Well, I'm a guy studying the "holistic" side of CS -- information systems, software architecture, human-computer interaction, etc. I think then the problem is framing computer science as an "analytical" field... Sure, I trudge through the various theory and low-level classes with the rest of them (yes, I program all the time, and program well), but 50+% of my classes are cross-listed and engage a variety of disciplines, which have been traditionally gender-neurtal (as of the last 25 years at least -- psychology, sociology, etc.). I think if women can comprehend and support a complex socio-biological system (e.g. nurses), they can comprehend and support a complex socio-technical system (e.g. software engineer).
Maybe the field of "information science" that is springing up in many schools will help that. Yea, you still need to take a nice helping of the technical classes, but you also get to take many humanities and social science classes.
(Not that I'm knocking on the analytical side of CS. It's fascinating, and important, and it's great that there are people doing it. I don't think that it's not a mostly-male field either, but you have to start the cross-over somewhere...)
It's both sexist and constraining to what it means to be a "computer scientist". You can't just break CS down to "manly" and "girly" parts because it is huge field with an incredible variety of things you can do. You don't even have to know how to program to be in a CS program (thought it's uncommon) -- you can be a theorist. Or you can be Anyway, there's so much to computer science that's it's just ridiculous to think it's something "masculine" or "feminine".
There's still plenty of girls graduating in fields around computer science: communication majors going into human-computer interaction, science & technology studies majors studying the social impact of computing, etc. Information science and other "not-just-techie" graduate fields around the country are around 50/50 by gender. These girls may not care about programming the "best" distributed computing platform ever, but you can be sure they know more about what one means in society than the majority of techies.
Humans have reached a point where biological evolution is no longer important to us. The current "important" evolution is happening in the mind -- memetic evolution. Next steps will hopefully the creation of new environments able to sustain self-replicating patterns, whether these patterns be computer networks or some other complex ecology.
Your brain and the ecology of all human brains is clearly where the evolutionary action is now (and has been for a relatively long, long time). Where's it gonna be next, and how will we know when it gets there? The first conscious monkeys didn't know they were the first step (or did they?)...
Trying to filter things the way PageRank filters them isn't always the best method. Explicit links between nodes in a network sometimes build a graph structure that is helpful and insightful when analyzed in a certain way (see Google's success with PageRank). However, researchers at HP's Information Dynamics Lab have shown that, for example, in the context of blogs other links than explicit hyperlinks can create structures that are even more insightful and helpful. Basically, by creating links expressing "What are the chances of blog A copying some bit of information from blog B?", they have come up with a graph structure that when analyzed with the PageRank algorithm yields much better results in searches over blogs (they call it iRank).
The idea is that the blog that is likely to be first to break out a story is probably the one you want to be reading (since blogs/blogging tends to be about the 'in-the-first-to-know crowd').
Check out their results and paper here: http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/idl/papers/blogs/
I would be very interested in using any safe mind-enhancing drug. However, the brain is not a computer and life is not a pre-mediated routine.
If people start using memory and attention enhancing drugs to ground themselves more in reality and their current world view/direction, I think it's important that people also start using psychedelics and other mentally-opening/freeing drugs to make sure they don't get bogged down in the now-now-now.
Basically psychedelics allow you an escape from grounding forces (like attention, or memory) to go and question important, overarching meta-questions -- where am I going? what does the world mean and what's my place in it? who are my friends and how do I feel about them? how do I feel about the future? etc. These would be a good counter-balance to the mind-enhacing drugs, which help you achieve goals formed from reflection upon your insight, more efficiently.
I'm not really advocating psychedelic drug use for everyone in general (well, not in this post at least, heh). But as "regular", not cognitively-enhanced people we supposedly have some sort of balance of 'free-thought' with which we question and reflect on Big, Important Matters and 'attentive/constrained thought' with which we make short-term goals happen. The two are a feedback process. If we're shifting the balance by increasing the duraction of our 'attentive/constrained thought', we need to have a way of increasing the intensity of our 'free-thought' so that we don't loose sight of the big picture.
