Other presidents in the million-dollar bracket were Peter G. Traber from Baylor College of Medicine (more than $1.3 million), E. Gordon Gee of Vanderbilt University (nearly $1.2 million) and Karen L. Pletz of Kansas City University of Medicine and Biosciences (more than $1 million).
Three other presidents who stepped down recently also earned more than $1 million: Jeffrey S. Lehman of Cornell University, Roger H. Hull of Union College and Donald E. Ross of Lynn University.
The most highly paid public university president, David P. Roselle of the University of Delaware, neared the $1 million mark: he earned $729,054 in salary and $250,517 in benefits. A university spokesman declined to comment.
The climb in the college chiefs' income is driven largely by the greater competition for experienced university executives as the baby boom generation retires and by institutions' increasing willingness to poach, said Raymond D. Cotton, a lawyer who specializes in academic presidents' contracts and compensation.
"The absolute number of people available who can do these jobs well is shrinking," Mr. Cotton said. "When demand increases and supply is shrinking, price goes up."
...when it's the ruling elite that wants more cash. Even when (if the Tsar is to be believed) they don't do their bloody jobs!
The rest of us...we're just a labor market to be manipulated by people like the Tsar and the college presidents -- no matter how well we do ours
What you're describing is NSFnet, which was based on the arpanet. NSFnet, proposed in the early 80's, proposed to expand the connectivity of the arpanet via several high-speed backbones, for the purpose of scientific data exchange. I collaborated on several projects using NSFnet.
The arpanet (and I was a registered arpanet user prior to the installation of the NSFnet backbones), was developed for military purposes -- (a fun trick was to send packets all the way around the world via, for example, a node called INCIRLIK in Turkey).
The stated purpose of dynamic packet-switched routing (one of the staff members in my office at Cornell was an original developer of gated, Mark Fedor) was, indeed, to get messages through in the event of node failure due to nuclear war.
So don't give me your silly little google links -- they don't convince me. I was there.
"Researchers at BBN Technologies, of Cambridge, Mass., have begun the second phase of a DTN project, funded by $8.7 million from the Department of Defense's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)
The US taxpayer already fund edthis project back in the 70's and 80's. This
was the goal of the original arpanet.
Or maybe BBN is admitting failure, which, in the world of military research contracting
is code for "so you should give us another 8-10 million dollars to do the project again."
Not surprising at all --10 years ago, while a bunch of software engineers from MITRE and SAIC were working on the last edition of ModSAF on SGIs, a couple jarheads put together a more effective urban combat training system in their spare time -- based on multiplayer DOOM.
Oh that's right! Medtronic's recall was for malfunctioning with bad battery contacts, over a year ago -- Guidant's recall is just the most recent in a series.
Whew! Now we can all feel safer buying a Medtronic thing that shoots electrons and chemicals into someone's brain, eh? Oh the neurostimulation will probably go to the right place, right?
Bibble is better, and was started by one guy in his garage that wanted some decent SW for the raw files coming off of his digital camera. At least four developers have touched it over the years...i.e. small, smart and agile development team. I think they're pretty cool. The principal developer/entrepreneur Eric Hyman gladly does the support, and he's a very nice guy besides. The SW is QT based and they do extensive testing on Mac (their professional customer base), Linux (where they get many helpful comments) and Windows. They have a freeware version. The whole series of changes you make to an image are stored as an.XML file, which lets you edit it and script a systematic image-processing stream to apply to whole shoots once you pointy-clicky on a representative image to see what works. Reputed to have the best white-balance algorithm in the business. They're usually the first to decode a new obfuscated raw file format for new cameras, too.
The little light-bulb went on for a friend of mine when his sister with a Ph.D in computational
physics was hired by a high-end as "a fukin' booth-babe! A Demo Dame! What kinda sh** is that?!" as he'd say with
considerable outrage in his voice. And quite right too -- when you help put your sister through the best schools,
she gets the degrees and demonstrates the prowess and formulates important (physics/math) problems and writes the code and brings in the
grants and gets the postdocs and --- then the best job she can get is basically not much better than a conventioneer's
whore -- not only do you start to wonder why the hell you and she bothered, but your family is humiliated and if she doesn't like
being a booth babe, she can bloody well quit and go on welfare. If she has kids, she'll be outright fired and wind up on welfare.
with a PhD.
