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Last week, we had a “Bring Your Child To Work” day, when parents are allowed to bring their kids to work so that the kids can get an idea of what their parents do during the day. We had a wide range of kids – from age 2 to age 14, and boy, was it fun!?

I couldn’t help noticing in all the revelry, that a disproportionate number of the children were girls. Even more peculiar, it seemed that it software fathers had a higher chance of having girl children than software mothers. Non-software folks had either male children or had an equal number.

This couldn’t be statistically true, I thought. But after a quick recap of my friends’ families, I think I’m ready to say that it is indeed statistically possible that male employees of software companies tend to have more girls than their female counterparts, and their male counterparts in other occupations. This needs more evidence, of course, and there needs to be a scientific reason for why it is so, but I think there is enough merit in trying to investigate the case.

And it was last week that I took part in my first protest march. We were protesting against the illegal felling of trees at CNR Rao circle, near IISc, which was ostensibly being done to build an underpass there. Now, I’m not a tree-hugger, and probably will never be, but this was something illegal being done. So, a few friends from MSRI and I went together, shouted slogans against the BBMP, had our photos taken, and came back. I have more to write on why such protests aren’t successful, but I’ll save that for another post.

BTW, here are a couple of photos of me at the protest:

http://www.deccanherald.com/content/5075/iisc-staff-students-protest-tree.html (I'm the one leaning on the tree)
http://www.expressbuzz.com/edition/story.aspx?Title=These+cuts+run+deep&artid=9tgoy95Efds=&SectionID=Qz/kHVp9tEs=&MainSectionID=wIcBMLGbUJI=&SectionName=UOaHCPTTmuP3XGzZRCAUTQ==&SEO=

Anyhoo, another thing that happened last week was that a submission a few of us from MSRI made to FSE 2009 was accepted and it’ll be part of the proceedings. The conference itself is in Amsterdam in August. I’ll see if I can post the paper somewhere.