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Is Computer Science Education Racist and Sexist?
theodp writes "What's wrong with this picture?" asked Code.org at its launch earlier this year, lamenting the lack of Computer Science students in a race and gender reference-free infographic. But as the organization has grown via public/private partnerships and inked agreements to drive the CS curriculum for the Chicago and NYC school systems, the same stats webpage has adopted a new gender and racial equity focus, positioning Computer Science education as "a chance to level the playing field" for women, Hispanic and African American students. The new message is consistent with the recently-forged Code.org partnership with the NSF-funded Exploring Computer Science (ECS, "a K-12/university partnership committed to democratizing computer science") and Computer Science Principles (CSP, "a new course under development that seeks to broaden participation in computing and computer science"). According to The Research Behind ECS, an "insidious 'virtual segregation' that maintains inequality" is to blame for keeping the number of African Americans and Latino/as CS students disproportionately low. So, what might the future of Code.org's proposed equity-based U.S. K-12 CS education look like? "Including culturally relevant instructional materials represented a driving focus of our course development," explained ECS Team members who now advise Code.org. "Cultural design tools encourage students to artistically express computing design concepts from Latino/a, African American, or Native American history as well as cultural activities in dance, skateboarding, graffiti art, and more. These types of lessons are important for students to build personal relationships with computer science concepts and applications – an important process for discovering the relevance of computer science for their own life." And — ironically for Code.org — it could mean less coding."
Is Computer Science Education Racist and Sexist?
Well, no. Unless there are roaming gangs of white nerdy kids beating up anyone with the wrong color that I haven't heard of.
Computer Science is much easier if you have a high IQ. Ergo African Americans, by and large, won't do well in C/S. (Ducking... and anonymous...)
I don't see anyone complaining that nursing or primary school teaching is sexist, yet those professions have a definite bias towards one sex.
So men tend to like computers more than women, does anyone seriously think this is somehow the industry keeping women from participating? (well, ok, but only because a lot of the "men" in the industry tend to be about as mature as the primary school children I referred to earlier!)
Racist? I can't answer that so readily, but I know a lot of foreign chappies working in IT, and my last company actively discriminated against white guys by only hiring Indian developers - though admittedly they were located in India, and cost a lot less. The one previous to that recruited a lot of Lithuanians, so they could hardly be said to discriminate against the usual native causcasian population.
Now ageist... that is definitely a problem in IT.
Is computer science racist or sexist? Nope.
Really of any industry, computer related fields are way more accepting of ANYTHING than any other i've seen. Race, sex, sexual orientation, religion, lifestyle, anything! People into computers don't really give a damm who or what you are. As long as you're not an idiot you'll do fine.
Now... Are some races or sexes less likely to go into computer science? Hell yes.
Why? Well now.. You could write a book about WHY...
For women i imagine it has alot to do with the power of sex. And in computer fields that power is gone. They can't smile and look pretty and get ahead like so many many other industrys allow. Or even demand. In computer related fields nobody cares how hot you are.
For races? Well.. I won't touch that subject. Everyone gets mad.
Give me a break. So tired of all this bullshit. Hey I know since Asians have higher representation than Europeans in CS, let's put them in the óppressed' pile too.
I'm transitioning from male to female? The SRS is in 6 months time.
I've been writing software for nearly 10 years after graduating in CS.
The white male dominance of computer science begins with little girls being given dolls instead of engineering toys, and poor children (which includes many racial minorities, although not because they're racial minorities) going to shitty schools where they're lucky if their education is only twenty years out of date.
- There are crazy stock valuations of computer companies that have almost no revenue.
- People claim that everyone should write computer software including those with minimal STEM background and minmal interest in such.
- When crazy articles about computer science racism starting appearing.
Can we possibly get away from this equality PC BS and just accept that some classes of people are generally better at things than others please? It appears to be screwing things up.
How about just teaching people to code, if they are interested. If they aren't then leave them alone. They don't need to learn how to skateboard, do graffiti etc to become proficient coders. People are looking for racism where it doesn't exist, or trying to teach people a skill who don't want to learn that skill, all in the name of multiculturism
"Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines
Computers science is a poor fit as a vehicle to level the playing field. Its not the sort of job you can do well if you don't have some sort of inherent interest or curiosity in.
Certainly any group can have members that have such an interest in programming. Finding those individuals would be a good thing. I just have severe reservations against trying to push anyone into this field. I've seen too many programmers who got into the field not because they have any inherent interest or curiosity rather somebody told them it was a good career path. They don't do well.
Should some sort of CS or programming classes be availably to anyone in K-12 that is interested or curious? Sure. It would be a great elective class.
obsoletely primitive to start
Exactly. They imply that the way to fix this is to make computer science "more appealing" to women and minorities.
The fact is, computer science (real understanding of information technology) is hard. I'm sorry if you get your feelings hurt when you attempt something hard and you can't hack it. The only advice I can give you is "try harder" if you really want to learn it. You know, MAN UP!
All kidding aside, this comes down to trying to persuade people to go into a field they aren't really interested in... whether that's due to cultural factors or some innate proclivity, the jury is still out. But if it's YOUR goal to get certain people interested, YOU have to persuade them. It's not the industry's business or the schools' prerogative to talk you into studying any particular subject.
The computer doesn't care if you are black or white. It doesn't care if you are male or female. It doesn't ask who your daddy is and it doesn't care what value (if any) you have assigned to $DEITY.
What's keeping African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans away from Computer Science? Simple: Computer access costs money and these groups are disproportionately poor. Increase access to the equipment and you solve the problem.
From near the end of the ECS Team Member link:
The learning environment of the more advanced computer science classrooms has supported the culture of these students and often made others to feel as "outsiders," as if their concerns, perspectives, were not valued in the field.
So what exactly does that mean? I don't remember any CS classes having a "culture" of any kind. Unless they are saying that "dry and sometimes boring" is "white culture"?
The whole reason you TAKE a CS class is because you are a relative "outsider" to the concepts being presented and want in.
They talk about the solution being "vision of success" for all cultures. But in the end the only possible "success" from a CS class is a better understanding of how to build software. Not only is that not tied in to a culture, ideally it's not even tied to a language! It's totally abstract, yet they seem to want to make it more concrete somehow...
I don't understand how the deride access as "not being enough" when access is EVERYTHING. Grafting hip-hip or graffiti into a college CS class is way, way too late. You want to help people from "other cultures" - well then figure out how to get them something they can and will program on when they are five years old up until college age. Then if it takes they will happily end up at the "dull" CS classes years later to learn mastery of the thing that they love.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Men and women have different brains, you fucking assholes. Africans are different from European are different from Asians are different from Native Americans. So there are certain demographics which are more drawn to computer programming than others, just as some people prefer to knit stockings and others design engines. Who gives a flying fuck?
Men tend to be taller than women. Is height sexist?
Well, yes. And following the model for all other solutions to every other -ism, men will now have their legs cut off and women will be given lifters.
In computer related fields nobody cares how hot you are.
possibly the wrongest thing I've ever read on Slashdot! :-)
Why not just report the findings for what they seem to be: education is sexist and racist in the sense that impoverished communities have crummier curricula. I can dig wanting to use tech education as a test-bed for that hypothesis, but it's starting to sound like people think computer education is maliciously designed for the purpose of inequality, and that it's the ONLY field where this is a problem. I wouldn't be surprised if they become the scapegoat for all of society's inequality ills at this rate.
The fact that the field is dominated by men who are known for lacking social graces, to put it mildly, doesn't help draw women into the field and doesn't help to keep the ones who were given engineering toys in.
Why would you want to make computer science "more appealing" to women? Just look at science students and computer science students in Russia. Women are the majority!
Support Eachother, Copy Dutch Property!
This is totally bullshit and it's being done for bullshit political reasons. Nothing good comes from the politicization of science and yet the politicians cannot resist making a political issue of the lack of "diversity" in CS education. In my own CS experience nobody gave a shit about whether you were black, white, asian or latino and yes we had all of those races represented in the program. What mattered was whether or not you could hack it and continue advancing through the curriculum. The grades were always on a curve and the competition was intense. If you weren't smart enough or fast enough you washed out. In CS, as in other sciences, people respect knowledge, ability and intelligence, not the color of your skin or your cultural background. If you wanted to major in foo-fa the Humanities department was on the other side of campus.
"Obviously never seen the only girl in a CS class. Most dudes crush on her, and most of the time she doesn't want any part of it. She demonstrates not all women use sex even when she could."
So in other words, the CS classes get the girls that are duds.
The US population has trouble with reading and math compared to the rest of the World and these guys are worried about computer science being taught in school.
Something tells me that this isn't so much about improving society and more about increasing supply of technical labor and the subsequent decrease in pay for said workers.
Oh, and "non-profit" is just a tax status - you are just limited on what you can do with the profits you make. non-profit != charity.
Sounds like another government funded public-private partnership on the road to pc mediocrity.
Children of English or British ancestry are handicapped by their cultural heritage, so they deserve extra stimuli and attention in education.
Their language is fraught with an enormous vocabularity, which impediments their efforts to become literate. To make things worse, the spelling is arcane, non-intuitive, and non-phonetic, and then American, British, Canadian, etc. English have different spellings.
Their ascent in the scientific and computing subjects is further jeopardised by a labyrinthine system of ancient units of measurement, which drives even the smart to seek a career in the humanities.
Why are they getting so much play on slashdot ?
I also take issue with most of the stated goals.
To repeat: there is no shortage of good technical
job candidates in the United States.
That's not really true. You can learn to code BASIC on a $5 hand-me-down 486 from Goodwill. Any Internet connection can provide you with more help documentation and tutorials than you can shake a stick at.
As an activity, the entry barrier for learning coding is set very, very low. The socioeconomic rewards (in terms of employability and marketable skills) is high, so you get a good return on your investment.
What is keeping poor ghetto children from learning to code, given that it is a cheap way to improve your lot in life?
Culture - coding is seen as something not worthwhile, or "white", or otherwise non-desirable in the ghetto.
So instead of seeing coding as a free way to educate yourself out of the ghetto, the ghetto culture encourages children to try for a 1 in 1,000,000 chance of being the next big rap or basketball star....
And that is not the fault of the CS community.
Or african-german? Always wondered why I never met an african-hispanic, or have I? Hm. Do these people carry cards to make IDing them easier one should ask. Nevermind women. I can usually spot one of those.
Haters gonna hate.
Hmm. An interesting notion. But rather it seems to me that very fields of math and science are racist and sexist. Just like cooking, flower arranging, and basketball are.
an ill wind that blows no good
I used to welcome any and all, but I'm not sure it's worth it anymore. Computer science is math-heavy, highly technical and you're going to look at a screen most of the time. Computer science is not about skateboarding, graffiti or dance. It is however about philosophers who are scrimping on cutlery. It is about an ancient Greek and a tortoise. It is about infinitely long words made of only 'a's and 'b's (occasionally there can be 'c's). If that sounds boring, racist or misogynist to you, then computer science is not for you. It is not toying around and playing games. It's SCIENCE. That doesn't mean it can't be fun, but you're not going to enjoy it if you're not prepared to do the work.
