Science, Computers and Horses

Mary L Gorden

Archives for September 2016

A Solitary Horse

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Grey after a brushing

I now have only one horse in my pasture. For the last several years McKenna, a Morgan mare belonging to a friend of a friend, has been a companion to my gelding Grey. On Saturday McKenna left. The decision for her to leave was made based on human needs and wants. The horses were not consulted.

Horses are herd animals and providing Grey with a “herd” even if it was only one other horse always seemed important to me. Eight years ago when my Appaloosa mare Spice died, I decided that I didn’t want to buy another horse. So I’ve provided Grey with company using a series of horses belonging to other people during that stretch of time. But these other horses brought extra work and extra expenses and I was finally ready to see how Grey would do by himself. After all some of my friends have only one horse in their pasture and those horses cope with the situation. And, unlike with some horses, Grey and McKenna weren’t buddies. So he wasn’t attached to her, she was just another horse.

With some experimenting last week and some planning, we were able to get McKenna loaded into the horse trailer before Grey realized what was happening. But as the trailer with her in it drove away he knew that she had left. And he started running around and screaming at the top of his lungs.

I opened the gate to the small pasture he had been placed in and gave him the full three and a half acres of pasture and yard to run around in. I also shut the dogs into the dog yard so they wouldn’t interfere.

The first 45 minutes were pretty intense. Grey was clearly upset as he kept calling out to McKenna and ran around the yard and pastures looking for her. Then he finally noticed one of the flakes of hay that I had strategically place in all of the pastures. He stopped to eat a bite. Then there was more running around and yelling but the hay had too much appeal. In less than an hour the drama was over. Grey was hanging out in the pasture eating and not caring that he was the only horse around.

He got a more attention than usual the rest of Saturday and all of Sunday. That included two baths. On Saturday he was sweaty from all of his running around on a very hot day. The bath on Sunday took off the layer of dirt from rolling while he was still wet from the Saturday bath. Sunday morning he seemed subdued.  I worried that he hadn’t slept well Saturday night but eventually I realized that he was just calm. Sharing a pasture with a dominant mare who wanted more than her share of the food was obviously more stressful than I realized.

With plans for Monday I was gone for most of the day. The lack of attention didn’t seem to be a problem for Grey. At night before going to bed I usually take out good night carrots. It is my way of checking on the horses at the end of the day. When I did good night carrots on Monday night Grey seemed happy just standing there and eating all of the carrots I had brought. I realized that from his point of view not having to compete for food and treats was well worth the price of being the only horse in the pasture.

My trying to provide horse companionship for Grey had created more work for me and more stress for him. If I’d realized that, I would have changed the situation earlier.

It makes you wonder though, how often people do that. They create a situation where they think they are doing something good for someone else and they are actually causing other people problems. In my case it was a horse I was creating problems for. But it could have easily been a person. Would I have had the common sense to have the conversation that could have easily resolved the situation?

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Women Programmers part 2

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halloween-pic-of-programmers-at-schwab

It is pretty well established that in the 1940s most, if not all, programmers were women. Hardware was the important part of computers and that field was dominated by men.  The programming part of the job was viewed as a minor clerical task.

Today, about seventy years later, the percentage of women programmers is small. Exact numbers seem hard to find.  According to an NPR article only about 18% of the Computer Science degrees earned today are earned by women.

It is tempting to draw a straight line between the dominance of women programmers in the 1940s and the paucity of women programmers today. But life is never that simple.  Again using the NPR statistics, the number of women receiving Computer Science degrees rose from about 15% in the mid-1960s to about 37% in the mid-1980s.

Did something happen in the 1960s?

The answer to that question is a resounding “yes”. For those of you who don’t know the history of the 1960s I would recommend When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present by Susan Collins.

My own career mirrored the rise of the importance of women in computers during these turbulent decades of the 20th century. When I became a programmer in 1966 women programmers were in the minority.  In my group, there were no women programming supervisors.

When I first became a programming supervisor in 1970 there was one other woman programming supervisor in a different area. She was about ten years older than me and unfortunately I never got to know her and learn her story.

By the early 1980s I had a significant number of women peers in computer management. My first woman boss was in 1989.  The picture at the top of this article from the mid-1980s on Halloween shows a group of programmers and their managers.  As you can see there was gender diversity in the group.

When I retired in 2001 I wasn’t aware of a decrease in the number of women in computing. I may have just not been paying attention as in the early 1990s I left management to return to the technical work that I loved.

Why did this happen?

And I have no theory about why the percentage of women receiving Computer Science degrees started to decrease in the 1980s. But I do know that a correct theory is unlikely to be developed if the increase in women programmers starting in the 1960s is ignored.

 

 

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Managing Martians

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managing-martians

Back to Women in STEM book reviews! This week’s book is Managing Martians by Donna Shirley with Danelle Morton.  Donna Shirley is not related to Dame Stephanie Shirley whose book Let IT Go was reviewed earlier in this series.

