kelpdiver

wait a minute. When anyone else gives a story point, you keep saying it's a single example and not reflective of the greater picture. Yet your evidence is your own singular examples - your daughter, and your singular observations of her classes. What's special about you? The number of singular stories on the other side and the CURRENT graduation rates strongly suggest that your singulars are the exceptions, not the rule.

proving once again your complete lack of objectivity in your quest to see him strung up. Most of us see an attention whore.

Licklider was part of DARPA - ie, the government. Kleinrock was a PhD student whose concept was turned into reality at DARPA. Development is much more than just the idea, but the implementation and testing.

I will give you that on rare occasions some smart people in the government make things happen but it is not comparable to what business does. Business could survive without government. how well was shipping near Somalia doing until the governments increased their military presence? And without those roads, how would business survive at all? No ability to transport except along the sea shore, and then we have pirates again.

Not sure how many times I'll need to repeat this - by the time they're adults, it's too late to decide they'd like to study physics at Cal or MIT. It's not too late to decide to go to law school, but for the STEM side of things, yeah.

or she's a career woman. Not being married is still a sin, but hardly the same one suggested here. But really, what women or minorities are going to vote for her? Her actions during the war branded her as Auntie Tom. And the Hoover Institute isn't exactly an outreach organization to the moderate or the left.

hah - given a choice between trained but incompetent TSA guys, or untrained and incompetent UK contractors....I'll fly to Fiji instead.

I love that tactic. Sure, if that's what you want to think, go for it. You take yourself so serious, Kelpy. you gave a stupid answer, I pointed out why, and you responded with a wild irrelevance. If you wanted to tag it with a "retarded" tag, fine. I don't care for it when Bill plays dumb either. We can play that way in the next Shac rant. Skip from Wendy's generation to NerdGirl's and it's a bit better, but hardly great. Current graduation numbers have also been provided, confirming that it is still present.

meh - I suspect the situation in the job market is already pretty apparent for those that really care to do their homework. by the 8-10 year olds? They all want to be astronomers and firemen and reporters. Maybe super heroes these days. By the time kids even begin to think about these things (and it's difficult to do too far ahead in technology due to changing trends) it's too late. If you want to do engineering or physics at a serious school, you better be on track to finish 1st year calculus (both semesters, not just the 1st) in high school, or you're going to suffer a bit in year 1 at college. (or more likely, not be admitted) Short of compressing years together, that means algebra in junior high. wow - I had no idea that grade schools and high schools had different curriculums for their students by gender....shows you learn something every day here clearly we need to force the girls to pretend to be astronauts and firemen at least 3 days per week until they think right so you have no actual response, is what you're saying here. Again, by the time kids, their parents, and any guidance counselors that might still exist, get to thinking about the job market in relation to college decisions, it's too late for some of the choices. Fortunately, math is the only one that's really hard to make up on time for. Though honestly I'd generally discourage kids from making the current job market the key to their decisions - the job market changes and 4-5 years is a long time to invest in a BS in a subject you find you don't like very much.

You do realize that I said that addressing the problem via admissions quota policies is not the way to do it, right? when you talked about "different approaches," that is the most obvious one. What else can you do if the initial approach fails and Caltech gets sued for non compliance? What has UC been doing all along? They add points to the admissions scoring of "disadvantaged" candidates.

http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/obama_administration/daily_presidential_tracking_poll Polling says otherwise. read your own link:

Like I said, I don't believe this story to be valid. But your answer is about the least assuring I can imagine ... you're blowing smoke up our asses here. The key problem with past mistakes around admissions quota policies is that the damage done to those applicants are long lasting.

