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Microsoft's Math-Challenged STEM Education Contest
theodp writes "As noted earlier, Microsoft is tackling the CS education crisis with a popularity contest that will award $100K in donations to five technology education nonprofits that help make kids technically literate. Hopefully, the nonprofits will teach kids that the contest's voting Leader Board is a particularly good example of what-not-to-do technically. In addition to cherry-picking the less-pathetic vote totals to make its Leader Board, Microsoft also uses some dubious rounding code that transforms the original voting data into misleading percentages. Indeed, developer tools reveal that the top five leaders in the Microsoft STEM education contest miraculously account for 130% of the vote. Let's hope the quality control is better for those Microsoft Surface voting machines!"
Note the graphics and the at-odds text.
CSC's vision is to "increase participation of underrepresented groups in computer science" but shows two pasty white boys. Underrepresented? I think not!
Code to learn foundation shows two black boys in the classic, "This is all going over my head." pose (head leaning on hand). But hey, at least the confused-looking children are not pasty white boys.
CFY shows multi-racial girls looking up a a computer screen with the keyboard placed out of easy reach. Clearly there is no intention of them doing anything with that computer.
Code.org shows multi-racial kids, but the two in sharp focus in the foreground are more stereotypical white boys.
Teaching kids programming shows three girls mugging for the camera, but there's little suggesting that they're learning anything about programming.
The other photos are not that bad. But seriously, somebody should have reviewed the photos and said, "Is this really the message you want to send?"
Please, Slashdot devs, update your code so submission links are flagged with the website's domain - as has already been done in the comments for as long as I can remember. It's annoying to have to hover over each link to check whether it's another click-bait attempt to inflate traffic on a site.
Of course, a flame-bait summary like this one is probably a reliable indicator as well.
#DeleteChrome
Picking on them for donating money to nonprofits - MS bashing has reached a new low.
Yeah they should hoard their cash like Apple and Oracle.
A leader board shows the TOP competitors. That's the point of a leader board. It is not "cherry picking" to only show the top.
The rounding is not dubious. They are rounding to 10% increments because that is the resolution of the progress bars.
The "percent-10", "percent-50", and so on that the "developer tool" is showing are the classes of the progress bars. There is a style correspond to each in main.css, and that determines the length of the progress bar. The style sheet provides "percent-0", "percent-10", ..., "percent-100".
Is this really the message you want to send?"
What we SHOULD be showing them is the truth!
The long hours sitting behind a computer.
The unreasonable deadlines.
The drudgery of coding and the very infrequent times of creativity.
How to jocky one's resume to fit the laundry lists of skills "needed". And then tell them about the reality that those job postings are written for poaching talent from other firms. (ex. Write a job description that only the lead dev at Google could match.)
The stagnant pay. You won't make much more than what you started with out of school unless you get into mgt.
Watching the CEO get a bug up his and can all everyone and send the work overseas.
And after a few years, every job seams to be doing the same shit. "New technology" is just a rehash of the same old shit. And having to listen to newbies who actually do think the "new technology" is new - Oy!
Dealing with employers who think what they're doing is rocket science and the most innovative thing since sliced bread.
I mean really, there hasn't been any real innovations in commercial computer science in decades. The last innovation was the World Wide Web.
It's a stagnant commodity field. If you got brains, go into medicine. That's where the challenges, money and need are.
I would rather see them pay the billions they owe Washington state end the US government. The money would be better spent. Rather than a few non-profits getting a pittance, the money which could make a real difference would be available. NGOs are horrifically inefficient. See Haiti as an example.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
The best kind of literate.
It looks like the only real complaint here is the "misrepresentative" bars. Those can be blamed on lazy development. There are a couple clues to this:
1: They didn't bother to minimize their CSS
They're apparently using the dev version of their CSS to serve on the site: http://www.azuredevs.com/css/main.css
One could maybe argue they're offering some fun for "developers" who show up. But my money is on a misconfiguration or some generally shoddy web development.
