You are projecting your idea of evil. Some small percentage of people probably actually liked Mitt Romney. I know people who positively worship Obama, despite his having very few policy differences from Bush II. Even as much as I disliked both guys and refused to vote for either of them, I don't know if I'd go so far as to call them evil.
No candidate will ever align with my beliefs 100%. Not even my wife agrees with me on everything in the political sphere. Sometimes you have to compromise and pick the best choice that is offered.
I think that number ignores all of the financing they pay on the debt they used for their build out. Verizon is simply not all that profitable. Their gross profits are in the 60-70% range, which gives credit to your number - but net profits bounce between positive and negative territory.
Yes, I want to be clear that I think this Supreme Court decision was a good one. I do not like racial preferences, even as a means to right wrongs. I think it also leaves intact the valuable parts of Affirmative Action.
Now, Johnson's order has definitely been used to justify quotas. Nixon famously did this, and Reagan famously failed to undo this. I don't think the concept is totally without merit, but I think it is misguided, counterproductive, and sets a dangerous precedent that runs counter to the larger goal of equality.
I bet you can find a few who remember when it wasn't legal to sit at the front of a bus if a white person wanted the seat. It really hasn't been very long. There's been amazing progress - but there's still a long way to go.
Especially how is bias eliminated when the source of the bias external?
It is not necessarily addressed. The external source has to be corrected.
What about Northern Michigan University, local population is 4.4% black?
If the places that their students are coming from are less than 5% black, and if everything else were equal, then you would expect the school to be about 5% black as well. Of course, it is much more complicated than that.
Internet is an afterthought in the US. In almost all cases, it is bolted-on to either the telephone network or the cable TV network. And in both cases, once they had enough bandwidth for internet, the cable company made sure to offer phone service and the phone company began to offer cable. I suspect that this is because cable and internet phone service are very high-margin, while internet service is not.
In any case, Verizon rolled out FIOS (fiber to the home) to great fanfare and were rewarded with a tanking stock price. So they stopped doing that. We need Mr. Moneybags to come in and rescue us, but the telecom and cable companies are making that as hard as possible. Which is rational, but it makes me hate them even more.
Yes, it was perhaps poorly phrased. If the university is itself responsible for the gap, as opposed to larger societal forces, then it needs to take blame. Conversely, if a nursing school has an even 50-50 male-female split, then they might want to investigate why they don't have a normal (for the occupation) mix of men and women. It might be OK, or it could be a problem - but without collecting the data there would be no numbers to begin with.
The point is that lowering the bar for minority students, while usually a noble notion, just doesn't solve the real problem
I agree. Affirmative Action, at least the flavor enacted by Executive Order in the US, does not do that - it is primarily about data collection. I share your distaste for quotas or racial preferences.
until these communities, as a whole, recognize the value of education and do what it takes to see that their kids get it, nothing will change
While I agree with this entirely, it is not the full extent of the problem. There are still sufficient numbers of biased people in positions of power to make being a certain kind of minority or woman a disadvantage. That is what Affirmative Action can address. It cannot force parents to take their children's educations seriously. It cannot relieve the vast majority of the ills that the poor suffer. But just because it only attacks one part of a complex problem does not mean it is not worthwhile.
My company went "Equal Opportunity". At first, I rolled my eyes. But the HR presentation had absolutely nothing objectionable in it. It turns out that Affirmative Action, as it refers to the Executive Orders in the US, is almost entirely data collection. I don't know why it is also associated with quotas - certainly some institutions use them... perhaps those institutions wrap it all in the "Affirmative Action" banner and have tainted the term. While I'd love to see quotas go away, I'd hate to see the data collection go away, so I get a little defensive.
An institution's tendency to select a candidate based on something other than merit (age, race, gender, etc).
If an institution accepts a higher percentage of Asians than the percentage in the US population (or amongst the applicants, or the amongst the qualified applicants?), is that a bias that needs to be corrected?
I can't answer that question without a lot more data. Action should be taken to rule out bias as a cause, though.
If an institution accepts a lower percentage of males than the percentage in the US population, is that a bias that needs to be corrected?
