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Comment Apple's Ellen Feis Ad: Worse Than Targeting Boys? (Score 2) 608

by theodp (#48237739) Attached to: Solving the Mystery of Declining Female CS Enrollment

If you were trying to discourage girls from trying to program computers, you'd be hard-pressed to top Apple's famous Ellen Feis 'Switch' ad (2002 Slashdot discussion). Btw, by introducing 'The Computer for The Rest of Us' in 1984 without a viable hobbyist programming language, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates no doubt helped discourage both girls and boys from studying CS, even if BillG is trying to make amends now.

Submission + - Not Everyone Feels NPR's Solved the Mystery of Declining Female CS Enrollment

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: After an NPR podcast fingered the marketing of computers to boys as the culprit behind the declining percentages of women in undergraduate CS curricula since 1984 (a theory seconded by Smithsonian mag), some are concluding that NPR got the wrong guy. Calling 'When Women Stopped Coding' quite engaging, but long on Political Correctness and short on real evidence, UC Davis CS Prof Norm Matloff concedes a sexist element, but largely ascribes the gender lopsidedness to economics. "That women are more practical than men, and that the well-publicized drastic swings in the CS labor market are offputting to women more than men," writes Matloff, "was confirmed by a 2008 survey in the Communications of the ACM" (related charts of U.S. unemployment rates and Federal R&D spending in the '80s). Looking at the raw numbers of female CS grads instead of percentages, notes Ministry of Truth, suggests there wasn't a sudden and unexpected disappearance of a generation of women coders, but rather a dilution in their percentages as women's growth in undergrad CS ranks was far outpaced by men, including a boom around the time of the dot-com boom/bust. So, any other factors that might help explain differences in the 1984 and 2014 demographics of undergrad CS programs? By introducing The Computer for The Rest of Us in 1984 without a viable hobbyist programming language, did Steve Jobs and Bill Gates inadvertently contribute to changing the CS study pipeline for the worse? Did the debut of the AP CS exam in 1984, and its choice of languages (Pascal, C++, Java), wind up driving kids away from CS study? Anything else?

Submission + - US Army May Relax Physical Requirements to Recruit Cyber Warriors

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Clifford Davis reports that only 30% of young people between the ages of 17 and 24 are qualified to become soldiers primarily due to three issues: obesity or health problems; lack of a high school education; and criminal histories. While cognitive and moral disqualifications have held steady, weight issues account for 18% of disqualifications, and the number is rising steadily and it's projected to hit 25% by 2025, which Batschelet calls "troubling." The current Army policy is that every recruit, whether enlisting for infantry or graphic design, has to meet the same physical requirements to join — but that requirement may be changing. "Today, we need cyber warriors, so we're starting to recruit for Army Cyber," says Batschelet. "One of the things we're considering is that your [mission] as a cyber warrior is different. Maybe you're not the Ranger who can do 100 pushups, 100 sit-ups and run the 2-mile inside of 10 minutes, but you can crack a data system of an enemy." "We're looking for America's best and brightest just like any Fortune 500 company out there," says Lt. Col. Sharlene Pigg. "We're looking for those men and women who excel in science, technology, engineering and math." Batschelet admits that a drastic change in physical requirements for recruits may be hard for some to swallow. "That's going to be an institutional, cultural change for us to be able to get our heads around that is kind of a different definition of quality," says Batschelet. "I would say it's a modernizing, or defining in a more precise way, what is considered quality for soldiers."

