Seattle Geek Girl Dinners

I'm always impressed by the number of tech / networking / startup opportunities in Seattle. Well, impressed / overwhelmed. Here's another one that came my way: Seattle Girl Geek Dinners.

The second dinner is coming up on Thursday, September 11 and will be hosted by Amazon.

Our 2nd dinner is right around the corner! Amazon.com is hosting, and will be presenting on some of the key technologies they are developing.

Thank you Amazon!

The date is Thursday, Sept 11 at 5:30pm.

To register: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/158982521

We also need help with finding sponsors, and are looking for your ideas on making this a great opportunity for local technical women to meet.

Website | Facebook Group

Skip School - Get an Ankle Bracelet

Creepy. From the New York Times:

The authorities will be able to track San Antonio students with a history of skipping school using ankle bracelets with Global Positioning System monitoring. Linda Penn, a justice of the peace, said she expected that some 50 students would wear the devices in a six-month pilot program. The American Civil Liberties Union criticized the plan, but Ms. Penn linked truancy with later criminal activity. “We can teach them now or run the risk of possible incarceration later on life,” she said. “I don’t want to see the latter.”

You're going to give kids ankle bracelets? To do what, exactly? It's not like you don't know if they skip school - the morning roll call already does that. It will, however, ensure that they're treated like criminals.

Forbes: College Ranking FAIL

It seems everyone wants to get a piece of the college ranking game, and Forbes is latest contender.

Let's look at how the Ivy League - the group of schools America loves to hate - fared in the newest contest:

College	US News	Forbes
Princeton	#1	#1
Harvard	#2	#3
Yale	#3	#9
Columbia	#9	#10
Brown	#14	#27
Penn	#5	#61
Cornell	#12	#121
Dartmouth	#11	#127

Yes, that's right - Wabash College (#12) and Centre College (#13) are all better than half of the Ivy League.

While I firmly believe that one can get a great education anywhere, something is just not right about these rankings.

It becomes quite apparent when you look at Forbes' methodology:

(1) Listing of Alumni in the 2008 Who's Who in America (25%)

Ironically, Forbes' itself wrote an article ("The Hall of Lame") criticizing that it "appears to contain a lot of relatively unaccomplished people who simply nominated themselves..." Apparently, the majority of those who apply are selected. Anyone want to be in Who's Who? Think of how you'll help your college!

(2) Student Evaluations of Professors from RateMyProfessors.com (25%)

Students' input about professors to RateMyProfessors is limited to four criteria: Clarity, Easiness, Helpfulness and Hotness. Nowhere in there do the students provide information about how much they learned. And this accounts for a whopping 25% of Forbes' rankings? At least Forbes decided not to include "hotness" as a criteria.

(3) Four- Year Graduation Rates (16 2/3%)

This criteria appears a tad more fair. But still, what about a school which has a large number of students pursuing double majors, simultaneous masters degrees, etc? Some school encourage these sorts of academic challenges which would drop their four year graduation rate, while other schools effectively prohibit it.

(4) Enrollment-adjusted numbers of students and faculty receiving nationally competitive awards (16 2/3%)

For once, I have no complaint about this criteria. Ok, ok, maybe just one: is the sample statistically size fair?

(5) Average four year accumulated student debt of those borrowing money (16 2/3%)

For the 64% of students who do borrow money for school, leave it to them to decide if going into debt is worth it.

This is like ranking cars based on the average debt of its owners.

Forbes should be embarrassed by their list. 50% of the rankings are derived from extremely unreliable sources, and another 16.6% is a financial consideration that is best left up to each individual student. If you took their list seriously, you would be led to believe that a small, liberal college is the only place to get a solid education in this country.

What's really shocking about this list is that no one at Forbes took a glance at this list and said, "Hey, guys, did we really mean to put Hampden-Sydney College over 250 spots above NYU?"

Shame on Forbes. I'd expect better statistics from such a source.

Time Calls Rape Case "Sexy and Surreal"

McKinney, charged with kidnapping and rape over thirty years ago, has recently emerged. Time Magazine tells us that in the winter of 1977, McKinney and a friend kidnapped a Mormon missionary by the name of Anderson, whom McKinney had been stalking since their relationship ended in 1975. Anderson was chained to a bed for three days and raped repeatedly by McKinney.

In an odd - if not shocking - choice of words, Time Magazine describes the details as "sexy and surreal". Instead of calling it rape, Time calls it "forcibly having sex." It's also called a "sex scandal."

So how could Time possibly describe an abduction and rape this way? The rapist was a woman and the victim was a man.

