Just a Sci-Fi Kid Like Me

Because I can't embed, here's a link.

Via The Mary Sue.

“Nerds don’t have a problem with women,” said host Larry Wilmore, “they have a problem with change.” He then asked the panelists if the whiny manbabies of the internet are racist, sexist, or just gross gatekeeping nerds, to which Amanat replied, “All of the above.” Killin’ it.

The Ladies Vanish by Shawn Wen:

Andrew Norman Wilson was fired from his contracting job at Google for interacting with what he called a different “class of workers.” He had been watching them for months as they exited the office building adjacent to his. Everyday they left at 2 PM (he later learned that their shifts began at 4 AM). “They were purposefully kept separate. They carried yellow badges that restricted access everywhere besides their own building,” Wilson said.

They were mostly black and Latino—a rare sight on Google’s predominantly white campus. They worked for ScanOps, the team that did the painstaking work of scanning texts that make up Google Books. Intrigued, Wilson attempted to interview some of them. He managed to get a few minutes of tape before he was caught by Google security. He was fired shortly thereafter.

Of course books don’t digitize themselves. Human hands have to individually scan the books, to open the covers and flip the pages. But when Google promotes its project—a database of “millions of books from libraries and publishers worldwide”—they put the technology, the search function and the expansive virtual library in the forefront. The laborers are erased from the narrative, even as we experience their work firsthand when we look at Google Books.

...

It’s very hard to get accurate statistics on the contingent workforce in the tech industry, as tech companies are less than forthcoming. But researching the demographics of mechanical turkers is even harder, as they are decentralized and anonymous. In 2010, New York University professor Panos Ipeirotis conducted a rare study to assess Amazon’s Mechanical Turk workforce. Ipeirotis discovered that almost half of the work force is American. (In fact, the percentage of Americans on the site has significantly increased since Ipeirotis’ study. Amazon changed its terms of service, requiring identity verification of its turkers, which ruled out many Indian workers who could not provide proper forms.) This upends a common argument used by the company’s defenders, who claim that $0.10 a task or $1.20 an hour goes a long way in countries like Pakistan and India.

But would workers be better off without the site? This was the question Ipeirotis leveled to me when I asked him about the mechanical turkers’ low wages and lack of power. People were on the site “voluntarily”—as much as capitalism allows anyone to work “voluntarily.” Workers on the site were free to leave. Workers on the site tended to be American. They tended to be young. Many were caregivers of young children or the elderly and so it benefited them to work from home. And they tended to be women.

Ipeirotis found that almost 70% of mechanical turkers were women. How shocking: the low prestige, invisible, poorly paid jobs on the internet are filled by women. Women provide the behind the scenes labor that is mystified as the work of computers, unglamorous work transformed into apparent algorithmic perfection.

...

Female mechanical turkers meet their parallel in the female computers before them. Before the word “computer” came to describe a machine, it was a job title. David Skinner wrote in The New Atlantis, “computing was thought of as women’s work and computers were assumed to be female.” Female mathematicians embraced computing jobs as an alternative to teaching, and they were often hired in place of men because they commanded a fraction of the wages of a man with a similar education.

Though Ada Lovelace is finally getting some notice almost two hundred years after she wrote the first ever computer algorithm, the women who have advanced math and computer science have largely been ignored. When male scientists from University of Pennsylvania invented the Electronic and Numerical Integrator and Computer, the first electronic computer (which would eventually replace female computers), women debugged the machine and programmed it. When these early female computer programmers unveiled the machine to the military, they were mistaken for models hired to stand attractively next to the new invention.

As computing machines gradually took over, mathematicians often measured its computing time in “girl-hours” and computing power in “kilo-girls.” The computer itself is a feminized item. The history of the computer is the history of unappreciated female labor hidden behind “technology,” a screen (a literal screen) erected by boy geniuses.

Silicon Valley really is a man’s world. Men have great ideas. Men code. Men attract money. Men fund start-ups. Men generate jobs. Men hire other men. Men are the next Steve Jobses, the innovators, the inventors, the disruptors. But women complete the tasks that men have not yet programmed computers to do, the tasks that make their “genius” and their “innovation” possible. And they do it for pennies.

ETA: A friend sent me another link: Sweating Out the Words from 2000:

" A generation ago such work was done within the country that generated the paperwork. Women in the United States did most of the keyboarding then, and many still do, for $7-$10 an hour. But in the late eighties, their jobs began emigrating as employers discovered satellites and other telecommunications technology. Before these innovations, a company interested in cheap Third World labor would have had to ship hard copy abroad at great expense in transport and turnaround time. Now, paper is optically scanned and the images zapped to computer screens thousands of miles away, where the relevant information is keyed in by foreign workers and the digitized material speedily returned to the home office.

Finally got to watch it tonight, and here was the conversation on the opening sequence:

Scott: So which of them is Tom Hiddleston?
Me: ...The dude.
Scott: But they're both guys?
Me: ...
Scott: Aren't they? Are they not?
Me: ... Congratulations, you not only don't see race, but apparently you don't see gender either.
Scott: OH! She is a woman, she has boobies!!

Yeah, I married him on purpose. Sober even. Thank goodness he's pretty and likes comic books.

Elizabeth: The Golden Age is one of the stupider films I've sat through in a while. Why did I sit through it? Because Clive Owen was in it, that was why. I didn't learn from the first film, with its exceedingly oversimplified Essex Rebellion or misplaced speeches. (Yeah, the really good one about how Elizabeth has the body of a woman but the heart of a king? It's in her drawing room in the first one. Not on horse in armor as the Armida attacks, like it should have been.)

