Rails Girls is a global, non-profit volunteer community, its aim is to give tools and a community for women to understand technology and to build their ideas. Women of all ages are invited to free workshop on 14-15th December, 2012 in Ljubljana to learn sketching, prototyping, and basic programming. No previous experiences with computer programming are required. (in Slovene)

Can a computer read your body language? A consortium of European researchers thinks so, and has developed a range of innovative solutions from escalator safety to online marketing.

The European Robotics Week offers one week of various robotics related activities across Europe for the general public, highlighting growing importance of robotics in a wide variety of application areas. Over 80 organisations (businesses, universities, research centres) participate in 165 robotics-related activities for the general public, like school visits with lectures on robotics, guided tours for pupils, open labs, exhibitions, challenges and robots in action in public squares.

The House will likely vote next week on a bill that would increase the number of green cards available to people with advanced degrees in science, math and technology. The House Rules Committee is set to look at H.R. 6429, the STEM Jobs Act, which would allow the spouses and children of legal residents to come to the United States while they wait for their green cards. The bill would also allow unused STEM green cards made available in fiscal years 2013 through 2016 to be utilized in future years. In total, 55,000 visas would be made available under the measure.

The European Commission's Communication on Cloud computing identifies cutting through the jungle of standards as one of the key actions to foster mass adoption of cloud computing. The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) will coordinate with stakeholders and devise standards roadmaps in support of EU policy in areas such as security, interoperability, data portability and reversibility. ETSI therefore launches this Cloud Standards Coordination in collaboration with a series of prominent players.

The workshop will be conducted by Analysys Mason who is carrying out the Study Analysis of technology trends, future needs and demand for spectrum in line with Art.9 of the RSPP" for the European Commission.

Women’s presence in higher education has increased, but as authors of scholarly papers - keys to career success - their publishing patterns differ from those of men. Explore nearly 1,800 fields and subfields, across four centuries, to see which areas have the most female authors and which have the fewest, in this exclusive Chronicle report. See how overall percentages differ from the important first-author position and - in two major bioscience fields - from the prestigious last-author position. See "About these data" for details.

Shadow business minister Chi Onwurah said employing a minimum number of women should become a key criteria in awarding government contracts to science, engineering and tech companies, in an attempt to increase gender diversity in a traditionally male-dominated environment. The "controversial" idea is not an official Labour party policy, Ms Onwurah is quick to point out, but one the shadow business minister says she will push for as part of a new list of recommendations to boost the number of women in science and engineering.

The University of Texas at Austin's School of Information has received $1 million to increase the involvement of women in information technology. The grant from the National Science Foundation was awarded to UT professor Lecia Barker, a principal investigator of the grant and a senior research scientist for the National Center for Women & Information Technology. Barker will focus on research and practices for recruiting, retaining and raising awareness about women in technology.

The nation's workforce will face a shortfall of one million college STEM graduates over the coming decade, according to a recent report from the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Part of the problem is not enough students are studying math and science. And more than half who start their studies in physical or biological sciences or math end up switching majors before their senior year. But why? A new study being conducted by researchers from the Wisconsin Center for Education Research (WCER) and the University of Colorado Boulder will attempt to answer this question and look at what can be done to encourage more students to remain in those fields. Co-funded by grants worth $4.3 million from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the National Science Foundation, the five-year study's research team is being led by principal investigators Mark Connolly of WCER and Anne-Barrie Hunter, co-director of Ethnography & Evaluation Research at CU-Boulder.