There is an age-old adage; you're not paranoid if someone is actually out to get you.
In predicting climate change, there are always the best-case scenarios and the worst case scenarios.
And, there is always intentional ignorance, like denying the reality that climate change has the potential to cause, "an immediate evacuation of major cities over a short period of time."
We built our major manufacturing and population centers based on the stable climate that had existed for thousands of years. A huge chunk is situated near sea-level. Look at the United States. Every major city except for Chicago (San Francisco, Boston, New York, Los Angeles, DC) is threatened by rising sea levels, as well as plenty of minor cities such as Houston and Seattle. A huge chunk of the population lives and works in areas that are near sea level.
Surges that may have caused minor damages in the past, especially the huge surges that can be caused by hurricanes and earthquakes will be more likely to utterly devastate these areas in the future, due to the rising sea levels. This could easily necessitate the evacuation of a major population center such as Manhattan or Boston, similar to what happened in New Orleans during Katrina.
So yeah, if it is "alarmist" to plan for worst-case scenarios, then I will proudly wear that badge, because it is not paranoid to plan for something that will probably happen somewhere at some point in the future due to climate change. If New Orleans and the federal government had taken an "alarmist" position on New Orleans's potential for storm-surge flooding, then a lot more people would still be alive today.
I would rather not be the guy playing my fiddle and yelling out, "you guys are all alarmists" when the world starts to burn.
I was thinking that the Raspberry Pi would make a great calculator (with the inclusion of Mathematica and GNU tools), but there are no good cases to achieve this.
All you need for a meter is a camera. Rural roads get huge subsidies from people who live in cities. In many cases, the true cost of using the roads in rural areas might be $10,000 or more a year per household. In a metered approach, it might be simply that some rural roads would have to be abandoned, because the users could not afford the cost.
I'm not advocating that metered access is the best policy for any government service, be it roads or internet. I am simply pointing out that there are always alternatives.
Just like only the government should build ships to explore what is west of the Pacific ocean. . . .
Only the government should risk lives to build flying machines. . . .
Only the government should send people into low-earth orbit to repair satellites. I mean, it is okay to send someone up up a giant live electrical tower to keep the electricity on, but not okay to send them into space to keep the internet on.
All those things are really a result of tradition rather than some significant pragmatism.
Right now, people have a huge tax burden generated by private automobiles, even if they do not own a car. It would not be astoundingly difficult to switch to a system where road usage is based on congestion and usage pricings.
Install cameras at every traffic light not just to catch red light runners, but also to scan license plates. Eliminate free street parking and make it illegal to park on the street without purchasing storage time (either from a smartphone or a meter). Charge people a monthly usage fee based upon how many miles they drove, the wear created by the mass of their vehicle, the cost of maintaining the roads they used, and the amount of congestion they created (based on real-time congestion data and the size of their vehicle)
You probably will not see a system like this for the same reason that you will not see a basic internet connection to everyone's home, which is simply tradition. People are uncomfortable with those kinds of radical changes, even if it would increase fairness and be a public benefit.
By that same token, if the nearest major grocery store is an hour bus ride away from an inner-city neighborhood, that distance is not actually STOPPING poor residents from getting affordable fresh fruit, but it is making it incredibly difficult for them.
Likewise, there are libraries here, but they usually have a one hour time-limit, limited to one or two hours per day. In theory, a poor student isn't being stopped from using the internet, but it might be very difficult for them to do compared to someone who has internet access at home.
If a homework assignment takes eight hours of research, for instance, a poor student might need twenty hours and two weeks to complete the assignment whereas a middle-class student can finish it in eight hours on a single Saturday.
Right now, if your house is burning down, you can call the fire department, and they put it out free of charge. It's a government service that is paid for, usually primarily by tax dollars and rarely by specific usage fees.
Most government services are paid for by a combination of usage fees, general fees, usage taxes, and general taxes. For instance, transportation is paid for about fifty percent from usage taxes (like gas taxes) and about fifty percent from general taxes, with a bit also paid for by usage fees (like toll bridges and carpool lanes, registration fees, et cetera). Something similar is true of public transportation, which comes about 50% from usage fees (usually in the forms of fares) and about 50% in the form of general taxes.
