ArmadilloCon 2010: non-native English speaker, an American author

I made a good effort to read Ilona Andrews' "Magic Bites", but this kind of urban fantasy is not to my taste. Yet I was intrigued by her as a non-native English speaker who is also a published author in English. I'm trying to follow the same path, and there aren't many role models in it. Ilona Andrews (for the sake of accuracy I'll add that this name is actually a pseudonym for a writing team consisting of her and her husband, who is a native English speaker) was only the second such person I met. The first was Sara Hoyt, who I met at the World Fantasy Convention in 2007. I blogged about it here.

Her biographical details resonated with me because of certain parallels. Like me, she grew up in the socialist block and immigrated the US as an adult. She came to US on a scholarship to a private school (it wasn't clear to me whether that was college or high school); I came here to go to graduate school. She said she knew very little English at first. I found that a bit strange, because any foreigner who comes to US for schooling is required to pass TOEFL, Test of English as a Second Language, to be admitted. The first time she used an English word was in the airport when she arrived to the US. A guy was blocking the walkway with his luggage. She waited for him to move, but he didn't. So she said "excuse me", and he moved. That was a defining moment in her life -- she used a word in a foreign language, and someone understood and responded. She felt like she was accepted into this other society.

(I guess it's remarkable that it happened so soon for her. Many immigrants take much longer to get to this point. But this incident has no more than symbolic value, and for some people, symbolic value is enough.)

Anne Sowards, Ilona and Gordon Andrews at Ilona Andrews interview at ArmadilloCon 2010.

When she first went to a bookstore in the US, she was stunned at the colorful book covers. In the USSR there was not only no western science fiction books sold (because they didn't pass censorship), but whatever books were sold, had dark, gloomy covers.

Oh, and in her high school days, she was required to do agricultural manual work. I had to do that myself back in the day. In the countries of the socialist block, all high school and college students had to spend 1-2 months of summer doing agricultural labor, such as harvesting the crops or weeding the fields. The only way to get out of it was to get a doctor to certify that a medical condition made you unsuitable for such labor. We were paid very little for it. 2 months of work in the late 80s was barely enough to buy me a few cups of coffee (since coffee prices went up astronomically). It's strange that decades later in the US I ran into someone who went through the same experience!

Pictures from Armadillocon 2010 are in my photo gallery.

ArmadilloCon 2010: Time travel meanders

Some discussion panels go disappointingly off-topic, turning into a free-form chat between the panelists that has nothing to do with the stated purpose of the discussion. Such was the "What do you bring on your time travel" panel. Based on the title, I was hoping for some fun brainstorming on what necessities you should bring with you to increase the odds of your survival in the past or the future. But it was nothing like that. Instead the panelists spend a good chunk of time debating whether they would want to know the date of their death. Then some of them turned it into "how things were better in their youth" gripe session. One panelist, who I already knew was conservative, criticized women's liberation for enabling girls to be as foul-mouthed and crude as boys. According to him, it's not progress if it makes it acceptable for women to engage in the worst behaviors of men. Gotta love the ole' double standard! Boys will be boys, but women are supposed to uphold civilized behavior. Blech.

To be fair, he also told entertaining stories about his Italian childhood, to illustrate how some of a modern person's basic cultural assumptions wouldn't hold up even as little as half a century back. In his mother's day in Italy, you were not supposed to chat with store clerks. If a clerk behind the counter tried to make small talk with his (the panelist's) mother (even here in the US?), the mother would grab her purse and hold it tight, because she assumed the only reason the clerk would do that would be to distract her and pick her pocket. This was a typical example of the attitude of the middle class towards the working class in Europe, he said. "People like my mother and her class is what makes lower classes want to be communists."

(As the reader may notice, I'm not naming any names. While I know that some people I'm referring to will find this blog post anyway, I still don't want search engines to link certain names with the critical stuff I'm saying here.)

At some point a guy from the audience tried to bring the panelists back on topic. He said that even if you brought all the right clothes and money, you wouldn't last an hour before people figured out you were alien. Well then, I guess, case closed? There is nothing, really, you can bring on your time travel to make it go smoother? I guess the obvious things, like antibiotics (if you are traveling to the past), or a wilderness survival kit if you happen to drop into the paleo era, were too trivial to talk about.

