tempest67

I wonder if being able to code while listening to music has anything to do with gender; I am a female developer, and can't listen to any kind of music at all while programming -- I find it as distracting as if a cat were jumping on the keyboard. Perhaps because female brains tend to have more connections across the halves? (...or perhaps because I'm a musician myself, and process music differently?)

I agree with j_baker -- I was thinking that this document was kind of nice until I got to the part where everyone has to take a holiday together. No matter how you tweak this, what it means is that the company is impinging on the employee's personal life and leisure time.

Another thing to remember is that there's a difference between personal and work relationships. You can (and should!) have great work relationships with people who you have little in common with, personally.

"Forced fun" is always as bad as it sounds.

/* >If, before a test, you imply that the women should expect to do a little worse than the men, that hurts performance. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

This sounds like a specific form of a general psychological result that would hold true for men too. If so then this article is beyond disingenuous it is a flat lie. That aside in order for the result to have a bearing on real world test scores it would require someone to be telling women just before their maths test that they're going to fail. Who's doing that, it would be pretty easy to spot in a school and certainly in my country a teacher doing that would lose their jobs. */

It does hold true for men -- specifically, men of African-American and Hispanic descent, when reminded that minorities generally do worse on math exams before the exam is given.

The proposition that nobody is telling women they're going to do worse on math tests, however, is simplistic. It isn't that some mean old guy is telling them they suck (although one of my female physics professors mentioned, out of the classroom, that she had been thrown out of a physics class at Georgia Tech in the early 1970's for "taking a man's spot" -- you're right that this sort of thing is much less common these days, at least in the West). It's that the whole culture is suffused with the attitude that women's mathematical abilities are suspect -- witness threads like these, which appear over and over on the interwebs, discussing whether or not women are as capable as men at math.

Measuring maths ability scientifically and publishing the results, rather than relying on folk-science and anecdote, could help encourage women to trust their own desires and abilities mathematically -- even when faced with a predominantly male culture and continual doubt being cast on their abilities to function at the highest levels.

I know this to be true because I am now a lone female coder in a group of (really great, smart, delightful) guys, loving my work on a complex, challenging system. And I remember that I dropped out of the very first coding class I took after a few weeks because I was completely intimidated by the swaggering guy classmates who threw around terms I wasn't yet familiar with -- I felt out of place and was full of self-doubt. It was only after maturing and understanding the social dynamics that I retook the class and ended up with one of the top 5 grades, out of several hundred students. Yet, at first, I had been certain I was incapable -- not because any guys were mean to me (not one was anything but helpful), but because I doubted myself, and felt alone and weird.

And surely this isn't gender-specific, and surely many geeky coders can relate, and have probably had similar experiences in different areas of life. This isn't a woman-man thing only -- it's a specific expression of a general human tendency to reflect cultural attitudes about their lives in the images they create of themselves.

That's correct, in the USA, at least -- although they seem to think better of him in Germany (at least, they did a decade ago). He did pioneering work on using computers for design at MIT in the sixties -- but it never really took off, or even worked terribly well. "Pattern Language" is seen as naive and ridiculous in the "top" schools -- but I agree with gruseom that there's a lot of wisdom there. We'll come back to it, as the cycles make their slow turn away from mannerism.

True and good advice for girls! This revelation came to me over a decade ago, as I recall, when my male roommate bought a modem, and was about to install it in his room. I (female) asked if he could show me how to do it, since I had no idea how to install a modem. He said sure, he knew all about it, he would show me. As he was installing it, it became clear (as he was trying to figure out what the lights on the front meant) that I actually knew more about modems than he did -- but he, full of confidence, was certain he could figure it out, while I didn't trust myself at all.

I've thought about that story many times in the past decade -- to remind myself that half of the game is trusting myself, and having confidence; something that seems to come less naturally to many women than to most guys, for whatever reason.

