Binders of Women!

Can you guess what my Halloween costume was for the Monster Dash run to benefit the Ashland Schools Foundation? Some people were able to guess it. Other people thought it had something to do with PhDs because quite a few women in the pictures have PhDs and I put that after their name. Kids liked the costume but had no idea what it meant. One guy from Alabama said I would get beat up in his home state wearing the costume. Mostly I got great feedback though.

I also attended the Ashland downtown parade. It's supposed to be for kids, but kids of all ages join in!

Sibling Rivalry at Work

A number of discussions I've had with technical women recently has gotten me thinking about the possibility that male and female workers tend to fall back on old family habits and engage in sibling rivalry. We get a "script" as youngsters, and sometimes are unable to cut loose from it. When you put men and women together in work places, the script can become toxic, especially if women take things personally and men deny that anything is happening under the surface.

If you read between the lines in some of the things that men and women say at work, you hear:

• MOM! She messed with my stuff again!
• Why does he get more allowance than me. It's UNFAIR!
• Why does Dad pay more attention to him than me?
• I want the front seat! Why does she always get the front seat?
• Don't touch my toys!
• Look how strong I am. I'm superman! Pummel, pummel, pummel.
• It's not fair. She's getting special treatment 'cause she's a girl.
• I got all A's on my report card. What did you get? Let me see your report card.
• I'm going to do way better than you in soccer. You're a girl. You can't kick a ball.
• Girls can't do that. Give it to me. I'll do it.
• Boys are stinky and stupid. 
• etc.

If there is some of this going on, what can we do about it? Here are a few remedies I came up with, especially for women (who bear the brunt of workplace nastiness):

• Recognize the problem. The first step to solving a problem is to recognize that there is a problem. 
• Recognize when a male colleague is acting bullish or acting out of jealousy, and stay calm.
• Recognize when you are starting to focus more on the unfairness and less on the work. 
• Refuse to get pulled into the negativity, jealousy, competitiveness, the undercurrent of sibling rivalry. 
• Keep it light. Make jokes. If a guy denounces you for touching his code, try saying with a smile, "you sound like my little brother when he yelled at me for touching his things." 
• If a coworker blows his own horn a lot, start blowing yours too!
• Get good at distinguishing annoying behavior from illegal behavior (sexual harassment and lack of equal opportunity employment). 
• Report any illegal behavior (after you document it well). 
• Roll with the punches when there's annoying behavior, (unless it gets unbearable; then start circulating your resume).
• Realize that you may never get the recognition that you crave. It will have to come from within. 
• STAY STRONG. Grow a backbone if you don't already have one! If your brother tried to beat you up when you were a kid, you didn't just crumple, right? You fought back!
• Stay flexible and agile. This doesn't mean being a wimp. The best fighters are not only strong; they are also flexible and agile.
• On the other hand, try not to focus too much on fighting. 
• Focus on your goals, your work, your peace of mind. 
• Remember what Aldous Huxley said, "There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self."

Growing up, I was the middle child in a family of 5 girls and 2 boys. I have a twin brother. My twin brother was very "special", talented, smart, dramatic. He got lots of attention. My younger brother is a genius (he really is). Now the universe is putting me in situations over and over again where I work with "brothers" who are special, while I'm often overlooked. Until I get the lessons, I think I will find myself returning to the childhood scripts. 

Thoughts, comments? Am I on to something? Am I brushing aside the legitimate, painful, workplace nastiness that many women face everyday at work? Am I overstating the undercurrent of sibling rivalry at work? Am I writing this blog to seek recognition that I'm clever and funny, recognition that I never got as a child, perhaps because I'm not really very clever or funny? :-)

My "Beloit List"

You have probably heard of the terrific list Beloit College makes every year describing the mindset of students entering college, to help older people understand them. Well, I have my own list.

For students entering college in 2012:

• Token Ring has always been a bad idea.
• Ditto ISDN.
• Cookies have always been stored on computers, not in jars.
• Computers have always been plug-and-play, or at least plug-and-pray.
• Google has always been misspelled. 
• Speaking of spelling, spill checkers have always fixed there miss takes.
• There's never been a need to distinguish "the big I Internet" from an internet.
• The Internet has always been commercial.
• The Internet has always supported streaming video, and it has always sucked.
• Al Gore has always been more famous for inventing the Internet and global warming, than for being a VP, or for winning the 2000 election.
• The term "Information Superhighway" has always sounded dumb.
• Amazon has never been just a river.
• Yahoo has never meant "red neck." 
• Red Hat has always referred to an operating system rather than something Communists wear.
• Commodore has always been bankrupt. 
• Women and African Americans have always been a tiny minority in the computer field (they were just a simple minority in the 1980s).
• OSI has always been just a model for teaching networking.
• We've always been running out of IPv4 addresses.

