Kakenya Ntaiya and the Kakenya Center for Excellence

Kenya ranks #130 in the 2012 Gender Inequality Index and ranks #145 in the Human Development Index. (Also, click here for a PDF of Kenya’s composite indices for the 2011 Human Development Report.)

Despite serious problems represented by these figures/values, Kakenya Ntaiya and the Kakenya Center for Excellence arguably provide many of the kinds of action, growth, hope, and promise that we need most in this world.

Woman challenges tradition, brings change to her Kenyan village (CNN Heroes story from March 14, 2013)

(Please check this out. Well worth our time. Every single minute – only 15 minutes, 42 seconds. Really gets going, truly inspiring, in the second half.)
– David Slutsky

More on the Real-Sized Mannequins

We posted about the Swedish mannequins a couple of days ago.  Pictures of these size 6 and 10 mannequins went viral, then it was a hoax, then it wasn’t. Read more about them here.

GCC: Another all-male list of invited speakers

This one, on probability.  (From PHILOS-L)

The Sixth Workshop on Combining Probability and Logic (progic 2013) continues the progic workshop series
(www.kent.ac.uk/secl/philosophy/jw/progic.htm). Progic 2013 takes placeon September 17 and 18, 2013.

Progic 2013 focuses on “Combining probability and logic to solve
philosophical problems”. Topics include but are not restricted to

-) acceptability
-) argument strength
-) belief revision
-) conditionals
-) conditionalization
-) counterfactuals
-) information
-) probability logic

Invited speakers are Igor Douven (Faculty of Philosophy, University of Groningen), Alan Hájek (School of Philosophy, Australian National University), Kevin T. Kelly (Center for Formal Epistemology, Carnegie Mellon University), Hannes Leitgeb (Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich), and Peter Milne
(Department of Philosophy, University of Stirling).

Kate Norlock on the New APA Committee on Sexual Harassment

Over at Leiter Reports, guest blogger Rebecca Kukla interviews feminist philosopher Kate Norlock on the new APA Committee on Sexual Harassment she’s chairing.

Here’s a taste:

Harassment can be experienced as both isolating and isolated. If there’s one thing philosophers can do to help each other, it is to call attention to a possibility that one is not alone, that one’s own colleagues and organizations can establish cultures in which this is affirmed, and that there is even a possibility for a systemic response, at least a small one.