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Finding Ada Day: Interview with Kate Carruthers, and Countess Lovelace

without comments

A really big thanks to Kate Car­ruth­ers for com­ing to the digital cot­tage for the in-studio interview.

Show notes:

Good even­ing! Wel­come to #under­cam, on Ada Lovelace Day. And in the stu­dio at “the digital cot­tage” we wel­come this week’s guest: Kate Car­ruth­ers. Tonight we talk about the impact of women in the inform­a­tion tech­no­logy industry. We will inter­view Kate, and then look into this per­son of the early 19th Cen­tury: Ada Lovelace

Clip was Bop Girl by Pat Wilson, then-wife of Ross Wilson (of Daddy Cool and Mondo Rock). Notice “our” Nicole Kid­man; video clip dir­ec­ted by Gil­lian Arm­strong. Aus­sie chicks rule! 

Sponsored by Sumo Bean­bags!
 
  1. Let­ters, Posts, Redux from last week
    1. Meta-backchannel Pro­du­cer is Dekrazee1: thanks! dir­ect Qs to her in the chat, and we’ll get ‘em sent to us via the meta Backchan­nel
    2. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29827248/ “if you had a pulse, you got a loan”
    3. Nobel Prize win­ning Paul Krugman’s column in the New York Times: gives his ver­dict on the plans of the Obama admin­is­tra­tion to res­cue United States banks. Obama is wast­ing his polit­ical cap­ital. Rad­ical reform is required. (Krug­man has pre­dicted the #gfc)
    4. #gfc is now The Great Reces­sion source: crikey.com.au // Alan Kohler; The reason the head of the IMF, Domi­n­ique Strauss-Kahn called this one the Great Reces­sion is that every eco­nomy in the world, except, at this stage, China and India, is con­tract­ing at once, which makes it quite dif­fer­ent to those other five. But the United States remains the key to end­ing it and pre­vent­ing it becom­ing another Great Depres­sion. And the key to that is sta­bil­ising the US fin­an­cial sys­tem: fiscal stim­u­lus and money print­ing won’t cut it.

  2. Lud­dites and Lol­lards [days news as up to the minute, online.]
    1. Lud­dite: Social move­ment against the mech­an­isa­tion of work in early 19th Cen­tury. Now used as a term to describe those against tech­nical pro­gress and change. Lord Byron spoke for the lud­dites in the house or Lords My ancest­ors put out of hand loom linen weaver work in early 19th cen­tury by mech­an­isa­tion, restored to farmer labour­ers; ulti­mate emig­ra­tion to Aus­tralia. (as free people, not con­victs)
    2. Lol­lards: Rad­ical Eng­lish Icon­o­clasts who star­ted a reform­a­tion from mid 14th Cen­tury.
    3. Lud­dite 1: Con­roy: dis­con­nect between accep­ted satire of Fake Stephen Con­roy vs. anti-democracy free speech ACMA list
    4. Lud­dite 2: MSM: via Kawker ‘News­pa­pers demand Google Wel­fare’ NYTimes web site vs wiki­pe­dia for ‘gaza’
    5. Lol­lard 1:  iiNet: iiNet yes­ter­day pulled out of the fed­eral Government’s inter­net fil­ter­ing tri­als, blam­ing drawn-out nego­ti­ations with the Depart­ment of Broad­band, Com­mu­nic­a­tions and the Digital Eco­nomy, con­stant changes in policy, and last week’s leak of a secret inter­net blacklist.

  3. [at 8:40pm] The Kate Car­ruth­ers Inter­view 
    1. why the love of LOLCATs?
    2. which female inspired you the most?
    3. where and why IT career?
    4. did you have sup­port from the people around you?
    5. MBA, Law (now) .. what drives you to con­tinue to study and learn new things?
    6. Battles/Strange Reac­tions from people?
    7. Is there a truly a hid­den secret net­work of fem­in­ists?
    8. Has the glass ceil­ing broken: women CEOs, mem­bers of Boards?

  4. [at 9:00pm] VIDEO 2: Jenny Mor­ris / You I Know 4m01s [writ­ten by Neil Finn]

  5. [at 9:04] The Right Hon­our­able (father was a Baron) Count­ess of Lovelace (from Hus­band), Augusta Ada King

