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

[atreic]

Gah, that first article is annoying

1) The figure shows that 41% of poor college grads are in the top 40% of the country, and 19% of rich high school drop outs are in the top 40% of the country. That _is_ the poor kids doing better.

2) Dropping out of high school is not 'doing everything wrong', being a college grad is not 'doing everything right'

Annoying rhetoric, made worse by their stats not even really showing what they claim they show.

[andrewducker]

You are right, and I actually meant to remove this link, because it's misleading. Also, the numbers in the article don't match the graph at the top.

I linked to it, came back to it last night to review it, and then got distracted. Sorry!

[channelpenguin]

:-). I was mulling over how to express the same thing - glad someone did it better first.

There is still *something* in it - but it's more a vauge "if you are rich and dumb you might still do okay -maybe better than if you are poor at all"

[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.

[supergee]

To be fair, the cartels are unlikely to come up here and try to kill large numbers of their customers.

[abigail_n]

As the article notes, the cartels have already killed hundreds of Americans, many on American soil. I also question whether ISIL truly has plans to do the same, or whether this is simply propaganda put out by both sides - is there any hard evidence that ISIL has the intention and the wherewithal to pull off large-scale terrorist attacks on US soil?

[kerrypolka]

There isn't as far as I know (for context, I work for an international security company and my focus is terrorism risks, so I have access to a little more information about this than most people, although less than security experts actually in MENA). The main danger to Americans from ISIL/Daesh is sympathetic American citizens going "hey, what a good idea" and carrying out an attack independently, like what happened with the Boston Marathon bombing or, in Canada, in Quebec on Monday. Daesh is curently focused on gaining and solidifying control over territory and assets in Iraq/Syria/Turkey. If it carries out an attack outside that area, it will most likely be in Paris or London, but that's also very unlikely. The main threat to Americans is from 'home-grown'/'self-radicalised' terrorists with no direction from Daesh.

[gonzo21]

Well, not so long as the US government keeps doing exactly what the cartels want them to do. ;)

[bart_calendar]

I thought the legalized pot in America were causing the cartels to start going broke?

[andrewducker]

It's probably having an effect. But at the moment it's a tiny proportion of the states - once it really gets going you'll hopefully see a much bigger effect.

[andrewducker]

We'll see whether Alaska, Oregon and DC voting kicks things into a higher gear.

(Plus Florida on medical marijuana.)

[bart_calendar]

There seems to be evidence that's it's already really hurting them.

https://news.vice.com/article/legal-pot-in-the-us-is-crippling-mexican-cartels

[alitheapipkin]

That SAD article is interesting but 11 is a really woeful sample size, I do hope someone gets funding to do a larger study.