Woz is a fucking genius. So yes, he'd have been successful in today's climate. Or at worst an unsuccessful genius. Despite all the nonsense further up in the comments, ability exists and is not merely the result of practice.
I answered THAT question, and pointed out that it is a red herring; The "nerdiness" demographic is conserved by BOTH genders, with a tiny bias toward males.
That's what the statistics show, and continue to show in other STEM vocations.
No. Almost every engineering field skews heavily male, as does computer science. Biology and health-related fields all skew female. Mathematics and Chemistry approximate parity and Physics skews male but not as heavily as computer science and engineering.
As for empirical study, the rates of CS involvement with women closely followed those with men until about the 80s, when the home computer showed up on the scene, and the advert material focused almost exclusively on male demographics.
Utter bullshit. In 1972, women made up about 20% of computer programmers in the US. This narrative about the personal computer is a recent fabrication. In fact, women's participation in the field hit a local maximum around 1984.
There was an earlier era starting during WWII when women were the majority of programmers in the US... but it was a VERY small field during WWII, and I don't have figures before 1972 so I don't know when that changed.
As a few ACs have colorfully pointed out, foreign language in high school is useless. You can go in, take the course, pass with flying colors, and not be able to speak or read beyond knowing how to greet someone.
I imagine computer science education in high school is equally useless, so the change is of no real consequence.
The problem is that having received a death threat, Sarkeesian and her allies feel they should be able to silence anyone who criticizes them on the grounds that those people contribute the environment in which death threats occur.
I think you're misunderstanding Crowdrise. Lo Ping didn't donate all that money, it was donated by people who selected him as the "Team Member" to get credit for soliciting them.
Wow. First two paragraphs were right on the razor edge of Poe's law.
Gave it away with "right wing hugbox" -- that's not a term the people who are serious about what you said use all that much. Definitely a masterful troll, though. Bravo.
The web doesn't need more "free speech" platforms. One person's dissident is another person's obnoxious, hateful, PTSD-triggering, and/or actually murderous asshole.
People role-playing at PTSD in order to provide a justification to silence others trigger me. If my saying "Niagra Falls" triggers you, that's your problem.
(Bonus points: 8chan is run by a wheelchair-bound neo-Nazi who thinks eugenics would have kept him from being born with brittle bone disease.)
Have no idea about "neo-Nazi" or whether he actually thinks that, but it's probably true; most cases of brittle bone disease are inherited. Of course, in that case, eugenics would have prevented him from being born at all.
Yay, another "women are better than men" article, soon to be followed with an article that insists men and women are exactly the same so therefore gender disparities in men's favor mean discrimination.
Also: "Other thoughts she shares have to do with finding mentors and dealing with negative people"
You know what you do with negative people? You give them work to do. Because you damn sure won't get so much out of positive rah-rah people; they're positive someone else will do it and aren't willing to look at the challenges long enough to figure out a way to overcome them. Though they'll be happy to take all the credit once the negative people do so... no matter, the negative people knew that would happen.
Star Wars was the number one movie of 1977. It's one of the most profitable franchises of all time also. Still associated with geeks. Geeks are still outside mainstream culture; it's just that certain geek-associated things are in fashion now. You may as well claim 1%er motorcycle clubs aren't counterculture because Sons of Anarchy is popular.
Nutrition science is terrible, and the close watch on it paid by various agencies (private and government) is even worse. Every time some case-control study on some nutrient shows it's bad or good, it gets jumped on as some fad. Then of course it turns out to be random noise. Doesn't mean science doesn't work, it means many of the ways we have for teasing small signals from noisy data have a nasty tendency to false positives.
Unfortunately, nutrition science isn't terrible because nutrition scientists suck. It's terrible because it's hard; you can't really do repeatable controlled studies.
If there is a social bias, what is it? It seems likely programming in the 1940s US started with women because men weren't around. Unlike in other fields, there were no men to come back to programming jobs and send the women home, so it's not surprising it remained "women's work" (as an article in Cosmopolitan in 1967 claimed) for some time. However, by 1972 only 20% of computer programmers were women. It's not clear when the switchover happened; the 1967 article may have been an anachronism.
That there was a social bias in the 1940s and an opposite one in the past 40 years is one plausible explanation. But another is that there was a bias in the 1940s (due to wartime conditions) and when that went away, factors other than social bias, that were themselves being overshadowed by the wartime bias, asserted themselves. Inherent ability certainly seems unlikely (particularly given the number of people in the field without any). That women find computer programming less interesting than men do, or find other things more interesting, seems more likely. This could be inherent, or it could be due to socialization, but given that there has been a push to get more women into CS for a very long time and instead things have been going the opposite direction argues against socialization IMO.
