If you mean it wouldn't be a bad thing to see why there is gender imbalance in CS then sure it might be an interesting question. Of course you have to wonder why the interest is for CS or more generally "why are women under-represented in desirable field X" and rarely "why are women under-represented in undesirable field Y?" or "why are men under-represented in..." etc. etc. But I think the first question to ask would be is there a demonstrable harm to there not being a 50-50 distribution of males and females in all occupations?
If we could get an answer with some hard facts and logical rational analysis to that question, and assuming the answer wasn't NO, then we might ask in which fields this is a problem and why?
I have to say that in my time I've met more than a few really competent women that would be very offended at the idea that they got where they are because a) they needed special help and b) they got the special help.
The boys/girls performance thing in schools shouldn't be that hard to figure out - if there was the will - because the situation is just about exactly the reverse of what it was 40 years ago when boys filled the honour rolls, got the scholarships and 3 of them went on to university for every two girls. Something changed in the last 40 years and I really seriously doubt that it is anything fundamental to the boys (or girls for that matter) themselves that changed. Something external changed and had a profound impact. The obvious candidate for inspection would be the school system itself.
Yes the Dean of Harvard (wasn't it the President?)... run out of town on a rail from the very last place one should be punished for having controversial views. I agree with you - one of the really big problems is that any attempt to draw attention to the problem is met with dogma and personal attacks. That fact alone ought to point the way to the source of the trouble.
I've drawn the logical conclusion from your prior comments. If you don't like that then that's your problem - claiming straw men is a pretty obvious tactic. The school system has utterly failed boys and yet we still hear how it is girls that need the special help - that and your comments are what is "Utter horseshit".
Well first I think the idea that there should be equal numbers of each sex in every single occupation is a huge assumption with no real basis in anything other than a politically correct idea that if things aren't that way then that is de facto proof of systemic discrimination. That really is a very bizarre notion. The second thing would be the notion that if it were proof of systemic discrimination then it is women who are the victims. The third thing would be that even if you assume past discrimination against women then "fixing" this by punishing boys who had nothing to do with it is wrong - it is the very essence of bigotry.
Does it bother you at all that boys are now doing worse than girls in public/high school in virtually every area - this wasn't the case a generation or so ago. Does it bother you at all that there are 3 women entering university for every 2 men? Again this wasn't the case a generation or so ago. Want a cite? Sorry don't have one handy but it isn't hard to find a wealth of evidence with Google.
At first I found your initial claim, that ignoring someone couldn't possible harm them, kind of mind boggling. But then I read the rest of your perfectly politically correct piece of propaganda and it made perfect sense. You have absorbed so much misandry that you are completely disconnected from reality. So there is really no point trying to communicate with you. In signing off I will say that in my first CS degree, which was quite a long time ago now, we were taught about all the people you mention and nobody gave a rat's ass about what their sex or sexuality was, the only concern was their contributions. Try not to hate so much, have a Merry Christmas and a life. Bye.
If you want to ask questions with specific cultural events you are going to have to go outside the USA - not all of us live there.
In this case, someone other then you is being helped out. Cry me a river.
Ummm, I never said I was asking to be helped out. Nothing in what I said implied that. How interesting that you try and make this about me instead of the issue.
I am interested in young boys being abandoned by the public school systems as they rush to "help" girls long after it became clear that boys were the ones who needed some help in the school system. I'm sorry you find the idea of boys and girls being treated equally, with no favouritism for either, so unpalatable. I'm sorry that more generations of boys will be left behind because men (or women) like you think that having a Y chromosome means paying for the (supposed) long ago sins of others who (supposedly) also happened to have a Y chromosome. I'm sorry that you seem to believe that the way to help one group of human beings is to punish or disadvantage another group of human beings. And I'm sorry I've wasted my time on you.
Because gender imbalance in a field is damaging to that field. Computing in general, and Computer Science in particular has suffered enormously because of rampant gender bias.
Uh huh... why we would have resolved the question of P==NP by now if only there had been better gender balance. What twaddle.
I would not be surprised if there were.
