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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-40438207
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And in "stupid ways to try and get famous"...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-40438207
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OK, for anyone who is from New Jersey and wonder why the public beaches are closed. Well, look at this fat motherfucker right now and what he's doing when the government of the state is shut down: http://www.nj.com/politics/index.ssf...ark_durin.html
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Christie is the fucking worst. His approval rating is in the teens. One of the least effectual governors ever. And he's going to walk right into a Trump appointment whenever something comes up that he is suited for.
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Nope, Jared Kushner HATES Christie; Christie put Kushner's dad in prison.Originally Posted by bobbie solo
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Good point...I forgot that. That's why he didn't get something already. But I feel like he's going to need Christie for some position eventually, and he'll get in. Maybe it'll be some lower on the totem pole, and where Kushner doesn't have to interact with him. I think we're going to see alot of people quitting all over his admin throughout his entire time in office.
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OJ granted parole.
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I saw some of the hearing. I can't believe he's going to walk free again. That board got bamboozled by his bullshit charm.
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For the crime he was convicted of, parole is fair and hard to deny. We all know what he REALLY went to jail for, but the courts failed there initially... We can't rewrite our system to favor "common sense" afterthought rulings. He's a murderer, but he wasn't in jail for murder
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Americans this is your potential refugee crisis ...you think the Syrian crisis was bad in Europe.......
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/0/ve...sis-explained/
Oh my god Venezuela....this has been the slowest moving car crash..
The Uk just cut of diplomatic relattions with them, seriously it only does that when it thinks something is seirously wrong,
Last edited by Exocet; 08-03-2017 at 12:22 PM.
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grand jury in russain probe: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/...ushpmg00000009 mad tweet begin at 11:00 war with n.K. new level of distraction in 10.9...8...
-Louie
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https://medium.com/@Cernovich/full-j...es-339f3d2d05f
Why the fuck was he fired for this?
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It's not politically correct.
So do you want me to send you a list of all the browsers you should be using instead of chrome?
Shit, now that i think about it, i got about 5 gmail accounts. Oh well, guess they'll end up failing either way, since merit is not really a criteria for hiring.
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When I read all those headlines today I was expecting some incoherent rant about women ruining STEM fields, but what I got from this the most was how important it is to have not only diverse people, but also diverse opinions. Google just prove his point so fucking much. There are clearly certain topics you just need to accept without questioning. Here's this dogma and you either accept it or you will be fired. Really nice one Google.
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And on top of that you have gizmodo, vice, etc, removing the citations and graphics from the manifesto.
Anyway he may have gotten fired but his piece just got distributed to a much bigger audience, who so far, seems to be quite supportive.
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Dunno, but this is interesting:
http://www.businessinsider.com/james...-google-2017-8
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Mr. Damore was certainly proven right about Google becoming an echo chamber, that's for sure.
Last edited by Archive_Reports; 08-11-2017 at 01:18 PM. Reason: Can't spell names.
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Well, the "science" in his "manifesto" contains a lot of faulty logic; but, FIRING him about it seems a bit harsh, vs. perhaps counseling him on it or sending him to diversity training or something. His argument that women are biologically less able to handle stressful jobs can be easily disproven by statistics and by science. He's not a scientist. He uses flawed logic and flawed citations. As that Business Insider article points out (although I'm hesitant to quote the Business Insider as a source re science, LOL):
See also this (from 1/8/12): The Number Of Female Doctors Has Increased By Over 400% Since 1981, But It’s Still Low:On Bloomberg, Damore added, "among psychologists there's a consensus that prenatal testosterone does affect a lot of personality traits, in particular one's interest in people vs. things ... that distribution differs between men and women." And this is why there is unequal representation of the genders in tech, he says.
The idea that your exposure to hormones as an embryo will somehow skew your entire career just isn't true. If our pre-natal hormones controlled our job prospects then women's work would not have changed much over time. In fact, it has changed dramatically.
In 1900, only 6% of American women had jobs. By 1990, according to US Census data, 60% of married white women worked:
In-utero testosterone exposure stayed roughly the same over that period.
