Proving once again that women can do anything... and everything.

Science has been a bit topic in our house lately and if you know us at all any time we are interested in a topic that means attempting to read all the

This is pretty ridiculous, but below is the transcript: 1943 Guide to Hiring Women The following is an excerpt from the July 1943 issue of Transportation Magazine. This was written for male supervisors of women in the work force during World War II. Eleven Tips on Getting More Efficiency Out of Women Employees: There’s no longer any question whether transit companies should hire women for jobs formerly held by men. The draft and manpower shortage has settled that point. The important things now are to select the most efficient women available and how to use them to the best advantage. Here are eleven helpful tips on the subject from Western Properties: 1. Pick young married women. They usually have more of a sense of responsibility than their unmarried sisters, they're less likely to be flirtatious, they need the work or they wouldn't be doing it, they still have the pep and interest to work hard and to deal with the public efficiently. 2. When you have to use older women, try to get ones who have worked outside the home at some time in their lives. Older women who have never contacted the public have a hard time adapting themselves and are inclined to be cantankerous and fussy. It's always well to impress upon older women the importance of friendliness and courtesy. 3. General experience indicates that "husky" girls - those who are just a little on the heavy side - are more even tempered and efficient than their underweight sisters. 4. Retain a physician to give each woman you hire a special physical examination - one covering female conditions. This step not only protects the property against the possibilities of lawsuit, but reveals whether the employee-to-be has any female weaknesses which would make her mentally or physically unfit for the job. 5. Stress at the outset the importance of time the fact that a minute or two lost here and there makes serious inroads on schedules. Until this point is gotten across, service is likely to be slowed up. 6. Give the female employee a definite day-long schedule of duties so that they'll keep busy without bothering the management for instructions every few minutes. Numerous properties say that women make excellent workers when they have their jobs cut out for them, but that they lack initiative in finding work themselves. 7. Whenever possible, let the inside employee change from one job to another at some time during the day. Women are inclined to be less nervous and happier with change. 8. Give every girl an adequate number of rest periods during the day. You have to make some allowances for feminine psychology. A girl has more confidence and is more efficient if she can keep her hair tidied, apply fresh lipstick and wash her hands several times a day. 9. Be tactful when issuing instructions or in making criticisms. Women are often sensitive; they can't shrug off harsh words the way men do. Never ridicule a woman - it breaks her spirit and cuts off her efficiency. 10. Be reasonably considerate about using strong language around women. Even though a girl's husband or father may swear vociferously, she'll grow to dislike a place of business where she hears too much of this. 11. Get enough size variety in operator's uniforms so that each girl can have a proper fit. This point can't be stressed too much in keeping women happy.

The minds of men and women are 99% the same, but that 1% may make all the difference. Studies of that 1%, for instance, have found that a female’s frontal lobe, responsible for problem-solving, is larger than in a man. Meanwhile, a male’s amygdala, which regulates the “fight or flight” reaction, is bigger. Many books [...]

The Innovators, Walter Isaacson's new book, tells the stories of the people who created modern computers. Women, who are now a minority in computer science, played an outsize role in that history.

Remembering the Cherubina de Gabriak hoax of 1909.

According to a new study, they're also much more likely to lie about their findings as they climb the academic ladder

It goes back thousands of years.

1. Castle Ashby Orangery Built in 1872 near Northampton, UK. Photos via here and here. Visit the Castle Ashby Gardens website here. 2. Iconic French Art Nouveau house to Reopen to Public Villa Majorelle, the famed Art Nouveau residence in Nancy, France, will

