The Arduino board has been the go–to out–of–the–box hacker project darling, but for some applications, its days are looking numbered. A new wave of microcontrollers that interpret JavaScript right on the chip are just getting ready to be hacked by makers everywhere.
Last week, Technical Machine announced the Tessel, an extensible, Arduino shield–compatible chip that the startup plans to take to Kickstarter next month. But there's already a JavaScript–on–a–chip on the crowdfunding platform: The Espruino, which aims to make open–source microcontrollers easy enough for anyone to use.
The Espruino comes pre–installed with both a command line environment and a graphical interface. Just plug it into your computer via the built–in USB port or connect wirelessly through an optional Bluetooth module (which can be soldered to the underside) and start typing away in a normal terminal window or a custom–built Chrome web app, which has a graphical code editor for non–coders and kids. Coding feedback is instant: No flashing, resetting, or compiling is required for changes to take effect.
The team chose JavaScript because of its increasing popularity, interpreted rather than compiled nature, and its ability to incorporate code changes on the fly. With 256kb of flash memory built in, the Espruino can operate without being plugged into a computer, and a built–in SD card allows programmers to run larger standalone apps on the device. It's not just the memory that's extendable: The board comes with 44 GPIO pins and a surface–mounted prototype area where you can solder on your own additions.
Gordon Williams, the Espruino's creator, has already built working prototypes and lined up a manufacturer, but the Kickstarter will allow him to order the controllers in bulk and drive the price down (the reward–level price point is £19, or about $30) along with documentation, tutorials, and improvements to the Chrome app that will make the visual programming interface even easier to use. If funded, the Espruino code and chip designs will be made open source, which Williams hopes will help cultivate a widespread community of makers like the one that made the Arduino a hacker sensation.
As the 3–D–printing revolution barrels forward, things are going to get pretty interesting. I don't just mean in a you–can–print–new–organs kind of way. For every gee–whiz advance in the technology, there will be weirdness, risks, and pitfalls. Today, it's 3–D–printed guns. Tomorrow, it will be printer security flaws. Yup. Believe it or not, your company's 3–D printer can be hacked.
This very topic was the focus of a recent presentation (PDF) given by security researcher Claud Xiao at the XCon 2013 Security Conference in Beijing. Xiao, who does security research for a Chinese antivirus company, outlined the ways in which hackers could take advantage of vulnerabilities within a 3–D printer or the network to which its connected. It's all pretty theoretical, but the details are specific and actionable enough to give any IT director a minor heart attack.
Why would somebody attack a 3–D printer? What could they even achieve? Like any form of malicious hacking, the motivation can range from harmless mischief to legit cyberwar. Whatever the end goal may be, getting enough access to do damage is no trivial matter. It does, of course, vary depending on the type of equipment being targeted. Something like the open source RepRap rapid prototyping system is going to make an easier target than the latest 800–pound machine from the floor of 3D Systems' headquarters.
"We analyzed the whole 3–D model data processing flow and 3–D printer control method when using the RepRap printers. We found almost all related software, firmware, and online download services didn't safeguard security," Xiao told FastCoLabs. "In most cases, when model data or configuration data is transferred or stored, or control command is transferred or executed, there isn't any authentication or verification, which means the potential attacker can easily modify or fake them."
By finding a weak spot in this data processing workflow, one could inject malware that would affect the output of the printer, snatch sensitive CAD files, or even dig into the machine's firmware and take control of the printer itself. It's also conceivable that unsavory code could find its way into the CAD files used to print 3–D models, which are freely distributed online.
Depending on the nature of the attack, the results can vary widely. First, there's the risk that a company's intellectual property or other sensitive information could be exposed. As we've already seen with hackable ink jet paper printers, infiltrating one of the 3–D variety can allow one to intercept STL files or other 3–D model data being sent to the machine. If you're printing an iPhone case you just downloaded from Thingiverse, this sort of thing wouldn't much matter. But if your company is working on prototypes for a top secret new product, an unusually ambitious competitor could take an unauthorized look. When you consider the types of industries that will be apt to use 3–D printing––medicine and the military come to mind––you can start to imagine why 3–D model data would make hacking into a printer worth the trouble.
With the right tactics, one could also affect the behavior of the printer. That could mean something as innocuous as interrupting a fellow student's final project print job to produce something far more obscene. Or, as Xiao's presentation outlines, it could provide hackers a way to physically damage the printer itself. In the same way that the Stuxnet worm was designed to disrupt uranium enrichment at an Iranian nuclear facility, a batch of nefariously authored code could alter the logic behind a printer's firmware, causing the machine to print damaged objects or, worse, damage itself. Deliberately causing the machine to overheat, for example, could render a very expensive machine unusable.
Xiao's research is intended to alert companies that utilize industrial–grade 3–D printers to the as–yet–underexplored security issues these increasingly popular machines can present. It's those heavier–duty printers that would likely be targeted, much more so than the desktop–sized 3–D printers used by hobbyists and designers.
Our ability to print things in three dimensions is, they say, the future. It's been around for several years, but this transformative technology is now getting cheap and fast enough for everyday consumers to utilize. The potential is undeniably enormous.
Yet for all the magical potential of 3–D printing, it also raises strange, illicit, and potentially troubling issues. The most obvious example is the 3–D–printed–gun controversy, which we'll follow closely as it heats up. There are also concerns over copyright infringement, a contentious issue that's only beginning to rear its head in the world of rapid 3–D prototyping. What happens when millions of people are slowly granted the ability to produce 3–D objects at will? It's not unlike the Internet: Lots of awesome, radically transformative things will happen. Along with it, we'll get plenty of weirdness.
In this story tracker, we'll touch on everything from 3–D–printed food to sex toys and look at the social, legal, and ethical issues raised by this rapidly blossoming technology.
If you thought the whole 3–D–printed gun thing got contentious earlier this year, just wait. The next generation of 3–D–printed guns will be easier to produce, sturdier, and unlike the firearms that come out of printers today, these homemade guns will be made of metal.
Printing metal with additive technologies is a very new process. This is believed to be the world's first commercially available 3–D–printed gun component:
The Auxetik, a muzzle brake for pistols and rifles that was made available by Michigan–based Sintercore LLC last week. A muzzle brake is a device that reduces the recoil of a weapon when it's fired.
What's different about Auxetik, compared to previously printed gun parts, is that instead of using one of the standard plastic–producing 3–D printers we're all used to seeing, it's built using a technology called direct metal laser sintering (DMLS), a technique already being used by some hobbyists to make homemade rockets.
The DMLS process turns metal powder into solid metal by melting it with a fiber optic laser. Like plastic printers, it takes blueprints from CAD files and turns them into physical objects, tiny layer by tiny layer. The chief difference, of course, is that the output is made of metal.
Why does this matter? It's the first step toward a reality in which real, metal guns can be easily manufactured by anybody with access to the right kind of 3–D printer and the proper design blueprints. The plastic guns and gun components printed by projects like Defense Distributed work, but they're cheap–looking and not particularly durable. In fact, police in Australia (where all guns are banned) have warned that 3–D–printed plastic guns can be dangerous to use, given their fragile construction.
Sintercore isn't providing access to the CAD blueprints for the Auxetik, but rather selling the component itself. Still, what Sintercore is doing gives us a glimpse at what's possible when high–powered lasers meet metal powder to form an object that was designed explicitly for destruction. No matter how you feel about the existence of 3–D–printed guns or the regulation thereof, it's hard to argue that the innovation isn't a big deal. As the music industry knows all too well, the sudden widespread availability of a certain filetype over this globe–spanning network we call the Internet can have a very dramatic impact.
The whole thing also stands as a reminder of how primitive 3–D printing is. Sure, those complex, colorful plastic widgets getting spit out of MakerBots and bigger 3–D printers are really cool, but it's only the beginning of this impending revolution in the way things are made. Plastic prototypes will be joined by hard metal and even a brand new type of flexible, self–healing metal. Houses. Food. Human tissue. The list of what will soon be printable seems to grow by the week.
To many, the advent of 3–D–printed guns represents a scary new frontier in which regulating who has access to deadly weapons becomes virtually impossible. To others, it's all about empowering citizens with expansion of constitutionally promised rights. Whichever it is, it's hard to argue things will ever be the same.
June 18, 2013
Cue The Battle To (Somehow) Regulate 3–D–Printed Guns
Well, this should make for a debate that's as contentious as possible. Nearly a year after Defense Distributed first grabbed headlines with its plans to build a 3–D–printed gun, lawmakers are starting to freak out. Last week, a New York City council member introduced a law that aims to outlaw the printing of any gun component unless one is a registered gunsmith. Under the law, any guns that are printed would need to be registered with authorities within 72 hours. The proposal comes a few weeks after a similar one was introduced in the New York state assembly. This is undoubtedly just the beginning.
The impossible–sounding nature of these laws highlights precisely why this issue is at once so terrifying and exciting to different camps of people. The same networks that empower everyday people to become publishers and share music freely now permit people to exchange blueprints for deadly weapons. To some, it's an expansion of liberty. To others, it sends us down a dark and dangerous path. Like the sharing of MP3s, restricting this kind of activity will prove difficult, if not downright impossible. The quest to do so only grows more urgent as 3–D printing becomes more ubiquitous.
For those who haven't followed the story, it broke into the mainstream last summer when Forbescovered Defense Distributed, an organization dedicated to creating a 3–D–printable gun and making its CAD design blueprints freely available online. To do so, the organization launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise the money needed to buy a 3–D printer. They succeeded, but Stratasys, the 3–D printer manufacturer, quickly repossessed the device, citing concerns over the legality of its intended use.
Cody Wilson, the 25–year–old founder of Defense Distributed, proceeded to develop the world's first fully 3–D–printable gun anyway. A video of Wilson successfully firing his printable pistol, dubbed "The Liberator" were posted online in May, as were the CAD files needed for others to print the gun. The State Department demanded that Wilson remove the files, which he did, but not before 100,000 people had downloaded them. From here on out, limiting the spread of these files online will be about as easy as scrubbing the leak of Kanye West's new album from the Internet. Indeed, as an intelligence memo from the Department of Homeland Security said of 3–D–gun blueprints, "limiting access may be impossible."
Just over 100 miles out from the coast of Rhode Island, an autonomous drone boat called Scout has already broken records for the farthest unmanned voyage, and its designers hope to set a much bigger one by using it to perform the first unmanned transatlantic crossing. The best part? You can follow the robo–boat on its voyage online via a handy Transatlantic Tracker.
The 12–foot craft is a mini–marvel of clever design combined with off–the–shelf components. One Mega Arduino microcontroller board handles navigation and another handles sensors and communications via an Iridium satellite transceiver, but the boat is entirely pre–programmed, relying on sensor data to adjust to environmental conditions. For power, the boat relies on solar panels, which can be heavy and make the boat less efficient. To compensate, the team removed the aluminum frames from the panels and laminated them straight onto the deck, allowing them to cram more solar arrays onto the top of the robot. The deck itself is tilted south, which is a better angle for collecting sunlight.
The boat is the brainchild of a collage of college students from Worcester Polytechnic, Notre Dame, Bucknell University, Endicott College, Northeastern, and the University of Rhode Island, but it isn't aligned with or funded by any school. Instead, the project has enjoyed the sponsorship of Jamestown Distributors, a local family–owned marine and building supply company, along with individuals who have donated to the cause via the group's Facebook page. Formed in 2010, the team started working on the final version of their unmanned craft in April 2012.
Though they initially wanted to take advantage of long days earlier in summer, after two false starts Scout finally launched on August 24. Within two days, the craft had beat the previous record for an unmanned naval voyage of 60 miles set by a team from Aberystwyth University in the 2010 Microtransat Challenge. The next hurdle is the transatlantic crossing, and judging by previous attempts, Team Scout is already leaps and bounds ahead of the competition.
Robot sex dreamers, amputees, Spider–Man fans, and heart surgeons, take note: Cyborg skin is closer to becoming reality than most of us realize, and it could change the way we interact with each other forever. Last month, a study describing lab–made plastic skin that can detect heat, pressure, and even light and sound through electronic sensors was published in the journal Nature.
Today, the skins send info wirelessly to computers, but eventually, data from the skins may even be fed directly into the brain, extending human perception. When that happens, we'll need to decide what limits to place on the technology, which will enable brand new kinds of spying and identity theft. In an era when our government tracks our email, think what could it could do with mind–reading chips literally at its fingertips.
This week, study author and Tokyo University engineering professor Takao Someya published an IEEE Spectrum review of the new technology, where he speculated on potential future uses. Because the e–skins are ultrathin (1/10th the thickness of typical kitchen plastic wrap), bendable, and heat and water resistant, they may one day be affixed to the wrist to measure vital signs discreetly, wrapped around a beating heart to prevent cardiac arrest, or attached to the steering wheel of a car to measure the driver's fitness to drive. But the potential goes beyond measuring physical states.
Someya's skins can detect heat and pressure with greater sensitivity than human skin, which means they could be used to infer mental states from physical indicators of emotion. Feeding sensory data from the skins into machine learning algorithms could one day allow us to detect excitement from the heat of someone's handshake, nervousness from a sweaty palm, or fear from chill or subtle trembling. In principle, they could even be made sensitive to sound waves and light, essentially acting as ears and eyes embedded in skin and extending the human ability to perceive, a prospect right out of science fiction.
Remember Spidey Sense, the ripple that Spider–Man feels when a bad guy approaches his psychic web? In the review, Someya writes that his lab is working on e–skins that do something similar by providing enhanced perception:
An ultrasonic skin covering an entire robot body could work as a 360–degree proximity sensor, measuring the distance between the robot and external obstacles. This could prevent the robot from crashing into walls or allow it to handle our soft, fragile human bodies with more care. For humans, it could provide prosthetics or garments that are hyperaware of their surroundings.
In principle, e–skins may make it possible to send information from human to computer, or even, given recent advances in computer–brain interfaces, between two human hands (or other organs) directly via touch. This technology would open up a number of intriguing possibilities, not the least of which is cyberskin sexuality, with humans and robots communicating via touch with enhanced perception. Imagine what the world will come up with when human–robot couples can talk by touch. We'll know what androids dream of, and it may not be electric sheep.
This is where the possibilities start to become dizzying and the ethics blurry. If information transfer becomes possible via e–skin handshake, it will also become easier to steal and spread. Imagine simply touching a computer to access its data or shaking hands with a leaker to hand over government secrets.
Hiding information from others will become difficult, too. Because the e–skins are thin, transparent, and can conform to just about any surface, you won't know if people around you are wearing them covertly. And even if you could stop digital information from being transmitted, how could you conceal your body's natural physiological processes? If researchers develop skins that can infer mental states, your emotions––I'm angry or embarrassed or turned on––might be decodable by anyone wearing a skin.
In typical futurist fashion, Someya deflects these fears. In the review, he argues that any risk his cyborg skins pose is outweighed by the great potential they have for keeping people safe and preventing biomedical disasters like heart attacks and car crashes.
"Skins that know what we're saying without having to say it, skins that can communicate themselves, skins that extend our human capacities in directions we haven't yet imagined––the possibilities are endless," Someya writes giddily.
