Category: Diversity

The importance of supporting diversity

Categories
Critters Diversity

The lion walks tonight

Today I took Zoe to the vet for her six months checkup, both for her rare seizures and her slightly enlarged thyroid gland. The doctor and I talked about putting Zoe on Phenol Barbital, a small risk anti-seizure drug for cats. However, roommate and I are hesitant to start her on a lifetime medicine when her seizures are about one every two years.

We spent a fairly long time chatting, which unfortunately made the doctor late for her next appointment. In the office afterwards, paying the bill, a large, heavyset man stormed out of one of the waiting rooms into the reception area, complaining bitterly about having to wait 20 minutes for the doctor.

After he stormed away, I apologized to the receptionist and she said not to worry about it; that his behavior wasn’t uncommon with men, especially middle aged men, as the place is very female centric and this brings out the male need to assert their dominant status.

I hadn’t noticed before, but the cat clinic does have a strongly feminine environment. All the doctors and assistants and other office workers are women, and the décor has a very feminine, feline feel to it–not to mention that all the cats that wonder around the office are also female.

All except the newest addition to the office — an eight week old orange tabby kitten that jumped up on the receptionist’s keyboard when she was making out my bill (”Well, your bill is now 362.00 dollars”); and then jumped up on the counter and immediately planted it’s tiny paws on my chest, gazing at me with eyes gold and round and very intense.

Entranced, I stroked and coo’d, which he seemed to take as encouragement, for it launched itself down from the counter to the floor (me catching it halfway, because that was a heck of a jump), and he immediately went over to Zoe’s carrier and started batting at her with his paws through the wire.

Zoe was hunkered down in the corner in misery, as she always is when at the vet’s and ignored him at first. But he was having none of this and after about a minute, she was nose to nose with him, each softly batting at each her, she as charmed by this wonderful little character, as I was.

I asked the receptionist who the new kitten was, and she said he was another abandoned kitten, dropped off at the office. The clinic won’t turn any cat away, and after making sure they’re healthy and nicely social, the workers manage to always find a home for the orphans. It took every ounce of self-control — every ounce! — not to pop up with, “I’ll take him!”

The receptionist turned back to the bill, dropping the eight blood tests that the kitten had added with his dance on the keyboard, while I watched the kitten gambol about the room. Suddenly, we hear a door slam, and heavy footsteps stomping down the corridor.

It’s the Big Man again, and he enters the room, drawing his breath to start huffing and puffing about his importance and how his time is valuable. However, the kitten spots him from across the room, makes a mad dash straight for him, and then with a flying leap, plants his tiny little kitten claws into the mans polyester pants, and starts climbing his leg, for all its little worth.

The man was startled, and sputtered out in surprise, looking down at this little kitten hanging off his leg, looking up at him. After just a moment of man and kitten staring at each other, the kitten jumps down from his leg, and glaring equally at me and the receptionist, the man storms off without saying a word. The kitten watches after him a moment, and then starts its mad dash around the room again.

The receptionist and I look at each other, both trying not to laugh; a resolve I couldn’t maintain when she turned back to the bill, casually tossing out about, “…knowing who’s the dominant male in the place is now, don’t we?”

Categories
Diversity Just Shelley

I am mistress of all you see

I grew up in an age when playtime was a time for our parents to get rid of us so they could do whatever they needed to do without us underfoot. Our parents seldom monitored how we played together, and even in the school yards you rarely heard, “Play nice, children!”

Kids were scraped and scratched daily, and cuts were usually only treated if pus oozed. Our swings were wooden and dangerous; if we fell off the slide we’d land on dirt and get hurt; and if you made it out of childhood without something broken, you were lucky, bigger than everyone else, or weren’t playing hard enough.

You had to be tough to survive being a kid when I was a kid.

Our games were as tough as we were. When we played Red Rover, people ran fullspeed, with an aim of victory…or else. If we played Dodge Ball, we threw with all the power and precision of a Patriot Missile. Many a party was enlivened with mock Roman battle recreations, otherwise known as “Musical Chairs”.

