You think that's bad? I'm a CS PhD studnet, and I do theory and crypto. I spend hours trying to explain what that IS to my family. I don't use Windows. These little "tech support" sessions are hell, since I have no clue what to do about their problem, so I have to start at square one. They've gotten better at being somewhat self-reliant, since my advice has become "use a better OS, there isn't anything on there that you can't get somewhere else."
Now if people in my family start getting OS X boxen, I'd be in a lot better shape. "Take the cord and plug it into the hole, and then the computer will download the pictures for you". "It's not booting? And making a funny noise? Call Apple, you seem to need a new hard drive"
Y'know, I'd think that someone's personal hygine and habits would have a lot more influence on their acceptability as an officemate (grad students: we don't get paid much, but at least we have offices) than their gender or measurements. I mean really, I'm not quite that poor and desperate to be tempted by this, since they pay me here an all, so it's just too incredibly degrading to be eye candy at work for some "hotshot" coder.
Look! Brains! They're much more important than the rest of it, especially in a coworker. It doesn't mean a thing that I am right around that description. It matters who I am and what I do.
Latanya Sweeney at CMU is working on a notion called k-anonymity. Should be another paper coming out sometime, from what I hear. Anyways, "completely" anonymous doesn't really mean that in a lot of cases. They've had great sucess identifying people by linking differnt sets of information. But in any case, I doubt that the regs right now do anything useful anyways. Hopefully they'll get changed if something provably good comes up.
> I know of a few women who passed their CS classes using the "Hey CS boy who has never had a girlfriend, want to help me with my program?" method.
I was more referring to grad school admissions and academic/research jobs. These are not necessarily places where being a woman is going to help you, precisely becasue there are these sorts of expectations, and becasue there are assumptions built in BY their earlier education/parents that have never been challenged, simply because there was no one around to do so. It takes a very self-aware person to realize this and give some real thought to it.
And because of societal attitudes towards child-rearing there is often a choice to be made for a woman between having children or making a signifigant sacrifice in her career, while this is not often the case for men.
And yes. I take your points about demographics. In fact I agree with most of it. My point is that by making sexism acceptable, and it IS out there, we're doing nothing to change that, and to give more freedom to live without being constrained to gender roles for both men and women.
... and some of us CAN see it with our eyes. Movies already really screw with mine, and I've switched entirely over the LCDs, since CRTs give me terrible headaches. (yes, I hate florescent lights too)
Caveat here: most people don't have six-degrees-of-prism lenses in their glasses, but it will REALLY piss me off if they decide to "fight piracy" in such a way that I can't watch the movies at all. Hopefully the cinemas that play the movies I want to watch will not have any part of this. Somehow I can't see anyone videotaping "The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys", which I saw last night. (Ditto music "protection" schemes in which the quality of the sound is sacrified on the altar of illusary profits.)
A lot of the "feminazi" stuff was just made up, from what I understand. Source may be biased, but *shrug*.
The problem is that people will say "I hate those feminists" or "I'm not a feminist", and words have power. Discrediting the equal-rights feminists (all the ones I know) along with extremists leads to a discrediting of their ideas, and slows (or stops) their application in modern society.
I have run into enough of this crap that I believe it's a problem, even if it's "just assholes", as they are a part of the current power structure. (If anyone ever says to me at the beginning of a design review "are you sure you know what you're doing, little girl" again,/someone/ is going to get spoken out against.) Assuming that a woman is unqualified becasue "she must have gotten {x} because she's a woman" is rather screwed up as well. "I'm not sexist, but women just aren't as good at {x}" also doesn't work for me. People vary.
I'd say you probably want to be treated as a person, not as "one of the guys". How the heck did being male get to be an intended compliment for women, and being female an intended insult for men, anyways?
Cosmo is certainly funny. DOA2, for example, is just as objectifying, with the *bouncebounce* OW don't even want to LOOK at that factor...