Again, I'd need a lot more data - but I don't think it should be any more acceptable to bias against males than any other broad category.
If an institution accepts a lower percentage of males than the percentage in the US population, is that a bias that needs to be corrected?
No, that is not something that IMHO needs to be addressed via affirmative action, though I don't approve of that as a policy for publicly-financed institutions. Though in all fairness I see the other side of this issue as well... legacies certainly are not helpful for class mobility and it can be seen as a form of economic discrimination. That's a very interesting topic in itself.
If an institution accepts a lower percentage of people with Down syndrome?
We allow discrimination based on aptitude, and I can't say that I disagree with that. Discrimination can be good.
If an institution accepts a higher percentage of people who were interested in a particular subject in high school?
Offhand, I'd expect this. An art school will have more people interested in art. An engineering school will have more science nerds. This is specialization, not discrimination IMHO.
There are no easy ways to account for all the obstacles a person encounters before he applies for college. Low income families, broken households, abusive parents, devastating medical conditions, high crime neighborhood, toxic cultural environment, etc, etc, etc...
I can't accept that we shouldn't work on problems just because they are hard. Efforts to explore our own biases will, on balance, lead to far more good than harm.
I know for a fact that some of the people in charge of admission cannot even agree on what the end goal is.
While that is certainly true, I think you'll find it is simply a matter of agreement over how far to go. I'd wager that the entire admissions office agrees that two otherwise similar students who differ only in skin color ought to each have a fair shake. If data shows that otherwise-similar students are NOT having similar incomes, then there is likely a systemic issue of bias. At the very least, there is a signal in the noise that needs to be looked into. Worst case, there is nothing you can do - but the effort should be made to make sure it isn't your institution's fault.
Somehow, when you give a middle class, black kid from a two parent family an advantage over a low income, single mother Asian kid, you are striking a blow for social justice...
I personally do not advocate quotas, but you are right that many do.
If your quibble is simply with my claim that Affirmative Action != Quota, then let's use some mutually-agreed upon terminology to remove that as an obstacle to discussion.
I am pro-data collection.
I support using said data to take action to eliminate bias in your own organization.
I do not support using a quota system to set up a system of racial or gender preferences.
I'm open to any terminology you would like to use to describe those three steps, but let's not get muddled down in semantics.
I strongly believe that certain information should be masked from admissions committees. Applicants should be referred to by ID number, not name. Race or age is a non-starter, and should only be collected to look for institutional bias. Obviously personal interviews subvert this, but we should do what we can - perfection be damned.
What you are describing is a quota system, not affirmative action. Opponents like it when people conflate the two because it is very hard to be opposed to data collection or removing biases in your organization. It's easy to get worked up over quotas, because they - by definition - express preferences for one group over another.
If those classes aren't represented in your organization at the same proportion as in the general public, you're in non-compliance.
No, that's not true. You are compared to the relevant pool, not the population at large.
However, only 20% of the candidates were female.
So then one has to try to triage this problem. Is the reason for this under the control of the university? If so, then the university is obliged to help. If not, then it should be up to their discretion how far they want to go, IMHO.
The pendulum is swinging in the other direction.
No it isn't. There is still a lot of racism and bigotry in this country. When you can look at a statistical analysis of black and white populations and have trouble figuring out who is who, we are done. Until then, we have work to do.
But in the end, letting them go through the Hell that is our Elementary, Jr, and High school systems and THEN being concerned about them getting into college is just plain stupid.
I agree with most of your points, but I feel the need to point out what you probably will find obvious... just in case.
Discrimination does not occur only through primary and secondary schools and then suddenly cease at the college door. A system of detection and correction must be in place at all levels. While I think taking it to the point where you have preferences and quotas goes too far, there needs to be a system in place to see if you have a problem in the first place.
You seem to have a certain idea of how affirmative action works that is different than mine. It varies, of course, but at its core affirmative action is hard to object to: the foundation is data collection.
You simply collect data to see if you have a racial or other bias. If you do see a bias, you try to find out if it exists due to some variable that you control, or if the variable is out of your control. If the variable is within your control, you try to correct the problem on your end. That is the core of affirmative action, and is all that is required of an "equal opportunity employer".
