PurpleCar

We Need Women STEM-mers

Being a woman in the Information Technology industry and now in tech writing, I’ve had to fight for opportunities and recognition every step of the way. Men with less experience, fewer skills and more basic (if any) degrees would get promoted or given better jobs over me. Any woman who has been in a tech job feels the same pain.

This country will have millions of jobs that will go unfilled in the next decade unless more women enroll in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) majors. For this to happen, we need a broad change in our thinking. If we Americans want to keep ahead of the innovation game and continue on as a leading economic force, we must each do our part to address the cultural prejudices that keep women from entering STEM careers.

Hidden in Plain View

Most people don’t give cultural prejudices a second thought; it’s difficult to notice endemic norms, and disruptions in one’s expectations are uncomfortable to endure. We must be willing to feel a bit of that discomfort until we get used to the idea that the talent stores in our female population will pick up the slack.

In this brave(ish), new(ish) world of the 21st century, disruption is a practice we should be implementing daily. Creativity and innovation are stimulated by a need left unfulfilled by the status quo, but you must practice disruption as a routine in order to be skilled at identifying those opportunities for growth.

Incorporate disruption in your daily life. Once you get used to asking questions of the status quo, then you will be primed to accept the creative solutions that seem to spontaneously generate from the asking.

How to Practice Disruption in 5 Easy Steps (great for kids too!)

Exercise your disruption muscle and train your brain to notice cultural assumptions at work in your life by implementing the following tiny changes in your daily routine:

1. Ask yourself a small “Why” question each day. e.g., Why do I drink this brand of coffee? Why do I always park here? (Answers can be quick & dirty. The point is to ask the question of something that seems totally normal and insignificant.)
2. Once you’ve spent a few days or weeks doing #1, Integrate a follow-up “What if” question. e.g., What if I switched to the expensive brand of coffee? What if I parked across the lot? (Answers can vary from the elusive “I don’t know” to ideas involving aliens).
3. Implement one of the What If ideas from #3. e.g., change coffee brands for a week or two. Park farther away from the office’s front door.
4. Ask others a “Why” question each day. e.g. Did you ever wonder why we have team meetings on Friday and not Monday mornings? Why did you buy that color corvette?
5. Move on to bigger premises. Ask a “Why” of increasingly bigger societal norms. e.g., Why don’t most men wear their hair in those long ponytails like in olden days? What ever happened to robes and kilts? (Have fun with this)

PITFALLS

• Beware of the knee-jerk “I don’t know” reaction. “I don’t know” will always be the 1st response your brain pumps out. e.g., Why do I use this coffee mug? I don’t know! It’s OK. After a few weeks of asking Whys, your brain should get better at looking past that required primary flight response.
• Practice Disruption in the morning or whenever you rise from sleeping. Our patience (and therefore feelings of safety and control) wear out by day’s end.
• Others will resist. Keep pushing forward. Here’s a paragraph from Brené Brown’s book Daring Greatly:

“When I talk about cynicism, I don’t mean healthy skepticism and questioning. I’m talking about the reflexive cynicism that leads to mindless responses like ‘That’s so stupid.’ or ‘What a loser idea.’ Cool is one of the most rampant forms of cynicism. Whatever. Totally Lame. So uncool. Who gives a shit? Among some folks it’s almost as if enthusiasm and engagement have become a sign of gullibility. Being too excited or invested makes you lame. A word we’ve banned in our house along with loser and stupid.”

Keep On Rollin’

Once a person becomes accustomed to disruption, the typical fight/flight response to it doesn’t overtake the brain. Learning and innovating are easier if we don’t feel “put on the spot”, “taken aback” or in any way uncomfortable. Get used to the Why, and you’ll see significant improvements in the “How” solutions you generate for any problem, including the sexism that holds this country back.

Photo Credit: Josh Parrish on Flickr

Several years ago my online friends and podcasting buddies were going on and on about Google Reader. They were all over it like geeks on an upgrade.