>the expectation that to be beautiful, they have to be tall, skinny, and large chested.
the tall part is somewhat debatable, but certainly beauty standards are warped almost beyond recognition, and are given FAR too much importance in contemporary society. there is a lot of sexism around (and a lot less sexism than there was before, don't get me wrong) revealed by the oft-used phrase "I'm not sexist, but..." and its twisted twin "I'm not a feminist", used by women who believe in equality for women. The first indicates that certainly there is more of an expectation for equal treatment and respect, even if it is not always fulfilled, and the second points towards the backlash against feminism (ERA, anyone) led by the religious right.
ok, I'll stop ranting now, I need to review papers.
wow. not stereotyping at ALL, are we. this seems like such a troll, I suppose I shouldn't respond, but I'm procrastinating at the moment, so here goes:
>Game makers have no obligation to cater to women, who in any event will not buy many games.
True. Unlikely. I remember reading that the audience for The Sims was 50% women, and they certainly sold a/lot/ of copies of it. Likewise other sim games, and civ games. I don't know figures for other types of games.
>Pacman is one of the few games that appealed to females.
I'd like to see some evidence for this one. In my experience, it was one of a wide variety of games that appealed to females. And it appealed to males.
>I think the reason is that he's a gender traitor, a man with the soul of a woman.
Wow. Wow. I don't know/any/ women who hate Lara Croft (which was your implication). I do also know many women who are very, very amused at romance novels. They're terribly written, and incredibly silly. I know some who are very angry at the objectification of women displayed in her modeling and so forth. I know some who see breasts bouncing every which way till Tuesday and think "ow. owow. owowow." Because, as you say, the eroticization of female figures is so ubiquitous in our society, many women don't notice it.
Neither do many women that I have met consider the musclebound type to be particularly attractive. Tastes vary.
Lastly, an utterly unresponsive woman, who doesn't care about your opinion, seems like she would be unattractive. Really. She just doesn't give a damn. You've at least managed to annoy me.
Don't be daft. I believe it has more to do with the (rather repulsive) advertising and perhaps with your sample set, and the games you are thinking of. I know a lot of young women who game. There are a lot of Sim games involved. Civ games. Smac. These are non-geek women, btw.
The differences within a gender are far wider than the average difference between them. (Especially if you're using the two-gender system, where there are huge numbers to average across and not the (4,6)-gender system, but I digress)
That sure as hell wouldn't appeal to/me/, but hey, I've been known to like Quake. Still, watching someone with huge breasts BOUNCE around the screen is vicariously painful for many women. Ever seen DOA2? Ouchieouchieouchieouchieouchieouchieouchieouchie. I try not to be in the same/room/ as that game.
They're occasionally entertaining, though depressing if you actually think about them. Cosmo is particularly funny. Not a regular thing, but it's nice to take one and read it in the bath every once in a while.
And last I noted, I'm not a sex object. Granted, I'm a grad student, I'm not in IT.
... and nick knows a few things about ranting about security! (hi nick.)
snake oil coming out all over on this one. At the very least, a lack of proper terminology. A lit search is certainly in order here, and there are a few books he might want to read to get a few basics in crypto. a nice introduction is:
S. Goldwasser and M. Bellare, Lecture Notes on Cryptography. Available online at http://www-cse.ucsd.edu/users/mihir/papers/gb.html . O. Goldreich, Foundations of Cryptography, Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001.
Quite readable, even if I prefer a more compact notation for some things, myself.
I'm still all for paying the approprate sorts of people to look at it, especially if there's a proof of security somewhere in the offing. Grad students work for food!
Hmm... authentication mechanisms are less than optimal at this point, I wouldn't say it's a solved problem. Forward-secure mechanisms with an unlimited periods (instead of being chosen at keygen time) may not be the best that can be achieved. IBE, deniable ring authentication (see the open problems in Naor's crypto'02 paper), and lots of other things have open problems. transferrable authentication (and I don't just mean undeniable/invisible signatures) and delegation aren't exactly solved either.
I still think that there's about zilch chance that this is actually IND-CPA secure, but there are a few uses for new encrpytion schemes. Having schemes based on different hard problems allows robustness in the face of changing mathematical knowledge, and may have keysize/cyphertext expansion/security advantages, as well as other properties which are useful for protocols that use em (predictable bit length, for example. don't ask, I'll probably publish later, but it is useful sometimes, though I believe there's a better solution to this particular problem.) Anyways, braid groups (for example) are cool:)
I think s/he should go prove one way functions exist, and get me some job security!