The controversial part comes when the variable is out of your control. Some advocate implementing something like quotas or other such measures which favor people who fall into "disadvantaged" buckets based on race, gender, or other criteria. I tend to agree with people who want to end this kind of system, but I absolutely support the data collection and active ("affirmative") attempts ("action") to correct organizational bias.
It sounds to me in your description like your company might be too small to have the sorts of problems that SharePoint is designed to fix.
I agree with this. At the time of our decision to use Sharepoint, our engineering was being run by a guy who was very fond of books about Toyota. Our company has about 450x less revenue than Toyota. Most of our engineers know a single system very well and "own" it. When you want to know something about a system, you ask the engineer - not look it up on Sharepoint. I've tried very hard to be a good company man and embrace Sharepoint. I put all of the work that it is feasible to in it, I use it to document my work, I put project pages together. But it has been far more frustrating than usual for a new (to me) software product. I tried to get them to stop fairly early on, though, as it all seemed a terrific waste of time. I still enjoy rubbing it in when they publicly are searching for something while in a meeting, but that's my asshole side peeking through.
Sharepoint is sold as far more than a document library.
First off, they emphasize these ridiculous social networking style features. "Connecting to people". As if you don't know who the members of your team are. The interface to the collaboration side of things is through the web browser. If you are such an MS house that you have Sharepoint, then you already use Outlook as your primary written communication tool - no one is going to switch over to Sharepoint for collaboration unless you take away Outlook, or unless MS spends some time actually integrating Outlook with Sharepoint in more than a token way.
They also sell it as a website builder, kind of a content-management system. I guess it is no more obtuse than others. I certainly wouldn't put anything public-facing on it.
I still don't understand how Excel/Word/Powerpoint losing data when saving to a Sharepoint site is not what you would consider a major problem with the client software, but a configuration problem on the Sharepoint side. A failure to upload should trigger some kind of fallback to local storage. We've all been trained by the school of hard knocks to either work locally or double-check that the upload succeeded before closing the document.
Even without the failure to save problem, integration with Office is a poor effort. The metadata enforcement mechanism is sloppy. Warnings come up at various stages about the document's trust, and how it is currently read-only. Sometimes if you click things in the "wrong" order, you get undesirable results. Documents left in read-only can sometimes be edited but then not saved. It's a mess. I mean, Office is kind of a mess too, but the Sharepoint integration is still the biggest wart on the witch's face. Well, maybe ODBC. I swear that still uses 8.3 filenames and 16-bit windows GUI elements in some places. But I digress.
IMHO, you need a dedicated librarian on each team if you want to use Sharepoint (or similar metadata based tools). The librarian has to have enough power to force people to fill in good metadata, and to update their Sharepoint documents whenever the real data changes. If you aren't willing to pay for this resource, give up on the micromanagement thing and throw stuff in a common shared network drive. Use any number of tools that you already have (e.g. Outlook, Communicator) for collaboration. For certain kinds of tasks that lend themselves to self-documentation, use some kind of wiki. Save the $200k, wasted time, and librarian and admin salaries. And God, the lock-in. It's bad enough that we have these legacy wikis running - now in emulated hardware purgatory. But at least they are running in a VPN somewhere in purgatory, requiring no admin time and not requiring any license fee. Our little failed experiments can wither peacefully and cheaply - only accessed when old data is needed for reference. But this Sharepoint stuff, if they decide to stop paying the fee it is gone. I'm sure you can export it in some manner, but what a mess.
Sorry I'm ranting... it's probably not even interesting anymore:)
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You are projecting your idea of evil. Some small percentage of people probably actually liked Mitt Romney. I know people who positively worship Obama, despite his having very few policy differences from Bush II. Even as much as I disliked both guys and refused to vote for either of them, I don't know if I'd go so far as to call them evil.
No candidate will ever align with my beliefs 100%. Not even my wife agrees with me on everything in the political sphere. Sometimes you have to compromise and pick the best choice that is offered.
