OK, this is just weird. A ridiculously common parasite can change people’s behavior, making us dumber and more sexy, says infectious disease researcher Nicky Boulter with the Sydney University of Technology. The toxoplasma gondii parasite can only sexually reproduce in cats, but it can live in other creatures, including rats and humans. The parasite changes rats’ behaviors, making them less fearful of cats. This makes the rodents easier prey for the cats, and makes it possible for the parasite to sexually reproduce inside its new feline hosts.

But toxoplasmosis may have much the same impact on humans, Boulter says. Weirdly, she says the effects depend on the host’s gender. “In short, it can make men behave like alley cats and women like sex kittens.” Or, more precisely:

Infected men have lower IQs, achieve a lower level of education and have shorter attention spans. They are also more likely to break rules and take risks, be more independent, more anti-social, suspicious, jealous and morose, and are deemed less attractive to women.

On the other hand, infected women tend to be more outgoing, friendly, more promiscuous, and are considered more attractive to men compared with non-infected controls.

There’s evidence that this parasite has a role in schizphenia, according to the source of all lies. Humans get it from eating undercooked meat that has the eggs, or by accidentally ingesting cat shit.

The really scary statistic is that 33.1 percent of Americans have antibodies for toxoplasmosis — and the parasite never really goes away, even with antibiotics. So up to a third of the U.S. population could be dumber and sexier thanks to a catshit-traveling parasite. France has an estimated rate of infection of between 45 and 88 percent (steak tartare?) and Brazil’s infection rate is estimated at 66.9 percent. By contrast, only 4.3 percent of South Koreans have the parasite.

But press reports about the wacky behavior of people with the parasite may be overstated, an Oxford biologist told the UK Guardian in 2003:

“We don’t want people to go into a panic and think they’re going to behave really strangely, because the problem is once we’ve got it we’ve got it for life,” says Joanne Webster, a biologist at the University of Oxford who studies the parasite. “And in the vast majority, 99% of people or above, the results will be very subtle.” For those that are interested, a simple blood test for antibodies raised against the parasite can tell you whether you’re infected or not.

The Guardian Unlimited tech blog reports that soon Apple computer screens will have digital restriction management (DRM) built in. Apple will launch a new range of “cinema display” screens using High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) connectors. The main advantage of HDMI over the competing standard is that it includes High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection, or HDCP. Sorry about all the acronyms. Anyway, this means you won’t be able to show copyrighted video on your new Apple screen unless the computer thinks you own it legally. Says the Guardian blog, “HDCP requires that every device with access to the reproduction chain supports HDCP.” In other words, the whole machine will have DRM in its DNA. Not only will this prevent you from making legal backup copies of your legally purchased media and playing them on your new Apple computer, but who knows what the DRM will do to the functionality of your hardware. My own experience with DRM is that it tends to crash your machine and get in the way of using your computer for even the most legitimate ends. Oh well, so much for “rip mix burn,” eh?

Nick Denton at Valleywag writes a freakishly misogynistic profile of Sandy Montenegro Littlefield, a former exec at Siebel and Oracle who married a rich tank collector:

She used to go to tech conferences in search of husband material, say the cynics. She’d arrive on her own and return on someone’s private jet. She is absolutely gorgeous in person, but I don’t think it took people too long to figure out she was a gold-digger.

Blogger Liz Henry points out the myriad layers of fucked-upness about this post, and then says:

Waaah! Women in tech are toooooo sexay! That sucks! It ruins our whole homosocial male bonding geek guy thing! Get them out! Or, quick, give Sandy a reverse makeover, a pair of glasses with electrical tape on the nosepiece, and some penny loafers!

Everyone needs to keep in mind that when women, sluts or not, sleep with geek guys, it might just be because they like geek guys a lot. Sleeping with geek guys doesn’t invalidate one’s geek credentials. It’s not like they have to be *rich* geek guys and the women have to be brainless bimbos going after their money. Trust me, geek guys, you are often super cute all on your own.

