Nancy’s Blog

Today’s NY Times has an article about the continuing lack of women in science and technology, based on a study by the Center for Work-Life Policy, a nonprofit organization that studies women and work, to be published in the Harvard Business Review in June.  The purpose of the study was “to measure the size of the gender gap and to decipher why women leave the science, engineering and technology professions in disproportionate numbers.”

It seems that more women are getting degrees in the fields in question — engineering, the hard sciences, the life sciences.  And they get good early job evaluations, so the problem isn’t quality.  And men do leave these professions — but proportionately more women do.  The reasons, they say, are varied, but can be subsumed under “pervasive macho culture.”  They don’t like the culture; they suffer harrasment; they are out of the loop; they don’t get mentored.

One story is telling: a woman named Josephine who was nicknamed “Finn” found it to her advantage to send email as Finn.  She got information that “Josephine” didn’t. Her advice: “Get yourself a Finn.”  (Apologies to my Finnish friends — you’re not the kind of Finn that she meant.)

The full report is a book available via Amazon et al: Off Ramps and On Ramps: Keeping Talented Women on the Road to Success (Harvard Business School Press).

The April 10 issue of The Economist has a special report on “The new nomadism.” Eight articles. I haven’t read them yet. Available online through the campus library, but some people might want to pick up the paper edition.

This is their list of “sources and acknowledgments”:
Read more »

Today’s NY Times has an article about how tech designers are figuring out that (gasp) women buy technology.

Don’t get excited. Wait till you see what they think women want:

Energizer, the battery maker, went so far as to create a charger for each sex. The Dock & Go, at $33, is aimed at men. Black and gray with shiny trim, the two pods hold up to four batteries each (AA or AAA). A light glows red when it is charging, yellow when it is charged.

The second device, the $20 Easy Charger [pictured], is aimed at women, who usually end up managing the household’s batteries. This charger is flat, round and sold with interchangeable faceplates in silver, black and eggshell that help it blend in with kitchen appliances. Large light-emitting-diode readouts spell out what the countertop charger is doing at every phase of the charging cycle. Focus-group testing indicated that men were turned off by the Easy Charger, especially in how its readouts appeared to tell them what they thought they already knew…“’We found that how people use chargers is very different,” she said. “For her, she wants it to be instantly understandable.”

Geez, and all these years I’ve been using a (unisex?) Radio Shack charger instead of one for women. But then my charger doesn’t match my kitchen: a decorating faux pas! How nice that the women’s charger costs less - did the men in their focus groups prefer to pay more?

Besides a general level of cluelessness, this reveals the misuse of qualitative research methods, in this case, focus groups: sit down a bunch of people, ask them some questions, and, voila, make proclamations about “women” and “men.”

The article does indicate one area where this research is valid - sometimes: size. Smaller and lighter objects for carrying around, such as for cameras. However, they come to some odd conclusions in this domain, too:

….the wider spacing of the keys on a new Sony ultraportable computer notebook …accommodates the longer fingernails that women tend to have.

Quick, look around: how many women who would buy an expensive Sony ultraportable actually have long fingernails? Of course there’s also the issue of smaller keys with lesser spacing for women’s smaller hands. What’s a poor tech company to do?

Here’s an idea: offer a range of options, not for women and men, but for people with different needs and preferences. Oh, but then they wouldn’t know which to make in black and silver, and which to match the kitchen appliances.

I love Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools — not only because it hearkens back to the Whole Earth Catalog (from which it is more or less descended) which I loved, but for its own virtues: good, clear reviews of things I actually can use. Not everything, of course, but periodically I do buy things it reviews and have never been disappointed.

The latest is the IngenuiTEA Teapot. Making one cup of tea is as easy as it could possibly be. Boil water; put loose tea in the Ingenuitea; when tea is ready, put the device on top of a cup; the contact with the rim of the cup opens the valve and tea flows into the cup, leaving the loose leaves behind.

I love it. Cool Tools links to Amazon, which sells it with tea. It can be bought cheaper without the tea from Cooking.com.

It is an example of a simple, straightforward technology that does something simply and extremely well.  Would that more of the technology that we use day in and day out were as functional.

As a former birder, I love the idea of the this project — but I have to point out that birders call it birding, not birdwatching.

Maybe I’ll leave CONE on my monitor at home when I’m gone, to keep the cats entertained.  Tho I’m afraid I’ll come home to find the monitor toppled over, with scratch marks.

Announcing: CONE Sutro Forest: Opening 23 April 2007

The Latest Massively Multiplayer Online Game? Birdwatching.

CONE Sutro Forest allows players to earn points by taking live photos and classifying wild birds. CONE Sutro Forest (CONE-SF) combines a remotely controllable robotic pan-tilt-zoom video camera with live streaming video, image database, and point system.

Conceived by Ken Goldberg, artist and professor of engineering at UC Berkeley, and Dez Song, professor of computer science at Texas A&M, and funded by the National Science Foundation, CONE-SF automatically computes the optimal camera viewpoint that satisfies dozens or hundreds of simultaneous players, including both experts and amateurs. Managing large communities is the specialty of craigslist founder Craig Newmark, who will host the camera from his San Francisco residence overlooking the Sutro Forest. All photos on this page were taken by him.

CONE-SF is free and open to the public. To play, visit: http://cone.berkeley.edu.

[However, my efforts to register are not working -- it registers me, then refused to recognize my pwd; resetting pwd doesn't work, either.]

