The other day I noticed that Shameless’ “Geek Chic” category is sadly underrepresented. Tech is important to me. I <3 tech. Poor little tech, not getting the love.

Sometimes the line is blurry between the personal interests of one young feminist (<-me), and what might be interesting to young feminists everywhere.

But when you get a great lead on some new (or overlooked) tech hawtness, one of the first things you do is share it with all your geeky buddies. So that's what I'm going to start doing here, extended circle of geeky buddies: expect some more regular excited blathering from me about videogames, operating systems, gizmos, hacks, all the things a growing tech-savvy girl needs.

Playing catch-up, here are few bits and pieces I owe you, Shameless ladies:

Nokia’s Morph nanotechnology concept ad

PicLens

PicLens is a swishy new picture viewing plug-in for Windows or Mac (and for just about any browser, though you’re all using Firefox right?)

Check out the preview. Shiny.

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I’m not sure how many of you own or play on an Xbox 360 or Playstation 3, but if you’re a rabid console gamer you’ve probably heard of Assassin’s Creed. For everyone else, here’s the scoop: Assassin’s Creed is a video game that has you playing a medieval assassin tasked with eliminating nine people associated with the Crusades. Assassin’s Creed is one of the biggest games this holiday season, with a big marketing push from publisher Ubisoft following months of hype. The game is projected to sell over a million copies in the next two months, an amazing feat considering only eleven Xbox 360 games have ever sold more than a million copies.

So why should you care if you’re not into video games? Well, if you’re a Shameless reader, you probably care about how women are faring in traditionally male-dominated industries, and guess what? The producer of Assassin’s Creed is Jade Raymond, a woman. Female game developers are nothing new; a lot of classics were conceived and designed by women. But Raymond’s profile is far higher than any woman before her, mainly because she’s been the public face of the game at a time when the video game audience is larger than ever before. This is both a blessing and a curse; while Raymond is easily the most visible woman in game development today, there’s a suspicion that Raymond’s been asked to promote the game so much because, well, look:

Jade Raymond, producer of Assassin’s Creed.

Which brings me to the utterly bizarre way video game audiences—especially younger male gamers—handle attractive women playing and developing video games. Everyone knows the stereotype of the nerd gamer with no social skills who quakes in fear of women. The truth, however, is just a bit creepier. Something about the intersection of “hot women” and “plays video games” creates in some gamers a strange emotional supernova that produces equal parts nerdish adoration, wanton sexual desire, and hateful bile.

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Do Shakira’s hips lie? I’m confused.

A Friday Funny (though this could also fall under the category of a Friday Cry-y): Women sway their hips the most when they’re least fertile, according to Queen’s University study.

Scientists at Queen’s are apparently blowing the minds of current zoology, claiming that women, contrary to a popular belief, make themselves less, not more, attractive when they’re “fertile.”

The study got 40 women (my goodness! 40 whole women!!) to wear clothes with special markers on them so that computers could track their movements, and then asked the women to walk up and down in a 6-metre area.

I keep on trying to come up with a clever critique of this study, but honestly I’m speechless. How and who came up with the idea for this study? Why is the degree of swayiness of my hips considered important? What is humanity supposed to do with this breakthrough information? And when are they gonna do a study on the boys, so I know when my man is most virile? Vomit!!

I didn’t really want to like Natalie Portman - her image is a bit too cutesy for me, I think her acting is overrated, and the stain of the last three Star Wars movies is awful hard to wash off. What can I say, I’m human, and all humans have some bias in their soul.

But after putting in the effort to learn a thing or two about her, she has earned my respect. She once said “I’d rather be smart than be a movie star,” and she apparently meant it. She speaks five languages (and is learning more), and has taken time out of acting for her education - first a BA at Harvard, then graduate studies at Hebrew University. She has also done some work to promote micro-lending for women-owned businesses in poor countries.

I particularly respect her latest dabbling: acting as guest editor for Scholastic MATH, a mag that helps teens appreciate the fun and relevance of mathematics.

This is what she has to say:

“Math was one of my favorite subjects in school. It always gets a bad rap and I’m not sure why. I always found math to be such an exciting avenue to think about the world in new and different ways.

Sure, you need to use math daily for knowing how much tip to leave at a restaurant or how much flour you need to make double the amount of cookies in a recipe, but it is the less obviously practical parts of math that are most fun for me—like considering the principles of infinity. It made me excited about life to consider the limitlessness of the mind and what we can do with it.”

Nicely put. It’s always wonderful to see women promoting math and busting up the “girls are no good at math” stereotype.

Do you know Allison Stokke? Hundreds of thousands of internet users do. Up until recently, if you did know Stokke, it was probably because of her athletic accomplishments; she’s a high school senior with an outstanding track and field record and an athletic scholarship to a state university. But now those accomplishments have arguably been overshadowed by a picture of her from a year ago that was posted to the internet. It’s not even a particularly notable photo; it’s just Stokke fixing her hair at a track meet. But because Stokke is a fit and attractive girl, the photo got the attention of bloggers and forum posters, and within days Stokke’s picture was everywhere. Now she’s hounded by attention from photographers and media outlets all because of the photo:

“Even if none of it is illegal, it just all feels really demeaning,” Allison Stokke said. “I worked so hard for pole vaulting and all this other stuff, and it’s almost like that doesn’t matter. Nobody sees that. Nobody really sees me.”

