Re: [agi] Where are the women?

2007-11-30 Thread Matt Mahoney

--- BillK [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 On Nov 30, 2007 2:37 PM, James Ratcliff wrote:
  More Women:
 
  Kokoro (image attached)
 
 
 
 So that's what a women is!  I wondered..

Wrong.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7mZStNNN7g



-- Matt Mahoney, [EMAIL PROTECTED]

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Re: [agi] Where are the women?

2007-11-30 Thread BillK
On Nov 30, 2007 2:37 PM, James Ratcliff wrote:
 More Women:

 Kokoro (image attached)



So that's what a women is!  I wondered..


BillK

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Re: [agi] Where are the women?

2007-11-30 Thread James Ratcliff
Yeah I couldnt resist, thanks for the video though, I handt seen that one, was 
well done.

James

Matt Mahoney [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 
--- BillK 
 wrote:

 On Nov 30, 2007 2:37 PM, James Ratcliff wrote:
  More Women:
 
  Kokoro (image attached)
 
 
 
 So that's what a women is!  I wondered..

Wrong.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7mZStNNN7g



-- Matt Mahoney, [EMAIL PROTECTED]

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___
James Ratcliff - http://falazar.com
Looking for something...
   
-
Be a better pen pal. Text or chat with friends inside Yahoo! Mail. See how.

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Re: [agi] Where are the women?

2007-11-29 Thread Robin Gane-McCalla
 This is not sociology, it is mathematics.  Transforming one set of
 binary states to another set of binary states.  Yes, there a number of
 different methods for doing a given a transformation, but those are
 all the same kind of mathematics and understanding the tradeoffs
 between those methods is also the same kind of mathematics.  And
 choosing a method is *not* arbitrary -- see the part about tradeoffs.

Right, but an important part of the design of any programming language
is how easy it will be for other programmers to use.  Otherwise, we'd
still be using assembly language.  Designing a language that is easy
for others to use is much more of an art than a science.

 Mathematics does not work differently based on cultural context.
 There is not a lot of room for whimsy if economical results matter.
Right, but different cultures understand mathematics differently.  For
example, the romans had a really strange and inefficient numerical
system.  Despite the fact that they were the economic power of their
day, they still didn't abandon an inefficient system when other more
efficient systems existed elsewhere.  There could be a more efficient,
easier to understand programming paradigm that people aren't adopting
for the same reasons the romans stuck with their numerical system.





 Or maybe after she has actually studied theoretical computer science,
 this female minority understands the subject well enough to realize
 that there is no such thing as this mythical culturally sensitive
 programming language so many people are pining for.
Where is your evidence of this?  What did I miss out in my theoretical
computer science class?


 This is a recurring theme, that Holy Grail programming language that
 requires no knowledge of computer science to use well.  These
 arguments are based entirely the desire to create a language that can
 turn a thoroughly ambiguous and contradictory specification into a
 perfectly working program, without grokking that programming languages
 are *by necessity* non-ambiguous and require consistent constraints --
 explicit and implicit -- if you want a useful result.

No, I am not aware of anybody that wants to create such a language.
We just want languages that are better than the ones that exist today,
there is a lot of room for improvement.


 Your above argument is handwaving.  There was a reason I was looking
 for a specific example -- a minority friendly lambda calculus language
 -- because I've heard your claim made repeatedly for many, many years
 and have yet to see a single shred of evidence that such a language
 would not look virtually identical to one of the thousands of existing
 languages.

The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.

We have many dozens of languages that were expressly
 designed to make the underlying concepts as easy to grasp as possible
 for a non-geek.
Ahh, that's the key word We.  Have you done any actual field work to
see what sorts of difficulties and misunderstandings people have in
understanding your languages?


 Uh, what kind of programming do you do that you would assume that
 almost the entire software universe is working in some kind of linear
 scripting environment?

I don't, I just don't think it's necessary to construct
multi-dimensional graphs in my head.  Perhaps when I am programming I
am doing something equivalent, but by making such a claim you are only
reinforcing my point... there are many different ways to program and
claiming that one must do a certain thing to program only prevents
people from entering the field.

