The reason that I like the Blake article is that she actually sat down and talked with the bankers. Not enough people actually do this, though I'm hoping I'll get the opportunity to do this in my own research. The bankers say pretty much what you would expect, they don't discriminate on gender, that they look fairly on everyone. And you know, I believe them. This issue arises from a number of levels, from education to parenting and life expectations.
But a big issue is that in people's minds, women are a risky investment because they might want kids in the future and therefore work less hard. This is not a fair way to judge people, men want kids too and will cut down on their work hours once they have them. But it's a view that's so deeply infused in our society that it's hard to get around.
The Kauffman Firm Survey is not some internet poll. They contacted Every. Single. Firm that first filed employment taxes in 2005. I participated in a 2 hour seminar just on the various bias controls they used in the collection and analysis of the data.
There is some error in there to be sure, but rigorous controls were put in place to ensure consistancy and accuracy in the data. This is why the statistical measures all contain error terms.
Oh I agree with you. It's an intractable problem. There's a poster down below who says that as an angel investor, he finds it hard to invest in women-run firms because they don't often have prior business experience. They don't have prior business experience because women have only entered technical fields in great numbers later than men.
The VCs aren't discriminating because they hate women. They are making decisions that are entirely rational based on their point of view. They meet less women entrepreneurs because their networks contain fewer women. The women that do pitch ideas to them will, on average, have less business experience than an average male entrepreneur. I can't blame the VC for not investing. It really is a social issue that doesn't have an easy solution. But bring up the issue a lot so that people are aware that there is discrimination is an important first step.
Okay. I'm a geographer too, and I like that article, so I brought it up. If you want a more rigorous study, check out Coleman and Robb 2008 (http://ssrn.com/abstract=1260980). Right now it's just a working paper, but I think it's been accepted for publication. It's based off the Kauffman Firm Survey, which is a longitudinal survey of 4,928 entrepreneurs. It's get a crazy amount of data on all of them, like over 1,000 questions. It's an amazing resource, and even better, most of the data is publicly available! Check it out at Kauffman.org/kfs. This study shows fairly conclusively that women have a much harder time getting capital, even after controlling for individual and personal characteristics.
Gender isn't important if there are enough people in the sector or occupation. Well, I mean, I would still be concerned if there's discrimination that favors or disfavors one gender over another, but it's not a critical issue.
It becomes an issue when there aren't enough people in it, and you need to get more. If there aren't enough women who want to become nurses, what's easier, trying to convince more women, who are essentially all tapped out, or try to encourage more men to join up?
It's the same thing with entrepreneurs, scientists and engineers. We need all of them. There are plenty of smart, talented and qualified women who don't enter because of both overt discrimination and more subtle forms of discouragement such as it being harder to get VC or bank investments.
And as for the studies: to quote XKCD, correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does wiggle it's eyes suggestively while gesturing towards causation. In the social sciences, statistical data provides the what, but theory and qualitative evidence (actually talking to people) provides us the how and why. It's hard, but when you look at dozens and dozens of studies, you start to see patterns emerge.
Not everyone gets VC, and it's not an unlimited supply. The figures I'm looking at now from the Kauffman Foundation say about $230 billion in US in 2008.
But, I don't think there's any reason to think that firms founded by women are any less productive or good targets for investment than those founded by men or by mixed-gender teams. In general, firms founded by women perform worse than by men, but this difference goes away once you look at firms in the same sectors (women are more likely to found firms in lower-profit sectors like retail and services).
VC's hard to get. But it should be equally hard to get. Right now it doesn't seem like it is.
You're right, there aren't enough male nurses. Gender discrimination goes both ways. We need a lot more nurses in this country, and one way to reach that is to get over this stupid idea that it's emasculating to be a male nurse.
But, I'd also point out that a hell of a lot of nurses work 60+ hours a week in a much higher stress work place than a coder at a startup does.