One of the greatest experiments with women's careers was done during World War 2, when men went off to fight and women were drafted into domestic manufacturing. With millions of men absent, women literally did men's work.
A majority of British women worked in the war effort. This UK government poster showed 7 million British women working in industry during the war.
Using Damore's logic, if a "scientist" had taken measurements in the UK between 1939 and 1945, he may have concluded that women's exposure to prenatal testosterone made them predisposed, on average, to munitions manufacturing.
Clearly, that's not how jobs happen.
The work we do — and who gets to do it — changes over time. Our work is a product of the world we live in today, not what happened to us in the womb. It's interesting that 69% of Google employees are male. But that doesn't make their presence in the company the result of "science."
You can find a lot of scholarly journal articles regarding prenatal testosterone exposure, like these:The increase is consistent with the increased participation of women in the professional workforce over the same time frame. Reflecting the overall changes in professional mores, medicine has become a far more gender diverse calling. The number of female physicians has increased by over 400% since 1981, while male physician ranks have increased by just 52%. The overall physician population has increased 35% since 1981.
(a) Association between a marker for prenatal testosterone exposure and externalizing behavior problems in children
(b) Correlational work using 2D:4D digit ratio as an indicator for prenatal testosterone only converged on extremely small effects
(c) Prenatal testosterone influences adult men’s behavior toward women
(d) Prenatal testosterone and gender-related behaviour (these findings have implications for basic understanding of the role of testosterone in normative gender development, as well as for the clinical management of individuals with disorders of sex development (formerly called intersex syndromes).)
(e) Pink Brain, Blue Brain
But NONE that I could find (and I do research for a living) seem to support his thesis asserting a "consensus." And what his thesis had to do with Google, I dunno.
If anything, he's guilty of being stupid. But, as has been stated, this just got this guy WAY more attention than he would have gotten otherwise.
Last edited by allegro; 08-11-2017 at 02:20 PM.
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I wasn't standing up for his science or sources at all, just to be clear.
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The topic is certainly provocative, he could do a lot to draw attention to the crap aspects of these suppositions.
Do we know his MOTIVE for writing this essay?
I mean, besides him possibly having to share his pay? LOL.
From a legal aspect, this is really interesting stuff. (The Law doesn't care about the content so much as the firing.)
Well played, sir! Well played!However, Damore says that before he was fired, he filed a complaint, formally known as a charge, with the National Labor Relations Board, which administers some aspects of federal labor law. Under the National Labor Relations Act, it's against federal law to fire someone in retaliation for filing a complaint to the board, lawyers say.
Last edited by allegro; 08-11-2017 at 01:56 PM.
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I'm not sure how to ask this question, so bear with me.
Can you file a complaint if you know you're about to be fired so it looks like retaliation? I guess the timing of it is what I'm asking about. Not for him specifically, just in general.
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Dunno, good question; they'd have to establish if he in fact "knew" he might be fired and if that's why he filed the complaint and even then, what was his motive?
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Well, but here is a clear example of dogma (his) that SHOULD be questioned. It's just as easy to accept his giant (bullshit) paper as dogma without doing research as it is accepting anything else, right?
He garnered much more attention by getting fired, yes, but I'm seeing the opposite of "support" from neuroscientists. Some of his essay contains logical (like "duh") claims, but his more controversial claims seem to be some kind of deliberate trolling for reasons I'd love to know. He's getting support from the legal standpoint, but (as stated above) Law doesn't look at the content of his memo; it only views his firing from the legal standpoint.
This is a really interesting article.
This is also really interesting.
If you are just tuning in, here are the highlights: Damore was especially vexed at Google’s various affirmative action initiatives, such as workshops that are limited to women or minorities. Damore didn’t call such practices affirmative action, though – he called them “discrimination,” which is a bit like telling a kid who needs glasses to read that he is “cheating.”
As a white male, Damore believes, in his own words, that affirmative action is “unfair, divisive, and bad for business.” In fact, Damore’s analysis was unfair, divisive, and bad for business, as others have already enumerated, but blaming him alone passes the buck: Google itself has never fully articulated why diversity is a desirable good, or how it will achieve it. In the absence of such leadership, no wonder one employee went off the rails.
