I was all pumped to the Kindle Fire and then I get this little turn from Amazon. Because, really, can’t repeat enough the universal truth that us silly gals just aren’t interested in hard, icky science. Because I don’t hear it enough.
November 20, 2011
November 14, 2011
![thedailywhat:
Catching Up With Cain of the Day: Luckily for Obama, Presidential elections aren’t based on the cleverness of a candidate’s 404 error page.
Neither are they based on a candidate’s choice of pizza toppings, but Cain might beg to differ:
Chris Heath: What can you tell about a man by the type of pizza that he likes?
Herman Cain: [repeats the question aloud, then pauses for a long moment] The more toppings a man has on his pizza, I believe the more manly he is.
Chris Heath: Why is that?
Herman Cain: Because the more manly man is not afraid of abundance. [laughs]
Devin Gordon: Is that purely a meat question?
Herman Cain: A manly man don’t want it piled high with vegetables! He would call that a sissy pizza.
[benjoseph / copyranter / gq.]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_luihd9laPz1qz764fo1_1280.png)
Catching Up With Cain of the Day: Luckily for Obama, Presidential elections aren’t based on the cleverness of a candidate’s 404 error page.
Neither are they based on a candidate’s choice of pizza toppings, but Cain might beg to differ:
Chris Heath: What can you tell about a man by the type of pizza that he likes?
Herman Cain: [repeats the question aloud, then pauses for a long moment] The more toppings a man has on his pizza, I believe the more manly he is.
Chris Heath: Why is that?
Herman Cain: Because the more manly man is not afraid of abundance. [laughs]
Devin Gordon: Is that purely a meat question?
Herman Cain: A manly man don’t want it piled high with vegetables! He would call that a sissy pizza.
[benjoseph / copyranter / gq.]
(via cltom)
November 4, 2011
Unplug
Yesterday, I whined a bunch about classes and the evil, evil exams that come with them. Today, I stared at that exam (it’s a take-home algorithms midterm) for a few hours, with my computer off (I type up my solutions, in general), and I think I solved about 3/4 of the problems, which is way more progress than prior.
And so, a Resolution: I am going to do work in silence and totally unplugged for at least 2 hours, during peak productivity time (10 am - 3 pm, usually), each work day.
This is really scary, considering any time I’m not in front of a computer writing or programming or reading or drawing/sketching, I’m in front of my phone or iPad doing one of those things anyway.
November 4, 2011
"One of the most perplexing problems for those new to ethnomethodology is the discovery that it lacks both a formally stated theory and a formal methodology. As serious as these problems might appear on the face of it, neither has prevented ethnomethodologists from doing ethnomethodological studies, and generating a substantial literature of “findings”."
—
The poorly-written, epistemologically cranky wikipedia article about ethnomethodology
(Bonus points for putting the quotation mark before period!)
(Source: Wikipedia)
November 4, 2011
"The peer review process works and I’m an enormous supporter of it. If you try to circumvent the process, that’s a recipe for disaster. Often, it’s based on a suspicion of the scientific community and the scientific method. They often see themselves as the hero outside of science, cutting through the jungle of bureaucracy. That’s nonsense: science is a very open pursuit, but peer review is there to ensure some kind of minimal standard of professionalism"
—
- Brian Cox
Why Brian Cox is wrong: blogging your research is not a recipe for disaster.
He is right that peer-review is an essential and respected keystone to quality published research. But it does nothing for public understanding of science or the transparency of the process that many are calling for and feel would add weight to the necessity of research.
In the future, everything will be online. Why do research scientists think that in-progress science will be any different?
(via jtotheizzoe)
One of the stickier issues for many in my corner of science is that a double-blind peer review process is directly threatened by blogging/etc in a relatively small scientific community. Reviewers will try to search online for prior art, and suppose they find the application or device or algorithm described in the paper on some website. That’s prior art. Now, they can either reject because it’s not novel, or continue on if it’s painfully obvious that the website author(s) are the paper authors(s). It’s a farce. And waiting until after reviews come back results? At that point, we’re either working on some new problem or sub-problem so we’re not going to write about the old thing, and why bother, it’s at the conference, anyway.
Many people in the field blog regardless, and we increasingly have debates at conferences about what that means for us as a scientific community. And the only thing we seem to agree on is that the current process cannot reasonably coexist with most people blogging about what they’re excited about. At the end of the day, we settle on the peer review process we have, despite our constant criticism of it, precisely to “ensure some kind of minimal standard of professionalism.”
I think that brand of hesitation isn’t really about acknowledging that in the future everything will be online, it’s how to get there, and what how the rest of the processes we rely on need to change.
(via jtotheizzoe)
November 4, 2011
Those Freaking Classes
So here’s the thing about classes. They’re not fun. You know deep in your heart they’ll make you a better person, and maybe you get a perverse sort of satisfaction from doing well, but they aren’t. If you think they are, I will stay up drinking with you and yelling about how the system has basically Stockholmed the crap out of you. The people who don’t care about the topic(s) (but are in the class because they have to be) are somewhere between apathetic and resentful, with varying degrees of bile. The people who do care are generally either (a) bored by being shown something [they think] they know or (b) not paying attention because they are completely taken with whatever Cool Thing was revealed to them 5 minutes ago.
And when I say “you” and “them,” I of course mean “me,” because I don’t know who “you” or “they” are and I am endlessly frustrated by classes. They never seem to hit the right spot.
Hold on. Back up. Did I say “classes?” I meant lectures. I didn’t mean talks, seminars, or those classes where you come in with a vague idea for project you’re not [yet!] qualified to do and you’re guided through completing it by brilliant people imparting their brilliance on you in an organized way. “Project-based classes” are not classes. They are like little gems of knowledge and skill that descend upon us lowly students from the heavens.