That's what it was like 15-20 years ago. Which
is why you just don't see any ongoing culture of technical women aged 35-65, and certainly few mentors beyond a few managers who specialize
in managing not code-writing, these days. It's why the percentage of women in many fields actually
declined despite tons of programs to promote their participation -- they knew how they'd be treated in an all-male environment:
like a mother to be fired, or a whore to be used and then fired. Better off going to nursing school.
no kidding. My brother-in-law makes twice what I make -- as a union steamfitter in NY. Sure, he went to college, majored in football, dug clams when he got out. Then he got into the apprenticeship program for Steamfitter's Local 638 ("We Heat New York") and there you go. Pension plan, full dental and medical for his family -- supplemental medical after retirement -- you can't beat that with a stick. You'd think programmers would have been smart enough to start a union already.
Both Oracle and IBM have got it wrong. If you've ever tried to install:
DB2
Oracle
WebSphere
on a RedHat or SuSE , the first thing you notice is...both Oracle and IBM tried
to make the installation easy by putting a shitty JAVA GUI on the thing.
Two problems with this: it forces you to have to install JAVA and X windows
eithier on your server (in the DMZ? I don't THINK so!) or to have to
install just the X windows client bits on your sever along with Java...and then
bring in a laptop that you attach to your server on a temporary network while the
network is offline, yada yada yada....
WHY NOT JUST WRITE A FRICKIN' RPM???? HUH? LIKE, ALONG WITH A PROPER DAEMON SCRIPT SO YOU CAN START AND STOP ORACLE, DB2, WebSphere, Etc Etc Etc in a single command-line, in the STANDARD LINUX WAY???? D'ya THINK????? DUH!
A couple of people have tried to write an open-source RPM/daemon script suite around these
packages, but of course -- then a new version of the proprietary DB/web service comes out.
And both Oracle and IBM are rolling in dough, why would anyone do this for them for free?
If a sysadmin got the freedom to run Open Source anything, they'll switch to PhP/MySQL and/or PostGreSQL (depending on whether they need triggers or not) soon enough ANYWAY
Oracle could drastically increase its install base in the Linux
community just by demonstrating some rudimentary competence in the area of
standard Linux server systems software management.
Really, if *everyone* did, it simply wouldn't matter -- because your credit report would have a line in it from the RIAA. And so would
everybody elses'. It's more important to finish school, and pay off your student loan.
And BTW that stupid bitch from the RIAA who was harassing our female MIT student probably flunked out of community college, and
is just going after Cassie because she thinks she can -- the usual queen-bee bullying bullshit.
---
KMRIA -- it's a reference from James Joyce's Ulysses. It means Kiss My Royal Irish Ass
So the U.S. supplied Iraq with WMD, which Bush lied about Iraq having.
Reagan, Bush, Sr. and in particular James Baker (who wanted Iraq to win the Iraq-Iran war)
eased up export restrictions and restrictions on loan guarantees through Eximbank and the USDA
that made it very easy for Saddam to purchase detonators, high-speed centrifuges and other
dual-use technologies throughout the Reagan and the beginning of the Bush, Sr. administrations.
In fact, shipments of arms and sensitive radar equipment to be used in anti-aircraft guns
were still on the docks to be shipped to Iraq -- purchased with US and UK taxpayer dollars -- in August and September of 1990, after Saddam Hussain's invasion of Kuwait.
The same arms and anti-aircraft guns were used against Americans in the first Gulf war. Thanks, Dad! The image I get is of Goya's painting, Chronos Devouring His Children.
Between 1990 and 2001 -- you might recall -- there were sanctions and weapons inspections.
It's entirely possible that Saddam Hussain succeeded in getting rid of every trace of WMD's
during that time (and thus make a liar out of Bush Jr) -- they were the WMD's
purchased with US Taxpayer Dollars.
Now Bush Jr. can't exactly wave around the receipts, export approvals and the loan guarantee documents
from back in the 80's that prove that Iraq had WMD's at one time -- because James Baker's signature
is on some of them! His dad's and Ron Reagan's fingerprints are all over them!
