Samira Ibrahim (from The Independent- click on the picture for the full story)

She plans to have her mostly female, and unarmed, force focus only on prevention with community education programs.

“Mike started asking me why I worked so hard in ROTC, why I cared about grades. When I said I wanted a good job, he asked me why I wanted a good job,” she recalls.

“He asked questions for 10 minutes, and then he said, ‘Shaina, I’m trying to get you to say because it makes you happy. That’s the big picture.’”

Cales, a standout athlete at Ripley High School who earned All-Conference status in five sports in a single academic year, says she fell in love with ROTC from the start.

Full story here.

from http://www.isaf.nato.int/images/stories/Womengraduation.jpg

These women are part of the first class of women to attend an Officer Candidate School for the Afghan National Army (ANA).  The School is run by Afghanistan’s Command and Staff College, with Afghan instructors and mentors made up of female officers from the international military coalition in Afghanistan.  Unlike in the United States, the women’s program is separate from the men’s program.  Similar to the United States- although even more restrictive- the career field choices for women are limited by cultural restraints.

The first class of 29 women graduated September 23rd, and most of them will serve as finance and logistics officers. Pictures of the ceremony can be found here and here.  [Please note the bangin' hairdo of Her Awesomeness, Brig. Gen. Anne Macdonald, in the Flickr album.]

Ladies of Camp Leatherneck (from Crossfit Endurance)

She first served as a Lieutenant in a computer science project, but asked to be transferred to the regular Navy at the close of the war (she was refused).  In addition to a successful academic and private industry career, she continued to serve the Navy in the Reserves until 1986 (when she was 80).

from Wikipedia

A list of her professional accomplishments:

• She is a recipient of the Defense Distinguished Service Medal, the Department of Defense’s highest noncombat award
• While working for Remington Rand Corporation she was the director of teams that created the first compiler-based computer programming languages.
• She was a subject matter expert to the team (filled with her former employees ands students) that built on her earlier work and polished a new programming language called COBOL, which became the most widely used programming language for years.
• In 1969, When the Data Processing Management Association decided to start awarding a “Man of the Year”, they chose Dr.  Hopper as their first recipient.
• In the 70s, she began her work on computer programming language standardization.  Most of her work on this was done in the Navy, but it lead to standardization of programming language standards across the industry- a major development in the history of computing, software development, and the advent of computers for personal and everyday business use.

Famous attributions:

• She is often attributed as the inventor of the term “debugging”. At the very least, she popularized the term after her team at Harvard found a moth in their computer in 1947.
• It is widely believed that she originated the saying, “It is often easier to ask forgiveness than permission.”
• From Wikipedia, on her famous “nanoseconds” visual aid: “People (such as generals and admirals) used to ask her why satellite communication took so long. She started handing out pieces of wire which were just under one foot long, which is the distance that light travels in one nanosecond…contrasting them with a coil of wire nearly a thousand feet long, representing a microsecond. Later, while giving these lectures while working for DEC, she passed out packets of pepper which she called picoseconds.”

Adm. Hopper was famous for her insistence that computers should be small, an idea that (along with her code standardization) lead to the personal computer. Her ideas have even credited as the genesis of the “Information Age” in general. There are various groups of women in the computer science field that belong to groups named in her honor, or study in buildings or programs named after her.  A conference is held in her honor every year.  You can find out more about it here: http://ghcbloggers.blogspot.com/ and here: http://gracehopper.org/2010/.

Grace Hopper’s gravesite can be found at the Arlington National Cemetery.

From her obituary, in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

At Bethune-Cookman University,  she created a multimedia textbook, African Legacy. As an associate professor at Fort Valley State University, she helped improve student pass rates on the state Regents’ Examination and teacher certification examinations. And she developed literacy programs to train teachers.

She was a pioneer in culture-based teaching before it had the popularity that it has now,” said a sister, Dr. Clarissa Myrick-Harris of Atlanta. “She taught students of various backgrounds and used one’s culture as a gateway to help students in reading and writing. She loved her African heritage and took every opportunity to infuse her life with aspects of a world culture.”

She was a product of City of Atlanta public schools and GA State University.