Ideas Festival 2009 Brisbane – Guest Speaker

Well, the details are up on the QLD Office for Women website about the Ideas Festival in Brisbane. I’m going to be talking there as part of a panel discussion on a topic entitled ‘Beyond Size 0: Is Anything Real?’. It’ll be looking at the impact of the media’s representation of women’s bodies and will incorporate emerging technologies, which is where I come in....

Women in the AI Field – Artificial Intelligence

Barbara Liskov has become only the second woman to win the Turing Award for her work in AI. The Turing Award is considered by some to be like the Nobel Prize of computing and Liskov has long been considered a leading figure in her field. She works over at the Programming Methodology Group in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT in the states and she’s definitely a...

Virtualization and Avatar Use

That’s me… well, a virtual representation of me. I was recently discussing with a friend the use of avatars in online worlds and how you’re in many cases only allowed to slide the weight slider so far. You can be extremely skinny, but generally not obese. This is something I’ll be discussing at the Ideas Festival where I’ll be looking at whether interaction, repartee...

Freelance Writing Gigs by Moi

Article: Guitar Gaydar – LOTL Magazine I was commissioned to write an article for LOTL, an Australian lesbian magazine about the phenomenon of Guitar Gaydar, a phrase I invented to refer to the way lesbians always seem to sniff out lesbianesque guitar girls. You can read the entire two page article here, by click on page 16: Guitar Gaydar LOTL Magazine. Article: Pam Spaulding Blogs Her Way...

Interconnectivity Teaches Us Too Much – The Downside of Social Networking

A realisation occurred to me today. Although I love technology and couldn’t live without it, there is a point where you can know far too much about the people around you. Traditionally with friendships you see people once or twice a week and enjoy spending a few hours with them. You catch up and listen to what they have been up to. You then go your own way and live separate lives for a...

Monday Unexpected Holiday!

This Monday, Tracy was given a holiday from work for good work that she’d been doing the previous week so we made the most of it! We went to the cinema to see The Other Boleyn Girl starring Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman. It was really good and it only cost us $7 to get in! We didn’t realise it was a special ‘senior show’ of the movie so it was full of all the...