Submission + - Profits! Profits! Profits! Ballmer Says Amazon Isn't a Real Business

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: According to Steve Ballmer, Amazon.com is not a real business. “They make no money,” Ballmer said on the Charlie Rose Show. “In my world, you’re not a real business until you make some money. I have a hard time with businesses that don’t make money at some point.” Ballmer’s comments come as Amazon posted a $437 million loss for the third quarter, disappointing Wall Street. "If you are worth $150 billion," Ballmer added, "eventually somebody thinks you’re going to make $15 billion pre-tax. They make about zero, and there’s a big gap between zero and 15." Fired-up as ever, LA Clippers owner Ballmer's diss comes after fellow NBA owner Mark Cuban similarly slammed IBM, saying Big Blue is no longer a tech company (Robert X. Cringely seems to concur). "Today, they [IBM] specialize in financial engineering," Cuban told CNBC after IBM posted another disappointing quarter. "They're no longer a tech company, they are an amalgamation of different companies that they are trying to arb[itrage] on Wall Street, and I'm not a fan of that at all."

Submission + - NPR (Thinks It) Has Solved the Mystery of Declining Female Enrollment in CS

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: "Last Friday," writes UC Davis CS Prof Norm Matloff, "NPR ran a piece titled 'When Women Stopped Coding' [podcast summary]. It was quite engaging, but was long on Political Correctness, blaming things ranging from boy-oriented toys to sexist institutions, and short on real evidence. Mind you, I don’t disagree that a sexist element runs through parts of the field, but NPR’s explanations are just wrong." So, what does Matloff see as the major cause of declining percentages of women in undergraduate CS curricula since 1984? Economics. "I share the concern about the gender lopsidedness in the profession," explains Matloff. "Actually, I started voicing this concern to my department chair a bit before the issue became a nationwide topic around 2008. My theory at the time was that women are more practical than men, and that the well-publicized drastic swings in the CS labor market are offputting to women more than men. This was confirmed by a 2008 survey in the Communications of the ACM, a professional magazine of the Association for Computing Machinery, which found that in choosing to enter the IT field, women placed significantly more emphasis on job security." In addition to the causes cited by NPR, Matloff, and others, a number of other changes have occurred since 1984 that had some effect on the composition of the CS undergrad pipeline. 1984 was the year that high school CS education was changed by the introduction of the AP Computer Science exam, whose choice of languages (Pascal, C++, Java) has ironically been blamed by some for actually driving kids away from CS study. 1984 was also a watershed year in that it marked the introduction of the Mac, a computer "designed as an information appliance" for which a hobbyist programming language was deemed unnecessary. That, coupled with the killing of MacBasic by Bill Gates, no doubt reduced the number of students who would catch the programming bug and later major in CS. IEEE Today's Engineer noted that a decrease in Federal R&D spending in the '80s affected STEM student production. College demographics in general also began to change dramatically in the 80's as schools embraced a huge influx of international students (stats show foreign STEM students skew male) and public universities increasingly sought out-of-state tuition windfalls, leaving fewer seats for even higher-qualified in-state students. Check out a comparison of 1984 vs. 2014 enrollment demographics for CS majors at the Univ. of Illinois, which is certainly at odds with NPR's US-white-boys-with-PCs-rose-to-dominate-CS-programs hypothesis. Also, it should be mentioned that evolving CS/IT/MIS/STAT programs of study make it impossible to do apples-to-apples comparisons of "CS programs" over the years. Finally, legislation passed or shaped in the '80s also helped make programming a less attractive career to U.S. students. Section 1706 of the 1986 tax act, noted the NY Times, helped insure a scarcity of programmers, since Congress decreed that most individual programmers cannot be entrepreneurs. And the ever-evolving H-1B visa program (and associated rise of outsourcing/offshoring), which had roots in the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, has also undoubtedly affected U.S. students' decision to major in CS. So, what made women "stop coding"? It's hard to say exactly, but there was certainly more to it than gender-skewed '80s PC advertising!

Submission + - Be True to Your CS School: Best Colleges for Programmers?

