Posted March 30, 2009 at 7:07 AM EST 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.
Posted March 24, 2009 at 8:15 AM EST in Bryn Mawr, Computing, People I Admire, Technology, Women! | Comments (2)
Today is Ada Lovelace Day, an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology. Ada Lovelace was a mathematician and, essentially, the first computer programmer (in an age where mechanical calculating machines were still ideas drawn on paper). Born in 1815, she envisioned machines which could not only compute calculations, but also compose music.
When computer science students are learning the history of the subject (assuming they get any historical teachings at all — our history is “taught” via small anecdotes as footnotes in textbooks), Ada Lovelace is sometimes the only women ever mentioned. However the history of the field is strewn with the impactful and inspiring stories of women: Grace Hopper, Jean Bartik and the other ENIAC programmers, Milly Koss (why doesn’t she have a Wikipedia page?), Fran Allen, Anita Borg, Telle Whitney, Wendy Hall, Ellen Spertus — and those are just the high-profile women whose names are likely to be recognized. There are so many other women out there who have done, are doing, and will do great things for computing, technology, and the world — and today’s blogging event will expose all of us to a few more.
Although I’ve found many female role models in computing and technology, none were as important to me as the women I was surrounded by in college, when I was pursuing computer science as a major. Bryn Mawr’s computer science department didn’t exist yet — in fact, we had only one full-time CS professor back then! But there were plenty of women on campus interested in technology and they were my primary motivators and supporters in those days.
Amy (Biermann) Hughes, PhD graduated from Bryn Mawr in 1995 and received her PhD in computer science from the University of Southern California in 2002. She is currently a member of the technical staff at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. I think I first met Amy when we were working together for Computing Services as student operators (“ops” for short) and she was an immediate inspiration. Amy seemed to know everything there was to know about networks, and she taught me a great deal. The fact that she’d decided to major in CS without there being an official major made the idea of me doing it seem feasible. Amy had done research as an undergrad — another fact which amazed me — in parallel computing! (That just flat out floored me.) On top of all of that, she loved Duran Duran. I’m not kidding when I say that there were times at which I’d say to myself, “Amy got through this somehow, I can too!” In fact, I’m still telling myself this, as every time I think about going back to school for my PhD, I wonder how I’ll get over my fear of qualifying exams and I remember that Amy did it, so can I!
My compsci partner-in-crime from my own class was Sarah Hacker (yes, that’s her real name). She graduated from Bryn Mawr in 1997 and went on to do graduate studies at SUNY Buffalo. She currently works in health care information systems at the University of Iowa. Sarah and I were in many classes together before we ever struck up a conversation. I was intimidated by her natural programming abilities — to me, it seemed that she could pick up any language syntax and any programming concept so easily! — but I came to greatly appreciate and sometimes rely on them. We also worked for Computing Services and frequently worked the night shifts together, drinking soda, eating candy, and making bizarre photo montages (such as Sarah’s brilliant Child of the Moon series). In fact, it was Sarah who first showed me how to create a web page, so I really owe her quite a bit! Sarah introduced me to Pulp (the band), reintroduced me to Real Genius, and taught me LISP for an AI assignment. We started the Computer Science Culture Series together and were featured in the Philadelphia Inquirer for our robots, Jimmy and Timmy. Generally, she just kept me company and in good spirits, and I can only hope that I did the same for her.
Fortunately Amy and Sarah are still friends, so I continue to draw inspiration from their current lives and achievements as well. Of course, they weren’t the only women who helped me make it through my undergraduate experience and early career — Elysa Weiss, Helen Horton Peterson ’79, and Jennifer Harper ’96 (all Bryn Mawr Computing Services staff) were instrumental as well. And I have to give props to the men who were able to put up with supported a community of such strong women: Deepak Kumar, John King, Rodney Battle, and David Bertagni.
Those of us interested in computer science and technology are constantly looking forward, but today gives all of us a great opportunity to look back and highlight our common history and all of the people — both men and women — who’ve made today possible. Thank you, to all of them!
Posted February 17, 2009 at 10:16 AM EST in Activism, Business, Web Standards | Comments (1)
I’ve spent most of my career working at large Web-focused companies which typically have multiple Web development teams to handle their sites. While the Web may be the vehicle that makes their business viable, most of the business people in these companies are ignorant oblivious too busy to follow the developments of the browser market space.
