links for 2010-08-24

  • Among those who sortied from Chiran, there were few fathers who volunteered to be kamikaze pilots. Captain Kuno was one of these men. On May 23, 1945, the eve of his sortie, he wrote his final letter all in katakana [1] to his 5-year-old son Masanori and his 2-year-old daughter Kiyoko who he was leaving behind. A child learns katakana in the lower grades of elementary school.
  • The difficulty is over microfinancers that started as not-for-profits by switched to a for-profit model, making them more beholden to shareholders than to the people they are attempting to help.
  • There is no history of whites being the victims of racial discrimination in the U.S. Where such charges have been raised, they have come from right-wingers with an agenda against affirmative action and other social programs created to help African Americans, who were not only slaves in this country, but then faced another 100 years of legal discrimination after slavery that only ended one generation ago.
    (tags: racism)
  • The belief has become widespread, particularly in the wake of the publication of international bestsellers such as John Gray's Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus that stress the innate differences between the minds of men and women. But now a growing number of scientists are challenging the pseudo-science of "neurosexism", as they call it, and are raising concerns about its implications. These researchers argue that by telling parents that boys have poor chances of acquiring good verbal skills and girls have little prospect of developing mathematical prowess, serious and unjustified obstacles are being placed in the paths of children's education.

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