Andragy

Google genders engineering

andra — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 23:49:01 +0000

Your categories

Below you can review the interests and inferred demographics that Google has associated with your cookie.

Business & Industrial – Business Finance – Venture Capital

Internet & Telecom – Service Providers – ISPs

Jobs & Education – Education – Teaching & Classroom Resources

Science – Engineering & Technology – Robotics

Your demographics

We infer your age and gender based on the websites you’ve visited.

Age: 35-44

Gender: Male

via google.com

I’ve checked out my Google ad preferences. Classic. If you like technology then you must be male.

If there weren’t so many other examples of gender by design, this would be depressing. But I’ve seen magazine display racks, toy shops and clothing stores. There are so many fronts to fight this battle on.

What scares me is feeling as though I’ve been coopted. As Google collects data from more and more places, where will it be ok to be female or middle aged or anything not associated with my work or public persona. I don’t wan’t to turn in to a stereotype. I’m tweeting #VAGINA more frequently to keep female technophilia alive. Let’s encourage alternatives and defeat stereotypes.

STARTUPYOU | FAKE GRIMLOCK FTW

andra — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 21:41:16 +0000

via flickr.com

Awesome is exhausting for some of us but FAKE GRIMLOCK has tapped the motherlode and is distributing it via twitter, blog, posters and maybe even in person. Although it could be kind of scary seeing a giant metal robot dinosaur with a penchant for eating stupid humans.

FAKE GRIMLOCK is my new favorite reading (along with The Bloggess and xkcd), because what he says makes a lot of sense. It also drips with sarcasm, awesomeness and blood. Many technology luminaries (like Eric Ries, Brad Feld, Fred Wilson and CNN) have noticed that FAKE GRIMLOCK carves through all the cream and gets straight to the coffee. I’m still new over here but sometimes I think that America is all froth and foam and eff all coffee. Then I remember stuff like #Occupy and STOP SOPA.

I wish I had some of FAKE GRIMLOCK’s gift for awesome communication because the tech world both fascinates and dismays me. We are changing society right here – punching code through the walls of the world. But all too often the vision is just personal or commercial success.

“STARTUP IS MAKE FIST OF CODE, PUT IT THROUGH THE WORLD. VISION IS PUT FIST IN RIGHT PLACE, BREAK WORLD IN HALF.”

Roadblocks of gender, race and class are still huge. Sometimes technological advancement is just making bigger roadblocks. Startup philosophy, which emphasizes the individual, is often powerless before huge areas of fail. We aren’t all giant robot dinosaurs and sometimes we don’t share the same visions. For example, feminism is a great conversation killer, because not a lot has changed in last 50 years. Seriously – this 1991 MIT report by Ellen Spertus is still accurate. That’s depressing. It’s great to celebrate awesome women engineers and ceos, but important to point out the systematic obstacles women face in the tech and startup worlds.

Fake Grimlock’s irresistible awesome is up against some pretty immoveable objects, but at least reading @fakegrimlock makes me feel like a raging fury in a good way.

Brain Drain – i do it right?

andra — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 18:07:35 +0000

This is what I found when I searched for brain enema. I also got Thor, a heavy metal band from the 80s. Enough said. My brain is still clogged up with all the words I didn’t write last year. Every day for the last month or three, I’ve tossed them around like a salad and tried to serve them up. Every day, I’ve ignored my healthy diet of self expression and loaded up on cheap internet carbs and stodgy domestic duties. Sweet, eh.

I hereby swear to post until I’ve unblocked my brain. Life is full of open tickets and I’m like an intern on the helpdesk. I’m still not certain if it’s OCD or procrastination, but I can’t sit and write until I’ve cleared my way to the desk. By then I’m mentally drained and turn on the distractions.

American bureaucracy is in a league of its own. I spent all of last week arranging a new dentist for the family and following up on asthma appointments. We’ve all had the first round of appointments which required 1 hour of paperwork EACH and each visit has spawned a minimum of one more visit (and in some cases 3!). I also have filled out 13 pages of school forms and still haven’t updated medication and insurance details for 2 of 3 kids. And preliminary camp forms… there goes another day.

OK. I am making post-its and lists and crossing shit off, but I must start putting writing first for a while, so that I can START THINKING AGAIN. Of course, the new year period has been dogged by MY COMPUTER INSISTING THAT IT WOULD NO LONGER OPEN STUFF. Not until I’d filed, archived or trashed some things. I think that says it all.

SOPA STRIKE SUCCESS

andra — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 19:52:36 +0000

via sopastrike.com

Stop SOPA Internet Blackout

andra — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 19:00:30 +0000

So you shouldn’t even be looking at this… but just in case you want to know more: sopastrike.com or just google it!

Today, we are striking against censorship. Join us in this historic moment: tell Congress to stop this bill now!

I am writing to you as a voter in your district. I urge you to oppose the Senate version of S. 968, the PROTECT IP Act. The PROTECT IP Act is dangerous, ineffective, and short-sighted. The House version — just introduced by Rep. Goodlatte — is far worse.Over coming days you’ll be hearing from the many businesses, advocacy organizations, and ordinary Americans who oppose this legislation because of the myriad ways in which it will stifle free speech and innovation. We hope you’ll take our concerns to heart and oppose this legislation.