My favorite part of the Valleywag post is the weird attribution to “the cynics.”

Transgender people aren’t the monolithic community we may appear from the outside. For every MTF transsexual who insists that she was always a woman inside and she corrected her male body to match her brain, you can find someone who questions whether categories like “man” and “woman” are absolutes after all. (I’ve been reading Undoing Gender by Judith Butler, which is by far her most readable book, and has taken my breath away several times. She attacks the idea of gender as a social construct from a new, ingenious standpoint, by showing how our personhood — and hence our gender — can be “undone” by grief or loss or social crap.) But the woman-brain-in-a-man-body school of thought (or its reverse, for FTMs) remains the mainstream view of trannies. And it’s won the support of some very iffy Dutch science:

[I]nvestigators from the Netherlands Institute for Brain Research in Amsterdam reported preliminary evidence that transsexuals may be inherently different, after all. Their study of six male-to-female transsexuals showed that a tiny structure deep within a part of the brain that controls sexual function appeared to be more like the type found in women than that found in men. If confirmed, the study seems likely to challenge long-held beliefs about what it takes to make someone a man–or, a woman.

The facts: the researchers dissected the brains of six (just six!) post-op transsexuals. They compared them with brains of straight and gay men, and women. The region of the hypothalamus that the researchers claim is different in MTFs than in men (the central subdivision of the bed nucleus of the stria terminals) is “smaller than a pinhead” and you can’t even see the differences using an MRI. The researchers claim, with absolute confidence, that they know the “bed nucleus” “controls sexual function.” The scientists say the “bed nucleus”

measures about 2.6 cubic millimeters, about the size of the colorful, spherical head of a pushpin. In women, it averages 1.73 millimeters, and in transsexuals the average figure is 1.3.

Some other experts were skeptical, the article linked above says. All of the TSs who were dissected had taken estrogen for years, and maybe that changed the size of this region of the hypothalamus. Or maybe the stress of living as a trans person changed the size of their “bed nucleus”. And then there’s this:

Dr. S. Marc Breedlove of the University of California at Berkeley, who wrote an editorial that accompanies the new report, said that the function of the bed nucleus in human behavior, sexual or otherwise, remained “a complete black box.”

So we don’t even know what it is, or what it does. Or what its size signifies.
The reason this research bugs me has very little to do with me and my fellow trans people. It’s more my fear that we’re being used as wedge to push an essentialist agenda. It’s not too far from saying “transsexuals have women’s brains” to claiming “men’s and women’s brains are totally different.” And from there, to claiming that women have less good spatial sense than men. And from there, to claiming there’s an innate biological difference between men’s and women’s math abilities, says Richard Francis, author of Why Men Won’t Ask For Directions:

Evolutionary psychologists assume that it’s biological, that there are hormones involved, that testosterone somehow makes men better spatial navigators. But, the evidence for that is extremely weak. In fact, I spent much of the time writing this book having to read that kind of literature. Whereas there’s ample evidence that social-cultural factors play an enormous role in this. And also this spatial cognition story extends to sex differences in mathematics. For example, the sex differences are most pronounced in the United States, even in the Western world. In some cross-cultural studies, they’ve shown that in African-Americans and Hispanics that females are superior in mathematics, and in Asian-Americans it has been found that the sex difference is quite small. And, then there’s evidence that these sex differences are disappearing over time, which you would expect given the new educational opportunities available to females. And, this does not accord well with a biological explanation, much less an evolutionary explanation.

(Cross-posted from my blog.)

Kat the Traveler deconstructs Esquire’s profile of physicist/chemist Naomi Halas:

So, would you ever see a lead paragraph like this? “Dressed in a clingy suit with tight black pants and business shoes, Joe Smith looks as if he stepped off a Hollywood set. He smiles and giggles and uses words like awesome and totally without ever dropping his intense focus on science.”