Alan Friedman, in his 1993 book
Spider's Web: The Secret History of How the White House Illegally Armed Iraq describes and documents how US taxpayer dollars paid for, designed and shipped components for those WMD's you
keep hearing about. That's why Bush kept thinking there were WMD's -- his fambly'd bought 'em, gol
dang it! (With my money, in part, and without my permission, might I add.)
The most shocking and disgusting things are not how Bush Sr. helped Saddam Hussain
build a nuclear arsenal that has somehow disappeared -- but how he helped Saddam Hussain purchase cluster
Bombs --with US taxpayer dollars --that are being used to kill those very same taxpayers today, by the
insurgents who captured those arsenals. Thanks, Dad!
There are a series of document facsimiles in the back, including receipts for cluster bombs purchased
with USDA-guaranteed loans. Cluster bombs that were previously only built in the US -- but when the UN
started asking difficult questions, the machine tools to build them were moved wholesale
(also documented) for manufacture in Chile.
Bush Sr. helping Pinochet to build cluster bombs for Saddam Hussain. Isn't it nice how these people just help each other out all the time?
Yah. And then there's always the "Oh-enn/Oh-eff-eff" digital signal filter technology....
Re:Learn to type ... and/or take piano lessons
on
Preventing RSI?
·
· Score: 1
Even banging on an old VT100 or IBM model-M series keyboard -- where you need to keep your wrists up
in order to get enough force on each key -- is better. And good luck playing tricky runs on the piano with
your wrists down...nowhere to rest your wrists on a piano keyboard...I wonder why that is?
I still remember our typing teacher walking around with a yardstick keeping an eagle eye out for anyone with
poor posture or droopy wrists. She'd only touch it under your wrists (or small of back, or top of head) as
a reminder -- but it was pretty intimidating none the less.
Since when did the old fashioned "keeping proper
posture" become the oh-so modern "science of ergonomics"?
Optimizing Java is about as absurd as racing sailboats -- elegant, yes, beautiful code, yes but...
puleeze! You pick the slowest form of transportation available and then... have a race?
...and spend millions of dollars in the process? Couldn't you just walk down the street in the rain, rubbing your tummy, patting yourself on the head and uh, stopping every five minutes to hop on one foot around in a circle while ripping up hundred dollar bills?
...in the guise of support. Usurp as in burn cycles, throw the DB into a "hurry up and wait" state, and have non-programmers cobbling together
their own "applications" on the client side in blissful ignorance of petty annoyances like referential integrity.
I just can't wait to see what MS does next to "support and usurp" Unix.
Same material as Singh's previous "The Code Book"
on
The Science of Secrecy
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The first thing I wanted to know when I looked at this review was, "How is this different from his previous, The Code Book ??
The answer is, not much at all, by the author's own admission:
NB: The Science of Secrecy is my second book on cryptography. My first, called The Code Book, covers similar material to the Science of Secrecy. It is already available in paperback so it is somewhat cheaper. The advantages of The Science of Secrecy are that it is in hardback, better illustrated, and follows the structure of the TV series. If you have read The Code Book then you probably would not want to read The Science of Secrecy, but you might want to buy it as a present for a friend. Signed copies of The Code Book can be bought via this site. You can buy the Science of Secrecy from Amazon.co.uk
In other words, if you've already read The Code Book (and you should! It's great!), you won't need to rush out and buy Science of Secrecy --
but if you want to get a gift for someone, a hardback copy of The Science of Secrecy (along with the DVDs of the TV series if available)
might server better.
Another advantage of going in to a green grocer is purely for the emotional and spiritual uplift
I used to deliver newspapers to a green grocer in our town (and pick up some fruit and vege there at the same time), and it was just sheer delight going in there!
The very aroma was intoxicating. And the care they took to rotate their fruit and vege stock, cull the ripest, put them on sale--
that's real value added, like the care that goes into proper maintenance of a software package or system.
But this past weekend was the weekend to dig in the garden -- to put in our own vegetables.
This year, we're doing Okra, Tomatoes, Collard, Corn, Basil, Dill, Beans, Radishes and...possibly Amaranth.
The more local vege we support and the more of our own vege we grow -- the less oil used in shipping in food from overseas...and
therefore the fewer people have to die fighting over oil.
Growing a vegetable garden is my radical act for peace.