Rape is not sex and it is never, ever, sexy.

A Creationist Explains the Male Sex Drive

A creationist explains why men have higher sex drives than women:

I believe God, in order to make certain that the human race would continue on, made sex one of most powerful desires known to mankind. But here’s the problem. If a guy created a baby every time he had sex and he had to take care of each and every baby and it’s mother for the next 20 years of his life and… THERE WAS NO PLEASURE IN THE ACT… how many guys would have sex? None! You think God didn’t know that? Of course he did. So, he had to make the desire for sex so pleasurable that most guys would do just about anything to have sex, baby or no baby. That way the generations would go on and on.

But the problem is, what if he made both men and women with the same desire? What if all men and women had the same intensity sexually as men? What would happen to our society? We’d never get anything done. We’d have so many babies it would overrun the Earths capacity. It would be terrible.

But on the other hand, what if both men and women had the same sexual intensity as most women? What would happen to our society then? We’d die out in one generation.

If the (alleged) difference in men's and women's sex drives is just God achieving population control, couldn't an omniscient, omnipotent God achieve this in other ways? Compared with creating the earth and the sun, tweaking fertility rates should be relatively easy.

Somehow, I find the evolutionary explanation a lot easier to follow...

BRADvite - Another Evite Alternative

Several months ago, I evaluated a number of evite alternatives out there. It's a crowded space, and lots of new sites have popped up since. Here's a new one that contacted me via a blog comment: BRADvite. Without looking at the comment again, I'm going to take a stab in the dark and say his name was Brad.

First Glance

BRADvite.com pops up with a loading screening. Literally - the background says "loading" all over it. It's sort of distracting. And then in the center, there's a picture of a guy talking on his cell phone. Brad, is that you? Why are you hanging out in the middle of the screen?

Invitation Themes

The various background images load relatively quickly in the background. Options include waterfalls, oceans, leafs, classical music sheet, etc. But my party is a toga party. On a boat. With a DJ. And drinking. As beautiful as a waterfall is, it has absolutely nothing to do with my party, nor does it express the "fun party" vibe. A picture of a keg would be more appropriate.

Tucked away in a corner is a little button to change the main image: a rose, secret service cartoon drawing, asian-style flowers, a man fighting off an elephant, aliens, etc. And, of course, a picture of our new friend Brad on a cell phone. Again, none of these match "toga party". Or even, say, a birthday / Christmas / Halloween party.

Registration

At least registration is fairly painless. It just asks me name and email address. The registration email didn't actually work, but they fixed that for me pretty quickly.

Event Details & Sending Invitation

I can't specify the time for the party. 'Nuff said.

Email Invitation

At least the email invitation is clean, elegant and provides useful information: host name, email address, date, location, and invitation details. To open the invitation, I see three links: View Comments | Click here to RSVP | Click for Map.

Yikes. I just want to open it. Shouldn't I be able to view comments and RSVP at the same time? And why not put "Click for map" next to the address, where it's most relevant and out of the way?

After the Invitation Is Sent

Host options are limited. I can edit the text of the invitation after I've sent the invitation, but not the background or main image. I can't export the guest list. I can't see when people RSVPd. There's no integration with Google Calendar or Outlook. I can't message guests.

Summary

The limitations of BRADvite are fairly significant, so I won't reiterate them. There is a more interesting point to be made.

Brad of BRADvite is clearly focusing on high quality images. Good. Far too many websites underestimate the importance of their user interface. The issue is that while the images are high quality, they don't very well match what the user wants to do. Brad needs to create user scenarios, such as the following:

1. Mary: 50 year old mother who is creating an invitation for her husband's 50th birthday party. It's a dinner party for 20 guests at their house.
   
2. AEPi: Fraternity which is inviting a sorority to their winter formal
3. Jake: 20 year old boy, soon to be 21. He's throwing a party for his 21st birthday in Las Vegas.
4. Gayle: throws large monthly parties with thousands of invited guests. (Hey, I had to throw myself in there.)

If Brad walked through these scenarios, he might see that as pretty as the background images are, none of them match what Jake or Gayle is doing. He might notice that AEPi, which is hosting a party as a group, might want to let multiple people edit the invite. He might notice that Mary needs the ability to message all the guests to tell them that they don't need to bring gifts. He might notice that if I'm throwing parties regularly, I need the ability to grab my guest list after each event.

Issues like this aren't limited to BRADvite, of course. Websites of all kinds need to stop thinking in the abstract "I am a website which provides [invitations, job listing, etc]" and start thinking concretely about exactly what problems they're trying to solve.