NEW PRODUCT – Ada Lovelace, large, oval black and white – Sticker! Celebrate Lady Ada Lovelace, one of the world’s first computer programmers. Adafruit offers a fun and exciting stickers to celebrate achievement for electronics, science and engineering. We believe everyone should be able to be rewarded for learning a useful skill, a badge is just one of the many ways to show and share.
Here are some Ada-related facts, events and organizations.
Who was Ada? Ada Lovelace Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (10 December 1815 – 27 November 1852) was one of the world’s first computer programmers, and one of the first people to see computers as more than just a machine for doing sums. She wrote programs for Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, a general-purpose computing machine, despite the fact that it was never built. She also wrote the very first description of a computer and of software.
The Ada Initiative is a non-profit organization that seeks to increase women’s participation in the free culture movement, open source technology and culture. Founded in 2011 by Linux kernel developer and open source advocate Valerie Aurora and open source developer and fellow advocate Mary Gardiner, the organization is named for Ada Lovelace, the “world’s first computer programmer.”
Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging (videologging, podcasting, comic drawing etc.!) to draw attention to the achievements of women in technology and science.
Art licensed as: This file is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.
Perfect for laptops or the workbench.
These gorgeous stickers are glossy, vinyl and made to last a lifetime. Made with printing/vinyl machines that are solar powered and using the most green friendly supplies as possible.
MADE IN THE USA!
Adafruit’s stickers are manufactured in partnership with AMBRO Manufacturing located in NJ, USA. AMBRO is a family owned and operated business since 1990 that celebrates open-source with Adafruit Industries. You can meet their team here. AMBRO uses non-toxic soy based, water soluble and environmentally friendly printing supplies, threads and more when possible. AMBRO has over 250 solar panels that generate 50,000 Kilowatt hours per year. Their equipment runs solar powered, so the wonderful things AMBRO and Adafruit have worked together on are made with the sun! AMBRO Manufacturing was recognized by Impressions Magazine, a leading trade publication in the garment printing and embroidery business, who published an article highlighting AMBRO and their commitment to their environmentally focused manufacturing practices. Adafruit knows you have a lot of choices as to where you spend your money and time, we hope our open-source values, commitment to green technologies and partners helps make the decision easier and fun!
Walter Isaacson reveals subject of next biography, After Franklin, Einstein and Jobs, the best-selling biographer is setting his sights on a lesser known — yet pioneering — figure in technology history. Ada Lovelace -
Walter Isaacson, the biographer of Benjamin Franklin, Henry Kissinger, Albert Einstein and, most recently, Steve Jobs plans to train his sights next on a lesser known figure in history: the 19th century scientist Ada Lovelace. Isaacson’s book on Jobs has been number one on The New York Times best-seller list for 6 weeks and is a runaway global success. (Read an excerpt here.) At an appearance Wednesday night in San Francisco, he said he felt he had earned the right to pick someone less iconic, and pluck her out of obscurity. “I want to give Ada Lovelace her moment in the sun,” he said.
The daughter of poet Lord Byron, Lovelace helped the development of the analytical engine — the first incarnation of a general purpose computer with Charles Babbage, considered the father of the computer. She is credited with inventing the algorithm and pioneering the idea that writing software could make a computer perform different functions. Though not a household name, Lovelace is better known in the computer science world, and is already the subject of older biographies. Her penchant for math came from her mother’s desire to make sure Lovelace was nothing like her absent father, according to a biography by author Benjamin Wooley.
…More broadly, he believes women in technology will be the wave of this century.
We think Suw Charman-Anderson and her team’s yearly event Ada Lovelace day really inspired a lot of people to learn about Lovelace and think about ways to encourage more scientists and engineers.
At the height of her Hollywood career, actress Hedy Lamarr was known as “the most beautiful woman in the world.” For most of her life, her legacy was her looks.
But in the 1940s — in an attempt to help the war effort — she quietly invented what would become the precursor to many wireless technologies we use today, including Bluetooth, GPS, cellphone networks and more.
Researchers in Britain are about to embark on a 10-year, multimillion-dollar project to build a computer — but their goal is neither dazzling analytical power nor lightning speed.
Indeed, if they succeed, their machine will have only a tiny fraction of the computing power of today’s microprocessors. It will rely not on software and silicon but on metal gears and a primitive version of the quaint old I.B.M. punch card.
What it may do, though, is answer a question that has tantalized historians for decades: Did an eccentric mathematician named Charles Babbage conceive of the first programmable computer in the 1830s, a hundred years before the idea was put forth in its modern form by Alan Turing?
When Ruth and Elliot Handler, who had met in an industrial design course, started making picture frames in their California garage, they probably never thought their venture—Mattel—would grow into the world’s biggest toy manufacturer. More or less by accident, they wound up crafting dollhouse furniture and later children’s playthings out of spare wood scraps. In the late 1950s, Ruth determined there was a market for dolls that looked like “grown-ups”; ignoring her husband’s objections, she designed a prototype and named it after their daughter, Barbie. (Ken, named for their son, followed soon after.) Mattel struck gold with the new line, and in 1968 Ruth became the company’s president.
