The Dish

Lizzie Wade questions the practice of raising endangered birds with puppets before releasing them into the wild:

These animals don’t cause as much trouble as marauding gangs of adolescent condors, but they can wind up with their own mysterious behavioural issues. Puppet-reared whooping cranes, for example, have trouble incubating their eggs in the wild; they will often abandon their nests mere days before the eggs are due to hatch.

John French, Patuxent’s research manager and head of the crane programme, has a couple of different theories about the crane’s parenting problems.

In the wild, nesting cranes are often swarmed by black flies; perhaps the puppet-reared cranes, raised in relative comfort, can’t tolerate the parasites and are driven off their nests. Or perhaps their own puppet parents failed to pass along a crucial piece of information about the breeding process. What the missing piece might be, French told me, ‘I have no idea.’ Meanwhile, the cranes’ failure to raise the next generation on their own guarantees, somewhat ironically, the need for more puppet-rearing.

It’s tempting to see puppet-reared California condors and whooping cranes as victims of a horrific real-life version of Plato’s cave: after living in a shadow world since birth, they are suddenly dragged out into the blinding sunlight and forced to cope with an incomprehensibly rich and complex reality. Ill-equipped to live in anything but a carefully managed simulacrum of nature, they crack under the pressure. When viewed from this angle, it is hard to imagine why keepers thought puppet-rearing would produce psychologically healthy animals.

[L]ike all intensive, hands-on conservation programmes, puppet-rearing was never really about the animals. While the stated goal of any captive breeding programme is to create self-sustaining populations of wild animals that can survive and thrive without human intervention, the true reason for their existence is guilt of a very human variety.

Steven Cook worries that Egypt is dangerously close to defaulting on its debt:

This might sound surprising to the casual observer of Egypt.  The economy was a subject of intense coverage in the months preceding the July 3, 2013 coup, but has receded from view as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait stepped in with an initial $12 billion infusion of aid that was followed recently with another $8 billion.  The money from the Gulfies was supposed to stabilize the Egyptian economy, but the numbers do not lie.  The country’s foreign currency reserves—between $16-$17 billion—are close to where they were in late 2012 and the first half of 2013, which means Egypt is hovering just above the critical minimum threshold defined as three months of reserves to purchase critical goods.  A portion of those reserves are not liquid and with a burn rate estimated to be $1.5 billion per month, it is easy to understand why Egypt is one exogenous shock—think Ukraine, which is a major producer of wheat and Egypt is the world’s largest importer of it—or political crisis away from default.

What this would mean:

An economic problem the magnitude of a solvency crisis will only intensify the pathologies that Egypt is already experiencing—violence, political tumult, and general uncertainty.  Economic decline would create a debilitating feedback loop of more political instability, violence, and further economic deterioration. It’s a scary scenario that deserves attention and preparedness, but there does not seem to be much urgency to try to address it anywhere.  Gulf money appears to have lulled people into the sense that the Saudis, Emiratis, and Kuwaitis will stave off disaster.  It’s a false sense of security.

Monica Potts examines what critics of pay equity must ignore to make their case:

Some argue that the motherhood penalty can be explained by the fact that women are choosing to have children, and are often taking some amount of time off work to take care of them when they’re young. The question of why there’s no fatherhood gap, or why men rarely choose to take time off to care for young children, remains unexplained.

The other component is that women dominate in college majors leading to fields with relatively low salaries, like early childhood education, while men dominate in the high-paying ones, like engineering. All of these things, however, ignore the fact that choices aren’t made in a vacuum, and pretend as though the only real gender discrimination happens when a manager sits in his dark office poring over ledgers, dutifully subtracting 23 cents per dollar from every worker in the female column. Discrimination is more complicated and often internalized, in everything from little girls picking up subtle cues they’re bad at math or building things, to pregnant women seeing their hours cut at work even when they haven’t asked for such a change or don’t want it. It also doesn’t account for an odd distinction made between “women’s” and “men’s” fields. Call yourself a janitor, and you make about $3,000 more dollars a year than if you are a maid or a housekeeper.

