Incoherent ramblings

The identity ideologues are pushing hard from york region primary schools

September 28, 2018 Incoherent ramblings , ,

York region district school board is preparing to roll out their “Every Student Counts Survey” for primary grades (to be answered with parental assistance) or by oneself in grade 7-12 that’s packed full of the extreme identity politics that is discussed so widely in podcasts these days.

Here’s a link to a sample copy of the survey for kindergarden to grade 6, and one for higher grades.  The one for the little kids is particularly absurd, asking the kids or parents to pick from gender identities of male, female or one of the following 7 additional options:

  • Gender Fluid (Of, relating to, or being a person whose gender identity or expression changes or shifts along thegender spectrum.)
  • Gender Nonconforming (Not being in line with the cultural associations made in a given society about a person’s
    sex assigned at birth.)
  • Non‐Binary (Refers to a person whose gender identity does not align with the binary concept of gender such as
    man or woman.)
  • Questioning (Refers to a person who is unsure about their own gender identity.)
  • Transgender (Refers to a person whose gender identity differs from the one associated with their birth‐assigned
    sex.)
  • Two‐Spirit (An Indigenous person whose gender identity, spiritual identity or sexual orientation includes
    masculine, feminine or non‐binary spirits.)
  • A gender identity not listed above (please specify):…

as constrained by the footnote: “A person’s internal and deeply felt sense of being a man, a woman, both, neither, or having another identity on the gender spectrum. A person’s gender identity may be different from the sex assigned at birth (for example, female, intersex, male).”

These are questions being asked of kids that are potentially still many years away from puberty!  Why on earth is there such pressure to have the kids pick from or even try to understand these host of made up categories?

When I was in grade 7 I got teased about being gay because I was too shy to ask a girl on a date (or accept a date, in one instance).  Heck, I was a virgin until I was in my early twenties.  If this level of gender propaganda was being pushed when I was a kid, I’d have to have started wearing a lipstick and blouses just to fit it.  All because I was introverted and shy.  My sexual identity had nothing to do with these plethora of current gender categories, but just because I hadn’t clued in that you had to communicate to the opposite sex if you wanted to make any progress towards sexual goals.  Time is required to figure this stuff out, and having to choose prematurely, seems, to be blunt, completely stupid.

There’s some other stuff in this survey that is just bizarre.  The desire to label is so severe that it appears they are also making up new races:

Latino/Latina/Latinx

Googling Latinx, which I hadn’t heard of, and isn’t defined in any of the “helpful” footnotes, it appears that they are pushing gender politics into race too.  Wikipedia says of this: “Latinx (la-teen-ex) is a gender-neutral term sometimes used in lieu of Latino or Latina”.

Here’s some samples of the gobbledegook that this survey is packed full of:

  • People can be treated differently based on their religion, or perceived religion, which can lead to negative impacts and unequal outcomes. Islamophobia and antisemitism are examples of the way religion can be racialized. People can experience racism not only based on skin colour but also other perceived characteristics that are associated with religion.
  • Bullying is an ongoing misuse of power in relationships through repeated verbal, physical and/or social behaviour that causes physical and/or psychological harm. It can involve an individual or a group misusing their power over one or more persons. Bullying can happen in person or online, and it can be obvious (overt) or hidden (covert).
  • Discrimination is being treated negatively because of your gender, racial background, ethnic origin, religion, socioeconomic background, special education needs, sexual orientation, or other factors. Discrimination can be intentional or unintentional.
  • Harassment is engaging in a course of vexatious [annoying or provoking] comment or conduct which is known or
    ought reasonably to be known to be unwelcome.
  • Race is a social construct that groups people on the basis of perceived common ancestry and characteristics and affects how some people are perceived and treated. Race is often confused with ethnicity (a group of people who share a particular cultural heritage or background); there may be several ethnic groups within a racialized group.

I wonder how much money York region is paying to roll out and process this survey?  As well as injecting chaos and insanity into the school system in liew of actual content, it seems like a pointless waste of time and money that will provide little useful information.

