Response to 'Women Medical Physicists'

The Denial

LinkedIn Groups

Group: Women Medical Physicists Subject: Your request to join Women Medical Physicists Thank you for your interest in the Women Medical Physicists LinkedIn Group. At this time our policy is that only women medical physics students and practicing clinical or research medical physicists who are women will be granted membership. The intent behind this policy is to establish a "community" of women medical physicists who can work toward improving the professional lives of women working in this field.  We appreciate your understanding and if we have incorrectly assessed that you do not fall within the group cited above, please do not hesitate to contact us. Best regards, Nicole Ranger Azam Niroomand-Rand azam@georgetown.edu Moderators Women Medical Physicists Group @ LinkedIn.com

My Response

Dr. Niroomand-Rad,

"if we have incorrectly assessed that you do not fall within the group cited above..."

Since I'm a medical physics student, I think you mean to say, "if I'm not a woman."

Discriminating by gender does your group a great disservice.  Not only insofar as your group's response to sexism is sexism itself, but because having a good ally does not necessarily mean having an ally of the same gender.  Seems to me that your purported goal to create a community "who can work toward improving the professional lives of women working in [medical physics]" will only be hampered by your unwillingness to include all of your allies.  Particularly a group so prevalent in medical physics today: men.

Please take this into humble consideration with regards to your policy,

Mark

32bit VMC++ on 64bit Architecture

In trying to migrate to a 64-bit architecture, I found that the 64-bit version of my (closed source) executable was corrupt.  But, since I still had a 32-bit version, it was no problem to setup the necessary 32-bit libraries and use the 32-bit version of my executable.  I am using Ubuntu 10.04 to illustrate this procedure.

First we must install the libraries needed by our executable.  If you run this on the command line:

ldd executable_filename
linux-gate.so.1 => not found
libvmcpp.so (0xf7677000)
libm.so.6 => not found
libgcc_s.so.1 =>not found
libc.so.6 => not found
libdl.so.2 => not found
libpthread.so.0 => not found
/lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0xf7712000)
libstdc++.so.5 => not found

you see all of the dynamic libraries on which this binary depends.  In my example, most of the needed libraries can't be found.  Install the ia32-libs package:

sudo apt-get install ia32-libs

This will satisfy most dependencies, but there is just one left for vmc++: libstdc++.so.5.  In previous Ubuntu versions, this library was packaged with ia32-libs package.  This problem already has an associated bug, but it sounds like we won't see a fix.  So, here is the way to get the 32-bit version of that last package (derived from this thread):

1. Go to the Ubuntu package database
2. Download the i386 version of the .deb (which is an archive containing the library we need)
3. Extract the contents of the .deb file with this command:
   ar vx libstdc++5_3.3.6-15ubuntu4_i386.deb
4. Copy the libstdc++.so.5.0.7 file to /usr/lib32/
   sudo cp libstdc++.so.5.0.7 /usr/lib32/.
5. Create a symbolic link with the standard name
   sudo ln -s /usr/lib32/libstdc++.so.5.0.7 /usr/lib32/libstdc++.so.5

Try to run your executable again: it should automatically detect the presence of the new libraries.  Yay!