Considering the “motherhood penalty”, Marjorie Romeyn-Sanabria advocates more parent-friendly work policies:

The fact that the U.S. is the only industrialized country that does not offer paid parental leave punishes women who participate in the natural experience of having a child. With the rising costs of childcare, and without the security of regular wages, the message that employers are sending women is that they are no longer valuable once they become pregnant.

We don’t need to close the wage gap; we need to remove the stigma that treats pregnant women and new mothers like pariahs, and the economic structures that punish childbearing.

Meanwhile, Evan Soltas notices occupations like manufacturing reverting to their men-only status:

Economists explain away about a third of the pay gap according to workers’ choices of occupation and industry. Implicit in their framework, though, is the idea that men and women fully choose their career. A retrenchment of the “man’s job” world weighs against the view that much progress has been made. … Women made up 32 percent of manufacturing workers in 1990; as of last month, that figure had fallen to 27 percent, lower than in any year since 1971. In the information sector, which includes computer engineering, telecommunications and traditional publishing, women’s share of jobs has dropped to the lowest on record: 40 percent, down from 49 percent in 1990.

The social concept of a “man’s job” or a “woman’s job,” that is, has sharply reasserted itself over the last two decades. Industrial change — such as technology replacing workers in manufacturing — is pushing out women more so than men.

Recent Dish on pay equity, from both sides of the debate, here and here.

A team of scientists has successfully implanted lady-parts cultivated from stem cells into four women born without them:

The women, who were between 13 and 18 at the time of the surgery, were all born with a rare genetic condition called Mayer-Rokitansky-Kuster-Hauser syndrome (MRKH) — a condition that causes about one in 4,500 girls to be born with either an underdeveloped or absent vagina and uterus. The traditional treatment for women with MRKH involves reconstructive surgery or painful dilation procedures. These interventions can be quite traumatic — they have a complication rate of 75 percent in pediatric patients — so researchers wanted to find a way to avoid them altogether. That’s why they set out to engineer vaginas, described in a study published in The Lancet today, that would be compatible with each patient.

How they did it:

The vaginal organs were engineered with muscle and epithelial cells from biopsies of the women’s genitals. The cells were taken from the tissues, grown, and put into a biodegradable material that is then formed into the shape of a vagina and fit to each patient. When the vagina is placed into the bodies of the patients, the nerves and blood vessels help expand it into tissue. The biodegradable material is absorbed into the body, and cells form a new structure and organ.

The cultured cells were grown on scaffolds like this one:

Jason Koebler celebrates this triumph for medical science:

Besides how awesome this obviously is for those four women, it represents a huge win for regenerative medicine and a look at what could be the future of transplantation. Researchers in the United Kingdom are working on making lab-grown noses, ears, and blood vessels, but so far, implanting them back into humans has proven difficult. With the success of this experiment, Anthony Atala, who worked on the transplantation team, says things like this could one be the norm for people who are born with disorders or otherwise need a new organ.

It’s certainly an improvement over the mouse method:

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Moneybox debunks the viral story about the French banning work calls outside business hours:

Here’s what really happened.

Last week, two groups of employers signed an agreement with French unions outlining certain workers’ “obligation to disconnect.” The agreement followed several months of negotiation and serves as an update to one from 1999 that established the 35-hour workweek, among other things.

This “obligation to disconnect,” a vague-sounding phrase if we’ve ever heard one, would apply not to the 1 million people the companies involved represent, but to the roughly 25 percent of independent workers they employ. Unlike typical workers, these “forfait jour” contractors have flexible hours and are not governed by the 35-hour workweek or 10-hour-day limit. So, unlike other workers, they can end up putting in extremely long days. They are not, as the Guardian piece angrily suggests, “sipping sancerre and contemplating at least the second half of a cinq à sept” before clocking out.

Marie Telling notes that “French employees can still send professional emails after 6 p.m.”:

The text never specifies any precise time after which the employees are not to exchange work emails.

The Guardian may have based its assumption on the fact that many French workers working the traditional 35 hours a week get off work at 6 p.m. The only problem is that the employees affected by the deal work outside this time frame. They work longer hours and that’s precisely why this rule was made for them (they can work up to a maximum of 78 hours a week).

These employees won’t stop sending work emails after 6 p.m.