Recent writings: privacy, young scientists, academia

[terriko]

Some fun recent stuff:

• A WebInsecurity post on a Christmas-related privacy policy
  
• A quick post about a girl who discovered a supernova (she's the youngest ever!)
  
• A longer piece about a class of 8 year olds who got their scientific bee study published
  

And then some more sad stuff in the form of a round-up of the links I've seen lately about women leaving academia. Poignant for me given that I've got a contract that'll take me away from academia... although I'm actually leaving mostly for the "work that has impact" reason and not so much for the others.

And then one thing that I didn't write (but I wish I had):

Let's say that fighting sexism is like a chorus of people singing a continuous tone. If enough people sing, the tone will be continuous even though each of the singers will be stopping singing to take a breath every now and then. The way to change things is for more people to sing rather than for the same small group of people to try to sing louder and never breathe.

Isn't that just the way of it? Thanks Mary for sharing that one.

Comments

[unregisteredpseudonymspls]

Re: academia.

Though I'm a dude I can relate to many of these things, especially since I'm also now officially on the market, though this is belied by my continued lack of a web page or any significant social networking presence beyond snarking on Twitter. ;)

I feel that while graduate school gave me the opportunity to meet a lot of cool people and do a diverse selection of cool things, I still fell afoul of the same problems people complain about in industry. At least in the dimension of the work I have been doing, it has been the worst of both worlds. Perhaps it is simply because of being at an American university or something. I guess I shouldn't complain because I've been trained in how to make money at something, in theory at least, but it's not why I went to grad school---it was because it was supposed to be greater freedom than simply going to a Real Job.

I'm still looking at academic jobs but I've become a little cynical about the benefits of academia. If I can't find a job that affords me the freedom I want, why not make money? So I'm trying to be more open-minded about the private sector because of my developing lack of faith.