Maia Weinstock is an American science writer and Lego enthusiast who resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She graduated from Brown University in 1999, [1] and is the Deputy Editor of MIT News . [2] [3]
Maia Weinstock is an American science writer and Lego enthusiast who resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She graduated from Brown University in 1999, [1] and is the Deputy Editor of MIT News . [2] [3]
Before working at MIT, she worked at BrainPOP, [4] and was an editor for SPACE.com and other science publications. [5]
In 2014, Weinstock was cited by Judith Newman of The New York Times as "a Wikipedian who has been instrumental in raising awareness" of the gender imbalance on that online encyclopedia; her article on how notability is determined on Wikipedia immediately provoked other Wikipedia editors to create a page about Newman. [4] [6]
In addition to her editing work, Weinstock has been an editor of Wikipedia for a number of years, and has been involved in efforts to reduce the gender gap among editors and articles that occur on the site. This work includes working at edit-a-thons on Ada Lovelace Day, as well. [7]
A fan of Lego mini-figures, she first started building them for living scientists, the first being her friend Carolyn Porco. [7] Eventually, this included a submission to the Lego Ideas contest called the "Legal Justice League", which was designed to look like a courtroom built out of Lego bricks, and contained miniature versions of Sandra Day O'Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan. [8] The submission was declined by LEGO as being too political, which led to an increase in publicity for the project, and eventually led to a submission with generic justices. A Boston Globe reporter described Weinstock's apartment as having "[s]tacks of heads and hairstyles, torsos and legs and arms, a pint-sized Frankenstein's workshop stored in little plastic bins". [9]
In March 2017, Lego announced that it would be making a "Women of NASA" set, based on a design Weinstock had submitted. [10]
In 2022 MIT Press published Weinstock's 320-page biography of Mildred Dresselhaus. [11] [12]
The English Wikipedia is the primary English-language edition of Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. It was created by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger on January 15, 2001, as Wikipedia's first edition.
Mildred Dresselhaus, known as the "Queen of Carbon Science", was an American physicist, materials scientist, and nanotechnologist. She was an institute professor and professor of both physics and electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She also served as the president of the American Physical Society, the chair of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, as well as the director of science in the US Department of Energy under the Bill Clinton Government. Dresselhaus won numerous awards including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the National Medal of Science, the Enrico Fermi Award, the Kavli Prize and the Vannevar Bush Award.
Weinstock is a Jewish and a German surname. Notable people with this surname include:
The free online encyclopedia Wikipedia has been criticized since its creation in 2001, most of which has been directed toward its content, community of established users, process, and rules. Critics have questioned its factual reliability, the readability and organization of its articles, the lack of methodical fact-checking, and its political bias. Concerns have also been raised about systemic bias along gender, racial, political, corporate, institutional, and national lines. Conflicts of interest arising from corporate campaigns to influence content have also been highlighted. Further concerns include the vandalism and partisanship facilitated by anonymous editing, clique behavior, social stratification between a guardian class and newer users, excessive rule-making, edit warring, and uneven policy application.
Dava J. Newman is an American aerospace engineer. She is the director of the MIT Media Lab and a former deputy administrator of NASA. Newman is the Apollo Program Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics and Engineering Systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has been a faculty member in the department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and MIT's School of Engineering since 1993.
Nai-Chang Yeh is a Taiwanese-American physicist specializing in experimental condensed matter physics.
Creola Katherine Johnson was an American mathematician whose calculations of orbital mechanics as a NASA employee were critical to the success of the first and subsequent U.S. crewed spaceflights. During her 33-year career at NASA and its predecessor, she earned a reputation for mastering complex manual calculations and helped pioneer the use of computers to perform the tasks. The space agency noted her "historical role as one of the first African-American women to work as a NASA scientist".
The Wikipedia community, collectively and individually known as Wikipedians, is an online community that volunteers to create and maintain Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. Since August 2012, the word "Wikipedian" has been an Oxford Dictionary entry.
Lego Ideas is a website run by Chaordix and The Lego Group, which allows users to submit ideas for Lego products to be turned into potential sets available commercially, with the original designer receiving 1% of the royalties. It started in 2008 as an offshoot of the Japanese company Cuusoo, named after the Japanese word 空想 kūsō.
Judith B. Newman is an American journalist and author. She writes about entertainment, relationships, parenthood, business, beauty, books, science, and popular culture. Her work has appeared in more than fifty periodicals, including The New York Times, Vanity Fair,Harper's, The Wall Street Journal, Allure and Vogue. Newman's books include the memoirs You Make Me Feel Like an Unnatural Woman: The Diary of a New (Older) Mother and To Siri With Love.
An edit-a-thon is an event where some editors of online communities such as Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, and LocalWiki edit and improve a specific topic or type of content. The events typically include basic editing training for new editors and may be combined with a more general social meetup. The word is a portmanteau of "edit" and "marathon". An edit-a-thon can either be "in-person" or online or a blended version of both. If it is not in-person, it is usually called a "virtual edit-a-thon" or "online edit-a-thon".
Gender bias on Wikipedia is a term used to describe various sex-related facts about Wikipedia: its volunteer contributors are mostly male, relatively few biographies on Wikipedia are about women, and topics primarily of interest to women are less well-covered.
The English Wikipedia has been criticized for having a systemic racial bias in its coverage. This bias partially stems from an under-representation of people of color within its volunteer editor base. In "Can History Be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past," it is noted that article completeness and coverage is dependent on the interests of Wikipedians, not necessarily on the subject matter itself. The past president of Wikimedia D.C., James Hare, asserted that "a lot of Black history is left out" of Wikipedia, due to articles predominately being written by white editors. Articles about African topics that do exist are, according to some, largely edited by editors from Europe and North America and thus, they only reflect their knowledge and their consumption of media, which "tend to perpetuate a negative image" of Africa. Maira Liriano of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture has argued that the lack of information regarding Black history on Wikipedia "makes it seem like it's not important."
Art and Feminism is an annual worldwide edit-a-thon to add content to Wikipedia about women artists, which started in 2014. The project has been described as "a massive multinational effort to correct a persistent bias in Wikipedia, which is disproportionately written by and about men".
Women in Red is a WikiProject addressing the current gender bias in Wikipedia content. The project focuses on creating content regarding women's biographies, women's works, and women's issues.
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is an American theoretical cosmologist and particle physicist at the University of New Hampshire. She is also an advocate of increasing diversity in science.
Jessica Alice Feinmann Wade is a British physicist in the Blackett Laboratory at Imperial College London, specialising in Raman spectroscopy. Her research investigates polymer-based organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs). Her public engagement work in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) advocates for women in physics as well as tackling systemic biases such as gender and racial bias on Wikipedia.
Prineha Narang is an American physicist and computational material scientist. She is a Professor of Physical Sciences and Howard Reiss Chair at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Narang currently serves as a U.S. Science Envoy approved by the Secretary of State to identify opportunities for science and technology cooperation. Before moving to UCLA, she was first an Environmental Fellow at Harvard University Center for the Environment and then an Assistant Professor in the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. Narang’s work has been recognized internationally by many awards and a variety of special designations, including the Mildred Dresselhaus Prize, the 2021 IUPAP Young Scientist Prize in Computational Physics, a Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and a Max Planck Sabbatical Award from the Max Planck Society. Narang also received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2020, was named a Moore Inventor Fellow by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation for the development for a fundamentally new strategy for single molecule sensing and environmental toxin metrology using picoscale quantum sensors, CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, and a Top Innovator by MIT Tech Review. Narang was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2023.
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