Tokyo University bioethicist Osamu Kanamori put it well at a global symposium on "Neuro–ethics and Brain Machine Interfaces" that I attended at Kyoto University in January 2008: The instinct to innovate is human nature. Brain–driven robots, mind–reading magnets, all new tools to solve health and communication problems, are as "natural" to humans as an umbrella to keep rain off our heads, he explained at the conference. Constraining biotech is not the answer––adapting is.
For the wide range of 3–D printers on the consumer market today, precious few have the baseplate size to print more than trinkets (only one in our recent roundup could even fit an 8.5"x11" sheet of paper). Luckily, the gMax 3D printer is just a Kickstarter away from bringing large projects to your desktop.
By "large" we mean 16"x16"x9", enough to finally print a regulation–size chessboard for all those 3–D–printed rooks you've been churning out. Altogether, the gMax will ship with over 575 cubic inches more printing space than the midrange Cubify Cube or Afinia H479.
The gMax began life when its creator, Brooklyn–based Gordon LaPlante, tried to apply his work in architecture to 3–D printing. He originally bought and assembled a RepRap Prusa printer in 2010, but found that it just didn't have a big enough build area to print the plans he was dreaming up. So, he channeled the replicating RepRap spirit and used his Prusa to print out parts for an even bigger monster. He worked on the gMax until he got the first prototype up and running last winter.
The gMax's Kickstarter reward price points are $1,095 for a budget model (sans several features which can be added later) and a $1,295 for the full–featured model. Though these are more than twice the price of some other RepRap models, the added features (like an LCD screen and SD card reader) blow the other RepRaps out of the water in addition to physically dwarfing them. Plus, unlike traditional RepRap kits, the Kickstarter funds will allow LaPlante to ship you an assembled machine so you can get to printing right out of the box.
In addition to the huge print area, the gMax also claims a minimum resolution of 75 microns per layer, which is more precise than leading consumer market competitors like Cubify's CubeX and MakerBot's Replicator 2X, which both retail for over $2,500. The gMax also comes with thicker aluminum frame struts (1.5" bars, compared to industry–standard 1"), and the entire extruder module is intentionally interchangeable, and could eventually be used with drill heads or laser etchers to make the gMax a complete printing and machining kit.
In fact, most of the non–aluminum expandable parts are 3–D–printable, which will allow the modding community to easily manipulate the gMax's design. LaPlante has already taken the biggest step to engendering the love of tinkerers by licensing the gMax design under a Creative Commons Attribution–ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
"I'll give up my printed books when you pry the last one from my cold, dead hands."
That's what I tell people when they ask me what kind of e–reader I have. As a technology journalist, author, and novelist, they expect me to own the latest Kindle or be an iBooks aficionado, and most seem genuinely shocked when I tell them I like my books on paper.
The reasons I give for preferring paper books are probably no different than what others have said: It's the smell, the feel, and the way books become decorative items on your shelf when you are done absorbing all the wonderful words they contain.
But as a technology journalist, I also know that one day I will be dragged into the digital book future whether I like it or not––or be left behind with no new stories to read. That's why I decided to sit down with Henrik Berggren, CEO of a small but growing app called Readmill that seems to have its pulse on the future of reading.
Talking with him, I discovered that compared to what Readmill is planning, today's e–books might as well be dusty scrolls of parchment. In the future, e–books are going to explode beyond just containing stories, becoming niche social networks where we discuss our favorite passages with other readers and even authors and publishers buy our data to make more informed decisions. So hold on tight, book lovers. Reading as we know it will soon change, forever.
I start my conversation with Berggren, a man who is staking his future on creating the great reading app, by telling him I'm not a fan of any of today's e–readers, like Kindle or iBooks on iOS devices, or any type of e–reading software in general. You'd think this would make him nervous, even hostile.
Instead, he smiles and agrees with me.
"The reason why I and my my cofounder David Kjelkerud started Readmill back in 2011 is because we thought that a lot of the people who were building these reading platforms were doing it in the wrong way," he explains. "When we started, there were basically iBooks and Kindle that were leading the game. Both of them were building their own vertical. But their vertically integrated systems were lacking a lot of things."
Both Apple and Amazon were designing e–book readers by copying the 2,500–year–old idea of books as self–contained collections of words, completely missing how readers share and discuss content online today. While most e–readers allow you to share passages or links to the book you are reading, and sites like Goodreads let you share what you've read, their implementations treat the book and the discussions around them as separate collections. Worse, these apps force users to venture into the distracting world of the open Internet when they want to share, making it hard to stay focused on reading.
This didn't sit well with Berggren, so he came up with an ingenious solution: Make each and every book its own self–contained social network.
Image by Readmill
"We thought that there was a huge potential in taking what Goodreads had done on social on the web for books, but doing that for a mobile integrated reading experience," says Berggren. "So instead of having to read your book and then think, 'Okay, now I have to go to Goodreads, find it there, add it to my profile, and write my review,' we just wanted to let you share and review from inside of the book."
The result is stunning. Berggren and his team designed the Readmill app so that words––and only words––are the focus point of every page. But if you find a passage you like or a sentence that irks you, you can highlight it on the page and then comment on it right from within the book. Other Readmill users reading the same book will then see these comments and can choose add their own thoughts. This starts a discussion––indeed, a bona fide social network––within the book, without ever having to leave it. The social network–in–a–book format also allows authors to take part in discussions with their readers, right inside the margins of their own book––something Berggren has found both readers and authors love. And of course, if a reader doesn't want to see other people's comments, they can just disable them and stick to the words at hand.
"The problem with companies like Apple and Amazon is that they are retailers," says Berggren. "They are not a reading service, and there is a big difference. It's the difference between the kind of focus you have and what kind of experience you want to bring to your users. We have detached ourselves from the selling of the book to be able to focus on the social experience one hundred percent."
Because Berggren decided to focus on helping people read books instead of buy them, Readmill doesn't operate its own e–book store. Instead, it makes it easy for users to import their e–books from other sources, including ePub files, PDFs, and DRM'd Adobe books (Amazon Kindle and Apple iBook files aren't compatible because they lock their digital books to specific platforms). The app itself is free, so the company makes money by selling anonymized data it collects about its users' consumption habits to publishers.
"Authors and publishers get access to a dashboard where they can see the engagement matrix of a specific book and see how many people that start reading the book actually finish it, how long it takes, if they recommended it to friends, and how much they shared throughout that experience," explains Berggren.
According to Berggren, modern publishers miss a lot of marketing opportunities for their authors because they don't know where or when to target their marketing efforts. For example, most U.K. publishers tell him that they only hold book readings and signings in London, because they get delayed sales statistics in each country and don't know where else to go until it's too late. London's always the safe bet.
"That is just for me a huge flaw in how we track and analyze how and where people actually spend time reading books and where those readers are and how engaged they are," Berggren argues. "What if it turns out that this author has a highly engaged group of readers in Edinburgh or Liverpool or some other place throughout the U.K., not to mention the U.S. obviously, which is a very, very big country? So there are lots of those kind of things where data can really have input in how to bring authors closer to their readers."
Berggren makes a good point, but as a journalist, I know that focusing so intently on analytics often influences what articles publishers cover, or even how they cover them. That begs the question: If a publisher can see a lot of readers are pausing at a certain chapter in a book, or even rushing through it, couldn't they use this data to dictate the author's writing style or pace in his next book? In which case, wouldn't the reader's past habits dictate the creation of the author's next work?
"I think it will to some extent," Berggren says, not beating around the bush, "and I think in some cases that is really good. Some good–use cases would be in nonfiction where it could reveal areas in a book that can be explained better, or that people don't really understand, or they lose interest because it gets too complex, too fast."
Nonfiction is one thing, but as a lover of stories, this makes me uneasy. After all, would a masterpiece like The Master and Margarita have been written if analytics data were telling the publisher parts of it were a little slow?
"Obviously fiction is a different story," Berggren adds, perhaps sensing my apprehension. "You can paint a very dystopian future where publishers say, 'Oh, people are just skipping this chapter. You can't write like this anymore.' However, I think that's unlikely to happen. But I do think learning about how people consume books and what they like and don't like is a key to making publishing a better industry."
To understand other applications of the data he collects from Readmill, I ask Berggren about the surprising results of an experiment he presented to the Media Evolution conference in Malmö, Sweden earlier this month. By collecting data from various versions of the Readmill app and other sources, Berggren found that the most popular type of e–reader is not a dedicated device like the Kindle, or a tablet like the iPad. It's the smartphone.
Berggren says he never believed that single–purpose devices like the original Kindle would become widespread, a prediction that seems to be playing out. But he did believe that multi–purpose tablets like the iPad would become most people's primary e–reading devices, not phones. According to Readmill's data, however, phones are not only the most popular e–reading device, they're the best at keeping readers engaged, too.
"It is not only that they are spending more time reading the books because the screen is smaller. Even taking into account screen size, smartphone users read more often, they finish more books in general, they start more books, they share more quotes, and they write more comments," says Berggren. "This paints a very clear picture that the people that are most engaged with their books are the people who read on their phones."
As a paper book lover, all I can think is, "Come on, phones? Phones? Like a Kindle or an iPad weren't bad enough." So I ask what would account for the increased reading on smartphones. Is it just because they are easy to pull out of our pocket when we are on a train or waiting for a meeting to begin? Berggren says he still has more data to sift through, but for the moment, that's his guess.
"We have so many distractions throughout a day nowadays with everything that is going on," he says, "so I think a good way of keeping in the loop with the story that you are reading or keeping interested in the nonfiction book that you are reading is having it with you all the time and grabbing all of those micro–moments that we have to continue reading that story. I think that keeps you highly engaged and will definitely make it easier for you to finish the book because you have more time to read it and more opportunities to sit down and read it."
I'm not entirely sure Berggren knows how much I'm doubting that phones can possibly be a decent reading experience as the interview wraps, but before it ends, he hits one more nail into the coffin of print books.
"At the end of the day, I really think that convenience is the winner," he says. "I really think that the best e–reader is the e–reader that you have with you all the time––and that e–reader is the phone for a lot of people in the world."
This is the same idea that runs throughout the Readmill app. In today's busy world, reading, reflecting on, and sharing the written word need to be as convenient as possible if we're going to read at all. The smartphone can be incredibly distracting, but if you design the right reading experience for it, you can embrace reading virtually anywhere and at any moment.
On my way home on the packed train that evening, the ride is long and there's a delay on the tracks. After 10 minutes, I've already read the evening's free newspaper from cover to cover, and there's still no sign of movement from the train. So I take out my iPhone and open up a copy of The Master and Margarita. And as I'm whisked off to the incredible world of a long–forgotten Russia, suddenly being stuck on the tracks isn't that bad. Maybe the future of reading isn't so scary after all.
It's shocking to be reminded of how little people understand software. After the Nasdaq stock exchange paused trading for three hours on August 22, an incident now being called the "flash freeze," wild rumors flew through the press, speculating on what had caused the problem. At first, Nasdaq attempted to point fingers at various trading companies, arguing that the issues stemmed from someone else's network, not their own. In a press release last night, the group finally took responsibility for the freeze, and offered a pretty decent explanation.
So what's the deal with the comments that Nasdaq CEO Robert Greifeld gave large international newspapers? He told the Wall Street Journal: "We know there's going to be issues with software. We know there's going to be bugs." And he was quoted in the New York Times as saying, "We certainly understand that code has this nefarious way of working and then not working."
Ah, yes. Nothing to see here. Just that crazy code being crazy as usual. To be fair, there are probably only a couple of people on staff at Co.Labs who could remotely begin to understand or interpret the code underlying Nasdaq trading. I'm not one of them. And given Greifeld's history in financial technology, he probably understands more than he's letting on. But there's a significant disconnect between his explanations, which come across as either ignorant or deliberately dumbed down, and the descriptions of the problem in the press release, which make sense and should be perfectly understandable to most people––one part of the network sent too many requests, and that overloaded the entire system's capacity:
In January 2013, a regularly scheduled systems capacity test showed the SIP system was capable of handling approximately 500,000 messages per second across 50 of the SIP system's ports. . . On August 22, the SIP received more than 20 connect and disconnect sequences from NYSE Arca . . . Available capacity was further eroded as the SIP received a stream of quotes for inaccurate symbols from NYSE Arca, and generated quote rejects. Both of these actions served to degrade the system below the tested capacity of 10,000 messages per per–port, per second . . . [and] exceeded the SIP's planned capacity, which caused its failure and then revealed a latent flaw in the SIP's software code. This latent flaw prevented the system's built–in redundancy capabilities from failing over cleanly, and delayed the return of system messages.
From a developer perspective, the outage raises an important question about continuity of service. Obviously, users will only be loyal to a service they feel they can rely on, especially where investments are concerned. But the Nasdaq outage, which was resolved within a few hours and contributed to only minor economic losses, shows that "going down" may not be a death knell so long as it can be resolved quickly and responsibly and doesn't happen often. Though it is obviously significant in trading because blackouts are an unpredictable risk, the Economist points out that Amazon and Google both had blackouts in the last few weeks that were totally unmemorable: "Zero tolerance of failure, which applies to airlines, bridges and tunnels is not so vital for electronic operators and financial firms."
That means that tech and financial companies shouldn't be afraid of admitting error, and should instead build trust by explaining what happened and what they learned. To their credit, after dodging blame for a while, the explanation for the outage in the press release makes sense.
So why is Nasdaq's CEO resorting to arcane descriptions of code as an untamable beast? Greifeld might be trying to reach a broader audience, or he might be trying to obscure the issues that caused the outage by resorting to vagaries. Either way, descriptions like these create the sense that companies aren't in control, and that tech literacy isn't important. In fact, computer and code illiteracy is becoming an increasingly noticeable problem in the U.S. and worldwide.
Technology moves so quickly and humans so slowly that we're still catching up with the realization that most workers today need at least a basic understanding of computer systems to be competitive. If computer literacy is going to become a priority in education, society needs to view code as productive, applicable, and conquerable. When downtime happens, leaders should be able to explain why. You don't have to devote your life to analyzing Shakespeare to be able to say that you know how to read.
Earlier this week we covered MEbotics, a company that's well on its way to launching a Kickstarter for the Microfactory, its work–safe 3–D printing/milling/crafting desktop machine. But it looks like someone else beat them to the punch: The FABtotum, which launched on Indiegogo over a week ago, has already beat its funding goal by $20,000 and will be entering production soon.
Like the Microfactory, the FABtotum prints in 3–D with PLA and ABS materials (at an impressive minimum 47 micron depth, too). But it's the subtractive milling that really lights our fire: Unlike the Microfactory, the FABtotum includes a removable baseplate that exposes a rotating spindle––allowing objects to spin as a drill cuts away unwanted material, lathe–style.
The engraving/milling spindle motor works with "common materials" like wood, light aluminum, and brass alloys, and like the Microfactory, the FABtotum can mill PCB, enabling DIY circuit boards. The beast also has a built–in laser scanner for digital acquisition (of medium quality, they admit) and a one–dimension touch probe digitizer that allows you to convert objects into print files at high resolution (but with long scan times).
