thusspakezuska | June 20, 2007I wasn't able to attend the WEPAN national conference this year, and I really missed going. So I was glad that Carol Muller of MentorNet wrote to the WEPAN listserv today with a mini-conference report/follow-up. She covered three topics: the plenary session tribute to Denice Denton; follow-up to a MentorNet panel discussion that mentioned NOGLSTP; and plans for MentorNet for the coming year. There's also a sneak preview for MentorNet at ASEE. Details after the jump.
Carol writes:
I am writing to provide requested and promised follow-up on 3 items which were part of our discussions at…
thusspakezuska | June 20, 2007Thanks to Scienceblogs, I have access to Google Analytics for my blog, which means I can obsess over a wealth of information and statistics. It's amazing what Google knows about my blog. Let's hope Google always and only decides to use its power for good...
Anyhoo, one of the things I can look at is where you, my fabulous blog readers, are situated. I can look by city, region, country, sub-continent region, and continent. Just for the heck of it, I thought I'd take a peek at what countries y'all are hanging out in. I thought I might get a nice handful of countries - surely Canada,…
thusspakezuska | June 19, 2007When I lived in North Carolina, I got to know a woman who worked in one of the Research Triangle labs. She had a baby girl, and I occasionally baby-sat for her. She had named her daughter Melina, which I thought was an incredibly beautiful name for a little girl. I remarked upon this one time, and she said to me "yeah, I like it, and I figure when she's a little older she'll be nicknamed Mel, which isn't too girly."
Melina's mother did not fit any "girly" stereotypes. She had rennovated her house pretty much on her own; she didn't dress in typical feminine garb, and she was, of course,…
thusspakezuska | June 19, 2007For those who may be interested, I have written an addendum to the infamous "I Support Gender Equity in Principle..." post. The very ugly comments thread on that post is now closed. You'll notice you can't post comments here either.
I'm doing this for my mental health. It's either this, or all gardening and no blogging.
thusspakezuska | June 15, 2007It's Friday and though I have no heart for blogging, I promised you last week a new feature called "Friday Bookshelf". I feel some obligation to deliver, especially since I can't seem to get the damn Joy of Science discussion posts finished and now I'm sure they'll take even longer with this new blog malaise on top of a weekend full of activities planned by Mr. Zuska. I've had migraine all day and I haven't eaten so this is bound to be a mess, but for what it's worth...
I made a daring move and took the SECOND book off my bookshelf. It's called The Second X: The Biology of Women by…
thusspakezuska | June 14, 2007I have been thinking all week about the topic for the next scientiae-carnival, "Transitions" and what I might write about. I had thought I would write something about the transition from health to disability, from employed to jobless, from known career to uncertainty about just what to do with my life.
But I didn't get it done and I don't have the heart for it right now.
What I'm thinking about instead at the moment is the transition I made with my blog from relative obscurity at the old site on Radio Userland, to the somewhat more visible position here on Scienceblogs. It's been good…
thusspakezuska | June 13, 2007You may recall that Senator Sam Brownback, erstwhile Presidential candidate, recently wrote a NYTimes op-ed expounding on his raising of the arm during a presidential debate in response to the now-infamous "who doesn't believe in evolution" question. I'm grateful to Page 3.14 for alerting me to Jerry Coyne's article Don't Know Much Biology written in response to Senator Sam Brownback.
I am generally a fan of Jerry Coyne, and this piece is as well-written as anything of his. But on this I think he misses the mark, as do many scientists who criticize the ID brigade, some of my Sciblings…
thusspakezuska | June 13, 2007So, last week I posted the Week 4 Joy of Science reading summaries and since then...nothing. No JoS discussion posts. What's up with that?
I'd say procrastination, but then you'd ask, "why?" I seem to be having an extraordinarily difficult time writing up my discussion of these readings; I know some of the reasons why, which I'll mention in one of the discussion posts, but I'm not really sure why. Writer's block? Weather too nice, would rather play in the garden? But suddenly there are a zillion other things I'd rather blog about, and it's been stormy the last two days, so those can't…
thusspakezuska | June 11, 2007UPDATE: I have appended some text to this post at the end. I have closed the comments on this post because they have become so unpleasant all around and I don't think further dialogue here is serving any positive purpose. If you disagree with me, I'm sorry. I'm also sorry I didn't do this a lot sooner.
I was browsing around Absinthe's blog looking for something in an old post when I happened across an entry I had missed. It seems Absinthe has taken down an older post discussing the differential treatment of two physicists - husband and wife - at Fermilab.
The post commented on an…
thusspakezuska | June 8, 2007Many of my Sciblings have a regular Friday feature of one sort or another. For example, Dr. Free-Ride's got her Friday sprog-blogging, and there's Orac's Friday Dose of Woo over at Respectful Insolence. Karmen has Friday Fractals at Chaotic Utopia, which are particularly fun.
