Wow, how disappointing. Just another lesson demonstrating that if you hear about a law being passed and it sounds good (or bad), it's really just motivated by the interests of those with the most power.
Why not call it "GoldieBlox: The Cute Engineering Toy"? Why enforce gender roles? Isn't the title kind of saying "Girls like cute stuff, boys don't ever like cute stuff, and the only way to get girls interested in engineering is to make it cute"? Couldn't we get females into engineering more easily if we stopped culturally delegating "cool" to little boys and "cute" to little girls?
[Or the real solution, just stop having gender identification entirely, but that's a ways away]
I think the answer to this has been no, females won't go into engineering more no matter how you culturally delegate personality attributes. Consider the sales of the toys and the admissions rates into engineering programs DESPITE the fact that more women are being admitted to university than men [1], and yet still engineering programs are 80-20 male-female[2], despite the gender neutrality motions taking place and the fact that it's no longer the 50s with openly sexist TV commercials and advertisements.
In the 50s women were prohibited from entering engineering programs by policy, so commercials didn't have anything to do with it. It didn't become illegal for engineering programs to discriminate based on gender until the 70s.
If it were natural differences the number would be consistent internationally. Instead, it varies in Western countries from 9% (Luxembourg) to 31% (Iceland) and has been trending consistently upward, albeit slowly, in the US.
Parents not buying gendered clothes or discussing their child's gender until after birth, texts using "she" as often as "he" or occasionally neither at all. Overall there's more of that social push than there ever was (perhaps because there was none at all).
In fact, there's even a school in Sweden that went hardline on this:
All of those things are fantastic but extremely isolated. Some of those things make the news every time they happen. Agendered thinking is pretty marginal.
I will say that it may take another 10-15 years to see the results of these programs, when these kids enter university. The motions are mostly too recent to affect current post-secondary students.
"Another result that derives from Gödel's ideas is the demonstration that no program that does not alter a computer's operating system can detect all programs that do. In other words, no program can find all the viruses on your computer, unless it interferes with and alters the operating system."
I think I just heard a 'pop'ping sound.. but really, writers try too hard sometimes to make this stuff accessible to people. I don't think someone who is going to get a whole half-way into the article is going to need such reductionism to catch their interest; I'd honestly be more excited if the actual symbolic definition of the theorem was shown to me at that point.
Where here does it say Turkey is "killing school books"? Even if they were replacing all schoolbooks with tablets, I find that idea kind of bad seeing as it makes it difficult to flip between exercises and the chapter or the index and the rest of the book (or other functionality that a textbook is supposed to support). Ebooks are fine for novels but I just can't use an endless scrolling touchscreen tome for learning something
I don't think they are going to just load the PDF files of current books to tablets and give the tablets.
They are saying that everything will be tablet optimized. Don't think your regular school books, thinks about something like, umm, Flipboard. With video and other content in it. All interactive.
I don't know how much they can achieve, but I'm really looking for it.
And then I stopped reading. At least with printed news media you have the weight of the fact that what you write will be printed permanently on physical materials to perhaps keep you from producing taglines as embarrassingly juvenile as "A country tries to BANISH GENDER"
Just to make sure Sweden wasn't actually trying to banish gender, I kept reading:
"The idea is that names should not be at all tied to gender, so it would be acceptable for parents to, say, name a girl Jack or a boy Lisa."
The funny thing is that this is the opposite of the idea; at the very least it's stated in a pretty uninformed way. This should read "The idea is that any name within reason would be acceptable for any human being that is born." The way the article puts it is subtly incredulous that a BOY would be named LISA??