I think that number ignores all of the financing they pay on the debt they used for their build out. Verizon is simply not all that profitable. Their gross profits are in the 60-70% range, which gives credit to your number - but net profits bounce between positive and negative territory.
Yes, I want to be clear that I think this Supreme Court decision was a good one. I do not like racial preferences, even as a means to right wrongs. I think it also leaves intact the valuable parts of Affirmative Action.
Here's the order that Kennedy signed, and here is Johnson's order.
Now, Johnson's order has definitely been used to justify quotas. Nixon famously did this, and Reagan famously failed to undo this. I don't think the concept is totally without merit, but I think it is misguided, counterproductive, and sets a dangerous precedent that runs counter to the larger goal of equality.
I've been around long enough to know that rich folks would just finagle their kids into good orphanages :)
I bet you can find a few who remember when it wasn't legal to sit at the front of a bus if a white person wanted the seat. It really hasn't been very long. There's been amazing progress - but there's still a long way to go.
Especially how is bias eliminated when the source of the bias external?
It is not necessarily addressed. The external source has to be corrected.
What about Northern Michigan University, local population is 4.4% black?
If the places that their students are coming from are less than 5% black, and if everything else were equal, then you would expect the school to be about 5% black as well. Of course, it is much more complicated than that.
I prefer approval voting for it's simplicity, but I agree with you that the current system is not ideal.
Internet is an afterthought in the US. In almost all cases, it is bolted-on to either the telephone network or the cable TV network. And in both cases, once they had enough bandwidth for internet, the cable company made sure to offer phone service and the phone company began to offer cable. I suspect that this is because cable and internet phone service are very high-margin, while internet service is not.
In any case, Verizon rolled out FIOS (fiber to the home) to great fanfare and were rewarded with a tanking stock price. So they stopped doing that. We need Mr. Moneybags to come in and rescue us, but the telecom and cable companies are making that as hard as possible. Which is rational, but it makes me hate them even more.
At least write in Kodos.
I voted Gary Johnson. My vote helped him carry zero states. I really can't blame people for voting strategically.
Yes, it was perhaps poorly phrased. If the university is itself responsible for the gap, as opposed to larger societal forces, then it needs to take blame. Conversely, if a nursing school has an even 50-50 male-female split, then they might want to investigate why they don't have a normal (for the occupation) mix of men and women. It might be OK, or it could be a problem - but without collecting the data there would be no numbers to begin with.
The point is that lowering the bar for minority students, while usually a noble notion, just doesn't solve the real problem
I agree. Affirmative Action, at least the flavor enacted by Executive Order in the US, does not do that - it is primarily about data collection. I share your distaste for quotas or racial preferences.
until these communities, as a whole, recognize the value of education and do what it takes to see that their kids get it, nothing will change
While I agree with this entirely, it is not the full extent of the problem. There are still sufficient numbers of biased people in positions of power to make being a certain kind of minority or woman a disadvantage. That is what Affirmative Action can address. It cannot force parents to take their children's educations seriously. It cannot relieve the vast majority of the ills that the poor suffer. But just because it only attacks one part of a complex problem does not mean it is not worthwhile.
I pity the poor applicant who gets 666 in the bible belt...
Technically that is a bias as well
Yes, of course you are right :) There are times when discrimination is good...
My company went "Equal Opportunity". At first, I rolled my eyes. But the HR presentation had absolutely nothing objectionable in it. It turns out that Affirmative Action, as it refers to the Executive Orders in the US, is almost entirely data collection. I don't know why it is also associated with quotas - certainly some institutions use them... perhaps those institutions wrap it all in the "Affirmative Action" banner and have tainted the term. While I'd love to see quotas go away, I'd hate to see the data collection go away, so I get a little defensive.
Right, but it does indicate (along with hundreds of other indicators) that society at large still has a big racial hangup.
Can you explain what exactly you think is "bias"?
An institution's tendency to select a candidate based on something other than merit (age, race, gender, etc).
If an institution accepts a higher percentage of Asians than the percentage in the US population (or amongst the applicants, or the amongst the qualified applicants?), is that a bias that needs to be corrected?
