Women in Free Software

Diablo III: "You click things; they die."

2012-05-18T18:28:25+00:00

My brother provided the best review I've seen of Diablo III when I asked him how he liked the beta: "You click things; they die." That sums up the Diablo experience in a lot of ways.

Other people may tell you that "Diablo III: Lords of Disconnection" sums things up too, but to be honest, that hasn't been my experience. Since launch day, I've rarely had to wait more than a few minutes, and I haven't played alone at all, so it's clear many of my friends are getting in too, including some who I haven't played games with in years since we stopped playing the same games. Even on launch day, sometimes the disconnections just gave us more chance to voice chat on another server.

So I've been spending a lot of my spare time over the past few days clicking things with friends, and it's been fun. The Diablo experience, for me, has always been about playing with other people. Back when Diablo II came out, my siblings and I learned networking and bought equipment just so we could hook up our machines and click things together! My first laptop, mostly a linux box, kept its windows partition just for playing Diablo. That game was probably also one of the experiences that really fermented my opinion that the players make games a lot more interesting: We still reminisce about sitting in my parents' basement, running around with broken armour, trying to punch Diablo in the nose. That wasn't part of the intended narrative of the game at the time, but that and the Diablo-killing polka became part of our personal narratives of the game.

Playing Diablo with my siblings in the early morning of launch day was all everything I wanted out of the new game right there, especially since we don't even live in the same country anymore. We had a laugh when my sister noticed that "punch Diablo" is an achievement in the new game.

I've actually spent so much time clicking things that sometimes I go to bed with a sore hand to match my sore ankle. (This week I ditched the cane; It's been good, but tiring and my ankle now has a dull ache from use.) Obviously, repetitive strain is a bad thing, but it does make a nice testament to having fun that I don't even notice 'till it's time for bed! My only real complaint is that I can't play with more than 3 other people at a time. Good games + good friends always equals good times.

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Linkspammmmm (18th May, 2012)

2012-05-18T15:40:43+00:00

Enjoy!

A tool to help fix sexism in tech: The Inclusive Team Tests.

The Inclusive Team Tests are a collection of tests which can be used to roughly determine how inclusive a team is of a particular group. The level of inclusiveness (or disadvantagement) that a particular group might experience within a certain working environment can be expressed as a score on the test.
Two women got on this year’s Hugo ballot for best short story: Nancy Fulda for “Movement” and E. Lily Yu for “The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees”.
Sweden just added the gender-neutral pronoun hen (similar to an English “ze”) to their National Encyclopedia, and the Henerator is a plugin that switches all han (Swedish for “he”) and hon (“she”) to the new pronoun. More info here.
Title says it all on this one: On Female Characters: This isn’t Highlander. There can be more than one.
A gaming analogy to explain privilege: Straight White Male, The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is.
Women In Magic, The 2012 Edition: combating sexism at competitive Magic: The Gathering events.
A large scale link round up on Sexism in Geek Culture, with a look at Comics.

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on delicious or pinboard.in or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Thanks to everyone who suggested links.

Why WotC’s Sexism in Gaming Art Article Made Me Happy

2012-05-17T20:42:03+00:00

Eva Schiffer is a Computer Scientist and a second generation tabletop gamer. This guest post is cross-posted from her blog.

WotC recently published a post titled Sexism in Fantasy that’s caused a lot of mixed reactions. I want to talk about why the article, if not it’s content, made me happy.

I see myself as a feminist. I know by putting that out there at the beginning I’m raising a lot of expectations about what I care about, how I react to things, and what I’m likely to defend. I’m also a relatively laid back person, despite some of my blog rants, and I’ve been through a long journey trying to understand sexism and feminism. For me this journey was many small cycles of “not getting it” punctuated by bursts of insight as I incorporated new ideas into my worldview. I grew up in the gaming world and for a long time I was so used to how things are that the roots and implications of the many traditions were invisible to me.

I’ve also watched many of my friends go through various cycles of getting and not getting aspects of sexism, racism, and other -isms. I’m not going to claim to be super enlightened… I mess up on ableism issues all the time… but I’ve reached a point where that cycle is familiar to me.

When I read WotC’s article what I saw was Jon Schindehette going through one of the early cycles of trying to understand sexism. He was “not quite getting it” and honestly if he’s just starting to struggle with these issues, I can’t blame him for not understanding them all at once. I’ve been there and I’ve fallen in the same pitfalls. I wish he had gotten further along before he wrote a public article… but he has my empathy as to why getting there takes time.

Jon tried to approach the problem logically and understand what sexism is and what it’s doing to gaming. He fell short on three fronts. One is that he didn’t do enough research on discussion that’s already taking place in the online community. Blogs like Go Make Me a Sandwich contain lots of resources that include frank discussion of the sort he’s trying to elicit. Tumblrs like Women Fighters In Reasonable Armor include loads of beautiful examples of art that’s attractive and pretty while presenting characters who look like people rather than toys. The fact that Jon didn’t bring up any of these resources makes me suspicious that he didn’t do this kind of research. He tried to start from square one by himself and he suffered for it. It’s a lot easier if you build on the work others have already done. ;)

The second problem Jon ran into was that he got into his logical investigation and backed off when he was starting to get somewhere. The definition of sexism he found, which seems quite reasonable to me, was, “Sexism is defined as having an attitude, condition, or behavior that promotes stereotyping of social roles based upon one’s gender.” That’s a good start. After talking about it for a bit he failed to take the next step and investigate gender roles.

To start understanding how sexism could promote stereotyping, you need to ask: “what gender roles might we be perpetuating?” Wikipedia has a good overview of historical gender roles. However, in the last 30 years, gender roles have changed. The “perfect submissive wife” ideal is not what our societal norms think women should be anymore. Unfortunately, there are still some very damaging gender roles out there for men and women.

One of the ones that hurts women the most is the idea that they must always be physically attractive and sexually available for men. This is sometimes called the Beauty Myth, and it’s the big problem one Jon missed. The Beauty Myth says a woman can be a brilliant rocket scientist, but if she isn’t also pretty, she’s not really worthwhile as a woman and no one will love her.

One of the roles that hurts men the most is the idea that they can only succeed financially and aren’t particularly physically attractive to women. This is also called the Success Myth. This is rather insidious because the Success Myth says that an average man needs to find a high paying job if he wants any hope of attracting a woman. If he suffers setbacks in his career or prefers to do something that is low paying, then he’s worthless and no one will love him.

Here’s a good summary of these two roles and how they hurt us from a male perspective.

The twin roles define a lot of our popular culture and they bleed into our fantasy as well. The Beauty Myth is why people fixate on making female characters beautiful even when “beautiful” crosses the line into impractical and unrealistic. The Success Myth is why we’re still unbelievably stuck on the “guy succeeds and then guy gets the girl” story plot.

Back to Jon… the third thing that I think went wrong for him is that he stumbled into some very basic fallacies talking about an -ism. This is a pretty common mistake and while embarrassing, isn’t all that surprising. Fallacy one is to assume that whatever went before is ok by virtue of being tradition. This was mostly justified by “market forces” in the article. If all tradition was free of -isms life would be sunshine and kittens and I wouldn’t have to write any blog posts in the ‘feminism’ category. :)

More seriously, a lot of people think “feminism happened, sexism is done now, right?” and sadly the answer is no. It takes a long time to change culture and there’s a lot of momentum. That’s not to say we need to flip out and throw all of our traditions out the window tomorrow. We can start by calmly taking a step back and making a few rational changes at a time towards a better, less -ism filled world.

The second fallacy Jon made was while talking about his three images. He got a bit muddy because he couldn’t see the modern roles affecting them and drifted into the “it’s really all opinion, anyway” argument. There is some opinion in everything, I agree. Sadly the existence of a systemic problem in media and in gaming media specifically isn’t really up for debate. It’s been discussed at length by a lot of people, especially authors. You can’t use the fact that some people can’t identify prejudice to justify prejudice not existing at all… that’s downright Paranoia levels of circular logic.

I want to be clear: being a bit blind to sexism doesn’t mean you’re some sort of horrible misogynistic asshole who’s running around saying terrible things all the time, it just means you haven’t quite figured out how to see sexism hidden in the world around you. All of us have been there, you don’t need to be ashamed of it, just do your best to keep an open mind and learn. :)

The final fallacy that Jon fell into was the “a few people complained, but lots of people like it, so everything must be great!” The argument “lots of people agree with me, therefore I’m right!” is not meaningful, especially when you’re talking about -isms. It’s an appeal to base social pressure and has no bearing on the correctness of your argument.

I suppose at this point you’re probably wondering how I’m going to justify the title of this post. Well, to be totally honest, as much as parts of the article irritated me, Jon redeemed himself in my eyes by taking the initiative to write about something as scary as sexism in the first place, making an honest (if flawed) attempt to learn, and asking for our input.

I can remember the first time that I tried to write up a post on a feminist topic. I think my hand was actually shaking when I pressed the “Publish” button. It’s scary putting yourself out there to talk about any issue of prejudice, because we all know our culture is so ready to throw a firestorm back in your face if you get anything “wrong.” I appreciate and respect that Jon was willing to try and that WotC was willing to let him.

When I reached the end of his article I was overjoyed that he openly solicited our feedback and I was presented with a comment box to put my thoughts into. Wow, was I happy. I didn’t even realize how happy I was until I’d spent an hour skimming and “liking” other people’s comments. I wanted a chance to speak to WotC directly and he gave that to me, which I’m deeply grateful for. The number of people who posted ernest, well thought out comments, some with great links to resources, made me feel better about the community. It made me feel like other people believe I belong here. :)

A lot of the commenters were talking to Jon too and most were very civil. Some offered him links to resources (like some of the ones I posted above) and encouragement. I’m hoping he’s taken some of those links and moved forward on his own path to understanding.

So, thank you, Jon, and thank you, WotC. It had some issues, but I appreciated the outreach and the effort that went into it. Please keep learning and write more about sexism and other -isms in gaming in the future. :)

Slowly, slowly, catchy monkey

2012-05-17T11:45:40+00:00

It’s been a while since I last blogged, so I thought I’d just update you on what’s been going on. The first thing is that after I realised that the Queen of the May Kickstarter project wasn’t going to work out, I did a bit of thinking about what it was I was trying to achieve. I realised – and this is something that I probably should have thought about earlier – that what I really need to do is just fishing up the two novellas I’ve got in progress and get them out there.

So that’s my plan, and what a simple, elegant plan it is too! I am being very strict and spending time every day working on Queen of the May, primarily on preparing for what is going to be a significant rewrite. I will produce a handful of hand-bound books once it is finished, so you will be able to get your hands on a physical copy.

I also realised that actually a big motivator for doing the Kickstarter project when I did it was, not to put too fine a point on it, money. As a freelance, it can be a bit scary when the work diary is a little sparse and after a big client was afflicted by budget cuts, I felt possibly a bit more pressure to ramp up the crowdfunding. Ach, well, live and learn, no harm no foul, and other platitudes.

My blogging over on Forbes is taking up quite a lot of the headspace that I would have used on blogging here. That’s not necessarily a bad thing – the Forbes blog is proving to be quite good for profile-raising, which is what I need right now. I’m also getting quite a bit of contact from crowdfunding platforms and seeing research and information that I otherwise wouldn’t. Very useful!

Finally, I just got diagnosed with a not inconsequential ovarian cyst which is currently some 8cm across. So I’m permanently a little bit achy, a little bit tired, and a little bit needing a pee. It’ll be a while before I get a judgement on whether they’re going to remove it or do something else – given my poor bladder is currently squished up into a boomerang shape, I really hope they chop it out. I’m not massively worried about it, as ovarian cysts are common and treatment is pretty routine, but I will be happy to have it gone.

So, despite the quietude here, things are proceeding apace and hopefully I’ll have more concrete news on the ETA for Queen of the May once I’ve got my teeth properly into the rewrite. Patience, as they say, is its own reward.

Upcoming: A Year in Europe

2012-05-17T00:49:12+00:00

Mozilla is an increasingly global community. This is important to the success of our mission. If we hope to have a world of openness and opportunity for all we should be building centers of gravity in many different locales. Silicon Valley in California is still the center of a big chunk of the Internet industry, but Mozilla’s commitment to the Internet as a global public resource means we in particular focus on building leaders in many other places.

With this in mind my family and I have decided to get ourselves out of California for a bit. We’re planning to move to Barcelona next September for a year. Barcelona is not only in the heart of Europe, it’s much closer to the middle east and Africa, and it’s no further from the east coast of Latin America than California. (Although getting to Asia may be a longer trip.) I expect to be able to spend much more time with many more local Mozilla communities.

This is a change of geography, not of commitment to Mozilla. I expect to spend more time meeting Mozillians and more time focusing on project dynamics. I want to strengthen the ability for local leaders to become regional and global leaders in Mozilla.

I also expect to spend more time representing Mozilla to governments, policy-makers and other organizations interested in Mozilla and the Internet. By being located in Europe, we will be able to give more support to the critical issues being discussed in that region. I will also stay involved in our product efforts, as these are so key to have we achieve our mission. Perhaps I’ll find the time to do some of the writing that would be so helpful.

I’m not (yet???) a Spanish-speaker, so I will undoubtedly spend a bunch of time off-balance and trying to figure out how basic things work.

September will be here soon. We’re excited!

Customer Service and internalized racism

2012-05-14T21:59:39+00:00

I had a not so great experience with a customer service rep on one of those live-chat things today, so I sent in a complaint after suffering through statements like "when u log in with yr used id and password what does it comes?"

I got a response back, which was nice, but it included a variant on "she's a great rep but English isn't her first language"

And while they don't really try to claim it's an excuse, it got me thinking... is our collective distaste for outsourced customer service and non-native speakers part of some internalized racism?

It's got a some of the hallmarks, but I don't really think it's the core issue. The core issue is communication and failure thereof. If I'd gotten that sentence above from a native speaker (and believe me, I've seen worse chatting with folk in games) I'd still have made my complaint that she didn't seem very professional with her tendency to abbreviate words that were already three or four letters long. It still would have been a problem that despite me telling her explicitly 3 times that I was not a student, she was still telling me to click on a "student" tab that doesn't appear in my interface and thus couldn't help me with that part of the question.

So then the question is, why tell me that she's a non-native speaker? Are you just trying to make me feel guilty about complaining about her? She still did a poor job today; it doesn't really matter to me if she's normally better at it or if it's harder for her than it would be for me. I just wanted to report that so that she could be helped with her listening and writing skills, as well as her knowledge about the differing interfaces to the system.

I'm used to making allowances for poor language skills (native and non-native speakers alike) within the university system, but when communication is the job she's being paid to do, I think it's fair for me to complain when her language skills are not at the level I expect.

In conclusion, it's always good to examine internal racism, but making a complaint about poor customer service seems fair regardless.

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ISOC Hall of Fame and Grad School Memories

2012-05-14T17:17:58+00:00

After I posted the ISOC piece, I got an unexpected message from an old, old friend. Apparently he was part of the Internet Society Hall of Fame process. This brings back so many memories. The person in question has been deep in IETF related topics for many years. In addition, he was one of the most generous people I’ve ever known about sharing his understanding of technology and his resources. Many years ago when I was in grad school he gave me keys to his office, set aside an old piece of technology for me to use and provided the basic support I needed.

As a result, my graduate school notes were all taken on an old, otherwise-decommissioned CP/M machine with 8″ floppy drives. As it turned out, my preferred study partner in grad school was also using such an ancient machine, and it mean we could share notes. My study partner was used to preparing “briefing books” for governor – level public officials, our our law school notes increasingly took on the look of briefing books as years went by. He was also the only other person I knew in my class to took 4 years to complete law school, so we both started together and finished together. (I spent the extra year living and traveling in China, he spent it getting an additional Master’s degree.) That extra year was pivotal for me, changing by worldview in so many ways.

Today the near-ubiquity of the network means it’s hard to imagine being far, far way from global communications systems. My time traveling in China (including Tibet, Taiwan and Hong Kong), Burma, Thailand, and Nepal, before cell phones and before the Internet is something I treasure. I came back from my longest trip to find both of us in our 4th year of law school (imagine being proud of that ). And to find the greatest measure of success: we had each learned each other’s most effective techniques. When a question came up, we would find him reasoning from the principles he remembered, and me leafing through the briefing book to find the materials we had already prepared. This was one of our finest moments: we had taught each other a whole new set of tools.

And then I’d bicycle through Berkeley back to “my” office. Sometimes I’d be alone there. Sometimes my friend would have given a set of keys to others and I’d find new people there. (If you happen to know “gumby” you’ll know what I mean.) We were above the pizza parlor and the California Girls massage studio, where bats appeared each evening off the fire-escape. I saw my first Mac in this office. I first came across email here (gumby, again!). I first encountered the IETF (long before the Web) here. I learned what an extraordinary place MIT is, especially at night during finals. At some point the office moved to slightly more upscale setting (no pizza, no massage). People came and went though, each bringing something.

I’m still not as generous as this friend with my personal space. I need more privacy that he did. But office space, and sharing resources, and connecting people, and wanting people to build on whatever resources I can bring to the party — I learned a lot about this from the friend in question. It’s not what people think of as a “law school education.”

I went to grad school at Berkeley Law (known as Boalt Hall School of Law in my day); one of the great legal institutions in the US. I was fortunate; the University and the State of California invested in me. I’m proud of being a UC Berkeley grad. I’m a little stunned by what I’ve been able to achieve with it. And there, generally unseen but critical nonetheless, I learned to share. In some ways this is the most rewarding.

