Balseros peleones

Here is a short video I made for a Chroma Key class taught by Alex Isorsky at Cambridge Community Television. Chroma keying is the act of using an editing program to select a “key”color (chroma) from an image or video and manipulate it in some way. Most commonly when editosrs use the chroma key effect they cut out all of this selected or “keyed” part of the image (Excerpt from class handout).

Watch the video.

Dr. Farouk El-Baz

In 1995 Magaly Koch, a Cambridge resident and member of Cambridge Community Television, was one the scientists who participated in a project by Boston University’s Center for Remote Sensing that involved estimating the crowd size of the Million Man March in Washington, D.C.

At the time, there was a huge controversy surrounding the actual number of people who had attended the event organized by the Nation of Islam. The National Park Service claimed the number to be well below one million whereas the organizers estimated a figure above one million people.  Dr. Farouk El-Baz, who is the director of the Center for Remote Sensing, was approached back then to provide a scientifically more accurate number that would  help settle the dispute. Ever since, he has become the nation’s leading expert in counting crowds.

So with the historic event of President Barack Obama’s inauguration approaching, Dr. El-Baz has been bombarded with telephone calls from the news media. Everybody wants to know how many people can fill the Washington Mall. Check out this conversation between Farouk and Magaly reminiscing about the Million Man March crowd counting project and discussing the number of people who can be expected to fill the National Mall in Washington, D.C. on January 20th, 2009.

Click here to watch the video.

Back on October 23, 2008, the Cuban humorist and storyteller Mario Barros a.k.a. Lenguaviva (Living Language) presented his latest book KleanKuts, Inc., Los misterios de Cayo Lungo at Schoenhof’s Foreign Language Books in Harvard Square, Cammbridge, MA. We shot the entire event with a low-tech, low-cost Flip Mino Camera.

Click here to watch the video.

Listen to the interview

So we went up to Damariscotta, Maine – a four hour drive from Boston – for a few days with the intention to shoot a short about an Oyster Farm along the Damariscotta river. Unfortunately, the owner of the farm was not very cooperative and canceled on us in the last minute and we were left stranded with all the equipment, not knowing what to do. Luckily, the beauty of Maine’s maritime landscape and the pecularities of its landmarks provide enough filming material and we decided to come back next year and give it another shot (pun intended).  In the mean time, our good friend and host Joe, a true Mainean, showed us around and took us to Glidden Point where you can see Oyster Middens which are, basically, heaps of oyster shells left behind by the Indian inhabitants of the region a thousand years ago.

Click here to watch our little home movie in high quality.

Click here to watch the video.

Every once in a while, I will check on the number of hits that my videos are generating on YouTube. As of lately, I’ve been noticing that the numbers for Minority Women In Science are increasing exponentially which aroused my curiosity and prompted me to investigate a bit further. As it turns out, some blogs, one of which is the Wired Blog Network, along with a bunch of Japanese web sites, were somehow linking to my video. Oddly enough, though, upon closer examination of the blog posts, I couldn’t find any specific reference to my video. I did discover, however,  one thing they have in common: They are all linked to a YouTube video about a Gender-Bending Mouse. Once you finish viewing the infamous Mouse Video, YouTube’s player will give you the option to continue watching so called related videos, one of which happens to be Minority Women In Science. Hence the increased number of hits. Go figure…

Minority Women In Science was mentioned in the local Spanish press: laverdad.es and diarioinformacion.com

The idea for the film Minority Women In Science developed from observing the obstacles and frustrations experienced by my sister and some friends of mine, as women academics in the United States. Most are struggling to be considered for tenure or tenure-track positions in their university departments.

Unlike other countries, in the US only a tenured position can secure you stable lifetime work in higher education. Typically, these positions are scarce and extremely competitive. And even if promoted to full professorship, women are rarely considered for the top leadership jobs such as department chair, head of a research center or dean of a school, let alone president of a university.

On one occasion, I remember asking my sister: Why is there still a gender gap problem? I thought universities were research institutions where objectivity prevails and people, irrespective of gender or race, are hired and promoted based on merit, where everybody is competing on equal terms, at least in theory.

Little did I know how far reality diverges from theory. I started going to conferences and workshops and began educating myself about the subject by listening to the testimonies of women who were either overlooked for promotion because they were unable, due to their child rearing obligations among other things, to work sometimes up to 80 hours a week — as did most of their male counterparts — or were paid significantly less for the same amount of work. A pattern of hidden biases emerged that tends to credit men more than women for identical accomplishments. All these testimonials were real and sometimes quite shocking but where was the quantifiable data to put the issues into perspective for a wider audience?

Very fortunately, in recent years numerous reports such as Beyond Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering by the National Academies have been published documenting and analyzing the barriers that women face in academia today. These studies are mostly based on data gathered over decades and from which a truly disturbing pattern of gender inequities emerges.

For example, according to the above study:

For over 30 years, women have made up over 30% of the doctorates in social sciences and behavioral sciences and over 20% in the life sciences. Yet, at the top research institutions, only 15.4% of the full professors in the social and behavioral sciences and 14.8% in the life sciences are women—and these are the only fields in science and engineering where the proportion of women reaches into the double digits. Women from minority racial and ethnic backgrounds are virtually absent from the nation’s leading science and engineering departments.

In spite of this rather depressing state of affairs, there has been remarkably little public debate over this issue. Interestingly, however, former Harvard President Larry Summer’s controversial remarks about women’s innate inabilities did stir up a major controversy that was picked up by the main stream media in the United States. But the issue still remains marginal if not invisible to the public eye.

On the other hand, as digital technology has evolved and film making has become more accessible to the average person, it certainly has enabled me to produce and distribute a film about this much neglected topic. By inviting my friends to tell their stories and to share their experiences in front of the camera, the focus became inevitably not only more personal but also more relatable and real.

Given the context, Minority Women In Science presents, hopefully, an insightful look at four women scientists from the Boston area, all from different countries of origin (Bangladesh, India and Venezuela), as they describe their personal experiences working in the United States, confronting issues such as gender and its impact on professional advancement, quality of research, and quality of life. The format is a lively round table discussion complemented by footage of the scientists at work.

The featured scientists include Saeqa Vrtilek, Senior Astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Irene Bosch, Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School Worcester, Magaly Koch, Research Associate Professor, Center for Remote Sensing, Boston University, and Sucharita Gopal, Professor, Geography and Environment, Boston University.

Minority Women In Science was originally shown in Cambridge Community Television as part of the Cambridge Science Festival, the first of its kind in the United States.

Click here to watch the video.

Click here to watch the video.