Heidi Li's Potpourri

Woman of interest: New FDA head Dr. Margaret Hamburg

Crossposted at 51 Percent

Announced today, March 14 2009:

Obama names FDA chief, announces new food safety panel

" Hamburg led the NYC health department from 1991 to 1997, where she established a needle-exchange program to curb the spread of HIV, set up a bio-terrorism defense program and instituted home visits to improve tuberculosis patients' adherence to their medicines. She was assistant secretary of health and human services for policy and evaluation in the Clinton administration and is now a senior scientist at the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit that works to reduce the spread and use of nukes and chemical weapons." (source)

One small blow for justice - an article worth reading

A good read about an important step toward returning the U.S. to the rule of law: Guantanamo inmates no longer "enemy combatants".

The Obama administration is moving swiftly, more swiftly than on the economy or other issues of social justice, to ensure that the United States is at dismantling the legal and rhetorical nonsense that put its treatment of Guantanamo detainees completely outside the ambit of international law, and in some respects, domestic Constitutional law. This is a positive, commendable development. It is not the end of the Bush era of abuse of citizen and non-citizen rights but it is absolutely a step in the right direction.

If the newly formed White Council on Women and Girls were to take as meaningful a step in improving the treatment of women in this country, it would be a major development. Go here to read the executive order creating the Council.

I have refrained from commenting on the creation of the Council on Women, because, like the Department of Justice, or any other office of the Executive Branch, the Council is positioned to make positive changes. It is also positioned to do nothing. Only time will tell.

A woman worthy of recognition: Barbara Liskov

Barbara Liskov Wins Turing Award

ACM cites 'foundational innovations' in programming language design

By Dr. Dobb's Journal
Mar 10, 2009
URL:http://www.ddj.com/hpc-high-performance-computing/215801518

Barbara Liskov has won the Association for Computing Machinery's A.M. Turing Award, one of the highest honors in science and engineering, for her pioneering work in the design of computer programming languages. Liskov's achievements underpin virtually every modern computing-related convenience in people's daily lives.

Liskov, the first U.S. woman to earn a PhD in computer science, was recognized for helping make software more reliable, consistent and resistant to errors and hacking. She is only the second woman to receive the honor, which carries a $250,000 purse and is often described as the "Nobel Prize in computing."

Liskov heads the Programming Methodology Group in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, where she has conducted research since 1972. Last year, she was named an Institute Professor, the highest honor awarded to an MIT faculty member.

Liskov's early innovations in software design have been the basis of every important programming language since 1975, including Ada, C++, Java and C#.

Liskov's most significant impact stems from her influential contributions to the use of data abstraction, a valuable method for organizing complex programs. She was a leader in demonstrating how data abstraction could be used to make software easier to construct, modify and maintain. Many of these ideas were derived from her experience at MIT in building the VENUS operating system, a small timesharing system that dramatically lowers the cost of providing computing and makes it more interactive.

In another contribution, Liskov designed CLU, an object-oriented programming language incorporating clusters to provide coherent, systematic handling of abstract data types. She and her colleagues at MIT subsequently developed efficient CLU compiler implementations on several different machines, an important step in demonstrating the practicality of her ideas. Data abstraction is now a generally accepted fundamental method of software engineering that focuses on data rather than processes.

Building on CLU concepts, Liskov followed with Argus, a distributed programming language. Its novel features led to further developments in distributed system design that could scale to systems connected by a network. This achievement laid the groundwork for modern search engines, which are used by thousands of programmers and hundreds of millions of users every day and which face the challenges of concurrent operation, failure and continually growing scale.

Her most recent research focuses on techniques that enable a system to continue operating properly in the event of the failure of some of its components. Her work on practical Byzantine fault tolerance demonstrated that there were more efficient ways of dealing with arbitrary (Byzantine) failures than had been previously known. Her insights have helped build robust, fault-tolerant distributed systems that are resistant to errors and hacking. This research is likely to change the way distributed system designers think about providing reliable service on today's modern, vulnerable Internet.

On the occasion of her winning the Turing Award, MIT Institute Professor Barbara Liskov discussed her role in shaping in the past, present and future of computer science.

