It could be a technology demonstrator, with or without the backing of the miliitary. It's easy to imagine using the same technology to recover more precious materials from pirate ships and what else. Who knows, maybe even NASA would be interested in knowing something they can send to the bottom of the presumably liquid Europa.
No doubt the technology is intended to be highly reusable. Having written grant applications, the broader the application, the greater the chance of funding, secret or otherwise.
I can't help but wonder if they're using this search for her plane as a cover for a secret military operation like they did with the Titanic. Seems like those robots would cost a little more than your typical academic research grant would cover.
Not that it's a bad thing: the researchers get funding from the military to quietly carry out their secret missions and in exchange they get to spend some time doing what they actually want to do which is investigate this remarkable person's fate. If it hadn't been for such arrangements, it's unlikely we ever would have found the Titanic.
As a man I find the general tone of discussion on this thread offensive, both from an emotional standpoint and from a factual one; I can't believe the ignorance I'm seeing. False assertions about women's abilities which have never been founded and have been long settled by research brought up over and over again as if it's a fact that women are less capable engineers than men. It simply isn't true. It's never been true, and it's not likely to be true any time in the future.
I think if anyone is looking for a reason why internet access might discourage women from CS, they should simply read this thread!!!
I never was a fan of the humanities during my undergrad. I believed people should focus more on studies which lead them into lucrative careers, like engineering and computer science. I still believe that to a great extent. But witnessing the ignorance of many in those disciplines makes me wish that they had at least taken the time to study the history of their own frigging profession!!!
I completely agree! I can't believe that in 2012 men are expressing this level of ignorant sexism. Women have played a very important role in CS historically and continue to. But the attitudes towards them expressed by many of the people in this thread I think more than explains why they are reluctant to enter a profession dominated by such ignorance.
Exactly. Additionally, women often perform better academically in the kinds of tasks programming requires, and those that go into CS tend to excel. Programming was once dominated by women, actually, and those who doubt that a conspiracy drove them away should probably familiarize themselves with the history of the profession. There was certainly a power grab by men once the predominantly female programmers began to distinguish themselves as capable engineers.
Nursing was initially dominated by men due to the strenuous labor involved. It was the war that moved women into nursing when the men were off fighting. And they're still there. Historically, nursing is a perfect example of a profession where women successfully dominated a profession which was previously considered too difficult for them. Anyone who's worked in healthcare would understand exactly why that is.
I think it's easy to forget how recently there actually was a mass conspiracy to drive women out of computer science and replace them with men. At one point the majority of programmers were women. There were literally campaigns to attract men to computer science and discourage women as soon as people realized that it was a credible profession, and it wasn't too many decades ago. My parent's generation grew up during that time.
It's really sad how ignorant people are about history these days.
Where can I get hired to turn our crap like this and never have to produce on solid thing that can be measured against the real world?
Trick is, you can dig at the softness of the soft sciences all you want; but it's a knife-fight-in-a-telephone-booth to get a decent tenure track job in them. For every one who gets to bullshit in public, there are probably 20 or more grading freshman philosophy papers for $12,000/year.
How's that for true hell? A brutal, dog-eat-dog competition, with no real world metrics against which to measure yourself? An endless, inter-subjective void, with nothing but brutal struggle for the few jobs that exist, and lots of Derrida. Flee crying back to the hard sciences while you still can, grasshopper...
>>>It's a scientific fact that global warming is real. There is no debate, and no controversy
How come it's getting colder over the last decade with record levels of snowfall and cooler-than-normal summers? (I had heard by 2010 we wouldn't even know what snow is in Great Britain.)
They don't. Global temperatures continue to show a rise, despite certain local climate variations.
In my opinion, cross-platform compatibility is of the utmost importance here. I don't have anything in particular against windows, but I have a mix of windows and linux machines and it really limits my choices when some technology refuses to support one or the other. There are relatively few cases of this in the real world, but unfortunately MS Silverlight is one of them.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, there's science refuting this. Ask any insurance company.
It could be a technology demonstrator, with or without the backing of the miliitary. It's easy to imagine using the same technology to recover more precious materials from pirate ships and what else. Who knows, maybe even NASA would be interested in knowing something they can send to the bottom of the presumably liquid Europa.
