Over the weekend, the New York Times had an article titled “What Has Driven Women out of Computer Science?” which had the following fairly dramatic chart in it: It shows female college freshman interested in computer science at an all time low of 0.3%. I studied computer science as an undergraduate at Harvard from 1987-90. There are a few things that I recall that might have something to do with this trend. At the time, there was a single female professor in the department (Meichun Hsu). Othe...

On vacation I had an interesting parenting moment. I threw my son in the pool with his clothes on, something I had done a few times before, but this time the reaction was very different. He was really upset and ran off. When I caught up with him he complained about my making him lose his “dignity” in front of others. I was a bit shocked at his use of the word in the first place, but then it ocurred to me that this provided a great opportunity to talk with him about what that even meant. We wo...

We have three kids in elementary school and yesterday I spent nearly 2 hours at Staples together with a bunch of other dazed and confused parents. The ritual of buying school supplies may have nostalgic value to some, but I find it appallingly inefficient. The ideal solution would be for the teachers to simply go ahead and order the supplies online and have them delivered to school. I suspect that if our entire school district signed up we could get a nice break from Staples. Short of that, i...

A couple of days ago I was riding on a Metro North commuter train behind a group of teenagers who were loudly discussing something. I say something because I could not make out their topic as it was drowned out by the word “like” appearing three or more times in every sentence. Now I am generally not language obsessed and English is my second language, but the complete lack of expressiveness among the teenagers and their constant substitution of “like” for more complicated words or expression...

As a father of three fairly young kids, I often think about how much responsibility is age appropriate. Two weekends ago we attended the bar mitzvah of a friend’s son. It was at a reform temple and much of the service was in English, which meant that I could follow it. I am a big fan of the message of personal responsibility that’s at the heart of bar mitzvah. It is striking to me though how much less responsibility we seem to be giving children today than when I was growing up. It starts wit...