Yay, another "women are better than men" article, soon to be followed with an article that insists men and women are exactly the same so therefore gender disparities in men's favor mean discrimination.

Also: "Other thoughts she shares have to do with finding mentors and dealing with negative people"

You know what you do with negative people? You give them work to do. Because you damn sure won't get so much out of positive rah-rah people; they're positive someone else will do it and aren't willing to look at the challenges long enough to figure out a way to overcome them. Though they'll be happy to take all the credit once the negative people do so... no matter, the negative people knew that would happen.

Star Wars was the number one movie of 1977. It's one of the most profitable franchises of all time also. Still associated with geeks. Geeks are still outside mainstream culture; it's just that certain geek-associated things are in fashion now. You may as well claim 1%er motorcycle clubs aren't counterculture because Sons of Anarchy is popular.

Nutrition science is terrible, and the close watch on it paid by various agencies (private and government) is even worse. Every time some case-control study on some nutrient shows it's bad or good, it gets jumped on as some fad. Then of course it turns out to be random noise. Doesn't mean science doesn't work, it means many of the ways we have for teasing small signals from noisy data have a nasty tendency to false positives.

Unfortunately, nutrition science isn't terrible because nutrition scientists suck. It's terrible because it's hard; you can't really do repeatable controlled studies.

If there is a social bias, what is it? It seems likely programming in the 1940s US started with women because men weren't around. Unlike in other fields, there were no men to come back to programming jobs and send the women home, so it's not surprising it remained "women's work" (as an article in Cosmopolitan in 1967 claimed) for some time. However, by 1972 only 20% of computer programmers were women. It's not clear when the switchover happened; the 1967 article may have been an anachronism.

That there was a social bias in the 1940s and an opposite one in the past 40 years is one plausible explanation. But another is that there was a bias in the 1940s (due to wartime conditions) and when that went away, factors other than social bias, that were themselves being overshadowed by the wartime bias, asserted themselves. Inherent ability certainly seems unlikely (particularly given the number of people in the field without any). That women find computer programming less interesting than men do, or find other things more interesting, seems more likely. This could be inherent, or it could be due to socialization, but given that there has been a push to get more women into CS for a very long time and instead things have been going the opposite direction argues against socialization IMO.

But then, Christie has been pretty vocal in his disdain for conservatives.

You can't go by that. Christie has been pretty vocal in his disdain for just about everyone.

Anyway, he's right. Some vaccines are vital and effective (measles), and others are not vital and ineffective (flu), a few are vital yet ineffective (acellular pertussis). Not sure if any are in that fourth category.

Lolz. Back in the 1960s, the same exact argument was made for why women were better at computer work.

Your link makes no argument for why women are better at computer work. "And if it doesn't sound like women's work--well, it just is." So no, it doesn't make the same argument at all. I don't buy the original claim (for one thing, "jumping around quickly to different thoughts, problems, and topics" is actually quite useful), but your link fails to refute it.

Well, her rank at the time was no higher than Commander; admirals have people to write compilers for them, of course. But yes. My point was only that there was an obvious reason for the ENIAC programmers to have been nearly all women during WWII, namely that there was something of a shortage of men, particularly younger men who didn't already have an established profession.

I can't imagine why in the 1940s, women were recruited for a job which didn't involve shooting people.

Inequal outcomes and inequal opportunity tightly correlate. The first doesn't always result from the second, but the second ALWAYS leads to the first.

On the contrary. See sports handicapping for an example where inequal opportunity leads to more-equal outcomes.

You cannot judge equality of opportunity by outcome unless you're sure ALL other factors affecting outcome are equal. Good luck with that.

If girls don't sign up for them in a particular school, then "technically" the class cannot be offered because there is no "female reprsentation" in these classes.

This is brilliant. Force the classes to have sufficient gender representation, and cancel them because they don't. Then the only people learning CS are those motivated enough to do it on their own... which will be even MORE male-skewed. Thus continued male dominance of the CS field. Wow, the masters of the patriarchy sure are clever!

Copyright law does not permit fair use. It is a valid defense against liability in court against a claim of infringement; in such a case, the user admits infringement but claims no liability due to fair use.

I'm not sure who came up with this line of bullshit, Jack Valenti's lawyers maybe, but it's not true. And no, it doesn't matter that Nolo press says so. Fair use is an exception to the exclusive rights granted by copyright law; if it is fair use it is not infringement. Establishing a claim of fair use is a complete defense to infringement.

17 USC 107, which codifies fair use, could not be clearer: "... the fair use of a copyrighted work... is not an infringement of copyright."

Who were these "one million disadvantaged middle-school students" compared to in order to determine that there was a "persistent decline in reading and math scores"?

You want a control group? With sociological studies you're lucky they actually measured real people and not proxies... control groups are asking for way too much.

...and you do, because they're reading everything... how would YOU respond?

The guru knows the novice knows more than the corporate enterprise architect, but won't let on lest the novice get a more-swelled head.

Just like Facebook has already seen the private messages people send each other.

No human has. I'm sure of this, because the overall banality of facebook messages would, if read en masse, cause an epidemic of "death by ennui"