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from the we'll-all-be-getting-dates-now dept.
Lina Nilsson writes in an op-ed piece in the NYT that she looks with despair at estimates that only about 14 percent of engineers in the work force are women but that there may be a solution to the disparity that is much simpler than targeted recruitment efforts. "An experience here at the University of California, Berkeley, where I teach, suggests that if the content of the work itself is made more societally meaningful, women will enroll in droves," writes Nilsson. "That applies not only to computer engineering but also to more traditional, equally male-dominated fields like mechanical and chemical engineering."
Nilsson says that Blum Center for Developing Economies recently began a new program that, without any targeted outreach, achieved 50 percent female enrollment in just one academic year. In the fall of 2014, UC Berkeley began offering a new Ph.D. minor in development engineering for students doing thesis work on solutions for low-income communities. They are designing affordable solutions for clean drinking water, inventing medical diagnostic equipment for neglected tropical diseases and enabling local manufacturing in poor and remote regions.
According to Nilsson, women seem to be drawn to engineering projects that attempt to achieve societal good and cites MIT, University of Minnesota, Penn State, Santa Clara University, Arizona State, and the University of Michigan that have programs aimed at reducing global poverty and inequality that have achieved similar results. For example, at Princeton, the student chapter of Engineers Without Borders has an executive board that is nearly 70 percent female, reflecting the overall club composition.
"It shows that the key to increasing the number of female engineers may not just be mentorship programs or child care centers, although those are important" concludes Nilsson. "It may be about reframing the goals of engineering research and curriculums to be more relevant to societal needs. It is not just about gender equity — it is about doing better engineering for us all."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 29 2015, @01:29AM
So given the observations:
I suppose that does imply "To make women sign up for Electrical/Mechanical/etc. Engineering, we should turn it into Development Engineering". Shame it took us so long to figure that out.
But while that may do wonders for your enrollment statistics, I don't see how you actually fix the scarcity of women who can actually do Electrical/Mechanical/etc. engineering, which (I thought) was the actual inequity we wanted to solve.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by anubi on Wednesday April 29 2015, @03:01AM
I got the idea women were generally smart enough to stay out of this.
There is a lot of competition, dog-eat-dog stuff, usually classified as exempt from employment laws, and quickly obsoleted by technological changes, however the employers want to get you at damned near minimum wage if you happen to have the skillset of the hour they need... then when you complete what they asked, you see what "at will" employment means.
Now, I know why playing sports was so encouraged in High School, and us STEM types were seen upon as antisocial nerds. The most valued part of the organizations are those who have the skills to get others to do the hard work for bottom dollar, whether it be design of a satellite or picking strawberries.
Fulfilling an Engineering curriculum is really tough. Just pull a few thesis for the Master's Degree of Engineering from the net if you do not believe me. No wonder we aren't so social, It takes a lot of time to fish through all those technical manuals to understand what is going on. Not a helluva lot of time left over for parties, believe me.
Now, one smart woman I just saw knew where to put her ducks... City Hall. She is highly paid ( in relation to me - that is) to make determinations as to who can do what to their houses and stay within city ordinances. She is still employed. I am not. From what I can tell, there are literally thousands of us aerospace engineers from the 60's that are currently working far below their training level.
I think the women have more sense than to get messed up in this kind of stuff.
I tell others to get into this ONLY if they have a passion for it, as I did. The passion does not necessarily mean you will be employed.
If you get a kick out of climbing mountains just because its there, go for it.
If you get a kick out of playing with AD641 and AD630 chips to make a logarithmic lock-in filter so you can hear morse code buried in so much noise that without the filter, you could not tell the code was even there... go for it.
However, do not expect you are going to find either a sponsor for your mountain climbing, analog skills, refrigeration, solar engineering, or whatever. There are a lot of things one does for fun, and ( for some ), engineering is one of them.
And there are some things one does for income. Personally, I find lawyering, banking, landlording, management ( especially the paperwork and personnel stuff ) to be painfully boring, but that is where the money is.
There are a lot of things people like to do... and those do not seem to pay well. What seems to pay well is to get in a position of having others pay you for permission to allow them to do something.
I do not blame the women at all for steering clear of this. This country is already awash in STEM skills, and we can import as many more as we want. If what I said was not true, engineers would be reabsorbed into the workplace as quick as a dented kruggerand would last on the sidewalk. What I see is no one wants the old dented one, when they can have a new one in a presentation case begging to be taken.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 29 2015, @03:23AM
Definitions:
Social: You are invited and you go to the party
Asocial (like asynchronous or asymmetrical): You are invited to the party but you don't go
Anti-social: You are NOT invited to the party but you go anyway
Really Anti-social: You go to the party and try to kill everyone there
-- gewg_
(Score: 1) by anubi on Wednesday April 29 2015, @05:00AM
I stand corrected. "Asocial" was the term I was looking for.
Yes, I was invited to lots of social gatherings during my university days, however I knew I had a lot of work to do, and put that first. You know, that old "Ant and the Grasshopper" meme. I chose to be the ant.
Knowledge of Ebers-Moll models or thermodynamics do not help me nearly as much as a good network of people who would hire me because they knew me in College.