 What on earth do you think code is?  The only difference between code
 and people-talk is that code requires precision and non-ambiguity
 since incorrect results are generally considered unacceptable.
Ok, so code is communication between human and computer, I know that.
But usually when somebody says communication I assume they mean
communication with a human.


 Because I've never seen anyone learn it, ever; experience changes a
 lot, but the ability to handle complex abstract models doesn't seem
 to.  I've known many software engineers with careers that span decades
 and bucketloads of experience that really don't grok graphs beyond a
 certain complexity
Do you have any objective measures?  Can you mathematically describe
the degree of complexity of graphs or models that certain people can't
understand?


-- it is a bit like you reach a certain description
 threshold where pushing more bits into the model makes other bits fall
 out.  That threshold varies from individual to individual, and it is
 difficult to not notice that the correlation between really bright
 software designers and people who are quite apparently able to
 atypically work with complex models in their heads.  I've worked on
 more than one software project where there were members of the team
 that quite obviously never grokked the dynamic characteristics of a
 system even after many months of intimate experience with it, 

Re: [agi] Where are the women?

2007-11-29 Thread YKY (Yan King Yin)
My collaborative platform is designed mainly with the aim of minimizing
discrimination (be it racial, gender, nationalistic, etc) by being open and
democratic.  If there're other ideas that may help reduce discrimination,
I'd be eager to try them.

My observation is that when things are not transparent, many people tend
to default to being biased.  Openness does not solve all problems, but IMO
it does help.

YKY

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Re: [agi] Where are the women?

2007-11-28 Thread Mike Dougherty
On Nov 28, 2007 9:20 AM, Mike Tintner [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 Sunday, November 25, 2007

 Think Geek. Bet you're not picturing a woman.

Nothing about a [computer] geek necessarily implies gender at all.

To be fair, ask this same question but replace women with any other
'minority' and see if it's still a problem.

Also, ask the question about how many of these stereotypical geeks
are successfully employed in the real world these days.  Perhaps the
reason there are so few computer geeks is because those who are
responsible for maintaining corporate computer systems have had to
mature into roles less obviously geek.

I have a very anti-bias bias :)

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Re: [agi] Where are the women?

2007-11-28 Thread Mike Tintner





Mike: To be fair, ask this same question but replace women with any other

'minority' and see if it's still a problem.

I think women are the majority, aren't they? Anyway, yes, women are 
remarkably absent here. You will find them in fair numbers on science and 
philosophy groups for example. Perhaps it's something to do with a more 
abstract, less grounded subject area not appealing. Perhaps women are still 
much less involved in technology/  invention and machines. 



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RE: [agi] Where are the women?

2007-11-28 Thread John G. Rose
 From: Mike Tintner [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 
 Mike: To be fair, ask this same question but replace women with any
 other
  'minority' and see if it's still a problem.
 
 I think women are the majority, aren't they? Anyway, yes, women are
 remarkably absent here. You will find them in fair numbers on science
 and
 philosophy groups for example. Perhaps it's something to do with a more
 abstract, less grounded subject area not appealing. Perhaps women are
 still
 much less involved in technology/  invention and machines.

I've tried talking to women about artificial intelligence but often they are
more interested in real intelligence so I don't bother anymore... If you
tried rephrasing some of the terminology I'm sure it would be possible to
attract interest. I mean once anyone hears the work artificial it
immediately brings into the mind negative connotations. Perhaps that is why
a lot of successful AI gets accomplished under another guise.

John
 

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Re: [agi] Where are the women?

2007-11-28 Thread Jiri Jelinek
Where are the women?

I once read a short article on this topic. The author was trying to
explain it suggesting that many technical books are using rather
man-appealing analogies when explaining concepts which has
discouraging effect for women. They were about experiment with this in
Germany, planning to rewrite text-books (/lectures) using neutral and
woman-appealing analogies. I did not really follow it so not sure what
the outcome was.

Regards,
Jiri Jelinek

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RE: [agi] Where are the women?

2007-11-28 Thread Ed Porter
At a funeral for a friend of my parents in Maine I met one of my deceased
bright mother's bright friends who managed a consolidated school districts
that covered several small towns near Brunswick, Me.

