Ada Lovelace day

Ada Lovelace Day: Jane of See Jane Compute

jdupuis — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 15:36:19 +0000

Ada Lovelace Day: Jane of See Jane Compute

Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science.

The first Ada Lovelace Day was held on 24th march 2009 and was a huge success. It attracted nearly 2000 signatories to the pledge and 2000 more people who signed up on Facebook. Over 1200 people added their post URL to the Ada Lovelace Day 2009 mash-up. The day itself was covered by BBC News Channel, BBC.co.uk, Radio 5 Live, The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Metro, Computer Weekly, and VNUnet, as well as hundreds of blogs worldwide.

In 2010 Ada Lovelace Day will again be held on 24th March and the target is to get 3072 people to sign the pledge and blog about their tech heroine.

Ada Lovelace Day is organised by Suw Charman-Anderson, with design and development support from TechnoPhobia and hosting from UKHost4U.

I encourage you to check out the rather extensive list of posts celebrating women in science and technology. It's truly inspiring.

A couple of days late (as usual) I'd like to add a name to the list of women deserving of a bit of celebration: Jane of the sadly departed blog See Jane Compute (and here for deeper archives).

Way back in 2005 or so, See Jane Compute was the first science blog I started following regularly. Her keen insights into the world of computing was what first drew me in, but it was the warmth and personality of the blog that kept me coming back. I'd done a computing degree myself way back in the 1980s and I saw a lot of what I went through as a student mirrored oddly through her experiences as a prof.

Also, as a callow youth way back then, I don't think I realized the challenges that the women in my program faced just being there, and that's something that Jane's writing really brought home to me, hopefully making me much more aware and sensitive now.

Over time, we also became blog buddies. It was always a thrill to see Jane's name pop up in the comments because I knew that someone who cared about the computing field and the people in it was contributing.

Jane also let us all into her life, let us experience the ups and downs of academia, of being a woman in computing, of everyday life. As all friends are, I was thrilled and happy when Baby Jane came along bringing great joy to the Jane household. I was also dismayed by some of the ups and downs of academic life and the weird tenure process.

Unfortunately, Jane's voice is mostly silent now -- I'm happy to report that she does still show up in the comments occasionally (here, for example). I'll also have a small little regret -- See Jane Compute closed down on Science Blogs on May 5, 2009 while I joined only a couple of weeks later, on May 18. Longtime blog friends, we missed being blog siblings by only a whisker.

So, slightly late Happy Ada Lovelace Day! And take a minute to go read some terrific insights by one of the great women technology bloggers here and here. And check out the interview I did with her on my old blog.

jdupuis Fri, 03/26/2010 - 11:36

Sassy Bitches of Science: Rita Levi-Montalcini

cagapakis — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 12:41:43 +0000

Sassy Bitches of Science: Rita Levi-Montalcini

Happy Ada Lovelace Day! Today we blog to celebrate women in technology and science and remember Ada Lovelace, the woman considered to have written the world's first computer program back in the 1840's.

So to celebrate, here's a clip of an interview with Rita Levi-Montalcini, one of my favorite Sassy Bitches of Scienceâ¢. At age 100, she is the oldest living Nobel laureate, sharp as a tack, still working, and a sassy dresser to boot. Her story is incredible and inspiring (especially in light of what I wrote about yesterday on DIYbio, oppression, and opportunity). Turned away from her position as a researcher at the University of Turin in 1938 because of her Jewish heritage, she built a laboratory in her bedroom and there began doing research on the nervous system of chickens that eventually led to her later discovery of Nerve Growth Factor as a researcher at Washington University in St. Louis in the 1950's, for which she was awarded the Nobel prize in 1986. She is totally amazing, as is the whole interview, which is up at Nobelprize.org.

Here's to Rita and to all the other Sassy Bitches of Science out there!

cagapakis Wed, 03/24/2010 - 08:41

Ada Lovelace Day: Katherine Jones-Smith and the Pollock Fractals

bioephemera — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 06:52:02 +0000

Ada Lovelace Day: Katherine Jones-Smith and the Pollock Fractals

It's Ada Lovelace Day!

