OT: Math

[carlsbadworker]

With ever puzzling financial market valuation, I thought I could still count on math, but I guess I was wrong:

https://nypost.com/2021/02/12/adding-wokeness-oregon-promotes-teacher-program-to-subtract-racism-in-mathematics/

[an]

I literally LoL

[Hobie]

oh my…

Here is the course:

Homepage

[img_assist|nid=27309|desc=And you might be wondering how they grade kids in this new method. Here is a screenshot of their course page.|link=node|align=left|width=100|height=77]

fyi, funding by Bill Gates Foundation

[ucodegen]

Holy crap. I don’t get how White Supremacy Culture is centered around getting the ‘right’ answer and ‘showing your work’…

These people seem to forget that Asians also emphasize the same thing.. and your tiger mom makes sure of it! I didn’t know that Asians were white too!! As well as ‘dark skinned’ people from India, who are black… but not black.. because they work hard to be successful.

They are forgetting that our current numbering system is not really white – it is Arabic. If it was white, it would be something like XXI for 21. It gets worse real quickly. The circumference of the earth is about 24,901 miles, or “MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMCMI”… humm.. time for some M&Ms…

So if a bridge collapses because the stress loading was incorrectly calculated because the emphasis was not on getting the correct answer nor on showing the work so that it could be double checked. Would the resulting collapse of the bridge be considered a racist event? What about crash of an airplane?

Oy Vey.

[phaster]

[quote=carlsbadworker]With ever puzzling financial market valuation, I thought I could still count on math, but I guess I was wrong:

https://nypost.com/2021/02/12/adding-wokeness-oregon-promotes-teacher-program-to-subtract-racism-in-mathematics/%5B/quote%5D

huh,…

[quote]
The Oregon Department of Education (ODE) recently encouraged teachers to register for training that encourages “ethnomathematics” and argues, among other things, that White supremacy manifests itself in the focus on finding the right answer.

An ODE newsletter sent last week advertises a Feb. 21 “Pathway to Math Equity Micro-Course,” which is designed for middle school teachers to make use of a toolkit for “dismantling racism in mathematics.” The event website identifies the event as a partnership between California’s San Mateo County Office of Education, The Education Trust-West and others.

…Part of the toolkit includes a list of ways “white supremacy culture” allegedly “infiltrates math classrooms.” Those include “the focus is on getting the ‘right’ answer,” students being “required to ‘show their work,’” and other alleged manifestations.

“The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false, and teaching it is even much less so,” the document for the “Equitable Math” toolkit reads. “Upholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuate objectivity as well as fear of open conflict.”

https://nypost.com/2021/02/12/adding-wokeness-oregon-promotes-teacher-program-to-subtract-racism-in-mathematics/
[/quote]

having taken a few traditional math classes (i.e. NOT “ethnomathematics”),… I think this new CULTural math is actually kinda interesting/humorous

[quote]
Students Asked About Prostitutes And Drug Dealers On MATH Quiz

Eighth-grade students in southwest Florida were asked about prostitutes, pimps and sex abuse on a take-home math test.

They were word problems on an algebra test at Lexington Middle School – and parents are outraged.

The set-up for the questions is the life of the writer Maya Angelou. The questions highlighted parts of Angelou’s life that are not only inappropriate for young teenagers, but equally inappropriate in a math class. The questions were sent home with almost 100 honor students.

One of the questions said, “Trying to support her son as a single mother, she (Angelou) worked as a pimp, prostitute, and ______.“

Students Asked About Prostitutes And Drug Dealers On MATH Quiz

[/quote]

[Coronita]

[quote=ucodegen]Holy crap. I don’t get how White Supremacy Culture is centered around getting the ‘right’ answer and ‘showing your work’…

These people seem to forget that Asians also emphasize the same thing.. and your tiger mom makes sure of it! I didn’t know that Asians were white too!! As well as ‘dark skinned’ people from India, who are black… but not black.. because they work hard to be successful.

They are forgetting that our current numbering system is not really white – it is Arabic. If it was white, it would be something like XXI for 21. It gets worse real quickly. The circumference of the earth is about 24,901 miles, or “MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMCMI”… humm.. time for some M&Ms…

So if a bridge collapses because the stress loading was incorrectly calculated because the emphasis was not on getting the correct answer nor on showing the work so that it could be double checked. Would the resulting collapse of the bridge be considered a racist event? What about crash of an airplane?

Oy Vey.[/quote]

When it comes to education and career opportunities, the average Asian male of course is white. that’s why things like sca-5 and prop 16 conveniently disregard asians as minorities. Prop 16, which ironically got defeated because not only asians overwhelming voted against it , but so did latinos….I guess now because both asians and latinos make up a large percentage or UC and CalState demographics based on merit, both groups really don’t want any sort of government heavy hand changing that….lol.