So I'm thinking of trying out my own Friday feature, which I am boringly calling "Friday Bookshelf". I've spent years collecting a mini-library of books on gender and science & engineering. Some of my readers will be familiar with more or less all of them; some may know of relatively few of them. I thought I…
thusspakezuska | June 6, 2007N.B.: Nature Physics (3, 363; 2007) has an editorial on a recent American Physical Society workshop, Gender Equity: Strengthening the Physics Enterprise in Universities and National Laboratories. This post is based** on that editorial, which is behind a paywall; you can read part of it here.
So, the American Physical Society had a gender equity workshop, and all the bigwigs came - chairs of 50 major physics departments, 14 division directors of national labs, leaders from NSF and DOE. "After all, if there is to be change, it has to come from the top." Sounds good on paper. There was…
thusspakezuska | June 6, 2007Welcome to Week 4 of our course on "Feminist Theory and the Joy of Science". This post will be a presentation of the summaries for each of this week's assigned readings. If you were not able to do the readings or couldn't get access to the books, I hope this post will give you a good flavor of what the week's readings were all about.
You can reference the course syllabus for more details about the readings in the whole course and the course structure. Here's the initial post about the course. And here are some guidelines about how I'll post on readings and what we should strive for in…
thusspakezuska | June 5, 2007Yeah, so I promised you the reading summaries for today, and they aren't ready. What's my excuse? I haven't had that many migraines in the past week, only two. Oh, I've been playing in the garden, and I went on a garden tour on Saturday instead of working on the readings all day, and blah blah blah...let me tell you, Donna Haraway makes my brain hurt. I don't know who put this week's readings together but I oughta smack them one. It's a nightmare. Oh, wait, that would be me.
Well, I shall be slogging along the rest of the day and you can expect something more or less coherent tomorrow…
thusspakezuska | June 3, 2007Every week in the Currents section of the Sunday paper, the Philadelphia Inquirer runs a feature called "Influences: What Shapes The Minds That Make The News". It's basically a "twenty questions" type of thing, with the same questions each week, and each week some interesting local bigwig answers it.
This week's bigwig is Catherine T. Hunt, who is president of the American Chemical Society, and is also described as a "leader in technology partnerships, Rohm & Haas Co., in Spring House". Let me just note here that she is also an alumna of Smith College; women's colleges send a…
thusspakezuska | June 3, 2007I sat down on my front porch this afternoon with a cup of coffee and the Philadelphia Inquirer and I was shocked beyond belief to find Jonathan Storm , the Inquirer's tv critic, offering up a critique of not just one new fall tv show, but the entire new fall lineup of all three networks, based on nothing more than "clips and the networks' hyperbole-heavy presentations to advertisers (all a critic has to go on at this early stage)".
Well. This is an outrage! I am particularly hoping that Chris over at Mixing Memory will get on the horn ASAP and let Mr. Storm know just what he thinks of…
thusspakezuska | June 1, 2007Yes, it's Scientiae Carnival time again! FemaleCSGradStudent has asked us "How We Are Hungry", and has collated and contextualized a most interesting set of responses.
Maybe you want to go visit Kat on a Wire and leave her a comment. Online communities can be very, very important for those of us deprived, for whatever reasons, of that community in the meat world.
Addy wants to be taken seriously. I swear, when I read this:
I was recently introduced to a professor emeritus in another department and he asked "are you a grad student?"
My first reaction was, "Hey, why is she writing about…
thusspakezuska | May 31, 2007The next Scientiae Carnival topic is How We Are Hungry. scientiae-carnival
We spent the Memorial Day holiday weekend at Mom's house, so hunger and food are topics much on my mind. Sunday we had a cookout at my brother's house; the weather was perfect, and Brother Zuska was in his element at the grill/smoker, delivering up enough grilled meat to feed at least three times as many people as we had there. Food - feeding each other, sharing meals - has always been a big deal in my family. Are you familiar with the Wedding Song? One time my sisters and I made up parody lyrics to it,…
thusspakezuska | May 31, 2007So, the Chronicle of Higher Education announced a new blog On Hiring. An item of interest: Don't Just Search, Recruit. There's a link in the post to a Heads Up column on the topic, which I read in this week's print version.
It's a great article, with lots of good tips, most of which are summarized neatly in the On Hiring blog post.
Design a Web site dedicated to the search with links that will showcase the institution and the community.
Advertise in multiple venues so "the greatest number of people have the potential to see the announcement."
A little extra personal attention goes…
thusspakezuska | May 31, 2007From the Chronicle daily update:
The White House announced on Tuesday the winners of the 2005 National Medals of Science, the nation's highest scientific honor. The prizes recognize achievement in the physical, biological, mathematical, social, behavioral, and engineering sciences.
I'm shocked, shocked! to discover no women's names on the list of honorees.
And now...let the comment whiners commence whining
thusspakezuska | May 31, 2007From the Chronicle of Higher Education daily update, I learned about a forthcoming book, Mothers on the Fast Track: How a New Generation Can Balance Family and Careers:
In the new book, Ms. Mason and Ms. Ekman say it is common for women who start off in fast-track jobs in law, medicine, academe, and business to slip into the "second tier" once they have children.
Those jobs, they write, have fewer and more flexible hours, but do not pay as well and offer less responsibility. It is often difficult for women who slip into the second tier to make it back into the upper echelons of an…