Terrifying, Escalating Sexism

A lot of people in the tech community have been abuzz about the recent story of Adria Richards, and I'd like to comment on it as a woman in technology, and as an observer of some pretty scary, sickening behavior.

Adria is a developer evangelist and a woman of color who attended PyCon, a large conference for Pyton developers. Up until today, she was employed by a company called SendGrid.

Here is a timeline of what has transpired as I understand it:

1. Last Sunday, Adria was at a keynote talk at PyCon. Two men behind her who work at PlayHaven, Alex Reid and "Mr. Hank", made inappropriate jokes about forking and dongles. It is worth noting that both Alex and Hank were clearly wearing company T-Shirts, and were attending this event as Gold Level company sponsor representatives.

2. Adria tweeted about how their joke was unprofessional and posted their photograph. She blogged about the incident, and how it was not inline with PyCon's rule of proper conduct for the conference. She also contacted the PyCon organizers. [1]

3. The chair of PyCon, Jesse Noller, addressed the parties privately, and amicably resolved the issue in order to continue a peaceful conference. [2]

4. Hank is fired from PlayHaven. He posted an oddly worded apology in Hacker News, mentioning they didn't mean anything at all sexual about their jokes, how it was just her interpretation, and, by the way, getting fired "sucks" because he is a father of three. [3]

5. Adria posts a kind note to Hank on the thread, apologizing for him losing his job, and encouraging his company to reconsider their actions. [4]. Several people attack her for this apology, actually, though Hank comments that he thought the gesture was kind. [5].

6. A petition is started online to save Hank's job, entitled, "Give the mistreated employee their job back". [6]. I've grouped the comments into common sexist tropes to help make it easier to skim.

Supporting the family man: "Dude, the guy has three kids and really enjoyed his job and is getting fired over the sensitive feelings of an already biased towards men female? Right on guys."

Bashing the feminists: "So it has come to a point where feminists have to make every joke between some friends a personal attack. This woman wasn't even involved in their conversation. She didn't even understand their jokes and yet the guys have to suffer for it? It's not fair."

Lighten up it's just a joke: "You should fire every developer who has ever made a harmless joke about about "forking", "fscking", or "Big O". Because god forbid people have fun while they work."

"If they were honestly fired for making a dongle joke to themselves and some over reacting bitch felt the need to get so pissed off I don't think I want to live on this planet anymore." 

Godwin's Law (Comparisons to Nazism): "Shameful. Just shameful. I, and others in the very liberally-oriented music industry have done this same thing at conferences, meetings and corporate get-togethers for the last 35 years now. There is no harm associated with this kind or type of behaviour, other than offending the occasional feminist shill... When did we become Nazi Germany and begin to turn in our fellow citizens for crimes of "humour" or "sexism?" Give the damn guy his job back, willya - and stop being so politically correct..."

"People like Adria Richards are little more than fascists"

"Please don't support her oppression and viciousness." 

One woman is all women: "This is absolutely disgusting! Adria Richard's actions have made it difficult for women to be properly accepted in the tech industry!"

I'm going to pause here, because I think if we review the facts thus far we can agree that perhaps this situation could have gone differently. As many people in these comment threads have stated, would it not have been better for Adria to have simply addressed the commenters directly, rather than calling them out publicly on Twitter? Perhaps. But at this point the cat is out of the bag, and I think here we can see in (5) that Adria expressed sincerely that she wishes Hank had not been fired.

7. Sometime around Wednesday, Jesse Noller starts receiving threatening phone calls, which scare him and his wife. [7]. Apparently the harassers do not like the fact that he helped pioneer (and enforce) a Code of Conduct for PyCon, in order to make it more welcoming place to women and other groups underrepresented in computing. [8].