We’ve gone over this territory before. It’s easier than ever for an embarrassing photo or a private video to be plastered across the web in a matter of days, and sometimes the side effects of that aren’t pretty. The issue is widespread enough that the Ad Council, an advertiser-supported non-profit advocacy group in the United States, created a public service ad campaign warning teens of the potential downsides to posting photos, videos and other personal information online. But the particular case of Allison Stokke seems slightly different.

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There’s an interesting piece in The Guardian about sexist harassment online, especially as experienced by female bloggers. (It’s also by the editor of Feministing, which we link to regularly.)

I was reminded of the hate mail that I get for a site I built, about ad trucks. I put it up when I was probably seventeen, and unfortunately haven’t updated it much since. But instead of disappearing into internet obscurity, the site has steadily climbed Google rankings. One side of this is that I’ve gotten some interesting feedback, from people around the world who are writing and campaigning against mobile advertising. But the cool email has been overwhelmed by strangely intense hate mail.

I didn’t think ad trucks had many supporters. But somehow every couple months, someone finds the time to tell me that I run the stupidest website they’ve ever found; that I need to get a job; that I’m ruining the economy; that I’m a hippie; that I must be a Democrat. The sheer rage behind most of the messages scares me a little.

After reading this article, I’m wondering where the insults would go if it was obvious from the site that I was a woman.

Spread the word. And for more info, click here.

I signed up for Facebook, partly to see what the hype was all about, partly for “research” purposes (I’m a graduate student in communications, after all), and partly from buckling under the pressure of being asked every day for a week, “are you on Facebook?”

I stayed on Facebook because it’s fascinating: people compare the site to highly addictive drugs for a reason. I’ve spent hours sifting through profiles of old high school friends and random people I’ve met in the real world over the years, looking at photos of their weddings, vacations and parties, marvelling at how seemingly unconnected friends know each other, and keeping up-to-date on people’s plans, careers and relationships.

Like many astute students of communications (as I said, this is research!), I’m interested in how free sites like MySpace and Facebook plan to make money. After all, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. purchased MySpace for $580 million (US) for a reason (which is made somewhat clear in this fascinating article). It seems to me to be about more than just getting people to voluntarily participate to make content costs virtually zero, getting participants to draw each other to the site (that’s why it’s called social networking) and then selling that high traffic to advertisers.

The answer to this question is becoming increasingly clear as I realize that Facebook is a data collector’s wet dream. By filling out personal information such as favourite books, movies and events we’re attending, we are volunteering information that is in turn repackaged and sold for big bucks (bigger than the bucks made from selling ads, I would imagine) to marketing companies and other interested parties, who then turn around and use our info to sell us things. This is nothing new (see: airlines, mailing houses and retail outlets for other examples), and something I think we have been able to brush off as just part of the massive marketing machine that we have learned to live with, to put it somewhat simply.

But something interesting (and I think something new) is happening on Facebook. We are willingly (and happily) filling out even more personal information, including our addresses, phone numbers and email addresses, places of work, political affiliation, religious and sexual orientation, who we have lived with and for how long, how we know each other, who we are dating, where we go to school, etc.

I was shaken out of my Facebook haze last night when I visited this site and learned about Facebook’s alarming privacy policy, which at first I thought was about limiting who on the site could see the photos of me and my friends from Friday night. Silly me: it’s about who has access to the personal information I keep plugging in. Do You Have a Facebook? traces the links between Facebook and the United States government and has kept me up all night trying to understand the implications of this.

These are critical questions we need to be discussing as we increasingly participate in sites like Facebook. We are drawn to social networking sites because we we want to establish personal connections with each other, however mediated those connections may be. I think we need to be asking what we’re willing to give up in the process.

An anthology of 24 essays by geeky women, Shes Such a Geek: Women Write about Science, Technology, and Other Nerdy Stuff “celebrates women who have flourished in the male-dominated realms of technical and cultural arcana. Editors Annalee Newitz and Charlie Anders bring together a diverse range of critical and personal essays about the meaning of female nerdhood by women who are in love with genomics, obsessed with blogging, learned about sex from Dungeons and Dragons, and aren’t afraid to match wits with men or computers. More than anything, She’s Such a Geek is a celebration and call to arms: it’s a hopeful book which looks forward to a day when women will invent molecular motors, design the next ultra-tiny supercomputer, and run the government.”

The She’s Such a Geek website and blog is also up and running now — specializing in entries on geeky topics as they relate to women and girls.

I thought I’d post the book info today, as it doesn’t look like either amazon or
chapters have tonnes of copies stocked (hopefully indie stores will do better), and this book seems like a great, reasonably priced Festivus prezzie for the geeky girl in your life…