These companies, while all different, handled the release of new browsers using the same wait-and-see approach: wait until the browser comes out, see how much of the site’s traffic moves to that browser, then invest on bug-fixing only if n% of users are on that browser. Most, if not all, of the alpha/beta/RC testing was done by developers who were interested enough to test and possibly bug fix (assuming the issues weren’t major shared template problems). And they were probably doing this on their own time, because the business wasn’t going to stop business-supporting, revenue-generating development work in order to support a new browser!
I often owned the browser support matrix at the companies I worked for, but just because I owned it didn’t mean I could change it whenever I wanted. I had to convince the business teams that preparing for a new browser was worth our time and money. If I didn’t walk into meetings with current and historical browser usage statistics and demonstrations of bugs in the new browser, I would have been laughed out of the room. Simply stating that “a new browser is coming and we’d better be ready” just wasn’t, and isn’t, enough.
Other than a handful of companies, businesses aren’t in the browser business, or even in the browser support business (even though we developers may feel differently). Microsoft is right to not expect all businesses and Web sites to jump just because they have a new browser coming out, and I think that IE8′s Compatibility Mode provides a decent solution to bridging the gap for users between the old, crappily coded sites and the nice, new(er), standards-compliant sites.
I’m not jumping for joy over it, of course, because it signals that we standardistas haven’t succeeded in our education mission. There still aren’t enough designers and developers out there building standards-compliant Web sites, with or without business support, to withstand an event such as this. There certainly aren’t enough business people who understand the Web well enough to simplify the business case for standards-based development. Community and education tie into this as well.
Those who think that IE8 is going to be a wake-up call to businesses dependent on the Web are wrong — it won’t be. But it should be one to all of those designers and developers and business people who do understand the benefits of sticking with the standards: we still need to get out there and talk to our colleagues and community about standards, and help move the Web forward!
Posted February 16, 2009 at 5:23 PM EST in Links | Comments Off
Posted February 12, 2009 at 5:53 PM EST in Education, Meeeeeeee, STEM | Comments Off
While reading another story about the lack of diversity in STEM I was newly struck by the following statement, which I’ve heard in various forms over the years (emphasis mine):
“I think science is seen as a man’s world by a lot of people,” said Candy DeBerry, associate professor of biology at Washington & Jefferson College. “All the studies show that somewhere around sixth or seventh grade, girls start losing their interest in science but might be equally interested in it in the third or fourth grade.”
For me, sixth grade was spent in elementary school. I had one teacher, unless you counted the music, art, or gym teachers. We almost always had one computer (a TRS-80 or an Apple II/IIe) in our classroom, which the teacher actually knew something about and which we kids would typically fight over using. Even the few kids who had computers at home (like me) wanted to use the computer at school, and we’d rush to finish an assignment so we could get in some computer time.
Seventh grade was the start of junior high school for me, and thus began the hourly switching of subjects, teachers, and classrooms. In none of these classrooms did we have a computer, and I don’t ever remember my teachers mentioning computers. In junior high, the only computers I can recall were in the library, and they weren’t the sort that you “played” with. In addition, all of the extra-curricular activities I was starting took away from potential computer time at home.
So when I keep hearing about this crucial sixth/seventh grade time period for young girls, I can’t help but think back to my own experience around these grades. I didn’t lose interest in computers (or science or math) in seventh grade, but I was certainly separated from them. As time went on, I had less time to pursue those interests myself, and in some cases I was discouraged from pursuing them.
Sure, times have changed, but as the old saying goes, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” Thus I’m inclined to assume that my experience may not really be that different from what kids experience today. Kids can’t stay in the elementary school environment forever, but with middle schools now starting at fifth and sixth grade, are we pushing change — not just academic and environmental, but social! — on them too soon, thus potentially losing more future scientists, technologists, engineers, and mathematicians?
Hi, my name is Kimberly Blessing. I'm a computer scientist, Web developer, standards evangelist, feminist, and geek. This is where I write about life, the Web, technology, women's issues, and whatever else comes to mind.
