women in computing, making, general techy geek stuff.
I've been running a wordpress blog since 2009, and over the years wordpress has gotten more and more complex. What I want is a simple site, old-school personal diary style, and I don't really need any fancy AI bells and whistles. So I figured I'd try and export my web stuff from wordpress and write something that converts it to static html. I mentioned this to the lovely Chris at sugarcube.co.uk…
I've spent most of this week in the University of Bath with an amazing set of colleagues preparing then managing the UK's main event for women computing students - the BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium . As founder and deputy I have a lot to do with the organisation but for personal reasons, this year I had to hand over much of the immediate admin to the rest of the team at short notice. So I am even…
Nearly a decade ago I had a conversation with Clive King about setting up a TedX event in Aberystwyth. We’d both been mulling over the idea independently, and decided to pool our resources. With input from Mike Parker we pulled a programme together and navigated the various admin hurdles associated with using the TedX brand (there are a lot of guidelines to do with image and brand management, and…
Aberystwyth University held a mini-conference on generative AI last week, and Amanda Clare and I submitted an abstract. It's safe to say that neither of us is embracing generative AI in the classroom, or in our work. Indeed I think we would both be classified as "generative AI resisters". There are all sorts of reasons why people are enamoured with the current flavours of Generative AI on offer,…
On 22 November I presented at BSides Aberystwyth - my title was "AI powered scammers: Looking at four some new-ish types of threat" and the talk was a summary of my thinking about cybersecurity and AI. I teach cybersecurity and I have spent most of my adult life working in AI so I have a few opinions about both. This blog post is a summary of the arguments in my talk, in case anyone's interested.…
Last week we held the 18th BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium, in Glasgow. It was the biggest ever, with about 275 people in total (and about 170 posters). On one level, it was the same as previous years (a one-day conference, with a keynote and some speakers, and a poster session, with a pre-event social the night before to stop students from feeling alone). On another level, though, there's something…
The final report from our gendered microaggressions project is available from the CPHC site: https://cphc.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Aberystwyth-CPHC_Microbehaviours_project_report.pdf We found all sorts of interesting things (read the report for the full story). Unsurprisingly: Women experience more microaggressions than other genders Women witness more Women and NB people have…
I'm trying out some gallery options for an artist, so thought I'd post some of my own paintings as a test. Here's the default Wordpress "Gallery" block - this is the least effort option: Cliff Railway. Cliff Railway + Gorse Nant yr Arian woods Blue Kite 1 Back road to Ponterwyd penglais mist, in the dark melindwr lake, at nant yr arian, in the drizzle Goginan dampness one - fields and trees Damp…
On April 4th, we held the 17th BCSWomen Lovelace. I've been running or co-running this conference for longer than I've been running this blog... so it's time for an event report. There's a few missing in my event report sequence as I started this blog in 2009 (after the first Lovelace), I didn't make it to #3 in Cardiff 2010 (I was working in France at the time), and it seems like 2021 Lovelace…
We (me, Clem Herman at the OU and Gillian Arnold of Tectre ltd ) are running a short project on gendered microaggression in computing at University. We have run some focus groups and are now at the survey stage. SO! This post is to help advertise the survey, which you can fill in in English or in Welsh: https://openuniversity.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/gendered-microaggressions-survey…
I do quite a lot of drawing and painting (check out my insta ) and quite often do courses to keep me on my toes and introduce me to new things. In the last five years or so I've done some... art for wellbeing with Saoirse Morgan at Aberystwyth Arts Centre (fun, friendly, low pressure) abstracting the landscape (online, self-paced) with Angharad Taris (online, allegedly self-paced but with buckets…
Aberystwyth University is 150 round about now and as part of the institution's 150th birthday celebrations they've had a series of projects to help celebrate this. Tally Roberts (our faculty outreach wizard) and I got a small grant to run some storytelling and animation based coding workshops for kids, which finished at the weekend. We ran five workshops (two in the Town Library, two in the Arts…
Gosh. Where to start. The 16th BCSWomen Lovelace happened a few weeks ago, and I was the event chair. Again. After retaking the reins and leading some events in lockdown, it was time to go face-to-face with the best women undergrads in computing in the UK. Again. Should I start on the day, with my brain waking me at 4, then getting me up at 5, for a stroll around a lake to clear my head before…
Over the last couple of months I have been intermittently playing with code and with the embroidery machine, and there are a few things I've learned. Here's a blow-by-blow account of creating an embroidered image from a photo: A teenage boy with a massive log First I cut out the image I was interested in using GIMP, and then blurred it to reduce the amount of detail. With my blurred image, I then…
We've got a new piece of kit in our university Makerspace! Thanks to Chris Price we've got a Brother Innovis NV880E embroidery machine https://www.brothermachines.com/sewing/2947/Innov-is_NV880E_Embroidery_Machine . This is a sewing machine with a robotic element - you put material in an embroidery frame, and the machine moves the embroidery frame around in order to sew in different directions…
Programmed Inequality by Mar Hicks is a history of early computing in the UK, starting right at the beginning. The book concentrates on the experiences and conditions for women in tech, and their changing status. Much like Recoding Gender by Janet Abbate (which I read recently but didn't, for some reason, blog about) it looks at the way the computing profession is first invented and then changes…
One of the jobs I have at work is to "manage" the makerspace, a room with a 3d printer and laser cutter and a few other cool toys in it. This room is supposed to be a facility for students and staff to build small prototype objects for any projects they have, however work-related or wacky - it's been used to print cases for kit, build replacement lab components, try out ideas for robots, and print…
BCSWomen Lovelace 2022 happened! It happened online, again, for the third time. Little did I realise that when we moved 2020 online due to threat of COVID and lockdown, I'd be chairing Lovelace 2022 online whilst actually suffering from COVID. I cannot recommend the experience of hosting a conference and being ill with COVID. From our core team of 4, one had been off with a virus in the run up and…
ACCU was my first conference for a long time and I threw myself into the conference experience, enjoying talks on all sorts of topics. The event was a bit more dynamic in planning than many conferences because people kept pulling out with COVID (and so other people kept stepping up and offering talks to fill the gaps). This meant there were more short talks than I think had originally been…
In the first week of April I went to my first in-person conference since all this [gestures at world] kicked off. ACCU is out of my area (it's a programming conference, and not an academic one), and the invitation to deliver a keynote arrived back in June last year. When making a decision about whether I could do this I looked back at their past list of keynote speakers and hoo boy there's some…