Movies too -- there are some wonderful movies out there. Now all I need to do is figure out where to get a region 2 player and a PAL->NTSC coverter, so I can watch French movies that are never going to come out in region 1. Silly artifical trade barriers; Cyrano calls!
> I only single out CS as I have experience in the area.
That'a pretty much where mine is too, so we're on the same page.
>I must say that one gets the impression that a lot of "dubious" stuff is published
well, I haven't read too many systems papers, given my proclitivities, but theory papers include proofs. sometimes there are bugs in the proofs, but these are easier to check than experimental results, and so are. (Yesterday during lunch we reproved that PRIMES is in P.)
I found a bug in a protocol proposed in a paper that was just published at CRYPTO. This doesn't men the work was "dubious" in any way, just that their proof made an unwarranted assumption, and that they made a mistake. It was a very good paper, in toto.
>There is also a lot of pointless stuff being done as well.
Depends on where you're coming from. Most researchers have had good reasons for choosing the problems that they do. Of course, the concept of a "natural problem" counts for me, where it might not for you.
> Unlike Physics, no one really seems to bother with repeatability of results though.
Hmm... besides theory, which takes about 25 years to go into circulation (figure from Lenore Blum, I don't know where she got it from), isn't a lot of CS research used by outside people fairly rapidly? If implemented correctly, and it doesn't meet expectations, I'd expect some information circulation...
At the time, I believed I might well have lost a friend who worked in the WTC. It turned out that he had quit just before, and he wasn't in the building. My worries for him and my grief were mixed with a healthy sense of worry for what would happen to civil rights, and what the government might use this as an excuse to do. Planning and worrying about the future does not somehow lessen the past and present.
... and you might as well make the most of it, if you're going to be paid so badly. I plan to strike terror and complexity theory in the hearts of students!
I expect a diamond engament ring, but that's only because I already HAVE one, and it's very special to me -- it's four generations old, beautiful, and practical (I wear it every day, and it doesn't get caught on my pockets or instrument, which other rings I've had have). Switching it from my right to my left hand won't be stressful for anyone, and it won't enrich DeBeers.
As I don't have a fiancee (or a boyfriend, for that matter) I don't know what to do about the wedding ring. It's a decision we have to make together, obviously, since that's money that could be put towards a house or saved. Personally, I'm leaning towards having the matching wedding ring (which will be my sister's when she turns 21) reproduced, and writing down what we know about the rings for when they're passed down again.
Moral: it's the sentiment that counts. Family heirlooms make wonderful engagement rings, if you have that option, and if you don't, you may well want to get something timeless and PRACTICAL to pass down to your children or grandchildren. Obviously material inheritance is no where near as important as the way in which you raise your children, and the way in which you help them grow, but it is a special thing to pass a token of your family's love and connection through the generations.
I read this when it came out, but there was one thing that really stunned me. I don't have time to look this up right now, but when he talks about the averages, and how they are supposed to only move downwards and smoothly, he includes a really amazing remark: I don't understand why, but people tell me that this doesn't work for women. It should, though, so just expect it to work the same anyways.
Now, as a woman, I can point out at least one reason why this won't work like that for at least most women. Water retention can change someone's weight dramatically, and to have this happening cyclically will screw up your charts. There are other reasons why I don't think this will work if you have goals like retaining or increasing your strength/fitness, but that's by the wayside. Point being, I find this rather ill-researched and possibly quite dangerous. Then again, I don't diet, but I've taken the too-much-martial-arts and my body didn't give me much of a choice on what to eat, which made the whole thing a lot simpler. (BURRITO! NOW!)
Lea
Believe it or not, there are things in CS Theory (and algorithms in specific) which are a bit too complex for most 2nd year undergraduates (or indeed many graduate students) to fully grasp. Abstract algebra is not often taught to first-year undergraduates, and it's rather helpful in this context. Research continues. It happens.
Slashdot Mirror
You think that's bad? I'm a CS PhD studnet, and I do theory and crypto. I spend hours trying to explain what that IS to my family. I don't use Windows. These little "tech support" sessions are hell, since I have no clue what to do about their problem, so I have to start at square one. They've gotten better at being somewhat self-reliant, since my advice has become "use a better OS, there isn't anything on there that you can't get somewhere else."