I talked to her about the gap between women and men in science, and she
claimed under her stewardship her junior high schools got a grant to promote
the teaching of math to girls, and, in stark contrast to the previous
condition, after several years the girls were outperforming the boys
substantially on math aptitude tests.

So women are capable of doing math.  It is possible that men on average have
some abilities women do not, just as it appears women on average have some
capabilities men do not. But such generalities are only tendencies for which
there are many exceptions, and I think there are enough different dimensions
from which to attack AGI that even the mental strength commonly associated
with females, such as dealing with people, could play a valuable role.

And there are some very bright women in AI.  

Daphne Kohler, a leader in Bayesian reasoning, is a star.  Janet Kolodner,
one of the people on Schank's case-based-reasoning team obviously very
bright. Regina Barzilay
http://www.csail.mit.edu/biographies/PI/bioprint.php?PeopleID=1840 , at
MIT's CSAIL, did a very interesting NL project called NewsBlaster, that
automatically created an NL summary of current news stories.  I have
attended multiple lectures at MIT given by women that are very interesting.
The percent of women doing valuable work in the area of brain science is
probably even higher.

I think one of the major reasons women are so under represented in math and
AI is that the fields are considered by many women and men to be
un-feminine. AGI in particular has a human threatening quality about it,
that is offensive even to me.  This aspect of AI does not fit well of the
image many women have of themselves and their sex as being nurturing.

But still if you go to the MIT AI labs, I think there are more women in the
hallways and in the lectures than I saw 25 years ago (and the vibe is much
better).  From such events it actually seems there are currently
substantially more women, as a percentage, in AI than in say in the audience
at semiconductor technology lectures.  The percentage of women at the MIT AI
lab today is much higher, than say the percent of women in my advanced
physics class when I entered college over forty years ago.

So there is hope.

As it become increasingly more obvious how important AI is I hope more women
will participate.

Ed Porter


-Original Message-
From: Robin Gane-McCalla [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 
Sent: Wednesday, November 28, 2007 12:18 PM
To: agi@v2.listbox.com
Subject: Re: [agi] Where are the women?

The interesting thing about CS and AI is that they are man-defined
fields whereas physics, chemistry, biology etc are defined by nature.
Perhaps the simple fact that almost all programming languages and
concepts in AI were designed by white males (and a geeky subculture of
white males at that) is the main factor that has limited the entrance
of women and other minorities rather than other cultural differences.

On Nov 28, 2007 7:46 AM, Jiri Jelinek [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 Where are the women?

 I once read a short article on this topic. The author was trying to
 explain it suggesting that many technical books are using rather
 man-appealing analogies when explaining concepts which has
 discouraging effect for women. They were about experiment with this in
 Germany, planning to rewrite text-books (/lectures) using neutral and
 woman-appealing analogies. I did not really follow it so not sure what
 the outcome was.

 Regards,
 Jiri Jelinek

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-- 
Robin Gane-McCalla
YIM: Robin_Ganemccalla
AIM: Robinganemccalla

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Re: [agi] Where are the women?

2007-11-28 Thread Robin Gane-McCalla
 Only to the extent that mathematics is man-defined, but then physics
 et al are built entirely on mathematics so I'm not sure where you are
 going with this.  Computer science, and by extension AI, is not a
 field coalesced out of an arbitrary set of brain farts.

Computer Science and AI are defined by humans with the help of math to
achieve a specific goal.  There are almost always multiple ways of
achieving the specific goal, this is where the bias comes in, people
usually chose that which is the way which is easiest for them and
their colleagues and don't give much thought to how easy it will be
for outsiders to understand their programming language or AI concept.

 The only substantive cultural bias in programming languages is the
 pervasive use of English language keywords,
how can you say that?  Programming is essentially a way to solve
problems and all cultures solve problems differently.

 which hasn't seemed to
 slow down pasty white males who do not speak English a whit.  There
 are only a handful of abstract concepts that underly all programming
 languages,
what are these concepts?  And if all you need to do is understand a
few concepts, then why do computer experts (people who presumably
understand all of these concepts) have languages they prefer and argue
about which languages are best?

and if you understand those abstract concepts then the
 construction details of the programming language are largely
 immaterial.  How, precisely, would a female minority design a lambda
 calculus programming language that would be radically different from
 the myriad of such languages invented by pasty white male geeks?
A female minority (or any other minority, anybody who is far away from
the dominant geek culture that dominates CS) probably wouldn't ever
get to the point of designing a programming language unless she joined
the geek culture, and then she would be distanced from all the other
people who don't understand programming, and thus not any more able to
create a useful and easy to understand programming language than the
geeky white males.

 Programming languages are derived from mathematical models, with some
 application-oriented syntactic sugar to make common operations
 simpler.  They are precise and highly regular constructs whose only
 cultural bias is that they disallow ambiguity as a basic feature
 that follows from their mathematical derivation.
The cultural bias lies in the choices that people make for the
syntactic sugar and the mathematical models.
  Being able to
 manipulate complex multi-dimensional graphs in your head and
wait, why do I have to manipulate complex multi-dimensional graphs in
my head?  I'm a programmer and I've never done that before.  I'd be
interested in knowing why you think this skill is important, but I can
guarantee you many programmers never do it.
 communicate without ambiguity are the only background skills required
 to be a good software geek; the latter is learnable,
Communication is necessary for programmers?  I'd say useful, but not
necessary.  In my experience, it seems that human communication skills
are inversely related to the ability to understand computers, but
there are exceptions to that.
but I suspect the
 former is largely innate and even most white males are relatively poor
 at it.
Why do you think it is innate?

 Cheers,

 J. Andrew Rogers



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Robin Gane-McCalla
YIM: Robin_Ganemccalla
AIM: Robinganemccalla

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Re: [agi] Where are the women?

2007-11-28 Thread J. Andrew Rogers


On Nov 28, 2007, at 12:17 PM, Robin Gane-McCalla wrote:

The only substantive cultural bias in programming languages is the
pervasive use of English language keywords,

how can you say that?  Programming is essentially a way to solve
problems and all cultures solve problems differently.



This is not sociology, it is mathematics.  Transforming one set of  
binary states to another set of binary states.  Yes, there a number of  
different methods for doing a given a transformation, but those are  
all the same kind of mathematics and understanding the tradeoffs  
between those methods is also the same kind of mathematics.  And  
choosing a method is *not* arbitrary -- see the part about tradeoffs.


Mathematics does not work differently based on cultural context.   
There is not a lot of room for whimsy if economical results matter.




which hasn't seemed to
slow down pasty white males who do not speak English a whit.  There
are only a handful of abstract concepts that underly all programming
languages,

what are these concepts?  And if all you need to do is understand a
few concepts, then why do computer experts (people who presumably
understand all of these concepts) have languages they prefer and argue
about which languages are best?



Different languages have different syntactic sugar and structural  
biases that are better or worse for solving different problems.  And  
then there is the case of people being biased toward the familiar.   
There is no best language because no language is highly optimized  
toward solving all major classes of problem, yet all of the thousands  
of languages out there are essentially equivalent at a theoretical  
level.


Arguments over whether one language is better than another are about  
practical concerns, like library support and expression density in  
various domains.




A female minority (or any other minority, anybody who is far away from
the dominant geek culture that dominates CS) probably wouldn't ever
get to the point of designing a programming language unless she joined
the geek culture, and then she would be distanced from all the other
people who don't understand programming, and thus not any more able to
create a useful and easy to understand programming language than the
geeky white males.



Or maybe after she has actually studied theoretical computer science,  
this female minority understands the subject well enough to realize  
that there is no such thing as this mythical culturally sensitive  
programming language so many people are pining for.  Computer science  
is what it is.  Chemistry cannot be made as simple as cooking in a  
kitchen either, even though it has some superficial similarities.


This is a recurring theme, that Holy Grail programming language that  
requires no knowledge of computer science to use well.  These  
arguments are based entirely the desire to create a language that can  
turn a thoroughly ambiguous and contradictory specification into a  
perfectly working program, without grokking that programming languages  
are *by necessity* non-ambiguous and require consistent constraints --  
explicit and implicit -- if you want a useful result.