"Cultural activities in dance, skateboarding, graffiti art, and more."
As a black software engineer I am tired of needing things dumbed down (or "hipped up") to be made more acceptable to minorities. We don't need skateboarding, "graffiti art", or dancing to teach a kid how to code. Just like we didn't need a substandard English (Ebonics) to teach kids how to properly read and write.
If under representation of minorites in computer science is racist, I'd love to know what they think of the under representation of non-Asian minorities in all science, medicine, and technology fields. By their metric there would be rampant racism.
Racism is a real thing, and a very terrible thing, and it's offensive to assume a lack of minority representation automatically means racism. I came from a culture that shunned academic excellence of any kind, and I think that's the reason there is under representation. But nobody wants to talk about the elephant in the room which is asking people to blame their perceptions and beliefs instead of their environment. Racism makes a convenient enemy when the enemy is within.
For races? Well.. I won't touch that subject. Everyone gets mad.
Learning computers is acting white.
I no longer want to read slashdot.
Fuck you and fuck this. Seriously.
I have an idea, every white students grade will be "redistributed" to a minority. So for every 100 the white kid gets, he'll give 30 points to every one else!. Then all the women and minorities can pass the class with B's and A's and the white kids can pass with C's. The better gpa will land them jobs, and poof problem fixed right! Who needs knowledge of your field, what really matters is that you bring "diversity"
Colleges Cut Men’s Programs to Satisfy Title IX
Sokal's Hoax
Yes, There’s a War on Boys in Schools
What About Our Boys?
The direction this is likely to go is easily predictable.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
My question is about as intelligent as this article is.
It's not, oh-my-god, a woman! We must chase here away! it's more like, oh-my-god, a woman, we should do everything we can to make sure she sticks around.
Still to blame for everyone's problems.
So we got to make programing classes with less programing and more cultural because its important that there is a balance of race/gender in that field? I think the guy who wrote this story is a racist, trying to hide the fact he is a racist by writing it.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
Anyone know some others?
It's applied mathematics how much more abstract and removed do you want it to be ?
What this is about is getting particular groups of people interested in the subject. That may be good or bad, but the problem is not with the material.
Actually, you can learn to do Object Pascal, C, C++ and Assembler on a cheap goodwill PC - all of which are useful commercially (although the pascal is less so these days).
And dat's de problem!
Kids aren't stupid. They know then they're being patronised by dumb adults trying to make something cool by being "down with the kids". If anything, doing this triggers suspicions that there is a bad taste or smell that needs masking.
the only girls in my CS classes were always ugly
I'm pretty sure there are many colors I haven't heard of.
Betteridge: No.
There is no reason why you should /expect/ race, gender, ideology, sexual preference, handedness, hair colour, or whatever to be proportionally represented for a group of people selected by some other unrelated criteria you pick. If you DO expect it, your brain has been steeped in PC thinking for so long that it has turned to mush.
I don't see anyone complaining that nursing or primary school teaching is sexist, yet those professions have a definite bias towards one sex.
If you haven't heard any complaints, it can only be because you haven't been listening:
Why Men Don't Teach Elementary School [ABC News, March]
Men in Nursing [October]
Sure, that would work too, and would probably be a good first step.
Just pointing out that you don't need a "good computer" to learn CS. Hell, you don't even need "books" - there are an enormous amount free resources out there.
All you need is the motivation.
Betteridge's Law of Headlines.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.slashdot.org Errors found while checking this document as HTML5!
blablabla
if i need a bipolar transistor do make a circuit neded by a post modernist author, he will insist that i use a fet, afterall, bipolr is a offensive word for those who suffer from maniac depression........
we can all answer post modernist bullshit by saying blablabla...
from a marxit viewpoint i can understand the tue feminist viewpoit. femists unschooled in maxist theory are prone to post-modernist bullshit. the reason is imple: machism is the result of an historical structure founded on the original patriarcal soieties (long topic to eaborate). the post modernist bullshit inverts this logic, and finng no underlyng causes for machism, loses roots and spin around widely:
original feminists wanted equality, ie: they wanted to make good female computer scientists on the same game as males of before
current, post-modernist feminists, having little to fight for in the central capitalistic societes now want to create a "feminist computer science"
this is akin to the mistakes of urss era, by trying to present hard sciences as ideological, they might very well recreate a kind of lyssenkoist computer...
If you're not from Bangalore you don't have a future. ...and as for sexist, I actually knew girls who took the IT course to meet a husband because of the insane ratio of males:females. One of them even stayed through the course and earnt her degree.
FUCK this is bullshit.
Speaking as a white guy... please oh please never work with me or on any projects that I have anything to do with.
The answer is no....slashdot used to be a great site....now it's all about theodp's jihad against code.org and "the man"
On the Infographic there is a link:
A Google employee's comparison of Computer Science education in Vietnam compared to the US. #WeCanDoBetter http://t.co/oRPRy2pSFm
THIS IS THE REAL STORY. What really needs to be done.
FIX THE EDUCATION SYSTEM.
I'm seeing free courses for women, and no similar freebies for men.
http://www.railsbridgeboston.org/
I am sick of womyn-born-womyn investing more energy in bitching about how computers are "too technical" rather than just getting out a compiler and making something. I am sick of the feminist movement that enables this kind of utter failure. Womyn-born-womyn, like anybody else, are perfectly capable of doing this crap on their own; except, apparently, when the privileges feminism has given them prevent them from doing so.
Except, why do I care what womyn-born-womyn want to do?
It's clear that Code.org wants to limit enrollment in STEM classrooms in order to drive down wages in engineering and computer fields. They're merely riding on the coat-tails of the idea that there's something sexist about this little blurb:
Gee! Who the hell wrote that?!
Oh! It was a womyn-born-womyn!
We need to stop believing that there's some mystical force keeping womyn-born-womyn out of the field. We need to tell Code.org to go fuck itself, because feminism is completely off base here.
I'm a trans woman, and I do computer-y shit for a living. Womyn-born-womyn can either bitch about how hard it is to sign up for CS-101 or they can just sign up.
And hell, womyn-born-womyn won't even need to deal with the sexist shit I need to deal with when I go to college like mandatory date rape classes and all the little other ways that assigned males are discriminated against in college.
Join the Slashcott! Stay away entirely Feb 10 thru Feb 17! Close all tabs to prevent autorefresh!
in my company. We prefer real science or engineering grads to CS people.
The difference is that CS people (from my interviewing over the past 4 years) don't have a clue about real world problem solving.
CS grads seem to think that they know everything but in reality they know very little that is of practical use at the sharp end.
Then there is their inability to understand that Flight Avionic Systems must be tested properly and 'near enough' is nowhere near good enough.
Any group who does not subscribe to the rhetoric, will be seen as sexist and racist.
This is why groups who are outsiders, and who have huge reasons to not care about who or what you are or how society says you should be treated are always considered the most racist and sexist.
The tech industry.
Gamers, Online communities (they do not even know the race or gender of each other, yet they are "outrageously sexist and racist" places).
Anarchists.
Treating everyone the same is the new sexism.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Wrong race. In my experience, whites are one of several minorities in Computer Science. Both in my B.S. and M.S., more than half of my classmates were Hindu males.
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
I making computers "hip" was lame when they did it for white kids. What got me hooked was video games and the idea I could make them --- that is all one needs... It won't help girls much because they've not been so keen on gaming.
READING. I hated to read but to do anything serious on a computer you have to READ. Now I read all the time. "Minority" reading levels are at lower levels than they should be. If you dislike reading, forget about computers.
Math is not actually needed; programming only takes a certain kind of math thinking and a minimal level of math background. Math is generally taught so kids hate it so even saying MATH is not going to help. Perhaps, one could combine math and computers in a compelling way that has not been done before NOT involving those horrid TI calculators. Not likely... it'll probably cause more kids to hate computers.
Ditch the TV get the kid a computer instead. Even the poor own a TV or two now days. Investing in a computer is a lower priority than a 2nd TV. Don't know about now, but when I was a kid, most kids didn't get much time to the family computer, IF they had a computer at all. Girls were generally discouraged from even using the computer and I see that in my relatives' girls today... it's just facebook, email, and the encyclopedia / cliff notes that writes their mindless homework. For the boys it's OK but the girls were subtly discouraged and the older are more strongly discouraged (because computer == facebook in their parent's mind.)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Most regular people eventually figure out that it's not really important whether the football team is better than the basketball team, or whether you bought a Toyota or a Ford.
I totally agree with your point that CS becomes a peer group, which is just a kind of human thing that happens.
Where I disagree is that CS or programming in general gets any more people with social issues than any other. I've met lots of people who did NOT figure out the things you mentioned, who were fixated on something they asserted with begin better - that itself is a VERY human trait, to the point where I almost think it's harder to rise above that than not as a normal human.
Some CS students just also are not great at social interaction, but I don't think we should lump that with the group association thing as they are distinct. And there again I don't think it's more prevalent in CS, it's just that in other fields the people who are not great at social interaction have to work with others and so improve to some degree, where the computer field allows to nearly complete isolation if you wish.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
That is a good question. You'd have to ask the people who think that more women should be in CS.
I'm not sure what the actual goal is, but I'm guessing it's a push by women who are in CS programs feeling like they're alone, outcasts, or marginalized or dismissed and "it's not fair!"
When more women want to study CS enough to finish the program despite the imbalance, things will start to change.
No. Their cultures compel them to select against it, and liberals can't abide the possibility that 'oppressed' cultures have negative attributes that aren't caused by white people.
Hindu is not an ethnicity.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
Me thinks, that the people who wrote the above article have been watching too many Big Bang Theory Reruns. And are confusing "CS culture" with the heavy overlapping Geek Culture. Whoever is behind this movement is a racist and is keeping the minorities down for their own profit. Code.org looks to be turning into a feel good program for the self-segregating "African American" and other minorities, instead of what it is meant to be which is an intro to the world and science of computer programing*. Also, their is something wrong with your value system, culture, education system or some combination there of; if the mention of a bunch of white males as inventors and discovers of computer science offends you. The only things stopping more American Minorities from competing in computer science is a proper education and better access to hackable or programmable hardware. So forget your iPhone, Surface, or even Android. Get a self hosting raspberry Pi or something like that and put it in the schools with a one press system reset button and "cloud" file saving and editing. Hell, it would help today's over privilege white students.
*if Code.org allows for enough freedom students will create their own culturally relevant programs or code which will probably not be anything like the walled garden culture Code.Org out of touch minority studies designers have envisioned.
Also, When I was 12 years old, I could barely read. What change my life?? I wanted to program and so I got a "real" computer, an apple Performa 6220CD. I was introduced to world full of text. It was then that I realized reading was important. And with a lot of help from tutoring, I actually learned to read. Writing?? well see above.
Yes, I was lucky to have parents with enough income to just afford both the tutoring and the computer. And at 15 I was making money on the side helping people with their computer problems.
... you still probably won't be able to get a date afterwards either.
And people wonder if computer science education is sexist... With such paragons of enlightened thinking how could any woman feel unwelcome in a CS class?