Alan Kay: The PC Must Be Revamped—Now

By Allan E. Alter

PCs should help people learn, not merely perform tasks, the prize-winning computer scientist says.

Most of the ideas in that sphere, good ideas that would apply to business, were written down 40 years ago by Engelbart. But in the last few years I’ve been asking computer scientists and programmers whether they’ve ever typed E-N-G-E-L-B-A-R-T into Google-and none of them have. I don’t think you could find a physicist who has not gone back and tried to find out what Newton actually did. It’s unimaginable. Yet the computing profession acts as if there isn’t anything to learn from the past, so most people haven’t gone back and referenced what Engelbart thought.

The things that are wrong with the Web today are due to this lack of curiosity in the computing profession. And it’s very characteristic of a pop culture. Pop culture lives in the present; it doesn’t really live in the future or want to know about great ideas from the past. I’m saying there’s a lot of useful knowledge and wisdom out there for anybody who is curious, and who takes the time to do something other than just executing on some current plan. Cicero said, “Who knows only his own generation remains always a child.” People who live in the present often wind up exploiting the present to an extent that it starts removing the possibility of having a future.

I said before that I have a new Nokia N-80, courtesy of my friends at Nokia. I’m using it a lot for both its camera function and its web access. What prevents it from being a viable working multiple artifact: power.

Web access: I’m surprised at how much I use the N-80 for web access: for Gmail and for Google searching. I used to think I didn’t want my email in my pocket all the time, but I find it extremely convenient to have all-the-time email access. For example:

• to check to see if a meeting is still on.
• to send a quick note, instead of having to remember to do it when I’m back at a computer.
• to use wait-time to deal with some quick email, or delete msgs I don’t have to deal with.

And I use the Google searching:

• Was in SF yesterday and didn’t know the exact addresses of two stores I wanted to go to; found them online.
• Was at a meeting with a friend who asked if I knew which person on the room was so-and-so; I searched Google images and the person was sitting 2 rows in front of us.
• I was in a bookstore looking for a book for which I remembered the title but not the author.
• In a meeting during an earthquake — a friend found the magnitude faster than I did (3.4) as we both searched our handhelds.

None of these are major, and most could be dealt with another way or don’t need to be dealt with at all. But what I like is that these noticeably reduce some of the small stresses of daily living. Finding the store or the book easily reduces the effort, the mental tension, and the time required. Needing to remember something for later is a small but noticeable burden — and not remembering can escalate to a problem. We didn’t NEED to know the magnitude of the quake, but for those of us who remember the ‘89 quake, there’s always the possibility that what doesn’t feel like a major shake just mean that we are on the edge of a major quake.

Life is full of stresses, small and large — something that eliminates some of the small ones contributes to the quality of life.

Camera: The N-80 camera has most of the features of a medium-price digital camera. It can be fully automatic, but the photographer can also control the exposure, color saturation, and contrast. It has flash with red-eye reduction, and a significant zoom. And, until Zonetags is ready for this generation of phones, I can upload to Flickr using Lifeblog. The result is that I’m more inclined to grab my N-80 when I see something photogenic (and not just my cats).

I was in a store looking at desk combinations for my study at home. I wanted to remember what the alternatives looked like and, of course, measure the pieces — so I took pictures of the pieces with my measuring tape, instead of writing down all the measurements.

Power: The problem, of course, is that all these functions use power, and I’m exhausting the N-80 much faster than I did my previous cameraphone. I’m working at exhausting and recharging the battery several times, as is recommended to max the life of batteries (and which no one I know but me actually does). I have chargers at home, office, and car, so most of the time power is not a concern — but I’m not inclined to, for example, take the N-80 as my only camera to some places where I might otherwise, for fear of running out of power. I most need its networking function where I don’t have a computer, where not likely to have a power supply.

It’s likely that I’ll find more new uses of the N-80 and make it increasingly a part of my life — as long as I’m not limited by a concern for running out of power. Nokia and the service providers would of course like for us to integrate these devices as fully as possible in daily life — but we won’t be able to as long as power is a concern.

I don’t work in IT, so my opinion on this is based on anecdotes and hearsay, not empirical data or my own experience. But I find this interesting — from Silicon.com – excerpt:

Are women ‘too smart’ for IT?
Best of Reader Comments: Or is it too macho…

By Gemma Simpson

Published: Tuesday 23 January 2007

Women are abandoning techie careers, with many put off by the long-hours culture and lack of flexible working. Currently only 16 per cent of tech workers are women, of which few are in management roles, according to IT industry trade group Intellect.

The female flight from IT may not be a question of sex discrimination but more about poor working conditions, say silicon.com readers, as the IT workers suffer from a lack of flexible working schemes and the threat of losing their jobs dues to offshoring.

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Charles Smith, a consultant from London, pointed out IT workers worry their jobs will be exported and are expected to work long hours of unpaid overtime by myopic management.

Women, readers argue, are simply being more choosy about life-work balance than men - and thus they are leaving the industry.

One reader pointed out that women were “maybe just smarter” for shunning IT careers in favour of “much easier jobs” such as being a doctor, lawyer or accountant.

Others said it was a lack of interest in the subject matter. An anonymous reader said he had tried to encourage women to learn more technical things but “only men seem to want to be technical”.

Some female readers said IT has become unattractive due to the ‘macho culture’ and offensive behaviour of their male colleagues.

From Magellan’s:

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