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(75% male might be a little low)

Actually, it's spot on. And that's actually damned high for a technical institution. In fact, the percentage of our faculty which is female is remarkably high for an engineering institution. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

If you go to CU Boulder, where our dropouts mostly wind up, you'll find a much higher female population, but most of them are in liberal arts areas. That's not to say anything against women or Boulder in general. Women are great, and it's still a bit of a mystery why women have poured into most previously male-dominated industries such as medical, construction, and so on, but engineers are still predominately male. Further, Boulder offers a wider variety of courses and degrees than Mines possibly could, and has an entirely different atmosphere. But the course work is decidedly less rigorous.

and the town absolutely reeks from that plant.

Can't tell you I've ever smelled anything from the plant. On overcast days, the inversion takes over, and the whole town (all of Denver, not just Golden/Denver West) gets a rather horrid smell from all sorts of emissions in the greater Denver area. Just the same, even the people who attend UIUC don't notice the smell after a week or two.

I think so. Try this.

There are really two important questions here:

1. Are colleges using Microsoft software in their labs?
2. Are colleges teaching their students to use Microsoft products?

The first question seems to about whether colleges are getting people comfortable with Microsoft products, or accomodating them if they are already comfortable. OTOH, the second question is a matter of whether courses specifically teach skills in a Microsoft-centric fashion.

Realistically, I can't speak to a trend, but I can tell you how things are at my school. I attend an engineering college. Obviously, this makes us not big on CS; therefore, we tend to deploy Windows on most of our open labs. It's what most students and professors are comfortable with when they arrive. Therefore, a lot of non-CS students see a lot of Windows. At least at first.

But simultaneously there is an open Linux lab in which anyone can get accounts with non-too-shabby computers. Almost no one but Geophysics uses it, but they require its use for some courses. And all of the nice physics labs for 3rd year and higher physics majors run Redhat. They're set up with Linux because all junior level and above reports must be done in LaTeX.

Everyone is required to take at least one programming course, which normally winds up being Fortran or C/C++ for everyone. Chemical engineers can take VB. C/C++ is taught almost exclusively on IRIX boxes. Only recently have we had a teacher that even required any exposure to visual studio for that class -- or any low-to-mid level CS class.

As far as CS students go, all high-level CS classes tend to either be a Unix-environment or a 'use any environment available on campus'. Most teaching is mathematically and theoretically centered. I can't count how many times teachers have said in lecture that we're being taught important theory and not too much application because we might as well go to a trade school if we just want to learn current applications.

What about non-CS required courses? We're all required to take a lot of general courses, one of which (EPICS) includes required use of Microsoft Project. We're all required to take a year of calculus-based physics whose labs were taught in additional Redhat labs. They're not Windows labs.

Myself, I find this pretty mixed. There are a lot of *nix machines on campus but they're frequently not obvious until you get in a class that requires them or you simply seek them out. We more-or-less force some cross-platform experience on all majors. But if someone wants to be all Microsoft, he can probably get by like that if he doesn't mind taking alternate courses and debating with his counselor. And the same can be done for someone who wants to go all Linux.

My experience is, despite heavy Microsoft pressure, we're a rather OS-balanced school. I can only hope all schools are along the same lines.

Oh, and how do I know we have heavy Microsoft pressure?

Date: Wed, 25 Sep 2002 10:49:43 -0700
From: <x-xxxxx@microsoft.com>
To: xxxxx@mines.edu
Subject: Opportunity

My name is xxxxx xxxxx and I am representing Microsoft and their Student Representative Program. We are looking for one qualified student in good standing that will be representing Microsoft and their latest .NET Technologies on campus. The student would be hired as a part-time employee (10-15 hours per week) of xxxxxxxx for the fall and spring academic year. http://www.microsoft.com/net/

Requirements include:
* Candidates that are using Microsoft technologies already, not necessarily the new .NET technologies.
* Candidates with a "B" GPA or above.
* Experience speaking to peers and large groups
* Involved in outside activities related to their major (ideally holding a position such as President within the club or organization)
* Need to be very dedicated, outgoing and energized

Ideally we are looking for current Junior students that could possibly maintain the program for two years, however sophomores and graduate would be great candidates as well. We will have phone interviews from now until Thursday, October 10th, preferably with faculty-recommended students that have the dedication and enthusiasm to represent the latest Microsoft .NET technologies. The chosen student with then be flown to the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington for the weekend of October 18th-20th for training.