The University Illinois at Chicago (UIC) is one of the best computer science schools in the country.
It is often referred to as the University of Indians and Chinese (UIC) by the white kids that go there, because
so many Indians and Chinese kids are there for computer science.
This has been true for at least thirty years since the Plato system became available on campus.
Ok, Code.org. Ok, feminists. You want to solve this thing?
We're going to need to conscript womyn-born-womyn into STEM classes. Demand that they at least get an associates degree in something STEM related before they be allowed to graduate with their Women's Studies or English major.
Sterilize them until they're able to do that. Take away the option of being a Single Mother.
If they don't enroll in a STEM class by the time they're 19, require their parents to throw them out of the streets until they starve.
Womyn-born-womyn are TOO PRIVILEGED, and THAT is why they don't enroll in fields that are "too technical."
If we given womyn-born-womyn the same options as assigned males, as I outlined above, we'll see an improvement in enrollment in that demographic.
Otherwise, what the fuck ever. Let womyn-born-womyn continue to choose to be Single Mothers or to marry to a man who will provide them with an income instead of EARNING IT THEIR FUCKING SELVES.
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I don't have personal relationships with concepts and applications. I have an intellectual relationship with them. I have personal relationships with people.
Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, President Obama, and a slew of celebrities are somehow part of an operation called Code.org, which promotes teaching kids to code. Supposedly coding is good for you and the initiative might actually get the young folks interested in computer science.
I see it as a ploy to sell more computers to schools. For the most part, middle schoolers-and even high schoolers-do not need to be taking computer science classes. These kids can't even balance a checkbook or write in cursive, and they don't get out nearly enough as it is. What's the point of teaching computer science when all they really want to do is go on Facebook and see what their friends are doing?
Many schools have cut art, music, cooking, home management, and countless other practical studies from the curriculum. So let's teach them to code instead! They can get jobs as coders, right? Wrong.
Code.org is dumb and if you want to see how dumb it is, watch some videos on its Tumblr. The worst of the group, if any single one can be highlighted, may be Bill Gates' because a disclaimer under the video reads: "Note: the quality of this video doesn't make for the best viewing. But we wanted to make sure to share for those interested in Bill's insight."
In other words, Gates didn't even care enough about this project to provide decent video. It seems Jack Dorsey is equally as unconcerned. He sounds as if he is in a bucket talking on a $5 microphone. He's a billionaire but he makes it clear he has better things to do with his time.
So what's the point of all this? America wants more students to gravitate toward STEM-science, technology, engineering, and math. This is turning out to be harder than anyone in power expected.
For one thing, boys and girls are dissuaded by the social norms to care about STEM. They look around, see that too many people in these fields are unemployed, and they bail.
And the American curriculum is being dumbed down, proven by declining test scores despite teaching for these tests. Kids can't find Missouri on a map but these code folks are pushing for the schools to buy computers and tablets. Maybe that will help-help the computer companies' bottom line, that is!
Based on what's popular on TV, the media only extols the virtues of singing, not the virtues of a STEM education. Teens are more likely to be watching and admiring some idiot driving his bike off a roof on You Tube than anything else.
And does anyone notice that STEM is very limiting? Yes, "science" can be all encompassing, but does it include or preclude "technology" and "engineering"? And is math a science or not? What about physics, chemistry, or biology? Plant pathology, embryology, biophysics, astrophysics, or astronomy? Is statistics part of science or not? What about anthropology? Why the moniker STEM? Because it's cute?
Where does computer animation fit in to the scheme of things? It's science and it's art, not to mention it involves coding. Why not funnel kids into this field, where they could probably find work or start a company?
But instead, people want to keep all this as simplistic and brain-dead as possible in hopes of selling more computers to rubes to teach computer science. Ugh.
Microsoft, which coincidentally has two employees working on Code.org, wants to hire more cheap workers from India. The company promotes expanding the H-1B visa program. Its lack of interest in the American coder stands out like a sore thumb.
If anyone should be up in arms-or a key part of the program-it should be Adobe. High schools should be teaching Photoshop and Illustrator.
What I'm seeing from this Code.org and STEM promotion is a non-starter for almost every child in school today. It's a dead end and the sooner people realize it, the better.
I just wonder how big the level of stupidity left wing must reach before it will be recognized by the majority of society. Or at least my majority of slashdot readers.
Let's go to the next level. Let's see how many females play first person shooter games. Maybe it's time to ban all these games because they are so sexist.
Or maybe someone should just call bullshit a bullshit.
...they want you to learn the theories and fundamentals of computer *science* in general, not to just learn a particular platform. Once you've learned the underlying principles, math and science about how to make computers do useful work efficiently, you can then apply that knowledge to all computer architectures and platforms.
It's wrong but it's easier to understand what is meant without having to mention "with the dot not the feather".
Ethnicity overloading can be a bitch.
lucm, indeed.
Which, predictably, chases plenty of women away. However, the men are damned no matter which choice they make -- if she leaves because they chase her away on purpose, it's their fault. If she leaves because they try too hard to keep her, it's their fault. And if they treat her the same as they would a man, and she leaves, well, that's their fault too!
YES.
Everything is racist and sexist, because races and sexes obviously, objectivelly exist, and are obviously, objectivelly non-uniform in defining properties.
I have nothing to lose but my bindings.
CS education is racist. Because everything is racist. Because everyone is racist.
Look, since even the most sincere efforts to make all opportunities open to anyone regardless of race or gender have only been met with even more cries of racism and sexism, I propose we give the hell up. Since nothing will satisfy them, just damn well stop trying, and tell them to shut the hell up already.
They won't shut up, of course. That's when we teach them what oppression really is, by reducing the women to chattel slaves, and killing off all the minorities. Yes, this is unjust, and quite mad. But it would be quieter.
I didn't used to be a sexist, but after women kept screaming at me that yes I was one, no matter what I did, I decided to just agree with them, and now I do indeed hate them all.
I didn't used to be a racist, but after blacks and Latinos kept screaming at me that yes I was one, no matter what I did, I decided to just agree with them, and now I do indeed hate blacks and Latinos.
The more screaming you do to people who aren't sexists and racists, calling them sexists and racists, the more sexists and racists you create.
Declining adjectives? Did we suddenly become French or something?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You can learn to code BASIC on a $5 hand-me-down 486 from Goodwill. Any Internet connection can provide you with more help documentation and tutorials than you can shake a stick at.
But there is no way that a 486 can run today's web browsers or display today's javascript-heavy websites. I seem to recall those thingies struggling to run Netscape.
How inappropriate to call this planet Earth, when clearly it is Ocean.
Says Barbie.
Way to throw up a specious assertion, Doucheronimous.
Computer science education is computer science education. It is not racist, sexist, ageist or anything else besides computer science education. It is not possible for it to be judgmental, prejudicial or anything else, but education. Why don't you whiny douches stop looking for injustice where none exists?
Drink a great big cup of cement and harden the fuck up!
There's nothing wrong with helping women (and other minorities) deal with actual bullying and dismissive attitude that does, in fact, exist.
The problem with this program is that what they propose instead is basically to sugar-coat CS itself to attract more people from the desired minority groups. Which is not really solving the problem, and is going to backfire big time when a guy who went into the program because it let him "artistically express his cultural background" faces a manager who wants him to write some mundane piece of code by the end of this week.
It'll bite him sooner than that, when the compiler or interpreter responds to his attempts with pages of error messages. It turns out that it's not practical to handicap the computers such that white males must write syntactically perfect programs to get any results at all, while minorities and women are allowed some number of errors depending on their relative disadvantage. It's even less practical to allow semantically incorrect programs to work properly merely because they are authored by a disadvantaged person.
Is Computer Science Education Racist and Sexist?
Well, no. Unless there are roaming gangs of white nerdy kids beating up anyone with the wrong color that I haven't heard of.
Yesterday a roving gang of white nerdy kids pummeled me for a half hour. I think I broke a nail.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
It's not even "their" culture but the culture impressed on them by the welfare state. The drive to survive gives a fantastic start, especially when it can be passed down through generations. If all you have to do is wait for the government to provide your food and housing and you can just hanging out with your buddies all day playing street fighter, where's the drive to improve going to come from?
I'm a zombie, you insensitive clod!
Wow, I just had a flashback. My grandmother used to call anyone with a certain color of skin "hindu", and didn't seem concerned at all that she was almost always wrong. (We had a fairly large Indian population where I grew up that were mostly Sikhs, not Hindus.) Of course, she was a profound racist. Some people exist to be a warning to others.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Oh, probably, as much as anything is.
Can People Make Money Off This?
You betcha.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
No. Racism and sexism are just true theories.
I have the solution. Rich White Males only assembly. White males, C. Whtie Women C++. All others python, hybercard, etc.
That is the important part. Once you start going against society's expectation of acceptable careers for your sex/gender/race/whatever then you're going to be dealing with it in school and with your family and even in the job market once you graduate.
Getting more of X to attend classes in STEM is easy.
Getting more of X to love STEM enough to stick with a career despite the constant societal pressures to conform is very difficult.
There are nerds from every race and class. Too bad many of the black nerds I've met have the work ethic of a tree sloth. Hey, it's a free country, if you want to work for minimum wage at Gamestop for the rest of your life that's cool...just don't cry later when I'm rich and you're still in your momma's basement.
Why don't you have a seat over there? -- CH
IT/Software Development is one of the rare, if not unique, fields where people can be very paid well, the job market is currently hot, and one can learn everything from inexpensive books(or even free online courses) combined with motivation. It's positively egalitarian. If the premise had to do with medicine and law, where there's required expensive schooling and potential for a "good ol' boys" club atmosphere, then I'd find it more believable.
When I've interviewed for development positions where the person went to school was of little importance. In fact, our CTO(who has his BS and MS in CS from Stanford) even jokes that it's the people straight from academia that sometimes seem the most incompetent. The only things we care about are if you know your stuff and have some body of previous work you can point to and talk about. But then I work in Silicon Valley where a competent developer can pretty much write his own ticket right now.
My experience in commercial development the last 13 years had me working with females. They were almost always foreign born, often with English as a second language. Yes, it's mostly males, but a large part of them are East Asians and Indians, not all white males.
In short, the bar of entry in my experience is low as long as you're motivated and competent. Why aren't there more women? Look at practically every engineering and scientific accomplishment in human history. Are you going to tell it's just culture that has kept those accomplishments relegated almost entirely to men?
Teachers don't want to teach the hard stuff, (if they even understand it themselves) they want to teach and grade subjectively, so they can fudge and not be the 'mean' teacher who gives students bad grades - see the ongoing resistance to any type of standardized testing for Math, Science(s), and Reading, as well as the terror in their eyes at the idea of the testing results being averaged over time and non-effective teachers being identified. (PS: The "teaching to the test" argument is bogus, because they don't know what's on these standardized tests unless they've opened them ahead of time - aka corruption and fraud).
Dance and Art for computer science education? Sorry, that's code for "being able to bullshit grades for sub-par students while still claiming to be teaching them Computer Science" AND "finding race-based excuses to not do our jobs"
I teach freshmen in a 4-year university. Well over half of them don't know how to write a paragraph, let alone a coherently-argued and/or researched paper. They also don't understand how to calculate their grade, average out their GPA, etc.
