Automatic Lover Book Review

Not so long ago I got sent Automatic Lover by it’s author Ariadne Tampion. She called it a steamy love story for geeks. Now one thing I will say before I go any further, this is not a book for young children. Personally I’d give it an over 16 age limit.

The story line is fun and interesting providing lots of questions about human computer interaction. It also brought up the question of computer ethics and at what point HCI becomes more than just humans controlling and programming computers. Is it possible for a computer robot to learn and analyse human emotion and react in a way that pleases a person. It also shows some of the risks and benefits of such interactions.

The book although light hearted really does make you think about what might become the future of robotics and in some ways it’s fun and others slightly disturbing.

Ariadne Tamion’s background is as an electrical engineer with a passion for robotics and programming. In her own words, Ariadne sees Automatic Lover as an ode to women engineers and the contribution they can make to society.

If you want an interesting read that is both fun, geeky and sexy then this book is definitely one for the beach!

About Sarah Lamb

Sarah is the founder of the Girl Geek Dinners & GirlyGeekdom. She is a lover of gadgets, geeky things and sport! Find out more about her on her website.

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The incredible team at the University of Southampton successfully launched a Windows Phone 7 handset into the stratosphere as a testbed for a series of experiements to further atmospheric research into pollution. Friday’s launch utilised a helium filled balloon to elevate a small package to an altitude of 18237 meters/59832 feet. The package contained a Windows 7 phone handset, additional power supply and a commodity digital camera which recorded 1,200 images during the flight.

At it’s maximum altitude the balloon burst (as expected!) and the package returned to Earth via a small parachute. During the flight a custom application on the phone recorded the latitude, longitude and altitude. While in range of the cellular network the application streamed it’s data to another application running on Windows Azure.Windows Azure provided the computational “horse power” to project the likely landing point of the package.

The image below shows the team preparing to launch Astra 7

This is a great example of inexpensive hardware being combined in a creative way with phone software and a cloud service to enable something (scientific research in this case) that would otherwise have been prohibitively expensive yet which can bring benefit to us all.

The team’s write up provides much more information as does Stuart Dredge’s article on the Guardian tech blog and Cliff Saran’s piece on Computer Weekly.

Kudos to Keith who beat me to it in his post which gives a heads up of the flight’s impressive statistics.

The image below shows the package containing the phone at it’s maximum altitude

Congratulations to the Astra 7 team including Dr Andras Sobester, Dr
Elizabeth Hart, Dr Steven Johnston and Neil O_Brien. Thanks to Geoff
Hughes, Ben Nunney (@bennuk), Will Coleman and Lou Waller for their support

I’m delighted to be able to say that this wasn’t a PR stunt – it was
serious scientific research as part of The University of Southampton’s
ASTRA (Atmospheric Science Through Robotic Aircraft) project

About Stephen Lamb

Steve Lamb is known to be a positive disruptive force and is a geek with a passion for making the most of every day!

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Google have just announced the RISE awards!  These awards are aimed at rewarding people with good ideas that support anyone from a minority group into the STEM subjects.  Rather than me giving all the details I’ll let Google do the talking this time!  But I will say if you have a project that can make a difference and need some funding to do it then it’s well worth putting in your application.  This application is currently open to those in Europe and the US version I am told will happen later in the year! So get your thinking caps on!

At Google, we believe a STEM education (science, technology, engineering & maths) can lead to creative, exciting and rewarding opportunities. That’s why we’re so enthusiastic about supporting it for all students.

Google RISE Awards (Roots in Science & Engineering) are designed to fund, promote and support STEM and computer science education initiatives in Europe. Through RISE, Google will provide awards to organisations that positively impact pre-university and university students, especially those from underrepresented groups in technology, eg. female engineers, minority groups, people with disabilities.

Apply now for financial support or volunteer resources for your program. Deadline for applications 31st October 2010.
google.com/riseawards

About Sarah Lamb

Sarah is the founder of the Girl Geek Dinners & GirlyGeekdom. She is a lover of gadgets, geeky things and sport! Find out more about her on her website.

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It’s been a while since I last posted but that’s because I’ve been really busy completing year 4 of my degree (only 2 more to go!) and starting a new job! Anyway I finally got around to posting some of the new stuff I’ve been learning and for this instalment I’ve created a video cast on the basics of getting MEF to integrate with Castle Windsor.

