the place you’re at now.

It has a better mission than the one you have now.

Where you are now, a lot of stuff is solidified in place, and your attempts to improve it are not valued. Here, you’ve got a chance to get in and do stuff right. Where it’s not right, you’ve got a chance to change it and make it right. (But this is not a chance to evangelize your preferred framework.)

You’ll have me as Architect on the PHP side. For some folks that’s a deal-breaker. For most people who actually have had me as a boss before, that’s a bonus. (I can provide references from previous employees on request. ;-)

The boring “help wanted” ad only says so much. Here’s the skinny:

The codebase is a typical PHP codebase. Some of you know what that means. I have already stripped out all the uses of globals. The job is to update it to PHP 5.4, design patterns, and a modern architecture, and add features as we go, while keeping the whole thing running. There are no tests; you will be refactoring to testable units. There is no standard development environment; you might be able to help us create one.

If you live in or near Scottsdale AZ and can be in the office on a daily basis, that gets a preference; otherwise, a telecommute for the right fit is perfectly acceptable. (If you live in Nashville TN we can telecommute together once in a while.)

You need to actually know PHP itself for the simple things. I don’t care if “the framework does that for you” — at the very least, you should know what the framework is actually doing under the hood.

If you blog about PHP, speak at PHP conferences, attend PHP conferences, help others in IRC or on mailing lists with PHP, work on an open-source project where there is at least one other significant contributor, and/or have a Github account where I can see your PHP code, so much the better.

The initial phone interview will consist of a very short programming exercise, not to solve a stupid “gotcha” problem, but to make sure you can actually write a program. (You’d be surprised how many self-proclaimed senior developers can’t write a decent program.) There will be 5-6 technical questions that a mid-to-senior level developer should be able to answer with ease. If you are a Zend Certified Engineer these questions will be no-brainers.

After you pass that we’ll fly you out to to Scottsdale AZ to interview for personality fit. Once you pass that we hire you and you get a better job than you have now.

Send me two copies of your resume: one in plain text in the body of the email so I can read it directly, and attach a Word or PDF copy for my HR guy.

That is all.

UPDATE: Fixed the email address.

... but I predict they won't be. The Republicans are too often as big-government as the Democrats. Regardless:

[There is no] shortage of free-market health care solutions. Among them:

• End the tax discrimination against individual insurance buyers.

• Let consumers buy plans across state lines, giving states an incentive to rein in their out-of-control benefit mandates.

• Let small groups establish association health plans to get benefits of scale.

• Ease the rules that are choking off the medical savings account market.

• Reform the nation's tort laws.

The Supreme Court debate this week exposed the left's health care vision in all its glory -- one that relies on massive federal spending and unprecedented intrusiveness into every aspect of our lives.

This June, Republicans may very well have the chance to offer an alternative vision that relies instead on free markets, consumer choice and open competition to improve what is already the world's best health care system.

via If Supreme Court Dumps ObamaCare, Republicans Must Be Ready - Investors.com.