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March

March 2009

Why microblog when you can IRC?

I've been meaning to answer Glyph for a while:

Maybe the reason I don't "get" this Twitter thing is I've been using IRC for much the same purpose for a decade, and the UI is better.

Finally I have an excuse, that is, I wrote it up in someone else's blog comments and can just lift it and edit it here. I have a feeling that I am cheating by using more than 140 characters though.

Advantages of microblogging over IRC:

  • it's easier to find out where the cool kids are playing; (Do you think Stephen Fry or even Sarah Haskins would tell me where their IRC channels of choice are? Me neither.)
  • I do not sign up for a whole 'channel' in its entirety, with an entire social group, ongoing conversations and complicated social conventions in order to microblog; and
  • it's not real-time. I am basically the person email was designed for. I do not real-time. Even people I talk to when forced can vouch for this.

Bonus advantage over Facebook status updates: following my microblog does not require that we are friends, or even 'friends'. You can just read them. I do not thereby have to share my high school graduation date and pictures of my hypothetical cat with you. (That said, I am now going to create a Facebook album entitled 'my hypothetical cat'.)

Disadvantages of microblogging over IRC:

  • yeah, the clients suck;
  • when I do get in a conversation with someone(s) I am limited to 140 character messages (plus boring any onlookers), or figuring out how to switch media; and
  • the overhead of a social group and ongoing conversations do have some benefits: I'm more likely to admire someone's wit and insight from IRC (or their blog) than from Twitter or identi.ca.

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Ada Lovelace Day profile: Allison Randal

Let’s create new role models and make sure that whenever the question “Who are the leading women in tech?” is asked, that we all have a list of candidates on the tips of our tongues... To take part All you need to do is... pick your tech heroine and then publish your blog post any time on Tuesday 24th March 2009. It doesn’t matter how new or old your blog is, what gender you are, what language you blog in, or what you normally blog about - everyone is invited.

This is a profile of a woman in technology for Ada Lovelace Day.

Creative Commons License
Allison Randal (Three photos) by Miles Sabin, Piers Cawley, Paul Fenwick, Mary Gardiner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License.

Allison Randal is the chief architect of the Parrot virtual machine, which, I have just now discovered, had their 1.0.0 release a week ago today. I've known of Parrot for a long time, because of its posited relationship with the Python programming language (see the original April Fool's joke), but I didn't know much about the project beyond it being a VM until Randal's linux.conf.au 2008 talk (see slides, Ogg Theora video, Ogg Speex audio).

I am not a Perl programmer and Randal is mostly known within the Perl (and OSCON, see below) communities, but Randal's talk at linux.conf.au 2008 was the most memorable for me: she talked about bringing modern compilation ideas to the Free Software programming languages community, and then about the architecture of Parrot and the various intermediate languages it is possible to target.

The most striking thing about Randal's work for me is that she combined high profile technical coding with deep community involvement (and technical writing). She is a past president and current board member of the Perl Foundation and chairs the talk selection for OSCON. In an ideal world I'd like to be able to straddle technical and technical community work in my own life, and Randal is one of the highest profile examples of this I know of.

Elsewhere: Randal's homepage, Randal's O'Reilly Radar blog, Randal's use.perl blog and Wikipedia.

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Ada Lovelace Day profile: Karen Spärck Jones

Let’s create new role models and make sure that whenever the question “Who are the leading women in tech?” is asked, that we all have a list of candidates on the tips of our tongues... To take part All you need to do is... pick your tech heroine and then publish your blog post any time on Tuesday 24th March 2009. It doesn’t matter how new or old your blog is, what gender you are, what language you blog in, or what you normally blog about - everyone is invited.

This is a profile of a woman in technology for Ada Lovelace Day.

Creative Commons License
Karen Spärck Jones by Markus Kuhn (modifications by Mary Gardiner) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Australia License.
Based on a work at commons.wikimedia.org.

I first heard about Karen Spärck Jones, who was a senior scientist in my field of computational linguistics, in 2007 as part of my paying job, which is as the editorial assistant for Computational Linguistics. Just before she died, Spärck Jones wrote Computational Linguistics: What About the Linguistics? which we published posthumously as the Last Words column for Vol. 33, No. 3. (Spärck Jones was aware both that she was dying and that her column was going to appear under the heading 'Last Words'.) I was never able to correspond with her directly: she died before we even had the camera ready copies done.

Spärck Jones's academic career began in 1957, and was funded entirely by grant money until 1994: most academics will recognise this as a hard way, requiring researchers to fund their own positions with grant money awarded in cycles.

Spärck Jones was the originator of the Inverse Document Frequency measure in information retrieval (1972, A statistical interpretation of term specificity and its application in retrieval., Journal of Documentation, 28:11–21) which is nearly ubiquitously used as part of the measure of the importance of various words contained in documents when searching for information. (The word 'the', for example, is very unimportant, as it occurs in essentially all documents, thus having high document frequency and low inverse document frequency.) She had a long history in experimental investigations of human language (most computational linguists are now in this business). She was also at one time president of the Association for Computation Linguistics.

Awards Spärck Jones won in her lifetime include Fellowships of the American and European Artificial Intelligence societies, Fellowship of the British Academy, the ACL Lifetime Achievement Award and the Lovelace Medal of the British Computer Society.

Elsewhere: Spärck Jones's obituary in Computational Linguistics and Wikipedia.

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Ada Lovelace Day wrap: the usual suspects

I use the usual suspects here in the sense of folks in my feed reader. Over the next couple of days I am going to look around more of the posts and pick out a set of favourites, focusing on women I've never heard of. In the meantime, here's the closer to home wrap.

I was profiled in a couple of places: by Jacinta Richardson in Ada Lovelace Day (with several others as described below), by Julie Gibson, the founder of Sydney LinuxChix, in Mary's Random Curiosity and in one private post.

Here's profiles pulled from my feeds, hopefully you find something and/or someone new.

Seen on Free Software planets (undoubtedly incomplete):

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Ada Lovelace Day wrap 2: Karen Spärck Jones elsewhere

Yes, this does mean that a third of these things is coming, but I wanted to point to some other profiles of Karen Spärck Jones, aside from my brief one. At least at the present time, she's on the first page of most profiled Ada Lovelace Day subjects. I was really pleased to learn more about this inspiring scientist.

Martin Belam has a long profile quoting extensively from Spärck Jones's interviews and speeches and focussing on both her own career progression: she worked with Margaret Masterman at the Cambridge Language Research Unit. "You have no conception of how narrow the career options were [for women]," is one of Belam's quotes. Another one of her stories reminds me of more recent stories Pia Waugh has told me about the resistance of parents playing a role in girls not choosing computing careers (these days it's apparently the perceived low earnings and limited career prospects of programmers from the point of view of ambitious parents, so at least something has changed):

We were trying to get at girls in schools [to take up computing] and we knew we had to get to the teachers first. We found that the spread of computing in the administrative and secretarial world has completely devalued it. When one of the teachers suggested to the parents of one girl that perhaps she should go into computing the parents said: 'Oh we don't want Samantha just to be a secretary'. That's nothing to do with nerdiness, but the fact that it's such a routine thing.

Bill Thompson was a student of Spärck Jones's, and writes about her influence on him as a fellow philosopher turned computer scientist. He also wrote her obituary for The Times (and, in 2003, that of her husband, fellow computer scientist Roger Needham).

IT journalist Brian Runciman remembers Spärck Jones as the most interesting woman he's ever interviewed in Computing's too important to be left to men. (I think it's very important to get more women into computing. My slogan is: Computing is too important to be left to men. seems to be Spärck Jones's best known quote.) In the interview with him, she talked about how her ideas permeate modern search engine implementations.

She scored smaller mentions from:

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Last modified: 26 March 2009