This illustrates why there is a disadvantage of having the same panelists at every convention -- many of them don't seem to think they should prepare for discussions, or stick to a discussion plan (and how would they if the moderator doesn't bother to create one?). Some of those "veterans" act like they think the audience has come just to hear them shoot the breeze. New people would be more likely to prepare to speak on the topic.

Pictures from Armadillocon 2010 are in my photo gallery.

My birthday: a ghost tour of Vilnius

For my birthday, my family took me on a tour of haunted places of Vilnius. I was entertained by the stories of the famous ghosts of Vilnius, but even more so by the way the tour guide tried to tie them to her personal life.

She told us a story of a fourteen year old boy who was a cemetery attendant. One day, before a rich man's funeral, the relatives of the deceased decided there was no reason the man should be buried with all of his gold, so he told the boy to take the jewelry off of the body and hand it over. Being very pious, the boy at first refused, but the relatives threatened to kill him. Then he tried to comply, but the dead people rose from their graves, and all hell broke loose. This event, despite taking place several centuries ago, had "horrible, horrible" repercussions in our tour guide's life. Back when she was a history student, their class took a tour of the crypt. The next day they heard on the news that a 14-year-old boy committed suicide by hanging. Some years later her class took another tour of the crypt (what, they didn't mind risking another teen's life? :-)), and the next day the custodian of the department building refused to let them in. "So you see, there is something supernatural going on there!" she concluded. Umm. Yes. I nodded and smiled.

	The courtyard in the historical Jewish district of Vilnius, where we met the dybbuk
	The dybbuk

Then she took us into a courtyard in a former Jewish neighborhood of Vilnius, and told us a story about a dybbuk -- a Jewish ghost that, unlike Christian ghosts, did not roam the Earth, but sought to inhabit someone else's body. An especially famous dybbuk of Vilnius was a ghost of a young man who wanted to let his grieving girlfriend know that he was happy in the afterlife. But the only body he found to occupy was a body of another young woman. So the said young woman came to his girlfriend to comfort her. Our tour guide said this legend was turned into an opera, which in turn was made into a Hollywood movie "Ghost". I did a brief research on Wikipedia and imdb.com, but found no confirmation of that.

It was this dybbuk that we got to meet in person, sitting in the corner of a courtyard in the historical Jewish district of Vilnius. He was holding a candle and wearing a decidedly modern outfit, if jeans and white socks are any indication. The tour guide said this was our chance to ask him a question -- anything we wanted to know. He'd answer it in a super-secret language of gestures that she would translate for us, as she studied it for many years. No one wanted to go first, so she ventured a question: "Will I be able to go on a very important trip this year?" The dybbuk made a flying gesture with his hand. "He says I'll go on a plane trip," said the guide. Glad those years of learning didn't go to waste.

The tour was cut short by torrential rain, but by that time we were almost done. All in all, it was not a bad way to get a tour of Vilnius Old Town, as long as one didn't put too high expectations into it.

More pictures from my trip to Lithuania are in my photo gallery.

SXSW 2010: Clay Shirky on monkeys with internet access

Among notable speakers on internet culture at SXSW, Clay Shirky gave a talk "Monkeys with Internet Access: Sharing, Human Nature, and Digital Data".

For starters, Clay Shirky made fun of the notion of "decade of the millennials". It's about as valid as designating a year to be a year of the donkey, or rooster, or dog, etc., as in Chinese horoscope. It's as if a particular animal, or particular generation to which a decade "belongs" to, brings something substantial into it, that's supposed to affect you deeply. But in reality human nature changes very very slowly, says Shirky.

Three kinds of sharing

So slowly, perhaps, that the "monkeys" in the title of the talk suggest that Clay Shirky thinks our fundamental mentality hasn't changed much since we were apes. He calls up results from primate behavior studies to explain the types of sharing people do on the internet, which are no different from the ones primates engaged in since time immemorial. There are three types of sharing.

Imagine you're walking down the street, and you see an old woman walking towards you. You would feel different if you thought she was going to ask you for money, than if you thought she was going to ask you to help her cross the street. The former -- a request to share the goods -- triggers a feeling of stinginess, even if you later overcome it; the second -- a request for services -- leaves people more amenable to share, even if the time they invest in providing the service is worth more than money. And if she asked you for directions, you would feel even more inclined to help. Sharing of information -- the third kind -- is the easiest. It comes at little to no cost to you.