Still waiting for Biden to pick an Asian male as part of his leadership team….not holding my breath.

[scaredyclassic]

Black and white

Maybe i nstead of calling it AA call it AR affirmative reparations

[Coronita]

I’d prefer the new term.. “unconscious bias”.

For example,

Is an asian american male being denied senior management positions at tech firms simply because he isn’t a big NFL or NBA fan or a frat boy? It’s a very interesting discussion, though it probably wasn’t meant to be applied to this category of people.

Take my company for instance. Out of roughly 25 directors, senior directors, and VPs. it’s just interesting that I’m the only asian male. Probably because I learned to play the game. I talk about football and basketball, not because I really care,. I suspected memorizing the statistics helps when it comes to promotions…. That and my unexpected interest in cars and SCCA club racing. More so than my actual skillset….Looks like I was right..Too bad I don’t like golf. There would have come in handy too, lol.

[an]

Coronita, when it comes to higher education, it’s worst being Asian than white.

[Coronita]

[quote=an]Coronita, when it comes to higher education, it’s worst being Asian than white.[/quote]

I remember when I was a freshman in college. I was interviewing for an internship at HP. Same as my friend. My friend and I both had limited work experience in electrical engineering. We both had roughly the same understanding and grades, after all we were lab partners.

We both had the same interview with the same guy, I’ll call HP asshole.

We were both asked the same 3 technical questions, figuring out the resistance, current , voltage of various circuits. I got 2 out of 3 correct. He got 1 out of 3 correct. In the last 15 minutes of the interview, the same asshole, Eric, made a snide comment about how I couldnt do all 3 questions, lecture about how we expect all candidates to know these questions , and another lecture about how HP prides itself on diversity and specifically said we hire “a lot of black engineers” (his exact words)..

My friend shared me what he and “Eric” talked about…. Football and the 49ers. he was complemented how well he got 1 out of 3 questions correct, no mention of how “diverse” HP is and no mention about how many “black engineers we hire”…

Eric was white. I got a rejection letter for the HP internship… My lab partner was white and could carry a much longer conversation about the 49ers…and so got the internship.

This is what the the essence of
unconscious bias. See if I was black, I probably would have been hired according to what Eric said. if I was white, I probably would have been hired like my lab partner, because I could have that all american 49er convo to blend in.. being neither, I was fucked even if , as a freshman I did answer 2 of 3 interview questions that took 2/3 of the entire interview…and that was for an engineering technical skills based position… I can’t imagine what the arbitrary criteria would have been even more so for something in sales or marketing…

And it had a very ugly result…You see, throughout my career, I never ever sought a job with HP. I was celebrating when Carly Fiorina destroyed HP, and when many people at HP from that Palo alto office were looking for a job when I was still up there, I made sure to toss all their resumes in the trash can, among many reasons, many of their engineers had their head up in the clouds with that sorry excuse of a distributed software architecture called “e-Speak”…. I never entertained a resume from Palo Alto HP. Neither did anyone in my group…never bought any office equipment from HP, or computer, or computer peripherals with HP label on it.

For me, there was no unconsciousness in my bias. I was young them, and didn’t know better ..

So forgive me if I roll my eyes when someone mentions about how “diverse” they think they are champions of “diversity”. In my experience, most of the time people who claim they are champions of diversity are most of the time full of shit and have a lot of unconscious biases lurking in their closets that either they don’t realize or even if they do, don’t care so long as they have something they can do to easily check the diversity box….

[paulflorez]

[quote=Coronita]See if I was black, I probably would have been hired according to what Eric said.[/quote]

Black engineers continue to have an abysmally low rate of representation in engineering. Sounds like Eric was feeding you bullshit. Eric would not have hired you if you were Black. Eric wanted to hire another Eric. That’s still how the industry is. People hire people who are like them and avoid hiring people who are different. Not only does it hurt under-represented minorities, but it also hurts the ability of businesses to innovate. Echo chambers are not the optimal places for innovation.

[Coronita]

[quote=paulflorez][quote=Coronita]See if I was black, I probably would have been hired according to what Eric said.[/quote]

Black engineers continue to have an abysmally low rate of representation in engineering. Sounds like Eric was feeding you bullshit. Eric would not have hired you if you were Black. Eric wanted to hire another Eric. That’s still how the industry is. People hire people who are like them and avoid hiring people who are different. Not only does it hurt under-represented minorities, but it also hurts the ability of businesses to innovate. Echo chambers are not the optimal places for innovation.[/quote]

I totally agree which is partly the reason why I was pretty happy why HP ended up the way it did, especially after Carly made it into a big mess.

