It's ironic that many authors resort to using the blatantly sexist 'she' to avoid being called sexist.
I would love to see any evidence that the usage of 'he' somehow harms females, and I would support any evidence-supported solution that is suggested (for one thing, I wouldn't want it to harm my wife and daughters), but so far this whole issue seems to be completely locked in the realm of hypothesis, and it's without the feeblest suggestion of evidence.
It's not that using "he" is sexist, so much as it's an indicator of a society where being male is the "default" setting, and it's always a little bit surprising to see a woman doing something. So I would argue that no, it's not really sexist to use "she" as a pronoun, if you're doing it to be rebellious. It isn't about putting down men. It's about encouraging the visible presence of women.
The pronoun thing is probably a minor issue in the gender wars, though. That "he" is the default pronoun isn't a problem so much as, say, that the vast majority of scientists are men, which sends the message to young girls that science is not for them.
Why is the small number of women in science a problem? To call this fact a problem good evidence is needed.*
Usually when this is called a problem it is done along with making the implicit or explicit suggestion that men in scientific fields are sexist and somehow discriminate against women. But I, like most men in science, would severely reprimand anyone who treats women unfairly. Therefore I find it extremely unwarranted and unfair that feminists think it is OK to accuse us of sexism without evidence. And I find it saddening that not more men have the courage to speak up against these accusations.
I'm sure there have been cases of discrimination against women in science, but this in no way proves that it's widespread, or that it's affecting the number of women in science.
[* The logic goes that since men and women are identical, there should be just as many women in science as there are men. But this conclusion is unwarranted because the premise is unsupported by evidence.]
If it were actually the case women were inherently less interested in science, sure, I wouldn't care, but discrimination exists. Much more subtly than it used to, but it's still there, and hence still a problem.
While it seems intuitive that a more scientifically 'literate' population is 'better', is 'scientific illiteracy' really a problem?
To me it would be a problem if there were lots of openings for jobs that require scientific skills without there being anyone to fulfill it. As things stand, to me it seems that there are tens, if not hundreds, of qualified people for every possible job opening, whether in academia, government, or the private sector.
What makes you think they are qualified? Certainly there are a lot of unemployed folks, and there is plenty of work for qualified people to do, but that doesn't necessarily back up your point (in fact, the very issue at hand is that it doesn't).
For the claim that 'there is too few qualified people in the US' to be a scientific claim, it needs to be falsifiable. In other words, what evidence do you need to see, in the future, to convince you that yes, now there are enough qualified people? What data-points will you use?
My entire problem is that all of the data-points I've seen used so far are extremely questionable, and there doesn't seem to be enough people questioning them.
The fact that US students have dismal scientific knowledge to a naive person suggests, but in reality in no way proves, that the US has, or will one day have, a shortage of scientifically qualified people.
I hope there are enough intelligent people who are uncomfortable about making the leap of faith from 'US students have bad science grades' to 'the US will experience a shortage of scientifically-qualified people'.
Any redesign of the education system needs to be grounded in science, not fashionable rhetoric.
>I hope there are enough intelligent people who are uncomfortable about making the leap of faith from 'US students have bad science grades' to 'the US will experience a shortage of scientifically-qualified people'.
How about the leap of faith from "there are heaps of scientific and technical jobs for which no qualified candidates can be found" to "science education in the US sucks?" And also the fact of increasing reliance on immigrants to fill those roles when a suitable local (i.e. native) doesn't appear?
Seems falsifiable to me.
edit: basically what I was getting at is that your original statement: "As things stand, to me it seems that there are tens, if not hundreds, of qualified people for every possible job opening" is false afaik.
doh! I wrote "wireless wiretapping scandal" but I meant "warrantless wiretapping scandal", which is what you are referring to explicitly. edited to note correction; Thanks!
To me things haven't really changed. The non-techy users never made good use of the freedoms of the PC-era, so to them their environment was just as restricted as the Kindle or iPad environment.
As for the geeks, things haven't changed either. We find ways to open up the devices and get the freedoms we want.
I agree with you on the extreme ends of the spectrum. But there are plenty of people in the middle who can be encouraged in either direction by the way we construct our tools. I think the explosion of content on the web, or Web 2.0, is all the evidence you need.
I can't speak for chc, but content creation on tablets and smart phones is real for joe average. Maybe not the kind of content joebadmo is thinking about, but the iphone 4 is the most popular camera on Flickr: photo and video editing power is given to the normal user without learning Photoshop or Avid. Even the customizing of your "personal" news magazine in apps like flipboard, Zite, ... is some kind of "content creation". Moreover, social media doesn't need keyboard and PC - most content on SM sites is created/shared "on the fly". I could go on. And lets wait for the integration of voice recognition in iOS 5 (and coming Android versions) - I don't thing the post-PC area is a step backwards. Content and content creation is changing for the non-power user ... and tablets and smart phones are heading to fill this niche.
