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
Communications welcomes your opinion. To submit
a Letter to the Editor, please limit yourself to 500 words
or less, and send to letters@cacm.acm.org.
© 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,