At some point I should really put together a post full of true ball-mover research. There's *plenty* out there. Anyhow, I'm glad it was of use to someone.
Literally every time we have a discussion of gender roles here, someone says "people should all do what they want and women don't want computing"... well let me see if I can frame this up.
Fallacy #1: People seldom "naturally" like things: You "like" things many of the things you like when you're young because people showed them to you/shared them with you/included you in them. If you never spent much time with them, you might stumble across them at random and decide you LOVE them. It does happen, but it's a lot less likely. We need to help girls know what computers are good for so their choices are actually honest ones.
Fallacy #2: Things you "naturally" like are what you should have. You might naturally like blowing up buildings, but except in the very narrow case that you become a demolitions expert as an engineer, that's really not a societal good and we should be steering your shit out of it. We *know* that tech teams with diversity on race and gender lines are healthier, so steering for that objective is probably in our societal interest.
Yes, you'll note -- I am indeed failing to supply you with data. I linked to some in an earlier comment, though, if you're interested. If you don't buy my basic logic, though, there's no point in arguing about whose fact set is better.
This is a really poor quality Slashdot story - and I say that as a woman. Yes of course *I* can name women who are or have been company leaders in tech (Melissa Mayer, Sheryl Sandberg) And I can also name hands-on technologists. Grace Hopper, Ada Lovelace, Kathy Sierra and Sandi Metz all come to mind without trying.
That said, "we have a problem with an absence of women in tech -- most people can only name Siri and Alexa" is a story without real merit. If you must discuss gender imbalance in our industry could you pick something smacking a bit less of click-bait as your only link? I mean, please.
If you'd like a link talking about why gender diversity is actually a boon to companies, try this one: https://www.ncwit.org/sites/de...
If you'd like a link on ways of actually getting women to take the computer science plunge, try this one: https://cs.stanford.edu/people...
I should really not allow myself to be trolled into commenting, but this is garbage and Slashdot can do better without even trying very hard.
I work on the east coast and I am (I admit) a manager, though I write code about half the time. I completely understand the class of people this guy is talking about. The power hungry incompetent douches exist. No doubt. But there ARE those of us who are not project managers, but dev staff managers whose job is a. figuring out who should be on which project so that people learn from each other and good work gets done b. making sure that when a programmer comes up with a really good process or tool it gets propagated to the rest of the teams. c. making sure that people who need mentoring because they're on a problem outside their expertise get it even when they're too stubborn to ask for it d. making sure that when programmers have expressed an estimate of the complexity of a problem, the over-eager PM who is probably NOT a software person doesn't over-reach and try to push some bullshit schedule. e. defending my team against idiotic business requirements and pseudo-experts. f. fighting for budget, headcount and training g. really working at finding ways of making our distributed team collaborate more effectively.
Maybe in the rarified air of San Francisco there are so many fantastic programmers capable of concentrating on both the big picture and the small that all of these things get done magically and in a self organizing way by the 1st among equals in the dev staff. Maybe. But I believe in the service I give my team. I took a hit to stop writing code so much because it needed to be done at the time, we didn't want an outsider who was apt to be douchey and I'm good with the people involved. The extra money doesn't mean that much and god knows I hate the sense that every programmer who doesn't know me assumes I'm an idiot until they've worked with me. I wouldn't do what I'm doing if I didn't believe it actually made my team a better place.
So thanks, a LOT for making it harder for real dev managers to exist, by declaring we don't. We all appreciate your eye rolling world weary lack of belief.
Hear! Hear! A. I'm female. and B. My 6 yr old daughter just enthusiastically signed up for robotics camp this summer. I'm hoping to god the person teaching it isn't some complete tool who can't engage her. The good news is, her good friend's mom is a research scientist and I'm a programmer. We're jokingly planning on taking over the robotics team when the girls get to highschool. So role models, they do have.
Keeping female role models in front of your daughter would help if you've got them. If not, finding "girl-friendly" science projects is actually a full time sport. I recently discovered Leah Buechley's Lily Pad Arduino project and have been plotting electronic circuitry education through sewing projects over the next few years. The metal boards are pricey, but they've started making the fabric ones cheaply.
