Who said it has to be balanced? There is a big vast gulf in between saying "181:0 in applications for our Summer of Code projects indicates we might not have adequate exposure to women in the field" and saying "everything must be balanced". Why invent positions to argue against?
Or, reaching back even further, Countess Lovelace, who "got" computers even before there were computers (not as germane to programming, per se, perhaps, but still.)
The idea that women are somehow genetically ill-suited to computing is a bizarre chauvinism.
GNOME Unique in its lack of female...popularity, for lack of a better word? I was under the impression that it was mainly because few girls major in computer science and the like; in that case, sponsorships don't make sense because it's part of a larger trend.
Women were about 1/6th of CS graduates a decade ago; the most recent numbers I've seen I think are closer to 1/4. GNOME's Summer of Code applications were 181:0 men:women. This suggests that the GNOME interest/exposure gender imbalance is considerably greater than the imbalance in the field overall. Which is why focussed outreach of some kind certainly makes a whole lot of sense.
Neither are most men. Nevertherless, for quite sometime, women have made up a not-insignificant minority of CS graduates -- to have no women apply for GNOME's Summer of Code projects suggests that there is a good likelihood that the outreach on those projects was not well-designed to reach women.
The largest percent increases seen in the bachelor's degrees women earned between 1971 to 1996 were in the following fields:
Agriculture and natural resources, 4.2 percent to 36.8 percent . . . Biological sciences/life sciences, 29.1 percent to 52.7 percent . . . Computer and information sciences, 13.6 percent to 27.5 percent Engineering,.8 percent to 16.1 percent . . . Physical sciences, 13.8 percent to 36 percent Psychology, 44.4 percent to 73 percent
Is this sponsorship a creative way to get women interested in GNOME, or is it merely sexist?
I would say the former. When you get a women far less interested than their representation in the field, its an indication that its quite likely that your existing visibility is skewed, and that you are missing exposure to a substantial portion of the talent pool.
...which is phenomenal and well-deserving of the prize, but why the comparison to incandescent bulbs for large-scale energy savings? Flourescent lightss, including full-spectrum lights that produce better quality light than most incadescent bulbs, are much more efficient than incandescents, too, for their output; my understanding is that White LED lights are now somewhat more efficient even than flourescents, which is the real reason they offer a big step forward in terms of large-scale energy savings (plus, they are much easier to make very small, which is good for lots of applications where flourescent lights aren't really well suited, but that's not going to be the source of enormous energy savings.)
Sadly, the Reagan Republican movement, which stressed smaller government, died with Reagan.
Given the huge expansion of the government under Reagan, there is little evidence it was anything but a rhetorical trick to win votes without any substance even when he was alive and even in office.
And to those who are just looking for an excuse to spout anti-Republican diatribes, don't bother. We are all aware that Slashdot is a bastion of liberalism who loves nothing more than a good Republican bashing, but nowadays there is really nothing that separates the two parties.
Oh, bull. There is quite a bit that separates the two parties. It may not be on issues that matter to you, but then with only two groups, you only get one axis of variation, so its not surprising that that axis may not be the most important one to quite a few voters. This is, really, nothing new -- the US has had this problem for most of its existence, more sharply though in the era of mass communications as the parties became truly national, and thus the positions (or at least the image) of each were less adapted to the various states and localities.
The point that I'm making is that the Republicans that are inside of the Washington beltway are no longer Republicans except in name.
Insofar as "Republican" to you seems to mean "small government adherent", there wasn't any time when that wasn't true, your romanticized illusions about the Reagan era aside.
If I'm not mistaken, 90% broadband coverage based on geography would almost always translate to a higher percentage of people than 90% of the population.
Its quite easy to 90% of either with far less than 90% of the other in most places. 90% geography is only guaranteed to mean 90%+ of the population if you require it to be the most populated 90% of the geography.
For example, the theory "There is no intelligent life in the universe" cannot be proven because you could not "prove" that you had looked everywhere that intelligent life might be found.
Well, that proposition has the rather more fundamental problem that in any universe in which the proposition (which is not a "theory" as the term is properly used in science) can be formulated, it is self-evidently false.
It should be noted that most theories are almost impossible to prove.
I'd go further and say all theories are entirely impossible to prove.
He hired a ghost writer to do Earth in the Balance, and it was soundly trounced by the Scientific community at the time. It was activist rhetoric that cherry-picked scientific "facts" to back up its claims.
So? The truth or falsity of all that aside, that has nothing to do with whether his writing of it illustrates a commitment to trying to mobilize action on the issue. A massive, dishonest propaganda effort would be as much evidence of that as a thoroughly researched, honest review of the scientific literature. (Indeed, given the realities of motivating people to act, the former is often, whether it ought to be or not, a much more effective way of motivating people to act.)