But then, Christie has been pretty vocal in his disdain for conservatives.
You can't go by that. Christie has been pretty vocal in his disdain for just about everyone.
Anyway, he's right. Some vaccines are vital and effective (measles), and others are not vital and ineffective (flu), a few are vital yet ineffective (acellular pertussis). Not sure if any are in that fourth category.
Lolz. Back in the 1960s, the same exact argument was made for why women were better at computer work.
Your link makes no argument for why women are better at computer work. "And if it doesn't sound like women's work--well, it just is." So no, it doesn't make the same argument at all. I don't buy the original claim (for one thing, "jumping around quickly to different thoughts, problems, and topics" is actually quite useful), but your link fails to refute it.
Well, her rank at the time was no higher than Commander; admirals have people to write compilers for them, of course. But yes. My point was only that there was an obvious reason for the ENIAC programmers to have been nearly all women during WWII, namely that there was something of a shortage of men, particularly younger men who didn't already have an established profession.
If girls don't sign up for them in a particular school, then "technically" the class cannot be offered because there is no "female reprsentation" in these classes.
This is brilliant. Force the classes to have sufficient gender representation, and cancel them because they don't. Then the only people learning CS are those motivated enough to do it on their own... which will be even MORE male-skewed. Thus continued male dominance of the CS field. Wow, the masters of the patriarchy sure are clever!
Copyright law does not permit fair use. It is a valid defense against liability in court against a claim of infringement; in such a case, the user admits infringement but claims no liability due to fair use.
I'm not sure who came up with this line of bullshit, Jack Valenti's lawyers maybe, but it's not true. And no, it doesn't matter that Nolo press says so. Fair use is an exception to the exclusive rights granted by copyright law; if it is fair use it is not infringement. Establishing a claim of fair use is a complete defense to infringement.
17 USC 107, which codifies fair use, could not be clearer: "... the fair use of a copyrighted work... is not an infringement of copyright."
Who were these "one million disadvantaged middle-school students" compared to in order to determine that there was a "persistent decline in reading and math scores"?
You want a control group? With sociological studies you're lucky they actually measured real people and not proxies... control groups are asking for way too much.
The purpose of all these regulations Uber and Lyft have been running into isn't safety or liability or anything like that; those are the excuses. The purpose is specifically to keep everyone inside the box.
Slashdot Mirror
Woz is a fucking genius. So yes, he'd have been successful in today's climate. Or at worst an unsuccessful genius. Despite all the nonsense further up in the comments, ability exists and is not merely the result of practice.
No. Almost every engineering field skews heavily male, as does computer science. Biology and health-related fields all skew female. Mathematics and Chemistry approximate parity and Physics skews male but not as heavily as computer science and engineering.
Utter bullshit. In 1972, women made up about 20% of computer programmers in the US. This narrative about the personal computer is a recent fabrication. In fact, women's participation in the field hit a local maximum around 1984.
There was an earlier era starting during WWII when women were the majority of programmers in the US... but it was a VERY small field during WWII, and I don't have figures before 1972 so I don't know when that changed.
As a few ACs have colorfully pointed out, foreign language in high school is useless. You can go in, take the course, pass with flying colors, and not be able to speak or read beyond knowing how to greet someone.
I imagine computer science education in high school is equally useless, so the change is of no real consequence.
The problem is that having received a death threat, Sarkeesian and her allies feel they should be able to silence anyone who criticizes them on the grounds that those people contribute the environment in which death threats occur.
I think you're misunderstanding Crowdrise. Lo Ping didn't donate all that money, it was donated by people who selected him as the "Team Member" to get credit for soliciting them.
Wow. First two paragraphs were right on the razor edge of Poe's law.
Gave it away with "right wing hugbox" -- that's not a term the people who are serious about what you said use all that much. Definitely a masterful troll, though. Bravo.
People role-playing at PTSD in order to provide a justification to silence others trigger me. If my saying "Niagra Falls" triggers you, that's your problem.
Have no idea about "neo-Nazi" or whether he actually thinks that, but it's probably true; most cases of brittle bone disease are inherited. Of course, in that case, eugenics would have prevented him from being born at all.
Yay, another "women are better than men" article, soon to be followed with an article that insists men and women are exactly the same so therefore gender disparities in men's favor mean discrimination.
