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Submission + - CS programs changing to attract women students

Magnifico writes: In today's The New York Times, there is a story about American universities are actively recruiting women to be Computer Science students and changing CS courses to do so. The story, "Computer Science Takes Steps to Bring Women to the Fold", explains that the number of women in CS is shrinking: "Women received about 38 percent of the computer science bachelor's degrees awarded in the United States in 1985, the peak year, but in 2003, the figure was only about 28 percent, according to the National Science Foundation." One of the largest barriers to recruiting women to the field is the "nerd factor". To attract women students to the CS field, "Moving emphasis away from programming proficiency was a key to the success of programs Dr. Blum and her colleagues at Carnegie Mellon instituted to draw more women into computer science." Changes at CMU increased women students in the CS program from 8 percent to nearly 40 percent.

Feed Early Time Change Costs Kid 12 Days In Jail (techdirt.com)

The early start on daylight savings time passed last month with little impact, both in terms of the predicted aclockalypse as well as the energy savings it was supposed to generate. However, the shift did have some severe consequences for one Pennsylvania 15-year-old: 12 days in the slammer. The kid made a call in to his school's recorded information line in the early hours of March 11, just a few minutes before the hot line supposedly received a bomb threat. School officials, in their haste to find the caller, matched his cell phone number to a list of callers to the hotline that morning, and immediately pointed the finger at him. His phone correctly recorded the call time as 3:12 am, which was apparently close enough for them to the 3:17 am entry in the system's call logs for the bomb threat. However, the officials hadn't set the clock in their call system properly, meaning the bomb threat came in more than an hour after the kid's innocent call, and it took nearly two weeks of the kid sitting in juvenile detention for somebody to figure it out. The real culprit here is somebody's stupidity -- because even if the time change hadn't occurred, the call times still didn't match up by five minutes.

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