Mama PhD

I’ve just spent an hour online looking at messenger bags with my son. When he was getting ready to start high school, we bought him a new bag, a more “grown-up” looking bag, a messenger bag that could hold his laptop and all his books. He carried it proudly to school, slung over his shoulder with all his school supplies carefully stowed in all of the pockets.

Last Saturday, I got caught in the snowstorm on my way to work. The clinic is a considerable hike from the subway, and my clothing was soaked through by the time I arrived.

In economics, we sometimes talk about "reservation wages." These are the lowest wages that one would accept to participate in the formal labor market.

I read with great interest Pamela Haag’s thoughtful assessment of her time at Swarthmore (and later Yale) in which she asks, “Are elite colleges worth it?”

With only one child at home — and him a teenager — Halloween crept up on me unawares this year. Over the weekend, Mark was away visiting our daughter over the weekend for Parents’ Weekend, and I was home with Nick waiting out his bronchitis and the rain — so we didn’t buy any candy, didn’t carve a pumpkin, didn’t decorate the house. Nick is too old (his decision) for a costume, so the whole thing almost passed us by.

Reading Elizabeth’s and Aeron’s columns this week made me wish more than ever that I had been able to participate in the recent Organization for Communication, Language & Gender conference. I had originally been scheduled to do so, but a series of insane technicalities got in the way, and in the end it was simpler to stay home and sulk.

In statistics one finds the experiment of flipping a coin and observing if the coin lands with heads facing up or with tails facing up. This is the central idea behind probability distributions that can be applied to many different situations involving uncertainty. I thought of the idea of a two sided coin recently when I realized that I am somewhat ambiguous about the coming holiday of Halloween.

"Maven" is a Yiddish word from the Hebrew "mevin," meaning "one who knows." Synonyms for the word are "expert," "gatherer of knowledge" and "geek." I always thought of the word as being somehow feminine in nature, suggesting a woman who is well-dressed, perhaps, and hovering above the crowds, but not separate from them. A blogging college professor, perhaps?