Wednesday, July 02, 2008

A NEW Blog in Town-kdphd

(***SORELLE*** requested and approved this message, though I wrote it.)

There is a new theory blogger on the scene and as you read that sentence you may be wondering `oh, who is he?' That would be the wrong question.

Check out kdphd.blogspot.com a new blog by a ***SORELLE*** a female theorist. Her first blog is a short intro to herself. The second one is about a women-in-computing workshop she went to.

What will ***SORELLE*** blog about in the future? She says it will be women's issues (a term she doesn't like- perhaps she'll blog about what to replace it with), computer science, grad school, politics, the politics of computer science grad school, and whatever else comes up. She is multi-dimensional and so I assume her blog will be too.

She is a Comp Geometry student from The University of Maryland. I am happy to say I have had no influence on her whatsoever. She is her own women.

Why is her name ***SORELLE*** ? Because I was once asking people what their stage names would be if they had one. Sorelle is one of those people like MADONNA and CHER and others celebs that have one word names. Hence she will always be ***SORELLE*** to me. Actually, I don't know her last name.

A pointer to her blog can now be found on our blog under `Sorelle'. (Lance is not big on asterisks and capital letters.)

8 comments:

  1. I don't think I've seen an introduction to a new blog that came across as more patronizing than this one.

    *oh, isn't it cute, a female theoretician*

    How about being a little more professional and treating her as a person and not a novelty?

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  2. huh. I actually didn't find it patronizing... probably partially because I know Bill and partially because there *aren't* many other female theory bloggers and he was trying to make that point (one I agree with).

    Of course, there's also the possibility that this was just so much more benign than the other stuff that women in theory deal with that I just didn't notice it. In which case, thanks for being on the lookout and speaking up.... even though I wasn't offended.

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  3. Maybe there was no offense intended, yet the post betrays latent chauvinism.

    Or maybe the post doesn't contain latent chauvinism, and is being misinterpreted.

    I don't know. There could be various motivations for the tone struck by this post.

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  4. This isn't the first time that Bill has been accused of chauvinism because of something he's written here, but seriously, if you've been reading this blog for a while you know that ***GASARCH*** just has a certain style of writing that can be a little, um, irritating at times. Perhaps that quality gets interpreted as chauvinism if the post mentions gender issues?

    Is it legitimate to point out the fact that Sorelle is female when announcing her blog? Well, I can think of female theorists in CS, and I can think of female bloggers in CS, but offhand I can't think of anyone else in the intersection of those two groups. So to me at least, that would seem to be something worth mentioning.

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  5. It's legit to mention that she's female, not so much because she happens to belong to the intersection of two sets but because it has a lot to do with the content of her blog. I just think there are better ways to do it than comparing her to starlets known more for their scanty clothes than their talent. I think Suresh's post is perfectly appropriate, for instance.

    And Sorelle: if my comments created too much drama for the introduction of your blog, I apologize for that.

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  6. And Sorelle: if my comments created too much drama for the introduction of your blog, I apologize for that.

    The drama will probably bring more traffic to her blog.

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  7. She is her own women.

    IMHO, that fully justifies the drama of this post. If I were my own men, well, I'd just make one of myself do my research for me and sit back and enjoy life.

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  8. Boring post about an equally boring blog. A CC blog by a renowned theoretician should be mostly about the topic. Recently, it has been mostly about a lot of things OTHER than theory. Of course, you can blog about whatever you want, but this is my opinion.

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