Back from Hopper, Still Flying

Picture by Katy Dickinson (my mom)
[Me in the suit presenting my poster to
Maria Klawe, President of Harvey Mudd]
Originally uploaded by John Plocher

I’ve made some interesting academic changes (see next post) since returning from Hopper, and feel tastefully in control of my life (for now). I planned a successful panel for the Pre-Law Society (whose website I also admin); Unfortunately, instead of watching my amazing panelists in action, I had to go to opera rehearsal to have my head cut off. But in rehearsal I learned that most young opera singers will make their livings as covers, which is a good lesson for all growing professionals.

I love attending Hopper because it gives me a chance to see my horizons. I use the ocean as a metaphor for school (and I am, incongruously, the duck* on the surface of the ocean). Most of the time, school is like paddling on the ocean. Some days, a killer wave breaks over my head and I have to fight back to the surface. Sometimes I fly. Hopper helps me fly.

As always, a beautiful, moving, and successful conference.

*I use a duck because I often feel like a duck in public settings: serene and confidant on the surface, paddling like hell under the water. No, I do not molt on the carpet and go after small pieces of bread with terrifying fierceness. It’s a partial metaphor.

Inspirational Quote:

A desert is a place without expectation.–Nadine Gordimer

Ignite Talks, GHC 2009

This posts are part of a series of official blog posts I am doing for the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. You will find them cross-posted here.

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“Opening the house of technology”. That could have been the sub-title of this year’s inaugural Ignite Talks. Yes, there were major differences in approaches (from GiveCamps to implementing the results of 35-year longitudinal psychological studies).

Yes, the presenters had wildly different presentation styles (from Jennifer Marsman, a fount of energy from Microsoft to David Klappholz who lectured from the podium with mature passion).

Yes, they were all serving different women (Nayda Santiago is helping Puetro Rican female undergraduates get to and through grad-school to Kassie Bowman of Raytheon, who is focusing on getting kids excited about math through MathMovesU.com).

Yes, their approaches clearly reflected their training (Jill Ross of Image of Computing presented on “A New Image of Computing”, Dawn Carter of Amazon dealt with girls in her community, Emma L Anderson of Oberlin College about “Feminist Perspectives on Teaching Introductory CS” and Ruchi Sanghvi of Facebook on “Powering Online Social Movements”).

But the impetus that moves them, the problem they are solving, the population they are worried about, all the same.

I should say, the impetus that moves us, the problem we are, the population we are worried about, because I (Jessica Dickinson Goodman) presented about “Playing with Alice After School” for the Ignite Talks 2009.

Listening to so many vitally interested women (and one man!) present about their work to open the house of technology to women, the U.S. middle schoolers, to student movements around the globe, was invigorating. The 10 minutes we were each given felt abbreviated, particularly for the industry and faculty presenters (15 would have been fine and allowed the audience to feel comfortable and non-infringing when they asked questions), but the experience of being filled with the information of these talks BAM BAM BAM was awesome. Below are the titles of the talks with links to their wikis.

• A New Image of Computing, Jill Ross (Image of Computing)
• Changing the Future – One Girl at a Time, Dawn Carter (Amazon)
• Coding for Charity: How to run a Give Camp, Jennifer Marsman (Microsoft)
• Feminist Perspectives on Teaching Introductory CS, Emma L Anderson (Oberlin College)
• FemProf –Advancing Undergraduate Female Students to a Professoriate Career: A Case Study, Nayda Santiago (University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez Campus)
• MathMovesU – A Defense Company’s Efforts to Encourage Engineering, Kassie Bowman (Raytheon)
• Playing with Alice After School, Jessica Dickinson Goodman (Carnegie Mellon University)
• Powering Online Social Movements, Ruchi Sanghvi (Facebook)
• The Real Projects for Real Clients (RPRCC) Initiative: An ACM-W Project Aimed at Recruiting Young Women Into, And Retaining Them in, Computing Majors, David Klappholz (Stevens Institute of Technology)

Inspirational Quote:

Only the desert has a fascination—to ride alone—in the sun in the forever unpossessed country—away from man. That is a great temptation.
–D.H. Lawrence

Change Agent Awards Panel – sponsored by Google

This posts are part of a series of official blog posts I am doing for the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. You will find them cross-posted here.

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Below are my impressions from the Change Agents Awards Panel for GHC09, and after that are the official bios of these incredible women.

Africa seems both very near and very far away on days like these. I spent my summer working for clients, survivors of human rights abuses, many of who grew up in Africa. I’ve used Google Maps to trace the Niger, seen tiny towns like the ones Human Rights USA’s clients grew up in, felt connected.

Reading all of these posters and listening to all of these presentations about high technology, it feels easy to forget how deep and cavernous the digital divide is. Each of these change agents are working to give women in their communities access to the most basic staples of computing. Some of these three women were working to foster entrepreneurship, some seeking to teach basic skills, all suffering from a lack of funding.

That was my biggest takeaway: funding these women is a safe-bet to helping women access technology.

Please go here to donate to NairoBits.

Here to donate to the Networking for Success project.

[I was unable to find online presences for any other projects listed below. If you know of them, please comment]

Just reading through their bios gives me tingles–and seeing them in person was inspiring.

Oreoluwa Somolu, founder of Women’s Technology Empowerment Centre is passionate about empowering women/girls of Nigeria through the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) as well as encouraging them to take up technology careers. Her initiatives include the Networking for Success project, where women were trained to use web 2.0 tools to facilitate knowledge gathering and sharing in their work; the Girls Technology Camp, which exposed high school girls to the relevance of ICTs to academic and professional pursuits; her collaboration with Fahamu to organize Blogs for African Women and BAWO, a blog mentoring initiative for African girls.

Halima Ibrahim’s initiative the Mu’assassatul Mar’aatus Saliha Women’s Skill Acquisition Centre is one of the biggest initiatives to emerge from the Community Technology Skills Program in Nigeria over the last three years. It has empowered over a 1000 women in ICT and Handcraft skills while fostering local innovation and creating jobs and opportunities for people. These women have been motivated and equipped with knowledge that has made them financially stable and independent while working from their homes where they are often in seclusion. The rate of divorce among this group of women has reduced due to the economic empowerment of women because they are perceived to have more value in their homes.

Anne Ikiara-Kabaara is the General Manager of Nairobits Trust, an organization dealing with youth/women empowerment through ICT in the non-formal settlements of Nairobi. Anne is devoted to helping others to get further in their lives. Nairobits has a vision of giving youth technical, social and entrepreneurship skills to enable them to positively change the circumstances. Though Nairobits deals with both genders, they take extra effort and affirmative action to engage the girls. They have been successful in getting jobs for 1,500 underprivileged girls/women.

Inspirational Quote:

… It is the desert’s grimness, its stillness and isolation, that bring us back to love. Here we discover the paradox of the contemplative life, that the desert of solitude can be the school where we learn to love others.–Kathleen Norris

Awesome ACM Post about my Hopper Poster and p4!

Last night I (and my poster for pfour) were randomly selected to be profiled on an ACM blog. Here is the awesome write-up. Presenting the post last night was so much fun! I chatted with students, a president of a college, at CTO of a major tech company, and friends from last year. This female-community thing is pretty amazing!

Inspirational Quote:

Why do I live in the desert? Because the desert is the locus Dei.–Edward Abbey

A Cryptographic Solution for Patient Privacy in Electronic Health Records

This posts are part of a series of official blog posts I am doing for the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. You will find them cross-posted here.

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As someone who has a close family member in and out of hospitals, patient privacy is a significant interest. Melissa Chase (link goes to her awesome CV) presented about her research at Microsoft about cryptographic solutions in this field.

Below is the 15 second summary.

The benefits of digitized patient records are:

1. Easier communication
2. Increased accuracy, growing from that easier communication
3. Lowers costs because of increased accuracy and easier communication

Now for the costs:

1. 100,000 digital records are easier to steal than 100,000 paper records
2. Large electronic systems are much more open to abuse by hackers, unscrupulous doctors, disgruntled employees (such as in this case, which is not what it seems)
3. Easier medical identity theft*

Major take-way:

Patients should have full access to their records, and control over privacy should not be all (every doctor gets every patient’s records) or nothing (no digitization).

