Not only is Veronica Mars on a bit of a slide this year, but apparently its portrayal of laboratory procedures in last week’s episode sucked, according to Jenny F. Scientist. She lists a number of things the episode got wrong, including:

• Nobody stores their monkeys in the lab. This is what animal facilities are FOR.
• Because to work with primates, or even be in a room with them, you need clearance, training, and a TB test. And then you have to swipe in….
• Also, the chick next door? Nobody covers their entire lab space with experimental plants and grow lights. They make greenhouses for that. Really.
• And while tea does live in lab, not so much next to the sink. Safety gets upset.
• Nobody wears their lab coat all the time.
• Much less into the school cafeteria.
• And they didn’t have anything in their pockets. And the coats were all clean. Come on.

More at the link.

Alternet reprints an interview with danah boyd about kids on MySpace, and the dreaded Alternet comment trolls come out to trash her. She writes on her blog:

Still, the comments on Alternet make me sad. I’m called “barely articulate” and a “typical talking head” (and my age is brought into the discussion as a way to dismiss me). It’s always peculiar to see my speaking style in written form; i feel far more coherent when i control the written form. That said, those labels sting.

I’m also accused of being too blase about the safety issues. As with all interviews, i gloss over a lot of details to get general ideas across but it is driving me nuts that everyone assumes that because i think we’ve gone too far in the direction of moral panics and culture of fear that i don’t care about safety or teenagers or rape. I find myself wanting to scream. I spent five years working on the issues of rape, domestic violence, and other violence against women; safety is a very real concern of mine, but reality is far more nuanced than the sky is falling perspective seems to convey.

She goes on to ask for advice on how to combat “extreme media positions” (like the MySpace panic) without sounding like an extremist in the opposite direction. Lots of good advice in her comments, such as “Just keep defending your side as politely as you can, and never stoop to their level.” (As well as one or two somewhat blowhardy guys who tell her to simplify her speaking style and be less “loosey-goosey,” whatever that means.)

…’cause I hope it will come back buttered! I seem to remember Ma Ingalls saying this in the Little House on the Prairie books (yes, I read the whole series during my pre-geek years).

So, I have a couple of questions to ask on behalf of a close friend from graduate school, a female scientist (and therefore that’s why it’s relevant to this blog), who lives in the heart of Silicon Valley. She has an 8-month-old daughter, and now that she’s beginning to emerge from a serious bout of postpartum depression, she is now facing some other issues.

1. My friend feels like she doesn’t fit in with the other mothers who (it sounds like) are buying into the whole “If I don’t make every split second a learning moment my kid is going to wind up on the street” hyperparenting mindset. It’s making her nervous and anxious, and it is totally not what she needs right now. Does anyone know of a group of parents in Silicon Valley who are more chilled out?
2. And does anyone know how to tell a Taiwanese mother (my friend is Taiwanese-American) that although her advice is appreciated, one has decided upon a different course of action and therefore no further discussion is necessary? (I’ve already suggested saying things like, “Hey, so are you gonna root for the Bears or the Colts in the Super Bowl?” but my friend doesn’t think that will work, since her mom doesn’t follow football, or most mainstream American culture, for that matter.) Apparently my friend’s mother’s response to my friend disagreeing with her is to repeat the original unsolicited advice again. How do we control-C this?

If anyone has any suggestions, my friend will surely appreciate them! Thank you!

People are still responding to last September’s Shalala report on Women in the academic sciences. The National Institutes of Health just appointed a new working group on Women in Biomedical Careers to help redress the gender imbalance in the sciences. NIH Director Elias Zerhouni “and Dr. Vivian Pinn, Associate Director for Research on Women’s Health and Director of the Office of Research on Women’s Health, will co-chair the Working Group, which will carefully consider the recommendations in the National Academies report.”

Meanwhile, one article suggests, more women technologists are getting involved with mentoring younger girls. “Many industry leaders and experts believe the long-term solution to the gender imbalance in IT lies in women technologists going back to school — way back, to high schools and even elementary schools to mentor young girls, who too often give up on math and science at an early age.” The article cites programs sponsored by IBM and Cisco, among others.

The low representation of women in IT isn’t just a women’s problem, it’s everyone’s problem, suggests another piece by the same author, Carmen Nobel at InfoWorld. “More than a matter of stemming the tide of the ongoing skills shortage, encouraging women to get involved in technology is fast becoming an imperative for establishing the kinds of adaptive, collaborative, and versatile enterprises that will thrive in a fast-paced global economy,” she writes. That last part only holds true if you believe that women are naturally more “adaptive” and “collaborative” than men, of course…

I’ve never been into science fiction or fantasy, the genres of fiction typically associated with geeks. I actually don’t have all that much exposure to it—I never heard of Piers Anthony or Robert Heinlein, to name a couple of well-known writers, until I started hanging out with male geeks in college and grad school. (I’d been off at Catholic all-girls schools for high school, and even though I attended a few meetings of the science fiction club my freshman year, the real reason was to hang out with the few girl geeks, not because I watched Dr. Who, which I still haven’t seen.)

