Sex, math, and scientific achievement

By Nat Torkington

Scientific American have an interesting article about gender balance, bias, and abilities. The danger in talking about whether ability is sex-linked is that people want to simplify the science and your position down to “girls’ brains can’t do this stuff” but reality is more complex and inoffensive than this. (update: changed some of what I said about the distribution to reflect the comments)

I’m taking two things away from the Scientific American article: (1) on average, abilities have different distributions across the two sexes; and (2) although these tendencies are probably influenced by hormones, targeted training can lift skills. The distributions are the important bits here: mathematical ability in girls tends to be quite tightly clustered, whereas boys tend to divide into either are more extreme, including the very good and the very poor. The bimodal (correction: broader) distribution of boy math talent puts the lie to “boys are better at math”, a misconception that came from the way we select the best at math. The very good boys have, on average, better skills than the tightly-clustered girls, so when we select “the best at math”, we get mostly boys even though there are huge numbers of girls not very far below them and a huge reservoir of more unskilled boys (correction: than girls) at the bottom end of the distribution.

And we do select “the best at math”—the article talks about kids choosing disciplines based on what they’re best at. In general, boys and girls look at their abilities and if they’re better at numbers go into sciences and if they’re better at words go into arts. So there are girls going into the arts that have better math skills than the boys going into sciences (the girls just happened to have even better verbal skills). This will always be true in individual cases, but the studies show this is an overall tendency rather than anecdotal evidence from specific cases.

What does this mean? I think it shows we need to do a better job of emphasizing that science and technology can be verbal as well as numerical: Larry Wall, the creator of Perl, is a linguist by training, and there’s a similar elegance in great code as in great poetry. If we finally acknowledged that science and technology are fields where words are critical and a keen mind for meaning can go far, rather than pretending it’s all math with syntactic sugar, we might get better computer programmers not to mention a better gender balance. And finally, first year classes should have catch-up skills-building options for those boys and girls who weren’t at the top of the curve. Do readers know of computer science departments (or senior high schools) that test for specific aptitudes and offer remedial courses for those lacking? Drop me a note in the comments if you do.

(Via O’Reilly Radar.)

Technology _69

Entry: Biomimetic
Focus: Dennis Dollens


Natural and digitally grown tumbleweeds as an example of biomimetic observations that can then be edited/developed and used for 3D visualization and CAD/CAM manufacturing. Biomimetic process of studying plant morphology and applying observed properties to digital forms leading to the development of a series of icons that are used like a form-lexicon for the development of structures, surfaces and spaces.
LINK>>>>>
http://www.tumbletruss.com/

(Via PLX.box.)

Prismatic geometries generated in Xfrog to study massing and the ability to grow geometries into interconnecting spaces as well as with nesting armatures like the spider-like frame seen at the right. In additon, experimentaiton was needed to develop grown files, edited in Rhino, into STL flies for building as STL and Thermojet models and later, potentially, CAD/CAM manufacturing.

(Via TumbleTruss)

Bionics (also known as biomimetics, biognosis, biomimicry, or bionical creativity engineering) is the application of biological methods and systems found in nature to the study and design of engineering systems and modern technology. The word ‘bionic’ was coined by by Jack E. Steele in 1958, possibly originating from the Greek word “βίον”, pronounced “bion”, meaning “unit of life” and the suffix -ic, meaning “like” or “in the manner of”, hence “like life”. Some dictionaries, however, explain the word as being formed from “biology” + “electronics”

(Via Wikipedia: bionics.)

Ambiguity as a Resource for Design

Gaver, B., Beaver, J. and Benford, S. Ambiguity as a resource for design (links to alternate locarion). in Bellotti, V., Erickson, T., et al. eds. Proceedings of CHI 2003, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, ACM Press, New York, NY, 2003.

The authors distinguish three principal kinds of ambiguity: ambiguity of information, of context and of relationship. Ambiguity of information is of prior interest with my focus on spatial uncertainty. Gaver et al. provide an example of Bystander, a mixed reality game in which mobile player’s location is tracked using GPS data, which is prone to errors

(Via 7.5th Floor.)

[tags]GUI, theory, design, process, methodology, emotion, interpretation[/tags]