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Yesterday I was in London for a BCSWomen Committee meeting, followed by an evening workshop called “My Brilliant Career“. It was a change from the normal BCSWomen workshop format (talk, drinks & networking, talk, drinks & networking) as we started with a very hands-on workshop on career planning from Christine Alexander Smith (who was high up in IBM and is now running http://www.diversity-coaching.info/) & Gillian Arnold (who was high up in IBM and is now running Tectre). This workshop was great – properly interactive, with NO POWERPOINT!!. They got us to consider what we actually wanted from our careers and how we might go aboutRead More →

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In psychology, there’s a classic study of mental rotation. In this, you get an example shape and some other shapes, and you have to work out which are the same as the example. The first rotation study was done by Roger Shepard and Jacqueline Metzler back in 1971. The technique is used to show various things – it appears that the time we take to match a shape is proportional to the angle we’d have to rotate it through. Which suggests that we are, indeed, rotating the image in our head. So, we may well have images in our heads (rather than “features”, or otherRead More →

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Thursday 14 April saw the fourth BCSWomen Undergraduate Lovelace Colloquium at The University of Birmingham. As you might know, as regular readers of this blog, I started the BCSWomen Lovelace in 2008 and ran it for the first two years. Now it moves around the country and I act as a kind of “programme chair”, organising the event alongside local staff. The talks The speakers for the day were all, without exception, brilliant. I’m not just saying that – I have read the event feedback forms and it’s true:-) We started with a keynote from Professor Angela Sasse of UCL, who talked about security andRead More →

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The 2011 BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium is shaping up to be a great one – we’ve just had confirmation from Google of an extra prize in the poster contest. The best poster by a first year student will get the Google excellence award (£500). So if you know any first year women students of computing, get them to write a 250 word abstract by 18 Feb to enter. Poster contest details can be found here, on the Birmingham University site (they’re the hosts). If anyone has any questions, just leave me a comment or drop me an email.

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The 2011 BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium will be held at Birmingham University on April 14th this year. As usual the centrepiece of the day will be a poster contest for women students of computing to show off their own work. If you’re a female undergrad in the UK, ENTER!! because It’s fun They only want a 250 word abstract now, and 250 words is nothing If they like your 250 words you can put “Finalist in national contest for women undergraduates” on your CV, which looks brilliant You’ll get your transportation costs paid for1 You might win some cash You’ll get to meet loads of otherRead More →

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I realised recently that whilst I know quite a bit about job interviews in the academic world (indeed, a little more than I’d like) I am quite in the dark about the situation in industry. So I put a call out on the fabulous BCSWomen list for more information and got a mailbox full of interesting and insightful responses. I’ve collated these into a a PDF that you can find here (suitably anonymised). The executive summary? Well, if you’re going for a graduate position you can expect a day or more of assessment, which will include an interview of an hour or more and aRead More →

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The weekend before last was WTech Cymru – a one day conference for women-in-tech-in-Wales. You might think that’s a small potential audience, what with “Women in Tech” being a small group, and Wales being a small country, but it was really rather well attended. I think there were about 100 people there (maybe 80? I’m not sure). It seemed a strong turnout for Lampeter on a cold bright November morning, anyway.  Aberystwyth Uni sent over 9 people (we nearly made double figures), which was great – 3 staff, and 6 undergrads. Speakers included me (yeah!), Miki Burgess from Glamorgan Uni (no I don’t  know whyRead More →

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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 IRead More →

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I went to ITiCSE 09 last week in Paris, along with Karen Petrie from BCSWomen. Rog joined us for a day, which was great. Our talk was on opinions of women in computing – we ran a survey on women at the Lovelace and Hopper events last year and tried to work out what it was about successful women in computing (i.e., those doing PhDs or degrees or similar) that made them interested. One great outcome of the conference is that we made contacts with people in Turkey and in the USA who thought our study was interesting enough to run in their countries –Read More →