This article via Wired about whether geeky decorations turn women away from computer science has me conflicted. The article is definitely provocatively titled, “Star Trek Stops Women From Becoming Computer Scientists”, but the underlying study being reported shows that sitting in a room with Star Trek decor correlates with women responding more negatively to a survey of attitudes about computer science, with men not showing the same effect.
As always with this type of study, there are things to poke at – would other strongly themed decors have the same result? What about a non-neutral room with lots of academic science posters and pictures? Or does a decor with any geeky content correlate with negative attitudes? Is the negative impact due to association with the geeky culture and the types of people the women think of as doing those jobs, so the issue is it being Star Trek, which triggers all sorts of stereotypes? Or is there a disinclination to associate so strongly with science that it defines one’s whole life including the decor of one’s space, and it doesn’t matter what the nature of that geeky decor is?
I obviously have ulterior motives for wondering – I inevitably end up decorating my spaces. And I’m a bit of a geek. I might even have a *very* *tiny* Enterprise model in my office that someone gave me, as well as the obligatory Escher calendar, conference posters, etc. Is this subtly hostile to female students, and do the quilts and curtains that I’ve hung help counteract that? Should I take down the XKCD cartoons I’ve hung on my lab door? I don’t want to – I like that students read them and will tell me “oh, now that I’ve taken your AI class I actually understand that!”. But I can also see how that type of imagery projects the message that you are either in the group and get it, or outside the group and don’t. I would be really curious if one gets the same effect with, say, physics or math.
So I’m thinking about it…. It adds to the oddness for me that I am the only female professor in my department, and I’m definitely the one with the strongest inclination towards geeky decor. Probably with the strongest inclination towards decor in general. I would have thought personalizing a space would show an appealing warmth and personality, which one might think would have a positive impact on attracting and retaining underrepresented minorities. But maybe I ought to think about bringing my Hermione wand home…
Let Turk research for you
Being interested in, and recently done a fair bit of reading about, human subjects research, this article from a couple of months ago about using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk for running human subjects experiments caught my eye. It’s a pretty neat idea for pulling in volunteers from a variety of demographics, with some obvious concerns – are people who they say they are, and how much effort will they put into the experiment being the major obvious ones. The article gives some nice specific suggestions for avoiding biases, cheaters, testing the correctness of your study, and addressing other issues. If done well, this seems like a clever way to recruit and manage anonymous subjects.
Best Bots
I’ve noticed that whenever I teach a subject, the news appears to be disproportionately full of stories about that topic (and yes, I do understand that is not the case…). These are some of my favorites I have found recently:
- I linked to the BigDog project several months ago – Boston Dynamics has outdone themselves, pushing their sophisticated walking abilities into a bipedal robot, Petman. The video on this is amazing! [via many places, including C.]
- On the opposite end of the spectrum, iRobot has developed a “morphing blob” robot based on a structure of inflatable air pockets. [via many places, including J.]
- These interconnected warehouse robots are an incredibly cool example of what modern robotics can do right now – these particular ones work together to speed up collection of items within a warehouse in preparation for shipping. Watch out for the cute “Bot Crossing” sign a minute and a half in.
- A nice transition from this semester into the next – researchers at University of Washington have a nice summary of a paper about security and privacy risks with future household robots.
- Finally, who doesn’t want to watch kittens on a Roomba again!
Does not yet wash the bugs off my windows
This is a robotics application I’ve never run into before, but it is actually being used in the Netherlands: a gas pumping robot. The video shown makes it look like it works pretty well too, and while it seems slow the article says it speeds things up enough to actually increase their number of sales per pump. I do wonder how much of that is the fact that, to use the pump, you preregister with your credit card number and preferred type of gas (so that you don’t interact with the robot at all, you just pull up and sit while the robot does its thing). The RFiD tag alone would eliminate the time I spend fumbling around with my credit card and receipt and getting everything in and out of my wallet. It may be that the advantage of having the robot fill your tank is just enough to get people to take advantage of the RFiD technology.
Data Liberation
The news from earlier in the week that Google is committing to providing users easy and free ways to move their data in and out of Google products addresses one of the concerns I have had about cloud computing. I understand the appeal in terms of expense, and I have had good experiences when I have used Google Docs for collaboration. But often the content being created is stuff that I may want around many years in the future, or also available off-line on a flash drive (we can pretend the entire world is networked, but in just the past two months I can think of three different trips that left me in locations with no convenient network connectivity).
We are even running into this with the course management systems we are looking at – not all of them offer the same degree of data portability. It seems that part of the issue there is a lack of clear “neutral” format to export all courses too, which certainly makes sense given the diversity of the tools available. But there are also systems where you can access old courses in perpetuity on their servers but cannot export the course to your own computer – where in perpetuity I fear means only for the lifetime of your school’s contract with the provider. This type of lock-in makes me very nervous.
A “fair” schedule lets me sleep in until at least 7
We’ve been talking about various types of scheduling problems in my AI class, so this local article about computer modeling used to schedule sports games caught my eye. It is an interesting constraint problem – not just the number of games, mix of who plays who, and frequency of games, but particular rules based on amount of time needed to set aside for travel and other issues of fairness. It is particularly worthwhile to think about the advantages this system offers when changes occur that make a planned upon schedule no longer acceptable. Often, the human response to that is to try to find the solution that requires the fewest shifts possible, in part because it avoids “messing up” large parts of the already-difficult-to-construct schedule. With this type of software in place, it becomes debatable whether the fix with the fewest changes is optimal compared to the fix that results in a new global optimization. This is probably a place where knowing a bit more about sports would help me.
Fashion PSA
While I am willing to concede that in general, I should never, ever attempt to give fashion advice, I am still comfortable saying that nobody needs eyes painted on the back of their jeans so that their ass winks as they walk.
Don’t just watch the first few seconds and stop the video – make sure you skip forward until you see the action/cut boards and the ducks at least. Based on the notes in the Consumerist article via which I found this, the eyes apparently only work if your pants are sufficiently snug. I’m surprised they stayed classy enough to not have a version that’s a big pair of hands that squeeze closed on your ass every time you take a step. I honestly cannot imagine what I would do if I were to see someone in these in real life.
Same low protein, less chlorine
I am unreasonably excited that King Arthur Flour is coming out with an unbleached cake flour. I love their bread flour, and my entirely-uneducated-bias is against bleached flours. I’m really hopeful that this shows up in my local food store. Sadly, I cannot even find regular cake flour in my local food store, so my hopes are not too high. Anyone who live around me have suggestions of where I can get cake flour around here? My Cake Bible has been pouting at me every time I use regular all-purpose in a birthday cake, but I cannot bring myself to order flour over the internet.
Don’t let them swab you
In a similar vein to yesterday’s post on data, I just noticed this NYTimes story reporting that DNA evidence can be fabricated in a lab to match a target, given a sample of their DNA, or their DNA profile from an earlier sample. Even if it seems expensive and cumbersome to start fabricating DNA evidence to frame people, there are some very interesting legal implications here just from this process being known.
While the article says that they were able to fabricate blood that a testing lab processed as if it were from the target rather than the actual source, one thing it does not comment on is whether, with further or different evaluation, it would be possible to detect that manipulation was performed.
Either way, the clock has now started on the race to see which crime procedural show airs a story based around this first….
Never admit you like Star Wars
I really enjoyed this article about how little information is needed to personally identify you. The answer is, a lot less than you might think, and using more benign information than you might imagine. 1990 census data showed that 87% of people in the US could be identified based on their zip code, gender and date of birth. I found their results on movie preferences even more interesting: “Knowing just a little about a subscriber–say, six to eight movie preferences, the type of thing you might post on a social-networking site–the researchers found that they could pick out your anonymous Netflix profile, if you had one in the set.”
As the article goes on, bringing up RFiD tags, phone tracking, and surveillance cameras, you get the idea that the only real protection you have is hoping that nobody really wants to bother tracking so much information about you. It is not plausible to perfectly control what information you allow to be released when small, diverse facts when grouped with the right databases can pinpoint who you are. Better to be aware that this is now possible and focus on having legislation that controls how such data can be used and what individual rights we have to access our own data, correct it, and ideally remove it.