Categories
Diversity

But young women don’t want role models

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Halley Suitt wrote at misbehaving.net about .NET developer Julie Lerman and her attending the PDC (Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference). Halley mentions the usual bad ratio of men attendees to women, which is not a surprise to any of us.

I wasn’t going to respond to Halley’s post, which was fine. But I could not let a comment Julie Lerman made go without response. First, to set the scene as to the skewed demographics of the conference (white/male, as usual) , Werner Vogels’ wrote:

The demographics are skewed not only for gender but also race and age. To dominant type: geeky white guy in the 20-30 year range and balding slighty heavyset white guys between 40-50. Hardly any African or Asian Americans. The presenters are almost all fit this stereotype.

I can agree with this assessment – it fits the conferences I’ve been to, and I’ve written about this in the past. To which Julie responds with:

Werner is right about the race demographics. You do have to discount the fact that it’s difficult for people from far away to get there. We know through INETA that there are huge .NET developer communities all over the world including places like Latin America, India, Malaysia, etc. As far as the age demographics, right again. But man, this stuff is exhausting and the older you get the harder it is to do. It is amazing to me how young so many of the “stars” of our little world are

(I did write a fairly scathing comment about this when I originally posted but I decided to remove it. I don’t think any comment is necessary. )

I am writing a very extensive essay on the technology profession, sparked in part by a thought provoking comment that Dori Smith wrote in comments at misbehaving.net:

Okay, I guess I’ll be the devil’s advocate and ask, what’s so special about getting women into tech?

I’ve been working with computers for over 25 years, and I’m at the point now where I don’t recommend that anyone go into this field, and particularly not women. The analogy I usually use is that of pro sports–if you’re going to get into the field, do it for love or for money, but don’t plan on it lasting as a lifetime career.

For love: it’s all you want to do, and it’s okay that either it’ll be a short-term paid gig or a long-term free gig. You do it because you feel driven to do it, and nobody better stand in your way. These folks (both male & female) don’t need any encouragement.

For money: you know it’s not a long-term proposition, but you’re okay with getting in, trying to grab the brass ring and make some serious dollars, and then getting out. These folks (both male & female) are going to pick tech or some other field based on how much money they think they can make in a short-time, and I (personally) don’t really care whether they decide that tech’s the answer for them or not.

But if you’re going to encourage women to go into tech, you need to make sure that they know that it’s a field just like, say, sports or modeling, where youth is always going to be more important than talent. They need to know that they’re picking a career where they’ll be unhirable once they turn 35 or have kids, or even worse, turn 35 *and* have kids.

This isn’t changed by getting more women into the field. This isn’t changed by a hot job market making employees more valuable (the Internet bubble made things worse, if anything). This is (imo) changed by getting rid of the self-destructive ways in which the field compensates employees, and producing more women graduates doesn’t touch that.

So, what’s so good about encouraging women to go into tech?

I apologize to Dori for copying the entire comment, but I thought it was a fascinating statement to make, and one worth discussion. I know that it stopped me cold and made me question a lot of my assumptions. More on this later.

I’m also writing several new essays for my For Poets sites on DDoS and weblogging’s impact on the openness of the Internet (and vice versa), which I hope to put out this weekend. Too bad it lacks the sexy shininess of all that way cool .NET stuff. *giggle*

Also almost finished with the rock show. Today. But first, I’m going on a hike. Have to keep these old bones moving, or they get brittle, you know.

Categories
Technology

Now that’s Semantic Web(?)

Danny pointed out SemaView’s new calendar based product, Sherba, congratulating them on a …winning application of SemWeb technologies.

The company is using the iCal RDF Schema to create a windows-based application to manage and share event information through an interconnected calendaring system. My first reaction when I saw “window-based application” is to wince at the use of semantic web to what sounded like another Groove-like product that just happens to use RDF/XML for the data. Or does it?

According to the developer documentation, though the company’s application generates the RDF/XML data, it’s not hidden into the bowels of an application only accessible through archane, proprietary rituals or other perversions of openness. (And yes I’m including web services in this because to me, open means open — wide out there baby, just like this web page is. )

There are web services available, but more importantly to me, me being a person who believes that the semantic web is about data rather than applications, the product produces lovely RDF/XML files. Crawlable, open, plain view, accessible RDF/XML files.