If you want to make progress in education, how about stripping out some of the crap.  There’s no shortage of that.  Let’s not confuse kids with four different pictoral multiplication algorithms, so that they’ll give up and end up using calculators.  How about not injecting terminology into math education like “commutative” in grade 5 when you won’t see non-commutative (i.e. matrix) multiplication until university (since linear algebra seems to have been dropped from the high school curriculum for all intents and purposes).  Arg!

Awesome bookshelves in my home office space

September 15, 2018 Incoherent ramblings , ,

Sofia and I spend a large part of the day installing a set of four Ikea Liatorp bookshelves in my office today. The shelves fit pretty much perfectly, with a 1/4″ gap on each side. In fact, to get them to fit we had to take the baseboards and window casings off, but I’ll put in new ones butting up nicely to the shelves. When we eventually sell the house, the buyer better be interested in bookshelves, because these are a permanent feature of the house now!

The Liatorp model shelves are nicely engineered.  There are easy access leveling pegs, they join together nicely, and the backer board uses screws with pre-drilled holes in exactly the right places, plug some other plugs that hold the backer in place (far superior to the Billy model!)

Here’s a view of the whole shelf unit, which is loaded bottom heavy since the top shelves are spaces closer at the moment:

I had a lot of fun moving books down from the bedroom bookshelves, and have moved most of the non-fiction content.  I was really pleased that I can mostly group my books in logical categories:

  • Statistics and probability, with a couple German books and a dictionary too big to fit with the language material.
  • Calculus and engineering:

  • Computer programming, including my brand new Knuth box set!

  •  Spill over programming, general physics, fluid mechanics, and solid mechanics:

  • Home repair and handywork, plus two religious books too big to fit in the religion section (I’ve got other religious material in boxes somewhere in the basement, including a Morman bible, a Koran, and a whole lot of Dad’s Scientology books (and a couple of mine from days of old) :

  • Optics and statistical mechanics

  • Investment and economics (although the only one I’ve really cracked of these is the old “Principles of Engineering Economic Analysis” from back in my undergrad days)

  • Electromagnetism and some older general physics books from Granddad:

  • Algebra, complex variables, General relativity, mathematical tables, plus Penrose’s book, which spans most categories:

  • Political, classics, some borrowed Gaiman books, and religious

  • Languages:

There’s a bunch of tidy up and finishing details to make my office space complete and usable, but this was a really nice step in that direction.  Mysteriously, even after moving all these books downstairs from the bedroom, somehow the bedroom bookshelves are still mostly full seeming.  Was there a wild book orgy when we weren’t looking, and now all the book progeny are left behind, still filling the shelves despite the attempt to empty them?

Is this Cantonese or Manderin?

September 2, 2018 Incoherent ramblings ,

I managed to somehow switch my bluetooth headset from English to Chinese, so my Chinese vocabulary is now three phrases:

Power on, pairing: kie-gee pae-doo-eh

Paired successfully: il-ee-en-gee-eh

Power off: guen-gee

However, I don’t know which dialect of Chinese this is.

IBM and other companies now claim to be loosening college degree requirements.

August 29, 2018 Incoherent ramblings , , , , ,

Here’s an article about companies that are starting to drop college and university degree requirements.

I’ve been expecting this for years.

I really enjoyed university and much of what I learned on my undergrad engineering degree. However, most of the skills that I required for software development, I learned on the job at IBM on my student internship, not from my undergrad engineering degree. I was very disappointed in the software engineering course that I took in university, as it was primarily droning on about waterfall models and documentation driven development, and had very little substantive content. I learned a lot of mathematics and physics at UofT, but very little of it was useful. I was once really pleased with myself when I figured out that I could do compute some partial derivatives on the job to compute error-bars in some statistical performance analysis, but that one time calculation, was the only non-trivial math I ever used in about 20 years at IBM. In short, most of the specifics I learned at University were of little value.

My view of the engineering degree I obtained, was that it was mental training. They tossed problems at us, and we solved them. By the time you were done your undergrad degree, you knew (or at least believed) that you could solve any problem. There’s definitely value to developing that mental discipline, and there’s value to the employer as a filtering mechanism. Interestingly, my first manager at IBM as a full time employee told me that they preferred hiring new engineering graduates over new computer science graduates. That is despite the fact that many of the computer science courses are quite difficult (computer graphics, optimizing compilers, …), and arguably more relevant than all the physics biased courses that we did in engineering. Perhaps that preference was due to the problem solving bias of engineering school?

