Two\u00a0of the finds this week are longer reads, but I found them worth the time investment. The third is food for thought for attracting, and keeping, women into the STEM fields. Jeneral finds of the week: 2015-05-06.<\/p>\n
On the fourth night of my journey I camp in woods owned by a Baptist deacon named Sammy Swinney. It was here in the rolling hills of northern Alabama where the April 27, 2011, tornado roared through at sixty-five miles per hour, a black cloud the width of twenty-five city blocks with winds stronger than any hurricane. And it was here in the sleepy farming community of Oak Grove that the tornado morphed into something truly unfathomable, and did things few people knew tornadoes could do: ate large brick homes straight through to the foundation, spawned side tornadoes that flanked the main like evil henchmen, climbed a mountain and rattled down a steep valley on the other side, turned an entire forest to spindles, and carried away cars and cows and people, too.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/li>\n
- The update of the health curriculum in Ontario where I live has garnered a lot of debate and controversy over the sexual education component of it. Full disclosure: I am totally in support of all the changes,\u00a0which is why I get so frustrated with those protesting against it\u2026but that\u2019s going to be another post. It\u2019s in this climate that this essay published in the Globe and Mail<\/a>\u00a0grabbed my attention. Yes, her own backstory is lurid, but her wading through the challenges\u00a0of educating\u00a0her teenaged son\u00a0about sexual health hit on so many of the points that I\u2019ve been worried about when it comes to the impact of online pornography.
\nSierra Skye Gemma survived unthinkable childhood abuse. Now the loving mother of a teenaged son, she finds herself on a deeply personal journey to teach him a healthy attitude to sex in the age of online pornography.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/li>\n
- This op-ed in the New York Times<\/a>\u00a0has a really interesting approach\u00a0for positioning engineering to be attractive for women to study and pursue careers in: provide the socially beneficial context in which the engineering work will affect changes. On a surface look, it makes a lot of sense: making things for the sake of making the thing better\/stronger\/more featured than before is not so\u00a0attractive to me. However, using engineering skills to help solve a problem in society? That is a better sell. Does it harken back to the days of my youth when much of the pretend play was about building a family and making sure everyone was taken care of? Maybe.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
~Jen<\/p>\n
<\u2014previous finds of the week<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Two\u00a0of the finds this week are longer reads, but I found them worth the time investment. The third is food for thought for attracting, and keeping, women into the STEM fields. Jeneral finds of the week: 2015-05-06. In\u00a0Walking the Tornado Line,\u00a0magazine journalist Justin Nobel goes on a walking journey in Alabama and Tennessee following the … Continue reading Jeneral finds of the week: 2015-05-06<\/span>