This morning I awoke to the headline "Michelle Obama's Fashion Homerun: Choice Of Outfit For Big Speech Widely Praised." Apparently Mrs. Obama chose a dress in a "shade of blue-green, which evokes calm and trust," and "her style is so clean and elegant, she won't need to change anything" if she makes it to the White House.

It seems to me that no one was talking about what Ted Kennedy and Joe Biden were wearing, or for that matter, about Barack Obama's choice of necktie.

To me, this underscores the fact that women are still not treated the same as men, in politics or in most other professional realms. Why do we care what Michelle Obama is wearing, or how Hillary Clinton styles her hair, or whether Nancy Pelosi shows her age?

It's not just men who do the judging; the quotes from the article above were from Laura Schwartz, fashion advisor to Teresa Heinz Kerry. It's widely accepted, I guess, that the personal appearance is more important for professional women than for professional men.

I'm not sure whether this is a bad thing. I can't help but feel vaguely resentful when I see hundreds of news articles discussing the color of Michelle Obama's dress when all I really want to hear about is the content of her speech. On the other hand, it could be argued that female politicians should be free to express their femininity by using fashion and glamor as part of their persona.

There are other, more profound symptoms of the enduring gender inequalities in politics. I was dismayed - but not surprised - to see bumper stickers during the primary season saying "Women for Hillary." Women for Hillary? Why not Men for Obama? Or White People for McCain? If women feel the need to support a female candidate just because she's female, that is a sign of prejudice, not a sign of progress. The same goes for African-Americans supporting a black candidate just because he's black.

Of course, it's not a simple situation. There are enduring inequalities in this country, and the election of a woman or minority President could make incremental progress toward erasing these. And it's reasonable to expect that someone of your gender or ethnic group will be more likely to focus on issues that you yourself care about. A race-blind, gender-blind society is highly improbable and maybe not even desirable.

But even though I remind myself of this, I feel a spark of discontent when I come across a news article that praises Michelle Obama's fashion sense before it praises her insight or eloquence.

I'd be curious to hear what you guys and gals out there on OKCupid think about this. Is it appropriate that female politicians' personal appearance be scrutinized and (if applicable) praised? Or is reminiscent of an era where women were supposed to look pretty and keep their mouths shut?

As do most of you, I tend toward the liberal side of the political spectrum. However, today I found myself agreeing with conservative NY Times columnist William Kristol, and disagreeing with Moveon.org. It was all because of a baby named Alex.

Perhaps you've seen (or even contributed money for) Move.org's new anti-war television ad. It features a young mother holding her baby son on her lap and saying "So, John McCain, when you say you would stay in Iraq for 100 years, were you counting on Alex? Because if you were, you can’t have him."

Moveon.org had touted this as the "most effective TV ad we've ever created." I watched it and felt not only dissatisfied, but somehow offended, although I didn't stop to think about why (other than the fact that, yet again, McCain's "100 years" statement was being unfairly distorted).

Then, today, I read William Kristol's NY Times column about the Moveon.org ad. Generally I find a lot to disagree with in Kristol's columns. Today, however, I was glad that he pointed out that the United States has an all-volunteer army, and no one is going to take baby Alex. It is Alex's decision, not his mother's, whether he will join the armed forces.

Kristol goes on to say (emphasis added):

The MoveOn ad is unapologetic in its selfishness, and barely disguised in its disdain for those who have chosen to serve — and its contempt for those parents who might be proud of sons and daughters who are serving. The ad [suggests] that military service and sacrifice are unnecessary and deplorable relics of the past. And the sole responsibility of others.

Now, I do think he exaggerates, but fundamentally my concerns with the ad are the same as Kristol's. Military service will continue to be a necessary and admirable pursuit, and men and women will continue to enlist of their own free will.

One could counter "But most soldiers are from low-income and minority families, and enlist out of desperate need!" or "But the war in Iraq is a stupid waste of money and lives!" or "But war should always be a last resort!" I think all of those statements are true.

