Category Archives: Home & Family

February 9, 2015 · 4:41 pm

Guadalupe River – Happy to Be Wet

When you live on a river, its lifecycle is of daily concern. The Guadalupe River in San Jose was dry in summer 2014 for the first time since we bought our house 18 years ago. California is in a major drought, with last month the first completely rainless January since 1849 (presumably, when record keeping started).

We are now in our second rainstorm of the winter. The Guadalupe riparian corridor is home to a wide variety of wild animals which are dependent on its water and ecosystem. Some of the larger creatures we see regularly in our garden include: Jerusalem Cricket (Stenopelmatus), garter snake (Thamnophis), Alligator lizard (Elgaria coerulea), American swallowtail butterfly caterpillar (Papilio polyxenes), arboreal salamander (Aneides lugubris), California Slender Salamander (Batrachoseps attenuatus), Horsehair worm (Nematomorpha), as well as the more common ducks, geese, song birds, humming birds, hawks, vultures, raccoons, opossums, cats, skunks, and squirrels (grey, black, and gold). The river is also home to both steelhead trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) and chinook or king salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha). I am sure they are as happy as we are to be wet this week!

Here is what the Guadalupe looked like yesterday from the bridge at Alma/Lelong:

Roughly the same views five months ago (September 2014):

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Tagged as garden, San Jose, Willow Glen

February 6, 2015 · 5:25 pm

TechWomen Delegation to South Africa

I am still catching up from my trip to South Africa with the TechWomen Delegation. Some of the highlights for me of this inspiring trip to Johannesburg, Pretoria, Cape Town and nearby Townships were spending time in a professional workshop or coaching session with girls and women, particularly at the Phateng Secondary School (in Mamelodi, Pretoria), TheBarn incubator (in Khayelitsha, Cape Town), and at the African Institute of Mathematical Sciences (in Muizenberg, Cape Town) where I was honored to give a talk on mentoring. It was a great pleasure to spend the week with the other two 2011 TechWomen Alumnae in the SA Delegation – my dear friends Sukaina Al-Nasrawi and Maysoun Ibrahim. We have not seen each other in-person since Jessica and I visited them in Beirut in 2012.

Eileen Brewer and I gave away dozens of “TechWomen Emerging Leaders from Africa and the Middle East” posters and card decks (now for sale!) – often in a brief formal presentation at the end of the Delegation’s visit. We hope that these educational materials will continue to inspire women in their technical aspirations for many years to come. This trip marks the farthest South I have ever been!

Our Delegation was all technical professional women with the addition of two brave husbands!

108 Technical Role Models and Mentors

As of January 2015, these cards and posters are available for sale on Notable Technical Women.

I am proud to present 108 role models and mentors. Each of these technical women has earned her place through remarkable accomplishments and experience:

54 Notable Women in Computing who are pioneers or have received multiple, high-level awards from more than one institution (such as being named an ACM Fellow, IEEE Fellow, elected to a National Academy, or receiving the Turing Award).
54 TechWomen Emerging Leaders (2011-2014, from 16 countries in the Middle East and Africa) – alumnae of the US State Department, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs mentoring program hosted in Silicon Valley annually.

You may know that after selling out the first edition of Notable Women playing cards at the Hopper Conference, Dr. Susan Rodger (Computer Science, Duke University), Jessica Dickinson Goodman, and I created the Notable Women in Computing Kickstarter, which was crowd funded by generous backers at five times our original asking. Since then, Jessica has ably managed our production and shipping. Card decks and posters shipped last month to not only our backers but also to 500 educators around the world (USA, Netherlands, Scotland, Nigeria, Lebanon, New Zealand, India…). We are now getting many photos of the cards and posters “in the wild” from teachers and schools, companies, and even from honorees. Susan and Jessica and I are discussing our next steps for the project, since we are still getting new requests for decks and posters. Jessica is setting up an ecommerce site for future purchases and new customers. More news on that soon…

“Notable Women in Computing” has also inspired many daughter projects – including the “TechWomen Emerging Leaders” poster and card decks (for which Jessica was also the designer!) – now in production to go to South Africa for the TechWomen Delegation next week.

