There's no excuse for this, but as others have said there's a bit more to it. Clarkson may or may not be a primadonna (vs just being a knob, as May referred to him several times), but given the stress he was under and the alcohol, him blowing his top over something small isn't a huge surprise. He certainly deserved to be disciplined, but I'm not sure sacking him outright was the best decision. One thing I am certain of is that the BBC will come to regret it.
You always sack over violence. If JC is smart he'd pay off that producer big-time not press charges; a couple million quid at least. All indications on JC are otherwise, however; he'll lose a lot more in future income with a GBH conviction than a couple million quid.
That problem is solved by providing paternity leave. It the wave of the future, and men should be pushing for it so they can spend some time with their newborn kids as well.
I used to think that too but I changed my mind. There's no point in doing that in the current marriage climate; not enough couples are together so paternity leave ends up useless to the unattached father and thus he may not take it anyway, making him even more valuable than women and attached men.
Unintended consequence: if only 2% of men are unattached fathers[1], they would be selected for the most by employers. This preference would lead to more men forfeiting paternity leave, and this situation would continue in a vicious cycle until *all* men forfeit their paternity leave. The end result would be an even greater resistance to hiring young women.[2] Another unintended consequence is that this situation makes being an unattached father even more desirable than it is now. There are precious few benefits to a man in marriage right now, so adding more points to the "don't get married" side is going to make the current decline in birth rates accelerate to off-a-cliff levels.
[1]The figure is a lot higher than this, IIRC.
[2]Older women have probably already had all the kids they want to and thus have a lower risk of taking maternity leave.
Then they shouldn't get the tax relaxations that businesses get.
Income to sole proprietorships is treated as individual income, no different than any working stiff, for tax purposes. They pay individual income tax rates.
Correct me if I am wrong, but do they not get to deduct the cost of running the business from taxable income? So, they receive $100k a year in revenue from business operations, and it costs $20k a year for their car (used for business), then they only pay tax on the $80k.
I dunno about you, but my car, that I use exclusively in getting a salary, is not tax deductible. Hence, I do not feel that it is wrong to say that sole proprietorships get tax breaks that I do not get, even though I have to expend costs in bringing in revenue.
This road does not end in a good place. For anyone of any beliefs, or even of no beliefs.
While I do broadly agree with you, I have to emphasise that when you are a business, and get all the tax breaks for your costs in running that business, then you should also deal with all the crap (no exclusivity in who buys your product/service) that comes with those advantages.
As to your muslim example, if he operates a business selling hardware he will experience legal trouble if he refuses to deal with people who want to buy hardware for use in a non-halaal butchery.
The other side of the coin, however, is work-to-order. Should a muslim/xtian/jew photographer experience legal troubles in advertising "I choose what work I will take on"?
I knew a guy with a Masters in CS who loudly proclaimed optimizing was a pointless exercise.
These days it might just be for most use-cases. For example the "research" above show this - the time consumed in 1 million inefficient string concatenations is what... less than 5 minutes? If you only perform a few hundred string concats at a time the program's user won't even notice the delay. If, like most use cases, you only concat a few strings at a time (say, a few tens) the user *certainly* won't notice. Not that I agree with such inefficiencies[1], but I *do* see the "why optimise" PoV.
There are only two rules for optimisation:
1. Don't optimise.
2. (For experts only) Don't optimise yet!
[1]One of my tasks in my first year of employment was to take a TCP stack and port to a different micro. My second task was given when the code was going through tests - I had to speed it up by a factor of two. I understand optimisation, and the important thing that I understand is that I do not have to do it much anymore!
And this is why we should not teach CS101 in Java or Python. If they'd been forced to use C this whole experiment would have turned out differently.
Not at all. If you wrote your C in memory string handling as stupidly as they wrote the Python and Java you will still get worse performance in C (e.g. each iteration malloc a new string and then strcpy and strcat into it, and free the old string; compared to buffered file writes you'll lose). It's about failing to understand how to write efficient code, not about which language you chose.
