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Comment · 12 years ago
Comment · 12 years ago
The gender balance is equal for law/medicine mostly at the school level[1].

And with regards to school[2]: "Research finds that men engage in more abstract thinking about many topics—using categories, generalizations—while women are more disposed to context-specific thinking—in terms of concrete situations and relationships. This is evident, for one thing, in how some psychologists contrast the moral reasoning of males and females. Males’ moral judgments tend to be governed by abstract principles of justice, duty, and fairness that apply to all people and situations (e.g., whether a law is broken, whether justice is served). Females’ moral judgments give more weight to specific relationships between people and extenuating circumstances in a given situation; moral judgments are made through subjective feelings (e.g., whether someone feels betrayed or harmed) rather than abstract principles."

And we know from other research, that people who fail in introductory programming classes, fail on that point exactly - they have problems with working with programs that manipulate variables without some meaning.

Add to that that in many fields of study women choose, there's relatively a lot of human interactions, and the goals are towards helping humans,one would see why CS doesn't have the biggest appeal for females ,and why the story of other professions evolved differently.

And that might guide us to some changes in CS curriculum - like maybe teaching in a more concrete way. But one wonders , isn't good CS mostly about abstraction ?

[1]http://onlinelaw.wustl.edu/women-law-infographic/

[2]http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sex-roles-and-seei...

Comment · 12 years ago
Comment · 12 years ago
Bill Gurley's post is very interesting and in-depth. One thing he doesn't mention is the potential of UberPool(combining multiple passenger trips into a single car) to further increase demand. I wonder why is that ?
Comment · 12 years ago
Have you tried something like f.lux ? it can remove the black spectrum of colors from computer/tablet displays ,and they claims there's research that this is the spectrum most critical for messing up with sleep.

With regards to eink web-apps, don't forget you'll also have to fight the keyboard if you'll even get one. So it's hard to design to that medium. On that note, there's the onyx eink phones/tablets that have a version of the play store, but their only unique apps are rss reader and google calender. But maybe sniffing around onyx and their users will let you discover usable apps.

Comment · 12 years ago
Maybe with UberPool(sharing rides with other people on the same route) they'll have more access ? and if you combine that with Uber's SUV service, which enables sharing rides between up to 6 people, you'll get to something more accessible to poor people.
Comment · 12 years ago
What's the big difference from downloading a cross-platform app using torrents ?
Comment · 12 years ago
I'm not sure it would take the long term to determine reliability: there are engineers who specialize in that,and there are software tools to simulate the reliability of a mechanical systems.

Whether this company did this or not is unknown, if they are offering this system on a per month basis, it makes sense they did some reasonable level of analysis of costs, because it would reduce their risk greatly.

Comment · 12 years ago
Comment · 12 years ago
Yes, it's not very nice to collude. On the other hand, were programmers get very good salaries. To some, maybe even Sergey, it might not seem like an urjent and critical moral issue,in the way that saving lives is.
Comment · 12 years ago
As a practical matter, especially for the robot ,it might not matter who is observing. The fact that one can observe oneself enables further capabilities like better feedback.

And by the way i think this observing robot has(or can have) an internal definition of self, and an observer beyond the self. It seems possible.

Comment · 12 years ago
Comment · 12 years ago
Watson understands natural language(to some extent).That's a general capability, not a specific task.
Comment · 12 years ago
The article ends in a non serious fashion.So the author discovers his books outside of Amazon.Does this fact has any relevance to how people in general discover books ?

On the other hand, Amazon is Google's biggest threat in general product search(and probably discovery). So surely Amazon is even stronger in books.

And i'm sure Amazon does play with search/recommendation ranking, and publishers see the effect on sales, or else they wouldn't have bothered with this fight.

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