Technology – Page 2

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Hi all – the site has been down for a while and some of you are no doubt wondering why. A server migration is about to happen – it was scheduled to happen later this month but it needs to happen now. The site will be in maintenance mode until the migration is completed, which could take a few days if the current rate of snafu continues.

This post is thus made for the benefit of those on RSS and email subscriptions. Please feel free to quote elsewhere if people ask you what the hell is happening with Feministe.

Why aren’t there more women at STEM conferences?: This time, it’s statistical.

UC-Davis professor and perennial noticer of gender imbalance at conferences Jonathan Eisen received an e-mail invitation and call for submissions to the 2013 Winter Q-Bio Meeting: Quantitative Biology on the Hawaii Islands. Nice, right? Sun, science, slate of speakers almost exclusively composed of dudes. (On the plus side, Dr. Lahav, at least you’ll never have to wait in line for the bathroom.)

Okay, Arizona, now you’re just messing with us.

Arizona is about to outlaw Internet trolling.

Which means I can think of a few people who’d better not be from Arizona.

10 Problems Women Need to Fix Before They Can Complain About Problems With Popular New Software, On a Blog

So people were real mad about my and other posts around the interwebs pointing out the fact that Siri can locate basically anything penis-related (Viagra, condoms, escorts, blow-jobs) but can’t find birth control, abortion clinics or oral sex for women. The responses were… fascinating, to say the least.

Photoshop-by-numbers

Though we generally notice the more egregious offenses, when a magazine cover barely resembles the celebrity it’s supposed to portray, we’re so jaded that we let it fly, much as we accept that a Picasso is going to kind of look just about person-esque.

Now scientists at Dartmouth can identify precisely how cubist a cover photo has become on a scale of 1 to 5.

Teenagers: Way More Boring Than We All Thought

It turns out that teenagers are not even sexting that much. Ugh, teenagers. Don’t you know that adults’ lives are so horrifyingly boring that we have to occupy ourselves by harping on you young, adventurous things doing stupid crap like sending each other nudie pics with your fancy portable telephones? I just retired my flip-phone a week ago, and I need to believe that someone uses their iPhone for a more exciting purpose than playing 16 games of Scrabble at once. THROW ME A BONE HERE. (And don’t laugh at the word “bone” you immature brats).

There’s been no shortage of hand-wringing over the menace of “sexting” among kids, but new research finds that parents’ concern may be largely overwrought: only 7% of children ages 10 to 17 created, appeared in or received a sexually suggestive photo in the past year.

Next thing you know, you’ll be telling me that every teenager in the neighborhood isn’t hosting Friday-night Rainbow Parties and then spending their Saturdays consuming vodka through a tampon. What else are you idiots doing with your time? Studying for the SATs? KIDS TODAY.

Emma Sullivan vs. Sam Brownback: A marketing case study

The biggest screwup out of Kansas Governor Sam Brownback’s office of late is easy: tattling on an 18-year-old to her high school for some juvenile comment she made on Twitter during a Youth in Government field trip to the capitol. I mean, seriously: Emma Sullivan says, to her mob of 60 whole Twitter followers, “Governor Brownback sucks.” Brownback’s staff runs to YinG and Sullivan’s school to say, “Waah! Your student is being mean!” And supposedly Sullivan is the immature one.

One thing Brownback’s office didn’t do wrong, although they’re taking some flak for it, was monitoring Twitter for mention of Governor Brownback. This isn’t creepy or paranoid–it’s actually marketing best practice. Online social media offers people, businesses, and organizations unprecedented access to the feelings and opinions of their target audiences. If you hear that people are criticizing you about a certain issue, you’re now able to reconsider your stance on it, make a note to address it publicly in the future, or even communicate with aggrieved individuals directly. Or if you see that some high-school student has tweeted that you suck, you can roll your eyes and say, “Nice. Really mature” and move on. (Or show some respect to a constituent and reply, “I’m sorry you feel that way. Why do you think the governor sucks?” Or be silly and reply, “No, YOU #blowalot… for tweeting about the governor when you could just ask him yourself. What can we do for you?” There are a hundred ways to handle it before you get to tattling.)