Q: When you began your career in computer science, it was still a relatively young field. How have you seen this discipline evolve over time -- at MIT and elsewhere?

A: The change has been tremendous. When I started, most of the field was unexplored and there were obvious problems everywhere -- lots of low-hanging fruit, but also very fundamental issues that were poorly understood and very confusing. Today the field is on a very sound foundation. There are still many problems to work on, but now this work happens in the context of all that has gone before. When I started, this context was missing, so you just struck out on your own.

Q: Looking back at your career, what is the single accomplishment of which you are most proud?

A: Probably the development of the concept of data abstraction and the CLU programming language. This work was done at MIT in the 1970s.

Q: Where do you plan to focus your research going forward?

A: Today I am working primarily on distributed systems -- systems that run on many computers connected by a network like the Internet. My focus recently has been on the security of online storage. I believe that more and more users will store their information online, but the storage they use needs to be implemented so that they don't lose their information, their information is available when they need it, and they can be confident that their confidential information will not be leaked.

Q: As the first woman to earn a PhD in computer science, what advice would you give to other women who are considering going into this field?

A: I have found computer science to be a wonderful field to work in. I think the main reason is that the kind of thinking and problem-solving it requires matches my abilities. I believe that finding work to do that you like and are good at is the most important way to find a satisfying career. Young women (and young men) who find that computer science is a match for them should pursue it. There is lots of interesting work remaining to be done.

Q: When you began studying computer science at Stanford, computers were big mainframes and the Internet was still in the distant future. Today, computers fit in the palm of our hands -- many are much smaller -- and the Internet is ubiquitous. Given that you have watched these transformations over the last five decades from a front-row seat, what do you think the next half-century will hold?

A: I don't have a crystal ball! It seems obvious that computers and the Internet will continue to be very important to individuals, companies and society. But I don't know the exact form this will take.

Copyright © 2006 CMP Media LLC

National Women's History Month should be renamed

With an increasing number of groups using the month of March not only to teach about women who have contributed to the historical development of the United States but also to our country's current and future development, National Women's History Month has really become National Women's Recognition Month (h/t to a commenter who mentioned this phrase on The Confluence). If we lived in a fully equitable and fair country, we would not have the need to set aside a single month in which to note women's contributions - noting women's contributions would be as commonplace as noting men's. We don't live in that society yet. So, as with all contemporary social justice and civil rights movements it is essential that we each and all use National Women's Month as an opportunity to remind ourselves and others that the fight for the full recognition of women as equal citizens continues.

For 2009, The National Women's History Project has honored many women who will be remembered by history but who are working now in myriad ways that deserve recognition. Learn about the honorees here.  The 2009 theme is Women Taking the Lead to Save Our Planet, and I personally was pleased to see that once again Hillary Rodham Clinton's name appears among a long list of other women:

"Hillary Rodham Clinton
b. 1947
Secretary of State
New York     USA
While serving in the United States Senate, Senator Clinton worked to secure federal legislation to protect the environment both on the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee and as the senior Democrat on the Fisheries, Wildlife and Water subcommittee. She co-sponsored the Petroleum Consumer Price Gouging Protection Act and Close the Enron Loophole Act to enable the President to declare an energy emergency and trigger federal gouging protections. http://www.ontheissues.org/hillary_clinton.htm#Environment
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Hillary_Rodham_Clinton"

But as pleasing as it is to me to see Secretary of State Clinton recognized for actions she took serving in the Senate, the entire list of women honored and their respective accomplishments make me proud.

I have repeatedly stated that my desire to see Hillary Rodham Clinton elected president was not rooted in the fact that she is a woman; but that the way she and her supporters were treated because she is a woman has galvanized me to do whatever I can to see that women's emancipation becomes a reality. Whenever I read the lists of what women have accomplished, I realize how important it is that we create a world in which the deck is not stacked against women - imagine how much more might get accomplished.

The latest from 51 Percent

• Via the generous financial support of a donor, we now have 51 Percent lapel pins - and for every $10.51 donated between now and March 30 we will send you a lapel pin (if you donate $21.02, for example, we'll send two), to help spread the word about 51 Percent. Offer good while supplies last. As of March 9, we have just mailed our first batch and we have about 30 pins left.
  
