thusspakezuska | December 11, 2006Penny commented that today is Annie Jump Cannon's birthday. I have long known of her as a famous astronomer but I did not know that she became deaf as an adult. Thanks, Penny, for providing the link to Disability Studies at Temple U. and the bit about Annie Jump Cannon for her birthday today. Do visit the DS-TU page; there is a marvelous photo of Cannon and a great short little bio. Her biography at 4000 Years of Women in Science is here. Also see this site at Wellesley. Great photos there, too, and a link to more info.
thusspakezuska | December 10, 2006Negative geekhood stereotypes abound - geek boys have no social skills. Geek girls are ugly.
But The Onion has recently put forth a new, semi-positive geek stereotype. It seems that now, geekhood is a protection against addiction.
Thanks to my friend Cindy for sending this my way!
thusspakezuska | December 10, 2006White papers from the WEPAN 2006 National Conference are now available on the web here. Papers available are:
But, Engineering IS Cool - Effective Messaging for Pre-college Students
Dump the Slump: Retaining Engineering Women into the 3rd Year
Facilitating Success for Women in STEM through Living-Learning Programs: Results from the National Study of Living-Learning Programs
The main conference website is here. You can access the conference proceedings. You should go check them out because I am absolutely sure you will want to read the two papers I am co-author on:
Designing Welcoming and…
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 | December 7, 2006Others before me have noted that whenever the Montreal massacre is discussed, the shooter's name is always mentioned but the names of the murdered women rarely are ever mentioned. Let's take a minute just to recount their names and ages at the time of their deaths.
As listed on the Gendercide.org case study site:
Geneviève Bergeron, aged 21;
Hélène Colgan, 23;
Nathalie Croteau, 23;
Barbara Daigneault, 22;
Anne-Marie Edward, 21;
Maud Haviernick, 29;
Barbara Maria Klucznik, 31;
Maryse Leclair, 23;
Annie St.-Arneault, 23;
Michèle Richard, 21;
Maryse Laganière, 25;
Anne-Marie Lemay, 22…
thusspakezuska | December 7, 2006This entry should have been posted yesterday but I wasn't able to finish it in time because of migraine. I should have left the other easier stuff alone and concentrated on this earlier in the day when I was feeling somewhat better. In the spirit of better a day late than not at all, here it is, with all its migrainey deficiencies.
Some of you know, some of you don't, that December 6 is the anniversary of the Montreal Massacre. The Chronicle of Higher Education has a brief item in its news blog:
White roses and candlelight vigils are part of ceremonies today on most Canadian campuses and…
thusspakezuska | December 6, 2006The 28th Carnival of the Feminists is up at Diary of a Freak Magnet, and it's a tasty one.
Yours truly has made the Carnival! Yay! That's fun.
Go check it out. Lots and lots and lots of good stuff. Especially this Bitchitorial about why young girls don't go into math and science. Love it, love it, love it.
thusspakezuska | December 6, 2006The latest installment in the X-Gals series is out: Life As A Mother-Scientist. Subtitle: The X-Gals, a group of nine female biologists, see a direct correlation between their productivity and their child care.
Note that last phrase: the link is not between productivity and having children. It's between productivity and child care. Access to it, quality of available child care, sudden unpredictable collapse of previously arranged child care, difficulty of obtaining child care for very young infants or sick children, and so on. When good child care arrangements are in place,…
thusspakezuska | December 6, 2006Yesterday, PZ Myers over at Pharyngula posted an entry with a link to my post on Why I Am Not Polite. And just like that - shazam! - blog traffic here tripled. Oh Mighty PZ, Zuska salutes you!
So, a hearty welcome to all you new readers, and I hope you'll stick around to join in the fun. Check out the "About" tab above if you want to get a quick overview of this blog. Or just browse about. Or whatever. It's just nice to see you here along with the regular crew, and thanks for adding so vigorously to the discussions!
Speaking of PZ, if you need a real laugh for today, go on over to his…
thusspakezuska | December 4, 2006Occasionally one of my (usually male) readers will take me to task for what he considers to be my unwarranted angry - dare I say, strident? - tone of voice. Can I not be more polite? More reasonable? Would I not catch more flies with honey? Only speak sweet reason, dear crazy bitch Zuska, they plead, and we will assuredly attend to the substance of your message. But not while you rant and rave so. No indeed. That can only turn us off.
Well, as someone I knew once said, I don't want to catch flies. I want to kill them.
I told the story of the origins of the "Puke On His Shoes"…
thusspakezuska | December 4, 2006I should have posted this yesterday but wasn't able to...so this is a belated birthday celebration for Ellen Swallow Richards. Thanks again to Penny Richards for sending along the following information.
December 3, 1842--birthdate of Ellen Swallow Richards (1842-1911), first woman admitted to study at MIT.
She was a chemist; she was also married to the head of the mining engineering department. She worked to establish the Women's Laboratory at MIT (1876-1883), and had an (unpaid) instructor's position teaching chemistry courses. She was the official water analyst for the Massachusetts…
thusspakezuska | December 4, 2006SuzyQueue is a frequent commenter on this blog and usually has something interesting to say. I just had to promote one of her latest comments to a blog post:
I have made it a point to celebrate each 'first' woman elected to membership in the engineering professional societies by ordering a cake and having a party in the student commons area. I read a short biography of the woman whose birthday we are celebrating.
I do celebrate other birthdays and since I am buying the cake, I get to decide the event, whether it be a person's, building's, or event's birthday. I celebrate Chuck Yeager's…
thusspakezuska | December 4, 2006Longtime Zuskateers know that I often recommend, or express the desire to engage in, puking upon someone's shoes when they have behaved in an egregious manner. Perhaps you have occasionally wondered whence came this delightful phrase.
A thousand years ago, when I was still a graduate student in Boston, I went to visit a friend of mine in D.C. On the long train trip back to Boston, a suited gentleman (and I use the term very loosely) sat down next to me somewhere around Baltimore. I was deeply engrossed in a novel, but this moron didn't care. He interrupted my reading with a steady…
thusspakezuska | December 4, 2006The Chronicle of Higher Education's news blog has a little item on Joseph Schlessinger. You may know him as the "internationally known researcher and head of the pharmacology department at Yale University" famous for his "his work in figuring out how information flows between a cell surface and the cell -- studies credited with laying the groundwork for several treatments for cancer".
Or you may know him now as the jerk-ass who allegedly sexually harassed his secretary so frequently and so long that she eventually had to quit her job to get away from him.
The secretary, Mary Beth Garceau,…
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 29, 2006What's the funniest lab accident you've ever had?...
...asks "Ask A Science Blogger".
Definitely not funny at the time. But funny in retrospect.
As a grad student and a postdoc, I worked with cultured mammalian cells (animal and human). I used magnetic resonance spectroscopy to study their metabolism and functional behavior. This involved packing a lot of cells into a very small volume in order to get good signal to noise ratio. Tissue culture experts know that lots of cells in a small volume means problems with nutrient delivery and waste removal - necessitating continuous perfusion…
thusspakezuska | November 29, 2006From the WEPAN listserv:
The University of Washington has received a grant from the National Science Foundation ADVANCE program (grant SBE-0619159) to offer a series of national leadership workshops for science, engineering, and mathematics department chairs and emerging faculty leaders. These workshops, called *LEAD: Leadership Excellence for Academic Diversity*, are focused on providing academic leaders with the skills and resources to address issues related to departmental and university culture and the professional development of all faculty. A pre-workshop mentoring-for-leadership event…
thusspakezuska | November 21, 2006Over at Dr. Free-Ride's pad, Ken C. is most distressed that no one has attempted to debate our dear friend Rachel's serious critique of the NSF report, Beyond Bias and Barriers.
Knowing how ably Rachel dissected the work of that horribly biased panel that put together that shoddy piece of work, I nevertheless shouldered the burden of taking on a point by point rebuttal of her main claims. You can find this rebuttal over at Dr. Free-Ride's, just below Ken C.'s whining. Here's a taste (quoting myself):
Well, Rachel is a freshman, and so perhaps she has not yet had a lot of experience with…
thusspakezuska | November 21, 2006Thanks to Dr. Free-Ride of Adventures in Ethics and Science for alerting me to this most wonderful post. Transient Reporter has provided a most delicious translation of one of Toadygawa's emails to Alla Karpova. It is too, too good to pass up. Here's the intro:
From: Susumu Tonegawa
Sent: Thursday, May 11, 2006 7:09 PM
To: Karpova, Alla
Subject: CONFIDENTIAL
Dear Alla,
I enjoyed talking with you enormously.So who the hell are you, exactly?
Although I do have a reservation about the use of the MIST technology as the primary approach for studying circuit mechanisms underlying the behaviors…
thusspakezuska | November 21, 2006Jokerine wrote in respone to Let Her Eat the Oppressor's Cake:
had a discussion in my group today about affirmative action. One of the guys comented that if we promoted women in male fields soon all groups on the fringes of society would ask for prefferential treatment. I couldn't figure out what was bothering me for a while, but wait a minute since when are women a fringe group. And this from a man that considers himself liberal and progressive. Poor Rachel, one day her eyes will open and she will see how much worse she is off as a woman. I'll be there for her to come crying to.
No indeedy,…