On monday 8 july 1996, Mark Rogaski wrote: An entity claiming to be Timothy C. May wrote: : : (Note: For various cultural and image reasons, science and technology are : _not_ emphasized as careers for black children. Contrast the image of : science in predominantly black environments with the image of science in, : say, predominantly Jewish environments. The result is clear: blacks are : severely underrepresented in these areas, and Jews are overrepresented in : these same areas. Hey, I'm just citing a basic truth of our times, at least : in this country. Similar statistics apply to Asians, with more than half of : all U.C. Berkeley science and engineering undergrad students being Asian, : and something less than 3% of them being black. The figures for who : _graduates_ are even more skewed. There are various reasons for this. One : of my pet peeves is how the terms "dweeb," "nerd," and "geek" are used to : characterize science and engineering majors and professionals. Hardly terms : that are likely to make a brother in the hood consider studying science!) : I attended a school in the Pittsburgh area that had an active recruiting effort centered in Philadelphia. Thus, most of the black students were from inner-city Philly. What I noticed about their failure to show up in upper level math/science classes was that they had to spend too much time in remedial classes to undo the damage done by city schools. Considering the percentage of America's black population that lives in urban areas, that seems to explain the lack of black representation. Even more distressing on the whole was the lack of female students in the Comp. Sci. department ... but that's another story. As for the slang, I don't think it's going to attract white kids from the suburbs either. Screw the stereotypes, it's a little too close to the "They could but they don't have the drive/will/intelligence" arguments to say that Dilbert cartoons are going to turn off a "brother in the hood" to math/science. Also, most of the Asian students at my school were not US citizens. Most were from China or Japan. mark - -- I wonder why you don't mention the fact that blacks on average have a lower i.q. than whites, while jews and Asians have a higher i.q. than (non-jewish) whites. If we talk about achievement in science, these facts seem rather important. And why is the lack of female students in the Comp.Sci. department distressing? It's what you can expect: on average, women are less talented than men in dealing with abstractions. Bart bart.croughs@tip.nl