• Donate to 51 Percent here.  You can donate by mail by sending a check to 51 Percent, 2118 Bancroft Place NW, Washington DC 20008. You can also support 51 Percent by supporting this blog. See donation button at upper right.
• For Women's History Month, we are rolling out downloadable fliers about just a few women who worked their way over, around, and through whatever misogyny the world threw at them and by doing so put women - and men - forward. The second one is ready - check it out, by going here and downloading. We hope people will print them out and leave them at local libraries, shops, schools, colleges, and coffeehouses - wherever permitted. Not only is the information worthwhile, but if you have a printer and can remember to grab a few on your way out to do your errands, you can help 51 Percent without laying out cash.

-from Heidi Li at 51 Percent

City Tavern: a new blog for our times

Please pay a visit to City Tavern.

International Women's Day: Women - the Forgotten 51 Percent Minority

This picture from the 1970s, reprinted in a March 8, 2009 story in the New York Times, is heartbreaking. It is heartbreaking  because even though such a picture today would, I fervently hope, show women more diverse in age and rage, it would be easy enough to find women - millions of them - who came out of the 2008 Presidential election cycle realizing that women are the forgotten majority in this country.

Women are the people who can be called anything for supporting another women's bid for higher office; indeed a woman governor who runs for vice-president can publicly be called a c*nt and absolutely no member of the punditry nor any politician in high office of either party denounces this. Imagine if photos of young people wearing shirts that called our current President a n*gger had circulated widely during the last election. The media and politicians would have been absolutely up in arms. They would have been right to have been, too. But what many women are only realizing now, after surviving the dashed hopes of seeing Hillary Rodham Clinton given a fair shot at the nomination in Denver (instead the Democratic Party held a rigged process where pledged delegates were pressured to change their votes for the first ballot and superdelegates were pressured, starting in June, to act as if they had already voted for a candidate to lead the Democratic ticket) is that the entire political and cultural situation in this country not is stacked against them, but that almost no progress in the fight for political and economic equality has been made since the "Women's Liberation" movement of the early 1970s. The wretched and persistent wage gap persists; no Equal Rights Amendment has been added to our constitution; and despite the de jure legality of abortion, women's reproductive rights generally cannot be vindicated by actual individual women, at least not without hardship.

Our current President had his inauguration blessed by a pastor who believes in "wifely submission" and has retained as his chief speechwriter a man who blithely posed for a picture depicting himself metaphorically groping the most powerful person in the president's own Senate - a person who happens to be a woman, Secretary of State Clinton. This same President has ignored calls for a Presidential Commission on Women modeled on John F. Kennedy's 1961 - 1961! - Commission on Women; and has displayed zero interest in creating an even stronger institution, one that would be on par with the President's Advisory Boards on Intelligence (spying) and Economic Recovery.

The other day I was reading and listening to Mario Cuomo's address to the 1984 Democratic Convention. Well into a classic speech, Cuomo delivers this message:

We speak for women who are indignant that this nation refuses to etch into its governmental commandments the simple rule "thou shalt not sin against equality," a rule so simple -- I was going to say, and I perhaps dare not but I will. It's a commandment so simple it can be spelled in three letters: E.R.A.

In 1984, the Democratic hall went wild when Cuomo added this apparent ad lib. The crowd chanted over and over E - R - A.

Thou shalt not sin aginst equality, thou shall pass and ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. Can you imagine a keynote speaker from either major political party today uttering these words at its presidential nominating convention?

The closest we came in 2008 was Hillary Rodham Clinton's convention speech, which included this declaration:

And I know what that can mean for every man, woman, and child in America. I’m a United States Senator because in 1848 a group of courageous women and a few brave men gathered in Seneca Falls, New York, many traveling for days and nights, to participate in the first convention on women’s rights in our history.

And so dawned a struggle for the right to vote that would last 72 years, handed down by mother to daughter to granddaughter – and a few sons and grandsons along the way.

These women and men looked in-to their daughters’ eyes, imagined a fairer and freer world, and found the strength to fight. To rally and picket. To endure ridicule and harassment. To brave violence and jail.

