What does it say about me if...

This is what Amazon thinks I want??


Santa, for the record, that is not what I want. :)

Geeks and TV

I read an article in a recent WIE magazine about how to get more women into computer science/engineering. The lady said all this stuff about how law has done it (not at the partner level, but at the law school and associate level), and so has medicine (I think women are now 50+% of medical students). Why not in engineering?

After I read that article, I thought long and hard about the best way to get more women into engineering - I think it really boils down to a perception issue. You want to know why Law and Medicine did it? Two answers:

ER and Ally McBeal.

Ok, not really, but there really are a lot of shows on TV that totally glorify law and medicine, and on top of that the shows are really about hot sexy people having hot sexy sex with each other. Think of one show about hot sexy engineering having hot sexy sex in an engineering building. Mmmm....ZERO.

Honestly, I think this raises the mental accessibility of Law and Medicine to women, because obviously there are lot of women in these shows in order for the men to have someone to have hot sexy sex with. Thus, both genders are well represented in these disciplines, and moreover, they are always having hot sexy sex so everyone wants to be a Doctor or a Lawyer to have this life.

In the last few years there have been a few geeky shows on TV that at least SHOW geeky people are somewhat main characters instead of just ancillary caricatures. Of course, they are all men, but I suppose it's a start. Geek representation on TV is a whole other subject. For now, I'll just review these shows.

Big Bang Theory:

This show airs on CBS and is about a bunch of total geeks who are friends, and the shenanigans they get into because a beautiful blonde girl moves in across the hall. These are geeks at their most...stereotypical.

The Indian Guy - in the few episodes I've seen what I learned about him is that he cannot speak to women. He is like, physically unable to speak to a member of the female sex, he's too scared.

The Jewish Guy with the Bowl Cut - he is the one who thinks about sex all the time.

The Arrogant Sociopathic Guy - this guy is not REALLY sociopathic but he totally denigrates things like feelings and emotions, reveres only logic and rational thought, and considers himself God's gift to Science.

The Nice Guy - This is the guy who is just that lovable geek that could totally be a girl's best friend, all the while pining for Beautiful Girl while she pines for Wrong Guy, and in the end she may or may not realize that he's the only one that will treat her right and possible also bring home millions as the next Mark Zuckerberg.

All in all, I enjoy the show enough to watch when I channel surf and see it on, but I'm sure it doesn't reach a wide audience. A lot of the jokes are totally out there, but it's quasi-real geek representation. However, it's not the kind of show where people will be saying, "I decided to be an X because of Big Bang Theory" the ways I've heard lots of people say, "I decided to be a lawyer because I loved Law and Order" or "I wanted to get into forensics because I love CSI". No one wants to be these guys...unless you already are total geeks, because these guys are alpha geeks. But I like it, it makes me think fondly of all my geeky friends.

Chuck

This show is soooo dumb but cute. I kinda like it, enough to actually TiVO it and watch it every now and then.

First of all, Zachary Levi (the dude who plays Chuck) is ADORABLE. I have a soft spot in my heart for geeks, I find extremely "classically" hot dudes kind of repulsive in a way. I have NEVER been a girl to swoon over some abs. I am a girl who swoons over humor and brains. So...Chuck is like, freakin' adorable. I love his hair, his Converse shoes, and his short sleeved button downs.

I watched a TiVO'ed episode yesterday, and he made all these geeky references which weren't over the top, but are the kinds of things that regular geeks (i.e. the ones who aren't stereotypical like the ones in Big Bang) do just in normal life.

1) He talked about how Pluto was no longer a planet and how he was kind of bummed out about it.

2) He talked about using the Force. He was trying to reach something he couldn't reach and just said in passing to himself, "C'mon Chuck, use the Force USE THE FORCE!" That's so something I would do. But I don't think everyone does that. And it's not *out there* but it's just regular geek.

3) He talked about MacGyver. The way he said it you could just tell he was one of those dorky boys as a kid who lived for MacGyver and watched every episode. It was cute.

So...none of the above are crazy geek markers the way the things the dudes in Big Bang do are totally geek markers - Chuck is a normal guy who happens to be a geek, and happens to be adorable. We need more geeks like this on TV. Now, he just needs to have a lot of hot sex with hot sexy she-geeks, kind of like his ex-girlfriend Jill, and we are all set. I loved the exchanges between Chuck and Jill a few episodes ago where they got all gaga over each other from totally geek references. That's how I get over Mr. PhizzleDizzle. When he knows something or figures something out that blows my mind, I want to just jump his bones.

In short, I vote for more hot sexy brainiac geek chicks on TV. We need a engineering Addison Shepard/whatever her maiden name is, an engineering Dr. Noah Wylie, an engineering Ally McBeal, and they need to get into a love triangle meanwhile saving the world over at the NSA with computers and technology.

Dreams

Last night, I dreamed that I was washing my hair with beer. Like, I was pouring it out of a bottle, into my hair, lathering, and trying to rinse out the beer with....more beer.

That's all I remember, and I don't understand it, but damn, it was funny.

