More on Harvard and Women

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I haven’t had as much time to really dive into this as I’d like, but that happens sometimes. Last month, Royce pointed out Harvard President Lawrence Summers’ remarks about women and their aptitude for sciences and asked me what I thought.

I wasn’t sure, but I ended up offering a limited defense of Summers — though not of what he said, for the simple fact that at the time there was no transcript, and all the reports were simply operating on second- or third-hand reports.

Well, a transcript of the session has been released, and from skimming it over, I’m more convinced than I was before that Summers was being a goob. Looks like I erred a bit too far on the side of caution on this one (though I’ll stand by that error — I’d far rather look at what someone did say than what someone else says that they said).

From the New York Times, via Daily Kos:

At that point, the Harvard leader suggested he believed that the innate aptitude of women was a factor behind their low numbers in the sciences and engineering.

“My best guess, to provoke you, of what’s behind all of this is that the largest phenomenon – by far – is the general clash between people’s legitimate family desires and employers’ current desire for high power and high intensity; that in the special case of science and engineering, there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude; and that those considerations are reinforced by what are in fact lesser factors involving socialization and continuing discrimination,” Dr. Summers said, according to the transcript.

Slate’s William Saletan, who had what I felt was a good look at the original furor, has also come back to take another look at Summers’ remarks.

For more than a month, critics have accused Harvard President Larry Summers of using genetics to explain away sexism in society and academia. They’ve demanded that he release transcripts of the remarks in question, delivered at an academic conference on Jan. 14. On Thursday, facing calls for his resignation, Summers released the transcript. It shows his critics misconstrued or misrepresented him on numerous points. It also shows what he got wrong and why.

[…]

In short, Summers got a bum rap. So was his analysis of biological and cultural factors sound? The transcript answers that question, too. The answer is no. Summers grossly overreached the evidence, and he made a couple of glaring logical blunders.

Summers proposed “that in the special case of science and engineering, there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude, and that those considerations are reinforced by what are in fact lesser factors involving socialization and continuing discrimination.” In other words, biology outweighs environment. No evidence he presented justifies this hypothesis.

[…]

Why did Summers make these mistakes? The transcript suggests two conflicting reasons. One is that he’s stubborn and argumentative. […] The other is that once he offers a hypothesis, he’d rather defend and extend it than listen objectively to the alternatives. He’s got an open mind but not an open heart.

I suspect this, rather than sexism, is the root of Summers’ errors, because a sexist wouldn’t have said what he said while displaying a second intellectual flaw evident in the transcript. Again and again, Summers warned his listeners to be skeptical of what they’d prefer to believe. We all want to believe socialization explains differences in male and female outcomes, he observed. Therefore, he reasoned, we should distrust that hypothesis and look for evidence to the contrary. He was so busy being skeptical of the popular explanation that he forgot to be skeptical of the unpopular one. He overstated the case for innate sex differences not because he wanted to believe it, but because he didn’t.

Whatever his reasons or justifications, now that we know what was said, it’s clear that Summers hasn’t been facing an undeserved controversy. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out in the long run.

Another Music Meme: Cover Me

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Another music meme, this one being started by Terrance: Cover Me.

Here it is. Do these three things, either in the comments on this post or in a post on your own blog that trackbacks to this post.

This one’s not easy, especially given the size of my music library. I’ll try, though…

List your three favorite cover versions of previously recorded songs.

(This is by no means a “final” or “definitive” list. Trying to pin down just three of all the ones that kept popping into my head was difficult enough, and I know that there are tons that I didn’t think of. I’ll be coming up with more and kicking myself for the next week. I’m already coming up with more possibilities — there are a ton of good covers of the Rolling Stones’ ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, for instance, and I don’t think I’ve heard a bad version of The Temptations’ ‘Papa Was A Rolling Stone’, not to mention Tom Jones and the Art of Noise taking on Prince’s ‘Kiss’, or Sid Vicious ripping his way through ‘My Way’…argh!)

List three songs you’d like to hear cover versions of, and the artists you like to hear perform them.

  1. Ain’t Goin’ Down ’til the Sun Comes Up, originally by Garth Brooks, re-done by Ministry with Les Claypool of Primus on vocals

I know we’re supposed to come up with three here, but this particular dream has been in my head for so long that it’s the only one I ever seem to come up with. Take a fun fast country song, re-do it with Ministry’s trademark high-speed distortion-heavy guitar work, and throw Les doing his best country bumpkin patter over the top of it. I’d pay good money for this to become a reality.

