The real question is whether the work was considered secretarial because women could do it, rather than the other way around.
Actually, most of those women had degrees in mathematics or physics - in some cases PhDs. Universities started admitting women (in very small numbers) to natural science classes as early as the 1880s. Certainly by the 1920s many women were graduating with degrees in mathematics. But very few of them were able to find employement in their fields of study, except as teachers - and mostly as elementary school teachers at that.
When WWII hit many of those women jumped into engineering and science positions to fill in for the missing men and increased demand.
After the war, most of them were sent back to the kitchen, as it were, in favor of men. However, since computing was so new there weren't men to "come back", and many women worked in the field from 1940-1960. For some reason however they were not replaced by the generation of young women who went to school during those years, so from 1960 - 1980 or so the percentage of women in computing fell drastically.
Nah, he can hit them with a, "Back when I invented COBOL" story.
Ha ha. Except that Adm. Grace Hopper, who did invent Cobol (as well as the idea of the assembler, which she didn't patent) was going full steam ahead (pun intended) in her 80's as a consultant for the Navy right up until her death. Or as the editor of Data Communications magazine once said to a 20-something web programmer designing a new subscription form: "Where is the radio button for 50+ years in experience in the industry?".
Anyone have any thoughts on what ulterior motives the airline industry may have here?
It's not really "ulterior". Airline traffic today flows, for the most part, along the Federal Airways layed out in the 1920's for airmail pilots to follow. These consisted of towers with rotating beacons at 100 mi intervals between big cities (almost all are gone but every once in a while you spot one out in the countryside). In other words, with the entire sky to fly in airliners are following the equivalent of railroads in the sky.
As you can imagine, this introduces some inefficiencies in routing! The airlines would desperately like to go to "Free Flight", which would allow them to route airplanes as more or less as desired (this is a vast simplification for you aero-nauts out there, and leaves out the problem of hubs entirely).
But Free Flight depends not only on GPS, but the advanced location services that the FAA and other GPS consumers would like to roll out over the next ten years. Those services will require absolutely pure signals on the existing allocated freqs, and possibly more freqs as well.
So they don't want anything messing with the GPS signal.
It's possible that a UWB system could interfere with these, but your UWB transmitter would have to be very close to your cell phone or TV.
Until 10-20k UWB devices are installed in an office park next to the airport.
Also, the signal strength as received by a GPS unit is incredibly low - very close to undetectable. It doesn't take much to disrupt them. In fact a month or so ago there was a NOTAM for a GPS outage in Phoenix AZ over a three day period. No reason was given but it is assumed that a new satellite was being tested at Motorola's satellite assembly facility - enough to shut down GPS in the entire county.
In fact, there is considerable concern in the GPS and radionavigation worlds that UWB may cause severe interference with pre-existing services - many of which are directly related to life saftey. Tests sponsored by the UWB industy to prove that such interference would not occur showed the exact opposite - that it did in fact occur. I am surprised that the FCC gave the go-ahead on this.
Biometric-based I.D. cards for everybody are coming. Squint, look ahead 50 years and honestly tell me you can envision a world where such things are not simply assumed. The important factor is not whether such cards exist, but whether they are a tool for robbing us of things we want and need.
Mr. Brin seems to believe that once a technology is developed, it must be used regardless of the desire and will of the polity. This is not correct. Decisions to use disruptive technology can be made on a deliberate, political basis.
As an extreme example, South Africa and Brazil both decided to terminate and dismantle successful nuclear weapons progrms (S.A. after actually assembling and testing weapons). Both countries deliberately decided that the dangers of having that technology were greater than any possible benefit.
So the creation of an Iraqi-style national ID card in the U.S. is not inevitable.
They probably don't want to open themselves up to be liable or responsible for providing info that could be the ticket to getting them kidnapped or murdered. I bet you couldn't buy info on most public people, government or otherwise. It could be suicide for the company if one information puchase could be linked directly to some terrible event.
But it is perfectly OK for the same company to sell information to someone who desires to steal my identity, or violate my constitution rights (the FBI was using the private database company because they claimed that such information was not subject to FOIA requests or subponeas)?