Also: "Other thoughts she shares have to do with finding mentors and dealing with negative people"
You know what you do with negative people? You give them work to do. Because you damn sure won't get so much out of positive rah-rah people; they're positive someone else will do it and aren't willing to look at the challenges long enough to figure out a way to overcome them. Though they'll be happy to take all the credit once the negative people do so... no matter, the negative people knew that would happen.
Star Wars was the number one movie of 1977. It's one of the most profitable franchises of all time also. Still associated with geeks. Geeks are still outside mainstream culture; it's just that certain geek-associated things are in fashion now. You may as well claim 1%er motorcycle clubs aren't counterculture because Sons of Anarchy is popular.
Nutrition science is terrible, and the close watch on it paid by various agencies (private and government) is even worse. Every time some case-control study on some nutrient shows it's bad or good, it gets jumped on as some fad. Then of course it turns out to be random noise. Doesn't mean science doesn't work, it means many of the ways we have for teasing small signals from noisy data have a nasty tendency to false positives.
Unfortunately, nutrition science isn't terrible because nutrition scientists suck. It's terrible because it's hard; you can't really do repeatable controlled studies.
If there is a social bias, what is it? It seems likely programming in the 1940s US started with women because men weren't around. Unlike in other fields, there were no men to come back to programming jobs and send the women home, so it's not surprising it remained "women's work" (as an article in Cosmopolitan in 1967 claimed) for some time. However, by 1972 only 20% of computer programmers were women. It's not clear when the switchover happened; the 1967 article may have been an anachronism.
That there was a social bias in the 1940s and an opposite one in the past 40 years is one plausible explanation. But another is that there was a bias in the 1940s (due to wartime conditions) and when that went away, factors other than social bias, that were themselves being overshadowed by the wartime bias, asserted themselves. Inherent ability certainly seems unlikely (particularly given the number of people in the field without any). That women find computer programming less interesting than men do, or find other things more interesting, seems more likely. This could be inherent, or it could be due to socialization, but given that there has been a push to get more women into CS for a very long time and instead things have been going the opposite direction argues against socialization IMO.
You can't go by that. Christie has been pretty vocal in his disdain for just about everyone.
Anyway, he's right. Some vaccines are vital and effective (measles), and others are not vital and ineffective (flu), a few are vital yet ineffective (acellular pertussis). Not sure if any are in that fourth category.
Your link makes no argument for why women are better at computer work. "And if it doesn't sound like women's work--well, it just is." So no, it doesn't make the same argument at all. I don't buy the original claim (for one thing, "jumping around quickly to different thoughts, problems, and topics" is actually quite useful), but your link fails to refute it.
Well, her rank at the time was no higher than Commander; admirals have people to write compilers for them, of course. But yes. My point was only that there was an obvious reason for the ENIAC programmers to have been nearly all women during WWII, namely that there was something of a shortage of men, particularly younger men who didn't already have an established profession.
I can't imagine why in the 1940s, women were recruited for a job which didn't involve shooting people.
On the contrary. See sports handicapping for an example where inequal opportunity leads to more-equal outcomes.
You cannot judge equality of opportunity by outcome unless you're sure ALL other factors affecting outcome are equal. Good luck with that.
This is brilliant. Force the classes to have sufficient gender representation, and cancel them because they don't. Then the only people learning CS are those motivated enough to do it on their own... which will be even MORE male-skewed. Thus continued male dominance of the CS field. Wow, the masters of the patriarchy sure are clever!
I'm not sure who came up with this line of bullshit, Jack Valenti's lawyers maybe, but it's not true. And no, it doesn't matter that Nolo press says so. Fair use is an exception to the exclusive rights granted by copyright law; if it is fair use it is not infringement. Establishing a claim of fair use is a complete defense to infringement.
17 USC 107, which codifies fair use, could not be clearer: "... the fair use of a copyrighted work... is not an infringement of copyright."
You want a control group? With sociological studies you're lucky they actually measured real people and not proxies... control groups are asking for way too much.
...and you do, because they're reading everything... how would YOU respond?
The guru knows the novice knows more than the corporate enterprise architect, but won't let on lest the novice get a more-swelled head.
No human has. I'm sure of this, because the overall banality of facebook messages would, if read en masse, cause an epidemic of "death by ennui"
Must be the former, because everyone's already on the list.
The purpose of all these regulations Uber and Lyft have been running into isn't safety or liability or anything like that; those are the excuses. The purpose is specifically to keep everyone inside the box.