Notably, as Ellen McGirt observed for Fortune magazine, Google’s diversity campaign never came with an official, top-down directive. Larry Page, Alphabet CEO and Google co-founder, for example, did not issue a memo, according to McGirt.
The closest thing to a vision statement might be on Google’s diversity page, where CEO Sundar Pichai is quoted saying, “A diverse mix of voices leads to better discussions, decisions, and outcomes for everyone.”
Nowhere on the site, however, does Google define what a better discussion, decision, or outcome is, or explain how diversity achieves that.
There are a number of ways we can speculate. It might be the case that Google believes diversity:
* Leads to better user experiences. Google’s employees don’t look much like Google’s users. Diversity could solve that, leading to better optimization.
* Would have prevented various appalling situations, such as facial-recognition technology that incorrectly tagged black people’s faces as gorillas’.
* Helps employees solve problems faster. In one study, researchers found that racially diverse groups of undergraduates solved a murder mystery faster than homogenous groups because they expected people unlike them would have different information and perspectives, which they did.
* Advances social justice. As one of the most powerful companies in the world, Google may simply wish to use its immense influence to stand up for certain values, such as equality of outcome.
Unfortunately we may never know why Google really cares about diversity, which affects our ability to evaluate its methods. Even after the Damore bombshell, Danielle Brown, Google’s new vice president for diversity, integrity and governance, resorted to bromides. “Diversity and inclusion are a fundamental part of our values and the culture we continue to cultivate,” she said in her condemnation of Damore’s statement. “We are unequivocal in our belief that diversity and inclusion are critical to our success as a company, and we’ll continue to stand for that and be committed to it for the long haul.”
Nice words, but what do they mean? As a former teacher, I get some of Damore’s frustration, and confusion. “We’re told by senior leadership that what we’re doing is both the morally and economically correct thing to do, but without evidence this is just veiled left ideology that can irreparably harm Google,” he wrote.
On this singular point, Damore is right: If he does not understand the purpose of Google’s diversity programs, or their results, how can he be sure they are working, and are worth his discomfort?
Last edited by allegro; 08-11-2017 at 02:35 PM.
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This is a really interesting article, too.
A tale of two tech cities
Picture a technology hub where more than 17% of high-tech workers – from programmers to security analysts to software and web developers – are African American.
This isn’t some kind of utopian diversity thought experiment. It is the greater Washington DC metropolitan area, home to more than 200,000 high tech jobs, many of them with the federal government or government contractors.
“You’d be hard pressed to have someone out here who thinks that blacks doing computer work is weird,” said William Spriggs, a professor of economics at Howard University. And lest you think that the computing in DC is less advanced than that in Silicon Valley, he adds: “We don’t do Mickey Mouse stuff out here. This is the number one place if you want to do cyber security.”
The DC area is a kind of mirror image to Silicon Valley when it comes to hiring African Americans. Overall, blacks make up 14.4% of the workforce nationwide and 7.4% of high-tech employment. In the DC metro area, which includes parts of Virginia, Maryland, and West Virginia, blacks hold 17.3% of the jobs in 12 computing occupations, according to government employment data.
But cross over to the west coast, and in Silicon Valley African Americans hold just 2.7% of the jobs in the same categories. At premiere employers like Google and Facebook, black representation in technical jobs drops below 2%.
To Spriggs, there is simply no excuse for Silicon Valley’s failure to hire a more diverse workforce. “The thing that always irritates me is that they say, ‘We can’t find them,’” he said. “You run a freaking search engine!”
So how did Silicon Valley end up with fewer than 5,000 black people in highly technical jobs, while DC has more than 35,000?
One obvious difference between northern California and the mid-Atlantic region is the underlying demographics. The DC metro area is approximately 25% black, while Silicon Valley is about 6.5% black.
But companies like Google, Facebook and Apple are known to recruit aggressively across the country – and throughout the world. And the fact that northern California’s workforce is heavily Latino (more than 20%) is not reflected in the area’s tech companies (about 6% Latino).
Spriggs argued that a significant difference is that in DC, the tech industry grew up around the federal government. Affirmative action provisions for federal contracting encouraged African Americans to start businesses in computing or data processing in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The first domain name registrar for the internet, for example, was the black-owned company, Network Solutions, which was founded in northern Virginia in 1979.