Your above argument is handwaving.  There was a reason I was looking  
for a specific example -- a minority friendly lambda calculus language  
-- because I've heard your claim made repeatedly for many, many years  
and have yet to see a single shred of evidence that such a language  
would not look virtually identical to one of the thousands of existing  
languages.  We have many dozens of languages that were expressly  
designed to make the underlying concepts as easy to grasp as possible  
for a non-geek.  This has lowered the barrier to learning a  
programming language a bit, but it has not obviated the necessity of  
learning the underlying concepts of theoretical computer science that  
would make knowing a programming language useful.




The cultural bias lies in the choices that people make for the
syntactic sugar and the mathematical models.



For example...?  Mathematical models are selected to optimize for  
certain functional characteristics.  If you think those choices are  
arbitrary, you were sleeping in your computational theory classes.


And in any case, you can find programming languages that run the range  
of every major (and most minor) mathematical models for programming in  
literature, and the major ones are available in major languages.  The  
choice is yours.


Syntactic sugar is not an excuse either; note that the cultural bias  
for syntactic sugar is among *sub-communities of geeks* and not the  
population at large.  It is a technical culture, not a social culture  
(though LISP weenies get damn close).  Also many (most?) languages let  
you create your own syntactic sugar.  In any case, I'd be interested  
in seeing an example of a prohibitive cultural bias in syntactic sugar.


And if what you assert is true, where are all the female COBOL  

Re: [agi] Where are the women?

2007-11-28 Thread Mike Tintner
JAR: These  arguments are based entirely the desire to create a language 
that can

turn a thoroughly ambiguous and contradictory specification into a
perfectly working program, without grokking that programming languages
are *by necessity* non-ambiguous and require consistent constraints --
explicit and implicit -- if you want a useful result.

No doubt - if you want a narrow AI result - a precise answer to a convergent 
problem. But virtually all human beings use natural language - ambiguous 
language - as their basic (though by no means exclusive) means of solving 
problems, and communicating with each other. Even mathematicians depend on 
natural language to frame their more numerical/ algebraic/ geometrical 
thoughts.


An open-ended, ambiguous language is in fact the sine qua non of AGI. 
Thankyou for indirectly pointing that out to me.



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Re: [agi] Where are the women?

2007-11-28 Thread Mike Dougherty
On Nov 28, 2007 9:23 PM, Mike Tintner [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 An open-ended, ambiguous language is in fact the sine qua non of AGI.
 Thankyou for indirectly pointing that out to me.

Would you agree that an absolutely precise language with zero
ambiguity would be somewhat stifling for use in a creative mode?

It seems to me that new points are discovered when different observers
attempt to relate their positions relative to a third point of
discussion.  The analogies, misunderstandings, reconciliation, and
meta-symbols that are required for even the simplest agreement often
generates more context about the other party in the conversation than
the point upon which they eventually agree.

you think?

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Re: [agi] Where are the women?

2007-11-28 Thread Mike Tintner

Mike,

I think that the central point of language is that it can be treated as 
consisting of general, abstract, open-ended scripts  (the last being 
another way of describing concepts).


The value of language then is that I can tell you Go to the movies for 2 
hours - and I do not have to tell you any of the vast details of what to 
do -  how to go - which transport to take, which movie to watch, which 
cinema to go to, how to divided your time,  and so on. Or I can tell you Go 
and buy me something nice for supper and again I can leave the complex 
details up to you. Or I can say The cat sat on the mat and I don't have to 
draw you a detailed picture.


All words - all scripts - leave the individuals concerned - both speaker 
and listener - immense latitude as to how to interpret them. (To the narrow 
AI, convergent mentality this is terrible. To a broad AGI divergent 
mentality it is a great virtue. It enables you, for example,  to adapt to 
dynamic environments - to change your route to, and choice of movies if 
unforeseen obstacles arise - whereas a narrow AI program, that held your 
hand every step of the way,  would get you stuck).


