Pico Aves

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• December 3, 2003, on Women in Computing:

  I am a woman who started out with computers at the age of 16, and took vocational courses on programming COBOL in high school in 1982. I grew with computers, writing batch files, organizing hard drives, etc. However, no one believed me on job interviews. I have taken technical classes on hardware. I know the OSI model. I can normalize databases, write programs in VB, and wrote macros, and designed spreadsheets long before it became popular, but I did these as a free service to my employer. Who, barely acknowledged, and yet continue to require this tasks performed every time a computer broke, or had problems. I decided that in order to be convincing on job interviews, and to get the job title to go along with my skills, that I needed a degree. It seemd that nobody believed I knew what I said I knew, and I got accused of lying on my resume. Now I am in college and I am taking a lot of math classes and working towards a CS degree. At first, when I went to get my degree pl...

• December 3, 2003, on Women in Computing:

  Women visualize also. Remember! a lot of women are interior decoraters, artists, and designers. We live in the visual world most of the time. We know how to spatialy balance things. We are concerned with shapes. In art, the main thing to learn is to take a 3-dimensional landscape and put it on a 2-dimensional canvas, but learn tricks to still make it look 3-d. We deal with dimensions more than we are given credit for. We work with 2d objects such as circles and learn to creat spheres out of them. We also learn the art of makiing a triangle into a cone. This is not new to us. What men don't understand, is that we are very aware of how we cannot show off our knowledge without getting dirty looks from men. So, most of the time, we keep quiet. Do not take our silence as a lack of not knowing. We keep our knowledge to ourself, instead of wearing it on our sleeve. That does not mean it is not there. I have noticed in my math classes, most of the men will yell out answers a...

• December 3, 2003, on Women in Computing:

  Speaking of visualization, women also think with pictures too. When a person says, "beach" I snapshot of the beach pops into my head instantly, with aquamarine water, white sand, and palm trees. I don't think this is special to men only. When somebody mentions the table of the elements, the chart appears in my head, with most of the elements in the right place. There are a few along the bottom I don't remember. You know how in the sci-fi movies, when a holographic map pops up. The table of the elements pop up for me. And, in addition to learning how to do integrals and derivatives from scratch and learning the concepts behind them, I also accidentally have a "snap shot" of the chart from the back of the book in my head. I have been trying not to memorize stuff, but it just goes in without my permission. I focus on the concepts. Why is it so hard for men to believe that we actually understand it. I have gotten comments like, "but you don't really understand it, you jus...

• December 10, 2003, on Women in Computing:

  I noticed in a lot of postings by men, they continue to speak for women. Why doesn't somebody do a survey, and just ASK women how they feel, instead of TELLING us how we feel. Sure, there are women who are not interested in computers but there are also a lot of men not interested in computers/math either. Sometimes I can't believe my ears when I hear men say, "it's easy for men and hard for women." I have heard many men talk about how hard the math and java classes are when speakiing "in general" thinking they are amongst men or referring to men. But then, when the subject comes up of men vs. women, the same men then turn around and contradict themselves and pretend it's not hard for them, but just hard for women. (It sounds like this when no gender is involved, and I hear male students in the hallway talking like this everyday.) Man1: "those upper level classes are hard" Man2: "oh yeah, I had to take calculus 3 times." Man1: "That's why technical fields get paid mor...