Diversity, the Intro Textbook we Need, and Privilege

A few weeks ago, I posted about Professionalization, and how it affected medicine, law, and engineering.

While I wrote about the move to replace midwives with doctors, sometimes at cost of childbed fevers, I didn't get into how that affected my family directly.

I am told that when my grandmother was born, nurses had to do exactly what the doctor said, no more and no less. The doctor forgot to tell the nurses to change my great-grandmother's absorbent material. She died when my grandmother was just one week old.

It was clearly the doctor's error, and the doctor apologized. My great-grandfather accepted the apology, took his youngest daughter, and went home to raise his 12 children alone. There was no lawsuit.

Women in STEM are naturally following the court case of Ellen Pao vs. Kleiner Perkins. As the article points out, combating second-generation bias has proved difficult. There's a specific term for this type of problem, where the solution is NOT intuitive, but the term is slipping my mind right now.


In the time between drafting and posting this post, Model View Culture released an article that ties this together even better:
Possibilities and Limitations of Discrimination Lawsuits in Tech

My thoughts continue below the cut.

Life moves on...

I had started writing the series of how I got to where I am.  Most recently, I was writing about my first semester as a cooperative education student (aka, "co-op").

My first Con

During the holiday season, I am re-posting an article from my previous blog.  This post was originally published in August 2010.  However, Brian and I still did not attend GenCon in 2011.

Having geeky family and geeky friends in Indiana, I am all too aware that I missed GenCon this year. Unfortunately, the combination of finances from visiting my Mom and losing income in her final months, and the family schedule, made a trip to Indianapolis in early August unworkable this year. I hope to make it back next year.

Creating the Future

Working as an engineer, I find old and new technologies juxtaposed on a regular basis. As an engineer concerned about our future, I think sometimes we look for the latest, greatest, highest technology solution, when sometimes low-tech will do the job.

Here are three four posts that mesh with some of what I've been thinking regarding wealth.

Wealth

I've been reading S.M. Stirling's Change series lately, which begins with the book:

The premise is that in 1998, something happens around the world which eliminates all of Earth's high technology, particularly electronics and explosives.  It's alternate "history," with both utopian and distopian elements.

But reading the series has had me thinking about wealth.

See, in the Dying Time that followed the Change, very few people in the cities survived.  All our stockbrokers in New York?  Turned cannibal and/or died.  Wealth did not necessarily mean survival.