oodness I love typographer Jessica Hische’s Daily Drop Cap project (“an illustrative initial everyday”). You just wait until the “S” and “F” come out. And should you be at all concerned, the work is under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
The closest I’ve been to fruit and vegetable juicing is a colleague’s experience whipping together radish/spinach/apple/pear juice in our work lunchroom. Not exactly hands on. But tonight’s private screening of “Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead” at the Kabuki may have me changing my tune: the “part road trip, part wellness manifesto” follows two men looking to overcome an autoimmune disease by getting nutrients differently. Production company Reboot Media is looking to show how Americans can improve their health with better food, and sustainable food system advocate Roots of Change stands to benefit from the screening. You don’t have to love the title, but you might just learn something (or at least taste during the post-movie reception).
Tinkers and creators alike, get thee (and thine children) to YBCA’s current show celebrating “hackers, modders, fabbers, tweakers, and design in the age of individuality.” fuseproject founder Yves Béhar curated the TechnoCRAFT exhibit about transitions from mass production to crowdsourced, modular and blueprint projects–and while it could do without a large sneaker self-selection display that acts as an overly large ad for PUMA–the other examples of new forms of user involvement are fantastic. Think consumer-designed labels for Jones Soda, pick your own fabric tarpaulin swatch bags from Frietag, and lamps from recycled material that you can trim any way you like.
Local historians and anthropologists, stand aside (for the quarter at least): students at the San Francisco Art Institution will be receiving instruction from Levi Strauss & Co. resident historian Lynn Downey starting today. A sustainable sculpture studio at SFAI will focus on design and recycled denim as part of the two organizations’ Fashioning the Future undertaking. Talks by a product development director and social sustainability expert from Levi’s are to precede students’ final projects – which are supposed to be zero impact – and their being exhibited at the denim giant’s headquarters in the fall.
Ah, Thursday. I’m glad that the newly opened HUB SoMa community and co-working space will be making almost-the-weekend better with tonight’s Kiva Social. If it’s anything like last year’s HUB Berkeley party for Kiva’s anniversary–as in good food, music and lots of smart folks–those who find themselves at the Chronicle Building starting at 6:30 are in for a treat of the microfinance, international development, and financial access varieties. The event will double as a sendoff for this quarter’s 37 Kiva Fellows as they embark on international visits to borrowers. Raise a glass to them.
As the last minutes of Bastille Day slip away on the West Coast, opponents of public displays of affection be warned: today’s French kiss flash mob justified 75 degrees of perfect (summer?) warmth. Consider it three minutes in heaven.
My oh my I’d like this designer to put me on her Valentine’s list.
As though I needed more reasons to love the creative art executions over at The Bold Italic, the SF news project added a funky ’50s look to my reflections on cooking from farm boxes with local couples. Get thee to the kitchen…
I’m a terrible cook. I mean granola-bars-three-nights-a-week atrocious. My past attempts at cooking have resulted in calls to the SF Fire Department to extinguish flaming fish fillets. So imagine how excited I was when my nutritionist Tessa urged me to add more fresh fruits and vegetables to my diet with organic farm boxes, the modern equivalent of wheelbarrowing a regular harvest into your kitchen.
Initially, I tried to thwart her efforts. I claimed not to have the time to prepare healthy foods, to which she said, “Just try making a few meals with fresh produce – you have nothing to lose.” Except money, I thought to myself – I already spend a pretty penny on unripe peaches at my corner market. Was I really going to spend more dough on fancy fresh produce?
But after all my grumbling and a week subsisting on store-bought soup, I decided to give Tessa’s advice a go – after all, maybe I had nothing to lose besides pesticides. Thankfully, San Francisco is home to enough organic-minded consumers that there’s a range of different subscriptions for community supported agriculture (CSA) boxes that offer a seasonal array of nuts, fruits, and vegetables. But before committing to a regular subscription, I wanted to test my options. I was looking for people who’d show me the ropes of cooking from a farm box – those who weren’t afraid to be adventurous in their kitchens and who wouldn’t judge my lack of culinary knowledge. I was lucky to find four different CSA subscribers who let me follow their food, from box to table.
Delicious details ensued. more
It comes as no surprise that opinion journalism seems troubled on the financial front (with fewer dollars for newspapers meaning less space for community editorial), but a lack of diversity of the part of those who author them largely goes unspoken. If the OpEd Project gets its way, however, women will start to contribute dramatically more than the 10 to 20 percent of opinion pieces they currently author.
After a few high profile newsmakers’ questioned female aptitude for intellectual pursuits–including Larry Summers’ controversial musings on women’s biology and Susan Estrich’s accusations that the LA Times’ editorial was sexist–Katie Orenstein founded the project as a way to see if changing the makeup of “gateway forums” could be teachable. The head of the nationwide organization explains that “the range of voices we hear from in the world is incredibly narrow, and comes from a tiny sliver of the world’s population: mostly western, white, older, privileged and overwhelmingly male. Which means we’re hearing from only a small fraction of the world’s brains–including very few women’s brains–which is a big problem for women and for all those of us who aren’t being represented – our stories and perspectives are not being told, sometimes with life and death consequences. But it also suggests a tremendous opportunity for all of us: what would be the return to society if we could harness all that brain power?”
I’m fascinated by this question and the longer term implications it might have on females being interviewed as experts in their fields more frequently. And in its efforts to get women to engage more with front door forums (op-ed pages and online communities included) the project will be offering its next training at the ACLU on Drumm Street this Sunday. Pick up your pens.
I’m grateful to social media news resource Mashable for helping highlight the work of notable organizations that are offering outside-the-classroom access to computer science education. Read on…
What happens when “equality in the workplace” is simply a numbers game? The ratio of women trained in computer science education is even lower now than it was in the 1930s. In 2008, girls made up just 17% of Advanced Placement test takers in computer science (the lowest percentage of any subject) and held less than 20% of CS degrees.
To combat these numbers, organizations have sprouted to improve and expand programming education for women. These include community workshops and regional networking groups aimed at school-age girls and working women. These organizations need to reach corporate sponsors in order secure money and space to hold their outreach.
Sometimes started out of frustration with the disproportionate ratio of male and female programmers, these five organizations are optimistic about building a community that includes first-time programmers and people shifting professional fields.
“It’s our sense that by the time you get to Stanford or Princeton, you’ve made it,” said Angie Schiavoni, a tech product consultant who co-founded CodeEd with her husband Sep Kamvar. “But that doesn’t address the gap in education for young girls from disadvantaged backgrounds, and we think we can reach them in a fun way.” She and her husband, a Stanford computer science professor, personally paid for colorful notebooks with Linux operating systems for the middle-school age girls at Girls Prep, a charter school for low-income girls on the Lower East Side. Schiavoni and Kamvar teach a one-hour, Saturday class at Girls Prep.
After the first five weeks of HTML (which resulted in quite a few Justin Bieber fan sites) the girls can learn JavaScript, Python, and Java. The couple is currently seeking volunteer teachers to expand CodeEd to more schools in New York.
