Recoding Gender

Computers / By /
Recoding Gender

Author: Janet Abbate

Publisher: MIT Press

ISBN: 9780262534536

Category: Computers

Page: 259

View: 777

The untold history of women and computing: how pioneering women succeeded in a field shaped by gender biases. Today, women earn a relatively low percentage of computer science degrees and hold proportionately few technical computing jobs. Meanwhile, the stereotype of the male “computer geek” seems to be everywhere in popular culture. Few people know that women were a significant presence in the early decades of computing in both the United States and Britain. Indeed, programming in postwar years was considered woman's work (perhaps in contrast to the more manly task of building the computers themselves). In Recoding Gender, Janet Abbate explores the untold history of women in computer science and programming from the Second World War to the late twentieth century. Demonstrating how gender has shaped the culture of computing, she offers a valuable historical perspective on today's concerns over women's underrepresentation in the field. Abbate describes the experiences of women who worked with the earliest electronic digital computers: Colossus, the wartime codebreaking computer at Bletchley Park outside London, and the American ENIAC, developed to calculate ballistics. She examines postwar methods for recruiting programmers, and the 1960s redefinition of programming as the more masculine “software engineering.” She describes the social and business innovations of two early software entrepreneurs, Elsie Shutt and Stephanie Shirley; and she examines the career paths of women in academic computer science. Abbate's account of the bold and creative strategies of women who loved computing work, excelled at it, and forged successful careers will provide inspiration for those working to change gendered computing culture.

Recoding the Boys' Club

Political Science / By /
Recoding the Boys' Club

Author: Daniel Kreiss

Publisher: Oxford University Press

ISBN: 9780197535943

Category: Political Science

Page: 209

View: 680

This book offers the first in-depth look at the employment patterns and work experiences of women working in political technology in the United States. Drawing on a unique dataset of 1004 political tech staffers and interviews with 45 women who worked on presidential campaigns between 2004-2016, this book reveals the underrepresentation of women in political technology, especially leadership positions, as well as the struggle women face to have their voices heardwithin the boys' clubs and bro cultures of the field. The book aims to help political practitioners create more gender equitable and inclusive workplaces, ones that value the ideas and skills of all those who work to get candidates elected (ed.).

Broad Band

Biography & Autobiography / By /
Broad Band

Author: Claire L. Evans

Publisher: Penguin

ISBN: 9780735211766

Category: Biography & Autobiography

Page: 288

View: 577

If you loved Hidden Figures or The Rise of the Rocket Girls, you'll love Claire Evans' breakthrough book on the women who brought you the internet--written out of history, until now. "This is a radically important, timely work," says Miranda July, filmmaker and author of The First Bad Man. The history of technology you probably know is one of men and machines, garages and riches, alpha nerds and brogrammers--but from Ada Lovelace, who wrote the first computer program in the Victorian Age, to the cyberpunk Web designers of the 1990s, female visionaries have always been at the vanguard of technology and innovation. In fact, women turn up at the very beginning of every important wave in technology. They may have been hidden in plain sight, their inventions and contributions touching our lives in ways we don't even realize, but they have always been part of the story. VICE reporter and YACHT lead singer Claire L. Evans finally gives these unsung female heroes their due with her insightful social history of the Broad Band, the women who made the internet what it is today. Seek inspiration from Grace Hopper, the tenacious mathematician who democratized computing by leading the charge for machine-independent programming languages after World War II. Meet Elizabeth "Jake" Feinler, the one-woman Google who kept the earliest version of the Internet online, and Stacy Horn, who ran one of the first-ever social networks on a shoestring out of her New York City apartment in the 1980s. Join the ranks of the pioneers who defied social convention to become database poets, information-wranglers, hypertext dreamers, and glass ceiling-shattering dot com-era entrepreneurs. This inspiring call to action shines a light on the bright minds whom history forgot, and shows us how they will continue to shape our world in ways we can no longer ignore. Welcome to the Broad Band. You're next.

Redefining Geek

Computers / By /
Redefining Geek

Author: Cassidy Puckett

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

ISBN: 9780226732695

Category: Computers

Page: 325

View: 316

"Take a moment to imagine a geek. A computer geek. Do you see thick glasses and pocket protectors? A face illuminated by a glowing screen, surrounded by empty cans of energy drinks? Bill Gates? Whatever trope comes to mind, it's likely a white or Asian man. As Cassidy Puckett shows in Define Geek, these are not just innocent assumptions. They are tied to underlying ideas about who is "naturally" good at tech, and they keep many would be techies, particularly girls and people of color, from achieving or even pursuing opportunities in tech. But Puckett is not just here to show us that anybody can be good at tech; she tells us how we can get there. Puckett spent six years teaching technology classes to first generation, low-income middle school students in Oakland, California, and during that time, she uncovered five technology learning habits that will set up all young people for success. She shows how to measure and build these habits, and she demonstrates that many teens currently unrepresented in STEM already use these habits; they are more ready for advanced technological skill development than assumptions about instinct might suggest. Redefining "instinct" reframes the goals of STEM education and challenges our stereotypes about "natural" technological ability. Our so-called leaky STEM pipeline is readily addressed by Puckett's five techie habits of mind"--

Coders

Technology & Engineering / By /
Coders

Author: Clive Thompson

Publisher: Penguin

ISBN: 9780735220577

Category: Technology & Engineering

Page: 448

View: 457

Hello, world. Facebook's algorithms shaping the news. Self-driving cars roaming the streets. Revolution on Twitter and romance on Tinder. We live in a world constructed of code--and coders are the ones who built it for us. From acclaimed tech writer Clive Thompson comes a brilliant anthropological reckoning with the most powerful tribe in the world today, computer programmers, in a book that interrogates who they are, how they think, what qualifies as greatness in their world, and what should give us pause. They are the most quietly influential people on the planet, and Coders shines a light on their culture. In pop culture and media, the people who create the code that rules our world are regularly portrayed in hackneyed, simplified terms, as ciphers in hoodies. Thompson goes far deeper, dramatizing the psychology of the invisible architects of the culture, exploring their passions and their values, as well as their messy history. In nuanced portraits, Coders takes us close to some of the great programmers of our time, including the creators of Facebook's News Feed, Instagram, Google's cutting-edge AI, and more. Speaking to everyone from revered "10X" elites to neophytes, back-end engineers and front-end designers, Thompson explores the distinctive psychology of this vocation--which combines a love of logic, an obsession with efficiency, the joy of puzzle-solving, and a superhuman tolerance for mind-bending frustration. Along the way, Coders thoughtfully ponders the morality and politics of code, including its implications for civic life and the economy. Programmers shape our everyday behavior: When they make something easy to do, we do more of it. When they make it hard or impossible, we do less of it. Thompson wrestles with the major controversies of our era, from the "disruption" fetish of Silicon Valley to the struggle for inclusion by marginalized groups. In his accessible, erudite style, Thompson unpacks the surprising history of the field, beginning with the first coders -- brilliant and pioneering women, who, despite crafting some of the earliest personal computers and programming languages, were later written out of history. Coders introduces modern crypto-hackers fighting for your privacy, AI engineers building eerie new forms of machine cognition, teenage girls losing sleep at 24/7 hackathons, and unemployed Kentucky coal-miners learning a new career. At the same time, the book deftly illustrates how programming has become a marvelous new art form--a source of delight and creativity, not merely danger. To get as close to his subject as possible, Thompson picks up the thread of his own long-abandoned coding skills as he reckons, in his signature, highly personal style, with what superb programming looks like. To understand the world today, we need to understand code and its consequences. With Coders, Thompson gives a definitive look into the heart of the machine.

Gender in Academic Computing: Alternative Career Paths and Norms, digital original edition

Computers / By /
Gender in Academic Computing: Alternative Career Paths and Norms, digital original edition

Author: Janet Abbate

Publisher: MIT Press

ISBN: 9780262319409

Category: Computers

Page: 49

View: 420

Few people know that women were a significant presence in the early decades of computing in both the United States and Britain; programming in postwar years was considered woman's work (perhaps in contrast to the more manly task of building the computers themselves). This BIT offers a chapter in this untold history of women and computing, describing women's career stratagems in academic computing—recounting both the obstacles female scholars have faced and their resourceful strategies for gaining credentials and finding alternative ladders to visibility and career advancement.

Data Warehousing and Knowledge Discovery

Computers / By /
Data Warehousing and Knowledge Discovery

Author: A Min Tjoa

Publisher: Springer

ISBN: 9783540377375

Category: Computers

Page: 582

View: 536

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Data Warehousing and Knowledge Discovery, DaWaK 2006, held in conjunction with DEXA 2006. The book presents 53 revised full papers, organized in topical sections on ETL processing, materialized view, multidimensional design, OLAP and multidimensional model, cubes processing, data warehouse applications, mining techniques, frequent itemsets, mining data streams, ontology-based mining, clustering, advanced mining techniques, association rules, miscellaneous applications, and classification.

Privacy-Preserving Data Publishing

Computers / By /
Privacy-Preserving Data Publishing

Author: Raymond Chi-Wing Wong

Publisher: Springer Nature

ISBN: 9783031018343

Category: Computers

Page: 128

View: 441

Privacy preservation has become a major issue in many data analysis applications. When a data set is released to other parties for data analysis, privacy-preserving techniques are often required to reduce the possibility of identifying sensitive information about individuals. For example, in medical data, sensitive information can be the fact that a particular patient suffers from HIV. In spatial data, sensitive information can be a specific location of an individual. In web surfing data, the information that a user browses certain websites may be considered sensitive. Consider a dataset containing some sensitive information is to be released to the public. In order to protect sensitive information, the simplest solution is not to disclose the information. However, this would be an overkill since it will hinder the process of data analysis over the data from which we can find interesting patterns. Moreover, in some applications, the data must be disclosed under the government regulations. Alternatively, the data owner can first modify the data such that the modified data can guarantee privacy and, at the same time, the modified data retains sufficient utility and can be released to other parties safely. This process is usually called as privacy-preserving data publishing. In this monograph, we study how the data owner can modify the data and how the modified data can preserve privacy and protect sensitive information. Table of Contents: Introduction / Fundamental Concepts / One-Time Data Publishing / Multiple-Time Data Publishing / Graph Data / Other Data Types / Future Research Directions

Connecting Women

Computers / By /
Connecting Women

Author: Valérie Schafer

Publisher: Springer

ISBN: 9783319208374

Category: Computers

Page: 174

View: 120

This important volume examines European perspectives on the historical relations that women have maintained with information and communication technologies (ICTs), since the telegraph. Features: describes how gendered networks have formed around ICT since the late 19th Century; reviews the gendered issues revealed by the conflict between the actress Ms Sylviac and the French telephone administration in 1904, or by ‘feminine’ blogs; examines how gender representations, age categories, and uses of ICT interact and are mutually formed in children’s magazines; illuminates the participation of women in the early days of computing, through a case study on the Rothamsted Statistics Department; presents a comparative study of women in computing in France, Finland and the UK, revealing similar gender divisions within the ICT professions of these countries; discusses diversity interventions and the part that history could (and should) play to ensure women do not take second place in specific occupational sectors.

Modern Survey Analysis

Business & Economics / By /
Modern Survey Analysis

Author: Walter R. Paczkowski

Publisher: Springer Nature

ISBN: 9783030762674

Category: Business & Economics

Page: 365

View: 662

This book develops survey data analysis tools in Python, to create and analyze cross-tab tables and data visuals, weight data, perform hypothesis tests, and handle special survey questions such as Check-all-that-Apply. In addition, the basics of Bayesian data analysis and its Python implementation are presented. Since surveys are widely used as the primary method to collect data, and ultimately information, on attitudes, interests, and opinions of customers and constituents, these tools are vital for private or public sector policy decisions. As a compact volume, this book uses case studies to illustrate methods of analysis essential for those who work with survey data in either sector. It focuses on two overarching objectives: Demonstrate how to extract actionable, insightful, and useful information from survey data; and Introduce Python and Pandas for analyzing survey data.

Programmed Inequality

Computers / By /
Programmed Inequality

Author: Mar Hicks

Publisher: MIT Press

ISBN: 9780262535182

Category: Computers

Page: 354

View: 418

This “sobering tale of the real consequences of gender bias” explores how Britain lost its early dominance in computing by systematically discriminating against its most qualified workers: women (Harvard Magazine) In 1944, Britain led the world in electronic computing. By 1974, the British computer industry was all but extinct. What happened in the intervening thirty years holds lessons for all postindustrial superpowers. As Britain struggled to use technology to retain its global power, the nation’s inability to manage its technical labor force hobbled its transition into the information age. In Programmed Inequality, Mar Hicks explores the story of labor feminization and gendered technocracy that undercut British efforts to computerize. That failure sprang from the government’s systematic neglect of its largest trained technical workforce simply because they were women. Women were a hidden engine of growth in high technology from World War II to the 1960s. As computing experienced a gender flip, becoming male-identified in the 1960s and 1970s, labor problems grew into structural ones and gender discrimination caused the nation’s largest computer user—the civil service and sprawling public sector—to make decisions that were disastrous for the British computer industry and the nation as a whole. Drawing on recently opened government files, personal interviews, and the archives of major British computer companies, Programmed Inequality takes aim at the fiction of technological meritocracy. Hicks explains why, even today, possessing technical skill is not enough to ensure that women will rise to the top in science and technology fields. Programmed Inequality shows how the disappearance of women from the field had grave macroeconomic consequences for Britain, and why the United States risks repeating those errors in the twenty-first century.

Communities of Computing

Computers / By /
Communities of Computing

Author: Thomas J. Misa

Publisher: Morgan & Claypool

ISBN: 9781970001860

Category: Computers

Page: 422

View: 254

Communities of Computing is the first book-length history of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), founded in 1947 and with a membership today of 100,000 worldwide. It profiles ACM's notable SIGs, active chapters, and individual members, setting ACM's history into a rich social and political context. The book's 12 core chapters are organized into three thematic sections. "Defining the Discipline" examines the 1960s and 1970s when the field of computer science was taking form at the National Science Foundation, Stanford University, and through ACM's notable efforts in education and curriculum standards. "Broadening the Profession" looks outward into the wider society as ACM engaged with social and political issues - and as members struggled with balancing a focus on scientific issues and awareness of the wider world. Chapters examine the social turbulence surrounding the Vietnam War, debates about the women's movement, efforts for computing and community education, and international issues including professionalization and the Cold War. "Expanding Research Frontiers" profiles three areas of research activity where ACM members and ACM itself shaped notable advances in computing, including computer graphics, computer security, and hypertext. Featuring insightful profiles of notable ACM leaders, such as Edmund Berkeley, George Forsythe, Jean Sammet, Peter Denning, and Kelly Gotlieb, and honest assessments of controversial episodes, the volume deals with compelling and complex issues involving ACM and computing. It is not a narrow organizational history of ACM committees and SIGS, although much information about them is given. All chapters are original works of research. Many chapters draw on archival records of ACM's headquarters, ACM SIGs, and ACM leaders. This volume makes a permanent contribution to documenting the history of ACM and understanding its central role in the history of computing.