I'm looking for robotics projects, but haven't got any on-tap this minute.
Being a woman and a programmer I have paid a fair amount of attention to the question of why I'm so rare in the field.
I really believe that the US's answers to this question are all youth-culture socially ingrained. The educational system doesn't have any way of providing anything like the roll models or mentoring or enough ways of reaching any really smart kid with aptitude who is socialized out of much of anything.
That's a gender-neutral way of saying US youth culture would have to change in order to alter this here. Enough other limiting factors have been removed, I think that's the last one and the biggest.
I have Indian coworkers who tell me that when they went to university, 1/3 of the slots in the science programs were reserved for women, 2/3 for men. The women, in their experience, may not look like they're going to be dominant, but are usually contenders for the very best grades.
I take that as (admittedly anecdotal) evidence that a much larger # of women could participate in computing and succeed if only they were not receiving some sort of short circuit early that kills interest.
Anyhow, ok, I'll grant women are different from men, but that doesn't mean the industry doesn't need to find a way to draw them in. We're just as smart as men and different is GOOD.
Or when was the last time you worked in a seriously multicultural office? Different world views and thought patterns make for constructive and healthy workplaces.
Count on it -- UUNet is the big winner in this equation. Neither Ford nor Ford employees are losing, mind you, but UUNet is the biggest winner. Especially if they're not buying the PCs.
Even if they are buying PCs, it's still a good deal though. New ISP users are getting more expensive to acquire through advertising every day. UUNet could buy the computers for every Ford employee who signed up and consider themselves darned lucky to have only spent the non-retail price for a bulk ordered HP computer.
And remember, not all employees are actually going to need/want new computers. Some of them will already have home PCs and will switch to UUNet because their company subsidizes the price of the service. Then UUNet would be soaking up gravy at no real expense to itself.
Anyhow, talk about a deal where everyone wins.
There are places where this tech is a godsend...
on
Spies in the Forests
·
· Score: 1
I have worked in government secure areas and I have worked for companies that sold this sort of email sniffing technology to companies who had to guard against insider trading.
I realize most of you are freaking out over the idea that the government could be reading your personal email without your consent, but there ARE commercial applications of this sort of snooping that are a godsend. If you've ever waited on an auditor to clear the release of some boneheadedly trivial email you want to send, you'd probably rather have a computer quickly and anonymously clear your stuff than wait for some person who might be busy to clear it.
Everyone here is getting really excited over the expense a shop would incur to start an e-commerce venture with MS's new licensing scheme and plotting MS's downfall because of it.
While I agree MS is neglecting the really small Mom and Pop ecommerce site, I don't think it's doing as bad a job with its pricing as everyone would like to believe.
Everyone is freaking out about cost, but remember, a company shopping for a developer often only understands its true bottom line price once it's too late to change it. If a company receives 2 bids, one from an MS Solution provider and one from an Apache based shop, it's easy enough for the MS Solution Provider to tweak hardware and software costs to conceal the difference until after they've won the bid. Then when the site takes off, BOOM "Excuse me, but we need to spend another couple of thousand on licenses". Of course the site is a success, so no complaints come of it.
Anyhow, nonMS shops can certainly educate their customers, but no MS solution provider is going to do people that sort of favor -- and they *will* get away with it.
Jon, you are too much. I can only compare you to that apalling "How to turn off geeks" column in WWN we all ranted about last week. Your article in summary:
October 27, 1999, cyberspace. Frightened Geeks deluge Slahsdot with cries for protection from the ATF and its mind sucking death profiler. Reports one geek "we know we haven't seen the weapon yet, but we're sure it's meant to discriminate against us!"
Another "I don't need a white paper on its effectiveness to know something will hurt me and my kind."
Many of the high ranked posters are ranting about how Jon is an opinionated twit who slants facts in order to maximize dramatic impact.
I won't defend what I also believe was a lousy article, but on a gut level I think I understand where Jon gets his willingness to call Christians hypocritical idiots.
The trouble is that Christians in the media all look like imbeciles who would actually give money to prevent a televangelist from dying "because god said so". I'm not saying that's all the Christians that are out there. Of course not, but an amusing stereotype will surive regardless of its validity. Jon's guilty of being a lousy article writer, but his prejudices spring from understandable places.
