Rebecca Zook is an online female math tutor who has been helping students get math into their brains for seven years. She blogs about learning at Triangle Suitcase.

Over half a million votes were cast to decide Barbie’s newest career. But even though Computer Engineer Barbie was developed in consultation with the Society of Women Engineer sand the National Academy of Engineering, the new doll’s appearance has sparked controversy.

While some have embraced coder Barbie, others have attacked the concept, saying that her pink laptop, sparkly leggings, and trendy glasses are “too feminine” to be realistic.

The critics imply that real coders aren’t feminine, and feminine coders aren’t real. But women shouldn’t feel like they have to stop being feminine to work in technology.

The First Computer Programmer Was a Fashionista

That’s right. The first coder was a lady. Ada Lovelace, over a century ahead of her time, is widely considered to be the first computer programmer. She was the first person to conceptualize and articulate what computers were capable of doing, and the first to foresee that computers could create artificial intelligence, generate graphics, and create music.

So, is Barbie’s outfit really that unrealistic? If the very first person to conceptualize a computer did so while wearing a girly up-do and a frilly gown, why can’t someone write great code while wearing pink platform crocs and a t-shirt that spells “BARBIE” in binary?

Women and Tech Today

This false dichotomy — that you have to choose between being feminine and “looking the part” of a mathematician or scientist — might be part of what turns girls off from math and science in the first place.

Or maybe girls don’t aim for careers in math and science because they don’t see role models. Even Ada Lovelace had role models. Her mom, the “Princess of Parallelograms,” loved math and gave Lovelace a very intensive math education. And Lovelace was also mentored by legendary female science writer and polymath Mary Somerville.

Or maybe girls are afraid of being the only woman in their technology courses or workplaces. If that’s the case, their concerns are certainly warranted. Not only are fewer women entering the information technology field, but more women are leaving the field mid-career.

A recent Harvard Business Review report, The Athena Factor, notes that “52% of highly qualified females working for SET [science, engineering, and technology] companies quit their jobs, driven out by hostile work environments and extreme job pressures.” These women report that they lack mentors and feel intense isolation in the workplace.

Coder Barbie and the Future

In 2010, maybe Computer Engineer Barbie would feel uncomfortable writing code on a pink laptop that matched her glasses in a workplace where she was outnumbered by men 25-to-1. But perhaps we should aspire to create a world where Computer Engineer Barbie and her gloriously pink accessories could realistically exist. Allowing a vision of an ultra-feminine computer engineer might, even subconsciously, open girls — and the rest of society — up to the possibility.

As a female math tutor, I used to feel the need to “tone down” my feminine style. I’d wear black slacks when working with my students for fear of appearing “unprofessional.” But then I decided to show my true fashion colors and wear my homemade dresses and sparkly barrettes when tutoring.

Since then, some kids have been openly relieved when they met me and found I didn’t look like their stereotype of a math tutor. The “math geek” stereotype in their brains was more intimidating and less fun than the real-life tutor wearing fuzzy pink boots.

You don’t have to choose between looking feminine and being good at math, science, and engineering. We need all kinds of people, all kinds of minds, and all kinds of geeks to solve our technology problems.

Facebook’s move into location has seemed inevitable for some time, and it now appears that the company will officially reveal its plans at next month’s Facebook developer conference.

According to The New York Times, the social network will incorporate location in two ways: (1) its own features for sharing location and (2) APIs to let other apps — like Foursquare and Gowalla –- offer location services to Facebook users.

Presumably, Facebook will make sure to address privacy issues with its location features — for example, perhaps with settings that allow you to share your location only with a select group of friends. The Times’ report doesn’t detail the specifics of such features, though it notes that the social network updated its privacy policy late last year in preparation for a location launch.

Facebook will be rolling out its location features to an enormous user base — there are now more than 400 million users of the social network in total, 100 million of which access the site via mobile regularly. The company also has its own native apps for all of the major mobile platforms. All of this gives Facebook’s location features an enormous edge over the competition.

The Times’ report suggests that the competition isn’t the likes of Foursquare and Gowalla, however, but rather Google and its huge base of local small business advertisers. Of course, the startups aren’t ignoring this opportunity either — earlier today, Foursquare shared details of upcoming features it plans to release tohelp local businesses utilize checkin data.

With Facebook entering the space, though, the other players will need to look to create value in ways beyond checkins and knowing where your friends are located at any given point in time. That’s why Foursquare seems to be so focused on partnerships and gaming, while Gowalla is making moves (as recently as last night) in virtual goods.

In any event, location remains the huge trend so far in 2010, and literally each day seems to bring new indications of which way it will all play out.

Today at the Google’s Campfire One event at the company’s headquarters in Mountain View the Internet search giant is launching its new app store for business, known as the Google Apps Marketplace.

Last week A news was broken out that Google Apps Marketplace would launch today, reporting that it would be an app store integrated within Google Apps that would allow third-party developers to sell software directly to Google’s business consumers.

Now, with developers gathered at the Googleplex, we’re about to learn how Google Apps Marketplace works and, more importantly, which apps are going to be available at launch.

Some of the notes are given below:

Google Apps Marketplace: The Details

- Note: you can watch the live stream of Google Campfire One on the Google Developers YouTube Channel.

- Vic Gundotra, Google’s Vice President of Engineering, has just started speaking

- Vic is talking about feedback it’s received from its business customers. Google believes that business apps should be run in the cloud. One problem: to use multiple business apps, you need to log into multiple websites, which can be messy and a security threat.

- Google Apps Marketplace announced.

- Details: $100 flat fee, no matter the amount of apps you launch. 20% revenue share. This is an important number, as most app stores charge 30% revenue share, especially Apple’s iPhone app store.

- Over 50 partners for Google Apps, including Aviary, Expensify, Intuit, and others.

- Now Google is talking about the technical details of how to get your app added into the Google Apps interface.

- Google’s diving into secure data access via OAuth. Google’s clearly thought about how to make sure that information that apps need is received from users, but that apps don’t take more information than they need.

- Google has brought up a developer, Ryan, to demo some of the code to integrate his app with Google Apps Marketplace. It’s a “Hello World” type of app.

- If you go to http://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/, you’ll see the store’s future splash page.

- Intuit is demoing. They’re the people behind Quickbooks and showing off their Intuit Online Payroll app within Google Apps.

- They’re showing of integrations of Intuit’s payroll system within Google Calendar. Logging in via Google Apps seems intuitive.

- New demo: Scott from Atlassin is demoing Jira Studio. The dashboard they’ve built with Google Apps integration is very impressive. Screenshots coming.

- “Fingertip access” to Google Talk. It has Google Docs integration, and is available today. It’s a very killer apps for development management and issue tracking.

- Another demo: Manymoon.

- The key themes seem to be A) how easy it is to code integration with Google Apps, and B) How many nifty things you can do linked to Google Apps. Google Calendar will definitely benefit from these apps.

- Everything will be available tonight for purchase

- Last demo of the night: Ryan from Appirio, a cloud solution provider. It’s a tool for managing your team’s cloud applications, such as Salesforce. It’s meant to transition enterprise into the cloud more effectively.

- One interesting demo: you can trigger actions within your email with Appirio. You can, for example, get information on customers right from within your email (it’s embedded!). The embeds are called Gmailcontextual gadgets, and they are really nifty.

- Example: Customers emails you saying that a project is behind schedule. With Appirio, you can access from Gmail the projects that are open with the customer vis PS Connect. It’ll show budget, the status of the project, end dates, and notes.

- Google’s David Glazer (Engineering Director) is closing the campfire session.

- The President of Google’s Enterprise division is on stage. Security, compatibility, simplicity, and more are possible through cloud apps, which is why Google has bet so heavily on it for enterprise.

- 25 million active users of Google Apps. And apparently once companies of 20,000+ employees switch to Google Apps, they don’t switch back.

A couple of days ago Foursquare’s iPhone application disappeared from the iPhone App Store due to “hiccup”. If you doubted that was true, worry no more, as the application is back in the store.

Here’s the official explanation of what happened: “Last week, Foursquare accidentally released to the App Store a new version of its app before it was totally ready. It was pulled shortly after, unfortunately, many users had already went through the update, and were left stuck with a non-functioning app.”

The version currently available is 1.6.1, but the folks at Foursquare say that the redesigned 1.7 update should appear in a few days.

John Gruber of Daring Fireball has an interesting story about the absence of certain iPhone apps – Stocks, Calculator, Clock, Weather, Voice Memos – on the iPad.

It seems that these apps, when scaled up to iPad’s bigger screen, simply didn’t look good enough to Steve Jobs, so he decided to scrap them. Writes Gruber:

“Ends up that just blowing up iPhone apps to fill the iPad screen looks and feels weird, even if you use higher-resolution graphics so that nothing looks pixelated. So they were scrapped by you-know-who. Perhaps they’ll appear on the iPad in some re-imagined form this summer with OS 4.0, but when the iPad ships next month, there won’t be versions of these apps.”

If true, it would be a pity, because these are quite basic, no brainer apps that everyone uses, especially Clock, Calculator, and the Weather. On the other hand, if these simple apps don’t look good enough scaled up, how will all those thousands of third party apps look? As far as apps go, the iPad experience (at least in the beginning) might turn out to be something that Apple otherwise struggles to avoid: good enough, but far from perfect.

