Gold and Beautiful

I am attending the IEEE Frontiers in Education conference and am just mortified by all these people sitting around me at lunch. Today is the first day and the conference organizing committee made a huge blunder by scheduling 2 keynote speakers at the lunch. OK IEEE.... 40 years organizing this conference and how do you do this? You invite these wonderful speakers, give them awards and ask them to speak when everybody is busy eating and talking. I don't know if the guy could even hear himself speak, because all that I could hear was murmur and knives and forks clashing!!! It was embarrassing. I was hoping the speaker (who was very well known and was saying some really good things about active learning and project-based learning) would not look up, because no one was paying attention. Everyone's head was down in their plates or they were busy conversing with others at the table. The lady at my table was talking for 5 minutes about how it was so noisy in there. I wanted to scream

I was a huge fan of Anderson Cooper for a very long time for all the wrong reasons.... until I saw AC360. Since then I have been a huge fan for the right reason :-) Good journalism, must watch show.

Attended Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing last week...... Great conference, actually not an ideal match for educators, but I found value in attending it. Lots of great participants, inspiring keynotes and useful plenary sessions... not to mention interesting research presentations. As I go from semester to semester trying to do all the things that I want to do and more, it is times like this when I can step back and look at what I am doing from a different perspective. The CS Ed conferences are great, but this was definitely a different perspective. I have to confess that I have never been surrounded by so many technical women ever.... In most of the MS and PhD classes I took, I was definitely a minority, usually the only female in PhD classes. Being surrounded by some 2200 odd technical women was kind of nice. I was also thoroughly impressed by the attention India is receiving. They had a female I BM executive from India in a plenary session, a complete track on Women