Yeah, much of what we know is being overturned. Some of the disinformation was probably created by the food companies that wanted to make cheaper food. Back in the 70's we were told that fat was bad, and so all these processed foods got lots of extra sugar instead. Now we find out that sugar is bad and you need to consume more of the right fats. We're also starting to see that this "food pyramid" they taught us about should be basically inverted. The reason for the food pyramid is more to do with cost (grains are cheap) than nutrition.

Today, we know a hell of a lot about the impact of genetics, microbiotic flora, and many other things that affect individuals differently. For instance, many people have some mild sensitivities to various food proteins, although no always enough to notice more than some unexplained lethargy unpredictable times after eating certain foods. Of course, for some people, it's bad, like those with celiac disease.

Here's an interesting one: Apparently, about 10% of the population (US or world, I'm not sure) has a homozygous MTHFR C677T mutation. These people cannot convert folic acid (which is artificial anyway) or folinic acid (found in lots of vegetables) into methylfolate. As a result, these people suffer from massive B9 deficiencies (which indirectly causes others, like trouble absorbing B12). Moreover, it's not just that folic acid and folinic acid are not useful to them; they're functionally poison, interfering with the normal function of the methylation cycle. So these people need to take large quantities of methylfolate and cut out certain "healthy" vegetables. They also have to cut out "enriched" foods. We're starting to see a correlation between health problems increasing in these people and the mid-90's FDA mandate to enrich certain foods with Folic Acid. Lovely.

If I had disposable income, I might get an iWatch for my wife (who actually uses a watch). This is a great little toy for people with some disposable income and an itch to collect expensive gadgets. It looks cool and probably has some great functionality.

For those complaining about it, they're expecting too much from a first-generation product. Give it a few years, and the features, battery life, and price will improve to a point where more of us would consider buying one. Meanwhile, Apple gets to test out ideas that will improve its later products, and some of what is learned from this will also positively impact other Apple products.

Some time next year, I'll go check one out in an Apple store for about a minute. (Which is about how long I can stand to be in an Apple store since I already know everything about the products before I go there, so I get bored quickly.)

In general, having a niche skill pays more if you can find a job in that niche. Companies that need that skill know it's a niche skill and one way or another end up realizing they have to offer higher salaries to attract the right talent. On the other hand, if you are an expert in COBOL and go to work doing web programming, they're not going to care, and your COBOL knowledge will have no impact on your income.

That all being said, I don't understand the general fear people have of learning new languages. Sure, it takes time and effort, but it should be considered part of the craft. At Ohio State, the CSE department used to teach a language called Resolve for its beginning courses. It was DESIGNED to make things like data structures and algorithms easier to code, avoiding a lot of the cruft of other languages that is unrelated to the code that matters. But students complaned and complained about learning a language they'd never use again. My thinking is that if they're going to be successful, engineers need to be willing and able to learn new languages on their own time.

At OSU, they eventually caved to student pressure and switched to Java. Why they chose Java is beyond me. Where I teach now, they use Python, and that makes a hell of a lot more sense to me. If you're entirely new to programming, there is a lot of boilerplate (from the perspective of the uninitiated) Java code you have to write just to do simple things that is unnecessary when writing Python.

Minimum wage is relative. Here, it could mean "the minimum amount of money offered to anyone for this kind of position."

People who weren't learning the material were still getting good grades (B's at least), and employers were preoccupied with GPA numbers.

Either that or they don't want to come to the DC area. Considering the massive cost of living there and the fact that "6 figures" can mean "just barely over 100K", maybe you're just not offering enough. I turned down a really nice offer in Arlington, VA, because $150K was worth substantially less there than $85K where I work now.

Probably the only place worse than DC would be NYC.

In my university, we accept huge numbers of international students because they pay higher tuition. If we didn't do that, we wouldn't survive financially, because the state's economy is poor. So in terms of keeping the institution alive, this is the best thing to do. And in any case, this never seems to negatively impact our very good reputation in the northeast. (Besides, it's not like we're giving good grades to bad students anyhow.)

