Tag: technology

The problem with STEM

What people fail to realize is that the problem in the tech industry isn’t that there aren’t enough women getting STEM degrees, the problem is that too many are doing so:

Research shows women share negative experiences far more widely than men. Does that have an impact on diversity? Do women start avoiding certain companies because they are well informed about the culture?

Barbara: Absolutely. There were two technology companies which had this enormous turnover, and we actually tracked where the women went. And again, these companies had this huge focus on recruiting women but the culture wasn’t inclusive or gender intelligent, and so the women would end up leaving.

We have these amazing women with STEM degrees, and they’re shelving that education and going off to do something else.

When we tracked down where they went, what we found is that they went to smaller or mid-sized companies, or some of them just left the sector. They would say, “I do not even want to be in technology anymore.” So here we have these amazing women with STEM degrees, and they’re shelving that education and going off to do something else.

What’s one of the most common frustrations you hear from women in the tech sector?

Barbara: One female engineer described it as a drip-drip-drip: it’s not just one thing that happens once. She calls it being “cleverly dismissed.” So, she’ll bring up a concern or something, and it gets cleverly dismissed. If you have these drip-drip experiences of feeling excluded and dismissed over years and years, this is where women don’t feel valued for their intellect, for their ideas, or for the different way of thinking they bring, which is so useful and so important.

That’s one aspect of the problem right there. The “different way of thinking they bring” is neither useful nor important. It’s irrelevant. All those clever dismissals are just the tech gammas being nice to their coworkers, because in most cases the correct response to the concerns being raised would be: “what on Earth does that have to do with our actual objectives and responsibilities?”

The main reason there are not more women actually doing technology-related work in the technology sector despite their expensive STEM degrees is a very simple one: all those amazing women don’t like the nature of the actual work itself. They’re not good at it, they don’t like it, and so they tend to gravitate towards tangentially related sectors, like marketing technology or selling it.

Which is fine, but it’s hardly an efficient use of resources or an indicator that forcing even less-interested women into the field is a good idea.

So much for the Cloud

I’ve always thought the idea of putting your data up on someone else’s server was absolutely and utterly retarded. I’ve turned down more offers of cloud-based storage than I can recall for just that reason. But most people don’t understand that because MPAI. So, it seems likely that what 4chan is calling “The Fappening” (one has to love the way those guys name things) is going to throw a monkeywrench into more than a few business plans, including those belonging to Apple and Microsoft, because even idiots can understand the problem when naked pictures of celebrities are involved.

In case you’re not aware of what happened, a hacker got access to a number of directories belonging to celebrities and discovered that a number of young actresses such as Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton, and Kirsten Dunst rather like to take pictures of themselves sans clothing. Which is a fine, time-honored tradition, of course, but again, storing those pictures on public servers protected by dubious security is not exactly what one would describe as the technologically sound option.

Another purge?

There are claims there has been another purging of a tech organization, albeit this time with the full knowledge of the founder:

I need for this info to get out. Most of the mods on 4chan have only been in that position for a couple of weeks.

The day after the #ShutDown4CHAN thing happened in july, moot called a meeting with all the mods in a IRC. He said that a girl did atempt suicide and that she had connections and they wanted blood.

Moot demanded that we use everything we can to remove anything wanting to “fuck up sjw shit”. Needless to say alot of mod anons called out moot and were kicked from the chat.

Before one was kicked he told every mod agianst this shit to meet in a 4craft server. We all did and discussed how fucked up this was. Over the next few days our chats about it became emails wich became skype calls. In the end we agreed that the next big fuck up the sjws make then we will let whatever happens happen.

What came next was dashcon.

We let the discussion go on like normal. Some mods did moots bidding and banned. Others were in the threads bumping. What was left was nearly 2/3 of 4chan`s given the boot.

We we’re all purged and outed. We fell on eachother and to bitch and moan. I swear to god our chatlogs the day after must look like mr. meeseeks.

One ousted mod anon was also a mod for 420chan and wizardchan. He said that alot of the mods thier were also exiled.

He gave proof, in the form of a collection of perma banned notices for dozens of IPs. And a list of those same IPs in log records for mod services.

