Norman Matloff's Frequently-Accessed Writings

Norm Matloff is a professor of computer science at the University of California at Davis, and is an active writer on social topics. Dr. Matloff's interests are mainly in issues involving minorities and age discrimination, touching on immigration, affirmative action and Silicon Valley hiring practices. Professor Matloff has been active in Chinese immigrant communities for over 20 years.

Click here for Professor Matloff's Minority Affairs Forum and immigration Web site. Both sites feature articles by various authors representing all sides of the debates on minority issues and immigration.

Here are direct links to some of Norman Matloff's more frequently-accessed Web documents:

• Norm Matloff's report debunking the myth of a software labor shortage. Pointing out that computer industry firms typically hire only about 2 percent of their applicants for software positions, Prof. Matloff notes that a perceived "labor shortage" is actually a reflection of overly picky hiring policies by shortsighted employers, resulting in rampant age discrimination in the field. He argues that the biggest victims of this penny-wise, pound-foolish approach are the employers themselves. See also Prof. Matloff's New York Times op-ed piece on this topic.

• Dr. Matloff's Public Interest article on immigration's impact on minorities. This magazine on public policy, founded 30 years ago by Harvard professor Nathan Glazer, has run a number of articles on the current debate over immigration. Among other things, Matloff points out that even many pro-immigration activists in immigrant communities concede that their communties suffer adverse impacts from today's large influxes of newcomers.

• Norm Matloff's Los Angeles Times op-ed piece in support of affirmative action, Here Prof. Matloff suggests a pragmatic compromise approach to the affirmative action debate. His ideas have won endorsement from various prominent activists who normally disagree on this issue, ranging from the conservative Chinese-American leader Dr. Lester Hsin-Pei Lee to liberals such as UC Berkeley professor Ling-Chi Wang and Urban League president Hugh Price. See also his 2000 update to this.

• His AsianWeek article in which Professor Matloff defended Dr. Raymond Luh, an award-winning Chinese-immigrant engineer who was unfairly fired at the insistence of NASA. Part of the motivation for Luh's dismissal appears to be racially motivated.

• His San Francisco Examiner article in which Dr. Matloff exposed the fact that Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) coerced students from China studying in the U.S. into supporting a bill which they actually opposed. Prof. Matloff argues that Rep. Pelosi exploited world outrage against China's repression of the 1989 student demonstrations in Beijing to advance her own political career.

• Dr. Matloff is an appointed member of the Committee for Rational Relations with China, a group founded by several prominent Chinese-American Silicon Valley businessmen with the goal of improving U.S.-China relations. Some of the articles on this site are authored by him.

• Norman Matloff's Chinese software Web page.

• Professor Matloff's congressional testimony on welfare usage by elderly immigrants, about 50 pages in length. Dr. Matloff shows how immigrant community political activists have transformed normally conservative, welfare-averse immigrant seniors into mass clients of the welfare state. See also a translated radio transcript of a Chinese-language talk show on this subject, in which he was a guest, and his article in the New Democrat, a publication of the Democratic Leadership Council, the moderate wing of the Democratic Party founded in 1985.

• His Los Angeles Times article describing how none of the three main tenets of our immigration policy is working according to their original intents, and Dr. Matloff's invited presentation at a Stanford University immigration forum addressing the common assertions made in support of high levels of immigration.

• Prof. Matloff's San Francisco Chronicle article on race relations. The Chronicle had asked him to write about tensions between Asians on the one hand and blacks and Latinos on the other. This produced quite a controversy in the Chinese-language media. Both the article and Dr. Matloff's comments are included here. An earlier version of the article appeared in AsianWeek.

• Various software tutorials written by Norm Matloff (see below).

Professor Matloff has long been active in minority issues, and is a former Chair of the faculty Affirmative Action Committee at UC Davis. He has been particularly active in Chinese-immigrant communities (thus the Chinese example in many of his writings on general social issues). Click here for a summary of his background.

Software Web pages by Norm Matloff:

• Professor Matloff's Unix/C tutorials.

• Dr. Matloff's introduction to the mutt e-mail utility. Don't use pine! It was designed for people who are afraid of computers, not for computer experts.

• His introduction to the elvis text editor. It is much better than ordinary vi (and far, FAR better than pico). X11 mouse capability; subwindows (even on nongraphics terminals); infinite undo; paragraph formatting and so on.

• Norman Matloff's guide to fast debugging!

• Dr. Matloff's beginner's guide to installing and using Linux.

• His general guide to editing program source code.

• Norm Matloff's Chinese-language software page.