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!)

I was a very happy Girl Scout when I was a kid. I wasn’t so into the Girl Scout meetings with the sewing and singing, but I loved Girl Scout camp. That’s where I met lots of interesting girls, rode horses, hiked mountains, learned to cook potatoes in a pit of coals, and discovered the joy of lanyards. So I was pretty excited when geek extraordinaire Jennifer Crakow emailed me about how the Girl Scouts have started after-school programs to inspire young women to become interested in technology. In these programs, called the EDGE, girls as young as five learn to use computers for art and science projects.
The Daily Texan reports:

Savita Raj, a technology specialist for the Girl Scouts and unofficial director of The EDGE, calls this program the first of its kind.

“We’re focused on empowering girls to become more comfortable to be able to take those kinds of electives in school, to make the choices to go that career route,” she says. “It’s all about getting girls comfortable with technology.”

According to Raj, most young girls between the ages of 8 and 17 tend to shy away from technology-oriented studies, particularly in classes with both boys and girls. She hopes that the EDGE program, which is meant to be an after-school, girls-only gathering, will help eliminate the discomfort or intimidation that may prevent girls from becoming adept at technology.

Nineteen counties and roughly 14,000 girls participate in The EDGE program, and the numbers continue to grow, Raj said. This program is an indication of a new route the Girl Scouts organization is taking, one that is less traditional and more progressive, using today’s fascination with technology to teach girls more about that field.

“The Girl Scouts is a wonderful tradition, but it needs to reinvent itself in so many centuries,” Raj said, laughing. “There’s a huge array in what Girl Scouts can do, you know. It’s not just cookies and camping . . .

In addition to The EDGE program, the Girl Scouts also hold such events as a Lego robotics camp and an architecture camp for young participants.

Not Your Mother’s Girl Scouts [via The Daily Texan]

Women who are making contributions to the field of computing, and to improving opportunities for other women, often don’t get the recognition they deserve. Especially if they’re less than a decade into their career. That’s why it’s amazingly cool that the Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research sponsors the Anita Borg Early Career Award:

The annual award will be given to a woman in computer science and/or engineering who has made significant research contributions and who has contributed to her profession, especially in the outreach to women. This award recognizes work in areas of academia and industrial research labs that has had a positive and significant impact on advancing women in the computing research community and is targeted at women that are relatively early in their careers (no more than 10 years past the Ph.D.).

The application deadline for this year’s award is Feb. 15, and the award will be announced May 15. Get writing! (Thanks to Liz Henry for the link.)

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.

…’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…