There were so many other instances of unconscious bias throughout my career both when I was an intern and when I was an after I was an FTE. I won’t event begin to tell you the stories at then Motorola in Schaumburg, IL. back decades ago….beyond the original experience that I couldn’t move a computer to a different cubicle before getting a unionized furniture worker to do it that would take a few weeks, a good part of my internship there. I mean, it was pretty tough to get in to “Motorola” as a undergrad asian EE engineer because when you applied, you had to jump through all these technical hoops during the interview. But once you got there, and shared a corporate housing with the other interns , you learned that it was hard to get in as you were asian, worked your ass off, didn’t nearly get invited to as many of the off hour happy hours and etc, and just plain ackward social vibe. But if you were African American intern roommate, you got to do the cool student intern events, parties, had a well organized mentor, well organized events specifically for all the african american interns there, a support network among other fellow AA interns and engineers,marketing, finance employees..And if you were like my white roommate, you were invited to all the happy hours, the chicago cubs games, after work softball, etc… Didn’t need to slave away at the tectronox spectrum analyzer testing the gain of a recover before a deadline, got make a lot of cool powerpoint presentations about the much smaller job you did. And were guaranteed a full time job after you graduated from college the few days you had left with your internship.

I was only asked if I wanted to come back as a full time engineer several months later about 2 months before my graduation after I got a full time job at then rinky dink Qualcomm. There it was a painful interview… Directors, managers, engineers , the only thing the systems engineering group cared about was asking technical skilled questions. no bullshit 49ers questions and frankly no one at least in that dept gave a shit what color you were as long as you were good enough to answer all the questions .. I was sold….well at least until they decided to have all of us pull cables out of the base station equipment for testing 90% of the time as the primary job function…. And then when I tried to transfer into their software engineering group, met some bullshit excuse from that group why I couldn’t… I guess because by that time, Qualcomm had slightly declined, hired a bunch of people for ailing Nortel and Motorola, and brought over some of that frat boy mentality into Qualcomm much easier software engineering group, since funny thing was many of them didnt require a master’s degree and several years of work experience in software as I was told. and frankly couldn’t code themselves out of a wet paper bag if their life depended on it ..hence why their base station business was an absymal failure and eventually sold to Ericcson. So I left there too, and went to the Bay area. (Probably cost me a fortune in stock options. …slightly mitigated by two ipos up there, lol)

I think when I retire from this industry maybe in 1-2 years if they fire/lay me off with my half golden parachute, I’m contemplating publishing my memoirs on LinkedIn just to stir the pot:

“Memoirs of an Angry Asian American Engineer That Got Fucked Over Many Times By Unconscious and Conscious Bias ”
Since at that point I won’t give a shit which bridges I burn.

I would have a lot to say on both the general problem of these biases and how any sort of affirmative action is just lipstick on a pig and not really doing shit to solve the problem, just pretending to fix the problem..At least in engineering though, these biases don’t bubble up nearly as frequently as in other industries , at least not until you get into senior leadership roles.

[scaredyclassic]

[quote=Coronita][quote=paulflorez][quote=Coronita]See if I was black, I probably would have been hired according to what Eric said.[/quote]

Black engineers continue to have an abysmally low rate of representation in engineering. Sounds like Eric was feeding you bullshit. Eric would not have hired you if you were Black. Eric wanted to hire another Eric. That’s still how the industry is. People hire people who are like them and avoid hiring people who are different. Not only does it hurt under-represented minorities, but it also hurts the ability of businesses to innovate. Echo chambers are not the optimal places for innovation.[/quote]

I totally agree which is partly the reason why I was pretty happy why HP ended up the way it did, especially after Carly made it into a big mess.

There were so many other instances of unconscious bias throughout my career both when I was an intern and when I was an after I was an FTE. I won’t event begin to tell you the stories at then Motorola in Schaumburg, IL. back decades ago….beyond the original experience that I couldn’t move a computer to a different cubicle before getting a unionized furniture worker to do it that would take a few weeks, a good part of my internship there. I mean, it was pretty tough to get in to “Motorola” as a undergrad asian EE engineer because when you applied, you had to jump through all these technical hoops during the interview. But once you got there, and shared a corporate housing with the other interns , you learned that it was hard to get in as you were asian, worked your ass off, didn’t nearly get invited to as many of the off hour happy hours and etc, and just plain ackward social vibe. But if you were African American intern roommate, you got to do the cool student intern events, parties, had a well organized mentor, well organized events specifically for all the african american interns there, a support network among other fellow AA interns and engineers,marketing, finance employees..And if you were like my white roommate, you were invited to all the happy hours, the chicago cubs games, after work softball, etc… Didn’t need to slave away at the tectronox spectrum analyzer testing the gain of a recover before a deadline, got make a lot of cool powerpoint presentations about the much smaller job you did. And were guaranteed a full time job after you graduated from college the few days you had left with your internship.

