#ghc10

This might be one of the most inspiring sessions I’ve attended so far. The women on the panel were:

Cecilia Aragon, Lawrence Berkeley Lab & U Washington

Patty Lopez, Intel

Sandra Johnson, IBM

Loretta Moore, Jackson State U

All of these women had wonderful stories. Sandra Johnson said she believes she was the first African American woman to get a PhD in Electrical Engineering! She is also the only African American woman who is an IEEE fellow. Cecilia Aragon left with a MS, took time off and then went back for the PhD and was still able to not only work in a National Lab, but to then get 6 offers for faculty positions and to accept an offer as a tenured professor. Patty Lopez took a risk after working at HP for almost 20 years and moved to Intel. Patty Lopez didn’t make the cheerleading squad (she couldn’t do cartwheels, like myself!) and decided instead to compete with the boy in class who thought he was smarter than her (haven’t we all?). Loretta More told a lovely story about how she decided that Chemistry was rather unforgiving to mistakes (the story involved an explosion!) and switched to Computer Science.

Here’s an interesting thought. Someone asked about dealing with people saying that you only got a position or an award because you’re female or a minority. The consensus from the panel was to know that you got where you are because you’re qualified, but Sandra Johnson mentioned that for years men actually got positions without being qualified!

My personal question was about carrying the burden of representing my race. Patty Lopez had a great insight, in a book on corporate tribalism, it was shown that white males see themselves as individuals but tend to see minorities as groups. So I need to work on separating myself from the group and stop seeing myself as a representative of all women, all Jamaican women, all Women of Color.

#ghc10

As promised, I’ll be giving a couple mini posts on Grace Hopper! The conference started yesterday evening. First impression: oh my god there are a lot of women! It’s so refreshing, I spend my day surrounded by men, and that’s great, but you miss having other females around. Everybody is so friendly, much more so than at other conferences.

Cool feature: Poken! They’re futuristic business cards, you hold them up to each other and they exchange sort of your business cards, but even more if you add social networks to your profile. A little tip: When you go to register, plug in your Poken into a usb slot. It should ask you to the open the folder to view files, double click the Start Poken icon, which will take you to the Poken webpage. On the webpage, your username is the email you used to register for Grace Hopper, and the password is poken.

 

 

Off to go meet some more cool women!

Grace Hopper #ghc10 is around the corner and I'm getting excited! I plan on doing some blogging, I think I'll be aiming for a couple short posts and then maybe one longer summary post, but we'll see. I'm not quite sure how to get my blog added to the blog roll or if it's too late, but even if it isn't, I'll have this in my twitter feed. A couple of notes so far:

The Linkedin Grace Hopper group is very useful, lots of good articles about making the most of the conference. As a first timer, I really appreciate all of the online resources:

• http://gracehopper.org/2010/
• http://www.facebook.com/gracehoppercelebration
• http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=2118727
• http://twitter.com/ghc
• http://ghcbloggers.blogspot.com/

You've had that moment, you hear a tune and can't place it. It's even worse if it's an instrumental song, because there's no hope of you remembering some words and googling them. Well in 2010, apparently there's a plethora of solutions. I'm still behind the times so needed a solution that didn't require a smartphone or super cool mp3 player, so no Shazam apps. Still, there are solutions out there. The first thing we tried was midomi. The idea is great, hum a tune, and it'll try match what you hummed to tunes other people have entered. Didn't work so great for us though. So I hummed and my guitar playing friend picked out the notes using his guitar and wrote them down. I meanwhile found another site, musipedia, which appealed to the musician in me. This site has several ways of finding tunes, one of which is playing the notes on an on-screen keyboard. It took just a couple seconds of me entering a dozen notes or so, and I had my answer. (If you're curious, the bugger of a song was Minuet for Harpsichord by J.S. Bach.)

What's your favorite way to identify songs stuck in your head? For more suggestions, here are some articles I found:
http://www.wikihow.com/Identify-Songs-Using-Melody
http://www.labnol.org/internet/find-name-of-songs/12316/

Otherwise known as one man's attention getting scheme. Not to take sides here, but after reading this story in the Times, I wonder why we allow these people to get the attention they desire. Take a look at the following excerpt:

Mr. Jones, who stutters a bit in his sermons and calls himself doctor based on an honorary degree from an unaccredited Bible school, has at times seemed sincerely shocked by the response he has attracted. But not unhappy.


His church has been in financial trouble for years — the property is now for sale — and even before General Petraeus and the president made him a household name, he said in an interview that he hoped to become well known as a critic of Islam.


He was in his office at the time, alone, and to his right there sat a drawing of a bearded man — a terrorist — that had been used for target practice.


The mix of guns and visions of grandeur would come to embody the end of his planned bonfire as well.


On Thursday, several of his parishioners carried pistols on their hips — the product, they said, of death threats — that also served as a sign of church membership and the outsized role their small group had taken on in world affairs.