Foursquare is battling for your SXSW check-ins with a musical scavenger hunt. Rival Gowalla is going to go after them with free gadgets – specifically free Palm Pre Plus and Palm Pixi Plus devices as part of a promotion the location-based social networking service is unveiling in conjunction with their just-launched app for webOS.

The app should hit the Palm App Catalog on Tuesday, and like the company’s applications for other platforms (including its recently launched Android app) it detects your location to show you nearby venues, lets you know where your friends are located, and has a gaming element called “stamps” that can be accrued as you check-in to various places.

The SXSW connection is part of a push by Gowalla into virtual goods. Users will be able to discover virtual Palm Pre and Pixi devices as they use the application (essentially, the more you use it, the better your chances – it’s random), and then be able to redeem those at specific parties at the festival to get the actual device. Another partner – Lomography – has inserted virtual cameras into Gowalla, that once found can also be redeemed for free gear.

This is one way Gowalla hopes to differentiate itself from the competition, and, truth be told, it’s not a bad one. No one wants to leave an event like SXSW empty handed, and by teaming up with brands to offer free gadgets to users at an event that will be loaded with tech enthusiasts could encourage some splitting (or at least doubling up) of the check-ins across services.

Now that Gowalla’s starting to catch up in terms of platform support, much of the battle might come down to marketing – where Foursquare has also recently invested heavily by forming partnerships with a host of media companies.

In any event, here’s a look at some of the features of the webOS app:

Which service will you be using to check-in at SXSW? Let us know in the comments!

Google is testing a new television programming search service in conjunction with Dish Network, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The service, which appears to be very much in a limited testing phase, runs on a special set-top box and apparently searches content from both the Dish programming guide, as well as web video services like YouTube.

Without any details about the specific implementation, it’s unclear how similar this venture is to the new upcoming TiVo Premiere service that was announced last week.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of The Wall Street Journal’s report dealt less with the service itself and more with the technology that powers the set-top box. Apparently, portions of Google’s Android OS power the Google-enabled device. While Android has been spotted on other devices like tablets and netbooks (or, so-called smartbooks), a move to the embedded device space could be huge.

As consumer electronics rapidly shift toward connectivity (hey, it might have taken us 15 years, but now everything is moving at a rapid pace), there are huge opportunities for embedded systems developers. As it stands, most embedded devices use either a custom-built kernel or a modified version of BusyBox, but Google could theoretically offer a framework that would be both free and value-rich for device makers, while also offering opportunities that impact Google’s core business.

Of course, this isn’t Google’s first foray into television. Back in 2008, Google AdWords launched Google TV Ads as a platform for companies to buy airtime in various markets. That project hasn’t been as successful as other Google ventures, but perhaps a more direct way of tying search to television would have better results.

What do you think about the possibility of having Google on your TV? Let us know!

For eager beavers who want a taste of Firefox to come, Mozilla issued a second preview release Wednesday of the browser.

The software is based on version 1.9.3 of the Gecko browser engine that underlies Firefox. The current Firefox 3.6, and an update called Lorentz, are based on 1.9.2.

The headline feature of the new preview release is the same for Lorentz, though: out-of-process plug-ins, which means that Adobe Systems Flash Player and the like run in a separate memory compartment to protect the browser overall when they crash. Mozilla hopes people will see how well it works on an OOPP testing page.

However, according to a mailing list posting by Benjamin Smedberg, who’s working on the OOPP feature, it only works on Linux and Windows systems at present. “MacOS presents some unique challenges: the traditional drawing and interaction model for plug-ins is very difficult to do across processes. We are working on Mac support for multi-process plug-ins, and hope to have a preview of this work available soon,” Smedberg said in an OOPP blog post.

The new alpha release also should cool off some hot spots that consume a lot of labor when laying out Web pages, Smedberg said, thereby improving performance.

Google plucked another start-up from the Bay Area Friday, this time adding DocVerse to its Google Apps team.

The deal–which The Wall Street Journal reported was valued at $25 million–will allow Google to start blending DocVerse’s Microsoft Office plug-in software into Google Apps,DocVerse and Google said in blog postings on their respective sites. DocVerse’s software and service is designed to let Office users who still need a lot of the power and features of the desktop version of that software share documents and track changes with colleagues online.

The move had been expected for a while, but a Google representative said it was too soon to know how quickly DocVerse’s products would get integrated into the Google Apps software. Building out the Google Apps experience is a big priority for Google this year, as it attempts to get more and more people comfortable with Internet-delivered software while antagonizing rival Microsoft.

DocVerse–founded by two Microsoft alumni–also becomes the fourth Google acquisition in recent weeks. Since the beginning of the year, Google has purchased Picnik, and Remail, Aardvark, and it completed the previously announced purchase of On2 Technologies. That’s a little ahead of the pace outlined by CEO Eric Schmidt last year to purchase one company a month.