thusspakezuska | January 22, 2007Just a short note to let you all know I've added a few blogs to the blogroll.
I thank Dr. Free-Ride for introducing me to A Natural Scientist. Do read this post of hers.
I had such a great time at the 2007 North Carolina Science Blogging Conference talking with Lab Cat , who has a post on the Teaching Science session and on the Illustrating Your Blog session. Yay! Lab Cat lives near me! Thanks for toting me all over Chapel Hill in your rental car, Lab Cat! I also had such a nifty time with Eva who writes Easternblot. I believe Eva will be writing about the conference for Inkling, so…
thusspakezuska | January 19, 2007I'm off to BlogTogether, the North Carolina Science Bloggers Conference, this weekend. And in a perversely un-blogger like move, I am NOT taking my laptop with me so that I can blog minute-by-minute from the conference. I plan to be unplugged from my computer from, oh, approximately now until I return Sunday afternoon. Hell, I may not blog until Monday.
Besides, Mr. Zuska wants the laptop to burn some cds from his old tape collection. I won't say from which famous jam band he has about a gazillion concert tapes he made himself and/or traded for. But if you know what a Betty Board is, I…
thusspakezuska | January 18, 2007Everyone says "encourage your daughters to stick with math and science". And you want to do it. You're proud of your daughter, you want her to have every option in the world open to her. But what do you do when she resists?
A worried dad recently wrote with just such a dilemma:
Slightly off-thread but my daughter is determined, against the evidence, that she's no good at maths. She mentions this from time to time, for example when she's doing her maths homework.
"I'm no good at maths"
"Your teachers seem to think you're doing rather well. Your last report was excellent"
"[changes…
thusspakezuska | January 17, 2007Yes, the 30th Carnival of Feminists is up at Girlistic's blog The Feminist Pulse.
Girlistic is the ultimate feminist resource, where all things women-centered can be found within a few clicks. Providing education and entertainment, pop and politics, culture and community, resources and shopping, Girlistic is the first place to visit for women-centered information.
I like the "Featured Feminist" bit on Girlistic. Also check out the link of the week. Right now it's about women's speeches, and you may be surprised what you read about them on Girlistic.
I found this excellent post by Lee…
thusspakezuska | January 16, 2007How do you effectively encourage young girls to stick with their math, science, and computer studies in high school? How do you effectively encourage them to consider careers in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics? There's no one perfect approach; you need a full toolkit that allows you to mend all the malfunctions and rip down all the roadblocks that gender roles, peer pressures, familial or societal expectations, and poor or misguided teachers can throw at a girl.
The editors of and contributors to She's Such A Geek! thought one good tool to have in the arsenal would be an…
thusspakezuska | January 16, 2007Are you a women in a high tech job? Please consider participating in this worthwhile project; it only takes a few minutes. Lisa Gable recently wrote to the WEPAN listserve:
I am writing to share news about exciting research being conducted by Catalyst, which IBM is sponsoring, in part. Catalyst is the leading research and advisory organization working with businesses and the professions to build inclusive environments and expand opportunities for women at work. This study focuses on talent management and women in high tech jobs and/or companies. The research provides insight into women's…
thusspakezuska | January 16, 2007Most of you are no doubt aware of this, but it's been ages since I've had to submit a government grant proposal (one of the perks of unemployment). But I just read in the Jan. 12 Chronicle of Higher Education a First Person article by Carol Kolmerten about the exciting new world of Grants.gov.
Recently, I tried to help a faculty member at my college submit a grant proposal to a National Institutes of Health competition. I soon discovered that one can no longer submit a grant to NIH directly. One has to submit it through Grants.gov. I estimate that it took me more than 25 hours to try to…
thusspakezuska | January 14, 2007Penny left some comments over at Let's All Have A Party with some January 14 birthdays to celebrate. She writes:
January 14 (as I type) is the birthday of botanist/geneticist Carrie Matilda Derick (1862-1941), the first woman appointed to a full professorship at a Canadian university. Her story is full of the pain and struggle of being the "first woman" over and over and over... and it's probably no wonder she worked for women's rights, including suffrage and birth control, beyond her academic work. See here for more info.
And one more born on January 14: Ninetta May Runnals (1885-1980…
thusspakezuska | January 8, 2007There's an interesting new ad campaign on the Scienceblogs site from Honeywell Interactive. It includes short video podcasts of scientists discussing their work and ideas. See an example here, down on the navigation bar at right.
Here is a quote from the Honeywell folks supplied to me by my Scienceblogs guru Katherine Sharpe:
Designed to inspire the next generation of engineers and scientists, The Honeywell  Nobel Initiative establishes a forum for students worldwide to learn directly from Nobel Laureates in Chemistry and Physics through a combination of live on-campus events, interactive…
thusspakezuska | January 7, 2007Happy New Year to everyone, and long overdue holiday greetings and all that to all the Zuskateers out there. I didn't intend to be away from the blog for so long, but life has interfered. Same old story: migraines, illness, family health issues. A wicked cold before Christmas that just wouldn't go away...though, you know, when I have a head cold, I don't get migraines. Ever. Anybody else out there experience the same phenomenon? When I suffer from allergies I still get migraines, but not when I have headcolds. Anyway, once the cold was gone the migraines came back. Then mom got sick,…
thusspakezuska | December 20, 2006The 29th Carnival of Feminists is up at The Imponderabilia of Actual Life, and here's one of the categories:
Sexism:
In which we look at examples of sexism from all over the world - sometimes blatant, occasionally subtle, often insidious. Some key words for posts in this section: stereotypes, gender bias, toys, pretty, and porn.
Yours truly has been included in this section for my recent post on Stereotypes and Subtext. Fellow Scienceblogger Tara at Aetiology is also in there for this post. In fact, there's a whole bunch of good stuff on gender and science that you'll enjoy.
I…
thusspakezuska | December 19, 2006If you enjoy reading Inky Circus, then you are probably going to enjoy the latest endeavor from the women who bring you that blog. That is, Inkling Magazine - subtitled, "On the Hunch That Science Rocks!" I particular like this Letter From Science Camp, in which Mike Gretes bares his soul about his love of crystallography.
Unbelievers will cry, but isn't science supposed to be the opposite of religion? O my people, truly I tell you, no, not at all. Here we are awake and surrounded by the Faithful for days, nay, weeks on end. Awake! We listen to the Good Word in lectures and lo, learn the…
thusspakezuska | December 19, 2006Attention, class!
You'll recall that in my About section, I state the following:
I wish that I could also say, like Twisy [Faster], that this is not a feminist primer. But Twisty has the luxury of dealing with the rest of the academy (and much of the workforce) that marched bravely forward starting in the seventies, entering the new millenium with at least a modest understanding of the fact that women are humans. Sadly for me and for all women, the majority of Science-and-Engineering-Land remains Groundhog Day-ishly rooted in the 1950's, where Title IX is just a dim dream...I resign myself to…
thusspakezuska | December 18, 2006Check out the Scienceblogger group portrait! It's clickable and it's cool! It also appears in the December/January issue of Seed Magazine, which you can get for free if you subscribe to Seed (thus getting 7 issues for the price of 6). Seed magazine is very nifty and it is not very expensive. And you know you want to own that portrait with my caricature in it.
thusspakezuska | December 18, 2006I generally resist doing the meme thing, but I saw this one over at See Jane Compute and I liked the idea of it. It's the year in review, by taking the first sentence of the first blog post of each month. So here goes:
January I wonder if Executive Creative Director Don Schneider, of BBDO, (my nominee for the award for Stupidest, Most Offensive, Most Hideously Insensitive, and Most Disgusting Human Being) is still able to picture coal miners singing the song 16 Tons "without any negative feelings"?
A post about my anger at General Electric's egregiously stupid sexy coal miner ad and how…
thusspakezuska | December 15, 2006The weekend's entertainment slate is All-Darwin, All Weekend. Just in from Netflix is Inherit the Wind, which Mr. Zuska and I will view either this evening or Sunday evening. Saturday afternoon we are planning to visit the Darwin exhibit at the Franklin Institute here in Philadelphia. There are two Galapagos tortoises at the exhibit, and there is a live tortoise webcam at the exhibit website, but I can't manage to bring it up on my browser for some reason. Maybe you'll have better luck.
thusspakezuska | December 14, 2006So I'm cruising about Scienceblogs to catch up on my Sciblings and I come across this on Aetiology:
So, razib relates a recent observation of the apparently rare species hottus chicas scientificas at a local wine bar. Shelley's ticked:
Not sure whether to be more irked that Razib suggests that smart women aren't hot (and vice versa), that hot women don't like sci fi, or than sci fi somehow denotes intelligence. Booooooooo.
While razib tells her to "focus on the science fiction part. not the intelligence," I agree with Shelley's later comment that who cares exactly whether he was talking about…
thusspakezuska | December 13, 2006Today marks the debut of guest-blogger Cynthia Burack at TSZ. A professor at the Ohio State University, Cynthia is a political scientist who tools are feminist political theory and political psychology. We have worked together in the past on several projects, including work on group dynamics and resistance to diversity (see sidebar, NWSA Journal article) and on evaluating STEM department websites for diversity. What follows, however, is entirely Cynthia's work. I am grateful that she has allowed me to present it here. I think it is very important for all scientists to hear.
Zuska has…
thusspakezuska | December 12, 2006I wonder if Rachel Brenc thinks the Iraq Study Group's report was biased. After all, of the ten members of the panel who issued the report, nine were all of one gender, with only one of the opposite gender.
Oh wait a minute, it's okay. There were nine penises on the Iraq Study Group, so bias clearly isn't an issue here.
Actually, there are two factors at play here. If the NSF report Beyond Bias and Barriers had been issued by a panel of seventeen men and one women, I am pretty sure Rachel and her ilk would still not have been happy with it. No, the fuss about the supposedly biased…
thusspakezuska | December 11, 2006The Chronicle of Higher Education published a little tongue-in-cheek holiday gift guide in the December 8 issue. I really liked this item: the Scientific Integrity Calendar, published by the Union of Concerned Scientists and available at their website.
In the summer of 2006, creative minds throughout America had the opportunity to show off their artistic and comedic talents in support of independent science by entering Science Idol: the Scientific Integrity Editorial Cartoon Contest. Artists of all skill levels submitted hundreds of entries dealing with political interference in science,…