Larry Summers was fired from his job as president of Harvard University partly for saying the following:

“There are three broad hypotheses about the sources of the very substantial disparities that this conference’s papers document [percentage of women among tenured professors of science] and have been documented before with respect to the presence of women in high-end scientific professions. One is what I would call the-I’ll explain each of these in a few moments and comment on how important I think they are-the first is what I call the high-powered job hypothesis. The second is what I would call different availability of aptitude at the high end, and the third is what I would call different socialization and patterns of discrimination in a search. And in my own view, their importance probably ranks in exactly the order that I just described.”

This fired up an international debate about whether or not there were enough women with the towering intellects required to make it as top scientists and mathematicians, the sorts who would be likely to receive tenure at elite universities.

Summers was deservedly castigated, but not for the right reasons. He claimed to be giving a comprehensive list of reasons why there weren’t more women reaching the top jobs in the sciences. Yet Summers, an economist, left one out: Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States.

This fall, I was lured to Panama. Friends who settled there a year ago had regularly regaled me, an avid traveler, with visions of a lively Latin city with nearby, unspoiled beaches bordered by jungle.

For half of my 10-day trip, I intended to traipse around Panama City. The rest would be a solo adventure — but to where? Greedily, I began surfing the Web, exploring my friends’ suggestions and amassing options.

It didn’t take long for disorganization to set in. There were so many possibilities and interesting tidbits in travel articles. How would I keep it together to make a wise destination decision — or take the information I’d found with me? I could cut and paste text into a Word document or save Web pages in a bookmarks folder. But the former seemed tedious, and the latter inadequate.

Then I remembered Gliider, a browser tool that saves and organizes travel research. I downloaded the free add-on for Firefox, which deposited a small arrow icon on my browser navigation bar that, when clicked, opened a sort of file box. There I created a ”trip” to Panama City, and began selecting, dragging and dropping text and photos from the Web into handy folders with labels like flights, hotels, see and do.

I could share the stash with friends and e-mail myself PDF dossiers of smartly organized information, ready to print out as a bespoke travel guide. (In January, iPhone users will be able to carry their Gliider content via an app.)

Gliider, I learned, is just one of a growing number of new online tools to help travelers plan where to go and what to do when they get there. While still immature and somewhat buggy, they are making finding, sorting, saving and organizing nuggets culled from the mountains of online travel content more efficient and fun.

As people acquire multiple digital devices, including tiny netbooks and super-smart phones, it becomes harder to coordinate all their documents, music and photos so they have access to them from whichever device they’re using at the moment.

People resort to all sorts of time-consuming methods for doing this. Some email the items to themselves. Others copy them to USB thumb drives and manually transfer them to each machine. Still others use Internet-based, or “cloud,” storage, uploading all their photos to a service like Flickr or Facebook, or using Web-based productivity programs like Google Docs. And some use Web-based backup, storage or synchronization services.

Each of these methods, even the cloud-based ones, has limitations and frustrations. Some are complicated, or work only with certain kinds of files. Others work only when you have a Web connection, or don’t replicate your preferred folder structure. Still, others work OK with standard files and folders, but have trouble with specially arranged content, such as music that is organized in a jukebox program.

I’ve been testing a cloud-based service that attempts to solve these problems. It is called ZumoDrive, and it comes from a small company called Zecter Inc. A new version is due out this week that aims to add some capability and make the task simpler.

ZumoDrive mimics a standard physical hard disk, which can contain numerous folders and files. It works on Windows, Macintosh or Linux computers, and also comes in a more limited version for the Apple iPhone. It presents itself as a standard hard-disk icon on all your computers. But it’s actually a single, identical virtual hard disk that lives on the company’s servers, not on the computers themselves. The files it contains are rapidly streamed down to your machines when you need them.

This is a Boston Globe story about a shameful incident at Dartmouth College in which some Dartmouth students harassed Harvard students at a squash match. Dartmouth’s new President, Dr. Kim, has his work cut out for him, as it is very difficult to change what is in people’s heart. Dartmouth’s only real long-term solution is to be more careful in whom they admit.

The President of the Alpha Delta fraternity has apologized and a Co-Captain of the men’s soccer team states the team “has taken full responsibility for our actions.” It will be interesting to see if this fraternity and soccer team removes at least the students who engaged in the most offensive behavior.

About 300 fans packed into the narrow spectator gallery at Dartmouth College’s squash courts, hoping to see their underdog team topple fifth-ranked Harvard for the first time. But the cheering soon turned to heckling – and then a full-fledged verbal assault.

For at least 90 minutes, about a dozen Dartmouth students pelted Harvard’s men and women players with obscenity-laced insults that some witnesses described as misogynistic, homophobic, and anti-Semitic. Women on the Harvard team were called “whores’’ and “sluts,’’ witnesses said; the men were taunted with crude comments about their masculinity.

The Dec. 2 incident, which shattered the genteel world of college squash, has prompted a flurry of apologies this week from Dartmouth’s president, athletic director, and students, including soccer players and fraternity members involved in the incident.

The incident also has sparked soul-searching on the secluded Hanover campus that has tried for decades to shed its “Animal House’’ image, and presented a challenge to a new Dartmouth president intent on fostering a climate of tolerance and social responsibility.

VALÉRIE BOYER is 47, a member of the French parliament and a divorced mother of three. She is tall, fashionable and, dare we say it, slim.

But she has also created a small furor here and abroad with her latest proposal: a draft law that would require all digitally altered photographs of people used in advertising be labeled as retouched.

