by, for, and about women in science, technology, engineering, & math

• Geek Feminism has started a new series, Wednesday Geek Woman, highlighting technical and scientific women both historical and current (it’s like Ada Lovelace Day every week!); today’s featured woman is biologist Rosalind Franklin.
• The Anita Borg Institute also has a series of profiles, Senior Technical Women; this month’s is Nora Denzel, a vice president at Intuit.
• There’s been a Twitter discussion about Silicon Alley Insider’s “New York’s Coolest People in Tech”. The conversation pretty much goes as per usual whenever a list comes out — someone points out that there’s an unrepresentatively small number of women on the list, and then a man involved in making the list complains that it’s because he couldn’t find any women or that they didn’t come to him asking to be included in the list. Sigh.
• Meanwhile, this Field Guide to Female Entrepreneurs managed to find plenty of women involved in the New York tech scene!
• Via the Systers mailing list, a cartoon drawn in honor of Ada Lovelace Day.
• Under the Microscope shares six things to inspire women in science.
• There’s still plenty of time to apply for Google’s Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship — which awards $10,000 each to qualified women who are full-time students in Computer Science or Engineering.

• Mathematician, philosopher, and skeptic Martin Gardner died last weekend; his Aha! series introduced me to a lot of the ideas of algorithms and discrete math when I was still a pre-teen.
• Skepchick debunks the science in a Daily Mail article by Richard Lynn claiming that evidence supports the idea that men are “just smarter”.
• A program has learned to recognize sarcasm; it was trained on Amazon reviews.
• Women 2.0 features mini-bios of some of the women and their projects who have gone through the Startup Weekend program.
• Betty Hayes, a professor at ASU, has co-authored a book exploring the role of games (especially moddable games) in developing computer skills, and the ways that the games girls tend to play fit into this.
• And just for fun, via Inkling, Fake Science: “for when the facts are too confusing”.

Here in Boston, it’s one of the first spring-like days: hooray! Here are some links for your weekend enjoyment:

• Brown University’s Artemis Program for 9th grade girls interested in science and tech is seeking funding.

• The Free Software Foundation is also seeking donations to their Women’s Travel Fund to help get more women to this year’s LibrePlanet conference in Cambridge

• The National Center for Women & Information Technology is offering an award for high school girls interested in computing.

• 15 Female Scientists Who Changed the World — who else would you include?

• Rebecca Skloot talks about her new book on Henrietta Lacks, a poor black tobacco farmer whose cancer cells were harvested without her consent — descendants of those cells have contributed to a lot of advances in cancer research and are still in use in labs.

• And just for LOLz: Scientific Americat!

There is a lovely homage to the history of Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage created by Syndney Padua. It is a comic strip, very entertaining and pretty well researched. I believe it was created for Ada Lovelace day last year. Enjoy! http://sydneypadua.com/2dgoggles/lovelace-the-origin-2/