The Indiegogo campaign markets FABtotum as a platform, not a one–off printer. The head is detachable, allowing for third–party add–ons like potentially stronger drill motors and laser cutters, and the platform is open–source: FABtotum uses Arduino–based controllers for I/O, and its designs are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial–ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
The FABtotum's Indiegogo price point for a DIY FABtotum kit is $999 ($100 for a fully assembled model), making it one of the most affordable high–res printers around. For $699, you can even try the FABtotum Mechanical DIY kit, which is a small collection of parts that will let you add FABtotum features to an existing 3–D printer in as little as 5–10 hours. The FABtotum doesn't look quite as workplace–robust (much less be able to hold up a 350–lb man) as the Microfactory, but it will be hard to make a fair price–per–feature comparison until MEbotics Kickstarts its machine in the coming weeks. Regardless, all signs point to a coming second 3–D–printing revolution with machine shops in a box leading the way.
Not so long ago, using the Internet meant one thing: sitting at a desk, at home or at work, in front of a personal computer. The user might have had different purposes in their use of the web, but much of the conditions under which they used it remained constant. As designers and developers, our assumptions about these conditions were baked into how we created websites and services.
Now, however, those assumptions are all out the window. Starting with the introduction of the original iPhone, every few years has brought not only new Internet devices, but entirely new form factors. Smartphones, tablets, and soon wearables such as smartwatches and glasses will create entirely new use cases for the Internet. People now interact with the web as they drive, shop, work, commute, exercise, eat in restaurants, and drink in bars. Additionally, multiple device usage has become commonplace: People start tasks on one device and finish them on another. Data analysis of user behavior makes mass personalization and behavioral segmentation possible. Who a user is, where they are, what they are trying to accomplish, and the type of device they're using all matter. The result: The next generation of the web will be driven by context.
Google Now and Apple's Siri are examples of purely "contextual" applications, each designed to interact and respond to an individual's unique circumstances. Smaller players include calendar apps like Tempo and the virtual assistant app Donna, both for iOS.
But there's a problem. The way we currently design websites and services does not fit with the potential of the contextual web, and the capabilities that this new technology affords. We need to find a new way to design web services. We need a new way to think about web services. And the key is to back to basics––back to long–lost art of the face–to–face conversation.
But designing a new generation of contextual apps and websites is extremely difficult, in part because we lack a language in which to describe them. That's where the face–to–face conversation metaphor comes into play. Face–to–face conversations are all about intuiting the context of the person to whom you're speaking and responding appropriately. By modeling these new apps and websites on conversations, the Internet will become a more dynamic, more natural, more conversational medium for humans interacting with software.
This new breed of applications will be the fruit of decades of artificial intelligence research, combined with the relatively new proliferation of Internet–connected devices. Smartphones, tablets, and wearable technology can all gather data for the purpose of informing contextual applications about their users' circumstances.
Currently, we have a very user interface–centric way of approaching application design. A single user interface is the comprehensive conduit for a user's interaction with an application. The "boxes and arrows" approach that is popular in UX design reflects this thinking. Up until now, this approach has worked fairly well, however it is poorly equipped to articulate this new generation of contextual applications.
Without the right metaphor to bootstrap our thinking, we're stuck in a design bottleneck. The right design metaphor will act as a bridge between the way we've understood application design in the past, and the way we will do it in the future. For example, in the early years of cinematography, filmmakers thought of what they were doing as capturing theatrical performances on film. Only decades later did filmmaking evolve into a distinct art form of its own.
The metaphor of the conversation encompasses all of the natural cues we require in order to understand how to properly build contextual applications. Here are 10 ways in which conversations can be used to understand contextual application design.
User Personas: When speaking with someone you take their personality and character into account. This informs how you interact with them. For example, some people might be more fact–based in their communications, whereas others may prefer a more emotion–oriented approach to interaction. In a contextual application, taking the persona of the user into account can inform decisions about the application's communication style and emphasis.
User Affinity: Your conversation partner has specific likes and dislikes. If you know this, it will inform your response to them. In an application, directing the user toward content or functionality that they are likely to appreciate improves the utility of your service.
User Goals: In a natural conversation, you frequently become aware that your conversation partner is attempting to achieve a specific and immediate goal within the conversation. A good conversationalist will help their counterpart find a way to accomplish their goal. Likewise, applications should dynamically optimize themselves in the service of user goals.
User Environments: Conversations don't take place in a vacuum, they occur within an environment. An environment includes a physical location, such as a person's home, work, or commute. Locations might afford specific opportunities, such as Jane's proximity to the grocery store enabling her grocery shopping. Besides a location, an environment can also include hardware technology: Is the interaction with the app taking place through a phone? A car? A tablet? A pair of glasses? What kind of sensor data such as biometric information––pulse, blood pressure––are available? What are the ambient light levels and ambient sounds? Applications should take environmental factors into account and adjust themselves accordingly.
Aggregating and Analyzing Context: The four contextual dimensions: Personas, Affinity, Goals, and Environment (PAGE), comprise the complete context of a conversational participant. Context paints a revealing picture about the conversant that can explain their behavior. We conduct natural conversations within this context and, similarly, applications should understand the aggregate contexts of their users.
Your Agenda: In addition to the context of your conversation partner, in any conversation there is also your agenda to consider. What are you trying to accomplish? Applications have natural innate business goals, such as delivering advertising impressions, converting e–commerce leads, or simply providing good service to users.
Modal Response: The aggregated context of your conversation partner, plus your agenda, combines to give you everything you need to know to converse appropriately. In a natural conversation, you would process these inputs (usually unconsciously) so you could respond in the most effective way possible. Your response would contain specific content and style, all of which were tailored to be appropriate to the context of the person with whom you were speaking, and to be delivered in the best way to advance your agenda. Contextual apps should also respond modally with specifically tailored functionality and content.
Continuity: You usually wouldn't just forget about the last conversation you had with someone because a couple of hours or days had passed. If there were unresolved issues you'd pick them back up where you left off. Natural conversations can also survive a switch of environments: For example, if you were texting with someone you could switch to a voice call and continue the conversation seamlessly. Contextual apps should be able to do the same. You should be able to resume a session with a contextual service and have the important parts of your previous interaction still relevant. Additionally you should be able to move from environment to environment (changing location, devices etc.) and continue the same conversation as you do.
Ubiquity: Conversations can occur anywhere in the world, online or offline, and contextual apps should be able to do the same. In general, the distinction between the physical and digital world is being steadily erased. App designers should think in terms of contextual services as they interact with users in the real world.
Authenticity: As humans, we are hardwired to make authentic connections with others, and in turn we should demand authenticity from our applications. An authentic interaction is one that works the same way that face–to–face interactions with individuals work. Authentic interactions are satisfying, whereas inauthentic interactions are highly frustrating. Have you ever used a phone tree, entered your account number when prompted, just to then be connected to a customer service rep who immediately asks for the same number again? There is no continuity in the interaction, and therefore it doesn't resemble communication with a sane individual. As a result it feels inauthentic and disrespectful to the user. With contextual applications we should seek to build them to act as authentically as possible––making users feel like they are interacting with a reasonable, intelligent, and sane human being.
Loren Davie is the CEO and founder of Axilent, which aids developers in building contextual applications. You can find his blog here.
More than money people, especially makers and creators, want flexibility when it comes to work. They want the freedom to work from wherever they want, and whenever they want. This is the credo of a freelancer, and it works well with a team of one. But how can you retain this sort of freedom and flexibility in a team of multiple people––especially as it grows bigger and bigger?
For a young startup that is still putting processes in place and proving itself, giving employees flexibility seems like a recipe for disaster. That's how I felt a few years ago when my BizeeBee cofounder Alex Notov suggested that we get rid of our office space in downtown Palo Alto altogether and go remote. He had a legitimate reason––he didn't want to commute two hours a day to meet with all of us––and he suspected that people could work just as well on their own.
While I understood the pain he experienced sitting in traffic, I immediately cringed at the thought of having a remote team for a startup that was less than two years old. I had limited experience dealing with a remote team, and my mind was filled with doubts. How were we going to keep up the momentum when it came to shipping product? How were we going to resolve communication issues? How would the culture of our team change and attract new employees?
Alex assured me that there were other companies that were successfully building products and fostering a collaborative culture, but I was still skeptical. However, I trusted Alex, and also wanted to create a company that would be conducive to his needs.
So I listed out all my concerns in priority: keeping the barriers to communication low, consistently shipping product, and keeping up the collaborative culture despite not sitting next to each other.
Communicating clearly is always a challenge. Having to communicate purely through text such as e–mails and IMs adds to the confusion, because it's hard to read people's facial expressions and understand their intent. Knowing that we'd experience this more as a remote team, we established four simple rules.
The first rule was that all meetings required all participants to share their video. This made it easier to see how people were reacting to what was being discussed in the meeting.
The second rule was that any serious communication shouldn't be conveyed via text. Whether it was a conflict situation, the production server was on fire, or we had an important decision to make, we needed to use video to talk it out. Once again this was to gauge people's emotional intent.
The third rule was to use Campfire during the day to stay connected with each other. This made it feel like we were literally sitting next to each other. We set up topic rooms like: deployment, customer support, and general discussion. People would hang out in the rooms and chat with each other based on the topic of the room. Since the transcripts were stored, it made it easy for people to review conversations that happened before they entered the room.
Finally, we knew that people would want some flexibility in terms of work hours. But, we were a small team and everyone had to help when it came to servicing customers. So we set up one last rule, which was that everyone had to be reachable 9 a.m.–5 p.m. PST. Meaning they had to respond to a text message or phone call regarding a customer ASAP. Only customer–related issues would receive this kind of priority of acknowledgement.
Founders and managers who suffer from micromanaging will find running a remote team really hard. So if you suffer from it, don't bother signing up until you get over it!
If you want to know how to get over it, then you'll need to learn the keys of delegation: trusting employees, communicating milestones clearly, and having a check–in based system rather than polling people constantly.
The first requires hiring competent employees, and backing off to let them do their work. If they fail to produce it will be obvious. The second means that you have to be clear setting up priorities. I say priorities instead of deadlines, because deadlines can be elusive. Employees fall sick, the scope of projects increase, or you might have to fight a fire, all of these cause deadlines to slip or be missed altogether.
At BizeeBee we setup a simple system. We'd aim to ship weekly, but we'd only ship product once we had one or more quality features. A quality feature was defined as one that is complete enough for the customer to use without confusion, there weren't any outstanding dependencies that needed to be built, our tests cases passed, and there were no obvious bugs or errors.
Setting up this criteria and putting it into practice took time, but after about six months we went from shipping every two months to shipping every two weeks. The real key to making this happen was having engineers break down features that were complex into smaller stories, and then recording each of those as stories in a tool like PivotalTracker.
Ticket–tracking systems like Pivotal's let everyone on the team see what is currently being worked on, and what is done. This prevents people from "polling," or interrupting to ask the annoying question, "What are you working on?" Whatever is in the current queue and has someone's name on it is what they were working on, and if they stop they put it into the backlog queue. When it's time to check in at the end of the week, everything that is marked as done can be shipped!
Silos and startups don't mix. Once we tackled putting a process in place for engineering the next step was to collaborate across departments. We'd have a weekly all hands meeting online, but when it came time to talk about company direction or brainstorm on major product revisions we realized we needed to meet in person. This happened every three to six months.
We also took this as an opportunity to spend quality time with each other, putting work away, and just getting to know each other. We'd organize a fun activity or a yearly retreat.
Making in–person time a priority kept the team collaborative and caring.
Finally, we anticipated that new hires might not like our remote working culture. We highlighted it while initially screening candidates, to avoid it causing a problem after someone came onboard as an employee. Most candidates would be honest and say they were disinterested in working remotely and needed to be with an in–house team. Others who were curious would want to know what it would be like. In that case we'd have a couple practice co–working sessions to see if they really did fit into our remote culture and understood our processes.
Highlighting it helped us find people who fit well with our culture, and as a result made us a happy, productive, and collaborative team.
I was wrong to think that a remote team for a young startup wouldn't work. Part of it was just my inexperience. What I ended up learning was that it can actually afford employees a lot of freedom and flexibility, especially if you hire the right people. But just like other aspects of a startup, you have to highlight what is and isn't feasible, listen to employee concerns, and put in place processes that are reasonable and their benefits or drawbacks can be clearly measured.
Silicon chip tech? Bah humbug. For the future of computer power, you may have to look no further than the graphite in the pencil in your desk drawer.
There's some really very clever innovation going on in semiconductor design, and for the next couple of generations of silicon chips this means we'll be able to jam still more transistors into an ever smaller space on their shiny gray surfaces. Our computers will get faster, and more powerful as a result. But no matter how clever we are at this task, there's a looming stop sign for silicon chips, based on the immutable laws of physics. Simultaneously we're beginning to realize that these simple, boring old boolean algebra–based chips are pretty limiting in their own way. So where next? University of California researchers have just served up an innovation of their own to help answer this, and it's all about wonder material graphene.
Graphene is remarkable in so many ways, from the randomness of its discovery (literally by peeling atom–thick layers of the stuff from a common lump of carbon graphite via some Scotch tape) to the extraordinary number of industries it could revolutionize.
But when it comes to semiconductor chip designs, graphene has a problem: It doesn't have an energy band gap. This is the property of a material that determines, for example, if it's a conductor (with a thin band gap), or a semiconductor (with a thicker and highly tuneable band gap). The band gap determines all sorts of things about how semiconductors work, including the way electricity flows through a transistor. There have been efforts to force graphene to have a band gap, and thus behave like a semiconductor, but these are said to have failed to produce a workable material in different ways.
What the new team, from the University of California, Riverside Bourn's College of Engineering has found, is a way to use the non–band gap properties of graphene to process information in a different way. They've discovered that if you let go of the need to have wholly on or wholly off transistors driving chips that use math based on ones and zeros, you can create "non–Boolean" chips from graphene.
The team looked at what's called the negative differential resistance behavior of field–effect transistors made of graphene. Resistance in an electronic device like a resistor typically means that when you increase the current running through the device, the voltage goes up too. The opposite happens in the graphene devices, which demonstrate dropped voltage as current goes up. The weird behavior actually lets you design strange new transistors that can process different voltage values instead of merely flipping between current and no current for the zeros and ones in a silicon chip.
Considering that graphene works like this on a nanoscopic scale, it could allow future engineers to design extremely tiny non–linear circuits that consume very low electrical power and which flip through the various states needed to perform calculations incredibly fast. No "ones" or "zeros" in sight. This is a lot like the way your brain works, remember. Good job we're working on new programming languages for this tech already, eh?
Teenage Engineering's office doesn't have a doorbell. You knock on a garage door, which is hauled aside to reveal something like a Batcave, if the Batcave had been designed by a committee of minimalist Swedes who collect white Lamborghinis. A series of diminutive electric cars lines one wall. Desks, packing boxes, prototypes, and sports cars compete for attention in the all–white space. The garage also houses a 3–D printer, a laser cutter, 1980s arcade games, a workshop, and a roomful of vintage synthesizers and turntables.
Despite the industrial clutter, the team that works in the space has been tremendously productive. In 2011, Teenage released its first product, the OP–I portable synthesizer, to near universal acclaim. CEO and cofounder Jesper Kouthoofd says that working in the garage allowed the team to be flexible about considering risky projects like the OP–I.
"We had different backgrounds, so we did a lot of different stuff and we needed a space that was a little bit flexible," says Kouthoofd. "I would say that the garage opened up for us to start building machines. We would have said no to those kinds of projects if we didn't have a garage. In a sense, the garage pushed us to be more physical."