Now if people in my family start getting OS X boxen, I'd be in a lot better shape. "Take the cord and plug it into the hole, and then the computer will download the pictures for you". "It's not booting? And making a funny noise? Call Apple, you seem to need a new hard drive"
Lea
Y'know, I'd think that someone's personal hygine and habits would have a lot more influence on their acceptability as an officemate (grad students: we don't get paid much, but at least we have offices) than their gender or measurements. I mean really, I'm not quite that poor and desperate to be tempted by this, since they pay me here an all, so it's just too incredibly degrading to be eye candy at work for some "hotshot" coder.
Look! Brains! They're much more important than the rest of it, especially in a coworker. It doesn't mean a thing that I am right around that description. It matters who I am and what I do.
Lea
Latanya Sweeney at CMU is working on a notion called k-anonymity. Should be another paper coming out sometime, from what I hear. Anyways, "completely" anonymous doesn't really mean that in a lot of cases. They've had great sucess identifying people by linking differnt sets of information. But in any case, I doubt that the regs right now do anything useful anyways. Hopefully they'll get changed if something provably good comes up.
Lea
> I know of a few women who passed their CS classes using the "Hey CS boy who has never had a girlfriend, want to help me with my program?" method.
I was more referring to grad school admissions and academic/research jobs. These are not necessarily places where being a woman is going to help you, precisely becasue there are these sorts of expectations, and becasue there are assumptions built in BY their earlier education/parents that have never been challenged, simply because there was no one around to do so. It takes a very self-aware person to realize this and give some real thought to it.
And because of societal attitudes towards child-rearing there is often a choice to be made for a woman between having children or making a signifigant sacrifice in her career, while this is not often the case for men.
And yes. I take your points about demographics. In fact I agree with most of it. My point is that by making sexism acceptable, and it IS out there, we're doing nothing to change that, and to give more freedom to live without being constrained to gender roles for both men and women.
Lea
... and some of us CAN see it with our eyes. Movies already really screw with mine, and I've switched entirely over the LCDs, since CRTs give me terrible headaches. (yes, I hate florescent lights too)
Caveat here: most people don't have six-degrees-of-prism lenses in their glasses, but it will REALLY piss me off if they decide to "fight piracy" in such a way that I can't watch the movies at all. Hopefully the cinemas that play the movies I want to watch will not have any part of this. Somehow I can't see anyone videotaping "The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys", which I saw last night. (Ditto music "protection" schemes in which the quality of the sound is sacrified on the altar of illusary profits.)
Lea
A lot of the "feminazi" stuff was just made up, from what I understand. Source may be biased, but *shrug*.
/someone/ is going to get spoken out against.) Assuming that a woman is unqualified becasue "she must have gotten {x} because she's a woman" is rather screwed up as well. "I'm not sexist, but women just aren't as good at {x}" also doesn't work for me. People vary.
The problem is that people will say "I hate those feminists" or "I'm not a feminist", and words have power. Discrediting the equal-rights feminists (all the ones I know) along with extremists leads to a discrediting of their ideas, and slows (or stops) their application in modern society.
I have run into enough of this crap that I believe it's a problem, even if it's "just assholes", as they are a part of the current power structure. (If anyone ever says to me at the beginning of a design review "are you sure you know what you're doing, little girl" again,
I believe this is important.
Lea
I'd say you probably want to be treated as a person, not as "one of the guys". How the heck did being male get to be an intended compliment for women, and being female an intended insult for men, anyways?
Lea
Cosmo is certainly funny. DOA2, for example, is just as objectifying, with the *bouncebounce* OW don't even want to LOOK at that factor...
>the expectation that to be beautiful, they have to be tall, skinny, and large chested.
the tall part is somewhat debatable, but certainly beauty standards are warped almost beyond recognition, and are given FAR too much importance in contemporary society. there is a lot of sexism around (and a lot less sexism than there was before, don't get me wrong) revealed by the oft-used phrase "I'm not sexist, but..." and its twisted twin "I'm not a feminist", used by women who believe in equality for women. The first indicates that certainly there is more of an expectation for equal treatment and respect, even if it is not always fulfilled, and the second points towards the backlash against feminism (ERA, anyone) led by the religious right.
ok, I'll stop ranting now, I need to review papers.