List three songs you would like to cover, if you could. (Assume you would have the musical abilities to do it well.)

  1. The Pet Shop Boys, It’s a Sin: One of my all-time favorite 80’s tracks, and at times, one that has seemed all too fitting in my life.
  2. Indigo Swing, How Lucky Can One Guy Be?: Great swing, and this is one of my favorite tracks off of an album that I have a hard time picking single favorites from.
  3. Queen, Dreamer’s Ball: Queen just kicking back and having fun with a silly little ditty. The live acoustic version of this is particularly good.

(Again, hardly a definitive list. One of these days I’ll actually get suckered into Karaoke, and then we’ll see what I can actually come up with…)

iTunes “Stagger” by Underworld from the album Second Toughest in the Infants (1996, 7:37).

Not Gallimaufry

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Since I’ve kind of slacked off on my ‘Gallimaufry’ meme posts over the past few weeks, here’s a music meme from Don to play with.

How many songs?

15,293 songs, 69.10 GB, 51 days 11 hours 46 minutes 42 seconds total playing time.

Sorted by song title, the first and last songs:

Sorted by artist, the first and last songs:

  • Is It You (Scintillating), by :Wumpscut:, off of Born Again
  • Green Crumble, by μ-ziq, off of In Pine Effect

Sorted by album, the first and last songs:

Top 10 most-played songs (Most-played song at No. 1):

  1. Listen, by the Kleptones, off of A Night at the Hip-Hopera
  2. Precession, by the Kleptones, off of A Night at the Hip-Hopera
  3. Break, by the Kleptones, off of A Night at the Hip-Hopera
  4. See, by the Kleptones, off of A Night at the Hip-Hopera
  5. Live, by the Kleptones, off of A Night at the Hip-Hopera
  6. Bite, by the Kleptones, off of A Night at the Hip-Hopera
  7. Jazz, by the Kleptones, off of A Night at the Hip-Hopera
  8. Play, by the Kleptones, off of A Night at the Hip-Hopera
  9. Ridicule, by the Kleptones, off of A Night at the Hip-Hopera
  10. Plan, by the Kleptones, off of A Night at the Hip-Hopera

(Um…yeah. I’ve been listening to this a lot recently.)

Last 10 recently played songs (Most recently played at No. 1):

  1. This is a Collective (12″), by Consolidated, off of Dysfunctional Relationship
  2. The Day the World Went Away, by Nine Inch Nails, off of The Day the World Went Away
  3. Somebody Gotta Do It (Remix), by Ice-T, off of Just Say Yes
  4. Erased, Over, Out, by Nine Inch Nails, off of Further Down the Spiral
  5. Phantom of the Opera (’94 Club), by Harajuku, off of Phantom of the Opera
  6. We Care A Lot, by Faith No More, off of Never Mind the Mainstream
  7. It’s A Miracle, by Roger Waters, off of Amused to Death
  8. China, by Tori Amos, off of Little Earthquakes
  9. Sexcrime (Ninteen Eighty-Four), by The Eurythmics, off of 1984 (For the Love of Big Brother)
  10. Brian Wilson’s Dreams, by The Who Boys, off of Tales of Townshend and Wilson

Find “sex”; how many songs?

  • Global (title, artist, album) search: 188 songs
  • Song title search: 83 songs

Find “death”; how many songs?

  • Global search: 150 songs
  • Song title search: 54 songs

Find “love”; how many songs?

  • Global search: 830 songs
  • Song title search: 557 songs

Find “peace”; how many songs?

  • Global search: 75 songs
  • Song title search: 30 songs

iTunes ”To Strong (Cosmic)“ by Ultimate from the album Tripnotized Vol. 3 (1996, 6:33).

Comment Spam Update

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This is so nice to see.

Since Feb. 8th (the last time I reset the logfile), the only entries in MT-Blacklist’s log for Eclecticism are automatic updates of the master blacklist.

Over on the family weblog, since Feb. 10th (when the site got reset), there have been all of 77 spam attempts, all of which have been blocked. Two comments have required moderation, both of which were me poking around during the rebuild.

I’m a happy sysadmin right now.

iTunes “Firepile” by Throwing Muses from the album Alterno-Daze: 90’s Natural Selection (1992, 3:14).

