Science Contest Glass Ceiling Shattered

[DeepModem Mom]

Source: NYT/AP

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: December 3, 2007

NEW YORK (AP) -- Girls swept a prestigious high school science competition for the first time Monday, winning top prizes of $100,000 scholarships for their work on potential tuberculosis cures and bone growth in zebrafish. It was the first time girls had ever won the grand prizes in both the team and individual divisions of the Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology.

Isha Jain, a senior at Freedom High School in Bethlehem, Pa., won the individual prize for her biology project on bone growth in zebrafish fins. Janelle Schlossberger and Amanda Marinoff, seniors at John F. Kennedy High School in Plainview, N.Y., won the top team prize for their research into tuberculosis treatments....

The entries were judged by a panel of scientists led by Joseph Taylor, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in physics and a professor emeritus at Princeton University. Five other individuals and five teams also won scholarships ranging from $10,000 to $50,000.

The Siemens competition was begun in 1998 to recognize America's best math and science students. Finalists were chosen at regional competitions and flown to New York for a weekend that included bowling and a Broadway show before Monday's awards ceremony. The contest has also been known as the Siemens Westinghouse Competition....

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Science-Competition.html

[Mojambo]

1. Nerds!

Good to see.

[Ian David]

2. Bill O'Reilly will cover this story, while showing B-Roll of sexy high school cheerleaders. n/t

[DBoon]

4. cheerleaders, bleh!

there is nothing sexier than a science nerd

[Ian David]

8. I agree! n/t

[Lisa]

15. why not do both? Be sexy AND do science ... like Hedy Lamarr

"Hedy Lamarr, a Hollywood actress, and George Antheil, a music composer, were granted a patent on spread spectrum wireless communication in 1942. The patent never earned a dime - its commercial adoption came decades after the patent expired. Spread spectrum is the basis for GPS (the satellite-based global positioning system)."
http://www.patenthawk.com/

http://www.inventions.org/culture/female/lamarr.html


Speaking of which, there is a former cheerleader turned graduate student, sitting a few feet away from me in the lab right now, performing a difficult mathematical transformation on a satellite image of grizzly bear habitat.

As a university instructor, it makes me furious when good-looking women feel they have to "dumb it down" for fear of intimidating people, or are stereotyped as "dumb blondes". How beautiful (or cute, hot, etc.) one is, ought not to affect how smart one is perceived to be. And yet it does.

[mitchum]

16. The reality of Hedy Lamarr always eclipses those Hollywood figures...

with alleged "genius IQs" such as James Woods and Sharon Stone.
Sure, Jimmy...
Sure, Sharon...

[galileo3000]

17. Good Point, I hear that cutie Danika McKellar is brilliant. (n/t)

[Lisa]

18. her book rocks!

http://www.mathdoesntsuck.com/

She's also had math papers published in academic journals.

[DBoon]

19. I disagree

sexy and science are synonymous, by definition.

case closed.

[Lisa]

20. then I'll take that as a huge compliment!

I take it that you approve of my shelling out for grad school tuition, rather than breast enhancement?

[DBoon]

30. Mind enhancement > breast enhancement

nt

[eppur_se_muova]

23. What, you're expecting cheerleaders to be rocket scientists?

Two bits, four bits, six bits, inertia
No joke: This Texans cheerleader works with NASA
Posted: Wednesday January 3, 2007 4:34PM; Updated: Wednesday January 3, 2007 5:02PM

Summer Williams is a Houston Texans cheerleader. She's also a rocket scientist.

This is a true story.

"Well," Williams said, "I don't actually use the term 'rocket scientist.' "

That's what she is, though. Williams is a 25-year old aerospace engineer for the Jacobs Engineering Group, which is NASA's main scientific support contractor. Williams, a small-town Kansan, is an assistant project manager on the group that figures out how to keep the international space station habitable.


***
more: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2007/writers/aditi_kinkhabwala/01/03/rocket.scientist/

[melody]

24. Why not do science and just be ourselves, whatever that is?

Being brilliant in science helps everyone. "Sexy" is a personal choice that is no one else's business.

[LanternWaste]

26. ... or Danika McKellar!

... or Danika McKellar!




(A thread touching on sexy nerds is useless without pics :) )

[galileo3000]

28. Good POINT!

[DrDan]

27. or like George Bush

cheerleader . . . wants to send an expedition to Mars . . . . and is an expert on stem-cell research . . . . and global warming . . . and fuel mileage . . . and evolution . . . .

[noel adamson]

3. This is great news; a milestone in unleashing ALL of the potential genius of our population.

And in the little dark age of the anti-science Bush regime too. Hope springs eternal.

[MissB]

5. Excellent!

[TrogL]

6. I wonder if they're going to have to start doing it like symphony auditions

I'm wondering if some science fair entries are judged poorly simply because they are created by a female science student - furthering the myth of "girls are bad at science".

The problem was so bad in hiring symphony orchestra musicians a special procedure had to be put in place. Rather than auditioning in front of the judges, a special obaque, acoustically-transparent screen was set up and the candidate would perform behind it, identified merely as "Candidate A" and so forth. The actual identity of the candidate wouldn't be known until after the hiring decision had been made.