I’ve found that sharing — sharing wildly, sharing boldly, and reveling in what others do with the sparks I send their way — is liberating. It’s powerful. And it makes me part of a community of people that gives me hope for the future.

Construction in America

2012-05-14T07:04:27+00:00

University Link Light Rail from University Link on Vimeo.

This video is good until the incongruous Henry Ford quote at the end.

sporty

2012-05-14T06:40:37+00:00

I was never sporty. I was definitely not team sporty. During high school I used to schedule my instrumental lessons to coincide with phys-ed. The sport I was good at was archery, but most kids don't appreciate that.

So it seems strange to look at myself nowadays and realise that I'm enjoying sport and I'm enjoying team sport. Who are you? my Mum joked. I'm playing netball, I'm swimming laps, I'm organising to go cycling and play squash. I tried to get into jogging, but that hasn't really happened.

I think for me, most of this is being motivated by netball. I am really enjoying playing netball because I really enjoy the people I'm playing with. None of us are really very good, so there's no clique of the can-plays and can't-plays. I'm tall, which is useful and I have long legs, which makes up a little for not being that quick, which serve to make me an okay player. This feels like a big difference from school, where everyone seemed more athletic than me.

Similarly I'm enjoying swimming, because I have a friend to do it with and motivate me. It was like that playing squash last year, but life got in the way. Planning on a return to that, perhaps alternating with swimming.

Going to make another attempt at the jogging thing, although maybe in the spring. We'll see how that goes. Although again, I think I need a buddy to get me motivated.

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Applying pedagogical skillz to FOSS projects: Plover case study

2012-05-13T22:31:47+00:00

When I was in New York at the end of April, Mirabai and I sat down and hacked through a lot of pedagogy thinking for plover, an open source steno software project. We made a concept map to see how various skills were connected and a list of what, exactly, made certain skills difficult to learn.

I’m posting this with curiosity about two things:

How understandable are these notes to someone who wasn’t part of the conversation (in the basement of a little tea shop with fantastic panini)?
From what you can see here, would any of this sort of thinking/work/process be useful to other FOSS (or open content/hardware/Free Culture) projects with an educational component — whether that’s new developer outreach, “students” as a user group for the software product, a software product that’s specialized and/or difficult to learn, or anything else?

This is a concept map showing the connections between the topics (the things in boxes – skills and concepts) that make up the ability to do steno at a basic level. You can see strong (double-lines) and weak (single-lines) connections between topics. Clockwise from top, they are…

EC – error correction (delete, backspace, arrow keys, etc)
CUST – customizing your own dictionary
CORE – using a basic “core” dictionary (the one that comes pre-loaded with Plover)
EXCEPT – dealing with exceptions to phonetic rules
PHON->CHORDS – mapping phonemes (auditory) to chords (on the keyboard)
READ – reading steno shorthand (being able to look at a brief for a word, immediately chord that word on your own keyboard, and have a good guess as to what that word might be in English)
THERE ARE PHONEMES! – breaking down words into phonemes instead of letters
KeyBoarD LAYOUT – what keys on the qwerty (sidewinder) keyboard map to what letters on the steno keyboard; mostly building muscle memory.
ALPHabet – the ability to type individual letters on the steno keyboard (vital at the start when you don’t know the briefs for many words).

The numbers by each box (for instance, 3/3/6 (9) right above the “EC” block) are totals for strong links, weak links, total links, and a weighted sum (2*strong + 1*weak) for each concept. This is to help us see which concepts are the most centrally connected, which is sometimes surprising – for instance, I didn’t expect “READing stenographic shorthand” to be almost half as “important” (by number of connections) than being able to use the delete key! (in “Error Correction”)

The orange highlights were things we tagged as “enduring understanding” — if you study steno and only remember three things, the most important ones to remember are…

Dictionary construction – the connection between EXCEPT(ions to the phonetic system) and CUST(omizing your own dictionary)
Transliteration – the connection between THERE ARE PHONEMES! and mapping PHONemes-to-CHORDS.
KeyBoarD LAYOUT – skill as described above.

This is a description of “why these concepts are difficult to learn” — it uses the same topics as listed above, which you can probably figure out by reading the descriptions. For instance, the concept of phonemes is really easy to learn (I think most of us “get it” when we first figure out what stenography is). In contract, error correction is inert (you can learn the “delete” key, and then totally forget what the chord is when you’re in the middle of transcribing something) and tacit (one of those things you’re just expected to “pick up” somehow — it’s so natural to advanced practitioners that it’s easy to forget that beginners need to be taught about it!).Sometimes, knowing why something is difficult to learn can help you figure out how to practice it. For instance, learning the alphabet is hard because it relies on skill — the muscle memory of learning the letters — so drilling over and over is probably a good way to learn that. However, the same kind of drilling may not be the best way to learn how to read steno syntax.So… readers, what did you get out of this, and is there something we can do to help you understand this more, or apply it to your own projects?

Internet Society Hall of Fame

2012-05-13T22:13:08+00:00

A couple of weeks ago the Internet Society started a Hall of Fame at its 20th anniversary gathering.

The best part of the event for me occurred at the Gala dinner. That’s when they got the groups of Hall of Fame members on stage. Most importantly, they started with the Pioneers group. A few of the pioneers are no longer with us, Bob Kahn couldn’t make it, and there were undoubtedly a few people who could have been included but weren’t. Even so, it was a visceral moment for me. There, on stage together, was the greatest concentration of the designers and creators of the Internet that we’re likely to see together.

The Internet has proved to be a revolutionary technology. And everything we’ve built with the web sits on top of the Internet. The principles of decentralization, freedom at the edges, the ability to innovate, leadership by action rather than status are all reflected in the early work of this pioneer group. Not to mention the development of the key technologies. I feel very fortunate to have been in the audience at that moment. I’m very grateful to Walda Roseman of the Internet Society for not letting me miss the event.

The Hall of Fall Induction Ceremony was also fun. I am of course very honored to be included in the initial class of people included in the Hall of Fame. It’s a great honor and reflects all that we’ve achieved with Mozilla as well as whatever particular talents I bring. The Hall of Fame induction ceremony was invitation-only I believe, and much smaller than the dinner. Not every member of this class of Hall of Fame members was there, but a bunch of us were. (Here’s a photo of most of us who were at the event.) Each of us was asked to give 1 to 2 minutes of comments. Most spoke for longer. I think Brewster gets the award for the closest to 1 minute I don’t know if these comments were recorded. I’ve looked a bit online but haven’t found these. I did find a set of pictures of most of us as we made our remarks (scroll down a few rows to find these). Many of the speakers described what it was like in the early days and how they came up with their inventions. Steve Crocker talked about the RFP process and its relationship to the development of standards. Randy Bush talked about the people — in particular the women of Africa and Asia — who weren’t represented in this class. Tim Berners Lee and Vint Cerf talked about the organic nature of the web and the internet, respectively. Vint told some jokes as well.

Nancy Hafkin and Elizabeth Feinler both accepted the award only on behalf of groups they had worked with, identifying the women they though should be there with them. This interested me a great deal. There were 3 women in the Hall of Fame group; I’m the third. I had thought about accepting the award not solely for myself but ended up talking about the Web and our goals for building openness and opportunity instead. (For some reason I was the first of the Hall of Famers to speak at the ceremony.) I spoke about how the Internet was always there — available, decentralized, open to exploration and innovation — as we began to build the World Wide Web. Both the other women were quite explicit that they were accepting on behalf of a group.

I almost didn’t get to these events. I first heard about the event in February, when Walda asked to speak at the event opening on Monday morning. I declined because I was at MozCamp LatAm for the weekend before and that was too important to miss, even for something else very special. In February I also heard about the Internet Society’s planned Hall of Fame. I had missed the public call for nominations, so I immediately started lobbying for someone (not me) to be included. Eventually I was told it was too late for this year, I should submit my nomination during next year’s process. The Internet Society folks suggested I speak at the closing event on Tuesday, and we managed to make that schedule work. It was only later that I learned that I had been included in the Hall of Fame and that the ceremony as well as the talk would be so special.

I gave a 15 minute closing keynote. I followed Francis Gurry, the director-general of the World Intellectual Property Organization. In turn, I was followed by Vint Cerf, who closed the entire event.

2012-05-13T21:44:59+00:00

Marlowe: http://www.poetry-online.org/marlowe_the_passionate_shepherd_to_his_love.htm Raleigh: http://www.luminarium.org/renlit/nymphsreply.htm William Carlos Williams: http://producer.csi.edu/cdraney/2010/175/etexts/raleigh-was-right_williams.html Who else would spend Sunday evening arguing about these poems? I love my husband!

Extended update: Strattera, pita bread, German/stats swapping, Zachery, and Nunsense

2012-05-13T12:56:05+00:00

So, Strattera! As it turns out, being able to focus more easily is nice, but I also like being able to sleep and eat, so… I am rapidly becoming not-a-fan (even I need more than 3 hours of sleep, and after 5 days the insomnia is wearing thin). We’ll see what ADHD meds I get next.

Had dinner with Jaqi’s family last week, and ended that evening building a rocket ship out of legos with her tiniest son (it was a very good evening). I was trading website-making lessons for cooking lessons, and now I can make homemade pita bread, which is the greatest thing since… okay, I know that sliced bread postdates pita bread in human history, but it predates it in my history, so the analogy still holds.

I will be making homemade pita bread on Tuesday night before I go to the Gerndt’s, because it is delicious. Jennifer is a doctoral student in German Linguistics whose dissertation focuses on teaching pronunciation, and whose datasets have grown to the point where it is difficult to manually analyze them. I am a deaf language learner with (consequently) big German pronunciation struggles who has a background teaching programming and math. We are therefore spending weekday evenings this Maymester in a glorious knowledge-swap (started last Wednesday) which I must write in more detail about in a separate post, because we are trying to log our adventures.

To make life even better, Jennifer and her husband Seb (yeah, it’s confusing – and both Sebastians are from Germany – but her husband goes by the nickname whereas my boyfriend refuses all abbreviations, so I’ll use that to distinguish) have two huge, friendly dogs that I adore completely. The last few weeknight evenings have been spent scratching a very contented dog’s belly while alternately playing with Python and listening to Jen and Seb speak German and attempting to isolate my tricky sounds, which is leading to the acquisition of an amusing vocabulary set: for instance, I must have said “Scheiße!” (“Shit!”) several dozen times while trying to figure out the “s” sound. (You have to admit that it is a good word for practicing the “s” sound.) Now there’s a double-bonus — I’ll practice hard sounds every time I curse in frustration (and trust me, learning how to say sounds you can’t hear is no walk in the park.) But anyhow, more notes on that later.

I love being in academia. Friday lunch was with Zachery Koppelmann, an English doctoral student who’s doing his dissertation on teaching composition to engineering undergraduates; the man clearly has more patience than I ever will. Pondering the same topic from two very different disciplinary perspectives (engineering and english) illuminated a lot of both perspectives for both of us — for instance, I’d taken Conway’s Law combined with the stated (but illusory) desire for meritocracy (and its consequence of topical expertise trumping titlular hierarchy) to be the way all meetings and organizations worked, but when I started illustrating meeting dynamics by drawing system block diagrams, Zachery assured me that was not the case in liberal arts. He (a military veteran) had not considered the impact of the GI bill on engineering education before our lunch — all of a sudden, a far more diverse group of people came into the field, at the same time as engineering professors began coming from research rather than industry backgrounds. Yeah, that might all have something to do with how engineers write. Deep geekery is fun, and if that’s a conversation between two grad students, how much better are these discussions going to get when we’re all professors decades and decades along in our field? Yesssss.

Watched Nunsense! peformed in ASL last night with my dad and my cousin Mark; my old interpreter Christine was the director, and it was fantastic to see her again for the first time in over a decade. The show was hilarious. I have no idea how they got deaf actresses to tap-dance (then again, I couldn’t hear if it was in unison — though Mark said the tap dancing was “pretty good.”) They cut some songs from the original script and reassigned others, but “Sister Julia, Child of God” never fails to crack me up, and the Reverend Mother unknowingly eating pot brownies and giggling all across the stage for the first act’s final number was… wow. The most interesting adaptation was to Sister Amnesia’s puppet show — in the original (non-ASL) production, the actress does ventriloquism with a hand puppet, which won’t work for an ASL version — not only can the puppet not sign, Sister Amnesia loses a signing hand. Instead, another actress dressed up as a puppet and signed the puppet’s part, leaving Sister Amnesia free to sign herself.

Breakfast with dad (perhaps) now, and then driving back to Indiana to do work. Mmm, work! First day of summer classes is tomorrow; I’m doing 6 credits (advanced qualitative research methods in education, plus modern dance 101 and an independent study teaching my blogging class) so I’d best get ready.

Giraffe!

2012-05-12T23:50:33+00:00

I saw this giraffe pattern on Ravelry and knew I had to try it for the next person with a baby on the way... and a few weeks later one of my colleagues announced that his wife was pregnant with their first kid!

Crochet Giraffe
by Terriko.

I'm absurdly early -- the kid's not due for another 5 months or so -- but this worked up really quickly. Now I need to decide if I should give it to him right away and then have an excuse to make something else if the lab decides to do a shower, or if I should wait so I don't look a little obsessed.

... Oh wait, everyone in the lab watches me crochet/knit constantly during meetings. I guess he gets the giraffe on Monday. ;)

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It is not change that causes anxiety; it is the feeling that we are without defenses in the presence of what we see as danger.

2012-05-10T21:22:01+00:00

I’m tired of people saying things like “oh, people are naturally resistant to change” or “everyone’s afraid of change” or “change is hard,” and treating those statements like Immovable Axioms that One Cannot Change Or Argue Against. They’re not entirely untrue; change is sometimes hard and scary. However, we’re not going to get anywhere if we use that as an excuse for not looking deeper.

It is not change that causes anxiety; it is the feeling that we are without defenses in the presence of what we see as danger… –Kegan & Lahey, Immunity to Change

I love the first part. Seriously, folks; I put on a new t-shirt every day, but that doesn’t cause me to go into paroxysms of fear as I stare at the closet in the morning. I’d be bored to tears if I had to eat the same thing for dinner every night, and think nothing of the sky going dark every evening. I look forward to starting new classes, getting new books, to the births of my new little nephews (welcome to the world, Oobs and Ewan!) We go through tons of changes that we’re not the least bit anxious about. (Okay, maybe my cousins were anxious about their babies being born, but I sure wasn’t.) Point being: not all change causes anxiety.

So what does? That’s the second part of the quote. There are two parts to it that I want to highlight.

It is the feeling that we are without defenses.

The feeling. Not the objective reality (if there is such a thing). If someone believes they are defenseless — if they don’t realize there’s a safety net, if they don’t think others will step in to protect them, if they don’t trust their own abilities to make everything okay — regardless of the situation, they will be afraid, and they will probably resist change.

In the presence of what we see as danger.

Again, subjectivity. If you don’t see something as a danger but someone else does, then of course they’re going to be more anxious than you. This works the other way around too; my parents and boyfriend are a lot more concerned about me walking around strange cities alone at night than I am.

And note that these two things together; if I’m without defenses but am confident that no danger will arrive, I’m not anxious — actually, I feel pretty safe. For instance, I feel fine walking around my apartment barefoot because I know there aren’t sharp things on the floor that could hurt me. And if you’re in the presence of something you think is dangerous, but you have defenses you feel are sufficient, you’re also going to be just fine; I know I would stand no chance against a full-grown tiger, but had no problem watching one pace behind thick glass the last time I went to the zoo.

Implication: to fix anxiety (whether it’s linked to change or not), make the fearful person either (1) feel like they’re well-protected, or (2) believe that what they’re seeing isn’t dangerous.

Sounds simpler than it is; this is still hard work. But it’s a heck of a lot better than going “well, people just don’t like change!” and throwing our hands up and walking away.

Well, I passed my classes.

2012-05-10T15:34:11+00:00

Not only did I pass my classes, I pulled off an entirely respectable performance; 3 A’s, an A+, and a B. That was carrying 13 graduate credits (4 classes and an independent study) at a place where a full load is 3 classes (9 credits).

What. The. Hell.

Yes, I’m sure some of this is impostor syndrome speaking, but… but… I feel like I did that with luck, not skill or planning. Luck, and panic and last-minute scrambling and trying not to cry so I could see the papers I was writing at 3 in the morning. My apartment looks like a bomb filled with academic papers exploded in it, which is pretty close to the truth; the materials cited for all 4 of my term papers are sprawled everywhere — desks, tables, kitchen counter, floor, stacked on stools, across the sofa… I’m eating breakfast atop a drift of papers that’s 2 inches thick in some places.

I can perform at this level (so far), but I’m not turning out anywhere near the quality of work I could. I see it when I look at my writing; there are logical flaws I can fix now, holes in my research I know how to patch, places where my arguments are weak, though these are often obscured behind a plaster of fluent writing (the ability to bullshit is both a blessing and a curse). Therefore: ADHD coping strategies! And medication, now; I started with Strattera yesterday and am trying to get used to my brain having a different sort of inertia than I’m used to, though it’s also early and the effects haven’t kicked in fully yet.

One of the things that’s shifted this year is the way I see myself. I’m an engineer. I grew into becoming one, and now I am one, and ought to be confident in that; I don’t know everything, but can always learn what I need to know. And I’ll always be an engineer; I have that now. But right now, I am not doing engineering as a career. (Well, not much; there’s often a little something on the side, but it’s not my full-time focus like it used to be.)