Okay, I guess I should get in here before it gets really bad. I'm a PhD student who studies entrepreneurship, so I've read a bit on the topic of gender discrimination and difference in entrepreneurship. In fact, I'm writing this instead of working on the lit review of my research proposal. There is plenty of evidence that women are discriminated when they look for loans or investments. A good read is Blake 2006 "Gendered Lending: Gender, Context and the Rules of Business Lending" in Venture Capital 8(2) pp. 183-201. Basisiaclly, there are pretty large, statistically signifigant, differences in loan approval rates between men and women, after controling for a host of factors like education, business plan, experience ect. Plenty of women applying for loans for high-tech businesses were told by the banker to instead start more traditionally women-oriented businesses like salons or clothes stores. On the venture capital side, access to venture capital is heavily dependent on social networks, if most venture capialists are men, then women will have a harder time getting into these networks. The old boys network still does exist, and it's hard to break in to.
But why does this matter? The fact is that entrepreneurship is the only way that the American economy is going to grow. This is the best feature of our economy. So sure, I agree that women might not be equally as interested in entering the technical fields as men (though I'd say this is due in large part to implicit and explicit discrimination rather than anything biological). But we need all the entrepreneurs we can get. If women, who as you recall make up half the population, can't get a fair shake at starting high-tech firms poised for fast growth and export-base sales. we're doing the economy a disservice.
But that's exactly what the actual article this story is based on was about. Someone raised the issue in a very calm and understanding manner. He didn't accuse the entire community of being sexist, but did bring up the issue that there are some implicit points that could be constructed as sexist by many members of the community, yet be seen as innocent jokes by the people who made them. And now we're in a flamewar.
This is actually a very big point for a lot of people working to end the more subtle forces of racism and sexism in our society. We're mostly beyond the point of abject and visible racism, sexism and homophobia. But, it's still a major part of our society. A lot of people who don't face jokes about how women should be in the kitchen making dinner (speaking of which, this'll be my last post in the thread because I have to go and cook a delicious thanksgiving dinner) don't see it as sexism, because it doesn't effect them. It's just a joke that they made. Same thing with saying that something's gay or faggy.
But, when it's done over and over again, it's not really a joke. So, I think a lot of the people talking about sexism in FOSS aren't asking you to change your entire life just to make sure no one in the world is ever offended again. But just to think about how other people might read what you write, and to put in the smallest modicum of effort so that people read what you actually mean instead of being turned off by how you say it.
Okay, let's take you're example of.01%. So, one out of every 1000 posts contains sexiest language. That's a problem in of itself. It doesn't solve the problem to say that other things are worse. Obviously 4Chan will have more sexist and racist comments than the Debian mailing list. Open source development is based on a community model of development. If you want it to succeed, you need to understand that when one part of the group gets attacked because of some intrinsic attribute about them, you're going to have problems. Do you want Linux distributions to be better? That means you need every single talented person who's willing to contribute to contribute. And I guarantee you there are a lot more women developers who would be willing to contribute than there are men who will quite over being "censored" when someone asks them not to make an ass of themselves.
No, I don't think anyone said that. Though, you know, it would be nice if people realized that it is generally a bad thing for people to be able to make death threats against women without being called on it. Because these things escalate.
Here's the thing. We all want open source to succeed and grow bigger. That mean getting more developers and more users. But, if someone with a name like Cindy or Susan tries to contribute to a program and they're met with responses that treat them differently because of their gender, FOSS is going to run into problems.
Okay, let's try an example from a Debian commentor called MikeeUSA
The women of the “geek feminism” movement will be just as effective at excising men from the movement as Nina was at systematically destroying Hans Reiser’s life untill he saw no reason, nothing left in his life, that could hold him back from striking back.
Ouch.
And also
Yea you’ve become a developer and have done nearly nothing except shill your feminist shit and try to turn debian into a woman’s project (you are succeeding, men are leaving debian because of you and your ilk, worthless bitch).
This is what happens when we leave social science to actual scientists. Physicists are doing some really cool stuff with social network analysis, but they're ignoring over 50 years of actual social theory of networks. They're finding correlation and calling it causation.
Saying that countries with large cabinets are less politically developed isn't that interesting or even true (Canada has a federal minister of sports and recreation!). What needs to be looked into is _why_ less developed countries have larger cabinets. Off the top of my head (and I'm a geographer, not a social scientist) is that developing countries often have multiple ethnic groups that demand representation in the government, and this is often required by their constitution. Cabinet positions are made to give them representation in the government and to ensure that the government receives those groups support.