Yea, I mean, it sounds funny, but those things def teach you to *actively look* for patterns in people's actions, as opposed to subconsciously processing them like most people do.
It's not even just analytical thinking, but meta-analysis of the game. I don't play that often, and would be considered a complete newbie, but I consistantly win against other newbies I'm playing with... I think due to CS training I understand the concepts of strategy in bidding, bluffing, and probability way better than non-math people. These variables are just inherent to the way I think (esp. since I enjoy security too), and combine that with the fact that I have taken courses and read much about non-verbal communication, social/group dynamics, etc. and I would think I have a pretty decent advantage. (I mean, that, and I tend to win;-)
But please, people, if playing with friends, don't just be an asshole and take the money! If you see other people really didn't get into the game, just refuse to take your share of the total pot... And if in company where that would be awkward, just offer to buy everyone late-night munchies/etc. or buy the next 6-pack, or whatever is most appropriate.
I'm not much into card games, but I think Poker and Asshole are great additions to any late-night weekend chilling! (And Durak rocks too, for those of you Russian enough to know what I'm talking about;-)
(1) Because when the RIAA goes after lawbreakers, it doesn't actually go after lawbreakers but rather goes after all sorts of people, some of whom are breaking the law and some of whom aren't. The problem is that almost *everyone* it goes after, regardless of the activity they were engaging in, has to settle because they cannot afford the costs of defense. If the RIAA actually went against file sharers who were sharing music of the artists they represent, where those artists said they want people who distribute their music sued, instead of grannies, children, and people who happen to have a random file named 'music.mp3' in their shared folder, less people would bitch.
Also, and bear with me here because I'm about to express a pretty anti-establishmentarian opinion that I think a lot, lot, lot of people implicitly agree with but just don't realize they do yet: (2) The RIAA and MPAA are basically trying to control and deathgrip culture. There is so much culture out there, and it's completely impossible to "pay" for it all in discrete, bite-sized chunks. If I, or most people I know "paid" for all the music we listen to, we would have spent all out moneys a very long time ago... We pay for concerts, t-shirts, and other material goods, we give tips and random cash to people we meet on the street who are selling CDs or performing or have cool websites. Hell, I would even pay for rare or difficult to find sets online if they were cheap enough and it was worth my time to do so (and of course high-quality, no-DRM). But I'm not willing to constantly keep throwing money to buy "music" or "video" as a set of etherial bits... And I'm not willing to pay to get something I might listen to a few times and then forget. However, once I *do* get some bits, I want to share it with anyone who cares to watch or listen because I'm spreading culture, and I expect them to reciprocate.
Keep in mind, I probably don't actually have any music by RIAA artists (though I don't really rigirously check). And some of the hip hop I listen to actually encourages you to "put it up on the Internet / and pump it outside" -- the artists *want* people to have the music, any way they can. They know money will come with recognition, and not necessarily by putting a stranglehold on distribution of the digital bits representing the music itself.
There's no real moral reasoning behind this -- it's simply my gut feeling and strong belief. It's how I feel about my culture and its spread. And I see this feeling amont the youth everywhere I look, too.
It's terrible that someone died, and my condolences to the family, but...
Wouldn't it be awesome if Free/Open source people started having real gang warfare? Raw raps, drive by shootings, the works! Hell, they could even pick up teh fly bitchez.
The Face Book is a social network for people in the same college or university. You can fill out classes you're taking, and then see all the people who are also taking it, as well as fill out where you live, etc. Very popular with a lot of the schools that it supports (listing is on the home page).
Sony has a device called the Gummi Bendable Computer that they've been developing. Input is based on bending the credit-card sized device (made of flexable material) towards and away from you. The design is well thought out, and as an HCI person, I'm actually pretty impressed with it.
If you have access to ACM's digital library there's a good paper on it that was published at the CHI 2004 conference.
What!?! In my previous posts I explicitly said that I (a) like OS X a lot (b) wish to run OS X soon (c) like *most* of the design/usability/HCI features that OS X added, save for a few (like the renaming feature). I also, for example. don't like the fact that in Finder if you highlight an image file, and press "Enter", it will not open. I think you get properties, IIRC. Just weird.