Jon, you really need to remember that Slashdot is a place where the articles are mostly supposed to be analytical. You didn't use any analytical skills on this piece. All you did was emote all over us.
As often as people rave about how wonderful William Gibson is (and you'll get no argument from me on that) I have to say, he's gone flat on me in the last few books.
I read Burning Chrome and the Neuromancer series and all of it was overlaid with a sort of stoic sense of beauty and loss. The girl/the world/the prgramming addiction all the things characters wanted were just out of reach. They were things destined not to be.
The newer books are great fun, but they don't have the same kind of sincerity or emotional power. They lack lyrical passages that mock themselves as they tell you that the English worship their trash and that (honestly) so does William Gibson. (That's not a derrogatory comment -- just a comment on how he goes sifting through societal junk for found art.)
Anyhow, I have hope for the new book -- but I miss the sense of smoke and dark and the high tech Boggie watching the girl walk away.(see Burning Chrome) Here's looking at you, Bill.
We *are* free. But the noise to signal ratio for almost all complex social issues is awfully high. And always will be. Even the internet doesn't truly solve this problem. And can't. If a person does not wish to receive unbiased or truthful news enough to work for it, nothing on earth can force him/her to listen. He or she will gravitate to whatever makes them happy.
The mainstream media presents someone like Peter Singer as a heartless bastard because god forbid someone in it's highly generic often stupid audience might misunderstand a truly sensitive article on the subject and think that the WashingtonPost or whatever your favorite paper is thinks "baby killing" is ok.
Now the Internet "new media" doesn't care if some moron thinks it just said baby killing is ok, because the person running the site JUST MIGHT REALLY THINK THAT. Internet sites are about specificity of interest. Instead of attempting to apeal to a large bland audience, the sites vie with eachother for various tight audiences. And there's a danger here,too.
On the internet, we listen to ourselves too much. We're free not just from news coverage we percieve as moronic, but from hearing opinions we don't agree with stated in a well thought out way. We're free to stick our heads in the sand as much as we like -- OR alternatively to be very well informed indeed. The internet gave us some control, but we can still choose poorly.
It's funny... when I first read ESR's essays on open source, I was immediately and viscerally won over by what I then perceived as the inherent rightness of his descriptions of open source development. This is how it things should be.
However, reading Bezroukov's article, I'm struck just as strongly -- that this is how things really are. I don't mean that I necessarily believe that open source is doomed to "fail", (whatever failure means) but until and unless we recognize the limitations of a development model -- or a governmental model or anything else for that matter -- we will not be able to make good choices for ourselves or for our industry. What's the old saw "those who refuse to study history are doomed to repeat it?" By declaring that open source is NEW NEW NEW we try to take it out of context and fail to make use of our opportunities to learn how to strengthen it.
A few years back I read a wonderful book about how smart girls get pulled out of professional life called Smart Girls, Gifted Women. The author, Barbara Kerr, had been one of a studied group of kids (half boys, half girls) in the Kennedy era whose parents were told "your kid is smart. we will pay for them to have the best of everything in school so that we can study their progress and acheivements."
Basically at a highschool reunion, Kerr, who was then working on her PhD in Psychology, realized with a jolt that all of the men in her class had gone on to be highly successful professional types, but only 3 or 4 of the women had. Further more -- most of the women thought on some level that they had been included in the project by mistake. They "weren't really smart". Never mind they'd tested very well very early. The women descended on her with a demand that she answer some questions. Were we really smart? What happened to us??? Why were we in this program and why did we not do what the study expected. The book is her answer to them.
Anyhow, to make a long story short, Kerr found what every geek girl here knows. All kinds of subliminal pressures tell girls from a very young age that they should spend their talents on being well socialized and pleasant as opposed to anything else they might have been interested in.
The book lists ways in which a parent of a smart girl can recognize a girl who is failing to reach her potential and things you can do to help her. I read this thing and it really hurt. I saw myself and things that had happened to me over and over again. At the same time it was validating -- ok, there's a reason we girls end up being all alone out there in the sciences as kids.