Instead, I’m a researcher and a writer. It’s kind of odd to realize that. I’m actually a writer; this is now what I do professionally — if you think about what academics get evaluated on, it’s mostly stuff that’s formatted in text. I’m a writer that has domain-specific knowledge (in engineering and engineering education) that I need to have and hone and keep updated in order to write well — but at the end of the day, I am a writer now, and that’s pretty cool. (Katrina — it took me a decade to get here, but I’m here!)

So I need to stop worrying about things like “but… but I don’t understand signal processing yet!” and actually focus on training in this craft, the craft of writing, the craft of being a scholar. This doesn’t mean I’m going to lose touch with making and doing (that would be… hard) but it does mean I will also be thinking of them as a means to better writing as well as a satisfying end in and of themselves.

And then maybe, this summer and this fall and into the next year, I can start producing writing that I’m proud of.

Girls and Robots

2012-05-08T22:07:57+00:00

Andrea Phillips is an award-winning transmedia writer, game designer and author. This is a guest post, cross-posted from Deus Ex Machinatio.

My daughter Maya is five and a half years old. She’s in kindergarten, and is as clever and adventurous a child as you’ve ever seen. She loves dancing and princesses and rainbows and anything that is pink.

Maya has also always, always loved cars and robots, right along with those butterflies and flowers and hearts. But recently she’s been saying that she doesn’t like these things anymore.

“I don’t like cars,” she told me, “because I want people to like me.”

This breaks my heart. And I imagine it breaks your heart, too. Five years old, and she’s already figured out just exactly how this thing works.

It turns out that “it got out” in school that she liked cars, so she says. And then the other girls in her class made fun of her for liking boy things.

All her life I’ve been talking about being true to yourself, about liking the things you find in your heart whether it’s a girl thing or a boy thing, and still, still, this is how fast it can unravel. Five years old, and she’s already trying to change who she is because she doesn’t think it’s who she should be.

Internet, talk to Maya, and talk to me. Tell us about girls who make robots and cars and bridges. Girls who build rockets, girls who can make and build and invent — girls who have grand adventures, but who can still go dancing, and still braid their hair, and still wear pink. Tell us about you. I know you’re out there.

On the subject of my sprained ankle

2012-05-07T17:31:58+00:00

Just in case anyone was curious, it's now been 4 weeks, and this is pretty much where my recovery is at:

(Found somewhere on the the internet)

Jokes aside, the point is that I can do most things, but stairs are still not my friend, at least not without the aid of a cane. Nor is rough ground. And I work best as a human hillclimber algorithm: maximal fitness achieved when going up or down a slope, but sideways doesn't work so well.

I wish I could say I was thrilled with the progress, but I could do most of this (except the up stairs) two weeks after the sprain, so it actually feels like I've slowed down on recovery. Still, things are progressing, and I think I can ramp up my ankle exercises to push myself a bit more!

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Mel’s first year in grad school, a retrospective

2012-05-04T17:49:01+00:00

I’m writing this post for Robin, my advisor, who wanted an update on what I’ve done during my first year in grad school and where I want to go from here. I’ll do it in four sections:

Classes I took (your first year at grad school, classes make up a huge portion of your life.)
Projects I did
Things I’ve learned about myself
What’s happening next

Classes I took, what I learned from them, and what I made

Form Follows Data (Art) – I learned how to “think like an artist,” making artifacts for exhibition rather than functionality. My major piece was Absence Makes The Heart, a yarn graph of a long-distance relationship.
Inquiry (Engineering edu) – I learned how to do a lit review by making my first (terrible) lit review on open source and education. I can’t yet make good lit reviews but I know what direction I need to move in to get there.
Seminar (Engineering edu) – I learned who the professors in my department were and what they worked on research-wise. I didn’t make anything.
History & Philosophy of engineering edu – I learned that the transdisciplinary thinking that’s so familiar to me is really hard for other people, and filled my bibliographic coffers with artifacts (papers, etc) that help express these thoughts to others. I made graphic novels.
German for Reading Knowledge II – I confirmed my suspicions that I do amazingly well in language classes that don’t require me to hear, and translated an article on Sugar on a Stick. (I’m working on getting permission to post my translation online.)
Art and Design Research Methods (Art) – I was thrust into conversations with people (artists and designers) with a very different way of thinking, and had space to develop Radically Transparent Research.
Theories of engineering thinking and development (Engineering edu) – I learned how to use a bibliography manager (zotero) to remember a firehose of reading; I was already a fast reader, but had never needed to remember my material long-term before.I wrote an essay on cognitive apprenticeships in open communities, which I still feel is a half-baked first release — but a first release nonetheless.
Content, Assessment, and Pedagogy (Engineering edu) - I learned how lucky I’ve been to have so many excellent teachers that I thought “good” course design (as explained in this class) was the only way courses could be. I learned how to reverse-engineer good classes in more detail (I’d started learning course design formally at an Olin summer workshop 2 summers ago, and this class at Purdue built atop that knowledge nicely). I created an academic blogging workshop that will run for the first time this summer.
Open Access (independent study with Amy Van Epps) – I learned that academic publishing and copyright don’t make sense, drafted Olin’s open access policy with Dee Magnoni, and presented it to Olin faculty; it’s currently being looked over by Olin’s legal counsel, at which point the faculty will formally vote on it.

Projects I did

I did some work with Eucalyptus around building their open source community; it’s great to be able to watch (and contribute to) their journey from an academic research project to a true open source company.
I started working on the Programmabilities project for UNICEF exploring how disabled youth can participate in open communities as part of their education; I’ll be finishing that paper for them this summer.
I left my job at Red Hat in December, but am still involved with Teaching Open Source (conferences and papers and panels, oh my!) and the POSSE workshop for professors interested in designing their courses to include open community participation. Sebastian Dziallas and I are doing a small study looking at the experiences of POSSE alumni to understand what teachers go through when transforming their teaching practices.
I started working on the Changemakers (former codename: Project Puppy) project with the Xroads research group and Linda Vanasupa from Cal Poly. My main contribution so far has been the evolving practice of radically transparent research.

Things I’ve learned about myself

Coming to get my PhD was the right decision. Academia is a rich and wonderful environment that works well for me, and I’ll rapidly grow in skill and facility in this new sort of universe — but I will also never quite be content within it, or within any particular discipline within it. It will become one of my homes, but never my only one.
My reading skills need upgrading. I read fast, but I don’t retain well, so I’m working on using tools and note-taking/finding processes to shore me up with a cyborg memory (seriously, I’m going to think of these things as the cyborg portion of my brain). I’m still a weak hunter in the jungle of scholarly information, and need to build my lit-review muscles.
I am a writer now, and need to develop my process for writing long things. My strategy of “write it all in a long marathon immediately before the deadline” is no longer a viable option. Planning, note-taking, outlining, revising… the more I develop the discipline to stick to a long-term process for writing, the better my writing (and thinking) will be.
I need to have at least one part of my life where I am making things with people. I can do individual reading and writing, but I can’t subsist only on that; I need to build things in community, or something in me goes adrift.
My coping strategies for deafness and ADHD need to evolve. I’ve never really needed help with coping with my “disabilities” before, but now I’m doing harder and harder things, and they’re showing up as limiting factors. I’m glad for this – one of my hopes in coming to grad school was to hit a place where people wouldn’t let me get away with things like covering up bullshit with enthusiasm, and the fact that I’m slamming against a wall right now means that I’m winning. I found my weak spots; they’re desperately exposed right now, and it hurts like hell, so I will be forced to evolve.

What’s happening next

I’m doing my 6 summer credits as follows: advanced qualitative research methods (3 cr), modern dance 101 (2 cr), and teaching my blogging workshop (1 cr) while writing a paper for UNICEF and learning German (since I’ll be getting hearing aids and might actually be able to hear people speaking it now). I’m doing this all during Maymester, effectively frontloading on “things that’ll pay the bills,” then going off to do awesome research project things for the rest of summer. Oh, and hiking across England without luggage; that’s going to be my vacation. It will be fun!
I plan on taking my readiness assessment (the equivalent of quals) in the late fall. Consequently, my fall courseload will be the lightest it can be, 9 credits. I’m taking a statistics class on the R programming language (3 cr) and a course on hearing aids as one of my “engineering” requirements (2 cr), which leaves 4 credits unspoken for at the moment. I’m on track to finish my required classes by spring 2013, assuming I passed everything this term.
I have a fellowship for this coming school year (2012-2013), but need to look for funding after that – so that’s a big item on my to-do list.
I’m experimenting with hearing aids and ADHD medication this summer to see if I can come up with better ways of incorporating them into my life.
And right now, I’m going home to take a nap.

A cool idea that failed: you can’t reverse-engineer a paper for open access

2012-05-04T01:42:59+00:00

One of the things I tried out as part of my independent study on open access this semester was the idea of reverse-engineering a publication. This isn’t about hacking code; it’s about hacking copyright. And as it turns out, it doesn’t work.

Here’s the setup: imagine you’re a researcher and you’ve written a great paper that’s published in a prestigious journal. You beam with pride! Life is fantastic. And then you find out about the open access citation advantage, realize your publisher allows archiving of preprints, and think that life is about to get even better.

There’s just one problem. You can’t find your preprint version (the final edited version you send to the publisher, usually a plain Word or LaTeX document). You only have the final copy PDF with all the branding and pretty-print formatting on it – the version that got published in the journal. Somehow, in the frenzy of hard drive clean-up that accompanied your “I am done with this paper forever!” project completion celebration, you… you lost the file.

But wait… the final print version is identical to the text you sent in, right? All the publisher did was add formatting. So if you could just grab the text from the final print version and throw it back into a Word document, that would be identical to the preprint, and you could post that. A preprint is just the end publisher content there without the end publisher formatting. Right?

Wrong. The problem here isn’t technical, it’s legal. I actually took a print pdf and “reverse engineered” it into a LibreOffice document, and it looked fantastic — I did the process by hand, but it would be easily automatable, so the software portion of the problem is trivial. I talked with Donna Ferullo, Purdue’s copyright librarian, and the copyright portion of the problem is, unfortunately, a blocker bug. The crux of it the matter is that we don’t know what value the publisher added before printing. Okay, this probably is “not much other than formatting,” but still… it’s legal grey. So we hit a hard wall on that, but at least we learned something.

I promised to write something up about this since I don’t think the reverse-engineering idea has been broached before, and it’s at least good for others to know that it’s a dead-end — so here it is.

ADHD coping strategies so far, pre-intervention

2012-05-03T23:10:46+00:00

Here are the things I’ve already figured out for my ADHD. These are the strategies that let me survive this long without getting help (and for a long time without being diagnosed, too). It will be interesting to see how this list changes once I start getting help.

Do homework on the day it’s assigned. Finish up the things for a trip before you leave that location. Basically, don’t ever leave hanging threads.

Travel a lot, which breaks the day into (useful) chunks and gets physical motion in; do work as a “secondary” thing between the bouts of travel, so you don’t feel guilty for not doing it (it’s travel!) but an amazing amount gets done (there are an awful lot of little breaks in there).

Teach — the regularity of a classroom and the requirement for immersive engagement motivates you.

When you study, try to have it be 1:1 as possible, and ride off the momentum from meeting your teacher as soon as you get it, for as long as it exists.

If you can’t get 1:1, your memory is likely to wander during instruction you don’t need to intelligently respond to. Prepare for this. Get things transcribed in realtime. Your memory will wander, but you can zip back and scroll up every once in a while — you can bring yourself back. If you can’t get realtime transcripts, use supplementary materials (textbooks on the same subject, etc) to give you the thing you can get information from when you “come back.”

Set reminders for your future-self to give you motivation-kicks down the road. Automatically scheduled emails help, especially if other people (who need to be involved) are copied on them.

Catalyze groups. They’re usually full of folks who can sustain things when you’re spotty, and they see you as an energy-injector coming at just the right time. You do well when you’re responding to the work of others coming in at real-time.

Work while eating. Read while eating. Reading keeps your mind on one topic’s track; it keeps you from being distracted to other tasks while eating or whatever else you’re doing.

Script out repetitive tasks and set aside time to do them. Expense reports on Fridays just marching through a detailed list of instructions. Reward yourself afterwards.

You can achieve anything, but not everything + ADHD

2012-05-03T23:09:06+00:00

This is one of the things I wanted to write about.

Aaagh.

I thought about what I tell my overly ambitious students when they take on too many extracurricular activities and their grades falter: “You can achieve anything, but not everything. If you try to do everything there is no doubt you will do everything badly. But if you choose, then you will succeed in whatever you do.” Yet at that moment, I couldn’t stop the voice that kept screaming in my head: I cannot choose! I cannot choose! I must do both and I must succeed! –Anjalee Deshpanda Nadkarni, in “Two Boards and a Passion”

I know. I know I know I know.

So, another thing I’ve been struggling with this semester is ADHD. One of the natures of the beast is that it doesn’t rear its head until you cross a certain threshold of doing difficult unstructured things, so the effect on your life goes from “sunshine! puppies! daisies!” to “HOLY SHIT LIVING HELL” in a heartbeat, leaving you wondering how you’ve suddenly become an idiot as the world crumbles around you. I nearly dropped out of undergrad because of it.

But the reverse is also true. Cross back over that threshold of difficult-unstructuredness, and poof – the butterflies and ponies reappear. It looks like you’ve learned how to deal with it, but you’re actually just in environments that don’t bring out the monster — and the unstructured, improvisational nature of open source communities are great for letting you pretend it isn’t there. Similarly, they’re great for letting me ignore the fact that I can’t hear, but we’re already seeing the beginning of my pushing back against that – I want to go everywhere, not just the places where I can slack off on coping with deafness and ADHD.

If any place is into difficult-unstructuredness, grad school… is it. I have been beating off the monster since March; it’s gotten particularly bad in the past few weeks. For folks who’ve seen me recently and may be thinking “but… but Mel, you looked like you were really kicking ass!” — yes, I was. There. Then. With other people. Getting out there into the world where I look (and feel) confident helps a lot, because when I’m by myself with it at night, my other-people scaffolding falls down and sometimes I end up crying (which is pretty epic; I’m not a bawler).

So. I have been taking advantage of the ADHD tendency to attack new shiny stimuli with great enthusiasm, frontloading on reading ADHD books, trying out new strategies, etc — trying to get ahead as far as I can before falling off the wagon. I’ve seen multiple types of counselors at Purdue in the past few days. Tomorrow morning I’m going to go in and see about medications (which I have incredibly mixed feelings on, but I should try it at least once). I’m sitting in a school support group writing this blog post right now.

One important decision I’ve made is to not reduce my workload while trying to handle all this. I’m going to try to build in more failsafes so that the consequences of my failures will be less severe (taking things pass/fail or auditing them, and so forth), but since my ADHD only rears its ugly head above a certain threshold, I need to stay on the “hard” side of that threshold to see if any of the strategies/medications/etc are taking effect. (There’s no sense in treating stuff if you’re in the land of happy butterflies anyway.)

I have a second post coming with coping mechanisms I’ve already developed. More in a moment.

Project Puppy is… not human subjects research? and: the true nature of Project Puppy begins to be revealed.

2012-05-03T21:30:18+00:00

For folks who’ve been following the radically transparent research adventures of project puppy (and the similarly transparent project kitten), we have… unexpected news.

Project Puppy is, apparently, not human subjects research. We don’t need to go through IRB.

Which is fantastic news (we don’t need to go back to our participants with yet more paperwork), but also somewhat confusing news; it feels like playing Minefield and clicking on a square and having the computer tell you “yay, you didn’t die!” But that only tells you about the square you’re on. Fog is all around you, so you’re not sure whether you can move in any direction without dying; there might be a cliff two feet to the right that you can’t see.

So I asked Robin to send back the following reply, and we’ll see what we get.

Thanks for your decision — this is great news that will help our research group move forward with our work. Since we plan on doing more projects with the radically transparent research technique in the future, would you mind helping us understand why our project is not human subjects research, and whether we are close to the boundaries of any actions that would make it human subjects research? We were told during initial office hour consultations that it ought to be submitted for HSR approval, so we’d like to make sure we understand the rationale so we can make sure we submit future “radically transparent research” projects for review appropriately in the future.

The short term effects of this, however, is that now we can talk openly about Project Puppy. Actually, we can call it by its real name, and show people its data, and explain the research, and… oh, this feels good. So, without further ado: I’m going to stop calling it Project Puppy, and start using the project’s proper name. Changemakers. (That’s what we call it, anyway.)

The short (overly-academic-sounding) version is that we’re doing “preliminary work on change knowledge through a study that investigates what exemplar changemakers understand about how transformation occurs.”

What this actually means is that Linda did long interviews with 8 people who’ve caused substantial changes in engineering education through the course of their careers, asking them to talk about how the heck they did that, and we’re trying to figure out, okay, how do they think? What makes someone able to affect that sort of change? Can we learn how to do it too? And stuff like that.

Now to put Project Kitten through the IRB process (armed with the Changemakers decision) so we can open that up to the world properly as well!

My first film festival: Tribeca (with reviews and spoilers)

2012-05-03T14:19:34+00:00

Sebastian took me to my first film festival last weekend – TriBeCa, in New York. It’s a trip we’ve planned since last year, so it was fantastic to finally get to go. We only watched two films because frantic amounts of homework were being done by all, but it was definitely a pause in the chaos that I needed and am grateful for now. Train re-routings meant we spent an afternoon getting lost instead of eating macarons at the Laduree location that recently opened near Central Park, but we did find a great little Italian hole-in-the-wall on the edge of Harlem (of all places!) and ended up with macarons from a Japanese bakery instead. And let me tell you, folks, if you’ve not had a cherry blossom macaron, you’re missing out. (Passionfruit was also excellent.)

