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Intel Drops Support For Science Talent Search
An anonymous reader writes: Started by Westinghouse Electric, the Science Talent Search (STS) has for 73 years been the nation's oldest and most prestigious science competition for high school students. Intel has been sponsoring the competition since 1998 at an annual cost of approximately ~$6M, representing 0.01 of the company's $56B revenue last year. Intel's abrupt decision to cancel sponsorship of this beloved and venerable institution is baffling to students and educators the world over. Former STS finalists include inventor Ray Kurzweil and physicist Brian Greene.
Hippie Rule of Imposition #36:
When reality stubbornly refuses to conform to what you think it should be, simply ignore reality.
... then this cannot be any good. Time to terminate it. We really do not need more cretins with huge visions and zero understanding of how things actually work.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Microsoft has bought Intel? News to me....
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
An opportunity for Apple, Google or Microsoft to step forward...?
I know people don't like Microsoft around here, but this is a story about Intel. You'd think a person would at least get company right before going of on a screed, but apparently not.
Is MS Intel's new initials? Intel's withdrawal is indeed puzzling. But former chairman Craig Barrett offers a possible explanation:
I'm not surprised. The fact that the vast majority of the winners were Asians and Whites doesn't fit the SJW agenda so the program had to be cancelled. Intel is more interested in hiring based on skin color rather than merit. Funny how Asians never seem to count as a minority as far as SJWs are concerned despite making up an even lesser amount of the US population than most other minorities.
$300 million? Oh, that's right, the executive who pushed Intel this direction is leaving now. Here's her announcement to leave: https://archive.is/egdkd Here's her announcement for the Diversity Program. https://archive.is/YYbrY Here's where that $300 million came from: https://archive.is/EIqxl
is it that bad seein a hot chick again? if i see a hot chick walkin down the hall i dont say "repost"
Really the title says it all.
High school promotes competition based on merit? Are you high?
I went to a £30,000/year private ("Public", in England) school... well, my parents paid £0/year because I got a scholarship after attending a prep school with class sizes of between 5-15 people. I took part in and won a few local science & other competitions. I'm not the brightest guy in the world, but I had the best teaching in the cushiest environment. Many people in my position would have done as well or better.
It did not escape my attention that pretty much everyone in my school was Anglo-Saxon or Far East Asian - yeah, there was the occasional son of an African politician or "businessman", and hell I was considered different because I'm Spanish and look like an Arab. Tell me, do you think this might affect results?
Yes, there's the fact that some cultures don't go in for competition as much as others. Asian SHUT UP AND WORK AND BE THE BEST. White YOU HAVE IT ALL ON A PLATTER, DO WHAT YOU CAN TO GET AHEAD, AND BE COOOOOL. Indian READ THE BOOK, GET IN YOUR PLACE. Black YOU'RE FAIRLY FUCKED, MY FRIEND... it's little to do with inherent ability and a lot to do with where your parents came from and your perceived position in society.
If you are going to troll, at least get the name right - Intel, not MS...
Actually I was thinking the same thing. If anything he is anti-science. Just a self-promoting flim flam artist.
Intel has been sponsoring the competition since 1998 at an annual cost of approximately ~$6M, representing 0.01 of the company's $56B revenue last year
If we're going to be on a website where people presumably understand basic math, can we at least use the relevant number? Revenue is not money that a company can use freely......most of it goes to paying for supplies, paying employees, etc.
A more relevant number is profit, that tells you how much money a company has after paying the bills. Another interesting number might be the advertising budget, since that's kind of what Intel is doing there.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
What a ridiculously stupid thing to say.
It's not a troll if it's true.
That's Space Nutter Law Zero.
The gender distribution was getting more and more female, so that's probably not why. One year, Natalie Portman was a winner.
Hot grits!!
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
the diversity funds. $300 million in feel good money. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01...
For all you know, when Kurzweil was a finalist in 1965, he was very, very different from today, some 50 years later.