Better, it gets better. Not only does the company produce the RDF/XML, it allows organizations that use the product to register their calendars in a global search directory called SherpaFind. Now you can search for events based on a set of parameters, view the calendar, download it, or best of all, directly access the RDF/XML for the calendar.

This is open. This is data within context, though Tim Berners-Lee hates that word . This is data that’s saying: excuse me little bots, sirs, kind sirs, but this data you’re slurping up isn’t just a mess of words waiting to be globally gulped and spit out in a bizarre search based on weights and links; it’s data that has some meaning to it. This data is calendaring data, and once you know that, you know that a lot.

Having said this, though, some of what I read leads me to think this isn’t as open as I thought at first glance. First, if I read this correctly, the Sherpa calendar information is centralized on the Sherpa servers. I’m assuming by this, again with just a first glance, that Semaview is providing the P2P cloud through which all of the clients interact in a manner extremely similiar to how Groove works. If this is true, I’ve said it before and will again — any hint of centralization within a distributed application is a point of weakness and vulnerability, the iron mountain hidden within the cloud.

Second, I can’t find the calendar RDF/XML out at the sites that use the product. There are no buttons at these sites that give me the RDF/XML directly. Additionally, trying variations of calendar.rdf isn’t returning anything either. Again, this is a fast preliminary read and I’ll correct my assumptions if I’m wrong — but is the only way to access the RDF/XML calendar information through SherpaFind? How do bots find this data?

Let’s compare Sherpa with that other popular use of RDF/XML: RSS. I generate an RSS 1.0 file that’s updated any time my weblog pages are updated. You can find it using multiple techniques, including searching for index.rdf files, following a link on my page or using RSS autodiscovery. You can find my site originally by me pinging a central server such as blo.gs. However, most of us find each other because we follow a link from another weblog. If we like what we read, we then subscribe to each other and use aggregators to keep up with updates. The golden gateway in this distributed application is through the links, rather than through an organization’s P2P cloud.

This is almost a pure P2P distributed application, enabled bya common vocabulary (RSS 1.0), serialized using a common syntax (RDF/XML), defined using a common data model, (RDF). Since it is dependent on the Internet and DNS, there’s an atom of iron in this cloud, but we can’t all be perfect. The only way to break this connection between the points is to take my site down (micro break), in which case there is no data anyway; or if we take the Internet down (macro break).

When you have a centralized cloud, like Groove’s, then you’re dependent on an organization to always and consistently provide this service. For Groove the product to work, Groove the company must continue to exist. If Groove no longer exists and the Groove cloud is no longer being maintained, hundreds, thousands, of connections to each other are lost.

The SemaView site mentions Sherpa Calendar in the context of Napster, as regards its functionality, except that calendaring information is shared rather than music. (We also have to assume the RIAA isn’t out to sue your butt if you use the application.) But Napster is based on the data being stored on the nodes — the end computers, not on the web. (Well, not directly on the wide open Web.) Is it, then, that the calendar data is stored on the individual PCs, only accessible through the Sherpa cloud? If this is so, then ingenous use of RDF/XML or not — this isn’t an application of the Sematic Web. This is just another application of web services.

(Though Tim B-L believes that the Semantic Web is based on functionality such as web services rather than data in context, I don’t agree. And many in the semantic web community wouldn’t, either. )

Without a closer look at how the product works, the documentation only tells me so much so my estimations of how this product functions overall is somewhat guesswork at this moment. When I have access to the product, I’ll do an update.

Page and comments are archived in the Wayback Machine

Categories
Political

Cue the aircraft carrier

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

CNN has an article on the efforts made by President Bush’s keepers of the image. Considering the current state of the economy, I was given pause when I read the following:

The White House efforts have been ambitious and costly. For the prime-time television address that Mr. Bush delivered to the nation on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, the White House rented three barges of giant Musco lights, the kind used to illuminate sports stadiums and rock concerts, sent them across New York Harbor, tethered them in the water around the base of the Statue of Liberty and then blasted them upward to illuminate all 305 feet of America’s symbol of freedom. It was the ultimate patriotic backdrop for Mr. Bush, who spoke from Ellis Island.

