The folks at learnstuff.com have sent me an infographic on the gender wage gap in the United States (click here). The puzzle is this: although women achieve higher scores in college than their male peers, women earn less than men. This holds true across all levels of education. Why? Discrimination may be part of the story, but child-rearing may explain a large chunk of the gap. A neat study would be to look at the effect of child-rearing on the wage gap. In other words, does the wage gap exist for childless women? If so, the puzzle deepens.
The Berkeley Earth Project , an independent study of global warming, has found that the earth has become a degree warmer over the past half century. However, the statistical uncertainty surrounding pre-1920 estimates makes it very hard to say much about long-term trends - click here for graph . This is one of my concerns with the global warming debate - we simply don't have trustworthy long-run data which looks at temperature changes over the last millennium (or two). My second concern with the global warming debate is that it is very hard to prove any sort of casual link between global warming and human activity. The scientists may be able to show correlation between global warming and our production of carbon dioxides etc., but correlation is not causation. My third concern with the debate is that those who are sceptical or agnostic are stereotyped as flat-earthers or intellectually-challenged crackpots. This only stifles debate and the progress of science itself.