I believe his STS entry was a computer program that composed music or something along those lines.
Besides if you're doing ad hominem attacks, given the popularity of Natalie Portman (another STS finalist) on /., wouldn't that cancel out Kurzweil?
STS has had lots of girls as contestants (since it's largely under 18s entering, I think you're safe in saying boys and girls).. In early ones, the winners were identified as "Top Boy" and "Top Girl" and they probably had equal numbers of finalists.
“It’s such a premier event in terms of young people and technology,” Mr. Barrett said. “But they appear to be more interested in applied things, like” Maker Faire, an all-ages event that showcases homemade engineering projects.
I see everyone jumping on the diversity bandwagon as an explanation, but I'm guessing one of the reasons they're not supporting this anymore is that it doesn't fit with their business model anymore. To a layman, technology is more about apps and social media now than the solid state electronics, physics and chemistry needed to power it. Of course, no one thinks about the fact that these fundamentals will have to keep advancing if we want cheaper, faster, smaller computers and phones to run those apps on. This is a pretty clear signal that Intel is an engineering company, not a science company.
Corporate basic research is pretty much dead now unfortunately -- Bell Labs is a tiny sliver of what it was, HP is almost entirely product-focused now, and who knows what's going on with IBM. Things like this, plus the fact that scientists are entering a shrinking market and treated badly, are only going to serve to reduce the number of students interested in science. US science students are seeing a lot of the same things IT workers are seeing now -- foreign students willing to work for any wage just to get the opportunity to study here, the slow demise of permanent solid employment, and a general lack of interest by the public.
It's going to take something like the Chinese colonizing Mars and extracting all its natural resources before a Soviet-style space race shocks the US out of its disinterest in science. This was one of the only good things to come out of the Cold War -- look how many state university systems were built up in the 60s and 70s and how much research got funded without griping about the cost.
After the Gnome Foundation said they were out of money, it was revealed that they had blown a huge chunk of the budget on "women's outreach" instead of developing software. The top dog (Karen Sandler) departed soon after.
Will companies ever get savvy enough to detect these ideologues before it's too late, or will they do a lot more damage in the future? We've all seen what's happened at Reddit . . .
Except most of the winners were not white males. If you consider Jews a minority, then nearly all of the winners have been either minority or female.
H1B's are cheaper and can be made to work 60-80 hour weeks for 40K or 50K bay area.
H1B's are cheaper and can be made to work 60-80 hour weeks for 40K or 50K bay area.
This. How are they going to make the case for importing foreigners if they keep finding talent here at home?
Remember that $125M capital fund to invest in women and unrepresented minorities? That money needs to come from somewhere, and you better believe it wont be from the investors pockets.
Why has it taken 18 MONTHS to start looking for another sponsor?
To Copy from One is Plagiarism; To Copy from Many is Research.
Best post on here. Ray Kurzweil is a fucking idiot.
SJW's don't count jews and asians as minorities, only blacks and some hispanics (not the rich or successful ones). The second your race or religion begins to succeed, then SJW's can't use you as an example of evil white male oppression, and so you're not a minority anymore.
So, what you're saying is, Intel hates complete male genitalia.
Couldn't Intel have added a "Poetry Slam" category or something and gave the award to a black kid? Then when President Obama visits the winners everyone can feel good and go home happy!
Westinghouse^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HIntel^H^H^H^H^HGeeks Of The World Science Talent Search
Where do I send my contribution?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Your parents emphasize education, as do East Asian parents. Studies show family emphasis on education outweighs any other factor.
The Left and Right argue about funding levels, and what goes where, but both ignore this elephant in the room.
You would have done well going to a terrible school, as would East Asian kids. Kids from families that don't care won't do very much better in an awesome school. The link with money per pupil, class size, and so on is gossamer compared to family emphasis on scholastics. These are red herring talking points.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
None of the links you posted shows a causal link between Intel's Diversity Initiatives and ending support for the science fair.
