Having chided the O’Reilly Emerging Tech conference for its gender imbalance, it’s only fair to praise it for working on the issue. This year’s list of twenty-two speakers includes five women, up from last year‘s one out of twenty featured on the home page. And the agenda is better for it. Gender aside, it looks like a great line-up.

E-Tech is one of my favorite conferences because it combines community-building (hence the extra special need to get more gender balance) and sessions that are over my head enough that I learn lots. See you there, March 6-9 in San Diego.. [Tags: EmergingTech oreilly MakeMagazine technology gender]

The PR department at O’Reilly sent me a copy of Make magazine’s coffee table book Makers by Bob Parks. The stuff is just so cool, from the voice-activated Cuisinart to Bathsheba Grossman’s 3d sculptures to the steam engine made entirely out of paper, to a shirt with 38 fans which is worth it just for the photo of Mikey Sklar on the beach embodying the word “geek.” This is technology so smart and original that it’s funny.

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