Forgotten women of science win recognition online | Science By late afternoon scores of red women on Sam Haskell's list had turned blue: female scientists, some dead and some living, many immensely distinguished, some geniuses, but whose names have almost been forgotten even by their peers. Up the grand marble staircase of the Royal Society in London, under the imposing gold and white library ceiling, women and a handful of men had gathered, joined by many more online across the world, to correct a gross injustice. The list gradually changing colour on Haskell's screen represented hundreds of women scientists who have either never had a Wikipedia entry, or whose lives and work are dismissed in a stub a few lines long. The event in London was booked out for weeks, but many more joined online, some starting work days ago. "It is shameful that when you ask people, including scientists, to name well-known female scientists and engineers, they can barely get past Marie Curie," she said. Other stubs were expanded. "Well honestly!"
Earth - Why we do not sleep around all that much any more On first glance, sticking with one partner for life seems like quite a bad idea, at least from an evolutionary point of view. Sperm is plentiful and does not take long to make, so it would not benefit a male to invest in only one female, who will take a long time to reproduce. If monogamy is not that useful, why did it become a favoured way of life in so many cultures? A female can also benefit from having a variety of partners. For these reasons, monogamy is extremely rare among mammals and many other animal groups, as BBC Earth recently explained. The same is true of human societies, many of which permit taking several spouses, or "polygamy". So if monogamy is not that useful, why did it become a favoured way of life in so many cultures? A new analysis provides a possible reason. If you think a behaviour is not acceptable, you have to spend time protesting They argue that this change in lifestyle was socially imposed. His theory goes like this.
How to create Grid accordion with jQuery Accordions are a UI pattern where you click on a title (in a vertical stack of titles) and a panel of content reveals itself below. Typically, all other open panels close when the new one opens. They are a clever and engaging mechanism for packing a lot of information in a small space. Basic accordion from jQuery UI One way to look at an accordion is like a collapsed single column of a table. Another consideration in this table I was building is that there was enough columns that each individual column (should they have been equal width in the space available) wasn't very wide, maybe 150px. The Grid Accordion works with the same theory as most other accordions. You can view and download the example at the end of this article. HTML: Classic use of the definition list Accordions are perfect semantic examples of definition lists. <dl><dt>Title</dt><dd>Information about that title here</dd><dt>Another Title</dt><dd>Information about that other title here</dd></dl> This is a classic technique.
Geek Feminism Wiki Liminal states :: Diversity and technology conferences, part 1: We received 189 valid proposals for talks at Expo Showcase. A few people, men and women, submitted two proposals, but the vast majority submitted just one. Of these 189, only 41 (or 22% of the total) were from women, with 147 proposals submitted by men. I have no reason in particular to offer for this. Perhaps women would like to comment on this blog about why a two month open call for proposals for anyone with a good idea for a five minute talk about Government 2.0 was dominated by 78% men.– Mark Drapeau’s Government 2.0 Expo: Women by the Numbers The women in technology community has been doing a great job of highlighting lack of diversity in conference speakers, using mechanisms like the #diversityfail Twitter hashtag and act.ly. Some context here: I’m writing this from the perspective of somebody who’s been a program committee member of the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference for the last couple years, and will be co-charing in 2010. jon
Invisible women of science – now appearing at the Royal Society | Uta Frith | Science Women in science have an image problem. It is not so much deciding whether they should aspire to the hard image of being a scientist or the soft image of being feminine, it is the more serious problem of invisibility. Nowhere is this more obvious than in our august institutions, our imposing portrait galleries and grand museums. There is a dearth of dignified portraits of women scientists produced by distinguished artists. There are historical reasons for this. In the Royal Society's buildings there are many portraits of great scientists, mainly donated, and many portraits of past presidents, usually commissioned. Preparing for this exhibition made it strikingly clear that there is a void in representations of women in science. Perhaps the time has come to take some steps towards a change. Garry Kennard is an artist who has long been making links between science and art. What does science say? Previous work suggested that men would speak longer than women in this sort of situation.
