Computers, creativity and learning

Motherhood and HCI - call for papers

I am excited because we got a workshop proposal accepted for CHI 2013 on Motherhood and HCI.Write a position paper! Come along! It'll be fun!

Here's a previous post of mine about interface design issues for breastfeeding mothers, written, as I recall, while feeding a sleeping and very heavy baby.

 Call for Participation: CHI 2013 Workshop on Motherhood and HCI Important Dates 11 January 2013: Workshop Submission Deadline 8 February 2013: Notification of Acceptance 27/ 28 April 2013: Workshop held in Paris, France Website: http://motherhoodandhci.wordpress.com/ *********************************** Becoming a mother and the experience of being a mother are increasingly influenced, mediated and invaded by technology and digital interactions. We invite the CHI community to grow and nurture the emerging topic of motherhood and HCI and explore how the lens of “motherhood” changes implications for design, development, and notions of care through participation in the CHI 2013 workshop “Motherhood and HCI” (http://motherhoodandhci.wordpress.com/). This one-day workshop will address research and design issues relating to technology use associated with the processes and experiences of conception, pregnancy and infertility, labour, childcare and the mother’s work in the family and home. Topics include (but are not limited to) the experience of motherhood, technologies for supporting mothers, and perspectives on the role of the mother, as well as everyday practices relating to technology and motherhood. We invite non-mothers,mothers and mothers-to-be to participate in our workshop through the submission of a 2-page position paper in CHI Extended Abstracts format that describes the authors experience engaging with a specific theme, or challenge involved with designing, using, or evaluating technologies that relate to the concept or experience of “motherhood”. We positively encourage submissions from a diverse range of participants, perspectives and disciplines. We also encourage active participation from industries already engaged in the design and development of technologies for motherhood. Submissions will be selected based on their originality, quality and ability to promote discussion amongst the community. Submissions and questions should be directed to madeline.balaam@ncl.ac.uk. More details can be found at: http://motherhoodandhci.wordpress.com/. At least one author of each accepted paper must attend the workshop. Please submit your position paper by Friday 11th January 2013. *********************************** Workshop Organisers Madeline Balaam, Newcastle University Judy Robertson, Heriot-Watt University Rebecca Say, Newcastle University Geraldine Fitzpatrick, Vienna University of Technology Gillian Hayes, UC Irvine Melissa Mazmanian, UC Irvine Belinda Parmar, ladygeek.com

Athena Irony

Last week was steeped in irony. I attended an Athena Swan self-assessment team meeting my university. Athena Swan is a scheme by which universities get accredited for not being rubbish about gender (and other sorts) of equality. Currently my university doesn’t have accreditation; it lost it in mysterious circumstances some years ago. Or at least, the circumstances are mysterious to me as they were not discussed at this meeting. Athena provide a giant checklist of practices which universities should try to follow to get themselves out of their mire of favouring white middle aged blokes (WMABs). They all seem perfectly sensible to me but let’s just say they may seem exotic – luxurious – to university senior management who after all are predominantly WMABs (and not just at my university).

The first serving of irony was the meeting itself. It was chaired by a WMAB,  and to an extent dominated by another WMAB who gave the impression of being somewhat dismissive of the scale of the problem.  There were women at the meeting. A lot of the preparatory work had been done by a well-informed woman. There was a female former member of Athena Swan panels there. So why the bias towards WMAB even in the meetings about gender equality? I have a suspicion, which might be completely unfair of course: the committee had to be taken seriously by the heads of academics schools so it was decided to have it chaired by an academic head of school to give it credibility. And due to the very problem which Athena Swan exists to solve, the heads of school in science and technology are WMAB. This is problematic in my view. There is a lot to be said for understanding stemming from lived experience, and clearly being a bloke academic prevents you from having experience of being a woman academic.  (Mostly. Apart from that psychologist who had a sex change and found that people took her a lot less seriously than her “brother”.) At any rate, I have decided not to continue as a committee member mostly because I think it is too important to be done “off the side of my desk”. The whole point of the accreditation process is to give serious time and resource to gender equality issues and I couldn’t realistically see it being factored into my work load. Further, I am increasingly taking the view that just because I could do something doesn’t mean I should do it. There are, after all, other women in my department who are working mothers and who would contribute to such an activity.

