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If you want a quick science-based tour of the same issues, but with some pointers to actual studies, and written by a very smart woman , then I recommend this: http://mitadmissions.org/blogs...

What does it matter if the author is male or female?

If you want a quick science-based tour of the same issues, but with some pointers to actual studies, and written by a very smart woman, then I recommend this:
http://mitadmissions.org/blogs...

What is the percentage of black, women, etc people with the skills and training that google, facebook, etc is looking for?

Are there out of work fully qualified programmers that can't work at facebook because they are black? Maybe the ratio is the way it is simply because there are not enough minorities looking for high end development work (Unlike baseball). That doesn't make it Facebook's fault if it is truly hiring the most qualified workers.

8% of MIT's class is black Among the general college population the numbers are closer to 14%. But even assuming Facebook, Google and Yahoo were exclusively recruiting from the top Ivy-league universities, their numbers should be significantly higher than the mere 1% of black employees that they are showing. If my company were showing such significantly different demographics from the graduate population they are recruiting from, especially among such a large employee base, we'd be under investigation for racial discrimination.

I thought that competitive business was supposed to hire the most qualified and motivated candidates? Seriously, get out there, carve out your own space, and get hired! "Diversity" is just a politically correct buzzword and is not guaranteed to lead to an agile workforce..

Except that African-Americans represent 10% of graduating students and about the same percentage of computer science grads. Even among an Ivy-League technical college like MIT, blacks represent 8% of the college body. I can't expect Yahoo and Google to fix social problems in the US, but I would expect that their employee ethnic makeup roughly reflect the ethnic makeup of the colleges from which they are recruiting from. The fact that their percentage of black students is 8-10 times lower than their available recruiting pool implies to me either a systematic bias or discrimination in their hiring practices.

how do you spend $100,000 on an undergrad degree?

After scholarship, MIT undergrads average $24,000 a year.

http://mitadmissions.org/afford/basics

Carnegie Mellon $46,000 annual tuition.

http://admission.enrollment.cmu.edu/pages/tuition-fees

Stanford $14,000 per quarter

http://exploredegrees.stanford.edu/tuitionfeesandhousing/#tuitiontext

There are multiple alternatives to the public education system we have today. You propose a false dichotomy when you say that the choice is either what we have now or "everyone home-schooling". The best answer is for parents to have options and not be forced into sending their kids to a specific public school as is now the case.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/p465n3166123272m/
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0161956X.2000.9681936
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0161956X.2000.9681933
http://eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/search/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=ED378635&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=ED378635

http://learninfreedom.org/colleges_4_hmsc.html
http://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/homeschooled_applicants
http://www.naturemoms.com/homeschool-and-college-acceptance.html
http://www.homeschool.com/articles/College05/default.asp#

It seems they are as well adjusted and engaged in their communities and prepared as those "socially promoted" from some of our lesser public no-choice schools.

http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/apply/homeschooled_applicants_helpful_tips/homeschooled_applicants.shtml

I'm saddened and shocked by this news. I took 6.001 as an elective (I was a physics major, and decided to stick with physics to finish out my undergrad career). In fact, I had Hal Abelson and Gerry Sussman as my professors for the class, which was totally awesome.

It seems 6.001 is being replaced by 6.00, 6.01, and 6.02; Scheme is, as you say, being replaced with Python... which IMHO is a poor choice to replace Scheme, if for no other reason than it forces you to care about consistent indentation. (Then again, Scheme is pretty ruthless about balanced parentheses, so I guess you can't completely get away from syntax stupidity. That said, parentheses and prefix notation are about the only bits of Scheme syntax you need to even learn, which is why it only took us 10-15 minutes of the first class to cover the basics of the language.)

I found this article which details this transition in some depth. It looks as though even Gerry Sussman knew that 6.001 was not long for this world, and needed to be replaced... but at least he taught the last class. The article says some people really dislike the new curriculum, and I can see why. I'm not throwing out my SICP book any time soon! I fail to see how the same material can be taught as effectively with the new curriculum and the new tools, at least from a theory standpoint.

I'm sure playing with robots controlled by Python is fun, though.

Hasn't. Will be, this fall.

Sad. :-( SICP was one of the best courses I ever took in univ; I'm sure I sound like an old-time when I say this, but without Scheme, there is no SICP.

Actually, May 1st is the deadline for accepting or denying admission to Olin. I think that it is a national deadline. Accepted students find out sometime in late March or Early April that they are accepted. These deadlines and dates are not so different from other schools. Though the application deadline is early this year (December 1st) and that is to give admissions more time and is probably related to our unusual admissions process. see for dates http://olin.edu/admission/applying_to_olin.asp and for comparison dates http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/apply/deadlines/index.shtml

One of the dorms at MIT has a room full of bouncy balls!. That might also be related.

Good, bad, I dunno ... but her daughter is rather attractive.