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: With apologies to The Beach Boys: "When some loud braggart tries to put me down / And says his CS school is great / I tell him right away / 'Now what's the matter buddy / Ain't you heard of my CS school / It's number one in the LinkedIn University Rankings'." The Motely Fool reports that the Data Scientists at LinkedIn have been playing with their Big Data, ranking schools based on how successful recent grads have been at landing desirable software development jobs. Here's their Top 25: CMU, Caltech, Cornell, MIT, Princeton, Berkeley, Univ. of Washington, Duke, Michigan, Stanford, UCLA, Illinois, UT Austin, Brown, UCSD, Harvard, Rice, Penn, Univ. of Arizona, Harvey Mudd, UT Dallas, San Jose State, USC, Washington University, RIT. There's also a shorter list for the best schools for software developers at startups, which draws a dozen schools from the previously mentioned schools, and adds Columbia, Univ. of Virginia, and Univ. of Maryland College Park.

Submission + - Apple's Next Hit Will Be a Microsoft Surface Pro Clone

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: "Good artists copy, great artists steal," Steve Jobs used to say. Having launched a perfectly-timed attack against Samsung and phablets with its iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, Leonid Bershidsky suggests that the next big thing from Apple will be a tablet-laptop a la Microsoft's Surface Pro 3. "Before yesterday's Apple [iPad] event," writes Bershidsky, "rumors were strong of an upcoming giant iPad, to be called iPad Pro or iPad Plus. There were even leaked pictures of a device with a 12.9-inch screen, bigger than the Surface Pro's 12-inch one. It didn't come this time, but it will."

Submission + - As Prison Population Sinks, Jails Are a Steal

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: After rising rapidly for decades, the number of people behind bars peaked at 1.62 Million in 2009, has been mostly falling ever since down, and many justice experts believe the incarceration rate will continue on a downward trajectory for many years. New York, for example, saw an 8.8% decline in federal and state inmates, and California, saw a 20.6% drop. Now the WSJ reports on an awkward byproduct of the declining U.S. inmate population: empty or under-utilized prisons and jails that must be cared for but can’t be easily sold or repurposed. New York state has closed 17 prisons and juvenile-justice facilities since 2011, following the rollback of the 1970s-era Rockefeller drug laws, which mandated lengthy sentences for low-level offenders. So far, the state has found buyers for 10 of them, at prices that range from less than $250,000 to about $8 million for a facility in Staten Island, often a fraction of what they cost to build. “There’s a prisoner shortage,” says Mike Arismendez, city manager for Littlefield, Texas, home of an empty five-building complex that sleeps 383 inmates and comes with a gym, maintenence shed, armory, and parking lot . “Everybody finds it hard to believe.”

The incarceration rate is declining largely because crime has fallen significantly in the past generation. In addition, many states have relaxed harsh sentencing laws passed during the tough-on-crime 1980s and 1990s, and have backed rehabilitation programs, resulting in fewer low-level offenders being locked up. States from Michigan to New Jersey have changed parole processes, leading more prisoners to leave earlier. On a federal level, the Justice Department under Attorney General Eric Holder has pushed to reduce sentences for nonviolent drug offenders. Before 2010, the U.S. prison population increased every year for 30 years, from 307,276 in 1978 to a high of 1,615,487 in 2009. “This is the beginning of the end of mass incarceration,” says Natasha Frost. "People don’t care so much about crime, and it’s less of a political focus."

Submission + - Microsoft, Facebook Declare European Kids Clueless About Coding, Too

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Having declared U.S. kids clueless about coding, Facebook and Microsoft are now turning their attention to Europe's young 'uns. "As stewards of Europe's future generations," begins the Open Letter to the European Union Ministers for Education signed by Facebook and Microsoft, "you will be all too aware that as early as the age of 7, children reach a critical juncture, when they are learning the core life skills of reading, writing and basic maths. However, to flourish in tomorrow's digital economy and society, they should also be learning to code. And many, sadly, are not." Released at the launch of the European Coding Initiative — aka All You Need is Code! — in conjunction with the EU's Code Week, the letter closes, "As experts in our field, we owe it to Europe's youth to help equip with them with the skills they will need to succeed — regardless of where life takes them." Hopefully, life won't take them to a massive layoff, like the one that left 12,500 Nokia workers jobless just three months after joining Microsoft. By the way, the "All You Need is Code" initiative, explained an SAP press release, was conceived at the 2014 World Economic Forum, where EU Commission vice president Neelie Kroes — who yukked-it-up at the event with former nemesis Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith — called on the private sector to endorse the Davos Declaration to deepen support for the Grand Coalition for Digital Jobs.