Ada Lovelace (1815 - 1852) is often referred to as the world's first computer programmer. The daughter of the famous poet Lord Byron, and the admired intellect, Annabella Milbanke, Ada Lovelace represented the meeting of two alternative worlds: the romanticism and art of her father versus the rationality and science of her mother. In her attempt to draw together these polar opposites and create a 'poetical science' during the Victorian age, Ada collaborated with the renowned mathematician and inventor, Charles Babbage. (source)

I'm betting famous names like Marie Curie and Emmy Noether get lots of love from other bloggers, so I decided to blog about a contemporary woman, an early-career researcher who bridges technology, art and science: Katherine Jones-Smith of Case Western Reserve University.

Over the past several years, Jones-Smith has been involved in an ongoing controversy over a proposed fractal method for authenticating the paintings of Jackson Pollock. The controversy began in 1999, when Richard Taylor, a physics professor at the University of Oregon, claimed to have identified a distinctive fractal geometry in 14 authentic Pollock paintings.

When a cache of unknown paintings, possibly by Pollock, were uncovered in 2003, Taylor used his fractal method to evaluate their authenticity. In a 2006 Nature study, Taylor ruled that they lacked the fractal geometry of an authentic Pollock, and that the variability between the paintings suggested they had been done by not one master, but several different artists.

Enter Katherine Jones-Smith. Then a physics grad at Case, Jones-Smith released her own Nature paper in 2006, in which she showed that an intentionally rudimentary doodle of stars was "fractal" enough to satisfy Taylor's definition of a Pollock (which Taylor disputed). Jones-Smith and her co-author, Harsh Mathur, questioned the mathematical validity of applying fractal analysis to the paintings because of the relatively narrow size range between the individual paint drops and the entire painting.

Untitled 5
Katherine Jones-Smith

Jones-Smith has now followed up with another study, described at the March APS meeting, which shows unequivocally that fractal analysis doesn't identify authentic Pollocks:

In the new research, Jones-Smith and colleagues commissioned local painters to create drip paintings in the size and style of Pollock. The researchers applied fractal analyses to two such paintings, and three undisputed Pollock paintings. Both of the two commissioned drip paintings turned out to be fractal, and thus, appeared to be authentic Pollocks. Meanwhile, only one of three undisputed Pollocks was fractal.

"That closes the question," says Jones-Smith, that fractal analyses cannot be used to authenticate the origins of these paintings. Taylor's work was "well-motivated, but when it comes right down to it, it doesn't stand up under scrutiny" Jones-Smith says. "When science does come into these interplays, it should be done with caution, with rigor, with error bars." (source)

The interesting thing is that in the process, Jones-Smith and her colleagues discovered a new way to identify mathematical fractals (which apparently prove more amenable to identification than Jackson Pollocks.) So what began as a specific examination of paintings by a single artist became a study of paintings done in a certain style, and eventually evolved into a description of what might be a general mathematical principle. That's pretty cool.

Art critics are happy, too. In his 1999 paper, Taylor asserted that "scientific objectivity proves to be an essential tool for determining the fundamental content of the abstract paintings produced by Jackson Pollock in the late 1940s." Unsurprisingly, many critics and scholars did not agree that science could discern more about Pollock than they could, and the press spun the debate as an art vs. science showdown, which of course it isn't.

This example of a faulty method underscores that caution is needed when interpreting scientific results, especially when applied to the art world, Peter Lu of Harvard University said at a news briefing March 18 at the APS meeting. "It's a little dangerous for scientists to get too far into the business of providing the final word. I think it's a little more complicated than that." (source)

When Jones-Smith's scientific analysis showed that scientific analysis (at least the fractal kind) can't unambiguously identify a Pollock, that was exactly how science is supposed to work! The truth will out.

It's not too late to blog about your own woman in technology - sign the Ada Lovelace Day pledge today and blog away!

Update: view a map of Ada Lovelace Day entires around the world here.

"Fractal Analysis: Revisiting Pollock's drip paintings." Nature 2006 Katherine Jones-Smith & Harsh Mathur

"Fractal analysis of Pollock's drip paintings." Nature 1999 Richard P. Taylor, Adam P. Micolich & David Jonas

bioephemera Tue, 03/24/2009 - 02:52