If women want to work and have a career, then they'd do well to be smart enough not to have children. So essentially, modern society removes a good deal of good genes from the gene pool. Female academics have much fewer children, they're pickier about who they marry/have those children with.
You're correct in that for female academics to postpone having children (often until it is too late) is society removing a good deal of good genes from the gene pool--in that it's not really the choice of the women themselves.
Up until 1976, in the passage of title VII of the Civil Rights Act, it was still actually legal to actually fire women from their faculty positions for
the crime of...getting married, having children. And Universities certainly did so, with absolute impunity, and with few exceptions.
Because the actual legal remedies are much worse for a woman's career
than the original tort itself, Universities continued to fire untenured female academics as soon as they got pregnant (and often as soon as they
got married!) at least up in to the mid-90's -- particularly in fields where women are really still
fundamentally unwelcome as women .
This rampant pregnancy discrimination is explained by a real misogyny -- hatred of womankind --
by people in the physical sciences, CS, engineering and mathematics. In these fields, women must still be accepted as "honorary men" -- they
must not be like women at all, you see -- and the act of getting pregnant simply destroys the "honorary man" status they've achieved by
e.g. wearing pants, cutting their hair short, deliberately deepening their voices, and so forth.
Women that have survived this hateful misogyny have essentially learned to hate themselves, and surprisingly are measurably more misogynistic than
their male peers --they are actually measurably more critical of young women scientists, more doubtful of their "committment to their
careers" and more willing to believe that they're "just going to go off and have kids anyway so why bother mentoring them" etc.
The authors of "The Queen Bee Syndrome" attribute this to the male-normative self-image of the senior female scientists, and an
ongoing belief in the idea that they are not really women to the point that they still believe in traditional gender roles--
for all the "little people" out there (who have to pay taxes, for example) out there, everyone except their own precious little
narcissistic faux-boy selves.
While the authors of "The Queen Bee Syndrome" attribute this effect, seen in their sociological data, to some kind of
narcissistic/male-normative self-selection and adaptation on the part of the women themselves, I have a more
cynical view based on my own observation: faculties have selected real bitches to be their "Token Females" in order to do their sexist
dirty-work for them, to keep it a mostly-male club, and never to get their hands dirty: they just get heir Chief Queen
Bee Bitch to torpedo any incoming female students, researchers and young faculty, while the men throw up their soft, clean
lilly-white hands and shout "Oh, She Couldn't Possibly Have Had Sexism Biasing Her Judgment, She's A Woman Herself!"
What Sheer Effing Bollocks!
Although academic departments and research institutes in the physical sciences, computer science, mathematics and engineering
still think they can get away with this kind of crap, it's starting to wear a bit thin now that The Queen Bee Syndrome has been measured: http://www.oxtrust.org.uk/pooled/articles/BF_NEWSA RT/view.asp?Q=BF_NEWSART_114676
Still, young female physicists, engineers, computer scientists and mathematicians are about twice as likely than their male counterparts
to be unemployed, and about four times as likely to be in temporary -- not permanent-- positions. While pregna
Slashdot Mirror
The rest of us...we're just a labor market to be manipulated by people like the Tsar and the college presidents -- no matter how well we do ours
What you're describing is NSFnet, which was based on the arpanet. NSFnet, proposed in the early 80's, proposed to expand the connectivity of the arpanet via several high-speed backbones, for the purpose of scientific data exchange. I collaborated on several projects using NSFnet.
The arpanet (and I was a registered arpanet user prior to the installation of the NSFnet backbones), was developed for military purposes -- (a fun trick was to send packets all the way around the world via, for example, a node called INCIRLIK in Turkey).
The stated purpose of dynamic packet-switched routing (one of the staff members in my office at Cornell was an original developer of gated, Mark Fedor) was, indeed, to get messages through in the event of node failure due to nuclear war.
So don't give me your silly little google links -- they don't convince me. I was there.
The US taxpayer already fund edthis project back in the 70's and 80's. This was the goal of the original arpanet.
Or maybe BBN is admitting failure, which, in the world of military research contracting is code for "so you should give us another 8-10 million dollars to do the project again."
and again. and again.
sheesh!
for free ("as in beer") is what...um...let me get out my calculator...