The films we watched were Trishna and High Tech, Low Life. The first one was an adaptation of Tess of the d’Urbervilles to modern-day India, and I have mixed feelings about it, largely because I know the story in the original book. The second is a documentary on citizen bloggers in China, and I liked it better. Sebastian thought High Tech, Low Life was good but too long and with less dramatic dialogue, and that Trishna had more well-crafted script moments (actually, he used some other film-review-ish term I’ve forgotten). I pointed out that Trishna had, y’know, a script. SPOILERS FOLLOW.

In Trishna, “Tess” from the original book is renamed into the title character, a rural girl forced to look for work when her father falls asleep at the wheel of their rented truck while it’s carrying vegetables to market — a nice transplant of the original story, which has the family’s horse-drawn wagon getting in an road accident that ends up killing the horse. The characters of Angel (“the good guy”) and Alec (“the bad guy”) in the original novel are rolled into one character in the movie: Jay, who runs several businesses of his family’s empire, including the hotel where Trishna goes to work. The acting is good, the cinematography well done (Sebastian may disagree, but I love disorientingly rapid cuts during montage scenes), and the story unfolds well in the beginning; Trishna works at the hotel Jay runs, they find themselves drawn to each other, and end up making love one night after a party (consensually, instead of the rape scene between Alec and Tess in the original book). Trishna is overwhelmed and runs away back home shortly thereafter, only to realize she’s pregnant; her family forces her to get an abortion, then sends her to a factory in the city, where she labors until Jay shows up again; he’s been looking for her ever since she ran away. So far, so good; the merger of Angel and Alec into the character of Jay is done in a way that makes sense.

Jay asks Trishna to move to Mumbai with him; she accepts, and they live together in the city, very much in love. (I think.) Jay is clearly channeling the character of Angel from the original book; he’s a good guy, genuinely seems to care for her, and so forth. Cute and funny moments abound in montage scenes here! He even promises Trishna he’ll tell his family about her – which prompts her to confess the pregnancy and subsequent abortion right before Jay leaves for home. The revelation shocks Jay; when he returns, he’s turned into a ticking timebomb of an asshole — effectively metamorphing from “Angel” to “Alec.” The metamorphosis is unconvincing and awkward now, and (in my opinion) ruins the movie; as Sebastian put it, “the film goes downhill along with their relationship.” The script attempts to justify the deteriorating romance by reassigning Jay and Trishna to yet another of his family’s hotels: he as the manager, she as a worker. Presumably, once they stop living together, the differences in their social strata cause strain (which I buy) and this strain turns Jay from a caring, sensitive guy into a cruel, abusive jerk within a few months (which I don’t buy) Finally, desperate to end the movie, Trishna stabs him, then herself (her suicide scene intercut with her cute little brother and sister dramatically reciting the Our Father in school as TENSE MUSIC BUILDS!) But it was quite good up ’till the “honey, I got an abortion — you can turn into an asshole now!” part.

I liked High Tech, Low Life better; it’s a documentary on citizen journalism in China, following two bloggers over four years as they skirt the edge of Chinese law to get news past the censorship blockades. The main characters are a study in contrast. One is “Tiger Temple,” an older man with a quiet steadiness and a heart that aches for the people whose stories he covers — a young woman murdered in broad daylight, a farm village devastated by toxic waste dumped into their water supply — once he starts interviewing the local homeless population, he’s motivated to raise money to buy a place for them to live. Then there’s “Zola,” a young man who bristles with overconfidence the same way his pockets bristle with gadgets and emergency supplies. He’s a vegetable seller, but wants to become famous — so he sets off to get attention on the internet by covering news that would otherwise be covered-up, always featuring a picture of himself grinning by the location. He does become famous, of course; he’s invited to speak at a blogging conference overseas, only to have the government block his exit from China. At times, his excitement at the increased notoriety this “injustice” is bringing him seems to overshadow his disappointment at the injustice itself.

Perhaps the reason I thought the documentary was a better film was because it stirred up all sorts of aches inside me as I watched, conflict and guilt and hope and rage, simultaneous familiarity and unfamiliarity… all these feelings from a whole different universe that I deliberately ignore and place halfway across the world. My family history includes (1) China and (2) participation in journalism that got us in big trouble in the past; Sebastian’s doesn’t, so maybe the film was less immediate to him — not sure. But it was good, to step into the stories of other people for a short, defined while — they’re on a screen, they start, they run an hour or two, they stop, you walk away and think and talk and eat falafel sandwiches and ginger ale. And then you go back to school and work and work and work again.

Film festival braindump done! Now to close out this semester, so that I can… work on the backlog of non-academic work that’s built up in the meantime.

Foundation at BSDCan

2012-05-03T13:31:00+00:00

BSDCan will be held next week in Ottawa, Canada. The Foundation is a gold sponsor of this event.

8 of the 9 Directors of the Foundation will be attending this event. There will be a Foundation booth during the conference with lots of swag and a shiny new brochure. Be sure to drop by, discuss the Foundation's work, and make a donation.

Things I want to write about

2012-05-02T19:59:47+00:00

…but have not yet had time for.

My summer plans and projects, which are pretty epic.
Stuff I’ve been learning about ADHD lately – treatments, coping mechanisms I’ve inadvertently evolved, that sort of thing.
Stuff I’ve been learning about hearing aids, speech therapy, and other things that go with the Great Deafness Adventure lately, including music and learning foreign languages.
Cognitive apprenticeships! And how they relate to open (source, content, hardware) communities. I just wrote a giant term paper on this which I am really, really not happy with, so my plan is to post that sucker online under a creative commons license, and then work through it bit by bit, expanding each piece into a blog post, seeing what happens with those ideas, and then rolling that back into a better piece of work.
The blogging workshop I’ll be teaching starting in 2 weeks. I’ve mentioned this in posts before when I was recruiting participants, but now I’ve actually started thinking about pedagogy and materials and such, and want to go through some of that thinking in public (because if it’s in my head, I don’t really understand it… but if I write it down and talk about it with people, I grok).
Radically transparent research as a research technique, and the few projects that have started using it even at this very early stage. What the heck “radically transparent research” means.
A recap and reflection of my 26th year of life, and what I want out of my 27th… I turn 26 in exactly one week, and I think I might actually… ask for a birthday present, this time. I need to formulate my request better, but I’ll write about it here.

If you’re particularly interested in one or another of these things, comment and I’ll be motivated to actually write about it. :) Otherwise, I’ll use this as a reminder to myself of what I wanted to write about, but give myself permission to maybe-never-get-around-to-it and be okay with that.

Why Colocation America Uses FreeBSD

2012-05-02T19:17:00+00:00

Albert Ahdoot, Director of Business Development, recently sent this testimonial regarding the use of FreeBSD by Colocation America and its customers:

Colocation America provides colocation, dedicated server, VoIP, and managed data center hosting services for businesses that are looking to host their servers in the United States. With 22 data center locations, Colocation America has become one of the leading providers of hosting services. Most of our customers depend on the FreeBSD operating system to provide them with a secure environment to host their network infrastructure. They praise FreeBSD for its ability to encrypt sensitive data and for the ZFS advanced file system that makes managing server files a breeze. Many of our corporate clients choose to use FreeBSD to operate their MySQL database systems and email servers due to the exceptional networking components of the operating system.

Developers that choose to colocate their servers with us also choose to install FreeBSD on their dedicated servers. The open source nature of the BSD license gives them the flexibility they need to develop innovative software. Plus, they have access to an enterprise level operating system that is free, has an active development community, and which lets them contribute their own skills to make the system better for their own development. We have asked several clients why they decided to use FreeBSD and the answer has always been the same: the cost and networking ability of the operating system rivals its commercial license competitors.

Our customers are not the only fans of FreeBSD. We use FreeBSD to manage our shared hosting servers due to the OS ability to manage firewalls and web applications while handling the server loads of several hosting accounts at once. With the WebHost Manager cPanel add-on for managing multiple web hosting accounts on a single dedicated server, our shared hosting server is able to provide customers looking for cheap website hosting. The community support of FreeBSD, along with its open source nature, provides a secure environment for our clients to host in. To find out more about the dedicated server hosting with the FreeBSD operating system, you can visit our FreeBSD dedicated server page.

Prime Factorization of the Integers

2012-05-02T16:33:04+00:00

Internet picture of the day:

UPGRADE MEL does not accept current limitations

2012-05-01T18:00:47+00:00

For someone who hates tooting their own horn, asking for help, making trouble for others, and so forth, my adventure-into-hearing-aids has been a huge exercise in deliberate practice of a set of skills and attitudes that I’m terrifically underdeveloped in.

Example: please justify why hearing aids will assist you in obtaining future employment.

My future job as an academic will require me to constantly use communication skills at a high level; I’ll be directly evaluated on oral presentations of my research at national and international conferences, expected to lecture to students on a regular basis, and also expected to participate in conference sessions, meetings, etc. which are largely based on oral discussion. I’m getting hearing aids to help me communicate at the level I need to be competitive.

Competitive. Not just “coping.” When Mirabai and I hung out last week, I thanked her for helping me see assistance as something that could lift me above awesome instead of things that always brought you to the level of “average.” With that old (and more naive) mindset, assistance made sense for “disabled people” who “couldn’t cope on their own” and would perform “below average” without help, but not for (arrogant, hubris-inflated, younger) me, who could perform above average without help, thank you very much; why would I take assistance that would knock me down to average?

But no… the point of accessibility isn’t to “make you average.” It’s to lift you up from where you are to where you could go. It just means that if “where you could go” is very high — if you plan on going fast and far and doing amazing things — you need to be sure that your access providers can keep up with you. (Ye gods, I hate how arrogant that just sounded, but I… I can’t think of a better way to phrase it.) They’ll become part of my posse, the same way I might hire an accountant or a lawyer someday.

MEL SMASH! WILL BE BEST MEL POSSIBLE EVAR! PLANS ON CHANGING WORLD, NOT JUST LIVING IN IT!

I’m so used to feeling guilty for asking about things because then I feel like I need to prove that I ‘deserved’ whatever help I got, and I don’t like going “hi, I need your help to get up to a basic level of functionality because I’m broken enough that I can’t make it otherwise,” but as we discussed earlier, that’s not an accurate picture. The more accurate picture, I think, is:

Hello, world.

I’m Mel. I’m performing rather well right now by normal-people standards, going purely off my own guts and grit and smarts — I’m pouring my creativity and energy and intellect into compensating for my disabilities so well that they’re almost undetectable. As far as most people are concerned, I’m already a success story — I don’t “need help.”

And… I don’t, not if my goal is to perform at “normal” levels — I can get and keep a job, be a functioning member of society, and all that. I don’t need help for that.

But if you look at this picture, you’ll see that I could be doing so much more. Imagine if all that energy that goes into compensating and covering up my disabilities (geez, I hate that word, but… I can’t think of a better one, so I’ll use it) could actually go into moving forward with my work — my research, my teaching, my technical development, all the things I’m doing to make the world a better place. You can see a preview of it — even with all the compensations I’ve had to make over the years, I’ve managed to do some pretty amazing things at a young age. Imagine if I had more resources and energy to take that sort of thing farther. Imagine if I could be thinking about solutions to problems other than “how do I keep up with lipreading this person?” or “how do I participate in this meeting when I can’t understand the other people on the conference call”?

That’s what these assistive efforts are trying to unlock — that sort of potential. Because right now I’m “pretty good.” But if we got these things out of my way, I could be awesome.

It’s going to be a rough ride at first. I’ve been coping on my own for so long that I don’t know how to use assistance; that’s going to be a learning curve to climb. Once I learn how to use this assistance to get me the same level of functioning I’ve been bootstrapping myself into, I’ll have all this freed-up capacity that we’ll have to figure out how to transform from “coping” energy to “moving-forward” energy — and that’ll be a tall order as well. I’m not used to having so much wherewithal available to me — I’m used to running forward with a fraction of my capabilities because I need to use so much of my energy to pay my “disability tax.” We’re talking about rewiring the way I breathe, move, think, live. It’s going to be cognitively difficult, and it’s also probably going to be emotionally difficult because I’m used to being so self-reliant. It will take a while.

But I’m young, and I’m still at the beginning of my career. So if we figure this out now, we’ll reap the benefits for the entire rest of my life.

That’s why you should care, people-who-work-with-disabled-folks. (And whether you specialize in access or not, to work with me is to work with a disabled person.) That’s why you should help. That’s why you should keep reminding me about this, that the extra time and trouble is worth it for someone who’s seemingly already “doing fine.”

I’m a teacher at heart: if I had a student who was doing “fine” with solid C’s in my classes, but I thought they had the potential to shine, be an A+ student, be one of my best — I would be pushing them to do this. I would tell them they owed it to themselves and to the world they could grow up to change. And if I would ask my student to go through that, I need to be willing to go through it myself.

It’s going to be hard for me to remember this and keep pushing on it, so I’m going to need my friends to keep on advocating for me and to push me to advocate for myself, to remind me why this is worth it, to chide me gently when I start feeling guilty for asking about this — I wouldn’t feel guilty about unlocking someone else’s awesome for the world, so I shouldn’t feel guilty about unlocking my own. The road we’re going down is a long one, and probably won’t ever end.

O brave new world, that has such people in’t! I’ve met some amazing folks in the past few years when they’ve come into my text-based, online space, and I want my passport to live in the bigger worlds where they are — not just live, but blaze new trails, change the bigger world where they are for the better.

Time for me to get my visas.

Dear feminist intellectual ancestors: thank you.

2012-05-01T17:13:44+00:00

The world is changing. And it may even be changing fast enough to get there ahead of me. Some parts, anyway — the other parts I’ll have to help build and change still, but the option of the ability to take some things for granted – temporarily, sometimes – and not have to work on them and fight with them and push against certain boundaries all the time will give me more energy and bandwidth to work on and fight with and push against others. In any case, there’s going to be plenty of paying-it-forward — if not in this format, then in others.

In case the link goes down — that points to a “dear colleague” letter from the NSF about work-life balance, supporting researchers who want to have great careers and sane family lives (both male and female, but women have historically gotten the short end of the stick in that department). So maybe I won’t need to make as many tradeoffs as my younger self thought I would; maybe the opportunity cost won’t be as high as I feared.

It’s not a binary! I’ve been learning that it’s not a binary. I’ve been learning that there are people who don’t want me to have it as a binary. It’s sort of weird to be writing this sentence, because my gameplan is still predicated upon being a genetic dead-end, but if that changes and some sort of future half-clone version of myself ends up reading this — (1) I’m sorry about the genetic predispositions to orthodontia, distractability/hyperactivity, and nearsightedness, and (2) these sorts of “let’s change society!” programs were a huge part of the reasons that allowed you to exist in the first place, so if you want our genetic and intellectual lineage to continue, you’d better make sure they keep happening. (And clean your room, and eat your vegetables, and if you want an upgrade to first class on our next transcontinental flight you can pay for it yourself, k? Frequent flyer miles don’t grow on trees.)

It’s a crazy feeling, this discovery that far more of the world is malleable and hackable than you’d originally thought. The things you were afraid would pen you in end up having the potential to give you more freedom instead.

When your misdeeds are archived

2012-05-01T15:00:18+00:00

This is an Ask a Geek Feminist question for our readers. It’s the last for this round.

This one is actually from me, it’s related to some questions I’ve been asked by various people who will remain anonymous (and who didn’t formally write to Ask a Geek Feminist). I have my own thoughts on this, and I also think it can vary (helpful!)

What do you think people and groups should do about sexism in their “archives”? By this, I mean for example, older stuff on their blog, or Facebook postings from years ago, or similar? A lot of people have sexism in their past, varying from “I used to be a pretty committed sexist actually” to “um, I didn’t really think about it, and I wanted to fit in, and I went through a ‘Your Mom’ phase for a while there”. Things you do on the Internet are pretty long-lived now, and your sexism sticks to your name while it remains visible.

Assuming someone or someones have control of their content, and they have sexism they don’t like in there, and they have reason to think it’s going to hurt someone. Should they remove the content? Should they edit it with warnings and apologies?

Have you seen this in a real situation? What did they do? How did it work for them and for women near them/involved in their community?

At least for systemic stuff, I tend to be on the ‘edit’ side of the fence. There are a few reasons for this:

even if you’ve totally changed and are ashamed and sorry, being a reformed sexist is something that may make people, women in particular, cautious about you. Living with that is part of the deal. You don’t get to get access to Has Always Been The Best Person Ever cred because you weren’t.
it also serves as a guide to How To Do It, for other reforming sexists (or How Not To Do It, if you apologise but don’t actually change)

And while writing an apology that is short and not self-serving is a challenge, but that doesn’t mean one shouldn’t try.

On the other hand, I, in general, do wish that much informal discussion on the Internet yellowed and started to curl at the edges and be difficult to read as time passed, sometimes. I realise that the invention of writing was some considerable time ago now, but even so, having to stand by your casual thoughts for years is a big ask. I can’t see that one should make a special effort to preserve evidence of one’s sexism if that same set of archives is going to disappear in its entirety.

Dr. Who Scarf effect

2012-04-30T22:54:00+00:00

Ken sent me a text message this weekend that said something like, "Thanks again for the scarf. I've found it meets a niche in my life not unlike the towel in the hitchhiker's guide."

