Girls Beware, Ewwwww Science

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34437233/ns/technology_and_science-science/

At least it’s not biased. I am severely disappointed in the University of Washington for letting this article reach national news levels. Ultimately, I am offended as a teacher in the field and a former professional.

Problems I have with the article stretch further than the reaches of the outline that will follow; however, I will try and enumerate as many of these gripes as I can.

1. Put a room full of college girls into a room full of Star Trek memorabilia and other “geek” items and I’m sure 96% of them will not be happy to work in that environment every day.

We all have our own customs and preferences when it comes to a place we will work every day. When I leave for the day and when I come into my classroom in the morning I make sure all the items on my desk are in order and everything is in its place. If someone asked me if I would like coming into a pink room every morning with Celine Dion on because most high school teachers like those things, I would politely decline the offer.

2. The conditions specified are, at best, extremely unrealistic.

Now I have only had seven years of computer science education and 2 years professional experience, but I have never (read: NNEEEEEVVVEEERRR) been in an environment where the described conditions exist. When I was working professionally I worked in an office that had clean carpets, organized desks, and modern art hanging on the walls.  When I was in school I was in a classroom, not some Start Trek fan’s dorm room. I can liken this testing to placing a sanitation worker on a chair in a room full of garbage, making him read a 180 page book , and asking him if this is the still the field he would like to go into. The are very strong undertones of gender biasing that are inherent in this experiment.

3. They are using stereotypes from 1990 and before

Seriously, computer nerds have grown so much in the last 20 years. Nerds now walk around with sleek looking $4000 laptops and free software to do everything imaginable. You may notice them on their very stylish cell phones or with very modern clothes or cars. There has been a pressing movement for “nerd integration” into the mainstream that this experiment is completely ignoring. I will not say that most nerds nowadays fit into the previous description but there is a large percentage that does, and flies under the radar. The old-style nerds are still around but they aren’t as well organized as they used to. Being what was once considered “nerd” is now socially acceptable. Playing video games and working on computers has been mainstream for years now. Everyone owns a cell phone or a smartphone and DSLRs are commonplace. Stereotypes that were looked down upon 15 years ago are now widely accepted.

Focus on a few things here to get women to enter Computer Science: focus on the positive advantages of a science education, the benefits of the jobs, the doors that will open. Please don’t focus on the negative connotations associated with pre-1990 computer lovers.  Whichever no-talent ass clown has interests that lie completely outside of the domain that this article covers. Moreover, anyone that would even come close to calling themselves a domain expert would literally laugh out loud (LOL) at the stereotypes introduced in this article.

A lot of negative press has been given to women in science, or lack thereof. Articles like this are not helping the situation. As a lady in science,  the author should be ashamed of herself and issue an apology.

<3<3

Roland

What Lies Beneath

I recently went out on a photowalk with my lady friend and I tried to get a wide spectrum of different styles of shots. I was eying this juxtaposition of patterns when I noticed someone coming down the street. I composed the photo to place the emphasis on the patterns in the front, but to give it context with the street aspect.

Not too much technical detail here. I made sure to open up the aperture as wide as I could to create the shallow DoF effect I was going for. I wanted the emphasis on the patterns in the front. Since the patterns were relatively shallow I could get away with the near maximum f/3.2 (or so) using my 24-70 Nikkor f/2.8. Since this was at night I tried to get the fastest shutter speed I could without bumping up the ISO too high. That didn’t really work out so I knew I would convert this to BW before I even took it.

You can get away with hiding some noise and you can make sharpening and clarity adjustments work that you just couldn’t afford to make leaving it in full RGB color. I used a very unmanageable ISO 2500 with a 1/40s shutter speed. This didn’t give me much leeway in terms of exposure so I set the meter manually to nail the colors in the patterns using a center weighted method. The matrix metering gets all funky in these unbalanced low light situations so I didn’t really want to trust it.

So the final product looks like how I imagined it.

I like the overall mood of the photo. The composition is really straightforward: I brought the elements I wanted to stress right to the front and left the minor elements towards the rear. I really love the patterns and the juxtaposition here and the person walking y was just icing on the cake. Toss it up to good fortune and keeping your eyes open and aware while you are composing.

Athletic Shorts with Pockets

Yesterday it came to my attention that they make dresses with pockets. I never really thought about that before. Why the hell would you put pockets on dresses? And how big would they be? I mean what do you really have to carry in them that you wouldn’t be able to put in your pocketbook? That got me thinking.

I have always been a big supporter of pockets in general. From the time I was young, most of my pants had pockets. But the one thing that really pissed me off was shorts with no pockets. I mean, there really is no downside to having pockets. I feel like a moron when I’m walking around in basketball shorts with my cell phone in one hand and my wallet in the other. I wish that the short manufacturers had thought of this before they decided to place their inferior product on the market. Seriously, when I’m wearing shorts I usually am not wearing a jacket with pockets. So I could be leaving my house completely pocketless!!