Join The Strike! and add this to your site

Learn More: Watch the video · American Censorship page · View the Infographic
Read SOPA on OpenCongress · Read PIPA on OpenCongress

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Sociology 1010101010101

andra — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 20:40:00 +0000

Andra Keay - 12:38 PM - Public

Great article – describes a huge study showing that weak social ties can insert information into our online ‘bubbles’, reducing the echo chamber effect. However, as Mahjoo points out, the content of the new information wasn’t evaluated, so really whether new information that has radical content (ie. protax if you aren’t) is as effective as neutral novelty (ie. cute kitten) is still an unknown.It’s also really cool that this study covered 1.2 billion instances of link sharing from 250 million people! Massive.

Howard Rheingold originally shared this post:

The End of the Echo Chamber
A study of 250 million Facebook users reveals the Web isn’t as polarized as we thought.

Online echo chambers: A study of 250 million Facebook users reveals the Web isn’t as polarized as we thought.

Today, Facebook is publishing a study that disproves some hoary conventional wisdom about the Web. According to this new research, the online echo chamber doesn’t exist. This is of particular interest…

via plus.google.com

When I don’t want to be me — TheBloggess.com

andra — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 03:31:05 +0000

via thebloggess.com

There’s no one better than the Bloggess. She seems to share my interest in many strange geeky things and has no fear of using the word vagina. Frequently. I didn’t post much in 2011 due to moving overseas and finishing my thesis… and starting the robot blog(s). So I’m kicking off 2012 with the sort of post I’d like to be posting, if only I’d finished building the dinosaur out of plastic spoons etc.

What is a Robot?

andra — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 00:25:35 +0000

A dream. The common definition of a robot, as situated and embodied, is incredibly broad. Robots, or parts of them, are developed constantly and subsumed into other ‘things’ or technical assemblages. Your car is a robot. Increasingly, so is your phone.

I say that a robot is whatever a roboticist is working on. But really, most robotics research is absorbed into other things, and what we call a robot has a lot to do with a vision. A dream of a robot that is personable and a slave to human needs. A robot has an animal or humanoid body that we can relate to socially.

via robotstate.wordpress.com

We are on the verge of changes in robot technology and development that will revolutionize what a robot is. It starts as toys, hidden technologies and transparent interfaces. It started with the Kinect, the smart phone and the cloud.

Now, you might say I’m a dreamer…. but here are some really great recent examples of the increasing democratization of robotics technology that indicate the fundamental ways the ground is shifting as we move into SME and consumer robotics.

DragonBot from MIT’s Personal Robotics Group is powered by an Android smart phone. Kombusto, the DragonBot is blended reality, living on your phone as well as in the fur. Being a cloud based robot, Kombusto can learn from other robots/interactions. (Image from IEEE Spectrum article Wed Dec 14)

Parrot AR drones, Romotivs and Sphero, utilising smart phone controllers, also open the door to cloud based robotics and crowd sourced learning for devices. Another approach is Brainlink, using smartphones – or other interfaces – to hack existing infrared controlled devices, via a bluetooth ‘brainlink’ to imbue cheap toys with extra intelligence. Brainlink is only $125, open source and eminently hackable. They also won an educational award at Maker Faire earlier this year.

Why women have to work harder to do startups | VentureBeat

andra — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 21:56:07 +0000

via venturebeat.com

This article by Julia Hu is spot on the money. It takes money to succeed, not talents that women have proven they have. More women run successful small businesses, but anything that requires asking for funding is harder for women.

It isn’t about changing women any more. It’s about changing what is effectively a boys club for funding into something more flexible. Something that can see why women are underfunded, undervalued and RIPE FOR ACQUISITION.

We are entering a new space | The Robot State

andra — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 21:23:28 +0000

We are entering a new space

Posted on December 7, 2011 | Leave a comment | Edit

I am fascinated by the changes in our situated awareness made possible by the merges in gaming and personal technology. Chris Chesher discusses the impact of gaming on sat nav systems in the journal Convergence and how we are entering a new space as we share our control systems with our game environments. I’d like to go further and suggest that our self awareness is shifting as we incorporate visual displays onto mirrored surfaces, ranging from the rapidly becoming pervasive rear view mirror/backup monitor/sat nav, to these newer technologies in R&D.

There is a qualitative shift from the ‘shopping’ style magic mirrors, which show you with different outfits, watches etc. Shopping mirrors function as a ‘paper doll’, you are selecting outfits for yourself much as you would in real life. However, the use of mirrors as channels for other information changes the space that you (in a mirror) are in. The more you switch modes the more you are changed. All the way to the complete carnival mirror changes below!

Via Pop Sci | An Augmented Reality Mirror That Alters Your Appearance

excerpt… Using a webcam hooked up to custom PC software, a pair of researchers at Queen Mary, University of London, have created an augmented reality “mirror” that morphs your facial features at will.

Unlike existing applications that overlay virtual features onto real-world video, this program doesn’t add any synthetic elements to the video feed. It creates a 3D model of the user’s face, tracks their features, and then subtly warps the video. The user can then see how they would look with a smaller nose, wider mouth, or Powerpuff Girl eyes.

Via Mashable | via Augmented Mirror of the Future Reflects You and Your World.

excerpt… The New York Times‘s R&D Lab has developed a digitally enhanced mirror that allows you to interact with personalized data during your morning routine.

Unfortunately, the mirror won’t be making its way into your local Restoration Hardware any time soon. Rather, it’s a proof of concept designed to explore “how the relationship between information and the self is evolving and how media content from the New York Times and others might play a part,” The Lab’s team explained on a page outlining the project.

via robotstate.wordpress.com