Yeah, but at least then they'd have to actually *write the inefficient code out*, thereby learning why it is inefficient. With Java and Python the novice does not know about the inefficiency because it is hidden behind a "+" operator. This is why OP said to teach in C - you have to implement the concatenation yourself and in the process you learn how not to do it.
A sole proprietorship is a business, and I've known the owners of some whose business was essentially everything they owned. Their business is for all practical purposes their life. As the owner and often the sole employee, the decisions of that business are the decisions of that person; they are indistinguishable.
Then they shouldn't get the tax relaxations that businesses get. If they want to call themselves a business to get the advantages that come with being a business, then they must take the disadvantages as well. They don't get to choose which rules apply to them as a business and which don't because they are not a business.
If they call themselves a business then they most certainly are.
Nearly everyone in the world that can afford a iPhone, already has one
I've heard that for years, and Apple keeps breaking year-over-year volume records.
-jcr
Doesn't mean anything - "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent". The last ten years having been good for Apple is no indicator of the next ten years (or even the next ten months). The market may, after all, have been irrational for the last ten years.
Your experience suggests a good starting point for further research. Anyway, a few more questions if you do not mind them.
1. Why do you not miss the male privileges? Do those items you listed not matter to you, or do they not matter enough to make a big deal out of it (Pick your fights, that sort of thing).
2. Can you say anything about your general motivation and goals that you had prior to the changeover and post-change? Have your life goals changed significantly, or not at all, or something in between?
3. Any changes in habits? (Eating, sleeping, etc).
Like I said, this prof is a great deal more respected and a good deal more well-read in the field than the authors of the PNAS paper. You are also making the supposition that he doesn't know about that paper, but in fact in a recent paper he goes so far as to cite it.
You are pitting recent findings from a small, limited, non-blind and uncontrolled study against this professor AND his peers' decades of peer-reviewed, blind and controlled studies. It is way too soon to invoke as-yet-to-be-determined factors as an explanation over existing explanations that have been the results of decades of study and research.
The PNAS study shows one thing for certain - bias in this particular field did not lead to the female under-representation at the level we see in information technology fields. The PNAS study serves as a good control for future studies of this sort, but in no way does it actually present any conclusions due to the lack of a control itself.
Many of "problems" that are being highlighted by sociology studies are due to the current crop of unemployable sociologists not having sufficient training in critical reasoning and/or statistics.
What kind of injuries? Curious to know what would prevent you from doing any sort of exercise.
I've now got two prosthetic discs in my back; prior to the disc replacement I could not move head, arms, torso or legs without pain. I could not turn/twist my neck, wrists or torso. I could not not even take in huge breaths (increased the pressure in my chest and caused pain that made me pass out). Merely making a fist was painful.
And that was only two discs; someone else in the ward with me in hospital was there to get four discs replaced. Do not underestimate how even a small wound to the back prevents all your limbs from working.
Sure, there's the "loss of male privilege" (which I really don't miss),
Have you considered that you may not be missing the loss of male privilege because, on average, there wasn't that much to start with?
Yes yes, we have had our contentious discussions in the past but we tend to agree at least 50% of the time. Or maybe 25%. Well, sometimes:-), so I'm asking you to carefully step back and consider all the doors that were open to you before because you were male that are now closed to you because you are female. You are in a unique position to actually list those privileges (that you actually don't miss or care about) that you, personally, had before that you personally, do not have now.
He didn't say that his team was broken. He said it fails the test. Failing the test is no indication of a broken team. What would be interesting is comparing the performance of projects that pass the test and projects that fail the test.
I have yet to meet a woman who doesn't love to talk about relationships with other women.
Shame. Sound like you know only pretty boring women.
And while men may not talk about relationships per se, we do talk about women. A lot.
And men too!
Those conversations have their place, but if you spend most of your time on either of them it's dull, dull, dull.
In fact, there's a convincing argument to be made that everything we do is in the pursuit of securing or keeping a mate,
If there is such an argument, I've not seen it.
You need to read more research papers by real scientists and not sociology grads. Start with this - a talk given by a real scientist who did actual peer-reviewed double-blind controlled studies for decades. I'll take his conclusions over your skepticism; most ofwhat we do is driven by instincts honed by evolution over thousands of years. Those who did things differently didn't have any progeny and so their instincts aren't around anymore.