8. Adria receives death threats, rape threats, racial slurs, sexist slurs, and calls that she kill herself.  Here are several:

"Cunt of the Year" goes to early entry @adriarichards. [t1]

"I'm pretty sure that Adria Richards has set women in technology back 50 years. What a bitch." [t2]

"Did that desperate attention whore and "diversity hire" Adria Richards get the wrong guy fired?"[t3]
"@adriarichards Shut the fuck up stupid bitch and go to the kitchen" [t4] 

"@adriarichards you need to kill youself tranny what you did was wrong"[t5]

"@adriarichards you are a stupid uneducated filthy nigger who deserves to die" [t6]

"@adriarichards You are a pure cunt for what you did. I hope you get Cancer and die a slow and painful death. I will celebrate your death" [t7]

"@adriarichards THIS COCK OF MINE IS BURNING RED ITS LOUD ROAR TELLS ME TO RAPE YOU" [t8] 

9. On Wednesday, Adria receives a photo of a, "beheaded woman, bound and stripped, with the caption 'when Im done.' Next to it was [her] home address and phone number."[9].

10. Several petitions demanding Adria be fired are posted, on change.org and elsewhere. [10].

11. On Thursday, someone (Anonymous(?)) posts on pastebin that while they think these petitions are great, they doubt SendGrid will pay attention to them. So, instead, the threaten SendGrid: [11]

...You[r] client list has also been obtained by Anonymous. They have already begun harassing your customers. These include obnoxious phone calls, emails, denial of service attacks, online vandalism and defamation, and even real-life harassment...Anonymous has analyzed your business model, and based on your clientele and competitors, you are very vulnerable. They are very focused on this.

Your financial backers have also been targeted for the same harassment. Normally, when a venture capitalist puts money into your organization, a bond is forged through your idea or product gaining the confidence of your financial backer for future returns. This is a strong bond that is not easily broken through petty harassment. However, if any of your backers have something embarrassing or illegal to hide (sexual misconduct, tax fraud, etc), Anonymous WILL find it (they are good at doing this) and make it public.

Real life harassment is an escalation that comes into play based on how long this situation is allowed to play out. It is not affected by the effectiveness of the previous forms of harassment. Even if your customers and financial backers are dropping like flies (or the opposite, entirely unaffected), this will still happen if Anonymous still maintains an interest in this situation. Doxing is a term used to define the discovery and dissemination of all personal information, including but not limited to home address, phone numbers, credit card numbers, your medical records, what brand of toothpaste you buy, etc. If some of the more talented members of Anonymous take an interest into this, every employee of Sendgrid becomes a target, starting at the top. For your reference, this is already happening to Ms. Richards as per standard protocol.

...You do have a choice to make at this point: Do nothing, or Publicly announce that Ms. Richards will be fired. The opportunity to stop this growing mob in its tracks before it tries to tear Sendgrid apart is as simple as publicly announcing Ms. Richards' firing. Now, you also have the opportunity to be sneaky about it and just publicly announcing the firing but not actually do it. But if Anonymous ever finds out, they will bring the full fury on you and your company. To put it in perspective, not even secure government websites are safe. If you believe you can tough it out, by all means, do nothing.

12. Later on Thursday, SendGrid is victim to a Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack. [12]. Adria's personal site was also attacked (though hers is protected by CloudFire). Kris Holt has a good break down of how these attacks were organized on 4chan. [13].

13. SendGrid announces on Twitter and Facebook that they have fired Adria Richards. Immediately their posts get a lot of "likes", and very vile comments against Adria are posted. [14].

And here we are.

Three things greatly trouble me about all of this:

1) Rape Culture. Death threats. Racial and Sexist name calling. None of this is ok, ever. I don't need to explain this further, do I?

2) 4chan-ers/Anon/whomever managed to easily cyberbully SendGrid into firing Adria. If I was a CEO of a small startup company with 130,000 customers and received a threat like that, I might acquiesce too. It's a credible threat. (Though, I probably would have first contacted the FBI before acting.).

3) Although he's not getting as much press, I'm also troubled by the fact that Jesse Noller is getting threats. Based on some comments I've read of his on github, it seems like his heart is in the right place with both the original Code of Conduct and its revisions.

In any case, there are a lot of factors at play in this story, and this is a complex situation, but I think it all warrants a larger discussion. I welcome your comments.

What the hell, Dell?

Last month, Dell ran a summit in Copenhagen with over 800 attendees, including Michael Dell himself. As an MC for the event they hired Mads Christensen, who apparently is well known in Denmark for making racist, sexist, and other sorts of remarks in bad taste.

