Date: April 16, 2007 @ 7:00 PM
What: Reading for She’s Such A Geek: Women Write About Science, Technology & Other Nerdy Stuff, edited by Annalee Newitz and Charlie Anders (Seal Press 2007)
Location: Ravenna Third Place Books, 6504 20th. Ave., Seattle, WA
Admission: Free
URL: http://www.shessuchageek.com

Co-editors Annalee Newitz and Charlie Anders will read from their new anthology, She’s Such A Geek, and discuss the growing role of women in the sciences, fandom, gaming and other areas. They’ll have a question and answer session about the book. Also reading will be contributor Elisabeth Severson.

More about the book:

She’s Such A Geek is collection of essays by nearly two dozen female geeks of all persuasions talking about their lives, careers and hobbies. They tell about how they fell in love with science, technology or role-playing games. They explain how those pursuits have shaped their lives. And they reveal the challenges — and triumphs — they’ve experienced in mostly male-dominated fields.

Raves for the book:

New York Times Technology reporter Katie Hafner called the book “exhilerating, hilarious, inspiring and infuriating.” Xeni Jardin from BoingBoing says she takes “great joy in the she-nerd spirit evident throughout this book.” Kim Stanley Robinson calls the book “sharp, interesting, and funny.” And Ladies Home Journal listed it in the “our favorites” list for December 2006.

About Ravenna Third Place Books

Ravenna Third Place Books is a bookstore with a jolly pub downstairs and the fabulous HoneyBear Bakery/Cafe right in the store. It’s in the Ravenna neighborhood: 6504 20th Ave. NE, Seattle, WA 98115
Phone: (206)525-2347
See http://www.ravennathirdplace.com/contact.html for directions and map.

This is freaking cool. British researchers, led by an Iranian researcher, say they’ve managed to turn bone-marrow cells into “early-stage sperm.” This could allow men with fertility problems to create sperm. But Karim Nayernia and his team also hope to be able to grow sperm from women’s bone marrow. Their technique works by isolating a “parent cell” from bone marrow, and then persuading “the sperm cells to develop.” The result is called “spermatogonial” stem cells. These should be able to morph into full-blown sperm in men, but this experiment didn’t go the full distance. But caution is indicated:

Prof Nayernia is concerned that the Government could outlaw treatments based on such work. A White Paper argued that the use of artificial gametes – eggs and sperm – would “raise profound new possibilities such as the possible creation of a child by combining the genetic material of two women”.

Prof Robin Lovell Badge, of the National Institute of Medical Research in Mill Hill, London, said there were fundamental reasons why female bone marrow could not be converted into sperm…

Josephine Quintavalle of Comment on Reproductive Ethics, CORE, said: “How ironic that one of the few reproductive novelties the Government wants to ban is the very one that CORE could make a case for. But infertile men shouldn’t get excited. There is far too much hype in this paper. As to growing sperm from women? As any A-level biology student would question, ‘Where are they going to get the Y chromosome from?’ ”

I have to say I’m somewhat disappointed that so many people have chosen to blame anonymity for the verbal and visual harassment of Kathy Sierra. I’m a free-speech zealot, and I believe the ability to speak anonymously is an important cornerstone of that freedom. For one thing, anonymity (however imperfect it may be online) is what allows so many women bloggers to tell their deeply personal stories without fear that their friends and family will see what they write. I wouldn’t want to do anything to make it harder for vulnerable people to tell the truth online.

The important part of the Kathy Sierra scandal was not that people were saying hateful and violent things anonymously. Rather it was that some A-list bloggers like Chris Locke, who were not anonymous and were in fact exploiting their fame, set up several blogs (ie, Meankids) explicitly designed for people to say hateful things. That being the case, I would blame the A-listers for giving the hate speech a high-profile forum, not the no-name low-lifes who took advantage of it. If the anonymous person/people had chosen to set up blogs on typepad and started spewing there, it wouldn’t have gotten nearly as much attention. (And that might have defeated the purpose.)

Or am I missing something?