Anyhow, if you have daughters, go see if you can find this book. It's out of print, but copies were easy to come by last I checked. The world is kinder to geek women than it used to be, but it could use some help and this is a place to start helping.
Maybe the folks at the very top of this business live to work, but I think the Pulpit article is fastening on a glamorous-seeming minority that hasn't got too much in common with the people I actually program with every day.
Frankly, I think of most programmers I know as living to play. Programming is play; and we play hard. We also mountain bike hard, play Quake and Doom hard, love our families too hard sometimes...
As for the not spending our money part of the article -- this part I agree with. We don't spend our money on ostentation. Why not? Well, part of programming is about community. Most of you have probably read it, but check out Eric Raymond's Homesteading in the Noosphere if you really disagree with this statement. Anyhow, if we, as programmers, develop exclusionary "only the rich can play" habits, we isolate ourselves. Programming as a culture is about intellectual community and competition. Start buying toys other programmers can't afford and pretty soon you're outside your culture.
I guess my point is that the Pulpit article suggests we are all pitiful losers who can't do anything else and won't spend our money. To them I say this: I am happy. I am productive. I don't work like a slave, I play like a child. Lighten up!
Ok, so Chad Davis is no Kevin Mitnick, but by shrugging off what happens to him -- stupid insignificant grafiti-loving brat that he is, we're saying that the government should incarcerate for electronic breaking and entering as though it were the same crime as 1st degree murder.
Is electronic breaking and entering without actual destruction of data really a high crime? Chad Davis didn't cost the govt anything but its pride. He destroyed nothing, and took nothing with him when he left, just left his tag behind. He cost them system down time probably, but what else?(Correct me if I'm wrong about this one.)
Don't get me wrong, the kid IS a criminal--but I wouldn't send him to the pokie to be raped daily by violent offenders for the next 20 years of his life in the hopes that someone else will remember it and think better of cracking. People who crack IMHO will NOT care -- and the really young kids who do it will simply idealize the incident.
Slashdot Mirror
At some point I should really put together a post full of true ball-mover research. There's *plenty* out there.
Anyhow, I'm glad it was of use to someone.
Literally every time we have a discussion of gender roles here, someone says "people should all do what they want and women don't want computing"... well let me see if I can frame this up.
Fallacy #1: People seldom "naturally" like things:
You "like" things many of the things you like when you're young because people showed them to you/shared them with you/included you in them. If you never spent much time with them, you might stumble across them at random and decide you LOVE them. It does happen, but it's a lot less likely. We need to help girls know what computers are good for so their choices are actually honest ones.
Fallacy #2: Things you "naturally" like are what you should have.
You might naturally like blowing up buildings, but except in the very narrow case that you become a demolitions expert as an engineer, that's really not a societal good and we should be steering your shit out of it. We *know* that tech teams with diversity on race and gender lines are healthier, so steering for that objective is probably in our societal interest.
Yes, you'll note -- I am indeed failing to supply you with data. I linked to some in an earlier comment, though, if you're interested. If you don't buy my basic logic, though, there's no point in arguing about whose fact set is better.
This is a really poor quality Slashdot story - and I say that as a woman.
Yes of course *I* can name women who are or have been company leaders in tech (Melissa Mayer, Sheryl Sandberg)
And I can also name hands-on technologists. Grace Hopper, Ada Lovelace, Kathy Sierra and Sandi Metz all come to mind without trying.
That said, "we have a problem with an absence of women in tech -- most people can only name Siri and Alexa" is a story without real merit.
If you must discuss gender imbalance in our industry could you pick something smacking a bit less of click-bait as your only link? I mean, please.
If you'd like a link talking about why gender diversity is actually a boon to companies, try this one:
https://www.ncwit.org/sites/de...
If you'd like a link on ways of actually getting women to take the computer science plunge, try this one:
https://cs.stanford.edu/people...
I should really not allow myself to be trolled into commenting, but this is garbage and Slashdot can do better without even trying very hard.
