Ada Lovelace Day

#AdaLovelaceDay.  It is the second Ada Lovelace Day.  A day when thousands of people all over the blogosphere spend a few minutes writing about the achievements of women in science and technology where they are still massively under-represented.

There is a web site of pledges and a list of all the women (past and present) who have been paid tribute to, some you may have heard of, but many you will not have done. My Ada Lovelacee – if I may coin such a word- is Anne McNaught.  She works for the BBC and makes radio programmes for Radio Scotland, the World Service and others mostly about science and technology.  She is a great communicator and a meticulous craftsperson when it comes to putting radio programmes together.  Her science background (unusual in the BBC male or female) means she can interview scientists really well and she blasts out their ideas to a wider community than the specialist science one. This is a niche area and she has stuck to it.  Well done and thanks Anne.  

We worked together on Planet Science when we launched the Planet Science Newsletter in 2001 which is still going strong.  Anne edited that weekly for nearly two years before Katie Walsh took it over and continued it, to this day, under the auspices of NESTA.