"That's Hedley!"
Posted on 12/15/2009 2:39:33 PM PST by decimon
The stereotype of computer scientists as geeks who memorize Star Trek lines and never leave the lab may be driving women away from the field, a new study suggests.
And women can be turned off by just the physical environment, say, of a computer-science classroom or office that's strewn with objects considered "masculine geeky," such as video games and science-fiction stuff.
"When people think of computer science, the image that immediately pops into many of their minds is of the computer geek surrounded by such things as computer games, science-fiction memorabilia and junk food," said lead researcher Sapna Cheryan, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Washington. "That stereotype doesn't appeal to many women who don't like the portrait of masculinity that it evokes."
The upshot: Women don't feel they would fit in and so steer clear of computer-science majors and jobs, the researchers say. Such avoidance could help to explain why just 22 percent of computer-science graduates are women, a percentage that has been steadily decreasing, according to 2008 data from the National
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
"That's Hedley!"
Sounds good to me. After all these years I still enjoy getting my wife naked.
Good Grief! They look like the people I was in school with in the 70’s.
you pulled out the old ram and installed our new ram which was 2 ram chips piggybacked
Clever.
It did require extra RAM, about an extra 4k of Static Ram if I remember right.
1Kx1, if I recall correctly.
I probably drooled all over your ads in Byte. Back when Byte was drool-worthy...
The problem in IT was created in the late 1980s and 1990s when women with EDU and SOC degrees, or no degree at all, invaded the IT world at the management levels using affirmative action mandates, and destroyed any credibility remaining in the management, systems, and project processes.
I’m sure that out of a thousand or so male computer geeks there exists a female one, but I have never met her. That’s why I qualified my statement with “personal experience.” It’s also why I don’t worry, since the theoretical skilled computer geekette would have no trouble landing a job based on her skill. I for one would hire her just for the rarity factor.
Those were the days weren’t they? I remember buying my first 16k dynamic ram upgrade for the old TRS, only cost 300 dollars... for 16k hahaaa, oh the pain, the pain.
Yeah, “the Patch” freed up clogs in the video display subroutines that prevented the display of the ASCII for the lowercase. Once we added the extra ram and the Patch had freed up the full 256 characters of 8bit ASCII for the display, we suddenly found out that the TRS80 was producing UPPERCASE normally and LOWERCASE when you pressed the shift key. Thats exactly backward :)
So we had to “flip the keyboard over” meaning another P-Term had to be burned into the brand new Signetics 82S107 field programmable rom patch that was at the core of my Upgrade module. After we flipped the keyboard over so to speak, when you typed you got lowercase and when you pressed the Shift key, you got Uppercase. We all held our breath the first time I typed in a DOS command like DIR or CAT or LIST whichever it was, to see if the Command Shell would respond to lowercase since it had been originally coded with nothing but UPPERCASE coming from its keyboard. YEEEHA it worked just fine. All commands did.
The patch also did stuff like Debouncing the TAPE interface, which was a big deal back then since the cassette tape deck was one of your big ways to get programs in and out. After patching the Tape subroutines the Tape interface went from frustrating to rock solid. So rock solid that as hams (most of us were) we were sending programs back and forth to each other by plugging the Audio Out into the Mic jacks of our 2meter handietalkies, and the Audio In lines into the Earphone jack. The tape start/stop plugged into the external microphone Push To Talk input. It was pretty neat stuff to be doing in the early 80s and led into me getting sucked into the telecommunications industry where I built the first totally automated Cellular system, in the VHF RCC spectrum. The cellphones, which were really RCC handie talkies with tone decoders in them so that they could “ring” and alert the owner to an incoming call, and a small DTMF dialing pad to place out going calls. A gutted Motorola 19” rack cabinet held the TRS80 computer system with expansion interface and disk drives. After coding the whole thing over the course of a year, it could handle incomind DID lines, a whole 10,000 number group coming in, and 300 customers which is about how many customers you can put on 1 radio channel and have them share it reasonably. The system also had an Auto Restart unit in it, to where the system was always pulsing a small timer chip, and if those heartbeats went away for a period of time, it would kick a relay which would reboot the computer and bring the system right back online and place a call to the owner to let them know there might be trouble. Over the years the system was downsized into the Color Computer, I added more and more features like digital pocket paging etc etc, and the company that I was building them for had deployed enough of these units around the northwest, controlling radio installations on the high mountain tops and became a 1 million dollar a year++ company in one year serving thousands of customers of all professions with mobilephone and paging services. They were very VERY economical to replicate when you owned the hardware interfaces and software to make them do their magic. A few hundred bucks per unit versus 10s of Thousands.
The patch also fixed the Printer subroutines which had been locked up by tandy/microsoft to only allow printing to Tandy printers by messing with the bytes travelling to the computer. After the patch it was wide open for all printers including Epson and CItoh etc, the pobular printers of the time. It fixed a bunch of other stuff to.
It was a great time to be young and inbued with technological prowess. I guess I went into the lab at about age 7 or 8 and never came out so that by 1980 at the age of 24 or 25 I had what I needed to really make hay in this new world of microprocessors.
So thats what I try to tell my Nephew today. My sisters son. He is like 23 years old, sits in his basement and crushes up his Ritalin pills (meth) and snorts them, calms himself back down with Vodka, smokes a bunch of Pot to get the other tastes out of his mouth and then digs holes in the walls to try to find the beeping sounds, and tried to Vivisection the family dog because he was sure that there was a FBI spy device in it relaying all his thoughts to Langley, all the while talking to his little Emo dopefriends about the lastest videogame that he stole. He cant go any where because they took his license to drive away from him and now he is trying to figure out a way to fool his latest probation officer.
