@suethomas

"Economommies" find new ways to combine family life with employment

Here in the US, my neighbour and many of her home-schooling colleagues are becoming 'economommies' - that is, women who were 'stay-at-home Moms' before the economic downturn but who now need to supplement the family income with paid work which allows them to look after the kids too. See full blogpost at NLab.

Laid-Off Architect Sells Advice For 5 Cents

 

See full post at NLab.

Edible Books

A hungry student's dream debuts at City College

By COLBY FRAZIER — March 25, 2009 In the mass of inky words and pulp pages that is a book, an infinite number of people, places and ideas wait to be lifted from the page by a human eye.

Once this occurs, anything can happen. The reader is free to write a paper about the book, tell a friend about it, or better yet, make some food, as 30 Santa Barbara City College students and faculty members have done for the school’s first Edible Book Festival scheduled from 2-4 p.m. today inside the Luria Library.

“The idea is to celebrate our love of books and our attachment to food,” said Elizabeth Bowman, a campus librarian who organized the festival.

City College’s festival is loosely based on The International Edible Book Festival, which was founded in 2000 to celebrate the birthday of French author and gastronome, Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin.

The festival’s rulebook is short: everything made has to be edible and based on a book.

Read the rest at UCSB's The Daily Sound

Historic Computing Calendar from 1992

Last week I interviewed Roland Bryan, one of the original Arpanet team, and we talked about this picture. I've never seen Leonardo this cool! Visit The Wild Surmise for the full story behind this image.

Attribution: The content of the ACC calendar was a collaborative effort by ACC staff and the artist Chuck Huckeba

My heroine for Ada Byron Lovelace Day: Stevie Vanhegan

Along with over a thousand other people, I have pledged to celebrate the first ever Ada Byron Lovelace Day by publishing a blog post on Tuesday 24th March about a woman in technology whom I admire.  

My nomination is my longtime friend and former colleague Stevie Vanhegan, of Lady Bay, Nottingham, UK. Stevie has taught computing in the Dept of Education at Nottingham Trent University for longer than I can remember, and she was there when I began a Humanities degree as a mature student in 1985. By then I had known her for around five years - we both had small children and were members of the same baby-sitting circle. I was a customer of her small wholefoods delivery business, run from her garage. There was always something interesting going on at Stevie's yet she had time  to stop for coffee and chat in between tending to the chickens and rabbits in the garden or looking after the numerous kids always streaming in and out.

Stevie was the only woman I'd met at that time who had studied any kind of science - in her case chemical engineering. This was an unknown land to me - everyone I knew had taken arts subjects. But Stevie was of a different breed. For example, when a household appliance was ready to be thrown out, she would hand it over to her kids to take apart and figure out how it worked. She was passionate about understanding the world around her and made sure her kids continued that enquiring nature.

So in 1985 when I began my Humanities degree and chose English and History as my two core subjects, Stevie was quick to jump in with her recommendation - "You've got to take a computing option. Everyone has to know about computing. It's vital." I wasn't keen, I must admit. I had always been useless at maths and science and there was no reason to assume I'd be any better at computing. But I gave in under the pressure of Stevie's not inconsiderable persuasive techniques (i.e. nagging) and elected to take an option module called Humanities Computing. It changed my life.

In 85, those pre-web days, Humanities geographer Brian Dittmer taught bemused arts majors how computers worked and how to communicate with them via snippets of Basic. Stevie was not my teacher but she was always available to answer my questions as the whole notion of code turned into an enormous revelation  - not just technically but conceptually and philosophically too. Very quickly, computers became my muse. I started writing about them then, and haven't stopped since. In 1988 my Humanities final year dissertation, Close Encounters of the Machine Kind,  was about the relationship between computers and humans (later I would discover HCI but at that time I was working completely alone), and by 1992 I had published my first novel, Correspondence, a fictional extension of those first discoveries.

None of that would ever have happened without Stevie's very characteristic suggestion, and I know she has helped many others too, not least a fellow ABL poster. Despite that, she is very modest - I couldn't even find a homepage or a picture to include in this post, although amusingly this morning I received an email from her reminding me it is Ada Byron Lovelace Day!

Almost 25 years ago, Stevie Vanhegan opened the door for me to an entirely other world, one I would never have even thought of venturing towards if I had not known her. We continue to be good friends, and we still talk about technology, but I don't know whether she realises the importance of her influence on my life. Hopefully, today she will. Thanks Stevie!

