and ultra-Orthodox. We do this, not because of a social agenda but because diversity makes business sense, helping our team ship great products and survive challenges.

We can also learn an important lesson that goes beyond business sense. American tech companies employ diverse work forces, including every other ethnicity you can think of. Whether or not we agree with the learning ethic of families of any of them, we can agree that the drive to succeed in science and technology starts at home at a young age. I do not pretend to know how to change home values, but if I were looking to encourage people to go into engineering, I would start by encouraging parents to inspire their children to achieve in science, math, and computing.

Danny Lieberman, Modiin, Israel

In Constricting an Art Form,
Digitization Can Open It As Well

Esther Shein’s news story “ Computing the Arts” (Apr. 2017) explored the relation between digitization and the arts. The history of European written music illustrates this development. The historic act of fixing Gregorian chant in a notation that used a seven-note octave during the European Middle Ages could be seen as a constriction of expression, as it eliminated the vitality of diverse vocal pitches in favor of just seven notes. But this particular form of digitization of music also opened the way for polyphony and the intense harmonies of later European music. Meanwhile, mathematics of a different type was behind the practice of perspective in Renaissance art. Digitization can derive insights by looking back at such historic precedents.

Andy Oram, Boston, MA

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© 2017 ACM 0001-0782/17/06

peer review, the putative gold standard in science, is seriously flawed. Double-blind review is a sham. A reviewer who is current and competent in the subject matter will almost always know who are the authors of a submitted paper, from content, style, reputation, or cited references. Social science research has repeatedly proved double-blind reviewing is a myth. Identical papers submitted under female or ethnic names are more likely to be reviewed unfavorably and rejected. Single-blind review converts to certainty only the probability that authors are disadvantaged.

One issue Varki did not raise is the competence of referees to review a particular paper. As an editor and conference organizer, I know how difficult it is to secure enough capable referees. The more innovative and advanced the paper and author, the more likely reviewers will be less experienced and underqualified. History attests to cases of work that ultimately proved groundbreaking but was repeatedly rejected due to poor reviewing. My own work on coupling and cohesion, which spawned a rich research literature and eventually entered the canon of software engineering, was repeatedly rejected until a fluke opportunity brought it to the world in a journal then at the academic margins. I have seen solid papers by others rejected by reviewers who were self-evidently unqualified to evaluate the paper, even sometimes by their own admission.

It is time to consider re-engineer-ing the entire peer-review process to reflect research evidence from the social sciences and the realities of contemporary academic publishing. Radical though it may seem, a fair process might be an open one without anonymity. So-called anonymous review that is only selectively anonymous leads to abuses and complications. In the deeply incestuous communities of scientific specialties and subspecialties, anonymous reviewing as now practiced is a hidebound fiction that fails in the ultimate purpose of peer review—ensure the quality of the cumulative literature and guarantee fair and open access to all qualified contributors.

Larry Constantine, Rowley, MA

To Inspire Future Engineers,
Start at Home

Several fallacies stood out in Gregory Mone’s news article “Bias in Technology” (Jan. 2017), which made the tacit but arguable assumption that working in tech has enough social value that getting more women and African-Americans into tech jobs is a laudable goal. Mone said African-Americans represent 1% of the work force at Google and Facebook and 4.6% of students awarded a bachelor’s degree in computer science but wondered why only 1% or 2% at “some major companies are African American.” Consider that 1% to 2% is actually an extremely high percentage. In his book Work Rules! Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead, Laszlo Bock, Google’s Senior VP of People Operations (what other companies call “human resources”) said, “We receive more than two million applications every year. [...] Of these, Google hires only several thousand per year, making Google 25 times more selective than Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. Approximately 0.1% to 0.3% of applicants get jobs at Google. I imagine the numbers are about the same for Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft.

Mone quoted Kaya Thomas, a sec-ond-year computer science student at Dartmouth, saying, “If you want to sell to everybody, you have to hire everybody.” This statement is wrong in both theory and practice. The design principles that guide Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft to create great products used by billions of people around the world are universal and have nothing to do with affirmative action. Consider, the deeper reason for diversity. Diversity is important in an engineering organization not because of a social agenda or because you want to sell to everybody but because of the value of hiring smart people who think different from you and the opportunity to learn from them and because of the resilience diversity brings to building a great team.

As an engineer who has worked at In-tel and as an entrepreneur, I am proud that my startup—Clear Clinica (cloud monitoring of clinical trial data)— has equal representation of men and women, native Israeli, American-born, Russian-born, religious, non-religious,