Elizabeth walks about with a pinched face because she's a monarch and can't get any. She's in a romantic triangle with her favorite lady-in-waiting and Sir Raleigh. She whimpers and whines when she has to kill Mary.

Y'know what the Real Elizabeth (TM) did? Had a portrait painted of the bitch's head on a pillow and kept it around, that's what she did. (It's still in the Tower. It's pretty creepifying.)

The destruction of the Spanish Armada is at best an afterthought. An expensive afterthought that would have been cooler if we hadn't already had cool ship battles in Master and Commander four years ago. I'm glad the pretty white horsie makes it out of there, though. (Symbolism? Hell if I know.)

The Inquisition huffs and puffs about. They might be plotting or they might have really bad indigestion, it's hard to say. The Spaniards come off as rather hysterical, and since they are always in black, rather like goth clubbers who got kicked out for being too annoying. You can't ever feel remotely worried about them, let alone horrified at the Inquisition. Frankly, everyone expects the Spanish Inquisition and are only worried about the actual mathematics of defeating them. (There's a lot of math talk in this one, especially when advisors pass around notes in study hall, I mean reports.)

Mostly I wonder why the hell popular culture is so intent on dumbing down kickass women. The Cleopatra of Rome was, shall we say, squirrelly at best. The Boudicca of the titular BBC film was also on the weak and whiny side, and for gods' sakes, she was the one who crucified whole Roman settlements! If I was in a very argumentative mood, I would note down some Hillary dissections, but as it is I'm just too cranky right now.

Grr. Argh.

So I'm reading the NEA "To Read or Not To Read" report. Here are some thoughts:

*I wish they would define reading material as used in this study. There's a disclaimer saying that, "Finally, except
where book reading or literary reading rates are specifically mentioned, all references
to voluntary reading are intended to cover all types of reading materials." (p.22) But
let's face it, there's lots of other serious reading cultural discourse (comics, manga, magazines, blogs, etc) that's going on nowadays. I know from experience that a number of kids don't consider comics or manga "reading" because their teachers (or possibly bad librarians) told them it wasn't.

They make a similar disclaimer for the discussion of the 2004 "Reading at Risk" report, where this time they clarify that yes "online reading" is counted (p.24). But does that hold for the newer report?

I also wish they would focus more on testing abilities of comprehension (as in "reading comprehension levels have dropped X% since 2004"): what does that mean? Are there any questions focusing on critical efforts?

E.g. You hand a kid a piece of paper that says "The dog is brown." Do you then ask the kid "What color is the dog?" or do you ask "What kind of dog do you think it is and why?" Yes I'm making this overly simple but honestly it's the best I can come up with at 1am. And I still wanna know.

*Correlation between readers and civic leaders.
18- to 34-year-olds, whose reading rates are the lowest for any adult
under 65, show declines in cultural and civic participation. [...] Literary readers are more than twice as likely as non-readers to volunteer or do charity work. (p. 18).
I have a quibble with this: Ours is the most debt-ridden, overworked and underpaid generation in American history. Most people my age are saddled with serious debts from education and are faced with an ever crapping economy that largely means working multiple jobs for little pay and less benefits. You know what happens if you leave for work at 7am and come home around 7pm (and you're lucky enough to not have another job to go to or children to rear): you generally have a few hours of chores and maybe two hours for entertainment of any kind. Social revolutions are not made of this lifestyle.

[Related political snap: 84% of Proficient readers voted in the 2000 presidential election, compared with 53% of Below-Basic readers. (p.19) Yes, and we all voted for Al Gore.)

*Define "literature" and "literary reading" for gods' sake, particularly as used on p.23. I read a helluva lot of books, and I have no clue how many any of them people would consider "literary."

*Random: what's with the photo spread of the hot white male reading on page 26?

*Second random: What is with the questions about "reading for fun for five minutes" or "reading for fun for 30 minutes?" (currently p.31 but repeated multiple times throughout) Who blocks their time like that aside possibly William Gladstone, RIP?

*Why is reading seen as more pointedly virtuous than watching TV? Note language bias:
Although all age groups read far less than they watch TV, we may take heart
that 15- to 24-year-olds spend a lower percentage of their leisure time, relative to
other age groups, on TV-watching. (p.38) Note also obligatory Neil Postman quote on page 41.

*Ambiguous question on page 45: “Have you read any books in the past year or haven’t you
had the chance to read a book in the past year?” With a 73% result. I'm not sure how to answer that myself...

*Discussion of book purchasing pp. 46-51. They discuss the average amount people spend on books and adjust it for inflation, but they don't discuss the likewise inflated cost of books themselves. (The biggest seller this summer hand's down was a kid's book. The average price for $19.99. If you didn't go to a megastore you probably bought it for closer to $35. And you all know which book I'm talking about too.)

*Obligatory ode to the seeming death of the newspaper pp.52-53. See elsewhere in this blog for my rants on that issue.

*Random photo spread of hot minority female p.54.

*Obligatory gender gap notation p.62 and 65-66.

*Photo spread of puzzled-seeming non-hottie in work environment, p.76.

*Emphatic disappointment that in the global scheme, American scores are only average: p.85. In a range of Finland being #1 and Mexico #26, the US is only #15. No noted correlation between reading level and patriotism, which somehow disappoints me.

*Gratuitous Robert Frost quote p.86. (Sorry, I can't stand Frost.)

*Fascinating Current Events Information table on p.89 that strongly implies that proficient readers are more likely to go to the internet than newspapers.

*C.S. Lewis quote on p.90 that made nice counterbalance to John Henry Newman quote on p.33 and Virginia Woolf quote on p.95. What's with all the dead white folk??

More later.