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!"

Comments

Front page sucks too.

[__aaltlg1547]

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?"

That was a pretty silly rant

[harlows_monkeys]

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".

Re:That was a pretty silly rant

[theodp]

Crediting an organization receiving just 46 out of 6,735 votes with 10% of the vote instead of 0.68% probably wouldn't receive a thumbs-up from data viz folks like Edward Tufte.

Re:That was a pretty silly rant

[theodp]

C'mon, this could be the poster child for Wikipedia's Misleading graph article. :-)

Other commenters pointed to the .css file, which contains a "min-width: 10%;" statement that adds to the distortion. Below the Leader Board, you'll note that even those nonprofits with essentially 0% of the vote have progress bars that suggest they have 10% of the vote. Guess it looks better than showing that pretty much nobody cared to vote for them (e.g., the Microsoft-backed STEM Education Coalition has 13 votes), and they're way out of contention.

Re:suckdot

[plopez]

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.

I would rather see them pay taxes

[plopez]

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.

Re:Classic neckbeardism

[aztracker1]

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.

Pay taxes so we can run our schools

[nbauman]

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....