Watch out for the Udacians!

I just completed my first Udacity class. It was fantastic. I took Building A Search Engine which is an introductory class to teach programming using Python. In theory, I didn't need an introductory class, but in practice it's been years since I did any substantial programming and that wasn't with Python. It was with PL/1, Pascal, C, and IBM Series 1 assembly language. I took the class mainly to analyze the success that Udacity is having disrupting higher education, but also because I love to learn.

The Udacity class was outstanding for the following reasons:

• It was free!
  
• The professor (Dr. Dave Evans) was easy to understand, funny, brilliant, and hardworking. His example with bunnies taking over the world, which I changed to Udacians taking over the world, was delightful.
• The class was only seven weeks, so there was no time to get bored.
  
• Each video lecture was just a few minutes, so there was no time to get bored.
• Each homework assignment focused on challenging, interesting, real-world (usually) problems, so there was no reason to get bored.
  
• The class was quite advanced (you guessed it, not boring!) We learned about recursion, hashed indexes, for loops, while loops, strings, lists, dictionaries, arithmetic expressions, variables, procedures, etc.
• The forum discourse was pleasant and helpful, with none of the snide haters or arrogant know-it-alls that you often see in online discussion groups. The senior people on the forum (not me, despite my age :-), were extremely helpful, especially with the many test cases that they provided so we could test that our code worked correctly.

Udacity grew out of the phenomenal success of the free, online Artificial Intelligence class that Stanford University unofficially offered in Fall 2011. I blogged about that class when I finished it. It was awesome but the homework was too hard. The class I just finished was better than awesome. It was udacious, mainly because the homework was hard (challenging) but not too hard. Though we never heard final numbers, literally thousands of students finished the class. Thousands of new programmers out there! Beware! We will take over the world. :-)

CS Professor Recommendations for Udacity

In a Udacity class that I'm taking, fellow students sometimes make recommendations for a professor they would like Udacity to hire. Well they could hire me. :-) See how nice my hands look when I teach online!? They might look even better transparent. Inside joke. :-) I am already happily and gainfully employed teaching engineers, however.

But this did get me thinking about whom I would like to see teach a class. And here's a list that I came up with:

