The 2012 Olympics are historic for women in sports. Now that Saudi Arabia, Brunei and Qatar are sending female athletes for the first time, women will have competed for every Olympic country.

Saudi Arabia was the last country to give the go-ahead after Brunei and Qatar previously agreed to do the same.  Wodjan Ali Seraj Abdulrahim Shahrkhani will suit up for the 78-kilogram category in judo while Sarah Attar, 17, will run the 800 meters for Saudi Arabia.

... The achievement is a long time coming. At the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, 26 countries were yet to include female athletes. Twelve years later in Beijing, the number had dropped to three.

... With the inclusion of women's boxing and wrestling, women will compete in every sport the men will for the first time. In fact, with men barred from synchronized swimming and rhythmic gymnastics, women will compete in more events than their male counterparts.

Say goodbye to the drug-fuelled raver and hello to the clean-living ecowarrior. Teenagers are changing and, for perhaps the first time in history, their parents approve.

Rates of drug- taking, drinking and smoking among children have plummeted in the past decade. Girls, it seems, are more likely to emulate the polite, studious Hermione Granger, played by Emma Watson, pictured right, in the Harry Potter films than wild-child party girls like Peaches Geldof in her heyday.

Among 11 to 15 year olds, the proportion who admitted to having taken drugs fell from 29 per cent in 2001 to 17 per cent in 2011. Regular smokers of at least one cigarette a week halved from one in 10 to one in 20. The number who said they had drunk alcohol in the past week was down from 26 per cent to 12 per cent.

Discovered in a cupboard 20 years ago, the only surviving police archive documenting the deportation of French Jews has been opened up to public view for the first time. The contents are a treasure trove for historians.

One of the most extraordinary documents on show is "Memo 173 - 42," dated July 13, 1942 and marked "secret." ''The occupying authorities," it reads, "have decided upon the arrest and grouping together of a carchertain number of foreign Jews."

Over nine pages, the head of the Paris police details his orders for the enactment of the Holocaust on French soil. Three days later, a few hours before dawn on July 16, French police operating in groups of two - one in uniform, one in plain clothes and accompanied by a German soldier - arrested more than 13,000 Parisian Jews.

Some chucklehead working for Microsoft thought it would be funny to slip a thinly camouflaged sexist remark -- "big boobs" -- into software code that connects the Linux kernel to Microsoft's HyperV virtualization product.

Naturally, someone noticed -- that was the intent (snicker, snicker) - and, as should surprise no one, criticism has ensued, since the vast majority of grownups have come to recognize that this kind of juvenile nonsense has no place in the business world.

And, just as predictably, there are critics of the critics -- apologists and enablers for this chucklehead and others like him -- who insist on defending  the non-existent right to be just a little bit sexist, even at work, as long as it's just a little bit and as long as not too many people notice or are offended. Lighten up, you nags, is the operative message from these folks.

mjg59 | Microsoft's ill-chosen magic constants

At the most basic level it's just straightforward childish humour, and the use of vaguely-English strings in magic hex constants is hardly uncommon. But it's also specifically male childish humour. Puerile sniggering at breasts contributes to the continuing impression that software development is a boys club where girls aren't welcome. It's especially irritating in this case because Azure may depend on this constant, so changing it will break things.

We all feel like we've already seen the movie: "Downfall of the Feature Phones."  Our heroes are Apple and Samsung. They take over the world with their smartphones, while Nokia -- the stereotype of the bumbling rival -- ignores the early warning signs of smartphone ascendancy, spurns the lovely ingénue, Android, and ends up in bed with the Vamp of Redmond, Microsoft.

As simplistic as this plotline sounds, it's the narrative many in the industry have come to accept.

But here's the thing.  Have we actually seen how this movie ends?

I, for one, believe that the "Downfall of the Feature Phones" may have a surprising, alternative ending (but only in the Blu-Ray version).

As in any good thriller, it goes, something like this: Just about when we all thought Jason Bourne -- I mean, feature phones -- must be dead this time, boing! They spring back to life and come back as... "entry-level" smartphones.

I anticipate more switcheroo's in sequels ("The Feature Phone Ultimatum," "The Feature Phone Legacy," "The Feature Phone vs. Godzilla"), in which incumbents who choose to ignore the new "entry-level" category (`because it's too low end') are pitted against a host of newcomers who seize the opportunity to build a fortune on entry-level smartphones.  Incumbents could get clobbered.

A TYPICAL American school day finds some six million high school students and two million college freshmen struggling with algebra. In both high school and college, all too many students are expected to fail. Why do we subject American students to this ordeal? I've found myself moving toward the strong view that we shouldn't.

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This debate matters. Making mathematics mandatory prevents us from discovering and developing young talent. In the interest of maintaining rigor, we're actually depleting our pool of brainpower. I say this as a writer and social scientist whose work relies heavily on the use of numbers. My aim is not to spare students from a difficult subject, but to call attention to the real problems we are causing by misdirecting precious resources.

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I WANT to end on a positive note. Mathematics, both pure and applied, is integral to our civilization, whether the realm is aesthetic or electronic. But for most adults, it is more feared or revered than understood. It's clear that requiring algebra for everyone has not increased our appreciation of a calling someone once called "the poetry of the universe." (How many college graduates remember what Fermat's dilemma was all about?)