No doubt the technology is intended to be highly reusable. Having written grant applications, the broader the application, the greater the chance of funding, secret or otherwise.
Queue the sexism. :( A very disappointing first comment.
I can't help but wonder if they're using this search for her plane as a cover for a secret military operation like they did with the Titanic. Seems like those robots would cost a little more than your typical academic research grant would cover.
Not that it's a bad thing: the researchers get funding from the military to quietly carry out their secret missions and in exchange they get to spend some time doing what they actually want to do which is investigate this remarkable person's fate. If it hadn't been for such arrangements, it's unlikely we ever would have found the Titanic.
In this case it's sheer speculation though.
As a man I find the general tone of discussion on this thread offensive, both from an emotional standpoint and from a factual one; I can't believe the ignorance I'm seeing. False assertions about women's abilities which have never been founded and have been long settled by research brought up over and over again as if it's a fact that women are less capable engineers than men. It simply isn't true. It's never been true, and it's not likely to be true any time in the future.
I think if anyone is looking for a reason why internet access might discourage women from CS, they should simply read this thread!!!
I never was a fan of the humanities during my undergrad. I believed people should focus more on studies which lead them into lucrative careers, like engineering and computer science. I still believe that to a great extent. But witnessing the ignorance of many in those disciplines makes me wish that they had at least taken the time to study the history of their own frigging profession!!!
I wonder if maybe Men and Women have different interests?
Yes: women don't like to be harassed by men who think they are superior at computer science. :-P
I completely agree! I can't believe that in 2012 men are expressing this level of ignorant sexism. Women have played a very important role in CS historically and continue to. But the attitudes towards them expressed by many of the people in this thread I think more than explains why they are reluctant to enter a profession dominated by such ignorance.
Exactly. Additionally, women often perform better academically in the kinds of tasks programming requires, and those that go into CS tend to excel. Programming was once dominated by women, actually, and those who doubt that a conspiracy drove them away should probably familiarize themselves with the history of the profession. There was certainly a power grab by men once the predominantly female programmers began to distinguish themselves as capable engineers.
Nursing was initially dominated by men due to the strenuous labor involved. It was the war that moved women into nursing when the men were off fighting. And they're still there. Historically, nursing is a perfect example of a profession where women successfully dominated a profession which was previously considered too difficult for them. Anyone who's worked in healthcare would understand exactly why that is.
I think it's easy to forget how recently there actually was a mass conspiracy to drive women out of computer science and replace them with men. At one point the majority of programmers were women. There were literally campaigns to attract men to computer science and discourage women as soon as people realized that it was a credible profession, and it wasn't too many decades ago. My parent's generation grew up during that time. It's really sad how ignorant people are about history these days.
Where can I get hired to turn our crap like this and never have to produce on solid thing that can be measured against the real world?
Trick is, you can dig at the softness of the soft sciences all you want; but it's a knife-fight-in-a-telephone-booth to get a decent tenure track job in them. For every one who gets to bullshit in public, there are probably 20 or more grading freshman philosophy papers for $12,000/year. How's that for true hell? A brutal, dog-eat-dog competition, with no real world metrics against which to measure yourself? An endless, inter-subjective void, with nothing but brutal struggle for the few jobs that exist, and lots of Derrida. Flee crying back to the hard sciences while you still can, grasshopper...
Well said!!! Very well said!
>>>It's a scientific fact that global warming is real. There is no debate, and no controversy
How come it's getting colder over the last decade with record levels of snowfall and cooler-than-normal summers? (I had heard by 2010 we wouldn't even know what snow is in Great Britain.)
They don't. Global temperatures continue to show a rise, despite certain local climate variations.
It got one out of five for me, and that one was google translate, (which also would be easy to detect.)
Back then most Universities placed computer science within EE. It wasn't often a separate department or degree.
In my opinion, cross-platform compatibility is of the utmost importance here. I don't have anything in particular against windows, but I have a mix of windows and linux machines and it really limits my choices when some technology refuses to support one or the other. There are relatively few cases of this in the real world, but unfortunately MS Silverlight is one of them.
Linux has had this feature for quite some time in the form the of grsecurity patches.