WEPAN started in 1990 and is a national (U.S.) not-for-profit organization with over  600 members across various industries and academia. Its stated goal is to “help members develop a more prepared and diverse engineering workforce,” which more clearly worded means that they’re working to facilitate the development of programs and activities that promote the entry and retention of women in engineering programs.

During the webinar, Diane Matt (WEPAN’s Executive Director) and Jenna Carpenter (IEEE Senior Member, Associate Dean at Louisiana Tech University and WEPAN’s Director of Professional Development) walked attendees through a tour of the WEPAN site and its associated Knowledge Center. Nearly forty percent of the webinar’s participants were academics.

The WEPAN Knowledge Center is an online resource for “research, best practices and professional communities dedicated to advancing all women in engineering.” It began with five hundred resources in June of 2009, and has since doubled its listings. Want statistics on the number of American college graduates with STEM-degrees who happen to be women? Curious about gender gaps and bias in various fields? Looking for organizations or institutions with diversity, outreach and research programs? All of that - and much, much more - can be found in the WEPAN Knowledge Center, and the information is completely open to the public; membership is not required for viewing, a deliberate action to make this information accessible to anyone. (Email registration is required if you want to add resource or access online community content.)

WEPAN also has a large professional community for members, which features a global calendar of events, as well as a the usual selection of social networking options – discussion groups, people and skills search, blogs, in-group email, etc. as well as the ability to track specific groups of professional interest. If you’re interested in mentoring or professional development, this community seems a great place to build your resources. Be sure to visit their main website as well as the Knowledge Center, and check out the FAQ.

Note that membership in the professional community and membership in WEPAN are different animals: only email registration is required to participate in the professional community, but individual membership in the organization is $100 (reduced rates available for student, etc.). WEPAN membership appears to be specifically aimed at academics of various levels, though it’s open to “anyone interested in promoting and achieving improved representation of women in engineering.” WEPAN also has an online store that boasts its own conference proceedings and presentation guides.

The WEPAN Annual Conference, aimed at addressing “recurring and emerging issues”, will be heald in June 2011 in Seattle, Washington. (This year’s conference included tracks on Diversity, Policy, How to Get Funding, Cultivating Tomorrow’s Talent and Effective Messaging.)

Look for announcements of future IEEE and IEEE WIE webinars on their website, or here on dotFiveOne.

Leah Busque is the founder and CEO of TaskRabbit.com (formerly RunMyErrand.com). The idea is simple and timeless - pay someone else a nominal fee to do whatever task you need done - but instead of hiring an assistant or nagging your friends, all you have to do is post your requested task on the website and potential “runners” will bid on the sweet privilege of being your lackey.

This kind of service - one-to-one outsourcing - has been covered substantially in recent years thanks to folks like Tim Ferriss (”The 4-Hour Work Week”), but TaskRabbit is the only one (that I know of) with a geeky woman at the helm. TaskRabbit is easy to use (no, I’m not getting kickbacks to say that) and I was pretty impressed with their customer service as well. For many of us, the work that runners can do is limited to the web since they’re only operational in a couple of cities, but the model is a good one. Here’s the geek factor: all of this magic - task assignment, acceptance and payment - happens through the website.

Check out this very cool video interview of Leah about TaskRabbit and its San Francisco expansion.

For more information about Leah Busque, check out the TaskRabbit press page, Leah’s Vimeo Page, her LinkedIn business blog, as well as a Beantown Chowda Chat and an interview in the Boston Globe. You can also follow her on Twitter or check out her LinkedIn profile.

[And if you haven’t checked out Tim Ferriss’ book which covers outsourcing in mind-blowing detail, visit the Amazon link below.]

Fast forward to present day:

The Nerd Girls are now casting for the NEW TV SERIES produced by MPH Entertainment, best known for their Emmy-nominated hit show “Dog Whisperer with Cesar Milan.”  Dr. Karen Panetta, founder of Nerd Girls, has been encouraging young women to change their world through science, technology, engineering and math, all while embracing their feminine power, and she wants you to join her team!

The main goals of the Nerd Girls are to offer positive role models to girls considering the engineering field and to provide geeky university students with the opportunity to work on very cool projects. If those ideas appeal to you, answer the casting call!