    1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_lovelace
    2. http://www.google.com/search?q=ada+lovelace&rls=com.microsoft:*&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&startIndex=&startPage=1
    3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Somerville
    4. Melvyn Bragg: In Our Time Pod­cast http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/inourtime_20080306.shtml
    5. The world’s first com­puter pro­gram­mer; even without access to the hard­ware
    6. Hence: ADA pro­gram­ming lan­guage
    7. Ada was born in Decem­ber 1815
    8. Lord Byron, her father, wanted a son. Left the mar­riage within weeks of her birth
    9. Lady Anna­bella Byron (Ada’s mother, also a smart and edu­cated woman) split from Lord Byron dur­ing one of his depress­ive epis­odes; estrange­ment between par­ents Ada often sick when young, had tutors, gif­ted in math­em­at­ics at an early age (like her mother)
    10. Tutors in math­em­at­ics: Mary Somerville; Laplace trans­lator into algebra
    11. why? insan­ity of her father (Manic depress­ive) used math­em­at­ics as a mech­an­ism of driv­ing out the insan­ity; mother did not want Ada to become a mere poet. She was manip­u­lated to hate her father.
    12. Intro­duced by Somerville to Bab­bage 5th June 1833; at about 17 years of age
    13. [2 minutes] Short video clip of Ada’s let­ter to Charles Bab­bage from Power­house Museum (sci­ence intel­lec­tual circle of the time: go to Babbage’s.)
    14. Saw the Dif­fer­ence Engine; began cor­res­pond­ence with Somerville.
    15. 17 year old: called it a think­ing machine. Wanted to look at the blue­prints.
    16. Mother and daugh­ter: go on a tour of the Mid­lands of UK, saw Jacquard Looms
    17. Oth­ers in Ada’s net­work: Charles Wheat­stone (meas­ur­ing res­ist­ance, tele­graphy), Charles Dick­ens and Michael Faraday (work with mag­netic fields)
    18. Augus­tus de Mor­gan, Somerville and Bab­bage helped with Math­em­at­ics
    19. Her unique skill was foresight.
    20. Ada mar­ried Wil­liam King in 1835; money from Lord Byron, Ada “wore the pants” in the fam­ily
      1. Wil­liam King was extra­v­agent nature (gam­bler). 220 estates at begin­ning, bor­row­ing from Lady Byron
    21. Bab­bage on Lovelace “The Enchant­ress of Num­bers”
    22. Bab­bage: Dif­fer­ence Engine (half built, govt fun­ded) : idea for Ana­lyt­ical Engine (1834, notice tim­ing) due to his per­son­al­ity, he fin­ished neither dur­ing his life­time. Two work­ing Dif­fer­ence Engines exist 8000 parts 5 tonnes.
    23. 1836, 1837 and 1839 (1842: 3 kids under 6!) Three chil­dren, only one had ‘issue’ » now the Lyt­tons of today. She was not keen on her chil­dren.
    24. 1838 title of Count­ess of Lovelace via her hus­band
    25. Dur­ing a nine-month period in 1842–43, Lovelace trans­lated Italian math­em­atician (future PM) Luigi Men­ab­rea’s mem­oir on Babbage’s new­est pro­posed machine (from present­a­tion in Turin), the Ana­lyt­ical Engine from French to Eng­lish. With the art­icle, she appen­ded a set of notes. The notes are three times as long than the mem­oir itself and include in Sec­tion G a com­plete detail a method for cal­cu­lat­ing Bernoulli num­bers with the engine, recog­nized by his­tor­i­ans as the world’s first com­puter pro­gram or series of steps. Con­ten­tion of work was Babbage’s or Ada’s; strong writ­ten evid­ence Ada strong influ­ence over the con­tent of the notes: lan­guage, included.
      1. Let­ters of the day delivered 5 times a day. twit­ter of the day :-)
      2. Col­lab­or­ated with Wheat­stone and Bab­bage on the notes
      3. The art­icle, and sub­sequent notes: http://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/sketch.html
    26. Ada ref­ered to manip­u­la­tion of sym­bols, rather than the pure repetitve crunch­ing of num­bers
    27. In this doc­u­ment, pub­lished in Richard Taylor’s Sci­entific Mem­oirs Volume 3 in 1843, there is a dif­fer­ence shown between Pascal’s cal­cu­lator from the 17th Cen­tury and the planned Ana­lyt­ical engine, she cor­rectly seper­ates data from the pro­gram, recog­nises the import­ance of a cor­rect pro­gram­ming, sub­pro­grams,  and mostly can see in Sec­tion G has the foresight to see the implic­a­tions of com­put­ing (as we know it today)
      1. The dis­tinct­ive char­ac­ter­istic of the Ana­lyt­ical Engine, and that which has rendered it pos­sible to endow mech­an­ism with such extens­ive fac­ulties as bid fair to make this engine the exec­ut­ive right-hand of abstract algebra, is the intro­duc­tion into it of the prin­ciple which Jacquard devised for reg­u­lat­ing, by means of punched cards, the most com­plic­ated pat­terns in the fab­ric­a­tion of bro­caded stuffs. It is in this that the dis­tinc­tion between the two engines lies. Noth­ing of the sort exists in the Dif­fer­ence Engine. We may say most aptly that the Ana­lyt­ical Engine weaves algeb­ra­ical pat­terns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.
    28. Alan Tur­ing, another icon of the begin­ning of com­puter, had know­ledge of Lovelace’s notes, but not the design of the Ana­lyt­ical Engine (blue­prints not fully researched until 1970s, Col­los­sus not known about until Bletch­ley Park)
    29. This was the peak of her intel­lec­tual work; and due to lack of acquaint­ances and pro­jects, health espe­cially men­tally (Bipolar?), declined. To off­set the early pain of can­cer: Drink­ing, Laudanum (opium) and prob­ably inher­ited depres­sion caught up with her.
    30. Prob­ably died of Uter­ine Can­cer (and excess bleed­ing) in 1852 aged merely 37    

  6. [9:24pm] THANKS+CLOSE: To Kate, Dekrazee1 (Rai) and Cameron Reilly 

    Next Week: No show next week, present­ing Iron­Py­thon at the Sydney Python User Group

Written by Nick Hodge

March 24th, 2009 at 9:23 pm

Posted in AdaLovelaceDay09,katecarruthers,understil,video

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