Newsflash: Psychics as accurate as ever

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I’m running behind in my online reading, between concentrating on my server and then feeling ill last weekend — I’m currently reading items from Feb. 13th in NetNewsWire, and I’ve got 2000 unread items to go — but sometimes there are advantages to being a bit behind the times. Take this Metafilter post, for example:

A group of psychics led by colourful ‘SilverJade’, based in Johannesburg South Africa, have predicted that a series of earthquakes and other natural disasters will strike the western coast of the United States on or around the 23rd of February 2005. The prediction is based on the interpretation of a series of dreams by SilverJade, and the technical analysis of earthquake patterns occuring worldwide throughout the month of January 2005. As of 11th of February 2005, they have successfully predicted a significant event, a 5.5 magnitude earthquake in south eastern Alaska, as being a first step in a series of smaller events leading up to the big bang. The next step of the prediction is set to occur at some time on or around the 13th and 15th of the month.

Seeing as how it’s now late in the evening on the 16th, I do believe that SilverJade was a bit off in her predictions.

Gee, now that’s a surprise.

Of course, we do have until “on or around” the 23rd to see if she ends up with the last laugh…

iTunes “Banstyle/Sappys Curry” by Underworld from the album Second Toughest in the Infants (1996, 15:22).

Too many movies!

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Remove some moviesWhoops!

Apparently the most movies you can have in your Netflix queue is 500. I had no idea. Of course, I’m not sure I expected to end up with a queue this big when I started this whole Netflix thing, either. And, of course, while I understand why they do it, it would certainly help if I wasn’t getting throttled.

So now I’ve got to go through and nuke some of my list. Though, given that there’s always more movies that I think would be fun to watch (each week’s New Releases list invariably adds at least two or three to my queue), maybe I should just set up a dedicated del.icio.us account to act as a NetFlix ‘overflow queue’. That’s not a bad idea, actually.

iTunes “It All Begins Here (Oneiric Vocal)” by Ofunwa from the album This is the Sound of Tribal U.K. Vol. 2 (1995, 2:36).

Hitchiker’s Trailer

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Amazon has the full trailer for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on their home page right now. It’s Flash-based and kind of small, but at least it’s there.

So far, things look promising.

Update: Waxy has a QT version.

I found this much higher-quality Quicktime trailer, that seems to be a copy of the internal workprint with time signatures and “Do Not Duplicate” warning. Oh, well!

iTunes “Shoot That Laserbeam (Re-Recorded)” by Army of Lovers from the album Army of Lovers (1991, 4:22).

Cuff ’em on! Eat ’em off!

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Oh, so you think the fuzzy handcuffs your sweetie gave you for Valentine’s Day are cool, huh? Kind of funny, maybe something to add a little “spice” to your sex life if you get the nerve?

That’s nothin’.

Check out what I got from Prairie for Valentine’s Day this year…

Read more

Thanks, Six Apart

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As might have been implied by my last post detailing an evening’s work tweaking templates and installing plugins, I’ve decided to stay with Movable Type for my weblog. There are a few reasons for this, but it boils down primarily to two things: familiarity and loyalty.

This isn’t at all a slight against WordPress (which I was actively poking at), Expression Engine, or any other weblogging system, for that matter. I’m actually quite impressed with WordPress, and if I were starting a project from the ground up, I’d definitely include it in the list of strong contenders to run the back end. For this site, though, I decided that it was better to stick with what I knew and spend some time tweaking things than to jump ship entirely.

Right now I have a little over three years worth of experience with Movable Type (I switched over to MT from a similar but far simpler package called NewsPro on Dec. 21, 2001). While I certainly wouldn’t rate myself terribly high in the pantheon of expert MT users out there, after this much time fiddling and tweaking, I don’t think I’m any slouch, either. While I’m sure I could learn the ins and outs of a new system easily enough, in this case I’d rather use and build upon the knowledge I have rather than starting over from scratch.

Besides, in the time I’ve been using MT, the software itself has worked quite well for me. My battles over the past weeks have been with the comment spammers and their abuse of the limited resources of my server, not MT. Moving to another system might have worked temporarily, but it would only be a matter of time (and likely not very much time, at that) before the attacks started hitting that system — and I’m still not convinced that a PHP solution is the best choice for my webserver. Better for me to make a few concessions (disabling comments after 30 days, for instance) than put my server through the effort of serving up an entirely dynamically-generated website.

