It is difficult to explain the fact that the changes emerge around age 13 as enculturation. Do societal expectations change around then, to favor more differences between the sexes?

It's not only not impossible, but it's pretty much always possible. You just have to think like someone who chases funding.

Everyone who reviews proposals knows the future is uncertain, so they don't currently expect a proposal to accurately predict, say, how someone's research would benefit math education. The key is to explain how what you're proposing could plausibly help. Doing it well comes down to having a reasonable story, having good salesmanship, and wordsmithing.

The new requirements seem very broadly applicable. For example, I could twist scientific literacy, promotion of scientific progress, and possibly national defense into justifying the grant proposal I'm currently working on. "Scientific progress" in particular would be very easy. I expect it would be similarly easy for any other academic who expects to publish at leat one paper on research that he or she intends to support by an NSF grant.

So this probably wouldn't change anything, except to require another section in every proposal, which would just waste everyone's time. It would save exacly zero dollars, and cost a few for every proposal just by a naive conversion from time to money. There are also one-time costs. The only possible way this could save money is by slowing down the overall process.

While I'm railing, I should also mention that active researchers review other people's NSF proposals. Adding another requirement takes time they could use to, I dunno, do useful research?

Everyone who chases funding knows how to play the game. Adding rules won't keep them from getting money, and it'll cost time.

No, it's not. It's Oracle demonstrating that they fail to grasp the idea of a loss leader. They have no idea how to leverage a free product, can't stand the idea of a transaction without dollars changing hands, and as a result, continually piss everyone off.

Yep, it's feeding an addition.

Caffeine is physiologically addicting, and detoxification takes a long time and is unpleasant. A cup of coffee contains about 2-3 times a reasonable therapeutic dose, which makes addiction really, really easy.

If I were prescribing caffeine to an average, healthy adult male, I'd say 3 cans of Diet Coke (equiv. one cup of coffee) spaced evenly throughout the day, and expect at least two days of hangover-like symptoms after quitting.

...responding to the player's own body language rather than mathematical rules.

I've done a lot of machine learning. It's very much mathematical rules. The inferred rules just happen to be so complicated that it's often hard to recognize them as such.

Maybe the submitter meant "hand-crafted decision tree".

It's because it's a calculus: a method of calculating things. In this case, the things are higher-order functions, and the method is beta-reduction.

Your other points are well-taken, however.

My problem with the question and all the answers so far is that they are focusing on generalities. It's true that most programmers won't need calculus. However, we desperately need the 2% that do, because scientists from other fields don't get taught how to program. Oh, they pick it up on the job. They have to take one programming course from the CS department. But they rarely get rigorous training in software engineering that they need to make reliable stuff.

If there are environmental factors, they're slight. It's as heritable as height.

Plenty of things can cause the same symptoms in the short term without the neurological condition. Examples are the death of a parent (the emotional pain is, among other things, highly distracting), lack of sleep, and malnutrition. Yes, staring at a screen all day and experiencing nothing but rapid, small rewards can cause an otherwise healthy kid to find other things less rewarding. But I've read a lot about ADHD, and I've never seen anything conclusive that says such things can give a child the actual disorder.

I'm an extrovert, and I had that same reaction to the article. Ha ha.

Um, I do understand introverts pretty well, though. I think I've boiled the essence of the difference between extroverts and introverts down to cost. For an extrovert, the cost of speaking is either negative (your "spewing drivel all the time" kind) or zero (your "thinking out loud all the time" kind). For an introvert, the cost is positive, and sometimes very high. Introverts spend a lot of time determining either 1) the best way to say something, to minimize the cost of saying it overall, or 2) whether it's worth saying anything in the first place.

I'm convinced we need both kinds of people. Here's an example from one context. I once taught an entire class of introverts. It was horrendous. Nobody talked. I never got in-class feedback so that I could adjust the presentation on-the-fly. (I've since learned that partitioning the class into small groups can help. It lowers the cost of speaking.) I've also taught an entire class of extroverts. It was likewise horrendous. Everybody talked. We never got anywhere in the material. I've mostly taught classes with a mix of students, and that seems to work out the best. I get immediate feedback from the extroverts, and more thoughtful feedback from the introverts when they come to me for private help.

The thing I appreciate most about introverts is that I can count on something thoughtful from them, and I've learned to wait for it.

Bah. This is human nature, not just Americans.

Each of our states is as big as a country. How many Europeans could name the states surrounding the one I live in? Not many.

In this country, a Texan is as close to a foreigner as most people are likely to meet.

When I lived in Scotland, I was asked at least twice a month whether I knew Pamela Anderson. (No, by the way.) The kids there had no idea just how big this place is. Friggin' huge, is what it is. Like Sputnik.

Don't forget that we don't just use our space for candy. There's also Unicode, which is often done with 32-bit characters, so 4x on your strings right there. Along with that is internationalization, so your strings get duplicated 10x or whatever. Further, every 64-bit pointer takes 4x the space of a 16-bit pointer. We also use a LOT more pointers, because we have this crazy, correct idea that fixed-length data structures are evil in multiple ways. We also tend to write in imperative object-oriented or quasi-pure functional style, which are both a bit bloaty, because with those styles it's a lot easier to write extensible code. (With OO, it's easier to extend the kinds of objects on the system; with functional, easier to extend the kinds of operations.)

So yeah, it's not just candy or foregoing optimization. We've been moving toward making it easy for every programmer, regardless of skill, to write code that, if not correct, will at least not blow up your computer, and do a lot of really cool stuff.

Hanging it under is far more practical. You can tear if it off with one hand very easily without having the paper unspool 7 yards of itself onto the floor.

For those of us fit enough to breed, there's another great reason to hang it under. A toddler will often unspool toilet paper with an overhand whack, but almost never underhand.

The one steady complaint I hear is "doesn't do a perfect job of opening Microsoft Office formats". THat complaint is, even if true, ridiculous.

Why is it ridiculous?

We work with lawyers all the time, and all the time they send their funky boilerplate with our names filled in, and about 40% of the time, we need to go to the token windows box in the office to open it up. (Nice note though, sending stuff to them from OO works great.)

Ergo, we need a token windows box. It's easier than convincing our law firm to switch.

As a general note, ignoring customer's demands and dismissing them as ridiculous is not the way to gain market share.

-- p