We flipped our shit and began looking for more chans that this had happened to. 7chan, mchan, getchan and even shrekchan had massive mod axeings on the same day as 4chan.u

The next day a mod who wasnt outed contacted us. To our horror he told us that the new mods are complete sjws and openly call for permabans for alot of 4chan “board culture”.

As we dug deeper we found out that the same thing was happening to alot of subreddits. Normally we would say fuck em. But they told us that tons of non sjw mods had thier accounts sieged and them ip banned.

Deeper we dug and found out that dozens of forum mods and website mods were either changed or became rabbid sjw over night.

Currently this is the deepiest we have dug. The girl who attempted suicide was kassie washington, niece of nick denton owner and publisher of gawker media

There is only one answer to this exclusionary behavior, of course. Start your own organization. Build it up. And then POLICE YOUR ORGANIZATION’S DECISION-MAKERS on a regular basis. Any sign of supporting “inclusion” or “outreach” or posturing for PC approval should be grounds for immediate removal from any decision-making responsibilities.

My purging from SFWA was, as I warned at the time, a small harbinger of much bigger things to come. Don’t think you’re safe simply because you’re not controversial. It’s not only the controversy they hate, or even the open resistance, it is the mere fact of failing to kowtow to their dogma.

The H1B lie

It is readily apparent that there is no shortage of American tech workers when the Americans are being let go in order to hire the cheaper Indians, either via offshore outsourcing or immigration:

At A.B.’s company, about 220 IT jobs have been lost to offshore outsourcing over the last year. A.B. is telling the story because, initially, there was little knowledge among fellow employees about H-1B visa holders and how they are used. They didn’t know that offshore outsourcing firms are the largest users of H-1B visas, or exactly how this visa facilitates IT job losses in the U.S.

“I think once we learned about it, we became angrier toward the U.S. government than we were with the people that were over here from India,” A.B. said, “because the government is allowing this.”

The IT workers at this firm first learned of the offshore outsourcing threat through rumors. Later, the IT staff was called into an auditorium and heard directly from the CIO about the plan to replace them. It would take months for the transition to be completed, in part because of some new system installations.

Many younger IT workers found jobs and left. Mainframe workers were apparently in demand and also able to find new jobs. But older workers with skills in open systems, storage and SAN faced a harder time. About half the IT staffers, mostly the older ones, would stay to the end.

Training the replacement workers involved holding morning-long WebEx meetings several times a week with offshore outsourcing staff based in India. The sessions were recorded as details about the environment, including diagrams and scripts, were shared.

The entire foundation of free trade is a lie. There are multiple flaws in David Ricardo’s comparative advantage argument that I have previously pointed out – do a search or go through the Free Trade tag if you’re interested. So it should be totally unsurprising that the justifications for the H1B visas are lies as well.

What does the consensus say?

Jerry Pournelle considers the veracity of some claims concerning reactionless drive inventions:

I would very much like to see a proof of principle for a reactionless drive: a way to convert angular momentum into linear momentum, angular acceleration into linear acceleration, some new cosmic principle that requires energy conservation but does not require equal and opposite reaction; and indeed I applaud NASA for doing the tests.

However, it is my understanding that the current tests have been done in air, using torsion to measure acceleration, and that is suspect to me: I’d prefer they used gravity (a swing) and a vacuum chamber. If that’s too hard to arrange, put a garbage bag around the entire apparatus.

Complex electronics produce complex force fields; it’s quite possible for a torsion spring to be affected by such a field. That’s not mysterious; but if gravity is affected I’d call it extraordinary evidence.

We can only wait for more results. But if I had to bet, so far I’d still bet that they have found a demonstration of flawed testing principles, rather than disproving Newton.

I have to confess that I am more than a little confused here. My understanding is that the correct way to determine whether science is correct or not is to take a poll of scientists in mostly unrelated fields.