Managing Martians begins on July 4, 1997 with the arrival of the lander Pathfinder and the rover Sojourner Truth on Mars.  Shirley describes the importance of that day to her.  “I headed the team that had designed and built this revolutionary six-wheeled scientific laboratory [Sojourner Truth], a 25-pound robot about the size of a microwave oven that could do what humans could only dream of: explore the surface of Mars.”

This book tells the story of how a girl, born in 1941 and raised in a small town in Oklahoma, became the woman who could write that sentence. Early in her life she became interested in aviation.  She made her first solo flight in an airplane at the age of fifteen.  As a young person her goal in life was to become an aeronautical engineer.  Like many woman of her era, she was told that “Girls can’t be engineers.”  In her case it was how she was greeted by her college engineering advisor.  After she assured him that she had been accepted into the College of Engineering he did look for and find her student folder.

After a rocky start to her career, Shirley was hired by JPL’s aerodynamics group in 1966. It was the start of her thirty-one year effort to get to Mars.

Managing Martians provides an inside look at both the technical and the management details of the space program.

The sections of the book that describe the different types of rovers that were built and tested on Earth before the design of Sojourner Truth was decided upon is fascinating. The tradeoffs of function and weight are explained.  Weight (or more technically correct – mass) was a major factor in every decision that was made.  From how smart the rover would be to how much battery backup power it would have.

The issue of mass also impacted the lander Pathfinder.  The problems encountered during the testing of the material to provide the protection for the lander as it crashed into the surface of Mars were made more difficult by the need to keep the mass of the material to a minimum.

Shirley really shines during the sections that cover the management of space projects. Her approach to managing technical staff where they clearly knew more about the technology than she did was daring, trusting and successful.  As a technical person who has worked for more than one manager who seemed determined to undermine my ability to accomplish anything, I would have loved to have had Shirley for a boss.  She also brought women onto her teams and recounts one small planning session where she suddenly realized that everyone in the meeting was female.

She talks about the money constraints of space projects as NASA moved into a period of “Better, Faster, Cheaper” after the end of the Apollo moon landings. Her ability to manage these constraints allowed her to, as she put it, “bend the glass ceiling” and be promoted over some of her male peers.

Managing Martians is well worth reading both as a history of the time and as a management primer.

 

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Crisis Management and Book Publishing

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Some people are good in a crisis. They do their best work then.  I’m not one of those people.  I actually spend a lot of time avoiding crises.  But ten days ago my crisis avoidance planning failed and work on my blog came to a screeching halt.  You may have noticed that there was no blog post last week and that this one is late.

I’m in the middle of publishing a book. It’s my first book, so a lot of what is going on is new to me.  I’ve delegated the actual publication tasks to an experienced publishing project manager and her team.  All I have to do is make choices, review results and sign off on everything.  Before hiring the publishing team I made sure there was a well-thought-out plan that showed when I had work to do and when I didn’t.  During my down weeks I could devote all of my attention to marketing.

Part of my marketing activity is establishing this blog which will appeal to my target audience, people interested in the problem of getting more women into the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) fields. I am also working to become visible to other people and organizations involved in this work.  Neither of these activities is a short term effort.  Especially since I am starting from almost zero and have very little experience in marketing.  But I was making progress; more so on establishing a blog.

Then last month, during the times I wasn’t working on book publishing tasks, I made two decisions which should eventually help my marketing efforts but in the short run added more work. The first decision was to expand my social media platform to include LinkedIn.  The second was to enter into an online conversation about the history of women in computers.  Entering into this discussion led to another direction change as I found needed to use my blog as part of that conversation.

My first attempts in these two areas didn’t go as planned. It’s not that they didn’t work per se.  It was just that they worked in a totally unexpected way.  So I had to figure out new next steps.  More work to do.

Then my book reappeared in the form of my first print proof.

It should have been a moment of great excitement but I was swamped with too much to do and I couldn’t fully appreciate the moment. At first I tried to work the crisis.  Just plug ahead and you can fix things later.  Except I couldn’t do that with the book, there is no “later” when you are looking at a print proof.  So that work had to be done well.

I could pull back a little from LinkedIn but I had to be careful to not lose all of my momentum. And I tried to continue to write blog posts that supported my online conversation.  But I couldn’t.  It turned out that there were gaps in my knowledge.  Since my reason for entering into the online conversation was to fill in gaps in other people’s knowledge, I had to have my facts in place.  And I had no time to do the needed research.  Missing one week of blogging is marginally acceptable during a crisis.  Missing two weeks is not.

So you are getting a different type of blog post this week. I had made a firm decision not to write about the problems of publishing a book.  There are plenty of blogs that do that.  But it’s a topic I can write coherently about.  Next week I will be back to book reviews and my online conversation will just have to wait until the book is published and I have time to do some serious research.

 

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