Kimberly Blessing

Geeky news stories you might have missed

Posted March 30, 2009 at 7:07 AM in Computing, Current Events, Links | Comments Off

Some of these stories are a few weeks old — sorry, that’s what happens when you go to SXSW!

• ACM Names Barbara Liskov Recipient of the 2008 ACM A.M. Turing Award You had to know I’d be excited about this one! Barbara Liskov is the second female recipient of the award (Fran Allen was the first, in 2006). Dr. Liskov was the first woman to receive a Ph.D. in Computer Science in the United States, and she is given the award “for contributions to practical and theoretical foundations of programming language and system design, especially related to data abstraction, fault tolerance, and distributed computing.” Congratulations, Barbara!
• Computer Science Majors Increase at Most Significant Rate Since Dot Com Boom Good news for the field of computing, however, if you look at the data, the percentage of women has remained the same.
• Psychology of nerding and the joy of reckless tech The topic of taking stuff apart without regard for whether or not it will work when put back together has come up in my life a lot, recently. For example, Mat Schaffer and I gave career day talks to young women last week, and we spoke about doing just this, to see if they have a knack for technology. My recommendation: spend $5 on an old VCR at Goodwill and pull the thing to pieces.
• Code cracker remade Bletchley Park scientists and makers have rebuilt The Bombe — the code cracking machines used to break the Enigma cipher in WWII! Plus, Bletchley Park is in need of saving, so please contribute, if you can.
• Students tie £56 camera to balloon and send it to edge of space to capture stunning images of Earth Now these are the types of projects that high schoolers ought to be doing! (The full set of photos are here.)
• Is Genius Born or Can It Be Learned No answers, but some interesting facts are mentioned.

Last week’s links

Posted February 16, 2009 at 5:23 PM in Links | Comments Off

• spacesick: The “I Can Read Movies” Series Brilliant 60s-style paperback book covers depicting famous movies.
• Katherine Johnson Katherine Johnson, in her 33 years as a research mathematician and scientist at NASA’s Langley Research Center, calculated the trajectories for the early space missions.
• U.S. Satellite Destroyed in Space Collision An Iridium satellite and a Russian Cosmos 2251 satellite collided with one another over Siberia, the first ever event of this nature.
• 1234567890 Day Unix time is calculated in seconds since the epoch (Jan. 1 1970) and will soon hit 1234567890! Let’s party!
• Brickshelf Gallery: Space Battleship Yamato StarBlazers comes to life… in LEGOs!
• Christians and Atheists Battle in London Bus Wars The Christians are responding to the Atheist Bus Campaign with similar ads.
• Why Women Should Play Video Games By Rhoulette of the Frag Dolls gaming team.
• Art and Code ART AND CODE is symposium on programming environments for artists, young people, and the rest of us. The event takes place the weekend of March 7-9, 2009 at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA.

Last week’s links

Posted February 8, 2009 at 8:03 PM in Links | Comments Off

• Ongoing Echoes from the Women of the Long House A brief history of the influence of the Haudensosaunee (Iroquois) women on early American feminists.
• The XX Factor : For Women, Good Jobs Depend on Good Contraception … and Yet … “Let’s be real: Most women couldn’t be 21st-century workers without contraception.”
• Acing a job interview with deliberate practice The Influencer Blog uses Ben Franklin’s self-improvement process as inspiration for preparing someone for a job interview. The technique, which I’ve used, works.
• Jo Ellen Parker ’75 to lead Sweet Briar College Fellow Bryn Mawr grad (and dean when I was a student) will take over in July.
• The Angry Grammarian: Verbed nouns, and the people who hate them. On "unfriending" and more.
• Stephen Ibaraki interviews Dame Wendy Hall A broad spectrum of questions are asked and answered in this audio interview.
• Lone male student rooms at Bryn Mawr In my day, there were around 10 men rooming on campus each year. Now there's just one, the first in 10 years? Seems odd.