liedra

You might get a tax free stipend... :) Depends on whether you get a scholarship! (I have a PhD student of mine who has a "fees only" scholarship - she is employed doing other things at the university but that's separate from the PhD.

Ha, my long distance relationship survived with a good old fashioned "3, 2, 1, go!" :)

This is creepy as hell. Video saved to the cloud, owned/processed by Google? Yeah nope.

I remember having to go home and tell my mum I now worked for freshmeat.net, looking at her face, then realising ... "NO! It's not a porn site!!!"

Yes, I'm an ethicist, but I also am a realist. In the current HE environment in the UK having a "permanent job" means very little these days. I'm all for bucking the system, but I have to be able to be in the system to effect change, and a lot of that isn't through token activities like this but working to change policy and governance structures (and educate the next generation!). I'd rather have a solid base from which to do that sort of thing than the ability to lose everything. It's not a whistleblower situation, I have nothing apart from a good story to really gain from meeting with him, and it's not particularly a principle thing because I think you have to pick your battles, and this isn't one of the ones I've picked.

Given I'm here on a work visa, I'd rather not have much cause for authorities to look closely at me until I've gone for citizenship :-)

I was an editor for freshmeat back in the early 2000s and it was a lot of fun. I was there when fm acquired themes.org and was one of the main people tasked with ensuring the HUGE db of themes was sanely migrated into the fm backend. We had stupidly high standards, and I don't think a lot of people really knew how much we threw out over the years, or how much we sanitised the entries (so much broken English!). We also had to (to a certain degree) sanity check the projects - make sure they looked like they did what they did. One of the best projects I ever had to say no to was a "next-gen compression tool" which came during a bit of a fad for these in the early 2000s and basically converted everything to binary and got rid of the 0s. (Not surprisingly, there wasn't an "unzip" tool!) Nice try, guy!

Another story I remember is all the flak we got when we opened the osx.freshmeat.net section - we got so much criticism about how we'd sold out etc. etc. but it actually turned out to be quite a good repository for OS X apps for a while until iTunes kinda took over.

Good times :D

Men can (and should be!) feminists too.

The more people who come out saying it's unacceptable the more likely there is to be a paradigm shift, at least, that's how I hope it will go. Another voice to add to those decrying the brogrammer culture is always welcome.

Not at all - I think a qualitative approach may be able to illustrate the problem better because you can get more complexity from deeper questioning.

And perhaps over on the "nursing news" website they are actually doing this. We're in tech. Let's sort our own back yards out before pointing fingers at others'.

"Applications of statistics in this area fail to illuminate but at all any useful causal link." - if you're relying on statistics to show things in this area you're missing the complexity of the situation which a more interpretative account may be able to find meaning in. Statistics is not the be all and end all.

You may be bored/fed up/whatever by it but many women (and men) in tech aren't - and nor should we be. It's a highly socially constructed issue that is endemic in our society and not present in others. If you think it's about suppressing ability then you obviously have absolutely no idea about the challenges of getting women into tech.

As a woman in tech, I'd like to thank the men in this thread who obviously get what the problem is here. This sort of stuff can only change with a concerted effort from both men and women to change the culture. And it's small steps like standing up to sexist jerks and calling out people who engage in activities like this that will get us closer to our destination.