The marquee event of her six-week U.S. tour (in 1921) was held in the East Room of the White House. President Warren Harding spoke at length, praising her “great attainments in the realms of science and intellect” and saying she represented the best in womanhood. “We lay at your feet the testimony of that love which all the generations of men have been won’t to bestow upon the noble woman, the unselfish wife, the devoted mother.”
It was a rather odd thing to say to the most decorated scientist of that era, but then again Marie Curie was never easy to understand or categorize. That was because she was a pioneer, an outlier, unique for the newness and immensity of her achievements. But it was also because of her sex. Curie worked during a great age of innovation, but proper women of her time were thought to be too sentimental to perform objective science. She would forever be considered a bit strange, not just a great scientist but a great woman scientist. You would not expect the president of the United States to praise one of Curie’s male contemporaries by calling attention to his manhood and his devotion as a father. Professional science until fairly recently was a man’s world, and in Curie’s time it was rare for a woman even to participate in academic physics, never mind triumph over it.
Open source hardware is key to what she does; other people building on her work, even if sometimes this enables competitors. This value runs through everything Adafruit does, and drives strategy and decision making.
Suw Charman-Anderson, Violet Blue, Margery Conner, Xeni Jardin, Annalee Newitz, Gina Trapani, Sara Winge, Cindy Cohn, Shari Steele, Kellie Brownell, Andrea Chiang, Eva Galperin, Gwen Hinze, Marcia Hofmann, Rebecca Jeschke, Cherese Logan, Lori McCoy, Corynne McSherry, Abigail Phillips, Rebecca Reagan, Rainey Reitman, Katitza Rodriguez, Julie Samuels, Stephanie Shattuck, Lisa Wright, Jillian York, Laura Baldwin, Addie Wagenknecht, Diana Eng, Sylvia, Syuzi Pakhchyan, Benedetta Piantella, Jennifer Magnolfi, Cynthia Breazeal, Catarina Mota, Carolyn Porco, Erin RobotGrrl, Gabriella Levine, Myriam Ayass, Jan Axelson, Amanda Wozniak, Daniela Antonietti, Jessica Uelmen, Melissa Godsey, Yuki Nakagawa, Carol Reiley, Christy Canida, Shawn Connally, Bethany Shorb, Bonnie Ignico, Kate Hartman, Mary Lou Jepsen, Leah Buechley, Dustyn Roberts, Helen Greiner, Jenny Holzer, Jeri Ellsworth, Louise Glasgow, Sherry Huss, Lenore Edman, Becky Stern, Alicia Gibb, Ayah Bdeir.
If we missed anyone it’s only because we ran out of time or it’s because we’ve been up for a day working on this Please be sure to post a special woman in your life who inspires or has inspired you.
See you next year! Or perhaps sooner – this can be everyday, right? “We are what we celebrate!”…
Ada Lovelace Day was founded in 2009 by Suw Charman-Anderson. Suw is a social technologist, journalist and writer who got fed up the tech industry’s continual excuses regarding the lack of women speakers at conferences and decided to do something about it. Suw’s first FindingAda.com blog post which explains where the idea for ALD came from. You can also find out more about Suw on her professional blog, Strange Attractor, and her personal blog, Chocolate and Vodka. She is @Suw on Twitter.
Each hour we’re featuring a woman we admire who is currently doing amazing work right in the tech/maker/art/science space. There are more women we could write about than hours in the day and soon we’ll be out of time! It is a lot fun and very easy to write these up all day and night – we know we could not include everyone and we hope others around the web posted about them. Post in the comments if you’d like too, that’s what today is all about. We also wanted to celebrate some of our favorite authors (and beyond) that keep up entertained, enlightened and inspired. We had this group here last year and they STILL are rocking, welcome back!
Violet Blue. Violet was a crew member of industrial machine performance art group Survival Research Labs from 1996 to May 2007. She is a top 25 Forbes “Web Celeb” and one of Wired’s “Faces of Innovation.” Blue is regarded as the foremost sexuality and technology futurist and sex-positive pundit in mainstream media (such as The Oprah Winfrey Show, CNN, Attack of The Show and The Tyra Banks Show).
Margery Conner. Margery Conner joined Reed’s electronics-industry portal, e-inSITE, as a technical editor in 1998 and became editorial director in 1999. She created some of the earliest e-mail newsletters for the electronics industry, including narrowly focused niche newsletters. She also developed a video-on-demand news program for the electronics-OEM market. When EDN magazine absorbed e-inSITE, she moved over to EDN as Technical Editor, Online Initiatives. In addition, she covers the Power Systems beat. She has a BSEE from the University of California—Irvine and 10 years of experience as a design engineer and engineering manager.
Xeni Jardin. Xeni is a tech culture journalist. She is a partner, contributor, and co-editor of the award winning blog Boing Boing. She is executive producer and host of the Webby-honored program Boing Boing Video (formerly Boing Boing TV). » She contributes to broadcast, online, and print venues including Wired and NPR, is a frequently-sought “tech expert” in broadcast news. She rides unicorns and drives cupcakes, likes to rock out, and occasionally floats in spaceships.