Right now, the road outside my house is, for the intent of what the OP meant by "free" provided gratis by the government. The government makes sure that I can walk, drive, or bike from my house to wherever I want to go by maintaining public roads. Everyone pays for it in one way or another, but nobody makes me pay a bill every month to walk to the subway station or drive my car to the grocery store.
Absolutely nothing would stop a municipality from doing the same for the internet. Provide basic service to every home in town from the tax general fund, like we do with roads. Charge residences a premium for broadband speeds and raised data caps, charge businesses, and provide discounts or free broadband speeds to children enrolled in school or poorer residents.
It is hardly "impossible". It is really nothing more than a question of some city deciding to actually do it.
I don't think they're very good fitness trackers because they don't actually track most fitness.
Do you go backpacking for the weekend? Too bad, the battery will be dead.
Do you lift weights? Too bad, because the fitness tracker can't actually figure out which exercises you're doing or which muscle groups you're targeting.
Do you use an exercise bicycle? Too bad, because the fitness tracker won't be able to figure it out.
Do you do calisthenics? Too bad, because the fitness tracker won't be able to figure out what exactly you're doing.
In principle, it could be a useful device, but it doesn't seem to do very much that your cell phone cannot do on its own. For someone that specifically wants to keep track of their jogging, this could be useful, but it doesn't seem like a good general-purpose fitness tracker.
The line is defined as "reasonable accommodation". As long as an accommodation does not impose a disproportionate or undue burden, it must be made.
It would be hard for me to believe that accommodating someone using a pair of Google glasses to assist them with their disability would impose an undue burden on a movie theater.
Yeah, but I don't have my smartphone on me when I'm exercising and few people use a smartband.
The fact is, the market is wide-open for someone to make a killer-product. I don't think Microsoft has done that, but their take on the market is not any worse than anyone else's and it represents more choice for the consumer.
An automatic watch though, even a cheap Chinese-made one with a cheap Japanese movement will keep pretty good time on a two week trip.
A quartz watch will usually last a minimum of 6 months between battery changes.
Most of these smart watches and fitness bands last less than 24 hours (like the Apple watch) or only a few days.
Honestly, if you have to take your watch off your wrist and charge it more than once a week, it's a crappy watch, the same if you have to press a button to see what time it is.
While Google Glass is not an FDA approved medical device, it can contain medical devices such as prescription lenses.
Additionally, it is used by people suffering from various medical conditions as an assistive device.
Not only do they run the risk of being sued for discriminating against those with disabilities, but it seems unlikely that someone intent on pirating movies would choose to wear expensive, conspicuous Google glasses with their bright-red "record" LED on the front when there are much cheaper and discrete options for glasses embedded with high resolution cameras designed to record video.
It seems unlikely the State of Kentucky would have funded a theme park designed to disprove the Evangelical Christian view of the bible or a theme park designed to convert people to Islam and explain the teachings of Mohammad.
The CMD terminal has always supported customizable fonts and font-sizes. Copy and paste was not exactly power-user friendly, but it has also always been fully supported. The Powershell terminal (which can also run CMD) is fully resizable.
There are various reasons why Microsoft chose not to support these things from the beginning of Windows NT (primarily because NT was supposed to do away with DOS except for legacy applications and so did not implement a proper terminal shell), but even before 6.0 they started working toward a fully-implemented text shell as an integral part of windows, which was fully implemented with 6.0 (Vista and 2008).
Supposedly, Windows 10 is supposed to bring serious improvements to the terminal itself, which is probably one of the reasons that the Windows UNIX subsystem (which supports UNIX shells such as BASH) is being taken completely out of Windows 10 in favor of Powershell.
Back when NT ran almost exclusively on lower end hardware and Unix ran almost exclusively on higher end hardware, I do not think Microsoft saw much of an advantage in rewriting the NT kernel to fully support a text-console interface. Now that NT is running on higher-end hardware and *NIX (mostly Linux) is running on lower end hardware, they are seeing the advantages in having the same tools as their competition.
The first amendment doesn't say anything about the internet or telephones either. You cannot understand the first amendment just by reading a few sentences anymore than you can understand the first law of dynamics by reading a simple equation.