A hell beyond

Karl Popper said: “Those who promise us paradise on earth never produced anything but a hell.” Think about how badly the promises of multicultural utopia through diversity have gone, and then think about the level of hell that experimenting with the entire food chain in search of transspecies utopia could lead:

The well-being of large and long-lived free-living mammals could be secured even with today’s technologies. Expanding the circle of compassion further is more technically challenging. Until a couple of years ago, I’d have spoken in terms of centuries. For sociological rather than technical reasons, I still think this kind of timescale is more credible for safeguarding the well-being of humans, transhumans and the humblest of nonhuman animals alike.

Certainly, until the CRISPR revolution, talk of extending an abolitionist ethic beyond vertebrates sounded fanciful because compassionate interventions would pass from recognisable extensions of existing technologies to a speculative era of mature nanotechnology, self-replicating nanobots and marine drones patrolling the oceans. For me, the final piece of the abolitionist jigsaw only fell into place after reading Eric Drexler’s Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology (1986) — a tantalizing prospect, but not a scenario readily conceivable in our lifetime.
 


Then came CRISPR. Even sober-minded scientists describe the CRISPR revolution as “jaw-dropping”. Gene drives can spread genetic changes to the rest of the population.

Whether for large iconic vertebrates or obscure uncharismatic bugs, the question to ask now is less what’s feasible but rather, what’s ethical? What kinds of consciousness, and what kinds of sentient being do we want to exist in the world? 

Naturally, just because a pan-species welfare state is technically feasible, there is no guarantee that some sort Garden of Eden will ever come to pass. Most people still find the idea of phasing out the biology of involuntary suffering in humans a fanciful prospect — let alone its abolition in nonhuman animals. The well-being of all insects sounds like the reductio ad absurdum of the abolitionist project. But here I’m going to be quite dogmatic. A few centuries from now, if involuntary suffering still exists in the world, the explanation for its persistence won’t be that we’ve run out of computational resources to phase out its biological signature, but rather that rational agents — for reasons unknown — will have chosen to preserve it.
 


Man never learns. In his attempts to improve the world, he has made things worse more often than he has made it better. The remarkable thing is that it is mostly people who believe evolution by natural selection has produced this world who are seeking to bring it to a crashing halt. I shudder to think the ways in which this latest plan for utopia could go awry and bring about a hell on Earth beyond the imagination of the average SF writer.

It does raise some interesting thoughts concerning the philosophical arguments against the existence of God related to the so-called problem of suffering. (I’ve always regarded them as rather stupid, but they do exist and therefore require addressing.) Since Man apparently has the power to end the “involuntary suffering” involved in the food chain, but thus far has declined to do so, is this similar evidence that he either a) does not exist, or b) is not benevolent?

Of Apple and NSA

This is not exactly shocking news, but it is disappointing all the same to learn that Apple is making it even easier for governments to spy on its users.

Apple has endowed iPhones with undocumented functions that allow unauthorized people in privileged positions to wirelessly connect and harvest pictures, text messages, and other sensitive data without entering a password or PIN, a forensic scientist warned over the weekend.

Jonathan Zdziarski, an iOS jailbreaker and forensic expert, told attendees of the Hope X conference that he can’t be sure Apple engineers enabled the mechanisms with the intention of accommodating surveillance by the National Security Agency and law enforcement groups. Still, he said some of the services serve little or no purpose other than to make huge amounts of data available to anyone who has access to a computer, alarm clock, or other device that has ever been paired with a targeted device.

Zdziarski said the service that raises the most concern is known as com.apple.mobile.file_relay. It dishes out a staggering amount of data—including account data for e-mail, Twitter, iCloud, and other services, a full copy of the address book including deleted entries, the user cache folder, logs of geographic positions, and a complete dump of the user photo album—all without requiring a backup password to be entered.

So much for that whole liberal countercultural vibe Apple has been riding for decades. It was one thing to construct a walled garden. It’s another to hand Big Brother a secret key to it.