It’s not that I’m against reading science fiction either. But my preferred genre has long since been literary fiction (and I know that some science fiction qualifies as this as well). This might make me less of a geek, except for the fact that I’m a huge Richard Powers fan. (more…)

SSAG contributor Suzanne Franks just cranks out one thought-provoking post after another over at her blog Thus Spake Zuska. Just about everything she writes about there is relevant to what our book and blog are about, too, so I’ve created the new category Zuska, Zuska, Zuska! to include the many links in which I anticipate I will be namechecking or quoting from her or responding to something that she wrote. We need to get a blogroll going here, too, but I think that might have to go on another page, since the menu on the right-hand side of the screen has quite a bit of information already.

Anyway, go read Zuska’s analysis of how people should have handled the incredibly rude situation when a male professor from the Stone Age snubbed a female academic. In a nutshell: if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.

So it’s taken me a week or so to decide how to respond to the less-than-positive review of She’s Such A Geek in the San Francisco Chronicle that I found via a Google News search a week or so back. It was clear to me then that the reviewer doesn’t get the book, but I wanted to understand exactly how.

The reviewer seems to be bothered that she can’t figure out the audience for the book:

Is it women—people—like me, users of technology who love their camera phones, Wi-Fi connections and “Battlestar Galactica,” but whose eyes glaze over at terms like Bose-Einstein condensate, sysadmin and RSS? Or is it women—people—unlike me, who are in an elite scientific stratum, be it biotech research or video game development, and are the choir to which these writers are preaching?

But this is setting up a false dichotomy. The first group of people is basically mainstream middle-class America, who get to enjoy the fruits of consumer technology that have been made so user-friendly that they require no particular technical expertise to operate. And science fiction shows on television are nothing new—I remember the first “Battlestar Galactica” from network TV over 25 years ago. In other words, this is not a very restrictive group. (more…)

The book reading at City Lights bookstore in San Francisco this past Thursday featured a lineup of contributors who wrote about the gaming and fantasy side of the geek realm, along with editors Annalee and Charlie. (It’s funny how the split happened that way—initially I had thought it would be cool to read at City Lights, what with its place in literary history, but it wound up that it made more sense for me to read at Modern Times on Feb. 1, which is more weighted towards the science geeks anyway.)

Even though I wasn’t reading, I decided to go anyway because I thought it would be cool to meet as many of the other contributors as possible and get them to sign my copy of the book—which is an appropriately geeky impulse, is it not? Besides, my husband was off on Easter Island and I had some serious procrastinating to do on some writing. So off to North Beach I went.

The cozy poetry room upstairs filled up with a crowd of nearly 100 people (I’m guessing) split pretty evenly between male and female. For some reason, my initial reaction was to be surprised by that—I guess I was expecting a more exclusively female turnout—but it just shows how I need to realize that there are more and more people who realize that feminism is not just a women’s issue but a human issue. So it was great to see the broad range of support.

(more…)

Last night, at the first San Francisco reading for She’s Such a Geek, a snippet of conversation went something like this:

Annalee: Kristin, your recent blog posts have been great! We’re looking forward to more!

Me, with a shrug*: Aw, well, I’m just picking at a wound that’s been festering for the past ten years.

Annalee: Well, if that’s the case, then let the blog be your lance!

And you know, Annalee had taken the metaphor about as far as it could go.

But I should have known that a woman who wrote an entire book about monsters and capitalism would have some grotesque imagery at her fingertips to parry with.

I will blog more about last night’s reading later….

*Of course, from all those years of being called a brain accusatorily as if it were a crime, I learned to be modest and self-deprecating about receiving compliments. Part of the acculturation!

Want to make a living helping girls become geeks? Now you can! Liz Henry at Composite posts a job listing for a program manager at Techbridge, an after-school program to get girls interested in technology:

Techbridge is an innovative program to inspire girls in technology, science and engineering. The program is hosted after school at elementary, middle, and high schools in Oakland, San Lorenzo, and at the California School for the Blind in Fremont. In these after-school programs, girls work on a variety of projects such as making solar LEGO cars, soldering, digital photography, and building robots. The girls also participate in field trips and meet with role models.

Under the supervision of the Program Director, the Techbridge Program Manager is responsible for supporting and supervising staff, coordinating and implementing our after-school programs, developing and piloting curricula, and leading professional development workshops for teachers, role models, and professional audiences. We are looking for an experienced and dynamic individual who has the ability to supervise a team of instructors, work with the Techbridge project director, and oversee the development of training and resources to teachers, professionals and partners.

According to the Techbridge Web site, girls had lots of ideas for things they’d like to do, including “addressing problems at school and in the neighborhood, working with tools, building robots, taking field trips, and meeting role models.”