methodology:

This does not refer to the famous gender gap in earnings but to a study (pdf) which compares men’s and women’s economic, educational, political and health outcomes by building all that into an index. The index measures outcomes (for example, the labor force participation rates of women and men) and not inputs (for example, the presence or absence of paid parental leave). What is interesting about this particular index is that it doesn’t weigh the results by the economic development level of a country. Thus, a poor country can rank high on this index even if it doesn’t offer many opportunities for girls to get educated as long as the opportunities are the same for boys and girls.

top ten:
1. Norway
2. Finland
3. Sweden
4. Iceland
5. New Zealand
6. Philippines
7. Denmark
8. Ireland
9. Netherlands
10. Latvia

so this is sort of weird. what’s the philippines doing w/ all these advanced industrialized countries? (except latvia, which is falling apart, and i guess iceland, too.)

my theory, based on speculation: there aren’t overt social/cultural barriers to women getting an education or jobs, and the sentiment that “women should stay home and cook and take care of the children” isn’t that prevalent. they’ve also had two female presidents, which i think makes a huge difference.

for people with no access to education, there might actually be more opportunities for women in service industries (live-in cooks, housecleaners, and nannies). and if that’s completely not true (totally possible since i don’t believe in “math” or “statistics” or “facts”), then i posit that being dirt poor is pretty good inspiration to get every person, male or female, to work or out of the country to send home some cushy remittances.

and for your own edification, the bottom 10
1. Bahrain
2. Ethiopia
3. Turkey
4. Egypt
5. Morocco
6. Benin
7. Pakistan
8. Saudi Arabia
9. Chad
10. Yemen

a larger slideshow with all my holiday family pics.

check back for more later. at least two more family parties to go …

troy high gets a silver medal, basically b/c we have high-performing poor/minority contingents.

i was surprised to see that troy had only 4.6% minority enrollment, but i guess all those asians (not included) make it seem more diverse than this accounts for. apparently troy high is now 25.7% asian, which is holy crap even more than the 19.8% when i was there. one quarter asian. that’s insane.

as you can imagine, the series is kind of bad. for example:

1. the acting sucks 60% of the time.
2. the writing sucks 80% of the time. actually, i can’t really watch this thing w/ out tivo b/c i need to fast forward through so many parts.
3. the samurai girl is supposed to be japanese (duh), yet the actress who plays samurai girl is named jamie chung (from real world fame). if you know anything about asians, you know that ms. chung being japanese = unlikely.
4. in fact, none of the many “japanese” characters on the show are japanese. i mean, you couldn’t even find one?
5. all the slant-eyed characters are non-americans, yet remarkably none have accents. FOR REAARRS?
6. in the show, samurai girl is supposed to be 19. the attractive white man she’s supposed to be shacking up w/ in the end is at minimum 24. apparently this is not supposed to strike anyone as sort of gross.
7. samurai girl’s name is “heaven.” having to listen to bad actors ask “where’s heaven?” over and over kind of hurts my ears.
8. it’s on abc family. before friday night, i didn’t even know what channel abc family was even on.

so many things wrong, yet here i am, setting my tivo for the last 2 hours tomorrow night and blogging about it. yikes. in my defense, there is nothing else on tv right now, and the white knight that i imagine will end up w/ young heaven is michael from roswell (circa 1999). so no one watched roswell, i’m sure, and neither did i, but i always liked reading about it. it’s a show that was riding the coattails of buffy and about aliens and shit, and it also produced katherine heigl. i hear she’s a big deal now.

here’s brendan fehr before and after:

now i’m not really recommending anyone watch samurai girl, but i just thought i’d record for posterity that this is happening. thanks to the aforementioned tivo, i think i’ll have actually logged about 3.5 hours of time watching the entire 3-day, 6-hour event, so thank god for technology! there are few and far between shows that feature asians, and even if they do the whole martial arts/yellow fever thing here, i gotta support my people — even if my people are real world hasbeens who sell their bodies (image search “jamie chung” and check out all the pics that were amazingly too inappropriate for this blog) and whose next project is the movie “dragonball” of “z” fame. (btw, does anyone else think she looks like a young lucy liu or a more asian kristen kreuk?)

anyways, if you think i’m pathetic, someone should have hung out w/ me on friday or i wouldn’t have been sent to these depths. that is all.

there are 39 more videos. so excited.

update (5/28/08 5:30pm): is this him? a cpa from australia?

but damnit, someone else did it already.

obviously the white people site went viral last week, and some crafty asians were quicker to the punch than i was. oh well. i’ll offer up my own (and coop’s) ideas here. maybe someone else can expand upon them.

asian girls like: white guys
asian girls like: black guys
asian boys like: asian girls
asian boys like: shakira
asian people like: betamax/laserdisc
asian people like: violin
asian people like: noncontact sports (tennis, golf)
asian people like: break dancing
asian people like: louis vuitton

i don’t think i’m actually asian enough to properly write the asian people blog, but i can expound upon these if the demand is high enough.

sample:
#51 Living by the water
#46 The Sunday New York Times
#45 Asian Fusion Food
#44 Public Radio
#41 Indie Music
#39 Netflix
#37 Renovations
#36 Breakfast Places
#35 The Daily Show/Colbert Report
#33 Marijuana
#29 80s Night
#24 Wine
#23 Microbreweries
#17 Hating their parents
#14 Having Black Friends
#11 Asian Girls

GREAT find, andy!