Positive Actions
thusspakezuska | June 9, 2010oh. my. fucking. god.
I sooooooo wish I had thought of inventing FEMINIST HULK!!!!!!!!!!!!
I am in love with Feminist Hulk. In love. LOVE! Love, I say!
Hat tip Rebecca of Adventures in Applied Math.
UPDATE: Ms. Magazine interview with my new love!
thusspakezuska | April 7, 2010We are a mere ten years into the 21st century. No jet packs for all yet, but things are moving at a lightning pace at Yale in the policy area.
After more than a quarter century of debate, Yale faculty members are now barred from sexual relationships with undergraduates--not just their own students, but any Yale undergrads.
Well you may ask: can we still nail grad students and postdocs?
Look: PI's and/or faculty really should just satisfy their sexual needs elsewhere. Not with the students, not with the grad students, not with the postdocs. It is not good for anyone. I know, I know, you…
thusspakezuska | April 7, 2010Reader Jason commented on my post about compulsory smiling thusly:
I just wanted to thank everyone for the comments here. They've been enlightening... to be honest I had never heard of anyone being ordered to smile outside of greeter/public relation jobs (chalk it up to youthful naivete, I suppose). With that in mind when I first read the post it struck me as an overreaction to something minor, but it's hard to argue with a few dozen women from all over with the exact same stories and reactions.
I don't know if I've ever been guilty of this behavior in my life (I hope not, though I am a…
thusspakezuska | January 19, 2010Over at A Blog Around the Clock there are a series of posts with great video interviews from ScienceOnline2010, but I'd like to especially point your attention to this one with David Kroll and Damond Nollan, both of North Carolina Central University. It was filmed shortly after their session on "Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial Session: Engaging underrepresented groups in online science media".
I missed this session due to a combination of sleep deprivation and headache, and am really regretting it. Isis has a good post based on her attendance at the session, however - you should read it…
thusspakezuska | January 6, 2010Professor in Training is working on a faculty website design and asks the following:
I'm in the process of designing my own page and also a separate set of pages for my lab. I know the type of stuff I want in both of these but I was looking for feedback from both current and prospective students and postdocs as well as other faculty as to what you look for if/when you go searching for faculty/lab pages.
Take a visit over there and share your opinion on what makes a good website. Inquiring minds may also be interested in some work done on this issue a few years ago by Cynthia Burack (and me…
thusspakezuska | September 3, 2009Two years ago I wrote about taking my mother to Cape Hatteras, and how great it was to have the use of a beach wheelchair that allowed my sister and I to take her right onto the beach. I wanted to call your attention to a comment recently left on that post by Jerry Nasello:
We thought you might like to know about how our little motorized beach wheelchair company is doing. We opened for business in April of this year. We rented a grand total of one motorized beach wheelchair in the month of April.
However, in the month of May we were booked solid for almost the entire month. In April we had a…
thusspakezuska | August 5, 2009UPDATE: Pat Campbell has asked that if you did take the survey initially when it was returning 404 errors, and you subsequently re-took it, drop her an email and she will send you cookies! She has promised to send cookies to the first 10 of my readers who had to retake the survey, if you let her know by email. I've had her cookies. They are great! If you got the 404 error this is a nice incentive to retake - just do so and then drop Pat an email :
campbell AT campbell-kibler DOT com
UPDATE: If you took this survey right after I first posted this entry and got a 404 error when you tried…
thusspakezuska | May 15, 2009Well, that's quite a vigorous discussion we've all been having these past few days over proto-feminist d00ds, no? I am grateful to you all for your participation and for the many good suggestions made to help proto-feminist d00ds along the path of growth. In case some of you missed it, Comrade Physioprof offered his own handy-dandy guide for d00dly commenters over at Isis's place.
With all the interest in these two posts, I'm thinking that maybe we need to spend a little more time talking to/with/for the d00dly d00ds. Herewith, I am proposing Zuska's Outreach Project For D00dly D00ds.…
thusspakezuska | May 11, 2009In the midst of a vigorous discussion on my last post, reader Deatkin expressed his frustrations as to how he might engage in a positive manner in a discussion of feminist issues. In this case, it was not the hairy-legged man-hating feminazi Zuska who was intimidating; it was Comrade Physioprof.
Now, I'm perfectly willing to accept that the problem lies with me on this... In sum, I may simply be too immature (I'm 20 and a mere undergraduate) to think broadly and imaginatively enough on feminist issues in order for me to reach a conclusion that somebody such as [Comrade Physioprof] would find…
thusspakezuska | March 22, 2009Text and title shamelessly stolen from Sciencewomen, I have no time to write, am at mom's again.
Dr. Isis has decided to donate the funds from her blog traffic to fund a scholarship for undergraduate research, and has gotten the American Physiological Society to match her donation up to $500. And all you have to do is click on her site - no $$ donations required. So cool!
Go visit her announcement, and her site through teh browser not the RSS feed reader for this month. :-)
thusspakezuska | March 1, 2009Well, February has come and gone, Black History Month is over for another year, and we've had the first round of the Diversity in Science carnival. I am sure some of you who blog may have thought about contributing to this carnival but didn't for a variety of reasons. Maybe, like me, you had family issues and/or health issues going on; I almost didn't make it to contribute to the carnival myself. Maybe your job was making you crazy. Or maybe you thought to yourself, "I am not an expert on diversity. I don't want to offend anyone. I don't really know how to go about writing on this topic…
thusspakezuska | February 26, 2009Over at Sciencewomen, Alice has a post up on the topic of colleagiality that includes the story of a casual encounter with a very nice outcome:
...my seatmate was Jamie Comstock, provost of Butler University. She saw I was editing a student's paper, and asked "Faculty or student?" That was nice that she didn't presume I was a student. :-) She introduced herself, and then did I, and mentioned I was in my second year of tenure-track at Purdue. She went back to reading her book, and I went back to my paper; and then she said, "Can I interrupt you for a second?" She said she was very curious to…
thusspakezuska | January 28, 2009Perhaps you have noticed our newly redesigned front page, and on that page, a link to the Rightful Place Project. In his inaugural address, President Obama promised to restore science to its "rightful place". Seed Media Group is starting a dialog in response, asking the question "What is science's rightful place?", through Seed Magazine and ScienceBlogs. Our benevolent overlordz have asked us to offer our thoughts in response to this question.
You'll see at the Rightful Place page that you can submit your own thoughts on this question, and there is a link to the Rightful Place blog to…
thusspakezuska | December 27, 2008It drives me nuts that there are so many great articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education - behind a paywall, where you can't see them unless you have a subscription. The December 19th issue had a great essay, In Search of New Frontiers: How Scholars Generate Ideas. If you have a subscription, that link will be useful for you. If not, try to rustle up a print copy somewhere on your campus.
The author, Robert L. Hampel, talked about how one selects a Good Topic for Future Research (GTFR). He came to question the advice he'd been giving to first year PhD students:
Fill a gap in the…
thusspakezuska | November 11, 2008Late last month the Chronicle ran a neat piece in its Careers section, titled Mothers in the Field. It's not behind a paywall - yay! Joan Ramage Macdonald, assistant professor of geology at Lehigh University, and Maura E. Sullivan, PhD candidate in ecology at the same university, write about their experiences taking their young children with them into the field.
And I do mean into the field! Joan took her infant with her into the Yukon Territory to do her research on the evolving snowpack. Maura does research in permanently saturated wetland environments, and first took her daughter with…
thusspakezuska | October 3, 2008When this first came up, I thought it was really outside the scope of my blog. But then I thought about all those stories you hear about women on tech campuses getting "glommed" by clueless nerd boys. I remembered dating catastrophes and tragicomedies from my own undergraduate days, a hundred years ago. And I thought, well, maybe there is a place for at least some brief commentary on this topic.
In the comments to this blog post, Anonymouse asked
Granted, a lot of the behaviors described elsewhere (tit-grazing, eg) are very much not appropriate, but how exactly DOES one go about the…
thusspakezuska | October 1, 2008It's October, and that means it's DonorsChoose time again! ScienceBlogs bloggers are, once again, participating in the DonorsChoose Blogger Challenge. Basically, we ask you, our readers, to help public school teachers across the U.S. fund proposals for classroom supplies, activities, and field trips.
It's a shame we have to ask at all, but our nation's public school teachers are woefully underfunded and often spend their own personal money to purchase needed classroom supplies. Looking over proposals to build my challenge, it was heartbreaking to see that for some teachers, the lack of…
thusspakezuska | August 14, 2008Via the AWIS Washington Wire, this news of interest to young black academics:
In The Black-American's Guide for Winning Tenure - Without Losing Your Soul, authors Kerry Ann Rockquemore and Tracey Laszloffy provide dos, don'ts, advice and support. One of the tips in the Q&A with Rockquemore includes being proactive rather than reactive in creating a professional network of support. She emphasizes the importance of knowing the institution's exact promotion and tenure process, as well as unwritten rules from department-specific norms to whether race can be explicitly discussed. Once the…
thusspakezuska | August 4, 2008For those of you who participated in last fall's Donors Choose challenge - and those of you who didn't! - here is a painless way to help out a really worthy cause.
A media website Seed digs called BigThink is in the middle of a DonorsChoose drive, and Seed has agreed to help them out.
Basically, they've negotiated a deal with Pfizer where for every person who clicks on the "Vote for this video profile" button on this page, Pfizer will give $1 to DonorsChoose, up to $10,000. Unfortunately, they've only raised about $1,200 so far.
To help them reach that $10,000 goal, we're going to try to…
thusspakezuska | July 29, 2008You all may be aware of the moronically stupid column by John Tierney that ran in the NY Times recently, an opinion piece disguised as reporting. I haven't had a chance yet to give my own response to this piece of tripe, or to show you how it is but one more piece in Christina Hoff Sommers's American Enterprise Institute-funded propaganda campaign against women in science.
The Association for Women in Science wrote a letter in response to Tierney's trash. Naturally, the NY Times refused to run it. However, you can read it here. In addition,
[AWIS] constructed an in-depth op-ed, also…