I've attached a copy of the job description/posting. Please let me know what you feel would be the best way to locate potentially qualified candidates for the program. If you could post the job opening on the bulletin board that would be fantastic.

<<Student Representative JD.doc>>
Thank you for your time.

Regards,

Just a hunch.

World oil consumption is around 27 BILLION barrels of oil a year.

try that math again

Heh, if you would explain that to the good folks at the Colorado School of Masochism I would be most grateful :-p

Man, people who do this for a living scare me. What scares me worse are the people who wrote a compiler called Brainfuck , a language that has 8 operators and emulates a Turing machine. Even more scary are the inventors of Malbolge , a programming language that took over a year to write a "Hello World" program--IN MIXED UPPER/LOWER CASE!!!!

You can also fight majors'monopoles by endorsing Free Art distribution policies.

True - only you can help. There's a good introduction to the enemy right here.

I think that's about half of all they have. I'm almost sure that my school also a colorado school has only a T1. We have 1/10 the membership that CSU has, though. Us midwestern schools just haven't had the oppourtunity that others (costal) to get that kind of speed. Level 3, the upstream provider here is hurtin bad, and is in bankrupcy court. Untill they came along, there was just about dick for fat-pipes here, partly due to the terrain, I imagine.

There is also an IOCCC-like contest for esoteric languages. It's homepage is here.
Take a look especially at Sorted!, which is a real cute language... :)

Another list of esoteric languages is also available.

You asked me where other free references etc could be
found online.

Hogan Books has a pretty nice list:


ftp://hoganbooks.com/weball.zip

`Numerical Recipes in C/F77/F90'. I think it may be
included above.


http://www.ulib.org/webRoot/Books/Numerical_Reci pe s/

Mostly science books, but has `A Simplified
Introduction to LaTeX'.


http://samizdat.mines.edu/


Of course, the Linux Documentation Project has its
HOWTOs and mini-HOWTOs and Guides in .ps or .pdf or
sometimes .dvi format:


http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/docs/HOWTO/othe r- formats/


http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/docs/HOWTO/mini /o ther-formats/


http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/docs/linux-doc- pr oject/

Adobe keeps all of their specs online; the PDF and
PostScript language references, stuff about TrueType
and the new Compact Font Format, etc etc.


http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/technote s/ main.html

`Thinking in PostScript', posted by the author in some
ridiculous proprietary format, as well as in PDF.


http://www.rightbrain.com/pages/book-download.sh tm l

A whole variety of programming books; most seem to be
available in PDF/PS:


http://www.free-book.co.uk/computers-internet/pr og ramming/index.htm

A variety of free online programming references.


http://www.thefreecountry.com/developercity/onli ne references.shtml

Oh, they would have to be simple. Otherwise, we couldn't find them. If there were laws of nature that werw extremely convoluted (like programming inhttp://www.mines.edu/students/b/bolmstea Malbolge then we would never discover them, simply because it would be impossible to see the statistical trend. So the fact that the laws of nature are simple simply reflect the fact that those are the ones we can actually find!

Here's a list of links to online books:

Books On-line, Listed by Title

Free Books from Samizdat Press

Free Online Books At The Free Well

Hard Sci-Fi Stories

ITLibrary

Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing

PROJECT GUTENBERG - ETEXT LISTINGS

The On-Line Books Page

The page with these links is:
http://members.axion.net/~enrique/book.html
and if anyone would like to add links to that list, please email me at:
perez_enrique@yahoo.com

Uhhh.... no.

Acceleration due to gravity has nothing at all to do with the mass of the falling object, only with the mass of the attractor.
Read up on your physics.

(for your curiosity: G = 6.6725985 x 10^-11 Nm^2/kg^2 )

Women have been leaving CS at a faster rate than men. According to the ACM, the percentage of CS bachelor's degrees going to women dropped from 37.1% in 1984 to 28.4% in 1995. For more information, see The Incredible Shrinking Pipeline by Tracy Camp.

A cursory review of the latest NSF data suggests that the percentage of bachelor's degrees in engineering going to women has been holding relatively steady. (According to the NSF, CS is a mathematical science, not an engineering field.)

I teach computer science at Mills College, the first women's college to offer a computer science major. I've also written far too much on this subject.