A role model is a person whose behavior, example, or success is emulated by others, especially by younger people. That is, a role model can inspire without ever communicating directly with the person whose life they have touched. Mentors, on the other hand, advise and inspire directly. In short, practical terms:

Mentors make introductions.
Mentors give recommendations to resources.
Mentors give feedback for the mentee to consider.

I am lucky to know many of the 108 women honored here personally. My respect for this group could not be higher. Most of the “Notable Women in Computing” group have been role models and mentors to generations of students and rising professionals. When I have served on the selection committees for TechWomen Emerging Leaders, one of the most common hopes I read in their application essays is for an opportunity to give back to their community and to help girls learn to use and love technology. I have also heard this aspiration over and over from my own amazing TechWomen mentees.

Please help spread the news of these amazing technical leaders. In August 2013, I wrote about Getting Beyond Marie Curie – developing information and awareness about other great women tole models. Here are 108.

Both Posters: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 U.S. License

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Filed under Home & Family, Hopper - Anita Borg Institute, Mentoring & Other Business, News & Reviews

Tagged as Africa, Algeria, Cameroon, Egypt, Jessica, Jordan, Kenya, Lebanon, Libya, Mentoring, Middle East, Morocco, Nigeria, Palestine, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, South Africa, technical women, TechWomen, Tunisia, Yemen, Zimbabwe

December 28, 2014 · 4:38 pm

New Playing Cards Honoring Women of Africa and the Middle East

As of January 2015, these cards are available for sale on Notable Technical Women.

Adla Mahmoud Chatila – Lebanon	.	Nezha Larhrissi Taghi – Morocco
Patience Mthunzi – South Africa	.	Arwa Yahia Al-Eryani – Yemen
Maysoun Ibrahim – Palestine	.	Josephine Kamanthe Ndambuki – Kenya

TechWomen Mentor Eileen Brewer, Jessica Dickinson Goodman and I are partnering with Arezoo Miot (IIE TechWomen Director), Jill Finlayson and Julia Lovin (Council Co-Chairs of the TechWomen Alumnae Organization, and TechWomen Mentors) to create a new playing card deck honoring 54 of the remarkable TechWomen Emerging Leaders – from 16 countries in the Middle East and Africa since 2011. We are building on the success and structure of the “Notable Women in Computing Card Deck” that Jessica and I developed with Professor Susan Rodger (Duke University) to develop this new deck honoring global women of STEM.

TechWomen is a professional mentorship and exchange program developed in response to President Obama’s efforts to strengthen relations between the United States and the Middle East and North Africa.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton first announced the TechWomen initiative on April 28, 2010 during President Obama’s Entrepreneurship Summit. In June 2011, TechWomen launched with 37 participants from Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, and the Palestinian Territories. In 2012, the program expanded to include women from Tunsia and Yemen. In 2013, the cohort doubled in size with the addition of women from Cameroon, Kenya, Libya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, South Africa, and Zimbabwe.

TechWomen is an initiative of the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.
TechWomen – Who We Are

The card design above is Jessica’s first draft proposal – still under discussion! It honors my 2012 TechWomen mentee and friend: Adla Chatila of Lebabon. This project is a labor of love for the women behind it, which is why we are licensing the card deck under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 U.S. License. We will make $0 profit from this project. We are still discussing how to fund production.

Thanks to the 70+ TechWomen Emerging Leaders who have already submitted their information to be considered for inclusion. I am very much enjoying my email communications with this inspiring and energetic group as we develop this exciting new project!

