The Real Geek Goddesses
thusspakezuska | April 28, 2009Fab reader Penny Richards has a Handmade Geekery site on Etsy with this stunning Rock Diva purse that can be YOURS! Do not click unless you are prepared to drool and desire said purse. Penny says that thanks to the Smithosonian's Flickr Commons project, there will be plenty more of these delicious goodies coming. Mayhap you could request your fav????
thusspakezuska | March 26, 2009
It's here! The second edition of the Diversity in Science Carnival! But it wouldn't be here today without the help of Dr. Free-ride and Dr. Isis. With all the time I have had to devote to my mother and her issues the past two weeks, there is no way I could have gotten the carnival up today without their help. Indeed they really get full credit. I haven't even managed to finish a special post I wanted to do for the carnival - so check back later. I'll update when I have it done and add it in here.
But enough of my travails! Let's get on to the really good stuff submitted to this…
thusspakezuska | March 10, 2009Just in time for Women's History Month and the second edition of the Diversity in Science Carnival, the Association for Computing Machinery has announced that the 2008 Turing Award goes to Barbara Liskov! Here's all the info from the press release:
ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, has named Barbara Liskov of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) the winner of the 2008 ACM A.M. Turing Award. The award cites Liskov for her foundational innovations to designing and building the pervasive computer system designs that power daily life. Her achievements in programming…
thusspakezuska | November 14, 2008Though university administrators seem to be widely reviled among faculty members, one of the best jobs I ever had was in administration. Many wonderful opportunities came my way; possibly the most mind-stretching, exhilarating, and rewarding of these was the chance to spend four weeks attending the Summer Institute for Women in Higher Education Administration, held at Bryn Mawr College. Just imagine spending four weeks with several dozen intelligent, interesting women from colleges and universities all over the U.S., from a range of administrative areas (including faculty members looking to…
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 | April 7, 2008Scientiae's April Carnival is now up - actually has been up for a few days while I've been off having migraines. Peggy has done an excellent job with many thought-provoking submissions. I particularly like Mrs. Whatsit's ponderings on what it what it means to "have the balls". And I positively swooned on reading Liz Henry's submission. That's some writing after Zuska's own heart! Here's a delicious excerpt:
You can see two assumptions set up here:
Women who like computers are ugly.
It fucking matters.
and
It's tokenizing; it's like suggesting women are only in tech because of…
thusspakezuska | February 29, 2008Lab Lemming recently wrote to me:
However bad the situation here on Earth gets, at least there is another planet in the solar system where women scientists and engineers can work
and then directed me to this very heartening story on the Mars Exploration Rover tactical operations team. It seems that last Friday, every single person on the rather large team operating the rovers that day was a woman. Yay! Emily Lakdawalla, the author, tells us
Think about that. One, two, or a handful of women around could be explained away by the chauvinistic as token participants, the product of affirmative…
thusspakezuska | January 17, 2008Just yesterday I posted information about a new resource on recruiting women and girls into information technology. Ironically, the same day American Public Media ran this story about Jean Bartik, one of the original "computers".
Yesterday in San Francisco, Apple released its new computer, the MacBook Air. The notebook has an eighty gigabyte hard drive, is a mere three quarters of an inch thick and weighs three pounds. Dick's guest today can certainly put that achievement into perspective. Jean Bartik's first job was as a "computer" - a human one. She went on to help program one of the…
thusspakezuska | September 11, 2007I found the link to this video over at She's Such a Geek! - thanks, Charlie! Listen to one female geek's response to reading the book. I particular loved her saying that the "she" in "She's Such a Geek!" should not make men feel excluded - they should just "ignore the s in front of the he as we have been ignoring its absence" for lo these many years. Hee! Enjoy!
thusspakezuska | June 27, 2007I recently got a notice from the AWIS - Philadelphia chapter about a film in production here in Philadelphia, called "Future Weather". The filmmakers, independent and mostly women, wrote to AWIS as follows:
We...are dedicated to bringing the stories of real women and girls to the big (and small) screen, one little story, one strong-willed girl at a time. We hope you will join us... I'm sure you are aware of the lack of positive female role models in the media, especially those with any interest, much less commitment, to science. We are hoping to change that.
Future Weather is the story of…
thusspakezuska | February 23, 2007So, they've been handing out this award for 40 years. For 39 of them, they couldn't see fit to find any woman qualified to receive it. But FINALLY! Yay! Three cheers for Frances E. Allen, 2006 winner of the Turing Award and its $100,000 prize!
She only had to wait until she was 75, and retired for 4 years, to be honored for her work. I guess they just didn't notice her anytime during the last four decades. Lucky for her she lived long enough for the judges to find her.
Plus, she must be the ONLY woman up until now who has done anything deserving of the Turing Award. Unless,…
thusspakezuska | February 15, 2007I have a friend who is always making up the most wonderful names for his female friends by adding the syllable "stress" to unusual words. My favorite was one he gave me after a nefarious piece of business: underminestress. Believe me, the person deserved it. Anyway, I say all this by way of explaining the word "geekstress" in my post title there. It's meant proudly and campily, the way my friend uses the modifier.
So: what does a true geekstress look like? We are in the process of finding out!
Kristin just posted this link to a contest on Inkling magazine:
In honor of all girl-geeks…
thusspakezuska | January 24, 2007Penny writes:
January 23rd is the birthday of Gertrude Elion (1918-1999) -- she won the Nobel in Medicine and held 45 patents.
January 24th is the birthday of a less famous medical researcher who was about the same generation as Elion: Virginia Minnich (1910-1996) was a hematologist. She was only able to attend college during the Depression because her older sister lent her the money--yeah for older sisters!
I would just like to add that January 20th is the birthday of Zuska and I celebrated with Mr. Zuska (but not till the 21st, since I was at the Science Blogging Conference on the…
thusspakezuska | December 10, 2006I'm one day late getting to this, but...
...Penny posted this comment on Let's All Have a Party!
Posting this on the centenary of Grace Murray Hopper, born 9 December 1906. Math PhD from Yale in 1934, taught at Vassar till she joined the Naval Reserve during WWII and became a computer programmer. She's credited with overseeing the development of COBOL. {for bio, see here]
I have a soft spot in my heart for Amazing Grace. Now THERE is a real geek goddess for you.
Do visit the link for Let's All Have A Party! and see all the birthdays of fabulous women scientists and engineers that have…
thusspakezuska | November 29, 2006Penny Richards wrote via email to tell me that Saturday, November 25 was Kate Gleason's birthday.
Gleason (1865-1933) was the first woman admitted to full membership in the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, in the 1910s (she represented ASME at an international conference in Germany in 1930). She was also the daughter of Irish immigrants, a bank president, an executive at her family's gear-planing company, and a lifelong suffragist. At Rochester Institute of Technology, the Kate Gleason College of Engineering is named in her honor, and displays a bust of Gleason at its entrance.…
thusspakezuska | November 17, 2006Congratulations to Donna C. Boyd, professor of forensic anthropology at Radford University! She is one of four professors (and the only woman) to be honored as Professor of the Year for 2006 by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Professor Boyd was quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education announcement of the award as follows:
"When you have unrecognizable human remains, our job is to try to identify it. Media depictions of forensic anthropology, like CSI and Bones, are a double-edged sword. They have brought in…
thusspakezuska | November 10, 2006What are the best pickup lines for scientists and science-savvy folk?...
I think I can best answer this Ask A Science Blogger question by quoting myself.
So:
Suzanne Franks, in her fabulous essay Suzy the Computer vs. Dr. Sexy: What's A Geek Girl To Do When She Wants To Get Laid? which you can now read in the available for purchase She's Such a Geek! Women Write About Science, Technology, and Other Nerdy Stuff, writes:
When I got to college, I found frat parties dominated the social life, and I suspected that smarts might not be a high-value attribute in that scene. Nevertheless, I trotted…
thusspakezuska | November 7, 2006Calling all geek girls: The She's Such a Geek blog is up and running. And is it ever good! Please do check out Kristin's post Show and Tell. You have not lived until you've seen a bra with a voltmeter-ammeter panel. I mean it.
In theory I am also blogging over there but in practice I have been barely keeping up with blogging here so I have not yet posted to the SSAG blog. But I promise you will love what the other contributors to the book have put up there so far!
And you can BUY THE BOOK now!
Or buy it here.
Here's the publisher's comments:
Geeks may be outcasts in mainstream…
thusspakezuska | August 30, 2006This post is a reply to a comment earlier this month from a very distressed young woman named Ellen. I'm sorry I wasn't able to reply sooner but family crises intervened. Ellen commented on the third in a series of posts I made regarding two calendars recently published, one in the U.S. and one in Australia, that feature women in IT dressed up as fancy whores (my term) or Screen Goddesses/Geek Gorgeous (their terms). The third post, Let Them Eat Cake - Beef vs. Cheese, compared the two calendars to the hot firemen's Flame Calendar (pun intended). In that post, I discussed why beefcake adds…
thusspakezuska | August 29, 2006At FairerScience.org I found this link to Val Henson's home page. Val is an operating systems programmer and one helluva woman. You'll want to check out her A Woman of Deeds essay. The essay takes its title from one of those "there, there, don't you worry your pretty little head about it" comments Val got from a 'friend' who, along with her husband, stole and patented one of her ideas. (Yes, I said along with her husband. Yep, they're now divorced.) The friend dubbed her "a woman of deeds, not ideas". That is just so precious. Val, if you will just point me in the direction of your…