“Computing is too important to be left to men.” - Karen Spärck Jones

The day before yesterday, I had a mini-rant about how the number of women accepted into Computer Science at Cambridge had decreased unproportionally to the number of men.

The thing that I forgot was that statistics always lie. You can make them show whatever you want, and if you let yourself get lost in the numbers behind the numbers, then sometimes you’ll even forget what it is that you wanted to know in the first place.

At least, that’s what happened to me when I tried to get to the bottom of the Cambridge story. Here are the facts:

What does this tell me? (And what do I want to know?)

I could write paragraphs comparing the percentages, but ultimately, it isn’t a quota system, and it shouldn’t be. The number of candidates accepted from either gender should be based on ability and potential, not on which box they tick or how it compares to the years before.

Given that, there’s only one number that I care about. The number of female applicants dropped 63%. This is significant because it’s a larger drop than on the male side, which only fell by 54%. Why were women turned off the subject even more men in those seven years?

If I could answer that question right now, I’d save a lot of people a lot of time and research.

Companies and professional associations and non-profits are all working to raise awareness to girls. But is it enough?

Headstart runs a number of courses to encourage A-level students into various engineering and science degrees. In 2006, they asked the same question before and after the courses – “What engineering degree do you intend to read at university?” 34% of the participants were female. The response for computing and software was 3% before the course, and 4% after. Is that really a significant difference? They also claim that 87% reported that Headstart had confirmed or encouraged their decision to study engineering and 76% reported the course confirmed or helped their choice of discipline.

My cynical question to them is this: what proportion of these students go on these courses to benefit their UCAS applications?

This type of education will only work if everyone has the opportunity - including when they don’t even know that they’re missing anything to begin with.

Tags: headstart

“Science is becoming more pervasive and invasive than it has ever been before.” - Baroness Greenfield

Professor Wendy Hall is making the most of her moment in the sun. The fact that she’s been made a dame has been covered widely, no doubt partially thanks to the large women in technology network Twittering away, emailing contacts, and making sure the media knows. The Guardian has a few words on her reaction, in which she succinctly states how she plans to use this status: to encourage more young people to go into computer science.

A lot of the time, I get sidetracked and focus on the issue of women in technology – namely, the fact that there aren’t enough. But the truth is that the number of students applying to do Computer Science courses nationwide are dropping (apparently except at the University of Southampton, oddly enough, where Prof Hall teaches). At Cambridge in 2000, 499 students applied and 88 were admitted (71 men, 17 women). In 2007, 231 applied and 71 were admitted (64 men, 7 women).

(You can see why I’m concerned about women. That’s a 54% decrease in applications overall, but only a 10% decrease in the number of men admitted, compared to the 59% decrease in the number of women.)

But back to the problem: it’s all about getting children, boys and girls alike, excited about computing at a younger age.

The Royal Institution (RI), an independent charity founded in 1799 designed to connect people with science, started delivering their famous Christmas lectures for children in 1825. Lectures have been delivered by luminaries such as Michael Faraday who initiated them in the first place, Carl Sagan and Baroness Susan Greenfield. This year’s lectures were around the theme of building the ultimate computer, presented by Professor Chris Bishop.

The best thing about them is that they’re accessible. Children and adults can listen alike and understand what’s being said, and more importantly, become enthused. The RI is an academic institution as well, and much groundbreaking research has been conducted there. However, as every university student knows, lecturers don’t always make the best teachers and this is where the RI lectures soar above the rest: these are the best teachers you’ll find.

The lectures can be accessed online, for anyone interested, and Prof Bishop speaks about the lectures (and his shock at how small the Faraday lecture theatre actually is) in the Guardian’s Science Weekly podcast.

Apart from the huge success of the Christmas lectures, the other thing that I like about the RI is that the current director is Baroness Greenfield. In 1994, she was invited to be the first woman to deliver the Christmas lectures, and four short years later she became the first female director of the RI – and only the fifth director to date.

“My dream for the Royal Institution is that people should go to it like they go to a cinema or concert or play. I want people to leave there after an event excited, frightened, worried, inspired, involved, and above all disagreeing with each other, like you would after a good play. Because once we have science talked about -and people thinking about it and in a sense owning it - then we have a chance.” – Baroness Greenfield

I was fortunate enough to attend a talk she gave to the womenintechnology network, titled Banana skins, bottlenecks and elephant traps: the perilous journey for women in technology. She lives up to every description, witty and clever and talking a million miles a minute, irreverently poking fun at us and herself. After all, how often is one in a room full of 200 female scientists and technologists with only the odd man dotted about?

