Tag Archives: Jessica

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:

Award-Winning Career Timelines In Computer Science and Engineering, GHC2010

A recent Anita Borg Institute press release starts out: “A conversation with Fran Allen held several years ago has blossomed into a new career resource women in technology. This is to announce the availability of the Anita Borg Institutes’ “Award-winning Career Timelines in Computer Science and Engineering” web pages, at URL http://anitaborg.org/award-winning-career-timelines/. The web pages present the biographies of a variety of successful technical women whose careers can serve as a touch point and model for other women working in technology. The women presented have succeeded in industry, government, and the academic world (and some of them in all three areas!). All of the women on this timeline have won major awards and been recognized over many years by a range of admirable organizations and institutions. …”

Since Fran and I had that conversation, my amazing committee has created two Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference panels, plus the newly-released Award-Winning Career Timelines web pages. Our second GHC panel “Advancing Your Career Through Awards” will be presented next week at the sold-out GHC2010 in Atlanta, Georgia:

Panelists: Katy Dickinson (Huawei Technologies), Frances E. Allen (IBM), Marcy Alstott (Hewlett-Packard), Lucinda M Sanders (NCWIT), Robert Walker (Kent State University) and Manuela M. Veloso (Carnegie Mellon University)

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?

My daughter Jessica is also presenting at GHC2010. About her poster:

OPM: How to Get the Funding You Need to Do the Work You Love

Presenter: Jessica Dickinson Goodman (Carnegie Mellon University)

Whether a travel grant to present at a conference, a nationally competitive scholarship, or a few hundred dollars for printing costs, applying for Other People’s Money (OPM) is a necessary evil for women in computing. This poster is informed by the experiences of institutional grant distributors and successful grant-seekers and will unveil the grant application process, to help attendees gain the knowledge they need to get the funding they need.

Jessica and I have been attending the Hopper Conference together since 2007 when she was a Freshman at CMU. She is in her Senior year now and will be a CMU 5th Year Scholar next year in Pittsburgh, PA.

Here are Jessica and my son Paul and my soon-to-be-son-in-law Matt at the Lair of the Golden Bear family camp in Pinecrest, CA last month:

Comparing College Costs

Yesterday, I paid $193 for my son Paul’s first Freshman quarter at Foothill College (Los Altos, California). Foothill is a community college where Paul will be taking a light load for his first term and living at home. Today, my daughter Jessica in her organized way sent us a detailed breakdown of the costs for the first semester of her senior year at Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania). Tuition at CMU is $20,590 and other expenses (food, housing, books, travel) come to $4,525 for a half-year total of $25,115. I think that works out to CMU costing about 100 times what Foothill College does. CMU is a great school and Jessica has done very well there (she is on the Dean’s List again, with High Honors!). It is worth the cost.

Here are the kids having fun together during Spring Break in Egypt:

Together in Washington D.C.

As of tomorrow morning, my kids will be together in Washington D.C. Jessica and her fiance Matt are working there this summer as interns (for different organizations). She bravely and kindly invited her younger brother Paul to fly from California to visit her for ten days. This is Paul’s first time traveling by himself, so he is being brave too.

We visited the capitol as a family two years ago when Jessica was singing in Mozart’s The Magic Flute, so Paul knows something about the place. He has been researching what he wants to see and adding his ideas to our family calendar: the National Museum of the American Indian, the National Air and Space Museum, the mall, the National Zoo, Colonial Williamsburg (near where his to-be-brother-in-law Matt goes to college), and other sites.

I am pleased that my kids have such a good relationship and I hope that their adventure will go well.

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Tagged as Jessica, Matthew, Paul

June 30, 2010 · 10:36 pm

Weaving in Harrania, Egypt

Because our daughter Jessica is a weaver, John and Paul and Jessica and I made a point to visit the amazing Ramses Wissa Wassef Art Centre in Harrania, near Giza, during our recent trip to Egypt. We had to insist that our guide take us there (Wissa Wassef does not give the guides kickbacks) but it was well worth making a fuss to see. We went back a second time later! Here is a description of how Ramses Wissa Wassef started this impressive craft center:

Ramses’ interest in tapestry weaving began in 1941 when he was asked by a social welfare organisation to design a small centre in Cairo. While designing the building he asked permission to teach a small group of the children to weave, thus beginning his “experiment in creativity.” Weaving seemed the perfect medium to bring together his appreciation for traditional craftsmanship with the innate creativity of children, which he believed was damaged by routine and formalised education. After apprenticing himself to a weaver to master the basic techniques and exploring natural dyes Ramses began to pass on these skills to a small group of the schoolchildren. Using a high-warp loom, similar to those found millenia before in Ancient Egypt, the children began to weave in local wool dyed with natural dyes such as indigo, cochineal, madder, and reseda. Encouraged by the success of these experiments in 1951 Ramses and his wife Sophie began building a workshop near the small village of Harrania, ten miles from Cairo. At that time no weaving was done in the area, although since the success of the Centre imitations have become widespread. [From About the Art Centre]

We bought two books, some postcards, a ceramic sheep and a bowl, and a delightful small woven tapestry at Wissa Wassef. The larger statues in the gardens were remarkable but there was no way we could get one home. The weaving is so tight on our tapestry that I cannot put my fingernail between the threads. Most of the tapestries in the Wissa Wassef museum were very large; I am pleased to have a small but lovely sample of this work. The books are:

Egyptian Landscapes: 50 Years of Tapestry Weaving at the Ramses Wissa Wassef Art Centre, Cairo by Hilary Weir, Suzanne Wissa Wassef, Yoanna Wissa Wassef, Opus Publishing Ltd (2006)
Threads of Life: A Journey in Creativity by E. A. De Stefano, Ramses Wissa Wassef Art Center (1991)

We also toured two commercial rug factories while we were in Harrania. One place was producing some very good work – the El Harrania Factory. The owner generously gave my daughter some of his wool as a souvenir and said he trained at Wissa Wassef. The second factory we went to was unremarkable for either quality or creativity (but the prices were very high) – that was the one our guide wanted us to go to!

Wissa Wassef Art Centre

El Harrania Factory

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Tagged as Egypt, Jessica, John, Middle East, Paul

June 30, 2010 · 4:27 pm

Paul Graduates High School!

After much struggle, my son graduated from High School! Hooray! Paul graduated with his Palo Alto High School class of 2010 in a ceremony attended by his parents and grandparents. His sister Jessica listened by cell phone to Paul’s name being announced as he walked to receive his diploma. Jessica is in Washington DC, where she is working as a summer intern for the Polaris Project (“For a World Without Slavery”).

Paul made his way through High School despite his social-cognitive learning disability, dyslexia, dysgraphia, brain surgery, and debilitating headaches. He stubbornly continued to do six or more hours of homework every day (including weekends) up until the week of finals – catching up after we were Stranded in Egypt over Spring Break. He took a CPR Saturday class just before finals after a last-minute note from the school said he needed that training to graduate. Other kids in Paul’s class were honored for their academic, sports, and musical achievements. Paul won through to the end, and that was good enough. We are so proud! This week, Paul is going to visit Jessica in Washington DC (his first solo trip). He starts at Foothill College in August.

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Tagged as Disabilities, Egypt, Foothill College, Jessica, Paul

June 3, 2010 · 11:03 pm

CMU-Q in Doha, Qatar

John and Paul and I visited my daughter Jessica in Doha while she was a student at CMU-Q (Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar) last semester. She had an excellent experience studing Arabic, history, and politics at CMU-Q and Georgetown. Qatar has a very conservative Islamic culture, similar to that of its neighbor Saudi Arabia. It was fascinating to watch guys in traditional white dress adjust their head scarves the way western women fiddle with their long hair. I have heard that between the expat business people and the guest workers, less than a third of the people in Qatar are citizens. So, we did not feel too out of place being westerners.

We were delighted to hear Jessica sing several roles in the Qatar Foundation’s annual musical, which this year was Oliver!. We went for a long walk on the Cornish and took a pearl boat ride across the bay to the very impressive Museum of Islamic Art in its I. M. Pei building. We toured the markets: Souq Wakif (including its depressing pets for sale), the falcon souq, and the gold souq. And we visited the huge Vegas-like Villagio mall, complete with its Venetian canal and gondolas. We played board games one night with some of Jessica’s faculty friends. She even made us dinner – we brought it from the kitchen in the women’s dorm to where John and Paul were in the park near by. We admired the many new and under-construction modern office buildings downtown but after a few days we ran out of things to do and were happy to move on to Egypt for some world-class sightseeing.