He was part of the administration that negotiated Kyoto, then FAILED to do anything with it.
Again, the issue is not whether he has been successful, but whether he has been serious.
If a surgeon fails operating on you do you give him credit for trying?
If someone accuses him of not trying, then the fact that he, in fact, did try would be, if not to his credit, at least to be held absolutely against whoever was claiming the contrary.
Again, if Gore is certain that only he can save the world from global warming
Strawman. Gore has never claimed that "only he can save the world from global warming".
then logically he would be campaigning endlessly for the most powerful position he can get so that he has the power to compel change.
Even granting your (false) premise, this does not follow. If Gore believed that only he could save the world from global warming, he would pursue whichever course of action he believed was the one by which only he could save the world from global warming. If, for instance, he believed that only he could save the world from global warming, and that he can only do so by convincing average citizens to act, and that being a political candidate would jeopardize that by increasing the degree to which his claims were seen through a partisan political lens, then he would, logically, be compelled not to seek political office, so that he had the power to motivate change.
He is,uniquely among green activists, in a position to become president of the worlds most powerful industrial nation where he could effect change.
Is he? He failed to acheive that office when he had higher positive ratings, when he was the sitting Vice President in the most popular outgoing administration in the history of the nation, and when he had the complete support of the major institutional backers of that party from the outset. Since then he has become less popular, lost the institutional advantages of the Vice Presidency, and lost the institutional support.
The only way he has even a remote chance of becoming President now is if somehow, without people tuning him out as a desperate washed-up has-been loser trying to make yet another shot at the White House, he gets a compelling message out to the public, which builds substantial enthusiasm for his leadership. Now, that's hard to do, so I wouldn't say in any case he would have much of a shot, but suppose, for a moment, that there was a major issue that he'd been an advocate on for many years, where much greater attention was being focussed on it, and yet few major political figures were advancing anything much different from the status quo... He'd have an opportunity to capitalize on that if he renewed his advocacy, but would shoot both his message and his own political prospects in the foot if he prematurely let on that he had personal political ambitions attached to the issue.
The solution to GW will require massive state compulsion and social engineering. It will require that rich nations dramatically lower their living and technology standards. It will require thtat developing nations like China and India either develop differently from how they are
Typically, yes. But if you're Microsoft, trying to do everything you can to deal with a horrible reputation regarding the security of your software, it makes a hell of a lot of sense to go nuts and hire every crazy black-hat hacker willing to pen-test the OS for you. Remember, plenty of black-hats are just in it for the money, and for them, it probably makes a hell of a lot of sense to take a big pile of cash from Microsoft than it does to keep running bot networks selling v1@garr@.
Wouldn't make even more sense, if money was your only concern and morality no issue, to take a big pile of cash from Microsoft, hold back the real vulnerabilities found, and then use that information to make money running bot networks (or selling the information to people who do?)
Science and God have no problem co-existing. Some scientists have problem with religion, some religious people have problems with science. Many religious people have no problem with science; many scientists have no problem with religion.
OTOH, "Scientist has no particular problem with religion" (or vice versa) doesn't make for much in the way of interesting news stories or anecdotes that show how the speaker is superior to the folly of shown by the other side.
Note, that in the above I was accepting the premise that this was a "private conversation" for the sake of argument; TFA says (emphasis added):
Famous astrophysicist Stephen Hawking said Thursday that the late Pope John Paul II once told scientists they should not study the beginning of the universe because it was the work of God.
The British author _ who wrote the best-seller "A Brief History of Time" _ said that the pope made the comments at a cosmology conference at the Vatican.
Not, notice, that it he was told this in a private conversation.
You could say we will never know what was truly said between the two, which is fine, but to just simply throw away Hawking's story is being highly disingenous and shows, shamefully, a real pro-catholic bias.
I don't think it shows any kind of bias to be dismissive of the credibility of a story in which one participant reports a statement from another that directly contradicts everything that other participant has been recorded as saying on the subject at issue, that reflects a common stereotype of a class of people of which that other participant is a member, and which serves the first participants interest in creating an amusing and self-promoting anecdote.
Now, of course, there will never be proof certain of what was said, unless there was a recorder hidden in the room that has been hidden away somewhere and will be produced with some kind of positive chain of evidence.
But there is certainly grounds for saying that seems likely to be a convenient invention.
A scientist cannot reasonably take a position of "I'm going to state this without proof until proven wrong."
Proof != evidence. Scientific hypotheses in generally cannot be proven. They make predictions, which can be verified, which is evidence for them, but not proof of them; OTOH, if their predictions are shown to be false, the hypothesis is disproven.