I was creeped out by the idea of Google knowing what I read even more than they already knew. I didn’t use it. I did have some RSS feeds, but very few. Relying instead on Twitter and other social sharing sites like StumbleUpon, Digg, FB, etc., I found my news and my friends’ blog updates more “organically.”

Last year I realized I could be feeding RSS into Greader (our short nick for Google Reader) and dump that into FlipBoard on my iPhone. No more boring lines! I could read an article of substance while I waited, and I could keep up with friends.

But after a while, the shine dulled. I hardly even opened Flipboard let alone go through the 5+ navigation steps needed to view my feeds in it. I let blogs I should have been following go. I didn’t find a replacement and I didn’t form new habits.

Digg’s reader will have to take up the slack. I need to make sure I don’t miss my friends’ blog posts, and I can use Scoop.It or RebelMouse to browse others’ cool stuff. StumbleUpon was a lot of fun back in the day, too. Reddit is just a fun time-waster, as I have yet to find information there worthy of sharing with my particular niche.

Do you syndicate really simply? Which app will you be using to do that?

-PC

Privacy is dead. Long live true online ID.

Blame the trolls.

No trolls in squeaky clean America!

When I say trolls, I don’t mean just the trolls that work under the auspices of the NSA. I mean Internet trolls: anonymous commenters that toss all decorum to cause chaos, despair and hurt, all for the sake of nothing more than the empty lulz. As a few billion more people come online, some of them participating in an honor culture (as opposed to cultures of law), the anonymous option will go away. Honor culture types will want to know who just insulted them, and cultures of law people will want to sue the trolls for libel. Parents all over the world will want to know who bullied their babies. Senators will want to seem like ball-busting heroes. Google and Facebook will want to sell more ad space to actual customers. No Anonymity will seem like the wholesome, honorable and safe choice, like banning sales of cigarettes to minors or imposing curfews in violence-prone city districts.

Tides are turning. The day of the anonymous online ID is coming to a close. It follows that the day of the anonymous in-real-life citizen will also come to an end. We will be under legal obligation to carry “papers” with us at all times. We will be obligated to tell our names to the police. We will have to register our presence everywhere we visit. We will need identification above and beyond our signature to be able to vote.

Because the folklore logic will go like this: If you need a valid ID to make a comment on a blog, you need a valid ID to vote. If you can’t click “Like” on Facebook without two-step, real-ID verification, you can’t expect to shop anonymously. And if you can’t even watch a youtube video without Google knowing about it, then of course you can’t read a newspaper article without agreeing to be tracked everywhere you go, online and in real life.

Everything will make sense. The overwhelming majority of people will welcome the End of the Troll. The sell will be “safety” and more importantly, “convenience.” The lexicon and sales copy will vilify the lurker and celebrate the squeaky clean renaissance citizen. The revolutionary will be doxed. The concerned good samaritan will be (unwillingly) sainted. All to throw the baby trolls out with the bathwater. And we will celebrate. The pundits will praise how real ID will mean more civil participation. Accepted terms and definitions of words will homogenize across cultures so we can all understand each other. No misconstruing. No vitriol. No hate. A no-bravery-necessary new world. And how peaceful it is, we’ll all say, as we look up from our phones for just enough time to pat each other on the back.

Photo credit: Boston Public Library

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Another PurpleCar post on anonymity you may like 

Early Web Adventures Start Innocently Enough

So, in 1994/95, I was a lab technician in a big university science lab on a huge NIH grant for NMR/MRI research. Part of my job was to was to construct staff pages on the nascent web in the new html language. I practiced by making my own page first (after calling my CMU Engineering grad brother first for help). I managed to set up 3 pictures and a short bio. This is basically what it looked like:

Stunning design, I know.

Pathetic for today’s standards but back then it was hot stuff, especially for a Psych graduate whose only comp sci experience was gathered via osmosis by being around her WarGames-level hacker brother (who, funnily enough, hasn’t bothered to change his website design since 1993).