Do you actually believe Intel could not afford $306M for both programs?
TFA itself quotes the reason Intel dropped the funding. Intel wants to focus on more "applied" programs...
But don't let the facts get in the way of a good hate-filled post.
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
The fantasy is you're trying to connect two distinct things, with nothing more than conjecture and speculation.
As an INTC shareholder, I'd prefer if they focus on maximizing shareholder return. Science fairs aren't profitable.
See subject: Most U.S. Citizens have benefitted by economies of scale in computers (PC's primarily, from which smartphone toys even get their coding done) & them becoming easily affordable by most!
Thus, "the common man" has access to the tools needed to create software...
(Much easier & readily available access @ HOME no less, right off the bat, vs. full-blown electronics labs with HIGHER END componentry + toolsets for it).
APK
P.S.=> That's my take on your statement - do consider it... apk
*sigh*
It's not a silly victim fantasy when it's happened to you before. I had thought I was done being judged by my gender and skin color when I left college and got out on my own.
Consider yourself lucky it hasn't happened to you. I can appreciate the problem that CEOs and other leaders disproportionately have a similar skin color the same legal gender I do. That does not help me when unemployment benefits run out and I find myself in a soup line. That does not help pay my rent. That does not give me an automatic pay raise. (Please don't post that absurd figure from 30 years ago that does not control for things like level of education. It turns out that women who are college graduates make about 2% less if hired by a man and 3% less if hired by a woman. I can also appreciate the problem that women who don't graduate college don't go into careers like construction or HVAC, and that's where you see your 25% pay gap. Unfortunately I don't know what to say about that problem, but it seems nobody but us misogynerds even recognizes it.)
I can appreciate that tech has a diversity problem. I'm doing my part and lucky to consistently find and help capable women who are interested in more technical roles. What I can't help are women who believe programming comes naturally to people with an M stamped on their birth certificate or that programming just isn't something a woman should do. I've tried arguing the point with them, but that only gets me labeled an asshole.
I am also sick of people in non-technical roles who are clearly misogynists who get a free pass in all of this. I am sick of men who come to me for shit I am not even remotely responsible for when a female co-worker in their own fucking department could help them better. I am told that I should feel "flattered" because I am so "respected," but it's clearly the "Can I talk to a man?" phenomenon. So many times it's questions that any of the line workers could answer, probably more insightfully or accurately, but no, he just needs to talk to a man.
Now here comes the Narrative. Not only does tech have a diversity problem, but it's the fault of geeks themselves, not high school counselors, not college advisers, not HR departments and non-technical managers. Let's ignore the subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle racism and sexism we see out of business types. Programming is actually easy, doesn't even require knowledge of maths, and it's just us misogynerds making everything too technical to keep women out. Now I have to be on the defensive. I have had more than one woman come to me to "learn programming" in order to intentionally fail and accuse me of being sexist. (Actually I don't know if it was intentional every time, but "u sexist! world's frist programmer was a woman!" has been made too much of an easy excuse for women who just can't program. I can tell a guy who will just never be able to program flat out to pound sand, no problem. Can't tell a woman that. But there's a solution here. When I can point to a woman I've successfully mentored into a more technical role, then I can tell a woman who will never be able to program to pound sand. See, diversity is good for many reasons. I'm just not sure that these "diversity initiatives" and labeling an entire demographic misogynerds is the way to achieve it.)
This is all quite disheartening. If TPTB actually wanted more women in tech, they would be doing things to make tech attractive, not just to women, but to everyone (e.g. cut the H1B nonsense out, let wages rise if tech workers are really in demand, require overtime be compensated, allow more work from home, etc).
tl;dr Maybe it's a win for diversity for diversity's sake, but I will probably be leaving tech for good very soon now. I do not need to be judged by my skin color and gender on paper and stereotyped as a racist and sexist because I do things with computers most people don't even try to understand. I would rather flip burgers.
