The New York Times confirms that gender pricing holds true for health insurance. They report that women pay more than men across states and across plans. 

via Bust Magazine

Thank you, Mrs. Obama! Supporting work-life balance for our nations brightest minds will lead to a brighter future!

The new plan from the National Science Foundation includes a “stop the clock” provision on its grants, allowing scientists to defer or suspend their grants for up to year to accommodate childbirth or adoption. The plan also includes a salary supplement to help pay for a research technician to step in when a grant’s principal investigator is on parental leave.

Why this matters:

Childbirth takes a high toll on the career aspirations of female scientists. Of those who had children while they were postdocs at the University of California, 41 percent indicated that they had shifted their career goals away from becoming a research professor at a university.

[Pole] ran test after test, analyzing the data, and before long some useful patterns emerged. Lotions, for example. Lots of people buy lotion, but one of Pole’s colleagues noticed that women on the baby registry were buying larger quantities of unscented lotion around the beginning of their second trimester. Another analyst noted that sometime in the first 20 weeks, pregnant women loaded up on supplements like calcium, magnesium and zinc. Many shoppers purchase soap and cotton balls, but when someone suddenly starts buying lots of scent-free soap and extra-big bags of cotton balls, in addition to hand sanitizers and washcloths, it signals they could be getting close to their delivery date.

Peter J. McNerney and Ning Zhang. 2011. Smarter Cities: Making societies smarter. XRDS 18, 2 (December 2011), 48-48. DOI=10.1145/2043236.2071895 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2043236.2071895

Abstract: In this article we outline the technological characteristics and features of “smart cities,” describe how these are being implemented in the real-world, and explore some of the challenges these characteristics present to communications technologies.

Using ICT to improve the multiple facets of cities has, rather obviously, captured the attention of some of the giants within the computing industry. IBM and Cisco are both involved in the creation and deployment of smart city technologies. IBM’s Smarter Cities initiative is a component of its larger Smarter Planet initiative. Smarter Cities looks at how increasingly populated cities can be better equipped technologically to drive a more prosperous and sustainable future. The main focus of the initiative is to build intelligence into a city’s interconnected smart systems. In doing so, IBM hopes people and objects can interact in new ways in order to deliver greater prosperity to citizens.

…

As older technologies are used in new ways and as new technologies continue to enter our lives and our cities, the threat landscape associated with these technologies continues to change. Mitigating the effects of new and evolving threats is a necessity in smart cities, since technology is at the core of what makes these cities “smart.” Moreover, with the potential for an increasing use of monitoring technologies in our homes and in our bodies, the preservation of people’s privacy is paramount. Generating and maintaining people’s confidence in smart city technologies requires security issues to be addressed; security is likely to be a key driver of people’s acceptance of the ever-expanding role that computing technologies play in their day-to-day lives.

So where do all of these smart city technologies get us? We—society—probably won’t get far unless the users and beneficiaries of these technologies know how to exploit them to their full potential. To quote a key tenet of the Manchester SMARTiP project, “Smart cities require ‘smart citizens’ if they are to be truly inclusive, innovative and sustainable.” Advances in technology should be mirrored with advances in citizens’ acceptance of and interaction with such technologies. The landscape of smart cities may therefore contain challenges and hurdles that are not solely of a technical nature. Computer scientists continue to develop the technologies of tomorrow to help meet the social, economic, and environmental targets of today; but the effective use of these smart city technologies rests in the hands of governments, businesses, and citizens, who must be empowered to cultivate a sustainable existence for today, tomorrow, and beyond.

The New York Times reports that V.I.P. rooms at the New York-Presbyterian cost patients $1,000 to $1,500 a day, while a suite on the penthouse floor costs around $2,400.

The finding marks the first time that endorphin release in the nucleus accumbens and orbitofrontal cortex in response to alcohol consumption has been directly observed in humans.