Harrison School District Two: Fill & Download for Free

Why aren’t there more black developers?I think a lot of this has to do with what part of the country you live in (assuming the OP is in America)For instance, the number of Black software engineers that I encounter in Atlanta, GA has dramatically increased during the course of my almost 20 years in the field.Now, I have worked at a few companies where almost half of the developers were Black. Of course, I have worked at many more companies were I was the sole Black developer. But still… I’m seeing progress.But to answer the question more directly, one of the things that we have to remember is that American schools weren’t desegregated until 1964. But of course, that was just a law that was passed. It took many many years for this to happen in actuality.Consider this timeline for a moment1963 62% of Americans — 73% of Northerners and 31% of Southerners — believe Blacks and Whites should attend the same schools.Two African American students, Vivian Malone and James A. Hood, successfully register at the University of Alabama despite George Wallace's "stand in the schoolhouse door" — but only after President Kennedy federalizes the Alabama National Guard.For the first time, a small number of black students in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Mississippi attend public elementary and secondary schools with white students.1964 The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is adopted. Title IV of the Act authorizes the federal government to file school desegregation cases. Title VI of the Act prohibits discrimination in programs and activities, including schools, receiving federal financial assistance.The Rev. Bruce Klunder is killed protesting the construction of a new segregated school in Cleveland, Ohio.1968 The Supreme Court orders states to dismantle segregated school systems "root and branch." The Court identifies five factors — facilities, staff, faculty, extracurricular activities and transportation — to be used to gauge a school system's compliance with the mandate of Brown. (Green v. County School Board of New Kent County)In a private note to Justice Brennan, Justice Warren writes: "When this opinion is handed down, the traffic light will have changed from Brown to Green. Amen!"1969 The Supreme Court declares the "all deliberate speed" standard is no longer constitutionally permissible and orders the immediate desegregation of Mississippi schools. (Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education)1971 The Court approves busing, magnet schools, compensatory education and other tools as appropriate remedies to overcome the role of residential segregation in perpetuating racially segregated schools. (Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenberg Board of Education)1972 The Supreme Court refuses to allow public school systems to avoid desegregation by creating new, mostly or all-white "splinter districts." (Wright v. Council of the City of Emporia; United States v. Scotland Neck City Board of Education)Brown's legacy extends to gender. Title IX of the Educational Amendments of 1972 is passed prohibiting sex discrimination in any educational program that receives federal financial assistance.1973 Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act is passed prohibiting schools from discriminating against students with mental or physical impairments.The Supreme Court rules that states cannot provide textbooks to racially segregated private schools to avoid integration mandates. (Norwood v. Harrison)The Supreme Court finds that the Denver school board intentionally segregated Mexican American and black students from white students. (Keyes v. Denver School District No. 1)The Court distinguishes between state-mandated segregation (de jure) and segregation that is the result of private choices (de facto). The latter form of segregation, the Court rules, is not unconstitutionalThe Supreme Court rules that education is not a "fundamental right" and that the Constitution does not require equal education expenditures within a state. (San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez) The ruling has the effect of locking minority and poor children who live in low-income areas into inferior schools.1974 The Supreme Court blocks metropolitan-wide desegregation plans as a means to desegregate urban schools with high minority populations. (Milliken v. Bradley) As a result, Brown will not have a substantial impact on many racially isolated urban districts.Non-English-speaking Chinese students file suit against the San Francisco Unified School District for failing to provide instruction to those with limited English proficiency. The Supreme Court rules that the failure to do so violates Title VI's prohibition of national origin, race or color discrimination in school districts receiving federal funds. (Lau v. Nichols)1978 A fractured Supreme Court declares the affirmative action admissions program for the University of California Davis Medical School unconstitutional because it set aside a specific number of seats for black and Latino students. The Court rules that race can be a factor in university admissions, but it cannot be the deciding factor. (Regents of the University of California v. Bakke)1982 The Supreme Court rejects tax exemptions for private religious schools that discriminate. (Bob Jones University v. U.S.; Goldboro Christian Schools v. U.S.)1986 For the first time, a federal court finds that once a school district meets the Greenfactors, it can be released from its desegregation plan and returned to local control. (Riddick v. School Board of the City of Norfolk, Virginia)1988 School integration reaches its all-time high; almost 45% of black students in the United States are attending majority-white schools.Look at all the turmoil going on with school desegregation in the 1970s.While people were still fighting over this, Black people were still attending schools that were under-funded and giving sub-par education. This was a known issue. The Black schools had outdated books, didn’t have funding for technology related course or the teachers to teach them.So this negates damn near every person of color from the technology industry for anyone in their late 30s on up. Most of the people you find in the field within these age groups were either.Able to live in a mixed communityIn the militaryHad a parent who got into the field because they were in the militaryHad fairly wealthy parentsI was personally lucky enough to have a father who worked on missile guidance systems in the Air Force, moved on to work at Burroughs corporation/Unisys and later started his own business that was technology related.Because I certainly didn’t learn anything in middle or high school that would’ve led me into this field.As an example. My middle school technology courses involved learning how to use a type writer. In high school, I learned about the history of computers and how to play games (not make them) on their outdated computers (of course, I knew this already… so I learned nothing). Oh, and we learned how to use WordStar & WordPerfect and how to make a resume.Nothing about building or repairing a computer and certainly nothing about programming one.And I took every tech course available to me at those schools.But at the house, we had several computers that my brother and I personally built; and a training facility my father owned (to train his clients) with another 30 computers to play with.I learned how to build web sites and desktop apps for some of our clients.That’s what started me on this path.How many Black people would you imagine were this lucky? Not many.So the number of Black developers my age or older is actually very impressive, when you consider what they had to go through to get to this point.And I’m seeing more and more young Black developers each year.Thanks for the A2A.

