Today’s Ada Lovelace Day, a day when people across the world will be writing blog posts about women in technology that they admire. It also represents a year of this blog, as I started on Ada Lovelace Day last year with a post about Sue Black.
My choice for today’s celebration of women-in-tech is my friend Julie Greensmith. She’s a lecturer in computing at Nottingham, doing research into artificial immune systems and into the nature of thrill. This second research direction has her covering people in electrodes, pointing cameras at them, and sticking them on roller coasters. All in the name of science. When I last spoke with her she was talking about buying a bucking bronco for the lab. YAY SCIENCE!
I invited Julie up to give a talk at the 2009 BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium (that’s where the picture comes from), and she’s spoken at the Royal Institution for womenintechnology.co.uk, and I’ve heard nothing but praise for both talks. She’s a great person to invite if you want an inspiring woman speaker, and if you’re lucky, she’ll show some video of a journalist screaming on a rollercoaster.
She also juggles, snowboards, plays about three hundred different musical instruments, and is great company. And she’s been called “Dr Thrill” in the national press, which you have to agree is very cool indeed. So here’s to Jools and many years of inspiring women scientists to come.
Posted on March 13, 2010, 6:31 pm, by admin, under France.
I’ve been getting quite into the rugby lately. It’s the wrong kind of rugby, obviously, and the whole “line up and throw the ball in” thing still confuses me a bit, but it’s good fun to watch down the pub and there’s a good chance that France might win the tournament. I got chatting to a woman during the France v. Ireland match who mentioned that there was going to be a live match between the Italian and French under-20s teams in Grenoble, and that it was free for women (!), so of course I said yes when she offered to get me a ticket.
Fast-forward a few weeks and I’d assumed that the opportunity had evaporated, like so many pub-based opportunities, but two days ago I got an email saying if I wanted my ticket for the Friday night match I should be in a particular square at 1915. So of course I said “Oui merci!”. But… upon arriving at the square, I discovered that it was full of people, many of whom were under 10. I hovered on the fringes of the crowd for a bit, straining to see if there was anyone I recognised (I had, of course, forgotten the woman’s name by now…) and generally played the lost English person. Eventually she spotted me and handed over the ticket, and we all moved off in convoy towards the ground. It turns out that all the local Rugby clubs had also been given free tickets and that’s who I was with – a junior rugby club. Oh my god can those children make a lot of noise. Good fun though. Here’s a video of some of the march to the stade des alpes – warning, you probably want to turn the sound down:
The pre-match entertainment included Les Pompom Girls du Stade des Alpes, a hugely irritating DJ bloke, and a brass band. DJ bloke came on to annoy us all at half time too. The match itself was a bit scrappy – lots of silly mistakes – but that’s to be expected from the under-20s teams I guess.
Posted on March 1, 2010, 2:17 pm, by admin, under France, OIWCIT.
Number 9 in a series of N…
This photo was taken by my mum in Galleries Lafayette in Paris. Apparently “Acne” is upscale designer clothes, and you can find it between Stella McCartney and Vivienne Westwood. Heh.
