KatysBlog

October 13, 2010 · 8:57 pm

Flying Quadricopter at Huawei

Jim Hughes, Fellow and Chief Architect, Cloud Computing, at the Huawei Santa Clara Research Center, brought his Parrot quadricopter to work earlier this week. There are large sections of metal-and-fabric cube walls on our floor so the little flying device had lots of free space to buzz around. While the charge lasted, Jim and his technical development team took turns controlling it using an iPad and the Parrot’s built-in cameras. The staff had bemused or delighted expressions as they watched the expensive toy zooming down the walkways, over their heads, and blowing papers off of desks.

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Tagged as Huawei

October 9, 2010 · 10:45 pm

Secretary Clinton Speaks on Mentoring

I was very impressed with the remarks given by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton at Fortune’s “12th Annual Most Powerful Women Summit” on 6 October 2010 in Washington D.C. Her powerful support for mentoring, particularly for women and girls, was inspiring. The full text of her talk is on the blog secretaryclinton.wordpress.com. One passage of Secretary Clinton’s speech that I found moving:

I am a firm believer in the power of mentoring. There are women and girls in our country and around the world who have the talent, the intellect, the drive to succeed, but who lack the support. I have become convinced that talent is universal, but opportunity is not. And you never know when what you do or say can open that door to opportunity for someone who is ready to walk through it, but could not get under, around, or over it without your help. And still in too many places, support for women is in short supply. But through mentoring, we can help meet that need. And it’s low-cost, high-impact, and deeply rewarding.

I was happy that in her 6 October speech, Secretary Clinton talked about the new TechWomen Program. Telle Whitney of the Anita Borg Institute (ABI) recently announced at the 10th Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing that the TechWomen mentoring initiative will be administered by the Institute of International Education and its West Coast Center in San Francisco, in partnership with ABI. Secretary Clinton said:

Now, we are just beginning a new initiative called TechWomen that I announced in April during the President’s Entrepreneurship Summit here in Washington. Through TechWomen, we will match women in Muslim-majority countries with women working in tech companies here in the U.S. And we will send American mentors to their protégés’ countries to engage on a wider scale with the people there. We obviously want to harness one of America’s great strengths – our excellence in technology and innovation – and use it to build effective and lasting partnerships with rising women leaders in Muslim countries. And I invite you to participate in that.

As a member of the Advisory Board of ABI for over five years, I am so pleased that ABI is able to partner in the administration of the TechWomen Program.

Two publications about mentoring which I recommend to those who want to know more about this powerful tool for change:

Sun Mentoring: 1996-2009 By Katy Dickinson, Tanya Jankot, and Helen Gracon (Sun Laboratories Technical Report TR-2009-185), 2009

Intelligent Mentoring: How IBM Creates Value through People, Knowledge, and Relationships By Audrey J. Murrell, Sheila Forte-Trammell, Diana A. Bing (IBM Press), 2008

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Tagged as Mentoring, Middle East, technical women, TechWomen

October 9, 2010 · 9:27 pm

Blessing the Animals on St. Francis’ day

Last week at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church (Saratoga, CA), we had our annual blessing of the animals for St. Francis’ day. We sang hymns appropriate to the day:

All things bright and beautiful…

For the beauty of the earth…

All creatures of our God and King…

We said the prayer attributed to St. Francis:

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace;
where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon:
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope
where there is darkness, light
where there is sadness, joy
O Divine Master,
grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;
to be understood, as to understand;
to be loved, as to love;
for it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life. Amen.

We said the Collect for the Feast of St. Francis:

Most high, omnipotent, good Lord, grant your people grace to renounce gladly the vanities of this world; that, following the way of blessed Francis, we may for love of you delight in your whole creation with perfectness of joy; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

John and I brought our cockatiel birds Guapo and Sparky in their domed cage. They were very interested and flirted amiably with many children. The biggest animals to be blessed were a team of draft horses; the smallest was a red betta fish. The congregation loves to bring their dogs and cats and rabbits and other pets to church this one day. Running the service around animals’ needs and noises is challenging but it is a joyous day for all.

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Tagged as birds, cats, Dogs, John, St. Andrew's Episcopal Church

October 9, 2010 · 6:46 pm

We Bought a Fire Hydrant

Saturdays are a good time to see what our Willow Glen neighbors have for sale. Garage and yard and estate sales are advertised with brightly colored hand-made signs on street corners, with arrows pointing the way. I often buy flower pots, small antiques, baskets, kitchen stuff, plants, tools, and holiday decorations.

Today, we bought a fire hydrant from a neighbor on Willow Street. It looks old, is very heavy, and says “Greenberg San Francisco” on the top. (I just learned that Morris Greenberg was the inventor of the “California” wet barrel fire hydrant. Learn more at Greenberg fire hydrants.) I plan to put the hydrant in my cactus garden. Here is a picture:

The neighbor had a pigeon feeder in his orange tree. Every time we came too near, there was a great whoosh as the flock flew onto his roof to safety. The birds would wander around on the roof for a minute, then line up on the edge to see when we would move away from their seed.