Liz Henry blogs about an amazing presentation that Angela Byron did about women in free and open-source software at the Flourish conference:

Angela’s talk addressed “How to Deal with the following situations”:

* Sexist jokes
* Posting sexual material (porn, etc.)
* Verbally attacking/dismissing women (time of the month)
* Death threats

The most jaw-dropping part is when she mentions that women account for 28 percent of proprietory software developers, but only 1.5 percent of people in open-source software. WTF?

Liz also mentions that blogging superhero Beth Kanter won an award for “most valuable person in the nonprofit tech community.” Go Beth!

Verónica Engler, who writes for one of Argentina’s leading newspapers, has just sent me a link to a long article she wrote (in Spanish) about She’s Such a Geek and the phenomenon of female geeks generally. She also used lots of great pictures from Inkling’s SSAG photo contest. If anybody would like to translate it, please send us a link to your translation!

El sutil encanto de la ciencia [via Pagina/12]

On Monday, April 9, at 7 PM, there will be a SSAG reading at Mills College. I’ll be hosting it, joined by editrixes Charlie Anders and Annalee Newitz and contributors Kristin Abkemeier and Roopa Ramamoorthi. The event will be in The Bender Room on the second floor of Mills’ Carnegie Hall. To get there, see directions, or practice!

Yesterday morning, Cambridge computer science professor Karen Spärck Jones died — she was one of the pioneers in the field of computer science and a staunch advocate of women in tech. According to the Cambridge University announcement:

She had worked in automatic language and information processing research since the late 1950s when she co-authored a paper in one of the great founding collections of the discipline, the Proceedings of the 1958 International Conference on Scientific Information in Washington, DC.

She made outstanding theoretical contributions to information retrieval and natural language processing and built upon this theoretical framework through numerous experiments. Her work is among the most highly cited in the field and has influenced a whole generation of researchers and practitioners.

Jones is famous for saying that computer science is too important to be left to men.

Regular readers of this blog won’t be surprised to discover that the announcement of Jones’ death also includes a detailed description of her CS researcher husband Roger Needham’s work:

Karen married Roger Needham in 1958 when both were studying for PhD’s. Roger, who died in 2003, joined the Mathematical Laboratory, now known as the Computer Laboratory, in 1962. He eventually became its Head in 1980 for 15 years. In 1997 he started up the Microsoft Research Laboratory in Cambridge, which brings talent from all over the world to the city, and which is now housed in The Roger Needham Building at West Cambridge.

It’s all too typical that biographers consider a woman’s husband and family to be relevant to her professional life, while a man’s wife and children will be given but a footnote in a description of his scientific accomplishments. Here Needham is so far beyond footnote level that his work is actually described before we get any comments from colleagues about Jones’ work, and before famous quotes from Jones are mentioned.

Karen Spärck Jones 1935-2007 [via University of Cambridge News Service]

The 2007 Hugo nominations are in, and out of 20 fiction writers, only one woman was nominated: Naomi Novik, author of His Majesty’s Dragon. Well, gosh! I mean, I’m thrilled that the judges voters have found a sure-fire way to keep women from having their breasts fondled at the podium — just don’t let them up there in the first place! Or maybe it’s the other way around — next time, the women will learn to keep their mouth shut, or they don’t get to play in the sandbox at all.

One person comments here:

[Y]our stereotypical Hugo voter is unlikely to have read many books by women in the first place. Put it another way: I doubt there are many people who nominated Novik and Vernor Vinge. And I suspect a lot of people who nominated Vernor Vinge are looking at the shortlist going, “well, I know who Stross and Watts are, but who the hell is Naomi Novik?”

And here, Patrick Nielsen Hayden says:

That’s really remarkable. And remarkably stupid, considering how much good SF is written by women these days.

I didn’t notice it until you pointed it out. The essence of sexism is that “male” is the unremarkable “default state.”

Also, Ide Cyan notes:

And there are no Japanese nominees either, although Worldcon, where the Hugos are awarded, is taking place in Japan this year.