Saturday, October 18, 2003
Song lyric of the day
We communicate more and more
In more defined ways than ever before
But no one has got anything to say
It's all very poor
It's all just a bore
--- Stereolab, "The Seeming and the Meaning".
You'd almost think they're talking about the Internet, except this song dates back to 1992.
Monday, October 13, 2003
Bestest post office on Earth to become train station
Maybe I'm just a sentimental expatriate New Yorker, but: *sob* they're taking away the post office on 33rd and 8th! This was the only public post office I knew in the metro area where you could send packages through USPS really late at night. Also, ever wonder how that line about "neither snow nor rain" came to be associated with the mail?
The building, which stretches across two city blocks, with a grand sweep of granite stairs rising to a Corinthian colonnade, will forever be linked to postal lore because of the engraving that runs above its 280-foot frieze: "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds." The quotation, inspired by Herodotus, was selected by the building's architect, William Mitchell Kendall, and over time became the postal service's unofficial motto.
As if Republicans weren't evil enough --- it's their obscene grave-dancing national convention that's providing the wedge to get the post office out.
2 out of 5 California Greens are pragmatists?
H. Meyerson at TAPPED notes the following:
In November of last year, when [Green Party gubernatorial candidate] Camejo couldn't get on camera to save his life, he won 5 percent of the vote. In the recall, he won 3 percent. Where did his vote go? In the Los Angeles Times exit poll, a plurality of the voters who said they'd voted for Camejo last year -- 44 percent -- owned up to backing Democratic Lieutenant Governor Cruz Bustamante when they cast their votes this time out.
Encouraging signs. I've bitched at Greens' tactical fecklessness before --- if 2/5 of the Florida Greens had voted for Gore in 2000, Bush would not now occupy the White House --- but at least they're beginning to wise up.
Labels: green-party, politics
Sunday, October 12, 2003
Wage discrimination and gender
Alas, a blog's recent series on wage discrimination and gender is quite informative; I hope someday the Alas folk will package this series up as a PDF, like David Neiwert's Rush series. The point that hits closest to home for me, as an apprentice scientist:
What the Nature study did was examine productivity (measured in terms of publications in scientific journals, how many times a person was a "lead author" of an article, and how often the articles were cited in scientific journals) and sex. Publication in peer-reviewed scientific journals is often considered to be the most objective and "concrete" sign of accomplishment in the sciences. These factors were then compared to how an actual scientific review panel measured scientific competence when deciding which applicants would receive research grants. Receiving grants like these are essential to the careers of scientific researchers.
The results? Female scientists needed to be at least twice as accomplished as their male counterparts to be given equal credit. For example, women with over 60 "impact points" - the measure the researchers constructed of scientific productivity - received an average score of 2.25 "competence points" from the peer reviewers. In contrast, men with less than 20 impact points also received 2.25 competence points. In fact, only the most accomplished women were ever considered to be more accomplished than men - and even then, they were only seen as more accomplished than the men with the very fewest accomplishments.
It probably wouldn't surprise the average layperson to learn that computer science is an overwhelmingly male profession. A 9-to-1 male to female ratio is a typical ballpark figure at all levels, from undergrad major enrollment through junior faculty, though it gets worse as you go up the ladder. Furthermore, my own specialization (programming languages and tools) is even more overwhelmingly male. When I go to the top conferences*, there will typically be a mere handful of women in a room of two hundred researchers.
I don't think these population numbers reflect disciplinary sexism. In fact, I think my profession's less sexist, on average, than society as a whole; and certainly the individual women researchers with whom I'm familiar are quite well-regarded. But the sobering studies cited by Alas do reflect disciplinary sexism (in science in general), and should lead us all to question the way we approach women and their work. Sexism in this context won't generally be a conscious act --- it could be a mere statistical differential in the probability that we'll cite particular papers, or chat with particular individuals at conferences, or chat about particular people's work with other people (the latter two are quite important for generating "buzz" around people's work).
This leads to an interesting question: should scientists practice a form of "personal affirmative action" for women researchers, whereby we consciously make an effort to pay extra attention to women and their research?
* Note for any curious scientists in other fields who may be reading this: conferences are a much bigger deal in computer science than in most other sciences. The year-or-more lag time for reviewing journal papers means that cutting-edge research is basically never published in journals. If you want to keep up, you must attend conferences, and publish your best research in them. As a result, the bar for conference publications is also much higher than in other fields: the top conferences in programming languages are well-known for rejecting even quite strong submissions because the competition's so intense.
Once you get a paper at a good conference, you may fill out the paper with all the details and tedious proofs, and attempt to publish the extended version in a journal; but this step's not strictly necessary to build a reputation. A fresh Ph.D. could get a faculty job at a top-ten institution without a single journal paper.
Labels: academia, economics, sex-discrimination
Jeanne d'Arc takes on the Terminator, and others
If there's any bright spot for me personally in the California recall debacle (honestly I'm too tired these days to care much, but nevertheless it's still depressing), it's the fact that it's inspired Jeanne to write some truly righteous posts on Schwarzenegger, California, and Republicans in general.
Incidentally, if you read blogs, but do not read Body and Soul regularly, then you're seriously missing out.
Labels: arnold-schwarzenegger, california
One more reason bicoastals call it "flyover country"...
An 11-year-old Oklahoma girl has been suspended from a public school because officials said her Muslim head scarf violates dress code policies. How many times do incidents like this have to make national headlines before these pinheads wise up?
Labels: culture, middle-america, religion
Cult of Shirky holds forth on future of file sharing
The latest NEC-list post discusses the probable future of file-sharing behavior. NEC (Networks, Economics, and Culture) is a low-traffic mailing list authored by Clay Shirky, who's something of a cult guru in new media circles. When I was an undergrad, I worked for a company that did an earlier iteration of his website; he was regarded by others with a curious reverence that nobody in our company could quite understand or justify. Anyway, he's interesting enough, and the list low-traffic enough, that you have no good reason not to subscribe to it.
Labels: clay-shirky, social-software