The 14th amendment applies the Bill of Rights to State and local governments.
If you want to learn more, read up about the Privileges or Immunities Clause and the Due Process Clause of the 14th amendment as well as the Slaughterhouse Cases.
If someone possesses a civil right or a civil liberty by virtue of the US Constitution, States may not abridge those rights or unequally apply them.
Windows NT does not use the DOS command line. It uses CMD and POWERSHELL. It also (until Windows 10) had an SUA UNIX subsystem that could implement shells such as BASH.
Windows ME was the last version of Windows to run using the Dos command interpreter. Starting with Windows XP, Command.com was removed from all 64 bit versions of Windows, so your computer probably does not even have a DOS command line.
. . . is that a lot of its software is automatically managed. Windows updates is great (it generally works better than the Linux versions), but it only updates Microsoft components. Other installed programs are responsible for updating themselves, often installing hidden processes that boot at start-up for that purpose.
Linux package managers are nice because they manage a pretty wide-variety of software. Their biggest flaw is that you usually still have to update packages you install yourself manually.
If Windows goes with a central package manager for commercial programs as a standard, this would be a big improvement for everyone. Adding it to Windows Update would be useful to the general consumer.
The first amendment prevents a government endorsement of religion. By funding a private park that endorsed explicitly religious beliefs, the State was arguably endorsing the evangelical version of Hebrew mythology.
Well, take the small but growing field of astrobiology for one. It draws a lot from astrophysicists, chemists, et cetera. If someone does not understand how life, how are they going to even consider becoming an astrobiologist? After getting a physics degree, maybe they would go on to study astronomy, focus on astrochemistry, and discover the first signs of life on a distant planet but, because that interest in the origins of life and the beauty of evolution was never sparked, they decided to go work for a startup.
Or, say someone with a physics degree who might be interested in studying biophysics applications in graduate school is not going to even consider the field if they don't believe or understand basic biology.
I don't know why the State got involved in funding the park in the first place (it is a pretty obvious potential conflict with their first amendment duties, but then again, this is Kentucky), but for it to even sneak by constitutional muster, employees cannot be discriminated against because of their religious beliefs.
So, if you let employees walk around and talk about Noah's flood and all that Jazz, you have to give other employees equal rights to talk about how it is a myth likely originating in the flood plains of Mesopotamia that the "decedents of Abraham" brought to Palestine.
Of course, the sensible thing would have been to not have involved the government in the park in the first place. I am sure there are plenty of young-earth creationists out there that Ham can scam.
Regression to the mean is, by definitive, a regression model that is applied to a set of data which fails to disprove the null hypothesis of "no correlation".
You will recall from Linear Algebra that you can use a least squares fit to test to determine the R-value (the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient).
You will recall from your study of Binomial, Poison or other similar distributions that the Central Limit Theorem implies that in a data set of tens of thousands can be treated as conforming to a Gaussian distribution, which therefore allows you to extract a simple P-value.
If the P-value is below the statistical significance threshold, then the null hypothesis is considered disproved and the trendline is therefore significant and not due to regression to the mean.
For our purposes, this would mean that the decrease is due to signal and not noise.
Now, if you want, you can calculate the P-value associated with the null hypothesis of "regression to the mean", but I think you will find the probability that thousands of women randomly decided to study computer science in the 1970's is going to be a lot less than the P=.05 used in the qualitative sciences. One might not be able to disprove "regression to the mean" by the 5 sigma standard of Particle Physics, but it clearly is disproved by the two sigma standard used in social and qualitative sciences.
Also, while the term "regression to the mean" is not often encountered in the quantitative sciences (not even something they ever bothered teaching in all the classes on statistics and probability I took), my understanding is that it purely refers to sampling bias, whereby one set of samples differs from the superset.
In the case of the data we are discussing, there are data sets with no sampling bias, because the data set contains every single student in a US institution that receives federal funding who is studying computer science, so there should be no sampling error.
You keep throwing out ad hominem attacks, but I have to wonder if you have even taken the standard freshmen and sophmore level math ciriculum for the sciences (statistics, linear algebra, discrete math, single and multivariate calculus, and differential equations) based on what you are writing.