Apps, optimized websites, content-sharing networks like Instagram, etc.
Basically, the flip side of the increased consumption is that it's a lot easier to get your work out to other people, which means people who previously couldn't or wouldn't are now becoming producers. For example, a lot more people are publishing books for e-readers because those platforms make it so easy — with Amazon, it's pretty much as simple as logging into your Amazon account and uploading a text file. Web series (e.g. "The Guild") are a viable medium because so many people have these easy-consumption devices.
The non-techy users never made good use of the freedoms of the PC-era, so to them their environment was just as restricted as the Kindle or iPad environment.
Yes and no. They didn't create software, but they created content. Just look at Facebook & other social network sites. It's full of user generated content. Likewise people generated content to print out with word processors, and they generated content as emails to send to people. They also generated photographic content. However pretty much all of this is now done in web browsers, so in a way, you can generate all this content with iPad/Kindle.
There is a book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (by two political scientists), that argues the Jewish/Israeli lobby is one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful, in the US.
From Amazon:
"Mearsheimer and Walt, political scientists at the University of Chicago and Harvard, respectively, survey a wide coalition of pro-Israel groups and individuals, including American Jewish organizations and political donors, Christian fundamentalists, neo-con officials in the executive branch, media pundits who smear critics of Israel as anti-Semites and the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, which they characterize as having an almost unchallenged hold on Congress. This lobby, they contend, has pressured the U.S. government into Middle East policies that are strategically and morally unjustifiable: lavish financial subsidies for Israel despite its occupation of Palestinian territories; needless American confrontations with Israel's foes Syria and Iran; uncritical support of Israel's 2006 bombing of Lebanon, which violated the laws of war; and the Iraq war, which almost certainly would not have occurred had [the Israel lobby] been absent. The authors disavow conspiracy mongering, noting that the lobby's activities constitute legitimate, if misguided, interest-group politics, as American as apple pie. Considering the authors' academic credentials and the careful reasoning and meticulous documentation with which they support their claims, the book is bound to rekindle the controversy."
And why is it so "powerful"? Is it perhaps because lots of people think that Israel is right?
Being morally correct and helping people is a very strong American ideal - even when it's to the detriment of the country. And supporting Israel fits right in, even when it causes America trouble.
It seems because of the fact that American Jews are much better organized, and better focused on their interests, than any other group. They're probably the most politically active group in the US.
I don't see anything wrong with the Jewish people looking out for their interests, but as a scientifically-minded person I'm more interested in objective analyses of the situation (as in the mentioned book) than vague anecdotes like 'lots of people think that Israel is right'.
If American Jews are an order of magnitude more politically active than other groups, we shouldn't be ashamed to admit it. It's an interesting sociological phenomenon that needs to be studied.
It would have to be quite a few orders of magnitude, considering that Jews make up less than 2% of the US population.
It's not as hard as you think to get support for Israel. It doesn't require a lot of lobbying when the people being lobbied already agree with your position.
The objective analysis of the situation is that support for Israel is the right thing to do morally. It's not always great for short term American interests, but long term its value is unquestioned.
Obviously it would be a lot easier to submit to Arab demands, but even though letting someone bully you can remove the short term pain, long term it's not a good idea.
Thinking of this from supply and demand theory, programmers only build programs that have a market, and there doesn't seem to be a market for such a tool (there isn't a large group of people vocally demanding it).
I'd guess that there is a market for it, but like the market for the iPhone before Steve Jobs, nobody powerful enough has discovered it yet.
Wouldn't the perfect cloud platform be one that charges based on disk IO, disk space used, network IO, RAM space used, (Ram IO?,) and CPU used? Maybe there are other metrics I'm ignoring.
https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/services/pricing been around since 2002, does automatic load-balancing, have most of the benefits of what people are calling "cloud-computing", makes no presumptions about language of choice, does MySQL, and is extremely competitively priced.
After getting used to Chrome's silent updates, I started to find it breathtakingly ridiculous the way Firefox kept interrupting its startup asking about updates. When I start Firefox, it is because I want to go to a website. Giving attention to updates is not what I want to do.
@Steko: I saw a supposedly new, and saddening, photo of Steve Jobs in which he looks emaciated. Maybe it is the way he is dressed that makes him look so much worse than what we are used to.
I would love to see any evidence that the usage of 'he' somehow harms females, and I would support any evidence-supported solution that is suggested (for one thing, I wouldn't want it to harm my wife and daughters), but so far this whole issue seems to be completely locked in the realm of hypothesis, and it's without the feeblest suggestion of evidence.