A scientist can reasonably take the position of "This hypothesis makes testable predictions which no other existing model makes, and which have been tested in X range of conditions, and therefore I will state that it appears to be true, until it is proven wrong." Indeed, that's pretty much the entirety of what science is.
A lot of the examples you give are things without testable predictions, which are simply outside the scope of scientific investigation. The problem has nothing to do with "proving a negative", or where the "burden of proof" lies. The problem has to do with the fact that they aren't proper scientific hypotheses in the first place. They are purely unscientific speculation.
I don't know, seems to me like science-vs-religion had _nothing_ to do with what happened from there. You get in a public pissing contest with the dictator of the realm, you get roughed up in return. It's that simple.
Science v. religion played an important role, because before Galileo went out of his way to piss off the Pope, lots of people in the Church heirarchy wanted Galileo dealt with because his ideas were seen as a threat. His main protection from them was the Pope, who disagreed with Galileo's ideas, but didn't see a need to surpress them. Until Galileo took the Pope's favorite argument, and put them in the an character who was unsympathetically portrayed; after which the Pope's enthusiasm for restraining the people who wanted Galileo silenced mysteriously evaporated.
...then shouldn't the Pope be against all science? Funny how they only do this with the sciences that threaten their beliefs. I find this interesting since this same Pope embraced evolution.
Its funny that so many people note the contrast between this characterization of the Pope's remarks on cosmology and his well-known position on evolution, yet so few people bother to take the next obvious step and wonder if maybe the conflict here isn't because the Pope is shockingly inconsistent, but because his remarks on cosmology have been characterized inaccurately.
The only cosmology conference Pope John Paul II appears to have ever addressed at the Vatican seems to be the one he addressed on July 6, 1985. His remarks to that conference do not include any suggestion not to study the origins of the universe; if anything, it praises such research, though it cautions that such research should not be the sole basis of our understanding of our place in the universe, and that that understanding must be informed by disciplines that go beyond the empirical (and, likewise, that those disciplines themselves must be informed by the findings of science.)
I would be surprised, if it were true, but it doesn't seem to be. First of all, it defies logic -- that the Church would a conference on cosmology at which the Pope would simply tell people not to study cosmology -- and second, as far as I can tell from a search of several archives of Papal speeches, the only Vatican conference on cosmology that John Paul II addressed was on July 6, 1985, and his remarks to that conference do not include even the remotest suggestion that the beginnings of the universe, or any other matter within the scope of scientific investigation, should not be investigated.
He does suggest that science alone is inadequate to completely understand the mysteries of creation, and that human understanding of our role in the universe must be informed by more than science, but that's not even remotely like discouraging investigation by science of, well, anything.
The Clinton administration did not ratify the Kyoto protocol.
If you read the Constitution, you'll find that the executive branch of the US government has no power to ratify treaties.
It never intended to.
There is certainly no evidence that the administration "never intended" to get the agreement ratified; its also clear that they realized that submitting it at the time to the Senate would result in it not being ratified (given as how the Senate had, as the article you point to noted, voted 95-0 in support of a resolution declaring opposition to central aspects of the Protocol), and that the way to get to a place where there was an agreement that could be politically viable (whether by moving the international consensus of how the mechanisms should work , or shifting US opinion, or some combination) was to remain actively engaged, which is what they did.
Gore might have been a big fan of Kyoto, but his administration never was.
I never said "his administration" was a big fan of Kyoto -- I said the Clinton Administration, in which he figured prominently, negotiated and signed it, which is a fact.
Seems to me you've got one piece of non-truth there.
Well, when you can point to the thing that is "non-truth", let me know.
Slashdot Mirror
Or, reaching back even further, Countess Lovelace, who "got" computers even before there were computers (not as germane to programming, per se, perhaps, but still.) The idea that women are somehow genetically ill-suited to computing is a bizarre chauvinism.
There's nothing like an outdated stereotype... (from U.S. National Center for Education Statistics, Digest of Education Statistics, via here)
I would say the former. When you get a women far less interested than their representation in the field, its an indication that its quite likely that your existing visibility is skewed, and that you are missing exposure to a substantial portion of the talent pool.
...which is phenomenal and well-deserving of the prize, but why the comparison to incandescent bulbs for large-scale energy savings? Flourescent lightss, including full-spectrum lights that produce better quality light than most incadescent bulbs, are much more efficient than incandescents, too, for their output; my understanding is that White LED lights are now somewhat more efficient even than flourescents, which is the real reason they offer a big step forward in terms of large-scale energy savings (plus, they are much easier to make very small, which is good for lots of applications where flourescent lights aren't really well suited, but that's not going to be the source of enormous energy savings.)