Not with today’s kids, though. Playgrounds are strewn with shredded rubber, school yards are shadowed with liability law suits, and mothers and fathers hover over their precious dears, ready to throw themselves in the way if a stray comet happens to fall to the earth.

As for children indulging in rough ‘n tumble, I saw something on television a few days ago showing a bunch of first graders playing today’s version of Dodge Ball. Under the close supervision of the teacher, each kid would put the large, soft, squishy ball on the ground and then push it, ever so gently, across at the other side. From what I could see, the only kids who were hit were ones who put themselves in front of the ball; probably deliberately losing so they could go play computer games, instead.

I can just imagine how Musical Chairs are played now. First, there’s the polite version, whereby kids get goodies for Demonstrating Good Behavior:

“Oh, pardon me! Did you want this chair?”

“No, I couldn’t. You must take it.”

“I insist that you take it. You were here first.”

“No, seriously, I’m not tired. Please do take this chair.”

Or the more likely:

“That’s my chair!”

“Is not!”

“Is too!”

“Is not!”

“Is too!”

(repeat forever)

Now, I will say that today boys and girls are encouraged to play more together — sort of. This wasn’t the case back in my childhood, where girls weren’t encouraged to engage in tough, contact sports. Still, our play was just as aggressive, if less painful, physically. Each girl would gather her Barbies and meet with her friends to compare accessories, and who had the most dresses and shoes.

A popular ’sport’ if you want to call it that, for girls when I was growing up was “Best Friend”. In this game, you would get mad at your current best friend, and then go and be best friends with someone else. Next week, the newest pair of best friends would have a quarrel about something trivial, and the original best friends would either make up and become the ‘old’ best friends — or some new soul would be dragged into the mix. Usually someone who didn’t have a lot of friends, and would be grateful for the attention, even if only temporary.

(These mix-n-match girls, everyone’s favorite temporary best friend, are the ones that grow up to be CEOs of major corporations or Secretary of State. Nothing like childhood to toughen you up for future challenges.)

Of course, girls could indulge in ‘rough housing’ if we were tomboys, which I was. I hated dolls, loved to climb trees, and was incredibly scary at Dodge Ball; god help you if you were on the opposing side if we played Red Rover together.

As for King of the Mountain — well, to be politically correct for today’s youth, it should be Person of the Mountain. And the ‘mountain’ is really soft straw or pillows, not a ‘real’ hill. And you can’t do more than circle around each other until someone gets dizzy and falls down on their own.

Or do they hand out numbers, just like at the Deli?

“Number Six! Number Six! It’s your turn to be on top!”

No, back in my day, we were left alone; to indulge our little “lord of the flies” natural savageness as much as we could wish. Usually, doing so out of sight of adults, so as to avoid creating a spark fear in our parents that they may be raising the next Hitler or Atilla the Hun.

Now my generation is all ‘growed up’, and our legacy of uncontained aggressiveness shows up in the boardrooms of most major corporations, as well as in government and in the military. Some would say that it is this that feeds our continuously insatiable need to go ‘…fight someone in defense of (fill in the nation/religion/way of life of your choice)’.

It is true that my generation has grown up to be pugnacious, angry, defensive, aggressive, and even, unfortunately at times, intolerant. Yet, the same impulse that drives these ‘negative’ behaviors, is also the same impulse that led many to stand in determined isolation on top of a hill, even when faced with hordes of kids just as determined to throw down their mangled bodies. It can breed courage; it can breed change.

You can see this impulse in people around you, and perhaps even yourself. It’s based on knowing that no matter how high up you are, there’s still places higher; no matter how good you are, you can always do better; no matter what you’ve accomplished, you can always do more. It’s holding firm on our beliefs, and standing by what we see are our truths.

It is a restless impulse. It is a tenacious impulse. It is an insatiable impulse. And it can either create great good, or great harm, because it is nothing more than raw determination to be molded into whatever shape our beliefs and our truths and aspirations dictate.

