Biology is so cute it’s like “look at this fossil! It’s a trilobite” whereas physics is like S U B M I T T O T H E E V E R - I N C R E A S I N G E N T R O P Y O F T H E U N I V E R S E
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Compsci is also very cute it’s like, “look i can make this machine talk to me!! This machine is my friend.”
former ballerina aesthetic
Via A Mighty Girl:
Professional hacker Parisa Tabriz is responsible for keeping the nearly billion users of Google Chrome safe by finding vulnerabilities in their system before malicious hackers do. Tabriz, a “white hat” hacker who calls herself Google’s “Security Princess”, is head of the company’s information security engineering team. The 31-year-old Polish-Iranian-American is also an anomaly in Silicon Valley according to a recent profile in The Telegraph: “Not only is she a woman – a gender hugely under-represented in the booming tech industry – but she is a boss heading up a mostly male team of 30 experts in the US and Europe.”
Tabriz came up with “Security Princess” while at a conference and the unusual title is printed on her business card. “I knew I’d have to hand out my card and I thought Information Security Engineer sounded so boring,” she says. “Guys in the industry all take it so seriously, so security princess felt suitably whimsical.” Her curiosity, mischievousness, and innovative thinking are all assets in her business: a high-profile company like Google is constantly in the crosshairs of so-called “black hat” hackers.
Tabriz came into internet security almost by accident; at the University of Illinois’ computer engineering program, her interest was first whetted by the story of early hacker John Draper, who became known as Captain Crunch in the 1960s after he learned how to make free long-distance calls using a toy whistle from a Cap’n Crunch cereal box. She realized that, to beat the hackers of today, she had to be prepared for similar — but more advanced — out-of-the-box thinking.
While women at still very under-represented in the tech industry — Google recently reported that only 30% of its staff is female — Tabriz has hope for the future: “[F]ifty years ago there were similar percentages of women in medicine and law, now thankfully that’s shifted.” And, while she hasn’t encountered overt sexism at Google, when she was offered the position, at least one classmate said, “you know you only got it cos you’re a girl.” To help address this imbalance, she mentors under-16 students at a yearly computer science conference that teaches kids how to “hack for good” — and she especially encourages girls to pursue internet security work. One 16-year-old who attended, Trinity Nordstrom, says, “Parisa is a good role model, because of her I’d like to be a hacker.”
Tabriz, who was named by Forbes as one of the “top 30 under 30 to watch” in 2012, also wants the public to realize that hacking can be used for positive ends. “[H]acking can be ugly,” she says. “The guy who published the private photos of those celebrities online made headlines everywhere. What he did was not only a violation of these women but it was criminal, and as a hacker I was very saddened by it. I feel like we, the hackers, need better PR to show we’re not all like that… [A]fter all I’m in the business of protecting people.”
To read more about Google’s “Security Princess” in The Telegraph, visit http://bit.ly/Z6Z5RG
Women are bad at computer science–it’s not sexist it’s a fact.
Computer Engineering Professor (via shitprofessorsspout)
Grace Hopper
Rear Admiral Grace Hopper would have been 107 today, and is being honored with a great Google Doodle. It’s quite literally impossible for us to imagine, as we sit here reading about her on the internet, but people used to use things like paper and pencils and chalk and slide rules to solve (and often not solve) complicated problems. Grace Hopper quite simply helped usher in the modern age, her impact, I think, is no less than the steam engine or the cotton gin.
Some awesome stuff she did: Grace Hopper developed first compiler, allowing computer calculations to move beyond simple arithmetic and into more complex problems. She also developed first standardized computer language, COBOL, which laid the groundwork for all the languages we use today.
One day she found a dead moth disrupting one of the electronic relays in the Mark 1 computer, and upon removing it (and fixing the computer), the term “debugging“ was born. Here’s her daily log from that day, with the offending moth taped to the page:
External image
Beyond that, she was a charming scientific communicator, and she possessed a marvelous ability to make people, and mind you this was in a time when almost no one owned their own computer, truly appreciate both the importance and the complexity of computing technology.
She famously carried around a bundle of nanoseconds in her purse for illustrative purposes. Here she is charming the socks off of David Letterman, and giving him a nanosecond of his very own (don’t miss the picosecond joke, either) :
A Video Game That Teaches You How To Code
“I think everybody in this country should learn how to program a computer because it teaches you how to think,” Steve Jobs said in a lost interview from 1995.
But for a beginner, learning to code from scratch can be intimidating.
Enter CodeSpells. UC San Diego computer scientists developed this video game to teach people how to code. The story line is simple: you’re a wizard that uses spells (i.e. code) to navigate through the world, fight off foes, and solve problems.
While experienced coders can delve deep into the programming to create some truly devastating spells, newbies can easily experiment with the simple drag-and-drop coding interface.
If you’re into Minecraft, the CodeSpells team has also developed LearnToMod — a tool that teaches coding through Minecraft.
