Blog
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Differences Between Men and Women Are Vastly Exaggerated [Link]
There are many biases peddled by our society.
If you don’t see bias there, try this: when teachers know students’ names, boys do better on math tests. Yet when grading is anonymous, girls do better on math tests. And before a math test, reminding college students of their gender leads girls to perform 43% worse than boys. But if you just call it a problem-solving test, the gender gap in performance disappears.
Biases affect men too. Women are stereotyped as more empathetic, and they do score higher than men when you test the ability to read other people’s thoughts and feelings. But if you don’t introduce it as an empathy test, the gender gap vanishes.
Here is a great article discussing difference seen between the genders and how they are extrinsic rather than intrinsic.
As an aside, I feel like the comment that “men feel more confident but women are rated as more competent” is true for so much.
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Dyslexia [Link]
I have dyslexia. One of the hardest parts of any disability is explaining how it effects you to others. Many people think of a visual flipping of letters when they hear dyslexia, but that is not how it effect most people. This post by the new tutoring service Clark, had a great quote.
Differences can be seen in the brain’s development of those who have dyslexia and those who do not. The condition is commonly misunderstood as a visual impairment that results in the jumbling and reversal of letters. However, dyslexia is not visually-based. Instead, dyslexia is a processing issue that affects how the brain interprets information. Researchers have found that the condition is neurobiological in origin, stemming from a physical difference in the brains of those who suffer from it. MIT and Boston University neuroscientists recently identified a deficiency in a brain mechanism related to processing sensory input. In those suffering from dyslexia, the speed at which the processing occurred was halved. . . . Those with dyslexia have phonological processing deficits and “do not map letters onto the correct sounds.” Research through brain imaging has shown that this occurs because people who have dyslexia show less activation of the temporal and left posterior brain areas during reading tasks than do non-dyslexic people.
To bring this point home, the summer before I entered high school was when I finally mastered what sound goes with what vowel.
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Secure & Easy SSH on macOS Sierra [Link]
Apple added a few non-standard interaction between SSH Agent and there own Keychain. This gave a great default of strong public-key cryptography with the convenience of not needing to enter a password all the time. But with macOS Sierra (10.12) the defaults changed1. It took some time for people to figure out what was happening, but finally after 7 months, Bart Busschots explains how to reset the defaults and regain the old balance of security and convenience.
For more information on SSH, I recommend the Bart’s Taming the Terminal parts 29 through 33.
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The previous defaults are explained well in Taming the Terminal part 30. ↩
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America, the Church, and Discrimination
America is called the land of the free. Why is the Church not also called the land of the free?
The Bill of Rights is a revolutionary document that protects citizens and limits government. After the Civil War, our nation knew that we had a major discrimination problem, we wrote three new constitutional amendments that re-proclaimed our desire for liberty for all. Common place today is an anti-discrimination clause for businesses and organizations.
There is a website that connects nonprofit organizations with software and hardware donations and not surprisingly they say that these nonprofits must comply with the website’s anti-discrimination policy. I love that! If you are advocating for reading to kids, then your staff promotions should not be made with regard to gender or sexual orientation. If you are helping families remove lead-based paint, your leaders should not be chosen because of their religion or national origin.
I support these anti-discrimination policies because of my faith. My God loves everyone, always. Full stop. No exceptions. And here is where I get hit in the gut. These policies always have a statement that says religious nonprofits do not need to follow them. WHAT!?! The place that should be the most open, the most loving, the most like our God is allowed to be the most hateful, closed and discriminatory. I understand that the pastor of a Christian church should be a Christian and therefore you must “discriminate” against non-Christians, but really a religious institution gets to throw out the whole clause?
To my Christian friends, remember, this is what the world sees: religion gets to, has to, be allowed to discriminate. If we are hoping to save the lost we must change this image now. What Trump (and his “evangelical” supporters) did today does not help improve our image, though I must say our image would have been tarnished far more if the leaked draft was the final Order.
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Marching
I march today for many reasons. The best summary I have come up with is that science – the increase of knowledge from evidence – should be trustworthy, trustable and trusted in our society.
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Compassion — What it means to me
Many people set goals for the year. If you do this near January 1st it's called a New Years resolution. For the next 12 months, I am focusing on the word "compassion."
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Tracing the 2017 Solar Eclipse [Link]
When depicting an eclipse path, data visualizers have usually chosen to represent the moon’s shadow as an oval. By bringing in a variety of NASA data sets, visualizer Ernie Wright has created a new and more accurate representation of the eclipse. For the first time, we are able to see that the moon’s shadow is better represented as a polygon. This more complicated shape is based NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter’s view of the mountains and valleys that form the moon’s jagged edge. By combining moon’s terrain, heights of land forms on Earth, and the angle of the sun, Wright is able to show the eclipse path with the greatest accuracy to date.
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