International Women's Day 2014

Today is International Women's Day 2014, and there's a ton of great news, information and activity happening around the world!

Here are some cool things to share:

• www.makers.com has inspiring videos/documentary film making that showcases the achievements of American women
• the IFLS blog has a post up about famous female physicists you have probably never heard of and need to know (I have a mug commemorating Anna Ternshnikova which is awesome)!
• Canadian content: The National Film Board blog has a post up about some great Canadian films made by and about women, check it out!

Women in Computing Science Alumni Endowment Fund
In case you're looking for a good cause to support to mark the occasion, you might be interested in donating to the new Women in Computing Science (WICS) Alumni Endowment Fund for my alma mater, Simon Fraser University!  I've posted a few times already but given the day and given that we haven't yet reached our goal, I'm going to do so again now.

WICS is a student society that helps support and promote women studying Computing Science.  They are an inclusive org that also welcomes male supporters and allies.  Since many of the WICS alumni in recent years have gone on to do awesome things and build successful careers, we wanted to give back by funding a scholarship to support women in the pipeline - women studying CS now who could use our help.

Here's how you can donate in Canada:

• Go to http://www.sfu.ca/engage50/ways-to-give.html
• Click the bar 'Online' and add your contact information
• Under *Please designate my gift*, choose: Faculty of Applied Sciences - Student Support
• Under *Additional Donation Designation Information* - please enter the name of the fund as 'The Women in Computing Science Alumni Endowment Fund'.

You can also donate if you are in the US: the organization is Friends Of Simon Fraser University which is a 501(3)c (for charitable donation purposes).  Please indicate that you are donating to 'The Women in Computing Science Alumni Endowment Fund'.

We still need about $4K to launch the award, so anything you can contribute will help!  If you've pledged to donate but haven't yet, today would be an awesome day to do so!

International Women's Day

Happy 101^th International Women's Day!  Although this year marks several milestones, I haven't seen much news yet today.  Well, it's still early.

This year I've been thinking about how far we've come, and how far we still have to go.  With regard to the former, I've seen some inspiring stories and documentaries in the past week or two that you should check out:

• PBS Maker's: Women Who Make America (documentary): This doc is three hours long and riveting throughout.  It's a really well-done series of interviews with prominent leaders from the Women's Movement, now and then.  Definitely a must-see!
• It's the 100th anniversary of women's suffrage in the US: This story not only has excellent written contact, but amazing photography to boot.  Worth a ready!  Kudos to my dad for sending it my way.
• Nature's article on Women in STEM: The content may be a little depressing (women in STEM fields still face systemic discrimination) but what is inspiring is that Nature devoted a special section entirely to this issue, which unfortunately not enough people have awareness of.
• Anita Sarkeesian's first installment of Tropes vs. Women in Video Games: You may remember Anita Sarkeesian's kickstarter project and the bullying it faced.  That the project was installment and its first video is here is a triumph.

I'm really happy that there are such great organizations/groups/initiatives particularly concerned with the issues facing women in STEM fields.  In case you haven't heard of them, here are a few:

• Anita Borg Instiitute (@anitaborg_org)
• Steminist (@steminist on Twitter)
• Anita's Quilt (@AnitasQuilt on Twitter)

Going forward, what I really hope is that we can continue to work towards a world where all women face equal opportunities, not just in STEM field but whatever endeavours they choose to pursue.  I hope the stories of discrimination in the workplace decrease, that I read fewer and fewer stories of harassment or of women being pushed out of promising careers.  And I hope to see more of the fantastic achievements from women that I know we are capable of.

Ada Lovelace Day, CS Ed Week, and More!

Given my recent post on the state of math education in Canada, I have a few relevant updates that may be of interest:

CS Ed Week
Whether you're a student, educator, parent, or CS geek like me, if you haven't checked out CS Ed Week yet you should!  There's all sorts of great information, activities, and events for all sorts of people, including a #CSEdWeek Twitter conversation tomorrow at 6pm ET, some interesting articles to read, and links to cool demos.

For my small contribution I helped out at the University of Washington's CSE Open House last weekend, where we showed of Windows Phone to nearly 700 students, parents, and educators and helped them learn how to make a simple Windows Phone app.  It was really neat to introduce some of the attendees to programming and show them an immediate practical application of it, which seemed to get them pretty excited!

Ada Lovelace's Birthday
December 10th marked what would have been Ada Lovelace's 197th birthday.  If you haven't heard of her, Ada is the author of the first computer program and a well used example of women in Computer Science.  Unfortunately her detractors have mounted a campaign to discredit her, saying for various reasons that she did not in fact write that program, that she had help or made mistakes etc, etc.  You can (and should!) read more about it in this excellent article.