The second portion of irony was served as I desperately tried to do my share of an EPSRC Culture and Communities network proposal on Communities of Motherhood. This was in a week of potty training angst (my angst, toddler’s potty). I was attempting to appear like a normal sane mother to grandparents while costing a proposal during nap times and after bed time. My collaborators on this (and other proposals) all had way too much to do as well. I wanted to help earlier career researchers to get this (tiny amount of) funding in these times of frugal funding. (Don’t get me started on the futility of funding research networks rather than research.) It seemed like a lot of effort for not very much reward. And yet, academia is structured in such a way that people routinely put in mega efforts to achieve yet more seemingly impossible things – meet this funding proposal deadline, write just another cheeky wee paper. Because there are core teaching activities which simply must get done within working hours, research sometimes becomes a strange hobby. I have a colleague who saves his paper writing for Friday evenings.  And the problem with this for gender equality is that working mothers don’t have extra hobby time to spend on the research which advances their careers. There just isn’t any slack time in the week for anything extra.

So, what could universities (or funding councils) do to improve gender equality? Here are my thoughts:

• Stop having stupid sand pits where people get walled up in a country house for 5 days at a time, in a terrible Lord of the Flies scenario. This makes it hard for people with family responsibilities to attend. It is costly in terms of childcare, puts strain on other family members to manage the child care in one parent’s absence and is particularly hard for breast feeding women.
• Don’t spring funding calls with short deadlines on people, particularly not during the school holidays.
• Make targets and expectations clearer and more feasible. Academics seem to carry a burden of guilt that they should have more grant funding or write more papers. It would help to know when one has done enough.
• Introduce careers paths where people can succeed through high quality work which can be done without extensive foreign travel. For example, this might mean weighting journal articles more highly than conference articles, and considering reviewing duties rather than key notes as indicators of esteem. Or not expecting EU grant funding (which often requires travel).
• Make an effort to put women on interview panels for promoted posts, even if this means asking women from outwith the university to serve on the panel.

Little Miss Geek

[cross posted from my CACM blog]

Little Miss Geek is a book – and a wider campaign– by Belinda Parmar to shift women’s role in technology from consumer to creator. The book is mostly aimed at technology business leaders, offering practical solutions to help them make their workplaces better at attracting and maintaining female staff in technical roles. It argues that the technology industry needs to have more female employees in the interests of equality as well as their own bottom line: more women involved in the creation of new technology products will open up exciting new products tailored for an expanding female market.

Here’s the current sorry technology trajectory for girls in the UK, as summarised in the book. Little Miss Potential Geek starts schools. Due to poor quality IT lessons at primary school, she associates computers with boredom, maths or typing.  Little Miss Potential Geek is persistent, however and wants to study it further. When she joins an A-Level computing class at secondary, she finds only 8% of the pupils are girls. Even though she is in the minority, Little Miss Geek (I think we can safely drop "potential" at this point) decides to study computing at university, and graduates with one of the 18% of technology or science degrees which are awarded to women. Initially not daunted by the fact that only 17% of the technology workforce are women, LMG gets a job.  But  danger lies ahead. For 41% of women leave tech companies after 10 years, compared to 17% of men. Will LMG (like 47% of other Little Miss Geeks) feel that she has to act like a man to get ahead? Will she want to have her own Baby Geeks and become one of the 84% of women in technology who thinks that their employers need to do more to encourage women to return after maternity leave? Or as an ambitious professional, will she simply object to the fact that with the tech industry that only 26% of women reach senior management or board level? Or will Little Miss Geek continue to rise within the profession and eventually become Elderly Dame Geek with a MBE for services to the technology industry? As much as we wish her well, we must admit that probability does not favour poor Little Miss Geek. Parmar’s point is that we have to get past just wringing our hands about gender imbalances in IT and take positive action.