A fellow chick computer scientist!

Here is one of the lady computer scientists I found when I searched via google reader. Her latest post is a great one about why CS is such an interesting field. The scope is just so big! Check her out. I'm excited to have a new addition to my blogroll.

Google and Successful PhDs in Computer Science

There are few fields in this world, as far as I know, where the speed of a PhD can be extremely dependent upon how you spent your time as a 10-year-old.

I was thinking recently about why I have been pretty slow in getting my PhD. One of the reasons is that I did not grow up a hacker. This means that when I have an idea that I need to implement in order to test and experiment, the success of my experiment rests very highly on my ability to implement it quickly, effectively, and successfully, and I had to learn all those skills all on my own. In the biological sciences, bench skills are usually taught either in lab classes, or at the very least in the lab when you get trained by a prof or a postdoc. But few people enter the biomedical sciences having had a decade of experience with bench work and the various techniques PRIOR to entering even college, let alone graduate school.

In my world, no one uses the word "train" describe what they do to nascent graduate students; they either know shit about computers or they don't. If they don't, they usually drop out because it's so hard to compete - you might have good ideas but if you can't implement them, you lose. End of story. This may be a reason why there are so few girls in the area, I don't know many girls who hacked all their lives, even fellow computer scientist chicks. In graduate school for computer science, all focus is on idea generation and testing of said ideas, and very little about training.

Because of this, I will totally and unabashedly say that if there were no Google, I could not get a PhD in computer science. Hands down, absolutely, totally true. There are too many things out there that I just don't know about that I had to use Google to figure out. Some are basic and some are complex. I think I will thank Google in my thesis acknowledgments.

Examples:

1) Compiler error X when building software Y.

Thanks to google and experience, I now understand and recognize most errors. However, sometimes I don't know how to fix them, but the plethora of mailing lists usually helps me figure out fixes or patches. I don't know how many blogs, mailing list archives, and whatnot I've trolled to figure out various things that have NOTHING to do with the idea I am trying, but everything to do with figuring out how to properly set up an environment to test the idea I am trying.

2) Finding helpful tools.

Without google, I would not have found various software tools that help me with my work. Writing your own tools is a bitch sometimes, and in the end, it's just great when someone else has written it already. But I wouldn't know about it without Google.

3) Little definitions.

Sometimes I just can't remember this little technical definition or that. Instead of having to go to the library, find the section that I think covers what I want to know, flipping through the index only to find that I'm wrong, and moving on to the next book until I find what I want to know, I can just ask google. For example, recently I needed to know what a Gini coefficient meant with respect to forming a decision tree. I had no idea - but Google did. Thanks Google!

In short, I think Google has revolutionized my ability to do what I want to do. It has (sort of) leveled the playing field such that it wasn't such a bitch to catch up to my fellow graduate students who have been living the dork-lifestyle since they were small children. It frustrated me to no end in the beginning of grad school about how I just didn't know stuff that I needed to know to get shit done. Not only did I have to learn about the field in order to properly think of new research directions, but I had to learn a crapton of other shit in order to be an effective researcher. It was a tremendous barrier to entry. Tremendous.

How can this be changed???? I don't know. I'll have to think about it.

In which I wax poetic about matplotlib

Every scientist needs to make graphs. It's one of those necessary evils in order to effect information transfer. It's also kind of unsexy. What's sexy is the research, what's unsexy is the meticulous work that can be required to put it into graphical form.

It's like in college, when I was talking with a girl who was working on her senior thesis. She said, "I'm almost done, I just have to do the bibliography" and she had 3 hours before the deadline where she had to physically turn it in. I looked at her and said, "Oh you poor girl, get on that right now." Bibliographies are also necessary evils and always take longer than you think/hope.

So, fortunately, in the computing world there are lots of people working on lots of free projects and software to make people's lives easier. Out of the goodness of their hearts. It's lovely and wonderful. I myself work on such a project. I won't tell you what it is though - I'd lose my anonymity in a heartbeat that way. But anyway.

One of my favorite free projects is called matplotlib. It's a most excellent piece of graphing software, extremely useful for me, as someone who does a lot of work in Python, as well. Anyway, you know MATLAB? You'll probably be just fine with matplotlib too.

Check out this gallery of screenshots for all the things you can do with matplotlib. It's incredible. It's awesome. It's magnificent. I LOVE MATPLOTLIB. Almost as much as I love mercurial. Hubby HATES Excel and recently asked me how I made such pretty graphs - I told him, matplotlib!!! So I made a few graphs for him. Lickety-split, he has pretty graphs.

What matplotlib is ideal for:

• If you already use Python to do your scripting, matplotlib is a MATLAB-ian interface within Python, so your transition to matplotlib will be very easy. Just download the egg file to get all your prereq packages and you're set to go.
• People who need documentation. Matplotlib has some of the best documentation for a free software project I have ever seen. Active mailing list, lots of examples, documentation for every class/function/everything, and even more examples.
• People who have to turn massive textual data into graphs. This is the best part about matplotlib, in my opinion. Python is my favorite workhorse language. It's very easy to pull out bits of data from massive amounts of textual data. The language is EASY, READABLE, and AWESOME. Since matplotlib is within Python, you just pull out your bits of textual data, and plop them into a graph of your choosing - bar graph, histogram, line plot, whatever. Woot!
  