Iva Ikuko Toguri d’Aquino, or “Tokyo Rose” as most people knew her was an American-born Japanese woman who famously hosted a Japanese radio program aimed at U.S. troops during World War II that was designed to broadcast propaganda. During World War II, American servicemen regularly huddled around radios to listen to the “Zero Hour,” an English-language news and music program that was produced in Japan and beamed out over the Pacific. The Japanese intended for the show to serve as morale-sapping propaganda, but most G.I.s considered it a welcome distraction from the monotony of their duties. They developed a particular fascination with the show’s husky-voiced female host, who dished out taunts and jokes in between spinning pop records. “Greetings, everybody!” she said during one broadcast in 1944. “This is your little playmate—I mean your bitter enemy—Ann, with a program of dangerous and wicked propaganda for my victims in Australia and the South Pacific. Stand by, you unlucky creatures, here I go!” Japanese-American Iva Toguri D'Aquino is pictured in Tokyo following her release from custody in this 1946 U.S. Army photo. She was convicted of treason in 1949 for broadcasting propaganda from Japan to U.S. servicemen in World War II as the seductive but sinister Tokyo Rose. American G.I.s concocted a range of exotic backstories for the woman they called “Tokyo Rose,” but few were stranger than the truth. Her real name was Iva Toguri, and rather than being an enemy agent, she was an American citizen who had found her way onto the radio almost by accident. Most fascinating of all, she would later allege that she had remained loyal to her country by actively working to undermine the message of her propaganda programs. Born on July 4, 1916, Iva Toguri was the daughter of Japanese immigrants who owned a small import business in Los Angeles. She had spent her youth serving in the Girl Scouts and playing on her school’s tennis team, and later graduated from UCLA with a zoology degree. In 1941, her parents sent her on a trip to Japan to help care for an ailing aunt. The 25-year-old Toguri had never been abroad before and quickly grew homesick, but her problems only mounted that December, when a paperwork problem saw her denied a place on a ship home. Only a few days later, the Japanese bombed Pear Harbor. With the United States and Japan at war, Toguri found herself trapped in a country that she barely knew. Japanese military police tried to persuade her to renounce her U.S. citizenship and swear allegiance to Japan—a route many other Americans in Japan took—but she refused. As a result, she was classified as an enemy alien and closely monitored. Toguri spent the next several months living with her relatives, but frequent harassment by neighbors and military police eventually led her to move to Tokyo, where she took a secretarial job. By August 1943, she was working as a typist at the broadcasting organization Radio Tokyo. Toguri in December 1944 at Radio Tokyo. It was at Radio Tokyo that Toguri met Major Charles Cousens, an Australian military officer who had been captured in Singapore. Cousens had been a successful radio announcer before the war, and he was now being forced to produce the propaganda show the “Zero Hour” for the Japanese. In defiance of their captors, he and his fellow POWs had been working to sabotage the program by making its message as laughable and harmless as possible. After befriending Toguri, who occasionally smuggled supplies to him, Cousens hatched a plan to use her on air as a radio announcer. “With the idea that I had in mind of making a complete burlesque of the program, her voice was just what I wanted,” he later said. “It was rough, almost masculine, nothing of a femininely seductive voice. It was the comedy voice that I needed for this particular job.” While she was initially hesitant to get behind the microphone, Toguri eventually became a key participant in Cousens’ scheme. Starting in November 1943, her “gin-fog” voice was a recurring feature on the “Zero Hour” broadcasts. Toguri adopted the radio handle “Orphan Ann” and grew adept at reading Cousens’ scripts in a joking manner, sometimes even warning her listeners that the show was propaganda. “So be on your guard, and mind the children don’t hear!” went one introduction. “All set? Okay! Here’s the first blow at your morale—the Boston Pops playing ‘Strike Up the Band!’” In another broadcast, Toguri called her listeners “my favorite family of boneheads, the fighting G.I.s in the blue Pacific.” Tokyo Rose was a generic name given by Allied forces in the South Pacific during World War II to any of approximately a dozen English-speaking female broadcasters of Japanese propaganda. The intent of these broadcasts was to disrupt the morale of Allied forces listening to the broadcast. American servicemen in the Pacific often listened to the propaganda broadcasts to get a sense, by reading between the lines, of the effect of their military actions. The surviving recordings and