Life as an Extreme Sport

Category: Academics

Classes and coursework.

XX, or, chemical freedom I’ll regret in the morning

...and everything else, Academics, AMBI

A few days ago, a comment was left for me in another blog’s comments section, saying Hope you’re well…your blog sounds awfully depressed lately for somebody who’s doing so well as a bioethics person in training!!! Which is a sweet and kind sentiment, although perhaps one that should have been left to me in my own blog, or email, or not the major blog for the field I’m going in to – but that’s being incredibly nitpicky towards a nice thought. Anyhow, the point was to not criticize the message, but answer it, at least in part, with something that I’ve been thinking about a lot since returning from Denver. In fact, I’ve promised to write something for the Women’s Bioethics Blog about it, and it’s being a woman in a field dominated by men.

This dominance starts in my department, which is a shift for me. While the faculty is pretty gender-balanced, the student body is not. There are five female graduate students actively taking classes. Of them, two have long term boyfriends that they spend their spare time with, and the other two have families. I’m the only single, childless girl in the department – at least of the students who’re there, and not ABD and thus who knows where. But on top of that, which is weird in itself (you have to remember that CHID was 60-75% female students) for me, they treat me differently. Us differently, I should say. For a while, I had thought it was just me, until I started talking with another new female student who confirmed the same thing was happening to her.

Being talked over. Having our ideas dismissed, and then hearing some other guy bring up what we were saying a few minutes later and hearing a great conversation build up around it. Being left out. They go out, you see, the guys. Beer, night’s out, poker, weekend parties at each others homes. The girls aren’ t invited. I thought it was me, then we thought maybe it was just the first years being left out – but no, the first year guys are all invited.

No girls allowed in the club. I had thought that idea had gone out of style a long time ago, but apparently not.

So you know, I move across the country, excited about a program that stopped existing a month after I got here. Excited about a nice group of people who seemed friendly and open and like my former department, except speaking my language…and then have to hear them talking, at the start of every week, over all the fun things they did over the weekend together. Things they did without including the girls in the fun, that they talk about in front of the girls.

It took me a while to realize that it was gender coming in to play. I really did just assume it was me, at first. I can be abbrasive, and I’m not one of them. I’m not a philosopher. I have this weird background that makes them cringe, and I think in such a different way than they do, they don’t know what to do with me. (Or, I think, why I’m there.) But then I found out that it wasn’t me, it’s not even that I’m new. It’s because I’m female, and that’s something I’ve never had to deal with before – and how do you? I mean, is saying “oh hey, you’re discriminating against me?” really going to do any good or change any minds? I don’t think so.

That aside, I noticed the gender imbalance while at ASBH, and I noticed how I end up having to act in those sorts of gender imbalanced situations: either very aggressive, which makes me uncomfortable, or wall-flowering in the corner, which also makes me uncomfortable. But it seems like I either have to scream to get noticed, or fade into the background, be ignored, and spend my time silently watching and learning. This is also not a familiar place for me to be – either ends of extremes of behaviour.

What I do need to do is ask a couple of the women professors here out to coffee, to talk, and just make connections with the women I’ll be working with. But it’s sad and frustrating that I’ve to do that – that the only way I don’t have to shout to be heard is if I’m talking with another woman.

Tracking the Speed of An Idea

...and everything else, Academics

This is an interesting idea, tracking ideas flowing around the net. It’s for an MLA presentation, so be a good person and go help the poor researchers gather data.

The fearless blogger trying this says,

People write in general (typically truimphant) terms about how swiftly a single voice can travel from one side of the internet to the other and back again, but how often does that actually happen? Of those instances, how often is it organic?

Most memes, I’d wager, are only superficially organic: beginning small, they acquire minor prominence among low-traffic blogs before being picked up by a high-traffic one, from which many more low-traffic blogs snatch them. Contra blog-triumphal models of memetic bootstrapping, I believe most memes are””to borrow a term from Daniel Dennett’s rebuttal of punctuated equilibrium”””skyhooked” into prominence by high-traffic blogs.

For my talk at the MLA, I’d prefer being able to quantify this triumphalism with hard numbers. Had I paid attention when “DISADVENTURE” and “My Morning” made the rounds, I could’ve completed this little experiment without revealing its existence. Since I lack foresight, I’m stuck announcing my intentions and begging participation. Here’s what I need you to do:

What s/he needs you to to do is go here and read the rest, and post similar to your own website. 😉

what’s that tattooed on my forehead, again?

...and everything else, AMBI

Guess who’s doing sysadmin work again?

Sigh. (I won’t lie and say it’s been hell, though – whenever I take a break and come back to computers, I’m always surprised at how much I enjoy it. But given how relieved I was after the last sysadmin gig ended,…) Bennett can commence laughing and pointing, as can several other people,…

I’m going to go back to spec’ing out servers and ignoring y’all.

Late Night Election Results Round-up

...and everything else, Academics, AMBI, Bioethics

Posted over at the Women’s Bioethics Blog, a late night, insomnia-fueled post-election round-up of interesting, mostly pertaining to bioethics-y things, results. So, you know, the stuff that interests me, which probably explains why it took me nearly an hour to write it all. We won’t talk about the time I should have sunk into reading Heidegger that instead went into fact-checking that every Better Know a District congressional representative that appeared on The Colbert Report did indeed find themselves re-elected…

UW joins stem cell game

...and everything else, Academics, Bioethics, University of Washington

The University of Washington gets fully in to the privately funded stem cell research game, according to the alumni newsletter:

Orin Smith, retired Starbucks president and chief executive officer, has donated $5 million for the UW’s Institute for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine. Smith, a 1965 UW graduate, is chairman of the board for UW Medicine. UW Medicine also has received a $1 million anonymous gift for stem cell research.

Dr. Randall Moon, director of the institute, said that “stem cell research is key to the success of developing new therapies for many diseases and injuries, and Orin Smith’s wonderful and timely support of the institute is really a gift to the patients of today and of the future, who will benefit from these therapies.”

Progress, he said, in stem cell research and regenerative medicine has been “severely thwarted by federal policies” that state federal funding can only be used for research on certain lines of embryonic stem cells and on adult stem cells. UW scientists have said the existing lines of stem cells eventually will wear out. And adult stem cells, they have said, do not hold the promise that embryonic cells do.

These policies have put “us way behind where we would have been” had researchers been allowed to use new lines of embryonic stem cells for their research, Smith said. If U.S. researchers can’t move forward with stem cell research, then scientists in other countries will, he said.

This is one of those issues where I agree, 100%, with the press coming out of AJOB: if the US doesn’t do it, someone else will, and if we want any say in how the technology is being used, we’ve got to get in there and create the technology to begin with. This is just another in a growing example of universities looking outside the federal government in order to do just that.