Not surprising at all --10 years ago, while a bunch of software engineers from MITRE and SAIC were working on the
last edition of ModSAF on SGIs, a couple jarheads put together a more effective urban combat
training system in their spare time -- based on multiplayer DOOM.
and maybe you get your ideas of what women should do for work from your mother?
Oh that's right! Medtronic's recall was for malfunctioning with bad battery contacts, over a year ago -- Guidant's recall is just the most recent in a series. Whew! Now we can all feel safer buying a Medtronic thing that shoots electrons and chemicals into someone's brain, eh? Oh the neurostimulation will probably go to the right place, right?
Bibble is better, and was started by one guy in his garage that wanted some decent SW for the raw files coming off of his digital camera. At least four developers have touched it over the years...i.e. small, smart and agile development team. I think they're pretty cool. The principal developer/entrepreneur Eric Hyman gladly does the support, and he's a very nice guy besides. The SW is QT based and they do extensive testing on Mac (their professional customer base), Linux (where they get many helpful comments) and Windows. They have a freeware version. The whole series of changes you make to an image are stored as an .XML file, which lets you edit it and script a systematic image-processing stream to apply to whole shoots once you pointy-clicky on a representative image to see what works. Reputed to have the best white-balance algorithm in the business. They're usually the first to decode a new obfuscated raw file format for new cameras, too.
...the same people that just had to recall their defibrillators because they were malfunctioning, and couldn't reproduce the test data adequately?
The little light-bulb went on for a friend of mine when his sister with a Ph.D in computational physics was hired by a high-end as "a fukin' booth-babe! A Demo Dame! What kinda sh** is that?!" as he'd say with considerable outrage in his voice. And quite right too -- when you help put your sister through the best schools, she gets the degrees and demonstrates the prowess and formulates important (physics/math) problems and writes the code and brings in the grants and gets the postdocs and --- then the best job she can get is basically not much better than a conventioneer's whore -- not only do you start to wonder why the hell you and she bothered, but your family is humiliated and if she doesn't like being a booth babe, she can bloody well quit and go on welfare. If she has kids, she'll be outright fired and wind up on welfare. with a PhD.
That's what it was like 15-20 years ago. Which is why you just don't see any ongoing culture of technical women aged 35-65, and certainly few mentors beyond a few managers who specialize in managing not code-writing, these days. It's why the percentage of women in many fields actually declined despite tons of programs to promote their participation -- they knew how they'd be treated in an all-male environment: like a mother to be fired, or a whore to be used and then fired. Better off going to nursing school.
no kidding. My brother-in-law makes twice what I make -- as a union steamfitter in NY. Sure, he went to college, majored in football, dug clams when he got out. Then he got into the apprenticeship program for Steamfitter's Local 638 ("We Heat New York") and there you go. Pension plan, full dental and medical for his family -- supplemental medical after retirement -- you can't beat that with a stick. You'd think programmers would have been smart enough to start a union already.
Both Oracle and IBM have got it wrong. If you've ever tried to install:
- DB2
- Oracle
- WebSphere
on a RedHat or SuSE , the first thing you notice is...both Oracle and IBM tried to make the installation easy by putting a shitty JAVA GUI on the thing. Two problems with this: it forces you to have to install JAVA and X windows eithier on your server (in the DMZ? I don't THINK so!) or to have to install just the X windows client bits on your sever along with Java...and then bring in a laptop that you attach to your server on a temporary network while the network is offline, yada yada yada....WHY NOT JUST WRITE A FRICKIN' RPM???? HUH? LIKE, ALONG WITH A PROPER DAEMON SCRIPT SO YOU CAN START AND STOP ORACLE, DB2, WebSphere, Etc Etc Etc in a single command-line, in the STANDARD LINUX WAY???? D'ya THINK????? DUH!
A couple of people have tried to write an open-source RPM/daemon script suite around these packages, but of course -- then a new version of the proprietary DB/web service comes out.
And both Oracle and IBM are rolling in dough, why would anyone do this for them for free?
If a sysadmin got the freedom to run Open Source anything, they'll switch to PhP/MySQL and/or PostGreSQL (depending on whether they need triggers or not) soon enough ANYWAY
Oracle could drastically increase its install base in the Linux community just by demonstrating some rudimentary competence in the area of standard Linux server systems software management.
