Thanks to Dr. Kiki Wants Your Help at .51 for leading me to The Bird's Brain.

The Bird's Brain is the site of Dr. Kirsten Sanford, a neurophysiologist. She has A Small Request for inspirational and motivational ideas that she can tell girls in grades 6–8. She explains her ideas in this video Small Request. Here's some of her explanation:

I’ve been invited by the Center for STEM [Ed.: Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics] Excellence at Scramento State University to give the Keynote talk at their Expanding Your Horizons conference this October. As a result, I’ve been thinking about all sorts of topics for my talk. Do I talk about science in general, specific areas of STEM, my personal experiences?

In my thinking and searching I came to realize that as the Keynote speaker it is my job not to inform, but to be inspirational and motivational… to get the girls at the conference fired up and excited about both the day ahead and their own futures. But, how to do that when I have my own struggles with inspiration and motivation on a daily basis?

I think I’ve come to an answer; lead by example. How do I get past those daily hurdles, and keep moving? How did I find a career that I love? How did you?

She's looking for real stories from career women, and especially women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics fields. If you can offer your story, check out the video and the post What's Your Story?, where she provides a number of ways for you to contact her with your career story.

It's been a big couple of weeks for Windows users. Just in case you missed it in all the political brouhaha we have going on, I'll pass along the news of some new Windows toys.

Google announced a new browser called Google Chrome. It's reported to be amazingly fast. It is in the early beta stage. You can download it or learn more. There was a bit of a Google brouhaha around the terms of service for Chrome. See Slashdot's report, but Google quickly made changes and announced them on the Google Blog. Beth Kanter reported in Beth's Blog that Google Chrome Comic Book Auction To Benefit Sharing Foundation and Kids in Cambodia. Yes, Google announced the new browser with a comic book. Shall we consider getting a comic book writer for our next PR campaign? Donating to Sharing Foundation is a very nice touch from Google.

A Firefox add on called Ubiquity is making a splash. I learned about it at rare pattern in the post Semantic meaning with Ubiquity. Ubiquity enables you to use email, post to Twitter and do all sorts of useful things right in Firefox. Get all the info at rare pattern and Mozilla Labs.

Finally, there's the Foxit Reader a tool that reads PDF files—and does it with a lot more speed than the tortoise-like old standard Adobe Acrobat Reader. It allows annotation and you can use it to convert a PDF file to text. You can try it free.

Come on, people, how about some new toys for Mac users?