Every person who becomes a leader of his or her people, whether dictator or saint, is a person who is standing on top of a mountain. Every person who creates great works of art, or great works of destruction, is a person who is standing on top of a mountain. Every person who is willing to die for their beliefs, is a person willing to kill for their beliefs, and is a person standing on top of a mountain.

I also remember back to my childhood at the end of the day, when our parents would call us home, dirty and battered and scratched and scrapped. False night would touch the sky around us, and we could barely see our own bruises much less the faces of our friends. Yet before we’d break up, we would turn, one last time, to look at the kid who held the top–holding it against all odds–as they stood dark against the sunset. Turn and look, with respect or despair, knowing that they held the hill not because they were necessarily the biggest or the meanest or the best; but because they wanted the top of the hill more than anyone else.

Categories
Diversity

Expectations not met

Yesterday came and went and nothing from O’Reilly about my Emerging Technology Conference proposal, which signals that it wasn’t accepted. Yes, I am disappointed, as I thought the idea was interesting and even rather fresh–a variation on the all too common discussions on protocol and how one can market one’s new concept that seem to occur with growing frequency at tech conferences.

I had written something yesterday about this and pulled it because I thought afterwards that it was a bit too much feeling sorry for myself. I don’t want to indulge in a bout of ‘poor me’, but I do have to seriously reconsider the time that I devote to technology efforts, in particular those related to the semantic web and metadata, if the work I do continues to generate little interest.

In particular, I wonder at the level of respect I’ve earned within the technical circles, particularly those with ties into the weblogging community. Very few people have commented favorably on my Practical RDF book at Amazon and elsewhere, and I have to accept the fact that the book has been a disappointment to those who wanted something else. This was a lot of work to have little notice paid, other than the reviews, each of which finds some new area of the book to fault.

I should network, because this an enormous influence on acceptance of your work. I would like to travel to conferences to network with others of same interest, but I do not work for a company or university that would foot this bill. Another hinderance is where I live: Missouri colleges are very good, but not known for their semantic web efforts, and the location isn’t close to centers of such activity.

As for networking online, well, I’m not known for the number of people who would want to claim me as friend on their various networks. I can be critical and it doesn’t take an especially acute intelligence to notice that those who are not, particularly among the women, get more frequent opportunities in technology. Do I resent this? If the women have invested time in the technical field, or demonstrate skills related to their opportunities, no. If the women’s career shows they’ve invested little time in the field, or evidence no demonstrable skills in technology, yes.

The lack of acceptance of the ETech proposal follows closely on another opportunity that ended up not being an opportunity. As I wrote yesterday in the pulled post, when I answered a request for tech help on a project, only to find that another person was asked to head the metadata effort and my help was more in the line of ‘aiding communication between the project manager and the developers’, I begin to wonder: is there any faith in my technical abilities? After all these years and all this talk of metadata and technology and providing samples and tips and help and code, my role was seen more in the nature of helping to write up requirements.

This was really very discouraging. What’s worse is I don’t know if it was more in the nature of me being a woman, or in me being me.

In my many writings on women and tech, many people have responded that all it will take for more women entering technology is us making the decision to do so. However, these folk don’t understand what it’s like to sit on a Monday morning, disappointed at missing out on another technology opportunity, and not knowing if it was because your work wasn’t a fit; your proposal wasn’t good enough; the company doesn’t like you because you’ve bitched too much about them–or it was nothing more than an accident of genetics before you’re even born.

I do know one thing: rather than add to my confidence in my technical abilities, the interactions I’ve experienced in weblogging have undermined much of it, to the point where I am ready to drop over twenty years of training and experience and interest, in hopes I can pick up another career at the complicated age of 50.

Categories
Diversity Standards

Accessibility and Geegaws

A good rule of thumb for web design is that indulge your interests in nifty tools–DHTML*, Flash, whatever–but your navigation should never be made up of anything other than a hypertext link, and you should never make your critical content accessible primarily (or only) through a mouse.