The OP–I counts Beck (a beta tester), Depeche Mode, and Jean Michel Jarre among its fans, and one DJ has even made an entire album on it. But before releasing the device, the team had never developed a product before. Most of Teenage Engineer's founders are self–taught engineers who started off in the media world. Kouthoofd directed TV ads. Another founder, David Mollerstedt, headed up the audio team at EA's DICE studio, which produced the Battlefield and Mirror's Edge games. What they all had in common was an interest in sound and a nostalgia for physical interfaces.
The founders grew up in the 1980s and played around with the home computers and Japanese synthesizers of that era. Working with hardware as well as software meant dealing with, and sometimes pushing, physical limitations. Kouthoofd says these experiences helped shape the OP–1.
"To have a portable machine which is dedicated to making music is a big difference compared to a computer, on which you can do a lot of other stuff," he explains. "We hope that you get a little bit more focused and perhaps a little bit more creative as well. One of the most inspiring things about the OP–1 is that it can't do everything that a computer can do. Those limits boost the creativity. Limitations are OP–1's biggest feature."
This same emphasis on the limitations imposed by physical interactions runs throughout the company's garage work space and clearly influences the way the team works. The garage office gives Teenage Engineering's staff of 17 electronic and mechanical engineers, software developers, and designers license to experiment.
"Usually you have an idea and then you go and manufacture it, but we buy the machine first and then explore the machine itself––a router or a laser cutter or a 3–D printer," says Kouthoofd. "Then you start to experiment and think 'What can I do with this machine?' We love machines and we want to see what happens when you put a creative person next to the machine as opposed to a classical engineer. Buying a machine before you know what to do with it is a big part of the whole Teenage Engineering approach."
Teenage doesn't limit this approach strictly to work. Kouthoofd wants his employees to feel comfortable exploring all of their passions in life in the space, which explains the cars.
"I collected Italian cars and another guy also did that," says Kouthoofd. "It's a nice way to mix your life, your hobbies, and your work. If you get tired of doing your website or whatever then you can tinker a little bit with the car or polish it or do something else."
Kouthoofd says the combination of work and play also helps the company attract the right people. Teenage wants to find people who are interested in figuring out how and what to work on on their own, instead of taking orders. The open office, with no cubicles or meeting rooms, communicates this vision to visitors instantly. There's another benefit, too. Because there's space for everyone to bring a little of themselves into the office, Kouthoofd says it helps the company find and keep a diverse set of employees.
"We work a lot with trying to keep this mixture because otherwise it will be guys in their 30s only," he says. "We try to bring in as many girls as we can, which is really hard in the engineering world (there are currently 5 women in the team), and also people from different countries."
To further facilitate this mixing of cultures and ideas, Kouthoofd says he might someday expand the garage into a kind of Teenage Engineering hotel. He envisions an open, creative space where visitors could make dinner together, play around with the company's products, and borrow one of their electric cars.
"Sometimes the garage is a little bit closed because you don't want to show the world everything you do," he explains. "So maybe we need another space that is a little bit more open but still creative. I know that Ikea, they have this policy now that if you go abroad and stay at a friend's place then you get paid more than if you booked a hotel room. They really want to nurture this social thing, take care of your friends and family and spend more time with them. I really like that. Work and life should be one unit and not two separate units."
For now, Kouthoofd is busy working on Teenage Engineering's latest project, the OD–11, which is a perfect blend of the company's passions for physical environments, human connections, and digital technology. The OD–11 is cloud speaker that takes a 1974 Swedish design and adds a built–in computer, a 100–watt amplifier and, Wi–Fi connection. All cloud speakers are automatically connected to each other. The speaker points toward the ceiling to bounce sound across the entire room.
"I am really super–excited about the cloud speaker, especially by the software side," says Kouthoofd. "The platform opens up so many new ways to listen to music when all the speakers are connected. It looks like a boring box now but it's like a creative bomb we are building."
Until now, if you wanted to step up from desktop scanners to professional film negative scanning, you needed to be willing to drop a pretty penny. That's why these hackers bolted together their own DIY automatic film scanner with little more than a DSLR, base materials, and a lightbox.
From tiny toilet paper tubes to cardboard and clamps, the DIY DSLR lightbox has been around for a few years, but only for traditional 35mm film, the dominant format for film and still photography. This new model is specifically for large–format film, from the popular 4"x5" format (which is 16 times the size of a 35mm frame––and thus has 16 times the resolution) up to 8"x10", after which it reaches "ultra large" format resolution.
Consumer desktop scanners have always lacked the resolution that superior professional options like drum scanners or high–end flatbed scanners offer, but both alternatives are costly (drum scanners in particular can go for upwards of $25,000) and run on older computer systems, making them hard for consumers to manage.
This DIY rig, on the other hand, appears to cost a fraction of the price for quality superior to a high–end flatbed. The scanner, built by Large Format Photography forum user Peter de Smidt, is controlled by an Adafruit Uno microcontroller with two Easystepper drivers for axis movement and a Nikon D600 (likely the costliest component at $2,000 retail) with a 55mm lens. For a 4"x5" negative, the scanner takes 25 individual scans using the D600 and then stitches them together with software called "Scanduino" built by Flickr user ReallySmall––which is also used in a parallel project by Smidt's Large Format Photography forum co–conspirator Daniel Moore. Though extremely large formats might need an expanded rig, the lightbox used appears to support up to 8"x10" negatives.
Only a decade ago, things looked much different from the top. And while Apple changed the economies of scale, is there any reason to think of mimicry as anything more than flattery?
Android has long suffered at the hands of reluctant updates from manufacturers and carriers. Their solution? Cut out the middle man . . . and the user.
Amid arrests and allegations of governmental conspiracy, the Taiwanese tech giant finds itself embroiled in a soap opera of sorts. On top of everything, their former VP of Product Design has temporary amnesia.
Little consideration is given to the textiles behind the newest trend in tech; but without them, we'd still be stuck with slap–bracelets and Hypercolor.
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office confirmed that the tech giant has patented a three finger gesture for a proximity based UI. Not really a shocker . . .
A recent filing by Google claims that "a person has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information he voluntarily turns over to third parties." Oh, so it's that kind of party . . .
Steve Jobs left Apple twice, this time for good. Larry Ellison explains hot the tech giant couldn't live with the cofounder, but can't live without him.
Researchers believe that repetition of tasks makes for simpler neural pathways and a less energy–indulgent brain. Monkey see, monkey do, monkey do better next time.
Programmers often turn a cold shoulder to the greats who came before them, dooming them to the same frigid, digital landscape developed years ago. Don't forget your booties . . .
As Internet traffic multiplies exponentially, network infrastructures will no longer be sufficient by the end of the decade. Antonio Liotta's getting nervous.
Some of the best ideas in human history are the last to catch on, but why? This renaissance surgeon reminds us the road to nowhere is paved with good inventions.
The NSA handed out its first "Best Scientific Cybersecurity Paper" award last week to a most ungracious recipient. Joseph Bonneau bites the hand that feeds him.
Learning to code can be intimidating. Here's a way to teach yourself a new language, within your own specific time frame. Don't forget the marshmallows.
Apple says they're not entirely sure if any confidential information fell into the wrong hands during Thursday'ss security breach. Wait, which are the wrong hands again?
Sixty–three recently embarrassed tech companies are calling for more transparency in surveillance requests. What are the chances the NSA sees right through them?
There are seemingly endless formats for site design across platforms. Casey Frechette reminds us of a "core Web principle": It's all in the way you look at it.
Sam Whited and Adam Wilcox have grown tired of the Google's ever–changing landscape, so they're cutting it out. Here's a peak at their new preferences.
The cell giant's network extender can be modified into a small transmission tower capable of picking up all cell traffic in its range. Someone alert the NSA . . .
Though not without faults of its own, Bitmessage offers users concerned with their privacy some peace of mind. How this hacker favorite might go mainstream.
A Tennessee lawyer filed suit against Apple claiming damages from devices that can display porn, and his own subsequent addiction. The first step is admitting this is someone else's problem.
Myriad Genetics' recent claim to DNA ownership looks like an unethical cash grab aimed at exploiting inequalities in the American health care system. Joseph E. Stiglitz reminds us everything that shines ain't patent leather.
Researchers at the University of Michigan launched a kickstarter aimed at funding revolutionary new space probes they believe can be sent millions of miles into space. And they're no bigger than a breadbox.
The next generation online archive features increased functionality changing the way we view the past. But it's the technology behind it that's really in flux.
Michael Hansen shot video demonstrating how varying levels of programming skill affect a coder's pattern recognition while reading script. This just in: Practice makes perfect.
Interaction Design is a relatively new field and not everyone knows it well. Christian Vasile touches on the basics and lays down a working foundation for rest of us.
More than half the social media users in the UK say they are willing to share private information for a more personalized web experience. England as an open book? Hey, a deal's a deal.
The small business landscape has changed drastically in the last 25 years. So will investors make more money moving forward or less? Paul Graham says more. Lots more.
The Data Journalism awards showed that the genre is gaining traction. Frederic Filloux shares three personal insights into the ever–changing DJ landscape.
Fifteen years ago, the NSA assured the American people that our security and privacy were their top priority. Bruce Schneier takes a look at what changed.
Sigurdur "Siggi" Thordarson hid inside WikiLeaks as an FBI informant for three months and $5000. Secrets, secrets are no fun . . . and they don't pay for shit either.
Mark Suster knows how to build business relationships, and not with emails. The entrepreneur–turned–venture capitalist lists seven ways to improve your asking strategies. It's face time.
Adii Pienaar employs cognitive dissonance in defense of PublicBeta's premium pricing structure. Either it makes you money or saves you money, but no matter what, it costs you money. You decide.
Apple claims it doesn't share your information with the government. Cryptographer Matthew Green reveals two truths about iMessage's user security that might surprise you. Say metadata decryption 10 times fast.
In 2008, eBay found itself lost within the next generation of search engines. Marcus Wohlsen explains how chief technology officer Mark Carges took action, forsook auction.
YouTube recognizes the importance of progress bars, so they're reinventing the wheel. Instant gratification, here we come! It's the best thing since . . . how does that one go again?
Guest writer Elizabeth Yin lists the things developers look for most in a technical cofounder, and a number of ways to gain traction. Remember the three things that matter least in tech startups: Location, location, location.
Digg is slated to replace Google Reader by July 1. And while that may not be nearly enough time for some, Andrew McLaughlin keeps his promises . . . with gusto.
There's a hassle–free introduction to iOS 7 available online. And while it may not be the smoothest transition, it gets the job done. Recumbo shows us what's what.
"The Superior Human?" questions whether or not human beings are superior to all other life forms. Humans: A) Rule; B) Are a disease; C) Abhor a Vacuum; D) Ain't so great after all. Cadell Last examines all of the above.
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) developed the world's fastest quadruped robot and hopes the Cheetah–cub stimulates search–and–rescue–related progress in robotics. Now if they'd only get to work on a bionic St. Bernard and some digital brandy . . .
Tom Waddington did some digging and found a mute button programmed into the popular photo sharing app. But don't get your hopes up, Facebook is likely to stay mum at Thursday's event.
Ghostery shares data with the same industry its users avoid at all cost. Scott Meyer explains how he keeps his consumers close, and his customers closer.
Ray Kurzweil believes medical advances in the last 1000 years suggest that humans may outpace organic decay. Someone alert the Social Security Administration . . . whenever.
NPR's latest hotshot developer is leaving news for Twitter. Wright tells Nieman Journalism Lab why design is the most prominent challenge to modern journalism. The solution is simple.
The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act makes life a living hell for whistle–blowers and highlights some glaring holes in the justice system. Just whom are we locking up?
Facebook rode hip–hop to the tip–top. Cade Metz explains how the world's most prominent social network continues growing and preserves "The Hacker Way."
Bijan Sabet outlines the difference in funding two types of startups and reveals his love affair with the consumer world. Maybe we're not just dreamers after all . . .
Outlining a plan doesn't mean it will execute properly, but it sure helps. Kenton Kivestu nails down the framework necessary in any product development process.
Physical stores may be going the way of the dinosaur, but showrooming is by no means extinct. Casey Johnston shines some light on a new online model. Might wanna try on some sunglasses...
The NSA is gleaning information off of some of the biggest players on the web. Matthew Ingram explains why having an independent leaks repository is invaluable.
Technological progress increases productivity across the board. But are those same advances costing people their jobs? Illah Nourbakhsh discusses the inconvenient truth surrounding the rise of machines.
Cops can't figure out the latest technology in car theft, and neither can automakers. Can signal repeaters used in conjunction with keys in close proximity be the answer? Repeat . . . Police stumped.
The U.S. government monitors our every digital move. The NSA compiles vast databases of emails, calls, and browsing history. So why does China get all the credit?
Apple and Google have long vied for control of the mobile marketshare. Mary Ellen Gordon breaks down the race and explains the difference between devie– and app–share. Win, place, and show us the analytics.
Ever wonder what's going on inside your computer? Photographer Mark Crummett employs his world lass diorama skills to open up a whole new world in his new show "Ghosts in the Machine."
Brooklyn's Breakfast invented an interactive street sign. Drawing from a user interface, social media, and even RSS feeds, Points can show you the way to your heart's desire. Now, where the hell is Wall–Drug?
Too often, our process gets mucked up on account of feelings. Cap Watkins explains how letting go and opening up during the earlier stages of design can alleviate creative pains.
Carpal tunnel got you down? As the sun sets on hand–coding, Tomasz Tunguz explains the not–so–subtle nuances of dictation, and gives his wrists a well–deserved break.
Google takes aim at Amazon's Prime subscription with Shopping Express. From cosmetics to toys, they deliver anything within a few hours of your order. No toilet paper? Keep your seat. They'll be right over.
Thalmic Labs raised $14.5 million for its MYO Armband. With over 30,000 pre–orders already, the Canadian startup is poised to usher in a new era of touchless computing.
Some suggest that media is going the way of the American automobile. Matthew Ingram explains who's on cruise control, and who's bucking the motor trend.
Developers notoriously reject paying for necessary technology. In fact, many of them waste weeks writing their own, bug–riddled programs. But they will pay for services, like the cloud. What's the deal?
Beneath Google's do–gooder facade lies something more akin to a Heart of Darkness. The tech giant got into bed with Washington, and now they're working together to implement the West's next–generation, imperialist status quo. But don't look, they're watching.
The crowd–funding site has never really been about technology, but new requirements make it even harder to raise money for gadgets. Artists aside, it's time to look elsewhere for cash.
Microsoft's "integrated" operating system never worked well for tablets or PCs. How InfoWorld aims to dissolve this unholy union and salvage what should be a healthy, digital relationship.
FanGirls compiled a miscellaneous iOS wish list for all the good girls (and boys) to see. From Wi–Fi and Bluetooth to file systems and bugs, here are eight reasonable expectations for the future of iOS.
David Lee uses Paul Graham's essay "Startup=Growth" as a jumping off point to explain the metrics of growth. And don't worry if you've lost your mathematical touch, he has too.
Andy Cush explains how Diego Pellicer plans to become America's first real marijuana chain. They're looking for $10 million in investments to expand into three new states. They must be high . . .