Earlier this year we celebrated Ada Lovelace Day, on which everyone is supposed to write about a female role model in CS.  Here's my post in case you missed it.

A pic of the video I really wanted to post!

Grace Hopper's Birthday
December is when all the cool kids are born, apparently!  December 9 was Grace Hopper's birthday, so following the theme I'll end this post with her wonderful explanation of what a nanosecond is (since my favourite video, her interview with Letterman, seems to have been removed from the internet due to copyright infringement, grumble grumble...).

New Math > Old Math?

I just saw this story air on CBC's The National tonight.  Having been away from the system for quite a few years now, I was surprised and dismayed to learn about the new math curriculum.

I experienced the math curriculum in western Canada both as a student and later as a tutor with my own business.  As a young student I always did well in math until I reached the middle school years, when I unfortunately had a less than stellar math teacher.  If I had had rock-solid basic numeracy skills (i.e. the ability to add, subtract, multiply, and divide multiple digit numbers in my head with very lower error rates and without needing to write down carries etc), I could have overcome this, but being weighed down by minor errors held me back.  Luckily when I went from an A to B student in math, my parents enrolled me in Kumon (a system of math drilling and rote learning originally from Asia), where I was able to develop those solid basic math skills.  This freed up my concentration for the actual problem solving required in high school math.  My grades went back up and here I am today as an engineer.  

During my college years I had the privilege to tutor many students at various levels, from early elementary all the way up to first year university.  I saw two problems over and over throughout my time as a tutor.  First, many students lacked excellent basic math skills - and when they acquired them their grades went up significantly.  Second, the students were not encouraged to practice the theories, techniques, and problem solving skills they were learning on a day-to-day basis.  Students were sent home with perhaps five homework problems, if any.  I would always encourage my students to do every problem that had an answer (so they could check their progress/success) for every section in the text book they studied in class.  As students practiced their confidence increased, which usually negated any reluctance to do extra homework.

In my experience the curriculum that I and many of my students learned was already lacking in the necessary drills and rote learning many students need to gain great numeracy skills.  But from what I can see the new curriculum does away with this kind of learning altogether.  It focuses on multiple ways of doing basic math problems like adding two numbers with multiple digits.  It worries me that we are spending so much time on basic skills, time we could and should be spending on problems with more complex critical thinking required.  These are the kinds of problems students need to work on in order to become the great engineers, scientists, and technologists we are increasingly going to need to solve the world's problems.  And while students with a natural gift for math will probably be fine in either system, it worries me that there are many others with high potential who without the right training will be left behind, shut out from amazing careers in STEM as a result.

CS Education Week Is Here!

This week is CS Education Week.  The idea is to celebrate and raise awareness of the impact of computing science and the need for CS education.  You can find out more here.

My first experience with CS education was terrible.  It was Grade 10 and I was enrolled in the pre-IB program (a preparation year for the full IB program which started in Grade 11).  I had chosen CS as an elective as I was generally interested in computers and programming, but had no background or training in either.  The first day the teacher gave out the assignment:

"OK, you guys are going to code a database, and you will be able to sort, save, search, and print records.  Go."

Can you imagine my shock and panic?  I had no idea what to do, but it seemed like all the other students in the class (all  boys, incidentally) did.  They confidently started up their IDEs and began typing away.  There was no textbook and the teacher did not offer any kind of useful help, and there was no internet so I could not search for examples or tutorials there either.

Well, I made it through the year (I had to, since by that time it was too late to transfer and nothing else fit into my schedule) but vowed never to take another CS course again.  I didn't feel like I learned anything except HTML programming and was very annoyed by the experience.  The next year I switched to Physics and managed to avoid CS courses almost entirely in my undergraduate studies.

Luckily I realized later how important CS would be for me and went back to school to study it - but I imagine that there must be many students like me who get turned off early on and never come back.  My experience highlights a few things that are currently missing from CS education in my opinion:

• Programming is not CS: That is, programming is a tool of CS, but at its roots CS is much more than just writing code.  CS to me is all about modeling solutions to problems using algorithms and data structures.  It's about how to think abstractly, how to analyze problems and their solutions to come up with the most efficient one, and it's how to communicate those solutions to users in a sensible way.  When I took my first course in algorithms and data structures, I fell in love, but that wasn't until long after completing my undergraduate studies.  It seems to me we have the order of things backwards here.
• CS is everywhere: There are so areas of education that CS could impact.  Bringing up CS when teaching about other topics could help inspire students or at least get them thinking about it more broadly.  Algorithms are an easy example when it comes to mathematics, and pretty natural when you think about the programmable graphing calculators students are encouraged to use these days.  We can start even earlier; even kids in elementary school could be learning how to sort using various algorithms (there is a neat demo using blocks and weights, or discs).  There are all sorts of applications of CS to art (digital painting, photomanipulation, using computers in art installations, graphics displays, etc).  There is a lot of literature around computing these days.  I'm thinking of Cyberpunk books like Neuromancer or Cryptonomicon.  How about artificial intelligence?  When I was a kid one of my favorite discussions on this topic was whether the character Data from "Star Trek: The Next Generation" was alive or not:

• Teachers need CS, too: In my (admittedly limited) experience, few teacher training programs have little if any focus on CS (or even STEM subjects in general).  How can we attract people with the necessary technical skills to teaching, when the technology sector provides numerous better-paying jobs?  But it's not just technical skills we need in the classroom - we need a special blend of the ability to teach and instruct in addition to the necessary subject knowledge.  At my university they had a course which was in effect 'Math for Teachers'.  Maybe we need something similar for CS.  Greater awareness of CS in general among teachers could help them integrate it into more traditional subjects, especially when CS-specific courses are not available.

Are you supporting CS Education Week in some way?  If so, please sign the pledge and talk about it!  If not, please consider how you can help raise awareness.  I don't think my experience is all that uncommon, and if so we must be losing an awful lot of talent to other fields.  Let's do what we can to help make things better!

Robots in the News

A few pieces of robotic news I came across this week!  First, a robot that can recognize itself in a mirror and tell the difference between itself and other objects.  The video is super cute!

Second, and perhaps more interesting, is a new robot driven by a Windows Phone.

The robot is being developed by WPBots and can actually work with Windows Phone or Android.  It's pretty neat and I'd love to try out some programming for it when it becomes available.

Teaching Your Kids Science

There was a very good piece this afternoon on CBC's afternoon program, On the Coast, about getting parents to encourage their kids to study science.  The guest gave some helpful resources, such as Let's Talk Science and Curiosity.ca. I wholeheartedly agree with most of what they discussed - parents should encourage their kids even if they themselves struggled themselves with math or science, and shouldn't emphasize that to their kids, but rather encourage their children's natural curiousity and thirst for knowledge.

The only problem came towards of the interview when the host asked "What about science fiction, is reading that or watching Star Trek enough".  This happens at about 6:39 into the interview.  The guest talks about how this is great for encouraging boys.  What the heck?  Lots of girls (like me, growing up) love science fiction, volacanoes, and yes, even farting dogs (which the host gives as an example).  Worse yet, she goes on to talk about how we should make science relevant to our 'youth', and how websites like curiousity.ca show lots of examples of cool 'guys' doing science.

These initiatives are generally great and yes, we need to do everything we can to ensure our population has a good grasp on scientific literacy.  But we need to make sure we are encouraging everyone, regardless of gender, and that means showing examples of all kinds of role models and making sure we don't discourage one group of people from pursuits they enjoy just because of their gender.

Getting Back Into Blogging

You've probably noticed various tweets and posts about Nanowrimo, which just started today.  I've always wanted to try it and have made a few attempts in the past, but given a pretty hectic schedule this year I'm giving it a miss.  I am, however, going to try to step up my blogging, and do at least one post a day (I got a head start and posted twice in October, but, being November 1st, today is my first official post).

To kick us off, I thought I'd share a bit about some cool things I've seen lately (Twitter and Facebook mostly).  Topics generally fall into a few different themes:

Technology News

• Bendy screens: This week I saw press about bendy screens from both Samsung and Nokia.  Excited to see what cool things they build with it next!
• Kindle Fire: The latest offering from Amazon and their entry into the tablet space.  I'm very curious to see how this is going to work out and just how good the device will be.  Although I find tablets in general to be very cool and a tempting purchase, I can't quite justify them to myself as anything more than a toy just yet.
• Kinect Ads: I was impressed with this ad.  Not only is it really well put together and beautifully done, but it tells a compelling story about the product (and it's obvious what the product is).  

Women in STEM/Business & Related Issues
A couple of interesting articles I read recently include:

• The Myth of the Ideal Worker
• Female Professionals No Longer Finding Mentors
• Huffington Post's new series on Women in Tech

I also heard about Sheryl Sandberg's latest investment in Levo League, which is dedicated to helping Generation Y women rise professionally.  It's a great idea, but I wonder if they will branch out to other generations if the initial effort is successful.

Other Useful Resources

• Catalyst: Catalyst provides research on various aspects of women and business.  Their articles are informative and help bring issues like the gender wage gap to light.  I quite like their blog.
• Spark: This program on CBC Radio styles itself as an 'ongoing conversation on technology and culture'.  Not only does host Nora Young provide excellent commentary and interviews with leading experts on subjects such as human computer interaction, robotics, and social networks, but she always makes an effort to pop in items related to women in technology (and the relative lack thereof), which is very cool.  You can find podcasts here.