Christiane Vejlo was in the audience and tweeted and blogged about some of the comments Christensen made. He started out by noticing the majority of people in the crowd were men and said:

"The IT business is one of the last frontiers that manages to keep women out. The quota of women to men in your business is sound and healthy". 

Then he points out the very few women in the room and says, "What are you actually doing here?" 

... 

After the break Mads Christensen shares with us his whole “show” about the bitchy women who want to steal the power in politics, boards and the home. “Science” he calls it and mentions that all the great inventions come from men. “We can thank women for the rolling pin,” he adds.  And then the moderator of the day finishes of by asking all (men) in the room to promise him that they will go home and say, “shut up, bitch!”.

Sigh.
The worst part is apparently Dell's response to complaints were along the lines of, "But, of course we support women! We were just trying to be funny. Ha ha. Can't you take a joke?"
I guess they realized this wasn't a good reply, so then they said something along the lines of, "We're sorry if we offended anyone." That "if" suggesting it is a woman's (or man's) fault if they were offended.

Molly Wood at CNET recently wrote about the event, and noted that apparently Dell has a precedent of being rather anti-women. In 2009 they had a marketing campaign suggesting women only used computers for dieting and shopping (you forgot knitting!), and it also settled a $10 million lawsuit over pay discrimination.
Dell, I am shaking my rolling pin at you. (Which I can do when I'm not baking your face off.)

Signal Boost: Stop the Internet Blacklist Bills

If you went to google.com, boingboing.net, wikipedia, or dozens of other sites on the net today, you may have noticed they have been blacked out in protest. This was done to bring the public's attention to two bills before congress: SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act).

Why the protest? Well, these bills were intended to curb online piracy and copyright infringement (good), but did so in a really technologically uninformed and dangerous way (bad).

In addition to these bills not actually helping curb online piracy, they grant an incredible amount of leeway to allow the government and companies to arbitrarily censor and monitor the communication of people using the internet, both in our country and abroad. A few fun nuggets about the PIPA bill, quoted from publicknowledge.org :

• PIPA is overbroad. By including "information location tools," it makes nearly every actor on the Internet a potential violator.
• PIPA is bad international precedent. By sanctioning government interference with DNS, it would be used as justification for other countries to hinder freedom of expression of online.
• PIPA is ripe for abuse. By creating a "private right of action," rights holders could directly go after payment processors and ad networks.
• PIPA speeds fragmentation of the Internet. By targeting DNS, it could lead to a fragmentation of the Internet, running contrary to the U.S. government's commitment to advancing a single, global Internet.

There is a lengthy list of reputable organizations protesting these bills, including legal scholars, human rights organizations, industry groups, and engineers. Also, Joi Ito, director of the MIT Media Lab and fellow CS blogger, has a great post summarizing this issue, as does Trevor Trimm of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

I urge you to take action and urge your congress members to reject this bill. 

Merry Hackmas (not really)

While most technologists were busy yesterday drinking eggnog and trying out their new gadgets, others were busy hacking Stratfor, an intelligence news organization.  All the news outlets reported it was 'Anonymous', but now people are saying it was (apparently) Sabu from LulzSec.

(Frankly, I can't blame the news outlets for the error - I can't keep up with the drama of who's who any more. It's like a soap opera, really.)

Anyway, whomever it was, they hack into Stratfor, steal a bunch of credit card numbers of people who subscribe to the company's intelligence briefings, then a) post them on the internet and b) use the credit cards to make donations to charitable organizations.

I'm not really sure what the point of this is. Any of these donations will be returned, and all the credit card numbers will be canceled. Really this will just cost the credit card companies lots of money, which will just result in the average Joe/Joann having to pay higher fees. Exactly what people need in this economy.

I wish these hackers would do something useful with their time. Solve some problems on challenge.gov. Teach math and computer science to children. Help local governments have more up to date computer systems in order to help empower communities.

Anything, really. This is just a sad waste of tech brains.

