Slashdot Mirror
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
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".
They refuse to pay taxes which support services like schools and then brag about the few crumbs they throw out on the floor for a few non-profits. There is plenty to bash Microsoft for.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
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+
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
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
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....