Because K-12 refuses to educate, while at the same time refuses to fail students, the public instead pays millions more each year re-educating them/failing them out in the vastly more expensive higher-education system.
We guys however, were unrecognized gems. 18 charisma, EVERY ONE.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
My grandmother was the same way, expect they were all "Spaniards". No idea what she may have experienced in the past but, boy, let me tell you, those Spaniards ... you gotta watch 'em.
Will Dice.com Holdings do anything its paymasters tell it, to keep up the astroturf campaign about a shortage of programmers? So that more cheap H1b visa labor can be had by big companies? Yes.
Just wondering when I see headlines and summaries like this one.
Yes CSE is most definitely Racist and Sexist. It is geared towards men from India.
Racist and Sexist?
The labels "Racist" and "Sexist" are like ketchup . . . you can put them on anything.
Even where it is neither appropriate nor warranted.
University CS programs will now be required to include these "culturally relevant instructional materials" . . . otherwise, they will be judged "substandard" by the government, and the university will lose any government funding.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Give us a break! It will never end! (And incidentally, this kind of stuff is why I have completely written off all blacks and any possible relationship I could have with them.)
Most of the guys in my CS classes were ugly...
Problem isn't that they are sexist, the problem is that they are smart/engaged enough to notice and not socially "adjusted" enough to no longer say the truth. On the other side I would agree that in my observations most woman prefer the happy lie to the truth so they tend not to fit in with logical pursuits...
Just go to NC State to get your CS degree. They care more about performance and less what you look like. That's how it's supposed to be.
Internet, computer hardware and proficiency in reading is not a low barrier to entry.
Learning BASIC on a 80486 is hardly CS anymore than kicking the tires of a car is being a mechanic.
At what age did you manage BASIC on a lowend computer? at what age did you outgrow it? What did you do then? No, this person can not afford that.
I also do not see much demand for BASIC (at least not any variation that will run on a 80486). So how does the person get further than pointless basic programs that are not feeding their family?
In other words, the high return on the investment is nonexistant for most.
Even more so for the minority groups - and that assumes you have anything to invest in the first place (working 2 jobs to pay the rent and food may not leave you with all that much energy left over. kids too? an abusive and drunk of a husband? yeah, being on the low end socially dont just mean you are short on cash. - though im sure someone will say that they did it - to that i say, you are a smaller minority than any mentioned here yet and congratulations on "making it").
Yesterday a roving gang of white nerdy kids pummeled me for a half hour. I think I broke a nail.
That'll keep happening until you upgrade your 360 to an aftermarket controller.
around the same time white people start playing The Knockout Game.
Its not the sort of job you can do well if you don't have some sort of inherent interest or curiosity in.,
I used to think that too, but since I've met a number of people who don't really like programming but are still very good at it. YMMV.
Don't like their employer, job, assigned programming tasks?
Or if they were free to indulge in whatever project held some interest or curiosity they would not enjoy the necessary programming?
I can understand getting burned out on tasks that are devoid of challenge or interest. I would just be surprised to find a person who was truly good at programming who never wrote a piece of code that was not a school nor work assignment. Who never did any programming simply because they were curious or otherwise personally motivated. I think such a person would be a true rarity.
Please see my previous comment, it applies to you, too.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I'm sorry, but look at the history behind so-called maths and logic. Was Newton a black woman? Of course not. Was Archimedes an Hispanic woman? Of course not. Clearly, all so-called 'maths' and 'logic' is simply an arbitrary invention of White Privileged Males, carefully crafted to keep women and 'people of colour' in their place.
Turing and Gödel ***PROVE*** that the abuse of White Male Privilege was even worse in the 20th century, when anti-black, anti-female doctrines were embedded at the heart of maths- I mean how many black people or women do you know who understand the 'incompleteness theorem', or the idea of 'Turing complete computing'?
Bill Gates is absolutely RIGHT with his Common Core maths teaching that strip out all those wicked white concepts, and instead forces pupils to do all their maths calculations using symbolic representation of every individual item involved, like we are back in 20,000 BC drawing in the dust with sticks. You want to multiply 128 by 234? Obviously the ONLY black and female way of solving such a problem is drawing out 128 circles over and over until you've done this 234 times, and can count out the total one by one. That's the Common Core way Bill Gates insists is taught to your children, because THAT my friends, is what Gates describes as the ONLY gender-free, 'race'-free way of teaching maths.
How the neo-liberal filth, which by the way is led by 100% white privileged males, loves to patronise women and black people, like they are talking down to extremely dull-witted children. This, of course, is when the neo-liberal filth can find time away from their genocidal wars against all they label "sub-Human", like the civilian population of Syria. Remember how earlier this year, the same neo-liberal filth wanted to subject the people of Syria to the greatest series of air attacks in Human History?
In the USA, the Republicans and the Democrats are both fully controlled by neo-liberal atrocities who worship Tony Blair as a god. The so-called 'new maths' that has been blighting American education for a few years BEFORE it became codified in the Common Core curriculum was designed to massively reduce the confidence in maths experienced by all BUT the top 5% of pupils. Gates' abusive teaching methods would have no impact on the performance of people like myself, because those with significant innate maths skills are mostly self-teaching, and extract good meaning from even purposely bad teaching. BUT the fact that the top 5% do NOT see their scores drop under Common Core then VILELY and DISHONESTLY used as propaganda 'proving' that those whose maths scores drop, do so because they are thick, lazy, or have interfering parents.
The principles of maths, science and logic CANNOT be biased to race or gender by definition. Of course, the materials and teaching can, being a corruptible Human system. In the UK, for instance, the forms of 'examination' were altered to bias toward higher female scores, leading to generations of school leavers with excellent grades and appealing ability in maths. In the UK, you lose more marks on Maths paper for spelling mistakes than maths mistakes, and good presentation, even when entirely faulty, earns major marks.
Again, such attacks on education do NOT slow down the best tiny top percent, but they do hurt the average pupil very badly indeed. Dumbing Down- the goal of Bill Gates, and his god Tony Blair, aims to fundamentally change the capabilities of the average citizen of the West, so they offer significantly less resistance to projects designed to manipulate them, or take them to increasingly destructive wars. Gates blatantly gives lectures explaining why only the children of the East, where the 'toys' of the West are designed and manufactured, need a good technical education. Citizens of 'Rome', Gates says, have no general need of higher educational skills, and should actually be taught to distrust those ordinary citizens that are well educated.
Push start or pull start?
Nobody is stopping anybody from becoming a software engineer or computer scientist (whereas the later term is derogatory for any engineer worth his/her title). The statistic just shows that the particular set of occupations is preferred by particular set of people. I would suspect that the problem if it is one at all is that there is not enough of them or to make it more precise there is not enough cheap ones so let us get some from elsewhere.
Computers are completely unforgiving. They do only exactly what they've been asked to do. They care nothing about your feelings and are only as useful as their inputs. And there's an insufferable amount of information to assimilate in order to become a talented programmer. Pedantic details are the difference between a good programmer and a great one. This is really true of any type of technical/engineering field. People that aren't "into" the minutia of details are probably better suited for social jobs than technical ones.
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
Think he means Arabic. And you are right, worldwide I would say there are probably more Arabic and Asian programmers than Caucasian. Does that mean computer science education is racist or sexist? No.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
"Cultural design tools encourage students to artistically express computing design concepts from Latino/a, African American, or Native American history as well as cultural activities in dance, skateboarding, graffiti art, and more."
In other words, not engineering.
Show me one example where coding is sexist or racist. When I say an example, show me syntax, I program in C, C++, PHP, ASM, PERL, PYHTON, BASH, SH, a variety of web languages and other desktop languages. I have yet to see syntax which is racist or sexist.
While I entirely agree with you on that one (I've been in more 'some sort of technical group/club/class' contexts than I can remember where having the temerity to join while female was treated as an implicit invitation for every optimist in the place to hit on you(well beyond the bounds of taste, being asked to fuck off, etc. so spare me the 'feminism is killing fun!!!') until you gave up in disgust and left.
What concerns me is that the assorted 'multicultural' bullshit described in TFA sounds more like some kind of racist farce than like an actual inclusion strategy: "Hey, black kid, you 'urban' types like skatesboards and graffiti, right? How about some programming with skateboards and graffiti?" and will do absolutely nothing to address the 'entire class looks you up and down, because you are not one of us and/or we are interested only in fucking you' school of dissuading people from taking up technical subjects.
It's not as though pasty white guys take up comp sci because it "expresses their anglo-saxon heritage".
If there is a gender/race bias on the hiring side then there will be a gender/race bias on the educational side. The public get aware pretty fast as to what is going on. Women and blacks will quickly decide that becoming a programmer is a waste of their time and their money. I have worked with a lot of programmer. And the ability to program doesn't have anything to do with gender or race. In fact some of best programmers I have meet were black and some were women.
I've obscured the name of the company so as to avoid a messy copyright battle, but this is the photo selected for the "Security Threats" chapter of my networking class: http://goo.gl/R67PWF
Takeaway message: be wary of inter-dimensional black guys in dungarees...
Perfectly Normal Industries
The day the create a computer language that works on passive agressive hints, women will take over the industry.
Floozy stubborn knownothing main(some shit) ... ...*sigh*
run that other thing.
dinner last night was great.
i had scallops.
print the thing from the thing i had you run.
words consiceinstructions ... ...*sigh*
gimme the thing those jerk guys always write.
Output: Hello world!
In my CS class I surely was a minority. 2/3 of the students (of which 1/3 were female) were not like me. I am a white male and made up less than 1/3 of the racial cohort of the class. The majority (2/3) were Asian, specifically Chinese. Now about code.org. Do they know about how many jobs get outsourced to Bangalore? I dispute the number of jobs available for CS grads. Thousands are looking for work. The graphs are a lie. Did you know that in a casual setting, 78.95% of all statistics are made up on the spot? The kids running code.org want to turn North American programming jobs into what Bangladesh sees in the garment industry: 100,000 jobs at 25 cents per hour.
So all the good code would be written by rich white males?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
INTJ/INTP personalities are far more prevalent among men than women.
Furthermore, INTJ/INTP personalities are far more prevalent among Germanics (including Anglo-Saxons, Celts, Scandinavians, etc.), Ashkenazi Jews, and East-Asians.
The only way the egalitarian progressive left can achieve equality is with another holocaust.
Neither is Jewish technically, but it's functional to use it that way. Anyway, Hinduism in some senses is closer to an ethnicity (or a culture within an ethnicity perhaps) than a religion, since Hinduism is not ONE religion but many related religions.
Because I'm a bi-racial autodidact who loves coding DSP algorithms in Haskell on his custom watercooled system running FreeBSD + XMonad.
If you like what you do, chances are you will advance at it. No need for affirmative action.
Well, here I am! ;-)
I can see it now, the infamous traveling salesman...
there was a black traveling salesman
there was a woman traveling salesman
there was an asian traveling salesman
oh wait - the problem had nothing to do with race...
