ALD News: Delia Derbyshire Day celebrates Doctor Who, FOTSN returns, ALD Patreon to close

Plus a look at our weekly emails, a few questions about how you use Substack, and our monthly round-up of links.

Hi there,

We’ve been incredibly busy here at ALD HQ, working closely with the Ri and Stylist on getting our ducks in a row for 10 October. We have already booked five fabulous speakers for Ada Lovelace Day Live and will be announcing them in a couple of weeks’ time, so keep your eye out for that email! 

Delia Derbyshire Day celebrates 60 years of Doctor Who

Delia Derbyshire Day is marking the 60th anniversary of Doctor Who, which aired on British TVs for the first time in 1963, with a program of activities over the summer, culminating with a worldwide online celebration on 23 November. 

As well as teaching primary schools pupils about electronic music, the team will be establishing a Delia Derbyshire Day archive, producing a short documentary with schoolchildren about how Delia produced the theme in 1963, and facilitating a new trans-generational oral history project led by school children who will interview past BBC employees.

Delia Derbyshire (1937-2001) was a pioneer of electronic music in the UK with her most famous work being her iconic rendering of Ron Grainer’s original Doctor Who theme tune for the BBC in 1963. Delia Derbyshire Day was founded in 2012 by Caro C, Ailis Ní Ríain and Naomi Kashiwagi. 

Festival of the Spoken Nerd announces their biggest ever West End show

Long-time supporters of Ada Lovelace Day will know Helen Arney from her sterling work hosting our live events over the years, and possibly also from the Festival of the Spoken Nerd where she’s joined on stage by mathematician Matt Parker and experiments maestro Steve Mould.

FOTSN has just announced that they’ll be taking over the Cambridge Theatre in London for An Evening Of Unnecessary Detail on Monday 20th November. Helen says:

From 7pm we'll be filling their gigantic stage with more detail than ever before, new songs from me, and some very special guests to be announced. 

A third of the tickets have already been snapped up by our Spoken Nerd newsletter subscribers (join it over here for first dibs next time) but sign up to the venue presale list right now and you can get early access to the best remaining seats from Wednesday 10am.

For those of you who can’t wait until November, the trio will also be performing at the Big Festival in Oxfordshire on 26 August.

A final thank you to our Patreon supporters

I’d like to effusively thank everyone who has supported us through Patreon over the years. Your generosity has been very much appreciated. Indeed, the total donated each year was roughly equal to the amount we paid in honoraria for our in-person speakers, so thank you for helping us to demonstrate our commitment to paying women for their time and expertise. 

As part of my drive to simplify Ada Lovelace Day’s online footprint, I have now stopped payments on Patreon and will close it permanently next month. If you would like to financially support Ada Lovelace Day, then the best way to do that now is via taking out a subscription here for a monthly sum of £8-ish, £6, £4 or £2 per month.

Are you missing out on our weekly emails? 

Over the last month, we’ve published several posts you might like: 

• Dr Katalin Karikó is a biochemist whose work on RNA-mediated immune activation was essential for the development of the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine.

• Prof Maria Pavlova was a palaeontologist who discovered several hoofed mammals from the Tertiary period and changed our understanding of the ancestry of horses in Eurasia.

• Sway by Prof Pragya Agarwal unravels the way our implicit or 'unintentional' biases affect the way we communicate and perceive the world.

• Prof Rita Levi Montalcini was a neurobiologist who discovered nerve growth factor in collaboration with her colleague, Stanley Cohen.

If you’d like to get more articles like these delivered straight to your inbox every week, just log in to Substack, visit your settings page and ensure that you have all the email notifications turned on. 

How do you use Substack? 

One of the reasons I decided to move the ALD newsletter to Substack was that it has some useful community tools like Notes, which is a bit like Twitter but nicer, and Chat. I’d like to know how you personally use Substack, so that I can think about how best to use these tools. Just click on or tap the answer that best represents you (you can only pick one answer in each poll). 

Finally, if you write your own newsletter on Substack, please leave a comment and let us know what you write about! 

Around the web

Here is our round up of links and reading that we’ve found this month!

• Ada Lovelace featured: Computer Science For Fun (cs4fn) has an issue on diversity in computing this month. They also have a series of posters with women in computing and diversity in computing (including our very own Ada Lovelace). Ada Lovelace is also the name of another award! UNSW created the Ada Lovelace Medal for Outstanding Engineer to recognise inspiring women role models as part of its Women in Engineering Awards ceremony, and it was won by Dr Marlene Kanga AO. The Portrait Gallery has recently reopened and Ada is one of the women included in Work In Progress, a mural by pop artist Jann Haworth and collage artist Liberty Blake

• Overlooked women: Kielder Observatory has renamed a tower after Caroline Herschel, with LJ Ross, a Northumberland author, leading the ceremony. Smithsonian Magazine tells the story of Dr Anna Bixby, a midwife who discovered the culprit of “milk sickness” in the 1800s.

• Women of colour: Anne-Marie Imafidon features on BBC’s The Life Scientific talking about her work in diversity and equality. Suzanna Hunes, a scientist at KAUST university in Saudi Arabia, has been awarded the L’Oreal-UNESCO International Award for Women in Science, for her research into membrane technology to reduce carbon emissions. Dr Kamala Sohonie was the first woman in India to receive a PhD in science, and was recently honoured with a Google Doodle.

• News: For International Women in Engineering Day, Nature has profiled women engineers: Imogen Howarth, who restores Porsche 911s, and Esraa Tarawneh, who is researching the effects of climate change in Jordan. In India, The New Indian Express speaks to women leaders about how to help more women in STEM.

• Videos and podcasts:The latest episode of the Lost Women of Science Shorts from Scientific American explores the work of Cecilia Payne, and her discovery that changed astronomy.

That’s it for this month!

All the best,

Suw & the ALD team.