2: The debug notations provide a clue to the source code /* line 1479, C:\Projects\Microsoft\MWA\Repo\mwa\AzureDev\css\main.less */ /* line 1484, C:\Projects\Microsoft\MWA\Repo\mwa\AzureDev\css\main.less */
Aside from the huge waste of bytes sent to users, using debug code in production provides hints to the actual source. In this case, the percent-bar classes read like this:
figure.progress-bar.percent-70 span {
width: 70%;
}
figure.progress-bar.percent-80 span {
width: 80%;
}
As you can see, each class is 5 lines apart, which means that they probably look more or less like we see here. If they were using a loop structure (non-trivial in LESS, but do-able), they could have easily generated 25 different versions of the bar. It would also have meant that each iteration would have been generated from the same line of code. So they're not doing that. And since someone had to hand-code each of the 10 version of the bar, they were probably a bit lazy about it.
3: Another clue from the CSS: The developer probably doesn't work for Microsoft.
If you look at the file paths from the debug CSS, you'll notice the source is stored under "C:\Projects\Microsoft\..." If you work for Microsoft and are developing Microsoft software on a Microsoft device, isn't it a bit redundant to have a "Microsoft" directory in your Projects folder? The only way that makes a lot of sense is if the person who wrote the code didn't actually work for Microsoft.
So, my conclusion: Microsoft farmed out their website to someone who was either under-skilled, over-worked, under-motivated, or some combination of those. The result isn't of top quality. Go figure. Next story please. :-D
So yeah, I think what we're seeing here is just bad/lazy web development. Another clue from the
Schools need to be more trades / tech like with some kind of apprenticeship system.
Not loads of theory based classes.
The crisis is that too many of those graduates expect to make more than minimum wage working in the field they studied. We can't progress as a society until an overabundance of potential employees allows us to treat them like expendable cattle.
Right now they are training me to become a math and computer teacher for middle school and highschool.
I used to hate them with a passion (typical slashdotter), but STEM is used to teach inner city children math, science, and engineering. My opinion has changed and STEM is not MS technology specific. I think it is great for non education majors who want a career change and STEM also is heavily investing in lego mindstorm projects too. This helps the tax payers out too as STEM students enrolled have higher test scores and achievement levels so they can persue greater opportunities in life.
STEM is part of Gates foundation to train engineering majors and not just paper MCSE to be I.T. professionals and encompasses many different things.
The tax and his personal dollars are appreciated and I get all sorts of training from other teachers as well while I spend my first year with 20 classroom observations and coaches. I see this as something that benefits everyone and I in Florida, not Washington state.
I wish the federal government cared more as other countries have similiar programs in their education system.
Anyway just a different opinion here I am presenting.
http://saveie6.com/
It's about like a typical person complaining that they can't find enough people to mow their lawns at a competitive rate, so they offer to distribute $2400 towards the problem (to be split up between 5 local schools).
MS is awarding is less than what a single, typical developer in Washington state makes in a year, a fraction of which alone goes to the school(s) that win. I think if it were $10 million across the top 10 schools evenly it would be a lot more impressive, and impactful. Or, just maybe $5 million across 5 schools, and $50k scholarship to 100 students chosen from those schools for use in higher education later on.
As it stands the award money (might) pay for a teacher at one school, and a T/A at another, but it's really a drop in the bucket, and won't impact any change in the system. MS is probably spending close to as much as the award on the website for the award, and whatever marketing they are doing here, for what is a really pitiful award.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
Race does not have a scientific definition, but it sure as hell has societal implications. I think it is a naive view of the world to think that you can ignore "race" and all of the problems will go away. You can't change old minds but you can influence new minds. A little change each generation is real progress.
In any case, if your organization mentions "under-represented groups" in it's charter, you probably should target those groups in your advertising! :)
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Dover Publications has excellent collection of cheap math & science books, just couple dollars each. ................ ..... M$ doesn't have reinvent the wheel. There is enough materials to teach kids !!!!
Here what I have on my bookshelf :
Theory of Functions (Part 1 & 2) by K. Knopp
Theory & Applications of Infinite Series K. Knopp
Elem. Real & Complex Analysis G.Shilov
Matrices and Linear Transforms. C. Cullen
Just saying
internships also need to be more apprenticeship like with some level of school control just to keep out the coffee / office boy internships. as well make it more education as well.
And why not also have an tech school / trade school track with internships / apprenticeships maybe even for 2 year schools. Not all people are college material but they can do well in smaller tech school / trades setting or do better with more hands on work vs boat loads of theory classes.