Look, I like social network analysis. I do it myself, and I'm glad that physicists are taking an interest in it, they've produced some amazing work. But, they also need to start to realize that they're working in a _social_ science, and qualitative research is needed to complete the quantitative.
my good friend works for the AAAS, and is right now doing her Ph.D work on the use of these images to document human rights abuses. It's not UN data, it's publicly available commercial satellite data. Anyone can buys these images. They've also been doing work on documenting destroyed villages in the Sudan, the Amazon and any number of other places. Ironically, the main problem with this is that the technique is useless when there is cloud cover, and villages are really hard to find in large scale maps
It's one thing to hear about massacres, but this work is making sure that we have hard, solid evidence to back up claims.
In any survey like this, there is a self selection bias. This is accepted and acknowledges by them. In fact, given the large sample size, this becomes increasingly irrelevant. They've included a range of values for the population and an alpha value based on the characteristics of the sample. Every single survey includes this, its at the heart of statistics.
As for the patents, there are few other ways to determine what an 'innovation' is. Its a fairly vague meaning, something different from what was before it. There is simply no other way to study innovation on a national level than through patent citations. Its not perfect, but its pretty damn good. There are plenty of innovations that aren't patented, but these have a smaller economic impact, which this study is looking at.
TO summarize: social sciences aren't perfect, that's what makes it fun to do (full disclosure: grad student in geography studying innovation diffusion). It means that you do have to read very carefully and look at their methodology. Sure, you can lie with statistics, but if you can read statistics, its not that hard to find the lies. However, these kinds of studies are fairly common, and almost all of them show similar circumstances.
this is a big difference between Boston and the Valley. New ideas coming out of MIT or Harvard - and to a lesser extent BU and BC;) - will mostly go straight to large firms, which have the resources to support and incubate the ideas, but that won't take the risks to make it huge. This lets Boston have a great high-tech economy when times are good, but during recessions, there will be much fewer big new ideas locating in Boston because the large firms won't take the risk. This means that Boston is much more susceptible to cyclical downturns than is Silicon Valley, which usually has something else replace failed technologies.
This is a huge question in economic geography (the economics of regions), and as grad student in economic geography, maybe I can at a bit.
Short answer is no. Long answer is yes with a but. Silicon Valley is the product of several interacting factors. The first is the presence of Stanford, which produces a great deal of spin off research, that locates near by so that people form Stanford can keep on interacting with the community. In a recent survey of biotech firms (in Seattle, not the Valley, but the example is still good for an example) over 75% of business owners said that continuing access to university resources was a large component of their locational decision. Stanford is important for another reason, it has a unique culture that encourages sharing of knowledge between people and firms. One of the reasons why Route 128 in Boston performs historically worse than the Valley is that its graduates are, generally, less likely to share information freely. This sharing creates what today is called "communities of learning," which allow all firms in a region to grow much faster.
The Stanford culture has created a unique culture, one that doesn't punish failure. Hell, you're expected to fail there at least a few times. No one gives money to someone who hasn't crashed at least 2 previous ventures. Its also created a pool of labor unrivalled anywhere else for what the Valley does best - software design, networking and chip design. People who are good at these locate there to be close to other people with the same interests, created a labor pool that attracts new firms looking for talented people.
This culture can't be recreated at the drop of a hat. It takes time. Sure, you can set up office space for chip designers, offer tax incentives to get firms to locate there, and sponsor high-tech grad programs at local universities, but it won't create a new Valley. It will create something else. Maybe better, most of the times worse. If anyone is interested, I expand on the subjects, but you're better off reading works by Melecki, Florida and Gertler.
I spent the last year doing a graduate program search (for geography, not CS, but same things apply), so the tips are fresh in my mind.
There are two schools of thought on how to search for a grad school. The first is to find a professor that you like and then look at the program. The best way to do this is to look through all the papers that you've written as an undergrad and look for the names that show up often in your bibliography. These are people who are interested in what you like. Chances are, they are surrounded by other people doing what you like. Take a look at the program that they teach in, do they offer classes that you like, are other people publishing things that interest you. The danger here to two fold. The first is that the person who you like is a jerk in person, you can find that out by corresponding with them by e-mail, see if they pay attention to you and treat you with respect. Ask your current professors about the person, most academic fields are pretty small, and word gets around. If you ever visit the campus, talk to their grad students and other people in the program. This is the best approach to take if you plan on either doing a ph.d, which is mostly working with an advisor one-on-one, or plan on staying in the same place for both masters and ph.d. One last hint, make sure they'll be staying at the institution, I almost got burned on this one.
