Jane Margolis, Allan Fisher: Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing (2003)

“The information technology revolution is transforming almost every aspect of society, but girls and women are largely out of the loop. Although women surf the Web in equal numbers to men and make a majority of online purchases, few are involved in the design and creation of new technology. It is mostly men whose perspectives and priorities inform the development of computing innovations and who reap the lion’s share of the financial rewards. As only a small fraction of high school and college computer science students are female, the field is likely to remain a “male clubhouse,” absent major changes.

In Unlocking the Clubhouse, social scientist Jane Margolis and computer scientist and educator Allan Fisher examine the many influences contributing to the gender gap in computing. The book is based on interviews with more than 100 computer science students of both sexes from Carnegie Mellon University, a major center of computer science research, over a period of four years, as well as classroom observations and conversations with hundreds of college and high school faculty. The interviews capture the dynamic details of the female computing experience, from the family computer kept in a brother’s bedroom to women’s feelings of alienation in college computing classes. The authors investigate the familial, educational, and institutional origins of the computing gender gap. They also describe educational reforms that have made a dramatic difference at Carnegie Mellon—-where the percentage of women entering the School of Computer Science rose from 7% in 1995 to 42% in 2000—and at high schools around the country.”

Publisher MIT Press, 2003
ISBN 0262632691, 9780262632690
182 pages

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2012-7-17)

Katie Hafner, Matthew Lyon: Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet (1996/1998)

In the 1960s, when computers were regarded as giant calculators, J.C.R. Licklider at MIT saw them as the ultimate communication device. With Defence Department funds, he and a band of computer whizzes began work on a nationwide network of computers. This is an account of their daring adventure.

Published by Simon & Schuster
A Touchstone Book
ISBN 0684872161

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-7-17)

YoHa: Coal Fired Computers (300,000,000 Computers – 318,000 Black Lungs) (2010)

A one-hundred year old, 35-ton showman’s steam engine powers a computer with 1.5 tons of coal. Black lungs inflate every time a database record of miners’ lung disease is shown on the computer monitors. It feels like you’ve been invited into a fun fair, but one where the rides log their own accidents – a fun fair run by people who long ago became indistinct from the machines they maintain.

Over three days at the Discovery Museum, with groups of miner activists, Coal Fired Computers articulates relations between Power, Art and Media. A new work by leading UK media artists Harwood and Yokokoji (YoHa), in collaboration with Jean Demars, it responds to the displacement of coal production to distant lands like India and China after the UK miners’ strike in 1984/85.

Coal Fired Computers reflects on the complexities of our global fossil fuel reliance and especially on how coal transforms our health as we have transformed it. Today coal produces 42% of the world’s electricity, and in many countries this rate is much higher (more than 70% in India and China). This power is produced by descendants of Charles Parson’s 1884 steam turbines, also on display in the Discovery Museum.

It could be said that coal dust gets into everything. Sealed into the lungs of miners it forms visible blue streaks, like veins of coal. According to the World Health Organisation, 318,000 deaths occur annually from chronic bronchitis and emphysema caused by exposure to coal dust. The common perception is that wealthy countries have put this all behind them, displacing coal dust into the lungs of unrecorded, unknown miners in distant lands, however coal returns into our lives in the form of the cheap and apparently clean goods we consume.

Coal fired energy not only powers our computers here in the UK, but is integral to the production of the 300,000,000 computers made each year. 81% of the energy used in a computer’s life cycle is expended in the manufacturing process, now taking place in countries with high levels of coal consumption. The UK currently produces less that one third of the coal it uses, importing the majority of it and therefore displacing 150,000 tons of coal dust into unknown lungs.

Coal Fired Computers brings together these disparate elements into an artwork, allowing us to reflect on the complexities that have created and maintained power, the crisis of fuelling that power and its subsequent health residues.

Authors: Graham Harwood and Matsuko Yokokoji
Commissioned by AV Festival 2010
Produced in partnership with Discovery Museum.

project page

PDF (updated on 2013-2-6)