I work on the east coast and I am (I admit) a manager, though I write code about half the time. I completely understand the class of people this guy is talking about. The power hungry incompetent douches exist. No doubt. But there ARE those of us who are not project managers, but dev staff managers whose job is
a. figuring out who should be on which project so that people learn from each other and good work gets done
b. making sure that when a programmer comes up with a really good process or tool it gets propagated to the rest of the teams.
c. making sure that people who need mentoring because they're on a problem outside their expertise get it even when they're too stubborn to ask for it
d. making sure that when programmers have expressed an estimate of the complexity of a problem, the over-eager PM who is probably NOT a software person doesn't over-reach and try to push some bullshit schedule.
e. defending my team against idiotic business requirements and pseudo-experts.
f. fighting for budget, headcount and training
g. really working at finding ways of making our distributed team collaborate more effectively.
Maybe in the rarified air of San Francisco there are so many fantastic programmers capable of concentrating on both the big picture and the small that all of these things get done magically and in a self organizing way by the 1st among equals in the dev staff. Maybe. But I believe in the service I give my team. I took a hit to stop writing code so much because it needed to be done at the time, we didn't want an outsider who was apt to be douchey and I'm good with the people involved. The extra money doesn't mean that much and god knows I hate the sense that every programmer who doesn't know me assumes I'm an idiot until they've worked with me. I wouldn't do what I'm doing if I didn't believe it actually made my team a better place.
So thanks, a LOT for making it harder for real dev managers to exist, by declaring we don't.
We all appreciate your eye rolling world weary lack of belief.
Hear! Hear! A. I'm female. and B. My 6 yr old daughter just enthusiastically signed up for robotics camp this summer. I'm hoping to god the person teaching it isn't some complete tool who can't engage her. The good news is, her good friend's mom is a research scientist and I'm a programmer. We're jokingly planning on taking over the robotics team when the girls get to highschool. So role models, they do have.
Keeping female role models in front of your daughter would help if you've got them. If not, finding "girl-friendly" science projects is actually a full time sport. I recently discovered Leah Buechley's Lily Pad Arduino project and have been plotting electronic circuitry education through sewing projects over the next few years. The metal boards are pricey, but they've started making the fabric ones cheaply.
I'm looking for robotics projects, but haven't got any on-tap this minute.
Being a woman and a programmer I have paid a fair amount of attention to the question of why I'm so rare in the field.
I really believe that the US's answers to this question are all youth-culture socially ingrained. The educational system doesn't have any way of providing anything like the roll models or mentoring or enough ways of reaching any really smart kid with aptitude who is socialized out of much of anything.
That's a gender-neutral way of saying US youth culture would have to change in order to alter this here. Enough other limiting factors have been removed, I think that's the last one and the biggest.
I have Indian coworkers who tell me that when they went to university, 1/3 of the slots in the science programs were reserved for women, 2/3 for men. The women, in their experience, may not look like they're going to be dominant, but are usually contenders for the very best grades.
I take that as (admittedly anecdotal) evidence that a much larger # of women could participate in computing and succeed if only they were not receiving some sort of short circuit early that kills interest.
Anyhow, ok, I'll grant women are different from men, but that doesn't mean the industry doesn't need to find a way to draw them in. We're just as smart as men and different is GOOD.
Or when was the last time you worked in a seriously multicultural office? Different world views and thought patterns make for constructive and healthy workplaces.
Count on it -- UUNet is the big winner in this equation. Neither Ford nor Ford employees are losing, mind you, but UUNet is the biggest winner. Especially if they're not buying the PCs.
Even if they are buying PCs, it's still a good deal though. New ISP users are getting more expensive to acquire through advertising every day. UUNet could buy the computers for every Ford employee who signed up and consider themselves darned lucky to have only spent the non-retail price for a bulk ordered HP computer.
And remember, not all employees are actually going to need/want new computers. Some of them will already have home PCs and will switch to UUNet because their company subsidizes the price of the service. Then UUNet would be soaking up gravy at no real expense to itself.
Anyhow, talk about a deal where everyone wins.
I have worked in government secure areas and I have worked for companies that sold this sort of email sniffing technology to companies who had to guard against insider trading.