And after so many decades – 88 years ago on this very day – the 19th amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote would be forever enshrined in our Constitution.

My mother was born before women could vote. But in this election my daughter got to vote for her mother for President.

This is the story of America. Of women and men who defy the odds and never give up.

How do we give this country back to them?

By following the example of a brave New Yorker , a woman who risked her life to shepherd slaves along the Underground Railroad.

And on that path to freedom, Harriett Tubman had one piece of advice.

If you hear the dogs, keep going.

If you see the torches in the woods, keep going.

If they're shouting after you, keep going.

Don't ever stop. Keep going. (emphasis added)

Although the convention applauded wildly it should be noted that in 20 years the Democratic Party went from demanding the Equal Rights Amendment to reminding women that when they hear the dogs, they must keep going.

Many women and women understand that women's rights are human rights and human rights are women's rights. They demonstrate this knowledge in this country and around the world as they keep going. Some make small contributions, financial and otherwise, to new organizations like 51 percent (disclosure: the author of this post is the president of 51 percent), WomenCount, and The New Agenda - organizations formed in direct response to the unresponsiveness of the Democratic Party to American women's dreams and hopes for their emancipation and autonomy. In other countries, too, women take action on the local level. A friend from Europe decided that she would mark International Women's Day (a holiday not recognized in the U.S.) by protesting a local piece of artwork that, however unwittingly, depicts a woman in a subordinate and demeaned posture compared to her male coworkers (the art is meant to celebrate rice harvesting). Here is the artwork as it looks on an ordinary day:

 But on International Women's Day, the woman sweeping wore a placard that, translated, read:

"I feel enslaved in this humiliating posture next to the two strapping men standing up. I demand equality."

Dones endavant! (Translation: "Put women forward!")

I believe that 2008 will be remembered not as a year of defeat for women, but as year of galvanization. Despite the wretched economic uncertainty that plagues men and women today, those who want to see the majority-minority - women of the world - put forward, are banding together and one placard or one donation or one blog post at a time these men and women realize that we must renew the fight against oppression and for emancipation of women everywhere.

To read Secretary of State Clinton's 2009 International Women's Day statement on the importance of advancing the interests of women throughout the world, go here.

Elizabeth Lizzie Magie-Phillips: co-inventor of Monopoly

In 1903, Elizabet "Lizzie" Magie patented the game that eventually was eventually adapted for mass sales by a man named Charles Darrow. Magie's game, patented under the name "The Landlord's Game" was designed to illustrate economic principles based on what Magie regarded as the iniquitie of landlordship and the economic advisability of a single tax, based on land values. (source: Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money 2008, p. 230) Below, are some versions of the game board patented by Magie (Philips was her married name). The first is from 1904, the second is from 1924. Monopoloy as we know it was not produced and sold until 1934. (Ferguson, 2008, p. 231)

Magie-Phillips' version of the game was meant to be more instructional than recreational. Some university professors even adopted a modified version for classroom use. (Ferguson, p. 231).

Meanwhile, Magie-Philips already had a relationship with Parker Brothers, the game company, which had issued another game she invented called Mock Trial. Although George Parker declined to buy The Landlord's game from Magie-Philips in the 1920s, he did encourage her to seek patent protection for her invention. (source)

When Parker Brothers decided to buy the patents for Monopoly from Clarence Darrow, the company also bought out Magie-Philips' patents recognizing that Darrow had been seen a version of The Landlord's Game (Ferguson, p. 231), which had gained a cult following in the northeastern United States. (source)

"Parker Brothers gave joint credit, in company publicity, to both Darrow and Magie-Phillips until the patents expired in 1953." (source)

Crossposted at Heidi Li on Equality at 51 Percent.

Congratulations, Judge Christen, on your appointment to Alaska's Supreme Court

(Left, Judge Morgen Christen.)

Yesterday, Governor Sarah Palin announced the appointment of Anchorage Superior Court Judge Morgan Christen to the high court in Alaska. Judge Christen will be just the second woman named to the high court in the 50 years since statehood. Some will emphasize the Sarah Palin angle of this story, because of differences between Christen's social values and Palin's. But to me, that is not the big part of the story. The big part of the story is that even in a state with a relatively small population, there was a woman jurist about whom any Governor, regardless of her or his own ideology, could say would make an outstanding state Supreme Court judge.

