Why Aren't You Reading This?
thusspakezuska | February 20, 2009I love Ursula K. le Guin's the Earthsea series, and recently finished reading the final novel, The Other Wind. Those who are familiar with the Earthsea books will know that among other topics, le Guin explores traditional gender roles, their change, and men's disparagement of women's power. Towards the end of The Other Wind, one of the characters, Tenar, observes
How men feared women! she thought, walking among the late-flowering roses. Not as individuals, but women when they talked together, worked together, spoke up for one another - then men saw plots, cabals, constraints, traps being…
thusspakezuska | February 16, 2009I found out about both of these courtesy of the Chronicle Review Note Bene/New Books in Print feature. Both look extremely interesting.
First, Revisiting Race in a Genomic World, from Rutgers University Press.
With the completion of the sequencing of the human genome in 2001, the debate over the existence of a biological basis for race has been revived. In Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age, interdisciplinary scholars join forces to examine the new social, political, and ethical concerns that are attached to how we think about emerging technologies and their impact on current conceptions…
thusspakezuska | December 23, 2008Via the Chronicle Review New Scholarly Books section:
I haven't read either of these but both look good and I thought they would be of interest to readers of this blog.
The first is Our Bodies, Our Crimes: The Policing of Women's Reproduction in America, by Jeanne Flavin.
In Our Bodies, Our Crimes, Jeanne Flavin argues that, not only has the state's control of womens bodies become more intrusive and more pervasive, it has also become invisible and taken for granted. This important work is framed around several vivid case studies, each taking place at a different time in the reproductive…
thusspakezuska | October 9, 2008I found out about these two books from the Chronicle Review; haven't read either one, but they looked interesting and some of you may want to check them out.
Stuck in the Shallow End: Education, Race, and Computing by Jane Margolis
The number of African Americans and Latino/as receiving undergraduate and advanced degrees in computer science is disproportionately low, according to recent surveys. And relatively few African American and Latino/a high school students receive the kind of institutional encouragement, educational opportunities, and preparation needed for them to choose computer…
thusspakezuska | August 27, 2008So: Long promised substantive reply to comments on previous post is not materializing anytime soon. Migraines, mom in hospital again, coming down with headcold, sister arriving tomorrow for holiday weekend visit, possible trip to western PA next week to tend to mom when she is discharged from hospital (extra attention on top of what assisted living can provide)...I planned to get a post out today but unexpectedly the roofers we just contracted with on Monday phoned at 7:30 a.m. and said surprise! we're going to be hammering and pounding over your head all day long! and the cats were going…
thusspakezuska | August 14, 2008Via the AWIS Washington Wire, this news of interest to young black academics:
In The Black-American's Guide for Winning Tenure - Without Losing Your Soul, authors Kerry Ann Rockquemore and Tracey Laszloffy provide dos, don'ts, advice and support. One of the tips in the Q&A with Rockquemore includes being proactive rather than reactive in creating a professional network of support. She emphasizes the importance of knowing the institution's exact promotion and tenure process, as well as unwritten rules from department-specific norms to whether race can be explicitly discussed. Once the…
thusspakezuska | August 7, 2008I never got around to reviewing Danica McKellar's first book, Math Doesn't Suck, and now she's got a second one out, Kiss My Math. You gotta love the title at least. I think she's got a whole franchise going here. Maybe by the time she puts out her calculus book I'll get my review of Math Doesn't Suck up on the blog.
Hat tip to Veronica for letting me know about this.
thusspakezuska | August 6, 2008The National Association of Scholars, in its tireless quest to have the little-noted perspective of the white man represented in our nation's colleges and universities, has succeeded in getting a pet project funded via the Higher Education Act reauthorization. As reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education:
The new grant program, which would provide aid to institutions to establish or strengthen programs to promote "traditional American history," "the history and nature of, and threats to, free institutions," and "the history and achievements of Western civilization" has had an even longer…
thusspakezuska | July 20, 2008I've been sorting through books lately, in an effort to cull and control my ever-burgeoning collection, and of course I have to browse through each book to decide if I want to keep it. It's a slow, but rewarding process. This evening I was wandering through Migraine: The Complete Guide, when I happened across this delightful anecdote from a fellow migraineur:
Many migraine patients feel that emergency departments treat them with disrespect and with disregard for the seriousness of their condition. Emergency-room personnel, they say, do not consider severe migraine a true emergency.…
thusspakezuska | May 2, 2008
You're a smart woman, and a fabulous scientist or engineer. You know you can be a great researcher or professional engineer. But have you given thought to doing more than your job - to becoming a leader? F. Mary Williams and Carolyn J. Emerson hope you will, and to encourage you, they've put together Becoming Leaders: A Practical Handbook for Women in Engineering, Science, and Technology. The book is a joint project of the American Society of Civil Engineers, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and the Society of Women Engineers.
