Monthly Archives: July 2018

Jul 19

Nice profile of this physicist.

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Originally shared by Kam-Yung Soh

Nice profile of this physicist. “In 1963, Maria Goeppert Mayer won the Nobel Prize in physics for describing the layered, shell-like structures of atomic nuclei. No woman has won since.

One of the many women who, in a different world, might have won the physics prize in the intervening 55 years is Sau Lan Wu. Wu is the Enrico Fermi Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and an experimentalist at CERN, the laboratory near Geneva that houses the Large Hadron Collider. Wu’s name appears on more than 1,000 papers in high-energy physics, and she has contributed to a half-dozen of the most important experiments in her field over the past 50 years. She has even realized the improbable goal she set for herself as a young researcher: to make at least three major discoveries.

[…]

Sau Lan Wu was born in occupied Hong Kong during World War II. Her mother was the sixth concubine to a wealthy businessman who abandoned them and her younger brother when Wu was a child. She grew up in abject poverty, sleeping alone in a space behind a rice shop. Her mother was illiterate, but she urged her daughter to pursue an education and become independent of volatile men.

[…]

Although she originally intended to become an artist, she was inspired to study physics after reading a biography of Marie Curie. She worked on experiments during consecutive summers at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, and she attended graduate school at Harvard University. She was the only woman in her cohort and was barred from entering the male dormitories to join the study groups that met there. She has labored since then to make a space for everyone in physics, mentoring more than 60 men and women through their doctorates.

Quanta Magazine joined Sau Lan Wu on a gray couch in sunny Cleveland in early June. She had just delivered an invited lecture about the discovery of gluons at a symposium to honor the 50th birthday of the Standard Model. The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.”

https://www.quantamagazine.org/sau-lan-wus-three-major-physics-discoveries-and-counting-20180718/
Jul 18

Via a private share.

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Via a private share.

I am a New Zealander married to an American, living in New Zealand. By complete and total coincidence, my brother-in-law (my wife’s sister’s husband) is a New Zealander married to an American, living in the US. There’s a family story about how he claimed, while they were playing the game Therapy, to be the most emotionally stable person in the family – pretty much because his standard of “emotionally stable” was based on New Zealand, not California.

What emotional expression is within acceptable ranges, how it’s expressed, how it’s evaluated, under what circumstances it can be expressed, what it’s considered reasonable to expect out of life – all of these things are highly culture-dependent. So what happens when multinational corporations (mostly, though not entirely, based in the US) start creating emotional management applications that are used around the world?

https://aeon.co/essays/can-emotion-regulating-tech-translate-across-cultures

Jul 17

If you fancy trying your luck with the Random Penguin House…

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If you fancy trying your luck with the Random Penguin House…

Be aware: I have seen books from them with bad copy editing. There are probably badly promoted books, too, but by the nature of things I haven’t seen those.

Just because they’re big doesn’t mean you’ll get more help. It does mean you’ll get a smaller proportion of the money than you would from self-pub or from many small presses. But it might… might… get you more visibility.

Originally shared by Erica Verrillo

DAW Books, a division of Penguin/Random House, and the oldest publishing company devoted exclusively to science fiction and fantasy, has opened its doors to unagented manuscripts. You can submit online through Submittable. There is no charge to submit. https://publishedtodeath.blogspot.com/2018/07/daw-books-opens-its-doors-to-sci-fi-and.html

Jul 17

These women are tough, dedicated, skilled, and “not corruptible”.

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These women are tough, dedicated, skilled, and “not corruptible”.

Originally shared by Kam-Yung Soh

Woah. Don’t mess with these rangers. “Mander said Akashinga is a departure from the male-centric military and special-ops world in which he has long operated — what he calls “one of the ultimate boys’ clubs” — and his newer realm of conservation rangers, where the male-to-female ratio is 100 to 1.

To build his Akashinga team Mander, who had not previously trained women, sought applicants from among the most vulnerable females in rural areas. He recruited abuse survivors, abandoned wives, orphans, sex workers and single mothers — women who, he said, “weren’t victims of circumstance; they were victims of men.” Also joining the team this past December was Vimbai Kumire, the youngest daughter of Zimbabwe’s president Emmerson Mnangagwa, reportedly as a show of her support for the women and their role in rebuilding the country.

[…]

The Akashinga recruits initially “went through 72 hours of hell,” said Mander, but only three of 37 women who entered the program dropped off after those first three days. They continued through the same paces as male rangers who train for anti-poaching work and completed an extensive program that covers camouflage and concealment, conservation ethics, crime scene preservation and crisis management. In Akashinga, they also learn how to deal with dangerous wildlife, democratic policing, firearm safety and proper use, first aid, human rights, information gathering techniques, leadership, patrolling, search and arrest, and unarmed combat.

The discipline the women displayed every day of training, and since, is also seen in their diet. All are vegans — a commitment they made to themselves and to the terms of Akashinga.

[…]

What matters, Mander said, are results, and so far their efforts are paying off. As of this writing, the Akashinga team has about 60 arrests, which have resulted in more than 41 years of jail sentences. Recent actions resulted in arrests for serious crimes related to ivory smuggling, zebra poaching and sable antelope snaring.

Mander said Akashinga has been “more effective than anything I’ve seen.” He noted too that the women have an uncanny ability to “de-escalate everything.””

https://therevelator.org/poaching-akashinga/
Jul 13

I found this thought-provoking.

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I found this thought-provoking. Particularly since I’d just read a post on how YouTube is a hostile environment for women with STEM shows, and blocked a commenter who was demonstrating why. In retrospect, maybe I should have reported him as well.

Originally shared by Michael “Draco” R

This brings us to the only thing I know for sure in all this: often, the online abusers win because the game is set up for them to win the moment they decide to play.

…

But ultimately, if we care about abuse, we cannot care most about whether we have comforted, converted, or even fed them.

We have to care more about the people they hurt.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/12/17561768/dont-feed-the-trolls-online-harassment-abuse
Jul 13

I hadn’t heard about this before. Ammonia has a lot of potential, it seems.

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I hadn’t heard about this before. Ammonia has a lot of potential, it seems.

Originally shared by Kam-Yung Soh

“SYDNEY, BRISBANE, AND MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA—The ancient, arid landscapes of Australia are fertile ground for new growth, says Douglas MacFarlane, a chemist at Monash University in suburban Melbourne: vast forests of windmills and solar panels. More sunlight per square meter strikes the country than just about any other, and powerful winds buffet its south and west coasts. All told, Australia boasts a renewable energy potential of 25,000 gigawatts, one of the highest in the world and about four times the planet’s installed electricity production capacity. Yet with a small population and few ways to store or export the energy, its renewable bounty is largely untapped.

That’s where MacFarlane comes in. For the past 4 years, he has been working on a fuel cell that can convert renewable electricity into a carbon-free fuel: ammonia. Fuel cells typically use the energy stored in chemical bonds to make electricity; MacFarlane’s operates in reverse. In his third-floor laboratory, he shows off one of the devices, about the size of a hockey puck and clad in stainless steel. Two plastic tubes on its backside feed it nitrogen gas and water, and a power cord supplies electricity. Through a third tube on its front, it silently exhales gaseous ammonia, all without the heat, pressure, and carbon emissions normally needed to make the chemical. “This is breathing nitrogen in and breathing ammonia out,” MacFarlane says, beaming like a proud father.

Companies around the world already produce $60 billion worth of ammonia every year, primarily as fertilizer, and MacFarlane’s gizmo may allow them to make it more efficiently and cleanly. But he has ambitions to do much more than help farmers. By converting renewable electricity into an energy-rich gas that can easily be cooled and squeezed into a liquid fuel, MacFarlane’s fuel cell effectively bottles sunshine and wind, turning them into a commodity that can be shipped anywhere in the world and converted back into electricity or hydrogen gas to power fuel cell vehicles. The gas bubbling out of the fuel cell is colorless, but environmentally, MacFarlane says, ammonia is as green as can be. “Liquid ammonia is liquid energy,” he says. “It’s the sustainable technology we need.””

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/07/ammonia-renewable-fuel-made-sun-air-and-water-could-power-globe-without-carbon

Jul 12

Still. In the 21st century.

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Still. In the 21st century.

Originally shared by Judah Richardson

Engineering UK said just 12% of all engineers in Britain are female, despite girls generally performing better than boys in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM).

The trade body said this is due to girls dropping out of the education pipeline, with issues around identity and the perception of the ability to achieve goals for young women in engineering.

Only 3% of apprentices starting up in engineering apprenticeships in Scotland are female, compared to 11% in Northern Ireland, 9% in Wales and 8% in England.

https://www.energyvoice.com/oilandgas/176547/scotland-worst-in-uk-for-women-in-engineering-apprenticeships/
Jul 10

So in the 80s, cyberpunk writers imagined a world in which giant corporations were in charge of an increasingly…

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So in the 80s, cyberpunk writers imagined a world in which giant corporations were in charge of an increasingly technological and dystopian world. Some would say they were proved correct.

These days, solarpunk writers are imagining a world of sustainability. Could giant tech corporations be key to that vision as well?

Originally shared by Singularity Hub

Big Tech Should Take the Lead on Climate Change—Here’s Why https://suhub.co/2ui8isc