What killed Technorati

Technorati has gone the way of The Truth Laid Bear and many of the blogs it once ranked:

Once upon a time, not long ago, anyone in the world who wanted to gauge the relative impact of any blogger—say, HughHewitt.com vs. MichelleMalkin.com or Instapundit vs. Daily Kos or Fark vs. Eschaton—knew exactly where to go for the latest, up-to-the-moment rankings: Technorati. During the salad days of blogging in the first decade of the 21st century, nobody could touch Technorati when it came to searching and sizing up the roiling mass of hot-blooded humanity that came to be known as the blogosphere. You could forget all about the New York Times Best Sellers list. That was dead-tree media ranking other dead trees. The Technorati “Top 100 Blogs” was America’s ultimate guide to influence. It was the scorecard of the hat-tip champions.

Alas, those days are now done.

With little fanfare last month, Technorati quietly shut down its blog directory and rankings.

It’s not hard to understand why bloggers eventually lost interest in both blog-ranking systems. I know why I did. Neither system paid sufficient attention to their core market, and both allowed non-blogs to freely enter the rankings, which promptly pushed down the blogs that had once been ranked highly, even when they had considerably more traffic than they did before.  This old post is informational in that regard:

According to Sitemeter, there were 2,000 visits yesterday on only the 12th day of this blog. Thanks for stopping by, everyone! The Truth Laid Bear even had Vox Popoli ranked in the Blogosphere’s top 150, much to my surprise.

There were 17,245 Sitemeter visits here and at AG yesterday (40,304 Google Pageviews to use the modern metric), and yet even that 69 percent annual growth probably would not suffice to put me within shouting distance of the top 150 blogs today, much less the big corporate sites.

What both NZ Bear and Technorati should have done was to maintain a very clear distinction between site-rankings and blog-rankings, thereby preventing the situation where the corporate site equivalents of the Dallas Cowboys were being compared to SEC, Ivy League, and high school teams. It simply wasn’t even remotely meaningful for the proprietor of a little sewing blog or whatever to be informed that Fox News, CNN, and Jezebel got more traffic than she did. What had once been a useful comparison became an irrelevant statement of the obvious.

The other problem was sub-par metrics. Technorati, for example, put too much value on links in lieu of actual traffic. That’s why blogs like Whatever were so ludicrously overrated (and why their proprietors were always careful to conceal their actual traffic metrics), because they did a good job of cross-linking and driving up their Technorati rating at the expense of less-linked, but better-trafficked blogs.

In any event, to paraphrase Glenn Reynolds, the ranking systems come and go, but we are still here.

Mailvox: a case for the Singularity

James Miller, an econ professor at Smith and the author of Singularity Rising, asked if he could present his case for
the future likelihood of a Singularity. Or, as the Original Cyberpunk has described it, “the rapture of the nerds”. Since this is a place where we are always pleased to give both space and genuine consideration to diverse points of view, I readily agreed to his request.

I define a Singularity as a threshold of time at which AIs at least as
smart as humans and/or augmented human intelligence radically remake
civilization. 

1.  Rocks exist!
Strange as it seems, the existence of rocks actually
provides us with evidence that it should be possible to build computers
powerful enough to take us to a Singularity. 
There are around ten trillion, trillion atoms in a one-kilogram rock,
and as inventor and leading Singularity scholar Ray Kurzweil writes: “Despite the apparent solidity of the object, the atoms are
all in motion, sharing electrons back and forth, changing particle spins, and
generating rapidly moving electromagnetic fields.  All of this activity represents computation,
even if not very meaningfully organized.”

If the particles in the rock were organized in a more
“purposeful manner” it would be possible to create a computer trillions of
times more computationally powerful than all the human brains on earth
combined.   Our eventual capacity to
accomplish this is established by our second fact. 

2.  Biological cells exist!
The human body makes use of tiny biological machines to
create and repair cells.  Once mankind
masters this nanotechnology we will be able to cheaply create powerful
molecular computers.  Our third fact
proves that these computers could be turned into general purpose thinking
machines. 

3.  Human brains exist!
Suppose this book claimed that scientists would soon build a
human teleportation device.  Given that
many past predictions of scientific miracles—such as cheap fusion power, flying
cars or a cure for cancer—have come up short, you would rightly be suspicious
of my teleportation prediction.  But my
credibility would jump if I discovered a species of apes that had the inborn
ability to instantly transport themselves across great distances.