I think this may be the greatest endorsement ever. :)

comments

Quick Hit: a GF approach to events

2012-04-30T21:34:20+00:00

I help plan technical events at the Wikimedia Foundation. I think we’ve improved in making them more welcoming and inclusive over the course of my time there. We just recently filled to capacity on registration for an upcoming event, and I thought I’d share a few things we’ve done:

A friendly space policy
Event info page shows photos of people of different genders, allows people to opt in to sharing their names/attendance
Registration form doesn’t ask for sex or gender; instead, it asks what kind of t-shirt we should provide (including a “None, thank you” option) and “If you need accommodation: would you prefer to share a room with a woman or with a man?” (options: “women’s rooms”, “men’s rooms”, “either will be fine”)
We’ll aim to document as much of the event as possible in realtime text
We’re ensuring that at least one of the social events is not booze-oriented
I’m working to ensure people can put whatever names they prefer on their badges, including handles/nicks for those who don’t want to share their wallet names
Free to attend, and we provide travel sponsorships to encourage participants from far away
Hostel very near the venue

I failed at:

childcare – just didn’t put in the time to ensure we could provide this
ensuring our venue is accessible to those with disabilities (I’m not sure, and didn’t emphasize this as a key criterion when my contact in Berlin was scouting venues)
clarifying many of the points above to prospective attendees
and probably more

What have you done to make your geek events more welcoming?

2012-04-30T17:32:43+00:00

Pycon 2012 was full of win, including the 5k on Satyrday morning! Lots of geeks out running. I loved it. Also, I nominate this 2012 for the BEST FOOD of any US Pycon. Others have already done reviews, but suffice it to say, it was an awesome conference and I highly recommend you attend next year. Better yet, send in a proposal and speak! Never spoke before? Start out at your local Python user group - they're almost always looking for speakers.

It's going to be a busy summer. Besides my urban homesteading (chickens, gardening, canning, dehydrating, cooking, etc), we're going to be doing a lot of travel. Friday, we're off to Omaha for Woodstock for Capitalists aka the Berkshire Hathaway Shareholder Meeting (yes, we own a couple shares of BRK-B stock). Next, it's off to Singapore for Pycon APAC where Alex and I will both be doing keynotes. Neither of us have been to Asia before so this will be an adventure! Two weeks later, we're in Italy for Europython, followed closely by OSCON in Portland, OR. Whew! In September, I'm heading to the Heirloom Expo in Santa Rosa, then off to the Tough Mudder in Northern California for a 12k Obstacle Course! Youch. Hope I survive that long!

In the meantime, I've just picked up a review copy of a new book from O'Reilly called Fitness for Geeks by Bruce Perry. I'll review it when I finish. You can also find me posting a fair bit on Fitocracy as annaraven.

Crochet Pony Pattern inspired by My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic -- Now available for free!

2012-04-29T04:57:26+00:00

As many of you know, I've been working on a pattern for making pones based on My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.

I finally sat down and stuck the pattern and the pictures together, so now you can all make ponies! And best of all, the pattern is free! (This is mostly 'cause I'm that kind of person, but it is complex for me to sell anything due to the conditions of my work visa here in the US. Which is to say please don't ask me if I can sell you a finished pony; I can't.)

The pattern as a pretty printable PDF
The pattern in HTML
The pattern on Ravelry
The pattern on DeviantArt (No good reason for this except that there's lots of bronies there and I might as well share where the community is!)

And to remind you, here's what you'd be making:

Amigurumi Fluttershy (Crochet My Little Pony in progress)
by Terriko.

Derpy Hooves my little pony crochet - nearly finished!
by Terriko.

More photos here.

I'm really nervous about this because it's the most complex pattern I've ever posted online and because I know other people really want it. I hope people enjoy it!

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Book Review: Truer than True Romance

2012-04-28T23:45:31+00:00

I'm not sure I've *ever* laughed so hard while reading a comic book. These stories would probably be funny satire of the romance genre on their own, but paired with vintage romance comic art they're downright hilarious. Highly recommended to anyone who's ever made snarky comments during a romantic comedy!

For the MBL crowd: this is the romance version of that Ghost Stories anime Jamie had, just as hilarious in juxtaposition but a little less reliant on the random gags.

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Book reviews: Craft books

2012-04-28T23:25:56+00:00

I don't normally review craft books, but since I've started getting them from the library and need some way to keep track of the ones I've seen and might want to get out again for projects, I figured book reviews was a good solution.

Knit Your Own Royal Wedding
by Fiona Goble

Instructions for very cute and slightly kitschy William & Kate royal wedding dolls. Lots of pictures and details in the clothing, so it's fun even if you haven't got time to knit and just want to look at the little doll dioramas. I think my favourite are the little corgis.

Last-Minute Knitted Gifts
by Joelle Hoverson, Anna Williams

As a newbie knitter, I definitely appreciate patterns for things that are small and have estimated times attached. Unfortunately, the books are starting to all blur together since most contain variations on the same hats, socks, scarves, small bags, etc. The thing that makes this particular volume stand out is actually the photography and the careful use of colour (there's even a whole section about it!)

Positively Crochet!: 50 Fashionable Projects and Inspirational Tips
by Mary Jane Hall

I loved many of the patterns, many of which are nicely modern (surprisingly hard to find in a crochet book!) though I found the "positive" sidebars totally insipid. If, like me, you find that's not your thing, at least it's easy enough to ignore. I liked the mix of small and large projects, and the couple of patterns I've tried from this book have been clear and well-written. Looking forwards to trying a few more in the future!

Simply Crochet: 22 Stylish Designs for Everyday
by Robyn Chachula

A beautifully photographed collection of nicely modern crochet designs. I haven't tried any of the patterns yet, but it looks like the instructions are very clear, and many projects are photographed from a variety of angles so that you can see the detail of the pattern and the places where joining might be tricky by instruction alone. I'm pretty sure I'm going to want to buy my own copy rather than constantly renewing the library one before I start any patterns, which is the reason I haven't done any yet.

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Book Reviews: Information Diets and Unusual Architecture

2012-04-28T19:48:49+00:00

The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption
by Clay A. Johnson

I expected the diet metaphor to get strained, but it actually worked better than I expected: consume less-processed information just like you consume less-processed food, and don't consume mindlessly and continuously. The author's approach to dealing with information "obesity" isn't the standard reactionary "Get off the internet! Go play outside!" but a more nuanced look at how to consume better information rather than just less. I particularly liked the looks into why headlines are terrible (overdone and outright false headlines get clicks, clicks = money), and how using your friends to filter information can result in a dangerously narrow point of view. I was less thrilled about how much of the examples were very American politics oriented, but obviously the author has to write from what he knows. And politics in America does provide some interesting examples of over-information warfare, as it were.

What's most striking about this book to me aren't the ideas, though (as a research scientist, going to the source and avoiding "junk" information is already part of my daily routine), but the fact that it's a life-hacking book that doesn't suffer from extreme bloat where the author repeats himself endlessly for 300+ pages. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, given the topic, that the author would be able to write succinctly, but after my experience trying to read volumes like The 4-Hour Workweek or Getting Things Done, this brevity and ability to get the point across in a nice slim volume were much appreciated.

XS: Small Structures, Green Architecture
by Phyllis Richardson

This is pretty much a tiny coffee table book filled with beautiful pictures of unusual architecture fitting the small structures, green architecture theme. Fun to flip through and see some unusual projects from around the world. If you're the sort of person who clicks on "look at this cool house!" links on the internet or just loves photography of strange objects d'art, this is a little treasure trove of neat things.

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conquering Tallinn this summer

2012-04-28T15:34:00+00:00

My very first Akademy was the one in Belgium. I have only missed one since then – Gran Canaria (a Desktop Summit to be correct). I could still kick myself today for missing out on Gran Canaria. I’ll try to not let that happen again – ever So obviously I have taken preventive measures and asked for vacation days and booked a hotel room to spend a week this summer in Tallinn before I fly to Washington DC to go to Wikimania. July will be an interesting month…

I have been to a lot of conferences so far but none of them were quite like Akademy. None of them were a family-reunion of such epic proportions. Each year since my very first Akademy I am looking forward to spending time with friends and making new ones, to getting stuff done, to listening to great talks and to seeing new places. Akademy is the time I get to chat with the people in KDE that I rarely work with day-to-day. But it is also the time I get to meet my best friends from all over the world.

New to KDE and don’t know anyone yet? Going to Akademy will change that quickly. Want to get more involved with KDE and don’t really know how? Show up at Akademy and listen to people for 5 minutes. Need input on your new amazing idea? Show it to people at Akademy and see what they have to say. Looking for a job? Talk to our sponsors and work for top-notch companies.

I hope to see you in Tallinn. Book your accommodation quickly and don’t forget to register.

things that make me happy today

2012-04-28T15:04:48+00:00

I just checked and found that 8 of the 20 successful students who took part in Season of KDE last year have been accepted to Google Summer of Code with KDE this year. I have not checked other orgs and previous years but these 8 alone really made my day. Rock on folks!
For details about this year’s Season of KDE please check Teo’s blog.

I’ve also finally settled in in Berlin. It’s awesome here surrounded by so many of my free software and free knowledge friends. I hardly had an evening over the last week without some kind of get-together. Oh and the sun is shining. Wohoooooo!

in order to not forget, and to realign

2012-04-27T16:30:34+00:00

I write in order to remember who I am; these past two weeks, I’ve felt like I was forgetting, that I should sit down and get some thoughts out so that portion of my mind can relax — it’s like a buffer that builds up with Stuff To Think About that I need to clear every so often. This is my meditation.

I’m sitting on Sumana and Leonard’s couch drinking a mug of cold tea I’ve left out too long; the mug is a free giveaway from last summer’s OSCON, I should be writing my papers before Sebastian arrives for the TriBeCa film festival, or doing expense reports, or writing my Grace Hopper scholarship app, or something, but this has been building up too long. (And as I write this paragraph I can recognize the clear stamps of ADHD all over my thinking. It’s not a problem; it’s just a fact of life. Another thing to understand, another tool to tune, respect, and wield.)

What’s happened in the meantime? Massive amounts of schoolwork procrastination and the accompanying guilt and tension, late-nights of pressured writing and distraction… nothing I haven’t had every semester of my student life ever since I started having finals, what, 11 years ago? I’m learning ways to understand my brain more, why it’s good at some things and not good at others, why the habits and environments I’ve built and chosen my way into are the way they are — learning more about ADHD is like having access to the source code of a large swath of my mind for the first time. It doesn’t fix the problem now, but maybe it’ll help you figure out how to debug for the next release. Being proactive.

These things — the ADHD journey and the stumbles through deafness (hearing aids, accessibility, CART, ASL, deaf culture) — are the discomfort of the constant quest to level-up. I keep needing to remind myself that it’s not because I’m suddenly more stupid; it’s because I’m deliberately placing myself in environments I can’t yet keep up with, so that I can learn how to keep up with them, and stretch myself in the process.

A lot of thinking and reading about ADHD; impulsively, last week, I ducked into a seminar by a visiting speaker on the topic — arriving late — and sat there as waves of holy shit it’s me continually plunged against my mind; I was diagnosed back in college but never consciously worked on handling it well, and the seams are starting to fray). Grabbing books on it. Reading. Knowing that this is a common pattern — excitement about new and shiny things! not concentrating on what I should really be doing! — and trying to simultaneously structure life to work with it; going in to writing tutor hours to make my essay seem “shiny” to me again; a project gets exciting-points for a while when I interact with someone about it, and I can ride off that wave for a bit before it fades again. It’s why the technique of doing all my homework for a class immediately after that class works so well. Breaking down stuff into bite-sized pieces.

Remembering how I used to think “good lord, I get so much done despite the fact that I have meetings back-to-back-to-back and constantly need to stuff my work between bouts of running around… what more could I do if I had uninterrupted time to sit and write and think?” and realizing, again and more saliently now, that I accomplished so much because I crammed them in bite-sized chunks between a busy life, not despite it; that this structure is the way I get things done at all. Adjusting my schedule as best I could, now in the last few days of term, to try and ease in some small way the desperate pressure I have (again) put myself under. Coping. Learning to cope better. Doing it again and again, as I have for years. It’s new, but it’s not-new.

It’s my attack against the Peter Principle: people rise to their level of incompetence, so what you do is get there and then try to kick your ceiling up again. The world gets larger. You become a little freer to move within it. It hurts now, but looking back on how far I’ve already come, I have a damn, yeah moment every time, and I tell myself again don’t stop, keep going, and perhaps someday you can really and truly make an impact. But in a sense, I already have. As long as I keep up this forward motion, I can die happy at any time with the momentum that I have. (Well… not really. Given the choice, I’d like to keep living a happy, healthy life — but I wouldn’t regret the way I’d spent what I do have already.)

So, on the deafness front. (I’m jumping around a lot here: this is the braindump “let’s get it out” post, because I do have that paper, and… and I’m accepting that I’ll do what I can here, writing now for this brief time before lunch.) SignMark, the first deaf rapper in the world, came to Purdue last weekend; it was the first weekend this semester I’ve been on campus, I think, with the exception of the weekend that Sebastian was here for his spring break. Nikitha and Farshid and I went to the concert; I made falafel from scratch for the first time, grinding chickpeas in small batches in my blender due to lack of food processor.

It was the first Deaf culture event I’d been to in years; applaud by shimmering your hands in the air, people signing to each other, me with my awkward “I’m not hearing, but I’m… sort of a fake Deaf person, I can’t really sign” position, music loud, the Mel too shy to go and dance with people. But I’m standing closer to the edges; that’s a start. And maybe I can take an ASL class in the fall to round out my 9 credits, since I’m trying to deliberately light-load for quals and crazy amounts of “let us figure out how my brain and my ears work” experimentation, and some other non-class things like research and projects for school, and work outside of school to pay the bills.

And learning to read — really read, not just index things quickly. This will surprise most people, but I don’t read well; I skim fast, but I don’t retain much when I do that, it just looks that way because I build a catalogue of where-to-find-information, then the first time I need to use it, I go back and find it, and once I use it, I remember it. I need to learn how to read, which means learning how to predict the stuff I want to use and using it in advance of other people telling me to use it, so I can be a more independent reader and writer and thinker and researcher. I also need to learn how to write things that are larger than my head. And that’s tough, because the “writing space” inside my head is huge; I wrote my undergrad humanities thesis in one go, I’ve written everything I’ve ever done in one sitting and in one go, and… I cannot, cannot write my dissertation that way. How to pay attention to classes. How to participate in large discussions. How to understand people when they talk. My old comfortable coping mechanisms are highly developed, and I shouldn’t stop using them — but I’m going to deliberately cut myself off from them for periods at a time, for training. That’s the only way I’ll be able to develop new ones, and that’s the only way I’ll keep on learning.

So, SignMark concert. And trying to finish the semester, which always feels like ending a marathon by climbing up a sheer cliff face; you’re so close, but you’re already so tired, and suddenly it gets harder. Tuesday I flew to New York, stopping by for my mom’s birthday dinner on the way out. Wednesday was EucaDay, and it was wonderful to be back in a flow, in a city, in an event… in something I knew I could get into and come out of, wrap and be done. (That sort of thing works well for my brain; I’ve learned to rev tasks up quickly, finish them quickly, and not leave with any edges or obligations hanging; I won’t, typically, follow up.) Learned things about live transcription of events.

Got to talk with Greg over dinner, which was “vegetarian duck curry” for me, fried fish for him. Talking with Greg, or anyone else who understands FOSS culture deeply, is a massive moment of zone-of-proximal-development, at least for me; I suddenly become aware of how much I do learn about FOSS by being out of it in part — by getting a different toolset to analyze it with in academia. It’s like leaving the basketball court to weight train for a couple weeks, and then getting back into it and going damn, my sprints are more explosive than I remember. But it takes other players who know the game well, and who know you well, to bring that out, to make that progress salient and real; otherwise, you’ve just upped your bench press by 5% but that means nothing to you in the scheme of how you value Real Worth.

Slept like the dead the next morning, had an amazing afternoon geeking out with Mirabai about CART and Plover and FOSS that afternoon. Witnessed, again, the quiet beginnings of a revolution (that’s my favorite part of hanging out with Mirabai — she’s making history, and making it the right way). Used my pedagogy skillz yesterday and hoping I can help with Plover more in the future, though I must disabuse myself of the false notion that “help with Plover” (or any FOSS project) means “write and/or test code and/or something-else-technical” — even I cling subconsciously to that idea, even now! I’ve gotten Plover a lot of attention through my writing, and put in a lot of shaping of the curriculum yesterday afternoon, and that is just as much a contribution as 100 lines of Python code would be. I know that, but I don’t yet know that. Working on it. But steno: exciting.

And dinner with Sumana last night – fantastic Mexican food, conversations that… oh, I’ve missed being with people who know the world(s) I come from, who know me, whom I don’t need to build an explanatory backstory for because we’ve already traded fairly extensive swaths of our relevant histories… what do we call these people? Ah. Yes. Friends. I miss friends. They are… I used to think I wouldn’t mind rebooting my life every few years, but now that I have connections that span more than a few years, I see why one would want to keep them. I do, now.

Working on my paper, piles of notes growing on the folding-tray table next to me on Sumana and Leonard’s sofa as I pull them out of my (increasingly battered) Wenger book and into my computer. Reading graphic novels before I sleep; finishing Leonard’s first sci-fi novel when I wake up, talking with him (and a just-awakened Sumana) about the plot and characters and pacing as my tea grows cold and I settle down on the sofa here again to write, and now we are full-circle back at the beginning of this post.

And now I feel like I have written myself back into myself again — not fully nor well, but hastily, sloppily… but well enough. Enough that as I move forward on my “real work,” the pieces will align, fall into the right places. And I am learning (forcing myself to learn) to be fine with that imperfection, to be done and to leave it, and to get used to that feeling of walking away when I know things are done but don’t feel like I know things are done. There is a time and place for thoroughness, but sometimes… you need to just go, so you can move on, so you can get to those times and places.