The thing that I like best about her is that she refuses to sacrifice her own individuality, including her femininity, while walking down the scientific path. She’s neither a single woman who refuses to have a life in favour of being an academic, nor is she married with 2.4 children. The media lambasts her for everything from wearing miniskirts to getting divorced, but she keeps on going, and more importantly telling people, so that we all keep on going too. According to her, the most important thing you can find yourself is a mentor, and if you’re not sure who that person should be, use this as a rule of thumb: “Someone who believes in you more than you believe in yourself.”

Tags: ri, susan greenfield, wendy hall

“An optimist stays up until midnight to see the new year in. A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves.” - Bill Vaughn

It’s New Year’s Eve 2008, and all I see on Twitter is excitement for 2009, pleasure that 2008 is over (was it that bad? does the ticking of the clock make it all end?), New Year’s resolutions, and great plans and parties in London town for tonight.

Lifehacker asked What Are Your Biggest Accomplishments of 2008? It can be quite inspirational to read what some people come up with, as I found it interesting how much of what I want to do next year is generated by looking back at this year and thinking about what I would have liked to have done. I won’t be sharing what I came up with though, because that would actually commit me to doing them

However, according to one study, only 46% of resolutions are maintained after 6 months, but people that make specific resolutions are ten times more likely to achieve their goals than people that don’t. Now there’s motivation!

I’m personally not that bothered about the ticking of the clock itself; it’s all just another day. I wouldn’t mind if 2008 stretched on for another week or so, because I could really do with the time off. I don’t know why I didn’t take January 2nd on holiday too.

The New Year Honours List is out now. The BBC opened by announcing that ‘Sport stars lead New Year Honours’. Ignoring all of gold medallists from the Beijing Olympics that were honoured, I was pleased to see Wendy Hall be made a Dame, Sara Payne be made an MBE, and of course, Terry Pratchett receive his knighthood.

This year, like last year, 39% of honours went to women - 378 out of 972 receipients. The webpage states that this is ‘higher than the historical norm’ as if that’s a reasonable justification, but it doesn’t explain why it’s not closer to 50%.

And with that, I’ll leave you for this year. My evening will consist of too much food, hopefully just enough drink, and probably more time playing Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games on the Wii. That’s never a bad thing.

Tags: new year

“I’m a PC… AND I am a voice to be heard.” - tristi

A few months ago, I was visiting my parents and my MacBook’s power cord split open, exposing wires and refusing to work (with electrical tape firmly in place, of course). As they had recently moved from Manchester, which has two lovely Apple stores, to the lesser-known Warrington, with none, I moaned and wondered how I would last the weekend. In a sudden burst of clarity, I used the last ten minutes of my battery to look up Apple resellers and found Apogaeum, located in the city’s Golden Square shopping centre. It saved the day. Unfortunately, I went shopping today, and found the store closed. Their website says, “Due to unforeseen circumstances (credit crunch/recession) Apogaeum has cease trading and is in liquadation.” Oh dear.

I have a friend who went to the opening of London’s Regent Street Apple store. He speaks fondly - and frequently - of that morning, when he turned up around 6am, not being hardcore enough to have camped out the night before. He goes on about the community vibe, these wonderful people he met in the queue and connected with enough to take turns running out for doughnuts and pastries for breakfast while holding each other’s place in the line. Is it an Apple thing, or a people thing? The way the story’s told, it’s an Apple thing.

I’m always surprised when I’m in the middle of a new group of people, and slowly the mobiles come out. These days, at least 40% of the people I’m with at any given time have an iPhone. It raises some questions about the people I spend time with, and in the past, I had chalked it up to the fact that most of the people I know are in technology-related careers. I spent this Christmas with two dentists, an investment banker recently made redundant, a qualified doctor and a medical student. Three of them had an iPhone. (I’ll let you guess which.)