I had a brain adventure in the Maker Shed @ ETech 2009, San Jose

O'Reilly ETech, social media, and non-profits

On Monday here at ETech, CEO Tim O'Reilly's keynote described the way in which the tech industry has been living in a bubble and declared that it should now turn its attention to the 'reality bubble' and work on 'stuff that matters'. For too long, he said, the industry has been focussing on pretty gewgaws instead of addressing problems that have been mounting for years whilst the best and the brightest have been preoccupied with throwing sheep at each other on Facebook. He emphasised the need to use our extensive skills to address the world's greatest challenges. This will, of course, include working with nonprofits, which statement rang a bell with me. A few weeks ago I interviewed Stewart Brand, who has a pretty successful record of persuading big companies to experiment with digital futures of all kinds. I asked Brand whether there were any examples of when his methods had failed, and he thought for a while then responded that he had failed to engage non-profits. The reasons, he felt, were cultural and related to the risk-averse nature of many non-profit agencies who are usually dependent on portfolios of funding from sources, often very traditional and not transliterate (the latter is my term, of course, not Brand's), whom they dare not offend.

I'm sure this is something O'Reilly will be thinking about as they move towards their challenges, and especially in relation to the first upcoming  O'Reilly Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington DC this September.

I'll be posting more about ETech and San Jose when I get back to Santa Barbara. Am about to hit the road. One word though - I met quite a few O'Reilly people this time and found them all very friendly, energetic, and interesting. Quite an impressive mini-ecology going on in that company!

Wolfram Alpha - next big thing?

Noticed in a tweet from Tim O'Reilly quoting a message from Tim Berners-Lee regarding possibly 'the next big jump in capability' - see this article by Nova Spivack about a different kind of knowledge engine Wolfram Alpha

Spivack writes:

Wolfram Alpha is like plugging into a vast electronic brain. It provides extremely impressive and thorough answers to a wide range of questions asked in many different ways, and it computes answers, it doesn't merely look them up in a big database.

In this respect it is vastly smarter than (and different from) Google. Google simply retrieves documents based on keyword searches. Google doesn't understand the question or the answer, and doesn't compute answers based on models of various fields of human knowledge.

Presumably if this takes off it will once again change the ways in which we obtain and process information. Just as we got used to searching, maybe now we will have to learn the skill of questioning...

How do you buy your books?

You’ve heard about a book which sounds vaguely interesting, so when you have a spare moment you search for it on the web. What form does your actual purchasing behaviour take from there on in? I have to confess that my usual method is to look on Amazon and if the book’s available new at a good price I often buy it there and then.

I prefer to get it direct from the Amazon store but sometimes I buy from the New and Used section.  If it’s only available from a high-price reseller, I often assume it is out of print, move on and forget about it.  Unless I’m really keen, I’m afraid I probably won’t look anywhere else.  I do also buy from bookshops, but these days that tends to be a special trip where I set aside some time for serendipitous browsing. I keep a list at the back of my notebook for things I’ve been looking for and I consult that when bookshop browsing, but for targeted buying I always go to Amazon first.

While I’ve been here in the USA on a temporary stay, my book acquisition behaviour has changed a bit, but I’m gradually swinging back to Amazon. The current picture is that first I visit the university library, with mixed success. Second, I visit local bookshops in Santa Barbara – there are quite a few and it helps me to get to know the area. I start with Borders in Goleta, then the Borders on State Street, then maybe Barnes and Noble, then move on to my list of used bookstores (which involves a fair bit of driving around). But sadly the result is nearly always the same – nobody has the book I want. They offer to order it, but I usually decline in the hope that the next shop will have it. An alternative would be to sit and ring round them all, but that can be time consuming and I don’t enjoy the tedious business of doing call-arounds. When I get home, I pull out my dog-eared list and sit down with Amazon. A few days later, I have what I want, sometimes new, sometimes used.

But these are titles I need for my research, books which I have to pursue. But idle purchases, for general pleasure and interest, are at the mercy of Amazon. If Amazon has it I buy it. If it's not there, or relegated to expensive used copies,  I’ll probably never look for it again unless I remember to add it to the list in my notebook.

How do you buy your books?  Have you, like me, grown to be largely dependent on Amazon for information about what’s available?

Close to the Machine by Ellen Ullman - 1997 but could be 2009

I've been reading quite a range of books during my research for The Wild Surmise but I've especially enjoyed Ellen Ullman's 1997 Close to the Machine: technophilia and its discontents. Eugene Miya at the Computer History Museum was keen I should read it as a commentary on life in Silicon Valley in the 90s, and it is certainly hugely informative about those early days of startups - the uncertainty of tech companies rising and falling on a weekly basis, the role of venture capitalist, and the nagging doubts of a generation who began as left-wing idealists and ended up with stock options that made some of them very rich.