The second school of thought, better if you're getting a masters and then moving into the private industry, is to find a program that interests you. Since you seem to have tried this, I won't add much more here except to say that I hear at Carnage Melon has a good computer security program, not sure if its what you're looking for though.
You're right. I'm a big believer in proper grammar and usage. If I were in charge, The Elements of Style would be waved around like Mao's Quotations. If someone gives me a paper to edit, I'll bring out my red pen and make damn well sure that all their commas follow the Harvard tradition.
However, this is the internet we're talking on, you have to expect trolls. If people are going to troll, I'd much rather them yelling about grammar instead of hot grits.
I think this blog of geek etiquette said it best: "Be conservative in what you generate and liberal in what you accept." It applies to grammar comments along with everything else in the world.
Two words, which mean almost the same thing, which sound alike, but have very different implications. The first implies that I spearheaded the change, that it is my responsibility. The second implies that I had slight input on the change.
The English language has one of the largest vocabularies in the world, which means that it has many nuanced definitions. It is important to use the words that you mean to. If you don't, than you're not communicating the message you meant to.
On further research, it looks like I was wrong. According to U of T's Copyright policy the university holds the copyright to anything "created by an Author in the course of the Author's employment by the University." On the other hand, "For the purposes of this Policy, research and instruction, or the creation of instructional Works, including Instructional Software, undertaken by members of the University's Teaching Staff or librarians shall not be deemed to be made or undertaken in the course of their employment by the University." This leaves me thoroughly confused, which is about par for the course.
However, in another twist in this dramatic story " Computer Software that is not Instructional Software will be deemed to be an "Invention" under the Inventions Policy, and the rights and obligations with respect to such Computer Software and the disposition of revenues therefrom shall be in accordance with the Inventions Policy." This Invention Policy says that the university essentially everything you make in your office.
So, we're no different than anyone else, but damn if we don't have the best student union in the greater Canadas.
I'm in the process of writing a report for the University of Toronto and recommendations for releasing research as open source. I was told not to even concentrate on convincing them to do it, they're already leaning towards that, but rather to make recommendations on licences. As far as I can tell, no department at U of T says that they own research, and profs and grad students generally have a free hand to release their research as they want.
U of T is also home to the Knowledge Media Design Institute, which is a huge proponent of Open Source. This year they ran a lecture series called Open Source | Open Access which was entirely on the place of open source within the academic community. They're also offering grants to students to work on open source software!
I'm not sure how good the math program is here, as the maths frighten me. From walking around campus, I do know that we have something called the "Fields Institute for Mathematics", which seems very official and such not. Give it a look, there are worse places to be than downtown Toronto.
Give me an e-mail if you want some more info on U of T
Well, its one of the most innovative. If you've ever been in a college library, than you've used the Congressional Catalogue System (A-Z classification), which is much better for large collections than the Dewey systems (0-999 system). Its also at the forefront of digital collections, and it ought to be, as the world's fastest growing library. That, and their reference librarians are damn good. It also has the world's largest collection of maps and sound recordings. Lets not also forget that the British Museum is fairly new, made in 1973 as compared to 1800 for the LC
But, to answer your question, there is no 'world's best library.' It all depends on your subject and access to primary resources. If you're studying early British history, than the Library on Congress won't have a heck of a lot of original documents for you. Vice-versa for trying to study American history at the British Library.
someone should mod this up. Your speech is guaranteed, not your bullhorn. The students are free to go to the copy shop and print off their own articles and distribute them at school (as long as they don't disrupt classes), or off school grounds. The school pays for the printing of the newspaper, and therefore controls what's in it.
I think there's a misconception the power over which people control how their taxes are spent. You elect people to decide how that money is spent, you have no other say than that. I don't like the fact that some of my taxes are going to pay for guns, and other people don't like their taxes paying for art. It doesn't mean I can force the government to spent my taxes in ways I want, I can just vote for someone who will spend my taxes the way I want them to be spent.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason that I like the Blake article is that she actually sat down and talked with the bankers. Not enough people actually do this, though I'm hoping I'll get the opportunity to do this in my own research. The bankers say pretty much what you would expect, they don't discriminate on gender, that they look fairly on everyone. And you know, I believe them. This issue arises from a number of levels, from education to parenting and life expectations.