New adventures in publishing metrics

In case you haven't heard, Google Scholar Citations recently opened its doors, allowing academics to set up Google Scholar profiles, track their citations, h-index and i10-index, and see pretty graphs.

At first I thought: Yay! Especially since, for Computer Science, this was right on the heels of Cite Scholar's beta release, which is all about highlighting the fact that in CS we're all about the top tier conferences and journals don't matter much for us.

Then I thought: Boo! Now it's easier for the bean counters to count beans. Also, I sense there's this "who's searched for me" button coming, which creeps me out. This is actually why I don't ever click on academia.edu pages.

After a few weeks of reflection I am still on the fence. While I can't speak for other fields, in CS number of citations doesn't necessarily mean anything about quality or impact of work. I can think of several lackluster papers that have hundreds of citations, whereas others are incredible and barely hardly any. Also, sometimes an insane number of citations simply means you forced encouraged people to cite you by releasing some software or data.

On the other hand, I find these new graphs seem to ignite my "MUST WRITE MORE" instinct, just as the darling tune my new washing machine plays encourages me to do more laundry.

NSF Fastlane: Party like it's 1999

I know the government is a monolith.

I know the government does not have any in-house software developers anymore to write and maintain software.

I know these are Troubled Economic Times.

But, still, what's up with Fastlane? This system is a dinosaur snail. I've had simple figureless PDFs take a century to distill.

NSF, if you fund me, in addition to doing amazing research I'll stick a few of my a-ma-zing undergrads on revamping Fastlane. Actually, I'll make it a class project and stick a gazillion undergrads on it. Give us a semester, that puppy will zip.

Seeing Color, Seeing Smart

A reader recently sent this article to me, describing the recent firestorm surrounding CNN's new documentary "The New Promised Land: Silicon Valley" in its "Black in America" series. Although the documentary has not yet been released, a variety of soundbites from it have made their way into the limelight, which is causing the controversy.

Generally I really dislike when people take soundbites out of context. I'm sure Mike Arrington's remark that started all this ("I don’t know a single black entrepreneur.") had more context surrounding it. However, something struck me in his blog rebuttal to the world. (From NYT article):

On Oct. 28, Mr. Arrington took to his blog to accuse CNN of ambushing him. He asserted that he said he knew no black entrepreneurs because he doesn’t “categorize people as black or white or gay or straight in my head.” 

He wrote, “They’re just smart or not smart.”

The problem is, how he thin slices "smart" is almost certainly based on someone's appearance, accent, vocabulary, phrasings, and body language. And in technology, those in Silicon Valley who are not in the "White, American Male" category almost certainly have to work harder to earn a "smart" label.

I could cite compelling scientific evidence to support my claim (pick up just about any issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology, the Harvard race project, or even just Google Scholar for "seeing race"), but for the purpose of brevity I will (just once) argue by anecdote: I am often told, "but you don't look like a Computer Scientist!". Why? Because the image burned in our brains of a smart computer scientist is: young, white, American male. Used to be a man with dark greasy hair and glasses, now it is a blunt, sneaky, snappy Jesse Eisenburg type man. But, still man, still white, still American.

"Seeing Smart" still means seeing color, seeing gender, seeing ethnicity. It just means you might cut someone a break if they can manage to work past those initial, societal-given barriers of What a Smart Person Looks Like.

This will eventually change, but Hollywood needs to step up and quit playing to tropes. Quit casting people of color and women as tokens/BBFs while the young white men do all the science and inventing. *This* is where kids get their role models from. This is where society gets its ideas of what Smart looks like.

Huh. I think I have the start of a STEM education grant here...

9/11's (and Google's) effect on technology

Marketplace had a great piece today on Alessandro Acquisti's work on his Face Matching Algorithms of Dooooom. As in, he takes a photo of the NPR interviewer with his iPhone, and it immediately pulls up everything about the guy.

From a technological perspective it's all fascinating, but from a privacy perspective it's downright terrifying. This is all reflects a lack of citizen and governmental understanding of data. You share some information with your grocery store, get a frequent shopper card, you don't realize how this data is being brokered, merged, sold, to countless numbers of people. Furthermore, a photo you post with some friends at a party, even if you don't tag it-- all you need is one identifiable photo (Driver's license registry?), and BOOM, there it is.