Some think such a law would destroy photographic art; some think it might help reduce anorexia; some say the idea is aimed at the wrong target, given that nearly every advertising photograph is retouched. Others believe such a label might sensitize people to the fakery involved in most of the advertising images with which they’re bludgeoned.

Underneath it all is an emotional debate about what it is to be attractive or unattractive, and whether the changing ideals of beauty — from Sophia Loren to Twiggy — have ever been realistic.

The White House is turning its nose up at last month’s spurt in temporary work—the one bright spot in an otherwise grim jobs report. It claims that such work is proof that the economy is still malfunctioning. The truth is that this surge in temporary workers is not only good news for the economy, it’s the future of the 21st century labor market. If Washington wants to jump start job growth for the 3.5 million white-collar workers who have lost jobs in this recession, it should start by scrapping the outdated legal and regulatory hurdles to temporary work.

I know something about this because I run a business that places talented individuals into temporary consulting and interim executive assignments. Amid the worst recession in decades, our business is up 70%. Yet there would be much more growth in this sector if Americans—from the White House down to the personnel department—stopped discriminating against temporary work as inferior or anomalous.

Today, demand for high-end temporary business talent is not focused on cost-cutting projects, as some might suspect. Instead, firms use temporary executives to drive innovation. In uncertain times, firms are simply more comfortable with deploying talent on a flexible basis.

Temporary work also boosts economic efficiency because not all executive roles require permanent staff. For example, one pharmaceutical company client took on a temporary marketing executive to help launch a new drug. The old way of doing this was to make a new permanent hire (or a small team) who would have been under-utilized after the launch. The availability of temporary staff who can get the job done quickly means that firms can rethink how work is organized.

Which brings us to another case for temporary work: Top business talent increasingly wants to work this way. In one situation, a VP-level executive we placed was developing his own new business. He valued the way a part-time senior role allowed him to support his family while he worked on his own project. For others, working in a series of temporary assignments may be their preferred full-time occupation.

Given the contribution that temporary work makes to the economy, it’s time Washington embraced it

Is there a reason to be alarmed by the prospect of global warming? Consider that the measurement used, the globally averaged temperature anomaly (GATA), is always changing. Sometimes it goes up, sometimes down, and occasionally—such as for the last dozen years or so—it does little that can be discerned.

Claims that climate change is accelerating are bizarre. There is general support for the assertion that GATA has increased about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since the middle of the 19th century. The quality of the data is poor, though, and because the changes are small, it is easy to nudge such data a few tenths of a degree in any direction. Several of the emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) that have caused such a public ruckus dealt with how to do this so as to maximize apparent changes.

The general support for warming is based not so much on the quality of the data, but rather on the fact that there was a little ice age from about the 15th to the 19th century. Thus it is not surprising that temperatures should increase as we emerged from this episode. At the same time that we were emerging from the little ice age, the industrial era began, and this was accompanied by increasing emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2, methane and nitrous oxide. CO2 is the most prominent of these, and it is again generally accepted that it has increased by about 30%.

The defining characteristic of a greenhouse gas is that it is relatively transparent to visible light from the sun but can absorb portions of thermal radiation. In general, the earth balances the incoming solar radiation by emitting thermal radiation, and the presence of greenhouse substances inhibits cooling by thermal radiation and leads to some warming.

That said, the main greenhouse substances in the earth’s atmosphere are water vapor and high clouds. Let’s refer to these as major greenhouse substances to distinguish them from the anthropogenic minor substances. Even a doubling of CO2 would only upset the original balance between incoming and outgoing radiation by about 2%. This is essentially what is called “climate forcing.”

There is general agreement on the above findings. At this point there is no basis for alarm regardless of whether any relation between the observed warming and the observed increase in minor greenhouse gases can be established. Nevertheless, the most publicized claims of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) deal exactly with whether any relation can be discerned. The failure of the attempts to link the two over the past 20 years bespeaks the weakness of any case for concern.

I am familar with Math 55 from my days at Harvard, a class that typically ends up with no women enrolled after the drop date. Feminists want full equality — 50 percent, nothing less — in everything. So 100 years from now, is it realistic to expect half the students in Matt 55 to be female? Would that be desirable?

Women earn most of America’s advanced degrees but lag in the physical sciences. Beware of plans to fix the “problem.”

Math 55 is advertised in the Harvard catalog as “prob­ably the most difficult undergraduate math class in the country.” It is leg­endary among high school math prodigies, who hear terrifying stories about it in their computer camps and at the Math Olympiads. Some go to Harvard just to have the opportunity to enroll in it. Its formal title is “Honors Advanced Calculus and Linear Algebra,” but it is also known as “math boot camp” and “a cult.” The two-semester fresh­man course meets for three hours a week, but, as the catalog says, homework for the class takes between 24 and 60 hours a week.

Math 55 does not look like America. Each year as many as 50 students sign up, but at least half drop out within a few weeks. As one former student told The Crimson newspaper in 2006, “We had 51 students the first day, 31 students the second day, 24 for the next four days, 23 for two more weeks, and then 21 for the rest of the first semester.” Said another student, “I guess you can say it’s an episode of ‘Survivor’ with people voting themselves off.” The final class roster, according to The Crimson: “45 percent Jewish, 18 percent Asian, 100 percent male.”

Why do women avoid classes like Math 55? Why, in fact, are there so few women in the high echelons of academic math and in the physi­cal sciences?