t is very important to me that responsible falconers put themselves into the public's eye to ensure a positive view and accurate representation of falconry. If all responsible participants of any group withdraw from the public's view then it is only the irresponsible dregs of that group that are left from which the public will form a perception. When falconry birds are seen to be healthy and eagerly cooperating with their falconer, it cannot be said that these birds are being coerced or mishandled. Because of this view, I have donated my personal time to the projects of others when I have been fortunate enough to be asked in order to further the positive perception of falconry. I have written original materials for some groups, donated pictures to some, and spent time personally educating others. Indeed the entire site is intended to open all aspects of falconry for the public to understand, and hopefully support.
I have been fortunate enough to contribute to a number of publications, both publicly available and private. Links to some of the articles and sources can be found here. I also have hand-outs on a variety of topics related to ecology, conservation, raptors, and falconry and use them in education. These are made available for download, printing, and sharing. If you use these in your own education, please cite this site as the source of the information.
September 2007 - The National Red Setter Field Trial Club published the Falconry FAQ to compliment an article by one of their members on the Red Setter in falconry.
February 2007 - New Jersey Audubon Society's Nature Center of Cape May produced educational lesson plans for their Cumberland County Winter Eagle Festival's Raptor Discovery Days. The videos and much information for many of their programs came from this site.
November 2006 - Speaker at Raptors on the Prairie conference. Authored a presentation on the use of raptor mutes as a leading indicator of disease and illness. Hosted by the South Plains Wildlife Rehabilitation Center
The full PowerPoint presentation is available here mutes.ppt
December 2005 - Writer for the North American Falconers Association. This research paper was featured in the December 2005 issue of the NAFA Hawk Chalk. The full paper is available here. Longitudinal Analysis of Cases, Violations, and Citations involving the MBTA Regulations from January 1, 2000 through April 20, 2005
April 2005 - Authored research paper on the current population pools of native raptors, the impact of falconry, and the population trends of our wild raptor populations. Population Pools of Native Raptors
March 2005 - Guest writer for the Primitive Ways site. This article has subsequently been selected for their exclusive CD. Falconry - Modern and Traditional
Mews Sign For placing on your mews with your appropriate paperwork. Gives emergency numbers and a bit of deterrence to any visitors.
NOTE: This is not a sign carrying any legal weight and is not intended to convey legal information to the possessor or to visitors to your mews. It is for information, contact numbers, and to act as a kindly worded deterrent to the casual visitor who may not realize that they need to respect the mews and the bird's space.
Permission to Temporarily Possess Raptor A template for those times when another falconer, or other appropriate permittee, will be caring for your raptor. Cites specific regulations and helps you hand over a raptor for temporary care with all the necessary information. Just print a copy, fill it in, attach a copy of your bird's 3-186A, and hand it over to your raptor sitter.
NOTE: This is not a document carrying any legal weight and is not intended to convey legal information to the possessor or to agents. It is for assistance in including the proper information when handing your raptor for short-term care to another properly permitted person.
Disease Card For placing in your wallet in case of medical emergency. Raptor rehabilitators, falconers, and hunters come into contact with a variety of diseases that are not typical in the general population. Because of this if you develop symptoms which are difficult to treat or diagnose, providing your physician with a sampling of common zoonotic diseases can help them diagnose and treat you.
Raptors A general handout on raptors, useful for educational settings.
Pasture Management A handout on managing pastures and fields for wildlife.
The Modern Apprentice has been featured in the Birmingham News and several times by the Washington Falconers Association's Mewsletter.
The handouts and information available on The Modern Apprentice has had the distinction of being used by rehabilitation organizations to help train their new volunteers, several falconry organizations in their educational efforts, authors researching books, and historical re-enactment groups to supplement their outreach programs. If you use the materials, please let me know how they worked for you!
s a corporate speaker, Lydia Ash has had many speaking engagements, most recently:
January 2008 - Panelist for the Women in Leadership Symposium
July 2007 - Google interviewed some of their key employees producing vignettes based on the interviews
http://youtube.com/watch?v=cWgfs0BaQJ0
July 2007 - Panelist for the New York Test Engineering Forum co-sponsored by the Society of Women Engineers
http://www.swe.org/SWE/regionE/Sections/sweny/Miscellaneous/GoogleEvent072507.pdf
July 2007 - Speaker at the Conference of the Association for Software Testing (CAST)
Data Set Analysis: Approaches to testing when the build is the data
Identifying some simple approaches to some complex problems.
http://www.associationforsoftwaretesting.org/conference/sessions.html#ash
July 2007 - Panelist for a QA SIG/CAST testing exhibition
http://www.qasig.org/calendar.html
http://www.associationforsoftwaretesting.org/conference/sponsoredevents.html
March 2007 - Speaker to the Society of Women Engineers
Working in the Innovation Factory
December 2006 - Speaker at University of Washington
Essential Skills for Web Testers
September 2006 - Speaker at the Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference 2006 (PNSQC)
A Peek Inside Google's Innovation Factory
April 2006 - Invited speaker at Amazon.com
5 Things to Make Your Web Testing More Effective
Sold out engagement to Amazon's engineers!
