Interesting Links for 22-10-2014

[andrewducker]

• Poor kids who do everything right don’t do much better than rich kids who do everything wrong
  (tags: inequality wealth society )
• The Internet: A Glossary
  (tags: funny internet ciph )
• A journalist investigates Gamergate to find the true basis for it. Can you guess what they find?
  (tags: games society sexism feminism )
• Mexican drug cartels are worse

Comments

[beckyc]

Interesting graph in that When women stopped coding link - shows that my experience at Oxford is perhaps not so very typical (shock, I know!). I did an undergrad MPhys physics degree then an MSc computation/computer science degree there in the late 90s/turn of the Millennium. In the years I studied there, the proportion of women on the two degrees was about the same for both courses, at around 20%.

I'm not entirely sure what it was like for people who did computation as an undergrad - amongst my cohort, the main route to a computation MSc was a maths or physics undergrad degree, so the proportions may be totally different anyway from people who selected it as a first subject.

[beckyc]

Though the article definitely struck a note with me about the intro compsci classes assuming certain skills - I wound up taking a module in introductory functional programming rather than introductory OO (which would have been more useful to me in my career) because the introductory OO one assumed you'd already got a few years of OO experience, and I was a scientist by training, so I didn't.

That entire computing degree was *such* a struggle for me from start to finish - I simply "wasn't good enough". I put that in quotes because I guess I *was* good enough - I got a distinction for the degree, and yet I spent most of the year planning to drop out and expecting to fail or be kicked off the course.

[andrewducker]

Did you have the same issue with not feeling good enough in other classes? Or was it an artefact of how it was run?

[beckyc]

I think a lot of it was Imposter Syndrome and lacking the brash self-confidence and assurance that *of course* one belongs there that a lot of people had. And failing to realise that many of the people in the middle were barely keeping up either, they just weren't getting their ego bruised by it

I've since observed that levels of self-confidence were not typically correlated with grades, but are in my limited experience correlated with who has done very well in life.

[channelpenguin]

I can't recall what prior knowledge was assumed when I did my degree (88-92). But I HAD mucked about with computers since I was 8 years old (ZX80/81, Spectrum, BBC B). I don't think there were any Computing O Grades or Highers at the time (or if so, only just - certainly my school did not do them

[beckyc]

I HAD mucked about with computers since I was 8 years old (ZX80/81, Spectrum, BBC B)

Heh, yes, me too! I can't even remember a time before I started mucking around with computers. I definitely remember playing on a Commodore Pet, though I think I only started coding with a BBC B. My mother tells a family story about how as a small child, I had come across her copying out a program from the BBC basic book we had, pointed at the screen and said "That's a syntax error*, Mummy". As a direct result, Mummy didn't touch a computer for about fifteen years after that ;-).

*To be fair, syntax errors were pretty much all I could spot. It would have been awesome if it had been a null pointer exception or an array out of bounds error or Mummy, that will *never* link or similar ;-).

I am most often the only one. The other times there is one other.*Nods* - yes, that does not surprise me. For my first 7 years at the company I work for, I was the only woman in a particular software dev department (of about 30 at the time). Then the departments got

[channelpenguin]

LOL - that syntax error story. I did the same with ZX-80 and a teacher. There was a missing closing quote in the magazine article she was typing in in her break time. First time I'd ever seen a bit of code in my life. Teacher just handed me the magazine and the computer and told me to get on with it! THAT is how I got into coding in the first place.

[pigwotflies]

*waves at a fellow Oxford physicist*
We must have been near contemporaries (I did the BA, 98-01).
I was a terrible programmer, though we didn't do a lot - just some Pascal. Oh and I narrowly missed out on having to do Fortran. Had I made it to the 4th year, my project would have involved Fortran. Sometimes I regret that I didn't get that chance. (Mostly since I married a programmer).

[beckyc]

*Waves* yay fellow physicists