The story mentions that during one of the many trips Bush made to St. Louis to speak at a manufacturing plant, his staff covered the “Made in China” words on the genuine boxes in the background and then brought in some fake boxes with “Made in the USA” printed on them. Hard to give a speech on the glowing economy when you’re literally surrounded by the evidence of the increasing, and alarming, offshoring that’s keeping our economy down while companies post record profits.

Of course, this isn’t anything compared to the debacle of Bush’s manufactured photo opportunity aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, including the much shown photo of him in flight suit, strutting across the stage like some form of bantam rooster.

Cockadoodle doo, and here’s my cock, too.

Some may have found Bill Clinton’s escapade with Monica to be an embarrassment to the country, but in my opinion the President playing to soldier in a flight suit beat this hands down. I’m still ashamed every time they show that photo.

Now the focus is on the sign on the ship that read ‘Mission Accomplished”, appearing behind Bush during his speech. Of course, with the increasing number of deaths in Iraq, and the continuing problems in that country, we all knew that the mission was not ‘accomplished’ when the words were first televised. To counter this faux pax, he President and his staff are trying to disavow the sign, with Bush saying I know it was attributed somehow to some ingenious advance man from my staff – they weren’t that ingenious, by the way. No, this wasn’t the White House’s doing we hear, but even that’s not the truth: supposedly the crew of the ship asked for the sign and the White House was kind enough to provide it.

I keep saying to myself and others, Bush is not America. Bush is not America. We are not like that man and his playing with the media and his deals with his corporate buddies and his My God only religion and his selling America and the World short because he didn’t get to play soldier when he was younger (too busy being AWOL). We are better than that, though it may not seem like this at times. We are more honest than that, though perhaps we’re not as honest with ourselves as we should be.

We are not that gullible I tell people. But then I become afraid that we are.

Categories
Just Shelley

Wiccan Barbie

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I don’t normally do the link to major publication/major story thing, but Mark Morford’s Barbie The Hot Pagan Witch is too good to pass up. It would seem that Mattel has now come out with a Wiccan Barbie, though the Wicca may not survive the honor. Mark writes:

Secret Spells Barbie is, despite her potential and much like every one of the 150,000 weird sub-subniche Barbies on the market, entirely pointless and disposable and, unless the girls who end up with her somehow tap into their inner badass witchiness and suddenly get inspired by some divine funky moonscream to rip off Barbie’s arms and paint her hair bright red and tattoo her nipples with a Magic Marker and impale her on a red-hot hair pin and suspend her upside down from a dreamcatcher, well, she does nothing to further the cause of funky gorgeous goddess-thick witchness and nothing to further the cause of earthly luscious pagan interconnectedness or divine feminine power.

Not that she claims to. Not that this was ever Mattel’s point, or Barbie’s raison d’etre, really. And I suppose it’s sort of wildly unfair to hope that Barbie might actually inspire girls beyond the hair-twirling saccharine fetishism of shopping and friends and cars and boys and shopping and money and dye jobs and shopping and fake careerism and shopping.

I was given a Barbie once for Christmas because all little girls back then were given Barbies. I can’t remember the outfits I got to go with the doll, but I soon became very bored with it. All you could do with the doll is put clothes on it, take them off and put other clothes on. What was the fun of that?

True, I did have a time when clothes, and the acts of putting them on and taking them off, were an important part of my life. When I reached puberty and became interested in boys and fitting in (not necessarily in that order) clothes were a part of the process. However, this obsessive interest in wearing the right thing and spending a lot of money on clothes to become this perfect paragon of rightness faded when I hit a certain age and realized that a pair of jeans and a nice cotton shirt lasts forever and feels great. And I don’t think Mattel makes a Barbie with worn jeans and a cotton shirt.