I read your post. I ignored your claim of regression to the mean because there is no factual basis to support such a claim. That would necessitate that the trend is statistically insignificant, which could easily be proved if it were true, In the social sciences, a P-value of only.05 is considered sufficient to disprove statistical insignificance.
The data sets consist of thousands of women graduating with CS degrees every year. It is not like astronomy and astrophysics where the number is low enough that there is some possibility of random noise distorting the signal over a period of a few years. With about a million data points over two decades, the Central Limit Theorem is very applicable.
Of course, if you can show using Gaussian probability in an appropriate regression model that the null hypothesis cannot be disproved, I would be willing to look over your calculations, but with so many data points, the Central Limit Theorem is clearly in full effect.
I already posted evidence of the existence of artificial barriers. In fact, it was extremely relevant evidence as it was directly related to this article. The participation of women in academic computer science programs has decreased since the 1980s. By some measures, the decrease is by almost 200%. There are two possible factors for that change:
1) Artificial Factors 2) Natural Factors.
A change in the actual physiological nature of women born over the last 30 years can be pretty thoroughly disproved, as I have done previously. By logical deduction: A+B->C => {C,'A}->B, we know that if natural factors can be disproved as a cause of this, then artificial factors must exist.
Demonstrating that natural factors can cause experiences does not logically imply that natural factors cause a specific experience. That is akin to claiming that because most people die of natural causes, the person I found face down in a pool of his own blood with a knife in his back must have died of natural causes.
The question that I was asking was not whether there COULD be natural factors that contributed to the gender disparity in CS, but whether it could be conclusively demonstrated that natural factors were a significant factor. Can you demonstrate that women are naturally disinclined toward computer science the way that have conclusively demonstrated that smoking is a significant cause of lung cancer?
So again, we get back to my original points which were:
1) There existence conclusive scientific evidence that artificial barriers exist that keep women out of computer science.
2) There is no conclusive scientific evidence that women are naturally disinclined toward entering computer science.
Slashdot Mirror
There is an age-old adage; you're not paranoid if someone is actually out to get you.
In predicting climate change, there are always the best-case scenarios and the worst case scenarios.
And, there is always intentional ignorance, like denying the reality that climate change has the potential to cause, "an immediate evacuation of major cities over a short period of time."
We built our major manufacturing and population centers based on the stable climate that had existed for thousands of years. A huge chunk is situated near sea-level. Look at the United States. Every major city except for Chicago (San Francisco, Boston, New York, Los Angeles, DC) is threatened by rising sea levels, as well as plenty of minor cities such as Houston and Seattle. A huge chunk of the population lives and works in areas that are near sea level.
Surges that may have caused minor damages in the past, especially the huge surges that can be caused by hurricanes and earthquakes will be more likely to utterly devastate these areas in the future, due to the rising sea levels. This could easily necessitate the evacuation of a major population center such as Manhattan or Boston, similar to what happened in New Orleans during Katrina.
So yeah, if it is "alarmist" to plan for worst-case scenarios, then I will proudly wear that badge, because it is not paranoid to plan for something that will probably happen somewhere at some point in the future due to climate change. If New Orleans and the federal government had taken an "alarmist" position on New Orleans's potential for storm-surge flooding, then a lot more people would still be alive today.
I would rather not be the guy playing my fiddle and yelling out, "you guys are all alarmists" when the world starts to burn.
I was thinking that the Raspberry Pi would make a great calculator (with the inclusion of Mathematica and GNU tools), but there are no good cases to achieve this.
http://search.dilbert.com/comi...
All you need for a meter is a camera. Rural roads get huge subsidies from people who live in cities. In many cases, the true cost of using the roads in rural areas might be $10,000 or more a year per household. In a metered approach, it might be simply that some rural roads would have to be abandoned, because the users could not afford the cost.
I'm not advocating that metered access is the best policy for any government service, be it roads or internet. I am simply pointing out that there are always alternatives.
Just like only the government should build ships to explore what is west of the Pacific ocean. . . .
Only the government should risk lives to build flying machines. . . .
Only the government should send people into low-earth orbit to repair satellites. I mean, it is okay to send someone up up a giant live electrical tower to keep the electricity on, but not okay to send them into space to keep the internet on.
All those things are really a result of tradition rather than some significant pragmatism.
Right now, people have a huge tax burden generated by private automobiles, even if they do not own a car. It would not be astoundingly difficult to switch to a system where road usage is based on congestion and usage pricings.
Install cameras at every traffic light not just to catch red light runners, but also to scan license plates. Eliminate free street parking and make it illegal to park on the street without purchasing storage time (either from a smartphone or a meter). Charge people a monthly usage fee based upon how many miles they drove, the wear created by the mass of their vehicle, the cost of maintaining the roads they used, and the amount of congestion they created (based on real-time congestion data and the size of their vehicle)
You probably will not see a system like this for the same reason that you will not see a basic internet connection to everyone's home, which is simply tradition. People are uncomfortable with those kinds of radical changes, even if it would increase fairness and be a public benefit.
By that same token, if the nearest major grocery store is an hour bus ride away from an inner-city neighborhood, that distance is not actually STOPPING poor residents from getting affordable fresh fruit, but it is making it incredibly difficult for them.
Likewise, there are libraries here, but they usually have a one hour time-limit, limited to one or two hours per day. In theory, a poor student isn't being stopped from using the internet, but it might be very difficult for them to do compared to someone who has internet access at home.
If a homework assignment takes eight hours of research, for instance, a poor student might need twenty hours and two weeks to complete the assignment whereas a middle-class student can finish it in eight hours on a single Saturday.
Right now, if your house is burning down, you can call the fire department, and they put it out free of charge. It's a government service that is paid for, usually primarily by tax dollars and rarely by specific usage fees.
Most government services are paid for by a combination of usage fees, general fees, usage taxes, and general taxes. For instance, transportation is paid for about fifty percent from usage taxes (like gas taxes) and about fifty percent from general taxes, with a bit also paid for by usage fees (like toll bridges and carpool lanes, registration fees, et cetera). Something similar is true of public transportation, which comes about 50% from usage fees (usually in the forms of fares) and about 50% in the form of general taxes.
Right now, the road outside my house is, for the intent of what the OP meant by "free" provided gratis by the government. The government makes sure that I can walk, drive, or bike from my house to wherever I want to go by maintaining public roads. Everyone pays for it in one way or another, but nobody makes me pay a bill every month to walk to the subway station or drive my car to the grocery store.
Absolutely nothing would stop a municipality from doing the same for the internet. Provide basic service to every home in town from the tax general fund, like we do with roads. Charge residences a premium for broadband speeds and raised data caps, charge businesses, and provide discounts or free broadband speeds to children enrolled in school or poorer residents.
It is hardly "impossible". It is really nothing more than a question of some city deciding to actually do it.
I don't think they're very good fitness trackers because they don't actually track most fitness.
Do you go backpacking for the weekend? Too bad, the battery will be dead.
Do you lift weights? Too bad, because the fitness tracker can't actually figure out which exercises you're doing or which muscle groups you're targeting.
Do you use an exercise bicycle? Too bad, because the fitness tracker won't be able to figure it out.
Do you do calisthenics? Too bad, because the fitness tracker won't be able to figure out what exactly you're doing.
In principle, it could be a useful device, but it doesn't seem to do very much that your cell phone cannot do on its own. For someone that specifically wants to keep track of their jogging, this could be useful, but it doesn't seem like a good general-purpose fitness tracker.
The line is defined as "reasonable accommodation". As long as an accommodation does not impose a disproportionate or undue burden, it must be made.
It would be hard for me to believe that accommodating someone using a pair of Google glasses to assist them with their disability would impose an undue burden on a movie theater.
Yeah, but I don't have my smartphone on me when I'm exercising and few people use a smartband.
The fact is, the market is wide-open for someone to make a killer-product. I don't think Microsoft has done that, but their take on the market is not any worse than anyone else's and it represents more choice for the consumer.
An automatic watch though, even a cheap Chinese-made one with a cheap Japanese movement will keep pretty good time on a two week trip.
A quartz watch will usually last a minimum of 6 months between battery changes.
Most of these smart watches and fitness bands last less than 24 hours (like the Apple watch) or only a few days.
Honestly, if you have to take your watch off your wrist and charge it more than once a week, it's a crappy watch, the same if you have to press a button to see what time it is.
While Google Glass is not an FDA approved medical device, it can contain medical devices such as prescription lenses.
Additionally, it is used by people suffering from various medical conditions as an assistive device.
Not only do they run the risk of being sued for discriminating against those with disabilities, but it seems unlikely that someone intent on pirating movies would choose to wear expensive, conspicuous Google glasses with their bright-red "record" LED on the front when there are much cheaper and discrete options for glasses embedded with high resolution cameras designed to record video.
You should be able to resize the size of the window with the mouse. The output width and height is dynamically changeable in the settings.
If you want the other advanced features, you have to either use a third party program or wait for Windows 10, which adds some and perhaps all of them.
It seems unlikely the State of Kentucky would have funded a theme park designed to disprove the Evangelical Christian view of the bible or a theme park designed to convert people to Islam and explain the teachings of Mohammad.
The CMD terminal has always supported customizable fonts and font-sizes. Copy and paste was not exactly power-user friendly, but it has also always been fully supported. The Powershell terminal (which can also run CMD) is fully resizable.
There are various reasons why Microsoft chose not to support these things from the beginning of Windows NT (primarily because NT was supposed to do away with DOS except for legacy applications and so did not implement a proper terminal shell), but even before 6.0 they started working toward a fully-implemented text shell as an integral part of windows, which was fully implemented with 6.0 (Vista and 2008).
Supposedly, Windows 10 is supposed to bring serious improvements to the terminal itself, which is probably one of the reasons that the Windows UNIX subsystem (which supports UNIX shells such as BASH) is being taken completely out of Windows 10 in favor of Powershell.
Back when NT ran almost exclusively on lower end hardware and Unix ran almost exclusively on higher end hardware, I do not think Microsoft saw much of an advantage in rewriting the NT kernel to fully support a text-console interface. Now that NT is running on higher-end hardware and *NIX (mostly Linux) is running on lower end hardware, they are seeing the advantages in having the same tools as their competition.
The first amendment doesn't say anything about the internet or telephones either. You cannot understand the first amendment just by reading a few sentences anymore than you can understand the first law of dynamics by reading a simple equation.
The 14th amendment applies the Bill of Rights to State and local governments.
If you want to learn more, read up about the Privileges or Immunities Clause and the Due Process Clause of the 14th amendment as well as the Slaughterhouse Cases.
If someone possesses a civil right or a civil liberty by virtue of the US Constitution, States may not abridge those rights or unequally apply them.
Windows NT does not use the DOS command line. It uses CMD and POWERSHELL. It also (until Windows 10) had an SUA UNIX subsystem that could implement shells such as BASH.
Windows ME was the last version of Windows to run using the Dos command interpreter. Starting with Windows XP, Command.com was removed from all 64 bit versions of Windows, so your computer probably does not even have a DOS command line.
. . . is that a lot of its software is automatically managed. Windows updates is great (it generally works better than the Linux versions), but it only updates Microsoft components. Other installed programs are responsible for updating themselves, often installing hidden processes that boot at start-up for that purpose.
Linux package managers are nice because they manage a pretty wide-variety of software. Their biggest flaw is that you usually still have to update packages you install yourself manually.
If Windows goes with a central package manager for commercial programs as a standard, this would be a big improvement for everyone. Adding it to Windows Update would be useful to the general consumer.
The first amendment prevents a government endorsement of religion. By funding a private park that endorsed explicitly religious beliefs, the State was arguably endorsing the evangelical version of Hebrew mythology.
Well, take the small but growing field of astrobiology for one. It draws a lot from astrophysicists, chemists, et cetera. If someone does not understand how life, how are they going to even consider becoming an astrobiologist? After getting a physics degree, maybe they would go on to study astronomy, focus on astrochemistry, and discover the first signs of life on a distant planet but, because that interest in the origins of life and the beauty of evolution was never sparked, they decided to go work for a startup.
Or, say someone with a physics degree who might be interested in studying biophysics applications in graduate school is not going to even consider the field if they don't believe or understand basic biology.
I don't know why the State got involved in funding the park in the first place (it is a pretty obvious potential conflict with their first amendment duties, but then again, this is Kentucky), but for it to even sneak by constitutional muster, employees cannot be discriminated against because of their religious beliefs.
So, if you let employees walk around and talk about Noah's flood and all that Jazz, you have to give other employees equal rights to talk about how it is a myth likely originating in the flood plains of Mesopotamia that the "decedents of Abraham" brought to Palestine.
Of course, the sensible thing would have been to not have involved the government in the park in the first place. I am sure there are plenty of young-earth creationists out there that Ham can scam.
Regression to the mean is, by definitive, a regression model that is applied to a set of data which fails to disprove the null hypothesis of "no correlation".
You will recall from Linear Algebra that you can use a least squares fit to test to determine the R-value (the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient).
You will recall from your study of Binomial, Poison or other similar distributions that the Central Limit Theorem implies that in a data set of tens of thousands can be treated as conforming to a Gaussian distribution, which therefore allows you to extract a simple P-value.
If the P-value is below the statistical significance threshold, then the null hypothesis is considered disproved and the trendline is therefore significant and not due to regression to the mean.
For our purposes, this would mean that the decrease is due to signal and not noise.
Now, if you want, you can calculate the P-value associated with the null hypothesis of "regression to the mean", but I think you will find the probability that thousands of women randomly decided to study computer science in the 1970's is going to be a lot less than the P=.05 used in the qualitative sciences. One might not be able to disprove "regression to the mean" by the 5 sigma standard of Particle Physics, but it clearly is disproved by the two sigma standard used in social and qualitative sciences.
Also, while the term "regression to the mean" is not often encountered in the quantitative sciences (not even something they ever bothered teaching in all the classes on statistics and probability I took), my understanding is that it purely refers to sampling bias, whereby one set of samples differs from the superset.
In the case of the data we are discussing, there are data sets with no sampling bias, because the data set contains every single student in a US institution that receives federal funding who is studying computer science, so there should be no sampling error.
You keep throwing out ad hominem attacks, but I have to wonder if you have even taken the standard freshmen and sophmore level math ciriculum for the sciences (statistics, linear algebra, discrete math, single and multivariate calculus, and differential equations) based on what you are writing.
I read your post. I ignored your claim of regression to the mean because there is no factual basis to support such a claim. That would necessitate that the trend is statistically insignificant, which could easily be proved if it were true, In the social sciences, a P-value of only .05 is considered sufficient to disprove statistical insignificance.
The data sets consist of thousands of women graduating with CS degrees every year. It is not like astronomy and astrophysics where the number is low enough that there is some possibility of random noise distorting the signal over a period of a few years. With about a million data points over two decades, the Central Limit Theorem is very applicable.
Of course, if you can show using Gaussian probability in an appropriate regression model that the null hypothesis cannot be disproved, I would be willing to look over your calculations, but with so many data points, the Central Limit Theorem is clearly in full effect.
I already posted evidence of the existence of artificial barriers. In fact, it was extremely relevant evidence as it was directly related to this article. The participation of women in academic computer science programs has decreased since the 1980s. By some measures, the decrease is by almost 200%. There are two possible factors for that change:
1) Artificial Factors
2) Natural Factors.
A change in the actual physiological nature of women born over the last 30 years can be pretty thoroughly disproved, as I have done previously. By logical deduction: A+B->C => {C,'A}->B, we know that if natural factors can be disproved as a cause of this, then artificial factors must exist.
Demonstrating that natural factors can cause experiences does not logically imply that natural factors cause a specific experience. That is akin to claiming that because most people die of natural causes, the person I found face down in a pool of his own blood with a knife in his back must have died of natural causes.
The question that I was asking was not whether there COULD be natural factors that contributed to the gender disparity in CS, but whether it could be conclusively demonstrated that natural factors were a significant factor. Can you demonstrate that women are naturally disinclined toward computer science the way that have conclusively demonstrated that smoking is a significant cause of lung cancer?
So again, we get back to my original points which were:
1) There existence conclusive scientific evidence that artificial barriers exist that keep women out of computer science.
2) There is no conclusive scientific evidence that women are naturally disinclined toward entering computer science.