Due to team-wide productivity concerns, we are requesting that you no longer wear skin tight sparkly pants to work. Also, it's apparently led to an increase in time-consuming meetings with the sales dept.
Production doll may vary from the photo shown above. Mattel reserves the right to modify the fashion/fabrics, sculpt, hair color/style, and accessories. Doll cannot stand alone. Name subject to change.
I have quite bad myopia (-4.5). My parents didn't notice this until I was in fourth grade (~9 years old.) I have a feeling that this contributed to my early enjoyment of indoor, "up-close" activities (reading, video games) in preference to "outdoor activities" where I would have relatively little clue what was going on at the other side of the soccer field/baseball diamond/etc. So, in a way, my bad eyesight could have pushed me toward computers.
I've often wondered this. I have acute astygmatism, and like very few outdoor pursuits. I'm not nearly active enough as a person and wouldn't be surprised.
I do remember before I was diagnosed having terrible coordination, I'd really struggle in games like Tennis and Cricket, whereas with Computers I had no handicap. It made sense to me to focus on what I enjoyed and computing was easier than Cricket.
Computer engineers have a tendency to read while not using adequate lightning, and to stare at screens for quite too much. That being said, it's not so much a matter of computer engineers using glasses because they are geeks, it's more because a "Computer Worker" can easily get headaches or fuck up his vision even more because he's staring at a computer for 10+ hours with less than perfect vision. A chef, psychiatrist, teller, or security guard won't need the glasses as much as we do.
So yeah computer engineer are more prone to wearing glasses than the general population. That doesn't mean that more hackers need glasses than regular people, but it could easily mean that hackers feel the effects of imperfect vision more than regular people, and because of it, are more prone to use glasses to correct said vision impairments.
You'd be surprised how many people walk around with terrible vision, without knowing it. My guess is that computer-related jobs require good vision, so people in these jobs are more likely to discover and treat their vision problems.
Also, until relatively recently glasses were uncool and unfashionable. Computer geeks generally pay less attention to such norms and choose function over form, so a geek with marginally poor eyesight would perhaps be more likely to go for glasses than a non-geek, who would survive without for appearance purposes.
I think jobs with computers are, in many ways, more forgiving to those with bad eyesight than other jobs. I have bad vision (just enough so I can't drive) but thanks to Gtk / Compiz, I can arbitrarily change the font size to be as big as I like it, and Orca and other screenreaders would help if I were completely blind. However, if I were a scientist or a taxicab driver or at a factory or throwing darts for a living, I'd be much worse off because I couldn't make those accommodations.
> Daylight may prevent myopia. Australian researchers had concluded that exposure to daylight appeared to play a critical role in restricting the growth of the eyeball, which is responsible for myopia or short-sightedness.[37] They compared children from other developed countries such as Singapore and Australian children spent about 2–3 hours a day outdoors which could increased dopamine in the eyes that restrict distorted shaping of the eyes.[38][39][40]
I only need glasses to program. I started getting pretty bad headaches every time I would sit down to program, got my eyes checked and some glassed fixed the problem.
If I remember correctly, there is a link you click on to create a poll. Can't seem to dig it up at the moment though. Try searching around the site to see if you can find it.
I'm not sure if this is exactly the point you're making; but my experience of women in the engineering trade (admittedly more electronic engineering than computing) is that they are fairly "girly".
Certainly not many fit the traditional stereotypes of "girl geek".
Geez, I KNOW that, but now Barbie has legitimized them! I can be a computer engineer AND have a pink laptop!
Better yet, I can ditch my tv-programmed dream of becoming a glamorous doctor/lawyer/detective in favor of becoming a glamorous computer engineer!
My friends and I will drive around in our pink convertible, hacking systems, meeting new geeks and every episode will end with our band playing a song. Maybe techno.
I can pretty much garuntee, give this to any girl, and she'll throw away the laptop and pretend she's having babies or dating ken or doing a fashion show.
Fairly pointless.
Up next: Fashion show GI Joe to get boys interested in fashion!
"From a two year research initiative published in 2000 by AAUW, young girls in focus groups reported that "lack of interest" was not the reason for steering away from a computing career, but rather, their male peers were treating computers as toys"
Is it safe to assume girls + I.T. + toys != good times?
Speaking as a male peer, do you mean to tell me that computers aren't toys? Code is my game, and the line between "tool" and "toy" is extremely narrow based on how much enjoyment I get out of a good hard problem.
Due to team-wide productivity concerns, we are requesting that you no longer wear skin tight sparkly pants to work. Also, it's apparently led to an increase in time-consuming meetings with the sales dept.
Thank you, IT Manager Guy