Dr Faust confirmed

As expected, Dr Faust was confirmed as the 28th president of Harvard University. The choice increases the diversity of the presidents in many respects, see Pug Bus. Faust said:

• I hope that my own appointment can be one symbol of an opening of opportunities that would have been inconceivable even a generation ago. [But] I'm not the woman president of Harvard, I'm the president of Harvard.
  

Well, I am somewhat less certain about the last sentence. At any rate, she's the fifth president in a row who is not a scientist and she is much further from science than her permanent predecessor.

I find this happiness about the femaleness of a president insane. It works very differently in the commercial world. Despite being attractive and interesting, the last Dow Jones female CEO was fired exactly two years ago.

How has Hewlett-Packard been doing since February 2005? Well, you can see February 2005 in the graph below. It's the moment when the linear growth of the stock price from $20 to $42 started. ;-) The earnings quadrupled between Q4 2005 and Q4 2006. Four days ago, Standard & Poor have upgraded Hewlett-Packard Inc. from "A-" to "A". All my computers in the last 10 years were Hewlett-Packard, so congratulations!



Fortunately for all of us, there is no analogous way how to draw similar graphs describing universities which is why all people in the Academia may uncritically celebrate that most of the Ivy League presidents will be female. It's just great, by definition. ;-)