But a big issue is that in people's minds, women are a risky investment because they might want kids in the future and therefore work less hard. This is not a fair way to judge people, men want kids too and will cut down on their work hours once they have them. But it's a view that's so deeply infused in our society that it's hard to get around.
The Kauffman Firm Survey is not some internet poll. They contacted Every. Single. Firm that first filed employment taxes in 2005. I participated in a 2 hour seminar just on the various bias controls they used in the collection and analysis of the data.
There is some error in there to be sure, but rigorous controls were put in place to ensure consistancy and accuracy in the data. This is why the statistical measures all contain error terms.
Oh I agree with you. It's an intractable problem. There's a poster down below who says that as an angel investor, he finds it hard to invest in women-run firms because they don't often have prior business experience. They don't have prior business experience because women have only entered technical fields in great numbers later than men.
The VCs aren't discriminating because they hate women. They are making decisions that are entirely rational based on their point of view. They meet less women entrepreneurs because their networks contain fewer women. The women that do pitch ideas to them will, on average, have less business experience than an average male entrepreneur. I can't blame the VC for not investing. It really is a social issue that doesn't have an easy solution. But bring up the issue a lot so that people are aware that there is discrimination is an important first step.
Okay. I'm a geographer too, and I like that article, so I brought it up. If you want a more rigorous study, check out Coleman and Robb 2008 (http://ssrn.com/abstract=1260980). Right now it's just a working paper, but I think it's been accepted for publication. It's based off the Kauffman Firm Survey, which is a longitudinal survey of 4,928 entrepreneurs. It's get a crazy amount of data on all of them, like over 1,000 questions. It's an amazing resource, and even better, most of the data is publicly available! Check it out at Kauffman.org/kfs. This study shows fairly conclusively that women have a much harder time getting capital, even after controlling for individual and personal characteristics.
Gender isn't important if there are enough people in the sector or occupation. Well, I mean, I would still be concerned if there's discrimination that favors or disfavors one gender over another, but it's not a critical issue.
It becomes an issue when there aren't enough people in it, and you need to get more. If there aren't enough women who want to become nurses, what's easier, trying to convince more women, who are essentially all tapped out, or try to encourage more men to join up?
It's the same thing with entrepreneurs, scientists and engineers. We need all of them. There are plenty of smart, talented and qualified women who don't enter because of both overt discrimination and more subtle forms of discouragement such as it being harder to get VC or bank investments.
And as for the studies: to quote XKCD, correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does wiggle it's eyes suggestively while gesturing towards causation. In the social sciences, statistical data provides the what, but theory and qualitative evidence (actually talking to people) provides us the how and why. It's hard, but when you look at dozens and dozens of studies, you start to see patterns emerge.
Not everyone gets VC, and it's not an unlimited supply. The figures I'm looking at now from the Kauffman Foundation say about $230 billion in US in 2008.
But, I don't think there's any reason to think that firms founded by women are any less productive or good targets for investment than those founded by men or by mixed-gender teams. In general, firms founded by women perform worse than by men, but this difference goes away once you look at firms in the same sectors (women are more likely to found firms in lower-profit sectors like retail and services).
VC's hard to get. But it should be equally hard to get. Right now it doesn't seem like it is.
You're right, there aren't enough male nurses. Gender discrimination goes both ways. We need a lot more nurses in this country, and one way to reach that is to get over this stupid idea that it's emasculating to be a male nurse.
But, I'd also point out that a hell of a lot of nurses work 60+ hours a week in a much higher stress work place than a coder at a startup does.