As the authors note in the introduction,…
thusspakezuska | May 1, 2008From the AWIS Washington Wire:
A new collection of essays, Gendered Innovations in Science and Engineering, explores how taking gender into account in the areas of science, medicine, and engineering can enhance human knowledge.
Inside Higher Ed has a conversation with the editor, Londa Schiebinger. IHE leads annoyingly with this:
The discussion of gender and science can take place on many levels. Some focus on issues of bias in who gets to do science. Others use much broader definitions, looking at the impact of gender on scientific questions and findings, as well as on who leads the…
thusspakezuska | April 17, 2008UPDATE: After posting this entry, I found out that the paper I discussed here is not actually slated at this time to be published in a peer-reviewed journal; it is merely available as a preprint. Nevertheless, I hear that the folks at Nature have picked up on this and have interviewed the author; we may see something next week there about it.
Remember that famous line about how women need to be twice as good as men to be considered half as good? A new statistical study by Sherry Towers available on ArXiv.org shows just how true this is in the world of particle physics.
Here's the scoop…
thusspakezuska | April 8, 2008Liz Henry's delightful, insightful skewering of the sexism deployed in an article about Google VP Marissa Mayer provides a very recent example of a pattern noted by Ruth Oldenziel in Making Technology Masculine: Women who love technology require an explanation; men who love technology are just being masculine. Oldenziel notes:
Whenever women enter computer rooms and construction sites as designers, hackers, and engineers...they need to be accounted for and explained. For decades scores of newspapers have reported, commented, and elaborated on the many "first" women who trespassed the…
thusspakezuska | March 28, 2008In the spring a suburban homeowner's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of lawn.
Originally uploaded by garethjmsaunders.
Fertilize! Break out the emergent herbicide! Fire up the sprinklers! Here comes the lawn mower and weed whacker! The relentless battle to maintain a time-, energy-, and resource-consuming monoculture that provides a perfect habitat for Japanese beetle grubs has begun!
Or maybe...just maybe...you could try something different this year. Douglas Tallamy, University of Delaware professor of entomology and wildlife ecology, hopes you will, and tells you why you…
thusspakezuska | March 27, 2008Writer's block sucks. So I did what I often do when I'm faced with a problem I need to solve: I bought a book. The book in this instance, Dorothea Brande's Becoming a Writer, was originally published in 1934 and was out of print for some time until a recent reissue. It is a charming read. I can't tell you yet if it's going to cure all my writing problems, but I did want to share this quote with you:
It is unfortunate, but the unimaginative citizen finds something exquisitely funny about the idea that one aspires to make a name and a living by any such process as "stringing words together…
thusspakezuska | March 6, 2008Bora has posted an interview with me at A Blog Around the Clock. See here for all the interviews in the series. He keeps adding new ones so check back now and then.
Via the Chronicle news blog, I found this wonderful site with all of Audobon's paintings of North American birds. Bird lovers, rejoice! Thank you, University of Pittsburgh!
Again via the CNB, The Scientist has named names - the best places for postdocs to work. The Chronicle advises:
Read the fine print: Only 17 international institutions (and 82 in the United States) received five or more survey responses; the magazine did…
thusspakezuska | March 5, 2008Maria told me about WOC PhD. A link in this post led me to the Feminist Studies Collections: Women of Color & Women Worldwide pages, from which I hopped to the Women of Color page from the Wisconsin Women's Studies Librarian, which in turn took me to Joan Korenman's Women of Color websites list. Joan's excellent list includes Black Women in Mathematics, Digital Sisters, summaries of a few studies, and Sister Mentors, among others.
Abel pointed me to Urban Science Adventures! - which, by the way, has a nice post on women's history month up. Also, Diary of a PhD Student, Education and…
thusspakezuska | February 21, 2008Alice has a very good post over at On Being A Scientist And A Woman about resources on implicit bias, including some really nice stuff to help you counteract implicit bias in reviewing/hiring situations. Go read it!
thusspakezuska | February 14, 2008If you find yourself in the condition of being unavoidably female, and you aren't willing to undergo a sex change operation, then your best publication strategy may be to hide the XX affiliation.
The title of a recent publication on this issue is self-explanatory: "Double-blind review favours increased representation of female authors" by Budden, Tregenza, Aarssen, Koricheva, Leimu, and Lortie. Sadly, as the authors note, double-blind review is "rarely practised". If your name screams out "woman", you may be better off with an initial.
Of course, this is nothing terribly new; just a…
thusspakezuska | January 16, 2008Some interesting things came across my listservs this week; one from WEPAN, another from the WMST-L listserv: a new book on recruiting women in IT, and a very interesting call for papers. Details after the jump.
Reconfiguring the Firewall
A comprehensive volume authored by three Virginia Tech professors, (published by AK Peters, Ltd.), "Reconfiguring the Firewall" addresses the global challenge of recruiting girls and women into majors and careers in information technology. Written and researched by Carol J. Burger, Elizabeth G. Creamer, and Peggy S. Meszaros, all faculty members in the…