Honestly, the answer to the question of precisely why there are so few women in computer science, physics, math completely eludes me.
Why are women staying away from computer science, physics and math? It's probably because they're different than men
I was going to link ``men'' to the goatse guy, but good taste intervened: the ``men'' link is workplace safe. The ``women'' link isn't quite workplace safe if you scroll down.
Those pictures I linked to show some obvious, structural differences. Is it reasonable to think that those are the only differences (hint: No!)?
But, were the government to levy a comparably-sized tax on purchasers of software they'd be able to give a larger fraction of it to the people in need,...
If we count me and my fellow bureaucrats as ``the people in need'', that's true. Gates is giving only a small fraction of the money he rakes in to the poor, but look at what portion of the Federal and state budgets go to aid the poor, and what portion of that is actually reaching the poor. I don't have the numbers at hand, but I suspect that the small fraction that Gates gets to those in need doesn't look all that bad in comparison.
Contrast government and Gates with the Salvation Army, which gets better than 90% of their budget directly to the poor.
1. Actually tries to follow the "don't be evil" thing.
Google is probably replacing their keyword stuffng approach with a customised algorithm for their own pages which ranks them higher without the need for keyword stuffing.
What's wrong with that? How is it different from doing keyword stuffing on their own pages?
It's Google's search engine, and if they want to tune it so that when I look for something on their site (like information on their adsense program) I find what I need, I don't think they're hurting anything.
I can always use the search term ``adsense -site:google.com'' if I don't want their pages.
The OED is great: it's the authoritative source for the meaning of an English word in some era.
The OED was put together by a large army of volunteers, who laboriously found and copied out examples of the use of words over the years, researched the etymology, and mailed the information to the editor. The editors (the project took 71 years (or less than 50, or more than 100, depending on how you choose to count), and several editors died of old age along the way) would assemble the scraps of information into a coherent entry for every word which was ever used in written English.
But, I think they're charging a lot for their dictionary, and I wouldn't donate any material to them.
Oxford and Clarendon Press only paid for a small staff, and the vast majority of the gruntwork was done by the army of English and American volunteer philologists. The 12 volume reissue was done in 1933, and the main body of the work hasn't changed since then, though they do issue supplements. In short, they've long since recovered their costs, and any income from it is pure profit.
It seems to me that the OED is something of a profit center for them. I would be happy to make contributions to a project which was making my free contribution freely available to all. If Oxford wants me to contribute to their cash cow, they can send me some of the cash.
All you'd really need is The GIMP to modify serial numbers.
I suppose that you could use script-fu to replace the serial number on the image of the scanned bill with a randomly-generated, legitimate serial number, then add it to a group of pictures to be printed on a sheet, then send it to the fancy printer, then repeat.
It's such a nifty business model, it's probably illegal.
By the way, even with the right paper, if you don't use an intaglio press, it's not going to feel right.
Of course, you could print bills on newsprint with a crayola and have a chance of passing it. Most folks just don't look very closely at their money.
Were you the guy with the ``help pay for my wedding'' sig? That might have been what Google was objecting to. You aren't supposed to do that sort of thing.
The first rule of adsense is: ``You don't talk about adsense.''
... we have another programmer who wants to make money programming, but has no idea how to create a solid business model, so let's all put in some work and tell this guy how to make money with FOSS instead of those of us who have figured it out running our own businesses.
The really funny part is that all the advise he's going to get will come from the clueless dweebs (like you and me) who have absolutely no idea what a business does or how it might do it.
The folks who have the knowlege and experience to answer his question are much to busy running their businesses to waste time on slashdot.
I'm not sure I see what's wrong with going and looking at a file on a web server. That's the sort of ``hack'' that one can do with a Google search.
What unfair advantage would anyone gain by reading their admission letter early? If harvard had their letter written and their minds made up, why didn't they just tell the admittees, instead of making them wait and sweat? I remember well that that's not pleasant anticipation.
On a related note, were those supposed to be on a web server at all? Would you want your admission letter on the web for the world to see? With the schools' ridiculous concern for student privacy, it seems strange that they're putting these on a web server at all.
Finally, I wonder how long it will be before someone tries to wriggle out of being unadmitted by claiming that someone else looked at his admission letter?
