A cool resource for making young women interested in math and computing: Nerd Girls. It is indeed high time to get rid of lame stereotypes, as, just in the moment of this typing, I witnessed another unfunny joke on women's capabilities. Go on, nerdgirls, there's a lot left to do! (Source)

The combination of the attributes "cool" and "funny".

Interesting New York Times article on ignorance of the human factor in the mathematical models of risk as an important reason of the recent financial crisis. Missing quality of data and incomplete models are certainly part of the drama (a 'bullshit in - bullshit out' scenario), but can't be the only nor the main reason. What we experience here are the fruits of a collapsing market that reinvested its profits from real economy during the last 20 years that started running hot. The profits were taken from the diminishing middle class by means of offshoring, streamlining, and permanent optimizing. Enormous amounts of money flushed back into the market and were a major reason for the bubbles that are now bursting. The good money so created highly-sensitive financial products that were only survivable in boom times. If only a few parameters, such as the base rate, changed, the overly optimistic models played havock.

Just became a member of the JPG magazine community. A nice and easy opportunity for me to link to some of my photographies. Don't forget my other blog, eclectic imaging, at aminus3.

There are some reasons why my posting frequence slowed a bit down in the last months. Many of the IT news I've read in these weeks seemed to me like a replay of yesteryear's news. No big deal about this: while experts still wonder why women still don't want to have a career in IT, others gave a surprisingly simple answer already months ago: it just doesn't work out. No matter how big the personal sacrifices are, women still experience the glass ceiling in IT jobs that hinders them having success, and they make - of course - less money than their male collegues too. That's the big topic now and so it will be next year. And again you will find intelligent and not so intelligent explanations of that simple truth.
The other big thing is the crisis. Or call it stagnation. I mean: where's the next big thing? It's not Web2.0, that's for sure. All big players are staring on the crisis like a rabbit on the snake and hope that the crisis will be over soon. I don't know more about it than everybody else, but I guess it will not! It would be really nice to see some cool inventions, something new that we could play with, but I think it's not going to happen next year.
So I'm taking photos. After my short crash course in surviving German Christmas fairs I just want to wish you a merry Christmas (or whatever you celebrate). And be assured, you'll find something new at this place here and then, but more frequently this will happen at eclectic imaging. Enjoy!