New exhibition of the Espace des Inventions in Lausanne
The Met Unframed
Powered by Verizon technology, The Met Unframed brings The Metropolitan Museum of Art to you in an immersive, one-of-a-kind AR experience that invites you to roam the halls, visit galleries with exclusively curated displays, and interact with the museum’s vast collection of art from wherever you are.
https://www.themetunframed.com
Bolo Museum
Swiss museum of Computer Science, Digital Culture and Video Games
The Musée Bolo is recognized as one of Europe’s most important IT museums. It has been managed since 2007 by the Mémoires Informatiques Foundation, whose mission is to safeguard the computer heritage of Switzerland and the world. The foundation highlights its collections via permanent and temporary exhibits, linking technological tools of the past with those of the present, and anticipating those of the future. Les Amis du Musée Bolo, an association of experts and enthusiasts, works tirelessly to restore old machines and get them up and running again for the benefit of current and future generations.
Computers of the Official Control Service
The computers of the Official Control Service, in the Besançon Observatory (France), in the Meridian Pavilion, ground floor, east room, 1948.
They were women hired to mathematically process large amounts of astronomical information.
Another example is the Harvard Computers.
Édmée Chandon, French astronomer
Edmée Chandon, born on 21 November 1885 in the 11th arrondissement of Paris and died on 8 March 1944 in the 14th arrondissement of Paris, was a French astronomer. On March 1, 1912, she became the first professional woman astronomer working in France at the Paris Observatory. She was also the first French woman to obtain a doctorate in mathematical sciences in March 1930.
Nicole-Reine Lepaute, French calculator and astronomer
Nicole-Reine Lepaute, born Étable on 5 January 1723 in Paris, died in the same city on 6 December 1788, was a French calculator and astronomer. Together with Caroline Herschel and the Marquise du Châtelet, she was one of the leading women scientists of the Age of Enlightenment.
Her work is often included in that of other authors, including Jérôme de Lalande and her husband. But, if we are to believe Lalande, who loved her very much, she was “a master rather than an emulator “. In particular, she helped to calculate the precise date of the return of Halley’s Comet of 1759 and was a major contributor to the calculation of the astronomical ephemeris Knowledge of Time.
On 27 June 2009, the watchmaking town planning of the towns of Le Locle and La Chaux-de-Fonds was recognised as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The site of La Chaux-de-Fonds / Le Locle watchmaking town-planning consists of two towns situated close to one another in a remote environment in the Swiss Jura mountains, on land ill-suited to farming. Their planning and buildings reflect watchmakers’ need of rational organization. Planned in the early 19th century, after extensive fires, the towns owed their existence to this single industry. Their layout along an open-ended scheme of parallel strips on which residential housing and workshops are intermingled reflects the needs of the local watchmaking culture that dates to the 17th century and is still alive today. The site presents outstanding examples of mono-industrial manufacturing-towns which are well preserved and still active. The urban planning of both towns has accommodated the transition from the artisanal production of a cottage industry to the more concentrated factory production of the late 19th and 20th centuries. The town of La Chaux-de-Fonds was described by Karl Marx as a “huge factory-town” in Das Kapital where he analyzed the division of labour in the watchmaking industry of the Jura.
Craftsmanship of mechanical watchmaking and art mechanics inscribed on the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity
At the crossroads of science, art and technology, the skills related to the craftsmanship of mechanical watchmaking and art mechanics are used to create watchmaking objects designed to measure and indicate time (watches, pendulum clocks, clocks and chronometers), art automata and mechanical androids, sculptures and animated paintings, music boxes and songbirds. These technical and artistic objects feature a mechanical device that generates movements or emits sounds. Though generally hidden, the mechanisms can also be visible, which contributes to the aesthetics and poetic dimension of the objects.
The Jura Arc is an area in which craftsmanship remains particularly dynamic thanks to the presence of highly qualified craftspeople and companies that promote the skills and a full range of training options. Historically, entire families were involved in the practice, developing apprenticeship practices and professional and family alliances. Skills were initially learned in training schools. Nowadays, practitioners also share their know-how via online blogs, forums and tutorials and collaborative open source projects. As well as serving an economic function, the skills have also shaped the architecture, urban landscape and everyday social reality of the regions concerned. The practice conveys many values such as good workmanship, punctuality, perseverance, creativity, dexterity and patience, and the infinite quest for precision and the intangible aspect of time measurement give the practice a strong philosophical dimension.
Once, most famous scientists were men. But that’s changing.
Women still are underrepresented in STEM fields. But some female scientists are now gaining recognition—and due credit—for their breakthroughs.
National Geographic
Science | Women of Impact
By Angela Saini
“I have something to tell you.”
I was ready to head home after giving a lecture about Inferior—my book documenting the history of sexism in science and its repercussions today—when a soft-spoken woman approached me. She told me she was studying for a Ph.D. in computer science at a British university and was the only woman in her group. Her supervisor wouldn’t stop making sexist jokes. He never picked her for workshops or conferences.
“Every interaction is awkward for me. I feel intimidated,” she said. “Most of the time I just find myself counting every minute.” Her plan was to see out the final years of her Ph.D., leave the university, and never look back.
I’ve had hundreds of these fleeting encounters with women scientists and engineers, all over the world, in the two years since publication of the book—which seems to reflect back at women the kinds of sexism that they experience in their own lives. When these women approach me at events to quietly share their stories, I’ve found what they want above all is empathy, to be told they aren’t imagining their misery. Their accounts of discrimination, marginalization, harassment, and abuse reinforce that, though progress has been made, there’s a long way to go.
7 women scientists who changed the world
National Geographic pays tribute to seven women scientists who, through their discoveries, have changed the world.
Juliette Heuzebroc, Romy Roynard
“Women scientists” sounded like a sweet oxymoron to the ears of a largely male-dominated research community. Many of them were shunned by the awards or had their discoveries stolen because they were women.
For centuries, female researchers had to “volunteer” to assist members of science faculties, and their major discoveries were attributed to their male colleagues and their names were removed from experimental protocols.
They often had to fight for even the “natural recognition given to their husbands or colleagues,” says Anne Lincoln, a sociologist at Texas Methodist University who has studied the barriers to women in the history of science.
According to a study conducted in 2014, women are still under-represented in science: only a third of researchers are women. Yet many women scientists have participated in discoveries that have changed our world.
On International Women’s Rights Day, National Geographic is honoring seven women scientists who have made major discoveries without always receiving the credit they deserve, simply because they were born women.
HENRIETTA LEAVITT
Born in 1868 in Massachusetts, Henrietta Swan Leavitt is an American astronomer. In 1893, she was recruited at the Harvard University Observatory to join “Harvard Computers”, a group of women hired to establish mathematical processing of astronomical data; women were not allowed to use telescopes at the time. Henrietta Leavitt was responsible for examining photographic plates taken at different periods in order to measure and classify the brightness of stars.
In 1908 and 1912, she published the results of her work on the Magellanic Clouds, a group of dwarf galaxies. Her observations enabled her to detect the periodic variation in the luminosity of certain stars, the cepheids. She thus established the period-luminosity ratio, known as Leavitt’s Law, which has enabled astronomers to develop a system for calculating distances in the universe and thus measure the distance between our planet and other galaxies.
Henrietta Leavitt was appointed head of the Department of Stellar Photometry at Harvard Observatory in 1921, a few months before her death.
Gösta Mittag-Leffler, a Swedish mathematician, attempted to nominate her for the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1926. He was unsuccessful, as the prize could not be awarded posthumously. But an asteroid and a lunar crater were named Leavitt in honour of the astronomer.