Linguists are often erroneously* asked, "how many languages do you speak?" when people find out they're linguists, so thank you for the chance to answer this question. But also: Daunting! Explain your raison d'etre in one Quora response or less.The answer, put most simply and directly (but perhaps cryptically), is that linguists explore how language works.Just to give you some examples, before breaking things down in more detail: This could involve exploring the neuroscience of how language works in the brain; the typology of how different languages achieve similar functions using different formal devices, the developmental psychology of how children language acquisition works and how it can go awry; how language ability stops working in aphasia, Alzheimer's, or due to some other dysfunction; how language works as a bidirectional human-computer interface; how language works when learned later in life in the classroom; how languages change; how language defines various social identities; how language functions in other professions, including politics, law and law enforcement; and, as alluded to in the question, how does one make new, working constructed languages.These days, as with most professions, doing linguistics actually looks like this:The name of this jpeg, young-business-woman-working-on-computer could also be young-linguist-working-on-computerFor a few linguists, it looks a bit more exciting:Field Linguist, K. David Harrison, in the fieldSo, there are lots of different topics involved in exploring how language works. And there are lots of different ways to get paid to do this.Let's take a look at both.JobsThe types of jobs that linguists have are pretty diverse. Here are some examples:ResearchAcademia: Some linguists teach and do research at Universities in Linguistics departments as well as in Psychology, Speech and Hearing Sciences, Cognitive Science and Computer Science departments. Most big Universities have Linguistics departments, but many Universities don't, a dismaying fact for linguists when compared to a discipline like Psychology.Research Scientist: In addition to research at a University, there are other organizations supporting linguistics research including the NIH (e.g., National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders), the NSF, DARPA and where I work, the Department of Veterans Affairs. In Europe there are places like the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, CNRS and BCBL - Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language that fund direct linguistics research far more generously than the US.Corporate Research: A handful of companies (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! to some degree) invest in basic linguistics research. Much of it is focused on stuff like NLP/NLU (see below). Raytheon also has a big Speech Tech research division (Speech, Language & Multimedia).Lexicography: Linguists are the ones that determine what goes in the dictionary and what does not go in. Pissed about literally being acceptable as simply an intensifier (Marc Ettlinger's answer to How do I stop being annoyed by people using literally as an intensifier?)? Blame a linguist, but know that the decision was made based on tons of research.EntertainmentHollywood! There are surprisingly many ways linguists can make a buck in Hollywood that doesn't involve waiting tables. There are the handful of folks (and their society, Language Creation Society) that make languages for movies and shows like Avatar and Game of Thrones, but there are also dialect coaches and linguistic consultants for shows that attempt to have some sort of historical accuracy in the language spoken.Linguistics Pundit: Many big papers have some sort of On Language type column and a few magazines, too. Linguists or pseudo-linguists (e.g., William Safire) write these columns, generally to the delight of prescriptive grammar nerds. Then there are folks like Deborah Tannen who also happens to be an academic, who are in the public eye talking about how we talk to each other.Writing Books: Usually this is done by the academics and researchers above, but not always. An acquaintance wrote this book, for example:High TechLocalization: As companies become more and more global, more and more expertise is needed in taking some product suited for some nation and moving it to another language and culture. Many companies, including Google (e.g., Google Localization Specialist Jobs) hire linguists to help them set up a web presence in some new locale.Natural Language Processing: We interact with computers a lot these days and it sure would be great to do so by just talking. Some day soon we might be able to. Supposedly the xbox one will have a pretty solid natural language understanding interface and Siri and Google Glass depend on this sort of technology, too. While generally CS-heavy, it is often developed through a combination of computer science and linguistics. Things like automated language translation come in to play here, too.Semantic Analysis/Big Data: What's the word on twitter about PRISM (NSA surveillance program)? How do the folks on Quora (product) feel about Justin Bieber (musician)? Figuring out how to sift through the vast amount of big data that is natural language data takes computer science, statistics and linguistics. And presumably PRISM itself involves some decent amount of linguistic sophistication - I'm sure NSA is hiring (Intern Program at the National Security Agency)!Document Management: We have a lot of documents these days. Corporations have a lot more. Linguists can help create automated systems that make sense of your documents, get the gist of what they're about and organize and retrieve them when necessary.Language Testing: There are two routes you can go here. First are companies that do language proficiency testing, and in particular, there's a move towards doing automated phone-based testing. An obvious application would be to score the English ability and accent for applicants to a call center. You can also work on figuring out how to test native speaker's ability in their native language. Companies here include Pearson and ETS.Linguistics in Other FieldsForensic Linguistics: Joe Devney is definitely the expert here (e.g., For what legal cases have linguistics played a big role?). Linguists can be involved in a lot of different dimensions of a law case, from interpreting the language of contracts to identifying if someone is drunk based on their voice.Politics: Language and politics is a pretty niche business, but I worked at a think tank (Rockridge Institute) that did that sort of research and gave a talk or two. John McWhorter is another example of someone who does this.Language and CultureTranslation: Translation involves appreciating a lot of the subtleties of two of more languages and figuring out how to translate from one to the other. Translation services is a big business and has been for a while. We'll see how much of it ends up being taken over by high-tech and automated translation.Language Revitalization and Documentation: Language are dying, and dying fast. So, there is a market for linguists to help groups -- Native American tribes, for example -- revitalize and or document these threatened languages.Language and HealthSpeech Pathology and Audiology: Generally, this requires a separate degree in Speech Path or AuD, but there isn't too much differentiating this field from linguistics. Indeed, many of the profs at Speech and Hearing Science departments have Linguistics PhDs. Speech pathlogists can work with children (many work for school districts, for example), aphasia/stroke patients and older adults.Hearing Aids: Hearing aids are big business in the US and building a better hearing aid will often involve understanding how humans perceive speech since that's the sounds people generally care about most. Linguists do research for hearing aid companies as well as fittings and so on; sometimes a SP/Aud degree is also needed.Language as a tool for diagnosis: An emerging niche field, but the one I'm going to end with because I think it's an interesting area ripe for research. The way you talk changes when you suffer from Alzheimer's, traumatic brain injury and possibly things like depression and schizophrenia. This may lead to powerful tools for preliminary diagnostic tools without the need of a doctors office visit. Just talk into your smart phone and have an algorithm, written by a linguist, figure out next steps.There are surely more; reply in comments with any additions and I'll add to this list.How We Explore How Language WorksLinguistics has been called the most scientific of the humanities and the most humanistic of the sciences.** As a science, linguistics therefore involves a lot of the same day-to-day stuff that various sciences do, but you're often working with people.Collect DataI collect data by doing behavioral experiments and neuroscience imaging studies. Audiologists might collect an audiogram from a patient. Others might collect data by sucking in large corpora, like twitter feeds or a cache of legal documents, into databases. Sometimes linguists go into the field (e.g., somewhere where a language or dialect is to be studied) and conduct interviews. These days, you can use things like online surveys and Amazon Mechanical Turk to collect speaker behavior information as well. Some linguists may be involved in measuring certain properties of speech (e.g. acoustic analysis). Others might spend their time reading up on Grammars of specific languages, investigating how others have documented how languages work.A Plethysmograph, for collecting physiological information about the volume of air in the lungs, which can be used to study speech production.Analyze and Report the DataThese two steps are pretty similar across all fields of work. Everyone that doesn't work alone has to analyze and communicate what they're investigating whether it's an expense report or a building plan. So, the linguist may have to be a statistician, neuroscience data cruncher, quantitative researcher, data scientist, data analyst and so on. Ideally a linguist's background in working with languages will help him/her make sense of the generalizations found by the relevant analyses.Then, whether it's a powerpoint deck for your boss or an article for a journal, a report filed for a patient or an email to a client, linguists have to communicate their findings to those that care. Oftentimes, there will be stats or graphs involved.Example charts and graphs from a recent paper.Act on the DataThis is relevant to some linguists (e.g., speech pathologist) more than others (academic) but based on the findings a linguist might recommend or enact some change. This might include a treatment or hearing aid. Or it might mean a change in