It shouldn't be too hard to set up your own tunnelling server at a home computer, or have a friend do it.
It would actually be a very interesting project to develope some sort of P2P proxy server system, one that was so massively distributed it couldn't be shut down without shutting down the web entirely. What does the rest of/. think?
About 50 academics from across the nation, many of them economists, participated in the conference, "Diversifying the Science and Engineering Workforce: Women, Underrepresented Minorities, and their S. & E. Careers." Dr. Summers arrived after a morning session and addressed a working lunch, speaking without notes. No transcript was made because the conference was designed to be off-the-record so that participants could speak candidly without fear of public misunderstanding or disclosure later.
I recognize that nobody signed an NDA to go to the conference, but it seems unfair to me to leak word of what happened in a forum whose intent was to be free from "public misunderstanding" and whose very design precludes Summers being able to defend himself.
Next, Summers went on to discuss the various hypotheses: The first factor, he said, according to several participants, was that top positions on university math and engineering faculties require extraordinary commitments of time and energy, with many professors working 80-hour weeks in the same punishing schedules pursued by top lawyers, bankers and business executives. Few married women with children are willing to accept such sacrifices, he said.
Sounds reasonable to me. But the response he got wasn't:
Dr. Hopkins said, "I didn't disagree, but didn't like the way he presented that point because I like to work 80 hours a week, and I know a lot of women who work that hard."
In other words, what Summers said was *completely correct*, *not bigoted*, *agreed upon by his critic*, and STILL she was offended. I simply don't see what there was to not like about this point. This passage pretty much shows you what sort of mindset Summers is up against.
Next, Summers discussed another potential theory:
In citing a second factor, Dr. Summers cited research showing that more high school boys than girls tend to score at very high and very low levels on standardized math tests, and that it was important to consider the possibility that such differences may stem from biological differences between the sexes.
Possible... he's not suggesting it's necessarily true, only potentially true. Perhaps it needs more research?
Not mentioned in the NYT article was the fact that Summers said that he hoped he would be found wrong on this hypothesis, or that another alternative (which he discounted) was discrimination.
To summarize: Summers delivered a speech on a problematic yet touchy subject in a conference designed to allow people to speak freely on touchy subjects. He then got burned by someone who wasn't really interested in understanding the nuances of what he had to say but instead immidiately assumed he was a bigot. He's trying to find the answer to a question that has no obvious answer: either it's discrimination (discounted), women don't want academic success as badly (reasonable), or women just aren't the math-science types (a bit out there but not insane).
That's not to say that my university's president is a great guy, but these accusations that he seems women as genetically inferior are absurd.
Slashdot Mirror
It shouldn't be too hard to set up your own tunnelling server at a home computer, or have a friend do it. It would actually be a very interesting project to develope some sort of P2P proxy server system, one that was so massively distributed it couldn't be shut down without shutting down the web entirely. What does the rest of /. think?
About 50 academics from across the nation, many of them economists, participated in the conference, "Diversifying the Science and Engineering Workforce: Women, Underrepresented Minorities, and their S. & E. Careers." Dr. Summers arrived after a morning session and addressed a working lunch, speaking without notes. No transcript was made because the conference was designed to be off-the-record so that participants could speak candidly without fear of public misunderstanding or disclosure later.
I recognize that nobody signed an NDA to go to the conference, but it seems unfair to me to leak word of what happened in a forum whose intent was to be free from "public misunderstanding" and whose very design precludes Summers being able to defend himself.
Next, Summers went on to discuss the various hypotheses:
The first factor, he said, according to several participants, was that top positions on university math and engineering faculties require extraordinary commitments of time and energy, with many professors working 80-hour weeks in the same punishing schedules pursued by top lawyers, bankers and business executives. Few married women with children are willing to accept such sacrifices, he said.
Sounds reasonable to me. But the response he got wasn't:
Dr. Hopkins said, "I didn't disagree, but didn't like the way he presented that point because I like to work 80 hours a week, and I know a lot of women who work that hard."
In other words, what Summers said was *completely correct*, *not bigoted*, *agreed upon by his critic*, and STILL she was offended. I simply don't see what there was to not like about this point. This passage pretty much shows you what sort of mindset Summers is up against.
Next, Summers discussed another potential theory:
In citing a second factor, Dr. Summers cited research showing that more high school boys than girls tend to score at very high and very low levels on standardized math tests, and that it was important to consider the possibility that such differences may stem from biological differences between the sexes.
Possible... he's not suggesting it's necessarily true, only potentially true. Perhaps it needs more research? Not mentioned in the NYT article was the fact that Summers said that he hoped he would be found wrong on this hypothesis, or that another alternative (which he discounted) was discrimination.
To summarize: Summers delivered a speech on a problematic yet touchy subject in a conference designed to allow people to speak freely on touchy subjects. He then got burned by someone who wasn't really interested in understanding the nuances of what he had to say but instead immidiately assumed he was a bigot. He's trying to find the answer to a question that has no obvious answer: either it's discrimination (discounted), women don't want academic success as badly (reasonable), or women just aren't the math-science types (a bit out there but not insane).
That's not to say that my university's president is a great guy, but these accusations that he seems women as genetically inferior are absurd.