But everything else? Those are the festering turds of one-sided monotone where both the students (read: me) and the instructors (read: anyone who has to deal with me being resentful about a class) are frustrated and mostly just want out of the predicament, but somewhere, lurking in the hallways of the building, there is a Form that says what Knowledge must graze our brains on the way from one ear to another in order for us to be good people. And because I am a ridiculous and pompous flaky-artist type, that doesn’t rub me quite right.
And that’s why I am writing in my little diary instead of working on an exam.
November 2, 2011
A woman is female, but not a female.
Please do not refer to anyone as a female in Computer Science (or any engineering, science, or math field where there’s historically been very few women), even if they are in fact female, and indeed in CS (or whatever).
This does not annoy me: “there are too few female students in Computer Science!”
This does: “there are too few females in Computer Science!”
To be sure, there are very few women in Computer Science. Using “female” as a noun in general can be a red flag, but I feel that it is almost always inappropriate in discussions about women in Computer Science because of the sentiment of affirmative action bubbling beneath the surface. Many of us exist in a stew of assumptions that we would not be wherever we are without quotas imposed on admissions and hiring. The dehumanizing term “female” (as a noun) brings up my status as a token, a representative of an underrepresented group. “Woman,” on the other hand, is more overtly respectful of my experiences as an individual who is part of a minority.
The meanings of words extend beyond their dictionary definitions into personally-relevant connotations (e.g., gay vs. homosexual), and it is hard to figure out which words to use to express the appropriate sentiment. As English is my second language, I am keenly aware of the difficulty of selecting the “right” words, and the fallout of using the “wrong” ones in a particular context. I offer you my explanation of why “female” is a bad noun to use when referring to women, and why “woman” is far better than many other mainstream alternatives. I hope that this will help allies of women in male-dominated fields, such as Computer Science, in figuring out which words to use when.
“Female” as a noun has a rather clinical connotation. It’s mainly used in things like the Discovery channel programs about mating habits where the female does this and the male does that and then there’s pigeons having sex on my TV. It’s also used as a noun to refer to people in scientific experiments. For one, it seems rather rude to appropriate slightly-creepy science-y wording in everyday life, and smacks of tallying up the token “females” to see if a quota-related checkbox can be checked yet.
Using “female” as a noun in everyday speech can also sound like an implicit declaration that gender is obvious and unambiguous. But gender is fluid, ambiguous and, most importantly, not in the eye of the beholder. It is up to people to figure out what labels they are, and are not, comfortable with, and the best everyone else can do is try to not seem like they are going to ignore those wishes. To me, when someone uses “female” as a noun, a red flag immediately comes up: more often than not, it eventually comes down to a sentiment about how that person, not me, gets to determine how my gender is expressed and what labels I prefer. This is very dismissive and hurtful, and so the use of “female” as a noun tends to set me on edge.
If we cannot use “female” as a noun, what noun shall we use? What about “girls”? It’s kind of like “guys,” and it’s not “babes” or “chicks.” That’s true. Of the random diminutive terms to apply to women, “girls” is better than a lot of things. And “girls” can be, and often is, used by women to describe themselves. But the same goes for “bitches:” in some social groups this is used by women to describe themselves and can be innocuous when used by their acquaintances. However, “there are too few bitches in Computer Science” is not a respectful thing to say. That term is not an okay thing to call women in general. People can call themselves whatever they wish and negotiate proper labels with their social groups, but you should not call me a “girl” any more than you should could call me “doll” and smack my butt, because that involves assuming an unwarranted degree of familiarity with my wishes on the matter.
You have probably noticed by now that I use the term “women” throughout this post. I think it’s the best we can do here. It does not reduce me to an adjective in an experiment, nor assume familiarity that I am uncomfortable with. It also seems actually pretty commonly agreed-upon: I have yet to see an outreach organization for empowering women in computing that uses “female” as a noun, and vast majority seem to use “women.”
It is rare, however, to hear people, especially men, speak about “women in Computer Science” outside of organized outreach activities, even if those people are obviously well-meaning and want to help. I feel like it might just weird people out to say the word “woman” because it has so many associations to biological transformations and processes, like when phrases like “you’re a woman now!” happen in stories after period/sex/orgasm/childbirth/etc. Although using the word “woman” to refer to a person may be uncomfortable for the speaker, it is more respectful to the person being spoken about. This is critically different from “female” (as noun) and “girl,” which are dismissive of that individual’s comfort and preferences in favor of the speaker’s wishes. From this perspective, “women” should always be used in identifying groups such as “women in Computer Science” as it is more respectful of members within those groups.
Of course, vanishingly few words are free of charge. And besides, something like “it’s great to get more women in Computer Science, we need someone to talk to the customers for us!” is a crappy and condescending thing to say whether using “females,” “women,” or “kitty cats;” it is certainly different varieties of crappy with different words, but it never ceases to be crappy. Crappy statements will continue being crappy whether or not we fix the language they use to refer to women, even if that reduces a flaming shit of a sentiment into a merely smoldering one. However, I am focusing my “woman” vs. “female” comments specifically on the language of allies, who wish to support women, especially in underrepresented arenas such as Computer Science. When someone says “there are too few females in Computer Science,” it sounds like they are lamenting an unmet quota, not our experiences as individuals. So how could it make me feel as anything but dehumanized and disrespected, despite the best intentions of the speaker? Unfortunately, intentions aren’t everything.
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credit to dardeile
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