But there’s one comment from Brownback’s director of communication, Sherriene Jones-Sontag, that makes me think she’s completely ignorant of the functions of her own job:

That wasn’t respectful,” responded Sherriene Jones-Sontag. “In order to really have a constructive dialogue, there has to be mutual respect.”

1. When someone tells you you suck on Twitter, she’s probably not attempting to start a constructive dialogue–she’s probably just venting. And/or goofing around with her friends.

Yes, Emma Sullivan is definitely lucky she’s not Ruth Marcus’s daughter.

As are we all.

If you were my daughter, you’d be writing that letter apologizing to Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback for the smartalecky [She actually said “smartalecky.” I didn’t just add that. -Ed.], potty-mouthed tweet you wrote after meeting with him on a school field trip.

Also, that smartphone? The one you posed with, proudly displaying the tweet in which you announced that Brownback “sucked” and added the lovely hashtag #heblowsalot? Turned off until you learn to use it responsibly.

I have to make one note about all of the pearl-clutching over Emma Sullivan’s “#heblowsalot” tweet: She didn’t actually say it to Governor Brownback. That part was a joke. The reactions to her “rudeness” and “potty-mouthedness” are of such a scale you’d think she’d run up to him and yelled, “You blow! A lot!” before running away, cackling gleefully, but she just said it to her friends using the language teenagers use when they talk to each other. Rude? Maybe. I myself will cop to being a little bit rude when I tweet about TV or politics or football, but I’ve never been ordered to write a letter of apology to Robert Kirkman, Robert Bentley*, or Tim Tebow. Crude? Sullivan’s derisive teenage tweetspeak is hardly the crudest thing ever said about the governor, online or off. Knowing Brownback, it probably wasn’t the crudest thing said about him that day.

There seems to be this belief, perhaps promulgated by a generation that passed most of its social media around in folded notes when the teacher’s back was turned, that Twitter is a bullhorn that draws attention and raises one’s voice above the fray. Folks, Twitter is the fray. While it’s true that what you put out on the Internet lives there forever, it’s also true that in a world where Kanye West ALL CAPS TWEETS to an audience of more than five million, an 18-year-old sending out a tweet to her 60 followers is the digital age’s equivalent of joking around in the food court at the mall. By raising a fuss over Sullivan’s tweet, Brownback’s aide was basically standing up on a table and yelling, “Did you hear what she just said about the governor?!” drawing the attention of a mall full of people who wouldn’t have known a thing about it otherwise.

(In this analog, Ruth Marcus is following her own daughters from Sbarro to Dippin’ Dots, listening to their conversations and ready to step in with a wrist-slap for “potty-mouthed”ness.)

Siri: Total Misogynist.

The big news of the week is that Siri, the iPhone 4s’s virtual assistant, is apparently unable to find anything related to women’s health. Ask her to find an abortion clinic in New York City — a place with a few abortion clinics — and she can’t locate a single one. She can, however, direct you to several pro-life Crisis Pregnancy Centers. Ask for contraception, and she doesn’t understand the term “contraception.” And as Amanda figured out, it’s not just reproductive health stuff that she can’t get right — it’s anything related to female sexuality at all (she’s great, though, when it comes to male sexual needs):

At my house, we discovered this while playing with Siri’s quickly established willingness to look up prostitutes for a straight man in need. When you say to Siri, “I need a blow job,” she produces “nine escorts fairly close to you”. You get the same result if you say, “I’m horny” into it, even with my very female voice. And if you should you need erection drugs to help you through your encounter with one of the escorts, Siri is super-helpful. She produced twenty nearby drugstores where Viagra could be purchased, though how — without a prescription — is hard to imagine. But no matter how many ways I arranged mouth-based words — such as “lick” or “eat” — with the word “pussy,” Siri was confused and kept coming up with a name of a friend in contacts. Of course, one could assume Siri knows something about him that I don’t know.

I actually tested this out too, since I recently upgraded my 2005 flip phone to an iPhone 4s. I stood on a street corner in Brooklyn with my friend P, and we came up with all kinds of sex-related questions to ask Siri, and then we died laughing because we are children. Since the Siri story broke, Feministe Friend Nabiha also sent on some questions she asked Siri, which I recreated (thanks Nabiha!). My results: