Want Women in Tech? Change the Culture

My college engineering circuit board. My hope is that a diverse group of people get to deal with the all nighters and circuit burning that I did.

I use this site not only for cool science stuff, but also as a proponent of diversity within the sciences. It's critical to understand that simply improving numbers of women and minorities within the space isn't enough. The culture itself needs to be changed so that elements such as misogyny and racism are not acceptable by anyone. Making a welcoming culture is a huge step in attracting underrepresented groups into a situation that they previously saw as hostile.

In the tech space, events known as hackathons are quite popular.  These events require collaboration from teams of folks to develop a solution to a stated problem, usually involving software or hardware.  The results are typically presented to an audience by the collaborators themselves, and winners are chosen. Since a hackathon can show both technical aptitude as well as the ability to explain and demo your solution to an audience, this is an important space that needs to be culturally sensitive so that all feel welcome to contribute their brainpower.

A hackathon during an ongoing conference entitled TechCrunch Disrupt allowed several offensive presentations to pass its supposed screening process, including a joke app called TitStare centered around staring at women's breasts.  There were several other offensive presentations involving jokes about masturbation, shrinkage, etc. All of this was in front of an audience that included young children. TechCrunch did apologize after facing heat, but it was the usual halfhearted empty apology that only comes after being barraged by social media influencers.

You'd think that hackathons and similiar events would attract women and minorities because as long as you have great ideas and you can present well, you should be fine, right?  It's true, as long as the culture welcomes them as people as well as tech resources. Putting on the greatest demo in the world suddenly seems low on the totem pole when you are dealing with being demeaned in a personal way.

Sadly, this culture has existed for a very long time, as seen is a recent documentary about women in the chemistry indu

stry. This is why it's important to have schools that take diversity seriously, and to celebrate initiatives like International Women's Day. 

I wasn't going to write about this initially, but I felt compelled to. We all need to stand up against this crap, and it needs to be a united effort, not one limited to women.  Any jokes that disparage women and the contributions that they've made to society harm us all. Having groups that don't represent the true diversity of America harms us all. 

Check out the Storify below for a great discussion on the Disrupt issue and its aftermath. 

Yeah They Still Work #4: '96 Tech

This is the latest post in my Yeah They Still Work (YTSW) series, where I review my old tech that still works and brings me joy.  

In December of 1996, I was a skinny, optimistic high school junior, ready to take on the world!  I kept one of my high school papers because I wrote a front page article and I'm a packrat. Little did I know that 17 years later, it would serve as a perfect time capsule for some of the technology of the day.

Check out the video below for a journey into the ridiculous TVs, CD players, and phones of the past! 

The Uncanny Valley to our Robot Overlords

Creepin up on ya

Technology improves at a rapid rate - so fast that most people can't keep up. One of the key ways that we can recognize tech is by visual improvements.  Movies and video games have been on a steady trajectory toward realistic approximations of humanity.  Playing my Atari 2600 in the early 80s is way different from strapping on those virtual reality goggles at Sportsworld in Paramus NJ.  And that is a far time away from video games like Splinter Cell: Blacklist (shown above).

But when does the technology get too real? There's a gap between technology that's clearly fake and us, and straying within that gap can lead to creepy results. Being in that gap, known as the uncanny valley, is offputting because our brains like things to be categorized and orderly.  If we can't immediately peg the source of something, we begin to hyperfocus on anything that would make it different.  If we see a perfect stack of books, we'll look for imperfections in the pages, covers, etc - anything to categorize.  

The BBC has a great article on the uncanny valley:

"There are a few explanations that might account for our strange aversion to humanoid robots. One is that not being able to tell whether something is human or not can be a deeply unsettling feeling in itself. Artists and directors take advantage of this all the time for dramatic effect. The dread that viewers feel while trying to figure out who is a zombie, or Cylon, or alien might be the very same dread they feel when faced with a very realistic robot. "

"An unexpected break in humanness can be an unpleasant shock, one that sets off fearful and distrustful instincts. "

Interestingly, the creepiness doesn't only involve trying to act human. Some things are just damn creepy - like Teddy Ruxpin.

50 Years of Tech: March on Washington

AFP / Getty Images

The Civil Rights movement of the 1960s had a clear high point when Dr. King gave his "I Have A Dream" speech at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial 50 years ago in Washington, DC. If the march had taken place in current times, official photos like the one above would show an entire crowd with mobile phones and tablets, recording King's speech, tweeting, and uploading pics and videos to Instagram.  The trolls would be out in full force on social media, delivering instant reaction to the speech and trashing King and the rest of the civil rights movement pioneers. Maybe even King would have a social media account managed by someone else, updating the account with segments from the speech soon after they were spoken.  But in 1963, mainstream television was still in its early ages and a mobile phone was a pipe dream. 

 A few highlights of the tech scene in 1963 are below: 

• NASA culminates its first spaceflight program Mercury by sending astronaut Gordon Cooper into Earth orbit. He completed 22 full orbits before returning home. The Mercury program, which had a goal of putting a human into Earth orbit, made a hero out of John Glenn when he became the first human to orbit the Earth the year prior (1962). 50 years later, many astronauts have been beyond Earth orbit to to land on the surface of moon.  While we still haven't ventured past the moon to put our feet on another planet, we've sent various probes throughout the entire solar system and, in Voyager's case, beyond.

• The first episode of sci-fi cult classic of Dr. Who was broadcast in London., with William Hartnell as the first Doctor. 50 years later and the current reboot of Dr. Who is still going strong.  Still waiting for a Doctor that's not white or male though ...

• Instant Replay is used for the first time during the live transmission of the Army Navy Game by its inventor, director, Tony Verna. 50 years later and we're able to create video on our phones and rewind, fast forward, and manipulate our videos in the same way that instant replay was intended for. Also, we have to deal with annoying commentating by sports announcers who usually replay the most horrible injuries over and over again.

• The television remote control is authorized by the FCC. paying the way for people to turn the TV on and off and change channels without leaving their chair. 50 years later and we are controlling our TVs with our phones, tablets, and WIi U Gamepads.  Somehow, I still didn't have a remote for my TV when I grew up in the 80s though ... 

The Atlantic put together a beautiful photo montage of 1963 which includes some of these tech highlights - check it out here! 

NASA Fermi: You Won't Like Me When I'm Angry

Gamma rays helped turn Bruce Banner into the Incredible Hulk

The Hubble isn't the only telescope floating in orbit around earth - NASA also has the Fermi Gamma Ray Telescope. Fermi turns five this week.

Why gamma rays? The visible light that we see is a small part of a much larger electromagnetic spectrum. The Fermi telescope uses gamma rays, which travel very fast with a very high energy (i.e. they have a high frequency). Faster, high energy waves have a better chance of detecting hard-to-see objects in the universe such as black holes. Check out the following description of the spectrum from Science Company.

The chart makes it apparent that lower energy light on the left of the visible spectrum such as radio, microwave, and infrared are what we see in our everyday lives.  Several of these waves are passing through your body as you read this, but since they are low energy no damage is done. The higher energy gamma rays on the right can only be used safely because the Fermi telescope is in space, away from human contact.

From the NASA Fermi mission site:

The Large Area Telescope (LAT), the mission's main instrument, scans the entire sky every three hours. The state-of-the-art detector has sharper vision, a wider field of view, and covers a broader energy range than any similar instrument previously flown.

Fermi's secondary instrument, the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM), sees all of the sky at any instant, except the portion blocked by Earth. This all-sky coverage lets Fermi detect more gamma-ray bursts, and over a broader energy range, than any other mission. These explosions, the most powerful in the universe, are thought to accompany the birth of new stellar-mass black holes.

Check out a five year retrospective of the Fermi telescope below.

All this news makes the Incredible Hulk happy, and he celebrates by beating the mess out of Loki in this scene from the Avengers movie.