Do you have a citation re:mathematics? As a person in mathematical physics, I would be /very/ surprised to hear that math is a more gender balanced field than physics.
I do somewhere; I'll track it down and relay the numbers. But also I'll say that this matches my own personal experience: go to an academic cryptography conference sometime and note how many more women you see than in a generic CS conference. There are more women mathematicians than computer scientists and physicists.
I haven't attended any crypto conferences but, I do work a bit with high school STEM programs and I can tell you.. higher ratio of male to female, BUT, those female students are far more interested in the math / crypto fields than the males (which leads me to believe they will stick to it career wise vs the male students. So it's not too surprising your observations.
I think the main difference (speaking from the biased perspective of a Canadian) is that US border guards seem to want to get angry. Whilst Canadian guards have a "what we're doing is necessary, but we want to be nice" attitude.
Unfortunately Canada's awful security policy comes because we need to be "up to US standards", or else we risk huge barriers being put in the middle of our trade relationship due to US paranoia. And economically, Canada is totally dependent on trade with the US.
As an American who has made three land crossings in to Canada, I can say that Canadian Border Agents treat Americans in the same way that American Border Agents treat Canadians.
My first crossing in to Canada was riding with my girlfriend and her parents, all Canadian citizens. It was maybe 10 PM, crossing from Maine to New Brunswick. The Canadian agent was very friendly to my three companions with Canadian passports, but immediately become agitated when she saw my US passport. It struck me as quite odd how rude she was to me given how she had no suspicion of the other three people in the car with me. I wasn't driving the car, I was in the back seat listening to music on an MP3 player.
I've decided it isn't so much that Canadians feel the need to be "up to US standards," as much as it is they feel the need to treat US citizens with the same contempt that the US treats Canadian citizens.
The experience crossing into Canada seems to vary quite a lot.
The two times I crossed (~5 and 15 years ago) the Canadian border agents were polite and brief. I guess that first one was in the days where US citizens didn't need a passport to travel to Canada.
Canada would likely do more if they weren't trying to get a free trade deal with China as fast as possible to avoid Trump being able to dictate their economy. The unfortunate geopolitics of our contemporary world.
Diversity is no excuse for America's failures. Your nation is not as much an outlier in diversity as you would like to believe, and in the domain of health care you need only look north to Canada to see that this argument is nonsense.
In all honesty, when I hear people say that some social program can't work in America because it's "too diverse," I can't help but hear "it can't work because of all the blacks and Mexicans".
It's disappointing and quite upsetting to me... It's clear that they are using a (slightly) more socially acceptable form of racism. After all, are they saying, for eg, education can't work because of all the Irish or German or Asians? Is it because of all the Canadians living off the US government?
Who exactly are these diverse types that are ensuring that particular failure?
You're absolutely right. Good emotional state is probably the key factor in combating addiction. Yet it's important to remember that there exist other factors at play in addiction, and that we should target them too. For instance, addiction to alcohol seems to have some genetic factors. In some genetic lines, almost every person with a low emotional state might be at huge risk for addiction. And in others, almost no one might be at risk. We need to also understand why that is, and combat that, too.
The problem, like the author points out, is that you can build all the rail you want -- but you need to make sure that it goes to places dense enough to support it. When cities fail to do this, you get that ridiculousness.
Yeah, I often say "in Massachusetts" when people ask where I go to school, when I'm back home. Everyone seems to think this is a mark of how snooty Harvardians are.
But often when I did just say "Harvard", it became a big deal. Not always, but often.
It can make social situations weird. I socialise with a lot of people who are in the trades. I've had more than a few conversations killed when the person I'm talking with finds out I go to Harvard. Suddenly (again sometimes, not always) the person feels embarrassed because they aren't an intellectual, or unrefined, or something, and the conversation gets awkward fast.
It can also make some people just overestimate or overcare for you. I used to volunteer for a political party. The local organiser was nice and treated me well, like he treated everybody, but once he found out I went to Harvard he decided to give me double the attention, plus the cushy assignments, I guess in hopes of retaining me-- when really I just wanted to do the door knocking and phone calling like everyone else.
I wish that the name of the place I go to school didn't have cultural cachet far beyond its worth and that I could always just say it. But it does, especially where I'm from, where not many people have been anywhere near an Ivy. So sometimes I decide to not risk triggering this weird overblown cultural image, because I just want to be myself and not "that guy who goes to HARVARD". Many of my friends feel similarly. I don't know how this desire counts as noblesse oblige.
Yup. I go to an ivy and many of my best friends are construction workers or service workers who will likely never attend college. It's because I wasn't sheltered (nor particularly wealthy as a kid).
And when you're there, talk to people. Not just ones who will help you climb the social ladder in whatever elite clubs and orgs you want to join. People of all stripes. It's a much more diverse group in every way than the author describes.
Honestly it sounds like the author was elitist and sheltered as a kid. And now they've realised this, but have decided to blame it on their university rather than deal with the fact that it was their own personal fault.
As with many things I feel the truth lies somewhere in the middle.
I spent my 20s working in STEM and living in between MIT and Harvard which meant that a large portion of my social circle was drawn from those schools. I see where both sides are coming from here. On one hand you're right in that there were also plenty of people in our circle who came from very different backgrounds. By and large these were normal people and not the sort of socially awkward weirdos the article describes.
On the other hand the article rings true at times. The bit about worrying about their occupation due to the 20 year reunion, I heard that exact thing countless times. The lack of recognition of the second chances to succeed or that they have a ridiculous social network that others do not was also a big thing. And through it all there was always a certain baseline, well, elitism. It was almost never direct but it was always there. It wouldn't be directed at the rest of us but you'd hear it amongst themselves, "I can't believe a Harvard graduate is doing that" when "that" is something that their good friend also does. That sort of thing.
My most distinct memory of early education is my grade seven teacher yelling at me, saying that he never wanted to see me read a book in his classroom ever again. I used to read books in class after I finished whatever trivial in-class work we had... apparently, this was more annoying to him than the kids who didn't do their work and loudly talked about their drug consumption.