Where exactly in the US Constitution does it say that there is a protected class of people, say goverment employees, who get additional protection over and above the law? Does the Constitution not in fact explicity forbid granting of titles of nobility?
I was reading a newspaper article a few months ago (can't remember if it was WSJ, NYT, or Chicago Tribune) about the FBI's use of private databases to dig up information on suspects. The reporter called the database company and ordered searches on the Director of the FBI, John Ashcroft, Bill Gates, Laura Bush, and a few others in similar positions of power. He received a reply of "sorry - we don't sell information on those people" from the database company.
So if living one's life in full view is such a great thing, why do the powerful arrange things so that they (and their families) don't?
In the normal world, a cease and desist agreement with a federal agency is enough to get a person or organization to stop doing something. However, Microsoft had an agreement with the Justice Department not to break any more anti-trust laws and we can see how well that one got enforced. So I guess the precedent for the information processing industyr is set...
I think my point had more to do with whether or not there was anything new under the sun w.r.t. Katz' argument. IMHO, no.
Long ago, for example we had "art ppl" doing painting, music, theatre, etc. and "tech ppl" doing science, experiments, inventions, maths.
Well, I think Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton, the Renissance painters who experimented with the camera obscura, Thomas Edison, Ansel Adams, Robert Oppenheimer, and others might disagree with you a bit here.
Again IMHO, the question is, is there now, or has there been for x years, a separation between technology and art any greater than the historical average, or any greater than between any two human activities which depend on each other but tend to be of interest to different personality types? And, IMHO, no.
I apologize. I did mistake your point, which was excellent.
Someone sure is burning a lot of mod points to kill the metadiscussion though, aren't they? The owners perhaps?
Weather in the central midwest today started out sunny but turned a bit gloomy by midmorn. No identifiable acts of terrorism have yet occured. Serious question of whether snowboarding, whether done with a half pipe or a full pipe, is a sport, is drowned out by the discussion of whether or not any winter activity is in fact a sport.
or, we could all just post extremely off-topic and completely ignore what katz wrote about.
Sorry, but a meta-discussion about whether a certain discussion is necessary is not "extremely off-topic". And the question this poster raised is completely legitimate. Newsweek doesn't give a full-page column to any idiot who wanders in off the street. Why should Katz have a favored position on the Web's premium socio-technical website?
This is a perfectly legitimate comment in a discussion forum of the nature of Slashdot. It might be Offtopic, but not Flamebait. Moderators - for shame.
Culture is being re-defined right before our eyes. For centuries, art and technology have been considered separate parts of culture. Now, because we live in an information society, they may be be coming together
Baloney. As if, on the one hand, the development of plaster of Paris, oil paints, silver halide photography, etc. in their day didn't have just as much impact on the world of art as CG does today. And, on the other hand, as if the most super-duper computer artist on staff at Lucasfilm doesn't spend a good percentage of his time goofing on charcoal sketches on paper.
This reminds me of the day in the 1980's when everyone thought they could fire their graphic artists and give standard employees graphic arts software. Result - lots of hideous graphics produced by non-artists with GA software.
I doubt Gaugain would have had any difficulty with Photoshop. Nor should any true artist today, whether or not he grew up with Photoshop, have any difficulty using any medium that he needs to get the job done.
Can someone explain why the Good Guys always have to keep the Bad Guy on the line for something like three minutes in order to trace the call, when all they should have to do is call up the Phone Company (on another line) and ask them to punch up the number of the person calling this number right now?
For two reasons. First, movie makers don't know jacks--t about telecomm systems, so they make up some stuff that looks good to add drama. But second, until as late as 1990 there was still a lot of electromagnetic switching equipment in the Bell System (North America). When the Bell companies installed switchgear, they thought in terms of 50 year lifetimes, and they weren't about to throw away those perfectly good mechanical switches that were brand-new in 1970 just because some newfangled "computer" was available. The process of tracing a call through a mechanical switch is of course more difficult than if everything is on a 5ESS.
About a year ago, they received approval from the Washington State Utilities Commission to implement time-sensitive rates. In essence, they charge a higher rate when consumption is higher, and a lower rate when consumption is lower.