Pirate 3D is bringing the revolution to your doorstep, and for a heck of a lot cheaper than their competitors. Their goal? Get these things out to kids and see what prints.
How do you create Medium and change publishing forever? By first gaining audience with the man behind Twitter, duh. And a couple other Obvious ones . . .
Google is laying off its App developers in Argentina on account of a logistical banking nightmare. Really, it's just paperwork. In a related story, interest in Google's Internship remains underwhelming.
You've met Big Brother, now meet "Little Brother." How the same technological developments advancing institutional surveillance are ushering in a new era of civilian watchdogs.
Can we see some identification? Mt. Gox announces new verification procedures in response to a recent money laundering investigation into one of its competitors. And they've got their own legal problems, too .
The Wall Street Journal is working to connect everyone invested in the Dow Jones on a more private, financial network with chat. Suddenly, Bloomberg's got some competition.
Developers read code more than anyone. David Bryant Copeland argues aesthetic in addition to content, and the importance of typography and readability of source code.
Tim Cook explained yesterday why there are a million different iPods, only one iPhone, and the importance of consumers' desires and needs. But will things be different after the WWDC?
To Brian Katz, BYOD is "about ownership––nothing more and nothing less." Why allowing people use of their own devices increases the likelihood that they will use the device productively.
Ever wonder if your doctors' hands were clean? So did North Shore University Hospital. New technology sends live video of hospital employees' hand–washing habits . . . to India.
Blog functionality has increased considerably in the last 10 years, but has that overcomplicated things? Here's a list from Matt Gemmell (aka the Irate Scotsman) of ways to simplify. Your readers will thank you for it.
Cost– and value–based pricing may at first appear in contrast to each other, but they exist for different kinds of consumers. Tomasz Tunguz explains some solutions to justify your pricing model and maximize your profits.
Google is already using blimp and satellite technology to bring the Internet to the farthest reaches of the planet. What they really want is television's white space, but they've got a fight on their hands.
The writer's landscape has changed. But with so many new options comes confusion. How do authors with something to say decide where, and to whom, they say it?
Researchers at Georgia Tech University are working to shed light on one of the Internet's unsolved mysteries. Here are 14 statistically significant methods with which you can increase your presence on Twitter.
With the launch of fastFT, Financial Times hopes to keep its readers closer than ever by providing a 100–250–word service for news. 8 journalists are now tasked with breaking the most important financial stories from all over the world.
Tomorrow, Yahoo will reveal its new, permanent logo after spending the last month unveiling a different version of its iconic mark every day. The "30 Days Of Change" campaign has been called everything from a confusing stunt to a brilliant rebranding effort, but no one knows if the company is actually considering using one of the 30–day logos as its permanent mark.
Luke Wroblewski, a designer who worked at Yahoo and was involved in the 2008 redesign of the logo that changed it from red to purple, thinks he might know the answer. After leaving the company, Wroblewski went on to found Polar, a popular iOS social polling app, which he's been using to test each day's new logo against the original. His series of polls now have over 112,000 votes, and although the results are unscientific, he thinks the data shows that Yahoo is probably seriously testing a few logos, and using the rest as marketing gimmicks.
"Let's say they're hedging their bets. They've got a couple of things they think are okay, but they're not 100% sure," Wroblewski speculates. "So they're like, 'let's make this big thing about it and let's roll them out there and let's just make sure that the stuff we pick is actually right, so that we're not totally shooting ourselves in the foot and what we put out there everybody's going to hate.'"
Most of the new logos are losing, badly, to the original, which Wroblewski says is natural given that people tend to hate change in general. But the day 10 logo has been consistently beating the original logo on Polar since it was released.
"[Day] 10 is essentially what they've got today, but they removed the serifs. It's kind of like a sans–serif iteration," explains Wroblewski. "And sans–serif in general feels a little bit more modern, so for a tech company that may be what's resonating with people. It still holds a little bit of the Yahoo element, but it's been modernized a tad. Again, to go back to people hating change, that sounds like something that people who hate change would resonate with."
The logos from day two and day five are effectively tied with the original logo, trailing 45% to 55% and 44% to 56% respectively. Unlike day 10, these logos don't retain any of the style of the original, which Wroblewski says is impressive given how much people hate change.
"I actually thought it was pretty good when two of them tied with the original," he says. "Two and five I think did well because they're actually pretty decent standalone marks. They seem to have a little bit more aesthetic integrity on their own. You look at them and you're like 'okay, yeah, those kind of look nice.' Some of the other ones, I must say, are just over the top. You can hear the designer chatter being like, 'are they serious? Are they really considering this one?'"
Day four, for example, fared particularly poorly compared to the original, winning just 14% of the vote. Wroblewski calls the mark mechanical and says it clashes with warm, human brand Yahoo has built over the years.
"There's been some serious stinkers," he says. "Maybe a couple of them they're actually considering, but some are just out there to––they'd never do it. If they do, the world would be stunned if they pick that one."
According to Wroblewski, one of the most interesting features of the 30 Days campaign is that Yahoo isn't just posting the new logos to a blog. They're actually releasing new logos, every day, on every single Yahoo property, from news to finance to shopping. This includes mobile sites, where Yahoo has even gone to the trouble of designing the shortened logo that features just a Y and an exclamation point, known internally as the "YBang."
If the company knows some logos aren't serious, why go through all the effort of designing and releasing them every day, on every single site? Wroblewski speculates that it's part of an effort to bring the company together around the redesign.
"You're living with it for a day," says Wroblewski. "I hope to God everybody at Yahoo is using Yahoo products, and so during the day that they're using all those Yahoo products they're seeing it the entire day. That part of it to me is the most interesting and leads me to think they're taking it at least somewhat seriously."
If the idea of forcing a company to live with design choices sounds familiar, look no further than Google, the company where Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer worked for 13 years. Google underwent a similar design overhaul that started two years ago––during Mayer's tenure––and forced all of its products to unite under a single brand identity. Wroblewski says Yahoo's effort bears some resemblance to Google's company–wide redesign.
"Say what you will about Google, but I would say their design has definitely leveled up as a result of that mandate," argues Wroblewski. "There's definitely something to be said about aligning teams and forcing everybody to get on the same page by making them align visually."
In an industry which constantly wrings its hands about how impossibly difficult it is to find female engineers, a startup called Levo League has built a majority–female development team without even trying. The product itself is a career site for twentysomething women, providing mentoring, advice, and meetups, but the company didn't set out to hire women especially––it just sort of happened.
"We never set out to have a female dev team," says CTO Sara Chipps. "We interviewed a ton of engineers and we ended up with our pretty diverse team organically." How is that possible?
"We know from the research that people do feel more comfortable with mentors who look like them, and unfortunately that also applies to gender," says cofounder Caroline Ghosn. "By virtue of Sara being a developer and being who she is, that attracts engineers who are both women and men."
Levo League has some notable backers. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg is an investor. Warren Buffet is a Levo League mentor. FastCoLabs quizzed Ghosn and Chipps––who told us just before we published this story that she will step down as CTO to devote more time to her Girl Develop It project, but will remain an advisor ––on how Levo League built a female–friendly development team.
If you don't know any female developers, you are probably not going to find them via your existing network. Identify people who are connected into different ones. "I've never had a problem finding female engineers," says Chipps. "I am involved in the community a lot so I do run into them. Most of our hires are actually people that I knew personally beforehand. I know a ton of them."
"If your culture is one of homogeny and you want to introduce diversity, then your culture does need to change," says Chipps. "The most important thing to focus on is understanding how to communicate with people in the way that they communicate. A lot of teams have their culture which they expect any new members to adapt to. They are resistant to incorporating that person's style into their culture. Teams have an established dynamic and can be averse to changing the way they interact or communicate. A lot of teams are afraid of that, but that's the whole point. Diversity makes better teams, and learning how to communicate with lots of different people makes your products better."
"Our culture is not competitive, "says Chipps. "I have found many engineering teams to be super–competitive. Who knows the most about XYZ? The skill set in our team is really broad and everyone is super–open to teaching anyone anything. Some team members are better at JavaScript, some are better at Rails. Everyone does pair programming. Pairing has worked as a great way to broaden everyone's skill set. Mentoring is what the Levo League product is focused on and it's also how we build it. Everyone on our team at some point is a mentor. Every developer has something to contribute. It's all about teaching each other and not about proving ourselves."
"Sara has compressed and delivered some of her Girl Develop It classes to the entire Levo team," says Ghosn. "Many members of our team don't have a technical background but it's important for them to have a certain level of empathy with how things are getting built so they can be better teammates to the engineers. Lila was on the business development team and she had a lot of knowledge about what the companies need on the job board. She spent the day pairing with an engineer and she was able to contribute business insights but also understand how the product she uses every day is being built. It started as pair programming within the engineering team and now it's been a way to improve the communication outside of that team."
Chipps explained further how this breaks down barriers within the company. "There was a really interesting article that came out about a month and a half ago called something like That Effing Marketing Chick," she says (meaning this piece entitled 'Misogyny and the Marketing Chick'). "It focuses on how startups think we just need a bunch of developers and some marketing girl who doesn't understand technology. Things like that really do create that rift––that the marketing people don't know and developers do know. If you can make sure that everyone on your team does have the technical knowledge, you are ensuring that those misunderstandings don't happen."
"Sometimes it's about being open to giving people opportunities to transition, to coach someone through a transition into development," says Ghosn. Chipps explains further. "Brenda was a Girl Develop It student and I really wanted her to work at Levo. I knew she would make a great contribution. She was interviewing for design jobs and when she heard that the role would be really heavy on development she was like 'Oh that's probably not something I can do.' I had seen her take all our classes and work as a TA in our classes so I knew what she was capable of. So I was like 'Brenda, you are being ridiculous. Come here and if you find it's too hard we will work something out.' Brenda has exceeded every expectation I have ever set for her. She is now our lead front–end developer. She mentors two junior developers."
Ghosn explains that there are multiple examples of this type of transition on Levo League's team. "We have Zahra who was an architecture Masters student and learned to program. We hired her straight out of her programming bootcamp. When you create an environment where people feel open to taking on new challenges and they feel supported and mentored, they can really blossom."
Terri Oda is a mathematician who has been teaching Computer Science for seven years. She gets very frustrated when people argue that biological differences in the mathematical ability of the genders account for the low numbers of women in software. So she made a mischievous slide set explaining why they are wrong.
Why did you create the slideshow?
Women in computing tend to have to waste an awful lot of time answering questions related to being a woman in computing. Case in point: My male colleagues are doing science while I'm taking time to answer this email. So I wanted to make something short, funny, and easy to pass around so women could turn those stupid arguments on their heads. Judging from the emails I've gotten, it's been pretty effective!
If it's not biology, then why aren't there more women in software?
My personal guess is that it's a combination of factors. Subtle and not–so subtle discouragement, outright harassment, cultural disparities that result in both young girls and adult women having less free time, young men stereotyped as bad communicators so they gravitate to careers not known for communication, more young men diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders so they gravitate towards places like Silicon Valley where it's common, etc. etc. It's a hard subject to study and because so much of it is cultural, the answer is probably changing constantly.
As a CS teacher, what do you think could help increase the numbers?
Because I don't think there's a single answer to what causes the problem, I don't think there's a single solution. Here are a few ideas:
We should make sure students understand that CS is about practice, not inherent genius, so that when young women try to program and run into simple bugs they don't assume people were right about women in computing and give up, but instead realize that they just need more practice. Better teaching helps everyone, but it helps those inclined to give up more.
We should do a better job of retaining women. It's cute to teach 8–year–olds how to program, but harder to deal with adult women who've had experiences with harassment. When my students ask me what it's like to be a woman in computing, I have to tell them bad stories as well as good, and that's not always very encouraging.
We need to find a way to better socialize the men in computing. 2/3 of women in computer science experience sexual harassment, and I got into online feminism after I received a death threat from a fairly well–known troll. It's outright ridiculous how these things thrive in a community of people who pride themselves on their intelligence.
We should do a better job of making people understand that CS skills are useful even if you don't plan to follow a typical programmer career path. My sister, for example, is a biologist who uses her programming skills to help her keep track of information so she can help the Canadian government make better decisions about public safety. Many young women gravitate towards positions where computer science skills could make them key players, but they don't realize it's worth the effort.
Developer Auction lets employers bid on top tech talent in competitive two–week auctions. For each auction, the company filters thousands of developers down to a few hundred of the best profiles. Employers can make these candidates job offers which include salary, equity, and signing bonus details.
Founder Matt Mickiewicz has noticed a curious phenomenon on the site. "Women represent just 7% of the candidates in our marketplace but 12% of our Top 100 most all–time popular developers," says Mickiewicz. "Our top ever engineer in our marketplace was a woman who got 24 offers and had a Computer Science degree from Stanford." According to the site, most developers receive between 5 and 15 offers.
Here's where things get strange. The median offer to a female engineer on Developer Auction is $100,000 versus $120,000 for her male counterpart. The average offer is $103,500 for women as opposed to $118,400 for men. The highest ever offer to a female engineer, the aforementioned all–time most popular coder on Developer Auction, was $160,000 while the top salary offer to a man was $240,000.
To put this in context, developers with H1B visas also get lower salary offers and 32% fewer job offers than average on Developer Auction. But they still get higher offers than women. H1B holders receive a median offer of $117.5,000 and $114,500 average offer.
I asked Mickiewicz why he thought female developers get more job offers but at lower salaries and whether there are significant differences between the years of experience or in–demand skills in the profiles of Developer Auction's female versus male candidates. "I think it's just the gender–wage gap that's seen in other industries," he said. Since employers don't see the minimum salary requirements of developers on the site, the salary gap can't be down to female engineers setting lower minimum salaries. There's also no salary negotiation at the auction stage (offers are non–binding and may be renegotiated at the interview stage), so the difference cannot be accounted for by the much–cited theory that women need help with salary negotiation.
The software business has a pretty good reputation when it comes to the gender wage gap. A 2012–2013 salary survey from tech recuitment site Dice showed a minimal difference between the earnings of male and female software engineers. Men earned $95,929 per year as opposed to $87,527 for women in the survey but Dice concluded that the gap was due to different job titles. "Average salaries are equal for male and female tech pros, provided we're comparing equal levels of experience and education and parallel job titles," says the press release.
A report from PayScale this year cited similar statistics. In PayScale's data, median pay for male software engineers in Seattle, for example, was $89,400 while women earn $79,000. Economist Katie Bardaro was quoted in the report as saying that when you control for years of experience and job responsibilities, the wage gap for women decreases to 97 cents on the dollar for men.
The four women who were promoted––Amy Hood, Julie Larson–Green, Lisa Brummel, and Tami Reller––are now in four of Microsoft's 13 Executive Vice President positions. The move has already garnered some positive press for the tech giant, which is not altogether undeserved.
But if you cast an ever–so–slightly critical eye at the facts, there's still plenty of room for improvement. First of all, three of these new executives are in positions that don't directly touch on any Microsoft development teams: Brummel is EVP, Human Resources; Hood is EVP and Chief Financial Officer; Reller is EVP, Marketing. Only Larson–Green, in her position as EVP of Devices and Studios, which oversees the Xbox and Surface, is directly responsible for development teams and has a software development background.