Also college has way to many filler / fluff classes and it some schools due to classes filling up 4 years can take 5-6 years to complete.
With internship and co-op need to find slots and that court ruling likely did kill off the non payed ones. But you should be able to get at least part of the hands on parts as part the cost of schooling. OR have say a full time / near full time apprenticeships count for class credit (more then just an small number of credits)
Some apprenticeships can take 6mo / 1 year and that should be part of an over all school plan and not just be an summer break internship.
It's time for new ideas in Education and not tacking more on / jamming trades / tech schools into the older system.
.. in town, will certainly motivate the best and the brightest to seek success elsewhere than in anything MS advocates. The real problem is that "managers" (a.k.a. MBA qualified idiots) have taken over and STEM people are not respected anymore, despite their education being a lot harder and they being a lot more critical on an individual level. No surprise smart people start to avoid STEM. No prospects, being treated and paid badly, and then get fired at 40 by a nil-whit and going into unemployment. Unless STEM people again get the respect they deserve, things will not change. And yes, that may involve preventing a lot of incompetent cretins from calling themselves "software engineer" or the like.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The tech / IT field can move fast and people who take some classes hear and there should have that count for something with out having to take 2+ year block out.
Also There some topics that can be ether to much / may need to be cut down to fit into an college time table or some stuff that may need to be padded out to fit in as well.
Why doesn't Microsoft pay its taxes, so that we can run the schools, libraries and support services for kids to grow up to be programmers or anything else they want?
We're a wealthy country. We should be able to raise money among ourselves and decide among ourselves how we want to spend it. (It's called taxes.) I think most of us would want to spend the money on free public schools, including free college (like the countries we compete with, including the countries those HB-1 immigrants come from). I don't think many people here want their children to graduate college $50,000 in debt, or to drop out of college because they can't afford it. (The Gates Foundation, BTW, was a member of ALEC, which did so much to cut our taxes and destroy low-cost public university education http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_members_of_the_American_Legislative_Exchange_Council#Former_corporate_members)
We don't need billionaires making these decisions for us, instead of paying taxes so we can decide ourselves.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/27/us-microsoft-tax-idUSTRE76Q6OB20110727
Insight: Microsoft use of low-tax havens drives down tax bill
By Lynnley Browning
FAIRFIELD, Connecticut | Wed Jul 27, 2011 7:07pm EDT
(Reuters) - If you want to know why tax from surging corporate profits isn't making much of a dent in the United States' crippling budget deficit, a glance at Microsoft Corp's recent results provides some clues.
Things were rosy in the giant software company's just-ended fiscal fourth quarter, which produced record sales of nearly $17.4 billion, a 30 percent increase in after-tax profit, and a 35 percent gain in earnings per share.
But for the Internal Revenue Service and foreign tax authorities, things weren't so rosy. Microsoft reported only $445 million in taxes in the U.S. and other foreign countries, just 7 percent of its $6.32 billion in pre-tax profit....
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"So, my conclusion: Microsoft farmed out their website to someone who was either under-skilled, over-worked, under-motivated, or some combination of those. The result isn't of top quality. Go figure. Next story please. :-D".
Yea, it's not as of Microsoft was ever caught before jiggling the code to make the competition look bad. link
MSN deliberately breaks Opera's browser
AccountKiller
So perpetuating the ethnic fallacy is the influence you desire to have on new minds?
Quite the opposite. But there is a lot of sociological programming to overcome.
t's common knowledge that women make terrible engineers, scientists, and programmers.
Common knowledge is exactly why we need real science-based education.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Technical literacy is a higher standard than literacy is. Literacy itself just requires the ability to read. Which doesn't take very long to achieve, especially since you're allowed to use a dictionary.
Technical literacy though, requires mathematics as well as various research skills in order to understand and operate technology.
There isn't any law requiring a corporation to maximize profits. The Free Software Foundation is a corporation. Do you think they maximize profit? How about the Red Cross, another corporation? The ACLU?
The closest requirements that actually exist are:
Directors and executives can't give THEMSELVES benefits at the expense of shareholders, aside from agreed salary and benefit packages. So they can't give company money (shareholder's money) to themselves.