Soon after this web project started, I began full-time graduate school. I went from full-time to part-time at the lab. Despite my best efforts to transition some of my lab duties to new techs, the slack wasn’t being taken up.

The lab was a tad bit lawless. In fact, right before I was hired the lab had been banned from conducting human experiments for at least 6 months because the staff didn’t bother to comply with the Internal Review Board’s regulations. (That was another part of my job – to get human trials back online, which I did promptly).

This Is Where It Goes Incredibly Bad

Since no-one was handling any of the duties I worked so hard to transition, things grew out of control within about three weeks of me starting grad school. I was summarily fired in one of the most dramatic tugs of war between work factions I’ve ever encountered in fiction or reality. It was traumatic. The Omsbudsman and other university officials sent warning shots to the lab after my dismissal, but at the end of the day I didn’t keep fighting for my job back. It was time to move on to educational research and away from the (surprisingly) cutthroat world of science.

Because I had no indication that I was to be fired, I had no time to take down my webpage. I hardly had time to gather up my belongings that day, let alone dig around in the server and its archives to erase traces of my personal data. To be honest, I didn’t give that webpage a second thought.

Life moved on. I quickly got a research position on an NEA grant at school. I got engaged. I made life work with some student loans and my paltry stipend. A few weeks later, I was out at our local pub with my science lab buddies and they told me some of the mean graduate students had hacked my page.

I was probably a bit tipsy because I couldn’t really grasp the situation at the time. A few days later, I noticed the offenders had left my webpage up pretty much in tact, but changed the wording in the bio. In summary: It was a long paragraph, written in the first person, with the most disparaging and untrue remarks a bunch of socially inept bottomfeeders could conger. All of this below 3 different, very plainly identifiable pictures of my face and body (clothed, of course).

My stomach lurched a violent, disgusted turn. Someone had the admin passwords, naturally, and they let these evil men have them.

Online Reputations Didn’t Exist in 1995, Apparently

I sent word to the lab that the page needed to be taken down immediately. Nothing happened. A few days, maybe a week passed. Friends explained to me that this was a case of “libel,” which, at about 25 years old, I’d never heard of and didn’t understand. They urged me to just call a lawyer and ask.

So I called a lawyer. I remember her response so clearly: “You have to prove damages to get damages.” I would not be able to prove my reputation was being harmed by this false information paired with profile photos that were very obviously identifiable as my likeness.

I went back to the university offices and worked with them to get them to force the lab to bring down the website. It was a ridiculous mess and left me quite scarred. I still felt the burn when I began this blog almost a decade later in 2004.

Why am I telling this story now?

With the recent wedding controversy around billionaire Sean Parker, I was reminded of this idea that civil laws like libel exist to (after-the-fact) regulate reputation-damaging moves such as website hacks and irresponsible journalism. In case you’ve been living under a rock, let’s sum up: Sean Parker was ripped to shreds in a feeding frenzy of false reporting over his supposed environment-crushing and extravagant wedding celebration. In a long response on TechCrunch, Parker, founder of Napster and kinda-founder of Facebook, says that reporters, some being highly respected journalists, didn’t bother to interview him about the facts of the case. Only one reporter out of dozens even called him for a quote. And of course, the democratized web, the very one Parker himself dreamt about 20 years ago, ironically went in for the kill armed with sharp teeth and the stinging bite of unsubstantiated accusations put out by the more traditional media outlets.

Now Sean Parker, the self-made billionaire who had a dream of “Information should be free” is feeling the effects of dark underbelly of the Internet, an unregulated breeding ground of bottom feeders.

Mind: Blown

Maybe I’ll chat more about this tomorrow, but right now I don’t know what to think. Other people like to wallow in “just desserts” for Parker, and Parker is talking about how “weddings used to be sacred.” I’m more concerned about the structure of our society. How are we going to regulate and educate our people on the responsibilities of democracy and a capitalized open web?