Lately, I’m seeing more and more sites use technologies, Flash in particular that violate these rules. As nice as they look, I always wince when I see a dependency on a specific product, focused at a specific audience: internet hip, sighted, and attracted to bright, shiny things.

Learning from DHTML

I didn’t always resist the shiny geegaws myself. When we were studying DHTML after it first came out, we all started using it to create our navigation buttons, and felt pretty cool and very web savvy. Mouse over a top-level button and a small little box would slide out underneath with all your options to click. After static content, this was heady stuff.

Of course, mouseover wasn’t always reliable. Sometimes you’d have to move quickly from the top-level to the sub-topics because leaving the top-level would close the sub-topic box; it then became a game of who could move faster–you or the browser.

This was all until we started running into cross-browser differences and the nightmare that followed for a good 2 or 3 years until Mozilla came along and routed Internet Explorer.

(What do you mean someone is still using IE?)

Then someone came along and said, well, what about blind people or people who can’t use a mouse? After all, it’s pretty difficult to try and tab through a lot of nonsense that doesn’t do anything in order to get to a working link. And if the work is DHTML, well that just mucks with the page reader’s electronic mind, and it doesn’t know what it’s dealing with.

After Google made web search fashionable and especially after it added a thing called pagerank, we found that not using hypertext links to manage our site navigation was actually working counter to seeing our pages show up in the search results, and as highly placed as possible. Pretty geegaw lost its attraction really quick on this one.

Especially when you add in the costs. In the dot-com job I had before it became dot-gone, I was brought in to lead a re-design of an application after another firm had spent close to two million dollars and basically had very little to show for it; all except for a really cool DHTML navigation system. No backend development. Half the pages needed unfinished. No database. No database design. But there were some really cool DHTML and pretty graphics.

Well, we kept what we could and yanked the DHTML and put a system out on the street in about five weeks. With plain old hypertext links.

But still, designers say when showing their latest frufrah, look how cool this all is?

(When I as at that dot-com, I shared an office with the lead web page designer — an art school grad. He was a nice guy and did the Burning Man thing and was all that was hip among designers, and very talented, too. But I still felt like I was sharing the office with someone from another galaxy, especially when it came to priorities. I know he must have felt the same way. Companies should do that more often–house the backend developers with the front-end designers. If both survive the experience, they might learn something from it.)

Let’s see: on the one hand we have cool. On the other hand we have cross-browser compatible, easier to build and maintain, search engine friendly, and accessible.

Bottom line, we came to understand that using DHTML to manage navigation, or to display critical content, was very uncool.

Next Big Thing

Of course, now we have the Next Big Thing in website design, which is Flash and its various incarnations. And it’s true, Flash can help you do some nifty stuff — but it still brings in the same burdens and problems on a page. You have to install the plugin; you have to have special readers for the content; you have to provide an alternative link structure for webbots if you want your pages search engine friendly; and it costs a lot more to design and maintain a Flash navigation system then it does plain old hypertext links.

To work around the accessibility issues one can use page readers that can read Flash, and one can install the plugins to access the navigation buttons; still each of these methods require that the web page reader go through extra effort to access your webpage content; content that supposedly you really want them to access. Site purpose and accessibility, in this case, is sacrificed to site design.

But isn’t design meant to enhance a site, not obscure it? In other words, if Flash and JavaScript hinder access, never use Flash, or JavaScript, or any moving part other than a hypertext link for site navigation–in fact any content that is critical for the site. If you must, have a separate Flash site, but make sure it’s secondary.

The Payoffs in Accessibility and avoiding the Geegaws

I’m not a web designer and I don’t pretend to make the prettiest pages and or use the best CSS and hippest styles; but one thing I have learned over the years is, if you design for those with accessibility challenges in mind, you’ll find that you’ve also created the easiest to build, easiest to maintain, cleanest, most valid, less fragile, and more forward compatible site design. In other words — designing for accessibility ends up being the best approach to designing for style, validity, durability, and economy.