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December 21, 2014 · 2:32 pm

Art Trust

My mother, Eleanor Creekmore Dickinson, has been an artist all of her life, including teaching for decades as the Professor of Life Drawing (and Gallery Management Program Director) at the renowned California College of the Arts (in Oakland and San Francisco). She has been creating in one medium or another pretty much daily since she knowingly composed her first photograph in 1941 at the age of ten. Even though she sells pieces regularly, this still makes for a huge collection of artwork – many thousands of framed and unframed works (mostly on paper or fabric). After my father Wade Dickinson passed away in 2011, we moved Eleanor and her art from San Francisco to San Jose.

For the last year, I have been working with my mother and brothers Pete and Mark, advised by an Estate CPA and an Estate Planning Attorney as well as experts in art, to set up a charitable Art Trust to maintain and manage my mother’s collection. Art is very complex in terms of taxes and valuation, and we want to get this business sorted out while our mother can be actively involved. I was very happy to finally get most of the Eleanor Dickinson Art Trust paperwork signed last week.

In addition to managing the business side of Eleanor Dickinson’s work, we also want her art to be exhibited – to be seen and enjoyed and not just kept in storage. However, even setting up a small local art show takes weeks of work for both the artist (or her family) and the gallery, museum, or exhibit space. Many shows require special framing, shipping, documentation, and insurance, all of which take time and money. We know from experience it can take many years of negotiations to donate an art collection to a museum or university. Within my mother’s larger collection, there are many sub-collections, including: Old Testament drawings, dream pictures, crucifixion velvets, animal portraits, plus drawings and photos and artifacts associated with Revival! and her other big traveling exhibits. We have set up the new Art Trust so that sales of art can pay the insurance and exhibit costs for the collection long-term. We hope that our mother will be creating new art for many years to come. We are doing our best to care for it!

Images Copyright Eleanor Creekmore Dickinson 1975, and Katy Dickinson 2013-2014

What I will miss about my long commute

As of tomorrow, I am no longer commuting 1-1/2 hours each way over the fifty miles up the San Francisco peninsula from San Jose. San Francisco and San Jose have the negative distinction of being two of the top ten worst traffic areas in the USA. While I rejoice to have that part of my life back, surprisingly, I find that I will miss some aspects of the terrible commute. I will miss…

Spending three hours every day with my husband. John is the Principle Architect in Seagate’s San Francisco office. We sometimes take CalTrain but mostly we drive together. Usually during the drive, I am reading aloud to John from Hillary Clinton’s Hard Choices, or from the Bible as part of my EfM homework, or interesting stories from the news of the day.
Seeing funny cars on the freeway – like this huge flatbed with a tiny toy truck strapped on.
Rainbows at dawn.
Watching from the train for developments in the homeless encampment by the tracks.

Notable Woman in Computing Duy-Loan Le

I was honored to talk with Duy-Loan Le in San Francisco yesterday about mentoring, and about the Notable Women in Computing playing card and poster project in which she is one of the 54 honorees. You can read updates about the ongoing “Notable Women” production on my daughter Jessica’s webpage and on our Kickstarter page.

Duy-Loan Le is a wise and very successful person and technical leader. I have heard her story several times in keynote speeches: her life and remarkable accomplishments are inspiring. Duy-Loan Le’s second edition card reads:

Senior Fellow-Texas Instruments, WITI Hall of Fame, ABI Women of Vision, Golden Torch Award for Exemplary Citizenship in the Vietnamese American community.
For contributions to Digital Signal Processor microelectronics technology, and as the 1st woman and 1st Asian TI Senior Fellow.

Thanks to Everwise Founder and CEO Mike Bergelson for taking our picture!

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Filed under Home & Family, Hopper - Anita Borg Institute, Mentoring & Other Business, News & Reviews

Tagged as Mentoring, San Francisco, technical women

Category Archives: Home & Family

Guadalupe River – Happy to Be Wet

TechWomen Delegation to South Africa

108 Technical Role Models and Mentors

New Playing Cards Honoring Women of Africa and the Middle East

Art Trust

What I will miss about my long commute

Notable Woman in Computing Duy-Loan Le

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