Ada Lovelace Day is approaching!
From the Finding Ada Lovelace website:
Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science.As my own observance of this day, I've downloaded Frankenstein from Project Gutenberg and will be reading it between now and Ada Lovelace Day. I will then blog about its author, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. She was, obviously, a writer and not a scientist or technician per se. But she had the guts to wrestle with the ideas and ideals of science in her work, and as such is a role model and pioneer for all of us geeky girl writers.
The first Ada Lovelace Day was held on 24th march 2009 and was a huge success. It attracted nearly 2000 signatories to the pledge and 2000 more people who signed up on Facebook. Over 1200 people added their post URL to the Ada Lovelace Day 2009 mash-up. The day itself was covered by BBC News Channel, BBC.co.uk, Radio 5 Live, The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Metro, Computer Weekly, and VNUnet, as well as hundreds of blogs worldwide.
In 2010 Ada Lovelace Day will again be held on 24th March and the target is to get 3072 people to sign the pledge and blog about their tech heroine.
posted by Laura E. Goodin @ 9:16 AM (permalink)
3 comment(s)
3 Comments:
What a lovely post!
Ada Lovelace holds a place near and dear to my heart as the world's first computer programmer. It's a pity she doesn't receive more attention.
Mary Shelley was a wonderful writer. The book was much better than any of the movie adaptations though the Karloff version isn't without its own charm.
What happened to the programming language Ada, named in her honor, I wonder?
She is the first in a long line of women whose contribution to technology seems to have not so much forgotten, but rather swept away by the male-domination of their times.
Two names from my own field come quickly to mind: Delia Derbyshire and Bebe Baron, both recently deceased (2001 and 2008 respectively)
A pity they can't all get the recognition that Marie Curie got eh?
Interestingly, the 2009 Nobel Prize for chemistry was shared by 3 people. 1/3 of the prize went to:
Ada E. Yonath of the Weizmann Institute of Science
Rehovot, Israel for her work in study of the structure and function of the ribosome.
Nice touch I think.
2 or the three winners for medicine were women: Elizabeth H. Blackburn Carol W. Greider
Contrast this with the clowns who have nominated Michael Jackson for the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize.......
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