Real Women Don't Write Programs !

Just found this humorous scientific paper written by Carol (a woman who apparently can program) ! Excerpts:

3. SOME SOCIAL BARRIERS TO FEMALE
PARTICIPATION IN COMPUTER SCIENCE
COURSES
3.1 Real Women Don’ t Date Computer Geeks
Real women don’t change tyres, mow lawns, or date
computer geeks.

4.1 Real Women Don’ t Write Programs
Real women don’t pump gas, like mathematics, or write
programs.
4.2 Most Women Can’t Program
An employer explained to me why he had not interviewed
any of my female students for a graduate IT position in his
company. “Most women” he said, clearly and slowly,
“can’t program.”
Of course, he is absolutely correct. Most women can’t
program. Most men can’ t program either. What most men
and real women have in common is that they are
unembarrassed by their lack of programming ability.

Towards Experiential Computing

It has been a few years since I've been looking for a clever system able to capture rich media experiences. I've been attending large conferences, where I desperately felt the need to capture, in a rich and meaningful way, diverse experiences: talks, random or prepared meetings, ephemeral chats, sightseeings etc.

Could not find anything. I discovered some research work such as LifeLog or MyLifeBits. And now I see a bit more clearly into the problem, thanks to Ramesh Jain. Life=Experiences (Events) . Laptops and phones are not computers, they are experiential devices. They enable us to capture and share experiences, and consequently create knowledge. Watch the talk here.

Another Sync Nightmare

Every now and then, honest people, using modern technology, spend hours, late in the night, crawling through the forums,looking for a tiny piece of wisdom that would help them do very simple things: synchronize emails, calendars ...

I hate blogging about this, but I have to admit that it is a big relief when you find the magic cure. So, if you're the happy owner of an iPhone 4 and you want to synchronize with multiple Google calendars, this is the info you may desperately look for : https://www.google.com/calendar/iphoneselect once you're logged in.

All other details (why ? how ? where ? etc) are useless.

Good luck !

Cute Theories : The Hemline Index

Reading around J2EE technology articles, I ran into a presentation given by a "respectable" Java architect that extrapolated (s49) the famous hemline index to complexity of the Java enterprise platform. The original, 1926 Hemline index stated that woman's skirts are short when the economy is booming, and they grow longer during an economic downturn. This applied to Java gives: companies are accepting more complex software platforms when the economy is doing well.

Let me try to provide an extrapolation of the hemline index: well thought, thoroughly tested and validated through extensive field studies : high alcohol consumption is strongly related to economic woes ...

Identity questions : make people busy arguing and forget about real problems

Recently the French governement (namely the Minister of Immigration ... and National Identity) have launched nation-wide debates about national identity or, more precisely, about French identity.
At first, I thought : "cool, it's gonna spur debates and let's see what people, collectively, come up with". I am myself only a few years old as an official French citizen.
But my second impression was amazement. The timing seems strange. It is a time when Europe is challenged with reforms that would make it more effective and therefore meaningful, with expansion (and celebration of the expansion) to the East etc. Europe has just (compromizingly) designated its president and its foreign affairs representative. Worldwide, countries are still struggling to get out of the financial crisis. Fighting hunger or various large-scale diseases, fighting global warming have increased the consciousness of citizens all over the world.
At this particular time, the French do not ask themselves "what is a European", nor "what is a good world citizen". No. They are busy debating about "what defines a French" ...
I also tried to ask myself these difficult questions. My family and friends are spread all over the world: my parents continue to live in Romania, my sister lives in Britain, one brother-in-law lives in Cyprus, another in Canada ... Do we all share something anything else than blood ties ?

On many media, journalists, experts very often mention that common values, such as those formalized in the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, are what define Frenchship. While it is true that the French were the first to formalize them in the form of a declaration, then as a the 1791 Constitution, these values have become universally accepted by democratic countries.

The more I think about it the more I have the feeling that this debate over French identity is a buzz. A clever buzz, spread by the government in order to get people distracted from real problems (economy is shrinking, unemployement is bad, politics is as dirty as ever etc). Our hyper-prezident can relax a bit: we're all busy brainstorming about national identity. Unofortunately, this has a more vicious effect : some of us are incidentally blaming not-so-good French, citizens of unhealthy origin, as the cause of many of our problems. Demonization, nationalism, they're only a few steps away.

My Third Toast to Siberia

A week ago I came back from Krasnoyarsk. My first trip ever to Russia, my first trip to the mythical Siberia. While traveling back, I had an undistinctive feeling of loss. It's like after a party, very early in the morning. The party goers are all tired, lying on the sofas, the music is dim, and you can hear the new day cracking. You can feel the nice, subtle warmness of the subsequent layers of alcohol in your blood. You've made new friends out of complete strangers, and with some of them you got really close: nice, deep discussions made you get so close, that it was like you've been knowing each other since childhood. You've explored together ideas and feelings, you've traveled together through extraordinary stories. And once of a sudden, you realize that you have to get back to the real world. The party is over.

It was a trip full of excitement. My positive expectations were pushed further. Beautiful, wide landscapes. Impressive infrastructures. Nice, charming people. Warm layers of vodka, soft blankets against the imminent cold weather and effective catalyzers for human links. And before each layer of vodka, a toast. Every participant has his/her turn. A surprising custom that provides the act of drinking with a real social importance: you are really together via a story, a dedication or some witty or nice words. I was told that the third toast is the most important, and it's usually said by a man: the toast for love.

This is my modest, third toast to Siberia.

Laboratory for the incubation of hectic thoughts

Potential future blogs ...

• the web of thought : how to manage the quasi-chaotic emergence of interlinked ideas
• what are the catalysts of this process ? Dialogging with a physical person, remarkable events, chemical stimuli (alcohol, smoke, sexmotions=sexually-linked emotions) ? Blogging, as a way of dialogging with unknown, virtully passive passive or in a loosly-coupled two-way dialogue ? The stochastic, semi-guided emergence of thoughts and emotions ?
• mastering the power of emotions in the workplace
• emotionally-lubricated professional relationship (The Pope, codoms and emotions)
• Mathematics of weddings