I have had so much delicious food this weekend. And I still have most of a banoffee pie in the fridge! #omnomnom #
2 hours ago

RT @nexcastellan: Origami Star Wars! Wow! t.co/dM6YXFqS #
2012/02/10

@Jillus Done! It's in my calendar. :) #
2012/02/08

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Open Letter to White Edmonton About White Privilege

Monday, November 8th, 2010

Dear White Edmontonians,

I am dismayed and disappointed by the overwhelmingly negative response to the Racisim Free Edmonton Campaign, most of which seems to be coming from white Edmontonians. That’s the first indication we have a problem.

Just to be clear, I’m talking to white folk in Edmonton in this post, as a white person who has in recent years started to come to terms with her own internalized racism and white privilege. I’m not an expert in any of this: I am at best an advanced beginner.

So I have some things to say, as a fellow white Edmontonian:

1. You have white privilege. Not knowing you have it is part of how it works.
2. It’s not your fault. Chance determined the colour of your skin which is a thing you can’t change just like someone of colour can’t change theirs.
3. Because having white privilege is not your fault doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
4. Learning all this for this first time sucks. But so does racism and a world that privileges one group of people over another. Deal with it.

I also have a couple of things to say about the campaign:

1. It’s not perfect. There are some legitimate complaints about the writing positioning “us” and “we” against “them”. This argument is not wrong.
2. The campaign is over simplified in places. Probably in more places than I realize.
3. In regards to items 1 and 2 above, the campaign has to be oversimplified in some respects because it’s targeted at a general overwhelmingly white public that probably has never heard of white privilege before and so it needs to be simple and short while still getting the main point across. Which I think it does fairly well.

Okay.

Now that you’re all gnashing your teeth at me, before you wade knee deep into a conversation about race and whether or not the campaign is racist please educate yourself first. Google “white privilege”. Learn how racism works.

Here are some resources to get you started. Some of these links I found on my own, some of them have been pointed out to me as “Important, Read This” by various people in a position to know way more about this topic than me, and some of them are well-known resources for anyone who has dared to wade into racism on the internet.

• Here’s a fantastic and fairly comprehensive beginner primer on privilege, what it is and how to deal with having it with literally dozens of links. Many of these primers deal with all different kinds of privilege including white privilege, male privilege, straight privilege and cis privilege.
• Here’s a required reading list for beginners trying to understand racism and privilege, including how prejudice and bias works, how discussions of racism are suppressed, a guide for white people on how not to be insane when accused of racism, and several other excellent resources.
• Watch this talk by Tim Wise, a prominent anti-racist writer and activist. Don’t like videos? Read This is Your Nation on White Privilege.
• Read White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack by Peggy McIntosh. This article deals somewhat in intersections between white privilege and male privilege which is a bit of an advanced topic, but you should read it anyway.
• Claiming to be “colour blind” doesn’t get you cookies: aversive racism isn’t beat by pretending not to see something your subconscious brain has been trained by white privilege not to notice. Learn the linguistics of Colour Blind Racism before you get too attached to the warm-fuzzies you get from being “colour blind”.
• Here’s another resource for the “colour blind”: The Problem with “I Don’t See Color”.
• And definitely read Derailing for Dummies so you can wade into the conversation knowing how to avoid classic derailing maneuvers made by privileged people in conversations where they’re confronting their own privilege.
• Check out the research site for Project Implicit and measure your own implicit bias, which is the bias you don’t know you have. This isn’t a game, it’s an actual study, and a way to start helping yourself acknowledge your own biases. You can’t change what you don’t know.

Comment Policy: If things get out of control I will have to freeze comments on this post because I just don’t have time to moderate the type of conversation this post might generate in the way it needs to be moderated. I almost didn’t publish it for that reason.

Linkspam: Feminism, Science & Usability

Monday, August 16th, 2010

Even during crazy weeks when I’m up to my eyeballs in work, Fringe shows and social appointments, I still manage to read piles of stuff on the Internet. Here is a sampling of the most interesting things I’ve stumbled upon this week.

Feminism & Women

• What does the word “sexualization” mean, how is it being used, and how is it affecting girls and teenagers? I think this is an entirely valid commentary on how slut shaming has become an integral part of our culture. “‘Sexualization’ is a troubling piece of cultural shorthand. It suggests that sexuality is something that is done to young women, rather than something that they can own and control: that they can never be sexual, only sexualised.” It’s easier to take girls and women to task for dressing provacatively than to address rape culture and violence at its core. This is a word with cultural nuance that both makes females the victim and simultaneously blames them for it.
• I asked the wonderful Heidi Anderson for some sex positive links on Twitter, and she responded by creating this fabulous sex positive link roundup! Includes dozens of sites and blogs, with clear indication of which includes SFW and NSFW content. So far I’ve only had the time to go through a few of these, but what I have is excellent. Thanks Heidi!
• There’s been a lot of response to this comic from Penny Arcade, including a post on the Geek Feminism Blog about Classic Conditioning and how it affects rape culture on why this comic is problematic. While I grant the point, I tend to agree more with this article on Pandagon that takes greater offense on the follow up non-apology apology comic which absolutely does makes light of rape.
• Feminism helps everyone, not just the women, and men are affected by patriarchal ideas too.
• What does a “real” feminist act like? The idea that all feminists are the same, think the same and act the same makes being a feminist all the more frustrating sometimes. We don’t all agree — in fact, some of the biggest feminist battles are being fought between women who identify as feminists. Look. You can’t pick us out of a line up. We don’t dress a certain way or act a certain way or believe in the same things. We are, as all people, individuals first and our individual experiences make up who we are, including our feminist perspective. Also? In my experience there is a direct correlation between people who use words like “feminazi” to describe feminism and the lack of knowledge they actually have about feminism, its history, and the myriad of different opinions and degrees of opinions it manifests.

Science & Technology

• Melinda Wenner Moyer talks about how women aren’t properly represented in many scientific studies and how that endangers women and limits our scientific knowledge.
• Science is showing that differences in male and female ability is more to do with socialisation and social expectation instead of genetics. I have long suspected our highly gendered culture makes up most of the difference: if we are surrounded by a culture that teaches us explicitly and implicitly from birth that boys have better spatial skills and girls are more emotionally intuitive, it isn’t a wonder expertise in those skills tend to break down by gender. We learn who we are by living in the world and taking cues from the culture around us, and mostly we do what we’re taught we’re supposed to be good at.
• The plural of anecdote is not data, and good science often isn’t sexy. Great article in the Edmonton Journal on how anecdotes make lazy research and aren’t often a good basis from which to make important decisions.
• Interesting article on how Star Trek: The Next Generation imagined the iPad 23 years ago. It’s fun to think that choices made by a television props department largely on the basis of cost have inspired actual technology, from the flip phone to the iPad.

Politics

• The Canadian federal government is getting rid of the compulsory long-form part of the Canadian census. I have not done as much reading on this issue as I would like. I also don’t know what specific questions the long form covers that the short does not and where those questions have been useful in the past. Hmm….

Usability

• Here’s a great and informative article about designing websites to be friendly for colourblind users that includes a little of the science behind what being colourblind is and isn’t. Informative and helpful.

Linkspam: Women, Skepticism and SEO

Monday, August 9th, 2010

I read and get linked to a ton of interesting blog posts every week, and as much as I would like to post commentary about most of them there just isn’t enough time in the day. I often share some of these links on Twitter and Facebook, but I’m going to start posting a list of my most interesting recent reads here on Mondays as a way of sharing online articles with a little more context.

Feminism & Women:

• Elain Nelson posts a reaction to Joe Clark’s mansplaining post on women in tech. Elain very helpfully points out that some accommodations that need to be made for female employees — in and out of the tech sphere — aren’t related to skills or choice as much as they’re related to cultural pressures and expectations, such as that women will be the primary child caregiver. She also disputes the idea that “programming savants” who spent “virtually unlimited time” on their programming are the best people for all (or even any) computer job. Certainly usability would suffer across the board if these were the only kinds of programmers employed. Joe Clark also has some major fail going on when he addresses harassment in tech workplaces, which Nelson calls him on.
• Jessica Valenti talks about character assassination, slut-shaming and misogyny used as traffic bait in blogs and reminds us of the personal and professional risks of being a feminist online. This kind of stuff? Sadly not unusual on women’s blogs, especially women who blog about feminist, LGBT and sex issues.
• Apparently the big debate on legal blogs right now is about whether peep-toe shoes are appropriate in the court room. I feel like this conversation about whether or not a woman’s toes are inherently “too sexy” belongs in Victorian times. I find “appropriate clothing” debates inane and exasperating at the best of times because they’re more about sexualizing or desexualizing different body types than they are about what’s appropriate in the workplace, but this one strikes me as overly ridiculous.
• Elena Kagan has been confirmed to the Supreme Court!
• Over at the Geek Feminism Blog there’s a really excellent (though long) post on Sexism in World of Warcraft that is worthwhile reading. It covers gameplay, armour, storyline and character concerns. I don’t play World of Warcraft, but I have played some Guild Wars in my time, and I can definitely identify with many of her comments about the way women are portrayed in gaming.
• And, on the other hand, we have a female gamer praising the diversity of female physical and body representation in World of Warcraft with lots of illustrations.

Science & Skepticism:

• Coca-Cola is being sued because their vitamin water products make unwarranted health claims, but the best bit is their defense, which is to say that “no consumer could reasonably be misled into thinking vitamin water was a healthy beverage”. Basically their defense boils down to “yes we said it was healthy, but everyone knows that’s not true so we’re fine”. Um… *headdesk*
• Myths about the “love hormone” oxytocin and the way conservatives are twisting slective bits of science to shore up abstinence-only sex education, slut shaming, monogamy and a lack of family planning. This is a link-rich resource that I have read through but haven’t clicked-through yet. It seems well-researched and comprehensive, and the article itself is very interesting.

SEO:

• When Good SEO Becomes Bad Information Architecture. This post is a great reminder from Search Engine Land that good SEO does not translate into a good UI. User testing is hugely important: the way someone will search for content on a search engine is not necessarily the way they will seek it out in a website’s category hierarchy.

Edmonton Jasper Avenue Safety Survey Results

Monday, August 9th, 2010

The Jasper Avenue Safety Survey Results have been published online and I’m not terribly impressed by Toybox’s breakdown of the data.

They asked questions like “do you live in downtown Edmonton” but didn’t break down the rest of the results by people who live downtown and those who don’t. People who live downtown spend more time here and likely have a deeper understanding of the real versus superficial safety concerns. By mixing the data, how are we to know whether or not there are real safety problems or perception issues? If the people who live downtown report very different safety concerns (or levels of safety concerns) than those who are here only to work or only to experience the nightlife, the disconnect needs to be addressed. The two issues — safety versus perception of safety — have to be dealt with in very different ways.

Also, they asked for age but not gender. More women than men experience street harassment (especially walking past popular bars like Oil City after midnight) and are a much better indicator of harassment levels than 25-35 year old white men, who by comparison are targeted for harassment less frequently. Depending on the gender mix of survey respondants, the harassment numbers may potentially be under-represented.

People experience downtown areas in different ways depending on their age, gender, sexual orientation, race, whether or not they live downtown, and which area of downtown they live in. My sister, for example, who feels most secure in white picket fence enclosed suburbia does not feel at all safe walking downtown at night, whereas I, who live, work and play 24/7 downtown, would comparatively report I feel safe most of the time. Who is right and who is wrong? Is the issue my sister’s unwarranted anxiety the issue, or am I, as a resident, just too used to to living here to notice as many safety concerns? Probably the truth lies somewhere in the middle, as most truths do, but this survey doesn’t provide the statistical depth required to help answer those legitimate questions.

I think a comprehensive survey of safety issues downtown is a great idea, but this survey isn’t very thorough and seems to skim the surface of a lot of issues that are worth a deep dive. I would be wary of drawing any conclusions from it until the data has been broken down further. I’m not certain Toybox Media was the best company to go through for this survey. Do they have the specialized statistical expertise needed to write and analyse a survey that has potential government and tax-dollar implications? Or would this have been better outsourced to a company that specializes in polling rather than one that specializes in marketing?

Prop 8 Ruling A Rational Win for Gay Rights

Thursday, August 5th, 2010

Yesterday Federal Judge Vaughn Walker ruled California’s Proposition 8 which bans gay marriage as unconstitutional and discriminatory, a major victory for gay and lesbian marriage advocates. The decision has already been appealed and will have to go through the 9th Circuit and, eventually, the US Supreme Court.

Over the last 12 hours I took the time to read through Judge Walker’s 138 page ruling, and what I was most pleased about was how he framed his decision, not in morals or emotional appeals, but in rational fact, which legal experts say will make it much harder for higher courts to overturn.

Walker’s focus on hard evidence and fact thrills me, and reading through his ruling as he methodically and without emotional appeal refutes the claimes of the Prop 8 proponents based on the fantastic legwork of the pro gay marriage legal team.

The anti gay-marriage proponents brought the “gay boogyman” to the trial, claiming that homosexual marriage would errode heterosexual marriage and damage children, and instead of moralizing, the plaintiffs’ lawyers said came back with piles of evidence, facts, precident and expert witness testimony from psychologists to social epidemiologists, methodically rebutting each of their claims. At one point when pressed by Judge Vaughn Walker to provide even one solid, fact-based harm that might come from permitting gay men and women to marry, Mr. Cooper had nothing but “Your honor, my answer is: I don’t know. I don’t know.” Aside from the boogyman that appeals to homophobic sentiment and discrimination, the anti-gay side has seemingly no evidence to back up their position.

A long list of factual evidence — most of which the Proposition 8 proponents conceeded to during the trial (my understanding based on reading through the ruling) — has been pulled out and is available for quick reading on the Yes Means Yes blog.

Over at Slate, Dahlia Lithwick has written an outstanding article highlighting the factual, well-reasoned Prop 8 ruling:

“But for all the lofty language about freedom and morality, nobody can fairly accuse Judge Walker of putting together an insubstantial or unsubstantiated opinion today. Indeed, the whole point of this legal exercise—the lengthy trial, the spectacularly detailed finding of facts (80 of them! with subheadings!)—was to pit expert against expert, science against science, and fact against prejudice.

It’s hard to read Judge Walker’s opinion without sensing that what really won out today was science, methodology, and hard work. Had the proponents of Prop 8 made even a minimal effort to put on a case, to track down real experts, to do more than try to assert their way to legal victory, this would have been a closer case. But faced with one team that mounted a serious effort and another team that did little more than fire up their big, gay boogeyman screensaver for two straight weeks, it wasn’t much of a fight. Judge Walker scolds them at the outset for promising in their trial brief to prove that same-sex marriage would “effect some twenty-three harmful co