Slashdot Mirror

Ok, I've added my own software to the mix :)

Please download this highly useful code.

Right from here

Great idea by the way :)

Cheers,
Q
--------

Actually, a better statistic is whether Women CS majors are declining at the same rates as Men...

...If , however, the attendance of women is becoming smaller at a different proportion than Men or other groups, then there is a problem.

There was a story about that very subject here last August. Unfortunately, the link to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch story it referred to no longer works, and I don't have the patience to wait for the archive search page to load. As far as I can remember, the premise was that the percentage of women in CS programs was declining. The evidence seemed to be more factual and less anecdotal than the Anita Borg interview we're discussing now.

If the percentage of female CS majors is what's declining, this might be the reason:

1) The people(of both sexes) who are computer-crazy are going into CS at the same rate as always. No problem here.
2) However, any decline in the percentage of women could be due to a huge increase in the number of men who have gone into CS in recent years, many of whom might not really be all that talented, but who want to go "where the money is" (in their perception).

To wit: 15 years ago, you might have a class of size X, with M males and F females. Now, you see classes of size X + (3 * M), with (4 * M) males and F females. The women are still there, in the same numbers, and they're just as interested as they always were. The extra (3 * M) men, on the other hand, are studying CS because they want the prestige and (they hope) the money that goes with earning the hot-degree-of-the-moment.

Remember a few years back, when MBA enrolment ballooned because it was the hot degree to have? When students viewed it as a ticket to prestigious management jobs and ridulously inflated salaries? Remember a few years further back, when the same thing happened with law degrees? Computer Science has been the "degree-in-demand" for a while now, and as soon as the next big degree appears on the radar, things will settle back down.

Maybe men are more likely to study a field that isn't really well matched to their interests, provided that the potential payoff (in terms of money and prestige) is high enough. Even if other people say to these guys "Hey, what are you studying CS for? You're much better at English...", maybe they aren't as likely to listen.

And just because no post would be complete without anecdotal evidence... :)

I am a female CS major at the University of Toronto. Despite the fact that my favourite (and best) subject was math right up until grade 12, I decided to enroll in a humanities BA. I couldn't figure out why I hated school so much all of a sudden, and eventually dropped out. 4 years later, I returned, switched to CS, and have been insanely happy ever since. The gender balance here seems to be pretty good (at least for the 1st and 2nd year courses), but I've overheard enough conversations between male students in the computer lab to conclude that many of them are in CS for reasons other than aptitude or interest. Personally, I wouldn't mind making tons of money, but my main motivation is that if I'm going to be in the working for 30-40 years, then I want to be doing something I enjoy.

The examples you give of AI research are pretty narrow. I don't know much about game bots, but personally I'm not sure if they qualify as "artificial intelligence" in anything but the loosest sense. Expert systems like chess-playing computers represent only very small subset of all the true research being done in AI.

The kind of project that the Great AIP site seems to be proposing is an entirely different idea. From what I can tell, they are proposing to create an online environment that allows AI's to interact and evolve and eventually "reach intelligence". We're talking about an artificial intelligence that should be able to interact, experience, develop, learn and create... not a big computer that can calculate and evaluate insanely huge numbers of chess moves.

The project itself concerns me a little, because I'm not sure that its creators have fully investigated and appreciated the magnitude of the task they are undertaking. The history of AI research shows a recurring pattern: periods of extreme optimism and lofty aspirations, followed by periods of cynicism as people's ideas fail to pan out as expected. Over and over we are confronted with the fact that this thing we call "intelligence" (which I notice the Great AIP still hasn't even *defined*) is far more complex and elusive than we previously suspected.

Not that I'm trying to say that AI research is pointless or that an open source AI project has no merit; I simply hope that people involved will do some serious research into previous attempts at finding "intelligence". Otherwise, I worry that they will simply repeat past mistakes.

For more information on the huge range of ideas and research falling under the category of AI, check out the collection of links at http://ai.about.com/compute/ai/. For a good beginner's overview (and a chance shamelessly plug a friend's site ) I recommend this AI Tutorial Review.

If you want to (possibly) meet Ralph, and see some cool LEGO bots in a competition, *and* you'll be in the Toronto area this weekend, check out the 4th Annual Toronto Lego Robotics Event, and look at my team's entry from last year. It's been totally redesigned, so watch out for it...

If you want to (possibly) meet Ralph, and see some cool LEGO bots in a competition, *and* you'll be in the Toronto area this weekend, check out the 4th Annual Toronto Lego Robotics Event, and look at my team's entry from last year. It's been totally redesigned, so watch out for it...

If you want to (possibly) meet Ralph, and see some cool LEGO bots in a competition, *and* you'll be in the Toronto area this weekend, check out the 4th Annual Toronto Lego Robotics Event, and look at my team's entry from last year. It's been totally redesigned, so watch out for it...

It sounds ridiculous, but there are still people in the "deaf culture" who oppose cochlear implants to mimic/restore hearing.. (see here, for instance, and this article as well)

A Modest Proposal by Dr. Jonathan Swift, 1729. You can read it online at
http ://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/nonfiction_u/swift j_modest/modest_ch1.html

I hope this new effort doesn't have any of these limitations. I remember how creepy it was to have a Unix command called "vmpunch", which submitted JCL files to the VM system. Ug.

At what point am I going to stop just reading about the culture and the people (else) and all the neat toys and actually become a geek myself? This sort of work depresses me in a big way - I have nothing to show for all the effort I put into learning the systems and languages. Sure, I'm only 2nd year university, and I never even thought much about writing software before last year (except in vague fantasies)!
At the same time, though, I think reading things like this extensively before even starting any of my planned projects (and I've been planning and planning!) will ultimately help me do the right thing in all the things I do.
One can hope, anyway!

*N

If you're interested in feedforward neural networks with Bayesian learning. Radford Neal at the University of Toronto has a lot of nice code that runs on Linux/UNIX. The URL is http://www.cs.utoronto.ca/~radford

...but doesn't Marc Merlin look an awfully lot like Mr. Bean?