While we certainly applaud any lifting of the glass ceiling for women within Microsoft, it's also fairly self–evident that to get more women programmers, big–cap companies may need more women managing programmers. In fairness, only four of Microsoft's 14 executive positions (counting CEO Steve Ballmer) are explicitly development–related. The 1:3 women to men ratio fits company–wide and even industry–wide trends, which I've previously covered in this tracking story. (To see stats, scroll down to the entry below entitled "Hard Numbers.")
Still, it's not all fun and games for Larson–Green. In fact, it's games that have already presented one major headache. After it was revealed that she would be stepping in for Don Mattrick in charge of Xbox, online news comment threads were filled with all manner of vitriol aimed at Larson–Green for nothing more than her gender. It's well–documented that gaming is a particularly male–dominated subset of the technology world, with plenty of room for improvement, but frankly we didn't expect this severe a reaction.
Company–wide, Microsoft's employee gender breakdown is under 25% female, and while the company doesn't offer gender breakdowns by job title, I'd wager that the ratio of females in programmer roles to non–programmer roles is much lower than the same ratio for male Microsoft employees. (The disparity is likely offset in the overall numbers by Microsoft's enormous publishing, marketing, and publicity arms, which in most large companies are traditionally more populated by women.) Microsoft isn't a lone pariah of gender inequality in the tech world––it's just archetypal of the sort of frat–like companies we hope will change.
Ross Baird founded the Village Capital startup accelerator program four years ago to assist mission–driven companies tackling major social problems, who might not otherwise get access to capital. At the end of each program, the 15 or so companies in a cohort select two of their peers to receive a $50,000 investment.
Now he has a problem. Roughly half of the 250 Village Capital alumni companies have a female cofounder, but those companies are 50% less likely to get follow–on funding than those with all–male founding teams. This is in spite of the fact that female–led Village Capital companies are 15% more likely to be profitable and 78% more likely to be selected by their peers for investment.
"The process favors entrepreneurs who are more substantive and less flashy," says Baird. "We find that women tend to under–promise, over–deliver, hit milestones but are maybe not as free to brag about themselves up on stage. Men, and I say this fully aware of being one, will oversell anything. Women undersell and this is a problem particularly in fundraising across our alumni. The shift in power dynamic in peer selection corrects for some of that. One of our female entrepreneurs has said that she often felt like she didn't get a fair shake in the traditional investment process in that she wasn't really given the time to demonstrate her value, to demonstrate what she was creating."
Baird thinks that the power imbalance between investors and founders is a bad thing for everyone. "Many startups are trying to figure out what investors will invest in. There is an overemphasis on 'What do investors like?' and less emphasis on 'What value can we provide to the world?' Raising money should not be your primary goal as a startup. We say that if you build a company which solves a major problem and people are willing to pay you to get the problem solved then investment will come. Investment is the result of achieving your goals. It shouldn't be the goal itself."
As a result, Village Capital's program concentrates on customer validation, acquisition, and revenue rather than pitching to investors. On top of the peer–to–peer review process, this emphasis on customers may favor women. "'We will get as many users as possible and we will figure out how to monetize them later' is not in the long term a successful business strategy. A lot of what we do in the program is distinguishing between customers and users. In the peer–to–peer process, customer acquisition rather than user acquisition is rewarded," says Baird.
That peer–to–peer review process involves three open peer ranking sessions where each company ranks the others based on team, product, customer, financials, scale, and return of capital. The final session results in the selection of the teams which get an investment. Baird insists that that process is more productive for everyone than the traditional investment model.
"In the prize mentality or the 'get the investment' mentality in a startup competition, two people get funding, 15 people get skewered and ripped apart by people trying to make themselves look good, and the non–winners just don't get anything," explains Baird. "In the peer–reviewed process everyone gets something out of it. Entrepreneurs when they give feedback to each other are very thoughtful because they care a lot about each other and if they are unfair to each other it comes back to them. The process is productive even for the non–winners." Could this emphasis on collaboration, rather than competitive pitching, be the key to the success of female entrepreneurs in the Village Capital program?
When I ask Baird to choose his favorite Village Capital graduate he doesn't hesitate. "Kickboard. Peer selected from the first program. The founder is a woman who is a teacher and coder and she has a data management process which allows teachers to manage student performance data so they can improve teaching. She didn't set out to be an entrepreneur. She built this as a teacher to solve problems for other teachers."
Kickboard founder Jen Medbery tried to get the company off the ground for a year before finding Village Capital. Four years later Kickboard has raised $2 million in mainstream capital. "To see her not raising funds in the traditional angel investment world but being the overwhelming favorite of her peers, getting her first investment peer selected and becoming incredibly successful in solving major problems in U.S. education is a story I am really excited about," says Baird.
Growing up in Ireland my three siblings and I had a favorite game; We called it James Bond. One of us would play the coveted role of secret agent, and the remaining siblings tried to stop them from snatching some top secret papers.
The twist? We're all sisters––not a James in the bunch.
As children, nobody ever told us that it was strange for four girls to impersonate James Bond plots. Yet we girls do get the message early and often that engineering is not something for us. The CEO of website builder Moonfruit, Wendy Tan White, recently described in the Guardian how she speaks at schools about careers in technology:
"Raise your hand if you want to work in technology," I ask students. Predictably, but sadly, no hands go up. But when I ask girls to raise their hands if they like Facebook, every arm in the room reaches for the sky. The "geeky" label is still attached to technology in schools, so it's little wonder that students can be indifferent to the subject: it's not presented in a way that's appealing.There needs to be a greater focus on showing what technology allows you to do: cross geographical boundaries; make stuff; unleash your creative side; talk to friends; and share your latest musical creation.
That brings us back to Goldie Blox, a construction kit for girls from the age of six up. CEO Debbie Sterling is herself a Stanford engineering graduate, and after talking to young girls about the toys they love most, she came to a realization: Girls love to read because they love stories. My sisters and I were all voracious readers. "Most construction and engineering kits, which are touted as 'technical and numerical toys,' don't include the storytelling that appeals to many girls," reports Forbes.
So Sterling designed a kit to be used in conjunction with a story book starring a girl inventor called Goldie who builds machines in order to solve problems, in the first book a spinning machine to help her dog chase his tail.
With the Spinning Machine, Sterling introduces girls to the idea of a belt drive and the concept of tension by using a plastic pegboard, spools and ribbon to teach them how to turn one and then multiple wheels as part of a story involving Goldie's dog Nacho and several other characters.
GoldieBlox reached its $150,000 funding target in the first four days of a Kickstarter campaign last year (It eventually raised $285,811) and Toys 'R' Us will stock the $29.99 "GoldieBlox and the Spinning Machine" in more than 600 stores.
This is a generalization of course––but girls are often more interested in machines and technical systems when they are placed in a larger context, where there's a problem to be solved or an obvious benefit to society. It's no coincidence that women study medicine in much higher numbers than engineering, even though both tracks are technical; It's obvious that doctors help people.
Girls don't just want to have fun––they want to know why.
Last month we took a statistical look at how job titles break down by gender. This month we're looking at why women are not represented at the highest levels of their work sectors. (Read back through our previous updates below if you need to get caught up.)
A study published in the May issue of the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin may help. It seems to suggest that women don't take as much credit for their work as their male counterparts, undervaluing their contributions to a project when working with men. From the article's abstract:
Women gave more credit to their male teammates and took less credit themselves unless their role in bringing about the performance outcome was irrefutably clear (Studies 1 and 2), or they were given explicit information about their likely task competence (Study 4). However, women did not credit themselves less when their teammate was female (Study 3).
The full study is unfortunately behind the ivory tower academic paywall, but Wired U.K. has more details on the study and noted that "teamwork is an essential component to most professional roles, so if women repeatedly undervalue themselves in group situations, in front of coworkers and employers, it could be extremely detrimental to overall job progression."
This study offers a strong, plausible reason for why women are not as likely to be recognized as leaders in their workplaces: You often have to speak up for your accomplishments in order to advance in your career.
Another bit of research put out last week in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology reveals that female scientists (evolutionary biologists, in the case of this study) don't present their work at conferences as much as their male colleagues. Apparently, women are underrepresented even in relationship to the gender gap that already exists in science fields. In other words, the percentage of female conference presenters is even lower than the percentage of female scientists.
Apparently, one of the main causes of this underrepresentation was that women turned down conference speaking invitations at nearly twice the rate (50 percent) as men (26 percent). One of the study's main authors, Dr. Hannah Dugdale, elaborated on the implications of the study's findings:
"It's important that we understand why this is happening and what we can do to address it––high–quality science by women has low exposure at the international level, and this is constraining evolutionary biology from reaching its full potential. We're currently investigating the reasons behind this lower acceptance rate––it could relate to child–care requirements, lower perception of scientific ability, being uncomfortable with self–promotion––there are many potential contributing factors."
It could also be related to the social psychology study above: If women don't feel as confident in their accomplishments, then they may feel underqualified to speak at international conferences.
Obviously neither of these studies look directly at gender dynamics in the software development space. But looking at both of these studies, it seems like some aspects might apply to software while others might not as much. For instance, it's definitely true that women coders are underrepresented in conference keynotes. And the observation of Dugdale's coauthor, Dr. Julia Schroeder, that "[f]ewer women in top positions mean fewer female role models for students who aspire to be scientists" certainly rings true in the software world as well.
On the other hand, depending on what type of developer someone is, they might work on their own a large part of the time, possibly even freelancing from home. In that case, the social psychology of attributing success to male colleagues isn't as relevant. Of course, many developers work in corporate office jobs where that dynamic could very much still be at play.
In other news, the fact that half of NASA's eight newest astronaut trainees are women, selected from a pool of over 6,100 candidates, is a good sign. It shows that some progress is being made in STEM fields more generally, especially considering the fact that until now only 10.7% of the people who have been in space are women. With NASA astronauts being the elite of their fields, not to mention role models for every third grader in the country, having more women in space certainly bodes well for the prospect of more role models for women interested in STEM careers.
The software industry has a gender problem. Men far outnumber women, and while most of those men like (dare we say delight in?) having women around the office, the cool–bro rock star nerd culture makes it harder to attract, hire, retain and––most important––listen to women engineers. We'll be tracking successes, conflicts, and visionaries in this vein, and narrate as the status quo changes. We won't stop tracking this story until there are as many women working in software as men.
We're not the only journalists tracking women's roles in technology. Laura Sydell, a longtime technology reporter for NPR, covers the intersection of technology and culture, and we caught her story a few weeks ago about the changing lives of female programmers. We asked her to give us the behind–the–scenes scoop on her recent piece profiling prominent developer Sarah Allen, who led the team that created Flash video and now runs a mobile app design firm. Sydell has seen the reality of ingrained sexism and thinks that building momentum is the only way to undo industry habits.
"My take is that it's about visibility," Sydell says. "I mean who do you hear about in the news? Who do you see in the news? Twenty percent of programmers are women–that's a significant number," Sydell says. But where is the coverage?
One obstacle is that women in tech are sometimes reluctant to talk about sexism ("like it's a disease they might catch" says Sydell.) She speculates that pointing out a gender disparity at their jobs may not feel like it will ultimately benefit their personal situation. "This doesn't mean they don't experience sexism," Sydell says. "They just want to fit in and they're working hard to get ahead."
If her sources are mum about office sexism, Sydell says, they're even less open about the flaws they see in hiring practices. "I have had some off the record conversations where people are like, 'well I'm afraid to hire a woman if she's around childbearing age because we can't afford for somebody in a startup to take maternity leave.' But nobody says, 'I don't want to hire a man of childbearing age.'"
It makes sense that one obstacle to women's proliferation has stemmed from a lack of computer science exposure in childhood, which can lead women to feel like they are at an insurmountable disadvantage once they start college. Expanding curriculum options and entry–level college courses, efforts being tested at schools like Harvey Mudd in California, may be one solution for leveling the playing field.
"You know unfortunately my take is that a lot of people who get into computers and programming start before college," Sydell says, "which often does turn out to be young guys and so the women end up feeling intimidated."
And it seems like computer science and engineering may currently be taught in a way that caters to how men think and conceptualize problems. "I remember people saying that for some reason guys are much more willing to work in the abstract for longer," Sydell says. "I don't know why this is, but women like to see pretty quickly that something they're building is having an effect."
This perspective could ultimately be a strength that draws women to coding, though, if other barriers are addressed. "It's not that they can't do the abstract," Sydell says, "but once they see that programming can have this immediate effect they get more interested in it."
While reporting for her recent piece, Sydell attended a 25–person mentorship event with Sarah Allen for young entrepreneurs. After the event, the only three women in attendance came over to Allen and started chatting. "None of them talked about discrimination really," Sydell says, but "they did talk about how they sometimes felt isolated. They all mentioned that in school they sought out a female colleague for support." Yet even this small and understandable measure, they feared, could have unintended consequences. "They also debated whether it was possible to do too much networking with other women," explains Sydell. "The problem is that the men have the larger networks and so you don't want to limit your connections."
Sydell has seen progress as an increasing number of hard working and qualified women enter tech, but she has also concluded that only a sustained, concerted effort will continue to draw women into the field. "I think one of the most important things that Sarah Allen said is find an industry where there isn't sexism. If you get up to the higher echelons of anything the world is sexist. And the more money that's involved, the more it seems to be guys. And what's up with that?"
We don't hear from the women who are actually working in software often enough. Ellen Ullman, a former software engineer, recently penned an opinion piece in the New York Times called "How to be a 'Woman Programmer'." It's an important firsthand account of what it actually feels like to be a woman working in technology––invaluable for men like me who will never subjectively know that actual experience.
I looked around and wondered, "Where are all the other women?" We women found ourselves nearly alone, outsiders in a culture that was sometimes boyishly puerile, sometimes rigorously hierarchical, occasionally friendly and welcoming. This strange illness meanwhile left the female survivors with an odd glow that made them too visible, scrutinized too closely, held to higher standards. It placed upon them the terrible burden of being not only good but the best.
Other parts of her article resonate with what we recently found in the gender gap by job title breakdown from Bright Labs: namely, that the more technical a job within the tech sector is, the wider the gender gap tends to be.
We get stalled at marketing and customer support, writing scripts for Web pages. Yet coding, looking into the algorithmic depths, getting close to the machine, is the driver of technology; and technology, in turn, is driving fundamental changes in personal, social and political life.
But perhaps the biggest takeaway for me and other male allies to women working in software, is this: It's important to talk about the challenges facing women in software, but it's just as important to recognize the achievements of women engineers as programmers, not merely as trailblazers. Ullman writes:
But none of it [experience as a programmer] qualified me as extraordinary in the great programmer scheme of things. What seems to have distinguished me is the fact that I was a "woman programmer." The questions I am often asked about my career tend to concentrate not on how one learns to code but how a woman does.
Bright Labs has released new research to Co.Labs about which roles are most male–dominated, and some patterns begin to emerge.
This is one of the most complete snapshots of the gender gap in technology employment we've seen so far. Co.Labs readers have been eating up the slices of data on the gender gap we've been dishing out. It's clear that "women in software" is a topic that begs for more coverage. So we got in touch with our friends at Bright Labs to provide us with some previously unreleased numbers on what the actual gender breakdown is by job title.