Off we go.

Activist careers for those with a geek background

2012-04-27T15:00:26+00:00

This is an Ask a Geek Feminist question for our readers:

I’m a doctoral student in physics, currently writing my thesis and I’m going to be looking for a job come summer. The problem is that I’ve had a long, shitty, depressed time of grad school, and I don’t really want to keep doing physics, at least not right away – I got involved with trans* activism while I was transitioning and didn’t have a bathroom I felt like I could use, and since that I’ve also done safe space trainings, small-scale community organising, and successfully got the university to adopt a trans-inclusive student health plan.

At the moment I’d much rather continue my activism than get a postdoc or whatever, so my question is what sorts of jobs might be available to a geek activist with a doctorate in physics (rather than something more directly applicable), or where should I even start looking?

So, what I did here (or rather, what Valerie Aurora started and we did) was found an entire non-profit from scratch to employ our geek selves as feminist activists. Possibly that wasn’t what you wanted to hear though, it’s not the easy way to a career in activism. If there is one? Can anyone shed light on this that doesn’t involve applying for tax exempt status in the United States?

EucaDay for Remotees: the complete guide to what happened

2012-04-26T15:48:53+00:00

Aaaand now that all the transcripts are in and somewhat cleaned up, here is the complete collection of EucaDay artifacts; if you wanted to know what happened during any of the Eucalyptus sessions, everything you need is below. It is all text-based so it is easy to search and translate (there are no audio or video files available). If new artifacts come in, I will update this post accordingly.

If you are catching up with the event now, I suggest reading the transcripts (there are two) as a primary activity since they are a live capture of what was said during the event, then opening the other artifacts (slides and videos) as they are mentioned in the transcript.

Morning transcript – a running log of what was said during (and around) Marten’s and Tim’s presentations, including audience questions. Use this as your primary reading to catch up on the morning.

Marten’s slides (presented in the morning) – Marten Mickos is the CEO of Eucalyptus, and gave an overview of where the company is and where it’s headed.

Tim’s slides (presented in the morning) – Tim Cramer is the VP of Engineering at Eucalyptus, and talked about the state of Eucalyptus technical development.

Morning IRC backchannel log - what was being discussed on IRC during Tim and Marten’s talks.

Afternoon transcript – a running log of what was said during (and around) Greg’s presentation, including audience questions, and the EucaDay wrap-up by Marten. Use this as your primary reading to catch up on the afternoon.

Greg’s slides (presented in the afternoon) – Greg DeKoenigsberg is the VP of Community at Eucalyptus, and talked about why a thriving open source community is vital to Eucalyptus — and then let community members take the floor through short filmclips.

Videos (shown in the afternoon) in the order they were shown:

Afternoon IRC backchannel logs- what was being discussed on IRC during the Community session.

Feel free to edit and comment on any of the transcripts and artifacts — and let us know whether this sort of event documentation is useful, and whether we should do it again!

EucaDay: Community session, part 1

2012-04-25T19:43:58+00:00

Couldn’t make it to New York to see Greg DeKoenigsberg’s Community session at the first EucaDay this afternoon? No worries, this post series has it all, including the mini film festival in the middle!

First, I’ll include the entire slidedeck (you can click through to slideshare and download the deck as a pdf as well). Then I’ll show each individual slide inline with the transcript of Greg’s talk and each of the videos that were shown.

Gregdek @ EucaDay NYC

This is an epically long post, so click to see more below the jump. And click on each individual slide to enlarge it.

So we’ll go ahead and get started. I’m Greg DeKoenisberg. And this is the Euca community bar…

…except that’s a lie. We were talking about this being the bar part. Apparently it’s too early to start drinking so — I guess. There’s time and time. Just relax. It’s at the end of the day. This is — I always sort of love and hate getting the session at the end of the day because everyone’s been hanging out and we’ll try to keep it interesting and light and if I don’t succeed in that, feel free to get up and wander off. Trust me, I’m not going to be the least bit offended.

There you go. Can you read that? Get your eyes checked. It said welcome EucaDay NYC attendees. That’s what it said. So that’s 6 point font, I think.

The community says hello, there’s a lot more of them than there are of us right now. That’s very clear. It’s — like 9 point font, I think. And that’s supposed to represent some notion of proportionality. My role is to design the Euca community so I care about the community. And constituency is very much a virtual constituency. So even though we’re all here today having a lovely time on Wall Street, there are people all over everywhere who care about what it is that we’re doing and part of my job so to make sure that we’re being as transparent a company as we possibly can be.

So for some of our sessions here we have made sure that we have a transcriptionist who is doing all of this in realtime over the Internet so that the people who are not in this room can be in some sense in this room because they are every bit as important as we are.

So I’d like to talk a little bit about what makes open source projects ultimately
successful. And there are three things that I think are key success factors for an open source project I will give you all the opportunity to guess at what these may be because that’s active and fun and any guesses on what one of the three key success factors of the project is? A great community, no, it’s not. That’s really not it. Openness.

Openness is good. I’m looking for one particular word first. Let’s see if anyone can come up with it. What conspiracy, what? Users. Users. Users. Right? If software has no users, it’s very difficult to build a community. So what’s the second thing?

Audience member: Developers.

No, users. And then the third thing is users.

Users, users, users, all other things are important but, if you have no users, you have no product, no community, no nothing. Users are what we make software for.

There was a great programmer named George Bernard Shaw. This is a quote about software. The reasonable user adapts to software. The unreasonable user adapts the software to himself. All progress is dependent on the unreasonable user.

I’m thinking of getting a bumper sticker made because to me unreasonable users are the things that make open source communities work. And if you’ve ever been in an open source community, you know that there are a certain number of unreasonable users in every one of them, right? But that’s a good thing because they’re the ones trying to bend the world to their own needs.

They are what Eric von Hippel would call lead users. There’s a great book called Democratizing Iinnovation. The URL is at the bottom here. If you want to understand how software works, there’s great stuff there. But as far as how open innovation actually works, this was a book that’s been very formative to the way I think about open source software. So I recommend it. And it talks basically about how lead users drive innovations. And I’m not going to get too much into that because I don’t want to take up all your time talking about someone else’s book but it’s a really good book, I highly recommend it.

So what I care about specifically at Eucalyptus right now is getting users to move up the open source pyramid.

And at the base of this, of course, is users. So we had some responsibilities to our users to get them on to the pyramid, to make sure that there’s something useful for them to actually use, first of all, right? Any open source projects has to have functional stable code and that’s what we can focus on for most of our existence. Right?

It has to do something that’s useful. It has to work. It has to install properly. Has to do these basic things. Because until it does that, it’s interesting, it’s busy, it’s a cool project but until there’s code that does stuff that the user needs, it’s not really open source software yet, right? It’s just a project — it’s just a project idea.

So this is what we’ve been focused on for quite a while. To get as many users as we possibly can, we’re racing, racing, racing to the Eucalyptus 3.1 session. For those who you who were here this morning, this is what we talked about this is where we bring the open source and enterprise part back together. Currently they’re forked, they’re going to be the same code base again in 3.1. That is was going to allow us to get as much penetration as we possibly with a stable product that does all the things that our users need that can be easily installed, quickly installed, configured to do all the useful things that they needed to do. And one of the most useful cases of coarse is as an on-premise AWS compatible product, that’s what a lot of our users are looking for.

But we are in open source, right? In people who participate in the open source world. Lots and lots of users. Most users will simply remain that. Not everyone wants to move up this pyramid, right? But it’s my job to make sure that those who are interested in moving up this pyramid, a lot of people are users, they’re perfectly happy being users. They will gain great value out of our product. Some of them will become customers so they can be supported. That’s good too.

But then a certain number are going to have questions and they’re not going to be satisfied with whatever documentation we have or what have you. So they’re going to start looking for knowledge. This is how people grow into open source communities. They start trying to figure things out. So we need to make sure that we are serving those people. We need to make sure that we’ve got great knowledge based articles. We’ve got great forms for them to interact and we’ve got ways for them to reach out and touch us as a company beyond simply the “I’m a customer who needs support, I want to buy a subscription” kind of relationship. There are people who want to reach out in different ways than that.

We recently launched a site called engage.eucalyptus.com. I recommend you check it out if you’re at a place that has reliable Wi-Fi. Not that it doesn’t here. And we hang out here in IR C. How many people know what that is? That’s a decent percentage. That’s good. That’s where open source developers tend to live. We live on irc.freenode.net. We’re on the #Eucalyptus channel. You can go to webchat.freenode.net and get on to IRC without having to have an IRC client.

A little bit of chicken and egg there if you don’t know how to get on IRC, you can’t ask someone on IRC to help you but there are good web interfaces out there. That’s a little diversion here. Most of the people I know on the Eucalyptus community think of them first by their IRC nickname. In some cases I don’t actually know what their real names are. But I know they seek to engage us in the mediums that they are comfortable in and we need to make sure that we are there to engage them in those ways. Right?

So then you move up. This isn’t actually a change of gear. This is just the next highest level up the pyramid but my transition — I’m terrible at slides. So I was going to have a little transition that was going to zoom up the pyramid. I don’t know how to do that. So some number of these people who find whatever knowledge it is that they’re looking for or maybe they don’t find the right kind of knowledge, maybe they had a suggestion, maybe they have a bug. Maybe they got a great feature idea. Maybe they want to partner with us on something. Maybe something really made them angry and they just want to shout at someone.

All of these are means of participation. And without participation, there can be no open source community and without an open source community, there can ultimately be no open source company or at least it’s not going to be really an open source company. Right?

So we need to make sure that we have infrastructure to serve these potential participants. And we need to make sure that when they present themselves as participants, we are super super responsive to them. Right? Because people don’t want to waste their time.

If people come to your community and say I am interested in participating in some way, giving you a patch, exploring a bug with you to figure out with you why it doesn’t work — because I could just ignore the bug and say this is just a piece thrash trash and I’m not going to use it. I’m a user, my time is valuable. I found a bug, now I’m bringing it to you. What are you going to do about it? We must be hyper-responsive.

And for people who are looking for help it’s nice if we can give them some kind of recognition, right? So this is what we’ve been working on in the last little while. As we build out the open source community around Eucalyptus, we’ve got a site called projects.eucalyptus.com where we’ve got a lot of open source projects that are more thoughtful in some ways to the main product and we’ll go over those in a little bit. Also as Tim mention earlier, we’re opening up our engineering process.

Right now the bug tracker we have is somewhat outdated. Most issues are from the 2.X time frame in the next little while we’re going to roll out a public bugtracker that’s going to have issues from the 3.X releases and then we’ll be moving our source out to github in the very soon to get ready for 3.1, right?

And then obviously IRC as we just mentioned is a key part of being hyper responsive. I got a little script that any time anyone says my name on IRC, it sends me an e-mail and a text that said someone pinged you on IRC. And I don’t turn that off. Sometimes I sleep through it. But I don’t turn that off. So any time anyone says “Greg, what are you doing on IRC?” I will see it unless I’m asleep or drunk or ignoring them.

Which I try not to do. I try to be hyper responsive.

And then we also have mailing lists for people who want to have conversations about things that we care about. So, if you go to lists.eucalyptus.com you can see that mailing lists tend to be… “I have this problem that I’d like to work with you on, I saw you were doing code stuff, I’d like to know more about that.” Sort of a different mechanism.

And then reward takes many forms. For our super high flying community folks we have sweet hoodies that we had made that has Euca and if I weren’t in New York, I would probably be wearing that instead of this. But I have it in my bag so, if anyone is super excited to see it I can go to the hotel and get it and wear it while we’re drinking. But also just thank you. Just thank you. Thank you for using our product. Thank you for filing a bug. Thank you for saying that terrible thing about us on the forum. We know you didn’t really mean it. And if you did, let’s talk about that.

You know?

And then at that point you get a level of contributors who become your core contributors over time. People who really make difference in your project. People who go from users all the way to the top and become core contributors. People just as useful to your company as any employee you might have. And we’re still bringing people down that road. We’re starting to see people bubble up that stack. And what they care about is being equal in agency to the people in the company. Right? And there’s a lot of talk in open source about what’s your governance model going to be. How are you going to make sure all these competing influences are heard and from my perspective, that has always been fairly simple. Who’s writing code and how are you treating it?

And mostly, that’s what people care about. You know? They don’t care about how much money company X or organization Y has to pay to be a quote, unquote member of your community. They care about what you do with their contributions. And if you contribute code and they say — I’ll look at that in a while, that’s enraging. If they contribute code, and you look at that code and say “okay, so thanks for this patch. It’s really cool. This is broken, this is broken. This is formatted way wrong, you’ve got guidelines over here, I’m really not sure what’s going on with this, you need to take a look at that. But, if you can take care of all that stuff and bring that patch back, we’ll be happy to put it in a main line.”

Developers really respond to that, right? That’s agency. Right? And then responsibility is when they get that code into your product, they want to know that they’ve got some piece of the action. Right? It’s all open source code so they can fork it any time they want that’s the thing that makes open source software interesting. Anybody can take all of that code and just walk away with it tomorrow and start their own project. So you want to make sure that they’re working with you and not forking to work against you.

And the way you do that is by giving them agency and responsibility. And then at a certain point someone’s going to ask for a job. And by this point, you should give it to them. Or if you can’t give it to them, you should make sure that they’re well recommended to get a job somewhere else or if they’re working with the partner organization, you know, you got a good relationship with them that opens up business opportunities for them. In my experience, and I worked with Red Hat for a decade, and was deeply involved with the Fedora project — this is how open source actually works. This is what we’re trying to build here at Eucalyptus. I think we’re being more successful every day.

But it’s our responsibility to build those steps. Right? People don’t just decide to participate in open source. You have to pull them in. You have to make a project that is a good strong open source project that it sends people to participate and make their way to the top. So I’ve talked quite enough.

I am literally posting this while Greg continues speaking at the front of the room – the talk is underway as I type. This level of detail in the capture was possible because, as Greg mentioned earlier, we’re live-transcribing EucaDay with CART today. I’ll write more about this later in an event wrap-up post, but I wanted to show the power that this sort of access enables.

Stay tuned for Part II: The Film Festival!

IPv6 Performance Analysis Project Completed

2012-04-24T20:21:00+00:00

Earlier this year the FreeBSD Foundation announced that together with iXsystems it had awarded Bjoern Zeeb a grant to analyze the performance of FreeBSD's Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) stack.

FreeBSD is well known as a network stack reference and research platform. With the expanding installed base of IPv6 systems throughout the world, more focus was brought to making sure that the IPv6 subsystem remained at performance parity with its IPv4 counterpart.

"'IP feature parity' is what our users expect. Closing the gap between IPv6 and IPv4 in terms of performance has become more important as IPv6 is seeing a significant increase in public deployments", says Bjoern Zeeb. "This will help to keep the resource usage at the same level as traffic patterns shift towards IPv6."

One feature that received special attention was hardware assisted offload support: Large/TCP Segment Offload (LSO/TSO) and Large Receive Offload (LRO). Getting the basic support done was very important, as it allows FreeBSD, together with network card vendors, to further improve performance. IPv6 Extension Headers can be taken into account when defining new interfaces and improved basic network packet data types will ease offload implementations in all network card drivers in the future.

Having offload support in the network stack immediately helps loopback performance. Turning on "offloading" for IPv6 avoids expensive calculation and validation of upper layer (TCP and UDP) checksums.

With IPv6, TCP performance is now basically on par with IPv4 in the offloading case, allowing 10 Gbps line speed connections. This is a huge step forward. UDP throughput has increased and is closer to the level of IPv4. Changes to locking allowing better parallelism, which is a step in the right direction.

Initial numbers showing the differences of the work can be found here.

"I'd love to thank the FreeBSD Foundation and iXsystems for sponsoring the project and hope that it will help the community deploying IPv6" closes Bjoern.

Increasing your programming skill

2012-04-24T15:00:53+00:00

This is an Ask a Geek Feminist question for our readers:

I’m a geek feminist trying to get into IT, specifically object-oriented programming and Flash/Actionscript. What I’m having the most problems with is practice – I’m taking some Continuing Ed courses because I have a totally different day job, but I still don’t feel like I’m gaining much skill in programming, probably also because I know exactly what I WANT to learn, but I haven’t found anything yet that covers it.

What I’m wondering is, for the typical programmer/developer job path, how do you figure out how to solve programming problems that aren’t covered in your classes? Do you just search through the language documentation (e.g. Java API) looking for relevant code?

This is in many ways closely related to an earlier AAGF question about finding newbie coding problems, but also a little broader: programmers, when you were learning, did you go to the puzzle sites, or work through language docs, or work on open source, or something else?

Book Review: Zombie Island: A Shakespeare Undead Novel (Shakespeare Undead 2)

2012-04-23T18:21:07+00:00

Remember me mentioning this appalling-sounding novel about Vampire Shakespeare? well curiousity got the better of me, and I did click "Request it!" and they actually chose to send me a review copy. Here's the review I provided:

This book is like a B-movie inspired by the anachronistic touches of Moulin Rouge, only the sex scenes are outright un-sexy. It's a cheesy mish-mash of modern pop culture and Shakespearean English. It's both totally appallingly bad and yet sometimes brilliant, often funny and probably the strangest adaptation of The Tempest ever.

If you wanted anything remotely serious or delicate, this is not the book for you. (And what were you doing buying a book about Vampire Shakespeare fighting zombies with his Dark Lady anyhow?) I think it has the worst romance I've read in years (and I have a project with friends where we read terrible romance novels out loud) but if you read it all with the pacing and imagine the wooden acting of a low-budget film, it's worth a laugh. Recommended only if you like bad movies, silliness, and dubious mashups of pop culture and literature, since this rests on the knife edge of "bad" and "so bad it's good." I enjoyed it, but your mileage may vary.