What I love s how you just made that up. All I ever said is you should have to be a citizen to vote and asking for you to prove that is not asking much.... I mean you seem to be fine with me having to show ID to buy a gun, why should that SAME standard not apply to voting? And unless you have data to show how many illegal votes have been cast... you are tailing out of your ass when you claim it is not many.... Fact is you can't prove that. a big part of the problem with you disappearing for a week at a time and resurrecting dead threads is your inability to keep context in your mind. We were talking about voter purges here, not voter ID. Dumping people 6 weeks before an election because they might not be legal voters is an example of presumption of guilt. You argued that this is acceptable because the alternative is that there might be an (imaginary) number of fraudulent votes that matches or exceeds the number of legal voters that would be disenfranchised in a purge. But since you have no fucking idea how many illegal votes there are, we only know the Americans getting screwed. So then we're on your favorite question - how do we count illegal votes? It feels like imaginary number math to me... For large scale fraud, you're looking for end results dramatically different from pre election polls and exit polls. But that's not fully reliable as there are many flaws in polling, starting with the participants lying (Bradley effect). Instead you look at how can they cheat. In the case that keeps getting raised to promote voter ID - they walk to a poll, see a name, and claim to be that person - it's pretty easy to detect. In an election with 50% turnout, 50% of the time you're going to get a second person (or absentee ballot) showing up. Bit of a give away, no? Easily measured and any sizeable number of such incidents would be indication that concerted voter fraud is occurring.

DARPA isn't a civilian entity. NSF is, but that seems akin to saying that defense contractors do all the work, not the DoD. Yes Bell Labs and the Berkeley guys did the substantial development behind unix and the internet protocols used today, but they needed the starting point and the money to do it. (Those who oppose spending today on far fetched ideas like biofuel or solar power or electric cars should look at how the development of what is now an essential part of our lives - the internet - was done.)

Complete and utter bullshit. There are innate biological difference between men and women that ultimately drive their behavior, the culture around them merely intensifies those behaviors. So what are the portions being culture and behaviours here? The huge gaping hole in your thesis here, which I will say is a big part of the continuation of this disparity, is that it doesn't seem to exist in Asian girls. I live in a city that is significant Chinese and other Asians - perhaps to the tune of 40-45%. I went to a university that had a significant Asian population. Even my high school in Orange County had a significant Asian representation in my honors classes - many of them lied about their address to attend my school. Their parents don't buy into your thesis and they certainly didn't allow their children to slack off with that excuse. End result - I see nothing to support your claim. The observational evidence is so strong that I think it's quite obvious that it's our cultural biases that are nearly entirely responsible. It's nearly shocking to me when I come across an Asian clerk - ie, generally the average woman, not the elite who went to my university - that can't do change in the register well. For other ethnicities, I expect that sort of fumbling.

meh - I suspect the situation in the job market is already pretty apparent for those that really care to do their homework. by the 8-10 year olds? They all want to be astronomers and firemen and reporters. Maybe super heroes these days. By the time kids even begin to think about these things (and it's difficult to do too far ahead in technology due to changing trends) it's too late. If you want to do engineering or physics at a serious school, you better be on track to finish 1st year calculus (both semesters, not just the 1st) in high school, or you're going to suffer a bit in year 1 at college. (or more likely, not be admitted) Short of compressing years together, that means algebra in junior high.

That's highly unlikely. While females may be underrepresented in math and science (excluding chemistry and biology), interest in these subjects by American students in general is pretty low. I can't imagine anyone would take steps to lower total admissions further. More likely is that attempts would be made to nurture an interest in math and science in young primary and secondary school students, particularly girls, so that when they are old enough to choose a university major, more of them will find math and science appealing. Initially, perhaps. But when those methods fail, what happens? Title IX lead to some bad results for non revenue men's sports like gymnastics and baseball. How long until Caltech gets sued to comply with an academic Title IX?

uh, while Al Gore didn't invent the internet, DARPA and the NSF certainly did. Initially intended as a networking solution that would still allow communications in the midst of a nuclear war.

cultural norms persist for generations. The biases are still obvious to see, and the results are still easily measured. BTW, you leaped to a conclusion that I said government needs to tell parents anything. I pointed out a fault that we have, not a solution. But now that we're in a state where women are actually overrrepresented in college, it seems likely that the next generation will be significantly closer in those fields.