There are only a few options for the pocketless:

1: Backpack

If you want to look like you are a freshman in high school or a sophomore in high school going drinking wear a backpack all the time. Wear it everywhere you go. Take it to church, wear it in the shower, break it in.

2: Man purse (also known as a satchel)

I leave this option for Europeans to take. Anytime you see a man with a purse that looks like he is from the US or Canada make sure to stay away. They obviously are oblivious to everything around them and may not even realize what year it is.

3: Walk around with shit in your hands

This gets really annoying and you look like an idiot. I don’t know if I have to elaborate on this one but if you have ever left your house without pockets and started to accumulate things ; there are some awkward positions you have to put yourself in to hold them all.

So, it seems that pockets are definitely the way to go. Pretty much with everything, ever. But, the more pockets the better? No.

Have you ever tried fitting things into cargo pockets and then walking down the street? Good luck. If you put more than a cigarette lighter in those pockets they start flailing all over the place as soon as you start walking.  I would rather put small to medium items in the lesser used back pockets. 4 pockets is enough. Don’t get greedy! Soon we’ll have shorts with 24 pockets. And because of this pocket overload we have the minimalistic approach of no pockets. So I say fuck you cargo shorts and fuck you no pocket shorts. Just give me my 4 pocket shorts or my 2 pocket athletic shorts.

<3 Roland

Gmail Contacts

When I first encountered google contacts last week I thought I was going to be pleasantly surprised. I had to import around 100 contacts with basic information, Street address, city, state, zip, name, phone, email, etc. The google tutorial that was posted on the site said how easy and intuitive it was. All I had to do was create a CSV with labels for all the fields at the top. Couldn’t be that easy!? But they are google and why would a little peon like me question the computational power of the mighty google. Upon first inspection of the import everything seemed to be alright. But when I started to type contacts’ names into the to: field nothing would come up. It seems that the importer doesn’t really like to put your fields where you want.  It like s to put them in the most convenient place for them. So all of the information for all of my contacts was placed directly into the notes section. From which I had to parse out all of the information one by one to populate the correct fields. Why the hell didn’t I just copy and paste in the first place? Now I have been fooling around with this more and more and I can get it to populate the Name field and email field only so far. I think there is a mandatory ordering to the way you can put in the fields for your contacts. The biggest snafu I have encountered is not a major problem. It is a catastrophic, show stopping, guy walks into the bar from out of town, problem. As I am importing contacts with the same name Google is telling me that ” oh we found a contact with the same name. It must be the same person so we will just merge the contacts. ” Again, thanks Google for doing things in the easiest way possible for you. What was the exact thought process behind this? Well you see, we have a John Smith in Wisconsin and a John Smith in New York. Hmmm, he must have two houses! SAME PERSON! What moronic program manager let this slide through the cracks! And even when I enter in supplementary information for notes they come up as the same person. Now I understand that the G1 phone from T-Mobile runs there contacts directly off of Gmail’s contact list. Good luck with that. So everytime you send and email to a techincal support representative they get put into your address book. HAHA. what a joke. As much as I love Gmail I feel like they are making backwards strides as far as Gmail is concerned. With a bulkier interface and flawed functionality I guess I just have to sit back and hope that it all just goes away. -roro

The christmas season

So unbeknownst to most people the Christmas season is now under way. No it did not start the day after Thanksgiving. Not it did not start on the first Sunday in December (that’s advent). Now the twelve days from December 25th until January 6th mark the official season of Christmas.

Christmas royally pisses me off. Mainly because it is the one season out of the whole year where people come out of the woodwork and clog up all the stores for four weeks. And most of the people are buying shit that they would never even buy but because its Christmas, it’s okay. How many people buy hundreds of dollars worth of  “seasonal” things during Christmas that they wouldn’t even dream of buying regularly?

First of all, does anyone even give meaningful gifts anymore? I mean I have seen about 15,819,654 commercials related to large screen TVs while I’ve been home in the last week.

Secondly, why the hell are all of these ab commercials on TV now? Who the hell buys these things. I mean they seriously have to be making some kind of money to be putting out these commercials one after another. Ab sculptor , crunch free abs, etc. Who the hell buys this crap? Does anyone go to the gym anymore? Why don’t we just buy caffeine pills and diet pills and destroy our insides so we don’t have to do any work to get in shape. Better yet get plastic surgery and toss the dice with your life you have better odds than going to the gym anyway.

This Christmas season why don’t we focus a little on what it really is about and not on trampling a preggo woman so that your kids can have a second Nintendo Wii for their bedroom.  So get back in your Hummer H1000 and maybe donate a gift to a giving tree, donate a shobox for the troops, or sponsor some kid that wouldn’t even have a single present for Christmas. All for the measly price of filling up your tank to go across town and back.