Yeah, I know. My point was that this puts some of the U.S.-bashing we've heard recently into perspective. As you say: `` All democratic countries have screwballs lobbying for this kind of stuff.'' It's not just the U.S.
... the government may soon unveil a new "extended license" that would require schools to pay millions of dollars for content that is currently freely available on the Internet.
While the committee recommendation excluded payment for content that is publicly available, it adopted the narrowest possible definition of publicly available, limiting it to only those works that are not technologically or password protected and which contain an explicit notice that the material can be used without prior payment or permission.
So, I have free pages (see sig) which contain copyright notices, and do not contain an explicit notice that the material can be used without prior payment or permission. How do I collect my tiny cut of the fees?
By the way, here in the U.S., schools (and everybody else) can freely surf my website. I guess you canuck educators will have to send me a check. Just remember, it was your idea.
But I thought it was the U.S. with the totalitarian, authoritarian government? Weren't all the atheists, left wingers and the civil liberties nuts going to move North to escape the Bush/Cheney/Ashcroft religious right-wing fascists after the election? Wasn't Canada supposed to be the civilised, free, safe, just-socialist-enough part of the continent?
What's that? You say that I can't believe everything I read on slashdot? That the U.S. isn't as bad as the slashdotters say, and Canada isn't so great?
Another fine set of illusions, shattered.
I wonder if the left wingers are still going to head North?
Nasa... didn't think that doing something which had no practical application and has been done already is a good sue of their budget.
Cheaper is more useful. Rutan isn't a big deal because he nearly equaled Gagarin's first flight, he's a big deal because he did it twice, cheaply.
Rutan's work is novel, and useful, because he does the same old thing, cheaply. Getting to the Moon is in the realm of the ``same old thing'', and if he gets some financing, I suspect he could embarass NASA with a cheap, successful moonshot, though it would cost his backers much more than $20M.
I keep talking about Rutan, but he's just the poster kid for a whole lot of people with interesting ideas.
The fact that NASA doesn't think that it is worthwhile to develop cheap spaceflight makes my point, I think.
I would really enjoy the sort of work that the quant finance people do. I've got lots of graduate training in Stats and Econometrics, and a bit of numerical programming way back in my past, and I'd be a shoe-in for it.
I talked with a big employer, and found that the working conditions were foul. Everyone was working 60 to 70 hours per week, and the talk in the office was: ``How's your divorce going?'' and: ``Have you heard from your ex?''. They were looking for someone to work on inflation forcasting, value at risk, and so on. Neat problems, and the reources to solve them, but you couldn't have a life.
For me, quant finance is right out because the cultural expectations make for toxic workplaces. That's really a pity.
When you're evaluating a career, one of the most important things to look at is where could you work? Which employers, and in which places? Would you want to work for that company, in that place? Would you be happy working there long enough to make the years of school worthwhile? If you're thinking about something like quant finance, how long could the money make up for the other aspects of the job?
Rutan had the benefit of multi-million dollar studies carried out by NASA, Air Force, German and Russian rocket/space programs from the past 40 years to learn from.
I hate to rain on your pro-NASA parade, but NASA has access to those same multi-million dollar studies that Rutan and the other X-prize contenders used. Everybody is on a level playing field, but NASA is bogged down in bureaucracy and bloat.
Rutan has proven that he can do development cheaply and well. NASA has yet to prove that it can still do development at all, let alone cheaply.
tell Rutan to call NASA when he knows how to put something into orbit (there is a difference between 100 km up and mach 2 and 500 km up and around and mach 25)
If Rutan had NASA's budget, the question would not be ``Will they get into orbit?'', but ``Which planet will they orbit next?''.
A warmer planet seems also to be a wetter planet. Since agriculture in most of Northern Africa is limited by lack of water, and doubly so in drought years, that's going to do a lot for the poor farmers there. The fact that Alaskans and Russians will get longer growing seasons is just a bonus.
Similarly, most (maybe all?) plants respond very favorably to more CO2, so even if we don't get the warming, those poor African farmers have something to look forward to, as long as we don't fall for that Kyoto crap.
Here are a couple of links which address the question of what global warming could mean for us:
one and two
As for what makes global cooling more likely than warming, well, we're probably near the tail end of an inter-glacial period, and probably overdue for a change for the worse. There isn't much hard eveidence either way, and what we do know, we don't really understand very well. I'd say that given the possibility that the Gulf Stream might fail, catastrophically and suddenly, according to one fairly plausible set of theories, another ice age isn't impossible.
I think that the definition of species is based on ability to interbreed. Horses and dogs are different species, because they can't get together and make babies.
So, how do we decide that those little skeletons were a different species? Is it based on ``They were too ugly to ever get laid.'', or what?
That's a semi-serious question, actually. I can believe that the smilodon couldn't interbreed with the Bos Primigenius, but how can we be sure those little hominids were not capable of interbreeding with us?
Personally, I want to see these studies that show there is... a link between real violence and shitty parenting.
Don't need studies to show that. We know that the first causes the second (though it's not the only cause). We've got 5,000+ years of history to demostrate that conclusively. That doesn't let the video games completely off the hook, though: there's also a pretty strong link between ``shitty parenting'' and violent video games.
Parents who don't impose their own values on their children leave a void on which Grand Theft Auto can impose its values. Parents who have successfully imposed their own values on their children find that those children are less interested in crap like GTA and less likely to be harmed by it.
The Army has a saying: ``Train the way you will fight.'' A better way to say it might be: ``You will react the way you have trained.''
If you spend hours solving virtual problems by virtual violence, does that make you more or less likely to solve real problems the same way?
I'd say that if there's any effect, it's to make you more violent.
People who practice violence become more violent, people who practice not abandoning themselves to their anger learn self control. I don't think that first person shooters help anyone learn self control.
A new study was released yesterday by Tulane Medical which tracked video game users over a 8 year period... The study found that among those who played games 8% went on to have some form of violence conviction while only 6% of the non-gamers did.
Any idea what the standard error of those estimates was? Is the difference statistically significant? I'd say that it is certainly socially significant.
Stick gentoo on with a nice auto login and make it do an emerge sync emerge -uD world once in a while...
Is that emerge sync emerge -uD world going to make anything change, ever? If so, gentoo is probably a bad idea. Most folks are bothered by having their computer change. They're driven right round the bend by sudden, inexplicable-to-them changes. Debian Stable might be safer, since ``Stable'' means ``never changes''. I'm guessing that since the OP will be `` showing him Linux and telling him a bit about it'', stable is better than up-to-date.
... and the only time you should have problems is when they want to install software...
This might not be a stumbling block, since the relative may not need to install software often, or at all. Gentoo's source packages might be significantly smaller than Debian's binary packages (is that right?), which could be a real advantage if this relative has a dial up connection. On the other hand, apt-get seems to be about as slick as emerge.
It's already there. Or did you mean ``the same as''? It's just as good, unless you define ``as good as'' to mean ``identical to''.
Make a GNU/Linux system as easy to use as Windows...
It's already there. Or did you mean ``the same as''? It's just as easy to use, unless you define ``as easy to use as'' to mean ``identical to''.
... or come up with GPLed equivalents for 99% of existing Windows software.
We already have those equivalents. Or did you mean ``exact copies''? Programs like GNUcash are equivalent to their proprietary counterparts, unless you define ``equivalent to'' to mean ``identical to''.
Slashdot Mirror
Why are women staying away from computer science, physics and math? It's probably because they're different than men
I was going to link ``men'' to the goatse guy, but good taste intervened: the ``men'' link is workplace safe. The ``women'' link isn't quite workplace safe if you scroll down.
Those pictures I linked to show some obvious, structural differences. Is it reasonable to think that those are the only differences (hint: No!)?
If we count me and my fellow bureaucrats as ``the people in need'', that's true. Gates is giving only a small fraction of the money he rakes in to the poor, but look at what portion of the Federal and state budgets go to aid the poor, and what portion of that is actually reaching the poor. I don't have the numbers at hand, but I suspect that the small fraction that Gates gets to those in need doesn't look all that bad in comparison.
Contrast government and Gates with the Salvation Army, which gets better than 90% of their budget directly to the poor.
1. Actually tries to follow the "don't be evil" thing.
Google is probably replacing their keyword stuffng approach with a customised algorithm for their own pages which ranks them higher without the need for keyword stuffing.