But that's not what the ad actually says. I agree with Kristol: The ad makes Moveon.org (and, by association, the liberal viewpoint) look short-sighted and selfish.

If any of you have a different interpretation of the "Not Alex" ad, I would be curious to hear your point of view. I'm sure Moveon.org means well, but sometimes I think they do liberal causes more harm than good.

What happened?

All of a sudden, my friend percentages with everyone have just plunged by two to fifteen percentage points, while the match percentages don't seem to have changed. In fact, match percentages are now consistently higher than friend percentages, whereas the opposite used to be true.

It must just be OkCupid implementing another tweak for the sake of tweaking, as they seem so fond of doing these days. But it's disconcerting, since I've gotten used to the old percentages. My brother went from 90% friend to 87%. My boyfriend went from 92% to 82%. A dear friend went from 79% to 66%. It seems as though nobody likes me as much any more!

Have you guys out there in OkCupid-land noticed the same thing? And do any of you know if there is an explanation or a reason for the change?

Should college instructors/professors be allowed to voice their political opinions in class?

• Sure, whenever they want.
• Yes, provided that doing so is relevant.
• It's OK, but only when I agree with them.
• Not on your life, pal!

As an aspiring college professor, I find this an interesting and important question. None of the given answers are satisfactory to me. I would say that professors should express their political opinions if and only if:

• ...they stick to topics that are relevant to the class material;
• ...they do so respectfully, with sensitivity to others' points of view;
• ...they provide supporting evidence for their beliefs;
• ...they make it clear that they are expressing their opinion, and that students are also free to express theirs.

As a graduate student at UC Berkeley, I've had professors who have violated all of these principles. Unfortunately, because UC Berkeley students are mostly of a liberal persuasion, professors sometimes assume it's OK to go off on rants about President Bush or about Republicans in general. Even when I agree with the professor's opinion, I find this highly inappropriate: I worry that it makes students with different viewpoints feel threatened and alienated, which is not a healthy classroom atmosphere.

That's not to say that political discussions should be avoided in the classroom. But I think it's very important that the instructor distinguish fact from opinion, and emphasize that everyone is free to speak their mind and defend their own viewpoint.

I've already had to deal with these issues myself, as a teaching assistant. The topics I've had to mediate include genetic engineering, creationism, free trade, the history of colonialism, and the ethics of abortion. I always try to begin the semester by saying "We'll be covering some sensitive topics, and it's important that we not hesitate to tackle controversial subjects, but that at the same time we keep the conversations respectful and focused on learning."

One reason I've made a special effort to establish my classrooms as a safe and open forum for controversial topics is because of something that happened to a friend of mine who was a TA in another department. I'll call her Paula (not her real name)...

Paula was teaching an intro class on environmental issues, and her students had to write a paper on climate change policy. She gave poor grades to two of her students who wrote that climate change was not a high priority compared to some other world problems. These students felt that Paula had graded them unfairly because she disagreed with their political beliefs. They complained to the professor and the professor confronted Paula. As you can imagine, this was very upsetting to everyone involved. I still remember Paula sobbing and saying she hadn't done anything wrong...

I didn't see the students' papers, so I can't really judge the situation, but knowing how politically outspoken Paula is, I can readily imagine her expressing her opinions beyond what is appropriate in a classroom. I vowed to be careful never to do the same myself.

One final thought: I think it's important to distinguish between promoting particular political ideas in the classroom versus encouraging students to be politically involved in general. I would never tell my students how to vote on election day, but I always remind them to vote. In my field, environmental science, there is an especially strong relationship between academic research and political action. Sometimes this relationship is an uncomfortable one, but what is the value of research if not to solve real-world problems?

If any of you (teachers, students, or anyone else) have other thoughts on politics in the classroom, I would be glad to hear them!