Really, if *everyone* did, it simply wouldn't matter -- because your credit report would have a line in it from the RIAA. And so would everybody elses'. It's more important to finish school, and pay off your student loan.
And BTW that stupid bitch from the RIAA who was harassing our female MIT student probably flunked out of community college, and is just going after Cassie because she thinks she can -- the usual queen-bee bullying bullshit.
--- KMRIA -- it's a reference from James Joyce's Ulysses. It means Kiss My Royal Irish AssSAS Shoes -- Buy Local, or Buy Nothing at all.
Reagan, Bush, Sr. and in particular James Baker (who wanted Iraq to win the Iraq-Iran war) eased up export restrictions and restrictions on loan guarantees through Eximbank and the USDA that made it very easy for Saddam to purchase detonators, high-speed centrifuges and other dual-use technologies throughout the Reagan and the beginning of the Bush, Sr. administrations.
In fact, shipments of arms and sensitive radar equipment to be used in anti-aircraft guns were still on the docks to be shipped to Iraq -- purchased with US and UK taxpayer dollars -- in August and September of 1990, after Saddam Hussain's invasion of Kuwait.
The same arms and anti-aircraft guns were used against Americans in the first Gulf war. Thanks, Dad! The image I get is of Goya's painting, Chronos Devouring His Children.
Between 1990 and 2001 -- you might recall -- there were sanctions and weapons inspections. It's entirely possible that Saddam Hussain succeeded in getting rid of every trace of WMD's during that time (and thus make a liar out of Bush Jr) -- they were the WMD's purchased with US Taxpayer Dollars.
Now Bush Jr. can't exactly wave around the receipts, export approvals and the loan guarantee documents from back in the 80's that prove that Iraq had WMD's at one time -- because James Baker's signature is on some of them! His dad's and Ron Reagan's fingerprints are all over them!
Alan Friedman, in his 1993 book Spider's Web: The Secret History of How the White House Illegally Armed Iraq describes and documents how US taxpayer dollars paid for, designed and shipped components for those WMD's you keep hearing about. That's why Bush kept thinking there were WMD's -- his fambly'd bought 'em, gol dang it! (With my money, in part, and without my permission, might I add.)
The most shocking and disgusting things are not how Bush Sr. helped Saddam Hussain build a nuclear arsenal that has somehow disappeared -- but how he helped Saddam Hussain purchase cluster Bombs --with US taxpayer dollars --that are being used to kill those very same taxpayers today, by the insurgents who captured those arsenals. Thanks, Dad!
There are a series of document facsimiles in the back, including receipts for cluster bombs purchased with USDA-guaranteed loans. Cluster bombs that were previously only built in the US -- but when the UN started asking difficult questions, the machine tools to build them were moved wholesale (also documented) for manufacture in Chile.
Bush Sr. helping Pinochet to build cluster bombs for Saddam Hussain. Isn't it nice how these people just help each other out all the time?
Yah. And then there's always the "Oh-enn/Oh-eff-eff" digital signal filter technology....
Even banging on an old VT100 or IBM model-M series keyboard -- where you need to keep your wrists up in order to get enough force on each key -- is better. And good luck playing tricky runs on the piano with your wrists down...nowhere to rest your wrists on a piano keyboard...I wonder why that is?
I still remember our typing teacher walking around with a yardstick keeping an eagle eye out for anyone with poor posture or droopy wrists. She'd only touch it under your wrists (or small of back, or top of head) as a reminder -- but it was pretty intimidating none the less.
Since when did the old fashioned "keeping proper posture" become the oh-so modern "science of ergonomics"?
I kinda like MediaWiki as a searchable documentation dump -- to at least capture things and have a decent format.
Benefits:
- auto-generated table of contents at the top of each page, from very simple headings format
- can make links to flat files (html, PDFs, images, documentation that came with other software) in a separate space
- popular format for How-To's and Wikipedia provides some consistency with what users might see elsewhere
- automatically keeps track of when things were edited, which provides a rudimentary way of logging
what you've been up to day-to-day, week-to-week
- easily searchable
- users can provide their own information
- separate "talk" pages for discussion
- can see the whole history of changes
- nice presentation format for verbatim text, such as you would use to display a series of commands
- easy for users to navigate
Drawbacks:Optimizing Java is about as absurd as racing sailboats -- elegant, yes, beautiful code, yes but...
puleeze! You pick the slowest form of transportation available and then... have a race?