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Tagged as birds, garden, San Francisco, San Jose, Willow Glen

October 7, 2010 · 10:31 pm

Academic Honors

My daughter Jessica has recently received two academic honors:

Selected as a 2011 Andrew Carnegie Society Scholar – an award given annually to 40 seniors from across Carnegie Mellon University
Accepted as a CMU 5th Year Scholar – this program provides an opportunity for a small number of exceptional students to remain on campus for one full year following the completion of their normal course of study

Jessica is an Ethics, History and Public Policy major, with a minor in Vocal Performance, and a concentration in Middle Eastern Languages. You can see Jessica’s introductory video about what she plans to do with her 5th undergraduate year on her blog. She recorded it from Qatar where she studied during her Junior year while taking classes at CMU-Q and the Georgetown University of Foreign Service. Did I mention I am proud of my girl? Did I? Did I? (I bet you guessed…)

Here is Jessica with the awesome and inspiring Dr. Duy-Loan Le (Texas Instruments’ Senior Fellow) at the the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing last week:

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Tagged as CMU, Jessica, Middle East, Qatar, technical women

October 7, 2010 · 9:00 pm

Making it Right

One of my professional credentials is that I am a Six Sigma Master Black Belt. (This means I know about quality management, not that I am a martial artist.) One of the truisms of quality management is that if you mess up for a customer, making it right can strengthen your relationship with that customer.

I experienced this myself last week, during the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing with my order from OvernightPrints. I have been in too many panels or presentations when someone refers to a helpful resource and very few of the audience successfully record that information. At best, this results in plaintive repeated audience requests for the speaker to give the reference information again (“What was that title you mentioned?” “Please repeat that phone number.” “You said h-t-t-p-:-/-/-w-w-w and then what came next?”). At worst, everyone just misses out. For my Hopper Conference panel “Advancing Your Career Through Awards”, I wanted to do better.

I ordered regular business cards printed with our panel’s key reference information. The cards were supposed to arrive the day before the panel so there would be time to distribute in advance. I paid a great deal extra to be sure of timely arrival. The promised day came and went with no cards, despite repeated and increasingly urgent phone calls by me to OvernightPrints. The cards did finally arrive, less than an hour before my panel started. This was unneeded aggravation and caused me to spend time on the phone rather than fully participating in several Hopper Conference events. The cards were a hit but we distributed only half of the number I had printed because of delayed arrival.

When I returned home from Atlanta, Georgia, I called OvernightPrints. They apologized, which was not good enough. After discussion, they ended up refunding the shipping charges, accepting back and giving me a refund for the cards we could not distribute (they paid for the unused cards to be shipped back), and giving me a discount against future orders. OvernightPrints made it right and kept my business.

Here is what the cards looked like:

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Tagged as Six Sigma, technical women

October 6, 2010 · 11:22 pm

10th Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC10)

Think of how it feels to smooth on pleasant-smelling hand lotion after a long day outside in the winter. Or, how it feels to swallow a cool drink after hours in the hot sun. That delightful sensation of rehydration, of filling in the gaps, is a little like how it feels for a technical woman to attend the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. All year long, every meeting in which I am the only woman is a small dessication, a little drying out. By autumn, I am so ready to spend three fulfilling days in the company of thousands of intelligent, capable, technical women from academia, industry, and government.

The 10th Hopper Conference was held in Atlanta, Georgia. This is the 2nd year that GHC was sold out months in advance. There were 2,147 Attendees (964 Students), from 29 Countries, and 436 Speakers. I chaired a panel on “Advancing Your Career Through Awards”. My daughter Jessica (a Senior at Carnegie Mellon University) presented a poster on Other People’s Money, called- “OPM: How to Get the Funding You Need to Do the Work You Love”. Jessica and I have been attending the Hopper Conference together for the last four years.

About my panel:

Panelists:
Katy Dickinson (Huawei Technologies), Panel Chair
Frances E. Allen (IBM)
Marcy Alstott (Hewlett-Packard)
Lucinda M Sanders (NCWIT – National Center for Women & Information Technology)
Robert Walker (Kent State University)
Manuela M. Veloso (Carnegie Mellon University)

Panel Description:
There are hundreds of awards available to women in computing. In industry, promotions and high-status titles can serve the same function as awards. Some organizations offer higher pay, public acknowledgment, or seniority to winners of major awards. What difference does it make if you get an award? How do we ensure that more women students, professionals, and academics will get into the queue and on the lists of those honored?

What’s the Hopper Conference all about?

Teaching

Sharing Experience, Knowledge, Resources

Learning

Connections, Building Networks

Inside your company

To the worldwide technical community

Honoring Achievements

Fun!

Two of the most inspiring presentations during this excellent conference were the keynote talk by Dr. Duy-Loan Le, Texas Instruments’ Senior Fellow, and Dr. Fernanda Viegas, Google Research Scientist, speaking on “Politics to Art: Visualization as a Medium”. We also heard from Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz and many other remarkable women. We danced, visited the Georgia Tech Usability Labs, and had a party with whale sharks at the Georgia Aquarium. It was great – I came back to work full of new knowledge, refreshed, and motivated.

Here are some GHC10 pictures: