MITPressLog

Women in Space

For American women, the road (or airstream?) to space has been rocky. Bettyann Hotlzmann Kevles, author of Almost Heaven: The Story of Women in Space, describes the challenges faced by women who dreamed of becoming astronauts:

…A Princeton professor who chaired the influential Space Science Board at the National Academy of Sciences… declared that the possibility of space travel “looks bleak” for women because, among others things, there were the “millions of dollars” he estimated it would cost to design a suit. But “the very best reason for not choosing women astronauts,” he stated, as if it was truly documented, “was the fact that women tend to get married. You spend all that money and time training them, and then they get married and have children. You can’t expect them to leave a couple of kids at home and take off into space.” Why not? Dads did.

In 1963, Valentina Tereshkova, a Russian cosmonaut, became the first women to orbit the earth. Two years later America saw the first Astronaut Barbie Doll. It took another eighteen years before a real American woman was allowed to go to space. In 1983 Sally Ride became the first American woman to fly into space. As of March 2006, there have been more than 400 humans in space but only 31 of them have been American women. Two more women are scheduled to fly on the next Space Shuttle Discovery mission (STS-121) in July 2006. Visit the NASA website for more information.

Women Mathematicians

Previously we've mentioned [here, here, and here] the difficulty that women face in becoming integrated in fields related to science and technology. We're rounding out Women's History Month with these two titles dealing with the lives women who have succeeded in math, where, as history sometimes seems to tell, only men persevere.

Lynn M. Osen's history, Women in Mathematics, starts centuries ago and makes to the 20th century, telling the tales of the (often unsung) women who have contributed so much to creating our mathematical reality.

Women Becoming Mathematicians by Margaret A. M. Murray, picks up where Osen left off and tells a more sociological tale of the women who earned PhD's in math during WWII and their lives and their impact the field and its terrain.

Sebastian & Stanley, Racing for Glory

On Tuesday PBS aired an episode of Nova called "The Great Robot Race." It centered on the DARPA Grand Challenge, a Pentagon-sponsored race of robotic, driverless vehicles held in the Nevada desert in March 2004.

At the center of the milestone competition are two autonomous robotic vehicles: H1ghlander, a modified Hummer created by a team at Carnegie Mellon University team headed by Red Whittaker; and Stanley (left), a (far cuter) modified Volkswagen Touareg built by Stanford University's Sebastian Thrun (also left) and his students. (Thrun is coauthor or coeditor of five, count 'em, five MIT Press books.)

The program is fascinating, and not only because of the built-in competitive atmosphere surrounding the race. (Besides the fame and glory, the wining team would take home a $2 million check.) The two teams took decidedly different strategies for navigating the grueling 130-mile course. The Carnegie Mellon team used meitculous topographic mapping of the race course, to plan in advance for what the vehicle would encounter. H1ghlander was also a highly hardware-dependent vehicle. Stanley, by contrast, relied largely on its adaptive vision software, which effectively allowed it to learn about the course as it went on.

We won't tell you who won, though an upset might have been in the cards. PBS has a well-stocked website devoted to the show here, where you can watch the episode and find out a lot about the robots. John Lithgow narrates -- could you ask for more?

P.S. - In case the answer to that last question is yes -- i.e. you are a confirmed autonomous-robot nerd -- you can check out a long article about Thrun and Stanley in the January 2006 issue of Wired.

Another Movie Star in Our Midst

As you may have noticed, we've been trailing the documentary (Zizek!) about the Solvenian philosopher and cultural critic, Slavoj Zizek, as it travels from city to city (here, here, and here). Well, it looks like we have another star of the big screen on our list. A documentary about the life and work of Frank Gehry was shown at The International Festival of Films on Art (FIFA), the largest festival of films on art in the world, which took place in Montreal earlier this month.  FIFA, "one of the best festivals you've probably never heard of," according to David D'Arcy, featured Sketches of Frank Gehry, directed by Sydney Pollack, on opening night. 

In an article for GreenCine, D'Arcy points out that while we may know a lot about Gehry's work, the film provides a warm portrait of Gehry that could only be achieved under the direction of a close friend like Pollack. 

By now, the Gehry buildings will be familiar, but the observations of Gehry's psychotherapist, the blind nonagenarian Milton Wechsler, are reason enough to see this one.

So, while  you're waiting for Sketches of Frank Gehry to hit a theater near you (it's been acquired by Sony Pictures Classics for US commerical distribution, so it shouldn't be long), check out some sketches by Frank Gehry in Gehry Draws. 

A Bottom Up Approach

The traditional approach to pulling a nation out of poverty has long involved providing substantial amounts of top-down aid, with the hope that it finds its way to the masses at the bottom. One of the obvious goals of this approach is to encourage new government initiatives that will spur on economic growth. The problem is that this is often a sluggish process that produces little in the way of tangible results. In a recent issue of the Economist (subscription), Ibbal Quadir argues that "top-down approaches do not work. The bottleneck is at the top."

Quadir insists that attention should be focused on the potential for growth from the bottom up. Using the example of his native Bangladesh, he says,

The key to economic progress in Bangladesh does not lie in foreign aid, but in the hands and brains of its masses. We need to find technologies that can activate those hands and brains for productive purposes.

In 1997, Quadir was able to put his assertions on bottom-up economic growth into practice by catalyzing the formation of GrameenPhone. Grameenphone allows Bangladeshis to take out "microcredit" loans in order to purchase phone network access. In the most strikingly original evolution of this business model, "telephone ladies" provide access to thousands of rural Bangladeshis without phones in return for reduced monthly rates. The "telephone ladies" profit by charging a fee for their services, and GrameenPhone profits in turn by collecting greater fees for increased air time. This is by no means an infrequent arrangement in Bangladesh; it accounts for about a third of all network traffic.

GrameenPhone's success is a great accomplishment for Quadir, but he hasn't stopped there. He continues to work on other innovative areas of "bottom-up" development, including the use of neighborhood power generators and the sale of chemical water treatments by local entrepreneurs. Quadir is an editor of a new journal called Innovations which looks at the interaction of technology and governance.  the innagural issue (Winter 2006) is just out and all articles are available for free here. 

Let's Hear It for Women in Technology

We recently gave you a tale of women's progress in the tech sector. Well, this is something that has been an interest of the MIT Press for some time, and again, in honor of this Women's History Month, we present you some titles both relevent and worthy. But first an excerpt...

A gender-balanced workforce is more likely to understand the needs and and concerns of a wider segment of the customer base, and will design products accordingly. The automotive industry has recognized this fact. Ford organized a design team including an unprecedented number of women engineers for the Winstar minican a few years ago. The hope was that this team would design in features that meet the concern of the many women who regularly drive minivans. More recently, Volvo formed an all-women team to design the YCC [Your Concept Car] prototype "by women, for women." ...[M]ost software, especially game software, has been designed for male users. There are only a few examples of designing software specifically for female users, notably Brenda Laurel's failed software company Purple Moon. Software that is more engaging to women, whether targeted at women or gender neutral, might go a long way toward improving the software available to the entire population.

Hot off the presses we have J. McGrath Cohoon and William Aspray's Women and Information Technology. As in the quote, this book demonstrates the importance of involving women in IT fields, and looks at all the issues that effects this, from home life in childhood, to professional advancement.

As mentioned above, Brenda Laurel's Purple Moon, as a dot-com casualty, failed to provide girls with their entry point to computer culture. However, Laurel survived to tells its story in Utopian Entrepreneur.

Virginia Valian's Why So Slow? and Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher's Unlocking the Clubhouse take two more looks at women's socio-economic achievement.

From the MIT Press to the White House

Last week the White House released its new report on The National Security Strategy of the United States of America. Fred Kaplan, in a piece for Slate, notices what he thinks "may be a bow" to Edward Mansfield and Jack Snyder's book Electing to Fight, (Slate review here). The thesis, in short:

"...while mature democracies tend not to fight one another (the premise of Bush's policy to spread democracy), emerging democracies are the most war-prone regimes of all."

Kaplan believes ideas such as these are being increasingly incorporated into US foreign policies. MIT Press authors helping sway Bush policy? Read on, at Slate.

Drink Responsibly

Here is a little bit of beer trivia for you on this merry St. Patrick's Day, courtesy of The U.S. Brewing Industry: Data and Economic Analysis by Victor J. Tremblay and Carol Horton Tremblay.

By world standards, the United States is a major beer-drinking nation... In 2001, U.S. per-capita beer consumption was about 22.0 gallons. The United States ranks 11th among developed countries in beer consumption, 34th in wine consumption, and 20th in spirits consumption. Most of the major beer-drinking nations are in Northern and Eastern Europe. The average consumer in the Czech Republic or in Ireland drinks almost twice as much beer as the average U.S. consumer...

But remember... it's not a contest! View a pdf of the full chart. May the luck of the Irish be with you, and have a happy and safe holiday!

A March of Women Architects

Another title and another issue we present in honor of this Women's History Month.

"This is the missing link buried in our past, essential for our future, an enormously important book for every woman—and man—who is struggling to live on terms of equality, reconciling feminism and the family, which means restructuring home and work."                                                        —Betty Friedan

When Dolores Hayden's Grand Domestic Revolution was published, it was ground-breaking and long over-due. Now it is a classic while still brilliant and revealing. From socialist cities to the politics of kitchens, Hayden gives us, for the first time a look at centuries of feminist designs and dreams concerning architecture, city planning and the social space in which we live.

This is Not Your Father's Philanthropy

Mary Ellen Capek and Molly Mead, authors of Effective Philanthropy: Organizational Success through Deep Diversity and Gender Equality, talk about how a new understanding of diversity and gender equality can strengthen organizations and increase public benefit.

Why is philanthropy important today?

Although philanthropy is increasingly common in many countries, the U.S. has the most institutionalized history of philanthropy—driven at least in part by federal income-tax exemptions for contributions to organizations that are certified "charitable" or "nonprofit" by state governments. In 2004, more than 66,000 foundations with over $476.7 billion in assets gave an estimated $32.4 billion in grants to nonprofit organizations to support a variety of activities, including research, health, education, arts, and culture as well as both systemic and charitable efforts to alleviate poverty and improve people’s lives. Foundation resources are money that would otherwise be added to federal and state treasuries, money otherwise taxed and used for public benefit. For this reason alone, the public should know more about how foundations are managed. By virtue of their "power of the purse" as well as more subtle forms of influence, these foundations are key players in U.S. social, economic, and public policy and are also increasingly influential internationally. So for all these reasons, philanthropy is important to know more about. And when foundations learn to function effectively, the potential for public benefit is tremendous.

Your book is called Effective Philanthropy. What do you mean by "effective" philanthropy?

While many [philanthropic] foundations, especially larger, professionally staffed foundations, work responsibly, collegially, and for "the common good," many more—an estimated five out of six U.S. foundations—are unstaffed and, for want of a better word, idiosyncratic because they are influenced by family members on their boards or financial advisors who may or may not have "the common good" as part of their portfolio. Given their inherently elite status with so few outside pressures to change, foundations are the least likely organizations to model cutting-edge effectiveness initiatives.

Effective philanthropy succeeds at amassing, managing, then allocating financial and human resources in ways that have the greatest positive impact in the sectors that foundations choose to fund. To allocate resources effectively, foundations must have vision and strategies for their grant making that allow them to analyze issues and concerns they want to influence, identifying both challenges and potential resources. They must be able to find the nonprofit organizations most likely to produce the results they intend. They must be able to structure their grants in ways that will be most useful to their grantees. And they must evaluate what they do to ensure they are having the intended impacts. The most important findings from our research revealed links between foundation effectiveness and institutionalizing nuanced understandings of diversity, what in the book we call "deep diversity," including gender.