I realize most of you are freaking out over the idea that the government could be reading your personal email without your consent, but there ARE commercial applications of this sort of snooping that are a godsend. If you've ever waited on an auditor to clear the release of some boneheadedly trivial email you want to send, you'd probably rather have a computer quickly and anonymously clear your stuff than wait for some person who might be busy to clear it.
Just a thought.
Scrappy
Everyone here is getting really excited over the expense a shop would incur to start an e-commerce venture with MS's new licensing scheme and plotting MS's downfall because of it.
While I agree MS is neglecting the really small Mom and Pop ecommerce site, I don't think it's doing as bad a job with its pricing as everyone would like to believe.
Everyone is freaking out about cost, but remember, a company shopping for a developer often only understands its true bottom line price once it's too late to change it. If a company receives 2 bids, one from an MS Solution provider and one from an Apache based shop, it's easy enough for the MS Solution Provider to tweak hardware and software costs to conceal the difference until after they've won the bid. Then when the site takes off, BOOM "Excuse me, but we need to spend another couple of thousand on licenses". Of course the site is a success, so no complaints come of it.
Anyhow, nonMS shops can certainly educate their customers, but no MS solution provider is going to do people that sort of favor -- and they *will* get away with it.
Scrappy
Jon, you are too much. I can only compare you to that apalling "How to turn off geeks" column in WWN we all ranted about last week. Your article in summary:
October 27, 1999, cyberspace. Frightened Geeks deluge Slahsdot with cries for protection from the ATF and its mind sucking death profiler. Reports one geek "we know we haven't seen the weapon yet, but we're sure it's meant to discriminate against us!"
Another "I don't need a white paper on its effectiveness to know something will hurt me and my kind."
Scrappy
Many of the high ranked posters are ranting about how Jon is an opinionated twit who slants facts in order to maximize dramatic impact.
I won't defend what I also believe was a lousy article, but on a gut level I think I understand where Jon gets his willingness to call Christians hypocritical idiots.
The trouble is that Christians in the media all look like imbeciles who would actually give money to prevent a televangelist from dying "because god said so". I'm not saying that's all the Christians that are out there. Of course not, but an amusing stereotype will surive regardless of its validity. Jon's guilty of being a lousy article writer, but his prejudices spring from understandable places.
Jon, you really need to remember that Slashdot is a place where the articles are mostly supposed to be analytical. You didn't use any analytical skills on this piece. All you did was emote all over us.
Scrappy
As often as people rave about how wonderful William Gibson is (and you'll get no argument from me on that) I have to say, he's gone flat on me in the last few books.
I read Burning Chrome and the Neuromancer series and all of it was overlaid with a sort of stoic sense of beauty and loss. The girl/the world/the prgramming addiction all the things characters wanted were just out of reach. They were things destined not to be.
The newer books are great fun, but they don't have the same kind of sincerity or emotional power. They lack lyrical passages that mock themselves as they tell you that the English worship their trash and that (honestly) so does William Gibson. (That's not a derrogatory comment -- just a comment on how he goes sifting through societal junk for found art.)
Anyhow, I have hope for the new book -- but I miss the sense of smoke and dark and the high tech Boggie watching the girl walk away.(see Burning Chrome) Here's looking at you, Bill.
Scrappy
We *are* free. But the noise to signal ratio for almost all complex social issues is awfully high. And always will be. Even the internet doesn't truly solve this problem. And can't. If a person does not wish to receive unbiased or truthful news enough to work for it, nothing on earth can force him/her to listen. He or she will gravitate to whatever makes them happy.
The mainstream media presents someone like Peter Singer as a heartless bastard because god forbid someone in it's highly generic often stupid audience might misunderstand a truly sensitive article on the subject and think that the WashingtonPost or whatever your favorite paper is thinks "baby killing" is ok.
Now the Internet "new media" doesn't care if some moron thinks it just said baby killing is ok, because the person running the site JUST MIGHT REALLY THINK THAT. Internet sites are about specificity of interest. Instead of attempting to apeal to a large bland audience, the sites vie with eachother for various tight audiences. And there's a danger here,too.
