This year, the venerable and cool American Association for the Advancement of Science is meeting in my backyard. Each year, the AAAS puts on a meeting to encourage better communication about science to policy makers and the public, and this year’s meeting focuses on “sustainability.” There are dozens of symposia and panels on topics like climate change, safe nanotech, and ocean ecosystems, as well as wonkier subjects like how to teach the public about evolution and what we can do to get more women and minorities into science careers. It’s a fun time, with lots of chatting and meeting interesting people. Plus, the public is invited to the mid-day lectures by luminaries such as Google’s Larry Page, Susan Solomon from IPCC, and the weird-bearded Robert Sapolsky.

I’m going to be on a panel on Sunday about how scientists and journalists can better communicate to the public about issues related to gender and biological sex. It’s called “Miscommunications, Misunderstandings and Mistakes: Gender, Science and the Press.” Join me and my cool co-panelists Sunday, Feb. 18, at 3:30 PM in the San Francisco Hilton, Continental Ballroom 2.

Here’s the vid of me giving a talk called “Revenge of the Female Nerds” at the CCC in Berlin. The sound quality and production are excellent! Plus, my suit looks great. Maybe that’s why the very first question I was asked in Q/A was why I dress like a man.

And here’s a video from the first night of the book tour for my recent anthology, She’s Such a Geek, which I co-edited with Charlie Anders. This was in Cambridge, MA, and we had a room utterly packed with amazing geeky women (and men!). You can hear readings from Charlie and myself, as well as two other contributors to the anthology: Diana Husmann and Nina Dudnik.

Also, Charlie and I were on the Leonard Lopate show on NPR talking about She’s Such a Geek. Scroll down this page to get the podcast version.

For the past couple of weeks, the interwebs have been buzzing with news about the way GoDaddy, one of the world’s largest registrars of domain names, shut down the research archives of a prominent security expert at the request of MySpace. Out of the thousands of pages of archived data on SecLists, one contained some leaked MySpace passwords. Instead of contacting Fyodor Vaskovich, the researcher who owns SecLists, MySpace called his registrar, GoDaddy. According to Fyodor’s meticulous records, GoDaddy gave him about 50 seconds notice that they would be redirecting SecLists visitors to an error message. After a day of arguing with GoDaddy on the phone, Fyodor eventually got SecLists back up (minus the passwords). He was amazed at how easy it was for MySpace to censor an entire domain with just one phone call. Disgusted with his experiences, Fyodor set up NoDaddy, a site for consumer complaints and activism in response to GoDaddy’s wretched policies.

I called up GoDaddy to find out how they would respond to the protest site NoDaddy:

A spokesperson from GoDaddy said the company disagrees with the way Vaskovich characterized his experience. While the legal department at GoDaddy has not yet read the NoDaddy site, the spokesperson said the company will take legal action if any of its statements are untrue. Given that GoDaddy disputes Vaskovich’s story, such a suit seems inevitable.

Read the rest of my story about how GoDaddy censors the net.