Star Simpson, an MIT sophomore, was arrested after walking into Boston’s Logan Airport today after wearing a sweatshirt containing a circuit board with wiring and flashing lights. The press agrees on the facts, but they differ in how they refer to her. In their headlines, the Associated Press and ABC News her an “MIT Coed”, while InformationWeek calls her an “MIT Computer Whiz”. I didn’t know anyone still seriously used the word “coed”. (In any event, MIT graduated its first female student, Ellen Swallow Richards, 134 years ago.)

Other media outlets refer to Simpson as an “MIT Student”, “MIT Sophomore”, “Woman”, “Teen”, “Student”, and “Art Student”. On her web page, Simpson describes herself as “an inventor, artist, engineer, and student”.

Congrats to the three winner’s of this year’s Women of Vision awards from the Anita Borg Institute.

UCLA computer science Professor Deborah Estrin is the founding director of the Center for Embedded Network Sensing. CENS, a National Science Foundation project, aims to develop wireless sensor systems. The uses of this new technology include military, ecological, seismological, and security-related:

ENS systems will form a critical infrastructure resource for society–they will monitor and collect information on such diverse subjects as plankton colonies, endangered species, soil & air contaminants, medical patients, and buildings, bridges and other man-made structures. Across this wide range of applications, Embedded Networked Sensing systems promise to reveal previously unobservable phenomena.

Also, Purdue University Dean of Engineering Leah Jamieson co-founded the Engineering Projects in Community Service (EPICS) program. It helps students and their advisors to devise engineering projects to solve problems in their communities. And Duy-Loan Le is the first woman to be named a Senior Fellow at Texas Instruments, and only one of six people to hold that title.

The first issue of Cerise, a new online magazine for women gamers, is up now. It covers “video games, tabletop games, and live action role-playing,” from the under-represented point of view of women. Topics include how to make your own miniatures, and the future of gender in games. Plus tips for video game designers wanting to attract female gamers, and an article explaining how all gamers can rip the head off of the “boys’ club” stereotype in video games.

And they’re looking for submissions for their second issue. They want to know how you got dragged, kicking and punching, into video games (or tabletop games, or LARPing):

Do you have a story to tell about an experience or two that shaped your identity as gamer? Do you want reflect on the good and bad of being a young gamer, or talk about what games helped get you into gaming, or think about the first character in a game that you really got attached to and why?

Submissions are due May 15.

Congratulations to the three winners of the Women of the Year In Technology awards, given in Atlanta this weekend:

Marie Mouchet, chief information officer for Southern Co. Generation, Southern Co. Nuclear and Southern Power., won in the “Enterprise Organizations” category. For the “Medium/Mid-Market Organizations” category, the winner was Terry Trout, vice president of customer experience for Cbeyond Inc. And in the “Small/Emerging Organization” category Nexidia Senior Vice President of marketing and product management Anna Convery was the winner.

Since I set up a Google alert for stories about women in technology, I’ve gotten lots of emails about local awards like these. It seems as though a lot of local communities are noticing and honoring the women who are making contributions in science and tech.

I was super excited that one of my recent blogposts got included in a catchall post about women, science and fiction over at the awesome Women & Science blog. It also included some other posts that are well worth checking out:

Skepchick starts a list of books written by female scientists (Sandra Hrdy, Marlene Zuk, and May Berenbaum) and science fiction writers (Connie Willis, Tanya Huff) and asks for additional recommendations. Be sure to read the comments for additional suggestions!

See also the IMDB’s category of “babe scientist” movies, both good and bad.  And a link to Joan Slonczewski, a feminist science fiction writer who also teaches biology.

Former Rutgers University Professor Beverly Whipple, best known for popularizing the G-spot, is still out there researching women’s health and sexuality, according to the London Free Press. More than just a pioneer in sexuality research, she also broke ground in challenging the male-centered bias of researchers:

In the mid-1980s, Rutgers asked her to join the faculty. She told them she wouldn’t come aboard unless she could conduct research on women, who had been neglected in medical research. The university’s nursing school then offered her a laboratory to seal the deal.

Among her more recent areas of research: proving that women who’ve suffered spinal-cord injuries can still have orgasms, and that “non-genital orgasms” are real. In some cases, women’s own doctors had told them it was “impossible” for them to experience genital pleasure after a spinal-cord injury, but the vagus nerve still connected their genitals and their brains. Using MRIs and fMRIs, Whipple told Wired she discovered that:

some of the same brain areas are activated during orgasm in women with and without complete spinal cord injury, and also during orgasm from imagery alone, with no one touching their body, including the women themselves.

Whipple’s new book is The Science of Orgasm, cowritten with Barry Komisaruk and Carlos Beyer-Flores.

The first Expanding Your Horizons (EYH) conference took place at Mills College in Oakland, California, in 1976 with the goal of exciting girls about math and science, and it was a huge success. EYH conferences have since served more than 625,000 girls in over 89 locales internationally.

I am looking for volunteers to help with the hands-on digital electronics workshop I will lead at this year’s Mills College EYH, this Saturday, March 17. If you know how to connect logic gates in a breadboard and would like to help, please email me: spertus@mills.edu.

If you can’t help at this Saturday’s Mills conference but would like to help EYH, see the national list of conferences with contact information.
The above photo, taken by Barton Friedland, is from last year’s Mills EYH, which was written up in the Google Blog.

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.

(more…)

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!