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Tuesday, March 28, 2006 |
Tim on Kenyon’s Confession. [Easily Distracted]
Where he says, in part:
There’s a hubris involved in the whole process, a kind of social engineering that is sometimes bizarrely fine-grained when you get down to the readings that particular admissions officers offer of particular dossiers. None of these schools are admitting true wild cards: there is a pretty narrow respectable range to the “diversity” they seek. On the other hand, all of them could probably fill an entire class with nothing but highly accomplished white men and women from upper middle-class backgrounds whose main declared educational ambitions would be to major in economics or biology. They don’t primarily because they feel that this would ultimately harm the appeal of their educational program to future applicants and negatively affect the overall health and vigor of the institution. Hence the disproportionate desire to admit students from South Dakota, Native American students, students who’ve spent their spare time in high school fighting Guinea worm in Nigeria or breeding champion pigs in Nebraska–and men, when the applicant pool is strongly tilted towards women.
If you don’t like this approach when it comes to gender, then arguably you don’t like it when it comes to race, ethnicity, geographical origin, and even accomplishment when accomplishment is not directly connected to probable academic success. If you think this is valid on everything but gender (as Pollitt seems to), I’d like to hear how you see the difference. I think you could make a good argument for simply randomizing the admissions process at most selective universities and colleges (e.g., set a high minimum range of admissions criteria and leave it at that), but that would be a big change–I have a colleague here who has seriously advocated that shift. That would probably leave you with a student body that was as much as 60% women and other demographic shifts as well. You’d lose the ability to try and ensure a balance of academic interests and plans among your admitted students as well, with some likely consequences. There might be other ways to make the admissions process more difficult to game and less engaged in trying to micromanage a range of perceived attractive attributes. For one, I wish all the selective colleges and universities would drop the personal essay in favor of a more rigorous essay that asked for analytic or intellectual responses to an ambitious or challenging prompt.
But if you see any legitimacy to weighting in favor of students from Pitcairn Island and students who are world-class kazoo players, then the only way you can differentially object to the pursuit of a fifty-fifty gender ratio is that only this objective is unimportant in trying to engineer heterogeneity in an admitted class, that a 60-40 ratio is no different than a 50-50 ratio in its effects on the culture and life of a selective college campus. That’s possible, but I do think there’s probably a tipping point where that gender ratio really would begin to affect the pervasive feel or character of a college or university.
10:20:20 PM 
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Eliot: Oglala Sioux Tribe on the South Dakota Abortion Ban.
Cecilia Fire Thunder, former nurse and Oglala Sioux President: "To me, it is now a question of sovereignty. I will personally establish a Planned Parenthood clinic on my own land which is within the boundaries of the Pine Ridge Reservation where the State of South Dakota has absolutely no jurisdiction." (Nativetimes.com via SF Bay Area Indymedia)
As some have suggested, it seems a worthy cause to contribute to, if the Oglala people are soliciting donations. If anyone knows, please send me a link, thanks.
[Follow Me Here...]
According to a post linked here a few days ago, kathrynt says:
If you want to mail donations to the reservation, you may do so at:
Oglala Sioux Tribe
ATTN: President Fire Thunder
P. O. Box 2070
Pine Ridge, SD 57770
OR: and this may be preferred, due to mail volume:
ATTN: PRESIDENT FIRE THUNDER
PO BOX 990
Martin, SD 57751
Enclose a letter voicing your support and explaining the purpose of the donation. Bear in mind, the Pine Ridge Res is not exactly dripping with disposeable income, so do consider donating funds directly to the tribe as well as specifically for this effort.
ETA: Make checks out to OST Planned Parenthood Cecelia Fire Thunder. This will ensure that the funds get routed properly.
For email contact, you can contact the president at:
firethunder_president AT NOSPAM yahoo DOT com
cc:vbush AT NOSPAM oglala DOT org
That is Ms. Fire Thunder's personal email address; I have received permission to post it here. For the sake of record keeping, do cc: the listed address on all correspondence; that's her official secretary.
She was frankly kind of surprised that a white girl from Seattle was calling to express support, and even more surprised that the news had spread so far so fast. She's likely to get deluged with screaming hate mail soon, so get your support in fast. Send email with good thoughts if you can't send money.
9:55:35 PM
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Mozilla Bug Causes Relationship to Break Up.
A couple -- living together, I assume -- and engaged to be married shared a computer. He used Firefox to visit a bunch of dating sites, being smart enough not to have Mozilla save his password. But Mozilla did save the names of the sites it was told never to save the password for. She happened to stumble on this list. The details are left to the imagination, but they broke up.
Most bug reports aren't this colorful. [Schneier on Security]
7:31:02 AM
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Gaming for Change.
In the same vein as Sarah’s recent post, Wired News points out two new competitions for game developers with a mission to use their powers for good. The first comes from a partnership between the USC Annenberg School for Communication and The State Department. The Reinventing Public Diplomacy Through Games Competition seeks to improve America’s reputation abroad. To compete, game designers must create or modify an existing massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) “incorporating the fundamental characteristics of public diplomacy.”
Early research has confirmed that within these spaces, there is a unique opportunity to create, foster and sustain intercultural dialogue and that perception of national values, ideals, and character are both reinforced and altered by the real time interactions that occur in these spaces. – from uscpublicdiplomacy.com.
The second contest mentioned in the article is mtvU’s Darfur Digital Activist competition. The contest drew 12 viral video game submissions to spread the word about genocide in Sudan. Voting is now closed but you can still play the 4 finalist games on the website. The winning game (to be announced soon) will receive completion funds and be launched to the public this Spring.
[WorldChanging: Another World Is Here]
7:30:51 AM
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Manager 2.0.
You can't very well have a Web 2.0 company run by version 1.0 managers, right? Yes, I'm making fun of the 2.0ness of it all, but if we're throwing version numbers around with impunity, might as well take it to the absurd.
. . .
[Creating Passionate Users]
7:30:48 AM
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US agency calls for probe over fears Lenovo "bugged" PCs.
The US-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC) is calling for an officiel investigation into Chinese PC firm Lenovo's contract to supply compuers to the State Department. The group fears Lenovo's hardware may be include software or hardware components to facilitate spying on the US government. Snip from BBC story:
Lenovo, which last year bought IBM's PC arm, said it had nothing to hide and would welcome the investigation. Concern has been rising in the US over foreign companies buying US firms.
Link (Thanks, Tian!)
[Boing Boing]
7:30:41 AM
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The Problem With Brainstorming. Whiteboards and enforced positivity can rob individuals of their greatest treasure: unfettered creativity. The anonymous internet, on the other hand, can unleash bold ideas. Commentary by iMomus. This column is also available as a . [Wired News: Top Stories]
7:30:24 AM
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