Feel free to expose Microsoft and Apple.

Yeah, it's bad to have padrones run society.

Yeah, it's bad when somebody who managed to make a lot of money once decides that makes him competent to run areas of society that they know nothing about, like education.

The other problem is that, in addition to spending things that are in their own interest, they can spend things on sheer whim.

Bill Gates listened to a few glib educational theorists and bought the idea of destroying the public education system and replacing them with private charter schools.

He and his billionaire friends funded a movement that is wrecking the educational system, and running everything by high-stakes testing that has never been validated and has been proven to be invalid. They're lowering teacher salaries, and humiliating teachers.

When I was studying accounting I collected annual reports and 10-K financial statements of corporations. For example, I got the annual reports of media companies. For the Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and McGraw-Hill, the controlling stock was owned by women.

The reason was simple: most wealth in America is inherited family wealth. Men usually die before their wives, so their wives inherit their wealth and have control over it. So it was the family matriarchs that wound up owning the Post, Times, WSJ and M-H. And they usually managed the companies to some degree. Katherine Graham was a hands-on publisher, but even at the others, a woman usually made fundamental decisions such as hiring (or firing) a publisher and top executives.

If there weren't enough women at the executive levels of those corporations, it was because Katherine Graham, Iphigenea Ochs Sulzberger, etc., didn't appoint them.

When you talk about presidents, senators, prime ministers, and corporate board members, you're talking about the 1%. Almost any woman among them is more powerful than almost any man in the bottom 99%.

Nancy Reagan: I'll have the meat loaf.

Waiter: And the vegetable?

Nancy Reagan: He'll have the meat loaf too.

What about Ronald Reagan? He was a God, right?

Your reading comprehension is not as good as you think it is.

For somebody who says that we should respect women, your language towards someone you disagree with is too snarky and disrespectful for me to want to continue this discussion.

That was in a university. At that time, we had a strong principle of academic freedom, and it would have been inappropriate and a violation of their AAUP contracts for HR to say anything.

My freshman physics professor, who was a great teacher, was teaching in the U.S. for the first time in several years, because he had been blacklisted during the McCarthy days. An oceanography professor had escaped Nazi Germany. One of my art teachers was arrested in an obscenity case. So they were very defensive of free speech.

One of the leading Supreme Court cases in free speech was the one known as the "Fuck the Draft" case. So even the Supreme Court defended free speech back then.

Now, we have much less free speech. In the "Bong Hits for Jesus" case, the Supreme Court took a dive.

It's not a coincidence that several college teachers who have been fired by their administrations, over the objections of the faculty, "Not for what he said but the manner in which he said it," had criticized Israel, like Norman Finkelstein and Steve Salaita. Salaita was fired after a billionaire contributor said he wouldn't give the university any more money. Or search Google for "professor fired" to get an idea of the state of free speech in America.

The original PLOS article was about the academic profession. That's an environment in which we try to give people maximum freedom.

Either you have free speech or you don't. As Lennie Bruce said, if you can't say "Fuck", you can't say "Fuck the government." And now, sure enough, we can't say either.

Yes, but in this survey, they only asked Question 32 about "inappropriate or sexual remarks" and Question 39 about "physical sexual harassment".

You can't tell from this survey whether the subject said "no", or whether the incidents happened once or repeatedly.

The survey asks them for a completely subjective response. They say in the article that they deliberately didn't give definitions. So these "inappropriate sexual remarks" might have been something as innocuous as telling an off-color joke in a bar after work. The "physical sexual harassment" might have been a co-worker putting his hand on your arm.

If you join a group of people and they have a certain style of conversation, should everybody else accommodate your standards, or should you accommodate theirs? I don't see why everybody else should be required to change their language to your standards. This is what anthropologists study. I'd like to see studies of these real issues.

Some people are very prudish. If you say "fuck", they get upset. Other people say "fuck" all the time. When I was in college, my English teachers assigned us poems by Alan Ginsberg, who used "fuck" all the time. Some people -- very few -- were upset. What were we supposed to do -- censor Alan Ginsberg's poems? Should we all change? Or should that one Freshman English student from a religious high school realize that she's being too fastidious and that this is the way adults talk?

Suppose the incidents happen repeatedly, and the subject doesn't say "no"? That's what happened in the Bora Zivkovic case. Nobody stopped coming to work. They even encouraged him. Then they suddenly started complaining that they were being harassed all along.

It's not that simple. That's why people study anthropology.

I did read the study, and the appendix S1. I just reread it, searching for "assault" and "rape."

They define "assault" to mean "unwanted sexual contact, up to and including rape." Apparently, they measure it by the answers to Question 39, about "physical sexual harassment," which is where they got that 26% figure from.

They don't define "unwanted sexual contact." For example, Bora Zivkovic had a habit of hugging women, some of whom didn't enjoy it. That is literally an "unwanted sexual contact." It may be creepy, unpleasant or inappropriate, and it should (and did) stop. But it's not rape.

This study doesn't distinguish between unwanted hugging and forcible rape, and it doesn't break down the 26% figure into more or less violent forms of unwanted sexual contact. It doesn't even give the number of violent rapes.

If you have an unknown number of unwanted huggings, at one end of the spectrum, and an unknown number of violent rapes, at the other end of the spectrum, then that's a big grey area.

Managers get their orders from the legal department. The legal department sets rules that will give them a safe harbor from lawsuits, and not necessarily rules that are fair, reasonable, logical, or based on evidence.

This study is oversimplified. I think they're using science to advance their political agenda. That's OK, but they need better science. I'd like to see a better-quality study.

No, what they're talking about is, according to the article:

That's not sexual assault. I'm not even sure it rises to the level of sexual harassment.

Flirtation isn't sexual harassment. I'm sure every woman in the country must have been the subject of welcome and unwelcome flirtations.

At a recent professional meeting, a woman made suggestive sexual remarks to me about a computer program. If I had said the same thing to another woman, the second woman could have interpreted it as harassment under that definition.

There's a lot of grey areas and political correctness. If you want to look at it with publications in the scientific literature, fine. Let's use rigorous scientific methods to find out what the magnitude of sexual assault is. The first step is get your definitions right.

Here's one of the questions:

In terms of good experimental design, that does seem too broad. "Comments about physical beauty" could be harassment or not. It's a leading question. What's inappropriate? They're not measuring sexual harassment, they're measuring their respondents' subjective perceptions of their colleagues' comments.

It seems as if the researchers were designing the study with the intent of coming up with the largest numbers possible, in order to make the problem seem as big as possible.

Last week a girl said to me, "that's a nice sweater," which I as a geek trying to understand social interactions interpreted as a friendly way of making small talk. If I said the same thing to a girl, these respondents could report it as sexual harassment.

This study has flaws that the peer reviewers should have identified.

I'd like to see studies of sexual harassment that meet the standards I see from rigorous scientific studies elsewhere.

You didn't go to Antioch, by any chance? That's where Nobel laureate Mario Capecci https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... graduated.

One of the most useful books I read in college was an art history book, Mechanization Takes Command, by Sigfried Giedion. (Here's a sample http://www.ediblegeography.com... you might be able to find the complete edition online).

He taught me about how technology changed things -- when that technology was first steam and then electricity. I learned about the Bauhaus from that. It's pretty insightful to learn about engineering from a historical perspective, starting with stone axes, the way an art historian looks at it.

I found it in the school library by picking an interesting book off the shelf of architecture and design books.

There was a story, I think on Slashdot, about cops who would go online and pretend to be sexually aggressive 13-year-old girls, luring in social misfits.

A lot of it seemed to be entrapment, that is, they trapped people into committing a crime who would never have committed a crime without the encouragement and manipulation of the cops. The entrapment defense has an unreasonable burden of proof.

That's not the kind of policing I would admire.

If Timmy said that Frank had been doing something heinous, then the cops could get a search warrant to arrest Frank and search his house and computer. They wouldn't need to trap him into exchanging child porn.