#ShockHorror! Women Scientists Who Have Been Screwed by The #Phallocentric System [#geekgirl]

Rosalind Franklin

“In April, National Geographic News published a story about the letter in which scientist Francis Crick described DNA to his 12-year-old son. In 1962, Crick was awarded a Nobel Prize for discovering the structure of DNA, along with fellow scientists James Watson and Maurice Wilkins.

Several people posted comments about our story that noted one name was missing from the Nobel roster: Rosalind Franklin, a British biophysicist who also studied DNA. Her data were critical to Crick and Watson’s work, but as several commenters noted, Franklin was robbed of recognition. (See her section below for details.)

She was not the first woman to have endured indignities in the male-dominated world of science, but Franklin’s case is especially egregious, said Ruth Lewin Sime, a retired chemistry professor at Sacramento City College who has written on women in science.” – From 6 Women Scientists Who Were Snubbed Due to Sexism

“Only For #Children” [#geekgirl]

“[The] ANAR Foundation…attend[s] children and teenagers [in] a risk situation…they can find the help they need in a totally anonymous and confidential way. But, how can we get our message to a child abuse victim, even when they are accompanied by their aggressor?

Knowing the average height for adults and children under 10,GREY has created two different messages. Using an outdoor lenticular we show adults an awareness message, while children see a message where we offer them our help and show them the telephone number. A message only for children.”

“Sea surface temperatures reach highest level in 150 years..” #sigh# [#geekgirl]

Melting, We’re MeLLLLTTTTing….

“Sea surface temperatures in the Northeast Shelf Large Marine Ecosystem during 2012 were the highest recorded in 150 years, according to the latest Ecosystem Advisory issued by NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center (NEFSC). These high sea surface temperatures (SSTs) are the latest in a trend of above average temperature seen during the spring and summer seasons, and part of a pattern of elevated temperatures occurring in the Northwest Atlantic, but not seen elsewhere in the ocean basin over the past century.

The advisory reports on conditions in the second half of 2012.

Sea surface temperature for the Northeast Shelf Ecosystem reached a record high of 14 degrees Celsius (57.2°F) in 2012, exceeding the previous record high in 1951. Average SST has typically been lower than 12.4 C (54.3 F) over the past three decades.”

- Via Phys.org

If #Minecraft and #Tetris had #Robot Babies…. [#geekgirl]

Soft Robot Evolution

[So evidently if Tetris and Minecraft had multiple Soft Robot babies, they'd all evolve just like this. Awwwwww.]

#Freetronics and #ArduSat team up to beam up. Design and run space-based applications #geekgirl

Have you heard about ArduSat? It’s the first open-platform low Earth orbit satellite system that allows any member of the public to design and run their own space-based applications. The project was originally funded by KickStarter donors and is now progressing very well. Participants can create their own Arduino sketches to run inside the satellite, taking advantage of the on-board sensors to record results and generate data. The hardware contains the equivalent of sixteen Arduinos which can run up to around 12 sketches concurrently. Freetronics co-founder Jonathan Oxer gives us more details in the following video.

Freetronics are really proud to be part of the ArduSat vision of allowing anyone to run their own experiments in space, so as well as being the payload hardware partner – Freetronics also have ArduSat prototyping modules for sale that allow you to recreate your own hardware for testing before uploading the sketch to the ArduSat system, or for your own projects.

For more information about the ArduSat, visit their website.

ANAT presents – The Subjects Sleep Research Residency #art #thesubjects #geekgirl

SCANZ 2013 3rd Nature Symposium :: #NewZealand #environment #intercreate13 #geekgirl

SCANZ 2013 3rd Nature Symposium / 1 – 3 February 2013 ::

“After Eden” an installation by Janet Laurence.

New Plymouth Nga Motu and Waitara, New Zealand SCANZ is a biennial event that includes a hui-symposium, a two week group residency and an exhibition. Intercreate Trust and event partner Te Matahiapo Indigenous Research Centre (TMIRC) are organising the symposium, which will propose that the solution to sustainability requires listening to the indigenous voice on the environment. Sessions of the symposium include: Matauranga Maori, Science and Art; Environment; Society; Indigenous Cultures; Data, Art and Ecology; and Futures. Views expressed include those from a Social Work perspective on environment, barriers to sustainability, working with remote communities, the body and the environment, art and data, biotechnology, little blue penguins and ‘Martian diaspora’ – among many others.

http://www.intercreate.org

Nature in the Dark Screening #Melbourne #cute #creatures #geekgirl

Enter a world where art and science converge and where the comfortingly familiar is tantalizingly foreign. In a joint venture, conservationists and artists use the same photographic material gathered to profile mammals’ response to fire (or the absence of fire) to very different ends. Animals from Wombat State Forest and Bunyip State Park were ‘caught on camera’ as part of a scientific data collection project. Nature in the Dark invited 10 artists to respond and presents their creative adaptations, remixes and interventions of the scientific footage of native bush animals’ activities at night.