Its sort of the chicken and egg problem here. Is it that a particular set of occupations is preferred by particular set of people because that particular set of people like it more or is it because others find it harder to get into it.
I don't seriously think any specific changes need to be made for a specific outreach to other diverse groups of people, but if getting in is contrastingly hard for those diverse groups, perhaps looking into why might be warranted. If it comes down to the general course load for the minority students are greater due to the lack of preparation typical on high schools with high concentrations of them, then perhaps increasing the standards and availability of those high schools can correct the issues. But if it is some inherent s&p500 company will not higher someone who lists Compton CA as their address on the application, then we got other problems to address.
My guess will be that the disproportionate amounts of poverty within minority communities plays a large role in the expectations of students who often want more immediate gratification of employment even if it means less over all income earned in a life time. Or in other words, growing up in a family of 4 with a household income of $25k, getting a career expecting to make $50k or so might be more attractive then someone who grew up in a family setting making $80K. So other avenues are taken.
On the other side I would agree that in my observations most woman prefer the happy lie to the truth so they tend not to fit in with logical pursuits...
If you believe that argument then you should also see women dominating the C-suite, sales, and marketing jobs at software companies.
This is a very narrow definition of what constitutes racism, one that unfortunately has the broadest acceptance in American culture. By this definition, racism must be deliberate and an aspect of a person's identity. The person must identify as being or not being a certain race, and applying an absolutist belief that one race is superior or inferior to the others. Further more, that valuation is taken as something concrete and consequential, upon which the person must act when race rises as a relevant factor in their social interactions with others. Most people are not racist in this way because it is stupid and stigmatized. But if CSE is not racist or sexist, how do you account for the extreme overrepresentation of white males in CSE?
But that is not the sort of racism (or sexism, which I'm not including for brevity,) that articles like this are addressing. The title, by including the term 'racism' is unfortunately inflammatory because almost nobody wants to be identified as a racist. A better title would have been rephrased as 'unintentionally discriminatory' or something similarly benign instead. Racism, as it is currently understood within academia and sociology (and by most non-white people in America), is the attribution of the assumed qualities of of a group to an individual based on their perceived race. Everybody does this. We visually evaluate people and make snap intuitive judgments, and unfortunately, race factors into this, even if only at a subconscious levels beneath other factors such as socio-economic class and beauty. At our best, we try to mitigate the affects of these judgments in our day-to-day lives, but at our worst, we pretend they are justified. It should not be seen, though, as a matter of the person being a racist person, but rather a particular judgment or action being perceived as racist. If you ever get called racist, you're best off apologizing for the act or judgment and moving on. Denying that something is racist more often falls in line with pretending it is justified, although the intention was more likely to have been to disassociate oneself from the definition of racism in the previous paragraph.
What the article attempts to address is not an exculsively race-related issue, but one that also ties in heavily with class. For dealing with black subsets of the population, there is an unfortunate overrepresentation of black people in the lower socio-economic class. Though I forget the specific statistics, I believe that the approximation is that where black people make up 10% of the American population, they make up 50% of the lower class, meaning that where class-based discriminatory practices exist, they will also be consequentially racially discriminatory (though not inherently racist). CS is heavily class-based in its discrimination, as access to computers and appropriate education is much more limited to families in lower classes than to those coming from more stable or privileged socio-economic backgrounds.
If the article's cultural design tools are meant to address an underrepresentation of non-white minorities in CS, there is value in that, but it is not entirely un-problematic. Things such as teaching cultural histories and linking them to CS reinforce the ideas of cultural/racial identities and could be in that sense considered racist, and the graffiti art could be much more considered classist, but until the groups are no longer disproportionately overrepresented in the lower class, offering cultural and lower class-based points of identification for people in a predominantly white, middle class area of study is one of the only (and statistically most effective) ways to encourage the underrepresented to cross the culture gap. Overall it's not a perfect solution, but it is a corrective one. The only other real options are pretending that racial, class-based, and sexist discrimination are not relevant in CS, and that unfortunately leads to doing nothing and consequently perpetuating the same discriminatory practices that are currently in place.
When I started learning programming, back in the early 1970's, there were 3 main races that I could see - Indians (from India), Caucasians (from Europe/America) and East Asians (Japanese, Koreans, Chinese, Vietnamese)
As the years gone by, more races were added, from the African continent and from South America (mainly Argentine, Brazil, Chile and Peru)
As for those "hyphenated-Americans" such as "Latino-Americans" or "African-Americans", yes, I saw them too, but their number is small.
Their number is small not because of racism - as far as I know, we in the tech field treasure people with skills, not people with a particular skin-hue - the main cause of their number is because of their culture do not care for people with brains.
I have had co-workers from the Latino-American and African-American communities and they told me of their struggle to "survive" the daily gauntlet from their own people - taunts, bully, threats and physical assaults.
It's okay to be a nerd if you are a white, an Indian, a Japanese, but if you happen to be an African American, a nerd is someone to be stepped on, to be pushed around, to be beaten.
If there is "racism" related to computer-science, the "racism" came not from the nerds, but from those who want to kick the nerds around.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Two links is equivalent to an avalanche of feminist concern on what planet? You're trying to tell us that there's really an equal amount of public discussion for "getting men into teaching and nursing" as "we need to encourage girls into STEM"?
Sense of proportion: needed.
Finally, it is clear that this just a kneejerk reaction from someone who afraid they are no longer to have the right to discriminate. There is a great deal of difference between a new immigrant, a voluntary immigrant, and a forced immigrant, views their life in the US.Just like there is a difference between the entitlement that a backwoods rednecks expects and the entitlement that person who lives a diverse city expects.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
And yet you don't say the same thing about the young white engineer that got into software to "change the world."
Do you honestly think that some minority is really so stupid to no understand what is required for a job he interviewed and was hired for?
A hot girl in CS will still get hit on. Like anyplace else.
BUT.
Will it get her a job? A promotion? Special treatment? Better pay? no. Not in CS.
Just because you'd like to fuck her. You still don't want her messing with your servers.
I think it is pretty well established that there is a difference between racism and racial discrimination. Racism is the belief that a certain race is inferior in some way because of their genetics. That is different than racial discrimination, which can be far more subtle but almost just as damaging. Most racial discrimination today has little to do with race at all, but instead have to do with cultural differences. When I hear someone talking in ebonics it takes a great deal of effort not to immediately form several negative assumptions about that person. That has nothing to do with racism as I have a similar reaction to a strong cockney accent. But it is still discriminatory.
It is important to have these distinctions in our language. When I say someone is racist I mean every negative connotation and denotation that the word has. It loses its meaning if you start calling anyone who is even inadvertently discriminatory a racist.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
it's implied they're Indian genius. Is there a point to your post?
And people wonder if computer science education is sexist... With such paragons of enlightened thinking how could any woman feel unwelcome in a CS class?
Wait a minute, the grandparent strongly implied that the men in CS are simply undesirable to the women in CS, but when someone says that the girls in CS are undesirable then it is sexist?
Fifty years ago the African Americans' lag in education was attributed to textbooks that ignored them, and a lack of adult role models in the schools. As time went on many black educators entered the workforce and textbooks included african american in pictures and as examples. Unfortunately it did not help much. We still have a gap.
[this] will do absolutely nothing to address the 'entire class looks you up and down, because [...] we are interested only in fucking you' school of dissuading people from taking up technical subjects.
You know that happens in every subject and location, right? The reason women don't stick with compsci is because the guys who are in compsci are unattractive, so they shift to the subjects where the guys are acceptable. They get asked out and/or complimented on their appearance wherever they go, but it's less creepy when the guys don't look like dorks.
but only when it is meritocracy based. discrimination is such a catch-all cop out nowadays, that it is only natural for the untalented to reach for it as their first resort.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
And yet you don't say the same thing about the young white engineer that got into software to "change the world."
The obvious difference is that you actually can change the world by getting into software. It's not particularly likely, and it would take more luck than skill, but it's not complete bullshit.
Do you honestly think that some minority is really so stupid to no understand what is required for a job he interviewed and was hired for?
If you teach them actual CS, no. If you teach them by having them paint graffiti about the "multicultural roots of computer science", OTOH...
Code.org is racist and hates men.
It's a matter of degree. And tech tends to skew further in the direction of 'being thrown to the shark-like feeding frenzy' than do most other subjects.
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This is liberal political correctness run amok. It is a bunch of meaningless politically correct, victimization complex garbage. If the aformentioned groups fail to avail themselves of college education for these IT subjects, there is only one group for them to blame, themselves. No one is stopping them from doing so. The article is basically full of a nonsense, meaningless drivel and window dressing. The idea that they cannot learn what a b-tree is without a dicussion of graffiti and gang identification is absurd. The constant obsessive compulsive drive to find sexism and racism in everything is nauseating. Nowhere in computer science textbooks do I find anything that suggests that this field is off limits to the aforementioned groups. This is an example of someone inventing a controversy to both falsely accuse someone of non-existant infractions and create a scapegoating of people for whom are not responsible for whatever they are complaining about. I believe in personal responsibility, of group X or group Y feels they need a computer science education, do it, the fact computer textbooks do not have a discussion of hip hop music is not an excuse for them not being motivated to do so. Some wish to shift blame to others for these groups not doing X or Y, when these groups only have themselves to blame for not being motivated.
what's wrong with being sexy?
That was the title of a book looking at attrition among CMU CS students. It's a death of a thousand cuts for women, and remember that we're talking CMU so these are bright motivated people.
Getting a programming assignment about football scores is a hint that you don't belong. It's not an assault, more like a paper cut, but what happens to you after a thousand paper cuts?
The problem isn't the sexism (if there is any). The problem is that the solution everyone wants to use is "You're a white male? Go away. You're not? Welcome to $InsertSchoolNameHere!"
Isn't it the ancient dream of artists to build a creation that moves and does things on its own? Isn't that what a program is, a sculpture that acts?
A hint to whom? Geeks who never even thought about trying out for football, and were held in contempt by those who did?
A few years ago my wife and I took our daughters to a stage show. In front of us while waiting in line to be admitted was another couple with two little boys. The boys had in their possession an assortment of Disney princess dolls. The father saw the Disney princess-themed dress on one of my daughters and pointed it out enthusiastically to his sons. I asked the couple about the dolls. They went on for a short while about breaking gender stereotypes. I replied:
"You seem very well-informed about gender issues. Were you brought up with dolls (looking at the man) and trucks (looking at the woman)?"
"No, quite the opposite.", said the man, "My Dad is overdosed on testosterone. Football...", etc.
"And despite your stereotypical upbringing, you have this keen awareness about gender issues. Why don't you think your boys are as capable as you were in developing an awareness of gender issues?"
The conversation went downhill from there. I want to ask a similar question of the brain trust that has given code.org a new gender and racial equity focus. Why do you think females and non-whites are unable to find the same appeal in computer science that you and I have found? I sure as hell wasn't drawn by some illusory "Hey, this is only for nerdy white males" appeal. I fell in love with the logic of it, and the absolutely beautiful art of solving problems with programming language constructs.