Okay, I guess I should get in here before it gets really bad. I'm a PhD student who studies entrepreneurship, so I've read a bit on the topic of gender discrimination and difference in entrepreneurship. In fact, I'm writing this instead of working on the lit review of my research proposal. There is plenty of evidence that women are discriminated when they look for loans or investments. A good read is Blake 2006 "Gendered Lending: Gender, Context and the Rules of Business Lending" in Venture Capital 8(2) pp. 183-201. Basisiaclly, there are pretty large, statistically signifigant, differences in loan approval rates between men and women, after controling for a host of factors like education, business plan, experience ect. Plenty of women applying for loans for high-tech businesses were told by the banker to instead start more traditionally women-oriented businesses like salons or clothes stores. On the venture capital side, access to venture capital is heavily dependent on social networks, if most venture capialists are men, then women will have a harder time getting into these networks. The old boys network still does exist, and it's hard to break in to.
But why does this matter? The fact is that entrepreneurship is the only way that the American economy is going to grow. This is the best feature of our economy. So sure, I agree that women might not be equally as interested in entering the technical fields as men (though I'd say this is due in large part to implicit and explicit discrimination rather than anything biological). But we need all the entrepreneurs we can get. If women, who as you recall make up half the population, can't get a fair shake at starting high-tech firms poised for fast growth and export-base sales. we're doing the economy a disservice.
But that's exactly what the actual article this story is based on was about. Someone raised the issue in a very calm and understanding manner. He didn't accuse the entire community of being sexist, but did bring up the issue that there are some implicit points that could be constructed as sexist by many members of the community, yet be seen as innocent jokes by the people who made them. And now we're in a flamewar.
This is actually a very big point for a lot of people working to end the more subtle forces of racism and sexism in our society. We're mostly beyond the point of abject and visible racism, sexism and homophobia. But, it's still a major part of our society. A lot of people who don't face jokes about how women should be in the kitchen making dinner (speaking of which, this'll be my last post in the thread because I have to go and cook a delicious thanksgiving dinner) don't see it as sexism, because it doesn't effect them. It's just a joke that they made. Same thing with saying that something's gay or faggy.
But, when it's done over and over again, it's not really a joke. So, I think a lot of the people talking about sexism in FOSS aren't asking you to change your entire life just to make sure no one in the world is ever offended again. But just to think about how other people might read what you write, and to put in the smallest modicum of effort so that people read what you actually mean instead of being turned off by how you say it.
Okay, let's take you're example of .01%. So, one out of every 1000 posts contains sexiest language. That's a problem in of itself. It doesn't solve the problem to say that other things are worse. Obviously 4Chan will have more sexist and racist comments than the Debian mailing list. Open source development is based on a community model of development. If you want it to succeed, you need to understand that when one part of the group gets attacked because of some intrinsic attribute about them, you're going to have problems. Do you want Linux distributions to be better? That means you need every single talented person who's willing to contribute to contribute. And I guarantee you there are a lot more women developers who would be willing to contribute than there are men who will quite over being "censored" when someone asks them not to make an ass of themselves.
No, I don't think anyone said that. Though, you know, it would be nice if people realized that it is generally a bad thing for people to be able to make death threats against women without being called on it. Because these things escalate.
Here's the thing. We all want open source to succeed and grow bigger. That mean getting more developers and more users. But, if someone with a name like Cindy or Susan tries to contribute to a program and they're met with responses that treat them differently because of their gender, FOSS is going to run into problems.
okay, how about 54 incidents? And that's with about 25 seconds of searching.
And before you respond, tell me if you'll need a tractor to help you with all the goalpost moving you're doing.
Okay, let's try an example from a Debian commentor called MikeeUSA
The women of the “geek feminism” movement will be just as effective at excising men from the movement as Nina was at systematically destroying Hans Reiser’s life untill he saw no reason, nothing left in his life, that could hold him back from striking back.
Ouch.
And also
Yea you’ve become a developer and have done nearly nothing except shill your feminist shit and try to turn debian into a woman’s project (you are succeeding, men are leaving debian because of you and your ilk, worthless bitch).
examples taken from Geek Feminism
This is what happens when we leave social science to actual scientists. Physicists are doing some really cool stuff with social network analysis, but they're ignoring over 50 years of actual social theory of networks. They're finding correlation and calling it causation.
Saying that countries with large cabinets are less politically developed isn't that interesting or even true (Canada has a federal minister of sports and recreation!). What needs to be looked into is _why_ less developed countries have larger cabinets. Off the top of my head (and I'm a geographer, not a social scientist) is that developing countries often have multiple ethnic groups that demand representation in the government, and this is often required by their constitution. Cabinet positions are made to give them representation in the government and to ensure that the government receives those groups support.
