The problem with that is that women *do* desire to do science. They're just being put into position all the way through their education where they're being told that they don't belong.
Even the ones who do get PhDs generally don't get faculty positions. There have been studies where they've sent identical applications with obviously male and female names to job searches. The only differences were the names. The applications with male names were preferred around 2 to 1. I'll bet you that almost no one on those committees thought that they were discriminating, either.
Note that something like while something like 35% of Chemistry PhDs in this country are going to women, only about 10% of faculty are women. The interested women are out there, but they're not being allowed into the faculty ranks. Many of them are leaving entirely.
(The only advantage I have over you is that I know someone who is publicly giving talks on the subject. You can also search for Elaine Seymour, a researcher in this field. Still, you *can* do a search yourself. Try it, it's fun!)
Uh, your second point shows you clearly grasp why the first one is nonsense.
As to your second point, it's also a strawman: there are indeed women to take these jobs. Many women leave the fields in grad school or afterward because the job prospects are bad (worse for women than men... and yes, there are studies that show this).
Honestly, if universities want to get gender balance, one huge step would be to encourage the retirement of the extremely senior faculty running around. This would also alleviate another problem pointed out in a recent study as to why we're not producing as many young scientists as we should be. (Part of the problem: the very senior scientists are getting well more than their fair share of the resources.) It's not as if they'd have to hire only women, for crying out loud.
Ah, the old "women/blacks/Irish aren't strong/smart enough" argument? Of course women are strong enough, they're just facing MORE discrimination. For the umpteenth time, this HAS BEEN SHOWN IN STUDIES. Your collective opinions are worthless if they fly in the face of the data.
Part of the problem is almost certainly the paucity of women role models in the sciences for both girls and boys. So, yeah, it would actually solve at least some of the problem. (How much is, naturally, a topic of debate.)
Again, there are studies that show that, indeed, women's brains do work differently than men's, but they ALSO indicate that this does not explain in any way why women don't go into the natural sciences and engineering.
If you're going to read the research, read to the end.
Congrats, I'm glad you've had a much more positive experience than many other women have. I can tell stories about people I know personally who have been jerked around in the sciences/engineering due to gender, but neither of our anecdotes is worth much. What is worth a lot is the data, and there are *copious* data on this topic and they point pretty strongly to the conclusion that women (and girls) are being discouraged from pursuing careers in the sciences. I don't have any at my fingertips, but you can pretty easily Google to find some. (That, or I could ask my best friend who reads the studies a lot more than I do.)
Trouble is you don't specify why they lack interest. Is in inherent, or are they being discouraged (if subtly) from a young age? Studies point to the latter since as kids move up through the grades into college, girls/women start out as interested in science as the boys/men and then fall away from the fields more rapidly.
Exactly, you beat me to the punch. The same is true in spacecraft components, which is why the computing power and other parts always seem to be so pitiful compared to current technology. (Well, plus the lag between design and actual appearance in space.) Sad, but it's most likely the best way. It's not quite as clear that the military should be quite as far behind as NASA, though.
Re:The explanation is obvious
on
Terminal Chaos
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· Score: 1
That, and they sell chocolate-covered cotton on the side?
(I assume that that's the reference you were aiming for, anyway.)
Yeah, the reporter is bad at math and/or communication skills.
Also, Homer did not live 100 years after the Trojan War, unless they've totally altered the chronology since I took Greek Archeology in college (8 years ago). It was more like 500 or 600 years.
I'm with you: when I read the original paper, I wasn't really bowled over by their case. In fact, I was a little concerned about the contrary evidence (which they addressed, but generally only in an iffy fashion). This lake *may* be the impact crater, but it's far from certain in my mind. I'd expect Slashdot to do better with differentiating between generally accepted theories and shaky ones.
Jupiter's one-way light time is more like 35-50 minutes, actually. Painful. As for interference, the radio emission shouldn't interfere with the visible/IR spectrascopy. The thermal emission might, but I doubt it. It's pretty easy to characterize that.
Along with a sensor, you'll want a very, very high resolution telescope in order to resolve the spot from the background (assuming the spot has spread to the size of the planet... eep). Also, you probably don't want to be on the ground if you're doing IR spectrascopy (which seems recommended for composition) since the atmosphere of Earth absorbs a good bit of that.