In the world where music was always shared as goods or services, says Shirky, all Napster did was made it possible to share music as information. This means music industry was freaking out that we didn't voluntarily withhold something that was at no cost to us. What do you call withholding something that comes at no cost to you? The word for it is spiteful. Music industry was shocked that we weren't acting spiteful!

Humans being social primates, sharing of information is our natural drive. It follows that privacy is not a binary on/off concept (this ties in with to danah boyd's keynote speech of privacy). For example, as much as we are determined to keep our medical information out of the hands of insurance companies, there is an equally strong drive to share relevant details with selected audience -- for example, other sufferers of the same diseases. This can have a greater purpose than just patients' mutual self-education: patients' symptoms are data that researchers may be able to mine to come up with cures faster. This kind of sharing actually changes the environment. It's co-creation of public good.

More pictures from SXSW 2010 can be found in my photo gallery.

Another example of internet collaboration leading to public good can be Facebook groups -- yes, those pesky Facebook groups that promote various causes. Sometimes they do succeed in attaining their goal, as did the group Clay Shirky talked about.

A Hindu fundamentalist organization, known for beating up women who were drinking in bars, issued a threat to attack any woman who was out with a man on Valentine's Day. So Indian women started a Facebook group, Association of Loose, Forward, Pub-going Women. (I recall many of my female Facebook friends joining this group in solidarity.) The women in the Facebook group mailed pink panties to the head of the fundamentalist organization for Valentine's Day. The effect of this on Indian politics was quite remarkable, says Shirky. Once it became clear that women, as a group, were going to stand up to attacks, Indian authorities arrested the members of the fundamentalist organization, and there were no attacks on Valentine's day. The Facebook group demonstrated that there was constituency that cared enough about this issue.

Someone asked Clay Shirky in what domains does public sharing and collaboration have the greatest potential. He answered that the greatest "points of inflection" for sharing or colaboration are ones where no one is looking closely. (I suppose it's trivially true -- if people could predict where the next successful idea will come from, they would be pursuing it already.) But Clay meant it in a more pessimistic way. "The minute everybody understands that something is important to everybody, all progress stops," he said. (Audience applauded). As an example, there is still no single standard interoperable instant messaging platform. Yahoo, AOL and other instant messaging platforms never agreed on a single standard, because each of them wanted to be the one to set a standard.

Turns out, cavemen loved to sing, says an article headline on msnbc.com. How, one wonders, do the modern scientists figure out such things? This article is interesting not just in that it reveals specifics of life of prehistoric civilizations, but also that it shows how scientists reach conclusions about things as nebulous as leisure preferences of long-gone civilizations. Namely,

Ancient hunters painted the sections of their cave dwellings where singing, humming and music sounded best, a new study suggests.

Analyzing the famous, ochre-splashed cave walls of France, scientists found that the most densely painted areas were also those with the best acoustics. Humming into some bends in the wall even produced sounds mimicking the animals painted there.

They did it not just for their amusement. Cave dwellers used echolocation to map out the properties of the caves, the article says.

With only dull light available from a torch, which couldn't be carried into very narrow passages, the ancient hunters had to use their voices like sonar to explore the crooks and crannies of a newfound cave.

As an aspiring science fiction writer, I'll certainly keep this article in mind when or if I try to invent an alien civilization for a story I'm writing. It provides enough inspiring details to fill out a picture of an ancient culture.

An article that dredged up some memories

There is an article in New York Times about an upcoming report of a study of women's experiences in the science, technology and engineering fields.

Diversity Isn't Rocket Science, Is It?

"It's almost a time warp," said Sylvia Ann Hewlett, the founder of the Center for Work-Life Policy, a nonprofit organization that studies women and work. "All the predatory and demeaning and discriminatory stuff that went on in workplaces 20, 30 years ago is alive and well in these professions."

That is the conclusion of the center's latest study, which will be published in the Harvard Business Review in June.

Based on data from 2,493 workers (1,493 women and 1,000 men) polled from March 2006 through October 2007 and hundreds more interviewed in focus groups, the report paints a portrait of a macho culture where women are very much outsiders, and where those who do enter are likely to eventually leave.

I would sure like to read this report, if it is ever made available on the internet. It would be interesting to compare those 1493 women's stories with mine. I am lucky to be in a workplace where I haven't experienced a bias against me, despite me being one of the few women in a mostly male technical team. My previous workplace wasn't so good. While I haven't experienced any overt sexism, I ran into some subtle forms of... weirdness, a lot of which could have been attributed to gender perceptions. They were subtle enough to not evoke outrage, and to make me feel it was all my fault (which is actually my default operating assumption in many life's situations).

