Hoofnagle.org

So on Friday I went to hear Nova Girl Geek Dinner. The food was good. The company was interesting and the presentation was.... thought provoking.

Dr McGrath's presentation was full of statistics about female participation in CS, but here most powerful point was one that extends across all professions and genders. The behavior she pointed up is this: When a person is engaging in a behavior that runs counter to their culture's stereo-types, the individual has a strong tendency to set the bar for performance higher than a person who fits the stereo-typical norms for that activity. What this means is that a woman participating in a CS degree program will feel she's failing and "not good enough" at an activity unless her grades are B+ or above. The average grade of women departing CS degree programs is .. no joke... B+.

Add to the sense of a requirement for perfectionism when you're running counter to stereotype that being counter to stereotype can seriously inhibit a person's connection to the faculty and mentoring opportunities and... well, no duh. People who are not the "norm" for a profession -- *any* profession -- will be much more likely to drop out unless they are blessed with serious gift and ability to work solo or unless a workplace/academic environment can make a serious bid to reach out to them.

Interestingly, we know that recruitment and sincere efforts at inclusion *work*. CMU used to have even lower than industry-normal percentages of female CS students. I think it was 7 or 8 percent. But a serious change of mindset on the part of the faculty who reached out to female students sent female retention rates through the ceiling and a recruitment drive now has the CS department made up of 40% women. Unheard of in the discipline. And this is one of the best schools in the country.

Maybe this is no eureka moment for the rest of you. But for me, it certainly lays out some root causes I've never quite been able to identify for a set of knee jerks I've mostly overcome now. Anyhow, go Girl Geek Dinners. It was fun.

Posted by karen at 05:49 AM

So, traveling to Guatemala in the middle of the night worked brilliantly. The kids had gotten more than 4 hours of sleep before we woke them after midnight and they were drowsy at first but then they perked up and were excited and happy while boarding. The plane was sufficiently empty that we each took a kid and had a row alone and although the grownups were sleepless and numb from being pillow-substitutes, kids *slept*. Small mercies. The driver to take us to Antigua also showed up right on schedule.

We spent so little time in Guatemala City it's hard to express the odd scattering of impressions we had of the place. Reviewers tell us we weren't missing much and whatever else is true, it's got all of the worst elements of a modern US city. Circuit City and Hooters. MacDonalds and poverty. Something about the lay of the mountains feels like a tropical West Virginia city. There's cognitive dissonance on everything. I'm full of confused thoughts I can't quite force into fruit. And then we're gone.

Antigua, with its one and two story buildings, exceedingly bumpy streets and internet cafes on every corner is something else entirely. And our hotel feels like a third thing. First, the easy part. Our hotel. You drive up the dusty street to a heavy wooden gate. Someone opens the gate and you drive into a walled retreat full of green things and the sound of falling water. The gardens have both a pool and a children's playground tucked into them. Although this particular hotel on the outskirts of town has a little more space and can do more with its gardens, at this point we know that this sensation is common to almost all the hotels in Antigua. A heavy door, a walled garden and you. It's very Guatemala. It's also not something that would transplant to midAtlantic weather more's the pity. The Guatemalan highlands in the rainy season are bright and shiny as a new penny all day until late afternoon or early evening when you get a light shower and the middle of the night when you get a full deluge. In the dry season it's just the same only without the rain. Sunny and 75 degrees all day long thanks to an elevation of between 4000 and 11000 ft above sealevel depending on where you are.

So the hotels provide a lush garden and a sense of intense privacy. The town... is complicated. Like any town that fishes so heavily from the international tourist stream, it becomes on some level quite ordinary. You can eat Italian or French or even Indian in Antigua. You can find good maple syrup and stinky foreign cheese. English and German and Italian and backpacks and Tevas are everywhere. Guatemalan Spanish is considered to be a comprehensible and "clean" Spanish by the rest of Latin America and Antigua is packed with language schools catering to those who want to learn. The loss on this front is that while actual Guatemalans *do* live and work here, they really can't afford the real estate anymore. If you want to know Guatemalan life as they live it... this is no place for you. If you want to buy the rarest finest things made in Guatemala and don't know where else to look, though, this is one of the better places for you. Someone has edited for your eye and figured out how to tell you what you're buying and though you're paying the tourist markup, it's still quite cheap by US standards.

So we spent two days here, getting the blear out after the plane ride. Figuring out how to get from place to place and letting the kids have all the panqueques (pancakes), pony cart rides and pool time they wanted. We'd be back and we'd go shopping, but this was just a jumping off point for us. A getting our bearings point. Our main desire was to get off the beaten path and get to the beach.

Posted by karen at 09:36 PM

So, I know everyone is waiting with the proverbial baited breath for a gush of a posting about how gorgeous our vacation was. Um. Sorry. While on the nightflight home, sitting in the middle of a 3 seat row with a child slumped on either side of me and my tray table almost touching their heads as I scribbled, what I was thinking about was what I *always* think about. The logistics of being a happy parent. Groan if you must. I'd been up to my eyeballs in this project for 2 weeks. The beauties of Guatemala will come in due time. Herewith: Taking the kids bush and doing it happily. Lesson 1: Your MedKit Shots and Hygiene are Not to be Shirked

You've decided to take your kid someplace your neighbors arch your eyebrows and say "Is that really a good idea?" and "Wasn't there poverty/civil war/famine there recently?" First order of business is to mind your health -- if the CDC suggests shots GET THEM. For Guatemala they recommend Hep A (which every child in the US receives at age 3 anyway) and Typhoid both of which are food and water born illnesses. For the lowlands they recommend malaria medicines if you're going to be there long and a liberal use of 30% DEET bug repelants for kids, 70%+ for adults no matter how long you're there. Permethin is something you can spray on your clothes to kill mosquitos should they land where they can't bite. Whatever your feelings about the evils of DEET for daily use in your home country, suck it up and don't get malaria. Or dengue. It's a couple of weeks. Use the DEET. Carefully. Age appropriately. But use it.

Other medical oddiments you can't live without: Pepto for Kids. Pepto for Adults. Imodium. Emetrol. Powdered gatorade which when diluted to about 1/3 strength is a health practioner recommended electrolyte replacement for illness, Advil for Kids. Advil for adults. Bandaids. Neosporin. A thermometer. Purel. Did I mention the Purel? P-U-R-E-L. You will learn it is your dearest friend. If you use it regularly whenever there's no soap, all of those other things I listed (except perhaps the bandaids and the Tylenol) will be irrelevant.

For the conservative, you might also ask your pediatrician for a prescription for some heavy duty antibiotics and a couple of epipens. We didn't ask for the antibiotics. We figured if we got scared enough to think we needed antibiotics we'd be finding a doctor in-country but the epi pens are something I no longer feel safe traveling without even as an adult. In Thailand 10 years ago, I who have no food allergies, got a case of hives from eating *something* on the night train to Chengmai. If I'd had even a kid-strength pen then I'd have used it on myself. Get an epi pen. And then laugh about how you didn't need it. If you don't use the soap/Purel you won't be laughing.

Purel or soap are only a part of your new religious discipline mostly related to eating and drinking. You never drink anything that wasn't sealed before you opened it. You never eat anything raw unless it had a skin that is no longer present. You only use a straw if you see it wrapped in paper and remove the wrapper yourself. You can break these rules and you might even get away with it as long as you're sensitive to the overall cleanliness of the places you eat. I talked to a guy who had been eating fresh salads in all sorts of restaurants for weeks with no ill effects. And bully for him. But he's not three years old and his dysentery is his problem to deal with in isolation. My dysentery or my kids gets out of hand and 3 other people are getting scared, bored and grossed out by it.

Other than your food observances, there's really only the one great commandment you break at your extreme peril. Wash. Your. Hands -- With. Soap. You do it before you eat. You do it every time you use the bathroom. You do it every time you touch the ground. You do it just because you can't remember when you did it last. I am convinced. If you will just do this, you can avoid almost every ill that comes your way. Our family case study was an interesting one. Betsy still sucks her fingers. Ginger doesn't. We warned Betsy thoroughly and carefully that we didn't want to stop her sucking on her fingers but that if she wasn't careful about washing she could be violently sick. We warned Ginger, too. But she's three. And not interested in hygiene.

What can I say? The results were notable. Ginger was the sickest of us all. While she never threw up, and we never had a day when we were stuck because she had to be near a bathroom every 15 minutes, we fought about handwashing, fed her Pepto like candy and carried diapers at the ready incase a toilet was completely inaccessible (it never came to that). Reed came next. He munched Pepto and cursed a bit. I took no meds but felt a tad ill. Betsy? Betsy was an OCD hand-washing maniac. And she was absolutely untouched.

I'd heard it from my nursing friends. I'd heard it from my teacher friends. I knew my special ed teacher sister in law, swears by it. Wash. Your. Hands. With. Soap.
I'm a convert. I think I'll go wash my hands now.

Posted by karen at 08:39 AM

The first NOVA Girl Geek Dinner is September 12 around the corner from my house at Viget Labs. It's free, but you gotta register to attend. So I'll see you all there.

(P.S. Super Happy Dev House will begin at my house in either late September or early October depending on how swamped I am when I come back from vacation.

Date announcements will happen just after Labor Day.)

Posted by karen at 11:18 AM

Well, I haven't touched this blog in far too long. Should YAPC people visit because of this post, ignore the CSS, the creaky MT install. *shrug* Whatever. I'm busy.

So, I've spent the past 3 days at YAPC::NA 2008 and for all my friends who don't work in perl, I rather pity you. It's not that your Java, Ruby and bizarro flash-interpretive languages aren't good to write. They are (some of them -- ahem). But *you* haven't seen Ingy the professional ham do a strip-tease. (Tossing his underwear from behind the curtain, I tell you!) or heard Matt Trout get good laughs out of righteous indignation and the word fuck or heard the "I'm f*cking Steve Ballmer" song. (Which I'm trying to find, but it seems not to be online anywhere. Not shocking since it was just released "into the wild" about 45 minutes ago and it would've been spoiled if anyone had seen it early.

Point being, the perl people? They are fun. And friendly too. There were 350 people here, most of them seasoned programmers even if they were new to perl and the level of investment in the community was very high. My frivolous regret? I didn't bring enough cash with me to the auction to compete for the right to be the auctioneer in charge of selling off lunch with Larry Wall. (Who accepts being sold like an expensive tart every year with real grace). And as much as I like perl what this really reminded me is how much I love code. My code. Your code. Any code someone is really joyfully writing.

Therefore, I hereby declare that (as soon as I clear it with my spouse) there will officially be a monthly SuperHappyDevHouse at my place in Washington once a month. Dates to follow. If too many people want to do this, we will be forced to find alternate space but what the hell. If I don't set dates to hack. I don't hack. So come on over. Coffee's brewing.

Posted by karen at 06:43 PM