NBC was able to get the Olympics organizers to schedule most of the key finals early in the morning Beijing time -- for live primetime coverage on the East Coast.

• Being an academic makes having a family easier (compared to working in industry) since our schedules are so flexible. Flexibility and being able to work from home occasionally make it all manageable.
• Things are changing rapidly. I am shocked to hear some of the horror stories about women having to teach a week after giving birth and not being offered leave. That isn't my experience at all. I applied for a Sloan Foundation grant to take a semester off from teaching, and other young academic mothers I know have received incredible amounts of support. Yeah, there are things that could improve, but I get the sense that maternity leaves are way better now than they were ten years ago (no, I never really left work behind, but that's another matter). Things seem to be much better in academia than industry.
• Things are changing rapidly for dads, too. Dads help out with child care and house work more than ever. They do like three times as much child care as dads a generation ago. Dads deserve support, encouragement, and praise.
• Mothers spend more time with their kids than they did a generation ago! (We're too hard on ourselves).

• Day care. I worry more about day care than tenure. There are too few options for working moms, and it's hard to figure out child care when going to conferences. Very hard. Few universities have child care available, and universities that have evening classes ought to have options, since day cares close by 6pm. My baby can't crawl herself home and babysit herself while I am teaching.
• Nursing. If the thought of nursing makes you uncomfortable, stop reading now. Nursing at home is easy, nursing at work is more challenging. It's really hard to focus at a conference when I am struggling to discreetly take pumping breaks, pumping in a bathroom because someone turned my cozy private pumping room into a very public coat room, and constantly worrying about how I'm going to keep my milk cold before I get home when the hotel didn't provide the fridge I requested and the ice machine is broken. None of this is unique to academia, but we do have to do a lot of conference travel. It's all worth it, especially when babies stay so healthy (there are about 100 more benefits). I refuse to feel awkward about it, because hey, babies have to eat.

• Displaying data and results is an important skill in the real world that can get you ahead in your job.
• Format matters! Students may grumble about how I take points off for unreadable homework, but it counts in the real world.
• Not every figure conveys information. You don’t have to output everything, especially if you don’t have anything to say about it. Every figure should tell a story. The results section of a paper should be built around a few key figures. Don’t tell a bad story that rambles on forever or isn’t interesting.
• A figure doesn’t have to be a figure and a table doesn’t have to be a table. How results are conveyed is just as important as what they convey.

• Parole populations are skyrocketing as a result of more people being sent to prison and as a result of reduced sentences for non-violent offenders.
• There are usually two extremes in sentencing: no sentence or a prison sentence. Other sentences in the spectrum (such as rehabilitation) are rarely used.
• Before you accuse the panel of being soft on crime, consider that evidence shows that it is not necessary to put all criminals in prison to reduce crime.
• Dora Schriro (from the Arizona Department of Corrections) observed that “good” inmates often become “bad” ex-offenders because prison life is not like life on the outside.

More than 9,000 prescriptions were filed, which identified a third of GPs as "responsive" prescribers who took into account their patients' specific needs, and 60% as "inertial" prescribers who did not necessarily make fully informed decisions. The findings suggest that inertial physicians stopped paying attention to new research findings once they opt for a specific brand and persistently prescribe a few chosen drugs even when facing different patients who might have different needs.

Applying decision analysis in the context of idealized government decision makers over a century raises the question of how to deal with the fact that political systems tend to exhibit "path dependency," a force that makes large policy shifts difficult and rare, and limits most decisions to small incremental changes. In his paper, [Webster] argues that consideration of path dependence in the context of climate policy justifies greater near-term emissions reductions in what amounts to a hedging strategy.