Submission + - Statisticians Uncover What Makes for a Stable Marriage

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: Randy Olson, a Computer Science grad student who works with data visualizations, writes about seven of the biggest factors that predict what makes for a long term stable marriage in America. Olson took the results of a study that polled thousands of recently married and divorced Americans and and asked them dozens of questions about their marriage (PDF): How long they were dating, how long they were engaged, etc. After running this data through a multivariate model, the authors were able to calculate the factors that best predicted whether a marriage would end in divorce. "What struck me about this study is that it basically laid out what makes for a stable marriage in the US," writes Olson. Here are some of the biggest factors:

How long you were dating (Couples who dated 1-2 years before their engagement were 20% less likely to end up divorced than couples who dated less than a year before getting engaged. Couples who dated 3 years or more are 39% less likely to get divorced.); How much money you make (The more money you and your partner make, the less likely you are to ultimately file for divorce. Couples who earn $125K per year are 51% less likely to divorce than couples making 0 — 25k); How often you go to church (Couples who never go to church are 2x more likely to divorce than regular churchgoers.); Your attitude toward your partner (Men are 1.5x more likely to end up divorced when they care more about their partner’s looks, and women are 1.6x more likely to end up divorced when they care more about their partner’s wealth.); How many people attended the wedding ("Crazy enough, your wedding ceremony has a huge impact on the long-term stability of your marriage. Perhaps the biggest factor is how many people attend your wedding: Couples who elope are 12.5x more likely to end up divorced than couples who get married at a wedding with 200+ people."); How much you spent on the wedding (The more you spend on your wedding, the more likely you’ll end up divorced.); Whether you had a honeymoon (Couples who had a honeymoon are 41% less likely to divorce than those who had no honeymoon).

Of course correlation is not causation. For example, expensive weddings may simply attract the kind of immature and narcissistic people who are less likely to sustain a successful marriage and such people might end up getting divorced even if they married cheaply. But "the particularly scary part here is that the average cost of a wedding in the U.S. is well over $30,000," says Olson, "which doesn’t bode well for the future of American marriages."

Submission + - Despite Push from Tech Giants, AP CS Exam Counts Don't Budge Much in Most States

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Well, the College Board has posted the 2014 AP Computer Science Test scores. So, before the press rushes out another set of Not-One-Girl-In-Wyoming-Took-an-AP-CS-Exam stories, let's point out that no Wyoming students of either gender took an AP CS exam again in 2014 (.xlsx). At the overall level, the final numbers have changed somewhat (back-of-the-Excel-envelope calculations, no warranty expressed or implied!), but tell pretty much the same story as the preliminary figures — the number of overall AP CS test takers increased, while pass rates decreased despite efforts to cherry pick students with a high likelihood of success. What is kind of surprising is how little the test numbers budged for most states — only 8 states managed to add more than 100 girls to the AP CS test taker rolls — despite the PR push by the tech giants, including Microsoft, Google, and, Facebook. Also worth noting are some big percentage decreases at the top end of the score segments (5 and 4), and still-way-too-wide gaps that exist between the score distributions of the College Board's various ethnic segments (more back of the envelope calcs). If there's a Data Scientist in the house, AP CS exam figures grabbed from the College Board's Excel 2013 and 2014 worksheets can be found here (Google Sheets) together with the (unwalkedthrough) VBA code that was used to collect it. Post your insight (and code/data fixes) in the comments!

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