May 11, 2013 · 6:03 pm

Week of Technical Women

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For me, this past week was full of meetings and events for technical  and professional women:

I have been a member of the ABI Advisory Board since 2005 and I come from our meetings refreshed and energized. Work done by my ABI Advisory Board committee over the years includes:

The highlight of this inspiring and busy week was shaking hands with one of my long-time professional heroes, Genevieve Bell. I have heard Dr. Bell speak in person and have watched her TED talk on “The Value of Boredom”. I was very happy to speak with her, however briefly. Her Women of Vision – Leadership Award acceptance speech was funny and memorable. My summary tweet was: “You have a moral obligation to make a better world if you can see it. You can do more.”

Jody Mahoney (ABI), Rick Rashid (Microsoft Research), Maria Klawe (Harvey Mudd College) at WOV:
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Caroline Simard (Stanford), Denise Gammel (ABI) at WOV:
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Sarah Loos (Carnegie Mellon), Nanditha Iyer (Georgia Tech), Anushka Anand (Tableau Software), Bill Unger (Mayfield Fund) at WOV:
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WOV Winner for Leadership: Genevieve Bell, Director, Interaction and Experience Research, Intel Labs:
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Indian Business and Professional Women:
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Images Copyright 2013 by Katy Dickinson

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May 9, 2013 · 2:41 pm

Peninsula School – Grads Doing Well

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In 2007, I wrote the blog entry “Peninsula School – A Successful Alternative” about the school my daughter Jessica attended from age three through 8th grade. Last weekend, many of her Peninsula School alumni classmates gathered at the annual Spring Fair in Menlo Park, California, to celebrate their 10th anniversary.  Although they started at an alternative school with no grades or tests, she and her friends have done very well indeed.

Here is where they were in 2007:

  • Academy of Art University (San Francisco)
  • Bard College (Annandale-on-Hudson, NY)
  • California College of the Arts (San Francisco and Oakland, CA)
  • Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, PA) – Jessica
  • Colorado College (Colorado Springs, CO)
  • Foothill College (Los Altos Hills, CA) 2 going
  • Portland State (Portland, OR)
  • Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI, Troy, NY)
  • Stanford University (Stanford, CA) 2 going
  • Swarthmore College (Swarthmore, PA)
  • University of California at Berkeley (Berkeley, CA)
  • University of California at Davis (Davis, CA) 2 going
  • University of California at Santa Cruz (Santa Cruz, CA) 3 going
  • Wesleyan (Middletown, Connecticut)

What Jessica was able to discover about her class at their reunion:

  • Motion animation business founder
  • Social worker
  • Online outreach specialist for a national non-profit (Jessica)
  • Still at the university – studying abroad or in graduate school (at least six)
  • Serial Silicon Valley technical entrepreneur
  • User experience software designer
  • Photographer
  • Elementary school teacher
  • Ultimate frisbee – professional sports player
  • Deputy US Marshall
  • Financial professional in Buenos Aires, Argentina

Jessica was graduated in 2012 from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh PA, with college and university honors, Phi Beta Kappa. She is now working at Polaris Project in Washington DC.

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Jessica and I traveled in Jordan and Lebanon together in February 2013.  Here we are in Petra, Jordan:

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Images Copyright 2013 by Katy Dickinson

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May 7, 2013 · 5:24 pm

TechWomen Kickoff with Distinguished Visitors

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The TechWomen US State Department mentoring program based in the Silicon Valley for STEM women in the Middle East and Africa had its kickoff event last night. It was generously hosted by Juniper Networks in their impressive but really-very-hard-to-find Aspiration Dome in Sunnyvale, California.  The TechWomen panel was interesting and I enjoyed staffing one of the tables to answer questions from potential-newbies.  Such a joy to see so many mentor alumnae as well as new faces!

Today, MentorCloud, eCloset.me, and the Sunnyvale Plug and Play Center were honored to host a visit by distinguished guests, including:

You can see more about the PNP visit in my MentorCloud blog entry “Distinguished Visitors to MentorCloud”.