…

Back to sexism! You’d never see this: “Happily married for 20 years to a theoretical physicist he met at IBM, Joe Smith was never able to have children. Maybe, he thinks, he was meant to do this instead.” Yep, gotta mention marriage and children since that’s the exclusive purview of women-folk. Snort.

Lots more good stuff at the link. Check it out.

It’s random! It’s a catch-all! It’s a linkblogging extravaganza! Here’s a bunch of random stuff I found on the web for your surfing amusement:

• Best Buy Gets In Touch With Its Feminine Side (USA Today). “The feminization of the consumer electronics business is underway… Shoppers may notice a softer, more personal atmosphere… Women now influence 90 percent of consumer electronics purchases… About four years ago, Best Buy realized women were warming up to technology…. Women are drawn to flat-panel TVs.”
• Miss Video Game 2007 (Average Gamer) “Lets take a look at the requirements… Number four. Loves the beach? Uh-oh! This one looks like trouble… You see, as a gamer I love dark cold rooms that are lit by flat panels and LCD monitors.” (From GenderInGames.)
• Social Morons and Daily Stereotype (Female Science Professor). Sexism and clueless behavior around a science conference. “At a conference this week, I was talking to Famous Professor X, and we were having a very interesting conversation about a topic of mutual interest. A man I don’t know and didn’t recognize walked up and started talking to Famous Professor X, completely ignoring me and ignoring the fact that he interrupted a conversation. Famous Professor X glared at the interrupting man and said “I am talking to Professor W (me)”, made a wonderful little shooing/dismissing motion with his hand, and turned back to me so we could continue our conversation. The interrupting guy slithered away sadly.”
• Women Scientists And Engineers Use New Information Technologies To Tackle Isolation On Campus (Science Daily). “Women researchers have plenty of human capital — the ‘what-you-know’ component of career success — but, because they are isolated, it is much harder for them to accumulate social capital, the ‘who-you-know’ connections through which insider information flows… NJIT Advance will address this problem by seed-funding small cross-disciplinary communities within which women faculty can do collaborative research, with each other and with male peers, from a position of numerical strength. The researchers will then interconnect these communities using traditional face-to-face networking strategies in combination with 21st-century pervasive information technology.”

Jessica Guynn at SFGate reports that Natali Del Conte has left Mike Arrington’s blog TechCrunch, at least partly due to sexist and annoying comments on her blog posts. (Also, she’d gotten a new job and hoped to keep blogging at TechCrunch from her new job, but Arrington wanted her undivided attention.) But also, Guynn writes:

The diplomatic Del Conte says she got more than she bargained for at TechCrunch, both in learning about Web 2.0 from Arrington and in the crude, rude or just generally sexist remarks from some in the TechCrunch community.

“She’s never had that kind of direct, anonymous feedback, and it’s clear it got to her to some extent. I’m very sorry for that,” Arrington said

I was curious, so I looked up one of Arrington’s recent own blog posts about a DVD swapping service, which had 19 comments. Here’s a sampling:

“Barter does work in certain areas. In the Uk there is something called Barter card and its a B2b service.”

“These people need to take an Econs 101 course and learn the foolishness of replacing a solution (money) with a problem (barter).”

“Michael, there is a factual error in your article.”

“Michael - I think you are dead right.”

OK, so that sounds like “direct, anonymous feedback,” sure enough. And then I looked up comments on one of Del Conte’s recent posts, about a streaming music video site, and they weren’t quite as helpful, let’s say. Looking back, it seems as though the comments were about half relevant to her blog posts and about half personal attacks on her for being “cute” but not smart. Even some of her supporters say idiotic things like, “She is a smart girl. Just give her some time.” Blurgh!

It just gets back to the idea (courtesy of the New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus) that women simply don’t write about “hard” subjects like science and technology, because we’re just too focused on being cute and writing about daisies. Or something.

