Domain: oxy.edu
Stories and comments across the archive that link to oxy.edu.
Comments · 19
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Re:One guy
If women are different from men in a way that would result in them having diverse perspectives, then why is it unreasonable to assume that those same diverse perspectives might lead them to other career choices?
As to your second point, the evidence seems to point the other way. I believe it was you who made a post in the previous thread in this topic indicating that Iranian women were more likely to be involved in software jobs as some evidence that it must be socially based. Interestingly enough, you'll see higher rates in other countries too. India is one example where there are significantly more women in computing. What you fail to understand is that this has little to do with cultural differences (and you'd be hard pressed to argue that either India or Iran have better views towards women in general than western democracies) and is the result of economic ones. Computer science jobs are well paying and in high demand, and do potentially afford you the opportunity to immigrate to a western democracy that may be preferable to the type of people who are intelligent enough to excel in the software development field.
When you remove economic pressures (the Scandinavian countries which have among the best social safety nets have the same low numbers of women in CS as the U.S.) and have a society that leaves you essentially free to pursue whatever ambitions you might have, it is hardly unsurprising that any biological tendencies that may predispose people to one field or another are more prevalent. To use an analogy, you can only really see if one strain of plant yields more only after you ensure that they all have sufficient water to thrive. If you somehow created a society that was able to ensure that everyone in life had an equal start, the only possible variance left would come down to biological differences.
There's a substantial amount of evidence to suggest men and women are different. Even at a surface level, we see large differences in things like personality, which has been demonstrated to be highly heritable. I'm not quite sure how you could look at those differences and come to the conclusion that it isn't going to result in differences in vocation selection or other life choices that can impact a person's career. I suppose you could argue that somehow all of these differences are merely a result of society, but that ignores the heritability of personality as well as evidence from studies that examined sex-based behavior difference in infants. See a recent study that examined children roughly one to two and half years of age in nurseries, a similar earlier study which examined infants 1 - 2 years of age , and another study which examined infants as young as three months old. There was another study that examined toy preference in young monkeys that found similar sex-based differences which does suggest that this is something that goes back quite far in our evolutionary history.
It's funny that you bring up global warming, because a lot of the evidence suggests that you are incorrect, yet you continue to act in much the same way as people who contest the science behind global warming. I seriously question how you could reconcile the studies I've presented above with your beliefs that biology plays such a little role in the outcomes we're observing. I suppose you could claim the science is biased, but then how do you know that the scientists publishing articles about climate change aren't biased? -
This is NOT the future.
The modern lecture format originated in medieval Northern Italy, and hasn't changed significantly. The rationale for the lecture as a method of transmitting knowledge and skill was that books were extremely costly, due to the cost of scribes.
Since Gutenberg the rationale for lectures has disappeared.
Rather than moronically scaling up lectures in a TV-like way, we need some R&D done on better methods of teaching. This has finally been realised and academics are - with great trepidation - starting to measure themselves and experiment with different methods. I expect that this century will see the death of the lecture.
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Re:Just wondering....
That would be Cal Tech. . . er, Pacific Tech. Interestingly, a good part of it was filmed at nearby Occidental College.
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Re:Wrong tense, Mr. Gates.
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Re:Wrong tense, Mr. Gates.
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Re:Wrong tense, Mr. Gates.
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Re:Wrong tense, Mr. Gates.
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Re:Wrong tense, Mr. Gates.
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Re:Wrong tense, Mr. Gates.
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Re:Wrong tense, Mr. Gates.
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Re:Wrong tense, Mr. Gates.
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Re:Wrong tense, Mr. Gates.
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Where am I?Obligatory link to Daniel C Dennet's essay Where am I?, which is more of a Sci-Fi short story, originally published in his book Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology.
And you thought philosophy was no fun.
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Re:Real Genius was filmed there...
Real Genius was not filmed there, becasue the Caltech public affairs folks did not care for the way professor Hathaway was portrayed. Hoever, the film was researched there and at least one techer was hired as a consultant. The indoor sets, particularly the dorm, are based on Caltech. The outdoor campus filming was done down the road at Occidental College.
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Re:Irresponsibility
Maybe --- but I doubt it. You do realize that chloroform is carcinogenic, mutagenic, teratogenic, and destroys kidney and liver tissue. In other words, it's horrible shit that you don't want near anything you plan to ingest. Here is some data to back up my assertion that steam does a good job of extracting caffeine. We see that as the temperature of the water goes from 25 to 100 degrees Celsius, the solubility of caffeine increases from 22mg to a whopping 670mg per mL.
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Re:Woah! PDAs can provide
Thanks for clarifying that, programcsharp. I did not think that the abbreviation would be confused with the paranormal acronym, but then, I should realize that english is not the primary language to many
/. readers.
Now, having said that, about ESP as in extra sensory perception, this could really be something, but I just don't see it happening until they hammer out the nasty details of MRML. -
Re:Extending Length to PREVENT Sonic Booms?
well, Ron Buckmire, one of my math professors in college did his PhD work on "The Design Of Shock-Free Transonic Slender Bodies" [abacus.oxy.edu]. pretty interesting stuff, though the math gets a bit deep.
if I remember correctly (it's been a few years since I heard him describe the work), they worked out a closed form solution to the equations that govern fluid flow over a transonic body. given that, it isn't too hard to engineer a fuselage that doesn't generate a boom as it reaches mach 1. oddly enough, it looks suspiciously like a missile.
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Banner Blindness
This is only going to be a short term effect. Banners generally suck. No matter how bad they get, people will start to ignore them. Our perceptual systems are built to handle this kind of crap.
Aside: It is unfortunate that you always have to watch out for crappy research like you see in this article. How do you know what is good and bad? Ack!
By the way, I actually like Google's Adwords program. Very fast loading pages are still possible, the results are not disrupted, and the sponsored links sometimes match my search. Bravo for usability!
Resources
What is banner blindness?
Banner Blindness: Web Searchers Often Miss "Obvious" Links
Commentary: Banner Blindness, Human Cognition and Web Design
Usability Perspective on Banner Ads
Banner Blindness: What Searching Users Notice and Do Not Notice on the World Wide Web
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Re:The Sapir-Wharf Hypothesis
If you do any AI or theorem-proving subjects you'll run right into philosophy. Turing's test, Searle's Chinese Room, and so on, are intensely philosophical.