Look, I like social network analysis. I do it myself, and I'm glad that physicists are taking an interest in it, they've produced some amazing work. But, they also need to start to realize that they're working in a _social_ science, and qualitative research is needed to complete the quantitative.
my good friend works for the AAAS, and is right now doing her Ph.D work on the use of these images to document human rights abuses. It's not UN data, it's publicly available commercial satellite data. Anyone can buys these images. They've also been doing work on documenting destroyed villages in the Sudan, the Amazon and any number of other places. Ironically, the main problem with this is that the technique is useless when there is cloud cover, and villages are really hard to find in large scale maps
It's one thing to hear about massacres, but this work is making sure that we have hard, solid evidence to back up claims.
In any survey like this, there is a self selection bias. This is accepted and acknowledges by them. In fact, given the large sample size, this becomes increasingly irrelevant. They've included a range of values for the population and an alpha value based on the characteristics of the sample. Every single survey includes this, its at the heart of statistics.
As for the patents, there are few other ways to determine what an 'innovation' is. Its a fairly vague meaning, something different from what was before it. There is simply no other way to study innovation on a national level than through patent citations. Its not perfect, but its pretty damn good. There are plenty of innovations that aren't patented, but these have a smaller economic impact, which this study is looking at.
TO summarize: social sciences aren't perfect, that's what makes it fun to do (full disclosure: grad student in geography studying innovation diffusion). It means that you do have to read very carefully and look at their methodology. Sure, you can lie with statistics, but if you can read statistics, its not that hard to find the lies. However, these kinds of studies are fairly common, and almost all of them show similar circumstances.
this is a big difference between Boston and the Valley. New ideas coming out of MIT or Harvard - and to a lesser extent BU and BC ;) - will mostly go straight to large firms, which have the resources to support and incubate the ideas, but that won't take the risks to make it huge. This lets Boston have a great high-tech economy when times are good, but during recessions, there will be much fewer big new ideas locating in Boston because the large firms won't take the risk. This means that Boston is much more susceptible to cyclical downturns than is Silicon Valley, which usually has something else replace failed technologies.
This is a huge question in economic geography (the economics of regions), and as grad student in economic geography, maybe I can at a bit.
Short answer is no. Long answer is yes with a but. Silicon Valley is the product of several interacting factors. The first is the presence of Stanford, which produces a great deal of spin off research, that locates near by so that people form Stanford can keep on interacting with the community. In a recent survey of biotech firms (in Seattle, not the Valley, but the example is still good for an example) over 75% of business owners said that continuing access to university resources was a large component of their locational decision. Stanford is important for another reason, it has a unique culture that encourages sharing of knowledge between people and firms. One of the reasons why Route 128 in Boston performs historically worse than the Valley is that its graduates are, generally, less likely to share information freely. This sharing creates what today is called "communities of learning," which allow all firms in a region to grow much faster.
The Stanford culture has created a unique culture, one that doesn't punish failure. Hell, you're expected to fail there at least a few times. No one gives money to someone who hasn't crashed at least 2 previous ventures. Its also created a pool of labor unrivalled anywhere else for what the Valley does best - software design, networking and chip design. People who are good at these locate there to be close to other people with the same interests, created a labor pool that attracts new firms looking for talented people.
This culture can't be recreated at the drop of a hat. It takes time. Sure, you can set up office space for chip designers, offer tax incentives to get firms to locate there, and sponsor high-tech grad programs at local universities, but it won't create a new Valley. It will create something else. Maybe better, most of the times worse. If anyone is interested, I expand on the subjects, but you're better off reading works by Melecki, Florida and Gertler.
I spent the last year doing a graduate program search (for geography, not CS, but same things apply), so the tips are fresh in my mind.