What positive actions might companies take? The book discusses a number of workable proposals such as apprenticeship ,sponsorship, bursaries and mentoring for  women; a supportive mum returner scheme; investment in female start-up companies; female heroes programmes; raising the profile of female employees within a brand; and even running coding workshops to encourage talented women from other parts of the company to consider more technical roles.

I applaud the book. The tech industry is indisputably not a female friendly work environment and this needs urgently addressed.  I admire Belinda Parmar’s energy in mounting a campaign to bring the public’s attention to the issue, in a similar way to Jamie Oliver’s campaign to fix school dinners in the UK.

But – and for heaven’s sake don’t let anyone use this paragraph as an excuse to wriggle out of doing the right thing – I have to dispute one point in the book. I can’t help it. I’m an academic first and a member of the sisterhood of technical women second. The book quotes Baron-Cohen’s findings about women having poorer spatial awareness, then says that spatial visualisation skills are directly linked to the ability to interacting with computer software and interfaces. But it’s Ok, the book consoles us, because such skills can be taught. Women engineering students can be taught how to do mental rotations and such. Such minor deficiencies can be overcome before ladies can manage to do all those hard technical things. I found this argument both unpalatable and bewildering, so I followed up one of the (extremely obscure) references which linked spatial awareness to computing skills. For a start, that article didn’t directly discuss gender differences. But the main point is that it does not discuss the impact of weak spatial awareness skills  on programming, or any other technically creative role. It is all about using technology. (In the early ‘90s. When people still used Hypercard.)  Little Miss Geek is a technology creator, not a technology consumer. So her putative lack of spatial awareness will neither hold her back nor need fixed. Unless she particularly wants to pursue a career in computer graphics.

But let’s ignore this odd digression into spatial ability. Let’s focus on the key message: the time is right to inspire girls to become technology creators. The Little Miss Geek book will tell technology business leaders how to do it.

Research excellence and the gender gap

Monday was the "the point in the year when women in effect start working for nothing because of the gender pay gap – for every £100 men take home, women are getting £85 – a 14.9 per cent difference."

Doesn't that make you happy to be alive?  That makes me feel great about all those essays I marked this week. To cheer me up, I can look forward to a lifetime pay gap of £423,000, if I make it to a managerial position. My university is feeling very pleased with itself because it now has gender equality in the strategic plan. Huzzah! That'll make all the difference then.

One of my reasons for starting this rant is that I just filled in the form to apply for reduction in my expected REF outputs. You may recall me blogging about this before when it appeared that those who took a period of maternity leave would be expected to produce the same number of publications over the 4 year period as those who did not. Luckily the REF people saw sense and decided not to pursue this policy and now people who have been off work get a reduction in the number of papers they were expected to write.

What made me snort (loudly) was there was also a box to fill in asking you to record any other factors which might affect your work (like breastfeeding or maternity). Sleep deprivation? General distractedness caused by raising a small person? Babies don't just go away once they are born. Turns out they grow into toddlers who also need looking after. Apparently this state of affairs continues for some time. Like 18 years or so.

What bothers me about this is that research careers (and in the UK, REF is one of the main ways of measuring research success) are built on hours of dedicated work above and beyond contracted hours. If you have small children (or indeed are caring for other family members) you don't have any extra hours. None. (If you want a further depressing read, here's an article on the impact of child rearing on female academics.)

What I want to know is this: why do academics feel compelled to work so hard? I can understand the lure of data analysis and the pursuit of new knowledge That's exciting work, worth doing and worth spending spare time on it. But applying for more and more funding for projects you don't really want and writing more and more obscure papers? That's make-work. I refuse to spend my very precious working hours on it.

 

Inside the Coder Dojo

[cross posted from my CACM bog]

There is a buzz inside the Coder Dojo. The kids have been coding html 5 for the last 40 minutes and are testing their first web pages in Chrome. Some of them are showing off their geeky prowess by introducing font tags with colour values in hex. Others are clearly bursting to point out the mentor’s missing “</p>”. The lead mentor, who looks like a small boy from the ‘50s in his fair isle jumper and dark rimmed specs, starts a lively debate about the relative merits of different browsers, teasing Opera users for their poor taste.  In the next hour or so, the kids learn how to apply a simple css style sheet. The web is their oyster. “Who wants to come back to Coder Dojo Edinburgh?” asks the mentor. The air bristles with hands. Witnessing this, I am drawn in. I find myself volunteering to help run the sessions in Edinburgh despite the million other things I need to do. The passion and enthusiasm of the mentors is infectious.

This Coder Dojo session was held inside the Scottish Parliament and was sponsored by two members of parliament. It was attended by various guests from industry, government, education and of course by local young people. It was a very high profile way of highlighting how important computer science is to this country’s economy. Initially I wondered how Craig Steele, the founder of Coder Dojo in Scotland pulled this off. But after chatting with him for a bit I realised how. He – like the other Coder Dojo mentors – just go for it. They see kids who are desperate to learn how to program, they see young computer scientists who love to share their passion and they put the two together. No learning outcomes. No syllabus. No assessment.  No underestimation of children’s ability. No red tape. Just learning. It feels liberating.

“There is only one rule of the Coder Dojo” says Lindsay Macvean earnestly. “Be cool”.  Their charter, I learn, is free open learning through peer instruction. In the dojo, as in martial arts, everyone is a learner and a teacher.  In Lindsay’s dojo in Cork, Ireland, you might find a 9 year old teaching his friends Ajax, while an eleven year old rebuilds a PC in the corner. One of his new recruits recently released an app which became the bestselling game on the App Store in Ireland. Although the idea began in Ireland, it has spread quickly. There are coder dojos held in the Microsoft HQ, Twitter, and McAfee. There are 70 dojos in Ireland, and around 150 worldwide from St Petersburg to Tokyo. All are run by volunteers, students, recent graduates, established software developers, or anyone else with a love of coding and a little bit of time to donate.

If you’d like to get involved, visit http://coderdojo.com/dojos/ and see if there is a dojo near you. If not, why not start one? All you need is a venue, some mentors and some kids.

When is user centred design selfish?

In 2005 Don Norman wrote: “Human-Centered Design has become such a dominant theme in design that it is now accepted by interface and application designers automatically, without thought, let alone criticism. That’s a dangerous state — when things are treated as accepted wisdom.” . I find this statement refreshing, because I am beginning to find the juxtaposition of user centred design (UCD) with recent trends in HCI towards sensitive application areas a little worrying. The benefits of UCD are well accepted: better appreciation of user’s needs resulting in better designed products which are more suitable usable and satisfying, empowerment of users, in depth understanding of the needs of specific demographic groups built up within a research community. I have seen criticism of UCD on cost or resource grounds (often in the form of a straw man), but never on ethical grounds.

Who benefits from user centred design according to standard wisdom? Designers and their employers benefit, because they end up with better products. End users (that amorphous generalised group) benefit, because their software-using lives are more satisfactory. Researchers benefit, because they get papers published about their thoughtful and inclusive design methodologies. What I want to know is whether particular users who contribute to the design process actually get anything out of it? And do they stand to lose anything?

