Q for the parents in the audience: would you be okay with your kids watching TV ads/news segments that featured a Palestinian woman being shot by an Israeli soldier, and being carried away, bleeding, by her husband? Or an Iraqi family's car being fired on by soldiers? Or a burning American armoured vehicle with the charred corpses of soldiers leaning out the windows? Or the pavement of a Baghdad street with pools of blood and gobbets of flesh and a dismembered arm?
I'm trying to figure out if it's violence against kids, or real-live violence in general, that kids shouldn't be viewing. I haven't seen the landmine ad, but I have seen all of the above on my local news. Do kids watch the six o'clock news? (I don't have kids, so I'm clueless about this stuff.)
According to the stats put out by the National Science Foundation for 2001 (http://www.nsf.gov/sbe/srs/nsf03310/pdf/sect3.pdf):
Of doctoral scientists working in mathematical and physical sciences, ~15% were female. In bio/ag sciences,women were ~29%. So, yes, women are underrepresented in the sciences (since they make up ~50% of the population).
But: Of doctoral scientists working in mathematical and physical sciences, less than 2% were black/African-American -- a minority group that makes up (I think) ~15% of the US population. So they, too, are grossly underrepresented.
What proportion of published hard SF is written by black authors? I've no idea. I ask our genial host: is it less than 15%? If the answer is 'yes' -- is anyone gonna be stupid enough to suggest that the reason fewer black authors write hard SF is because they are intellectually incapable of "hacking the physics"?
Bit o' trivia for the day:
The incorrect usage of the word _data_ (as a singular instead of plural) is far more commonly employed by non-scientists than by trained, published scientists.
Correct: "the data clearly demonstrate...."
"don't the data matter?"
Incorrect: "the data clearly suggests...."
"doesn't the data matter??"
/There are women with PhDs who write hard SF./
"Feel free to enlighten me."
Well, my wife, for one.
"That you fail to grasp this difference is one reason why women do so poorly at the hard sciences."
"Reason"? Once again you are implying an erroneous causal effect.
I'm afraid this final example of your ignorance has placed you in my "not worth wasting time on" category.
Nick B, since you're so insistent on the importance of the scientific process, please note that when you are citing anecdotal evidence, saying "in my experience" is fine. However, if you want to make claims such as "Women DON'T ENTER "HARD" SCIENTIFIC FIELDS. This is FACT" or "Women as a group do poorly at math," you'll probably be asked to cite the evidence of these claims.
Judging from recent publications such as the textbook "Gender Differences in Mathematics" (Cambridge University Press) your claims are in fact not based on fact.
"Women use a number of factors, the most obvious being indicators of affluence and power as the first level of triage, with the second being the males ability to schmooze them. Men use a number of factors, but probably fewer...."
This appears to me to be a simplified, selective, and not-unbiased presentation of the scientific evidence that has been gathered wrt human mate selection. Could you cite your sources?
Nick B, could you please explain how someone with a doctoral degree in biology, working as a biological scientist, can succeed while lacking "a critically relevant grasp of science as a process and its underlying function"? Such a scientist might, say, be researching the genes that contribute to the pathology of a disease or the signal tranduction pathways that direct a cell to undergo apoptosis. Would such a grasp of scientific processes not be necessary in order to design well-controlled experiments and to interpret the data?
"Ah, yes, the inevitable feminist repression argument."
Er, it wasn't an argument.
"If women were REALLY ***that*** much better than men they could do this."
No one suggested that women are =better= than men. It has, however, been suggested that your and VD's claims that women are =less able= than men might be faulty, and have yet to be proved.
"Ergo, the assertion is blatantly false."
It wasn't an assertion, or an argument -- hence my statement that I am unaware of any evidence to prove misogyny by SF publishers. It was presented as an illogical line of speculation for explaining the gender inequality in published SF, as a means of illustrating the similar lack of evidence in your and VD's claims.
VD said: "Again, I ask the very simple question that no one has yet seen fit to answer. How many female writers of hard SF exist? How many hard SF novels were published in 2004 by women?"
How many male writers of hard SF exist? How many hard SF novels that are written get published? How long is a piece of string?
It is poor scientific practice to automatically assume a causal relationship between two observations. Why not argue that zillions of women write hard SF, but all those horrible, piggy, misogynistic publishers keep refusing to publish their work?
There are women with doctoral degrees in the hard sciences. There are women with PhDs who write hard SF. There are women without PhDs who write hard SF. There are women with PhDs in hard sciences who write fantasy (or other genres). There are women whose hard SF novels get published. These are all facts.
The majority of published hard SF novels were not written by women. That is a fact, too. It may be interesting to speculate the reason(s) for this; however, I am not aware of any definitive proof that it is caused by a) women's mental deficiencies, or b) women's lack of doctoral degrees, or c) misogyny on the part of publishing houses. Please cite any (factual, preferably peer-reviewed) evidence you might have regarding these issues.
Well, gosh. Just....gosh.
Okay, putting this together with the previous story-thread (while desperately searching for any kind of metallic lining to the very, very black cloud we are now living in):
If I want to create a character who is even stupider than he is despicable, and this character is going to communicate in text, I should model his writings on those of the Pentagon top-brass.
Dave Bell -- both the US and Brit coverage (CNN and BBC websites, anyhow) look 'sanitized' to me compared with the NZ coverage. See:
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydisplay.cfm?storyID=3400811&thesection=news&thesubsection=world
Of course, our =big= headlines are usually about whether or not Helen Clark should apologize yet again the Bush for making the comment about how we wouldn't have this war if Gore had been in the White House....
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2005 | 10 |
| 2004 | 1 |
| 2003 | 1 |
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