Em's rant

Women and Computers

heem0801 — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 22:47:03 +0000

We began our class with a report by Tina on Carol Bartz that was made via portrait mode on Power Point. We also learned about the women of Google. Most of the people in high positions of google are women, many of them are millionaires. Over 2/3 rd of the worlds searches are done daily on Google. Marissa Meyer was one of the first of the nine members of Google. She was in charge of making the Google logo so everyone is able to use Google, it is not threatening. Her chief task is the look of Google. She is one of the top 15 powerful women. Shona Brown is a big part of Google, she is also an author and director of non-profit groups, etc. Jayme did a power point on Caterina Fake. She co-founded Flickr with her husband. Flickr was originally meant to be a game, it ended up becoming a venue that allowed notes below the photos for friends to make comments. She gives a tool that provides a user-friendly and easy to remember site for non-profits to get their word out. She has left Flickr now to move on to a different company. Kerri did a story book put up on her blog. Her storybook is on Corvida Raven, who calls herself a “geek girl.” She is affectionately called “Oprah on the Web.” Her storybook shows that she has had a big impact on the web, she does consulting work on geek work. She is only 23 years old. Kerri got the backgrounds on paint and wanted her cover page to be different from the rest of her storybook. I also learned that WITI is a place where you can learn about women who are involved in computer related fields.

What I learned today during Women and Computers (4/14/2010)

heem0801 — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 23:43:47 +0000

File extensions you have to convert into a different file format. The only way you can look at the file format is by looking at the extensions. .wmv is the only way you can see these extensions. Go to tools…folder options…advanced settings….show hidden files and folders…look for hide extensions for known file types-unclick this on the menu. Power settings can also help you decide how long the screen stays on-if you walk away from your computer after a while you don’t want to over heat there is a cooling setting on your computer you can go in and change the fans to “active.”

We learned about some interesting software explorer is the slowest and most prone to get infected. “Geeks” don’t ever use explorer, generally they use Firefox. There are lots of add ons for Firefox.

I learned how to read PDF files with free software. If the computer doesn’t have a PDF reader, you can get FoxIt reader, it is faster and you can use it to annotate a PDF document.

To save pictures, you can use fire shot that makes a PDF out of the page, this eliminates having a ton of files.

Microsoft Office is expensive for a small business -OpenOffice is a good alternative. It has a navigator that is much like Microsoft’s document map. Anything you create in OpenOffice can be saved in a Microsoft file so that it can be viewed by many people, especially important for people who want to see your document but don’t have OpenOffice.

Zoho Office has great power point templates. It also has a notebook application that Google Docs does not. Otherwise Zoho Office is quite similar to Google Docs.

GIMP is the free version of Photoshop (costs 700 bucks!) This is for sophisticated brochures, etc. not for simple photo cropping (there are better, more user-friendly tools for this!)

Screencasting tools make movies where you can talk and explain what you are doing (demonstrations.)

CamStudio is on our USB stick. There is Screencast-o-matic and Screen Toaster-the poor person’s way of making a power point video for a presentation.

MPR Mobile Services on iPhone iPad | Minnesota Public Radio

heem0801 — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 23:32:35 +0000

MPR Mobile Services on iPhone iPad | Minnesota Public Radio.

My Experience with Pageflakes

heem0801 — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 19:02:35 +0000

I discovered that Pageflakes is an awesome, user friendly site. It is very easy to build a well organized page (or pages if you would like to add a new one-they are separated by tabs like a file folder.) I chose to make my starter page on environmental issues, as I was very interested in the Greenpeace international site I looked at for a previous WAC assignment. You can choose to search through google on the top of the page. I used google to look up various environmental activism sites. I was hoping that most of them had an option to add a “flake” to my starter page. Some sites actually do give you the option to add a news feed onto your Pageflakes.

On Pageflakes, you can search through different flakes and add them to your page via a button that states “add to my page.” The different flakes are rated so you can choose which one you like the best. I chose to search for Greenpeace flakes and picked the flake “If You Can Tolerate This-the Greenpeace WebBlog.”