Watson Wins on Jeopardy!

Just finished watching the first episode of Jeopardy featuring IBM's Watson computer in competition with two humans (two of the most successful/celebrated contestants ever to appear on Jeopardy). A few quick thoughts:

• In some ways it doesn't seem a fair competition; on the one hand a computer can store a huge amount of data and retrieve it very efficiently, but there is only so much the human brain can memorize. On the other hand, it seems to me that humans would have the advantage in lateral thinking and making obscure connections in clues, where an algorithm might have a more difficult time with this.
• The explanations of how Watson works were really well done - nice visuals and simple ideas, easy for the audience to grasp.
• I'm really interested in why they made the 'avatar' the way they did. Why not give it a humanoid appearance? The voice also sounded smug to me, and at least one other person I've spoken too thought so as well - she even caught herself hoping it would get the answer wrong. Incidentally, I feel the same way about Alex Trebek.
  

Star Trek in the News

Over the past year, it seems there have been a number of advances in Star Trek-like technology. Just consider the advent of transparent aluminum, the capture of antimatter, and now Vger's latest attempt to go where no one has gone before. So when will the Klingons arrive?

Oh, the irony.

As seen in Scientific American...

Canadian Space Agency

Apparently there was a campaign recently for would-be astronauts at the CSA in the Province and at a paper at UBC. Sadly it seems SFU was missed by the campaign, but what's cool is that two of my friends have made it past the first round! Good luck guys!

From the Sublime to the Ridiculous

No wait, this has always been ridiculous.

This morning CBC news reported that the BC Government wants to use more of the chemical SLICE to protect the spring run of wild salmon from sea lice. What is SLICE, you ask? It is a drug that is supposed to prevent farmed fish from getting sea lice. Since it is widely acknowledged (by all except our government, until, apparently, today) that farmed fish are hotbeds for sea lice and that wild salmon migrating past these farms easily fall prey to the lice which jump from farmed to wild fish and consume their flesh, the government claims that this will help save the wild run.


This idea that pumping more chemicals into farmed fish (and thus the oceans) is not the answer. Because that's just what we need, Mr. Campbell, more antibiotics, carcinogenic dyes, and now SLICE, which is apparently a crustacean neurotoxin, in our food and environment.

No, what we really need is not only an opposition with the backbone to fight the government on this issue, but a media that isn't so bought that I'd be able to find the story online, from a major media outlet, when it breaks on the radio. By the way, where is the Green party? I never seem to hear anything about this from them.

Those things aside, at the very least we must have closed containment facilities immediately. If we continue to go down this path, there will be no wild salmon left.

More Science in the News

Robots make another appearance in the news with the announcement of the vigilante-bot (named as such by me, haha).

In other news, a plutonium shortage which may limit future NASA space missions, and new evidence pointing to the age of the universe, coming in at 13.7 billion years old.

Even though it's been a while since my physics days, these things still hold some interest for me, especially astrophysics.

US computer science drought may be bottoming out

Recently I've been hearing a lot of lamenting over the low enrollment in CS programs across the US and Canada. There are so many interesting things to study in CS and its a shame that students who might otherwise enroll in it choose other pograms instead, especially if the reason is simply because of the dot com bust. I can understand concerns about the tech sector and its perceived instability, but I think it's also important to have a more long-term outlook. And maybe it's a little naive, but doing what you love is always a good reason too. At the very least it will ensure you have some investment in what you are studying, and you may perform better because of that.

On the other hand, with fewer students in these programs, there are a lot more opportunities for those of us sticking with it. Which, I guess, isn't a bad thing.

YouTube - Google's Channel

Wow! Google Lunar X Prize! And, I must be behind the times not to know that Google has its own YouTube channel.

Yes, Please!

Technology Review: Clothes That Clean Themselves

Not having to get things dry cleaned would be especially handy. Now couple this with an ironing robot and I'd be set.

New Year's Resolutions Finally Kick In

Started running again; I went for the first time yesterday and again today. And! I saw the eclipse. Very nice! There was about a minute right at 7:00pm where it was really nice and red, and then completely disappeared. We wondered what happened until we realized that a cloud had covered it all up. That's Vancouver for you! But I was very glad to get a quick peek.

Here's an image of the eclipse that someone posted on Flickr:



This picture shows the moon quite a bit redder than what we saw - it looked much more orangey and the colour was nowhere near as saturated either. Still, it was neat!

NASA predicts red or orange lunar eclipse for Wednesday

I'm hoping to get a glimpse of this tonight! Here's hoping Vancouver's famous rain let's up for a bit.