Previous authors have argued that Scandinavian employees benefit as participant designers because they get to participate in work place decisions . Druin has claimed that children reap the benefits of being in intergenerational design teams . It’s quite easy to argue that contributing to redesigning the fiendish technology inflicted on us by our employers is satisfying, or that participating in a design activity has educational value. But let’s face it, for ordinary users, taking part in a design task is time consuming and may intrude into an already crowded schedule. Some people might find it tedious (“not another packet of post-it notes and a blank wall!”). Others may find it threatening (“I don’t want to show how little I know about technology”). In the end, it might be disappointing for those whose ideas don’t make it into the final product (“I wasted an hour of my life to have these jokers ignore my genius ideas?”), or those who are underwhelmed by the rough edges of a research prototype (“you realise this smart phone is made of paper?”).  These are mere irritations, presented cynically and not entirely seriously. However, in cases of user centred design work in sensitive areas involving vulnerable users there are some genuine ethical concerns which I think we need to talk about.

CHI has been expanding into new domains recently, with the laudable goal of using technology and design to improve people’s lives. But as we move from research about productivity systems in the work place to technology to improve the quality of users’ lives - in domains such as farming assistance in the developing world, health care, environmental disaster management, reminiscence, homelessness and end of life care- we must tread lightly.

We know from well established ethical principles that researchers should adhere to the general ethical principle of beneficence and nonmaleficence: by taking part in our design processes, users should benefit and should not be at risk of harm. We should not stray from our area of professional competency. We should not disrupt the lives of our participants unless we believe that the benefits outweigh the costs of the intrusion. But within the current set of user centred design practices, some of these ethical principles are compromised when working with vulnerable users.

Imagine a fictitious research project which aims to develop technology to help the bereaved share memories of those they have loved and lost. This is an academic project suffering from underfunding (as many do) and the designers can only afford to make a rough prototype which never makes it to market. The designers, realising that this is a very emotionally sensitive area, seek to consult users in order that the technology is appropriate, comforting and respectful of grief.  They interview a new widow on several occasions, and ask her to try a pilot application. They find this to be useful exercise and believe that their design is much improved because of it. They publish a paper about it, and other researchers are interested in the findings and it generates much discussion at a conference. Unfortunately, the user herself does not benefit from her contribution to the design because she finds that the software doesn’t run on her computer due to glitches she doesn’t understand. The researchers tell her that there may be a proper product developed in a few years, but she is finding it hard enough to get through each day just now, and doesn’t want to think that she will still feel this way in the future.  During the consultations, she finds it painful to talk about her loss, and tiring to keep concentrating on the design activity as she is distracted by worries about her financial circumstances. Originally she felt she ought to contribute to the project because she wanted to help other people in the future, but she is now increasingly upset by having relative strangers in her own home.

In this story we have well intentioned, respectful practitioners following best practices for design who nonetheless departed from ethical principles. They have unintentionally caused emotional distress without providing the benefits of a working system. They have intruded into the life of the user at a time when she was particularly vulnerable. They have been operating out-with their area of professional competency, as they were trained as designers and programmers rather than therapists. It is possible to imagine scenarios in other sensitive domains where similar ethical transgressions occur. What if physical rehabilitation technology trials aggravate injuries? What if involvement in a design project disrupts the participants’ social standing in a community in an unforeseen way? What if the time spent on design activities diverts vulnerable participants’ attention from addressing the key issues which are of important to them? I believe it is time to reconsider the best practices for design in sensitive areas from the point of view of the participant. Why should they help a design project? We cannot expect altruism on their part, nor a desire to further research knowledge. We must be careful that our own motivations for user centred design activities are not selfish.

Quantum gaming

[cross posted from my cacm blog]

Do you remember the overweight hamster in the film Bolt who travels everywhere in a Perspex ball? Can you imagine being stuck in such a ball, rolling through a pleasant country meadow? Curiously as you travel, the ball deforms into sausage shape, then inflates again in a different direction. It does this regularly, with no discernable pattern. Your goal is to survive until the sun sets as you combat gremlins and various other airborne threats. Your only means of defense is a grappling hook, which you can use to deter the enemies. You can amass points by firing a grappling hook from the centre into the furthest away point of the deformed ball. To put it another way, can you imagine finding an optimizing pair of points for maximal re-growth of a Bloch sphere, and thus solve a problem in quantum information back flow?