There is also an option at the bottom of your Pageflakes homepage to search through pagecasts. I chose to look at a page called Go Green for inspiration.

OneWorld’s site was awesome. I found this site via a Google search on the top of the Pageflakes home page. What is great about OneWorld is that you can share the page, a perfect opportunity to put this site on my environmental Pageflakes starter page-unfortunately there is not an option for this site to be shared on Pageflakes. The site is UK based and attends to many global issues, however they only seem to have one US partnership (the World Cocoa Foundation-doesn’t seem to be U.S. based, however this is what came up on my US partnership search)

What is great about Pageflakes is that you can delete feeds you don’t like anymore. You can also move your different flakes around on your pages so that you can determine which ones you want to make most prominent. I feel that Pageflakes is a great site for starter pages because it is very user friendly. There is a great flake you can add that was created by Pageflakes. This flake keeps you updated on all of the new and exciting pagecasts on the site.

You can also coordinate and organize events by adding a to do list flake on your page. This is great if one is planning on attending/hosting/creating many different activist projects. Others can see your events on your starter page, so Pageflakes can be a great mode of promotion as well.

What I learned about Androcentric norms

heem0801 — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 00:03:55 +0000

I learned that androcentric norms is generally the placing of the male in the center of focus. His needs are typically met first and foremost. Material written for courses tends to reflect a “male ideologies” rather than a female ones.This is problematic for women in the sense that many of her needs are secondary and even overlooked as a result of their “lack of prominence.” We learned in class that many women were suffering and dying from heart attacks because studies were not done of women, their symptoms are sometimes different from those of men. Many women would have these differing signs of a heart attack and die, as a result of the studies favoring men. Also, many young women experience more stress in school and testing because the systems are set up to favor males. Many of the math tests involve blowing things up, action based games are promoted to boys by parents, schools, TV, and other social institutions, whereas girls are not encouraged to engage in these action based (often violent) activities. Androcentric norms can also limit how many women enroll in technical based colleges, the programs are more linear and similar to how men are taught to think. Enrollment increased from one college (8 percent to 32 percent) when the college changed the way the courses were set up-they included a course that allowed students to work hand in hand with social activist groups.

Ultra Violet, a Great Site for Indian Feminists

heem0801 — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 22:23:27 +0000

I like Ultra Violet a site for Indian Feminists for many reasons. One reason why I like the the site is the fact that the “group” isn’t all inclusive. One of their missions is to understand women in many different groups across cultures. They also are very independent and would like to live outside of the box. Another thing I really liked about this site initially was the layout of the site. Recent posts and most popular posts are separated and the titiles are distinct, so are their resources, other sites to visit, research, etc. The graphics on the site are quite lovely, the art on the top banner is very beautiful and eye-catching. I had a great first impression of this site as a result of the thoughtful layout and presentation. The site is also a great place to share views and ask questions, and the blog posts are entertaining, poignant and informative. Indian blogger Sengupta reminds us that there are many issues (a never ending amount) happening to women in the United States that can be blogged about but often are not. She states “At any rate, I do believe in this: even when there are problems that we can do nothing about, it’s important to know. To note. To remember. Because forgetting would be the last nail in the coffin, the final bone burned to cinders.” I couldn’t agree any more.

Life Resources

heem0801 — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 02:56:16 +0000

Being in WS445 has taught me that whatever field I choose to go into, I will need to understand the power of social media and what it can do to facilitate my activism in the future. Activism, being one of my passions, will be something I will continue (and enhance my skills in) hopefully for the rest of my life. I found many interesting sites that can enhance my ability to navigate and utilize certain online resources, such as The New Watercooler,Cause Global: Social Media for Social Change,Social Media Examiner, and Google Buzz.

International Feminist Web Site Search

heem0801 — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 22:48:20 +0000

Isis international is an organization that has been working through media technologies to achieve justice for women, the site also hopes to connect women’s rights organizations in the global south through networks. It is important to note that one of Isis international’s main goals is to strengthen social movements, and that the organization works primarily with women’s groups and networks. It is interesting to see that Isis has led the drafting of a Gender Policy for Community Radio in order to refute the capital driven and globalized media and turn the medium into a tool of empowerment. I like Isis because they feel that individual women have the power to make change. Isis also looks at all different groups of people (LGBT, indigenous peoples, etc. ) and analyzes the cross cutting issues that come into play in relation to human rights violations, etc.