I was horrified to read that, in the latest of a string of incomprehensible actions, the Myanmar junta turned away a French ship carrying 1,500 tons of food and medicine for the cyclone victims, saying it was an unwelcome "warship":

http://www.reuters.com/article/featuredCrisis/idUSN16409637

Myanmar's citizens are suffering, and many thousands - perhaps hundreds of thousands - will die needlessly as a result of the regime's inaction and isolationism. What should the rest of the world do? Is there anything we can do?

According to a recent NY Times op-ed by Robert Kaplan, "Aid at the Point of a Gun," perhaps we should muster our military might and force them to accept Western aid. Or else. But, as Kaplan points out, that seemingly simple moral act is fraught with complex implications. After all, the removal of that brutal tyrant Saddam Hussein hasn't exactly improved Iraqis' lives, has it?

I remember having similar feelings when the Taliban took over Afghanistan in the mid-1990s. I was a teenager then, and even more naive than I am now. I was so incensed by the descriptions of men being beaten for not wearing a beard, women being killed for appearing alone in public, and children being denied all access to education that I said to my family and friends, "We have to DO something!" Their reply was "I know it's awful, but there's nothing we can do. Afghanistan is a sovereign country."

I still don't know how I feel about this issue. Meddling in another country's affairs is dangerous indeed, but so is standing by while human rights are violated on a vast scale. At least I'm confident in saying that we would do more good to invade Myanmar than we have done by invading Iraq. But I still don't know if it would result in a net benefit for Myanmar's people, and even if it did, that wouldn't be sufficient justification for such a drastic action.

Or would it? Is allowing hundreds of thousands of innocent people to die needlessly, through starvation (as in North Korea) or exposure and disease (as in Myanmar) really that different from killing them in a gas chamber?

I'd be curious to hear your thoughts...

We can't help but feel sad for the death of Eight Belles, the young filly who placed second in the Kentucky Derby only to die moments later after shattering her front ankles. The tragedy has catalyzed calls to stop the racing industry's cruelty. I wish, though, that discussions of this event would place it in the context of far more awful things that happen to animals every minute around the country.

Horses are beautiful, charismatic creatures, to be sure. The mammals we raise for food - cattle, pigs, sheep, goats, and others - are perhaps less graceful. But that is not in any way a moral argument.

If it breaks our hearts to see the filly stagger and collapse after she crosses the finish line, why does it not break our hearts to know that exhausted dairy cows are collapsing on the slaughterhouse floor, and improperly stunned pigs are bleeding to death while fully conscious? This cruelty is far more immense and prolonged than anything on the racetrack. At least Eight Belles lived in clean stables and galloped on green fields, unlike hundreds of millions of her fellow ungulates who spend much or all of their lives confined to small pens standing on their own excrement.

This raises the bigger question of how people interpret information to make moral decisions. Universally, our moral consideration is given disproportionately to those who we know or feel as though we know. It's much easier to empathize with a beautiful horse whose last moments are vividly depicted on our TV screens than to empathize with a beef shish kebab or a dim sum pork bun. Never mind that the dim sum bun used to be a pig who was as intelligent as a pet dog. We never met that pig. Out of sight, out of mind.

Even though I ponder these issues a lot (as those of you who know me are already aware), I am still sometimes taken aback by the hypocrisy with which Americans pamper their pets and torture their farm animals. I was reminded of this recently by a thought-provoking New York Times article about a badly injured goat who escaped from a Brooklyn slaughterhouse and made his way to Prospect Park, where he was rescued and taken to the Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary. The Sanctuary's founder, Jenny Brown, spent thousands of dollars on surgery for the goat, and will spend thousands more on a prosthetic leg for him.

Sounds crazy, right? A live goat is worth only a few hundred dollars for meat. Well, why is it any more crazy than spending thousands on medical treatment for our dogs and cats? In parts of China, where dogs are raised for food, lavishing expense upon an injured dog might seem equally crazy.