I'll be keeping my copy for The Project, but I'm quite happy to lend it out to anyone else who foolishly thinks that Vampire Shakespeare and his Dark Lady battling zombies during The Tempest sounds like a good idea. I'm not sure if this is warning or endorsement, but it's only a few velociraptors or beagles shy of sounding like it could have been written by beable. Now you know.

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Auditdistd Project Completed

2012-04-23T14:32:00+00:00

The auditdistd project is complete. Pawel Jakub Dawidek provides the following report regarding the project:

I'm happy to report that the auditdistd project I was working under sponsorship from the FreeBSD Foundation is complete.

The auditdistd daemon is now part of the OpenBSM package and will be available in its next release.

The auditdistd daemon nicely complements the audit framework. It allows one to distribute audit records collected locally with minimal latency to another system. This helps in postmortem analysis, as we know that at least to some point in time audit logs stored on a separate machine can be trusted. This is very important, because once the system is compromised, we cannot trust any of its local files.

One of the most important goals was to make the daemon very secure. We really don't want any weakness in the auditdistd protocol to allow a break into the machine where audit logs are collected. To achieve this, the daemon makes heavy use of sandboxing mechanisms, including Capsicum, if supported by the operating system.

The daemon can act as a sender, as a receiver, or as both. The whole communication between two auditdistd daemons is secured by TLS encryption. Low latency is achieved by using the kqueue mechanism to monitor local trail files and by sending new audit records as quickly as possible.

For more information on how to setup auditdistd please visit its wiki page.

I'd like to thank the FreeBSD Foundation for sponsoring this project and I hope that it will meet the expectations of the FreeBSD community.

Self-critique of my DML Ignite: “Productively Lost” talk (video!)

2012-04-22T17:53:30+00:00

The video of my DML 2012 lightning talk is up! My blog post transcript is not quite accurate, but it’s close enough, and the message is the same.

Looking back at it with a more critical eye — wow, I’m nervous, and it shows in the stumbles. Not the smoothest talk I’ve ever given (in fact, I remember shaking as I walked off the stage). I talk fast, but I’m understandable and relatively clear, which isn’t too bad — and there are audience reactions (which I remember with gratitude).

All in all, considering that I was running on close to no sleep fresh off a practically-overnight flight to San Fransisco while converting this talk from a 2-person one to a solo one on the plane, it wasn’t bad. (Sebastian was originally a co-presenter, but we hit SIGCSE so exhausted we decided he’d take the brunt of SIGCSE so I could breathe enough to do DML while he went back early to rest). Redoing an Ignite talk is tougher than a normal talk – it’s 5 minutes, slides auto-advance every 15 seconds – so you need to get your timing down. I was running this constantly on the plane, on the taxi… the video makes the slides look more out of sync to my talking than they actually are (the slides I’m actually talking about are a few seconds behind the video).

Need to get more of my talks recorded so I can do more comprehensive post-mortems of what I need to work on. Right now, I know timing, pacing, and fluidity of movement — I’m energetic and that shows, but I use the same movements and gestures again and again, and while I move across the stage, I don’t own it with the quiet confidence really good speakers have.

I’ll practice more.

Akademy sponsoring – deadline for round 2 is soon

2012-04-21T17:17:39+00:00

This is just a quick reminder that the deadline for the second round of sponsorship requests for Akademy is at the end of the month. If you need sponsorship from KDE e.V. to attend please find all the details in my previous blog post.

Quick hit: Top Girl, Rock Bottom

2012-04-20T19:17:03+00:00

I’ve played some pretty terrible video games, but this sounds like it may be a candidate for the worst game ever:

And that’s when it hits me, the one brilliant thing about this game: there is something in it for everyone. Everyone who plays it would find something in it that they hate.

Feminists would hate it. “Men’s Rights Activists” would hate it. Parents already hate it. Left-wingers would hate the consumerism and the objectification of women; right-wingers would hate the sexualization of young girls. Economists, as I’ve said above, would be baffled. Grammar enthusiasts would be appalled at its many punctuation and spelling errors. Models would hate that it makes modeling look easier and less cutthroat than it is. Fashion designers and artists would hate it for all the mismatched, misguided styling choices. My father would hate this game and Caryl Churchill would hate this game. Israelis and Palestinians would hate this game. We would all be united by our hatred of this, the most useless, uninteresting, universally offensive game known to humanity.

Read the rest of Mara Wilson’s detailed and funny review here: Top Girl: The Game for Everyone!

Writing violence against a woman

2012-04-20T15:00:31+00:00

This is an Ask a Geek Feminist question for our readers:

I am male who wants to write a novel about a female superhero. Since this is a superhero novel there will be violence and at some point my hero will have to lose a fight (though of course she wins in the end).

I am wondering how I should write the scene where the supervillain beats the crap out out of my female hero. Should I just write as if she were a male? Or do I need to take precautions so I don’t end up glorifying violence against women?

A quick thought on this one: there’s no “just” in “write as if she were a male”. A big part of the problem is that this is pretty rare, hence the Women in Refrigerators trope and similar critiques. Your own knowledge that she’s a woman will influence you to write violence specific to her gender and to cultural tropes about male-on-female violence.

So, I think you’ve set up a bit of a false dilemma between “write what comes naturally and it will be just like as if she was a man getting beat up” or “go out of my way to de-glorify the violence against her”. Another thing you need to be careful of is “write what comes naturally and spew your cultural uglies about women and their bodies and violence against them all over the page completely unawares.”

Second thought: you don’t want to “write as if she were a male”, in any case, because she isn’t. You want to write as if she was a person. Your current thinking on this seems to be edging towards “men are the pattern for people, women are special unique cases of people” which is a little concerning for your characterisation of a woman!

Do you have a writing group who review each other’s drafts? Does this group contain women? Obviously the women in your writing group should be reviewing all the work that your male peers do, not just “hey, I have a woman-centric bit here, so now you’re the expert, but I’ll ask John about the rest of my writing.” But you could ask the group in general for feedback on this and since you can show them the actual draft, they may have more specific thoughts.

You could perhaps get some of the way with playing around with reading and writing drafts of your violence scenes gender-switched and with more ambiguous pronouns in order to try and keep the uglies out of it, but I think this is where we need some fiction writers to step in. What think you?

“Oh, You Sexy Geek!”: “Geek Girls” and the Problem of Self-Objectification

2012-04-19T15:00:28+00:00

Cross-posted at From Austin to A&M.

I just returned from the PCA/ACA conference in Boston this year, where I presented a paper on geek women presenting themselves as “sexy,” focusing on cosplay.

My presentation had a powerpoint. I’ve embedded it below. You can also download it, if you like.

Oh, you sexy geek!

I’m fairly certain the embedded video for “G33k and G4m3r Girls” won’t work, so here it is:

And here’s the actual presentation I gave:

In July of last year at Comic-Con (the largest media convention in the country), a panel titled “Oh, You Sexy Geek!” purported to address the trend of female geeks dressing “sexy.” From the panel description:

Does displaying the sexiness of fangirls benefit or demean them? When geek girls show off, are they liberating themselves or pandering to men? Do some “fake fangirls” blend sex appeal with nerdiness just to appeal to the growing geek/nerd market, or is that question itself unfair? And what’s up with all the Slave Leias?

The discussion at Comic-Con was framed in terms of individual choices, not structural influences, and this limited the conclusions the panel could come to. The dichotomous choice offered—“Does displaying the sexiness of fangirls benefit or demean them? […] are they liberating themselves or pandering to men?”—fails to take into account the complexities of women’s positions in geek culture, the politics of cosplay, or how cultural ideals of beauty influence women’s fashion decisions and choices.Geek cultures—centered on video games, science fiction and fantasy, and comic books—are traditionally thought of as boys’ clubs. Even though women often make up half of geek populations, their roles in geek culture(s) are limited by the perceptions and actions of advertisers, producers, designers, marketers, and fans. Women are considered valuable additions to many geek cultures, but usually as decoration. Which means that most of the women “celebrated” in geek cultures are conventionally beautiful, thin, white, abled cis women who position themselves as sexy objects for male geek consumption, usually via cosplay. For the uninitiated, the term cosplay is a combination of “costume” and “roleplay” or “play,” and refers to when fans costume as characters or objects from their favorite media (like video games, movies, and TV shows). Cosplayers usually wear their costumes to conventions, and the “roleplay” aspect of cosplaying is often minimal in North America, and limited to the poses struck for photos or occasional interactions in the convention hallways.

This presentation will explore the ways in which female geeks’ choices are limited by geek cultures, how the trend of self-objectification among geek women can signal both a hostility towards women as equal participants and a resistance to that hostility, and how blaming women’s performances is a hand-waving exercise intended to gloss over the culture(s)’ problems.

The sexism that persists in geek communities is not special. It is not separable and inherently different than sexist institutions and behaviors in the “real world.” This means that the sexualization and objectification of women is not unique to geek cultures, though it is particularly severe in geek media. Video games, comics, science fiction, fantasy—these media forms are often at fault for promoting unrealistic (and, pretty regularly, physically impossible) standards of beauty for women. They fashion their female heroines and villains as sexy objects to be consumed, unlike male counterparts. Further, geek industries bring the objectification of women into the real world, hiring, for example, booth babes for conventions. Booth babes are conventionally attractive models hired by media companies to wear skimpy clothing and entice convention-goers to their respective booths. Geek women exist within this culture, which devalues their contributions as producers of media and meaning, but values their contributions as adornment.

This project is about self-objectification, not objectification by others, but the two are not wholly separable, any more separable than my putting on makeup and high heels this morning and the objectification of women in advertising and fashion magazines. Just as media representations of women influence women’s decisions to diet, wear cosmetics, get plastic surgery, lighten their skin, relax their hair, shave their legs, and wax their bikini lines, geek media representations of women influence geek women’s decisions to dress in “sexy” cosplay.

By “sexy” cosplay, I mean cosplay that appeals to heterosexual male fantasies, participates in the objectification of the cosplayer, and (purposefully or not) positions the cosplayer as an object for consumption by male geeks. There are two ways to participate in sexy cosplay; one is to choose a character whose costume is already sexy, and another to alter a character’s costume in order to make it sexy.

First, let’s look at cosplayers who do not alter their costumes. A rather visible example of this kind of sexy cosplay is women who costume as “slave Leia.” The Star Wars character has two main costumes that cosplayers choose from. [Next slide] The first, and least popular, is the costume from A New Hope. This is the costume with the iconic buns. [Next slide] The second, and more popular, Leia costume is “slave Leia,” the bikini-style costume worn by Leia in Return of the Jedi when she is the prisoner of Jabba the Hutt. At major science fiction media conventions, like Comic-Con and Dragon*Con, it is common to have an official group slave Leia picture, because of the popularity of this costume with cosplayers and other convention-goers. In the slave Leia cosplay, we see a classic example of sexy cosplay in which the costumer chooses a costume that is already heteronormatively “sexy.”

Next, let’s look at an example of a cosplayer who alters their costume to make them sexy. [Next slide] This is LeeAnna Vamp as Chewbacca from Star Wars, who is on the left. This cosplay was featured on IGN, a website about gaming and entertainment. Notice how Vamp positions herself compared with the actual Chewbacca. Chewbacca stands firmly and aggressively, feet apart to keep him stable. LeeAnna, on the other hand, stands off-center, with her legs together and crossed: a passive position. In the kneeling photo, her position suggests sexual availability and exposure (not sexual aggression), with a slightly open mouth and legs parted. These positions, along with her revealing costume, position LeeAnna as a sexual object for consumption. [Next slide]

In both altered and unaltered sexy cosplay, we thus see a desire to be seen as attractive by straight men. These women visually signal to a viewer (there’s always a viewer for cosplayers) that they are conforming to heteronormative beauty standards. They do this by positioning themselves as sexually receptive and passive; by wearing costumes that emphasize body parts that our culture associates with sex appeal, like breasts, hips, buttocks, and navels; and by emphasizing their femininity and conformity to beauty standards.

As Naomi Wolf points out The Beauty Myth, women in the U.S. are rewarded for capitulating to narrow and often impossible beauty standards. She claims that beauty is a currency, with which “women must unnaturally compete for resources that men have appropriated for themselves” (12). Ariel Levy’s exploration of raunch culture in Female Chauvinist Pigs demonstrates, however, that women must often do more than merely perform beauty work. She argues that “hotness doesn’t just yield approval. Proof that a woman actively seeks approval is a crucial criterion for hotness in the first place.” In a world of booth babes and sexy cosplay, this is apparent. What makes the sexy cosplay sexy is not merely that the cosplayers are thin, young, and buxom, but that they are performing and actively seeking male approval. [Next slide] For a particularly egregious example of this, I’m going to show you the video created by some geek women, mostly actresses, who formed a group called Team Unicorn. [play to 1:28] The video is very repetitive, so we can stop it there.

Almost everything about this video marks it as a performance in the service of geek men. Of course, the participants in the video, Team Unicorn, consist of young, thin, light-skinned women who conform to cultural beauty standards. There are a number of particularly porn-like shots, in which the young women are naked, strategically covered by light sabers, video game controllers, or DVDs, and on piles of geek toys, movies, or comic books. Meanwhile, the men in the intermittent shots do not match cultural standards of male beauty or masculinity. They wear cheap costumes and dance in awkward or silly ways. The women in the video wear sexy and high-quality costumes, and their dances mimic those of pop stars, which is to say, their dances are meant to appeal to straight male viewers. The video is also framed by Seth Green saying, “Hello friends. Don’t you want to meet a nice girl?,” positioning the video as an introduction to women as dating partners or sex objects. The video is not meant for geek women to view, and feel empowered by seeing representations of other geek women. It is meant to be viewed by men who wish to believe that, despite their own inability to meet cultural standards of masculinity, there are geek women available to them who are “sexy” in two ways: 1. These women do fit a physical standard of beauty, and 2. These women want to please men, want to be sexually appealing to them.

The video’s YouTube description claims, “This music video parody proves Geek and Gamer Girls really do exist.” Since, at the time, there had been multiple headlines proclaiming that women make up 50% of gamers and Comic-Con attendees, this description seems disingenuous. This is because geek women who are not “hot” are routinely ignored or erased in geek culture. This video would more accurately describe itself as “proof that conventionally sexy women who are also geeks want to have sex with you, presumed straight geek male viewer.”

Because geek women are often clearly aiming their performances at geek men, geek men and women often place blame on the women who dress this way. [Next slide] A comment on Geek Tyrant, written by a blogger who is posting a collection of “cosplay cleavage,” is illustrative. Venkman writes, “And ladies, maybe some of you will find these images offensive, but these are women that are dressing like this. We didn’t ask them to, they do it on their own, and if women dress like this, the fact of the matter is…guys are going to stare [sic].” This sentiment lands the blame for the objectification of geek women squarely on the shoulders of women, and characterizes men’s responses to these women as inevitable, natural, and uncontrollable. [Next slide] Needless to say, however, the images included in the blog post make it clear that these geek men feel they have nothing to apologize for. The blogger is not suggesting that men do not objectify women (after all, they go to cons to see “cleavage,” not to meet women or fellow geeks), but he refuses to accept responsibility for this. Rather, he suggests that women need to just accept that “guys are going to stare” at women who perform a certain version of “sexy.” It is thus women’s responsibility to prevent their own objectification. [Next slide]

There are some obvious problems in this kind of hand-waving exercise, but the most important one for us today is that one of the reasons geek women seek the approval of geek men is that geek men have positions of power and privilege in both geek industries and in geek fan communities. While women understand that sexy cosplay won’t get them respect, per se, they also know that it is most likely to get them positive attention, recognition, and limited acceptance in geek communities. Women who do not or cannot seek sexual approval from the male geek community are more likely to be ignored, derided, or dismissed. They are more likely to be called harpy feminists or annoying squeeing fangirls than to get approval and acceptance. Team Unicorn, for example, was rewarded generously for their performance with relative fame and funding for a slick new website. They also managed to buy legitimacy in this video with the inclusion of Seth Green and Stan Lee. One has to wonder, would Seth Green have agreed to a video proving the existence of female geeks if those geeks had been fat, queer, or disabled?

The pressure is on for geek women to position themselves as sexy consumable objects for geek men. When they do so, their decision is framed as a freely-made choice. On the other hand, men’s behavior in reaction to sexy cosplay, like leering, sexual harassment, or other forms of objectification, is usually framed as inevitable and natural. The pressure women feel to perform “sexy” for their fellow geeks is usually ignored or dismissed, and the conversation becomes similar to the “Oh, You Sexy Geek!” panel at Comic-Con, in which the problem is framed as about geek women, not geek culture. Are women selling out, or being empowered?

The answer to that question is that it’s more complicated. While women performing sexy for their fellow geeks are unquestionably doing so within a culture that encourages this performance and values women merely as decoration, they may also be using sexy cosplay to subvert that culture’s objectification of women.

In John Fiske’s Understanding Popular Culture, he describes jeans as objects of popular culture that can embody contradictory meanings. Jeans, he argues, have multiple meanings given to us by jean producers, such as associations with heteronormative femininity, youth, toughness, and/or hard work. These meanings come from the top, and represent the interests of those in power. People can tear their jeans (or write on them, or bleach them, or cut them off) to subvert and resist those meanings, but this doesn’t mean that the original meanings just go away. Rather, both meanings coexist in the garment simultaneously. According to Fiske, this means that popular culture objects, like jeans, “can entail the expression of both domination and subordination, of both power and resistance. So torn jeans signify both a set of dominant American values and a degree of resistance to them” (4). Sexy cosplay works in the same way. There are ways in which individual sexy cosplayers incorporate meanings resistant to the culture’s demand that they proffer themselves as consumable objects.