“Having black-owned companies helped get people in,” Spriggs said. “It’s partly entrepreneurship, partly because the federal government does not discriminate, partly because you have to have [security] clearance, which favors American citizens, and partly because the area is heavily black.”
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http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/goog...tists-respond/
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I don't think what he wrote in that memo was inherently dogmatic apart from things like "men and women are biologically different", you don't need a science degree to see that. He just tried to make an argument for himself, there's nothing wrong with that. I think both sides could benefit from having an open discussion about this. Especially since he wasn't proposing Google should stop with its efforts to bring more women into tech industry, but rather he tried to lay down different approach. And no matter if you think it's bullshit or not, it's worth a genuine response. But I think Google was just too scared to do anything else than sack him, because boy oh boy if you dare to criticize women/feminism/diversity in any way nowadays you are in some deep shit. So rather than to engage in a dialogue with this person, they thought firing him would be the most progressive way of dealing with emloyees who dare to have their own opinions. I think it's the complete opposite of progressive.
Me personally I don't exactly agree with his reasoning, but having women in tech just for the sake of having women in tech is not a way to go. And it's a complicated issue, I understand some women might feel weird studying/working with mostly men, but having things like gender specific classes or lower standards and special treatment for women is just insulting isn't it?
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Three of them are experts SOCIAL psychology (not neuroscience) and the one who IS in neuroscience asserts that the "truth" of career preferences supported by brain differences is getting laughed at by other studies in neuroscience. There's no evidence that Asians are biologically smarter and there's no evidence that males are, either.
Yes, there are SEX differences between brains (which is a big part of the studies of the transgender brain), but that is useless re career choices (unless maybe you want to be a surrogate mother).
See this article re Asian females in STEM:
https://jobs.newscientist.com/articl...stem-industry/
The Truth Lies in the Numbers
There is a stereotype in the United States, that if there is a position open in STEM and an Asian applies for the spot, he or she will get it. Data shows that this is a myth, and that Asian females may have hit the ceiling when it comes to STEM employment. While comparing the numbers to females, Hispanics, and African Americans, you can see a leap for female Asians, but when it comes to overall figures, the number is still small.
NGC Project out of California surveyed and found that Asians “ work in science and engineering occupations at higher rates (19%) than their representation in the U.S. working-age population (5%). Asians are particularly highly concentrated in computer and information science occupations (22% Asian).”
They also discovered that while all females, not just Asian, help to make up 47% of the American workforce, these numbers are lower in the STEM field with 12.1 % being civil engineers, 7.2% being mechanical engineers, and 8.3 % working as electrical engineers.
A nonprofit research and advisory organization Advancing Asian Women in the Workplace by Catalyst, surveyed Asian women in the STEM industry and found that “ Asian-American women in industry are most likely to have graduate education but least likely to hold a position within three levels of the CEO. Among the more than 10,000 corporate officers in Fortune 500 companies, there were about 1,600 women of whom 30 were Asian.” The women of Asian descent who were hired in the STE sector often felt as they were competing for other Asian women for the one token spot.
Asian women fill only 28.1 % of the spots in government STEM management and 0.9% of science and engineering managerial spots. The bottom line is that while 47% of Asians enroll in a STEM program, only 19% of that graduate with a STEM appropriate degree. And of those 19% Asian graduates only 4% of those are female.
The push to work on disparity for female Asians is necessary for society cannot buy the lie that Asian females have flooded the STEM sector. There should be no settling for the idea that because the numbers are better for one group than others, that the numbers, while still lower, are good enough. They aren’t.
Last edited by allegro; 08-11-2017 at 05:22 PM.
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My statement didn't SAY his essay was inherently dogmatic; I stated that someone could USE it as dogma, or to reinforce their own opinion, and accept it all as truth without researching it. That's not on him, that's on anyone who doesn't go "hey, wait a minute" and then research it carefully, considering the types of research and sources. Statistics, alone, refute his female brain assertion.