Valerie’s post has a good summary of the technical magic involved! This presentation went from 0-100 pretty fast, but her consistent use of clip-art characters (“Dr Alice”, “Charlie” etc) made it easier to keep up. Most of the presenters I have seen need to remember: Low, Slow and Loud. Lots of fast talking to finish in time.

*Medical identity theft is where thieves get medical care they cannot afford, or access to medication and equipment for the purpose of reselling it.

Inspirational Quote:

The desert is a natural extension of the inner silence of the body. If humanity’s language, technology, and buildings are an extension of its constructive faculties, the desert alone is an extension of its capacity for absence, the ideal schema of humanity’s disappearance.
–Jean Baudrillard

Designing Systems that Gain Public Trust: Simplicity, Transparency, and Security in e-Voting Systems

This posts are part of a series of official blog posts I am doing for the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. You will find them cross-posted here.

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In this presentation, Kathy S Faggiani (Milwaukee School of Engineering) posed a massively important question to her audience: how confidant are you that your vote is counted?

If you are very confidant, check out blackboxvoting.org

According to the presenter, 3%-5% of optically scanned voting sheets are counted wrong. To this cynic, this number seems plausible–constitutionally terrifying, but plausible.

Voting is what separates a democracy from a dictatorship. Constitutionally mandated privacy and accuracy affect e-voting software development in fascinating ways.

Good to know: according to the presenter, the most important legal litmus test for vote-counting accuracy is whether the vote was counted as the voted intended. This is different from whatever the machine thought the voter wanted, which is what it actually does count.

This presentation had a narrative (see Valerie’s post for more on that), the data was inviting, and the conclusions were incisive.

Best quote:

“Those who say it can’t be done are often interrupted by people who are doing it”

Inspirational Quote:

The sky was as full of motion and change as the desert beneath it was monotonous and still,—and there was so much sky, more than at sea, more than anywhere else in the world. The plain was there, under one’s feet, but what one saw when one looked about was that brilliant blue world of stinging air and moving cloud. Even the mountains were mere ant-hills under it. Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky!–Willa Cather

Video for Women in Technology from ABI

Want to help a young woman get into computer science? There is a lot to do, but a start might be this video:

Inspirational Quote:

The Mojave is a big desert and a frightening one. It’s as though nature tested a man for endurance and constancy to prove whether he was good enough to get to California.–John Steinbeck

Arrived at Hopper: Resume Clinic was great, about to present my poster

I’m here in lovely Tuscon, AZ for the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, eating popcorn from tiny bags and eagerly anticipating dinner. I’ve given my pitch to a few companies, attended a great resume clinic (here’s my resume, now a fixture on feelingelephants), and am dashing around Amelia (my laptop) opening windows to display my videos from p4. Just because it is cool, check out this video.

It is a play list of all of Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie, read aloud (this was part of my research last semester).

More later!

Inspirational Quote:

To say nothing is out here is incorrect; to say the desert is stingy with everything except space and light, stone and earth is closer to the truth.–William Least Heat Moon

Watch This Space (A Marathon Day of Video Posting)

So, when I finished last semester, I still had chapters 8-17 and a few smaller pieces still not uploaded from my research project. After my awesome summer internship I will be presenting my work on pfour at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Technology and need to get the rest of the videos up. So. Here goes my 12 hour day of video uploading. Every time I get a new video up on YouTube, I will post it here. Watch out!

Update, 2:26pm. First video up! It’s “Birches” by Robert Frost

Update, 2:56pm: Second video up! It’s “Mending Wall” by Robert Frost

Update, 4:22pm. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot. Enjoy!

Update, 6:19pm. Parts 1 and 2 of Peter Pan, Chapter 8 are up!

Update, 6:37pm. Part 3 of chapter 8 of Peter Pan is up.

Money quote: “To die will be an awfully big adventure.”

Update, 6:42pm. All of chapter 9 is up (this sudden bursts of uploads has more to do with queuing than huge jumps of productivity ).

This is one of the quirkiest in all of J.M. Barrie’s quirky book. In it, the Never Bird saves Peter and Wendy from drowning by letting them use her nest as a boat. It shows Peter at his most transcendental. Enjoy!