Annalee Newitz. Annalee covers the cultural impact of science and technology, such as topics on open source software and hacker subcultures. She writes for many periodicals from Popular Science to Wired, and since 1999 has had a syndicated weekly column called Techsploitation. From 2004-2005 she was a policy analyst for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. She is the editor of io9, a Gawker-owned science fiction blog. In 2006 she published a book based on her doctoral research. It’s called Pretend We’re Dead, and it was published by Duke University Press. In early 2007, Seal Press published a collection of essays she co-edited called She’s Such a Geek — it’s about female nerds.
Gina Trapani. Gina is an award-winning author, blogger, and programmer whose work translates cutting-edge technology into insights that boost personal productivity. Gina was the founding editor of Lifehacker.com, the seminal blog which garnered nominations for Blog of the Decade and yielded the best-selling book, Upgrade Your Life, a compendium of the best lessons from the thousands-strong Lifehacker community. Currently Gina is a project director at Expert Labs leading development on ThinkTank, an open source crowdsourcing platform the White House will use.
Sara Winge is VP of the O’Reilly Radar group. Since 1994, she’s been crafting the O’Reilly story while in a variety of jobs in Communications. She’s been involved in launching most of O’Reilly’s new initiatives, and, with Tim O’Reilly, co-created Foo Camp in 2003. Her previous jobs, which include furniture refinishing, firefighting, and job counseling, prepared her for working at O’Reilly in non-obvious but crucial ways.
Cindy Cohn is the Legal Director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation as well as its General Counsel. She is responsible for overseeing the EFF’s overall legal strategy and supervising EFF’s ten staff attorneys and its legal fellow. Ms. Cohn first became involved with the EFF in 1995, when the EFF asked her to serve as the lead attorney in Bernstein v. Dept. of Justice, the successful First Amendment challenge to the U.S. export restrictions on cryptography. Outside the Courts, Ms. Cohn has testified before Congress, been featured in the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle and elsewhere for her work on cyberspace issue. The National Law Journal named Ms. Cohn one of 100 most influential lawyers in America in 2006 for “rushing to the barricades wherever freedom and civil liberties are at stake online.” In 2007 the Journal named her one of the 50 most influential women lawyers in America. In 2010 Intellectual Property Section of the State Bar of California awarded her its Intellectual Property Vanguard Award.
We want to also celebrate ALL the women who fight for our freedoms at the EFF, thank you!
Shari Steele, Kellie Brownell, Andrea Chiang, Eva Galperin, Gwen Hinze, Marcia Hofmann, Rebecca Jeschke, Cherese Logan, Stuart Matthews, Lori McCoy, Corynne McSherry, Abigail Phillips, Rebecca Reagan, Rainey Reitman, Katitza Rodriguez, Julie Samuels, Stephanie Shattuck, Lisa Wright, Jillian York.
Prior to becoming EFF’s Executive Director in 2000, Shari served as EFF’s Legal Director for eight years. She is also co-founder of Bridges.org, a nonprofit working to ensure sound technology policy in developing nations. She has spoken widely on civil liberties law in newly emerging technologies, including on the CBS Evening News, C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, The Today Show, CNN, the BBC, and National Public Radio. As EFF’s Legal Director, she advised the NTIA on hate crimes in telecommunications, the U.S. Sentencing Commission on sentencing guidelines for the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and the No Electronic Theft Act, and the National Research Council on U.S. encryption policy. She has spoken about Internet law as part of the Smithsonian Institution’s lecture series on the Internet, the ABA’s TechWorld Conference, the National Law Journal’s annual Computer Law Conference, and the National Forum for Women Corporate Counsel. A graduate of Widener University School of Law, Shari later served as a teaching fellow at Georgetown University Law Center, where she earned an LL.M. degree in Advocacy. Ms. Steele also holds a Master of Science degree in Instructional Media from West Chester University.
We want to also celebrate ALL the women who fight for our freedoms at the EFF, thank you!
Cindy Cohn, Kellie Brownell, Andrea Chiang, Eva Galperin, Gwen Hinze, Marcia Hofmann, Rebecca Jeschke, Cherese Logan, Lori McCoy, Corynne McSherry, Abigail Phillips, Rebecca Reagan, Rainey Reitman, Katitza Rodriguez, Julie Samuels, Stephanie Shattuck, Lisa Wright, Jillian York.
Laura Baldwin: O’Reilly CFO/COO, she’s runs the show at the best publisher/event producer (from Maker Faire to OSCON) in the world
Laura Baldwin started with O’Reilly Media in October 2001 as CFO and added COO to her responsibilities in October 2004. She is largely attributed with managing O’Reilly through the tech downturns of the past decade and currently runs both the Publishing and Conference Divisions of the company. Laura also manages all of O’Reilly’s international offices as well as finance and operations. Prior to O’Reilly she was a consultant to the publishing industry through BMR Associates and managed several large consulting engagements across all genres of publishing. Laura’s publishing career started at Chronicle Books the large, premiere publisher of popular culture, art, and children’s books as well as gift products where she served as CFO for ten years, establishing Chronicle’s successful distribution business as well as helping bring Chronicle’s Gift Business to market.
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