Why would you do that I hear you ask? Apart from it being pretty cool It means that you don’t have one central place that you are registering everything with Windsor. Each project takes care of it’s own registration making the application less tightly coupled and easier to extend. I think it looks pretty tidy and there is so much more you can do with it than I’ve done with this little app but it’s just there to serve as a foundation. Have a play see what you think and let me know about the interesting things you’ve done with it. I’ve uploaded the code here if you want to pull it down and have a play.

S

If the below video isn’t showing you can see it on vimeo here or youtube here.

Using MEF with Castle Windsor from Sara on Vimeo.

Remember to vote for GirlyGeekdom in the Cosmo Blog Awards!

About Sara Stephens

I'm a Web Developer. I work for a media company in London while I study in my spare time at Essex University for a BSc(Hons) degree in Computing Solutions. I enjoy most aspects of development and I am always on the look-out for new technologies to experiment with and master.

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When trying to save on energy costs, leaving a PC on overnight for a full year can cost $360 in energy, depending on where you live. That’s a new netbook, or the price of an energy efficient monitor.

So it is of interest to most people to turn off their PCs (not just the monitor) while they aren’t using them. However, there’s a reason why most people leave their PCs or Macs running when they aren’t using them. We don’t want to wait two minutes for a computer to start. We want it to load now. Right now.

What’s the solution? Getting computers logged on and ready at ultra fast speeds, so you don’t feel like you need to leave your computer on in order to get a jump start. How can an average geek girl do this? Simple solutions are always best.

Clean Up, Clean Out

Computers need regular clean ups. That’s why most people recommend defragmenting and running disk clean up software at least once a week. These are good habits to get in to, however, there’s additional things you can also do.

You could also clean out registries. You can also turn off unused background software that you don’t use. Did you know iTunes often starts up in the background when you start up your computer, even if you haven’t clicked on the program yet?

Yes, you could hit Control, Alt, Delete and then take off the individual programs one by one… but it’s after they’ve been loaded, and a lot of work if you are wanting to turn off your computer every night.

You could do all of these things individually, or you could get a program that does it all for you, all at once. Programs like System Mechanic will take care of the defragmenting, cleaning disks, registry clean up, and more. I’ve used it on my PC for a few of weeks, and from the first time I used it, it boosted starting my PC from a few minutes, to a few seconds. Brilliant.

Dumping The Unwanted

Unwanted software is often cluttering up my PC. You know what I mean. That software someone promised would be great. That game you played twice and then went back to World of Warcraft. Spacemonger helps identify large quantities of space being used up by your programs and then you can choose what to extract, where to move things too, etc. Sometimes you discover files you never even knew you had, like those programs you downloaded and forgot about.

So store them away on an external hard drive. Don’t have one? Buy a small, easy to use one like Verbatim or similar.

How does this save energy? Your computer doesn’t have to work so hard loading up your computer when you unload all of that data somewhere else. Start up is the big eater of energy. Your computer loads faster as well when it has plenty of free space on it.

Do you have some tips on getting your PC to run faster? Want to share? Leave a comment!

About Calissa Leigh

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Geek girls are probably some of the highest users of energy. I don’t known about other geeks, but I like to keep my energy bill low. There’s more money to spend on games that way.

Perhaps you’d like to contribute a little bit to saving energy for the sake of the planet as well as saving green on your phone bill. Any way you look at it, there’s usually at least one reason to be self conscious about how much energy you use.

Centralize and Unplug

Computers, printers, cell phones and Wii consoles, in my house, go into a single extension strip cord strip. It makes it easier to unplug them all at night and plug back in later. That saves over 30% on my electric bill when I’m able to unplug all of that hardware.

Want some bonus points? Use separate electric strips, one for your TV, computer and Playstation, the other for your printer, fax and other devices you don’t use every day. Keep the less used strip unplugged until you need it.

Cold Water Cleaning

Do you really need to run the hot water as often as you do? Heating your water counts for a big percentage of your electricity bill. You can cut back simply by learning to love lukewarm showers (it’s better for your skin!) and washing a few loads of laundry (at full loads) with cold water. Your whites and brights do not need to be washed in half as much hot water as mentioned. Every other load can be hot to brighten clothes.

By the way, do you linger at the computer, trying to finish that last dungeon as your ‘water warms’ in the shower? You may as well be tossing dimes out the window. Be ready to get into the shower when the water turns just warm enough to your touch. Save even more money by lowering the temperature on your hot water tank.