The disadvantage of course of language's open-endedness is that it can leave 
room for considerable misunderstanding as to what are and are not proper 
details of a given script (or proper individual concretisations of those 
general abstractions). I might get upset, for example, if you didn't leave 
the house but watched movies on the house TV, (strictly a legitimate 
interpretation of my command).


An additional advantage of language is, as you indicate at the end, that 
different individuals can agree on certain basic interpretations of any 
given set of words, and yet bring in addition their own rich associations  - 
fill in those scripts with different details.  We may agree that an 
open-ended language is the sine qua non of AGI and yet each have  v. 
different associations with language/AGI etc. - which can be mutually 
enriching.


P.S. The only thing I disagree with you about is that I don't think language 
is much use for analogies - I think they are derived primarily from 
graphics/ schemas and images.



MD: MT An open-ended, ambiguous language is in fact the sine qua non of 
AGI.

Thankyou for indirectly pointing that out to me.


Would you agree that an absolutely precise language with zero
ambiguity would be somewhat stifling for use in a creative mode?

It seems to me that new points are discovered when different observers
attempt to relate their positions relative to a third point of
discussion.  The analogies, misunderstandings, reconciliation, and
meta-symbols that are required for even the simplest agreement often
generates more context about the other party in the conversation than
the point upon which they eventually agree.

you think?

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Re: [agi] Where are the women?

2007-11-28 Thread Jean-Paul Van Belle
By coincidence whilst the debate was raging last night (local time:), I was 
busy reading 'Studying Those Who Study Us, An anthropologist in the world of 
artificial intelligence', (Stanford University Press, 2001) which is a 
posthumous collection of academic essays by Diana Forsythe. She roamed 4 or 5 
AI labs for the better part of 10 years using her trained anthropologist's eye 
to reflect on the culture of AI labls and geeks. A couple of essays concern 
exactly this point (esp 'Disappearing Women in the Social World of Computing') 
and I have a feeling that she would strongly disagree with the feelings 
expressed on this list i.e. that women are scarce because of the nature of the 
field - she feels strongly it has much more to do with the social attitudes 
(cultural norms) in the discipline. Ok she took a bit of a feminist angle but 
that's not surprising considering what happened to her parents (both were 
acccomplished computer scientist, the father became famous, the mother 
forgotten), or probably more by exactly her personal experiences in these labs. 

Anyway it is a very interesting (and quick) read with some good thoughts/inputs 
on other aspects of AI (and AGI) thinking - especially the disconnect between 
how AI geeks think and how the rest of the world (including the user) operates. 
The article that I found the most interesting was 'The Construction of Work in 
Artificial Intelligence' where she highlights strongly what *we* (AI 
scientists) think is real A(G)I as opposed to what we actually really do. It 
relates to an earlier posting of mine whereby I queried how much time the 
people claiming to work on AGI really spend on AGI design as opposed to the 
time spent on peripheral issues (she lists 19 major things AI researchers do, 
only one of which is related to real AI :)

Back to the women, there is at least one very smart woman on this list who's 
elected to stay quiet in this debate... Samantha?

=Jean-Paul
-- 

Research Associate: CITANDA
Post-Graduate Section Head 
Department of Information Systems
Phone: (+27)-(0)21-6504256
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 On 2007/11/28 at 19:18, in message
[EMAIL PROTECTED], Robin
Gane-McCalla [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 The interesting thing about CS and AI is that they are man-defined
 fields whereas physics, chemistry, biology etc are defined by nature.
 Perhaps the simple fact that almost all programming languages and
 concepts in AI were designed by white males (and a geeky subculture of
 white males at that) is the main factor that has limited the entrance
 of women and other minorities rather than other cultural differences.
 
 On Nov 28, 2007 7:46 AM, Jiri Jelinek [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 Where are the women?

 I once read a short article on this topic. The author was trying to
 explain it suggesting that many technical books are using rather
 man-appealing analogies when explaining concepts which has
 discouraging effect for women. They were about experiment with this in
 Germany, planning to rewrite text-books (/lectures) using neutral and
 woman-appealing analogies. I did not really follow it so not sure what
 the outcome was.

 Regards,
 Jiri Jelinek

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