She clicks, just like a woman
Posted: Tuesday, March 27, 2007 1:20 PM by Will Femia
The online tech community is seized by discussions of death threats and incivility in online discourse. Actually, "incivility" is probably too mild a term when you're talking about hanging someone and other mortal threats. The spark for this particular iteration of what has become a perennial topic comes from a blogger who has cancelled her public speaking appointments out of fear for her safety.
I don't recognize all of the names in her post, but it's weird that she almost seems to know who made the threats. Scoble is not blogging for a week out of sympathy and solidarity. He also calls for discussions on how to fix the culture.
Scoble is talking specifically about how women are treated in tech culture, but even in the broader context of online abusiveness, I don't see how it gets fixed. Every time one of these stories comes up I wonder if future generations will just have thicker skin. What will likely happen is that people will start to learn how to have public and private identities online. When I first started working in online communities no one in their right mind used their real name for anything. It was like CB radio. Everyone used a handle. Yesterday I was reading the reactions to this lady's story of someone stealing online photos of her baby to use on some kind of bogus personal site. If you don't care to read through the comments I'll just tell you that a lot of people had no sympathy for her because she was fool enough to post such personal photos publicly.
Here's an irony for you: Web anonymity can sink your job search - "If someone searches for you on the Web and comes up empty-handed, do you exist?"
Speaking of women fearing for their safety. The story of women in the U.S. military being so afraid of being raped by their comrades that they deprive themselves of water rather than make a trip to the latrines is receiving a lot of attention. I naturally made the association with the recent New York Times Magazine piece about women in the military coping with trauma. The NYT piece (sorry, it's behind the subscription wall at this point but it looks like most of it is here) is ostensibly about sexual assault in the U.S. military but really it's about military women recovering from the trauma of war and how sometimes sexual abuse is part of that trauma.
Anyway, with regard to the first item about women depriving themselves of water, the accusation is that the U.S. government isn't reporting cause of death of female soldiers to avoid providing evidence of the situation. I clicked military blogger Mudville Gazette who calls the whole thing an urban legend. He focuses on the source of the report (Karpinski of Abu Ghraib infamy) and unlikelihood of someone dying of dehydration by not drinking water for part of the day.
Speaking of respecting women and hiding one's identity online, Beautiful celebrity women with relatively impressive academic credentials (Written by someone calling himself Greedo.)
Speaking of finding intelligence attractive, Why geeks are more attractive. (This is probably linkbait for a dating site, but still, it's good for geeks to read stuff like this periodically.)
OK, one more on respecting women and their state of wellbeing (all of these felt like a cohesive whole when I was plotting them in my head, but I'm not sure I've really established a connection now that I'm putting them on pixel): "Researchers have found that parity between the sexes may be bad for your health."
Dollar bill origami - Contrary to a headline I once read on a similar feature, your waiter/waitress does not appreciate you folding the tip into a bunch of little animals.
Commuter Click: Bob Garfield's Chaos Scenario 2.0 - I got half way through and said, "Holy cow, I'm only half way through?" It's a fun read though because lately there have been a lot of comments from mainstream media saying that everything is going to be OK. The media doomsayers were caught up in their own hype. The media world as we know it is not coming to an end. I was enjoying those articles because I find media doomsayers to be generally obnoxious and take some pleasure in the idea of them being wrong (even though, as a new media employee, I should probably want them to be right). But this is a good old fashioned end of the world piece about the collapse of traditional media with the twist being that the Internet is still too young to serve as a safety net.
Speaking of holding a finger to the media breeze, So, how many podcasts did you download today? The UK's Daily Telegraph pursues some trendy new media ideas and doesn't find a whole lot of reader interest. Now what?
I played a little with Click2Map today. It's still in beta, but you can tell what it's about as you use it. Place markers on a map and label them, then save the map.
World's first building-integrated wind turbines - The Freedom Tower at Ground Zero was supposed to have these but I think they were written out of subsequent designs of the building. "Through its positioning and the unique aerodynamic design of the towers, the prevailing on-shore Gulf breeze is funneled into the path of the turbines, helping to create power generation efficiency."
"Researchers have discovered a pair of twins who are identical through their mother's side, but share only half their genes on their father's side." This is a quick summary of a longer article to which it links. They're calling these semi-identical twins chimeras.
Speaking of Chimeras, how about a sheep that's 15% human? Craziest sentence: "He has already created a sheep liver which has a large proportion of human cells and eventually hopes to precisely match a sheep to a transplant patient, using their own stem cells to create their own flock of sheep." What I like best about these kinds of stories is the way the force us to wonder at what percentage we'll have to grant human rights to these partly human sheep.
Before sharing this "worst logo ever" sign I wanted to double check that it's real and not a photoshop job. Sure enough, it's real. FYI, that's an Alabama area code.
"If you're not familiar, Folding@Home is a Stanford University project that analyzes protein folding patterns to work toward cures for diseases like Alzheimer's and cancer. All you need to do is download the program and leave it running when you're not using your computer; Your compy's spare processing capacity is put to good use performing incredibly complex protein folding calculations."
"The last, unfinished book by the 'Lord of the Rings' author has been completed by his son."
The old traffic death comparison trick. Iraq war defenders use it to make the point that the number of people dying in Iraq is small relative to the number of Americans who die in automobile related incidents. War on Terror skeptics use it to point out the over-reaction to 9/11 because of the small number of people who died relative to the number of Americans who die in automobile related incidents. No one seems to make the point that what these comparisons actually demonstrate is the magnitude of the plague automobiles are on America. They kill Americans in huge numbers, they pollute, they isolate us from each other, they make America dangerously dependent on oil... Perhaps it's not that the Iraq War or 9/11 are so small but that our car culture is an exponentially greater problem.
Owner of a lonely heart on violin - See if this doesn't end up in your head for the rest of the day.