Hrm. This doesn't ring true to me; in fact, it seems almost more like a guy bragging about his victories than a helpful message about failure. It isn't true that every door closing is met with another one opening; nor is it true that every failure happens "for a reason." Sometimes failure is brutal, nasty, and not helpful. The real message about failure to remember is Theodore Roosevelt's: Yes, you might fail (and you will, for "there is no effort without error"), but the credit and honor is yours nevertheless, because you didn't hang back -- you got out there and gave it your all.

EDIT: (For anyone who might not know the T.R. quote, it's taken from his Sorbonne speech (in red on this page): http://www.theodore-roosevelt.com/trsorbonnespeech.html)

"Reading a newspaper is not possible currently..."

It may be painful, but it should be possible; yes, you'll have to look up the kanji, over and over -- writing them down as you look them up -- and it'll take you half an hour to read half of one article. But if you keep at it, and keep looking them up, every day, you will improve -- you will learn them! You just have to tolerate a lot of tedium on your way.

I don't have a rigorous source, but there is a marvelous historical-fiction account of Ignatz Semmelweis's discovery of the importance of hygiene in 19th century Vienna, and the ridicule and professional scorn he was met with, called "The Cry and the Covenant." There's a fairly good synopsis at http://www.doyletics.com/arj/tcatcrvw.htm, including descriptions of the reasons the doctor's opposed his innovations.

Another good question -- some of it definitely might be, but I also did find the behavior at Ivy League School was characteristic of the entire school.

Then again, I did some grad-level coursework at the B.S.U. before I switched to the I.L.S., and found the same sort of differences that I described in my note above. In fact, after I.L.S., I wanted to go back to my former classmates at the State University and bring the message "you have power! You can change things! You are in charge!" But, of course, this is what every commencement speaker in the world tells every graduate, and you can't really understand what it means until you've felt it in your own bones, one way or another...

Good question! I have tried to answer this before, and always fallen flat -- I think that the reason is that if it could be transmitted by writing, I would have picked it up without the need to have spent all that money and time. But that sounds like such a cop-out! So I'll try:

At the Ivy League school I went to (and I did not study a technical subject here -- it was an architecture school), I was surrounded by people who had an agenda for their lives -- in fact, they often already had their career plotted out, and many were already working on the side. School was for them a set of tools (people, information, opportunities) to be hacked resourcefully to get what they wanted. At Big State U, the kids seemed to think of themselves more as subject to the whims of an institution, and to think of the institution as something they needed to please to get "a degree." The degree was hardly worth mentioning at Ivy League School; the professors were seen as either equals or, in a sense, servants/tools. The Ivy League kids also seemed far more ready to create their own programs and experiences; they would see a niche, form a group, and suddenly the school was filled with minority kids learning architecture on the weekends; or suddenly a local youth group had a student-made meeting place.

Of course this kind of volunteerism and spirit of service happened at Big State U as well! What I thought was really different at I.L.S. was the self-assurance and lack of self-consciousness involved; these kids saw ownership and power in the world as their natural right -- they seemed to act and take command as naturally as another young person might turn on the television.

I hope this doesn't sound arrogant or somehow fanboyish; I am trying to explain how being thrown together with these people for years changed me deeply -- made me both able to see beyond where I came from and to be more proud of it, and of myself. It was really almost more a matter of physical knowledge -- of mimicry and group identification, perhaps -- than of something you could pick up in a book.

I find it interesting that the reports tend to consistently state that college prestige is indeed important for students from lower income families. I found that to be enormously true, myself. I am from a working-class background -- did my undergraduate degree at a state school, and found it boring and, really, a waste of time -- much like high school. But I also think now that a lot of this was my own fault -- I had no idea how to approach college, and how to really make it work for me.