The prominence afforded to horses - especially racehorses - can be explained in similar terms, I think. Horses have a special prestige in Western culture, and racehorses are extremely valuable commodities. I hope, though, that the publicity surrounding Eight Belles' fatal injury will spark some discussion about the profound contradictions in our attitudes toward the welfare of animals.

It's worrying how often public sentiment (or lack thereof) can be explained by the axiom "Out of sight, out of mind." It reminds me of the immense power of the media and reminds my why, earlier in my career, I wanted to be a journalist. Instead I'm writing yet another blog post on animals in the news...

For a change I have some happy advisor news to share with you all. I'm helping Dan Kammen, one of my advisors, edit a sprawling report on clean energy R&D priorities for state governments. It is a massive job and I have trouble focusing on it for more than an hour or so at a time without taking a break. So I have been taking lots of breaks.

Professor Kammen is rarely seen in the student area, and he almost never walks by my desk, but this morning he did.

And, what did I have on my computer screen? Was it the New York Times? Was it Facebook? Was it OkCupid?

No, it was the clean energy report!

He glanced at my screen and said "Good work - I appreciate your help with this," and continued on his way.

Whew. Now I'd better get off OkCupid before Prof. Kammen or anyone else wanders by my desk again. I'm not superstitious enough to believe that the chance of being caught procrastinating is anything other than directly proportional to the fraction of time spent procrastinating.

P.S. Sometimes, even being apprehended in the middle of productivity is sort of embarrassing, as Cecilia demonstrates below...

I just noticed that OkCupid seems to have stopped making adjectival comparisons with the "similar users" who appear on the left of every profile. You know, "more adventurous." "Less greedy." That kind of thing.

Maybe this is just as well. I mean, didn't our parents always tell us not to compare ourselves to others, but just to be the best that we could be? There's no need to make OkCupid users feel inadequate by reminding them that their peers are more giving, more literary, and more into sports.

On the other hand, I have to admit that I quietly enjoyed seeing my favorite people come out on the flattering end of the comparisons. For example, compared to my boyfriend, "similar users" tended to be:

less organized
less geeky
less compassionate
less ambitious
less scientific
less mathematical
less pure
more arrogant

(In case it's not clear from context, I consider "more geeky" to be a highly desirable quality.)

I didn't fare as well myself; compared to me, similar users tended to be "less sloppy" and "hornier." And also "less geeky." Well, I guess I could be doing worse, then.

But it seems the age of comparisons has come to an end, and we will no longer be able to pass judgment on our fellow OkCupid users based on a single auto-generated adjective. I dunno what I think about this... it exemplifies one of the challenges of the Information Age, which is the inevitable tradeoff between:

• being overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of information, versus
• being deceived by oversimplified summaries.

Since, according to my personality awards, I'm supposed to be "more ambitious," I suppose I really ought to stop procrastinating and get back to work now!

Golfer Tripp Isenhour is facing a fine and possibly jail time for killing a red-shouldered hawk by driving golf balls at it until he hit it in the head. Isenhour claims he was not trying to hurt the bird and that the hit was "one in a million." The Humane Society, though, says he deserves punishment for his cruelty.

When I first heard this story, I had the following reactions, in order:

1. Poor hawk! What a pointless waste of the creature's life.
2. Wait a minute... jail? That seems a bit much.
3. Hmmm. What ethical principles are being invoked here?

I'm still a bit stuck on the last question, which is why I'm writing about this in my blog. At best, it seems as though this punishment for killing a hawk is inconsistent with many of our other laws, which is why it bothers me. Here are the possible reasons I can think of why killing a hawk is an awful thing to do:

• Killing an animal is wrong. Obviously not. You kill insects every time you drive a car.
• Killing an intelligent animal (one with a complex nervous system and social relationships) is wrong. This is certainly not a tenet of our legal system: we kill millions of intelligent animals (cats, dogs, pigs, cows, etc.) daily.
• Causing unnecessary suffering to a living creature is wrong. While I agree with this, the hawk didn't suffer: it was killed instantly by a direct blow to the head.
• Killing a wild animal for sport is wrong. If so, then why do we allow hunting of game species? Also, if one is going to kill an animal, isn't it kinder to kill a wild one than to raise one in miserable captivity, and then kill it?
• Killing an endangered or threatened species is wrong. But the red-shouldered hawk is a common bird, found across the North American continent.
• Killing a charismatic species that we have deemed worthy of protection is wrong. At least that's logically consistent. But how sound a reason is it?