Lea
wow. not stereotyping at ALL, are we. this seems like such a troll, I suppose I shouldn't respond, but I'm procrastinating at the moment, so here goes:
/lot/ of copies of it. Likewise other sim games, and civ games. I don't know figures for other types of games.
/any/ women who hate Lara Croft (which was your implication). I do also know many women who are very, very amused at romance novels. They're terribly written, and incredibly silly. I know some who are very angry at the objectification of women displayed in her modeling and so forth. I know some who see breasts bouncing every which way till Tuesday and think "ow. owow. owowow." Because, as you say, the eroticization of female figures is so ubiquitous in our society, many women don't notice it.
>Game makers have no obligation to cater to women, who in any event will not buy many games.
True. Unlikely. I remember reading that the audience for The Sims was 50% women, and they certainly sold a
>Pacman is one of the few games that appealed to females.
I'd like to see some evidence for this one. In my experience, it was one of a wide variety of games that appealed to females. And it appealed to males.
>I think the reason is that he's a gender traitor, a man with the soul of a woman.
Wow. Wow. I don't know
Neither do many women that I have met consider the musclebound type to be particularly attractive. Tastes vary.
Lastly, an utterly unresponsive woman, who doesn't care about your opinion, seems like she would be unattractive. Really. She just doesn't give a damn. You've at least managed to annoy me.
Lea
Don't be daft. I believe it has more to do with the (rather repulsive) advertising and perhaps with your sample set, and the games you are thinking of. I know a lot of young women who game. There are a lot of Sim games involved. Civ games. Smac. These are non-geek women, btw.
The differences within a gender are far wider than the average difference between them. (Especially if you're using the two-gender system, where there are huge numbers to average across and not the (4,6)-gender system, but I digress)
Lea
That sure as hell wouldn't appeal to /me/, but hey, I've been known to like Quake. Still, watching someone with huge breasts BOUNCE around the screen is vicariously painful for many women. Ever seen DOA2? Ouchieouchieouchieouchieouchieouchieouchieouchie. I try not to be in the same /room/ as that game.
Lea
They're occasionally entertaining, though depressing if you actually think about them. Cosmo is particularly funny. Not a regular thing, but it's nice to take one and read it in the bath every once in a while.
And last I noted, I'm not a sex object. Granted, I'm a grad student, I'm not in IT.
Lea
... and nick knows a few things about ranting about security! (hi nick.)
l .
snake oil coming out all over on this one. At the very least, a lack of proper terminology. A lit search is certainly in order here, and there are a few books he might want to read to get a few basics in crypto. a nice introduction is:
S. Goldwasser and M. Bellare, Lecture Notes on Cryptography.
Available online at http://www-cse.ucsd.edu/users/mihir/papers/gb.htm
O. Goldreich, Foundations of Cryptography, Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001.
Quite readable, even if I prefer a more compact notation for some things, myself.
I'm still all for paying the approprate sorts of people to look at it, especially if there's a proof of security somewhere in the offing. Grad students work for food!
Lea
The patent office should put a ban on entropy-generating encrpytion schemes, as well as on perpetual motion machines.
"In this house we OBEY the laws of physics!"
Lea
Hey, I'm a grad student, I work for cheap. I'm even in the area of crypto!
No problem, I'll help ya out for pizza, most likely.
Lea (feed the starving student.)
Hmm... authentication mechanisms are less than optimal at this point, I wouldn't say it's a solved problem. Forward-secure mechanisms with an unlimited periods (instead of being chosen at keygen time) may not be the best that can be achieved. IBE, deniable ring authentication (see the open problems in Naor's crypto'02 paper), and lots of other things have open problems. transferrable authentication (and I don't just mean undeniable/invisible signatures) and delegation aren't exactly solved either.
:)
I still think that there's about zilch chance that this is actually IND-CPA secure, but there are a few uses for new encrpytion schemes. Having schemes based on different hard problems allows robustness in the face of changing mathematical knowledge, and may have keysize/cyphertext expansion/security advantages, as well as other properties which are useful for protocols that use em (predictable bit length, for example. don't ask, I'll probably publish later, but it is useful sometimes, though I believe there's a better solution to this particular problem.) Anyways, braid groups (for example) are cool
I think s/he should go prove one way functions exist, and get me some job security!