When we were little, we were supposed to use our imaginations and put ourselves into the glamorous world of Barbie, but how could we? The image was as plastic as the doll. I had brown/red hair, not blonde. I had no boobs or hips when I was a kid, and Barbie had no nipples or hair under the arms or in the groin. My imagination could extend to pirates and make believe worlds with white rabbits and cards that talked, but it couldn’t make Barbie into anything I could understand, much less appreciate and seek to emulate.

I gave the doll to my dog to chew. He had much more fun with it than I ever did.

Update

Speaking of spending just to spend, Sheila writes about an eBay auction of Beanie Babies that has some extremely funny comments by the person making the sale. (Jeneane wishes this guy blogged. I want to use his secrets for my own auction – don’t buy these rocks! They’re just rocks!)

But the ultimate in disposable society and spending is covered in Sheila’s story on Disposable DVDs. Want to know why corporate America has us by the (virtual) balls? Disposable DVDs is a hint.

Categories
Culture

Burningbird’s Diet for Life

Usually our minds turn to dieting when Spring is here and our thoughts are on bathing suits and shorts for the summer. However, a couple of webloggers I know have been talking about dieting lately, and this is something also on my mind.

Frank Paynter is on a diet that has him eating plenty of vegetables, but little fruit and he’s counting scallops. I can’t eat scallops – shellfish allergy reactions – but I wouldn’t be amenable to anything that cuts into my fruit. I love fruit. I love veggies, too, but the grocery stores are all on strike here and it’s hard to find anything fresh.

Norm Jenson recounts a very funny tale of coffee and donuts, with some problems with number and other forms of perception. Personally, its hard for me to bypass a Krispie Kreme, but luckily the only time I go past the nearest store is on my way back from some of my favorite hikes.

(Then there’s Jonathon Delacour’s Ozu DVD boxed set diet. When I first read the story I thought Jonathon had written I’ve stopped eating, I’ve given up drinking…, until he had all of the Ozu DVD box sets. I was reminded of that man in London who didn’t eat for 40 days and how awful he looked, and was getting ready to put together an emergency Paypal account labeled “Feed Jonathon”, when I re-read the story and saw that Jonathon was not eating out until he gets all these movies. Oh. I really must learn to be more careful with my reading in the future.)

Now that I’m feeling pretty damn good myself, I’m also focused on getting back into shape. I not only need to lose weight, I also need to re-establish the muscle system that would allow me, among other things, hike some of the better trails without killing myself or having some nice young woman come along and say, “Oh you poor thing! Are you okay? Do you need help back to your car?”

I’m not one for diets though. The Atkins leaves me cold with its focus on returning us to primal man, when we hunted and killed mastadons, barely searing the butchered carcass over open fires before wolfing down huge chunks of greasy meat. Frank’s diet, though sounding more balanced, also turns me off with the limitations on fruit and having to count scallops.

I have been giving serious consideration to turning vegetarian, not the least because I am a strong animal rights advocate. However, I am also an omnivore, as are all humans, and I don’t think I can quite hack cutting out all meat from my diet. I can cut down, and go with leaner meats and range fed critters and push for more humane practices – but I’m not ready to go the grains and legume route. Not just yet.

(Yes, I have had tofu, thank you. I’d rather chew the foam I’m using to pack my rocks.)

I remember when I was very young my mother gave me a diet sheet that someone had given her. It was a joke diet and included items like “eat five banana seeds for breakfast”, and “for a snack, cut open an orange and inhale the fumes”. What was funny about this is that my mother, tiny woman that she is, never had a problem with her weight – she’s always worked too hard. Even now at 70 she’s in phenomenal shape, and when she was younger, she was a drop dead green-eyed beauty. I inherited her eyes, but I inherited my Dad’s build and the Powers have always been big. Not just tall – big. Come to a family party with this clan and you’re going to get scared to death about being tromped on by accident.

“Oh, I’m sorry little man. I didn’t see you.”

A great doctor I had years ago who helped me quit smoking said that my family doesn’t have a weight problem – our metabolism is great in fact. We need little food to maintain our bulk, while people who are naturally skinny are folks that have a bad metabolism. They need more food just to maintain their size, which means their metabolism is inefficient. What she said made sense, but I used to wistfully think that I would have liked to be a tad less efficient.