The problem with that is that the chromophores (color-causing agents) are probably extremely minor constituents. It takes very little tinting agent to turn a white cloud interesting colors. Doing an in situ measurement of them would be tricky.
Ah, I stand (partly?) corrected. I'm in planetary, which is about as far removed from cosmologists as an astronomer can get. (Seriously, we barely even see each other in the hallways.) I do work with a lot of people who research dust behavior in planetary and galactic contexts, though.:-)
Hydrogen and helium are not dust by any definition of "dust" I've ever known an astronomer to use. Dust is, by definition, solid matter which is microscopic, but much larger than atoms. To broaden the term to include plasmas and gases would pretty much make it so broad as to be useless.
A single SN can eject a pulsar at high speeds (this isn't even just a theory, we observe them moving pretty fast so it's a pretty reasonable conclusions:-), but remember that the pulsar started out inside the star, thus felt a lot of force. As you get farther away, the force falls off as 1/r^2 (one would think, perhaps a bit faster). At reasonable astronomical distances, it probably wouldn't be very big. Perhaps juuust enough to switch a pass into a capture, though, it it was marginal to begin with.
Yeah, that's the three-body problem. Of all the capture scenarios, that seems the most likely. However, it still seems unlikely since a millisecond pulsar would be close to its companion and therefore hard to strip away.
I'm not sure I followed all of that, but an SN could, I suppose, in theory provide the braking force needed to shed some of the energy. But it's extremely unlikely, the timing would have to be awfully precise.
The triple-star system idea seems a lot more likely.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with that is that women *do* desire to do science. They're just being put into position all the way through their education where they're being told that they don't belong.
Even the ones who do get PhDs generally don't get faculty positions. There have been studies where they've sent identical applications with obviously male and female names to job searches. The only differences were the names. The applications with male names were preferred around 2 to 1. I'll bet you that almost no one on those committees thought that they were discriminating, either.
Note that something like while something like 35% of Chemistry PhDs in this country are going to women, only about 10% of faculty are women. The interested women are out there, but they're not being allowed into the faculty ranks. Many of them are leaving entirely.
Good question. Here's a quick Google search: http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&safe=off&q=debra+rolison+women+science&btnG=Search
(The only advantage I have over you is that I know someone who is publicly giving talks on the subject. You can also search for Elaine Seymour, a researcher in this field. Still, you *can* do a search yourself. Try it, it's fun!)
Uh, your second point shows you clearly grasp why the first one is nonsense.
As to your second point, it's also a strawman: there are indeed women to take these jobs. Many women leave the fields in grad school or afterward because the job prospects are bad (worse for women than men... and yes, there are studies that show this).
Honestly, if universities want to get gender balance, one huge step would be to encourage the retirement of the extremely senior faculty running around. This would also alleviate another problem pointed out in a recent study as to why we're not producing as many young scientists as we should be. (Part of the problem: the very senior scientists are getting well more than their fair share of the resources.) It's not as if they'd have to hire only women, for crying out loud.
Ah, the old "women/blacks/Irish aren't strong/smart enough" argument? Of course women are strong enough, they're just facing MORE discrimination. For the umpteenth time, this HAS BEEN SHOWN IN STUDIES. Your collective opinions are worthless if they fly in the face of the data.
Part of the problem is almost certainly the paucity of women role models in the sciences for both girls and boys. So, yeah, it would actually solve at least some of the problem. (How much is, naturally, a topic of debate.)
Again, there are studies that show that, indeed, women's brains do work differently than men's, but they ALSO indicate that this does not explain in any way why women don't go into the natural sciences and engineering.
If you're going to read the research, read to the end.
Congrats, I'm glad you've had a much more positive experience than many other women have. I can tell stories about people I know personally who have been jerked around in the sciences/engineering due to gender, but neither of our anecdotes is worth much. What is worth a lot is the data, and there are *copious* data on this topic and they point pretty strongly to the conclusion that women (and girls) are being discouraged from pursuing careers in the sciences. I don't have any at my fingertips, but you can pretty easily Google to find some. (That, or I could ask my best friend who reads the studies a lot more than I do.)
Trouble is you don't specify why they lack interest. Is in inherent, or are they being discouraged (if subtly) from a young age? Studies point to the latter since as kids move up through the grades into college, girls/women start out as interested in science as the boys/men and then fall away from the fields more rapidly.
Exactly, you beat me to the punch. The same is true in spacecraft components, which is why the computing power and other parts always seem to be so pitiful compared to current technology. (Well, plus the lag between design and actual appearance in space.) Sad, but it's most likely the best way. It's not quite as clear that the military should be quite as far behind as NASA, though.
That, and they sell chocolate-covered cotton on the side?
(I assume that that's the reference you were aiming for, anyway.)
Black Holes and Time Warps by Kip Thorne is an excellent read. It's both informative and (I think) easily read by the average person.
The Demon-Haunted World by Sagan is a must-read.
For math books, William Dunham's books are amazing: full of stories and history, but also explains the mathematics in question in elegant terms.
Yeah, the reporter is bad at math and/or communication skills.
Also, Homer did not live 100 years after the Trojan War, unless they've totally altered the chronology since I took Greek Archeology in college (8 years ago). It was more like 500 or 600 years.
I'm with you: when I read the original paper, I wasn't really bowled over by their case. In fact, I was a little concerned about the contrary evidence (which they addressed, but generally only in an iffy fashion). This lake *may* be the impact crater, but it's far from certain in my mind. I'd expect Slashdot to do better with differentiating between generally accepted theories and shaky ones.
Jupiter's one-way light time is more like 35-50 minutes, actually. Painful. As for interference, the radio emission shouldn't interfere with the visible/IR spectrascopy. The thermal emission might, but I doubt it. It's pretty easy to characterize that.
Along with a sensor, you'll want a very, very high resolution telescope in order to resolve the spot from the background (assuming the spot has spread to the size of the planet... eep). Also, you probably don't want to be on the ground if you're doing IR spectrascopy (which seems recommended for composition) since the atmosphere of Earth absorbs a good bit of that.
From where, though? It'd be hard to power such a large laser on a spacecraft and getting a beam to and from the Earth may be harder still.
How would you do that, exactly? Where does the laser go to and from?
The problem with that is that the chromophores (color-causing agents) are probably extremely minor constituents. It takes very little tinting agent to turn a white cloud interesting colors. Doing an in situ measurement of them would be tricky.
Ah, I stand (partly?) corrected. I'm in planetary, which is about as far removed from cosmologists as an astronomer can get. (Seriously, we barely even see each other in the hallways.) I do work with a lot of people who research dust behavior in planetary and galactic contexts, though. :-)
Hydrogen and helium are not dust by any definition of "dust" I've ever known an astronomer to use. Dust is, by definition, solid matter which is microscopic, but much larger than atoms. To broaden the term to include plasmas and gases would pretty much make it so broad as to be useless.
So no, not dust.
This isn't dark matter. Dark matter shows evidence (based on its measured distribution) which is not consistent with ordinary baryonic matter.
A double-super nova?
:-), but remember that the pulsar started out inside the star, thus felt a lot of force. As you get farther away, the force falls off as 1/r^2 (one would think, perhaps a bit faster). At reasonable astronomical distances, it probably wouldn't be very big. Perhaps juuust enough to switch a pass into a capture, though, it it was marginal to begin with.
A single SN can eject a pulsar at high speeds (this isn't even just a theory, we observe them moving pretty fast so it's a pretty reasonable conclusions
Yeah, that's the three-body problem. Of all the capture scenarios, that seems the most likely. However, it still seems unlikely since a millisecond pulsar would be close to its companion and therefore hard to strip away.
Not sure we've seen strange coincidences in the sky, but I'd say that we humans may be more unlikely. :-)
I'm not sure I followed all of that, but an SN could, I suppose, in theory provide the braking force needed to shed some of the energy. But it's extremely unlikely, the timing would have to be awfully precise.
The triple-star system idea seems a lot more likely.
Yeah, a triple-system definitely struck me as more likely than capture. I just didn't mention it because it wasn't what was being suggested here. :-)