Energy Efficient Hardware

Saving energy by using energy efficient appliances and computer systems will green up your bottom line. For example, monitors that are on all day long use up a whole lot of energy, but you can save 25% or more using energy efficient monitors. Check out the Dell G2410 or the HP LE1901w. Look for Energy Star qualified products.

Other energy saving products, from the weird light bulbs to new faucets that uses less water, can help reduce your utility bills. Companies are consciously trying to provide new products with super efficiency.

So how much can you save? For every $100 you normally spend on your energy bill a month, you could save as much as $20 or more by trying these three steps alone.

About Calissa Leigh

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Next Thursday, March 25, 2010, AAUW will release a new report, Why So Few? Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics, which focuses on innovative ways to help girls and women succeed in these fields.

In an era when women are increasingly prominent in medicine, law, and business, why are there so few women scientists and engineers? The AAUW report presents eight key research findings that point to environmental and social barriers — including stereotypes, gender bias, and the climate of science and engineering departments in colleges and universities — that continue to block women’s participation and progress in science, technology, engineering, and math. The report also includes up-to-date statistics on girls’ and women’s achievement and participation in these areas and offers new ideas for what each of us can do to more fully open scientific and engineering fields to girls and women.

You’ll be able to download the report on the release date, but we also wanted to let you know that we are live-streaming a panel presentation with the report’s authors and experts, which audience members will be able to comment over live-chat and Twitter. This live-stream event will take place at 9:30 a.m. EST on Thursday, March 25.

About Sarah Lamb

Sarah is the founder of the Girl Geek Dinners & GirlyGeekdom. She is a lover of gadgets, geeky things and sport! Find out more about her on her website.

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Some years ago I got a Digital Photoframe, and recently it’s just been used for pictures but it got me thinking about how I used to use it.  So far this is what I’ve come up with:

• Photoframe
• FlashCards – help you to remember stuff!
• HowTo Video’s (as that one does video playback too with sound!)
• Podcasts (it has mp3 playback so you can put your podcasts on there – via sd card)
• Mindmaps – draw them on the pc and save as image files but the text has to be quite big

At the time I was thinking about it for educational use rather than for the original intention. So if you are a student or you are studying for exams etc then consider creating your revision notes to be displayed on that digital photo frame that someone bought you at Christmas time. Put it to good use!

About Sarah Lamb

Sarah is the founder of the Girl Geek Dinners & GirlyGeekdom. She is a lover of gadgets, geeky things and sport! Find out more about her on her website.

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If you remember, last year brought the very first Ada Lovelace Day, Founded by Suw Charman-Anderson where loads and loads of bloggers, male and female wrote about their geeky, science, technology and mathematical inspirations.  Well it’s coming back round again.

Keep the 24th March at the forefront of your mind for a blog post about who you think of as one of your most inspirational women in science, technologyor mathematics!

To help you along finding that inspirational person here’s a few suggestions of ways to find that special someone:

• Think about people you looked up to as a child
• Think about whether someone close to you inspired you
• Think about teachers who encouraged you in these areas
• How about looking back through history at famous women in these areas
• Business owners
• Entrepreneurs
• Work colleagues
• Friends
• Someone who is making a difference to the industry
• Artists
• Designers
• Writers

Whoever makes you think about these different subject areas in a way that makes you want to work in the industry is someone worth considering for an Ada Lovelace Pledge!   Write a post about the up coming pledge whilst you’re at it… In fact just borrow mine if you like & add to it!  Inspire change and inspire future technologists, scientists and amazing mathematicians!

About Sarah Lamb

Sarah is the founder of the Girl Geek Dinners & GirlyGeekdom. She is a lover of gadgets, geeky things and sport! Find out more about her on her website.

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A while back I got the opportunity to catch up with some great people at the Beam Presents event, and chat to them about their technologies, what they do and how young people might be able to get into something like their jobs.

The second of these video’s to be released out into the wild is the interview I did with Timothy Hill who is the designer behind Ferguson Hill.  It was really great to find out about the face behind the beautiful designs of the hardware!

So here you go!  Enjoy!

About Sarah Lamb

Sarah is the founder of the Girl Geek Dinners & GirlyGeekdom. She is a lover of gadgets, geeky things and sport! Find out more about her on her website.

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