Women are no less sexist than men. So is it a problem? We are not selecting or encouraging exactly the best people. This has economic and scientific consequences, and it has social consequences. If the work "sexism" doesn't apply to this, then you need a word that does, because there's plenty to discuss here.
Basic interest? Gender based interference by ones own gender? It really isn't as easy as the blame game might seem at first
Having participated in many "take our son's and daughters to work day" events at the University I worked at, we did try to encourage young women to look at the technical fields. Keeping in mind that this was originally "Take your daughter to work day", it was the underlying purpose of the whole thing.
Working in an overwhelmingly technology and science arena, these were by and large, the sons and daughters of Engineers, computer technologists, and scientists. They were offspring of dedicated people and encouraged by their parents toward technology.
We polled the kids on what they wanted to be. The young ladies almost universally did not want to go into tech. The closest was a couple of young women who wanted to become mathematicians. Lot's of Veterinarians and Lawyers, precious few wanting to be like daddy or mommy.
And it is a pity. The lady engineers I worked with said that our push to get women in those positions really helped them in their career path. One indeed received almost yearly promotions. This was a fantastic place for a technically minded female to be employed.
Why? I am not completely certain, but I am a firm believer that an engineer or scientist knows exactly what they want to be at a pretty early age, regardless of gender. And in large part, trying to dissuade them is useless.
Some of the excuses, like young women are discouraged from mathematics, or the perennial variations on "men are pigs", really don't fit. And some of the excuses end up painting women into a corner, like if men can deter women from subjects like math, or if they can be deterred by men away from science in general, well then the woman wasn't really all that interested in the first place, or was just too "weak" for the field. Becoming an engineer or scientist is no place for people who become easly discouraged.
And all of the women I worked with in engineering and Computer IT or science were well received by the men. In my office we had a lot of turnover, but we tried to always have a good mix - and yes, this did often mean that if all other things were equal, the woman got the job.
And interestingly enough, some of the women engineers I worked with noted that the biggest opposition they ever received was from other women. "You want to do what?" That's a nerdy thing to want to do! But it is not acceptable to blame other women. And there is still the issue of apparently easy discouragement. I had similar questions and statements back in school. A lot of the other kids called me "Perfesser", and it was a pejoritive. Like I cared - a lot of them are working as insurance salesmen now, and I did what I set out to do So my guess is that it is going to take a long time to solve the problem. Which is why I have become convinced that if we decide that gender balance must be obtained, we will have to force young women into the field, and likewise keep young men out of the field. A title IX program, like that in college sports.
I do doubt that will make for either happy people or the best people for the job though.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Anyone who cares about getting this right must read "Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences " by Rebecca Jordan-Young.
Bottom line: most of the research sucks rocks.
The more carefully you look, the more it looks like overlapping bell curves and not dimorphism.
A few years ago my wife and I took our daughters to a stage show. In front of us while waiting in line to be admitted was another couple with two little boys. The boys had in their possession an assortment of Disney princess dolls. The father saw the Disney princess-themed dress on one of my daughters and pointed it out enthusiastically to his sons. I asked the couple about the dolls. They went on for a short while about breaking gender stereotypes. I replied:
"You seem very well-informed about gender issues. Were you brought up with dolls (looking at the man) and trucks (looking at the woman)?"
"No, quite the opposite.", said the man, "My Dad is overdosed on testosterone. Football...", etc.
"And despite your stereotypical upbringing, you have this keen awareness about gender issues. Why don't you think your boys are as capable as you were in developing an awareness of gender issues?"
The conversation went downhill from there. I want to ask a similar question of the brain trust that has given code.org a new gender and racial equity focus. Why do you think females and non-whites are unable to find the same appeal in computer science that you and I have found? I sure as hell wasn't drawn by some illusory "Hey, this is only for nerdy white males" appeal. I fell in love with the logic of it, and the absolutely beautiful art of solving problems with programming language constructs.
Damn it. Didn't realize I wasn't logged-in.
"Cultural design tools encourage students to artistically express computing design concepts from Latino/a, African American, or Native American history as well as cultural activities in dance, skateboarding, graffiti art, and more."
This is purest drivel. A culture is a set of shared behaviors, interests, and values that cause people to cluster together, or derive from them being so. Geekdom, hackerdom, tech, or whatever you want to call it is its own culture. It may be predominantly white male, but it is not the same thing as white male culture at large. If it was, we'd be more interested in football and reality TV and less interested in roleplaying games and Star Trek. Not to say that no geeks like the former and that all like the latter, but the percentages are very very different from mainstream. We have our own slang, places we tend to hang out (especially if you consider online "places"), entertainment interests, people we admire, people we hate, things we like to talk about, and so forth.
In fact, the very idea that someone's ethnicity defines their culture is itself racist. When I hang out with my black, Chinese, and Indian coworkers, we all have common ground due to us sharing the tech culture, rather than being pigeonholed into the cultures we were born in, staying there, and having to overcome barriers when we want to interact.
"The Greens lynched a hacker in Chicago. Last month, but I think the body's still hanging from the old Water Tower."
don't judge the CS and IT by a AC troll
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
Growing up in Southern California, I had a very diverse classroom in all normal classes. Once you get to the tech type classes, this became all nerds and most of them were indeed white or asian. Very few mexicans and we had one black guy in there (cool guy too). With that said, yes we were all nerds.
Like it or not, but nerdism doesn't stack well with most latino and black cultural values. White pasty, sometimes tall and lanky, other times fat and a bit of a dork is all to common. You don't think mexican or black when you think of a nerd. You think of a skinny white boy with zits. Funny how they didn't try to change that image.
The same things that would get more latinos and blacks involved in computers is the same thing that gets them into business and cars, which is education and focus on such.
Most racism tends to fade off when everyone feels included and money is left out of the picture. Most people of all races have much more in come with people of a similar tax brackets then of other specific race that's rich if they aren't.
Method overloading in General can be a bitch.
Why don't you just call them South Asian...duh.
When reading binary the 1's are obviously phallus-symbols.
but everything is better with Ketchup! Is everything better with Racism and Sexism?
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
People talk about the typical "ask a question, inflame people" approach of the article, but the real answer is I don't care.
I genuinely just don't care about it. I don't harass anyone, don't care if you're white or black or asian or anything else. I also don't care if CS is discriminatory. If it isn't, good for it. If it is, that's fine too.
I'm too busy actually trying to get shit done.
both girls and boys were pink...and they still are!
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
i can do whatever i want with a little dedication and hard work!
Nobody actually gives a fuck what's between your legs in an CS/Engineering curriculum.
Sure, there are the occasional asshole looking to get laid, But have you checked the guys in business school, there are where the real sexist pigs, and nobody's bitching about business school being sexist.
The Engineering and Science schools only care if you're willing to put in the hours and do the fucking work for little to no immediate gain.
Can't wait for the CS class taught in gangsta.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Everything that does not have a majority of women or "non whites" in it, is always sexist or racist.
We get it White Men are evil.
Didn't Read the Article.
Seriously.
Where are the short asian men in the NBA?
Racism.
They should be shut down immediately.
Yeah, there's certainly no CS in Eye Writer or Time Writer.
Of course, you never bothered to actually read the link before you go off and loudly spout your uniformed opinions about how damn liberals are trying to dumb these down for the minorities, and thus undercut "our" exalted position in society. If you had bothered to read the link, you'd know that it says:
These types of lessons are important for students to build personal relationships with computer science concepts and applications â" an important process for discovering the relevance of computer science for their own life. Allowing students to build an authentic identity as someone who does computer science within a familiar cultural context increases the likelihood that they will pursue additional study or careers in the field.
Heaven forbid anyone first start coding something that they find interesting!
You are exactly the reason why these program need to exist.
I have went and read the link; indeed, I have quoted this exact statement verbatim elsewhere. This is exactly the kind of bullshit that I'm rallying against. There's no "cultural context" in computer science, nor there should be, as in any other scientific field. Down that road lies Deutsche Physik and proletarian genetics.
Oh, and I am a liberal myself, thank you very much. That's why I want to kill this with fire: because this is precisely the kind of stuff that will have Fox News and the like harping about liberal idiocy for years to come, and it will be damn hard to refute that argument.
No one is saying computer science has a culture context. What people are saying is that computer scientists have a cultural context, and that's obvious since they are human.
If dance or graffiti or whatever inspires someone to stay in school, study hard, and then get a six-figure salary, then who gives a fuck what the initial reason was?
It's not racist, it's culturally biased.
The thing is, people who take CS courses are typically in the smarter end of the spectrum, and they have no desire to associate themselves with the gangsta/mafioso/ghetto cultures, because whatever little these cultures bring to a classroom is rarely enough to compensate for the disruption they also bring. These cultures do not tolerate smartness, so they don't go well with a science course.
It does happen that people from these cultures break free from the taboo and land themselves in college, and that's fantastic, but blaming CS for their hardships isn't the right way to go about it.
If dance or graffiti or whatever inspires someone to stay in school, study hard, and then get a six-figure salary, then who gives a fuck what the initial reason was?
No-one gives a fuck. But neither dance nor graffiti will inspire someone to stay in school for the sake of CS. Or if they will, it will be a person that doesn't actually like, you know, CS - and they'll end up with a bitter choice of getting a six-figure salary doing something they don't like, or getting less for something that they do like.
computer science students in Russia. Women are the majority!
Excuse me while I start learning Russian and enlist in a Russian exchange program to... broaden my cultural horizon.
Therefore they can't program.
There, that wasn't difficult, was it?
Football scores? That's probably not a good example you've picked there. Not only is football not something cared about by male geeks, there are a lot of female non-geeks who are football fans. (both handegg and truncated icosahedral footballs) I'm no football fan (though I can at least appreciate well-played basketball), but my mom is.
Racist and Sexist?
University CS programs will now be required to include these "culturally relevant instructional materials" . . . otherwise, they will be judged "substandard" by the government, and the university will lose any government funding.
No problem, just present the curriculum in rhyme.
Who gets into it to "change the world"? I got into it because I started playing with TTL chips as a kid in the mid '70s. At age freaking twelve when TTL was still new. There was nothing more to it than the next toy after Lego. Yes, that's right, the reason I got into computers was because for me it was the ultimate TOY. If they think the time to get women into CS is at the college level, they're sorely mistaken. That's way too late. You need to get them interested in their high school years at the latest. And I hate to say it, but women generally just aren't into nerdy things in their high school years. Their own self-reinforcing social cliques won't let them.
I am glad that you feel superior to your grandmother. I hope you get a nice, warm, fuzzy feeling from having exactly the opinions that you are supposed to.
Actually there's quite a lot of debate about whether societal and professional attitudes make it more difficult for men to enter and stay in primary school teaching so perhaps this is not the best example to offer.
Try asking two friends (one male, one female) to announce in a conversation with their friends in a party that they like children and would like to work with them. I suspect the reaction will be quite different in each case. I can only offer anecdotal evidence but here in the UK I know two friends who are male primary school teachers and often have to justify their decision and are faced with critical responses, hinting that their motives are questionable: they've really had to fight prejudiced opinions.
