As a female physics student a few months away from a Ph.D. I would have to disagree. Simply because more men major in physics does not mean that they are better at it on average (I might suggest a class in logic). I would agree with the parent poster that social factors are probably much more important in keeping women away from science research. Your assertion that women struggle more in math and science is, in my experience, due to their exclusion from the male-dominated student culture in those fields. A woman has to get past that before she can figure out that science is actually fun and rewarding. While this is not active discouragement, it does take some/all of the fun out of science classes. Studies about innate differences between men and women are very hard to do because of the pervasive social differences between the sexes; to call the difference "obvious" is very unscientific. I would also question whether money spent doing these studies is well spent. Regardless of the average woman or man there are clearly individual women and men who are good at science and these people should be encouraged to pursue these careers.
Re:As /. has clearly shown
on
The "Techie" Vote?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
While it is true that the tech community could never agree on taxes and religion I don't think it is that important. We can demand that politicans address issues that we think are important just like they do for the Christian right and big labor. There is never going to be a big Slashdot party to run against the republicans, but we can make them take our position seriously.
Aren't stability and apt-get enough? I run debian on 3 desktops that I use for work. Debian has never caused me any problems once I got it installed, they always worked and they have never got hacked. Since my job isn't messing around with linux that's all I really needed them to do.
Debian is actually a really good option for people such as myself who want a computer they have control over, but that won't break. It might not be the most exciting distribution around, but sometimes exciting isn't good.
Actually "average joe" is not quite the right term. People who are to some degree engaged in file sharing are generally young and well educated (to first order and certainly in in the media fed mindset it is college kids). There seems to be a lot of backlash against these kinds of people these days. The Bush administration is carefully cultivating an image of down home American common sense which is willfully blind to the subtlties of just about every situation. This, I think, resonates with the real "average joe" who gets their news from fox and wears American flag t-shirts. Anyway, those who believe in fair use rights and rights in general need to make their case stronger to the center of the political spectrum and realize that in many circles they are easily, if not consciously branded as Birkenstock wearing hippies just because they know a few 4 syllable words and have a passing knowledge of the law.
Actually this is not just another test of the standard model. Those tests are done with simple systems (like proton-proton or electron-electron collisions). The gold-gold collisions here are a much more complicated system where studying the properties of the large thermalized soup of quarks and gluons is the issue. There is no complete model for explaining how all aspects of this system should behave. This is one of the more experimentaly driven areas of physics.
I might point out the the current administration is also appointing judges to the federal, and soon supreme courts. Unless people write their senators and complain the US courts will be filled with Bush-ites and legal challenges to the Patriot Act will be rejected. It's important not only to vote, but to persistantly inform those in power of your objections to all the new threats to our civil liberties.
I agree comletely. I use linux because I can pick what I want and not be forced to do things in some officially mandated way. If open source is reduced to the latest version of redhat with open office and mozilla then I, personally, would loose the major productivity and happiness gains I have made since my switch to linux. While provide linux to the masses is an admirable goal open source should not be reduced to the simple goal of seeing my mom use something which is essentially GNU/Windows.
My husband left the back of our truck open on I80 in south dakota and at some point my laptop bag fell out. Some nice people picked it up and shipped it to me (isn't the midwest grand?). The bag had clearly met it's match with the highway, and I feared the worst, but aside from a couple of dents it works as well as ever.
Slashdot Mirror
As a female physics student a few months away from a Ph.D. I would have to disagree. Simply because more men major in physics does not mean that they are better at it on average (I might suggest a class in logic). I would agree with the parent poster that social factors are probably much more important in keeping women away from science research.
Your assertion that women struggle more in math and science is, in my experience, due to their exclusion from the male-dominated student culture in those fields. A woman has to get past that before she can figure out that science is actually fun and rewarding. While this is not active discouragement, it does take some/all of the fun out of science classes.
Studies about innate differences between men and women are very hard to do because of the pervasive social differences between the sexes; to call the difference "obvious" is very unscientific. I would also question whether money spent doing these studies is well spent. Regardless of the average woman or man there are clearly individual women and men who are good at science and these people should be encouraged to pursue these careers.
While it is true that the tech community could never agree on taxes and religion I don't think it is that important. We can demand that politicans address issues that we think are important just like they do for the Christian right and big labor. There is never going to be a big Slashdot party to run against the republicans, but we can make them take our position seriously.
Aren't stability and apt-get enough? I run debian on 3 desktops that I use for work. Debian has never caused me any problems once I got it installed, they always worked and they have never got hacked. Since my job isn't messing around with linux that's all I really needed them to do. Debian is actually a really good option for people such as myself who want a computer they have control over, but that won't break. It might not be the most exciting distribution around, but sometimes exciting isn't good.
Actually "average joe" is not quite the right term. People who are to some degree engaged in file sharing are generally young and well educated (to first order and certainly in in the media fed mindset it is college kids). There seems to be a lot of backlash against these kinds of people these days. The Bush administration is carefully cultivating an image of down home American common sense which is willfully blind to the subtlties of just about every situation. This, I think, resonates with the real "average joe" who gets their news from fox and wears American flag t-shirts.
Anyway, those who believe in fair use rights and rights in general need to make their case stronger to the center of the political spectrum and realize that in many circles they are easily, if not consciously branded as Birkenstock wearing hippies just because they know a few 4 syllable words and have a passing knowledge of the law.
Actually this is not just another test of the standard model. Those tests are done with simple systems (like proton-proton or electron-electron collisions). The gold-gold collisions here are a much more complicated system where studying the properties of the large thermalized soup of quarks and gluons is the issue. There is no complete model for explaining how all aspects of this system should behave. This is one of the more experimentaly driven areas of physics.
I might point out the the current administration is also appointing judges to the federal, and soon supreme courts. Unless people write their senators and complain the US courts will be filled with Bush-ites and legal challenges to the Patriot Act will be rejected. It's important not only to vote, but to persistantly inform those in power of your objections to all the new threats to our civil liberties.
I agree comletely. I use linux because I can pick what I want and not be forced to do things in some officially mandated way. If open source is reduced to the latest version of redhat with open office and mozilla then I, personally, would loose the major productivity and happiness gains I have made since my switch to linux. While provide linux to the masses is an admirable goal open source should not be reduced to the simple goal of seeing my mom use something which is essentially GNU/Windows.
My husband left the back of our truck open on I80 in south dakota and at some point my laptop bag fell out. Some nice people picked it up and shipped it to me (isn't the midwest grand?). The bag had clearly met it's match with the highway, and I feared the worst, but aside from a couple of dents it works as well as ever.