So, now you've seen the argument, peer-reviewed and backed by controlled studies, supported by the most respected academics in the field. You are not going to be able to say "I've not seen that argument before" when you see this argument again.
And at such a young, impressionable age... you think perhaps what they learn is the "accepted behavior" during their first 5 years of life might carry through for quite a while, and be hard to fix?
You seem to be implying that it is all learned. You know, experiments with male and female monkeys show the different genders preferring different activities on average. It is not all learned, it is/mostly/ (but not all) hardwired.
Here's a question: Would you enter such a discussion open to the idea that you are wrong? What if someone showed you concrete evidence of, say, widespread institutionalised misogyny - would you accept it?
Well, all the activists have yet to produce any evidence for me to accept - you can't very well ask me to accept that there is institutionalised misogyny without providing any evidence; after all, you are the one making the claim so you are the one who should be bringing the evidence.
The Bechdel test is far from perfect, but it's an interesting test to apply to movies that have no real reason not to pass it. It's supposed to make you think. It's supposed to make you question why not just women but lots of other groups often get stereotyped or sidelined in films, or why directors don't think that the more central characters can be female, or if they even considered it.
A simpler method - ask why women prefer those movies that fail - almost all of the chick-flicks fail that test, yet women are the biggest demographic interested in chick-flicks.
Actually fashion is very egalitarian, with many male and female designers, as well as models. Interior design is hardly devoid of either gender either.
What makes you think women don't like programming? Is it because there are so few women doing it? That sounds like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
What makes *you* think they all like it? *We* may think that they don't like it due in some part to occams razor - the simplest explanation that encompasses all available evidence is probably the correct one.
As far as I know, there are a lot more talented women trying to say there's a problem in tech
No, there aren't. There are a few brilliant females in tech but they aren't saying anything because they're too busy enjoying what they do. The ones I've seen saying that there is a problem in tech are those that have not displayed any technical ability. They are social science students, and *they* don't want to be in tech personally, they just feel that more women should be in tech (just not them, personally).
No one is asking whole populations to change. In particular, no one is asking self entitled while male programmers to stop programming, if that is indeed what they're so scared of that causes them to panic whenever the subject comes up.
To be honest, it's the "for" gang that have been getting more strident and abusive; I expect that this is because too many people are posting actual statistics and asking the activist camp to provide some sort of evidence for their assertions. I ask for evidence all the time and never get any, but the minute you do you get labelled as a misogynistic, scared, white male. I'm not even a white male, but it seems that asking for evidence is the ultimate insult to a certain group of people.
Free will is there of course. But free will is based upon past experiences as well, assuming that only free will is involved. However the balance has changed over time. Women used to be much better represented, today they're poorly represented. Of course some guys who are used to the status quo say "who gives a shit?" But the change in represention strongly indicates that there is some sociological effect going on here,
No, it doesn't indicate that at all - there are many explanations other than sociological ones. Why do you believe that the change in numbers MUST BE because of sexism?
Evidence of a change in numbers is only evidence of a change in numbers, it is not evidence of your explanation for the change.
The problem that isn't going to go away is that sociology isn't taught as a real science and usually doesn't do real science. In real science you don't get to look at the numbers and then manufacture a reason for them, you need evidence to support your explanation for the observation of the numbers. Sociology is doing it the wrong way around.
But they are being discouraged earlier than that sometimes. The parent who says good girls don't do technical stuff. The peer pressure from other classmates. And so forth. Girls used to be interested in this stuff, now it's a lot rarer, there's got to be a deeper reason than a statistical anomaly.
Okay, the numbers are different now than they used to be in the 80's. Why do you think that this MUST be due to sexism, frat-boy environment, etc? There is no evidence for any those things you believe in.
Slashdot Mirror
350 million people disagree with you. /shrug.
More than that believe you follow the wrong religion. Number of believers have nothing to do with anything.