One of the sites, Women’s Net , the article Famine Marriages , it is interesting to see that unlike the domestic activist sites we looked at earlier, we can see that global warming can threaten women’s lives so much more directly in ”third world” countries than it does in the United States (loss of crops that are so closely linked to people’s survival.) Climate change has been linked with the early marriage of women, they are exchanged for bride price or dowry. These early marriages keep young women from getting an education, they are also subject to getting life threatening STI’s.

The FIRE site is interesting to me because although the site addresses Latin American human rights issues, they still bring up issues that are directly linked to the United States–the campaign to sign a letter to Hillary Clinton to stop human rights violations in Honduras. It seems that many of the issues on the FIRE site are directly linked to the United States.

It seems as though many of the sites address the issue of globalization more so than the sites (domestic) that we looked at earlier in our Women and Computers course. It is interesting to see that so many countries have women’s movements and have a desire to ban together to create positive change.

WS:415 Topic reflection

heem0801 — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 23:03:33 +0000

In my feminist theory class, we talked about an unusual power dynamic- the unequal exchange of culture when tourists go to a place and act like they know they culture better than the locals. People become passive learners this way as opposed to being active learners of the culture. Many individuals don’t fully address the real issues in the society they are visiting. Globalization has shaped the author Bahavana, in the story we read from Colonize This! White men teat India as if it is some exotic local to be made into a novelty, they do not address the real-life issues that directly affect the women and children in India-poverty, etc. These men can take things at face value and they do not indulge in the background of that country. They take what is entertaining about the culture with them, not what is real and serious. The Indian culture, in this instance, is put on display as if it were in a museum. The ownership-those who own the museum have the ability to put whatever they want into the museum, they can also choose what is to be omitted from the museum. People from India are also tokenized, they are seen as exotic.

Also, we talked about what can be translated as identity. Words like CRAZY, mean that the individual that travels to a new culture finds it weird and abnormal, because of colonization they are taught to feel that the culture different from them is not the “norm.” It is important to remember that we live in a globalized world, it is inevitable that we will interact with different cultures and communities from us. We will mix cultures, an example Beth used was yoga. Yoga is much different in its origin than it is in the U.S. People end up getting a sense of entitlement in feeling like they know the “correct” yoga positions, they claim to know the culture better than the culture that created it. We talked about being responsible travelers-being humble and knowledgeable. All in all, I felt that the discussion was encouraging to hear the opinions of an Indian woman living in the U.S. on her native culture.

Reflection on Article: Use of the Internet For Global Sexual Exploitaion of Women and Children

heem0801 — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 20:06:32 +0000

The fact that sex is so readily located on the internet is not a concept often contemplated on a daily basis. However strange sexual service networking seems, it is prevalent on the World Wide Web. Adding a global network of sex tips and how-to’s in relation to the dangerous and exploitive world of paid (and unpaid/forced) sex is wrong. The fact that detailed accounts on how the sexual encounters went horrifies me. Women are objectified by being presented as objects and their appearances are graded by the buyers. Men can post their experience with one purchased woman and create a whole network of men who will go to her for sex and then in turn write about what they did to her. The report of a “bad experience” on these message boards is saddening, because it reveals that the woman did not put on an act and “enjoy” the sexual act. The places that these sites promote solicit underage girls for sex, they also promote hotels that “own” women that can be tortured and victimized. alt.sex.services should be protested and banned. The ability for those who have bought and sold women and children to share their experiences is horrific. A network of individuals who utilize people for sexual pleasure should not exist. What is scary is that the internet transfers information and gets these industries promoted with ease. Under age girls can also be purchased as brides by credit card, further promoting the concept that they are commodities. There is also an industry for sex tourism, many economically faltering countries promote sex tourism as a financial boost.

I agree with the article in that pornography should be looked at as a real issue that directly affects real women and children.