She’s made plenty of headlines because her sport is one a lot of people – both men and women – would not dare to do and she is excellent at it.  Vicki Golden is a professional freestyle motocross rider.

She began biking at age seven, imitating her brother’s passion for dirt bike riding.  When her parents recognized her potential in the sport, they bought her first bike and arranged for private lessons.  That’s when she was exposed to the hilly terrain around San Diego near her home.  She described the experience in this way. “It was a gnarly experience, but that’s what made me such a good rider.  We didn’t have well-groomed, brand-new prepped tracks.  We had the hills.”

She began racing as an amateur and then turned pro when she was seventeen.  What has followed in the years since she became an amateur racer and then a professional is a string of medals and firsts.

• The Loretta Lynn AMA Women’s Amateur Champion.
• Four-time X Games gold medalist.
• The first female competitor in a Moto X freestyle competition, winning a bronze medal in the best whip category.
• Nominated for the ESPY’s Best Female Action Sports Athlete award in 2014.

In January, 2018, it looked like her career might come to an end when she had a serious accident during an international motorcycle freestyle show.  It was an extremely traumatic time for her but, after seven surgeries and nine months of difficult rehabilitation, she was determined to return to the sport she loves.

She came roaring back by landing her first ever FMX backflip off the 15-foot Next Level ramp in Auckland, Australia.  She is the only woman who has flipped one of the largest ramps in the world.  That was March, 2019.

On HISTORY’s “Evel Live 2”, Sunday, July 7, 2019, she sped through a series of flaming wooden boards becoming the first female to break the record which was set in 2006.

It seems likely she will continue to make news and win more accolades.

When Frances Perkins was a little girl, she asked her parents why nice people could be poor. Her father told her not to worry about those things, and that poor people were poor because they were lazy and drank. Eventually, she went to Mount Holyoke College, and majored in physics. In her final semester, she took a class in American economic history and toured the mills along the Connecticut River to see working conditions. She was horrified. Eventually, instead of teaching until she married, she earned a masters degree in social work from Columbia University. In 1910, Perkins became Executive Secretary of the New York City Consumers League. She campaigned for sanitary regulations for bakeries, fire protection for factories, and legislation to limit the working hours for women and children in factories to 54 hours per week. She worked mainly in New York State’s capital, Albany. Here, she made friends with politicians, and learned how to lobby.

On March 25th, 1911, Frances was having tea with friends when they heard fire engines. They ran to see what was happening, and witnessed one of the worst workplace disasters in US history. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire was devastating, killing 146 people, mostly young women and girls. Frances watched as fire escapes collapsed and fireman ladders couldn’t reach the women trapped by the flames. She watched 47 workers leap to their deaths from the 8th and 9th floors.

Poignantly, just a year before these same women and girls had fought for and won the 54 hour work week and other benefits that Frances had championed. These women weren’t just tragic victims, they were heroes of the labor force. Frances at that moment resolved to make sure their deaths meant something.

A committee to study reforms in safety in factories was formed, and Perkins became the secretary. The group took on not only fire safety, but all other health issues they could think of. Perkins, by that time a respected expert witness, helped draft the most comprehensive set of laws regarding workplace health and safety in the country. Other states started copying New York’s new laws to protect workers.

Perkins continued to work in New York for decades, until she was asked by President Elect Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 to serve as Secretary of Labor. She told him only if he agreed with her goals: 40-hour work week, minimum wage, unemployment and worker’s compensation, abolition of child labor, federal aid to the states for unemployment, Social Security, a revitalized federal employment service, and universal health insurance. He agreed. Similar to what she had worked for in New York, her successes became the New Deal, and changed the country and its workers forever.
So while you may not know her name, you certainly know her legacy.

One of the greatest gifts my Mother gave me was to instill in me the importance of reading.  In doing so she made it possible for me to find my voice.

She did not even have a high school diploma and yet somehow she made reading well and learning of paramount importance to me.  She instinctively knew there was nothing one could not learn if only one would read.

This fact has been borne out in my life in all of my endeavors. For example,  I came to realize my activism in the fight for women’s equality would only be productive if I was as intellectually prepared as I could be.  Reading would make this possible.

The more I read the more determined I was to make my voice heard.  This process continues daily.

womensvoicesmedia.com is MY VOICE.

Truth is always explosive, particularly when belief is ruled by opinion rather than facts. Many people don't know the difference. Today's political climate is evidence of this principle. From the highest level of our government, truth has been the victim of the Trump administration's  lack of character, voice without filters, and epic ignorance.

Elevating the dialogue by factual and supportable posts is one of our major goals. We intend to practice fierce adherence of truth-telling. If by some chance we fail in this goal, it is imperative that you bring it to our attention.

Truth will bring the winds of change!  

The badass '60s programmer who saved the moon landing

Her code fixed a malfunction that could’ve prevented Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong from landing safely.

July 19 will mark the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11's arrival on the moon. The lunar lander holding Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin touched down at 4:18 pm Eastern time, and Armstrong became the first human in history to walk on the lunar surface at 10:56 pm.

Huge amounts of aeronautical and hardware engineering effort went into the Apollo program from its birth in 1961 to its completion in 1972, as NASA and its partners designed the Saturn V rocket to get astronauts out of Earth's orbit, the command/service modules that orbited the moon, and the lunar modules that actually landed on the moon. But Apollo was also a major software project. Astronauts used the Apollo Guidance Computer, which was placed in both the command module and the lunar module, for navigation assistance and to control the spacecraft, and someone needed to program it.

The software for the guidance computer was written by a team at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory (now the Draper Laboratory), headed up by Margaret Hamilton. Above is an amazing picture of her next to the code she and her colleagues wrote for the Apollo 11 guidance computer that made the moon landing possible.

How good software saved Apollo 11

Hamilton's code was good — so good, in fact, that it very well might have saved the entire Apollo 11 mission. The rendezvous radar (the radar system to be used when leaving the moon and reconnecting with the control module) and the computer-aided guidance system in the lunar module used incompatible power supplies. The radar, which didn't really have a purpose in the landing portion of the mission, started sending the computer lots and lots of data based on random electrical noise, just as Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong were attempting to land. This overloaded the computer and threatened to leave no room for the computational tasks necessary for landing.

By Dylan Matthews | Updated Jul 17, 2019, 10:19am EDT