I can't answer that question without a lot more data. Action should be taken to rule out bias as a cause, though.
If an institution accepts a lower percentage of males than the percentage in the US population, is that a bias that needs to be corrected?
Again, I'd need a lot more data - but I don't think it should be any more acceptable to bias against males than any other broad category.
If an institution accepts a lower percentage of males than the percentage in the US population, is that a bias that needs to be corrected?
No, that is not something that IMHO needs to be addressed via affirmative action, though I don't approve of that as a policy for publicly-financed institutions. Though in all fairness I see the other side of this issue as well... legacies certainly are not helpful for class mobility and it can be seen as a form of economic discrimination. That's a very interesting topic in itself.
If an institution accepts a lower percentage of people with Down syndrome?
We allow discrimination based on aptitude, and I can't say that I disagree with that. Discrimination can be good.
If an institution accepts a higher percentage of people who were interested in a particular subject in high school?
Offhand, I'd expect this. An art school will have more people interested in art. An engineering school will have more science nerds. This is specialization, not discrimination IMHO.
There are no easy ways to account for all the obstacles a person encounters before he applies for college. Low income families, broken households, abusive parents, devastating medical conditions, high crime neighborhood, toxic cultural environment, etc, etc, etc...
I can't accept that we shouldn't work on problems just because they are hard. Efforts to explore our own biases will, on balance, lead to far more good than harm.
I know for a fact that some of the people in charge of admission cannot even agree on what the end goal is.
While that is certainly true, I think you'll find it is simply a matter of agreement over how far to go. I'd wager that the entire admissions office agrees that two otherwise similar students who differ only in skin color ought to each have a fair shake. If data shows that otherwise-similar students are NOT having similar incomes, then there is likely a systemic issue of bias. At the very least, there is a signal in the noise that needs to be looked into. Worst case, there is nothing you can do - but the effort should be made to make sure it isn't your institution's fault.
Somehow, when you give a middle class, black kid from a two parent family an advantage over a low income, single mother Asian kid, you are striking a blow for social justice...
I personally do not advocate quotas, but you are right that many do.
If your quibble is simply with my claim that Affirmative Action != Quota, then let's use some mutually-agreed upon terminology to remove that as an obstacle to discussion.
I am pro-data collection.
I support using said data to take action to eliminate bias in your own organization.
I do not support using a quota system to set up a system of racial or gender preferences.
I'm open to any terminology you would like to use to describe those three steps, but let's not get muddled down in semantics.
I strongly believe that certain information should be masked from admissions committees. Applicants should be referred to by ID number, not name. Race or age is a non-starter, and should only be collected to look for institutional bias. Obviously personal interviews subvert this, but we should do what we can - perfection be damned.
What you are describing is a quota system, not affirmative action. Opponents like it when people conflate the two because it is very hard to be opposed to data collection or removing biases in your organization. It's easy to get worked up over quotas, because they - by definition - express preferences for one group over another.
If those classes aren't represented in your organization at the same proportion as in the general public, you're in non-compliance.
No, that's not true. You are compared to the relevant pool, not the population at large.
However, only 20% of the candidates were female.
So then one has to try to triage this problem. Is the reason for this under the control of the university? If so, then the university is obliged to help. If not, then it should be up to their discretion how far they want to go, IMHO.
The pendulum is swinging in the other direction.
No it isn't. There is still a lot of racism and bigotry in this country. When you can look at a statistical analysis of black and white populations and have trouble figuring out who is who, we are done. Until then, we have work to do.
But in the end, letting them go through the Hell that is our Elementary, Jr, and High school systems and THEN being concerned about them getting into college is just plain stupid.
I agree with most of your points, but I feel the need to point out what you probably will find obvious... just in case.
Discrimination does not occur only through primary and secondary schools and then suddenly cease at the college door. A system of detection and correction must be in place at all levels. While I think taking it to the point where you have preferences and quotas goes too far, there needs to be a system in place to see if you have a problem in the first place.
You seem to have a certain idea of how affirmative action works that is different than mine. It varies, of course, but at its core affirmative action is hard to object to: the foundation is data collection.