There are two schools of thought on how to search for a grad school. The first is to find a professor that you like and then look at the program. The best way to do this is to look through all the papers that you've written as an undergrad and look for the names that show up often in your bibliography. These are people who are interested in what you like. Chances are, they are surrounded by other people doing what you like. Take a look at the program that they teach in, do they offer classes that you like, are other people publishing things that interest you. The danger here to two fold. The first is that the person who you like is a jerk in person, you can find that out by corresponding with them by e-mail, see if they pay attention to you and treat you with respect. Ask your current professors about the person, most academic fields are pretty small, and word gets around. If you ever visit the campus, talk to their grad students and other people in the program. This is the best approach to take if you plan on either doing a ph.d, which is mostly working with an advisor one-on-one, or plan on staying in the same place for both masters and ph.d. One last hint, make sure they'll be staying at the institution, I almost got burned on this one.
The second school of thought, better if you're getting a masters and then moving into the private industry, is to find a program that interests you. Since you seem to have tried this, I won't add much more here except to say that I hear at Carnage Melon has a good computer security program, not sure if its what you're looking for though.
You're right. I'm a big believer in proper grammar and usage. If I were in charge, The Elements of Style would be waved around like Mao's Quotations. If someone gives me a paper to edit, I'll bring out my red pen and make damn well sure that all their commas follow the Harvard tradition. However, this is the internet we're talking on, you have to expect trolls. If people are going to troll, I'd much rather them yelling about grammar instead of hot grits. I think this blog of geek etiquette said it best: "Be conservative in what you generate and liberal in what you accept." It applies to grammar comments along with everything else in the world.
Here's why we need to be careful about language:
*I effected the change
*I affected the change
Two words, which mean almost the same thing, which sound alike, but have very different implications. The first implies that I spearheaded the change, that it is my responsibility. The second implies that I had slight input on the change.
The English language has one of the largest vocabularies in the world, which means that it has many nuanced definitions. It is important to use the words that you mean to. If you don't, than you're not communicating the message you meant to.
On further research, it looks like I was wrong. According to U of T's Copyright policy the university holds the copyright to anything "created by an Author in the course of the Author's employment by the University." On the other hand, "For the purposes of this Policy, research and instruction, or the creation of instructional Works, including Instructional Software, undertaken by members of the University's Teaching Staff or librarians shall not be deemed to be made or undertaken in the course of their employment by the University." This leaves me thoroughly confused, which is about par for the course.
However, in another twist in this dramatic story " Computer Software that is not Instructional Software will be deemed to be an "Invention" under the Inventions Policy, and the rights and obligations with respect to such Computer Software and the disposition of revenues therefrom shall be in accordance with the Inventions Policy." This Invention Policy says that the university essentially everything you make in your office.
So, we're no different than anyone else, but damn if we don't have the best student union in the greater Canadas.
I'm in the process of writing a report for the University of Toronto and recommendations for releasing research as open source. I was told not to even concentrate on convincing them to do it, they're already leaning towards that, but rather to make recommendations on licences. As far as I can tell, no department at U of T says that they own research, and profs and grad students generally have a free hand to release their research as they want.
U of T is also home to the Knowledge Media Design Institute, which is a huge proponent of Open Source. This year they ran a lecture series called Open Source | Open Access which was entirely on the place of open source within the academic community. They're also offering grants to students to work on open source software!
I'm not sure how good the math program is here, as the maths frighten me. From walking around campus, I do know that we have something called the "Fields Institute for Mathematics", which seems very official and such not. Give it a look, there are worse places to be than downtown Toronto.
Give me an e-mail if you want some more info on U of T
Well, its one of the most innovative. If you've ever been in a college library, than you've used the Congressional Catalogue System (A-Z classification), which is much better for large collections than the Dewey systems (0-999 system). Its also at the forefront of digital collections, and it ought to be, as the world's fastest growing library. That, and their reference librarians are damn good. It also has the world's largest collection of maps and sound recordings. Lets not also forget that the British Museum is fairly new, made in 1973 as compared to 1800 for the LC
But, to answer your question, there is no 'world's best library.' It all depends on your subject and access to primary resources. If you're studying early British history, than the Library on Congress won't have a heck of a lot of original documents for you. Vice-versa for trying to study American history at the British Library.
I think there's a misconception the power over which people control how their taxes are spent. You elect people to decide how that money is spent, you have no other say than that. I don't like the fact that some of my taxes are going to pay for guns, and other people don't like their taxes paying for art. It doesn't mean I can force the government to spent my taxes in ways I want, I can just vote for someone who will spend my taxes the way I want them to be spent.