"Alaska's Supreme Court bears the awesome responsibility of ensuring that our court system administers justice in firm accordance with the principles laid down in our state Constitution," Palin said in a written statement. "I have every confidence that Judge Christen has the experience, intellect, wisdom and character to be an outstanding Supreme Court justice." (emphases mine)

Alaska, like most states, has a procedure by which it produces a set of candidates from whom the Governor may select a high court judge - in other words, there are are checks on the Governor's choices. Under the state Constitution, Palin had to select from among the nominees sent to her by the seven-member Alaska Judicial Council. To get on the map of such a  Council a judge has to have demonstrated professional excellence and, usually, shown involvement in the community more generally.

Judge Christen fits that bill based on the public write-ups I could find readily. This one comes from an Alaskan philanthropic foundation whose board she sits, the Rasmuson Foundation:

Judge Morgan Christen was appointed to the superior court in Anchorage in 2001. In 2005, she was appointed Presiding Judge for the Third Judicial District. Judge Christen currently co-chairs both the Child in Need of Aid Committee and the Probate Rules Subcommittee for Involuntary Mental Health Commitments. She serves as a member of the Board of Directors for the Rasmuson Foundation and the Alaska Community Foundation.

Prior to being appointed to the bench, Judge Christen was a litigation partner at the law firm of Preston, Gates & Ellis from 1992-2001. She worked as an associate attorney at Preston from 1987-1992. Judge Christen clerked for the Honorable Brian Shortell after she graduated from the Golden Gate University School of Law and received her undergraduate degree in international studies from the University of Washington.

Judge Christen's previous professional experience includes service as a Lawyer Representative for the Ninth Circuit Judicial Conference, service on the Alaska Bar Association Disciplinary Committee and as President of the Anchorage Association of Women Lawyers. Judge Christen has been a member of the Anchorage Rotary Club since 1994 and is a former member of the Board of Directors for Big Brothers Big Sisters of Alaska. In 2004, Judge Christen, was awarded the Light of Hope award for work on behalf of Alaska's children, and the Chamber of Commerce Athena Society Award. In 2004, Judge Christen and her husband, Jim Torgerson, received the Outstanding Philanthropist of the Year award from the Association of Fundraising Professionals Alaska Chapter. Her special interests include family, hiking, traveling in Alaska, reading and cooking.

While this bio demonstrates that Judge Christen has been active and involved in both the judiciary and broader Alaskan civic activities, what I, as a lawyer and law professor, find most striking about it is, in some respects, its essential ordinariness in terms of the credentials one would expect a state high court appointee to have. This in no way detracts from Judge Christen, who has clearly worked hard to extend her reach outside the four walls of courtroom, both to influence and to learn about her state and its different demographic sectors. This is exactly what we should want from jurists - people with competence in the courtroom in and interest in goings-on outside of it. So I applaud Judge Christen's decisions to get to know both the Rotary Club AND the Anchorage Association of American Lawyers; to have worked on behalf of children and on behalf of Alaska's business community. She will be deciding cases involving interests related to all kinds of Alaskans and this brief biographical sketch indicates that she's taken the time to get to know a cross-section of the citizenry.

Now it happens that Judge Christen, in the 1990s,  was on the board of Planned Parenthood. And a conservative Christian group, the Alaska Family Council, decided to apply pressure to Governor Palin to get her not to appoint Judge Christen to the Supreme Court. This is what the Alaska Daily News seems to find most noteworthy, or at least most newsworthy, about Judge Christen's appoint. (The paper's headline: Palin bucks pressure in Supreme Court appointment;  Selection went against push from Alaska Family Council.)

But the real news here is that a sitting Governor simply picked an apparently competent jurist with a range of ties to the state's community and that the Governor and the judge are both women, and both women are in the positions they are in by virtue of fairly ordinary career paths, career paths that have, however, led each to some fairly extraordinary positions.

Cross-posted at Heidi Li on Equality at 51 Percent.

An event worth checking out