transcripts of Toguri’s programs indicate that she never threatened her listeners with bombings or taunted them about their wives being unfaithful—two favorite strategies of wartime propagandists—but she wasn’t Japan’s only lady announcer. There were dozens of other English-speaking women who read propaganda, and at least some of them adopted a more sinister tone. As the war dragged on, American servicemen began referring to the different female voices by a single, infamous nickname: Tokyo Rose. None of the announcers—Toguri included—had ever used the moniker, yet the character became legendary. “Hers was so persuasive a myth that for most Americans she was as famous a Japanese as Emperor Hirohito,” journalist John Leggett later wrote in the New York Times. Iva Ikuko Toguri d'Aquino was the woman American authorities charged as being "Tokyo Rose", the Japanese American woman who broadcast propeganda for the Japanese during World War II. Toguri performed her “Orphan Ann” character on the “Zero Hour” for roughly a year and a half, but she appeared with less frequency in the lead-up to the Japanese surrender in August 1945. By then, she had married a Portuguese-Japanese man named Filipe D’Aquino and was looking to return home. She remained in dire financial straits, however, so when two American reporters arrived in Japan and offered $2,000 for an interview with the famous “Tokyo Rose,” she naively stepped forward to recount her story. It would prove to be a disastrous decision. Once her identity became public, Toguri was made into the poster child for Japan’s wartime propaganda and was arrested on suspicion of treason. She would remain in custody for over a year until a government investigation concluded that her broadcasts had been nothing more than “innocuous” entertainment. Toguri made an attempt to return home after her release, yet anti-Japanese sentiment in the United States remained high. Several influential figures—among them the legendary radio commentator Walter Winchell—began lobbying the government to reopen the case against her. The campaign worked, and in 1948 Toguri was rearrested and charged with eight counts of treason. Iva Toguri mug shot, Sugamo Prison - March 7, 1946 Iva Toguri mug shot, Sugamo Prison - March 7, 1946 At her trial in San Francisco, Toguri stressed that she had remained loyal to the United States by working to make a farce of her broadcasts. Charles Cousens even came to the United States to testify on her behalf, but the prosecution produced a series of Japanese witnesses who claimed to have heard her make incendiary statements on the air. Much of the case centered on a single broadcast that occurred after the Battle of Leyte Gulf, when she was alleged to have said, “Orphans of the Pacific, you are really orphans now. How will you get home now that your ships are sunk?” The remark, which didn’t appear in any of her show transcripts, proved to be a deciding factor in the case. In October 1949, a jury found her guilty of one count of treason. She was stripped of her American citizenship, given a $10,000 fine and sentenced to ten years behind bars. Toguri being interviewed by the press in September 1945. Iva Toguri D'Aquino, also known as "Tokyo Rose," is shown after her release from Federal Women's Reformatory in Alderson, West Virginia, Jan. 28, 1956. Tokyo Rose was released after serving 6 years of her ten-year sentence for good behavior. Toguri ultimately spent six years in a women’s prison in West Virginia before being released early in 1956. She reunited with her family, settled in Chicago and began working as an employee at her father business, but her reputation as “Tokyo Rose” continued to follow her. She was forced to fight off a deportation order from the U.S. government, and received no answer from repeated presidential pardon requests. It was nearly two decades before there was a fresh development in her case. In 1976, two of the key witnesses from her trial admitted that they had been threatened and goaded into testifying against her. “She got a raw deal,” one of them said. “She was railroaded into jail.” Around that same time, the foreman of her jury said that the judge in the case had pressed for a guilty verdict. Iva Toguri, better known as Tokyo Rose, has plenty of time for reflection on her crimes here, as she waits in her jail cell in Yokohama for her upcoming trial for treason. With public opinion turning in Toguri’s favor, groups ranging from the California legislature to the Japanese-American Citizens League all endorsed a new petition for a presidential pardon. On January 19, 1977, in one of his last acts in office, President Gerald Ford granted the request. Toguri, who was then 60 years old, was exonerated of treason and restored her American citizenship. “It is hard to believe,” she said at the time. “But I have always maintained my innocence—this pardon is a measure of vindication.” The woman once known as “Tokyo Rose” later returned to private life in Chicago, where she died in 2006.

