2014 April : Camille Minichino

Archive for April, 2014

Girls Only

Filed Under : Science and Math by Camille

Apr.24,2014

April 24, Take Your Son and Daughter to Work Day!

The day began in 1993 to give adolescent girls additional attention and an insight into work-world opportunities available to them. When boys realized that they were in school as usual while the girls were out having fun, the day turned into Take your Son and Daughter to Work Day. Much better.

Too bad it wasn’t planned that way in the first place. Isn’t it just as (or more) important for adolescent boys to see both women and men in the workplace? Aren’t “boys” still the ones at the top, who do the screening and the hiring?

Years ago, I was part of a similar program, XYZ, to give girls an extra push by having a day of science, for girls only, taught by female scientists. Sounds good, right? Wrong. First, there was the giggle factor – boys, young and old, giggling over the fact that girls had to be taken aside and given special attention to learn science. They just weren’t good enough to take science with the boys.

They were right—that’s how it looked.

That should have been enough to kill the program, but it didn’t. I tried several times to change the course of the program, simply by inviting boys to the classes. Let the boys experience female scientists, too. (see above for why that’s important!) I continued to volunteer in the program, constantly petitioning for a change of philosophy and was shot down each time, until I finally quit. I realized that sexism was still rampant, and the powers that be would always consider that girls need special TLC to learn the hard stuff.

Last time I checked (4/22/14) the program is alive and running, and still girls only. I found an interesting FAQ on their website:

Q (paraphrasing): Why is there such a thing as the XYZ conference?

A (in part): Because girls and women are still underrepresented in science and technology fields.

I might pose it in the opposite way.

Q: Why are girls and women still underrepresented in science and technology fields?

A: Because programs like XYZ that have existed for more than 30 years, and are still encouraging people to think girls can’t cut it in the normal learning environment. Because boys who are left out will still go on to be the CEOs, Research Directors, who will pass over those girls.

Maddie speaks out

Filed Under : Books by Camille

Apr.16,2014

At last, Maddie Porter, age 11, has her say. She’s the sidekick in the Miniature Mysteries series by Margaret Grace.

Wow, after all the drills in school, we finally had a real earthquake where I live in California. I wasn’t scared. Not too much, anyway. It was only a 3.1, but everything quaked! I was in my Grandma’s house with her and her BFF. I think they’re going to get married soon. I hope so, because Uncle Henry—that’s what I call him—his granddaughter, Taylor, is my BFF! So that would be so cool. Me and Taylor would be, like, cousins or something.

Back to that earthquake, it’s a good thing I remembered Drop, Cover, and Hold On! from our drills in school, and made sure Grandma and Uncle Henry came under the dining room table with me and held on even though it moved a little. I think a vase in grandma’s house broke, but the big thing is that downtown in the new, giant crafts store, some pottery fell off a high-up shelf, and someone died from being hit over the head. The man was a boss of the new crafts company. He came to our town from New York, and my grandma thinks maybe it wasn’t the earthquake’s fault that he died. She’s probably right, and if she is, then we’ll have a Case to work on.

I love helping Grandma and Uncle Skip (he’s not old like Uncle Henry) who’s a police detective. This time I made up a data chart so we could have an easy way to see where everyone was when the earthquake hit. That’s called an alibi, and when we looked at all the alibis it helped us figure out how the man from New York was killed.

Grandma and I work on dollhouses together, and that’s almost as much fun as police work. When I grow up (I’m almost there—I’m eleven years old), I think I want to be a detective like Uncle Skip. Or just make miniatures all day. Or maybe work in an ice cream shop, or maybe live in New York. That’s where my dad was born when Grandma and Grandpa were living there. At least I want to visit New York and see the Rockettes. Maybe Grandma will take me some day.

GIVEAWAY ALERT: go to Dru’s Musings where this blog first appeared and make a comment by MIDNIGHT APRIL 17 for a chance to win a copy of MADNESS IN MINIATURE, the 7th in the series.

Tags : california earthquake, Miniatures

From Cozy Fun to Zombie Fun

Filed Under : Books by Camille

Apr.10,2014

WELCOME, CHRISTINE VERSTRAETE!

What my friend Chris doesn’t know about Camille: She writes light, reads dark!

My new bedtime reading!

Why Write About… Zombies?

By Christine (C.A.) Verstraete

Thanks to Camille, who is brave enough to let me grace the pages of her blog here and there.

Now Camille is a terrific writer who writes fun, light, cozy mysteries which I adore and LOVE to read. So why in the world would she want me to come here today and write about something as awful as … zombies?

Well, I admit being a mystery buff first. Camille and I got to know each other way back in the early days of her publishing her first miniatures mystery since we both are miniatures collectors. Later, I happened to write a kid’s mystery, Searching for a Starry Night, A Miniature Art Mystery, which features the search for a missing mini replica of Van Gogh’s Starry Night (hence the book title), and which she featured on her blog.