Screening
The works will be screened at Fed Square 23 November – 23 December 2012
for screening times check Events on the Fed Square website http://www.fedsquare.com/events/

Participating Artists
Angie Black / Elizabeth Dunn / Siri Hayes / Jan Hendrik Brüggemeier & Renuka Rajiv & Scott Lewis / Tim Nohe / Josephine Starrs & Leon Cmielewski / Steve Turpie

Website www.centreforcreativearts.org.au/nature-in-the-dark

Balance-Unbalance Conference Call out: Deadline Nov 20 #arts #science #technology #geekgirl

CALL DEADLINE: NOVEMBER 20, 2012
Balance-Unbalance is an International Conference designed to use art as a catalyst to explore intersections between nature, science, technology and society as we move into an era of both unprecedented ecological threats and transdisciplinary possibilities. We are thoroughly looking forward to hosting artists, scientists, economists, philosophers, politicians, sociologists, engineers and policy experts from across the world to engage in dialogue and action towards a sustainable future. Balance-Unbalance 2013 will also host a diversity of virtual components allowing global accessibility and significantly reducing the carbon footprint of a major international conference.

One of the main goals of Balance-Unbalance is to develop the role of the arts and artists in dealing with environmental challenges. The previous events held in Buenos Aires in 2010 and Montreal in 2011 (http://balance-unbalance2011.hexagram.ca) provided a powerful platform for reflection, debate, and ideas leading towards Balance-Unbalance 2013, hosted in the UNESCO Noosa Biosphere Reserve on the Sunshine Coast of Australia.

The 2013 conference theme, Future Nature, Future Culture[s] is aimed to provoke discourse around what our elusive future might hold and how transdisciplinary thought and action could be used as tools for positive change.

Submissions are now being accepted for the International Balance-Unbalance 2013 conference to be held at Central Queensland University in Noosa, Australia from May 31 – June 2, 2013. Balance-Unbalance 2013 is being held in the beautiful resort town of Noosa, in parallel with the Floating Land 2013 Green Art festival and just prior to the ISEA 2013 (International Symposium on Electronic Art) conference in Sydney, so participants can maximise their time in Australia by attending all three events.

For more information see our website on www.balance-unbalance2013.org

Facebook www.facebook.com/balanceunbalance

#code {poems} #book (via @sister0) #geekgirl

Due for release code {poems} is a book edited by Ishac Bertran

“When things get complex, as they may indeed be getting, the distinction between tools and the things that can be made with them begins to dissolve. The medium is not only also a message, it is an essential counter-valence to our own impulses towards the creation of meaning, beauty and knowledge. The tools we think we are using also use us: They push us around, make us think new things, do new things, even be new things. Language is no different, of course, although in its supremacy and ubiquity, it is even more elusive, difficult to perceive. The very words you are looking at right now are like compact little cryptograms—a written convention, talking back at you in codes.

Poetry is language speaking for itself. It is, at its best, where what is being told is coincident with the telling. The words written, or uttered, pop out at us, while in the same moment, constellations of meaning emerge; the components and its composition resonate, vacillate, on the page and in the air. Many of the constraints and styles of poetry we know have developed in order to allow words to express themselves, or show themselves as the mediation of a mental image. Programming languages for computer hardware, no matter how “high level” or abstract they are, are by necessity far less elaborate than traditional forms of writing and speech. But the structure and function of these new languages give them special advantage in clarity: These languages (syntax, sequence) and the results they produce (ideas, ‘executables’) are absolutely inseparable. By design, computing languages are created in order to express specific ideas, creating certain kinds of action or manipulation of other codes (data). In this sense perhaps, software is always, and already, poetic. It is precise description, and pure syntax—the signifier and signified—clearly coincident in the machine.

Ishac Bertran’s code {poems} is an edited book project that exposes the materiality of computer programming languages. Here are presented a small sampling from a compiled book of poetry written by software engineers, artists and other code writers, “exploring the potential of code to communicate at the level of poetry.” (code-poems.com) The project solicited for online, public submissions from code-writers in response to the notion of a poem, written in a software language which is semantically valid (i.e.: it compiles). This solicitation winds up revealing the inner workings, constitutive elements, and styles of both a particular software and its authors. From a large number of submissions, a selection of poems will be printed as a bound volume in 2012.”

Source: in continent. 2.2 (2012): 148–151