In other words you don't know. Well there aren't in any school I know of - but go ahead and provide some examples.
Either way, even in nursing, the gender imbalance is nowhere near that of CS.
Well I've spent time in both hospitals and CS departments and my experience is that as a proportion there are significantly more women in CS than there are men in nursing.
Women who might have been pigeon-holed into nursing might discover their talents in another field, thus increasing demand for male nurses.
Except there won't be any male nurses to fill that demand since they won't have been encrouaged to see that as an option. Oh wait... I see... a generation or so later the number of male nurses will fill the gap. So let's fix things for girls now, with the same special programs and encouragements of the last two or three decades, continue to ignore boys for the next generation or two and then things will even out? What amazing misandry.
Mmmmm most of the time Java is fine even for embedded devices (which is usually used as a synonym for "limited resources platform") but sometimes it isn't. Every once in a while I do need to use JNI but it is rare. And I can imagine JNI not being adequate in rare cases, because it is a relatively high overhead mechanism, so you might have to write most of an app in C or asm... that's why I also stay capable in both C and asm.:)
Right, because the way to decide if something is or isn't doing the job is to look at hold long it has been around and not at what it actually does or doesn't do.
My thought on this is "How is this ever going to work?" I mean I have to reconfigure my home routers about once a year. That means that, along with all the other obstacles like wired access only for administration, an attacker is going to have to monitor my router 24/7/365 in the hope of compromising it sometime during the next year... doesn't seem likely.
My solution to that general problem is to have two routers - hey they are dirt cheap - there is the one I use and the one everyone else uses. My machines are all behind my router and nobody else has access to that.
No people's complaint about there being too much drama is because good science fiction has a plot and you watch as the characters react to that plot.
I don't know where you get your information to make your huge unsubstantiated assertions but let me refer you back to what I originally said - most of the comments on Episode World were that there was too much drama and not enough shooting (of aliens) - specifically they didn't want human interaction they wanted mindless shoot-ups.
You "tend to skip the Earth stories because they don't add any depth to the characters" - interesting that you know what they do or don't do when you haven't seen them. Let's see - one episode exploring the failure of the commander's marriage and how he is dealing with it, another episode exploring Rush's feelings about his wife, how he behaved while she was dying etc., another episode where we find one of the major characters is a brainwashed spy... yeah nothing important there.
most of the characters were so flawed I'd doubt any of them would have achieved their positions let alone be good enough to send off world
You obviously haven't spent much time around really smart people - I mean the real outliers in intelligence and ability - because it isn't at all unusual for them to also be dysfunctional in many ways. But if you want the smartest guy there is in some field you accept his deficits as well.
Anyhow I'll waste no more time on this so have the last word if you like. Merry Christmas!
Well gee, since I watched the episodes I'm pretty sure I know how much "drama" was in there. I think the show was a reflection of what normal life, with all its "drama", would be like when put into that sort of high pressure fish-bowl. Maybe you just have an abnormally dull life and so can't relate to that?:)
My point was that it actually was more adult with more believable and well developed characters, and that this is so regardless of your apparent belief that it was an illusion.
Just because there was a shift in tone away from episodic plots with a bit of humour and action, does not make the show more adult nor does it make the characters deeper.
Of course not. The show was simply more adult and the characters deeper because the show was written to be more adult and the characters were better developed. It had nothing to do with "tone", "episodic plots" etc. - whatever gave you that idea?
He said not formulaic enough, not too formulaic. And sometimes "This show was too creative for the plebes with their beer-swilling and their NASCAR to get!" is the actual explanation. Except it wasn't beer swilling and NASCAR it was juvenile basement dwellers, literal and/or figurative, looking for BEMs being killed and foes miraculously being beaten, all without any of the messy character development stuff.
I didn't think it was trying to be BSG - seemed like a very unique flavor all its own. But in a way I'm glad it's going - I'm sick and tired of 10 or 11 episodes then a 4 month break, then 10 or 11 episodes then a few more months break. To really enjoy a show you have to have some sort of emotional tie in to the characters and the situations and this practice of just enough to get interesting and then stopping just doesn't work for me - it was the single biggest problem wit BSG for me as well.
