Maia Weinstock

Maia Weinstock is an American science writer and Lego enthusiast who resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She graduated from Brown University in 1999,[1] and is Deputy Editor of MIT News.[2][3]

Weinstock in 2010

Biography

Before working at MIT, she worked at BrainPOP,[4] and was an editor for SPACE.com and other science publications.[5]

In 2014, Weinstock was cited by Judith Newman of The New York Times as "a Wikipedian who has been instrumental in raising awareness" of the gender imbalance on that online encyclopedia; her article on how notability is determined on Wikipedia immediately provoked other Wikipedia editors to create a page about Newman.[4][6]

In addition to her editing work, Weinstock has been an editor of Wikipedia for a number of years, and has been involved in efforts to reduce the gender gap among editors and articles that occur on the site. This work includes working at edit-a-thons on Ada Lovelace Day, as well.[7]

A fan of Lego mini-figures, she first started building them for living scientists, the first being her friend Carolyn Porco.[7] Eventually, this included a submission to the Lego Ideas contest called the "Legal Justice League", which was designed to look like a courtroom built out of Lego bricks, and contained miniature versions of Sandra Day O'Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan.[8] The submission was declined by LEGO as being too political, which led to an increase in publicity for the project, and eventually led to a submission with generic justices. A Boston Globe reporter described Weinstock's apartment as having "[s]tacks of heads and hairstyles, torsos and legs and arms, a pint-sized Frankenstein's workshop stored in little plastic bins".[9]

In March 2017, Lego announced that it would be making a "Women of NASA" set, based on a design Weinstock had submitted.[10]

gollark: I quite like the FP style, but Lua makes it annoying, so I'm looking at making a FP/general convenience lib for potatOS.
gollark: The main large thing I work on is potatOS, which someone wanted me to rewrite in amulet, but that would be impractical as it's quite large and not really programmed in a very functional style.
gollark: My stuff is mostly designed as "insanely weakly typed with minimal sanity checks", while most of the CC standard libraries/programs go for "have some type checking on function arguments".
gollark: Oh, right. I assumed you meant it would make `type` return that, but I don't think CC has that implemented.
gollark: No, I mean I don't think it does anything.

See also

References
  1. "Goodbye, Columbus". Brown University Alumni Magazine. August 2009. Retrieved 30 April 2015.
  2. "Who We Are". MIT News. Retrieved 30 April 2015.
  3. "Women in science target Wikipedia". Portland Press Herald. 16 October 2013. Retrieved 26 April 2015.
  4. Newman, Judith (8 January 2015). "Wikipedia, What Does Judith Newman Have to Do to Get a Page?". The New York Times. Retrieved 30 April 2015.
  5. "Index". 2015. Retrieved 26 April 2015.
  6. Newman, Judith (January 16, 2014). "Wiki-Validation: A Wikipedia Page for Judith Newman Is Approved". The New York Times. Retrieved April 30, 2015.
  7. Ziv, Stav (18 March 2015). "Legal Justice League Lego Maker on Writing Women Into History". Newsweek. Retrieved 4 April 2015.
  8. Palmer, Anthony (13 March 2015). "Lego Says You Can't Build That — Because Of Politics". NPR. Retrieved 4 April 2015.
  9. Weiss, Joanna (4 April 2015). "Dreaming of Lego equality". Boston Globe. Retrieved 4 April 2015.
  10. Kennedy, Merrit (1 March 2017). "Women Of NASA To Be Immortalized — In Lego Form". NPR.
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