And with directory structure I said that OS X was breaking convention (at least for Windows users, obviously Unix people are used to it) BUT IT DOES NOT MATTER because, and I quote myself: OS X provides a natural and consistant abstraction layer over the actual directory structure, making it not [not important what the actual directory structure is] (at least for the average user). That the fact that Windows users have to know about their "C:" drive is a *bad* thing.
I know arguing is fun and all, but you can at least try to read/understand what I'm saying, especially when I'm trying to agree with you!
Yeah, I just learned that the rename feature is not new to OS X, but has been around in older Mac OSes. Great-grand-parent (or whatever) post made it seem like this was a new feature.
My original point, however, was twofold, and breaking convention was the more minor one. The bigger point that users, often, are just bad at aiming with the mouse still stands. You want to give as much room for error as possible. I'm not just pulling this out of my ass, either -- lot's people way smarter and more knowledgable than myself have reiterated this point over and over (Donald Norman, blah blah). Especially true if you want disabled users or users with imprecise input devices (trackpad, nipple) to be able to use the system more effectively.
In that vein having one directory structure instead of breaking it up into "drive letters" is breaking a convention.
Sure is. However, in OS X there really is no reason for you to know exactly how your directory structure is arranged. Applications are in "Applications", documents either on your desktop or somewhere in your home directory space, etc. Windows tried to have this too with Start button + My Documents, but evidently failed, since most users are still aware of the "C:" drive.
OS X provides a natural and consistant abstraction layer over the actual directory structure, making it not matter in the end (at least for the average user).
Slashdot Mirror
I hope you realize you must die now...........
Well, I'm a guy studying the "holistic" side of CS -- information systems, software architecture, human-computer interaction, etc. I think then the problem is framing computer science as an "analytical" field... Sure, I trudge through the various theory and low-level classes with the rest of them (yes, I program all the time, and program well), but 50+% of my classes are cross-listed and engage a variety of disciplines, which have been traditionally gender-neurtal (as of the last 25 years at least -- psychology, sociology, etc.). I think if women can comprehend and support a complex socio-biological system (e.g. nurses), they can comprehend and support a complex socio-technical system (e.g. software engineer).
Maybe the field of "information science" that is springing up in many schools will help that. Yea, you still need to take a nice helping of the technical classes, but you also get to take many humanities and social science classes.
(Not that I'm knocking on the analytical side of CS. It's fascinating, and important, and it's great that there are people doing it. I don't think that it's not a mostly-male field either, but you have to start the cross-over somewhere...)
It's both sexist and constraining to what it means to be a "computer scientist". You can't just break CS down to "manly" and "girly" parts because it is huge field with an incredible variety of things you can do. You don't even have to know how to program to be in a CS program (thought it's uncommon) -- you can be a theorist. Or you can be Anyway, there's so much to computer science that's it's just ridiculous to think it's something "masculine" or "feminine".
There's still plenty of girls graduating in fields around computer science: communication majors going into human-computer interaction, science & technology studies majors studying the social impact of computing, etc. Information science and other "not-just-techie" graduate fields around the country are around 50/50 by gender. These girls may not care about programming the "best" distributed computing platform ever, but you can be sure they know more about what one means in society than the majority of techies.
"the Anna Kournikova worm showed us that nearly 1/2 of humanity will click on anything purporting to contain nude pictures of barely clothed females"
???
Humans have reached a point where biological evolution is no longer important to us. The current "important" evolution is happening in the mind -- memetic evolution. Next steps will hopefully the creation of new environments able to sustain self-replicating patterns, whether these patterns be computer networks or some other complex ecology.
Your brain and the ecology of all human brains is clearly where the evolutionary action is now (and has been for a relatively long, long time). Where's it gonna be next, and how will we know when it gets there? The first conscious monkeys didn't know they were the first step (or did they?)...
Wow, I drive like a pro when talking on my cellphone! That must mean I'm pretty good after taking down half a fifth of Jack Daniel's too! Sweet!