Thanks!
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 29 2015, @09:24AM
And what are you if you are not invited to the party, and don't do?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday April 29 2015, @09:41AM
Either compliant or oblivious.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Wednesday April 29 2015, @01:12PM
Dont know why this was modded down. It is the missing option.
Strange it was missed because in fact it is vastly the majority option. If you live in the USA just think of all those parties in Russia you are never invited to and never go.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday April 29 2015, @11:46AM
The passion does not necessarily mean you will be employed.
I started out chemeng, went EE, then CS/IT. The nice part of being an electronics nut, ham since I was a teen, building heathkits since I was 5 (with some help), etc, is I can go home and build a:
AD641 and AD630 chips to make a logarithmic lock-in filter
In my basement for frankly not very much of my salary. Mouser wants $48.33 for your AD641 (wtf is that thing, a LNA for 47 GHz or ?) Mouser doesn't sell the 630 but the point is some chips, some sockets, some wire wrap wire, some super glue, I can do stuff cheap. The first thing I thought when I pulled the 630 data sheet is that would make a hell of a SDR quadrature demod/mod, Tayloe mixer style, wouldn't it? Of course more than 15 seconds of analysis might prove otherwise.
Its my poor unfortunate Chemeng brethren who are totally screwed. Oh that distillation column? Thats for my hobby of microscale petroleum refining. Would you like to see my homemade hydrocracker? That would be a hell of an interesting, although unrealistic, hobby.
Its kind of like music. A fun way to spend your evenings and weekends, but having a day job is a better overall lifestyle.
currently working far below their training level
Yeah no shit the best summary of early 21st century culture I've seen recently. Not just aerospace. Sure... all those CRUD webapps and boring ETLs "need" a guy who passed compilers, automata theory, os design, control system theory, diffeqs, and both systems analyst courses, sure... but good luck getting a shitty job doing that shitty work without the above gold plated class list, at least outside SV and NYC during their tech bubbles.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Friday May 01 2015, @12:42AM
VLM... You really impressed me... you actually looked up those parts?
I was spouting off my latest dream when I was contemplating how to hear morse code ( or anything else ) when it was buried in noise. Yes, you hit the nail square on the head for those AD630. Quadrature demodulator. Lock-in amplifier. I want only to see what is in frequency and phase of an arbitrary frequency and nothing else. And the AD641 is a high speed logarithmic amplifier... this will allow me to see tiny signals but not get overwhelmed with large ones. Its one of the tricks I used to use on radars. The further away something was, the weaker the return was, however playing games with log amps and variable gain amps would allow me to pull signals out of the noise.
Those old CRT displays made things much simpler to display, as the phosphor would act as an integrator and allow many scans to be integrated making especially weak returns identifiable. However these days, a lot of the stuff I play with is much shorter range.
I was lucky to have picked up a bunch of surplus stuff during my aerospace days and have a few to monkey with. Otherwise, I get my toys out of China if I can't find them at swap meets. Commercial outlets are too pricey for me, as I have to save what money I do come across trying to keep tax authorities satiated.
All these fake "crises" have done a lot of us in. All we ended up doing is paying dearly to acquire skills un-needed by this nation. Skills in chem-eng just as you say, energy conversion, thermal transfer ( one of mine ), even fundamental computer science. It seems all the jobs are for code-jockeys spinning whatever the current fashion today is without no concern whatsoever for tomorrow..... when it all has to be done over again.
If I am going to invest years of my life building something, I am building it to last. A lot longer than I will last. I see no reason to build castles in the sand, only to be washed away by the tide. Nor do I see much reason to invest much time building around proprietary technologies, protected by copyright, and vulnerable to enforced obsolescence at the whim of someone else - and nothing I can (legally) do about it. ( Oh, I can circumvent it, but that isn't *legal*, and the wavers of the pen are apt to descend on me and destroy my work and me ).
The hardest trick for me has been to find businessmen who also feel as I do and want a system that runs forever, not until the chain is broken by the first critical component failing through enforced obsolescence ( by copyright and legally unbreakable digital locks ). To me a good, solid, maintainable system is a lot more desirable than a patchwork of proprietary stuff hobbled together that runs for a year or so before one thing or another goes out of style.
I am kinda interested in your mini-refinery... just wondering you might wanna use a different feedstock with some reflux columns and run off ethanol.
I would not advise selling any - as any money exchanges light up all sorts of indicators on governmental monitor panels. However the ability to produce that substance will guarantee your neighbors will not see any advantage of doing away with you should the economy collapse.. as you will be able to produce something which would soon be in high demand and short supply. The way our government runs these days, it appears they are deliberately trying to get everyone onto sustenance programs anyway, and make sure *everyone* but the chosen few are ignorant of how stuff works - by copyright, patent, DMCA, high tuition fees, and snuffing out the economy to finance high-falutin' lifestyles for the chosen few that know the right people.