As long as those poor students aren't TOO distracting, the revenue they bring in is good for everyone else. (And some of them get brought around to actually find the subject interesting.) Our domestic students are almost all very good. And there is always a nontrivial portion of the international students who are also very very good. I like to think about the cases where a student who had trouble getting into to other schools was given an opportunity to unexpectedly shine in ours. This happens plenty.

The companies say there aren't enough IT workers. The IT workers say there aren't enough jobs. It really comes down to there being huge numbers of IT workers but very few good ones.

As someone who educates CS students, I see the whole spectrum. There are lots of students who seriously have no interest in learning the material. All they care about is getting a diploma. Where I teach, those students don't make it all the way through the program, due to a combination of poor grades and being caught cheating. But when I was getting my undergrad degree, I was always angry about the fact that employers couldn't distinguish my A's from those of people who didn't actually learn the material.

Not surprisingly, supply and demand is a factor here. With low numbers of CS students, standards have to be lowered to keep the tuition revenue going. As the student population grows beyond capacity, schools are able to be more selective based on SAT scores, high school GPAs, and weed-out courses.

As someone who teaches computer science for a living, I can tell you that if you're only majoring in computer science because you think you need to get a degree, then the degree will be useless to you. You'll do the minimum work to pass (if that) and not retain anything you learned. Then you'll have a hell of a time trying to find a job. Employers have become jaded and assume that although you have to be a college graduate to apply, almost all college graduates are morons. This is because most of them are there just to get a degree, and employers have to go through gargantuan efforts to find those few who are actually good.

On the other hand, if you're the kind of person who is good at learning to code and you actually find computer science interesting, then getting a degree will help you immensely. If you're really smart, you would learn most of this stuff on your own anyway, but classes help you organize the knowledge, and professors can help you with the difficult questions. If you go to a good school, you'll learn more than you would if you did it alone because college degree programs help direct you along and force you to practice as you go along. Finally, when you're done and graduate with good grades, you have verifiable evidence that you've been exposed to this knowledge. If you just learned it yourself, you'd have to ask the to take your word for it, and they're not going to do that.

Also, let's not forget that finishing a degree is also proof that you are able to start and finish a long-term project. It means you have attention span and can be dependable. Being able to finish things is another rare trait that employers put a lot of effort into looking for.

I don't know what your professors were like, but I instruct my graders to (a) do the assignment themselves for an objective set of answers (to later compare to mine) and (b) look for common "wrong" anwers and evaluate them carefully. For (b) there are three reasons why we might mark correct a "wrong" answer. One is that I just screwed up my work. Another is that I screwed up the question. And another is that I may have given a misleading explanation that lead students commonly produce a wrong answer. We also consider carefully how many people got it "right." A few times I have just dropped a question out of the grading and given extra credit to those few who got a good answer.

I suspect I put more time into grading than I "should" given tenure requirements, but I can't bring myself to do a shit job at teaching.

At least not intentionally. :)

From the summary, it appears to say that they SURVIVED that long, but we probably have to read the article to find out when they arrived there, which is surely a REALLY long time ago. Like more than 50000.

It's SUPPOSED to be objective. But it's impossible for it to be entirely objective. Having more diverse viewpoints would likely improve its level of objectivity, which is as much as we can hope for.

What would happen if the executive branch (which is supposed to enforce the law) simply refused to comply with a judicial order? Can someone be held in contempt? Who would take on the role of enforcing the judicial order (in terms of compelling the action or executing punishment)?

You may be right. If we eliminated the barriers, then women might still not be interested. Either way, it's still bad that Wikipedia can't claim to be completely neutral if it doesn't represent a large section of human perspectives.

No, it's a real problem here. Wikipedia is all about (1) information about the world, and (2) a neutral perspective on that information. Women do have a slightly different perspective, focusing on different information and different aspects of information. Including those additional perspectives will make wikipedia content more complete and also more accessible to female readers.