Where to send the girls who do like computer science

Originally posted at AWEARNESS

WOW!

I can't believe the response my post about girls and computer science on Wednesday received on Twitter. Thanks. Many of the retweets were of "don't forget us too!" variety, so to follow up on the popular post, here is a quick run down of just a handful of the amazing groups working to recruit girls to computer science and keep them interested. Please, please add additional ones in the comments!

• Anita Borg: This is a powerhouse organization that works to connect tech companies to women. ABI offers workshops, publications and information aimed to develop leadership skills; celebrates and highlights the success of women who are changing the face of technology; and provides programs that change the way technology is created, learned and taught. One peek at their board and you'll see that the movers & shakers of technology are gathering at ABI to bring more women to the keyboard.

Read the rest of the resource list over at AWEARNESS please. Thanks!

Wanted: Girls who like computer science - From AWEARNESS

Originally posted at AWEARNESS

Despite the rise of women attending college and becoming the majority of the workforce, one area that continues to be ignored by women and girls is computer science.

There are many theories as to why girls love using computers (women are the majority of social media users) but don't want to learn how to program or build computers. There are those who chalk it up to gender differences plain and simple. Some believe it is because girls are repelled by geek or hacker culture. Universities and companies who hire computer scientists are constantly recruiting girls and trying to show them why computer science is a great option.

One part of the theory why girls are excluded from hacker culture is that it is too "frattish" and misogynistic. That is why I find the lap dances at a recent Yahoo! event (Yahoo! paid for women to dance in skimpy clothing at a "brainstorming session") to be especially atrocious.

Read the rest over at AWEARNESS please! Thanks. 

Those security codes you have to enter

I hate them, don't you? So annoying...yet so needed. Well on the way home yesterday I heard a piece on NPR about how those security images are now, on some sites, now merged with a project to digitize old books.

"Approximately 200 million of these are typed every day by people around the world. Each time you type one of these, essentially you waste about 10 seconds of your time," he says. "If you multiply that by 200 million, you get that humanity as a whole is wasting around 500,000 hours every day, typing these annoying squiggly characters."

But with reCAPTCHA, von Ahn has come up with an idea for harnessing all that human brain power.

He knew that lots of libraries have huge efforts under way to digitize their collections. These projects first scan books or newspapers by basically taking a picture of each page. Then a computer takes the image of each word and converts it into text, using optical character-recognition software.

But computers often come across printed words they just can't recognize. "Especially for older documents, things that were written before 1900, where the ink has faded and the pages have yellowed out, the computer makes a lot of mistakes," says von Ahn.

A human being has to look at those words and decipher them. It occurred to von Ahn that he could link this kind of activity to security devices used on the Internet. Instead of asking people to prove they're human by copying random sequences of distorted letters and numbers, he could ask them to decipher mystery words from scanned books and newspapers.

How awesome is that!? There is no end to my astonishment of science.Now I don't hate them all, just the ones that really are wasting time.

It's a science nerd's heaven

This September Chicago will launch Science Chicago. A whole year's worth of sciencey goodness around the city. Check out the website, sign up for updates, and keep an eye out here when I'll promote events I'll be at! Hey, this science nrrd isn't missing this!