I wonder what 'flaws' you think exist. And whatever you 'fix', even then, 'making' someone do something they don't want to do is still wrong. I think it's wrong to give girls dolls over legos, and esp Barbies that say things like "math is hard." How much engineering background are they getting playing in Barbie's fun house while the boys are using construction kits with hammers? Sure her mansion has an elevator pulley in it, but once it's been built, nothing learned there. Children absorb what they're introduced to and build on top of it. Girls are steered away from the STEM fields by these cultural norms that date back to when they were to be housewives and perhaps nurses. It's not intentional damage, but it is damage all the same.

Bio,Chem,and biochem are classic premed programs, particularly the two with the bio in them. It's not surprising that you see the same 60% of women that universities see in general. At least half of students at the University are premed or prelaw. The other half of sciences- math, physics, computer science, engineering in general - they're still bastions of testosterone thanks in large part to the numbers of Shahs in them. In the bigger picture of let people elect their major and pick the best, yes, that is the way to go. But the original posting articulated a Title IX policy might be implemented, which is an entirely different beast than the current one.

being the VP candidate on a losing ticket isn't damaging in the longer term. Look at Palin - she came out of it as strong a candidate as she had any right to be given her qualifications. A GOP loser may position him or herself in good position to run for the upper half of the ticket in 2016. I also don't see it as a slam dunk loss either - odds are getting good enough that it's worth taking a shot. It's very hard to get on the ticket for President and this year is the best chance for most of them to do so. If Obama prevails, then it will be a highly contested race in 2016 and frankly most of the existing candidates should be disqualified for failing to win this time. The GOP will need to find new blood, new leadership. I had expected it to emerge by now but it seems that got derailed by the Tea Partiers.

I'm not so sure that those numbers are representative of STEM programs nationwide. Of all the schools I've attended (two in Florida, one in Missouri), males have vastly outnumbered females in all (Calc or higher) math and science classes I've taken, except Biology. (My observations are biased towards math classes.) At my current school, I would estimate the math department male:female ratio is at least 2:1 for undergrads, and higher for graduate students. As undergrads, the females seem more likely to study Math Education, so fewer female students continue on to graduate level mathematics classes. I don't believe Don's summary either*. I read the opening post as a rant that Obama was going to apply Title IX like policies to STEM degrees in some sort of quota system that would require universities to have equal representation in students and in graduation rates. Like with sports, this would make the false assumption that equal interest exists. I don't believe this fear is real, but it would be problematic. You can't make girls want to do these degrees at the same level of interest without fixing some serious societal flaws. I'm all for selling it, but not for the other half where you discourage or filter out the boys. *

microeconomics - individual actions - are fairly simple and easy to build models around. But the big picture where all the little models interacts, not so simple. (sort of like the climate science). Economics has well pedigreed people in complete disagreement with each other, leading to a fair conclusion that this is more social science than science.

As I understand it, Blythe Masters, whose background is in economics, "invented" credit default swaps. To whom are you referring? No. She was only responsible at J.P Morgan, but the concept of derivatives existed well before she ever came on the scene. In fact, people like Frank Partnoy were warning about them as far back as 1994, just about the time Masters was gaining power and designed the one with Exxon. But, like I said, they existed several years before that. My understanding is financial institutions hired out of work physicists (people particularly good with differential equations), to invent the derivatives that directly lead to the creation of CDOs. you went from an (single) out of work physicist to multiple, unnamed, out of work physicists at some unnamed part in time? OTOH, it can explain the spectacular mess this sub species of Quants got us all into. Treating human behavior as simple, if complex, mathematics is hardly better than the mathless economics practiced by others. And then you look at the ongoing religion of technical analysis.... Nothing more dangerous than smart guys who think they actually understand the big picture and are willing to gamble trillions on their theses.