An apprenticeship based recruitment system can potentially save software companies a lot of money, as it should provide cheap labor for the company and a valuable opportunity to learn real skills for the apprentice. It’s a good deal for both parties.  You can get paid to learn, vs. going to school, and paying to learn things that are not truly valuable. I’ve actually been very surprised that IBM, who is offshoring so aggressively to save money, has not yet clued in that they can hire students directly out of high school (or earlier!), for much less than the price tag that a university/college graduate would demand. While offshoring is nominally cheap, unless the whole team is moved, it introduces large latencies and inefficiencies in development processes. Hiring out of high school would provide companies like IBM that are desperate to reduce their costs, the chance of acquiring cheap local talent, free of the hassles and latencies of splitting the team to pay some members offshore rates, less benefits, and so forth.

Assuming that a university degree is not actually useful, the problem to be solved is one of filtering. How does a company evaluate the potential of an untrained candidate without using (potentially useless) accreditation as a filter? I’d guess that we will see a transition to IQ style testing (although that is illegal in some locals) and a bias for hiring youth with demonstrated interest and proven open source project contribution history.

Propublica’s IBM age discrimination investigation

March 22, 2018 Incoherent ramblings , , , , ,

Not too long after I quit IBM for LzLabs in 2016, I was sent a copy of Pro-publica’s survey about age discrimination based firing and forced retirement at IBM. It appears that this survey was just the start of a very long investigation, and they’ve now published their story.

I wasn’t forced out of IBM, and am only ~45 years old, but at the time I had close to 20 years at IBM (including my student internship), and could see the writing on the wall. Technically skilled people with experience were expendable, and being fired or retired with gusto. To me it looked like 25 years at IBM was the firing threshold, unless you took the management path or did a lot of high visibility customer facing work.

IBM’s treatment of employees in the years leading up to when I quit was a major part of my decision to leave. I considered my position at IBM vulnerable for a number of reasons. One was my part time status (80% pay and hours), as I’d been slowly studying physics at UofT with a plan of a future science based job change. Another was that I was a work in the trenches kind of person that did not have the high visibility that looked like it was required for job security in the new IBM where the quarterly firing had gotten so pervasive that you could trip on the shrapnel.

Even after two years I still use “we” talking about my time as an IBMer working on DB2 LUW, as I worked with people that were awesome (some of which I still work with at LzLabs.) Despite now competing with IBM, I hope they stop shooting themselves in the gut by disposing of their skilled employees, and by treating people as rows in resource spreadsheets. It is hard to imagine that this will end well, and it’s too easy to visualize an IBM headstone sharing a plot with HP and Sun.

When I was recruited for LzLabs, my options seemed like continue working for IBM for <= 5 more years before I too got the ax, or to ride into the wild west working as a contractor for a company that was technically still a “startup”. Many startups don’t make it 5 years before folding, so even in the worst case it looked like no bigger risk than IBM, but I thought I was going to have a lot of fun on the ride. LzLabs was just coming out of stealth mode when I was interviewed, but had an astounding ~100 people working at that point! Salaries add up, so it was clear to me that LzLabs was not really a startup in the conventional sense of the word.

It is amusing to read the Pro-publica article now, as most of LzLabs employees are probably over 65. At 45 I’ve been singled out in staff meetings as the “young guy”. Many of the LzLabs employees are technically scary, and know the mainframe cold. I once wrote a simple PowerPC disassembler, but that’s a different game than “disassembling” 390 hex listings by chunking it into various fixed size blocks hex sequences in an editor so it can be “read” by eye!

In less than one month I’ll have been working for LzLabs for 2 years, about six months of which was a contractor before LzLabs Canada was incorporated. Two years ago, if you had mentioned JCL, LE, PL/I, COBOL, QSAM or VSAM (to name a few) to me, I’d have known that seeing COBOL is a good reason to get to an eye wash station pronto (it still is), but would not have even recognized the rest. It’s been fun learning along the way, and I continually impress myself with the parts that I’ve been adding to the LzLabs puzzle. Our technology is amazing and I think that we are going to really kick some butt in the marketplace.