There's no excuse for this, but as others have said there's a bit more to it. Clarkson may or may not be a primadonna (vs just being a knob, as May referred to him several times), but given the stress he was under and the alcohol, him blowing his top over something small isn't a huge surprise. He certainly deserved to be disciplined, but I'm not sure sacking him outright was the best decision. One thing I am certain of is that the BBC will come to regret it.
You always sack over violence. If JC is smart he'd pay off that producer big-time not press charges; a couple million quid at least. All indications on JC are otherwise, however; he'll lose a lot more in future income with a GBH conviction than a couple million quid.
That problem is solved by providing paternity leave. It the wave of the future, and men should be pushing for it so they can spend some time with their newborn kids as well.
I used to think that too but I changed my mind. There's no point in doing that in the current marriage climate; not enough couples are together so paternity leave ends up useless to the unattached father and thus he may not take it anyway, making him even more valuable than women and attached men.
Unintended consequence: if only 2% of men are unattached fathers[1], they would be selected for the most by employers. This preference would lead to more men forfeiting paternity leave, and this situation would continue in a vicious cycle until *all* men forfeit their paternity leave. The end result would be an even greater resistance to hiring young women.[2] Another unintended consequence is that this situation makes being an unattached father even more desirable than it is now. There are precious few benefits to a man in marriage right now, so adding more points to the "don't get married" side is going to make the current decline in birth rates accelerate to off-a-cliff levels.
[1]The figure is a lot higher than this, IIRC.
[2]Older women have probably already had all the kids they want to and thus have a lower risk of taking maternity leave.
Income to sole proprietorships is treated as individual income, no different than any working stiff, for tax purposes. They pay individual income tax rates.
Correct me if I am wrong, but do they not get to deduct the cost of running the business from taxable income? So, they receive $100k a year in revenue from business operations, and it costs $20k a year for their car (used for business), then they only pay tax on the $80k.
I dunno about you, but my car, that I use exclusively in getting a salary, is not tax deductible. Hence, I do not feel that it is wrong to say that sole proprietorships get tax breaks that I do not get, even though I have to expend costs in bringing in revenue.
This road does not end in a good place. For anyone of any beliefs, or even of no beliefs.
While I do broadly agree with you, I have to emphasise that when you are a business, and get all the tax breaks for your costs in running that business, then you should also deal with all the crap (no exclusivity in who buys your product/service) that comes with those advantages.
As to your muslim example, if he operates a business selling hardware he will experience legal trouble if he refuses to deal with people who want to buy hardware for use in a non-halaal butchery.
The other side of the coin, however, is work-to-order. Should a muslim/xtian/jew photographer experience legal troubles in advertising "I choose what work I will take on"?
I knew a guy with a Masters in CS who loudly proclaimed optimizing was a pointless exercise.
These days it might just be for most use-cases. For example the "research" above show this - the time consumed in 1 million inefficient string concatenations is what... less than 5 minutes? If you only perform a few hundred string concats at a time the program's user won't even notice the delay. If, like most use cases, you only concat a few strings at a time (say, a few tens) the user *certainly* won't notice. Not that I agree with such inefficiencies[1], but I *do* see the "why optimise" PoV.
There are only two rules for optimisation:
1. Don't optimise.
2. (For experts only) Don't optimise yet!
[1]One of my tasks in my first year of employment was to take a TCP stack and port to a different micro. My second task was given when the code was going through tests - I had to speed it up by a factor of two. I understand optimisation, and the important thing that I understand is that I do not have to do it much anymore!
And this is why we should not teach CS101 in Java or Python. If they'd been forced to use C this whole experiment would have turned out differently.
Not at all. If you wrote your C in memory string handling as stupidly as they wrote the Python and Java you will still get worse performance in C (e.g. each iteration malloc a new string and then strcpy and strcat into it, and free the old string; compared to buffered file writes you'll lose). It's about failing to understand how to write efficient code, not about which language you chose.
Yeah, but at least then they'd have to actually *write the inefficient code out*, thereby learning why it is inefficient. With Java and Python the novice does not know about the inefficiency because it is hidden behind a "+" operator. This is why OP said to teach in C - you have to implement the concatenation yourself and in the process you learn how not to do it.