I was just thinking about that story here about companies not being able to hire people with the skills they needed for robotic order filling. Now, that is right down my alley, but no way would I be hired - as I would want to do the whole thing in C++. First thing I would do is select huge hard drives - how many bytes in a cluster? Then make sure my C++ structures to store/retrieve are compatibly sized. Take each inventory item and make a record for it. Each unique article in the storeroom would correlate with a record on the disk. Make key files on each item in the records, so I can sort those for quick retrieval. And as far as the warehouse goes, every item is placed by what bin it fits in - I do not care where it goes - just that a little thing goes in a little cubbyhole, a bigger thing gets a bigger cubbyhole. I do not want to waste volume. But I have no compunction of placing screwdrivers and packages of plant seeds right next to each other. The warehouse may look like a complete hodgepodge of unsorted stuff, but its all packed in the minimum possible volume. The database knows where it put everything.
I know how to code it. I know how to build the robotic placer/picker, how to put barcoding along the rails so the machine gets immediate confirmation of correct placement, but I must use tools I already know how to use to build anything like this. Do I really think a businessman would let me do things my way? Or would he rather deal with someone else that will give him lip service and agree to any thing he wants - even if he is using "faith-based" implementation skill?
Our nation seems to have little need of engineers and scientists, as our elite have printing presses and they can pay for whatever they want with the fruit of their press, then exact it back with tax. It won't change until some other country develops superior technologies and questions who really owns what with superior weaponry to back up that question... Being most of us do not own anything ( we may *think* we do but fail to pay the man and you quickly see who *really* owns it) , that won't be our problem.
It seems such a waste to me to see so many talented artists in our midst, yet we keep trying to use our Picassos for painting houses.
From what I see, the most immediate pressing need we have right now is having a trustable computing system. Microsoft ain't it. By a long shot. Way too many special interests have their backdoors in it. My own feeling is a simplified public WIN95-like GUI running from ROM is the way to go. It would be standard issue with any motherboard. Well-documented ( like the early DOS was... remember the early AT technical reference where they actually printed the source code to DOS, along with the schematics?). It would provide basic file and I/O management standalone, along with the GUI equivalent of GWBasic. ( Gawd I miss GWBasic on the new systems! )
I was a little windy here, but this post is probably too stale to get modded ( -1,Windbag. )
(Score: 1) by anubi on Friday May 01 2015, @01:50AM
Oh yes, VLM, I got so wrapped up in that AD630... thanks for the reminder on the Tayloe detector!
I was not aware there was another part out there, the PI3B3253 [pericom.com] that makes a good switch for this topology. I had previously used a pair of flip-flops of a 4013 to make a quadrature waveform, which drove 4016's, as I had both Q and Q* from each flip-flop available. I was considering AD630 cause I have some and thought the carrier injection noise might be less.... but then that new low voltage switch looks quite neat... as I might want to battery-power this thing from a lithium cell.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday May 03 2015, @11:56AM
There's .gov encouragement of infotainment and lowest common denominator entertainment also.
Something to think about the engineering of warehouses is they tend to build them in the middle of nowhere (admittedly on great roadways) and I wonder if the primary limiter for a really large warehouse (to big for human pickers to walk around in) might end up being thruput. In which case you'd end up building a really ugly department store anyway to minimize robot time once you're over 100 acres in size or whatever.
The cost of sales issue was something I always thought about with the rise of FOSS, at least with unix mentality of small simple tools one reason to free it is the fixed minimal cost of setting up to legally sell (and pay innumerable taxes and follow innumerable regulations) would exceed the revenue of a small simple tool. This might explain some of the sputtering out effect over time of more "windows like" monolithic apps in FOSS.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 29 2015, @03:18AM
> I suppose that does imply "To make women sign up for Electrical/Mechanical/etc.
> Engineering, we should turn it into Development Engineering".
I think it says quite a lot about you and the people who modded you up that you think an engineering program that produces hardware like cellscope [cellscope.com] and gram power [grampower.com] does not teach electrical and mechanical engineering skills.
I suppose they just typed up their ideas in google docs and some 3d printer magically produced the hardware then?
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday April 29 2015, @03:25AM
But while that may do wonders for your enrollment statistics, I don't see how you actually fix the scarcity of women who can actually do Electrical/Mechanical/etc. engineering, which (I thought) was the actual inequity we wanted to solve.
I studied computer science in college because I wanted to make video games.
Big shocker, when I graduated and got a real job it was not making video games.
However, I did learn how to do the subject matter.
People are motivated by different things. It doesn't take anything from you to acknowledge that fact.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday April 29 2015, @12:47PM
Did your university have to offer a major in "video game engineering" to get you to enroll?
Of course not. You had enough sense to know that you need to go into Computer Science if you want to learn how to develop games. Universities aren't trade schools; they're there to teach you the fundamentals that you need and to give you a well-rounded education.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday April 29 2015, @02:33PM
You have clearly never studied computer science if you haven't programmed at least one simple game.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 29 2015, @05:05PM
That's not necessarily true in the least. You are not the one who decides how others study computer science, and colleges/universities are not the only places to study it.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anal Pumpernickel on Wednesday April 29 2015, @05:07PM
Universities aren't trade schools
And yet a grand majority of the people who enroll seem to believe they are, going simply so they can get a 'good job' and ultimately make more money. They are trash who don't belong there, but the university is happy to take their money and make the environment worse as a result.