They must act in furtherance of the purpose(s) stated in the articles of incorporation. Microsoft's articles, like most corporations, say only that it's purpose is for "any lawful business", so there's no restriction there.
Fantastic. Now under your scientific racial classification system, classify Obama without depending on knowledge about his ancestry. Classify someone with ancestors from India, Africa, and Europe. Also, it sounds like your scientific classification system needs to change over time... 10,000 years ago your chart would have looked quite different. Even on your existing chart, the definitions seem, to me, arbitrary. The Middle East plot blends into the Europe series, which in turn blends into the Central and South Asia series. The Central and South Asia series seems to have three or four distinct blobs, yet all are colored the same. Oceania has 2 distinct blobs. Africa seems to have 3 or 4 distinct blobs.
While this chart is very useful to see human migration patterns, I don't see much benefit in classifying people in a non-arbitrary way. If anything, it reinforces my original point.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
You mean like they're already doing?
I think they must have meant Microsoft-literate. Perhaps they are concerned that the current uprising of youth is not learning Windows 8 like they are supposed to.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
"Race does not have a scientific definition"
Are you sure of this? Really sure?
No brain, no pain.
Yup - care to enlighten me?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Enlighten?
Again, really?
Google> definition: race
Result> Each of the major divisions of humankind, having distinct physical characteristics.
Try it some time, there are sources other than moveon.nut.
No brain, no pain.
Explain to me how you can have a "scientific" classification system that can't classify the President of the United States. Go ahead, let me know how you classify him and the scientific basis by which you made that choice.
No one disputes there are features common to people from various places, but ignoring the gradual nature of the change across geography just so you can lump them into buckets called "race" is not very scientific - it's arbitrary. And completely useless once people started getting on ships, let alone airplanes.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
"a human population partially isolated reproductively from other populations, whose members share a greater degree of physical and genetic similarity with one another than with other humans". This is a specialized use of the broader term as applied to animals and plants.
Australian aborines, for example, are a race of humans, as are Micronesians and Laplanders.
I didn't say the pasty white boys were bad. I said their pictures were at odds with the missions of some of the organizations. You don't promote coding for underrepresented groups by showing examples of the most overrepresented group.
Based on that, I would find three races: Men, Women and Children.
If you want a classification to make you happy then look up the Presidents Of The USA.
For more fun and creativity listen to 'Red Dress' and figure out where Conrad got those production ideas from.
No brain, no pain.
And what happens when an Aborigine has kids with a Laplander? What race is that person? How about someone from Ethiopia? Are they the same race as someone from Kenya? Because they sure look like they are crossed with people from the Middle East to me. What about people from Eastern Russia. They look kind of Chinese, but kind of Russian.
I think you'll find that race becomes much harder to pin down once you leave isolated islands in the middle of the Pacific. Even a Laplander (which I think is a slur these days) wouldn't exactly stand out in a room full of European-descended people. It's all quite arbitrary - even the term wasn't really used in it's modern way until the 1800s when early scientists tried to classify people based on traits. To my knowledge, every attempt has failed. Even genetic testing shows wide overlap between "races", with a continuum roughly tracing the human migration path. One of these other posters linked to a chart showing as much, though he for some reason took it as "proof" of race being a scientific concept.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Maybe it's just late, but you lost me! :)
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
And what happens when an Aborigine has kids with a Laplander? What race is that person?
Mixed race offspring. Tell me you are smart enough to figure this out. The fact that some people are members of races does not mean everyone is.
Mixed race offspring. Tell me you are smart enough to figure this out. The fact that some people are members of races does not mean everyone is.
So something like 50% of the US can't be classified in your scientific classification system? That sounds useful. And very scientific.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
It's not MY system. It's the standard definition. And yes, it's true that WAY more than half of Americans don't belong to any particular race. We are not reproductively isolated.
I didn't say there wasn't a definition of race, I said it wasn't scientific. And it's not. It was all the rage to try and classify people based on trait in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It was abandoned as a scientific pursuit. Humans are not reproductively isolated except for a few island populations, and even then there were immigrants, emigrants, and trade. And the islands were populated a few thousand years ago - hardly enough time to develop anything but a few superficial traits.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.