Add this to fraudulent SSL certificates running amok, and I really feel like we're up a creek.

This is a great time to become a security researcher. Grad students, forget all those other CS topics - do security. Or systems. Or both! There are plenty of important problems that need solving ASAP.

Why I'm glad Computer Scientists invented the internet -

- and not politicians. (No offense, Al).

Apparently after Sarah Palin's recent gaffe claiming a revisionist American history regarding Paul Revere's ride (and then doubling down about it), inspired a group of her supporters to rewrite the Revere wikipedia page to support her statements. As it happens, an interview with Sarah Palin does not exactly constitute a valid source, so Wikipedia said, "uh, no," and that was that.

Not that Wikipedia was exactly a bastion of valid historical data to begin with (and people are easily fooled by citation-looking-things), but this was a pretty weird thing for Palin-fans to do in my not particularly humble opinion. (Twitter is much better for spreading misinformation, doncha know?)

Anyway - Pedantic Wikipedia editors: 1, Wignuts: 0.

Also:

Image description: Paul Revere holds his head in his hand
whilst holding a teapot.

Credit: From Charles Johnson, from Boing Boing.

She said, he read (and he read, and he read..)

Several times in the recent past I have written an email to a single person asking them a question. They replied to my question, but in their reply they carbon copied (cc'd) several other people. In one instance the cc'd person was relevant. In another instance the cc'd people were most definitely not relevant, and I was surprised to find the responder write, "We discussed your question and decided..."

I understand people are trying to be helpful, but this is getting a bit ridiculous.

When I telephone someone, there is usually a social contract that the telephone call is just between the two of us unless otherwise specified.  Somehow this has been lost in email. (Maybe it was never there in the first place?)

Several lawyer friends have told me they don't conduct any business or send anything remotely important over email - they do everything in person or over the phone. "It's not discoverable", they say.

Despite having the typical Computer Scientist's dislike of telephone conversations, I am now beginning to appreciate their value.

RSA hack - Trouble with a capital T

It seems RSA was hacked today. This means, if you use one of those nice little SecureID fobs to connect to your corporate server or bank, it may have been compromised.

This is a big deal. Using two-factor authentication is an industry gold standard, and RSA is one of the most prolific manufacturers of such fobs.

Securious has a nice write up of the fact vs. fiction surrounding the attack, including a note that this was an APT attack, not some random script kiddie in Germany.

I'm not trying to stir up panic here, but if you work with sensitive data, this might be a good time to add another layer of encryption on it*. There are lots of free solutions, like True Crypt, or if you're on a Mac the easiest thing to do is create a password protected disk image. Remember not to use the same password for your encrypted disk partition that you use for anything else (logging in, email, etc.). But also don't lose this password - if you do then your data is "irrevocably lost". Whee!

* Obviously all the "check with your (IT) doctor" disclaimers apply here.

Signal Boost: TechWomen is Seeking Mentors

TechWomen, a new initiative sponsored by the US State Department, is looking for Mentors. Here's an excerpt from the Anita Borg Institute press release:

Palo Alto, CA, March 1, 2011 — The U.S. Department of State’s TechWomen initiative is now accepting cultural and technical mentors for its cutting-edge international exchange program that will bring the power of global business, technology, and education together to empower women and girls. TechWomen will pair female mentors from Silicon Valley with 38 women from communities with predominantly Muslim populations. These “TechWomen” will participate in a professional mentorship and exchange program at leading technology companies beginning in June 2011. Mentor applications are open until March 25, 2011; access the application for both technical and cultural mentors here. TechWomen is a public-private partnership in conjunction with the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology and the Institute of International Education.

If you're interested in participating, you can learn more about the program here. It sounds like it could be a lot of fun!

Dangerous by Design

I recently read this article, which describes hundreds of infants (and adults) mistakenly being over-radiated in hospitals.

Like others who were interviewed in the article and those who commented on it, I too am shocked and outraged. But not for the reasons you might think.