some wording on a website, adding some key words, or updating a Social graph based on an analysis of users' dialects. With a company like Lexicon Branding, it might mean helping a company name a product based on your findings. Or it might mean adding a new word to the dictionary if you work for Oxford University Press (Ben Zimmer).A hearing aid fitting may be the result of an analysis of speech perceptionResearchAgain, this is relevant to some (e.g., research scientist) but not as much to others (e.g., localization). I'll just report my own experience since I don't know what others do:I spend about 1-2 hours/day, on average, reading and sifting through new journal articles. Each week, I go through about 500 abstracts from journals as diverse as Nature and Science to Journal of the Acoustical Society and of America and Cerebral Cortex, covering some fraction of the new research going on in linguistics. I'll save about 20 articles, skim a handful and carefully read a couple. When I'm actually writing, I'll usually read about a dozen papers that are new to me and skim a few dozen more.There is a ton of new research on language and it's a very exciting field to be in right now. Neuroscience methods have advanced to where we can take techniques honed in researching more basic functions like vision and apply them to understand how the brain processes language. Big data and technology now allows us to look at language from a large-scale quantitative perspective with projects like Google Culturomics. Interest in social networks is tightly enmeshed with understanding the spread and use of language. Human-computer interfaces have advanced to the point where there is only one place left to go - talking to our computers - and we're getting pretty close. And with the globalization of the world economy, understanding how to best communicate with each other is more important than ever.So, there's lots for a linguist to do.And I haven't even begun to explain what linguistics is...* Erroneous because fully learning a second, third or fourth language is not a prerequisite for exploring how language works. Chomsky, for example, famously is only fluent in English and has some passing familiarity with Hebrew.** The internet tells me that Alfred L. Kroeber, founder of the UC Berkeley Anthropology department, actually said this about Anthropology. Since the first linguistics department in the western hemisphere was founded at Berkeley by an anthropologist before it was folded back into Anthropology ten years later, we'll just call it a draw.

I'm going to touch on a bit more personal information than I usually like to give.I'm from the small town of Rayland, Ohio. It's about a half mile from end to end, a population floating at about 400, a singular Dairy Queen on one of the two State Routes that grazes the outskirts of town.The high school is one of several in the county, a large, rural district pulling only 1000 7th-12th grade students over 128 square miles. The largest employers for years were the steel mills, the coal mines, and the power plants, and farmland is everywhere.The county has two colleges. Franciscan University in Steubenville is a small, expensive Catholic university. The primary non-theological majors are nursing and education. There's a community college in Steubenville as well, with your standard two-year degree tracks. And that's it.Harrison County, the direct western border, has no post-secondary education choices. Columbiana immediately north has satellite campuses for both Kent State University, offering non-STEM two- and four-year programs along with nursing and early-childhood education, and the community college based in Steubenville. Belmont County has a community college and a satellite campus of Ohio University (not to be confused with Ohio State) that offer about the same programs as Columbiana's selection.Pittsburgh houses the nearest research universities, but they're an hour away, and out-of-state, and so will cost students from my town over $40,000 a year for just tuition.The choices we face are either to try and become a teacher in an environment without enough children to sustain more teaching jobs, a nurse in an environment where 40% of the hospitals have closed their doors in the last year, a welder/machinist where there are no more mills or mines, or a carpenter where nobody is building new homes. (Forget plumbers and HVAC technicians; homeowners need jobs to pay for those services.)Or we can move. Maybe we do get the nursing degree and move to Pittsburgh, where the starting pay is 70% higher. Maybe we become a teacher and move to Cleveland where the pay is $55,000 for what pays $26,000 here.Maybe we move to Columbus or Akron or Cincinnati and go to a solid University that doesn't cost anything different from the low-priority satellite campuses but that has high-return degrees. And once we go to those cities for those schools, and there are things to do and people with like interests and housing that doesn't actually cost anything different because people in an economically depressed environment with only one real asset will try and artificially inflate the value (or just leave it overpriced on the market for six years), there's no reason to come back.Some do; family, maybe a farm, maybe the familiarity, but most of us stay gone. Our children will be born into better opportunity than we were. We're just chasing it.