I've also seen alpha-nerds placed into management positions where half the underlings either quit or transferred out of the department within six months.

This isn't some alpha-nerd v. social butterfly thing; it's all about fitting the right person to the right job.

FWIW, it's pretty easy to find posts from tech people around here who, on the topic of a nerd-centric work environment, say, "Suck it up, that's how we roll." The counterpoint, of course, is that if you want management to notice you and think you're worthy of promotion, you ... make chit-chat. Go out for coffee. Talk about current events. That's how management rolls.

At the risk of being labelled "Troll", maybe that's not so bad. The folks with social skills move on to positions that require unscripted social interactions, the folks who are really good at the technical aspects of the job keep on doing their own thing.

There are gender differences; you don't see it so much in ability scores, but you do tend to see it in how boys and girls learn. There are, I believe, some advantages for separating boys and girls for some classes, but certainly not all. The tricky bit, however, is that, on an individual basis, some kids simply don't fit the gender stereotypes. Some girls like being hands-on and active; some boys prefer to get their answers from reading and watching.

In a perfect world, you'd pair the right kid with the right teaching method, but that's not always possible, so you make compromises ... like gender-specific classes -- which can also help boys in some cases. FWIW, a couple years ago, news and infotainment stories based on all-boys programs were all the rage in Canada (specifically that elementary school education had become too feminized with too many female educators), so, while the current media frenzy is focusing on girls' achievements, there is a degree of parity in the overall arc of the coverage.

As for the current controversy, Google and MS aren't in the business of being SJWs; they're in the business of making money. And the research strongly suggests that:

Source (with cursory review of the literature): http://www.theglobeandmail.com... Note: Credit Suisse is not some backwater, liberal college spouting pseudo-scientific gibberish; they're a well-run capitalist organization that makes no bones about being in it for the money.

You want people with a wide variety of backgrounds and experiences working together. It might take longer to reach a decision (or finish a project), but it's likely that the decision will be better for it. Monocultures are suboptimal for decision making (the research from WWII on is quite solid on this). Google and Microsoft are not pushing forward with trying to get more girl coders from some sense of goodness and charity; they're doing it because they see a business case for it. The gender equity aspect is veneer slapped over a business decision to make it 1.) seem like a good thing for society and 2.) make it easier to shake money loose governments to improve their own workforces.

The apology is released right before American Thanksgiving when, more or less guaranteed, the story will be buried almost immediately beneath a pile of stories about travel, Black Friday, football, and recipes.

OMG, the review embargo actually worked! Totally dodged a bullet there. I wonder how many more times we can pull that one off?

Last year, after the ice storm knocked out power to large parts of Toronto for several days, the local utility published some numbers of what it would cost to fully bury Toronto's power lines; it was a mind boggling number -- in the billions. No one has the will to spend that kind of money to improve the grid's up time by .1%.

But ... above-ground lines aren't the worst thing in the world. First, if there is a problem, above-ground lines are far easier to repair. Second, parts of Toronto are prone to flooding. We lost part of our subway system for a few days a couple years ago due to flooding shorting out the buried power infrastructure downtown.

FWIW, it's not the aboveground nature of Toronto's grid that causes most of our problems; it's 60 year-old infrastructure with a rated lifespan of 50 years that kills us. Coming out of WWII, there was public will in Toronto to build grand projects -- the citizens were fine with the idea of doing without for the greater good. Once the boomers came into power, they started nickel and diming everything and put off maintenance. Infrastructure spending? Not cool. Lowering tax rates far below what their parents paid? That's cool.

Seriously, people. Looking at the comments here for the last couple of years, you can see the same people say, "NSA surveillance is bad because it violates my constitutional and civil rights. The government requires a warrant to gather information about me." The same people will say, "Suck it up, buttercup, because the cops are in the right when they stop and search you [for no reason other than your age and skin colour]."

Snark on:

Does anyone have a guide for which anonymous #GG users are legit and which anonymous #GG users are not?

Snark off.