The problem is the manufacturers of this machine violated one of the most central tenants of systems design, and that is:

The system should be designed to help the user prevent errors

These CT scanners are clearly not well-designed to help radiology technicians avoid making mistakes. It should be difficult, not easy, to overdose an infant. There should be a scale on the exam table - if the patient is below a certain weight the radiation level will be limited, and only by entering an override code can that the dose be increased.

The system should run through a step-by-step procedure with the technician, requiring them to verbally say, "Yes, I have properly positioned the infant." "Yes, I have shielded them." etc.

Really, very simple stuff - but could help prevent an avalanche of errors.

I agree that increased licensing / re-certification of techs is also a good idea, but they still need to be using  systems designed to help them make fewer errors in the first place.

Check yo self

FSP's post today on getting blogged about reminded me of something I meant to write about awhile ago. And that is - ways to actively monitor how others talk about you publicly.

I highly suggest setting up several Google Alerts. This is a great service that emails you whenever someone mentions your name on a site Google indexes*. You can set this up for general search results, as well as for blogs, twitter, and news articles.

You also can set up citation alerts in Google scholar, which will tell you if someone has cited you generally, or you can set one up for individual papers if you're so inclined.

For these alerts, I have quite a few variations of my name, for example:
(Ada A. Lovelace) OR (A. Lovelace) OR (Lovelace, A.) OR (Lovelace AND Analytic Engines) 
etc.

I've found these alerts invaluable, because over the years I have given several talks where my privacy requests were violated. This happened along the lines of:
"Can we have a copy of your slides?"
"No."
"Pretty Please? It's for those poor undergraduate students who couldn't attend your talk today."
"No."
"Pleeeeease? We promise not to put it on the internet."

Because I'm a pushover when it comes to pleas about wee undergraduate students, I acquiesced, and sure enough two weeks later, surprise! There are my slides.

But these alerts have also relayed good news, for example, I've learned of news articles about my research I didn't know existed, learned of entirely unexpected paper citations, and, I also discovered a really juicy paper basically trashing one of the subfields I work in. (Not trashing me specifically, just saying something factual about my publication frequency).

So, these alerts are worth setting up. Unless you're the academic equivalent of Lindsay Lohan, in which case I do not recommend this service.

(*) If you're a Bing person, sorry - there are no Bing alerts at present. Their academic.research.microsoft.com site offers RSS subscriptions, though I imagine there is a fair bit of overlap with Google scholar. 

Mobile Scholar: Part 3

I've thus far written two posts on how to turn my iPad into a computer. I am doing this both because I am too stingy to buy a MacBook Air and too stubborn* to give up.

My number one "killer app" has been the ability to work on papers from anywhere using LaTeX. I am now able to fully do this (provided the iPad has an internet connection). Here are step-by-step instructions for anyone interested in trying:

Step 1: Get Dropbox

This first step is very easy. Dropbox is cloud-based storage that works on every device under the sun, and is really, really fantastic. It's free up to 2 gigabytes, and you get 500 mb for every friend you invite. Unless your papers tend to have gigantic graphs and images, it's likely you'll never come close to that 2GB limit.

Step 2: Start your LaTeX paper on your computer

If you're familiar with LaTeX, this is also straightforward. If you are new to LaTeX, there is a bit of a learning curve but a lot of help out there. In particular, I highly recommend Lyx, which is a cross-platform WYSIWYG editor.

Get everything set up - your bibliography file, tex file, etc. Save it all to your Dropbox folder.

Step 3: Get latexmk going

Latexmk is, by far, the most brilliant piece of software ever written, ever.  If I could write a love letter to its author, John Collins, I would.

What this program does is sit happily in a directory watching for changes to any changes to your tex files... or any associated files (e.g., .bib files)... OR, any other tex files that your main paper references (e.g., chapter1.tex, chapter2.tex).

What does this mean? This means you can have something watching your dropbox folder all day and all night and automatically recompiles your pdf on the fly. Now we're gettin' somewhere.

I believe latexmk is now bundled with all the major TeX distributions. To run it, the magic command you want is:
    % latexmk -pdf -pvc mypaper.tex

Step 4: Get Tex Touch

Tex Touch is a program that lets you edit LaTeX files on your iPad.