What's wrong with that? How is it different from doing keyword stuffing on their own pages?
It's Google's search engine, and if they want to tune it so that when I look for something on their site (like information on their adsense program) I find what I need, I don't think they're hurting anything.
I can always use the search term ``adsense -site:google.com'' if I don't want their pages.
I'm dying to find somebody who actually checks that box every year, because I have some land I want to sell him.
Unfortunately, the one person who checks that box has no money, and doesn't believe in private ownership of property, so it'll be a tough sale.
Make the boss happy by solving a problem this period.
Watch things fall apart in the next period as your solution destroys everything.
Make the boss happier than ever by showing that you need a bigger budget to solve the new, improved problem.
Profit!^H^H^H^H^H^H^HJob security! It's a yearly cycle.
The OED was put together by a large army of volunteers, who laboriously found and copied out examples of the use of words over the years, researched the etymology, and mailed the information to the editor. The editors (the project took 71 years (or less than 50, or more than 100, depending on how you choose to count), and several editors died of old age along the way) would assemble the scraps of information into a coherent entry for every word which was ever used in written English.
But, I think they're charging a lot for their dictionary, and I wouldn't donate any material to them.
Oxford and Clarendon Press only paid for a small staff, and the vast majority of the gruntwork was done by the army of English and American volunteer philologists. The 12 volume reissue was done in 1933, and the main body of the work hasn't changed since then, though they do issue supplements. In short, they've long since recovered their costs, and any income from it is pure profit.
It seems to me that the OED is something of a profit center for them. I would be happy to make contributions to a project which was making my free contribution freely available to all. If Oxford wants me to contribute to their cash cow, they can send me some of the cash.
France or Viet Nam? Didn't France lead the way there, by capitulating in Viet Nam roughly 20 years before we did?
France and Viet Nam would make more sense.
I suppose that you could use script-fu to replace the serial number on the image of the scanned bill with a randomly-generated, legitimate serial number, then add it to a group of pictures to be printed on a sheet, then send it to the fancy printer, then repeat.
It's such a nifty business model, it's probably illegal.
By the way, even with the right paper, if you don't use an intaglio press, it's not going to feel right.
Of course, you could print bills on newsprint with a crayola and have a chance of passing it. Most folks just don't look very closely at their money.
The first rule of adsense is: ``You don't talk about adsense.''
The really funny part is that all the advise he's going to get will come from the clueless dweebs (like you and me) who have absolutely no idea what a business does or how it might do it.
The folks who have the knowlege and experience to answer his question are much to busy running their businesses to waste time on slashdot.
What unfair advantage would anyone gain by reading their admission letter early? If harvard had their letter written and their minds made up, why didn't they just tell the admittees, instead of making them wait and sweat? I remember well that that's not pleasant anticipation.
On a related note, were those supposed to be on a web server at all? Would you want your admission letter on the web for the world to see? With the schools' ridiculous concern for student privacy, it seems strange that they're putting these on a web server at all.
Finally, I wonder how long it will be before someone tries to wriggle out of being unadmitted by claiming that someone else looked at his admission letter?
If you want me to read about how Google revoked your ads, provide a non-Flash version.
Yeah, I know. My point was that this puts some of the U.S.-bashing we've heard recently into perspective. As you say: `` All democratic countries have screwballs lobbying for this kind of stuff.'' It's not just the U.S.
By the way, here in the U.S., schools (and everybody else) can freely surf my website. I guess you canuck educators will have to send me a check. Just remember, it was your idea.
What's that? You say that I can't believe everything I read on slashdot? That the U.S. isn't as bad as the slashdotters say, and Canada isn't so great?
Another fine set of illusions, shattered.
I wonder if the left wingers are still going to head North?
Cheaper is more useful. Rutan isn't a big deal because he nearly equaled Gagarin's first flight, he's a big deal because he did it twice, cheaply.
Rutan's work is novel, and useful, because he does the same old thing, cheaply. Getting to the Moon is in the realm of the ``same old thing'', and if he gets some financing, I suspect he could embarass NASA with a cheap, successful moonshot, though it would cost his backers much more than $20M.
I keep talking about Rutan, but he's just the poster kid for a whole lot of people with interesting ideas.