A sole proprietorship is a business, and I've known the owners of some whose business was essentially everything they owned. Their business is for all practical purposes their life. As the owner and often the sole employee, the decisions of that business are the decisions of that person; they are indistinguishable.
Then they shouldn't get the tax relaxations that businesses get. If they want to call themselves a business to get the advantages that come with being a business, then they must take the disadvantages as well. They don't get to choose which rules apply to them as a business and which don't because they are not a business. If they call themselves a business then they most certainly are.
Nearly everyone in the world that can afford a iPhone, already has one
I've heard that for years, and Apple keeps breaking year-over-year volume records.
-jcr
Doesn't mean anything - "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent". The last ten years having been good for Apple is no indicator of the next ten years (or even the next ten months). The market may, after all, have been irrational for the last ten years.
Your experience suggests a good starting point for further research. Anyway, a few more questions if you do not mind them.
1. Why do you not miss the male privileges? Do those items you listed not matter to you, or do they not matter enough to make a big deal out of it (Pick your fights, that sort of thing).
2. Can you say anything about your general motivation and goals that you had prior to the changeover and post-change? Have your life goals changed significantly, or not at all, or something in between?
3. Any changes in habits? (Eating, sleeping, etc).
Like I said, this prof is a great deal more respected and a good deal more well-read in the field than the authors of the PNAS paper. You are also making the supposition that he doesn't know about that paper, but in fact in a recent paper he goes so far as to cite it.
You are pitting recent findings from a small, limited, non-blind and uncontrolled study against this professor AND his peers' decades of peer-reviewed, blind and controlled studies. It is way too soon to invoke as-yet-to-be-determined factors as an explanation over existing explanations that have been the results of decades of study and research.
The PNAS study shows one thing for certain - bias in this particular field did not lead to the female under-representation at the level we see in information technology fields. The PNAS study serves as a good control for future studies of this sort, but in no way does it actually present any conclusions due to the lack of a control itself.
Many of "problems" that are being highlighted by sociology studies are due to the current crop of unemployable sociologists not having sufficient training in critical reasoning and/or statistics.
What kind of injuries? Curious to know what would prevent you from doing any sort of exercise.
I've now got two prosthetic discs in my back; prior to the disc replacement I could not move head, arms, torso or legs without pain. I could not turn/twist my neck, wrists or torso. I could not not even take in huge breaths (increased the pressure in my chest and caused pain that made me pass out). Merely making a fist was painful.
And that was only two discs; someone else in the ward with me in hospital was there to get four discs replaced. Do not underestimate how even a small wound to the back prevents all your limbs from working.
No wonder dudes refuse to see sexism, if they refuse to even look for it.
I don't see unicorns either - doesn't mean I should waste my time looking for them.
Sure, there's the "loss of male privilege" (which I really don't miss),
Have you considered that you may not be missing the loss of male privilege because, on average, there wasn't that much to start with?
Yes yes, we have had our contentious discussions in the past but we tend to agree at least 50% of the time. Or maybe 25%. Well, sometimes :-), so I'm asking you to carefully step back and consider all the doors that were open to you before because you were male that are now closed to you because you are female. You are in a unique position to actually list those privileges (that you actually don't miss or care about) that you, personally, had before that you personally, do not have now.
Maybe you should fix your team, then.
He didn't say that his team was broken. He said it fails the test. Failing the test is no indication of a broken team. What would be interesting is comparing the performance of projects that pass the test and projects that fail the test.
I never said it was due to sexism, just sociological reasons rather than biological ones.
Well, do you have any evidence that it is due to $SOC rather than $BIO?
I have yet to meet a woman who doesn't love to talk about relationships with other women.
Shame. Sound like you know only pretty boring women.
And while men may not talk about relationships per se, we do talk about women. A lot.
And men too!
Those conversations have their place, but if you spend most of your time on either of them it's dull, dull, dull.
In fact, there's a convincing argument to be made that everything we do is in the pursuit of securing or keeping a mate,
If there is such an argument, I've not seen it.
You need to read more research papers by real scientists and not sociology grads. Start with this - a talk given by a real scientist who did actual peer-reviewed double-blind controlled studies for decades. I'll take his conclusions over your skepticism; most ofwhat we do is driven by instincts honed by evolution over thousands of years. Those who did things differently didn't have any progeny and so their instincts aren't around anymore.
