For Ada Lovelace Day
I missed posting for Ada Lovelace Day this year. A lot of G+ friends have recently shared posts about gender bias in science and I decided to list them here along with my re-share of my Alice Kober post.
Ada Lovelace, was an English mathematician and writer chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage’s early mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine. Her notes on the engine include what is recognised as the first algorithm intended to be processed by a machine. Because of this, she is often described as the world’s first computer programmer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace
Ada Lovelace Day in a nutshell
Ada Lovelace Day is about sharing stories of women — whether engineers, scientists, technologists or mathematicians — who have inspired you to become who you are today. The aim is to create new role models for girls and women in these male-dominated fields by raising the profile of other women in STEM.
Essential Reading for Today’s Theme
Blind Spots: Seeing Sexism in STEM via Buddhini Samarasinghe
https://plus.google.com/+BuddhiniSamarasinghe/posts/RnkYFTfDYgs
Double standard in academic dress code via Sara Del Valle
https://plus.google.com/+SaraDelValle/posts/LkyZCARFuTU
(Mis)Judging Female Scientists
https://plus.google.com/+InsideHigherEd/posts/bdXoHsWfA5c
Science Fellowships and Institutional Gender Bias in STEM via Zuleyka Zevallos
https://plus.google.com/+ZuleykaZevallos/posts/5yfNN5ov3Tv
When Women Stopped Coding from NPR via Betsy McCall
https://plus.google.com/+BetsyMcCall/posts/RxjgfSqU92q
#ScienceSunday
Originally shared by Chad Haney
Alice Kober, Deciphering Linear B
Deeksha Tare ‘s post about inventions by women (http://goo.gl/TLl3Z4) reminded me of a segment on The World on NPR. It was yet another story of an important breakthrough by a woman being overlooked. Alice Kober did a lot of the major analysis in deciphering Linear B but Michael Ventris received much of the credit, at least initially. Part of the lack of credit could be due to the fact that she worked on Linear B in private, i.e., in her “spare time”. She unfortunately died at the age of 43.
Linear B
So what is linear B? Linear B is a syllabic script from Knossos, Crete around 1450 BC. You can think of it as unlocking hieroglyps, without the Rosetta Stone. British archeologist, Arthur Evans found a series of clay tablets in ruins thought to be the home of King Minos. Linear B descended from Linear A which is an undeciphered earlier script for writing the Minoan language. Linear B consists of approximately 87 syllabic signs and over 100 ideographic signs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_B
Linear B had been known for about 30 years before Alice Kober began working on deciphering it. That’s 30 years with no breakthroughs. One of Alice’s breakthroughs was understanding that Linear B is syllabic, like Japanese where characters stand for a sound. The other two types of written language systems are alphabet, which we know, and logographic, like Chinese where a symbol represents a whole word. Part of the reason Linear B was not identified as syllabic earlier on is due to a few pictographs (like Chinese) that represented objects, e.g. horeses and pots.
Database
Instead of trying to guess meaning or speculate on sound values of symbols, Alice recorded the frequency of every symbol, in general and then in a particular position, which lead to the idea of Linear B being syllabic and an inflected language (having suffixes and prefixes). Keep in mind this was in the 40s and 50s with no computer aid. She handmade index cards for her database because of the limited supplies during WWII. From the database, Alice was able to build a grid showing the relationships between symbols but died before she could add sound.
It’s all Greek to me
Michael Ventris was able to add sound to the grid as he guessed that some repeated symbols might be towns in Crete. So Knosso in Linear B was “ko-no-so”. With a few city names figured out, he could add sound to the grid. No one had guessed that Linear B was a form of Greek because they didn’t know Greek was spoken that far back. Since Greek using the alphabet system, it wouldn’t have helped much, knowing that Linear B was a form of Greek. So the end story is that the Greeks colonized Crete and used the local writing system to record their own language.
Sources:
How American Linguist Alice Kober Helped Unlock the Secrets of Linear B
http://goo.gl/YH5jMZ via PRI The World
Alice Kober: Unsung heroine who helped decode Linear B
http://goo.gl/4W3cbL via BBC
Images from BBC and Wikipedia
#ScienceSunday