The message has shifted since #GG became a thing; you can poke around the stories here, at Ars, and elsewhere and see that people who identified with the movement, early days, were often (note: I said "often", not "always" or "frequently") OK with calling people "feminazis" (since replaced with SJW). They also, sometimes, went on explain how "rape" and "kill" are almost used affectionately in gaming or dismissed the threats with arguments that, basically, said, "She hurt our feelings." I think that, as #GG has become more organized, the obvious trolling gets smacked down, at least in the forums (seriously, that's a positive step forward) ... but you can't walk back the fact that the harassing comments, (and fabricated stories about trading sexual favours for positive reviews) early on, muddled the message.

And it's the early comments that framed the debate. And those early, juvenile, minority opinion comments absolutely proved Sarkeesian's point better for more people than her videos ever could -- and gave her a FAR wider audience than she could ever have dreamed of.

Seriously, I have no idea why the #GG people interested in journalism ethics continued to use the #GG tag when its brand had been tarnished beyond repair. It tied a legitimate cause to one tainted in the public's eyes with threats (rape and murder), lies (sex for positive reviews), intimidation (doxxing, mass murder threats at the university), and outright misogyny (seriously, it's not OK to call someone a Nazi). No amount of damage control will fix that.

And, finally, since I'm about to modded down to troll anyway ... ethics in gaming journalism is not a big deal to most people. Gaming journalism rates as a cut below entertainment journalism. And, frankly, gaming (let alone ethics in gaming journalism) receives fewer column inches than the obituary section in most newspapers. It is, simply, not a subject most people care about because it doesn't affect them personally, any more than the extravagant gifts given to film journalists at film festivals (iPads, private parties) do.

So ... here's an article from the Globe and Mail, http://www.theglobeandmail.com... .

You want men and women working together. Simple as that.

The business case goes like this:

Credit Suisse is not exactly some radical feminist organization out to overthrow patriarchy.

The Lee-Enfield eventually replaced the Canadian-made Ross rifle during WW I for Canadian soldiers. The Ross rifle was incredibly accurate with great range, but needed to be fired in clean conditions with perfect ammunition. Not a weapon for the trenches, but a handful of snipers kept their Ross rifles even as they were phased out for regular infantry. Ross, the manufacturer, blamed a lot of the rifle's problems on bad British ammunition, but the army eventually decided that using a less accurate rifle that actually allowed to a soldier shoot at stuff was more important than having a rifle that required a maintenance crew.

We got the kids a Kano. Daughter 1 asks, "Do you two know how to program?" Parents, "Does the Kano have Turbo Pascal?" Daughter 2, "Is that like some kind of 80s cartoon character?"

Notice I said "apparently ... 137." The numbers are from Audi, not me.

Never tried going that fast -- we bought the car because it was, at the time, the most fuel efficient luxury automobile we could get in Canada. And the only other cars, period, that were more efficient were hybrids (seriously, it's more efficient than a Smart on the highway). FWIW, speed kills fuel economy. That's why I don't drive with a lead foot.

My four cylinder diesel A3 apparently has a top speed of 137 MPH.

In metric, I can get ~ 5.0 litres / 100km with a driver, 3 passengers, and luggage doing 80km / hour. At more typical highway speeds, it gets 5.5 or so litres / 100km. That works out to about 47 / 42 MPG -- and fueleconomy.gov's "guesstimate" is 42 MPG on the highway for this car. The US's guesstimate more or less nails my realworld results.

But did he manage to deliver the "think about the children line" with a straight face? 'Cause that's like the all time best argument for when you've got nothin' else. Or you're asking someone to do something that fails the basic sniff test of, "Is this reasonable?"

So ... here's the thing. Metro was designed around keyboard and touch, not mouse. Desktop was designed around mouse and keyboard. Many of the years-old keyboard shortcuts such as alt-f4 and alt-tab (definitely Win95 era, possibly Win3) work perfectly fine in Metro. Just because Metro looks "touchy" doesn't mean you can't interact with it in other ways.

I am frankly ... kind of amazed that a nerdy crowd that frequently crows about the number of ways they can interact with gadgets (different iterations of Android, MacOS, Windows, Linux, iOS, Amiga, BeOS, BSD, BASH and on and on) have such a hard time wrapping their heads around keyboarding through Metro.