Unless we invoke a reason like the last one, i.e. we afford arbitrary levels of protection to species we think are cute or charismatic or inspirational, I can't see any way to reconcile the severe penalties for killing a red-shouldered hawk with the complete lack of consequences for, say, raising turkeys under squalid factory-farm conditions and causing them prolonged agony during their slaughter.

Regardless of your feelings about animal welfare - whether you believe that killing any intelligent animal is inherently wrong, or whether you believe that animals can't feel anything and their treatment is irrelevant - don't you agree that our laws in this regard are contradictory?

After answering a few hundred more questions the other day, I suddenly found myself in possession of the "less socially free" badge, which means, in a nutshell, that I hate hippies. Never mind that by most accounts I am a hippie. So what's going on here?

Here is the badge description for "more socially free":

Socially free users believe people should be allowed to do what they want, within reason. Are you gay and want to get married? A nudist? Anti-war? Addicted to your local health-food store's organic soy-granola-fiber chunklets? You'd probably get along well with these users.

Hmmmm. Supposedly this is a description of the filthy pinkos I detest. But let's do a point-by-point comparison here:

• Do I support gay marriage? Yes, strongly. I've repeatedly written to my lawmakers about gay rights issues.
• Am I a nudist? Not me personally, but I don't care what other people do.
• Anti-war? Most certainly I'm against the current foolish war; I've been to at least half-a-dozen protests since the war began.
• Addicted to my local health food store's organic soy-granola-fiber chunklets? Yep. Berkeley Bowl has the yummiest carob Energee Nuggets.

In addition, I'm vegetarian (and have friends who are are vegan); I ride my bike everywhere; I recycle everything; I minimize my consumption; I've devoted my career to furthering environmental sustainability and social equity; and my circle of friends includes many people who are gay, bisexual, and/or polyamorous. And if that wasn't enough, I wear tie-dyed clothes.

OkCupid, I declare you are WRONG! What were you thinking?

I looked back through the questions I recently answered, and the only possible culprit I could find was this question:

Could you easily obtain illegal drugs through your social network?

• Yes.
• No.
• Only marijuana.

...to which I answered "No." I certainly hope that OkCupid doesn't assume that social freedom = drug use.

I thought I should blog about this in case anyone viewing my profile assumed I was actually as conservative as my personality icon suggests. I guess I might be considered "conservative" in some senses of the word: My family is important to me. I obey the law. I believe there are universal moral tenets that all members of society are obligated to follow. But to me that doesn't contradict "social freedom." Laws and norms are necessary to the extent that they protect our right to self-determination.

I think this guy said it best:

"The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good, in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it."
~ John Stuart Mill

It's up to you, then, to decide whether I'm a hippie or not. I'm perplexed by the fact that I am the only one I know on OkCupid who has the "Less Socially Free" badge. Many of my friends are labeled as "More Socially Free." If you have any idea why I have been pegged as a conservative, please let me know! In the meantime, I'll just keep eating my organic carob Energee Nuggets and going on peace marches...

P.S. Here's an example of these definitional ambiguities: The Marines Recruiting Center in Berkeley has recently been besieged by protests from anti-war group Code Pink. The Berkeley City Council responded by giving Code Pink a permanent parking space in front of the recruiting center, and by issuing an edict calling the Marine Corps "unwelcome intruders." Now, maybe this is stereotypical "hippie" behavior, but to me, it seems an unacceptable curtailment of freedom - specifically, of the Marine Corps' right to do business in their Berkeley office. Which is the more "socially free" stance on this issue, I wonder?