October 21 marks the birthday of Ursula K. Le Guin, one of the most well-known and popular science fiction and fantasy authors of all time.

She used mine shafts as a beer fridge and shot bears to get lard for pie crusts.

Celebrity, scandal, tell-all books, palace intrigue, political protest and more.

Barbara Newhall Follett was poised to be a force in 20th century letters. What happened?

Before Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring was serialized in the magazine The New Yorker in 1962, she made sure that her book publisher, Houghton Mifflin, had good libel insurance.

This biography traces the life and work of Mary Fairfax Somerville, whose extraordinary mathematical talent only came to light through fortuitous circumstances. Barely taught to read and write as a child, all the science she learned and mastered was self taught. In this delightful narrative the author takes up the challenge of discovering how Somerville…

An excerpt from Angelica Shirley Carpenter’s biography Born Criminal: Matilda Joslyn Gage, Radical Suffragist, telling the story of a lesser known yet important colleague of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Lucretia Mott.

In 1918, following years of bitter struggle, some women finally gained the right to vote

Computers, and technology in general, have come a long way in today’s world. The modern world is actually shaped and defined through the usage of computers, those neat little gadgets that do the hard work for you. Modern computers are also perfectly capable of entertaining, organizing, reminding, even surprising you. That wasn’t always the case. Here is glimpse of the history of computers and their humble beginnings. These computers may not have been as powerful as modern computers, but they’re old black and white photos are intriguing nevertheless. If for no other reason, then because those old computers were capable of filling a whole room with their robust circuitry. Enjoy these old photos of the first generation of computers. AVIDAC, Argonne’s first digital computer, began operation in January 1953. It was built by the Physics Division for $250,000. Pictured is pioneer Argonne computer scientist Jean F. Hall. The CSIRAC was Australia’s first computer. The name stands for CSIR originally stood for “Council for Scientific and Industrial Research”. This name was in effect from 1926 to 1949. The computer history at NTNU is much older than the computer departments. The very first computer at NTNU was called DIANA, or DIfferential ANAlysator. This was an analog electronic computer built by Jens Glad Balchen and the Division of Cybernetics in the years between 1952 and 1955. A press conference for what is considered the first computer, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator (ENIAC), was held at the University of Pennsylvania on February 1, 1946. The machine (shown here with a technician) took up an entire room, weighed 30 tons and used more than 18,000 vacuum tubes to perform functions such as counting to 5,000 in one second. ENIAC, costing $450,000, was designed by the U.S. Army during World War II to make artillery calculations. The development of ENIAC paved the way for modern computer technology–but even today’s average calculator possesses more computing power than ENIAC did. First ever apple computer running windows. This is an Apple II with a monochrome screen and PC emulator hardware installed. The board was called the 88 Card, “the only fully functional 8088 processor for the Apple II personcal computer. A man and woman working at a Ferranti Pegasus computer. This computer was a classic 1950s/1960s mainframe installation, taking up the majority of space in a room. First hard disk. The rotating drum technology allowed ERA to deliver the world’s first production stored-program computer (ATLAS – ERA 1101) to a customer site in October 1950. The engineers making the installation delivery to the National Security Agency predecessor were Frank Mullaney and Jack Hill. As shown in the photo below, these drum products came in various sizes. They were first used in several classified processors, then in the early 1100 computer series and the UNIVAC SS-80 and SS-90 computers. Dr. Cohen and Sid Rubens are credited with patenting the rotating magnetic drum. The drum development engineers and management shown in this early 50’s photo, left to right are: William Keye, Arnold Hendrickson, Robert Perking, Frank Mullaney, Dr. Arnold Cohen, and John ‘Jack’ Hill. The first ever computer in Latvia was developed and made at the start-up Institute of Electronics and Computer Science in early sixties. No computers were made industrially in USSR at that time. Therefore successful completion of that project certainly represented a significant achievement. Built on a lot of vacuum tubes, the computer actually worked well and was used for supporting research activities for several years till the time when it became possible to replace it by a more powerful industrially made computer. IBM 701. IBM’s first computer. Introduced in 1952, the 701 was designed for scientific work and research, which later led to the development of the high-level FORTRAN language. Nineteen machines were built, a record volume for such a machine in that era. Its internal memory contained 2,048 36-bit words of electrostatic memory and 8,192 words of magnetic drum memory (see early memories). It used magnetic tapes for storage and was one of the first machines to use plastic-based tapes instead of metal tapes. See IBM 650 and IBM 1401. At General Electric’s Aircraft Jet Engine Plant in Evendale, Ohio, this 1954 photo shows GE manager Herbert Grosch explaining the 701 to Ronald Reagan. Reagan was a TV personality for GE at the time. Amdahl Corporation, Sunnyvale, CA. A computer manufacturer founded in 1970 by Dr. Gene Amdahl, chief architect of the IBM System/360. In 1975, Amdahl installed its first IBM-compatible mainframe, the 470/V6. In 1979, Amdahl left the company he founded to form Trilogy, which tried without success to make the world’s largest chip based on wafer scale integration.