Update, 7:32pm. Part 1 of Chapter 10 is up. It’s missing a bit–go to the YouTube page for the text of the missing parts. Part 2 is on its way.

Update, 7:45pm. Here it is!

Update, 8:06pm. Here is chapter 11, parts 1 and 2″

Update, 8:55pm. Here’s Chapter 12, parts 1 and 12:

Update, 10:11pm. Parts 1 and 2 of Chapter 13 are up:

Update, 10:15pm. Parts 1 and 2 of chapter 14 are up. Horray!

Update, 10:54pm. Both parts of Chapter 15 (“Hook or Me This Time!”) are up!

Update, 10:58pm. Sad update. I cannot find Chapter 16. But you can read it here. Coming up is one of the most bittersweet chapters in all of children’s literature. The final chapter of Peter Pan.

Update, 11:04pm. Last chapter *sigh of relief*. Parts 1, 2, and 3 of Chapter 17 of Peter Pan, by J.M. Barrie

I spent 9 hours working on these videos today, and I still feel jazzed. I love creating defined objects that will be used, that help people access things I love. I love it. Time for sleep.

Inspirational Quote:

A hundred ten in the shade is sorta hot, but you don’t have to shovel it off your driveway. ~Author Unknown

A Humanities Major’s Guide to Surviving GHC09

As a geek whose geekiness comes out in her work (social media consulting, blogging, web presence development), her achievements (only high school student with an essay in She’s Such a Geek, programmer for Stanford University Libraries at 18, three time presenter at Hopper) but not her major (Ethics, History and Public Policy [an interdisciplinary major between the History and Philosophy Departments], with a minor in Vocal Performance), it can be a little rough going to a conference for technical women.

Here are three of my coping mechanisms:

1. I am not my coursework–I am my ideas.

   Whether you are on Brazen Careerist or not, expecting to be hired based on your web presence rather than an 8.5×11 sheet of paper is an idea whose time has come. My ideas–whether you find them in my presentations at this year’s Hopper, my personal blog, or just through conversation with me– are what makes me a woman in technology, not whether I have taken C++.

2. Focus on the conversations, not the initials.

   The Impostor Panel was one of my favorites at Hopper last year. In it, incredible women (a presidents of a major University, inspiring technologists, groundbreaking innovators) stood up and told a roomful of women: “I am an impostor”.

   Women in technology often feel like impostors, fakes, like we’re sliding by until someone notices we’re not up to snuff. As geeky humanities majors, we are particularly vulnerable to this feeling. Acknowledge it, process it, and ignore it. We have the ovarios to show up to this conference, and we are here because we have something to say. Once we say it, everyone will know we belong.

3. Technology is more than programming (Or, What Can You Do With a Humanities Degree?).

   As a daughter of a programmer, and as a geek who grew up in Silicon Valley, I know the value of programming. But for any given technology to reach its full potential, it needs people to speak for it–policy makers, columnists and visionaries. Here are three humanities majors who are shaping how we develop technology today:

   • Lawrence Lessig graduated from UPenn with a BS in management and a BA in economics.
   • Annalee Newitz from Berkley with a PhD in English and American Studies.
   • Clay Shirky from Yale College with a degree in Art.

   So what can you do with a Humanities Degree? Rock the world. In the short-term, rock the Hopper conference.

Build your ideas. Focus on the conversation. Remember who sets policy. And enjoy yourself–this is a world-class chance to be surrounded by geeks like us, and to confirm we’re not impostors. Enjoy it, spread it, bring it home.

Inspirational Quote:

For there are two deserts: One is a grim desolate wasteland. It is the home of venomous reptiles and stinging insects, of vicious thorn-covered plants and trees and unbearable heat… visualized by those children of luxury to whom any environment is intolerable which does not provide all the comforts and luxuries of a pampering civilization.

The other desert — the real desert — is not for the eyes of the superficial observer or the fearful soul of the cynic. It is a land which reveals its true character only to those who come with courage, tolerance, and understanding. For those the desert holds rare gifts.–Randall Henderson (my quotes theme this Hopper will be the desert, since the conference is in Tuscon AZ.)