No more than math is. It is funny how Computer Sciences is getting such a whipping, while other fields with similar degrees of race and sex separation are ignored. Math has similar statistics, and computer sciences is a form of applied math. Can a woman learn CS? Yes, I know at least 5 women in the CS program at the university I attend, and just counts the ones i had in classes with me this semester. There are many more that I did not count. Does the field favor men? Well no but men do favor the field. This is also true for the minor I have Electrical Engineering.
So why is CS being debated like this? My guess is because it sells. CS can be picked up by anyone. I originally learned many of the skills I have by simply examining them on the internet. It cost me next to nothing, and was freely available to anyone. There are many books that can be downloaded, and tutorials that one can find in seconds with a simple search. I didn't start out with a ton of money, I didn't have parents pushing me into the field. Everything I learned I had to pick up on my own. It takes literately no guidance to pick CS up. If one wants to take that education to the next level then it is on them as well. That is exactly what I did, I went to a university and picked up the skills I didn't have before. I believe I am a better off because I did this. It was all my choice.
The ethnic and sexist guidelines are not present in the field. They are imagined, people have preferences, social obligations, and predispositions, these make them favor certain fields. If anything i would say CS is not sexist or raciest, but has a prejudges against it. That is not present in certain ethnic circles, which allows us to enter the field without any social stigma against us. Some evidence of this is even presented by some of the older instructors. CS is a recipient field, that was heavily debated as to weather it had enough material to be a full degree. Originally CS materials were handles by mathematicians, scientists, and engineers, because they were the ones building the equipment. Their code was often a mess, poorly assembled, and rarely extensible. Which is why CS made it in the end. Because it's the new field on the block, it is not viewed as a field worth pursuing, except by a few of us. You wont hear of a kid who was pushed by his parents to be a programmer, or of a kid who committed suicide because he could not live up to the pressures placed upon him in the CS field. CS just does not have the long lived prestige of the other fields that it relates to. This causes children who are the pride of their parents to have a want or need to pursue other fields. Parents who are striving for a better life for their child wont push them to be a CS major, and CS is too new to have parents who want their children to follow in their footsteps to be CS majors. CS is the outlier, not the discriminator.
On a side note, how is keyboarding and cutting and pasting a CS field? That is like saying cooking is chemistry, or driving a car is being a mechanic.
I learned to code on a TRS-80. WIth no internet. And cassette tape for storage for the first two years. There's this amazing invention you may not have heard about. You see all those words and pictures on your screen? People have figured out how to put them on paper, then they stack a bunch of these pieces of paper and glue them together. There are even places where you can read these stacks of paper for free.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
Actually, that was a good pick: cherry flavored.
"A soft answer turneth away wrath. Once wrath is looking the other way, shoot it in the head."
A level playing field would suggest two kids get equal access to developmental resources.
This is different than equal outcomes, which are the statistics the artical is using.
To force equal outcomes, you might need a non-level playing field.
From what I've seen, computer science is an interesting area in the sense that it doesn't take a lot of resources to become really good at it.
It takes meager computer resources, but serious dedication in time and also a nerd like focus doesn't hurt.
Around here, meager, means thrown out on the street computer and library internet access.
You probably would have to buy a flash drive and some blank media.
Once bootstrapped, self study works given time.
The problem is getting kids to focus on that path.
It is a nerd like starting path. (Although on later, bigger projects social skills are important.)
Perhaps if you want more girls on this path, start earlier as in elementary school.
You do not need a computer to develop programmes for a computer. All you really need is a language reference guide preferably written in tutorial-style, sheets of paper (plain - ruled and grid), pencils, pencil sharpener, eraser, and an interest in solving problems algorithmically. A motivated person can learn to programme in a high-level language or low-level language using their brain as the computer. After learning the basics and using a computer to develop BASIC and 6502 assembly language programmes of various types, I recall developing algorithms and complete programmes entirely in my head before I sat down at a computer. The mental exercise and related activities drew me into computer programming. An inner-city or low-income child could apply the same techniques if they have an interest and the aptitude to develop software, even the most basic of algorithms are ideal training for analytical, logical, methodical problem-solving in many facets of life apart from "writing code."
I have seen Hindus who would have had no problems in South Africa at its worst or Saudi Arabia right now. One was fair skinned and had light brown hair. I have also seen others who had really dark skin. Not all Hindus come from India either...
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
applicants with previous experience and expect universities and colleges to provide a vocationally-trained workforce. While most software development in business does not require an undergraduate degree in computer science the job listings seem to demand an undergraduate degree in computer science, graduate degree and doctorate degree preferred, along with 10 years "verifiable" experience in a plethora of languages, tools, frameworks, industry-specific applications or hardware in addition another laundry list of cleverly worded generic soft skills.
However, you are correct in saying degrees outside of computer science are equally applicable for software developers. There is a lot of resentment by general IT staff towards anyone with a capability to develop anything of an algorithmic nature. I faced intense hostility from two co-workers whom constantly sarcastically said, "Oh you're just writing a Perl script. Why would you want to work at the Unix command prompt and vi when we have Microsoft Visual Studio?"
As for interviews stop asking stupid questions. If you cannot ascertain within 5 minutes of talking with an applicant whether the person as the aptitude, maybe you should not be interviewing applicants. You sound like as ass of a manager anyway, although organizations are filled with your narcissistic type.
these days with the easy access to free development tools and tutorials on the World Wide Web. This is not the 1970s or 1980s when it took concerted effort and interest in computers and programming to assemble the necessary resources. If a kid gets an allowance these days there are hosted programming environments available for as low as USD5.00 each month and the kid has full reign over the software to be installed. Admittedly such an environment is typically command-line Unix but you don't need a GUI to learn to develop software be it full applications or automation scripts. A hosted environment means they can use the library or school computer to access the service; no need for a computer at home.
My parents never exposed me to the classical guitar or violin as a child. In recent years, as an adult, I have begun learning to play these instruments for my own enjoyment, as a hobby, and most importantly because I want to learn something very different. Honestly, if not for my high school mathematics teacher brining his personal computer (Commodore PET) into the classroom my interest in computers might never have been sparked.
) ...sorry, but this *is* slashdot. That open paren is going to cause a problem eventually.
you just need to be willing to kill yourself by working non-stop for years at a time.
Great for the fresh out of the college guy with no relationships. Not so good for the married person with children.
They can force you to take the class, but they can't force you to remember it. In one ear, take the exam, and out the other, and back to the coding :)
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
Isn't it also sexist against men that it's assumed they're interested in football scores?
Maybe standardizing assignments towards a technical field would be more productive to both sexes. Something related to electronics, for instance, would not only be deprived of sexual charge, but also be a possible path to introducing students into an area that is more than tangentially related to programming.
If you're too hot, the overheat cut off circuitry will cut in and turn off.... wait what are we talking about again?
Not on anything. You can only put it on white male. Otherwise you are a bigot.
Check out my new book "C++ for Eubonics Speakers" Next is "Java for Valley Girls"
Two words.
Guys are dumb. Girls are psycho. It's how the world works. And yes, if you show up to a sausage party and you're one of like three females there out of 50 attendees... THERE'S THE BEEF!
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Sikhs look pretty different from Hindus, since they mostly have turbans & beards. Whereas most Hindus are generally either cleanshaven or have modern goatees or mustaches
He means Indians from India. India is part of Asia.
In Soviet Russia, horizon broadens YOU!
In other countries, such as india, there's plenty of women and non-whites hacking on keyboards. In Europe, there's lots of women in computing. I'm sure in asia and japan there's plenty of women involved in tech industries, (and I'm willing to bet there's lots of asians) Can we stop assuming nothing happens outside of the US that's worth mentioning?
Sadly, a Libertarian cannot force his views on another, and freedom cannot spread as does the cancer known as religion.
No, Hinduism is one religion, while Buddhism, Jainism & Sikhism are completely separate religions whose original founders were Hindu, but which themselves have little in common with Hinduism. Buddhism is an atheistic religion, whereas Jainism & Sikhism is monotheistic. Hinduism, OTOH, is polytheistic. The Hindu holy books - the Vedas - are not holy books of the other 3, in the way the Old Testament is to Christians.
Jewish is practically an ethnicity, since few non-Semites profess the religion. Similarly, few non-Indians practice Hinduism, and populations in Fiji, Guyana et al are not just statistical outliers, but the Hindus in question even there are descendants of Indian settlers. Only non-Indian Hindu place I can think of is Bali, which is a remnant of originally Hindu Indonesia, that's been lost to Islam. So statistically, the GGP was correct in using the term 'Hindu', although there may have been some Jains in the mix.
Computer science is tough for kids that don't come from a family background that pushed reading and math skills. Pharmaceutical researchers require a solid science experience from grade school and high school. Engineers need reading and math and science. The problem is the lack of a culture to push education. You don't see that in Asia or India where children are required to succeed in school by their parents. The simple solution - that will likely not come to pass - is that all US Cultures embrace education with strong mothers and fathers focusing the family to succeed.
Saudi Arabia doesn't discriminate on the basis of skin color - they do it on the basis of ethnicity - Arabs uber alles. Saudi Arabs are the preferred people in that country, then come Arabs from other countries, then come Muslim non-Arabs from anywhere, and finally, all the Infidels. So it doesn't matter how any Hindu would look - he'd still be an Infidel.
Yeah, not all Hindus are from India, but statistically, 95% of them are. You hardly see anyone from Nepal, Bali, Fiji, Guyana et al.
This whole thing is stupid. As you've observed, women gravitate less toward a certain field, more toward others. Men gravitate less toward daycare and more toward bashing shit with a hammer. Investing a tremendous amount of energy gets one or two anecdotes of "wow! This gave me the confidence to stop being shy and get into the field I really wanted to be in, but thought nobody would accept me for, and it's fantastic!" Guess what? Those success stories won't start just rolling in when you "get it right"; they're outiers.
People can't accept that most women just don't want to be construction workers, auto mechanics, or computer programmers, while men generally find interest in these things. They want to "level the field", force women into it, make it look "fair" and "even". And they justify it by pointing at a handful who were forced out and going, "See?! 90% of women WANT to do this, but they just can't! THEY CAN'T! WE WON'T LET THEM!"
It's bunk. What next? Do you want to find a way to make women fathers?
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In any case, this has nothing to do with the curricula. It's cultural. Make 50cent rap about hacking, that's how you fix it.
Is Computer Science Education Racist and Sexist?
No. No. No. Fucking no!
It is not. As a Hispanic, no one prevented me from getting into Computer Science, graduating from that field and making a good career out of it just based on my race, ethnicity or whatever. It was just me, myself and my efforts. My sister, being a Hispanic woman, she did not have a "racial" problem getting into Math (and graduating). There are no Jim-Crow-like establishments that prevents people like me from getting into STEM. So, no, Computer Science education is not racist.
Saying so is just bullshit race baiting designed to distract people from the actual social problems that pervade the African American and Hispanic communities. It is a lot easier to race bait than to actually fix shit. This is pretty much what this whole endeavor amounts to.
