It’s been quite the week of gossip and spectacle for us living here in San Francisco. There’s been Gavin Newsom, Queen Mary 2, and Gavin Newsom again. Not much more to say about these than what’s already been said (my reactions were, “What the hell was he thinking?”, “Whoa, that’s a really HUGE ship!”, and “Ah, so that sort of explains why he wasn’t thinking. I hope he gets the help he needs.”

But astronaut Lisa Nowak just did Gavin Newsom a big favor by doing something even more bizarre and of even greater national—nay, international—newsworthiness. After all, Newsom may be the mayor of a major American city*, but being an American astronaut carries global cultural cachet. Astronauts are international cultural icons. We all read or saw The Right Stuff. American astronauts were first to land on the moon. Astronauts Sally Ride and Judith Resnik inspired me during my formative geek years as the first and second American women to go into space.

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And speaking of Liz Henry, she wrote a great piece about being a blogger for other, the magazine which Annalee and I publish. It’s a great exploration of blogging and geek culture, and how bloggers are making the world a better place. We just posted it online at othermag, and you can read it here.

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.

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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.”

Here are all the things I meant to blog about in the past couple of weeks but didn’t have time to mention:

The makers of Joe Millionare are unveiling a new reality series, “When Women Rule The World.” There’s this island, see, and on it women are in charge. Unfortunately, it’s not Paradise Island and the women won’t be Amazons. Instead, they’ll be typical reality contestants. The men have to obey the women, and/or they’ll get eliminated. Will this lead to a Utopian society, the Fox network press release wonders? Because of course we all look to reality television for our world-shattering thought experiments.

Yet another study finds a correlation between gender stereotypes and math ability in women. This time, instead of having the women read essays before doing math problems, the researchers just surveyed their attitudes:

Researchers discovered that women who possessed strong implicit gender stereotypes, (for example, automatically associating “male” more than “female” with math ability and math professions) and were likely to identify themselves as feminine performed worse relative to their female counterparts who did not possess such stereotypes and who were less likely to identify with traditionally female characteristics. The same underperforming females were also the least inclined to pursue a math-based career.

To be fair, though, they didn’t seem to establish which was cause and which was effect.

Two new books look at lives of women who made major contributions to physics:

During the past 40 years, study after study has addressed why more women do not become scientists. The question is most apt for physics… The flip side of the question is: Why and how did those few prominent female physicists succeed? Historian Judith P. Zinsser’s La Dame d’Esprit and the profiles of women physicists in Out of the Shadows unveil the scintillating lives of women who overcame discrimination and made major contributions that went largely unacknowledged.

Marquise du Chatelet was Voltaire’s lover and shielded him from critics, but she also helped to synthesize prevailing notions of the physical world in her time. And her book Institutions of Physics helped to propagate the scientfic method. Meanwhile, Mary L. Cartwright, a pure mathematician, helped to found chaos theory.

Although the salary gap between men and women remains weighted in men’s favor in most instances, women are actually making more money than men in some IT related jobs, PC Magazine reports. Female help desk professionals and tech writers make more than men in the same jobs. But also female CEOs and other execs in the IT industry make 1.4 percent more than male ones. Overall, women in IT make 9.7 percent less than men, an improvement over the 10.9 percent gap a year ago.

The Boston Globe recently had a super uplifting article about Alafia Spencer, a high-school student who pushed her school system to start a specialized high school that focuses on engineering:

As a 10th grader [Spencer] sat through biology and geometry lectures about subjects she had long ago mastered. Bored, the aspiring aerospace engineer worried that the school wasn’t challenging enough for her or her classmates.

So last spring, when Boston school Superintendent Thomas W. Payzant sought ideas from students, teachers, and principals for themed high schools, the teenager raised her hand. The only student to do so, Spencer suggested an engineering school that would offer advanced classes in physics, chemistry, and computer science and let students take classes at nearby universities.

The idea sounds like a no-brainer, especially given how dismal a job many public high schools seem to do in preparing students for careers in science and math. But teachers tried to talk Spencer out of proposing her engineering high school at a meeting with the superintendent of schools.

But on the day Spencer had to present the idea for the engineering school to the superintendent, she still had not persuaded any Hyde Park teachers to support her proposal. Many of them had already committed to other teams led by colleagues, who wanted schools that focused on such subjects as social justice, business, and health. Several discouraged Spencer, advising her to join their teams because hers would not make the cut. One told her that teachers, not students, should be driving the proposals because teachers would be affected most by the changes.

Spencer’s response — that the teachers already had their degrees, and she wanted to know what they were going to do to help the students go to college — was awesome. She asked the would-be headmasters how they planned to raise MCAS scores and attendance, and reduce suspensions. In the end, she got her engineering school, with 350 students.

The word is now out about a unique graduate program designed to bring women into computer science, thanks to an article by Charlie Anders in this week’s San Francisco Bay Guardian. The Mills College Interdisciplinary Computer Science program, which I direct, is aimed at women and men who have a bachelor’s degree in a field other than computer science who want to get into CS or interdisciplinary work. Some of the graduates mentioned in the article are:

• Sheri Wetherby, a former casino worker who became a Microsoft programmer
• Erica Rios, a former labor activist who now works as an Internet project manager at the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology
• Lisa Cowan, who has a BA in anthropology and is now pursuing a CS PhD at UC San Diego
• Constance Connor, a CS instructor at City College of San Francisco

The above photo, not from the article, is of former ICS students Susan Housand and Kiem Sie with a robot they built. Kiem went on to build several more.

On a personal note, I moonlight part-time at Google, which was deservedly named America’s best workplace, and many of my Google co-workers wonder why I don’t leave Mills and work at Google full-time. Charlie’s article does a great job of showing what excites me about teaching.

The Australian newspaper has a really cool interview with UCSF scientist Elizabeth Blackburn, who recently shared a prestigious Lasker prize with two other researchers. She also just won an award from the Gruber foundation for her research but also for fighting “the politicization of science.”

Born in 1948 in Hobart, she soon discovered a childhood passion for creatures. She also developed - as she confessed in her Lasker acceptance speech - a “spine-chilling habit of picking up dangerous animals” including jellyfish and stinging ants. All this translated into an interest in biochemistry and how living things work.

Blackburn, an Australian who’s lived in the U.S. for three decades, is best known as the co-discoverer of telomerase, “the enzyme that makes and repairs telomeres, the DNA caps that protect the ends of each chromosome and the integrity of the genes contained within them.” Her research has shown that telomerase constantly replenishes the telomeric tips of chromsomes in some organisms, but not humans. If we could reactivate our telomerase, we might be able to stop cell aging. But also, turning off telomerase could help stop cancers, which have high telomerase levels.

The other reason she’s well known is the fact that George Bush booted her from his Council on Bioethics, after she criticized his policy on stem cell research. In the interview, she also talks about the problems women scientists have balancing career and family, and how she solved them herself.

(Cross-posted from my blog.)

Kat the Traveler deconstructs Esquire’s profile of physicist/chemist Naomi Halas:

So, would you ever see a lead paragraph like this? “Dressed in a clingy suit with tight black pants and business shoes, Joe Smith looks as if he stepped off a Hollywood set. He smiles and giggles and uses words like awesome and totally without ever dropping his intense focus on science.”

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Back to sexism! You’d never see this: “Happily married for 20 years to a theoretical physicist he met at IBM, Joe Smith was never able to have children. Maybe, he thinks, he was meant to do this instead.” Yep, gotta mention marriage and children since that’s the exclusive purview of women-folk. Snort.

Lots more good stuff at the link. Check it out.