I’m declaring 2007 the year of women in science. In the wake of Larry Summers’ ass-minded comments at Harvard two years ago, several academic institutions have put the spotlight on women in science and engineering. We’ve started to see the results of that over the past few months. A National Academy of Science study called “Beyond Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering” came out in September and both Columbia and Harvard have been sponsoring conferences and lectures on women in science.

And as Kristin mentioned in her post, a great article by Cornelia Dean came out today in the New York Times about women in science. Since this article is about to go behind a subscription wall, here are some relevant exerpts from it:

At . . . the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . . . half the undergraduate science majors and more than a third of the engineering students are women. Half of the nation’s medical students are women, and for decades the numbers have been rising similarly in disciplines like biology and mathematics. Yet studies show that women in science still routinely receive less research support than their male colleagues, and they have not reached the top academic ranks in numbers anything like their growing presence would suggest. For example, at top-tier institutions only about 15 percent of full professors in social, behavioral or life sciences are women . . .

As the National Academy of Sciences noted in its report, women who are scientists publish somewhat less over all than their male colleagues — but if surveys control for the amount of support researchers receive, women publish as often as men, the report said . . .

Dr. Joan Steitz cited a study of letters of recommendation written for men and women seeking academic appointments. Though all the applicants were successful, she said, and though the letters were written by men and women, the study found that the applicant’s personal life was mentioned six times more often if the letter was about a woman . . .

She cited “Every Other Thursday: Stories and Strategies from Successful Women Scientists” (Yale University Press, 2006), a book by Ellen Daniell, a former assistant professor of molecular biology at the University of California, Berkeley. In the book Dr. Daniell describes a group of female scientists who have been meeting regularly for more than 20 years to talk about their professional triumphs and travails, turning themselves into mentors and role models for one other.

There’s also a lot of great stuff in the article about how women are evaluated on the way they dress more than men are, and how difficult it is for women to be taken seriously when they are pregnant.

I’ll be reading the NAS study over the next few days, and will post here when I find interesting statistics.

I think that Time magazine got it right when they named you the person of the year for the way that people are bringing all their perspectives online via social networks, blogs, podcasts, and videos. I especially appreciate and applaud the blogs written by a number of anonymous female scientists and engineers who give the dirt about what it’s like to be in their position. (Three examples are FemaleScienceProfessor, ScienceWoman, and the still-new Am I a Woman Scientist?, but each has links to plenty more such blogs kept by women in many different disciplines and at all levels of science from grad student to tenured professor.)

I wrote my essay for She’s Such a Geek because I wanted girls who were considering science as a career to learn from my mistakes. I believe my main mistake was that I didn’t talk to enough people to learn what a physics career really entailed before I committed to that path. Partly it was because I didn’t really give enough thought to issues pertaining to balancing work and personal life as an undergraduate—academic achievement had been priority #1 for me up until then, and I didn’t see anything changing any time soon—and also it was partly because I didn’t feel like there was any faculty member I could have opened up to and ask these things if I’d even known to ask them. Talking to a professor (and they were all male in the engineering and physics departments where I was) felt so intimidating compared to talking to the secretaries and admins there, who despite being warm, fabulous people, couldn’t give me the mentoring that I didn’t know I needed.

So my advice is, find female scientist mentors any way you can—and until you do, read these female scientist blogs. If you’re in a department where there’s only one or two female faculty members, you still can’t expect them to be able to mentor you. Those women have their research to do, just like every male professor in the department, and they probably have to work even harder to make sure that their work is perceived as equally competent to their peers’. Until you find the professor or postdoc or senior graduate students who you feel some chemistry with and who can give you practical, caring advice, you could do a lot worse than read these blogs telling the good, the bad, and the ugly about the lives of female scientists in academia today.

(Also note that this Dec. 19 NY Times article about some of the issues that female scientists are discussing today. It’s definitely progress that people are discussing issues such as unconscious bias, which weren’t even acknowledged when I was an undergrad and graduate student. I’d love to discuss this in a future post, because if I’m honest I internalized some of these biases myself—it would have been hard not to, being raised Catholic.)