So I mentioned a while back that I write science fiction, and I’m increasingly identifying as a science-fiction writer. This week, I was very proud to have my story Horatius and Clodia published at StrangeHorizons.com, one of the coolest science fiction publications (online or in print) these days. The story is about sentient electronic cash, which becomes maybe a little more self-aware than its creators had in mind.

For some reason, I’ve gotten more fan mail and props for this story than any other in recent memory. Maybe it’s just that StrangeHorizons has grown in popularity since the last time they published my fiction, a few years ago. (more…)

In today’s NY Times food section, there’s an article (”Kitchen Chemistry Is Chic, But Is It a Woman’s Place?”) that asks where the women are in the male-dominated world of molecular gastronomy, the application of science to culinary practice. (Never mind that the same thing was done by women in the late 19th century when it was called “home economics” and not at all the big rage in restaurants.)

Anyway, the article begins with the premise that using too much precise chemistry in the kitchen is not very soulful, and therefore women won’t take to it. But then they round up a few young women who are working in top molecular gastronomy restaurants, and they’re taking to it just fine, thank you very much:

Pamela Yung, for instance, didn’t have to steel herself to face a hostile French kitchen, nor did she train in California. She didn’t train anywhere. After majoring in computer science and design at the University of Michigan, she was working in a Detroit design firm when she saw a notice on eGullet, the food-maven Web site. Mr. Goldfarb was about to open Room 4 Dessert and needed a stagiaire, or trainee, who would work long hours for low pay. “On a whim, I e-mailed him,” said Ms. Yung, 24.

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OK I officially hate Abigail Breslin who starred in Little Miss Sunshine. Not only is she wearing a giant pink pincushion thing at the Oscars, she also just set a total anti-geek girl example. Jaden Smith from the Pursuit of Happyness just asked her what her dad did, and she said, “computer systems analyst.” And Jaden responded, “but what does he do?” and she said, “I have no idea.” Which got a really feeble laugh from the audience. Dammit, Abigail, you SHOULD know what your dad does!

Apologies to Caddyshack here, but it seems an appropriate cultural touchstone. Gotta love this article from the Feb. 25 New York Times about how a bunch of women at DePauw University in Indiana feel they were kicked out of their chapter of the Delta Zeta sorority because they didn’t conform to the proper image for the sorority:

When a psychology professor at DePauw University here surveyed students, they described one sorority as a group of “daddy’s little princesses” and another as “offbeat hippies.” The sisters of Delta Zeta were seen as “socially awkward.”

Worried that a negative stereotype of the sorority was contributing to a decline in membership that had left its Greek-columned house here half empty, Delta Zeta’s national officers interviewed 35 DePauw members in November, quizzing them about their dedication to recruitment. They judged 23 of the women insufficiently committed and later told them to vacate the sorority house.

The 23 members included every woman who was overweight. They also included the only black, Korean and Vietnamese members. The dozen students allowed to stay were slender and popular with fraternity men — conventionally pretty women the sorority hoped could attract new recruits. Six of the 12 were so infuriated they quit.

Apparently the women asked to leave had been interviewed by national officers who determined that they weren’t dedicated enough to recruitment, since membership had fallen. So what was the pre-diaspora Delta Zeta like?

…[T]he chapter appears to have been home to a diverse community over the years, partly because it has attracted brainy women, including many science and math majors, as well as talented disabled women, without focusing as exclusively as some sororities on potential recruits’ sex appeal, former sorority members said.

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As challenging as the situation is for women in the academic sciences overall, at least there’s progress in most areas. But the situation for minority women in the sciences is “dismal,” according to Brown University professor Anne Fausto-Sterling:

In 2002, there were no African-American, Hispanic, or Native American women in tenured or tenure-track positions in the top 50 computer science departments in the country. …

Although African-American women earn more science and engineering doctorate degrees than African-American men, African-American men hold a greater percentage of faculty positions than women. Overall, the proportion of minority women in tenured science positions is extremely low, and actually fell between 1989 and 1997, Fausto-Sterling said.

“While the overall trend for women is going up, the trend for minority group women is not,” Fausto-Sterling said.

In her talk at Harvard University, Fausto-Sterling pointed to many of the same problems that confront non-minority women. But both women and minorities face discrimination and obstacles:

Firsthand accounts told of economic pressures for those from lower-income backgrounds, the need to care for family members, discrimination from faculty, and the belief of other students - and in a few cases even of themselves - that they don’t belong in the field.