With the passing of SGU there isn't much left on TV that I want to watch outside of Discovery Channel, History Channel type stuff and movies. House? Should have stopped when he entered the asylum. Sanctuary? OMG *retch*. Fringe? Mind boggling that Fringe still goes on and SGU is cancelled. Heroes? Justifiably cancelled. Supernatural? Well it's a zombie so I guess it's kind of fitting. Smallville... there should have been a global green Kryptonite shower a few years ago. Big Bang Theory - this was hilarious but just isn't as good as it used to be. Dexter and Rescue Me were kind of interesting but only because I'd never seen them and then I did marathon viewing of all the episodes over a few days... can't imagine maintaining any interest seeing them as TV shows.
I agree that SGU was more adult. It had better acting, 3 dimensional characters and plots that weren't totally linear. That's why the ratings were so bad - if it is any guide take a look at the comments on Episode World... almost all complaints were that there wasn't enough shooting and there was too much "soap opera" and "drama" (I guess that's the term for anything involving emotions). The real problem is that most of the SF audience is juvenile - and I don't mean physically.
Yes it had some problems - most shows have growing pains. But I think it was the best of all the SG series. The people were more believable as real people. There was none of the virtual invincibility displayed by the characters of other SG franchises every time some technological problem was faced.
For example compare Rodney McKay to Nicholas Rush. MacKay was completely two dimensional - I think the actor playing MacKay did a great job with what he was given but the character was ridiculous. Rush was more believable as a human being, had motives that weren't completely transparent, showed a bit of the dark side of human nature etc. Or compare Rush to Carter on SG1... same thing, Rush is far more interesting and believable.
Remember the scene where Rush has been abandoned and regains conciousness to look up at the alien night sky, all alone half way across the universe. Great scene - it wasn't hard to imagine how you would have felt in his place. Yes I wasn't impressed when I found he had gotten off the planet and how but I can't think of anything as good as that scene in any of the other SG franchises. Given a bit more time to mature it could have been a great show. Oh well - RIP SGU.
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and what about systemic roadblocks to men in education?
If you mean it wouldn't be a bad thing to see why there is gender imbalance in CS then sure it might be an interesting question. Of course you have to wonder why the interest is for CS or more generally "why are women under-represented in desirable field X" and rarely "why are women under-represented in undesirable field Y?" or "why are men under-represented in ..." etc. etc. But I think the first question to ask would be is there a demonstrable harm to there not being a 50-50 distribution of males and females in all occupations?
If we could get an answer with some hard facts and logical rational analysis to that question, and assuming the answer wasn't NO, then we might ask in which fields this is a problem and why?
I have to say that in my time I've met more than a few really competent women that would be very offended at the idea that they got where they are because a) they needed special help and b) they got the special help.
The boys/girls performance thing in schools shouldn't be that hard to figure out - if there was the will - because the situation is just about exactly the reverse of what it was 40 years ago when boys filled the honour rolls, got the scholarships and 3 of them went on to university for every two girls. Something changed in the last 40 years and I really seriously doubt that it is anything fundamental to the boys (or girls for that matter) themselves that changed. Something external changed and had a profound impact. The obvious candidate for inspection would be the school system itself.
Yes the Dean of Harvard (wasn't it the President?)... run out of town on a rail from the very last place one should be punished for having controversial views. I agree with you - one of the really big problems is that any attempt to draw attention to the problem is met with dogma and personal attacks. That fact alone ought to point the way to the source of the trouble.
And when all else fails you make a simple ad hominem attack. How totally predictable. Have a life.
I've drawn the logical conclusion from your prior comments. If you don't like that then that's your problem - claiming straw men is a pretty obvious tactic. The school system has utterly failed boys and yet we still hear how it is girls that need the special help - that and your comments are what is "Utter horseshit".