This is not a terrible dream in which you are the victim of crazed Lillupitian quantum physicists, but rather the prototype of a scientific discovery game we are working on at Heriot-Watt University, Scotland*.  Scientific discovery games “focus on leveraging human problem solving ability to solve computationally difficult scientific problems” (Cooper, Treuille & Barbero, 2010;1). There is a nice review article about the use of such online games to solve scientific problems in the March issue of CACM. It describes how 57,000 players of the Foldit game helped biochemists to discover the structure of a protein which helps the human immunodeficiency virus multiply, a long standing problem in biochemistry. It also summarises other crowd sourcing games in which players tag photographs, translate phrases and identify astronomical objects. All of these games take advantage of humans’ superior image processing capacity. In the case of Foldit and other biochemistry games, the target problem is highly spatial: the 3D representation of the protein in the game closely matches the structure of the actual protein in real life. But can scientific discovery games still be useful if the target problem doesn’t have an obvious 2D or 3D representation which our visual systems can get a grip on? In general, what sort of scientific problems are amenable to representation in game form? Which sorts of problems benefit from non-expert human intuition and to what extent does this approach outperform computational techniques?

Back to the crazed physicists and their hamster ball.  We’re attempting to solve a problem in dynamics of information flow in quantum bits which physicists often visualize using a three dimensional sphere (see Haikka et al, 2011 if you care to know the details).  For now, we are creating the game around a three dimensional version of the problem, for which there is a known solution so that we can easily check whether the players arrive at the right answer. But as I understand it, there is a whole set of more general problems in multiple dimensions for which no solutions are known. This will be a real test for the scientific discovery game approach. Quantum physics is notoriously un-intuitive. While humans are evolved to be dab hands at reasoning about three dimensions, most of us would feel quite ill at the thought of reasoning in thirteen dimensions. In later stages of the project, we need to think of ways in which we can divide and conquer the problem in such a way that individual players can each solve a small aspect of the problem within a 3D world, but somehow the solutions of many players can be put together in a coherent solution to the more general high dimensional problem.

For now, even designing a game for the simple three dimensional version of the problem is proving quite challenging. Because the physicists often think of the problem in terms of geometric shapes, we decided to exploit this in a first person shooter style game instead of the puzzle game genre which suits Foldit. We started off by modelling the Bloch sphere according to a set of equations, stuck a camera in the middle, and made a grappling hook which the user can throw at the sides of the sphere to get points. We logged the required data for the physicists to study later. This was completely faithful to the physics problem we were trying to solve, but – boy! – that was a boring game. In fact, it probably couldn’t be described as a game at all, as there was no challenge for the player, no rewards, no ways to lose, and no forms of punishment. So we had to insert classic game mechanics into the basic representation of the game world in such as way that the player would have fun while still achieving the problem solving requirements of the physicists. We ended up with the design described in the opening paragraph. We’re refining the game now, and will be testing with users over the next few weeks. If you fancy trying out the hamster ball whilst solving open problems in quantum physics, you’re most welcome. Leave me a comment below.

*The project team are Sabrina Maniscalco, Suzanne McEndoo, Stephen Kilbride,John Truesdale,  Sandy Louchart, Theodore Lim, Judy Robertson.

References

Cooper, S., Treuille, A., & Barbero, J. (2010). The challenge of designing scientific discovery games. Foundations of Digital Gaming. Retrieved from http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1822354

P. Haikka, S. McEndoo, G. De Chiara, G. M. Palma, S. Maniscalco, Phys. Rev. A 84, 031602(R) (2011)

Design adventures in a children's hospital part 2

A few months back, I posted a bit about a project which Madeline Balaam and I are doing in a children's hospital. We've been asked to write a report recommending how technology enhanced play can be incorporated into the design of a new building for the hospital which will open in 2017. We've now finished the first phase of our consultation with patients, parents and the play specialists on staff. After observing children in the play rooms, and interviewing various people who kindly spared some time, and reading the literature we came up with a set of design principals and then design stories based on them.