The first thing to keep in mind with these numbers is that job titles can be pretty arbitrary and may not actually reflect the kind of work being done by any given individual. With that said, there are a couple of interesting trends worth highlighting here. But first, the stats:
Let's break down these numbers. First of all, it looks like tech support positions tend to bubble up and be the most of a dudefest: IT support, computer technician, network technician, and desktop support technician are all more than 90% male. Does this mean corporate suits feel more comfortable talking to a male IT geek about their problems with Outlook than a female IT worker? Or perhaps the IT help desk is a particularly unfriendly place for women to integrate? Either way, it's important to note that these numbers are domestic; it would be interesting to see the gender breakdown in outsourced IT, or internationally.
On the other hand, "analyst" positions like data analyst, help desk analyst, and senior programmer analyst tend to be the least––though are still significantly––male–dominated, floating between 53.8% and 75% male. With these numbers, we're starting to see a clearer picture now: The less a job deals with the back end of a development environment or network infrastructure, the more open (for whatever reason) it is to women working in that role.
One final interesting data point to note is that senior software developers are 89.5% male, while plain old software developers are only ("only") 78.1% male.
What's the gender breakdown for these positions like in your company? What do you make of these numbers? Do you have your own research you'd like to share? Tweet @jcassano and @FastCoLabs with your facts, insights, and opinions.
Want to improve economic conditions in developing countries? As usual, the best approach is to focus on women.
If women can't get online, then there's no chance they'll get a job in software. Here at Co.Labs we've been on a number–crunching bit when it comes to women in software. So far we've taken a look at two important slices of data: perspectives on obstacles to getting more women in tech and how new tech jobs are mostly going to men. Now we take a look at the third piece of the puzzle: the gender gap in accessing the Internet.
Earlier this year, Intel released a massive study crammed full of useful research. It's a lot to digest, so we've pulled out some of the most provocative trends.
The report focuses on women's access to the World Wide Web, particularly in developing countries. One consistent but unsurprising pattern is that the less economically well–off a country or region is, the wider the digital divide between women and men tends to be.
On average across the developing world, nearly 25 percent fewer women than men have access to the Internet, and the gender gap soars to nearly 45 percent in regions like sub–Saharan Africa. Even in rapidly growing economies, the gap is enormous. Nearly 35 percent fewer women than men in South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa have Internet access, and nearly 30 percent in parts of Europe and across Central Asia. In most higher–income countries, women's Internet access only minimally lags that of men's, and in countries such as France and the United States, women's access, in fact, exceeds men's.
Intel stresses that this is bad for business for two main reasons: first, the loss of revenue from online transactions and second, the reduction in economic opportunity for women who might use the Internet to find work. According to the report, there will organically be 450 million new women online by 2016––the report's main recommendation is to boost this number by another 150 million in that time period. This will reportedly open up market opportunities of at least $50 billion.
Intel's researchers also home in on the fact that 30% of women with reliable Internet access have used it to search for jobs or otherwise improve their economic standing. A lot of efforts to overcome the digital divide work narrowly on just getting more people online. That's great, to be sure. But in a section called "not all access is equally empowering," the authors write:
The Internet can convey numerous benefits to women, but unlocking these benefits depends on how deeply women engage online. "Fully engaging" on the Internet requires feeling conversant––knowing what to look for, how to search, and how to leverage networks, knowledge and services––as well having fast, unrestricted, reliable access.
Our study showed that the longer a woman had been using the Internet, the more likely she was to report concrete benefits such as earning additional income, applying for jobs, and helping with her studies. Users with multiple platforms to access the Internet were also more likely to report these concrete benefits than users of either computers or mobiles only.
The report also features an interesting breakdown of the different demographic groups and how they are likely to access the Internet: computer–only, mobile–only, or multi–platform. In general, mobile–only users are younger women who use the Internet daily, but are unlikely to use it to apply for a job. Computer–only users (laptop or desktop) tended to be middle–income female homemakers and often use the Internet for education and study. Multi–platform users, naturally, tended to be wealthier women who use the Internet daily and are likely to use it for education and shopping.
How one accesses the Internet also affects one's attitudes about it. Women who access the Internet through both mobile and computers, for instance, hold the strongest belief that Internet access is a fundamental human right. This suggests that there's a positive feedback loop at work: The more regularly women access the web, the more they begin to see it as an integral piece of social fabric––something that everyone needs to be a part of.
This is good to know because if we're serious about overcoming the gender gap in software, the first job needs to be getting more women around the world online. Computer programming is a skill that any individual, with enough access, can learn on their own to improve their economic standing. This is true even––and perhaps especially––in the developing world. If the next wave of new computer programmers is going to come from outside developed countries, then it's imperative to get more women online now so that they can enter the job market on equal footing.
Despite all of the increased attention the gender gap is receiving, new data suggests that it might be widening rather than shrinking. Spoiler alert: We need more women engineers.
The data doesn't lie. For all the talk about tech becoming a less male–dominated space, women are still a vast minority in the industry. In fact, recent data from Bright.com suggests that the gender gap is widening––at least momentarily.
We recently covered a survey by the freelancing site Elance, an online marketplace for self–employment. That survey mostly focused on the attitudes of men and women freelancers towards how tech can become more open to women. A new survey from job search platform Bright tackles the nitty–gritty details of who's actually snagging new tech jobs.
The number of jobs in the technology sector has grown a substantial 3.8% nationwide in just the first four months of 2013 (compared to the last four months of 2013). In April 2013, some of the known tech geographies where among the fastest growing regions in tech, including San Jose, Austin, San Francisco, Boston and Seattle, however other areas less well–known for their tech jobs also displayed strong growth, including Oklahoma City, Kansas City, Tucson, and Indianapolis.
Nothing new there. We know that tech is one of the country's fastest–growing sectors, and that it tends to grow the most in traditional geographic hotbeds like the Bay Area. It is interesting to see that New York's much–touted "Silicon Alley" didn't make the growth cut while Kansas City continues to explode under the influence of Google Fiber.
The real question we're interested in is, who are companies hiring to fill all these new jobs? The report tackled this question head on:
These jobs are trending to favor male job seekers. While the tech sector is predominantly male overall, an estimated 71% male, the titles displaying the largest increase in available jobs have also trended towards male–dominated roles, including Systems Administrators (89.7% male) and Senior Software Engineers (77.1% male).
Let's take a moment to unpack these numbers. We know that men account for about three out of every four people working in tech right now. On top of that, the job areas that grew the most in the first four months of 2013 tended to favor men by an even larger percentage than the industry as a whole. If this trend keeps up, the gender gap may end up widening rather than shrinking, despite heightened awareness of the issue.
To be clear, we know the problem is probably even worse than it seems because a lot of the women who are counted as working in the tech sector often work in PR, HR, or marketing. The answer shouldn't be to just keep hiring women in those roles. According to Bright Labs, the most in–demand job titles in April 2013 were all technical positions. Companies need to hire women engineers if they want the gender gap to shrink.
The war for engineering talent is so hot that companies are trying everything to lure top candidates. Sometimes, these incredible bonus packages are a great way of finding talent who will fit in with the team. Other times, the tactics become so gimmicky and specific that they're almost guaranteed to screen out a diverse set of candidates.
Take, for example, Saatchi and Saatchi Tel Aviv's recent decision to screen candidates for a software engineering position by conducting interviews inside Diablo III.
The idea to test skills like teamwork and thinking under pressure using a video game is worth exploring. The U.S. Army, for example, uses video games to help train soldiers how to recognize friendly people from insurgents disguised as civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Choosing a specific game with no relation to the job other than the CEO's preference, however, was probably not the way to go if the company wanted to have any shot at hiring a woman. Technology is already a male–dominated field, especially in Israel. Moreover, Diablo III's playerbase is 69% male, meaning that by choosing the game you've already narrowed down the pool to an incredibly homogenous group.
Even if you did find a qualified woman gamer–developer, there's another problem with conducting in–game interviews that most men would never even think about. Due to a combination of their relative scarcity and the anonymous nature of online gaming, women who play Internet games and identify themselves as such face a constant barrage of sexist trash–talking from their male counterparts. The problem is so severe that some women have created entire sites to document the misogyny they face playing online on a regular basis. Given the stigma attached to female gamers, it wouldn't be shocking if women didn't want to participate in an interview where their potential boss was giving them orders over the same system so many jerks use to berate them.
Although it's tempting to search for new and inventive ways to find candidates, companies have to be careful not to automatically weed out too many qualified candidates just by the interview criteria. There's a fine line between offering perks that help you find someone who will fit well on the team and searching for such specific traits that you're almost guaranteed to find someone exactly like yourself. Unfortunately, Saatchi crossed that line.
According to a survey conducted by Elance, the greatest deterrent to getting more women in technology fields is a lack of female role models. Elance is a popular platform for freelancers, so survey respondents come primarily from that share of the tech marketplace. And some questions are specific to working from home. Still, it's probably a safe assumption that a lot of the same trends apply for women working in technology fields whether remotely or in–office.
It's definitely worth reading through the results of this (fairly short) survey. Here are three stats we've pulled out for you:
66 percent say that for women to be successful in tech will require equal pay for women and men with same skillsets
Only 22 percent of respondents believe technology needs to be made more "glamorous" or "cool" in order to appeal to women
80 percent are "optimistic" or "extremely optimistic" about the future of women in technology
Female readers: Do these figures resonate with you? The most interesting stat here is the one about unequal pay, because it demonstrates that the women responding to this survey expect to get paid less off the bat, even in more progressive companies. Also––it's telling that nearly a quarter of respondents don't find technology "cool enough" to compete with careers in more feminine organizations. Help us unpack what these stats mean by sharing your take on Twitter.
A recent NPR segment, "Blazing The Trail For Female Programmers," profiled the lead developer of Flash video, Sarah Allen. It's part of an ongoing NPR series called "The Changing Lives of Women." NPR talked with Allen about what it means to work in a field where only 20 percent of her peers are women.
Today Allen is CEO of mobile design & development outfit Blazing Cloud. In addition to Blazing Cloud's volume of work speaking for itself, Allen is also getting business from startups who value their genuine emphasis on diversity, as opposed to just hiring women as "window dressing."
Allen reflects on the decades she spent being the only woman on a development team and how things still haven't changed too much. She tells a story about being being one of six women at a 200 person Ruby on Rails conference a few years back. Coming out of that experience Allen started RailsBridge, an organization aiming to increase diversity in tech through free workshops for "women and their friends."
She also emphatically makes the point that the issue is a lack of supporting for women who already want to get into tech:
We've really proven that demand is not a problem. Every single workshop we've ever held has had a waiting list.
There are lots of other interesting moments in this quick 8–minute segment: According to NPR, the proportion of women studying computer science has actually decreased since the mid–20th century (that's ponderous stat #4, for those counting). While you're listening, also check out the April 29th broadcast of NPR's All Things Considered for a complementary segment about Harvey Mudd's efforts to get more women in computer science degree programs.
Should all–male software companies be on some kind of wall of shame? Here at Co.Labs we've celebrated the success of specific companies that have actively sought to increase diversity within the programming community. But what about those companies with particularly egregious records? Is it really so bad to have an organization that's all one sex?
It seems like a total no–brainer for a dating product to have a gender mix on the design team, doesn't it? Perhaps that's why no one's heard of Couple.me. Read previous updates to this story below.
Rails Girls Summer of Code (RGSoC) was started by Berlin Rails Girls organizers to help Rails Girls get into open source, a focus that distinguishes it from Google's original Summer of Code. Ruby on Rails is a full–stack development language that you can learn more about here.
Just as in Google Summer of Code and Ruby Summer of Code, students will be paid so they're free to work on Open Source projects for a few months. Unlike those programs, the Rails Girls Summer of Code is about helping students to further expand their knowledge and skills by contributing to a great Open Source project (rather than producing highly sophisticated code).
Targeting women in tech is great, and helping them become active, productive members of the vibrant Rails and open source communities makes this program particularly exciting. To get involved as a student or mentor, write to summer–of–code@railsgirls.com or catch RGSoC on Twitter.
Stacey Mulcahy wrote a letter to her 8 year old niece and posted it online. Why does that matter? Well Mulcahy–aka @bitchwhocodes–is a developer who has personally come up against the shortcomings of the tech community when it comes to gender equality. Inspired by her 8–year–old niece's decision to become a game developer when she grows up, Mulcahy wrote this letter "to a future woman in tech." It's full of hopes for her niece and for the developer world in general:
I hope that when you attend a meeting that is mostly male, that you never get asked why you are not taking meeting notes. I hope you say "fuck this" more than "it's okay".
...I hope that skill will always be held in higher esteem than your gender––if you had no skill, you would not be part of the discussion, and your gender is simply a modifier.
...I hope that no one ever tells you to "deal with it," "relax," or "ease up" because you refuse to laugh at something that simply is not funny.
...I hope that you attend conferences and find yourself complaining about long lines for the bathroom.
A lot of the lines in this letter will be familiar with anyone who follows even the slightest the grievances of women in tech. But it's a powerfully original way of framing the issue, by focusing on the positive vision of the kind of developer community Mulcahy would like to be a part of, rather than just railing against the shortcomings of the one that currently exists–it's empowering. (Hat tip to @NGA_Anita.)
We can talk about the gender divide in tech all day, but it's also important to celebrate the achievements of women in software. In fact, if it weren't for the work of one woman, Ada Lovelace, computers as we think of them today might not exist. Lovelace worked closely with Charles Babbage on his early mechanical computer designs. Although today Babbage is considered the "father of computing," it was actually Lovelace who is believed to have written the first computer program. She also imagined computers as more than just calculating machines, influencing the thought of several pioneers in modern computing.
An interdisciplinary conference celebrating the achievements and legacies of the poet Lord Byron's only known legitimate child, Ada Byron King, Countess of Lovelace (1815–1852), will take place at Stevens Institute of Technology (Hoboken, New Jersey) on 18 October 2013. This conference will coincide with the week celebrating Ada Lovelace Day, a global event for women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM). All aspects of the achievements and legacies of Ada Lovelace will be considered, including but not limited to:
Lovelace as Translator and/or Collaborator
Technology in the Long Nineteenth Century
Women in Computing: Past/Present/Future
Women in STEM
Ada Lovelace and her Circle
So if you care about women in software, then, now, or in the future go ahead and submit a paper. It's a good way to honor the legacy of the world's first coder –– a woman.
For those who missed it, "donglegate," as Wired dubbed it, is the latest blowup after a display of sexism in the coding community. Although some people, including women in tech, took issue with the way Adria Richards handled the situation, Wired's Alice Marwick puts it in context very bleakly:
Regardless of the nuances of the incident, the fact remains that Richards faced a gargantuan backlash that included death threats, rape threats, a flood of racist and sexually violent speech, a DDOS attack on her employer––and a photoshopped picture of a naked, bound, decapitated woman. The use of mob justice to punish women who advocate feminist ideals is nothing new, but why does this happen so regularly when women criticize the tech industry? Just stating that the tech industry has a sexism problem––something that's supported by reams of scholarly evidence––riles up the trolls.
Jezebel also chimed in, pointing out the how these kinds of jokes are possible and seem normal because of how much of a dudefest tech is. It seems particularly egregious that these guys made these jokes right when the speaker was talking about bridging the gender gap in tech.