People choose STEM (and in particular Computer Science) based on a variety of social factors. In the US, women shy away to go into STEM, but you see this as less of an issue with the many Chinese and Indian female colleagues I have had the honor to work with. The same occurs with African American and Hispanic students.
To begin with (and I say this from the POV of a minority) our African American and Hispanic cultures have significant problems that lead students away from certain subjects and careers. This is in parallel with American society at large where women are conditioned to stay away from STEM fields.
Consider the following: it is well known that many African American kids (and Hispanic kids to a lesser) degree do not know how to swim. But we know that the causes are cultural as well as economical: African American and Hispanic neighborhoods are on average of a lower income than Non-Hispanic Caucasian and Asian communities, with poorer infrastructure and less amenities: that include pools. Furthermore, lower income means lesser variety of extra-curricular activities (including swimming.)
But we don't go and ask "is swimming racist"? It would be a stupid question for obvious reasons. But why is it then that when people ask the same about Computer Science (and STEM in general) we do not see this as a stupid question?
"Including culturally relevant instructional materials represented a driving focus of our course development," explained ECS Team members who now advise Code.org. "Cultural design tools encourage students to artistically express computing design concepts from Latino/a, African American, or Native American history as well as cultural activities in dance, skateboarding, graffiti art, and more. These types of lessons are important for students to build personal relationships with computer science concepts and applications – an important process for discovering the relevance of computer science for their own life." And — ironically for Code.org — it could mean less coding."
Computer Science is the field of computing, an off shot of Discrete Mathematics. This is not about artistic expression, but hard science of numbers and computing. We could also propose the same for Math and Physics because not that many Hispanics and African Americans and American-born women go into those fields.
The solution is not to plaster Computer Science education with multicultural trivia and singing kumbaya and shit. The solution involves solving the economic gaps that pervade in the African American and Hispanic communities (and let's be honest, to have those communities solve the systemic cultural issues that keep *us* from partaking in process of fostering technology and science.)
Anything less than that is lipstick-on-a-pig, sugar-coating bullshit.
I've been in more 'some sort of technical group/club/class' contexts than I can remember where having the temerity to join while female was treated as an implicit invitation for every optimist in the place to hit on you
You know who else gets treated like that? Celebrities.
I've seen racism and been a victim of it too. I haven't seen sexism. The racial balance in the IT world is mainly due to the H1-B Visa program. The average programmer has a career lifespan of about 12 years before they become obsolete. The H1-B visa program works to lower average/median salary of an IT worker and discourages inhouse training of IT workers and encourages management to push workers to work unpaid overtime making it problematic for IT workers to retool/maintain their professional skills. Unless a US citizen can have a fair chance of getting a Ph.D in STEM - I would advise against them trying for a STEM career. Business, accounting, law, pick something else.. even a plumber or a electrician or a locksmith would be better.
Arabic? No, I hardly see many Arab programmers. I dunno what they do, but s/w ain't it
Since Java is Muslim, make it 'Java for Muzzies'. For Valley Girls, have 'Objective C for Valley Girls'
And yet nerds who would sooner gargle ground glass than go to a football game don't seem to have any problems with it.
Arguably, if celebrity weren't something that a depraved subset of the population actively seeks out, I'd classify it as cruel and unusual punishment. It often doesn't do the people who find it much good, either(though, at least they can afford their raging drug habits, unlike some people).
To my wife, anyone who speaks spanish is Mexican. To her Mother, anyone who speaks Spanish is Spanish. My wife accepts correction when necessary, but after a long life of messing it up, I don't bother with my Mother-in-law.
They are feminists and want to support women with any means and therefor discriminating men!
Determining that racism, sexism or any other 'ism' is the cause of a disproportionate number of people of a certain race or ethnicity to be 'over' or 'under' represented in a certain profession assumes that given the absence of any form of discrimination based on 'isms' there would be a proportioning representation. It is intellectually lazy junk science. There has never been a proportionate representation of folks of different ethnicities or races in any filed during the entire history of the world. Why? People all come from different places with different skills and different interests. Growing up in a certain place is likely to limit your career choices. Men and women also make different choices in their lives. Who cares what percentage of people of a certain ethnicity or race are working in a certain field? Isn't it more important that people work in a field that they enjoy and that they are proficient at?
What concerns me is that the assorted 'multicultural' bullshit described in TFA sounds more like some kind of racist farce than like an actual inclusion strategy: "Hey, black kid, you 'urban' types like skatesboards and graffiti, right? How about some programming with skateboards and graffiti?" and will do absolutely nothing to address the 'entire class looks you up and down, because you are not one of us and/or we are interested only in fucking you' school of dissuading people from taking up technical subjects.
I'd like to note that the complaint about racism is, as is traditional, ignoring the fact that Asian and Middle Eastern groups are represented--with the traditional not-so-subtle implication that they're not 'real' minorities--and ignoring the fact that the problem could easily be a lack of people from the underrepresented groups who want to turn up. The social stigma placed on being interested in technical subjects is not limited to white males.
But the more important this is that these kinds of programs can--when done like a sexist/racist farce, which is also traditional--make it worse because it reinforces the stereotypes, and add a generous helping of resentment. Better would be a program that simply views everybody involved as people interested in whatever the technical subject is--and expects everybody to be up to the work & treat everybody else as a person.
And if they do want to actually have projects encouraging, say, Native Americans to code--why not sponsor coding projects whose results will be useful to those communities, to help show those communities why they should value those skills? This would be most efficiently done by actually having the ideas for these projects come out of the community, and favoring sponsorship of those projects where at least some of the coders will need to be members of the community in order to understand what the program needs to do...
"from India" is too many letters for you?
It's bunk. What next? Do you want to find a way to make women fathers?
Your question is not far fetched. It will pretty soon be possible to clone humans. I suspect that males will become rather scarce soon after that.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
When is someone going to worry about racial equality in the NBA? Yes, you say, a dumb question. But no more ludicrous than the one discussed in this article.
Still missing the point. The point was we're biologically wired to want different things - male brains and female brains are hardwired differently from birth. Advertising, social differences & behavior, pink vs blue - these aren't causes of the differences we see in boys vs girls or men vs women, they're tailored to what we're biologically included to do. Differences in brain development can already be seen at 26 weeks in the womb.
Even babies react differently depending on the gender. How are you going to pin these differences on nurture instead of nature?
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2486497
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19334302
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10692611
Global warming and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking number of pirates - Gospel of the FSM
If you are the current preferred race and sex, then the answer is YES. I weep with joy daily that I was born white, male, and American. Sure beats being black, female, and Middle Eastern these days.
...slashdot proves it can troll with the best (worst?) of them.
Well it looks like you're "no smart enough" to learn to properly express the English language and/or proofread. I bet you'll respond with "five dowa sucky sucky, love you wrong time."
> Getting a programming assignment about football scores is a hint that you don't belong.
Where the fuck did this notion come from that your studies have to be "relatable" to your cultural background in order for you to learn anything?? I thought education was about expanding your mind and embracing new ideas. You know, making the unfamiliar familiar?
You don't need to like it or know jack shit about football in order to do a programming assignment. In fact, this is good training because when you get out in the working world, you don't always get to choose which programming problems you work on. You have to study the problem domain first. You don't have to already be intimately familiar with the area of application. That's what Subject Matter Experts are for.
The question is posed with the assumption that racism and sexism are somehow "wrong". Based on what ? "God is dead", right ? So what possibly replaces him ? It can only be consensus backed up by force and violence. Who is promoting this consensus ? Who has the guns to back it up. White, north americans seems to be the only category of people in the world who insist that tribalism, that has characterized human culture for all of recorded history, is somehow an aberration.
Stop whining, and look for something useful to do with yourselves, or do nothing useful at all....what possible difference does it make in reality. You are already dying. When you are dead, nothing existed. "Racism and Sexism" are just new ways of trying to throw a net over all the pajama boys.
Not only that, I knew of the "top-5-rank" coder on CodeEval.com who is actually a graduate of UI-Chicago (UIC), not UI-Urbana-Champaign as most people thought when they think of computer science.
New Economic Perspectives
You clearly are a White man, because you have no understanding of what racism and sexism are.
I'm going to make an argument. This argument is going to be a tautological restatement of the transitive property. As a tautology, the premise of my argument will be the same as the conclusion. The fact that my premise will be a restatement of one of the foundational elements of logical systems won't stop people arguing against me.
So here is my argument: All things being equal, all things will be equal. If CS weren't racist and sexist, there would be a representative number of women and PoC in the field. There aren't; so it is.
First, "Hindu" is a religion, not an ethnicity. The term you're looking for is either desi or South Asian. Second, you don't understand what the term "minority" means within a sociological context. It's not a measure of population; it's a measure of power. The opposite of a minority group isn't a majority group. The opposite of a minority group is a dominant group. Third, there is a well studied effect where men see a group that is 17% women as being half women. And groups that are 30% women as being majority women. I'm betting that's what was going on with you.
Yes, you White people are so put upon.
Every discussion on the internet about racism, sexism, homophobia, or any other form of bigotry is filled with posts denying the existence of said bigotry in the most bigoted fashion possible.
The vast majority of Hindus are of Indian ethnicity, not arab.
The majority of arabs are Muslim.
This is BS. Everything blacks/latino has a small showing in is "Racist". Really? How about get off your ass and accept responsibility for yourself regardless of race?
You don't know that, and I gave specific examples of where graffiti and CS intersect, while you have given nothing but loud and repeated assertions to support yours. The whole point of this project is to get someone in the door and thinking about possibilities. Perhaps you get all hot and bothered thinking about installing printer drivers, writing some timecard application in Visual Basic, or tweaking the borders on some random intranet webpage to get it work in IE6, but most people don't, but that's most people in CS do. Only an exceedingly few get paid to do exactly what they want to do.
The fact is most people -- including the best
people in CS think of it as simply a job, an interesting job, better than most jobs, but still just a job, not a lifestyle. Well-rounded people have interests outside of their job. As one I know put it, "I spend 10 hours a day five days a week either sitting at a computer, or sitting in meetings talking about computers. Why the hell would I want to do that on my days off? I'm riding my bike."
You're just over-reacting to people coming in to your subculture that didn't grow up like you.
This isn't a blame game. Its about being aware of what sexism is so that you know how to level the field: hide the gender of applications to science courses.
How do you decouple that from being less valued in those fields?
Yes. The PNAS paper did not find that sexism was less from women. Did you follow my link?
The objective should be that an identical application, barring the gender of the applicant, should be given equal worth, equal chance of being accepted, and considered equal for mentoring. It is not necessary that the objective be gender balance in terms of numbers. (Although you would expect that better balance would be a consequence).
If one student's application to study was considered inferior to another's when the only difference was the name, then that's not stupid. That's evidence of bias that is reducing the overall quality of students able to enter the field.
Maybe, but it is difficult to decouple that from cultural effects. In any case if a particular women gravitates towards hitting things with a hammer, her contribution to that field and her recognition should be based on how well she hits things with a hammer. Otherwise you're not getting the best people to the best places.
Do you think the PNAS paper was mistaken?
This isn't what the study found. Do you have any evidence that that is occurring?