I just can't wait to see what MS does next to "support and usurp" Unix.
The first thing I wanted to know when I looked at this review was, "How is this different from his previous, The Code Book ??
The answer is, not much at all, by the author's own admission:
In other words, if you've already read The Code Book (and you should! It's great!), you won't need to rush out and buy Science of Secrecy -- but if you want to get a gift for someone, a hardback copy of The Science of Secrecy (along with the DVDs of the TV series if available) might server better.
You are SO right on!!
Another advantage of going in to a green grocer is purely for the emotional and spiritual uplift
I used to deliver newspapers to a green grocer in our town (and pick up some fruit and vege there at the same time), and it was just sheer delight going in there! The very aroma was intoxicating. And the care they took to rotate their fruit and vege stock, cull the ripest, put them on sale-- that's real value added, like the care that goes into proper maintenance of a software package or system.
But this past weekend was the weekend to dig in the garden -- to put in our own vegetables. This year, we're doing Okra, Tomatoes, Collard, Corn, Basil, Dill, Beans, Radishes and...possibly Amaranth.
The more local vege we support and the more of our own vege we grow -- the less oil used in shipping in food from overseas...and therefore the fewer people have to die fighting over oil.
Growing a vegetable garden is my radical act for peace.
You're correct in that for female academics to postpone having children (often until it is too late) is society removing a good deal of good genes from the gene pool--in that it's not really the choice of the women themselves.
Up until 1976, in the passage of title VII of the Civil Rights Act, it was still actually legal to actually fire women from their faculty positions for the crime of...getting married, having children. And Universities certainly did so, with absolute impunity, and with few exceptions.
Because the actual legal remedies are much worse for a woman's career than the original tort itself, Universities continued to fire untenured female academics as soon as they got pregnant (and often as soon as they got married!) at least up in to the mid-90's -- particularly in fields where women are really still fundamentally unwelcome as women .
This rampant pregnancy discrimination is explained by a real misogyny -- hatred of womankind -- by people in the physical sciences, CS, engineering and mathematics. In these fields, women must still be accepted as "honorary men" -- they must not be like women at all, you see -- and the act of getting pregnant simply destroys the "honorary man" status they've achieved by e.g. wearing pants, cutting their hair short, deliberately deepening their voices, and so forth.
Women that have survived this hateful misogyny have essentially learned to hate themselves, and surprisingly are measurably more misogynistic than their male peers --they are actually measurably more critical of young women scientists, more doubtful of their "committment to their careers" and more willing to believe that they're "just going to go off and have kids anyway so why bother mentoring them" etc.
The authors of "The Queen Bee Syndrome" attribute this to the male-normative self-image of the senior female scientists, and an ongoing belief in the idea that they are not really women to the point that they still believe in traditional gender roles-- for all the "little people" out there (who have to pay taxes, for example) out there, everyone except their own precious little narcissistic faux-boy selves.
While the authors of "The Queen Bee Syndrome" attribute this effect, seen in their sociological data, to some kind of narcissistic/male-normative self-selection and adaptation on the part of the women themselves, I have a more cynical view based on my own observation: faculties have selected real bitches to be their "Token Females" in order to do their sexist dirty-work for them, to keep it a mostly-male club, and never to get their hands dirty: they just get heir Chief Queen Bee Bitch to torpedo any incoming female students, researchers and young faculty, while the men throw up their soft, clean lilly-white hands and shout "Oh, She Couldn't Possibly Have Had Sexism Biasing Her Judgment, She's A Woman Herself!" What Sheer Effing Bollocks!
Although academic departments and research institutes in the physical sciences, computer science, mathematics and engineering still think they can get away with this kind of crap, it's starting to wear a bit thin now that The Queen Bee Syndrome has been measured:
http://www.oxtrust.org.uk/pooled/articles/BF_NEWSA RT/view.asp?Q=BF_NEWSART_114676
Still, young female physicists, engineers, computer scientists and mathematicians are about twice as likely than their male counterparts to be unemployed, and about four times as likely to be in temporary -- not permanent-- positions. While pregna