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

• 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”.

• Jennifer Hunt, a researcher at McGill, has crunched some numbers on women leaving engineering and finds that most of those who leave are dissatisfied with their pay and promotion opportunities, and that the more male-dominated the field in general, the higher the rate at which women leave it. The paper is behind a paywall/accessible to university subscribers; there’s also a writeup in Time and a discussion at the Freakonomics blog.

• There are a few days left for students to apply to the Google Summer of Code; Geek Feminism has collected a few GSOC projects that are seeking interested women applicants, and added a post with advice about applying to the program (#1 point: APPLY if you’re at all interested, even if you think you’re not qualified!)

• Leslie Hawthorn writes at Geek Feminism about getting inspired early in her tech career by hearing about other women’s stories of how they got started (and we would love if you’d post your own stories here at Stemming to inspire others!) — and her story brings up an awesome and important point to keep in mind when feeling like an impostor: no matter how new and inexperienced you are (or think you are) in your field, the people you admire in that field were also once just as new — maybe even not that long ago!

• And just for fun, via Inkling: Solarbeat creates music based on the movement of the planets!

• New on our blogroll:

Inkling (tagline: “life in the girl nerd world”), an online science mag that also features great ladygeek content like a gallery of geeky women and the geek perspective on birth control

Skepchick, where a group of mostly female bloggers write about science and skepticism (and recently, what most people won’t tell you about pregnancy (kind of terrifying!))

• ReadWriteWeb posts about why we need tech events for women
• Girl-wonder.org has a page up about the Con Anti-Harassment Project
• Bao Phi blogs at Racialicious about being a nerd of color
• Restructure! blogs about male IT geeks thinking they are low-status and venture capitalists consciously rewarding candidates for being white and male
• There’s been a lot of buzz about Google Buzz, and [trigger warning] its potentially serious privacy concerns. Are you using it? Do the privacy issues affect whether you’re using it?
• Notes from a mini-conference on how to make women welcome in tech at Agile Open Northwest
• As was mentioned here before, “computer engineer” was in the running for Barbie’s next career — and it turns out computer engineering Barbie will be produced!
• PhDork at The Pursuit of Harpyness writes about feminism in the classroom and her experiences teaching a class where male students volunteer to talk more often
• Nadya Fouad, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, studies the reasons girls don’t stick with math and science
• At Salon, Kate Harding writes about Christine Alvarado and Linda Geddes, women who’ve developed or expressed their scientific leanings through “girly” means (My Little Pony and weddings)!
• And for your Friday dose of science+cuteness=win, a neuroscience study guide… with cats!