You simply collect data to see if you have a racial or other bias. If you do see a bias, you try to find out if it exists due to some variable that you control, or if the variable is out of your control. If the variable is within your control, you try to correct the problem on your end. That is the core of affirmative action, and is all that is required of an "equal opportunity employer".
The controversial part comes when the variable is out of your control. Some advocate implementing something like quotas or other such measures which favor people who fall into "disadvantaged" buckets based on race, gender, or other criteria. I tend to agree with people who want to end this kind of system, but I absolutely support the data collection and active ("affirmative") attempts ("action") to correct organizational bias.
Heh, I'd probably just walk over to accounting and start asking people who I should talk to :)
Their answer might very well be someone in Singapore or Malaysia, but that would be my approach...
Anyway, I think you are right and I'm just not in a big enough organization for this kind of software.
It sounds to me in your description like your company might be too small to have the sorts of problems that SharePoint is designed to fix.
I agree with this. At the time of our decision to use Sharepoint, our engineering was being run by a guy who was very fond of books about Toyota. Our company has about 450x less revenue than Toyota. Most of our engineers know a single system very well and "own" it. When you want to know something about a system, you ask the engineer - not look it up on Sharepoint. I've tried very hard to be a good company man and embrace Sharepoint. I put all of the work that it is feasible to in it, I use it to document my work, I put project pages together. But it has been far more frustrating than usual for a new (to me) software product. I tried to get them to stop fairly early on, though, as it all seemed a terrific waste of time. I still enjoy rubbing it in when they publicly are searching for something while in a meeting, but that's my asshole side peeking through.
Sharepoint is sold as far more than a document library.
First off, they emphasize these ridiculous social networking style features. "Connecting to people". As if you don't know who the members of your team are. The interface to the collaboration side of things is through the web browser. If you are such an MS house that you have Sharepoint, then you already use Outlook as your primary written communication tool - no one is going to switch over to Sharepoint for collaboration unless you take away Outlook, or unless MS spends some time actually integrating Outlook with Sharepoint in more than a token way.
They also sell it as a website builder, kind of a content-management system. I guess it is no more obtuse than others. I certainly wouldn't put anything public-facing on it.
I still don't understand how Excel/Word/Powerpoint losing data when saving to a Sharepoint site is not what you would consider a major problem with the client software, but a configuration problem on the Sharepoint side. A failure to upload should trigger some kind of fallback to local storage. We've all been trained by the school of hard knocks to either work locally or double-check that the upload succeeded before closing the document.
Even without the failure to save problem, integration with Office is a poor effort. The metadata enforcement mechanism is sloppy. Warnings come up at various stages about the document's trust, and how it is currently read-only. Sometimes if you click things in the "wrong" order, you get undesirable results. Documents left in read-only can sometimes be edited but then not saved. It's a mess. I mean, Office is kind of a mess too, but the Sharepoint integration is still the biggest wart on the witch's face. Well, maybe ODBC. I swear that still uses 8.3 filenames and 16-bit windows GUI elements in some places. But I digress.
IMHO, you need a dedicated librarian on each team if you want to use Sharepoint (or similar metadata based tools). The librarian has to have enough power to force people to fill in good metadata, and to update their Sharepoint documents whenever the real data changes. If you aren't willing to pay for this resource, give up on the micromanagement thing and throw stuff in a common shared network drive. Use any number of tools that you already have (e.g. Outlook, Communicator) for collaboration. For certain kinds of tasks that lend themselves to self-documentation, use some kind of wiki. Save the $200k, wasted time, and librarian and admin salaries. And God, the lock-in. It's bad enough that we have these legacy wikis running - now in emulated hardware purgatory. But at least they are running in a VPN somewhere in purgatory, requiring no admin time and not requiring any license fee. Our little failed experiments can wither peacefully and cheaply - only accessed when old data is needed for reference. But this Sharepoint stuff, if they decide to stop paying the fee it is gone. I'm sure you can export it in some manner, but what a mess.
Sorry I'm ranting... it's probably not even interesting anymore :)