They were paying me -- why didn't they want me to work?

My previous workplace, a software company in Dallas, had a huge software development team of ~ 100 people, divided into many groups. I was assigned to a group that was focused mostly on R&D, rather than pedal-to-the-metal, get-the-product-out-the-door stuff. My group wrote prototypes of plugins for the company's main product (they didn't call them plugins, but that's kind of what it was -- different algorithms for doing tasks that our product did), and then the Big Brains decided which of them might be worth integrating into the company's product. Out of 10 people on this team, everybody except two people had a PhD. Most of them had spent a significant time in the academia as post-docs or professors. I was one of the two people who only had a Master's degree, and one of only two women. The other woman was a seasoned software developer, who played along very well with the rules and social norms expected in such an environment. I was, on the other hand, a complete rookie. This was my first job as a software developer, and also my first job in the US! I had no idea what to expect or how to behave.

One thing I completely did not expect is that nobody would give me any work to do. :-)

I'm serious. It became clear to me that my team lead did not see me as an available resource. Apparently, when he assigned team members to projects, I simply did not come to his mind. It was kind of like in an old detective story, the title or author of which I forgot. The mystery in it centered around the fact that there were footsteps in the snow leading to the house, yet the witness who's been at the house the whole time swore there were no visitors. It turned out, somebody had indeed come to the house: a postman (or a milkman -- details elude me). But for a member of English upper class in the beginning of the 20th century postmen and milkmen were simply not persons. So the postman flew completely under the witness's radar; when asked who came to the house, the witness did not even think to mention the postman. The same way, when thinking who to assign the work to, my boss simply did not think of me.

Feeling Kafkaesque

How was I supposed to interpret this? Was it because

(a) I didn't have a PhD like most of the group members? But then why did he take me on his group to begin with? Ostensibly it was because the research I did for my Master's thesis was related to the research his group did. Still, he knew I had only a Master's, not a PhD. If he thought this wasn't enough, he should not have taken me on.

(b) I was a woman, and therefore incompatible with a notion of a software developer?

(c) I was considered unworthy to be given a chance for some other reason?

I was so puzzled by his attitude (hey, they are paying me -- don't they want me to work?) that I (a) internalized it, assuming it was my own fault, and (b) tried to rectify the situation by repeatedly asking him to give me tasks to do. Sometimes he did, by assigning me some little research project; the problem was that when I tried to get him to review what I did and determine how to proceed further, he would never, never have time to review it. Weeks would go by, and he still would not find time.

I also asked him to give me bugs to fix in the existing code, because what's a better way to become familiar with the company's code if not by fixing bugs? And his reply literally was "there aren't that many bugs in our group code".

I just didn't know whether I should continue to "bug" him to give me work, or to give up. Since, as I said, I internalized the message that he behaved that way because something was wrong with me (women are really good at this -- at assuming everything is their fault! It's the default operating mode for many women, and I used to be no different), I gave up. I did not dare to continue to pester him. Besides, how many times could I pester him without starting to feel like an attention-starved wife being brushed off by a husband who's "just not that into her"? :-) There's this odd gender dynamics there, that wouldn't be present if both employees were the same sex.

And yet, at the meetings with the director of software development, my boss constantly complained he did not have enough developers to implement all the projects he has planned! I felt Kafkaesque. Should I wave -- hey, look at me over here! I'm not a roach on the wall! I'm a developer too! What about me? How about you give me some work? but of course I couldn't do that, as it would have been very embarrassing for all parties involved, even if it was said in the most polite form.

In retrospective I know my biggest mistake was to try to make the whole thing work, instead of going to the development director and asking him to reassign me to another team. But I could not bring myself to ask for it, because I was afraid that if I admit to the development director I haven't been doing much work, I would be shown the door! Eventually though, he and my team lead jointly decided to reassign me. And it made a big difference. My new team had concrete projects, deadlines, and -- surprise, surprise -- bugs to fix. :-)

So I don't know if this was just a weird case of a boss who's clueless about management, but I suspect he would have treated me differently if I had been a guy. When some new guys joined the team after me, he integrated them right away, giving them work to do. But he never gave me a chance to begin with, as if he simply could not imagine me being on the team. Go figure.