Used to be you'd never see a female brass player because many conductors had a bias against female musicians (except playing upper strings, upper winds and harp)

[DeepModem Mom]

10. That is amazing, TrogL. Thanks for posting this info. nt

[awoke_in_2003]

11. I am one that grew up during the time when

the myth of "girls aren't good at math and science" was really strong. I am glad to see anyone take a strong interest in science, and maybe things like this will inspire a few more people to take science (and math) more seriously. We are falling woefully behind the rest of the world in these catagories.

[SharonAnn]

21. Heck, I even thought I wasn't "good at math and science" even though facts proved otherwise.

I honestly thought that, since I was a girl, I wasn't any good at math and science. Test results didn't matter, SAT scores showing me in 99 percentile didn't change my belief, etc. Then when I was about 25, I heard myself saying "Well, I'm not really very good at math" and suddenly the light went on. THAT wasn't true! Why on earth was I saying that? I was very good at math.

Just goes to show how powerful cognitive dissonance can be, until something shatters it. I "knew" something that wasn't true and I had all the information that told it wasn't true so I chose to ignore the information because it clashed with what I "knew".

I'm so glad that we're moving out of that belief set, even though we're still not quite there.

[awoke_in_2003]

22. It is sad the amount of brain washing that goes

on in childhood. Children need to be praised when they do good, and encouraged to seek out new challenges and question the norm. They have to know that worthwhile things take work. This is how I try to approach both my boy and girl. I want them to ask "why" more than I want blind obedience.

[antigop]

7. Hey, great! Now they can go to college & find that when they get out all of the jobs are outsourced

so they won't be able to use their talents.

[DCKit]

9. Seven years to destroy the dollar, the economy and our credibility in the world...

but they didn't manage to put teenage girls in bhurkas (sp?) and kick them out of school and back into the kitchen. * IS a total failure!!

I can't wait for his snarky, smirky comments when he "welcomes" them to the WH for a photo op. No doubt he'll tout the success of "No Child Left a Dime... er "Behind""

Good show Ladies!! There is hope for Amurika yet!!!

[Lisa]

13. Dubya's take on women in higher education...

I'm sorry to confirm your suspicions, DCKit. Here's how Bush felt about Yale letting in female students.


"Bush mentioned something about Yale University, from which he graduated in 1968. Novick graduated from Yale in 1983, so she brought it up, thinking it would be "like a bonding thing."

"When did you graduate?" Bush asked her, as she recalls. She told him. That's when Bush told her that Yale "went downhill since they admitted women."

"I said, 'Excuse me?'" Novick says. "I thought he was kidding. But he didn't seem to be kidding. I said, 'What do you mean?'"

Bush replied that "something had been lost" when women were fully admitted to Yale in 1969, that fraternities were big when he'd been there, providing a "great camaraderie for the men." But that went out the window when women were allowed in, Bush said.

"He said something like, 'Women changed the social dynamic for the worse,'" she says. "I was so stunned, shocked and insulted, I didn't know what to say.""

http://www.dubyaspeak.com/incidents.phtml?page=4



p.s. for a group that claims to be into "school spirit" and all that, I thought it was interesting that neither Dubya nor Poppy spoke up on behalf of their fellow Eli, Yale architecture grad Maya Lin, when she appealed to the Bush family for help, during her struggles with getting permission for the Vietnam Memorial. And yet Dubya expected the school to shower him with affection (he practically invited himself over for a convocation photo-op, over the objections of faculty and students).

[Lisa]

12. these days, most undergraduate students in the US/Canada are women ...

And many departments are seeing the gender imbalance for graduate degree programs, also beginning to even out.

Whenever my male colleagues in my university department make snarky remarks about females (and this, mercifully, is becoming less frequent, even in the hard science and engineering disciplines) -- I remind them that they would likely not have faculty positions if we went back to the old way of doing things (and lost half the student enrollment overnight).

Kudos to the winning students -- and to the ones who even made it to the finals, because the competition is really tough. I hope they stay in science!

Someday, it will be so normal to see women winning major awards (including Nobel prizes) that it will seem quaint to even mention it in the press -- just like the term "co-eds" is rapidly becoming obsolete. (The students look bewildered when I ask them if they've heard it lately ... one of them said, "I thought a university that admits males and females is 'normal'?")

[entanglement]

29. Engineering departments still have a long way to go, though

And I'm talking about large, well-known American universities with explicit AA / diversity policies. In my experience, most of the 'push' for diversity comes from University Administration or the offices of the Dean. The 'resistance' (grumbling) comes from individual male faculty at the department level. No one opposes hiring women, of course - but you have people saying things like 'Why the hell can't we forget about this diversity c*ap and just hire the best person for the job?' or 'What a waste of time this diversity seminar is!'

Maybe Canada is better in such matters?

[intheflow]

14. Kickin' for the little sistahs!

[Le Taz Hot]

25. K & R

for the oh-so-smart younglings. Kickin' ass for Team xx! :applause: