Would you expect to find that phrase in a mathematics journal? In the proceedings of a computer science conference? In a doctoral thesis of marine biology? If you answered "no" to all these questions, it may just be field-specific jargon. In particular, while "culturally congruent [understanding]" has a fairly unambiguous meaning, I think the word choice is specific to the field rather than something that is generally used, and scientists in other fields would use a less dense description for that situation.

If the evidence shows that education and common sense tends to make a person your political opponent and policy adversary, call their social group names!

The first paragraph of the letter (after the abstract) almost perfectly identifies the problem, although the authors, being social "scientists", predictably fail to understand the implication: "As members of the public do not know what scientists know, or think the way scientists think, they predictably fail to take climate change as seriously as scientists believe they should."

The same is true of climate change, diet, exercise, privacy, foreign policy, gas mileage, law, and so forth: The general public does not take any of these issues as seriously as specialists in those fields think they should. This is not because the specialists are right, though; it is because the specialists devote their careers to those areas, and as a result have a distorted view of how much concern the average citizen should dedicate to the specialist's area of expertise. If I was as concerned about everything as experts thought I should be, I would spend all day worrying and no time getting anything done. Considering that dynamic (which often results in "rational ignorance" by average citizens), it is not at surprising that individuals look to peer groups or ideological leaders for cues on complicated issues.

(I suspect the authors also have an ideological bone to pick, based on the breakdowns they chose -- why focus on "hierarchical individualists" versus "egalitarian communitarians", and mention the hierarchy/egalitarianism and individualist/communitarian axis results in passing? How many other proxies did they look at before settling on those, and why did they reject other possible proxies? These social scientists might be unduly concerned with their narrative and as a result not take methodology as seriously as statisticians think they should [wink, wink -- I know that social scientists tend to take post-hoc analytic methodology more seriously than many domains because they are short on testably predictive hypotheses].)

As I said before, you're complaining about a different dynamic than getting farmers to grow cash crops instead of subsistence farming.

If those folks are still in the Pacific, it wouldn't do much good to tell them -- they would have drowned by now.

But seriously, your argument is as bad as your sentence construction. If Americans were willing to pay more to put food in their cars than these Pacific-region people were able to pay for food to put in their mouths, that is an economic problem that is unrelated to the question of cash crops versus subsistence farming. If you have a complaint about inefficient allocation of the harvest, take it to the corruptocrats in the US who handed out subsidies for ethanol production. The farmers growing ethanol feedstocks are already growing cash crops; unless they are the same people who were starving in the Pacific region, it would not help anyone for those farmers to switch to subsistence farming.

Then try economics. Note that u38cg's distinction was not between "cash crops" and "food crops" but between cash crops and subsistence farming -- the former means you produce enough of whatever crop to bring in net income, the latter means you can only grow enough to feed your own family. Food crops often are cash crops.

I hate to break it to you, but that expectation is ridiculous(ly naive). If those cheap, quick, outsourced projects get finished at all, the code will probably not be robust and will almost certainly be unmaintainble over the course of a year.

That is a distinction that the study apparently did not make, because it talks about "malicious code" rather than viruses. In fact, most of the malicious apps that one hears about are spyware or trojans rather than viruses.

Once certainly does choose MATLAB over C -- one chooses the MATLAB language over C because the former makes it much easier to represent many mathematical operations; one chooses the MATLAB libraries and execution environment because they are richer than C in mathematics building blocks. When a particular numerical analysis needs to be performed at most a few times, development time becomes a major factor in the cost, which is why people would prefer MATLAB over C -- but the MATLAB execution time might be so long that alternatives become interesting.

(I suspect that Julia and R do not have code generation for signal processors, but Mathworks and its partner companies will gladly sell you tools that will convert a subset of MATLAB code to C or an HDL to run on an embedded system or FPGA. They will even give away free stories about how awesome those tools are, while glossing over their limitations, but hey -- they are sales pitches..)

Yes. As a female engineer, I absolutely despise applying looser standards to women because it helps perpetuate the stereotype that women are less qualified than men. On the other hand, programs that encourage women to become better at technical fields can help break the stereotype. I can go toe to toe with most men in my field just fine, and I'm even perfectly content to be the only woman in a room with 20 or more men, but it wears me down every time someone I'm meeting with makes the assumption that a male colleague is the right person to direct technical questions to - especially when it continues to happen after both of us have made clear that I'm the technical lead. Then again, I find I have to consciously stop myself from making the same type of assumption when I'm on the other side. More women in technical fields who are in fact qualified to be there is the answer.

Good: Scholarship programs, outreach, mentorship. Bad: lower standards, hiring/admission preferences, token females.