Study finds, surprisingly, that women are favored for jobs in STEM – The Washington Post
“At one point we turned to each other while we were coding email responses from faculty across the U.S. and said we hoped that the large preference for women applicants over identically qualified men applicants would slow down because it seemed too large to be believed!” Williams wrote in an e-mail to Inside Higher Ed. “It never did slow down, and the final tally was roughly a 2 to 1 preference. So, we were surprised.”

Anatomy of a Tragedy – The Texas Observer
As she lay dying, Duntsch performed his third surgery, on a woman named Mary Efurd. Another spinal fusion; another routine procedure. Efurd woke up after surgery in horrible pain, barely able to move her legs. Two days later, once Efurd was stable, Henderson was assigned to do the repair surgery. A CT scan found that the metal spinal fusion hardware, meant to be placed on the patient’s spine to keep the vertebrae from moving, was sunk into the muscles of her lower back, inches from her spine. Henderson went in to remove it. He had been a neurosurgeon for 40 years and what he saw inside Efurd’s back shocked him. “He had amputated a nerve root,” Henderson said. “It was just gone. And in its place is where he had placed the fusion. He’d made multiple screw holes on the left everywhere but where he had needed to be. On the right side, there was a screw through a portion of the S1 nerve root.”

The Nerdstream Era: Nameday
How cute is that? Congrats, Stefan! — "Rejoice! Our Queen of Love and Beauty, Lyanna Sasse, was born on March 10th. You may use the comment thread to do her hommage."

Quantifying the Clickbait and Linkbait in BuzzFeed Article Titles | minimaxir | Max Woolf’s Blog
I decided to determine which phrases in BuzzFeed headlines are the most successful in order to see if it’s possible to reverse-engineer BuzzFeed’s business model. Therefore, I scraped BuzzFeed’s website (after initial frustration) and obtained 60,378 distinct articles and the corresponding number of Facebook Shares for each article. From there, I decomposed each headline into its component n-grams, allowing me to perform quantitative analysis for each possible permutation of words in the article titles. You probably don’t know that the 3 most interesting things I found will blow your mind.

Math for eight-year-olds: graph theory for kids! | Joel David Hamkins
This morning I had the pleasure to be a mathematical guest in my daughter’s third-grade class, full of inquisitive eight- and nine-year-old girls, and we had a wonderful interaction. Following up on my visit last year (math for seven-year-olds), I wanted to explore with them some elementary ideas in graph theory, which I view as mathematically rich, yet accessible to children.