I’ve always been a horror fan, and loved Stephen King, Dean Koontz and others. Along the way I started writing some horror-tinged short stories and finally found something that inspired me enough to write a book—zombies.

Yes, they’re disgusting, awful, horrid—you name it. I started watching The Walking Dead and admit, even I cringed or turned away sometimes at how ghastly these monsters were. They’re like every nightmare rolled up in one. The show is fascinating, though, for both the human drama, the zombies and the fear factor involved—you never know what may be around the next corner.

So an idea came, but I naturally didn’t follow the typical route. Instead, in GIRL Z: My Life as a Teenage Zombie, I thought of a story about a 16-year-old girl who turns… part-zombie. No brain eating here, though she is on a kind of gross restricted diet. (You’ll never look at a certain white meat the same way again.)

About GIRL Z: My Life as a Teenage Zombie:

Life can suck when you’re sixteen. It can suck even worse when you’re not-quite-dead.

Sixteen-year-old Rebecca Herrera Hayes faces every teenager’s biggest nightmares: bad skin, bad hair, and worse . . . turning into one of the living dead.

Becca’s life changes forever when her cousin Spence comes back to their small Wisconsin town carrying a deadly secret—he’s becoming a zombie, a fate he shares with her through an accidental scratch.

The Z infection, however, has mutated, affecting younger persons like her, or those treated early enough, differently. Now she must cope with weird physical changes and habits no girl wants to be noticed for.

But time is running out… Most of all, she needs to find something, anything, to stop this deadly transformation before it is forever too late…

Links:

Amazon US, print and Kindle: http://tinyurl.com/mwjn6v3

Amazon UK: http://tinyurl.com/ctyd9dz

B&N: http://tinyurl.com/d889gzn

I wanted to write a book with some humor, bad puns and have it told from the zombie (or part-zombie’s) point-of-view. Having the main character Becca only part Z answered the problem of having her go Uggghhh through the whole book. Bo-ring. ha!

The main part was having fun with it. It wasn’t until later that I learned that zombie books are a genre all to themselves, and can be pretty gore-entrenched, violent and have a lot of military action. Not my thing so much, even though you have to have some zombie killing. Writing the gory parts, I admit, was fun. Call mine gore and zombie lite I guess.

Now I’m hooked. I’m working on some more adventures for Becca and am almost finished with a completely different book with another different take on zombies, this time in a historical setting.

The main thing is I’m enjoying it. After all, if you don’t enjoy what you’re writing, then why bother, right? But what I really learned was, who’d think horror could be so much fun?

Tags : teens, Verstraete, zombies

C Me? I C U

Filed Under : words by Camille

Apr.3,2014

In the third grade, I won a spelling bee. My prize was a shiny new green pencil and a pristine pink eraser, wrapped together with an oft-used rubber band (we called them “elastics”).

I have no recollection of the words I spelled, but I checked what today’s third graders are spelling. Some examples:

enough

thought

difference

easy

photograph.

There was no way Mrs. Johnson could have known how much the spelling of these words would change in a few decades. I feel like turning back my pencil and eraser.

In the 18^th century, Benjamin Franklin proposed a new, phonetic alphabet (what didn’t the man take an interest in?) His alphabet consisted of all the letters we’re familiar with, except there was no c, j, q, w, x, or y, on the grounds that they were redundant; and there were six additional letters, such as th, to provide for sounds that needed representation.

There wasn’t much interest in his proposal, even though he had the means to commission a foundry to prepare type for the new letters.

I wonder what he or Mrs. Johnson would think of “spelling” in today’s world of texters? I don’t recall a formal proposal or RFPs for new type foundries, but there’s no question that we have a more phonetic approach to spelling, much as he’d recommended:

enough –> nuf

thought –> thot

difference –> diff

easy –> EZ

photograph –> foto, or pic

Will improved technology (better ergonomics for finger/keyboard interaction, e.g.) take us back to enough, thought, difference . . . ?

It’s not so simple. Here are some examples from a list of 1400 abbreviations I found for texting and chatting on line.

TMI means too much information

411 means information

POS means parent over shoulder

And more Netlingo:

**// means wink, wink, nudge

*$ means Starbucks

Even if you use only the most common acronyms (LOL, BFF, ROFL), I’ll bet you don’t write

I won’t be late; I’ll see you soon, but rather Not L8; CU soon.

Or some variation.

It seems to me that technology is driving this “evolution” of language, starting with spelling and grammar. Has it always been that way – technology as the tool of change?

Do you text? How’s your spelling?

Is anything the same as it was in third grade?

Tags : spelling, texting