Time of use (TOU) pricing has been in use since the earliest days of the utility industry (1880's) for large and commerical customers. Nothing a utility likes better than a big customer that cranks up at 7 PM. What is happening today is that advances in metering and RF control are allowing these pricing schemes to be pushed down to smaller customers. At the same time average household electricity use continues to rise so today's "small" customer is as big as a commercial customer of the 1940's.
First, electric and gas utilities were the ones that came up with the idea of trading bandwidth. They do not have any clue about the mechanics of high speed internet access, and I see no reason for them to get one any time soon.
Um, I would have to disagree a bit there. It was Enron, the Enron-wannabes and the California state legislature (and its owners) who came up with the nuttier ideas of the last 10 years concerning the economics of utilities. Those economics were pretty much figured out by 1930 when Sam Insull was sent packing and as far as I know nothing (incuding the Internet) has changed the fundamentals.
There are some utilities out there who fought like crazy to retain the "old, outmoded dinosaur" model. Those that came closest to succeeding against Ken Lay and the friends he purchased are the ones that are today not scheduling rolling blackouts ala Southern California.
Given the current state of the economy and the stock market, I personally would be careful about applying "they just dont' get it" type arguments.
I guess we can use this technology because the entire population is about 280.000 people (and about 260.000 of them use the internet) check out
With a small (by utility standrds), self-contained, bounded system engineered by a single utility (guessing on that last one), they could probably afford to install the repeaters and transformer bypasses need to make high-frequency access work. Just a guess on my part though.
Thanks for the link. I thought everyone in Iceland was blonde?;-)
Your ground wires shouldn't be connected to the power grid, to the best of my knowledge anyway. They should be connected to, um, the ground. Even if someone were to stick a pole in the ground next to your house, I doubt they could get the connectivity needed to tap your net.
Your household ground is tied to neutral at the service entrance, and your local distribution transformer is, well, grounded to the same Earth as your house. So with the appropriate equipment it would be quite feasible to snoop. That's how utilities detect ground faults, after all.
So if you see any guys in ninja suits burying copper plates in your rose bushes, be alarmed.
Anyway, labor costs are thus $0.33/minute, so your meter readers must be reading one every minute and a half. I believe that only if it's in an urban area, and all meters are positioned to be visible from the sidewalk.
Can't give you more details because (a) I don't have them (b) if I did, they would be secret. However, the number I quoted was valid.
The utility I worked for had an average mix of urban/surburban/rural for a metropolitian service territory (middle of Wyoming would be a different story). Remember that the meter reader will make up time when he hits an apartment complex and gets 50 meters in 2 minutes. Reading jobs had a piecework bonus for speed and accuracy so I am sure theere are plenty of other tricks to be used as well.
There is no way for a utility not to have outside people (except Enron I guess) so the costs you mention are already averaged in. And as a manager you tried hard not to take a reader who applied for a posted office job because they would usually drop it before the probationary period and go back outside - they liked the work, even in the winter.
At the time, there were a number of obstacles that made this technology unworkable. If I remember correctly it had something to do with electromagnetic field sensitivity. The earth's EM and solar flares made the whole system too error prone, at the time.
The Canadian utilities are hit harder by geomagnetic storms and disturbences than other North American utilities due to their northing and having a lot of long HV lines that cross geomagnetic field lines. Upstate New York can get hit also.
A few years ago I was working for a large energy utility. One of our competitors (different form of energy) went hell-bent-for-leather into wireless/remote meter reading. Cost per house: $300. Our cost to read meters via shoeleather: $5/meter/year, dog bites, workmans comp, and credits for misreads included. Simple payback on a $300 investment: 60 years.
Our competitor got their hands slapped pretty bad by the public utility commission for that one and had to eat the entire investment. There was just no justification for such fancy toys to handle such a low-tech task.
Slashdot Mirror
When WWII hit many of those women jumped into engineering and science positions to fill in for the missing men and increased demand.