If you think your future knowledge would help you in the past, we have bad news for you.

This IB PYP Learner Profile collaborative research project is filled with all you need to teach about the Learner Profile attributes through well known, global leaders, Nobel Prize recipients, activists, authors, scientists, abolitionists, orators, artists and real-life heroines for all generations. Tying in with Women in History, it fits perfectly with the IB PYP theme of Where We Are in Place and Time as well as Women’s History Month in March. Highly engaging, this collection of Learner Profile posters is a unique application of collaborative research activities. The children work together to connect the global leader with the specific attribute as they apply their Approaches to Learning Skills. You will find a reflection and assessment sheet to guide self/peer assessment with the ATL Skills as the children work collaboratively on their project. Print in either letter/A4 size for portfolios, working binders and wall posters OR create a large, poster sized version, perfect for showcasing the focus attributes. •Each poster is designed to be worked on collaboratively in small groups of 2-3 students. This create your own Learner Profile posters set includes 40 diverse, global personalities including: •Mother Teresa Ada Byron Lovelace •Anne Frank •Malala Yousafzai •Leymah Gwobee •Mae Jemison •Jane Goodall •And more. •For each attribute, you will find a female example, providing 10 examples PLUS blank templates for the children to select their own characters to research, to fit with each Learner Profile attribute. ★ Structured research note-taking organisers • Features images all in line art for your students to add colour and design. ★ Printed at 250% full size, posters are approximately the size of easel chart paper. (65cm x 75cm ) ★ Self/Peer assessment rubric ★ Reflection Questions relating to the ATL Skills applied. ★ Student handouts and planning sheets explain each part of the body biography project ★ The teacher set up directions, background & suggestions for use. ★Classroom Décor ★Bulletin Board ★Hallway ★Showcase Display If you are looking for a set of collaborative Learner Profile posters for younger children, you can take a look at this set here. You can also find a set with men and women here. And for Learner Profile attributes in fairy tale characters here. You may also be interested in my MANY tools for bringing the IB PYP Learner Profile to life, right here. Enjoy! Susan Powers PYPteachingtools.com

Uncollected poems and an essay show the troubled confessional poet striking a much brighter tone than in her more famous work

“Lab Girl”, the powerful new memoir of a female scientist — geobiologist Hope Jahren -- on life and love.

1. Forgotten Bollywood Film Sets “When I went back to Kolkata in 2013 a few years after photographing the cinema halls there, it was evident to trace the footsteps of film backwards from the cinema hall to film studio. The old filmmaking gear was stored in corners of the

On the 100th anniversary of her birth, her grit and brilliance are as legendary as her work.

In their search to understand the world around them, these women made groundbreaking discoveries that changed it instead.

Engineering consultant and author Karen Purcell stresses the importance of capturing young girls' interest in STEM subjects and career paths, offering five strategies to make this happen.