Well first I think the idea that there should be equal numbers of each sex in every single occupation is a huge assumption with no real basis in anything other than a politically correct idea that if things aren't that way then that is de facto proof of systemic discrimination. That really is a very bizarre notion. The second thing would be the notion that if it were proof of systemic discrimination then it is women who are the victims. The third thing would be that even if you assume past discrimination against women then "fixing" this by punishing boys who had nothing to do with it is wrong - it is the very essence of bigotry.
Does it bother you at all that boys are now doing worse than girls in public/high school in virtually every area - this wasn't the case a generation or so ago. Does it bother you at all that there are 3 women entering university for every 2 men? Again this wasn't the case a generation or so ago. Want a cite? Sorry don't have one handy but it isn't hard to find a wealth of evidence with Google.
At first I found your initial claim, that ignoring someone couldn't possible harm them, kind of mind boggling. But then I read the rest of your perfectly politically correct piece of propaganda and it made perfect sense. You have absorbed so much misandry that you are completely disconnected from reality. So there is really no point trying to communicate with you. In signing off I will say that in my first CS degree, which was quite a long time ago now, we were taught about all the people you mention and nobody gave a rat's ass about what their sex or sexuality was, the only concern was their contributions. Try not to hate so much, have a Merry Christmas and a life. Bye.
If you want to ask questions with specific cultural events you are going to have to go outside the USA - not all of us live there.
Ummm, I never said I was asking to be helped out. Nothing in what I said implied that. How interesting that you try and make this about me instead of the issue.
I am interested in young boys being abandoned by the public school systems as they rush to "help" girls long after it became clear that boys were the ones who needed some help in the school system. I'm sorry you find the idea of boys and girls being treated equally, with no favouritism for either, so unpalatable. I'm sorry that more generations of boys will be left behind because men (or women) like you think that having a Y chromosome means paying for the (supposed) long ago sins of others who (supposedly) also happened to have a Y chromosome. I'm sorry that you seem to believe that the way to help one group of human beings is to punish or disadvantage another group of human beings. And I'm sorry I've wasted my time on you.
Uh huh... why we would have resolved the question of P==NP by now if only there had been better gender balance. What twaddle.
In other words you don't know. Well there aren't in any school I know of - but go ahead and provide some examples.
Well I've spent time in both hospitals and CS departments and my experience is that as a proportion there are significantly more women in CS than there are men in nursing.
Except there won't be any male nurses to fill that demand since they won't have been encrouaged to see that as an option. Oh wait... I see... a generation or so later the number of male nurses will fill the gap. So let's fix things for girls now, with the same special programs and encouragements of the last two or three decades, continue to ignore boys for the next generation or two and then things will even out? What amazing misandry.
Mmmm I don't know... not screw over complete innocents because they resemble the people you're pissed at? Just a thought.
Mmmmm most of the time Java is fine even for embedded devices (which is usually used as a synonym for "limited resources platform") but sometimes it isn't. Every once in a while I do need to use JNI but it is rare. And I can imagine JNI not being adequate in rare cases, because it is a relatively high overhead mechanism, so you might have to write most of an app in C or asm... that's why I also stay capable in both C and asm. :)
Right, because the way to decide if something is or isn't doing the job is to look at hold long it has been around and not at what it actually does or doesn't do.
My thought on this is "How is this ever going to work?" I mean I have to reconfigure my home routers about once a year. That means that, along with all the other obstacles like wired access only for administration, an attacker is going to have to monitor my router 24/7/365 in the hope of compromising it sometime during the next year... doesn't seem likely.
My solution to that general problem is to have two routers - hey they are dirt cheap - there is the one I use and the one everyone else uses. My machines are all behind my router and nobody else has access to that.
Even assuming your assertions about history are true - and that's debatable - when did two wrongs become a right?
You are saying there are such programs? What high schools have these programs? None in my area.
Why is that even considered an important issue? Seriously. Are there also high school programs designed to up the ratio of males in nursing?
I don't know where you get your information to make your huge unsubstantiated assertions but let me refer you back to what I originally said - most of the comments on Episode World were that there was too much drama and not enough shooting (of aliens) - specifically they didn't want human interaction they wanted mindless shoot-ups.