Lea
Movies too -- there are some wonderful movies out there. Now all I need to do is figure out where to get a region 2 player and a PAL->NTSC coverter, so I can watch French movies that are never going to come out in region 1. Silly artifical trade barriers; Cyrano calls!
Lea
> I only single out CS as I have experience in the area.
That'a pretty much where mine is too, so we're on the same page.
>I must say that one gets the impression that a lot of "dubious" stuff is published
well, I haven't read too many systems papers, given my proclitivities, but theory papers include proofs. sometimes there are bugs in the proofs, but these are easier to check than experimental results, and so are. (Yesterday during lunch we reproved that PRIMES is in P.)
I found a bug in a protocol proposed in a paper that was just published at CRYPTO. This doesn't men the work was "dubious" in any way, just that their proof made an unwarranted assumption, and that they made a mistake. It was a very good paper, in toto.
>There is also a lot of pointless stuff being done as well.
Depends on where you're coming from. Most researchers have had good reasons for choosing the problems that they do. Of course, the concept of a "natural problem" counts for me, where it might not for you.
> Unlike Physics, no one really seems to bother with repeatability of results though.
Hmm... besides theory, which takes about 25 years to go into circulation (figure from Lenore Blum, I don't know where she got it from), isn't a lot of CS research used by outside people fairly rapidly? If implemented correctly, and it doesn't meet expectations, I'd expect some information circulation...
Lea
At the time, I believed I might well have lost a friend who worked in the WTC. It turned out that he had quit just before, and he wasn't in the building. My worries for him and my grief were mixed with a healthy sense of worry for what would happen to civil rights, and what the government might use this as an excuse to do. Planning and worrying about the future does not somehow lessen the past and present.
Lea
As I can't walk in anyone else's shoes, I don't know how you deal with it, but if I do anything like that, I start passing out.
Just be careful with it.
Lea
... and you might as well make the most of it, if you're going to be paid so badly. I plan to strike terror and complexity theory in the hearts of students!
Lea
Yet another Real Live Woman(TM) here.
I expect a diamond engament ring, but that's only because I already HAVE one, and it's very special to me -- it's four generations old, beautiful, and practical (I wear it every day, and it doesn't get caught on my pockets or instrument, which other rings I've had have). Switching it from my right to my left hand won't be stressful for anyone, and it won't enrich DeBeers.
As I don't have a fiancee (or a boyfriend, for that matter) I don't know what to do about the wedding ring. It's a decision we have to make together, obviously, since that's money that could be put towards a house or saved. Personally, I'm leaning towards having the matching wedding ring (which will be my sister's when she turns 21) reproduced, and writing down what we know about the rings for when they're passed down again.
Moral: it's the sentiment that counts. Family heirlooms make wonderful engagement rings, if you have that option, and if you don't, you may well want to get something timeless and PRACTICAL to pass down to your children or grandchildren. Obviously material inheritance is no where near as important as the way in which you raise your children, and the way in which you help them grow, but it is a special thing to pass a token of your family's love and connection through the generations.
Lea
volvo weight >>>>> passenger weight. even if they're heavy. my volvo's likke 4500 pounds, according to the manual.
Lea
Now, as a woman, I can point out at least one reason why this won't work like that for at least most women. Water retention can change someone's weight dramatically, and to have this happening cyclically will screw up your charts. There are other reasons why I don't think this will work if you have goals like retaining or increasing your strength/fitness, but that's by the wayside. Point being, I find this rather ill-researched and possibly quite dangerous. Then again, I don't diet, but I've taken the too-much-martial-arts and my body didn't give me much of a choice on what to eat, which made the whole thing a lot simpler. (BURRITO! NOW!) Lea
Believe it or not, there are things in CS Theory (and algorithms in specific) which are a bit too complex for most 2nd year undergraduates (or indeed many graduate students) to fully grasp. Abstract algebra is not often taught to first-year undergraduates, and it's rather helpful in this context. Research continues. It happens.
Lea