I tried to tell him to knock off being a white kid trying to be a Black Gangsta, and to choose a profession and to forget all this Social crap, all this touchy feeley people crap and to buckle down and study for 20 years and then maybe he could build and create and contribute to the world.
You know what he said to me? He said: “Wull, I want to be able to do all that stuff you do but I don’t want to study. I want to comit crimes so brilliantly that when I get out of prison the government will have to give me some really Big Cushy job helping them”
Do you believe that? I wanted to be able to pass along a lifetime of learning and insight into the electromagnetic fabric of nature to a family offspring. But he spun his head somehow and may be schizophrenic now. I dont know, but he way he threatens his mom, he will never come into my house again.
BE SMART AND USE YOUR HEAD :)
Cheers!
(Sound of grey_whiskers purring).
I wonder if the author is as concerned about the lack of males in education, sociology, and social work?
*crickets_chirping*
I have the scruffy beard but no suspenders. :(
Bachelor’s in Comp. Sci. here. The ratio in my classes were about 80% men and 20% women, so I know what you’re talking about.
Ah yes, Grace Hopper. Military girl computer scientist.
The stuff manga is made of...
I think that's it. It's hard to find an IT woman these days who doesn't come from that "soft skills" background...and IT is short on real CS people, anyway, being an applied technology area.
“Speaking of, can’t wait to get my Droid next month.”
Sweetie has been hinting that I’m getting a Droid phone for Christmas. I’ve already found the console app I want so I can have command line access to the underlying Linux kernel.
Those were the days weren’t they?
Indeed, they were.
I remember buying my first 16k dynamic ram upgrade for the old TRS, only cost 300 dollars... for 16k hahaaa, oh the pain, the pain.
In my case, my little group of friends went up to Lewistown, Montana for the 1979 solar eclipse because one of my friend's dad had a new truck he wanted to break in. He brought his brand-spanking new TRS-80 with him (4K, Level I). A friend and I were up all night in the motel room the night before the eclipse hacking away on the thing; neither of us had touched a computer before.
It was a life-changing experience. That summer, the high school's chess club bought a Level II 16K machine, that eventually got decked out with an expansion units, floppies, and the whole shebang. I spent the entire summer hanging out at the high school just playing with the machine.
By the end of 10th grade, I was doing data entry for a local accounting firm, which I managed to parlay into a programming gig (COBOL on a Burroughs B-800 minicomputer), but my heart still belonged to the TRS-80. Sometime in 1980, I scraped up enough money for a Heathkit microprocessor trainer, the low-end model in a cardboard case with 256 bytes of RAM, and built it. Good thing it worked first time, because I could not have figured out what was wrong with it back then.
I've been doing programming and hardware design ever since. I tend to get involved in stuff that's close to the hardware.
Once we added the extra ram and the Patch had freed up the full 256 characters of 8bit ASCII for the display, we suddenly found out that the TRS80 was producing UPPERCASE normally and LOWERCASE when you pressed the shift key.
D'oh! Maybe it's a good thing I never got the bits together to mod the chess club TRS-80...
The patch also did stuff like Debouncing the TAPE interface, which was a big deal back then since the cassette tape deck was one of your big ways to get programs in and out.
Indeed. I remember when floppies were fast. I also remember software that would play music by fiddling with a small reed relay in the machine, burning it out if you weren't careful.
So rock solid that as hams (most of us were) we were sending programs back and forth to each other by plugging the Audio Out into the Mic jacks of our 2meter handietalkies, and the Audio In lines into the Earphone jack.
Interesting. I never managed to get very far into ham radio; I loved fiddling with the equipment, but never had anything to say to anyone. This sort of thing would have changed my world. I'm pretty certain the hams in my area weren't doing it.
Thanks for all the details; fascinating story.
It was a great time to be young and inbued with technological prowess.
And enthusiasm. Don't forget enthusiasm. I find it harder to scrape together as time goes on.
I guess I went into the lab at about age 7 or 8 and never came out so that by 1980 at the age of 24 or 25 I had what I needed to really make hay in this new world of microprocessors.
For me, it was all compressed; I started in 1979 at the age of, uh, 16 and it wasn't long before I had a job doing computing. Went to college to learn enough to build a computer. When all I had left in EE was analog I bugged out to CS, but I couldn't handle all the database mashing and whatnot; I wanted to fling bits. So I wound up getting my degree in Philosophy, of all things (my boss at the time wouldn't let me drop out entirely because he was ex-professor).
So I wound up doing both hardware design and low-level programming. The firm I worked for did consulting work for folks all over the world; I designed both hardware and software that was sold by DEC and did some work for Siemens in Munich.
Just recently, I noticed that the 26th anniversary of my first VMS device driver had come and gone without me noticing it. Time flies when you're having fun.
So thats what I try to tell my Nephew today...
Don't even get me started. I have a sister that was born just before I left for college. She's a bum and she's married to a bum; neither will ever amount to anything. They're living in my house in Utah; after 9/11, I moved down to California when my job up there disappeared, but still have the house. I charge them rent (with the intent of motivating them to get a job), but it's paid month-after-month by their church. My wife would toss them out if there wasn't a niece involved.
It's odd; I have a job that I love and would do even if I didn't get paid. On those rare occasions they have jobs, they're always looking for excuses to get some time off or not show up for work.
The world's going to hell in a handbasket, I tells ya!
Smarts and looks are definitely not mutually exclusive, and smarts adds an extra level of hotness.
Really?
That's great. I love figs.
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