ellauri082.html on line 781: "The underrepresentation of girls and women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) is a continual concern for social scientists and policy makers. Using an international database on adolescent achievement in science, mathematics, and reading (n = 472,242), we show girls performed similarly or better than boys in science in two of every three countries, and in nearly all countries, more girls appeared capable of college-level STEM study than enrolled. Paradoxically, the sex differences in the magnitude of relative academic strengths and pursuit of STEM degrees increased with increases in national gender equality. The gap between boys’ science achievement and girls’ reading achievement relative to their mean academic performance was near universal. These sex differences in academic strengths and attitudes toward science correlated with the STEM graduation gap. A mediation analysis suggests that life-quality pressures in less gender equal countries promote girls’ and women’s engagement with STEM subjects."
ellauri096.html on line 146: The preface paradox pressures Kyburg to extend his tolerance of joint inconsistency to the acceptance of contradictions (Sorensen 2001, 156–158). Consider a logic student who is required to pick one hundred truths from a mixed list of tautologies and contradictions. Although the modest student believes each of his answers, A1,A2,…,A100
ellauri162.html on line 818: The Haeckelian form of recapitulation theory is considered defunct. Embryos do undergo a period or phylotypic stage where their morphology is strongly shaped by their phylogenetic position, rather than selective pressures, but that means only that they resemble other embryos at that stage, not ancestral adults as Haeckel had claimed.
ellauri180.html on line 233: However, with a healthcare budget of $140 million per year in the USA (1990), insurance companies eventually forced closer scrutiny. Following such pressure, the first Task Force of Neonatal Circumcision from the American Academy of Pediatrics (1n 1975) concluded that there was no valid medical indication for this procedure. However, the pro-circumcision lobby was strong and the task force was forced to re-evaluate. In 1989, they conceded that there may be certain advantages to neonatal circumcision, although their recommendations did stop short of advising routine operation. Similar pressures in the UK have now resulted in only certain Health Authorities being prepared to pay for the procedure. These tend to be in regions with large ethnic minorities who otherwise may suffer form back street' circumcisions.
ellauri222.html on line 795: Though in some ways separated from American society, Bellow's protagonists also strongly connect their identity with America. Augie begins his adventures by claiming, "I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city." Almost all of Bellow's novels take place in an American city, most often Chicago or New York. Through his depiction of urban reality, Bellow anchors his novels in the actual world, and he uses the city as his central metaphor for contemporary materialism. Although recognizing the importance of history and memory, Bellow's novels maintain a constant engagement with the present moment. His characters move in the real world, confronting sensuous images of urban chaos and clutter that often threaten to overwhelm them. Looking down on the Hudson River, Tommy Wilhelm sees "tugs with matted beards of cordage" and "the red bones of new apartments rising on the bluffs." Sammler denounces contemporary New Yorkers for the "free ways of barbarism" that they practice beneath the guise of "civilized order, property rights [and] refined technological organization." In Humboldt's Gift, which is replete with images of cannibalism and vampirism, Charlie Citrone sees Von Trenck, the source of his material success, as "the blood-scent that attracted the sharks of Chicago." Acknowledging the influence of the city on his fiction, Bellow himself has remarked, "I don't know how I could possibly separate my knowledge of life such as it is, from the city. I could no more tell you how deeply it's gotten into my bones than the lady who paints radium dials in the clock factory can tell you." However, although the city serves to identify the deterministic social pressures that threaten to destroy civilization, Bellow's heroes refuse to become its victims and instead draw on their latent nondeterministic resources of vitality to reassert their uniquely American belief in individual freedom, as well as their faith in the possibility of community.
ellauri264.html on line 221: „Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions, our ego satisfactions, in consumption. The measure of social status, of social acceptance, of prestige, is now to be found in our consumptive patterns. The very meaning and significance of our lives today expressed in consumptive terms. The greater the pressures upon the individual to conform to safe and accepted social standards, the more does he tend to express his aspirations and his individuality in terms of what he wears, drives, eats- his home, his car, his pattern of food serving, his hobbies.
ellauri299.html on line 528: Labor market polarization has been the most severe in liberal market economies like the US, Britain, and Australia. Countries like Denmark and France have been subject to the same economic pressures, but due to their more "inclusive" (or "egalitarian") labor market institutions, such as centralized and solidaristic collective bargaining and strong minimum wage laws, they have experienced less polarization. Cross-national studies have found that European countries´ working poverty rates are much lower than the US´s. Most of this difference can be explained by the fact that European countries´ welfare states are more generous. Grisham's folks gave offerings to the church because the Bible strongly suggested it.
xxx/ellauri087.html on line 471: Funny little Jew Primo Levi roughly quotes Marvell in his 1983 poem "The Mouse," which describes the artistic and existential pressures of the awareness that time is finite. He expresses annoyance at the sentiment to seize the day, stating, "And at my back it seems to hear / Some winged curved chariot hurrying near. / What impudence! What conceit! / I really was fed up."
xxx/ellauri187.html on line 123: At moments Rilke's awareness of his self-interest amid modern anxieties appears uncannily precocious: "The pressures even in the preschooler's life were often suffocating. He longed for change." How does Freedman know that? I presume he got it from one of the mature Rilke's self-dramatizing letters, letters that Freedman paraphrases tendentiously throughout the book. That approach has the effect of turning Rilke's harsh and vain self-explorations into evidence of the "traumas" that Rilke spent a life riddled with "failure" denying. Indeed, Freedman writes enigmatically about "Rilke's pattern of living through failure as part of a process that turns denial into poetic art." I'm not sure what that means, but it sounds like success to me.
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