So, now you've seen the argument, peer-reviewed and backed by controlled studies, supported by the most respected academics in the field. You are not going to be able to say "I've not seen that argument before" when you see this argument again.
And at such a young, impressionable age ... you think perhaps what they learn is the "accepted behavior" during their first 5 years of life might carry through for quite a while, and be hard to fix?
You seem to be implying that it is all learned. You know, experiments with male and female monkeys show the different genders preferring different activities on average. It is not all learned, it is /mostly/ (but not all) hardwired.
Here's a question: Would you enter such a discussion open to the idea that you are wrong? What if someone showed you concrete evidence of, say, widespread institutionalised misogyny - would you accept it?
Well, all the activists have yet to produce any evidence for me to accept - you can't very well ask me to accept that there is institutionalised misogyny without providing any evidence; after all, you are the one making the claim so you are the one who should be bringing the evidence.
It's not about "not talking about men/women at all," it's "having at least one conversation that isn't about men."
The point of the test is to say "are there women who exist outside of props for the men?"
How many movies fail the dude bechdel test? How many fail the regular one?
All of the chick flicks fail the regular one.
The Bechdel test is far from perfect, but it's an interesting test to apply to movies that have no real reason not to pass it. It's supposed to make you think. It's supposed to make you question why not just women but lots of other groups often get stereotyped or sidelined in films, or why directors don't think that the more central characters can be female, or if they even considered it.
A simpler method - ask why women prefer those movies that fail - almost all of the chick-flicks fail that test, yet women are the biggest demographic interested in chick-flicks.
Actually fashion is very egalitarian, with many male and female designers, as well as models. Interior design is hardly devoid of either gender either.
What makes you think women don't like programming? Is it because there are so few women doing it? That sounds like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
What makes *you* think they all like it? *We* may think that they don't like it due in some part to occams razor - the simplest explanation that encompasses all available evidence is probably the correct one.
As far as I know, there are a lot more talented women trying to say there's a problem in tech
No, there aren't. There are a few brilliant females in tech but they aren't saying anything because they're too busy enjoying what they do. The ones I've seen saying that there is a problem in tech are those that have not displayed any technical ability. They are social science students, and *they* don't want to be in tech personally, they just feel that more women should be in tech (just not them, personally).
No one is asking whole populations to change. In particular, no one is asking self entitled while male programmers to stop programming, if that is indeed what they're so scared of that causes them to panic whenever the subject comes up.
To be honest, it's the "for" gang that have been getting more strident and abusive; I expect that this is because too many people are posting actual statistics and asking the activist camp to provide some sort of evidence for their assertions. I ask for evidence all the time and never get any, but the minute you do you get labelled as a misogynistic, scared, white male. I'm not even a white male, but it seems that asking for evidence is the ultimate insult to a certain group of people.
Free will is there of course. But free will is based upon past experiences as well, assuming that only free will is involved. However the balance has changed over time. Women used to be much better represented, today they're poorly represented. Of course some guys who are used to the status quo say "who gives a shit?" But the change in represention strongly indicates that there is some sociological effect going on here,
No, it doesn't indicate that at all - there are many explanations other than sociological ones. Why do you believe that the change in numbers MUST BE because of sexism?
Evidence of a change in numbers is only evidence of a change in numbers, it is not evidence of your explanation for the change.
The problem that isn't going to go away is that sociology isn't taught as a real science and usually doesn't do real science. In real science you don't get to look at the numbers and then manufacture a reason for them, you need evidence to support your explanation for the observation of the numbers. Sociology is doing it the wrong way around.
But they are being discouraged earlier than that sometimes. The parent who says good girls don't do technical stuff. The peer pressure from other classmates. And so forth. Girls used to be interested in this stuff, now it's a lot rarer, there's got to be a deeper reason than a statistical anomaly.
Okay, the numbers are different now than they used to be in the 80's. Why do you think that this MUST be due to sexism, frat-boy environment, etc? There is no evidence for any those things you believe in.