[Next slide] Olivia Waite, a geek and erotica writer, wrote about her personal experience with the slave Leia cosplay, after I had blogged a version of this essay at the Geek Feminism blog. Waite was a big fan of Star Wars when she was a child, and her favorite character was Leia, who she describes as “badass, intelligent, and passionate.”

She writes that when watching Return of the Jedi,

as soon as [Leia] shows up in the gold bikini, with the high ponytail and the neck-chain, every cell in my being went, She must be so pissed about that.

Because what people forget, when they talk about Slave Leia outfits, is that it’s the one costume she doesn’t choose for herself. She’s forced into it, compelled to wear that bikini for Jabba’s dubious and slobbery pleasure. And I can see why people are upset that this happens—because if there’s one thing we do not need to gratify so much, it’s the male gaze in film—but at the same time, I think it’s important that this happens to Leia, because it happens to plenty of women, all the time, every day, around the world, with or without help from a gold bikini.

And here is what Leia does, when you force her into a scanty outfit and choke-chain: she takes that chain, and she kills you with it. She doesn’t let her clothing get in her way or limit her more than she can help—she waits for her moment to strike, and then she conquers her would-be conqueror and saves the day.

And I was a little kid, not yet desensitized to violence [...] Jabba’s death scene freaked the hell out of me. It wasn’t a clean blaster shot to the chest or a slice from a lightsaber that sent sparks flying or made you turn invisible. There were struggles, and flailing, and twitching limbs. The shots are close-ups, and very dark—it’s vicious, and vengeful, and physical, and very very personal.

So for me, wearing that gold bikini does not mean Here I am, a sexy toy for your amusement and gratification.

To me, that gold bikini says, If you fuck with me, I will end you.

It says, What I wear is not the same as who I am.

Waite’s is a particularly powerful example of how women can create subversive meanings in their sexy cosplay. Hers doesn’t even require an alteration in the costume, though it may include a more aggressive stance for pictures, or even a performance of the chain choking. But it is, all the same, resistant to the cultural meanings put onto the costume by the producers of Star Wars and by the powers that be in fan communities. In Waite’s cosplay, the gold bikini is a symbol of female power and resistance to objectification. At the same time, it holds those dominant meanings as well. It contains the raunch culture assumption that women are primarily valuable for their performance of “sexy” and a resistance to that gross objectification. It symbolizes the titillation of women in sexual slavery and a challenge to women’s subordinate status as the sex class. From my own experiences in geek fan cultures, I don’t believe Waite is an anomaly, a pioneering feminist geek who uses sexy cosplay to challenge the messages found in geek media and geek culture. There are others like her, whose sexy cosplays are also challenges to the status quo.

It is also important to note that not all cosplay (sexy or not) is progressive or oppositional, either. As Henry Jenkins points out in Textual Poachers,

To say that fans promote their own meanings over those of producers is not to suggest that the meanings fans produce are always oppositional ones or that those meanings are made in isolation from other social factors. Fans have chosen these media products from the total range of available texts precisely because they seem to hold special potential as vehicles for expressing the fans’ pre-existing social commitments and cultural interests; there is already some degree of compatibility between the ideological construction of the text and the ideological commitments of the fans and therefore, some degree of affinity will exist between the meanings fans produces and those which might be located through a critical analysis of the original story. [...] Readers are not always resistant; all resistant readings are not necessarily progressive readings; the ‘people’ do not always recognize their conditions of alienation and subordination. (34)

That is to say, not all geek women recognize their conditions as alienated and subordinated members of geek cultures. Not all sexy cosplay is (or can be) oppositional or progressive, as Waite’s reading of the costume is. However, this does not mean that geek women are somehow to blame for their objectification. As Jenkins notes, fans make their choices in the context of their cultures, and not in isolation of social factors. The beauty myth, raunch culture, and the male domination of geek culture(s) all contribute to female fans’ choice in sexy cosplay, even if they choose to resist the meanings handed down from those in power. In order to fix the culture of objectification in geek culture, we cannot look to individual women and cosplayers, but rather to those in power, whether they be content creators (like George Lucas, Stan Lee, Felicia Day), influential commentators (like Chris Hardwick, Jerry Holkins, Mike Krahulik), convention organizers, or forum moderators. The problem here is not “self-objectification,” as my essay title suggests, but the pressure to perform sexy (or be ignored, derided, or dismissed). The fact is, “sexy” is not the only way that geek women represent themselves; it is merely the representation recognized and rewarded by geek culture at large. That has to change before the position of women in these culture(s) can change.

Works Cited

Fiske, John. Understanding Popular Culture. 2^nd ed. London: Routledge, 2010. Print.

Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge, 1992. Print.

Levy, Ariel. Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture. Kindle ed. New York: Free Press, 2005. AZW file.

“Oh, You Sexy Geek!” Panel at Comic-Con, 21 July 2011, 10:45 AM. My Comic-Con 2011 Sched*. Comic-Con, n.d. Web. 25 September 2011. < http://mysched.comic-con.org/event/c31518fe1aa3bb6b788ba63757b84fba>

Venkman. “Collection of Cosplay Cleavage.” Geek Tyrant. Geektyrant, 15 July 2011. Web. 9 April 2012.

Waite, Olivia. “In Defense of Slave Leia.” Olivia Waite. Olivia Waite, 29 August 2011. Web. 8 April 2012.

Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1991. Print.

Ways for men to respond to harassment of women

2012-04-18T21:55:06+00:00

This isn’t exactly geek feminist, but we often get asked questions about how to be a better ally, so I thought this was worth sharing. It’s a video of a bunch of men demonstrating ways to respond to street harassment. Within geeky circles, stuff that’s not unlike street harassment does happen at conferences and other gatherings, and it’s worth being prepared.

Not only is this a good collection of lines to have in your head, but their delivery and expressions also help get the message across:

So if you see bad behaviour happening, these are some non-violent ways you can step in and tell someone to cut it out. Sometimes, a clear expression of disgust from other men will make a really big impression, and once one person says something others will chime in and make the offender really look and feel like he’s in the minority. It’s good to have a bunch of lines prepared and practiced so you aren’t left with your mouth gaping open thinking, “did he really just say that? here?” and instead you can launch right into responses like, “I can’t take you anywhere,” “That’s not ok,” “Are you serious?” or “It’s not a compliment.” This video is obviously targeted at male allies, but some of these lines may be useful to others who want to be able to step in.

Remember, the wiki has an article on allies that can always use more links and tips. If you’ve seen any great resources, please mention them in the comments or add them directly to the wiki!

Getting management feedback from your kids

2012-04-18T18:24:35+00:00

Last night on our drive home from school I started asking my 11 year old about his science fair project. I asked him what it was going to be on, what supplies he needed, what was he going to do if his idea didn’t work, what was he going to draw on his poster board, … and he ended up yelling at me “I’M GOING TO DO IT, OK?!”

Then this morning I had a whole series of 1:1 meetings with folks on my team … and I caught myself asking them questions in much the same way. How many people are coming to the doc sprint? Where will it be? Do you have a theme? Did you email the developer teams?

Now Janet, the one planning the doc sprint, didn’t yell at me. But was she just being nice?

So I have some theories:

Maybe it’s ok to ask co-workers those questions and not your kid. (I do really want and need to know that information about the doc sprint …)
Maybe my way of asking questions is really abrasive (or giving feedback on what I think needs to be done via questions is abrasive) and my kid just feels more free to tell me so.
Maybe my kid feels like he’s behind on his science fair project and was just defensive. I expect my co-workers to have answers to those types of questions (and they do) but perhaps I haven’t taught my kid to think like that yet.

It made me think that I need to make sure I get more feedback from those I work with … especially since most of these conversations happen through a video camera.

Oh, and the science fair project is coming along quite nicely. So’s the doc sprint.

Rating my scientific impact

2012-04-18T17:58:48+00:00

A while ago, I saw a mention in a UNM newsletter about Google Scholar profiles and decided to give it a try. Like many people in my field, I already keep a list of publications on my website, but this had graphs! Citation counts! I wasn't too sure about this whole social-media-for-researchers aspects, but I like graphs.

I had totally forgotten about it 'till a few days ago when I got a reminder email, and upon looking at my profile I was pleased to see that my very first paper now has 60 citations. Sixty!

For context, the average citation rate in computer science was 3.75 from the period 2000-2010 (Source: Times Higher Education), and even the average citation rate for science in general was 10.81. So 60 seems awesome, even if average may be a weird number for something that I know is a power law distribution. Still, go me! I've got a few above-average papers, mostly the spam work (I was the first to apply artificial immunology to the spam problem, so subsequent people working in that space generally cite me) but I notice that SOMA's almost made it up to 30 citations, and that's the first of my papers in the web space.

It's still a pretty modest accomplishment in the grand scheme of things. Check out Paul's list or Steph's list if you want to feel small, but those are both totally amazing, exceptional people who run whole labs. For my weight class as a newly minted PhD, I'm happy enough, but I need to do more...

So now to take that pride and turn it into a totally awesome, citation-worthy paper summing up my remaining thesis work!

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GF classifieds (April 2012)

2012-04-18T15:00:34+00:00

This is another round of Geek feminism classifieds. If you’re looking to hire women, find some people to participate in your study, find female speakers, or just want some like-minded folk to join your open source project, this is the thread for you!

Here’s how it works:

Geeky subjects only. We take a wide view of geekdom, but if your thing isn’t related to an obviously geeky topic, you’ll probably want to give a bit of background on why the readers of Geek Feminism would be interested.
Explain what your project/event/thing is, or link to a webpage that provides clear, informative information about it. Ideally you’ll also explain why geek women might find it particularly awesome.
Explain what you’re looking for. Even if it’s not a job ad, think of it like one: what is the activity/role in question, and what would it involve? What is the profile of people you’re looking for?
GF has international readership, so please be sure to indicate the location if you’re advertising a job position, conference, or other thing where the location matters. Remember that city acronyms aren’t always known world-wide and lots of cities share names, so be as clear as possible! (That is, don’t say “SF[O]” or “NYC” or “Melb”, say “San Francisco, USA”, “New York City, USA” or “Melbourne, Australia”.) And if you can provide travel/relocation assistance, we’d love to know about it.
Keep it legal. Most jurisdictions do not allow you to (eg.) advertise jobs for only people of a given gender. So don’t do that. If you are advertising for something that falls into this category, think of this as an opportunity to boost the signal to women who might be interested.
If you’re asking for participants in a study, please note Mary’s helpful guide to soliciting research participation on the ‘net, especially the “bare minimum” section.
Provide a way for people to contact you, such as your email address or a link to apply in the case of job advertisements. (The email addresses entered in the comment form here are not public, so readers won’t see them.)
Keep an eye on comments here, in case people ask for clarification or more details. (You can subscribe to comments via email or RSS.

If you’d like some more background/tips on how to reach out to women for your project/event/whatever, take a look at Recruiting women on the Geek Feminism Wiki.)

Good luck!

Ideas, Invention, and the Future: Technology Strives Godlike :: Omniscience, Omnipotence and Omnipresence

2012-04-18T14:56:55+00:00

How do you make calls about new or future technology? Which ideas are worth pursuing? What frameworks can you apply for thinking about this?

I ask my friend Tim, who lays down his theory for predicting advances in technology, and whether we’ll accept or reject something new.

Tim has read a lot of classical philosophy, and also once started a company back in the 90s to make 3D printers (ZCorp), so I really enjoy asking his perspective on the philosophy of creating technology.

This blog post is largely based on an email conversation from back in 2010 that, with Tim’s permission, I am quoting here.

In short: good technology makes us more omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent. Bad technology detracts from those things.

—
Who wrote the frameworks around omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, etc.?

That was Thomas Aquinas, which is easiest in secondary source form (wikipedia etc.) I probably read it in excerpts or summaries by others.

Aquinas also collected arguments “proofs” of the existence of God, some of which don’t make sense anymore and some are often recycled for “intelligent design” and other proselytizing.

Aquinas seems to have been trying to pin down “what God is” or “what qualities define God”. In this sense, good technology could also be seen as “that which makes us more godlike.” (which I’m going to call dated language, but probably the best thought framework Aquinas had access to.)

That Technology Strives Godlike thinking is useful to predict cultural trends within a worldview that doesn’t acknowledge limits.

“The Singularity” is a good example of such a striving, but a general singularity is a very long way from happening for a lot of reasons, all based in practicalities. If energy, materials, and garbage dumps were costless and infinite, the singularity would be jumping out at us everywhere.

It’s useful to think about real situations when old limits are removed by some new material or technology and physics or economics are no longer the limiting factors.

How did you know to work on 3D printers back then? What changed while you were working on them?

In the case of 3D printing, improvements in CAD and the spread of CAD set the hard market limits of 3D printing as a business, which meant for us, not a limit to early growth at all.

How much did the frameworks for foresight, or for systems thinking, consciously factor into making 3D printers?

Very much in choosing major directions/abandoning distractions. Very little in actually making it work. That was mostly close observation and a willingness to use existing/free stuff.

Nassim Taleb and “Psychology of Selling” are good on risk assessment. Take cheap risks and don’t take any with actual downside consequences.

One of the two qualities of inventorship that currently fascinate me most right now is “systems thinking”. The ability to see how whole systems work together.

I think you’ve identified our new technology “God”.

That’s very important, our new shared religion/culture of “sustainability” acknowledges limits. No one takes seriously the old plan to move to other planets after we trash this one. That’s a big change.

A few think they’ll go to heaven, but most of them want their kids to have a viable planet to live on.

What can I do to improve my abilities in thinking about systems?

The system dynamics people at MIT, Sterman especially, are good to learn from. I have an old manuscript of his that catalogs quirks of behavioral economics and does a better narrative of Easter Island than Jared Diamond. I don’t know if it was published or if that stuff stayed in.

Watch out for astrology – I’ve seen a couple of SD folks go manic with a nearly identical system mania with horoscope connections.

They’re also not so good with politics, so it’s hard for them to get their insights into policy.

Anything I should read that you’d recommend?

All of the mp3s at the Long Now and all the ones at the London School of Economics, except for the psychologists and lit/crit nuts.

I’m reading codecheck.com building code summaries which are beautiful and clear. Makes the code look like pretty reasonable building instructions. Memorize that and know exactly what’s going on in a construction site.

EAGLE has the worst UI of any software I’ve ever persisted in using

2012-04-18T07:54:46+00:00

Dear Lazywebs,

If you have suggestions, this is one of my present-day problems: http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/30197/placing-a-device-in-eagle

I just added a new library (the adafruit library) in EAGLE comprised of many devices and packages. I can place packages, but not devices (usually devices represent a few different specific packages).

I’m using EAGLE-6.2.0. How do I get the devices onto a board?

This really shouldn’t be as difficult an issue as it’s been proving versus my “try every button” and “googling” problem-solving techniques. I even tried to solve it by making my own modified EAGLE library (called starfruit, obvi) out of Ada’s devices, which did not solve. If you have any suggestions I will be pretty grateful!

In the long term, I feel like it should be within our capabilities as a humanity to make tools that are better than EAGLE.

on not knowing what the hell I’m doing despite appearances to the contrary

2012-04-18T01:48:14+00:00

When I started getting involved with FOSS, I was a naive and sheltered student who hadn’t really seen or done much in the world, and saw the people in the first communities I joined as just… the coolest people ever. They flew all over the world for speaking engagements! They did crazy hackathons and boldly jumped into new things! They cooked ethnic food I’d never seen at big dinner parties in their apartments in the city with people I’d read about on the internet but never dreamed of meeting, they were all grown-up and in their mid-twenties and totally had life figured out. Right?

Fast forward. I’m 25 now, still doing FOSS stuff, flying all over the world for speaking engagements, doing crazy hackathons, boldly jumping into new things, cooking ethnic food at dinner parties in my apartment in the city with people from the intarwebz. I grew up to become one of the people that my younger self idolized, and now students come up to me and ask how I’ve done all this amazing stuff, and say they wish they could have so much of their lives figured out, and I have a weird disconnected moment because I have no freaking idea what I’m doing. I am making it all up. And I think: “good grief, is that what they were doing?”

Now those people are in their early thirties, maybe finishing grad school and starting professorships, maybe getting married and starting families, maybe starting companies, maybe making big waves in their field. And I look ahead and think: how will I ever be ready for that? And I look at myself now and think: I am where they were at this age – maybe I can grow up to be that awesome. And I look behind and think that when I was younger, I thought that people like my current self were grown up already. And then I buckle down and work harder! because… what else can I do?

I still feel awkward growing into “the middle” — no longer clearly an neophyte in all things, caught somewhere between journeyman and apprentice. Actually, that’s selling myself short — I’m clearly a journeyman for some things (facilitating open source communities) and an apprentice for others (scholarly research), but it’s at least comforting that I’m not a master in anything yet. That would just be… far too scary. I can’t admit that possibility yet; I don’t have a clear picture of what I want to grow into.

Or I do, and I don’t want to admit what that picture looks like because it might get laughed at; sometimes the world is awfully good at squashing dreams down, especially if you’re an ambitious <insert any of a number of categories I fit into>.

I need to get myself into a mental space where I can do things again, so I’ll steer into ending on this note: you’re never really ready for the world, but that means you’re about as ready as you’re going to get, so you might as well go out and get it.

Hooyah.