Trying to filter things the way PageRank filters them isn't always the best method. Explicit links between nodes in a network sometimes build a graph structure that is helpful and insightful when analyzed in a certain way (see Google's success with PageRank). However, researchers at HP's Information Dynamics Lab have shown that, for example, in the context of blogs other links than explicit hyperlinks can create structures that are even more insightful and helpful. Basically, by creating links expressing "What are the chances of blog A copying some bit of information from blog B?", they have come up with a graph structure that when analyzed with the PageRank algorithm yields much better results in searches over blogs (they call it iRank).
The idea is that the blog that is likely to be first to break out a story is probably the one you want to be reading (since blogs/blogging tends to be about the 'in-the-first-to-know crowd').
Check out their results and paper here: http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/idl/papers/blogs/
I would be very interested in using any safe mind-enhancing drug. However, the brain is not a computer and life is not a pre-mediated routine.
If people start using memory and attention enhancing drugs to ground themselves more in reality and their current world view/direction, I think it's important that people also start using psychedelics and other mentally-opening/freeing drugs to make sure they don't get bogged down in the now-now-now.
Basically psychedelics allow you an escape from grounding forces (like attention, or memory) to go and question important, overarching meta-questions -- where am I going? what does the world mean and what's my place in it? who are my friends and how do I feel about them? how do I feel about the future? etc. These would be a good counter-balance to the mind-enhacing drugs, which help you achieve goals formed from reflection upon your insight, more efficiently.
I'm not really advocating psychedelic drug use for everyone in general (well, not in this post at least, heh). But as "regular", not cognitively-enhanced people we supposedly have some sort of balance of 'free-thought' with which we question and reflect on Big, Important Matters and 'attentive/constrained thought' with which we make short-term goals happen. The two are a feedback process. If we're shifting the balance by increasing the duraction of our 'attentive/constrained thought', we need to have a way of increasing the intensity of our 'free-thought' so that we don't loose sight of the big picture.
Hahaha, good one!
Yea, I mean, it sounds funny, but those things def teach you to *actively look* for patterns in people's actions, as opposed to subconsciously processing them like most people do.
It's not even just analytical thinking, but meta-analysis of the game. I don't play that often, and would be considered a complete newbie, but I consistantly win against other newbies I'm playing with... I think due to CS training I understand the concepts of strategy in bidding, bluffing, and probability way better than non-math people. These variables are just inherent to the way I think (esp. since I enjoy security too), and combine that with the fact that I have taken courses and read much about non-verbal communication, social/group dynamics, etc. and I would think I have a pretty decent advantage. (I mean, that, and I tend to win ;-)
;-)
But please, people, if playing with friends, don't just be an asshole and take the money! If you see other people really didn't get into the game, just refuse to take your share of the total pot... And if in company where that would be awkward, just offer to buy everyone late-night munchies/etc. or buy the next 6-pack, or whatever is most appropriate.
I'm not much into card games, but I think Poker and Asshole are great additions to any late-night weekend chilling! (And Durak rocks too, for those of you Russian enough to know what I'm talking about
(1) Because when the RIAA goes after lawbreakers, it doesn't actually go after lawbreakers but rather goes after all sorts of people, some of whom are breaking the law and some of whom aren't. The problem is that almost *everyone* it goes after, regardless of the activity they were engaging in, has to settle because they cannot afford the costs of defense. If the RIAA actually went against file sharers who were sharing music of the artists they represent, where those artists said they want people who distribute their music sued, instead of grannies, children, and people who happen to have a random file named 'music.mp3' in their shared folder, less people would bitch.
Also, and bear with me here because I'm about to express a pretty anti-establishmentarian opinion that I think a lot, lot, lot of people implicitly agree with but just don't realize they do yet:
(2) The RIAA and MPAA are basically trying to control and deathgrip culture. There is so much culture out there, and it's completely impossible to "pay" for it all in discrete, bite-sized chunks. If I, or most people I know "paid" for all the music we listen to, we would have spent all out moneys a very long time ago... We pay for concerts, t-shirts, and other material goods, we give tips and random cash to people we meet on the street who are selling CDs or performing or have cool websites. Hell, I would even pay for rare or difficult to find sets online if they were cheap enough and it was worth my time to do so (and of course high-quality, no-DRM). But I'm not willing to constantly keep throwing money to buy "music" or "video" as a set of etherial bits... And I'm not willing to pay to get something I might listen to a few times and then forget. However, once I *do* get some bits, I want to share it with anyone who cares to watch or listen because I'm spreading culture, and I expect them to reciprocate.