• Deborah Estrin is a professor of Computer Science at UCLA. She is a pioneer in the field of embedded network sensing and is the director of the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS) at UCLA.
• Sally Floyd was a computer scientist at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, California. She is best known for her work on Internet congestion control. She was the inventor of the Random Early Detection active queue management scheme, and a co-author on the standards for TCP Selective acknowledgement (SACK) and Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN).
• Adele Goldberg is a computer scientist who participated in the development of the programming language Smalltalk-80 and various concepts related to object oriented programming.
• Dame Wendy Hall is a professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton, England. She is a founding director, with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, of the Web Science Research Initiative.
• Daphne Koller is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University and a MacArthur Fellowship recipient. Her general research area is artificial intelligence and its applications in biomedical sciences.
• Susan Landau is an American mathematician and engineer, and, as of 2011, a Visiting Scholar at the Computer Science Department, Harvard University. In 2010-2011, she was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, where she investigated issues involving security of government systems, and their privacy and policy implications.
• Barbara Liskov is the Ford Professor of Engineering in the MIT School of Engineering's Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department. Liskov received the 2008 Turing Award from the ACM for her work in the design of programming languages and software methodology that led to the development of object-oriented programming.
• Jennifer Mankoff is an associate professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research interests also include mediation of ambiguous, recognition-based interfaces. Application areas of her work include assistive technology for people with special needs and the elderly, health and safety, and technologies that promote sustainability.
• Tamara Munzner is an associate professor in the department of Computer Science, University of British Columbia. Her research interests include the development, evaluation, and characterization of information visualization systems and techniques from both user-driven and technique-driven perspectives.
• Evi Nemeth is an internationally recognized engineer, author, and teacher known for her expertise in computer system administration and networks. She is the lead author of the “bibles” of system administration: UNIX System Administration Handbook (1989, 1995, 2000), Linux Administration Handbook (2002, 2006), and UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook (2010). Nemeth is best known in mathematical circles for originally identifying inadequacies in the “Diffie-Hellman trap,” the basis for a large portion of modern network cryptography.
• Radia Perlman is a software designer and network engineer. She is most famous for her invention of the spanning-tree protocol (STP) for Ethernet bridges and switches and for authoring the quintessential book, "Interconnections." She also worked on Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Links (TRILL), routing security, and numerous other inventions in the networking field.
• Dana Randall is a professor of theoretical computer science at Georgia Tech. Her primary research interest is analyzing algorithms for counting problems (eg. counting matchings in a graph) using Markov chains. One of her important contributions to this area is a decomposition theorem for analyzing Markov chains.
• Jennifer Rexford is a professor in the Computer Science department at Princeton. Her research focuses on Internet routing, network measurement, and network management, with the larger goal of making data networks easier to design, understand, and manage. Jennifer is co-author of the book "Web Protocols and Practice: HTTP/1.1, Networking Protocols, Caching, and Traffic Measurement" (Addison-Wesley, May 2001).
• Dawn Song is a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California at Berkeley. Her research areas include operating systems, networking, programming systems, and security.
• Ellen Spertus is an associate professor of Computer Science at Mills College, Oakland, California, and a senior research scientist at Google. Since January of 2009, Spertus has spent her time at Google working on App Inventor for Android.
• Latanya Sweeney develops algorithms and real-world systems that allow information to be shared with provable guarantees of privacy (legally and scientifically) while remaining practically useful. Dr. Sweeney has had significant impact on American privacy policy. Dr. Sweeney is a Visiting Professor and Scholar at Harvard University, was a Distinguished Career Professor of Computer Science, Technology and Policy in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, and remains the Director and founder of the Data Privacy Lab, now at Harvard University.
• Valerie E. Taylor is the Royce E. Wisenbaker Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A& M. Her research interests are high performance computing, with particular emphasis on the performance analysis and modeling of parallel and distributed applications.
• Manuela M. Veloso is a professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University where she studies how robots can learn, plan and work together to accomplish tasks. She was the winner of the 2009 Autonomous Agents Research Award from the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence (ACM/SIGART).
• Katherine Yelick is a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California at Berkeley and is also the Associate Laboratory Director for Computing Sciences and the Director of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She is the co-author of two books and more than 100 refereed technical papers on parallel languages, compilers, algorithms, libraries, architecture, and storage.

Some of these people are getting up there in age. Udacity should grab them while they can! Even if they are retired, perhaps they would like to still share their expertise and help up-and-coming computer scientists recognize that the field isn't all young men. :-)

Jacked In

The most amazing thing I saw at MacWorld|iWorld wasn't an iPad or app. It wasn't a Mac or an iPhone. It was a young man who was so lost in the Metaverse that he didn't notice when I bounced balloons off his head. Let me explain...

On Friday night there was a great party at a bar on Broadway. There was a rock band, with Paul Kent, the organizer of MacWorld|iWorld, and others playing loud 1980s music, a circus act, free booze, lots of hooping and hollering, laser light shows. Mac fans gone wild!

At one point, a bag of balloons dropped from the ceiling, with hundreds of balloons in old-Apple rainbow colors. People started hitting the balloons every which way, and popping them. If we had been in New York, and not mellow San Francisco, people would have run to the door. (It sounded like gunfire).

In front of me, a young man was using Facebook on his iPhone. For an entire 10 minutes he stood in the midst of chaos, reading Facebook comments. (He wasn't even posting something new, just reading comments.) There were people dancing, laughing, taking pictures, stomping balloons. Women on stilts gyrating above our heads. A buxom blonde in a barely-there Octoberfest outfit, roller skating around the balloons. Guitar solos, drum solos, more balloon pops.

None of this fazed the young man. He was utterly still except for his scrolling finger. He looked like a Second Life avatar frozen in space as the user updates his appearance.

So I started bouncing balloons off his head. He didn't notice. He was jacked in, like in Snow Crash. I should have whipped out a Samurai sword and popped a balloon in front of his face. Would he have noticed? Probably not.