After the war, most of them were sent back to the kitchen, as it were, in favor of men. However, since computing was so new there weren't men to "come back", and many women worked in the field from 1940-1960. For some reason however they were not replaced by the generation of young women who went to school during those years, so from 1960 - 1980 or so the percentage of women in computing fell drastically.
sPh
sPh
sPh
As you can imagine, this introduces some inefficiencies in routing! The airlines would desperately like to go to "Free Flight", which would allow them to route airplanes as more or less as desired (this is a vast simplification for you aero-nauts out there, and leaves out the problem of hubs entirely).
But Free Flight depends not only on GPS, but the advanced location services that the FAA and other GPS consumers would like to roll out over the next ten years. Those services will require absolutely pure signals on the existing allocated freqs, and possibly more freqs as well.
So they don't want anything messing with the GPS signal.
sPh
Also, the signal strength as received by a GPS unit is incredibly low - very close to undetectable. It doesn't take much to disrupt them. In fact a month or so ago there was a NOTAM for a GPS outage in Phoenix AZ over a three day period. No reason was given but it is assumed that a new satellite was being tested at Motorola's satellite assembly facility - enough to shut down GPS in the entire county.
Here's a more complete article: GPS World.
sPh
sPh
Hey, how about a link to a picture?
sPh
As an extreme example, South Africa and Brazil both decided to terminate and dismantle successful nuclear weapons progrms (S.A. after actually assembling and testing weapons). Both countries deliberately decided that the dangers of having that technology were greater than any possible benefit.
So the creation of an Iraqi-style national ID card in the U.S. is not inevitable.
sPh
Where exactly in the US Constitution does it say that there is a protected class of people, say goverment employees, who get additional protection over and above the law? Does the Constitution not in fact explicity forbid granting of titles of nobility?
sPh
So if living one's life in full view is such a great thing, why do the powerful arrange things so that they (and their families) don't?
sPh
sPh
Again IMHO, the question is, is there now, or has there been for x years, a separation between technology and art any greater than the historical average, or any greater than between any two human activities which depend on each other but tend to be of interest to different personality types? And, IMHO, no.
sPh
Someone sure is burning a lot of mod points to kill the metadiscussion though, aren't they? The owners perhaps?
Weather in the central midwest today started out sunny but turned a bit gloomy by midmorn. No identifiable acts of terrorism have yet occured. Serious question of whether snowboarding, whether done with a half pipe or a full pipe, is a sport, is drowned out by the discussion of whether or not any winter activity is in fact a sport.
sPh
sPh
sPh
This reminds me of the day in the 1980's when everyone thought they could fire their graphic artists and give standard employees graphic arts software. Result - lots of hideous graphics produced by non-artists with GA software.
I doubt Gaugain would have had any difficulty with Photoshop. Nor should any true artist today, whether or not he grew up with Photoshop, have any difficulty using any medium that he needs to get the job done.
sPh
sPh
First time I've heard a scheme for moving pricing closer to the microeconomic ideal called "communism"!
sPh
sPh
There are some utilities out there who fought like crazy to retain the "old, outmoded dinosaur" model. Those that came closest to succeeding against Ken Lay and the friends he purchased are the ones that are today not scheduling rolling blackouts ala Southern California.
Given the current state of the economy and the stock market, I personally would be careful about applying "they just dont' get it" type arguments.
sPh
Thanks for the link. I thought everyone in Iceland was blonde? ;-)
sPh
So if you see any guys in ninja suits burying copper plates in your rose bushes, be alarmed.
sPh
The utility I worked for had an average mix of urban/surburban/rural for a metropolitian service territory (middle of Wyoming would be a different story). Remember that the meter reader will make up time when he hits an apartment complex and gets 50 meters in 2 minutes. Reading jobs had a piecework bonus for speed and accuracy so I am sure theere are plenty of other tricks to be used as well.
There is no way for a utility not to have outside people (except Enron I guess) so the costs you mention are already averaged in. And as a manager you tried hard not to take a reader who applied for a posted office job because they would usually drop it before the probationary period and go back outside - they liked the work, even in the winter.
sPh
sPh
Our competitor got their hands slapped pretty bad by the public utility commission for that one and had to eat the entire investment. There was just no justification for such fancy toys to handle such a low-tech task.
sPh