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Images Copyright 2013 by Katy Dickinson

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May 3, 2013 · 5:11 pm

Cottonwood Storm

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For the last two weeks our house and garden have been in the annual dancing seed storm from the female Cottonwood poplar trees along San Jose’s Guadalupe River. Thankfully, we are now almost done with blowing fuzz for the year. All of my cactus have fluff caught in their spines. I will be watering down the garden all weekend. At least the white seeds make it very obvious where the spider webs are – giving me a target for the hose.

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Images Copyright 2013 by Katy Dickinson

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April 26, 2013 · 1:38 pm

Business is Good When Traffic is Bad

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It is taking longer to get to work lately in the Silicon Valley – one of the signs that business is good! This is a global trend – not just my personal observation: you can see all of the measured patterns in the report “INRIX Traffic Scorecard Reports U.S. Congestion on the Rise in 2013 Following Two Years of Double-Digit Declines” (24 April 2013).

In the first three months of this year, traffic congestion is up 4 percent compared to 2012. This suggests that after a tumultuous economic year in 2012, the economy is back on the mend bringing increased traffic congestion.

Two of the “Top 10 Worst Cities for Traffic in America in 2012” in that report are in the Bay Area: San Francisco and San Jose. These are the only two cities on the list within 50 miles of each other.

Of course, being the Silicon Valley, we have to get our technology involved. You can see live Traffic Pattern Analysis – complete with color coding and webcams. Only a few of the backed up cars so far are Google Self-Driving vehicles but that will come in time.

Image Copyright 2013 by Katy Dickinson

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April 25, 2013 · 10:45 am

TechWomen and International Visitors at Home

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Yesterday, the TechWomen mentors gathered at my house in San Jose to cook a dinner for eleven guests from the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the Institute of International Education (IIE West Coast). Our guests arrived from Egypt, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. Here is more about the IVLP program:

IVLP at IIESF works to promote citizen diplomacy in the San Francisco Bay Area. Community supporters and IIE members are called “Citizen Diplomats” and promote international understanding through person-to-person interaction with emerging foreign leaders from around the globe. Through direct contact with these visitors, members have an opportunity to share unique aspects of the Bay Area and/or their professional field, while increasing the visitors’ understanding of local and national culture and institutions. In the past 53 years Citizen Diplomats have had direct dialogues with tens of thousands of emerging international leaders from more than 145 countries.

These particular ladies are part of WISE (Women’s Innovations in Science and Engineering), invited to the United States under the auspices of the Department of State’s International Visitor Leadership Program. Their program was arranged by World Learning.

The TechWomen prepared a delicious potluck dinner, I showed them WP 668, our backyard caboose where I have my office, John and Paul helped and served as local guides to the house and kitchen, and everyone had a delightful time talking and learning.  As always, I feel blessed in the community of my TechWomen sisters and look forward to our continued work together!

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Images Copyright 2013 by Katy Dickinson

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April 23, 2013 · 3:51 pm

Attack of the Towhee, De Quincey on Macbeth and Murder

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In my 2008 blog entry Obsessed Towhee, I reported on a little brown bird attacking our car windows here in Willow Glen. What is probably that bird’s grandson has started attacking the house windows and those of WP668, our backyard caboose. The stupid California Towhee apparently sees his reflection in the glass and feels called to defend his territory against the other bird by knocking with his beak, flinging himself at the window, and smearing it with bird dirt. Sigh.

The Towhee moves from window to window knocking. I feel like I am in a performance of Macbeth:

Whence is that knocking?
How is’t with me, when every noise appals me?

The only good side is that regular knocking lead me to read the Thomas De Quincey 1823 essay “On the Knocking at the Gate, in Macbeth”, which in turn lead me to De Quincey’s black humor essays “On Murder, as Considered One of the Fine Arts” and “Second Paper on Murder”, the source of the famous quote:

If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination. Once begin upon this downward path, you never know where you are to stop. Many a man has dated his ruin from some murder or other that perhaps he thought little of at the time.

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Images Copyright 2013 by Katy Dickinson

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