historicalheroines:

 I’ve created these flyers for a school activist project where I bring more attention to the women in history that have been forgotten or ignored. This blog will be an extension of those flyers where I post longer biographies of these women and other bad-ass women like them. Too often women’s achievements have been pushed aside, either by others in their lives, or else by the historians who choose to ignore them. This tumblr is dedicated to celebrating them and bringing their achievements to light!

I LOVE THIS.

(via laishe)

Source: historicalheroines

oddpicturesoddpeople:

anathematic:

hydrogeneportfolio:

Minimal Posters - Six Women Who Changed Science. And The World.

i would reblog this a million times if i could.

These would make great mini posters for my classroom.

(via becauseiamawoman)

Source: hydrogeneportfolio

Since the Nobel Prizes were established in 1901, more than 850 people and organizations have been awarded a Nobel Prize. Yet, just 44 of those prizes have gone to women. Many experts say a history of discrimination in the sciences is likely the cause.

via Is The Nobel Prize A Boys Mostly Club?

An interesting story by one of our Kroc fellows, Chris Connelly. — tanya b.

(via npr)

(via npr)

crookedindifference: The “Most Important Algorithm Of Our Lifetime” Could Change This Modern World Math breakthroughs don’t often capture the headlines—but MIT researchers have just made one that could lead to all sorts of amazing technological breakthroughs that in just a few years will touch every hour of your life. Here’s a quickie explainer: Fourier transforms are a mathematical trick to simplify how you represent a complicated signal—say the waves of sound made by speaking. They work by reducing the complex wave pattern to a simple and pretty short list of numbers that, when run through the system again, result in a very good approximation of the original signal. FFTs (Fast Fourier Transforms) are simply a way of making this magic happen in a digital computer, but the combination of math and machine means the FFT has revolutionized science and many industries that have technology at their core. Which is why it’s been labeled the “most important algorithm of our lifetime.” Now, you should remember that sound waves, and both picture and video signals, are all handled by processors in your TV, PC, and phone, and that the radio waves that whizz through the air to keep us all connected to the Internet need digital processing too. That’s every compressed sound signal that you listen to as an MP3 or similar format, most every image that you snap with your smartphone or DSLR, every image frame in the video you’re watching on your TV streamed over the Net, many images—such as those from an MRI—your doctor uses to diagnose your disease and every burst of radio that connects your cell phone to the nearest tower or your PC to its Wi-Fi router.  So calculating FFTs up to ten times faster is a big deal. It means that if you use existing hardware to do the math, it’ll be quicker at solving the problem you’ve set—so you need less compute time to do the task. If you’re talking about a portable computer like the one in your smartphone, that means it can spend more time doing other things instead. And with the valuable computing and battery resources of these portable devices under such pressure (you wouldn’t want your phone to be laggy now, would you?) that’s a good thing.
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crookedindifference:

The “Most Important Algorithm Of Our Lifetime” Could Change This Modern World

Math breakthroughs don’t often capture the headlines—but MIT researchers have just made one that could lead to all sorts of amazing technological breakthroughs that in just a few years will touch every hour of your life.

Here’s a quickie explainer: Fourier transforms are a mathematical trick to simplify how you represent a complicated signal—say the waves of sound made by speaking. They work by reducing the complex wave pattern to a simple and pretty short list of numbers that, when run through the system again, result in a very good approximation of the original signal. FFTs (Fast Fourier Transforms) are simply a way of making this magic happen in a digital computer, but the combination of math and machine means the FFT has revolutionized science and many industries that have technology at their core. Which is why it’s been labeled the “most important algorithm of our lifetime.”

Now, you should remember that sound waves, and both picture and video signals, are all handled by processors in your TV, PC, and phone, and that the radio waves that whizz through the air to keep us all connected to the Internet need digital processing too. That’s every compressed sound signal that you listen to as an MP3 or similar format, most every image that you snap with your smartphone or DSLR, every image frame in the video you’re watching on your TV streamed over the Net, many images—such as those from an MRI—your doctor uses to diagnose your disease and every burst of radio that connects your cell phone to the nearest tower or your PC to its Wi-Fi router. 

So calculating FFTs up to ten times faster is a big deal. It means that if you use existing hardware to do the math, it’ll be quicker at solving the problem you’ve set—so you need less compute time to do the task. If you’re talking about a portable computer like the one in your smartphone, that means it can spend more time doing other things instead. And with the valuable computing and battery resources of these portable devices under such pressure (you wouldn’t want your phone to be laggy now, would you?) that’s a good thing.

jayparkinsonmd: “A human being at rest runs on 90 watts,” he says. “That’s how much power you need just to lie down. And if you’re a hunter-gatherer and you live in the Amazon, you’ll need about 250 watts. That’s how much energy it takes to run about and find food. So how much energy does our lifestyle [in America] require? Well, when you add up all our calories and then you add up the energy needed to run the computer and the air-conditioner, you get an incredibly large number, somewhere around 11,000 watts. Now you can ask yourself: What kind of animal requires 11,000 watts to live? And what you find is that we have created a lifestyle where we need more watts than a blue whale. We require more energy than the biggest animal that has ever existed. That is why our lifestyle is unsustainable. We can’t have seven billion blue whales on this planet. It’s not even clear that we can afford to have 300 million blue whales.”
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jayparkinsonmd:

“A human being at rest runs on 90 watts,” he says. “That’s how much power you need just to lie down. And if you’re a hunter-gatherer and you live in the Amazon, you’ll need about 250 watts. That’s how much energy it takes to run about and find food. So how much energy does our lifestyle [in America] require? Well, when you add up all our calories and then you add up the energy needed to run the computer and the air-conditioner, you get an incredibly large number, somewhere around 11,000 watts. Now you can ask yourself: What kind of animal requires 11,000 watts to live? And what you find is that we have created a lifestyle where we need more watts than a blue whale. We require more energy than the biggest animal that has ever existed. That is why our lifestyle is unsustainable. We can’t have seven billion blue whales on this planet. It’s not even clear that we can afford to have 300 million blue whales.”