WESconf

WES conference was good. So many people I haven't seen for years, and lots of lovely new people too. The talks I got to were excellent. Shame I missed a few because Surrey Uni is rather less wheelchair-friendly than usual at the moment, but huge thanks to the security staff who watched out for me and found routes through locked buildings (for the lifts) and opened barricades.

Reports of the talks will be in the Woman Engineer magazine and possibly on the website.

Julia King began her presentation on how to do well as a woman engineer (she's Vice-Chancellor of Aston, Chief Executive of the Institute of Physics, and many other shiny things) with explaining that her early role model was Lewis Carroll's Alice: enquiring, no-nonsense, and confident, and utterly dismissive of anything which prevented her achieving her potential (though in her case, the glass ceiling was a mirror). I'd never thought of Alice in this way, but it's very true. Perhaps we should support the books (not the Disneyfication!). Actually, Alice in Wonderland is one of the first books I remember, from when I was about 7. I think I tried to read Alice Through the Looking-glass a bit too young, though - some of the concepts were rather confusing and I didn't have the background to understand the White Knight, nor indeed the chess game. When I read it again at 12 it made much more sense.

When I was a child I listened to some of my mother's friends talking about their work on tidal-power generation. Eventually they gave up on trying to get the systems accepted in the UK and went to the middle east. Marvellous to see the trials around Orkney.

Wendy the futurologist introduced us to an excellent game. It's supposed to be a design and planning tool, but it's clearly a geek party game. And there's an online version! Sadly, it's Flash.

Engineers Against Poverty and Arup have produced another interesting tool called Aspire - a "planning, monitoring and evaluation model for assessing the sustainability and poverty reduction performance of infrastructure projects in developing countries".

Ah, and kettles. Amazing how many people still fill a kettle for one or two mugs of tea. Apparently using just the amount of water you need saves about £25 a year on electricity, based on 5 kettle-boilings a day. And of course it uses less water. So why do they fill up the kettle and wait ages?