LadyGeek recently posted about her dislike about the evangelical nature of Apple users, always at the ready with ‘unconditional and undeserving love’ for the Apple brand. It’s not an unfair comment. I can think of many people who have encountered problems with their Apple technology, myself included, but for some reason, we keep on going back. Did Apple cultivate this attitude? I don’t think so. It just happened, but now it’s there and everyone else (i.e. Microsoft) has to run around in circles trying to generate it.

I went to the European Capital of Culture the other day, to see the Scouse Cinderella panto on at the Liverpool Empire Theatre, with none other than Cilla Black, Les Dennis and Jennifer Ellison. The theatre is right next to Liverpool Lime Street station, which has a massive I’m a PC installation across the road from it. When you’re in the car, waiting for the lights to change, the installation is somewhat hypnotic, as you see the faces of normal people and what they do. My first thought was nothing to do with PCs (or Macs), but instead I wondered how many people had seen installations like that and gone to the website in the hopes of having their face up there at some point.

The I’m a PC website is very good, I’ll give them that. It’s simple to use, and with iSight nicely built in, all I had to do was click Approve once and I was all set up for my five seconds of fame. I can’t help but think that they should have some kind of built-in checker to determine whether the user is actually using a PC for their clip, and if not, ask, “Are you sure you want to do this? Really?” Now that would be a stat I’d love to get my hands on - the number of users using Macs to say I’m a PC.

Tags: apple, microsoft

“If you read a lot of books you are considered well read. But if you watch a lot of TV, you’re not considered well viewed.” - Lily Tomlin

I’m not very well versed in British television. I miss the modern stuff because I rarely watch TV at all these days, and I haven’t seen a lot of the old ‘classic’ stuff because I grew up in Canada. I used to be very annoyed at my lack of knowledge, but every year I learn that little bit more. The problem is, a lot of the good British stuff is comedy.

Comedy’s a tricky thing with me. A good friend once hmm’ed apologetically and told me that I had ‘a special sense of humour’ when I asked whether I would like a certain comedy show; but I’m quite happy to admit that my sense of humour is rather lacking. I watched one episode of Little Britain a few years back, and I know that’s something that will never appeal to me. Similarly, I’ve seen a few episodes of The Royle Family, and while I don’t hate it the way I do Little Britain, I don’t find it particularly funny.

This Christmas, I was given the DVD boxset of Gavin & Stacey. I watched it all over the past two days, and have to say that I actually like it. I think I’m too much of an idealist at heart, I need the ultimate message of the story to be something nice, because otherwise it feels like laughing at people instead of with them, and that happens enough in this world without needing to encourage it further.

There was also the Blackadder special on this Christmas. I’ve seen a few episodes here and there, and that comedy does seem to work for me, so maybe I’ll get round to seeing it properly at some point. I’m more familiar with Rowan Atkinson in his Mr Bean persona, because that’s what really got him worldwide attention and so managed to reach me in Canada. I’m quite pleased to have tickets to see Oliver! in the West End next year; I look forward to seeing his Fagin.

Of course, we do other genres of television as well. There are the good ol’ soaps, like Coronation Street and Eastenders, neither of which I’ve seen, and never will, if I have anything to say about it. I was forced to endure the second part of Eastenders on Christmas Day and took the opportunity to increase my number of wins on Spider Solitaire on my iPhone. The only soap opera I’ve ever watched was The Young and the Restless, back when I was 12 years old in Canada. I was incredibly amused to discover that the soap is actually aired here now too, although after watching for five minutes I can’t really understand what possessed me to watch it in the first place. Adolescent immaturity is the only explanation available.

Then there’s science fiction, which can be narrowed down to Doctor Who (including its subsequent spin-offs). It’s absolutely brilliant, and that’s all there is to be said about that. I don’t know about other British sci-fi endeavours, although I have had a number of people encourage me to watch Red Dwarf. Maybe one day. (I suppose there’s The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but that was radio first and I’ll always love the books best, so we’ll leave the TV part to one side. I do own the DVDs, though.)

Is there anything else I’m missing? I think that just about covers it. It’s a shame that I seem to have broken the BBC iPlayer Desktop, I was looking forward to downloading the Christmas special of Gavin & Stacey. Does anyone know how to get the main window back after you (accidentally) click hide?

Tags: blackadder, gavin & stacey, sci-fi, soaps

“Aerodynamically, the bumble bee shouldn’t be able to fly, but the bumble bee doesn’t know it so it goes on flying anyway.” - Mary Kay Ash

I know three women that have taken flying lessons. I’m hoping to join that list, but given the current economic climate I’m opting for the far more rationale route of a one-hour taster session, just to make sure I like it, and then put it on hold for another year when I have more money and actually am in proximity to an airfield (or own a car, either works).

I don’t know any men that fly. I spent four years in university where my class was 90%+ male, and I work in an environment that has similar demographics. Maybe it hasn’t come up in conversation yet (now that’s something for the next work social), but I can’t think of a single man I know that flies.

Yet 95% of flying students are male, and only just over 6% of certified civilian pilots in the US are women.

The New York Times has an article on the general decline in anyone flying since 1980. It’s ironic that general aviation is a technical enterprise, and yet in this day and age of technology, this £1.4 billion a year industry in the UK ($150 billion in the US) is being slowly forgotten.

What’s interesting is that the primary reason given on the first page is women. Of course.

“Women learn differently from men,” Mr. Kauffman said. “If two men go up, they will scream and shout, and a transfer of knowledge occurs, and we’d get back on the ground and go have a beer, and life is good,” he said. “If you yell at a woman, she’d start crying, and she’d never come back.”

I’ve tried to come up with something witty and damaging to say in response to that, but all I have is a deep-seated anger at a) the women that act like that and thus force the rest of us to be condemned to those stereotypes, and b) the men that are so narrow-minded and stupid to believe that those stereotypes are true.

If you can bring yourself to make it to the second page, other factors such as the increasing cost (it can range from £100-200/hour or £5000 for a flat-fee programme) and apparent safety fears are the other main deterrents. According to the article, the fact that women now have a larger stake in decision-making and are more likely to generate a sizeable portion of the family’s income also contribute to making the former point a larger issue than it would have been a few decades ago.

What the article doesn’t mention is the thing that’s being rammed down all our throats: the environmental effect. Every time a celebrity (or a royal, as the case seem to be more often than not) uses a private plane to make a trip, the media jumps up and down for days on end. Yes, flying raises your carbon footprint significantly, but there is similarly this concept called offsetting. I’m not saying that makes it okay, but I believe that shutting down the private jet industry isn’t an acceptable solution either. It’s a part of the general aviation industry, and it’s only by keeping all aspects alive that change can occur to develop the future.

But why must change occur? Why keep it alive? Why should you, male or female, want to fly?

The LA Times suggests that it’s due to young people nowadays not seeing it as an ‘attractive or romantic pursuit‘. Ironically enough, that’s exactly what I see. The concept of flying was first introduced to me by many of my childhood heroes - astronauts. These were people that grew up flying, some of which had even gained their pilot’s license before their driver’s license. It’s exciting, challenging, and the bit that I like best - you can see the Earth.

Tags: flying

“I don’t normally do requests, unless I’m asked to.” - Richard Whiteley

When I was in the fifth grade, I was put in a group exercise with five boys. Being boys, they started talking about dinosaurs and soon found a way to incorporate dinosaurs into the exercise. This escalated into a debate on how to spell the words, and I spent a good ten minutes watching them all decide that dinosaurs weren’t in the dictionary, until I said that I bet that I could find pterodactyl in it.

Being the only one to know that it started with a silent ‘p’, I did just that, and won their respect despite knowing less than nothing about dinosaurs of any kind.

Over a decade and a half later, I’m just as pernickety with my spelling and grammar. One thing that recently annoyed me was Adobe AIR. This is encouraging redundant acronyms. They’re omnipresent in this day and age - PIN number, ATM machine, HIV virus, the list goes on. And they’re redundant! But at least they’re a result of people not thinking, and trying to make their own lives easier. It’s not a great explanation, but it is one. My annoyance at Adobe deliberating launching the ‘Adobe Adobe Integrated Runtime’ knew no bounds. Of course, there’s a certain eloquence in TLAs (three letter acronyms, for the uninitiated) that can be pronounced, and ‘air’ is quite a nice word with good connotations - so maybe I’ll let this one go.

The reason that this even came to my attention? Adobe AIR is everywhere! Twitter clients, Google Analytics and now the BBC iPlayer Desktop. The BBC announced last week that the iPlayer Desktop was finally available for Macs. Given that streaming doesn’t work well for me, this was a welcome announcement, combined with the ability to watch in the next thirty days after downloading. Take that, seven day limit.