Lydia Ash focuses on effective testing - making the testing efforts the most effective they can be. As such, her talk will focus on 5 high impact things testers can do to be more effective immediately, yet with a small additional cost to their time and effort. Suggestions are concrete with immediate results that set a firm foundation for web testing.
April 2006 - Invited speaker to Association for Women in Computing (AWC)
AJAX in Action: Asynchronous JavaScript And XML
Sold out engagement to AWC's engineers!
Topics covered include:
- What is AJAX?
- Components of modern web applications
- How Gmail works
- Pros and Cons of AJAX
- Public AJAX libraries
- Similar burgeoning technologies
- Testing AJAX applications
March 2006 - Speaker at Google - Network Analysis
Lydia Ash's book The Web Testing Companion has received much recognition as one of the foremost books on testing web applications, and is now one of the foundation books given to new Google employees.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0471430218
Wiley online site for The Web Testing Companion
http://www.wiley.com/compbooks/ash/
Sites Citing The Web Testing Companion
An Introduction to Quality Assurance
http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2005/01/13/quality_assurance.html
Wikipedia - Software Testing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_testing
Software QA and Testing Resource Center
http://www.softwareqatest.com/qatbks1.html
StickMinds - Book Review
http://www.stickyminds.com/sitewide.asp?Function=edetail&ObjectType=BOOK&ObjectId=617
HighBeam - Book Review
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-116741386.html
Microsoft Technical Careers - Recommended Reading List
http://blogs.msdn.com/jobsblog/archive/2004/07/29/201143.aspx
Microsoft - Security Booklist
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/secnews/securitybooklist.mspx
HotCoding - Software Development
http://www.hotcoding.com/Programming/perl/200611/34838.html
Plynt - Penetration Testing
http://www.plynt.com/resources/learn/penetration-testing/
Software Risk - Performance Testing
http://www.software-risk.co.uk/keyperformance_testing.htm
VideoGameKnowledge - Localization
http://www.videogameknowledge.com/search/Software_localization
COQAA - Recommended Reading
http://www.coqaa.org/Links/books.html
The Encyclopedia - Software Testing
http://en.encyclopediahome.com/wiki/Software_testing
Answers.com - Software Testing
http://www.answers.com/topic/software-testing
R.S. Pressman - Resources
http://www.rspa.com/spi/webe-test.html
How to Test Like Leonardo a Vinci
http://blogs.msdn.com/kintan/archive/2005/04/27/412476.aspx
Software Test Engineer's Bookshelf
http://forums.sureshkumar.net/testing-tools-qa/21032-software-test-engineer-s-bookshelf.html
Testing web applications in practice
http://www.dsic.upv.es/workshops/wwv05/pre-proceedings.pdf
Quality Assurance and Software Testing booklist
http://quality-assurance-software-testing.blogspot.com/2005/07/software-testing-books-amazoncom.html
Dinesh Bhat's blog
http://blogs.msdn.com/dinesh_bhat/archive/2005/01/08/349206.aspx
Testing Testing 1, 2, 3
http://blogs.msdn.com/testing123/archive/tags/Testing/default.aspx
The Web Testing Companion is also used as a university textbook for several courses including:
Institute for Advanced Studies in Software Testing
http://www.softwareeng.org/curriculum/softw_testing.shtml
University of Leeds
http://ics.leeds.ac.uk/icsmodsb/ay2006/COMM1730.doc
University of Calgary - Software Reliability and Testing 521
http://www2.enel.ucalgary.ca/People/far/Lectures/SENG521/index.html
University of Calgary - Software Reliability and Testing 635
http://www.enel.ucalgary.ca/People/far/Lectures/SENG635/index.html
Lydia was a consulting expert on the recently published book Software Requirement Patterns by Stephen Withall.
http://www.amazon.com/Software-Requirement-Patterns-Best-Practices/dp/0735623988/
Lydia Ash's recent paper Data Set Analysis published in the CAST 2007 proceedings describes the foundations to testing data accuracy and relationships in large-scale sets of data through simple approaches to complex problems.
Data Set Analysis
Lydia Ash's professional resume