*DHTML is Dynamic HTML, or using scripting language, usually JavaScript to manipulate a page’s contents after it’s been downloaded to the browser.

Categories
Diversity Voting

Men and women should vote for the same reason

I don’t respond to most of the weblog postings that Halley Suitt writes about women in general. I do think she tends to promote stereotypes as often as not. However, I also think that sometimes she breaks stereotypes by presenting the concept that women can be many things and still be womanly or even girly if that’s what she wants.

But today, I have to write in strong disagreement with her 12 reasons women should vote for Kerry/Edwards. And indirectly, I also disagree with the USA Today story that inspired Halley (link to which will most likely disappear, since it’s to Yahoo News.)

 

The USA Today article writes:

Women have long tended to shift toward Republicans as they get married, have children, return to regular churchgoing and acquire wealth and mortgages. In 2000, 63% of single women voted for Gore, but only 48% of married women did. As the ranks of female business owners and homeowners grow, fewer may be inclined to lean to the political left.

However, the same can be said for men. Men, if they become business owners, tend to shift to Republican in their voting. That women do so also, just shows this is not a gender-based difference. Also, people of both sexes, as they get older and have kids, especially if they become regular church goers, tend to lean more Republican.

So why are we differentiating between men and women, as if somehow women aren’t of the same species? Why do we focus on the W vote, and totally neglect the M vote?

Instead of disagreeing with USA Today for this differentiation, Halley actually supports it, but thinks the article didn’t go far enough. In this, she was effective, and made good use of arguments and counter-arguments. But she still supports the dichotomy between men and women, as if how we think is so different that we might as well be from different cultures.

She writes:

No woman looking at the pictures of the prisoners of the Abu Ghraib prison can be anything but devastated by this ungodly treatment of humans under Bush’s watch. As a mom I find it disgusting that anyone ever let it happen and then, never took the blame. Those people — despite being our hated enemies — are the sons of some mother somewhere. No person should be treated that way. All mothers know that in their hearts. It makes me cry to imagine it and makes me ashamed to have been a part of it — which as an American I was forced to acknowledge — they did it in my name.

By implication,then, is Halley saying that men, Dads, could look at these photos and not be devestated? That somehow men are immune to feelings of disgust and sadness when seeing another person humiliated? That men can’t see the photos of these men and think of their own sons?

I know that Halley is refuting the Security Mom phenomena, whichs is nothing more than a cold, carefully crafted and fostered necon (yes, I have adopted this word now, I have seen the light) manipulation into making it seem that all women should vote for Bush because all our babies are going to be killed in their schools and in their beds if we don’t. I applaud Halley’s approach, even while I wince at it.

(BTW, yes, your babies are in danger now–if your babies are grown up in and soldiers in Iraq, or if you live in Iraq. Outside of this, your babies are more in danger of being sexually abused, hit by a car, killed by a serial killer, catching a fatal disease, or dying of a bee sting, than killed by terrorism in this country. Frankly the Security Mom agenda–with its images of the frail, semi-sexy, God fearin’ woman holding a German Luger–is a bit of joke.)

Still, returning back to Halley and the USA Today story — is the implication then that there are no Security Dads?

As for voting for Edwards because he’s a ‘babe’ who supports his plump wife — nothing like pointing out how heroic Edwards is because he didn’t dump his wife when she gained weight.

“By gol, that’s a darn brave boy that is. Look at his wife — takes courage, you know that?”

What I don’t understand is why Hilary didn’t dump Bill when he turned into a porker.

Bottom line, we’re more alike than not. If you cut us, do we not all bleed? In fact, can’t we even use each others blood and organs to survive? We are the same species, and though society does enforce subtle behavior differences, we still share the same culture and the same values.

Isn’t it time that we focus more on the candidates and what electing each of them can mean, then our sex, and what it means?