To compensate for the fact that I can live on the calories of a person several inches shorter than me is the fact that when I do put my mind to getting in shape, it happens quickly. From previous years work in Karate and being a relatively active person, I have a musculature that seems to snap back into existence with only little effort – once I exercise the discipline I need to bring that baby out of hiding. Luckily, I am more active in cold weather rather than warm, so now is the time for me to drop the excuses of not feeling well, and get well. However, rather than diet, I’m looking at making lifestyle changes, some easier than others. The changes may not make me into a svelte figure of a woman, but I’ll feel good.

First is exercise. I haven’t been hiking or walking as much as I should in the last couple of months and this is going to change. I’m returning to my walks every day, and whenever I can, several times a week I hope, hitting the hiking trails. This time of year there are no ticks and chiggers and I can walk the hikes I have to avoid in the summer.

Hauling twenty pounds of camera equipment around helps, but I also need to start working out with weights again. I believe and strongly too, that the reason women have so much trouble with menopause and other aspects of aging is that they no longer indulge in stenuous exercise when they get older. By this I don’t mean the treadmill – I mean lifting heavy things and really pushing our bodies to the limit. To me the best estrogen therapy is a good work out with the weights. This not only helps to balance estrogen in your body, it also triggers your muscles to burn fat more efficiently, as well as increasing your absorption of calcium.

Swimming doesn’t cut it. You need to have gravity to get the best effects. Swimming is great for the joints and great therapy if you’ve had joint problems – but you need weight training, too. Even if it’s working with a set of barbells when you watch TV at night.

Weight training and walking will hurt rather than help if you don’t add in the final leg of this fitness triangle – stretching. I have a new Pilates video that I’m going to try but I find that sometimes the best stretches are the ones we’ve used for years. Newer isn’t always better.

Working the body is a good thing but that’s only part of the battle – I also need to establish a new regime for my mind, and that’s going to be the harder task.

To start, I am going to stop putting my ego into the hands of others. When we’re young we bring things we make to our parents to get their praise, but somewhere along the way, we get stuck into needing that praise when we become adults. Appreciating praise is one thing – needing it and becoming dejected when we don’t get it, that’s another and it isn’t healthy.

Weblogging tends to enforce this, with our every increasing need for link fixes and rank, as if our pages have become the new druggie flophouses of choice. I challenge you to not to check your referrers or your ranks for the next week, and see when you start sweating. I did this, cold turkey, this week and the only thing I check now is Technorati because it gives me information about who is linking to a specific post of mine, and I like to read what people say; to join in other conversations.

(Or, is that an excuse, similar to saying I need the speed to lose weight and the barbituates to calm down; the cigs to keep from getting angry, and the booze to keep on smiling.)

Part of this effort to take back our egos also means that, at times, we have to cut people out of our lives who are quick to judge us, and even quicker to express that judgement. Life is too short to be surrounded by people who are quick to point out our faults, but strangely silent when it comes to our strengths. When faced with the weight of their disapproval, we can become dejected, eat more, walk less and feel less good about ourselves – it becomes a pretty nasty cycle of disapproval and living to that expectation of disapproval.

People who provide praise and support in equal measure to advice or constructive criticism, these are our friends. These are healthy, confident people and the type of person we should seek to become. The others aren’t worth our effort, and they’re certainly not worth our time or tears.

I’ve read entries in weblogs about people having to come to grips with friends or family members who disapprove of them, who condemn them, or who constantly demean or tear down the person. Usually the weblogger has had to get professional help in dealing with this situation, and that’s not a bad thing; I believe in doing what you need to do to get healthy. However, I can’t help thinking that the person causing the problem is the one that needs help and perhaps the best thing for the weblogger is to tell them so, and then say good-bye until they get their own problems fixed. Yes, even with family – being born in to a family is not the same thing as entering a covenant of disapprobation.

As for food, the traditional focus of a ‘diet’ and really that aspect of getting into shape that’s the least important component: I am practicing moderation, and I’ve had to eliminate or severely curtail some types of foods, but I’m not counting, weighing, or otherwise fixating on it.

Well, except for my box of Godiva on my birthday, of course.