Clearly something is wrong. I'm not a regular church goer, but it seems to me that at the point that wearing a pistol on your hip is a sign of church membership, let alone the leader of a church using the image of a "terrorist" as target practice, you have gone off course. This is not what religion is supposed to be, is it?

Here's a debate I know many of you have had. If, like me, you usually have a fair amount of equations in your presentation, just out of necessity, what's the best way to include them? Even better, we'll add the constraint that I don't want to pay money for any of the products we use.

1. Beamer: This I'm sure will be the first suggestion from many people. I love LaTeX but I don't love LaTeX for presentations. I think the presentations it makes all look too similar, and while this quality is lovely for papers, it's not ideal for a talk. Still, if you want to be hard core, you can make your entire presentation in LaTeX, then you have no problems when it comes to equations.

2. Open Office/Google Docs + texify.com: This is a lovely little site that generates image files of equations for you. Problem? The first is that it is a little clunky, and if the presentation is remaining in Google Docs then you can just drag the images, but if you're going to export it, I believe you'll have to actually save copies of all the equations. Even worse, you generally have to export the presentation, because Docs doesn't do relative placement of images properly, so when you move from a small screen to a larger screen, images have moved. Still, this does work, and I've done it for many presentations. One other word of advice: The names for the image files that texify generates is different on a mac than on a windows machine, which turns out to be bad because it uses a character on one that the other os doesn't like (I think on a mac it uses ! in the file names which windows dislikes).

3. Open Office/Google Docs + http://www.codecogs.com/latex/eqneditor.php: I just discovered this lovely website. The problems here I'd imagine would be much the same as with texify, so the main advantage is that you can use codecogs to easily embed LaTeX equations like this  on your blog. Texify doesn't really like you doing this and does this
 
when you try.

4. Open Office LaTeX plugin: I forgot that this exists, but you could also you this. For some reason I've had problems installing it in the past, which is why I almost left it off the list. If you're just working in Open Office, this should be the way to go.

Those are all the solutions I know of so far. Do you have any? Please share!

I distract myself, I go out with people, I laugh, and yet...
When I'm home alone again, with the silence, the tears come again.
The sadness just won't leave.

This was going to be a post about Inception, but something actually managed to push it out of my mind. A dear friend of mine, full of life, Dan Schreiber, has passed away. I can't even comprehend it. As I write this, I think the emotions are churning, I actually feel like something just took the breath out of me. I think this may actually be my first friend who's died. It's part of life right? We all die eventually. Last summer I had my first friend get married, but this is part of life too. I'm not even sure if this post makes sense or if I'm just rambling, I just know that I have to deal with all of this emotion. Dan was a fellow graduate student and an aspiring chocolate maker. He was brilliant, top of the math department during his undergrad at the U of I, and chose to do a PhD in computer science. Last summer he started experimenting with chocolate making, from the cacao beans, and he got quite good at it. ..

I just had to take a walk. The silence is deafening. I walked in a daze, listening to Here Comes The Sun and Because. There was something very melancholy about the department when I walked in. Maybe I was just projecting my emotions, I just don't know...

From Drop Box

You know, any time you see someone young died, they always say how full of life they were, how nice they were to everyone. It's so cliche but it's completely true about Dan. Why do the nice ones go first? I never told Dan this, but he really inspired me. He was brilliant enough to get a PhD with ease but chose to do what he loved instead, make chocolate. It's so funny, the other day I was cleaning my fridge and came across one of his earlier chocolate wrappers. I'm a packrat, so instead of throwing it away, I tucked it beside the jam bottles. I look at it now kind of in shock. When I started experimenting with baking this past semester, I wanted to try baking this scone recipe I found that called for chocolate chunks and dried cranberries. I described the recipe to Dan, and he instantly knew what chocolate I'd need to go with the cranberries. I've never known anyone so enthusiastic about chocolate. That's the wrapper I unintentionally saved and now have. I won't be throwing it away.

Now I haven't stopped cooking just because it's summer, I just haven't been sharing as regularly. I didn't realize NYTimes had cooking videos, here's a vegetable torte recipe that I'm dying to try.



Do you have any good vegetable recipes? I made a salad (not a vegetarian one) last night that was amazing, and it's really made me appreciate how good a salad can be.

...apparently I'm a modern cool nerd! It has the word cool in there so it must be cool right? I had no clue I was that dorky though!

Your result for The Nerd? Geek? or Dork? Test...

Modern, Cool Nerd

83 % Nerd, 57% Geek, 22% Dork
Take The Nerd? Geek? or Dork? Test at OkCupid

One more thing: I really liked the graphs. The vertical line = average.
Nerdiness (83%, higher than 93% of my peers) :







Geekosity (57%, higher than 82% of my peers):







Dork points (22%, higher than 21% of my peers):