Are lab mice too cold? Why it matters for science A typical mouse laboratory is kept between 20 and 26 degrees C, but if the mice had it their way, it would be a warm 30 degrees C. While the mice are still considered healthy at cooler temperatures, they expend more energy to maintain their core temperature, and evidence is mounting that even mild chronic cold stress is skewing results in studies of cancer, inflammation, and more. Researchers review the evidence April 19 in Trends in Cancer. "Most people only look at results from experiments at standard lab temperatures," says Bonnie Hylander, an immunologist at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute. There are multiple reasons to keep a mouse lab cool. A few years ago, Hylander and Elizabeth Repasky, an immunologist at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute, along with their colleagues, began investigating the effects of cold stress on the mouse immune system's ability to fight tumors. But the answer isn't necessarily just turning up the thermostats. Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAlert!
Google Wave 101 (Presentations from Scottish VLE groups) In the last couple of weeks I’ve given Google Wave presentations to the Scottish Blackboard User Group (Scot-BUG) and the Scottish Moodle User Group (SMUG). These have been designed to be introductory session Google Wave giving an overview of the technology and how it could be integrated into existing institutional systems like VLEs. This post contains follows the narrative I used for the presentations with some additional thoughts and resources. Here is the PowerPoint used for Scot-BUG and SMUG (some edits) The Wave Model Here’s a nice video from EpipheoStudios.com which gives a quick overview of Wave: The basic message is email works for basic communication but when you do anything which potentially involves more than two people it can get complicated. The Wave Interface The current Wave interface is entirely browser based and you don’t need any additional plugin’s for basic functionality (for drag and drop of files you need Google Gear’s installed). Basic Wave Interaction Extending Hosting
Girls Go Geek… Again! Computer science has always been a male-dominated field, right? Wrong. In 1987, 42% of the software developers in America were women. And 34% of the systems analysts in America were women. Women had started to flock to computer science in the mid-1960s, during the early days of computing, when men were already dominating other technical professions but had yet to dominate the world of computing. For about two decades, the percentages of women who earned Computer Science degrees rose steadily, peaking at 37% in 1984. In fact, for a hot second back in the mid-sixties, computer programming was actually portrayed as women’s work by the mass media. Don't worry, ladies. There were many reasons for the unusual influx of women into computer science. And then the women left. Why do we care about a long-gone moment in early computing history when the presence of women was unexceptional? Because it looks like women are now returning to computer science. Table 1. Go geek with us.
Why Are There So Few Female Computer Scientists Next: Introduction Why are There so Few Female Computer Scientists? © 1991 Ellen Spertus Abstract Women pursue education and careers in computer science far less frequently than men do. This is MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Technical Report 1315. A Secret History Of Women In Science, From Marie Curie To Florence Nightingale “This is not the run-of-the-mill stuff you can find at a library,” curator Ronald Smeltzer says. But the exhibit doesn’t just focus on the scientific discoveries of the female scientists. There’s plenty of artifacts that add a biographical dimension to some of the famous (and not-so-famous) names. “We were trying to embed the human interest story in the scientific life,” Smeltzer says. Whether you’re looking to further explore the work of a female scientist you already know about, or ready to discover a totally new researcher, the exhibit has something to offer. Florence Nightingale, Passionate Statistician What do you think of when you hear the name “Florence Nightingale?” Actually, one of Nightingale’s greatest legacies is related to math. The number of soldier deaths in the Crimean War attributed to enemy fire is in red; the number of deaths attributed to disease is in green. courtesy Ronald Smeltzer On a tour of America, Curie gifted the machine to the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia.
What Is it Like to Be a Bat? "What is it like to be a bat?" is a paper by American philosopher Thomas Nagel, first published in The Philosophical Review in October 1974, and later in Nagel's Mortal Questions (1979). In it, Nagel argues that materialist theories of mind omit the essential component of consciousness, namely that there is something that it is (or feels) like to be a particular, conscious thing.[1] He argued that an organism had conscious mental states, "if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism Summary[edit] The thesis attempts to refute reductionism (the philosophical position that a complex system is nothing more than the sum of its parts). Nagel begins by arguing that the conscious experience is widespread, present in many animals (particularly mammals), and that for an organism to have a conscious experience it must be special, in the sense that its qualia or "subjective character of experience" are unique. Criticisms[edit]
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