On the internet, we listen to ourselves too much. We're free not just from news coverage we percieve as moronic, but from hearing opinions we don't agree with stated in a well thought out way. We're free to stick our heads in the sand as much as we like -- OR alternatively to be very well informed indeed. The internet gave us some control, but we can still choose poorly.
Scrappy
It's funny... when I first read ESR's essays on open source, I was immediately and viscerally won over by what I then perceived as the inherent rightness of his descriptions of open source development. This is how it things should be.
However, reading Bezroukov's article, I'm struck just as strongly -- that this is how things really are. I don't mean that I necessarily believe that open source is doomed to "fail", (whatever failure means) but until and unless we recognize the limitations of a development model -- or a governmental model or anything else for that matter -- we will not be able to make good choices for ourselves or for our industry. What's the old saw "those who refuse to study history are doomed to repeat it?" By declaring that open source is NEW NEW NEW we try to take it out of context and fail to make use of our opportunities to learn how to strengthen it.
Scrappy
A few years back I read a wonderful book about how smart girls get pulled out of professional life called Smart Girls, Gifted Women. The author, Barbara Kerr, had been one of a studied group of kids (half boys, half girls) in the Kennedy era whose parents were told "your kid is smart. we will pay for them to have the best of everything in school so that we can study their progress and acheivements."
Basically at a highschool reunion, Kerr, who was then working on her PhD in Psychology, realized with a jolt that all of the men in her class had gone on to be highly successful professional types, but only 3 or 4 of the women had. Further more -- most of the women thought on some level that they had been included in the project by mistake. They "weren't really smart". Never mind they'd tested very well very early.
The women descended on her with a demand that she answer some questions. Were we really smart? What happened to us??? Why were we in this program and why did we not do what the study expected. The book is her answer to them.
Anyhow, to make a long story short, Kerr found what every geek girl here knows. All kinds of subliminal pressures tell girls from a very young age that they should spend their talents on being well socialized and pleasant as opposed to anything else they might have been interested in.
The book lists ways in which a parent of a smart girl can recognize a girl who is failing to reach her potential and things you can do to help her. I read this thing and it really hurt. I saw myself and things that had happened to me over and over again. At the same time it was validating -- ok, there's a reason we girls end up being all alone out there in the sciences as kids.
Anyhow, if you have daughters, go see if you can find this book. It's out of print, but copies were easy to come by last I checked. The world is kinder to geek women than it used to be, but it could use some help and this is a place to start helping.
Scrappy
Maybe the folks at the very top of this business live to work, but I think the Pulpit article is fastening on a glamorous-seeming minority that hasn't got too much in common with the people I actually program with every day.
Frankly, I think of most programmers I know as living to play. Programming is play; and we play hard. We also mountain bike hard, play Quake and Doom hard, love our families too hard sometimes...
As for the not spending our money part of the article -- this part I agree with. We don't spend our money on ostentation. Why not? Well, part of programming is about community. Most of you have probably read it, but check out Eric Raymond's Homesteading in the Noosphere if you really disagree with this statement. Anyhow, if we, as programmers, develop exclusionary "only the rich can play" habits, we isolate ourselves. Programming as a culture is about intellectual community and competition. Start buying toys other programmers can't afford and pretty soon you're outside your culture.
I guess my point is that the Pulpit article suggests we are all pitiful losers who can't do anything else and won't spend our money. To them I say this: I am happy. I am productive. I don't work like a slave, I play like a child. Lighten up!
--Scrappy
Ok, so Chad Davis is no Kevin Mitnick, but by shrugging off what happens to him -- stupid insignificant grafiti-loving brat that he is, we're saying that the government should incarcerate for electronic breaking and entering as though it were the same crime as 1st degree murder.
Is electronic breaking and entering without actual destruction of data really a high crime? Chad Davis didn't cost the govt anything but its pride. He destroyed nothing, and took nothing with him when he left, just left his tag behind. He cost them system down time probably, but what else?(Correct me if I'm wrong about this one.)
Don't get me wrong, the kid IS a criminal--but I wouldn't send him to the pokie to be raped daily by violent offenders for the next 20 years of his life in the hopes that someone else will remember it and think better of cracking. People who crack IMHO will NOT care -- and the really young kids who do it will simply idealize the incident.