The fact that NASA doesn't think that it is worthwhile to develop cheap spaceflight makes my point, I think.
I talked with a big employer, and found that the working conditions were foul. Everyone was working 60 to 70 hours per week, and the talk in the office was: ``How's your divorce going?'' and: ``Have you heard from your ex?''. They were looking for someone to work on inflation forcasting, value at risk, and so on. Neat problems, and the reources to solve them, but you couldn't have a life.
For me, quant finance is right out because the cultural expectations make for toxic workplaces. That's really a pity.
When you're evaluating a career, one of the most important things to look at is where could you work? Which employers, and in which places? Would you want to work for that company, in that place? Would you be happy working there long enough to make the years of school worthwhile? If you're thinking about something like quant finance, how long could the money make up for the other aspects of the job?
I hate to rain on your pro-NASA parade, but NASA has access to those same multi-million dollar studies that Rutan and the other X-prize contenders used. Everybody is on a level playing field, but NASA is bogged down in bureaucracy and bloat.
Rutan has proven that he can do development cheaply and well. NASA has yet to prove that it can still do development at all, let alone cheaply.
If Rutan had NASA's budget, the question would not be ``Will they get into orbit?'', but ``Which planet will they orbit next?''.
Similarly, most (maybe all?) plants respond very favorably to more CO2, so even if we don't get the warming, those poor African farmers have something to look forward to, as long as we don't fall for that Kyoto crap.
Here are a couple of links which address the question of what global warming could mean for us: one and two
As for what makes global cooling more likely than warming, well, we're probably near the tail end of an inter-glacial period, and probably overdue for a change for the worse. There isn't much hard eveidence either way, and what we do know, we don't really understand very well. I'd say that given the possibility that the Gulf Stream might fail, catastrophically and suddenly, according to one fairly plausible set of theories, another ice age isn't impossible.
So, how do we decide that those little skeletons were a different species? Is it based on ``They were too ugly to ever get laid.'', or what?
That's a semi-serious question, actually. I can believe that the smilodon couldn't interbreed with the Bos Primigenius, but how can we be sure those little hominids were not capable of interbreeding with us?
Don't need studies to show that. We know that the first causes the second (though it's not the only cause). We've got 5,000+ years of history to demostrate that conclusively. That doesn't let the video games completely off the hook, though: there's also a pretty strong link between ``shitty parenting'' and violent video games.
Parents who don't impose their own values on their children leave a void on which Grand Theft Auto can impose its values. Parents who have successfully imposed their own values on their children find that those children are less interested in crap like GTA and less likely to be harmed by it.
If you spend hours solving virtual problems by virtual violence, does that make you more or less likely to solve real problems the same way? I'd say that if there's any effect, it's to make you more violent.
People who practice violence become more violent, people who practice not abandoning themselves to their anger learn self control. I don't think that first person shooters help anyone learn self control.
A new study was released yesterday by Tulane Medical which tracked video game users over a 8 year period ... The study found that among those who played games 8% went on to have some form of violence conviction while only 6% of the non-gamers did.
Any idea what the standard error of those estimates was? Is the difference statistically significant? I'd say that it is certainly socially significant.
Is that emerge sync emerge -uD world going to make anything change, ever? If so, gentoo is probably a bad idea. Most folks are bothered by having their computer change. They're driven right round the bend by sudden, inexplicable-to-them changes. Debian Stable might be safer, since ``Stable'' means ``never changes''. I'm guessing that since the OP will be `` showing him Linux and telling him a bit about it'', stable is better than up-to-date.
This might not be a stumbling block, since the relative may not need to install software often, or at all. Gentoo's source packages might be significantly smaller than Debian's binary packages (is that right?), which could be a real advantage if this relative has a dial up connection. On the other hand, apt-get seems to be about as slick as emerge.
It's already there. Or did you mean ``the same as''? It's just as good, unless you define ``as good as'' to mean ``identical to''.
Make a GNU/Linux system as easy to use as Windows ...
It's already there. Or did you mean ``the same as''? It's just as easy to use, unless you define ``as easy to use as'' to mean ``identical to''.
We already have those equivalents. Or did you mean ``exact copies''? Programs like GNUcash are equivalent to their proprietary counterparts, unless you define ``equivalent to'' to mean ``identical to''.