The thing is with affirmative action programs is that they seek diversity but they should seek QUALIFIED diversity. A good and respectable diversity program would completely disregard gender or race and would make that information hidden during the process. Institutionalized sexism works just like institutionalized racism: it is so prevalent, even females and minorities (often subconsciously) buy into it. I've seen experiments where two different fake resumes were submitted to a group of male and female managers - one from a phony male, one from a phony female, both containing the same experience and qualifications - and the male's resume was chosen more often and offered more money, EVEN BY THE FEMALE MANAGERS, due to "better qualifications" etc.
Something goofy is going on at Google where 68% of the tech employees are white males. AND there's an investigation by the Government re pay discrimination. Google is full of shit, and what this guy's memo did is make it really well-known. Qualified diversity sans animosity isn't that hard to achieve. But the goals have to be clear, and the process has to be void of those items.
Women have been the minority in all fields since the beginning of time, but that hasn't stopped us from seeking careers. Have you seen that movie "Hidden Figures?" Computer science used to be considered "women's" work.
Here's an article from Smithsonian. The history, alone, proves this guy wrong.
Google's response was NOT in the interest of being politically correct; it was an attempt to hide the fact that Google is about as diverse as a bowl of vanilla ice cream.
Last edited by allegro; 08-11-2017 at 05:43 PM.
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Sex differences in personality:
http://bit.ly/2vmtSMs
http://bit.ly/2gJVmEp
http://bit.ly/2vEKTUx
sex differences in more gender-neutral countries:
http://bit.ly/2uoY9c4
http://bit.ly/2utaTT3
http://bit.ly/2p6nHYY
http://bit.ly/2wMN45j
Women's interest in people vs men's interest in things:
http://bit.ly/2vr0PHF
http://bit.ly/2wtlbzU
http://bit.ly/2wyfW23
The general importance of exposure to sex-linked steroids on fetal and then lifetime development:
http://bit.ly/2uufOiv
Exposure to prenatal testosterone and interest in things or people, even when the exposure is among females (these are particularly interesting):
http://bit.ly/2uKxpSQ
http://bit.ly/2hPXC1c
http://bit.ly/2vn4KXq
http://bit.ly/2hPYKSu
Primarily biological basis of personality sex differences:
http://bit.ly/2vJ6QSh
And always somewhat pertaining to the discussion, the occupations by gender:
http://bit.ly/2vTdgPp
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Dude, did you actually READ those whole articles or just the titles? Those are all really fascinating but I don't think you read any of them because they aren't asserting what you think.
Every one of them provide qualifications and caveats indicating the social and environmental factors.
Even the final "occupation by gender" is 100% social and environmental. Up until at least the 1980s (some still even today), American schools pushed girls to choose careers in "girl" things. In the 70s, they pushed me to take typing, home ec, sewing, and English. The boys were told to take wood shop, metal shop, and gym.
That Swedish study is particularly interesting.
You and telee.com don't live here, didn't go to school here, and I don't even know if either of you are in STEM fields.
Anyway, I know you two love this topic but that's not what is all over American television reports right now; what IS: how that guy exposed the total lack of diversity at Google, plus the class action suit against Google. I agree with this guy, there needs to be more open discussion so that all sides understand and can make suggestions for improvement.
Last edited by allegro; 08-11-2017 at 06:21 PM.
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See I don't really understand why does it even have to be 50/50 split, there's some sort of gender gap in every work field and I don't think it's necessarily wrong. Or better yet, why STEM fields are such a hot topic and not dentistry or law or whatever. Just let people do whatever they want to do. The question should be - if you are a woman/black/trans and you want to work in tech, is there something that would prevent you from doing that apart from your own incompetence? If there is some systematic problem (with the industry itself) I don't see it and I don't believe these diversity programs are necessary. Make this about education, show young people (all of them, not just girls) that coding could be fun and maybe more girls will eventually be interested in working for Google or whatever tech company.
As per the article I didn't know that actually. The part about the "math test".. I dunno how it is in US, but in here the university level computer sciences go hand in hand with math and I would say math is the hardest thing about this particular university degree. Most people fail this program because of math course is too hard for them.
Last edited by telee.kom; 08-11-2017 at 06:35 PM.
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