So I eagerly signed up as a iPlayer Labs tester and downloaded the application installer. Something downloaded, and something claimed to be downloading on the screen for an extremely long time. I have no idea what that was, but after twenty minutes, I gave up and shut the page, ran the file that had appeared on my desktop, and ta-da, the iPlayer was mine.

First order of business: watch something. It can’t be that difficult, can it? As someone that doesn’t really watch television, it took me a few minutes of scanning through TV listings to decide on something to demo it with. I thought it might be an excellent opportunity to binge-watch Merlin, given all of the hoop-la surrounding that at the moment. After being glad that the entire series was online, due to a series rewatch thing, I spent another fifteen minutes trying to figure out how to download the thing.

I made it my way to their FAQs and it seems that “a significant amount of BBC iPlayer Desktop downloads are not available.” But don’t worry, they’re working to correct this. I finally gave up and grabbed the final episode of Strictly Come Dancing, despite not really caring about celebrities dancing in the least.

It downloaded rather quickly, which I was pleased with, but that was the end of the good news. I couldn’t resize it enough so that it only took up half my screen and I could multi-task. The quality was fairly pixellated and given that I didn’t care about the show at all, I gave up less than ten minutes into it.

Rather unfortunate after all the hype, but there you go. Let’s see what comes out of the labs next.

Tags: english language, iplayer

“I have an underwater camera just in case I crash my car into a river, and at the last minute I see a photo opportunity of a fish that I have never seen.” - Mitch Hedburg

Writing my last blog post allowed me to calm down from the outrage I felt when over-thinking winking. Unfortunately, it also required visiting the BBC News website. For some reason, my proxies at work are a bit messed up, and I sometimes see adverts on the site. Feel the blood pressure rise again. I imagine anyone reading this has yet to endure that particular unpleasantry. It’s not that I’m against adverts themselves, per se, as I frequent many other news websites that incorporates them. I barely even notice them on The Guardian’s website, and The FT’s new layout is more likely to anger me with its inability to let you actually find what you’re looking for, than the adverts on it.

So why the annoyance at the BBC? Is it simply the ages-old resistance to change? Is it the fact that I pay my license fee so I shouldn’t have to endure this? Is it because they’ve elected to use those annoying adverts that get bigger when you hover over them (accidentally, in my case), but of course you don’t realise what you did and can’t find an ‘x’ on the advert to get rid of it, and the anger escalates.

I dare say it’s all of the above. The BBC isn’t perfect by any means, but it provides a good overview of what’s going on in the world. The website is simple and easy to navigate, and I’m a huge fan of the most popular read and emailed stories feature. I appreciate a lot of other sites incorporate this too, but given the wide audience the site has, I find it a nice indicator of what people are interested in at any given moment. You sometimes get stories popping up from years ago, and I often wonder what caused the sudden re-surge of popularity.

Of course, the errors on the site are plentiful and colourful – ranging from incomplete captions to the numerous spelling mistakes (I can’t even bring myself to look for an example; just read a few articles and they’ll appear out of the woodwork).

I was rather amused to see an article appear today, with the leading image being credited to a flickr user. It marks a departure from the traditional sources of Associated Press, Agence France Press or the newer Getty News Images, which provide a combined force of over 5000 pictures a day for the BBC to use. Even with a picture wire service like that, it’s still not possible to guarantee that you have the one that you need – especially when it’s as specific as capturing a poster in a tube station. Clearly, one journalist saw the benefit in leveraging the internet to provide an accurate and relevant representation of the article, rather than putting an irrelevant image up. Is this something we’ll see happen more often in the future, or were we lucky to get a particularly internet-savvy journalist for that one?

This only serves to show the increase of amateur involvement in non-critical events. While amateur reporting is taking an increasing presence – everyone has their camera video phones out ready for tragedy – and news stories gain coverage via Twitter and Facebook, news agencies invariably cry out for viewers to send their own photos in. But how much do they check to see what’s already available?

If only I could enjoy all these articles and images without adverts now!