Later, I then did a graduate program at an Ivy League school -- and the scales fell away from my eyes. The most important thing I learned there, I think, was how successful people work in the world -- how to resourcefully make the most out of every opportunity, how to seize the initiative, how to make connections. I have the feeling that if I hadn't been brought up in the class I was, I would have inhaled these things at my parents' knee -- as it was, it took me much, much longer than it should have; but it was an enormous lesson, and almost worth the ridiculous student loans I now owe. ;-)

(I am also by no means saying that an Ivy League school is the only place for lower-class kids to learn how to work the world -- far from it! I was just not talented enough to figure it out myself, and the experience made all the difference in the world for me.)

Representing the 309! Not there now, but grew up in Rock Island... many moons ago!

I see this has been answered several times already, but I'm not sure it has been laid out plain and simple:

The first $250K any American makes gets taxed at exactly the same rate. For everybody. It's the same for any value -- Bill Gates pays exactly the same tax rate on the first $50K he makes in a year as I do. The rates go up for successively higher values -- your first n dollars may not be taxed at all; then your next n dollars is taxed at a low amount, and successively higher. These bottom rates will not change no matter how much your total income is.

When they talk about raising the tax rate for people that make more than a certain value, they are talking only about taxes on the money OVER that value. So only your 250001st dollar gets taxed at the higher rate -- as will every other dollar you make on top of that. The tax rate for the rest of your money will not change at all.

"If the goal of communication is having other people understand you, why would you deal in words that are notable precisely because they are difficult to understand?"

One important value words have lies in their discriminatory capabilities; the more exact and fine-toothed your toolset is, the more precisely you can express yourself. Sure, it doesn't matter if you're wearing mittens on your vocabulary for most exchanges -- but it sure is nice to be able to take them off once in a while, and say exactly what you mean.

Oh, like Brecht -- Verfremdung! I should have gotten that -- sorry. I love the Milton quote (and I wonder what it means in the age of technical hyper-reproducibility online...).

I also wonder what could accomplish defamiliarization nowadays, when satire and Dadaism have become commodities and every crap sitcom breaks the fourth wall. But perhaps utter economic collapse will do the trick?

Great point about the explosiveness of transition periods -- the Renaissance comes to mind as well, powered both by new intellectual openness and the thuggish Medicis. But calling for "defamiliarization" with free speech sounds kind of horrible -- like putting us in jail for a while so we appreciate our freedom of movement.

But isn't the process of technological upheaval a continual defamiliarization of sorts, with people constantly changing modes and methods of communication with every new development? We don't need to be subjected to tyranny to be continually thrown off balance and required to innovate...

Temple Grandin also famously speaks of thinking in pictures; could this + Einstein be related to Simon Baron-Cohen's thesis that autism can be defined as an "oversystematizing" brain?

I completely agree with this -- I am bilingual too, but the words seem to spring out of the flow of thought, not to "be" the flow. And when I'm learning a new language (or enough rudiments not to be impolite when visiting, say, Lisbon) I never have this "translation table" issue the OP mentions -- at least, I don't think I do. There is no transitional linguistic step between the thought-flow and the words, new or not. (Of course, that doesn't mean that language pickup is necessarily easier -- just different.)

That's interesting -- I never thought of it in terms of context, but I had similar issues when I returned to the states after 7 years in Germany -- I would go into shops and order things in German, because my "talk to shop people in German" bit didn't turn off right away. Some confused/amusing looks when you say "Ich moechte gern ein Hamburger, bitte" in a restaurant; and it takes a few months to switch back.

If you drop out now, you're basically handicapping yourself for the rest of your life -- unless you get lucky. You say you "mastered several scripting languages" in the last two years -- any CS department worth its salt will demand significantly more from you than that. What about theory? You say you saw a 4-year student who lacked "basic programming instinct" -- I certainly saw a lot of that as a CS TA, too, but I also saw brilliant students who made the most of their education.

If you're so ahead of the game, why not try to get involved in research -- talk to professors, take more advanced courses, join ACM? If you push, you can use college to advance your skills and connections far beyond what you could (generally) do on the "outside".