Given the huge expansion of the government under Reagan, there is little evidence it was anything but a rhetorical trick to win votes without any substance even when he was alive and even in office.
Oh, bull. There is quite a bit that separates the two parties. It may not be on issues that matter to you, but then with only two groups, you only get one axis of variation, so its not surprising that that axis may not be the most important one to quite a few voters. This is, really, nothing new -- the US has had this problem for most of its existence, more sharply though in the era of mass communications as the parties became truly national, and thus the positions (or at least the image) of each were less adapted to the various states and localities.
Insofar as "Republican" to you seems to mean "small government adherent", there wasn't any time when that wasn't true, your romanticized illusions about the Reagan era aside.
So? The truth or falsity of all that aside, that has nothing to do with whether his writing of it illustrates a commitment to trying to mobilize action on the issue. A massive, dishonest propaganda effort would be as much evidence of that as a thoroughly researched, honest review of the scientific literature. (Indeed, given the realities of motivating people to act, the former is often, whether it ought to be or not, a much more effective way of motivating people to act.)
Again, the issue is not whether he has been successful, but whether he has been serious.
If someone accuses him of not trying, then the fact that he, in fact, did try would be, if not to his credit, at least to be held absolutely against whoever was claiming the contrary.
Strawman. Gore has never claimed that "only he can save the world from global warming".
Even granting your (false) premise, this does not follow. If Gore believed that only he could save the world from global warming, he would pursue whichever course of action he believed was the one by which only he could save the world from global warming. If, for instance, he believed that only he could save the world from global warming, and that he can only do so by convincing average citizens to act, and that being a political candidate would jeopardize that by increasing the degree to which his claims were seen through a partisan political lens, then he would, logically, be compelled not to seek political office, so that he had the power to motivate change.
Is he? He failed to acheive that office when he had higher positive ratings, when he was the sitting Vice President in the most popular outgoing administration in the history of the nation, and when he had the complete support of the major institutional backers of that party from the outset. Since then he has become less popular, lost the institutional advantages of the Vice Presidency, and lost the institutional support. The only way he has even a remote chance of becoming President now is if somehow, without people tuning him out as a desperate washed-up has-been loser trying to make yet another shot at the White House, he gets a compelling message out to the public, which builds substantial enthusiasm for his leadership. Now, that's hard to do, so I wouldn't say in any case he would have much of a shot, but suppose, for a moment, that there was a major issue that he'd been an advocate on for many years, where much greater attention was being focussed on it, and yet few major political figures were advancing anything much different from the status quo... He'd have an opportunity to capitalize on that if he renewed his advocacy, but would shoot both his message and his own political prospects in the foot if he prematurely let on that he had personal political ambitions attached to the issue.
Science and God have no problem co-existing. Some scientists have problem with religion, some religious people have problems with science. Many religious people have no problem with science; many scientists have no problem with religion. OTOH, "Scientist has no particular problem with religion" (or vice versa) doesn't make for much in the way of interesting news stories or anecdotes that show how the speaker is superior to the folly of shown by the other side.
I don't think it shows any kind of bias to be dismissive of the credibility of a story in which one participant reports a statement from another that directly contradicts everything that other participant has been recorded as saying on the subject at issue, that reflects a common stereotype of a class of people of which that other participant is a member, and which serves the first participants interest in creating an amusing and self-promoting anecdote.
Now, of course, there will never be proof certain of what was said, unless there was a recorder hidden in the room that has been hidden away somewhere and will be produced with some kind of positive chain of evidence.
But there is certainly grounds for saying that seems likely to be a convenient invention.
The only cosmology conference Pope John Paul II appears to have ever addressed at the Vatican seems to be the one he addressed on July 6, 1985. His remarks to that conference do not include any suggestion not to study the origins of the universe; if anything, it praises such research, though it cautions that such research should not be the sole basis of our understanding of our place in the universe, and that that understanding must be informed by disciplines that go beyond the empirical (and, likewise, that those disciplines themselves must be informed by the findings of science.)
I would be surprised, if it were true, but it doesn't seem to be. First of all, it defies logic -- that the Church would a conference on cosmology at which the Pope would simply tell people not to study cosmology -- and second, as far as I can tell from a search of several archives of Papal speeches, the only Vatican conference on cosmology that John Paul II addressed was on July 6, 1985, and his remarks to that conference do not include even the remotest suggestion that the beginnings of the universe, or any other matter within the scope of scientific investigation, should not be investigated.
He does suggest that science alone is inadequate to completely understand the mysteries of creation, and that human understanding of our role in the universe must be informed by more than science, but that's not even remotely like discouraging investigation by science of, well, anything.