The Left and Right argue about funding levels, and what goes where, but both ignore this elephant in the room.
Funny, all I hear from the "Right" is how funding level doesn't really matter, and getting families involved in the education process would fix things.
Maybe you need to reconsider who you trust to tell you what other people are saying.
Well said.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Craig Barrett was a big proponent of education and was the CEO when Intel submitted its bid to take over sponsor the Science Talent Search. Now that he's out of the picture, the new folks in charge probably just lost interest.
Jews are the only minority that can occupy two spots on the organizational ladder of "oppression", bot the bottom rung as "most oppressed" as well as the top rung "publicly make jokes and articles about running the media and influencing politics." As various SJWs argue over which of them is more oppressed than the next, Jews take an entirely different stance, proving that the ladder is in fact a wheel that we are simply viewing in 2D.
http://i.cubeupload.com/T6cyLu.png
Intel just spent $300 million on a "diversity drive". But $6m for a race-and-gender-neutral science talent search was too much for them.
Of course, there's a radical subset of the population who hates that I point this out.
"it's little to do with inherent ability and a lot to do with where your parents came from and your perceived position in society."
If you had the ability to justify a scholarship like that, you should know that you're just voicing your own pseudoreligion as truth.
Maybe you were the quota.
So, instead of spending money on graphene or any material to substitute silicone since it has pretty much reached its limits and thus pave the way towards a gigantic technological leap for Humanity that would affect every single part of society and industry,
they'd rather suspend a program for developing and motivating great future minds, and waste money on social justice BS mainly driven by Twitter and Tumblr basement dwellers who haven't seen the world nor read a scientific book in their lives.
That's just great. Maybe AMD can finally wise up and take this opportunity as quickly as possible to get on even level with Intel with any hope, and force a competitive conflict that has been lacking in the CPU segment for quite some time.
Oh my dear no this isn't the USofA and there was certainly no such thing as a Spanish quota. I got my scholarship because my quantitative performance in the various academic scholarship exams was 4th from the top that year, and the top I-can't-remember-how-many places got academic scholarships. There were also music scholarships and a fund for the offspring of clergy - since this was all privately funded, of course any wealthy body was welcome to pay toward anybody's fees for whatever reason they pleased. But there was no fund which measured on the basis of colour or country of origin.
Perhaps you're not following my argument, though. As you advance your years of compulsory schooling, performance is a lot to do with where your parents came from and your perceived position in society: if your parents can pay for good education AND your culture (which starts at home) pushes the appropriate ethos, you will perform better. So, ignoring both racists and political correctness, black people perform worse both because they're typically from poorer backgrounds AND because well Bill Cosby was *unusual* in pushing the right message to black youth but then look what it turned out he was doing... but it has nothing to do with inherent (lack of) ability based on race.
to not work for one of these giant corporations. These places are up to their collective asses in political correctness and "diversity". Policies that are seriously diluting their talent pool. When you abandon traditional hiring practices of picking the best person for the job and instead pick a certain quota from group A and a certain quota from group B it is bound to happen.
It's no wonder that the real talent is working for small companies or going independent or just starting their own company.
On the other hand, if you are looking to work for an employer with tons of HR drones and enough middle management glut to stuff the Hoover dam then by all means step up to a career in big corporate America.
6 million dollars? And it doesn't generate profit? CUT! I don't care if we make more on interest from the $56 Billion in revenue we made last year in a second than the 6 million, if its a loss then we chop. That's what MBA's do. We look for rolls of toilet paper, identify that they have two sides, and then insist that both sides get used before disposal, representing a 50% cost savings. When MBA's start running things, we cut and cut and cut and save and save and save till there are only MBA's left, to retire with a golden parachute, after which we wind down the company.
I don't think you're allowed to criticise Kurzweil here. The argument that someone can have produced excelent software, but be an idiot in every other imaginable way, does not compute in the slashdot binary hive mind.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
.01 of 56 billion is $560 million.
How did this not get noticed?