I have to tell you, I am not deeply in love with this program because it is extremely clunky for a $9.99 app. (No multitasking support, sometimes crashes, has no syntax highlighting). BUT, it does the one thing no other piece of iOS software does - it understands the LaTeX workflow and syncs to Dropbox. It also sports an easily accessible and well-designed symbol editor so you don't have to go through 18 soft-keyboard screens to find an α.

Step 5 (Maybe?): Get Mendeley

I have Mendeley Lite on my iPad, and while it is also pretty clunky at least it's functional. While writing I can search my bibliography, export a citation in bibtex format (using the web view), plunk it into my .bib file in Tex Touch, and voila. A Mendeley -> DropBox .bib connection would be really nice, and if Mendeley opens up their API maybe I'll write one. In any case, I have high hopes for the Pro version of their iPad software.

That's it! I still would like offline compilation of LaTeX source on the iPad, but I figure by the time someone writes that I'll have bought a MacBook Air. :-)

Happy writing. If you end up trying any of this (or have any suggestions/questions), please drop a comment - I would love to hear how things have worked for you.

----
(*) Something that occurred to me recently - possibly one of the best skills you can have as a computer scientist is stubbornness. If you are tenacious and keep trying lots of different things and talking to lots of people until you can get something to work, you will do well in this field. Even if you can't get something to work in the end, just going through the process of trying is a great learning exercise.

The Leaky Cauldron

I've been grimly amused reading about the latest wleaks webhosting drama over the past few days because of the astounding lack of understanding of how distributed systems work displayed by both the media and lawmakers. Perhaps this is our fault as technologists, maybe we're not explaining things clearly enough.

I've decided to draw some pictures on virtual cocktail napkins to help.

This is (mostly) how servers and data flow on the internet used to work:

One server, lots of nodes connect. Server distributing bad stuff? Shut it down, problem solved:

But in today's world of peer-to-peer file sharing, we actually see a model that looks more like this:

Not so happy about that file being shared? Well, you can try to stop it...

...but, well, good luck with that.

The cat is out of the bag, that file ain't never coming back. It's time to move on, folks.

I think it's hard for people to conceptualize decentralized networks. But it's really important to think about things this way, because this is what the internet is today. That first model is long, long gone.

The google gossip trade

Photo by Sklathill

The NYT has a fantastic article in this weekend's magazine on something I have been stamping my feet about for years. It is about how the permanence of our digital lives (a lack of ephemerality) is significantly affecting our physical day-to-day lives, often in adverse ways.  (I unfortunately don't have the time to summarize the article - please go read it, it's very well written.)

Our world has not only become a panopticon, but it is a permanent, indexed, fully searchable one. This is not merely your employer seeing a photo of you being goofy at a party, this is a permanent record of your daily existence of which you increasingly have absolutely no control over.

The right to anonymity and ephemerality of action is something we take for granted when acting in the physical world. The problem is that the digital world does not in any way reflect these assumptions. Not only is everything you do online often fully archived and linkable to you, but with the advent of social media everything other people post about you is too.

There are a ton of papers in the literature about how online activities we believe to be anonymous are not at all. Seemingly innocuous and anonymous net activity can reveal one's search queries, social security number, phone number, sexual orientation, political views, travel plans, oh, and, one's real identity when they thought they were anonymous. I think I meet a new researcher mining Twitter for gold just about every other day. The fact is, computer scientists are clever folks, and coming up with these kinds of algorithms is quite easy.  And they're the good guys/gals.

Being a private person, I find these papers terrifying. But when I talk to many people about it, they say, "I don't care. I have nothing to hide." This is a selfish and, frankly, privileged attitude to have. For people living in countries with authoritarian governments, anonymity is often the only path to freedom. Imagine the Underground Railroad or hidden Jews during the Holocaust being successful with 24/7 video surveillance, with automatic face tagging being posted to live feeds on Facebook. Or more recently, imagine someone using these techniques to out Iranian green party members. They'd be killed. And I don't think the counter-argument holds; I doubt such a permanent panopticon will suddenly engender good behavior.