There Are 3 States Where Not a Single Girl Took the AP Computer Science Exam
When people talk about how to diversify the tech field, a common solution is, “Start earlier.” Rather than focus on getting women and minorities hired at tech startups or encouraging them to major in computer science in college, there should be a push to turn them on to the discipline when they’re still teenagers—or even younger.
“It’s already too late,” Paul Graham, founder of the tech entrepreneur boot camp Y Combinator, said last month in a controversial interview. “What we should be doing is somehow changing the middle school computer science curriculum or something like that.”
Right now, the “start early” strategy doesn’t seem to be working: The students doing advanced computer science work in high school remain overwhelmingly white and male. According to data from the College Board compiled by Georgia Tech’s Barbara Ericson, only a small percentage of the high-schoolers taking the Advanced Placement Computer Science exam are women. Black and Latino students make up an even lower percentage of the test-takers.
Ericson’s analysis of the data shows that in 2013, 18 percent of the students who took the exam were women. Eight percent were Hispanic, and four percent were African-American. In contrast, Latinos make up 22 percent of the school-age population in the U.S.; African-Americans make up 14 percent. (I don’t need to tell you that women make up about half.)
Read more. [Image: Jim Mone]
This is such a serious issue that I’m responding with the body of the article, not in the tags. I’m a senior in high school, and the class known throughout the school as the “Hardest Ever” is AP Physics, which I take. I’m one of three girls, in a class of forty—and, it goes without saying, all three girls are white.
We had a substitute teacher a few days ago, who commented on the weird gender division within the class, and a few guys laughed and said “Well, yeah, it’s a hard science class,” as though girls couldn’t be expected to even get to that class, let alone do well in it.
Except, of course, that the best student in our class is my friend R, who’ll be going to MIT next year, spent the summer studying with NASA, and who is, quelle surprise, a girl.
This is a problem that can’t be fixed just by telling high school girls to go into STEM, or making STEM sexy, because it is, as the article says, already way too late. The pressure you’re put under as one of three girls in a class of forty is absolutely unfathomable. What you do doesn’t reflect on you as a person, but rather on women on the whole. We hardly speak up as much, despite R being brilliant and good at everything, and I not too far behind, because we’ve been socialized our entire lives to sit back and let the boys handle things. This is, obviously, bullshit.
It’s also resulted in weird gender presentation among the three of us; id est, we’ve all become way more feminine (I’d say femme, because that gets more across the point I’m going for here, but the other two of them are straight and that’s not a straight girl identity) this year. Bright red lipstick, flouncy dresses… all at the same time as we’ve had to become louder than the boys around us. There’s been this odd visual shift among us towards being Obviously Girls, because we’d be looked over and classified wrongly if we didn’t present the way we do.
And there’s, hm. The only PoC in the class are boys, obviously, and there’s about five of them. So 1/8 of the class is non-white, none of the three girls are non-white, and this is all disgusting.
We have to fix this, about as soon as possible. Fix it before middle school, though. Girls already have internalized passivity at that age, have internalized “science is for boys.” Obviously, fuck this, but also, work earlier to make things better. Call almost exclusively on girls in early math and science classes. Don’t gender math and science toys for young children — by this I mean neither SUPER AWESOME MAN’S ULTRA-DUDELY EARLY CHEMISTRY SET nor PRINCESS PINK’S FEMININE AND BEAUTIFUL GEM MAKING KIT: USE MYSTICAL CHEMISTRY TO MAKE YOURSELF A TIARA!, because both of these reinforce gender roles and both of these suck. We need gender-neutral science and math toys, and we need them early.
And then there’s the issue of pushing non-sciency kids into STEM because it’s the “only way to get a job,” but that’s another point.
Model-Slash-Coder Shatters a Dozen Tired Stereotypes
If you have preconceived notions about models being dumb and coders being nerdy white dudes, prepare to abandon them. Lyndsey Scott has modeled for brands like DKNY, Victoria’s Secret, Gucci and Prada. But she also knows Python, Objective C, and iOS, and builds apps in her spare time.
In a profile by Carmel Diamicis on Pando Daily, Scott explains that she graduated from Amherst College in 2006 with a dual-degree in computer science — and 3 years later, found herself modeling for Calvin Klein, as “the first ever African American to get an exclusive contract with the company for New York Fashion Week.”
But up until recently, while modeling, her tech background was kept secret. She tells Diamicis:
The industry makes an effort to reduce the model and, in a way, simplify things. The way they marketed me a lot of times was as younger than I am. They wouldn’t talk about my education, they wouldn’t talk about me… In a way I understand. Youth is valued more than a college education.
One of Scott’s apps — available in the Apple store — is called iPort, and it’s basically a digital portfolio for models. (She tells Business Insider she started coding in middle school!)As seen in this tongue-in-cheek video, Scott is not just smart and beautiful — she’s also got a sense of humor. She also wrote a moving Quora post about going from physically unattractive to physically attractive:
Just a fun fact but I’ve grown a lot as a person in the past year and am continuing to do so!! I’ve tried so many new things, learned new ways to connect and interact with people, and learned a lot about what I do and don’t like in the people around me.
I’m branching out in a lot of ways and I’m excited to see what I’ll do next!
😚