You "tend to skip the Earth stories because they don't add any depth to the characters" - interesting that you know what they do or don't do when you haven't seen them. Let's see - one episode exploring the failure of the commander's marriage and how he is dealing with it, another episode exploring Rush's feelings about his wife, how he behaved while she was dying etc., another episode where we find one of the major characters is a brainwashed spy... yeah nothing important there.
You obviously haven't spent much time around really smart people - I mean the real outliers in intelligence and ability - because it isn't at all unusual for them to also be dysfunctional in many ways. But if you want the smartest guy there is in some field you accept his deficits as well.
Anyhow I'll waste no more time on this so have the last word if you like.
Merry Christmas!
Well gee, since I watched the episodes I'm pretty sure I know how much "drama" was in there. I think the show was a reflection of what normal life, with all its "drama", would be like when put into that sort of high pressure fish-bowl. Maybe you just have an abnormally dull life and so can't relate to that? :)
My point was that it actually was more adult with more believable and well developed characters, and that this is so regardless of your apparent belief that it was an illusion.
Ok Alex I'll take "worse" for $200.
Of course not. The show was simply more adult and the characters deeper because the show was written to be more adult and the characters were better developed. It had nothing to do with "tone", "episodic plots" etc. - whatever gave you that idea?
ok I guess you missed my point. That's ok.
He said not formulaic enough, not too formulaic. And sometimes "This show was too creative for the plebes with their beer-swilling and their NASCAR to get!" is the actual explanation. Except it wasn't beer swilling and NASCAR it was juvenile basement dwellers, literal and/or figurative, looking for BEMs being killed and foes miraculously being beaten, all without any of the messy character development stuff.
I didn't think it was trying to be BSG - seemed like a very unique flavor all its own. But in a way I'm glad it's going - I'm sick and tired of 10 or 11 episodes then a 4 month break, then 10 or 11 episodes then a few more months break. To really enjoy a show you have to have some sort of emotional tie in to the characters and the situations and this practice of just enough to get interesting and then stopping just doesn't work for me - it was the single biggest problem wit BSG for me as well.
With the passing of SGU there isn't much left on TV that I want to watch outside of Discovery Channel, History Channel type stuff and movies. House? Should have stopped when he entered the asylum. Sanctuary? OMG *retch*. Fringe? Mind boggling that Fringe still goes on and SGU is cancelled. Heroes? Justifiably cancelled. Supernatural? Well it's a zombie so I guess it's kind of fitting. Smallville... there should have been a global green Kryptonite shower a few years ago. Big Bang Theory - this was hilarious but just isn't as good as it used to be. Dexter and Rescue Me were kind of interesting but only because I'd never seen them and then I did marathon viewing of all the episodes over a few days... can't imagine maintaining any interest seeing them as TV shows.
Nope, TV is dead for me.
I agree that SGU was more adult. It had better acting, 3 dimensional characters and plots that weren't totally linear. That's why the ratings were so bad - if it is any guide take a look at the comments on Episode World... almost all complaints were that there wasn't enough shooting and there was too much "soap opera" and "drama" (I guess that's the term for anything involving emotions). The real problem is that most of the SF audience is juvenile - and I don't mean physically.
Yes it had some problems - most shows have growing pains. But I think it was the best of all the SG series. The people were more believable as real people. There was none of the virtual invincibility displayed by the characters of other SG franchises every time some technological problem was faced.
For example compare Rodney McKay to Nicholas Rush. MacKay was completely two dimensional - I think the actor playing MacKay did a great job with what he was given but the character was ridiculous. Rush was more believable as a human being, had motives that weren't completely transparent, showed a bit of the dark side of human nature etc. Or compare Rush to Carter on SG1... same thing, Rush is far more interesting and believable.
Remember the scene where Rush has been abandoned and regains conciousness to look up at the alien night sky, all alone half way across the universe. Great scene - it wasn't hard to imagine how you would have felt in his place. Yes I wasn't impressed when I found he had gotten off the planet and how but I can't think of anything as good as that scene in any of the other SG franchises. Given a bit more time to mature it could have been a great show. Oh well - RIP SGU.