• People who hate Excel.
  
• People who aren't afraid of trying new things and doing a little digging on how to get something to work. If you're totally unfamiliar with everything I'm talking about, you can still love matplotlib, you'd just have a learning curve issue. But once you get it, you'll love it. But only if you're willing to put in some time to get away from Excel.
• People who are cheap. Matplotlib is free. FREE.
  
• People who like to control things. You know how in Excel, you can't force it to do certain things? You just can't - if it's not built-in, you can't get it to do it. Not so with matplotlib - if you can code it, you can make it. And you can always code it.

Ok, I guess I'm done waxing poetic about this piece of software. But I think it's worth sharing. Because as I said, every scientist needs to make graphs sometimes.

A Veritable Cornucopia of Thoughts

I've been away for nearly a week now, both recovering from my paper and celebrating Thanksgiving. I have a lot of posts bottled up in my head, so I will just combine and randomly write.

On Ethics and Integrity in Academia

I've mentioned before that my advisor is a really really good guy. He believes in publishing quality work in quality venues, and that's all. He's very methodologically meticulous, and extremely well respected in this regard.

This necessarily means that his students don't publish that much, me included. Some because I didn't push myself enough (he's not pushy or demanding), but then also because he kind of nixes pieces of work as not good enough.

So now I find myself in a pretty shitty position when it comes to an academic job search, to the point that I don't even want to try. I talked to him about it recently; I told him that I respected his reputation and his good work, and I didn't want to stray from it, but also that I friggin' need some more pubs if I ever want to be a prof at a semi-reasonable place.

What to do?

Then there is a whole other, more insidious level of academic integrity. What I've been talking about is pretty forgivable, just submitting semi-frivolous work to low- and mid-level venues just to pad a pub list. But this other level is different. When I was working on my paper, there were numerous ways in which I could have semi-fudged what I was doing, but I draw the line there. Not explicitly making up numbers, but methodologically skewing results to look better. I know people do this all the time. It sucks, and it means reviewers have to be really on the lookout, but they aren't always. It's pretty easy, in my field, to do this skewing in non-obvious, and not even intentionally insidious ways. It could just be from carelessness. Anyway, with this paper I worked on, I could have, but I didn't. It might cost me a pub or two or ten over my life, but I learned well from my advisor and I don't want to be that kind of researcher. But I also don't want to be out of a job.

What to do?

Thanksgiving and giving thanks

I had a very nice Thanksgiving weekend with my in-laws, where there was food, laughter, love, and fun. It was lovely. I have much to be thankful for this season, and I think it's important we remember that, all of us, that we are very lucky to not be living in a society where things are so plentiful in the grand scheme of things.

Things I am grateful for:

1. My health - it is easy to forget that just being able to go about your day normally is something to be grateful for.
2. My husband - I've talked about how wonderful he is, and he is such a huge boon to the quality of my life. I *heart* Mr. PhizzleDizzle.
3. My family - not only is my entire family awesome and functional, but they too, are healthy and happy. This also makes my life easy. I know enough people who are totally awesome themselves but are dragged down by f'ed up family dynamics or family health issues, and this is not the case for me. Thank goodness.
4. My in-laws - the fact that they are not monsters and in fact, are nice people, is probably one reason why Mr. PhizzleDizzle is also so awesome, so woohoo for me.
5. Our lack of debt - Thanks to our respective parentals, who shelled out big $$$ for college, we are both free and clear in terms of college debt. We owe nothing. To anyone. This is suuuuuch a weight off of us and allows us to easily live within our means, despite making very little money. The other thing that enables us to live within our means are our awesome parents who taught us how to do so. We don't have a lot of "stuff" but we have enough and are very happy.
6. My looks - I sort of just added this on from reading JLK's post on hotness. But let's face it, society cares about beauty and I'm just happy I was born reasonably good looking. Add to that a healthy sense of self-confidence and I am able to navigate lots of this world pretty easily. I do all the right things, eat reasonably well, exercise (sort of - not lately), and all that, but also am blessed with a pretty nice rack, a pretty nice ass, a pretty nice figure, a pretty damned awesome metabolism, and a variety of pretty nice other features that just make my life easier. And I am thankful for that as well. One of the most annoying things in the world is a chick who complains about how ugly she is when she is in fact very aesthetically pleasing. I am not one of those chicks. I am grateful for what I've got.
   
7. My friends - I have the least catty, most supportive, bestest friends in the world. I just wish they all lived near me. They're all the things girlfriends should be, and none of the things girlfriends shouldn't be. I love them.

In short, I have a rich, blessed life. And I'm grateful for that.

I had more to post about but I just finished making brownies and it's time to eat them. So it will have to be another time.

But I hope everyone had a marvelously happy Thanksgiving filled with love, family, and laughter.