In some alternate universe that had different laws of
physics, it’s perfectly possible that intelligent machines couldn’t be created.  But human brains provide absolute proof that
our universe allows the construction of intelligent, self-aware machines.   And, because the brain exists already,
scientists can probe, dissect, scan and interrogate it.  We’re even beginning to understand the
brain’s DNA and protein-based ‘source code’. 
Also, many of the tools used to study the brain have been becoming
exponentially more powerful, which explains why engineers might be only a
couple of decades away from building a working digital model of the brain even
though today we seem far from understanding all of the brains operations.  Would-be creators of AI are already using
neuroscience research to help them create machine learning software.   Our fourth fact shows the fantastic
potential of AI. 

4.  Albert Einstein existed!

It’s extremely unlikely that the chaotic forces of evolution
just happened to stumble on the best possible recipe for intelligence when they
created our brains, especially since our brains have many constraints imposed
on them by biology: they must run on energy obtained from mere food; must fit
in a small space; and can’t use useful materials such as metals and plastics,
that engineers employ all the time.

But even if people such as Albert Einstein had close to the
highest possible level of intelligence allowed by the laws of physics, creating
a few million people or machines possessing this man’s brain power would still
change the world far more than the industrial revolution. We share about 98% of our genes with some primates, but that
2% difference was enough to produce creatures that can assemble spaceships,
sequence genes, and build hydrogen bombs.  
What happens when mankind takes its next step, and births lifeforms who
have a 2% genetic distance from us?  

5.  If we were smarter, we would be smarter!

Becoming smarter enhances our ability to do everything,
including our ability to figure out ways of becoming even smarter because our
intelligence is a reflective superpower able to turn on itself to decipher its
own workings.  Consider, for example, a
college student taking a focus-improving drug such as Adderall, Ritalin or
Provigil, to help learn genetics.  After
graduation, this student might get a job researching the genetic basis of human
intelligence, and her work might assist pharmaceutical companies in making
better cognitive enhancing drugs that will help future students acquire an even
deeper understanding of genetics. 
Smarter scientists could invent ways of making even smarter scientists
who could in turn… Now, throw the power of machine intelligence into this
positive feedback loop and we will end up at technological heights beyond our
imagination.  

I hereby recuse myself from the position of critic, mostly since my position on the concept can be best described as “mild, but curious skepticism”. But everyone should feel free to either express their doubts or offer additional arguments to bolster Prof. Miller’s case.

No water for oil

An article from Oilprice is interesting in light of what looks like a serious revision to the prospects for shale gas production in California:

The California Shale Bubble Just Burst

The great hype surrounding the advent of a shale gas bonanza in California may turn out to be just that: hype. The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) – the statistical arm of the Department of Energy – has downgraded its estimate of the total amount of recoverable oil in the Monterey Shale by a whopping 96 percent. Its previous estimate pegged the recoverable resource in California’s shale formation at 13.7 billion barrels but it now only thinks that there are 600 million barrels available.

The estimate is expected to be made public in June.

The sharply downgraded numbers come amid a heated debate in California over whether or not the state should permit oil and gas companies to use hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) – the process in which a combination of water, chemicals and sand are injected underground at high pressure in order to break apart shale rock and access trapped natural gas.

Fracking involves enormous quantities of water; an average of 127,127 gallons of water were required to frack a single California well in 2013, according to the Western States Petroleum Association. That’s equivalent to 87 percent of the water a family of four uses in an entire year.

California is home to an enormous agricultural industry, and with the Monterey Shale located beneath the fertile Central Valley, fracking is going to compete with agriculture, ranching and other commercial and residential users for water use. With 100 percent of California now in a state of “severe” drought, critics of fracking have gained traction in the debate over the extent to which the government should allow oil and gas companies to move in.

Fracking makes sense in some scenarios and makes no sense in others. In light of California’s chronic water shortages, I can’t see that fracking is a good idea there even if the revision is wrong (or fraudulently concocted for political reasons) and the original estimates of recoverable oil turn out to be correct. More energy doesn’t do much good if you can’t grow crops or transport your sewage.