I couldn’t find a copy of Fausto-Sterling’s talk online, so I don’t know what substantive solutions she called for. The article about her talk simply quotes her as saying “leadership is important” at universities. It would be interesting to know if she actually got into any specifics of how to redress the gender and race gaps in science.

Rock on! Retired IBM programmer Frances E. Allen was the first woman to win the prestigious Turing Award, worth $100,000. When she joined IBM in 1957, the company was trying to recruit women on college campuses by circulating a brochure called “My Fair Ladies.” She joined right after John Backus’ team had just developed Fortran. Allen developed techniques to optimize the performance of compilers, which translate programming languages into binary code. Says Business Week:

The point of Fortran was to develop a system that could operate a computer just as efficiently as previous “hand-coded” approaches directly assembled by programmers. Allen recalled Wednesday that her task at IBM was to replicate the achievement on multiple kinds of computers.

“I had the good fortune to work on one big project on good machines after another,” she said.

Her work led her into varied assignments, including writing intelligence analysis software for the National Security Agency. More recently she helped design software for IBM’s Blue Gene supercomputer.

Backus got his own Turing Award in 1977, but it’s taken 40 years for a woman to receive the honor:

Allen called it “high time for a woman,” though she quickly added: “That’s not why I got it.”

Look at the great array of submissions to the She’s Such a Geek photo contest over at Inkling magazine! One more week to enter!

I was at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting over the weekend, and have much to follow up on with that. Blog you later!

A group of female students at Shippensberg University have started doing podcasts to educate local high school girls about computer science, the Cumberland County Sentinel reports. They originally aimed the “Where is the Software” podcasts at local girls, but found that each podcast gets 100 listeners from all over.

“I am every excited with what we are doing,” said [sophomore Sarah] Joseph. “The biggest benefit of this podcast is the interaction we have with one another and other females who might need a little help. This community of women we have formed has been our biggest success so far.”

Topics include Malware, encryption, and genetic searching. If you ignore the cheesy effects and music, it’s awesome to see young geeky women holding forth with glee. The not-so-secret agenda of these podcasts is busting stereotypes about computer scientists. The women in the podcasts are happy, social and obviously enjoy explaining the differences between resident and non-resident viruses.
My favorite is the Malware podast.

Today two Ohio teens will be charged with illegal access to their high school’s computer. On Monday, the two girls posted a “school cancelled due to snow” announcement on their school’s website. They had somehow obtained a secret password to the school’s website, whether by social engineering (ie, tricking somebody into giving it to them, ala the infamous hacker Kevin Mitnick) or using some kind of simple password cracker (I’m guessing that this high school probably used a dictionary word for its “secret password,” it would be relatively easy to crack).

According to The Columbus Dispatch:

One of the girls, 16, was charged in Butler County Juvenile Court with delinquency counts of unauthorized use of a computer and records tampering. The other girl, 17, was charged with a delinquency count of complicity, Sheriff’s Sgt. Monte Mayer said. Their names were not released.

The company that runs the Web site, RCH Networks Inc. of Middletown, said the system was not hacked into because no security breach was detected. Administrators say the girls must have gotten the password.

“The Web site wasn’t hacked. It was accessed,” RCH President Craig Hesson said.

Um, yeah. FYI, “hacking” is one way that your web site can be “accessed.” Leave it to the girls to show you how lame your “security” software really is. Sorry, but a firewall from Symantec won’t protect you from kids who want the day off school.

A lot of people lately have been complaining about Google dropping their sites from search results, or presenting weird versions of their sites. Was it a conspiracy? Was it a computer glitch? Now, a site called SEO chat claims that these problems are part of a larger mess at Google:

In January of last year (2006) Google went through “The Big Daddy” update. Unfortunately, since then things at Google have been … unstable, for lack of a better way of putting it. The reason for this is simple. Google servers ran out of space…

[Google’s CEO said in April]: “Those machines are full. We have a huge machine crisis.”… [Google] started making changes to the spider. The spider would no longer even attempt to index every page of a site. Instead, it would index only “entry pages,” or those pages that could be gotten to from another source (links from other sites) or had a “high likelihood” of being clicked on if the page came up in a search (how that was determined I don’t know)…

The problem however is that I have reason to believe that those changes had some rather significant bugs.

I’d be curious to know if there’s any truth to this story, and what Google is actually doing to solve this alleged problem. (Thanks to Joe for the heads up!)