There’s one more big reason why I wanted to stay with MT, though — and that’s Six Apart.

As I mentioned above, I started using MT back in its version 1.something days, back when there was no Six Apart, just Ben and Mena in their apartment. Back then, I was one of many people occasionally popping up on the Movable Type Support Forums, and as often as not, it would be either Ben or Mena personally answering the pleas for help when one stumbling block or another was found. It’s things like that that add a more personal touch to software — and one of the reasons I’m fond of shareware programs like NetNewsWire, ecto, or many other programs where the developers are still personally involved with their user base — there’s the feeling of a real, breathing person behind the software, rather than a faceless corporation.

Obviously, as Six Apart has grown, Ben and Mena aren’t always as personally involved with their user base as they used to be. However, in my experience, Six Apart has yet to lose that personal, “real person” feeling, and that’s in no small part due to the excellent people they’ve been hiring, many of whom have been loyal users of MT for longer than I have.

When I got Slashdotted after news of my departure from Microsoft broke across the ‘net, I was using Six Apart’s TypePad service. As it turns out, I had the unenviable position of being their first Slashdotting, and those next few days became something of an experience (for both myself and Six Apart, I believe) in how to handle such an event. I’d already spent much of the day waging a losing battle with my inbox as comments, TrackBack pings, and e-mail missives deluged me, when suddenly iChat popped up with a friendly hello from Mena herself. I was a bit taken aback — it’s not every day I get an IM from the President of a software company, after all — but again, it’s things like that that impress me. Rather than assigning my case to one of the tech support crew, she and I spent the next few minutes working out ways for me to tweak the code on my pages to ease the load on the TypePad servers.

A few weeks ago, I realized that due to my own absentmindedness, I’d accidentally paid for a year of TypePad that I wasn’t going to be using, as I’d moved back onto my own server. It was a little frustrating, but I had noone to blame but myself, and said as much when I grumbled about it here. Imagine my surprise, then, when I got an e-mail from Brad Choate, who’d come across my post, pointed it out to someone at Six Apart, and had made arrangements with Brenna to refund me that yearly fee. I hadn’t asked for this, and there was absolutely no reason for Six Apart to do this for me — but they decided that it would be a nice thing to do.

Then, just a few days ago, Anil Dash noticed that with my battles against the spammers I’d started looking at WordPress, and he sent me a friendly little note asking if there was anything they could do to help me with my MT installation. I let him know that my limitations weren’t with MT, but with my webserver (and was barely able to keep from mentioning how nice it would be to find an Xserve PowerMac Mac mini on my doorstep one day — it wouldn’t have been at all serious, but I don’t know if Anil stops by my page often enough to catch my sense of humor), and thanked him for his note. Again, this is the kind of thing that impresses me — sure, on the one hand, he’s “just another blogger”, but he’s also the Vice President of the Six Apart Professional Network.

What it boils down to is that over the years, time and time again, I’ve gotten incredibly friendly and personal service from the crew at Six Apart. I can’t think of a better way to build and maintain customer loyalty than that.

So, to Ben, Mena, Brad, Brenna, Anil, and all the rest of the crew at Six Apart — thanks, folks. Keep on rockin’. :)

Final comment tweaks

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Some few final tweaks to the comments tonight, and I think I’m finally done tinkering. For now, at least. There’s always more projects coming down the line somewhere. :)

As I mentioned before, comments will now automatically turn off after 30 days. Most conversations only really continue for a day or two after a post goes up anyway, and this limits the number of entries on my site that can be targeted by comment spammers. I’ve decided to go ahead and leave TrackBacks open, however, for two reasons. Firstly, there are posts that will continue to be relevant as time goes by, so I don’t mind getting pings long after a post originally went up; and secondly, turning off TrackBack pings also removes them from the page entirely, and I’d prefer to keep them visible.

I’ve also re-installed Adam Kalsey‘s SimpleComments plugin, which integrates comments and trackbacks together. This way, rather than having all TrackBack pings listed together above the comments, there is one single chronological list that combines both.

Lastly, I’ve integrated Gravatar support, so those of you who have Gravatar icons will now see them displayed along with any comments you leave here.

iTunes “Space Food” by Tai-Fun from the album Essential Chillout (1999, 6:57).