sciencewoman | November 1, 2008
InaDWriMo did not get off to a good start. I had spent 3 hours working on my proposal on Friday afternoon. Before leaving for the weekend, I carefully backed it up into multiple places AND emailed the co-PI with the almost-complete draft. This afternoon, I opened up the file to fill in some of the remaining holes and made a maddening discovery. Somehow, I only had a pre-Friday draft. In multiple places. Including the co-PI's email box. All that work, down the tube. It's taken me all my stolen moments of work time today to get back to where I was at the end of yesterday. And now I don't like…
sciencewoman | November 1, 2008InaDWriMo is, and I quote:
International acaDemic Writing Month is the academic's answer to NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month. It was originally created by StyleyGeek as International Dissertation Writing Month, but because so many of us who had already finished our degrees were interested in a little challenge, the D was loosely interpreted as acaDemic. This means that you can write your dissertation, a book chapter, an article, a grant proposal - anything goes, as long as it is academic.
The festivities are being ably hosted, once again, by Dr. Brazen Hussy. To participate, all you…
skookumchick | October 31, 2008I've been tagged twice to tell you 6 random things about me. Here are the rules:
The Rules
Link to the person who tagged you.
Post the rules on your blog.
Write 6 random things about yourself.
Tag 6 people at the end of your post and link to them.
Let each person you have tagged know by leaving a comment on their blog.
Let the tagger know when your entry has posted.
Number one for me? My favorite holiday is Halloween. :-)
It really is. I've loved Halloween best since I was a kid. Okay, kind of because candy was involved. Kind of because I got to spend it with my friends. Now that I'm…
skookumchick | October 31, 2008My colleague Donna Riley just sent me a way-cool call for papers: inclusive science, for a special issue of the National Women's Studies Association Journal. Get your writing hats on -- papers are due January 15! The rest of the call is after the fold.
INCLUSIVE SCIENCE: ARTICULATING THEORY, PRACTICE, AND ACTION
Call for papers for a Special Cluster of Papers in the
National Women's Studies Association Journal
It is no secret that there is a national crisis in STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics), particularly in terms of the involvement of women and people of…
skookumchick | October 31, 2008 I'm hoping it's not the effect of the Halloweeny season, but Jane's edition of the November Scientiae will be delayed. Because she has pneumonia. Please don't take this as indicative of a curse on Scientiae hosts. But do take it as a chance to send in a last-minute post to Jane through the usual way - maybe even some photos of your trick-or-treaters/ing? :-)
sciencewoman | October 30, 2008It's the very last day of our DonorsChoose Reader Challenge for 2008. I just want to say how amazed I am by the generosity of our readers. I'm particularly proud that we have far more donors than many of our more widely read competitors er, Sciblings.
By the time we add in the contribution from Seed and the matches promised by Alice and I, we'll be well over our $2000 goal.
Yay, us!
So in these waning hours of our pledge drive er, reader challenge, there's only four reasons remaining to donate.
4. A chance to win a fabulous Yellow Ibis t-shirt, hopefully one of our Sciencewomen custom tees.…
sciencewoman | October 29, 2008 It's one of those days where it is now almost 4 pm and I have yet to get working on tomorrow morning's lecture. I'm also going to miss a self-imposed deadline to get a draft out to a collaborator. Instead, I spent the morning getting flu shots for Minnow and I and working with a student on a proposal to get a particular dataset for use on his/her thesis. There's a student-only RFP available and we're about 2/3 the way through the proposal. One of the pieces I was helping with involved contacting some other people who might be interested in having the same dataset for their own projects, and…
skookumchick | October 29, 2008A couple of weeks ago, I was invited to come to a day-long workshop hosted by the Association of Women in Science at Eli Lilly in Indianapolis. Below are some snippets on things I learned, for better or worse.
I listened to a panel of scientists, Margaret Wasilewski, Katherine Armstrong, and Alisa Wright. Wasilewski is moving into retirement, and asks us to pass on good ideas and information to people coming after us. She said she recommended that you trust your instincts about what roads are good for you, and if there is no road where you want to go, you build it yourself. Armstrong…
sciencewoman | October 28, 2008Picking up on a meme for which I've been tagged by ScientistMother, I'm going to add my own little twist, and do six random facts along a common theme.
I chose geoscience in seventh grade because I needed a science fair project and I didn't want to do anything my parents knew something about. Between them, they had degrees or jobs in chemistry, biology, and computer science. Physics was a little daunting for a 12-year old, so geoscience it was.
By the time I was 17, I knew I wanted to be a particular geoscience subspecialty. My choice of colleges was influenced by the location of one of the…
sciencewoman | October 27, 2008I sporadically get press releases from organizations trying to promote themselves to our readers. This time, I'm actually going to manage to post it in a timely fashion.
The Feminist Press with IBM have just launched UnderTheMicroscope.com, a new site to involve young women in science and to encourage them to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and math. The site is part of the Women Writing Science, a project initiated by The Feminist Press at the City University of New York and funded by the National Science Foundation.
The site features personal stories of women scientists…
skookumchick | October 27, 2008I'm very very behind on blogging. I have two conferences to write up for you, 3 blogs to share with you, and 3 update posts. But I have another migraine. So they will have to wait. But feel free to donate money to DonorsChoose in the meantime. And I am indeed sad for the little pre-engineering kids. And the blind kids who also need to learn science.
For an uplifting time, however, you can check out how Annika is doing. In 3 words: pretty darn good.
skookumchick | October 27, 2008This is it, folks - we're coming round into the home stretch of DonorsChoose, with one week left in October. And there is some great news - ScienceBlogs has decided to donate FIFTEEN THOUSAND DOLLARS to Donors Choose, distributed among the bloggers who are participating! I'm still checking about whether this is participating *blogs* or *bloggers* -- if the latter, that means Sciencewomen will have $1430 to distribute among our projects, woo hoo! So we want your help on deciding how to distribute the funds.
Update at 11:34 am: Sb says $715 per blog, not blogger. However, we can still make…
sciencewoman | October 26, 2008Our DonorsChoose blogger challenge ends on Friday, and we've still got a couple of projects left to fund in our challenge. Yes, we've added a few along the way, but there's still a few of Alice's original picks that have been sitting there all month just waiting for your $.
You're making Alice a sad engineer.
And not just Alice, Academic Crossroads has also been waiting to see these projects funded, and even put a plea on her blog. Both of these projects have gone from 0% funded to well on their way to realization, but they each need <$250 to complete and make a difference in the lives of…
sciencewoman | October 23, 2008That sort of crazy talk sounds like it might be something from a right-wing political campaign, but it's not. It's from a letter published in this week's Nature magazine. The authors, Timothy J. Roper & Larissa Conradt of the University of Sussex, responded to a Nature post-doc journal entry in a manner that appears sympathetic to the plight of women in science, until you read the last few lines. Then they pull a nasty switcheroo.
Here's ~1/2 of the good part:
The career structure for young scientists must be made more family-friendly. This means, for example, making part-time work a real…
sciencewoman | October 22, 2008I find it so refreshing that a bunch of guys are debating the value of anonymity/pseudonymity/identity and its relationship to trust as pseudonymous Abel Pharmboy and decloaked Dr. Pal prepare for their session at ScienceOnline09. I think that sometimes pseudonymity is considered a women's issue, because of concerns about harassment or easy identifiability of a woman blogging in a male-dominated field. I think Abel is raising some interesting questions about pseudonymous health blogging and how readers know whether to trust what they read.
But here's what going through my mind when I read…
sciencewoman | October 22, 2008Hat tip to a reader who pointed me at this recent Chronicle article by two women scientists who tell their stories of bringing their infants along to their field research sites. And pretty hardcore stuff too. Two months in the Yukon studying snow for an assistant professor (Joan Ramage Macdonald), and peat bog research by a Ph.D. student (Maura Sullivan).
When I read the article, I felt a wave of familiarity wash over me. Minnow accompanied me in the field several times during my post-doc The story of her first field experience is here.
Below the fold, key recommendations from the Chronicle…
skookumchick | October 21, 2008At last, I am happy to reveal to you our final design for our t-shirt prizes for Donors Choose. They are below the fold, in all their glory, and designed by the awesome YellowIbis. Recall if you donate to our Donors Choose campaign, (note our goal is $2K; we're currently at $876...) and email me your donation receipt we will select 5 people randomly to receive a t-shirt from YellowIbis on top of donating 20% extra. You can choose one of their cool sciencey ones, or our Sciencewomen one. And note, the t-shirts are designed with both men and women in mind.
Thanks, YellowIbis! And everyone…
skookumchick | October 21, 2008Hear ye, hear ye! I am looking for an awesome up-and-coming scholar to work with on ADVANCE. See the job advertisement below! Email me with questions! Spread the word! Thanks!
ADVANCE-Purdue and the Purdue Center for Faculty Success (PCFS) invite applications for a postdoctoral scholar.
We are seeking a highly-motivated up-and-coming researcher to help develop and administer a series of research studies associated with increasing the number of women, particularly women of color, in faculty positions in the Colleges of Science, Technology, and Engineering at Purdue University. This…
sciencewoman | October 21, 2008
Dear Administrators,
I understand that Dr. Bigwig in a field related to -ology is coming to campus this week and that we're all very excited to have him here. I'm glad that we are throwing a reception before his lecture. Free food is good. I even support the decision to move Dr. Bigwig's provcatively titled lecture to the evening, in the hope that the general public will be lured onto campus to hear him speak.
But please lay off the pressure on the faculty to attend the event. We'd like to come. We're interested in the topic. (We like free fancy food.) We even like to occasionally mingle…
skookumchick | October 20, 2008Y'all have been so great in our Donors Choose campaign that we needed to find some more projects to support for the rest of the month and to help reach our goal of $2000. So we've added these projects particularly because they're so close to being funded you might be able to help them go over the top. And remember our commitment to bumping up your pledges by 20% each, plus if you email me and Scienceblogs your pledge confirmation you have a chance at some swag. (Note: Lab Lemming, your pointed comment is well taken, and we agree. I'm not sure what the Sb donation deal is myself, being new…