I was only asked if I wanted to come back as a full time engineer several months later about 2 months before my graduation after I got a full time job at then rinky dink Qualcomm. There it was a painful interview… Directors, managers, engineers , the only thing the systems engineering group cared about was asking technical skilled questions. no bullshit 49ers questions and frankly no one at least in that dept gave a shit what color you were as long as you were good enough to answer all the questions .. I was sold….well at least until they decided to have all of us pull cables out of the base station equipment for testing 90% of the time as the primary job function…. And then when I tried to transfer into their software engineering group, met some bullshit excuse from that group why I couldn’t… I guess because by that time, Qualcomm had slightly declined, hired a bunch of people for ailing Nortel and Motorola, and brought over some of that frat boy mentality into Qualcomm much easier software engineering group, since funny thing was many of them didnt require a master’s degree and several years of work experience in software as I was told. and frankly couldn’t code themselves out of a wet paper bag if their life depended on it ..hence why their base station business was an absymal failure and eventually sold to Ericcson. So I left there too, and went to the Bay area. (Probably cost me a fortune in stock options. …slightly mitigated by two ipos up there, lol)

I think when I retire from this industry maybe in 1-2 years if they fire/lay me off with my half golden parachute, I’m contemplating publishing my memoirs on LinkedIn just to stir the pot:

“Memoirs of an Angry Asian American Engineer That Got Fucked Over Many Times By Unconscious and Conscious Bias ”
Since at that point I won’t give a shit which bridges I burn.

I would have a lot to say on both the general problem of these biases and how any sort of affirmative action is just lipstick on a pig and not really doing shit to solve the problem, just pretending to fix the problem..At least in engineering though, these biases don’t bubble up nearly as frequently as in other industries , at least not until you get into senior leadership roles.[/quote]

I would like to be your agent. I know i can sell that book.

[gzz]

I don’t know how HP is managed but I try to buy their products because in my experience they last longer and have a lot of nice design features.

At my first job here we mainly used HP laserjets that were 10+ years old and worked great. I purchased a p4014 and p3015 duplex network printers in 2008 and they don’t even get paper jams and have no problem with $22 brand toner cartridges.

All HP pcs have also lasted until they became out of date after 7-8 years. Some
even older as media servers and guest PCs. I also have HP monitors from 2005-6 that all work great. They have been demoted to side monitors but still have been used 5 days a week for 15 years. I thought one had died this year, turned out the power cord wore out and a new one fixed it.

[svelte]

[quote=Coronita]

And it had a very ugly result…You see, throughout my career, I never ever sought a job with HP. I was celebrating when Carly Fiorina destroyed HP, and when many people at HP from that Palo alto office were looking for a job when I was still up there, I made sure to toss all their resumes in the trash can, among many reasons, many of their engineers had their head up in the clouds with that sorry excuse of a distributed software architecture called “e-Speak”…. I never entertained a resume from Palo Alto HP. Neither did anyone in my group…never bought any office equipment from HP, or computer, or computer peripherals with HP label on it.

For me, there was no unconsciousness in my bias. I was young them, and didn’t know better ..

So forgive me if I roll my eyes when someone mentions about how “diverse” they think they are champions of “diversity”. In my experience, most of the time people who claim they are champions of diversity are most of the time full of shit and have a lot of unconscious biases lurking in their closets that either they don’t realize or even if they do, don’t care so long as they have something they can do to easily check the diversity box….[/quote]

When I graduated with a CSCI degree in northern CA, HP did very heavy recruiting at my university and supplied most of the servers in our labs. We used bid points to do interviews, so I bid heavily on HP, Lockheed, and Chevron. I was young and stupid and didn’t know that my GPA wasn’t high enough to get hired by any of those companies. My GPA wasn’t bad, it’s just those companies wanted the very high end of the GPA curve and I wasn’t it.

When I did land a job with another company, it was in San Diego and because of my college experience with HP equipment, I was assigned projects that developed software to run on HP servers. I worked with the HP reps very closely and got to like them a lot. They had a certain way of dressing, of acting, of caring for the customer and I began modeling myself after them. They were great guys and I think learning from them has helped me in my career.

At my company, the attitude everyone had was that HW developed by HP was very high quality, but any SW they put out to run on that HW was terrible. And it was. I went to several HP SW training courses at HP’s Fullerton location and part of my mission was to ask for workarounds to the shortcomings of their SW. As it turns out, I knew more about their SW than HP instructors. One started turning to me for answers when other students asked questions! It was bizarre.

On to your bias comments. Completely agree – I have a great deal of skepticism when someone portrays themselves as unbiased. Quite often, it ends up being that they are biased in the other direction!

Everyone is biased. Whites, blacks, hispanics, asians, everyone. The best we can do, in my opinion, is to be aware of our biases and do our best to not act on them, to take them out of the equation. That is easier said that done, I know.

[Author]

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