Here is a draft list of the design principals. Play technology in the hospital should:

• Offer age appropriate opportunities for creative, imaginative, expressive and therapeutic play 
• Support comfort and rest: technology can be used to make surroundings more pleasant when patients are feeling unwell
• Enable play with children and their parents
• Support family and friendship ties- patients need to communicate with their friends, classmates, teachers and family members outside the hospital.
• Help children to make new friends within the hospital – patients should have opportunities to meet other children of their own age within the hospital 
• Foster a community – build a sense of belonging and contributing to something positive 
• Keep patients in touch with the outside world: patients can engage with nature, the passing of time and seasons and world events. If they cannot go into the outside world, it can be brought to them 
• Enable patients to express their emotions, even if they are negative. 
• Offer opportunities for children to care and nurture. 
• Meet health and safety requirements in terms of medical restrictions, infection control and child protection

Our design stories are here. They are based on the principals above as you will see. I'd love it if you could add some comments and suggestions. Children, parents and staff at the hospital will be doing the same (am going to start this process on Radio Lollipop tonight), but we are keen to consult more widely. Particularly with knowledgeable (and may I say charming) technologists such as yourself. 

 

Busy boa constrictor jobs

My fave quote this week: “More and more people in this country no longer make or do anything tangible; if your job wasn’t performed by a cat or a boa constrictor in a Richard Scarry book I’m not sure I believe it’s necessary. I can’t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter.”
— The ‘Busy’ Trap -http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/30/the-busy-trap/

Are there lecturers in " what people do all day"? I think not.

Should a supermodel judge a youth programming competition?

Help me out here- I can't make up my mind about this. Is a super model and actress an appropriate judge of a youth programming competition?  There was an article in yesterday's Guardian about how the supermodel and actress Lily Cole will be judging the Young Rewired State programming competition this year. There is something about this which makes my skin crawl slightly but I think I am being unfair. What do you think?

Here's some more background. Young Rewired State is a fabulous UK programming competition which brings together programmers (under 18 years old) to work with more experienced software developer mentors to create socially useful applications which harness open data sets. There is a a very cute example of an app from last year created by under 10s in a public library which visualised data on happiness in different English counties as asteroids. YRS seems like a great idea to me, and I must remember to encourage my students to sign up as mentors. [Hey, students! Sign up as mentors!] 

Lily Cole has a double first from Cambridge. She appears to be thoughtful, articulate and humble, and holds laudable views about the gift economy. She is founder of a social website called impossible.com so I can see the connection to the aims of the YRS competition. I have no doubt she could be inspiring to the young programmers. 

So why do I feel uneasy about this?  Let's see... her double first is in history of art, not computer science! She has no technical background. Her celebrity status (which in turn is gained from her appearance) seems to have been a factor in recruiting her as a judge. This worries me in the wake of the ridiculous EU Science:It's a Girl Thing debacle from last week. In this video, developed by the European Commission, gorgeous women in high heels prance around shaking test tubes making male scientists peer at them above their spectacles. The video has been widey derided (apparently it's not judge me who vomits when watching it). An interesting New Scientist article in reponse to the video quotes a study which found that girls are demotivated by seeing (manufactured) successs stories of female scientists with overtly feminine characteristics."Worse still, girls who already disliked science were especially demotivated by the feminine scientists. Sekaquaptewa [the researcher] says this was probably because they saw simultaneous success in both domains as totally unattainable." I totally understand this: who has the time?

I don't like the thought of girls being turned off the programming competition because they feel they can't be both geeky and gorgeous. But then, Lily Cole is gorgeous but not geeky. Will girls think they can bypass the geeky bit as long as they are gorgeous? What message does it send to boys if the high profile women are not programmers? Will they care, or will they just like to shake hands with the pretty lady? Am I just a bitter old hag? But mostly, I wonder: why didn't YRS get a female geek as a judge instead?