Keep in mind, I probably don't actually have any music by RIAA artists (though I don't really rigirously check). And some of the hip hop I listen to actually encourages you to "put it up on the Internet / and pump it outside" -- the artists *want* people to have the music, any way they can. They know money will come with recognition, and not necessarily by putting a stranglehold on distribution of the digital bits representing the music itself.
There's no real moral reasoning behind this -- it's simply my gut feeling and strong belief. It's how I feel about my culture and its spread. And I see this feeling amont the youth everywhere I look, too.
It's terrible that someone died, and my condolences to the family, but...
Wouldn't it be awesome if Free/Open source people started having real gang warfare? Raw raps, drive by shootings, the works! Hell, they could even pick up teh fly bitchez.
Are you serious? Of course Slashdot covered those stories too.
Critical Mozilla, Thunderbird Vulnerabilities
CERT Warns Of Multiple Vulnerabilities In Libpng
Parent is clearly a troll.
Not surprisingly, it's MIT. They own 018.x.x.x
The Face Book is a social network for people in the same college or university. You can fill out classes you're taking, and then see all the people who are also taking it, as well as fill out where you live, etc. Very popular with a lot of the schools that it supports (listing is on the home page).
Sony has a device called the Gummi Bendable Computer that they've been developing. Input is based on bending the credit-card sized device (made of flexable material) towards and away from you. The design is well thought out, and as an HCI person, I'm actually pretty impressed with it.
If you have access to ACM's digital library there's a good paper on it that was published at the CHI 2004 conference.
PERL ;-)
I can't wait. Cyberpunk all the way!
DXM? No, it's def. still there. What do you think all of the high school kids in suburbia are drinking?
Try drinking some Robo too ;-)
Hahaha you rock!
Except percs ain't heroin... percs are just a "regular" opiate.
But K on a beach sounds like a blast... Wish they would have more of that stuff around here.
What!?! In my previous posts I explicitly said that I (a) like OS X a lot (b) wish to run OS X soon (c) like *most* of the design/usability/HCI features that OS X added, save for a few (like the renaming feature). I also, for example. don't like the fact that in Finder if you highlight an image file, and press "Enter", it will not open. I think you get properties, IIRC. Just weird.
And with directory structure I said that OS X was breaking convention (at least for Windows users, obviously Unix people are used to it) BUT IT DOES NOT MATTER because, and I quote myself:
OS X provides a natural and consistant abstraction layer over the actual directory structure, making it not [not important what the actual directory structure is] (at least for the average user). That the fact that Windows users have to know about their "C:" drive is a *bad* thing.
I know arguing is fun and all, but you can at least try to read/understand what I'm saying, especially when I'm trying to agree with you!
Yeah, I just learned that the rename feature is not new to OS X, but has been around in older Mac OSes. Great-grand-parent (or whatever) post made it seem like this was a new feature.
My original point, however, was twofold, and breaking convention was the more minor one. The bigger point that users, often, are just bad at aiming with the mouse still stands. You want to give as much room for error as possible. I'm not just pulling this out of my ass, either -- lot's people way smarter and more knowledgable than myself have reiterated this point over and over (Donald Norman, blah blah). Especially true if you want disabled users or users with imprecise input devices (trackpad, nipple) to be able to use the system more effectively.
In that vein having one directory structure instead of breaking it up into "drive letters" is breaking a convention.
Sure is. However, in OS X there really is no reason for you to know exactly how your directory structure is arranged. Applications are in "Applications", documents either on your desktop or somewhere in your home directory space, etc. Windows tried to have this too with Start button + My Documents, but evidently failed, since most users are still aware of the "C:" drive.
OS X provides a natural and consistant abstraction layer over the actual directory structure, making it not matter in the end (at least for the average user).