One of the best things about our freedom as human beings is that other people quickly forget our stupid, embarrassing moments. People don't always know who we are everywhere we go. We can take many risks freely. But, increasingly, neither our technology nor our legislation is supporting us in this. And that, in my opinion, is very dangerous indeed.

Disconnected connectedness

NPR had a nice interview yesterday with the author of Hamlet's BlackBerry, William Powers. In the interview, Powers talks about how several information upgrades in recent history (Roman cities and papyrus, the printing press, and now the internet), and how, always, society struggles to cope.

Photo by YlvaS

Academics are of course no exception to feeling overloaded. I am presently at a conference, and yesterday chatted with a friend. She said she struggles with staying present in life. Even while we were outside walking in a beautifully wooded area, she said she is always thinking of the next project, the next paper, etc.

This seems like a terribly stressful way to live.

Powers discusses ways in which his family has "offline time" on weekends, where they spend the entire time with each other instead of computing. Most people I know also seem to have developed certain rules for managing their technology. Like, "I don't use instant messenger at work", "I only check email after 6pm.", etc. This is certainly how I manage things, but perhaps due to occupational hazard I am more used to technology than most, and thus it's easier for me to ignore it.

The trick, I think, is to manage things in such a way that you can attend to the important things (i.e., your co-author needs your feedback by tomorrow), and disregard the unimportant things (i.e., the latest old spice guy video). Sadly all this technology is designed to trick our sensation-seeking brains into thinking every piece of information we receive is equally important, and sets it off into fire-fighting mode every time it dings/flashes/buzzes.

Speaking of which, back to meatspace...

Cloudy with a chance of iPhones

I was ... the first full-time woman faculty member in my department.
There really was difficulty among my male colleagues in associating
with a woman as a colleague. I think they literally did not know how
to talk to me, and as a consequence often just did not talk to me.
They would ignore me. They would not invite me to have lunch with
them, which was a very ordinary experience there ... they would walk
past my office and ask the next person and never ask me. [Years
later] I asked one of my colleagues why this was so. And he said,
`You know what would happen if I asked you to lunch ... People would
talk' ([Clark et al 1986, pages 36--37,] in [Sandler 1986, pages 7--8,]).

Ellen Spertus quoted this passage in an MIT tech report she wrote in 1991 on the topic de jour in various tech circles, "Why are there so few female computer scientists?" One part of the article I liked was the section entitled, The Masculine Environment: Behavior Due to Sex-Correlated Differences. Here she discusses how difficult it can be for women to talk with men about non-academic topics as their interests often do not overlap. She also points out that many of the "team-building" activities intending to foster communication among colleagues often involve things that tend to appeal more to men than to women. (In general).

Photo by Adam Crowe

For example, in my department, some recent events purporting to build camaraderie have been: World Cup viewing + drinking beer, happy hour, visiting a bar, some video game events, and recently a long string of XTREME sporting activities. Of the very few female faculty and students in my department, I don't think any participate in these activities. Several come from religious and cultural backgrounds that strongly prohibit drinking-related activities.

While we do have a great mentoring scheme set up for women coming into the department and supporting them while they're here which includes some social events, it's not really the same thing. In fact, while I applaud the efforts, sometimes going to these women-focused events makes me feel like I'm sitting at the kid's table at Thanksgiving. By trying to help us fit in, we are further made separate. I've suggested to various people in my department that perhaps there might be other group activities more amenable to helping us intermix a bit more, so perhaps things will change in the future.

But in the meanwhile: What can a lone woman do to fit in with the men?

The answer lies within the thing that got you into this crazy field in the first place - a deep love (or hatred) of technology. Think of this topic like the weather for computer scientists. I guarantee you that most people in your department are following the latest drama regarding Apple and Flash, Facebook's latest privacy fail, or what neat things the new Kinect will do. And if you're not up on the latest, I strongly suggest subscribing to the ACM's Tech News. It's only three emails a week which you can quickly skim to get an idea of what's happening.

Talking tech is a great way to break the ice and start to develop the rapport that is essential to being accepted into (and thus feeling comfortable in) a male-dominated department.