One lucky winner was drawn at random to receive a shiny new Ruby Pocket Reference from O’Reilly Media, and as a special treat, an issue of the super-geeky Make magazine.

Congratulations to Alesia Zorn! Alesia is a classic geek: she’s a calligrapher and letter artist! Visit her website to see fine examples of her beautiful work.

As always, thanks for reading dotFiveOne!

Molly Dilworth’s latest artistic expression has her painting rooftops - ones that can be seen by satellites orbiting the Big Blue Marble. While those of us gravity-bound to the ground will only be able to see her work through her Flickr photostream and the occasional perfect-vantage-point, perhaps we should nag - er, politely suggest to the folks at Google Earth that they take a few digital images so we can view them through the application in the near future.

I could wax poetic about Dilworth all day long - my house is practically an art gallery of her work - but photos and various posts and articles on the web will do it better. This article includes fabulous shots of her works-in-progress, as does this one (though some of the page’s other posts are rated R).

Read Italian? How about French? Live in NY and want to get in touch with her to commission a rooftop painting of your own? Check out her web site for contact info.

Intel’s CTO, Justin Rattner, announced this week that Perlman will be joining the Intel team. Dr. Perlman, an MIT grad, was with Sun Microsystems (which appears to have been swallowed whole by Oracle) where she was a Senior Distinguished Engineer.

Perlman holds more than 100 patents in encryption, decryption and routing, is a published author, and has repeatedly been named one of the 20 most influential people in her industry. Perlman’s focus has been network and security protocol, and she talked about her work in this 2006 interview from Network World.

A few years ago, Perlman received one of the first Anita Borg Institute Women of Vision awards, specifically for Innovation.

People - techies and geeks included - like to throw around the word “genius” a lot and generally use it to describe someone of exceptional intelligence or unmatched technical skill. Consider this more precise definition:

“More than just originality, creativity, or intelligence, genius is associated with achievement of insight which has transformational power.”

Perlman’s work is the backbone of the Internet, the skeleton upon which all the other matter depends, and that construct has transformed all our lives. For that reason alone, Radia Perlman is a true genius.

USB is enviable in its ubiquity. (Perhaps someday, we’ll see that kind of universality in some remaining troublesome software - say, video file and electronic book formats - as well.) The authors begin by briefly recapping the history of USB and the evolution from Hi-Speed to SuperSpeed (3 Gbits/s). What follows is an admirably simple discussion of USB architecture and power management, followed by a comparison with other interfaces and a tabular view of differences between USB 2.0 and 3.0.

Wondering how long it will be before USB 3.0 is on the market? Not long at all - at least one device with USB 3.0 is already slated to be revealed at CeBIT 2010 in Hannover this week.

Both Gandhi and Govindaraman are employed by Cypress Semiconductor, whose “offerings include the…PSoC programmable system-on-chip families…CapSense touch sensing and TrueTouch solutions for touchscreens.” Gandhi is a senior applications engineer, and Govindaraman is a product marketing manager currently hacking on an MBA at the Wharton School of Business.

Her time in space includes a stint on STS-90 Neurolab back in 1998, where she logged over 381 hours in space (Doesn’t that sound more impressive than the number of actual days?)

“During the 16-day Spacelab flight, the seven-member crew aboard Space Shuttle Columbia served as both experiment subjects and operators for 26 life science experiments focusing on the effects of microgravity on the brain and nervous system.  The STS-90 flight orbited the Earth 256 times, and covered 6.3 million miles.”

The liftoff footage for Endeavour’s launch is amazing, though the on-shuttle camera cuts out a little.

Be sure to check out Kevin Lee’s impressive article about Hire, her family beginnings and later career,  then listen to an interesting piece from Go Navy Radio that includes Hire and Wendy Lawrence, another Naval Academy grad to become an astronaut.

Lastly, visit NASA’s Space Shuttle site for more details on the mission. Once the mission completes, mission details will be stored under STS-130.

(Need some music to accompany all this reading material? Check out SOMA.fm’s streaming Mission Control channel, which mixes ambient music with real chatter from NASA’s STS-130 mission!)

While the focus of “Under The Microscope” is similar to .51, it provides information specifically on women in science and STEM-related fields.

(And yes, I really should make these posts longer, don’t you think?)