One of my biggest passions lately is photography, especially nature, wildlife and surf photography. I live in a Storke Ranch condo in Goleta. It is biking and walking distance to the beach, Coal Oil Point Reserve, Ellwood and UCSB where I enjoy taking pictures, walking, birding, surfing and visiting with friends.

I work at UCSB's National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis with Informatics Research as a Metadata Coordinator. This job complements my interest in information science. John, my husband has a wonderful organic market garden that I helped with for 10 years while my boys were young.

Writings

January's Welcomed Guest (2008)

Devereux Slough Story (12/31/05)

Springs Revelations (Spring 2005 Story)

Video Links - Interesting Women with a voice

Acounstic Performance, Sheryl Crow on Amzon.com

Joni Mitchell "Shine" EPK

Senator Boxer's floor speech regarding the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA): 12.17.2007 (video)

Lois Capps Iraq Troop Surge Debate : Lois Capps - antiSurge (February 2007)

Quotes - mainly regarding information science

“Joy is an asset.. It may will turn out that one of the most important effects of open source’s success will be to teach us that play is the most economically efficient mode of creative work.” (Erick Raymond quoted in Dreaming in Code)

“Perhaps the idealism most programmers share is a direct consequence of the toil and frustration of programming. If you are going to have to wrestle with daunting abstractions or squash armies of bugs, big ambitions can help pull you through the slog.” (Dreaming in Code, Scott Rosenberg)

"While the eighties of the last century were a time of local automation for libraries and the nineties the decade in which libraries embraced the Internet and the Web, now is the age in which the big search engines and institutional repositories are gaining a firm footing. This heralds a new era in both the evolution of scholarly communication and its agencies themselves, i.e. the libraries." (From libraries to 'libratories' by Leo Waaijers, 2005)

"One reason for the belated adoption of informatics approaches in ecology is the breadth of ecologically pertinent data (from genes to the biosphere) and its highly heterogeneous nature. The variety of formats, logical structures, and sampling methods in ecology create significant challenges. Cultural barriers further impede progress, especially for the creation of data standards. Here we describe informatics frameworks for ecology, from subject-specific data warehouses, to generic data collections that use detailed metadata descriptions and formal ontologies to catalog and cross-reference information." (Jones, M. B., M. P. Schildhauer, O. J. Reichman, and Shawn Bowers. 2006. The new bioinformatics: integrating ecological data from the gene to the biosphere. Ann. Rev. Ecol. Evol. and Systematics. 37:519-544. )

"Two organizational schemes are used to describe whaling: operations and eras. ...Our main goal in this chapter has been to establish the conceptual utility of a taxonomy that can serve as a heuristic tool for studying the history of whaling on any scale of time or space and for analyzing the effects of whaling, whether at a species, population, or ecosystem level." (Whales, Whaling, and Ocean Ecosystems Edited by James A. Estes et al. (2007) - Chapter 8 A Taxonomy of World Whaling Operations and Eras by Randall R. Reeves and Tim D. Smith)

"Information gently but relentlessly drizzles down on us in an invisible, impalpable electric rain."
(Information The New Language of Science, Hans Christian vonBaeyer, 2004)

"Having grown separately for millennia, the Americas were a boundless sea of novel ideas, dreams, stories, philosophies, religions, moralities, discoveries, and all the other products of the mind. Few things are more sublime or characteristically human than the cross-fertilization of cultures. The simple discovery by Europe of the existence of the Americas caused an intellectual ferment. How much grander would have been the tumult if Indian societies had survived in full splendor!"(Charles C. Mann, 1491 New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus, 2005, Published by Alfred A. Knopf, p. 123)

"Unlike the Norse the Inuit represented the climax of thousands of years of cultural developments by the Arctic peoples learning to master Arctic conditions. ...They burned whale and seal blubber both for fuel and lighting lamps...They stretched sealskins over frameworks to build kayaks." (Jared Diamond, Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed, 2005, Penguin Books Ltd., p. 258)