Tags: bbc news, flickr

“Maybe that’s what life is… a wink of the eye and winking stars.” - Jack Kerouac

Last night, around 8pm, I had the TV on mute. I was on the phone to my mother when a familiar scene played out, which I recognised from Children in Need this year. It was the Tenth Doctor, meeting The Other Doctor, in the new trailer for this year’s Doctor Who Christmas special. The Other Doctor winks.

Has a more horrific sight ever been witnessed? It has been argued that the wink is fitting for the OTT, cheesey scene that it takes place in. I suspect that the real reason I’m having such trouble coming to terms with it is that this man goes by the name of Doctor – and we’ll find out soon enough whether he is some version of ours or not – and yet that behaviour is irrevocably irreconcilable with the Doctor I know. (I’m not invested in my TV shows at all, oh no.)

It annoyed me enough that I ended up wandering the interwebs reading more and more about this curious phenomenon. The BBC’s H2G2 has a whole article about The Wink and the Social Aspect of Winking, which only served to get me from annoyed to hysterical. A socially accepted substitute when kissing isn’t possible between established couples?! It’s not wise for a woman to do the winking even if these days of sexual equality?! The ‘I’m Joking’ wink isn’t a good idea for the autistic?! (The other types will work just fine, clearly…) Where do they get this stuff?!

Oddly enough, once we hit the ‘I’m Faking It’ wink, the sections become full of real-life examples, which interested me but also reinforced my dislike for this facial expression, as the only people that seem to wink are ones that I do not greatly like (footballers, George Bush, Sarah Palin…).

And then we reach the online wink. H2G2 clearly hasn’t been updated recently, as we all know that last week the Russian entrepreneur Oleg Teterin trademarked the winking emoticon, Teterin has openly announced that he will go after firms using the symbol without permission, which will amounts to tens of thousands of dollars.

It’s not the first time that an emoticon has been trademarked, though. Back in 2001, Despair Inc, a Texas company, trademarked the ‘frowny’ emoticon, :-(, and announced their plans to sue anyone who used it in email. However, mass outrage on various internet forums including Slashdot soon resulted in the official retraction, where the whole thing was clearly a joke. Nonetheless, the trademark remains.

In summary: don’t wink. It’s weird, and if you’re a big corporation, pretty expensive too.

Tags: random, rants

“The Internet “browser”… is the piece of software that puts a message on your computer screen informing you that the Internet is currently busy and you should try again later.” - Dave Barry

Chrome has apparently hit the 10 million active user mark, on seven continents, in 100 days. In all honesty, it’s the seven continents bit that impresses me. However, with some thought, it seems the most logical – Antarctica, especially at this time of year, will have its reduced winter population of ~200, and most of them will be scientists and researchers. In other words, most of them are tech-literate people who are willing to try out the latest thing. It does sadden me that by virtue of using Chrome, they are also therefore Windows users. (Yes, you can dual-boot, use vmware, and all that stuff, but they’re still Windows users.)

The really sad part is that I was tempted to re-install Parallels after having let it go once and for all, just for that browser. It pains me to admit that MacBook has been less than useful in facilitating internet access as of late. Given what a necessary part of one’s life this is, I’m actually looking at netbooks seriously.

At the beginning, all was fine. Safari was there and Firefox was a good backup. Then one day, Safari shut itself down and I haven’t managed to get the thing to launch successfully since. I moved over to Firefox full-time, and didn’t even mourn my loss. Then Firefox 3 came out, and I hit Upgrade, and suddenly I found myself with a browser that didn’t permit me to download anything. Not good. Especially because the only way to circumvent a problem like that is by downloading something new!

The only thing that I managed to successfully download was Camino. It’s small, functional, and I like it. I liked it so much that I used it for the better part of this year. For some reason, a few weeks ago I turned to Opera and gave it a go. The interface is pretty, it’s customisable and has add-ins and all the good stuff that I did miss out in Camino. Unfortunately, webpages take significantly longer to render. I can’t give you precise times, but it’s long enough that I’m sitting there and noticing it, and that’s far too long.

Safari still refuses to load – I suspect I accidentally deleted some key files required along the way – so I’ve given up hope.

I feel like I should probably give Firefox another go, and I’m tempted to visit OmniWeb and see what that’s like. There are so many browsers though, and there’s no clear winner. As much as I hate Internet Explorer, I think I’d actually prefer having something that always works, just as backup.

Tags: camino, firefox, omniweb, opera, safari