Richards was distracted, mid–seminar, by a couple of tech bros sitting behind her making some shitty sexual puns about "dongles" and "forking." (She blogged about the full chronology of events here.) Richards did not enjoy the jokes. She especially did not enjoy the disrespect shown to the speaker, who happened to be specifically, at that moment, addressing programs designed to make the tech community more welcoming to women. Meanwhile, in the audience––Richards's photos reveal a sea of men––a couple of dudes felt 100% comfortable cracking the kind of crude jokes that people generally reserve for their home turf. And that's because, to a lot of dudes, tech is a space owned by men.
Bruce Byfield, who has written extensively on all things free & open source, gives an overview of sexism in the FOSS community. As a subset of the broader development community, FOSS has a lot of great things going for it because of its transparency and emphasis on collaboration. Unfortunately it still shares many of the same problems when it comes to gender. Byfield takes an informative look at initiatives that are trying to fix the gender imbalance, like the Geek Feminism Wiki, Ada Initiative, and Ubuntu Code of Conduct.
Carla Schroder credits Ubuntu for its all–purpose code of conduct, which she calls "a radical departure from the dominant 'freedom to be a jerk' ethos that prevailed before." As a result, Schroder adds, "Ubuntu has also attracted large numbers of contributors and users from more diverse walks of life than other distros.
However, in the last two years, FOSS feminism has paid special attention to anti–harassment policies for conferences. Most of this work has been developed by the Ada Initiative, an offshoot of the Geek Feminism Wiki, which has developed templates for policies that can be used either unmodified or as starting points for discussion.
The rationale offered for this emphasis is that anti–harassment policies can be a starting point for changing other aspects of the community.
All in all a thorough and well–reasoned piece worth a read (even if the pagination on datamation is ridiculously annoying).
Ashe Dryden, a Drupal and Rails developer, did the software community a huge favor by starting to answer the question "How can I help tech be less sexist?" She gives concrete, applicable steps that people can take to make conferences more diverse, like:
Anonymize and remove gendered pronouns from abstracts/bios before handing the data over to your proposal review committee. Someone who is outside of your proposal reviewing committee should be assigned this task.
Pretty simple, but makes a huge difference. Dryden's post is full of tidbits like that. It also includes a pretty thorough list of different marginalized populations, going far beyond gender diversity to include, for example, physical disability and economic status. But women in tech is still the focus of what Dryden is writing about.
The headline of this article in Forbes elides individual (and organizational) responsibility by saying that women are "accidentally" excluded from tech. That said, it still makes a great point that tools like Codecademy are democratizing technology and thereby removing a lot of the traditional barriers to women, like it being hard to find mentorship in a boy's club.
It's no secret that the games industry, by and large, lacks diversity. In this case, that is gender diversity. This is actually a huge shame as it limits the stories and points of views different types of people bring to the collective table of gaming.
Landers contrasts the way she handles representation of female characters and motherhood with the way major video game studios do, which is pretty obvious in her artwork.
The differences in the way I create concept art and models is pretty self–explanatory. Basically, notice how the female characters aren't half naked with giant breasts? Yea, this is a pretty easy one to be aware of...I'm kind of surprised this is even "different" to treat them with that level of respect.
The influential gaming site Penny Arcade picked up the story, with a really interesting take on how gaming can be a safe haven for certain marginalized populations.
Games themselves may offer a safe place for transgender, genderqueer, questioning, or other LGBT community individuals, but the gaming community has been less receptive. When Landers was promoting her game in one gaming community forum, users hijacked the thread and began posting "tranny porn," telling Landers she should find new work in the adult film industry.
Articles and features on gaming sites that bring up gender representation of any kind, be it transgender or otherwise, is typically met with the 'Why is this important?' 'How is this relevant to video games?' style responses. It should be apparent by now that games can be far more than just entertainment to some individuals. To some, it's a necessary escape, or a safe haven where the question of "Who am i?" can be safely explored.
So, a pretty prime example of women being reduced to sexual objects in the technology world is this article on Complex, "The 40 Hottest Women in Tech". At first glance the article is a weird mix of acknowledging sexism in tech followed by outright sexism from a publication covering tech. It begins:
Technology has been a boy's club for most of its existence. Just another unfortunate repercussion of the patriarchy. But that's been slowly changing, and over the last decade we've seen a number of wonderful, intelligent, and cunning women make inspiring strides in the field of technology. Through web development, social media, space exploration, and video game design, we see the world of tech becoming a more equal playing field. Here are 40 women we admire doing work in the field of innovation.
Followed by a slideshow of scantily clad women or typical "hot" women, including noting that one of them was a Playboy playmate. Commenters on the piece were justifiably outraged, writing:
How can you open with "sure, tech hasn't been friendly to women for ages, but it's better now!" and then proceed to objectify the women who have fought through this bullshit? Do you not see that you're only perpetuating the toxic culture?
And:
Funny you would mention patriarchy in your opening paragraph, then proceed to perpetuate it by subjecting all of the hardworking and talented women in this field to, effectively, a 'hot–or–not' list. Shameful.
I was assigned to write the 50 Hottest Women in Tech by Complex and it really bummed me out, because the idea of perpetrating the same old gender divisions in an area like tech – which has predominantly been a boy's club throughout history – seemed like kind of a messed up thing to do. It represents the most banal form of internet content that exists. But it's hard to say no to a paycheck.
So what I tried to do was see if it was possible to make something called "The 50 Hottest Women in Tech" earnest and empowering and an actual good thing. I pretty much only included normal looking women, who were involved in something really crucial or exciting in the tech space. I made no allusions to their looks in the blurbs, and ended up with simply a long list of very exciting women.
Of course when the piece actually ran, I discovered that over half of the women I had included were replaced with people like Morgan Webb, complete with the usual lascivious dialogue. Sigh. It's hard to win when you're writing for Complex, but please know that I tried.
That explains why tech–entertainment celebs are mixed in with actual female technology innovators like Gina Trapani and Marissa Mayer. It's the mark of a bad publication that it would not only assign a piece like this in the first place but that it would so drastically alter it after the fact. Fortunately, people in technology fields weren't buying what Complex was selling, as evidenced by this tweet and this tweet:
At first blush it might appear that Spotify Connect, the company's new play for direct hardware integration, is aimed squarely at Apple's AirPlay. Connect works a lot like AirPlay, except that the technology will be built into hardware from eight different companies like Philips, Denon, Pioneer, and Bang & Olufsen, allowing Spotify apps to pipe music directly into receivers and speakers throughout your house. What Spotify lover wouldn't want a compatible home theater, right?
But in this case, I suspect the tail is wagging the dog. As I've said before, digital media companies want physical product tie–in because consumers like buying tangible things, whether it's headphones or vinyl records.
This is the exact reverse of the strategy of Sonos, the Boston–based smart–home–theater company which has been selling networked speakers like this for years. Unlike the Spotify–manufacturer alliance, Sonos systems are only made by one company––Sonos––but connect to all sorts of music services including Pandora, Rdio, iTunes, and basically anything else your computer or phone can play. Sonos has done well selling premium systems starting at $299, but a lot of consumers balk at the a $50–a–piece transmitters needed to make each set of speakers fully wireless. Spotify has mixed up the model by making the hardware the commodity––call it the Microsoft Windows approach to music system sales.
Having a great–sounding, simple, and wireless speaker setup of my choosing is easily worth the $10 a month for Spotify, in this listener's opinion. But it's also true that if Spotify wants to continue to attract new paying customers, it's going to have to keep finding ways to expand into people's physical lives. Spotify Connect is a way to get in front of new customers browsing the shelves of a Best Buy who may not have been a good fit for the Sonos brand or price points. Whether the new wireless enabled speakers are a success or not, however, the move clearly shows that even the biggest software services won't be satisfied being software only for much longer.
While most of us are busy wondering what will happen to post–space shuttle NASA in the age of the sequester, the agency is chugging right along, producing wonders like the Hyperwall 2, a giant quarter–gigapixel visualization wall.
Lots of groups like to build big screens, like the multi–screen 200 megapixel HIPerWall at the California Institute For Telecommunications and Information Technology, but few match the quarter–gigapixel display of NASA's new Hyperwall 2. The new screen combines 128 LCD monitors into a stunning 23'x10' wall of visualized science, all juiced by 1,024 Opteron AMD cores and 128 NVIDIA GeForce GPUs totaling an astounding 208 GB of graphics memory. While each screen can display a "cell" of visualized scientific data, the Hyperwall 2 was built to take advantage of visualizations produced by the Pleiades, NASA's processing workhorse.
The Pleiades is the 9th–fastest supercomputer in the U.S. and 19th in the world. It maxes out at 2.9 petaflops and is used by NASA for everything from modeling experiments to piecing together massive, stunning images of the Earth and the cosmos. The Hyperwall 2 itself has 9 teraflops of computing power on its own and 1.5 petabytes of storage space. It reads data directly from the Pleiades filesystem via 65 miles of super–fast InfiniBand cabling, the largest such network in the world.
All of the raw power is impressive, but what do they plan to do with it? Mostly, to visualize models run on the Pleiades. Displaying global tide patterns on the Hyperwall 2, for example, allows scientists to see all the tricky details of airstreams and current flows that you would miss combing through terabytes of data on a low–resolution laptop screen. The wall is also used to visualize space, as shown in the video above, from still images to timelapse simulations.
Built by Colfax International, the Hyperwall 2 runs on the SUSE Linux operating system, uses a PBS job scheduler, and runs C and Fortran programs. Pleiades itself is set to for an upgrade soon, adding an additional 3,312 Ivy Bridge nodes, which will further improve the Hyperwall 2's performance.
The iPad should make for a terrible musical instrument. As marvelous as it can be for everyday tasks, the small–ish multitouch screen lacks the tactile feedback you normally get when you play music. But once I started looking into some of the music–making apps and devices that you could mate to iOS, I realized the iPad may not be much of an instrument––but it could be the most versatile musical "brain" ever created.
My moment of clarity happened recently, while unpacking the Akai SynthStation49 from its box. I plugged it in, and pulled out my iPad and docked it in the device's tablet tray above the row of black–and–white piano–style keys. Right out of the box, the SynthStation looks like any basic synthesizer keyboard. It has keys, knobs, and square rubber pads for playing drum beats or samples. But if you plug it into the wall and start playing, you'll hear nothing. That's because this thing isn't running any software. No tones are pre–programmed into it. It's just a soulless skeleton that knows no sounds of its own.
That's where the iPad comes in. Once the the tablet is affixed to the SynthStation's 30–pin connector, it comes alive. Suddenly, the carcass has a brain and the sounds it can make are limited only by the collective imagination of music app developers everywhere.
Indeed, without robust music apps, devices like the SynthStation would not be all that interesting. Fortunately, iOS developers have built some pretty complex and incredible things for iPad–toting musicians, and the Android ecosystem is not far behind.
Take Korg's iPolysix iPad app, for example. It packs the the interface of a real, 1980s–era polyphonic synthesizer––with its rows of knobs and buttons for tweaking every sonic nuance––into the 10–inch (or 7–inch, if you've got a Mini) screen of an iPad. Like a real synthesizer, its bank of dozens of pre–built sounds can be endlessly tweaked and layered with effects and the new ones you create can be saved for later. The iPolysix app also packs in a drum machine, mixer, and sequencer for recording multiple tracks. Much more than just a synthesizer, it's a mini–studio for creating multi–track synth songs from the iPad. The results can be exported as WAV files, uploaded to SoundCloud, or wirelessly synced with nearby iOS devices using Korg's own WIST standard.
The further into the iPolysix app's initially intimidating interface you delve, the more its $30 price tag starts to make sense. The same is true of the iMS–20, an equally pricey (but even more complex) app from Korg that replicates the functionality of a vintage analog synthesizer and sequencer, complete with virtual patch cables and no fewer than 35 knobs. Apps like these sport complex UIs that normally fit onto sizable synthesizer consoles, but that have somehow been squished onto the screen of a tablet. In the case of the iMS–20, each component of the interface can be zoomed in upon to maximize––or as it sometimes feels, enable––usability.
Synth apps like these are incredibly complex and impressive. A true testament to the power of iOS as a software development platform. But they remain, by default, trapped inside a form factor that doesn't lend itself all that well to forming piano chords or twiddling knobs. At the end of the day, the tactile feedback of a physical interface is still necessary in some cases. This is one of them. And that's why devices like the SynthStation49 are so useful.
The physical keys, pads, and knobs of the SynthStation don't map one–for–one to the virtual UI of an app like the iPolysix or iMS–20. Far from it. Indeed, when you play either of Korg's flagship synth apps from the SynthStation, all you're really getting is a physical keyboard upon which to play notes and chords, as well as modulation and pitch wheels, drum machine pads, and a few other basic physical knobs. But by breaking the keyboard interface free from the confines of the iPad's glass screen, it not only makes playing chords far less tedious, but it frees up that screen for more appropriate types of user inputs: turning virtual knobs, selecting sounds, adjusting settings, and generating tones by moving your finger around on the app's Kaoss pads. Suddenly, the interface is split into two: physical keys and buttons for the things that most require them, plus a multi–touch screen for tasks that don't feel cumbersome when you put your fingers to glass.
There are plenty of other, less complex music apps available for iOS and most of the keyboard–based virtual instruments in the App Store will work perfectly with the SynthStation or a device like it. Apple's GarageBand app alone features a ton of pianos, synthesizers, and other virtual instruments that can be played via an external controller. GarageBand's built–in drum machine can also be controlled using the rectangular rubber pads found at the top of the SynthStation (and presumably any other MIDI–enabled controller with such pads). Animoog, a widely beloved and rather impressive synth app from Moog, suddenly turns from an app into something resembling a real synthesizer once it's docked into an external controller. Like the Korg apps, it sounds indistinguishable from physical, far more expensive synthesizers.
The split tactile/multitouch music interface has some advantages inherent in the way iOS itself works. For example, a four–finger swipe across the screen lets you instantly jump from app to app. That means you can play one part using the Animoog app and then swap it out with the iPolysix without fidgeting with the home button. Thanks to iOS's multitasking, you can even play sounds from multiple apps simultaneously. For instance, if you set the iMS–20 app or GarageBand to be controlled via the SynthStation and tell the Animoog app to be controlled natively, you can play both at the same time. Likewise, you can use the external controller to play a keyboard–based instrument app in the background and then pull up another, multitouch–centric music app to be played simultaneously on the screen. Of course, there's far more you could do once you pair this set up with other instruments, pedals, and devices, but the scope of capabilities presented solely by the iPad and an external device like the SynthStation is pretty mind–blowing.
One of the first and most novel use cases for the iPad was as a virtual piano and tool for teaching music. As the hardware has grown more powerful and the development platform has matured, the possibilities for iOS musicians have been slowly expanding. Perhaps the biggest push forward for mobile music app developers was the inclusion of the CoreMIDI framework in iOS 4.2. Using the CoreMIDI APIs, developers can build MIDI support into apps and enable their software to talk to external devices via the iPad Camera Connection Kit (which turns the power cord slot into a USB port) or another third–party accessory. In iOS 7, the state of iOS music–making will step forward once again with the introduction of support for inter–app audio.
Of course, Akai's SynthStation is not the first device to pair with iPads and iPhones to enhance the creation, performance, and production of music. There's a long list of adapters, audio interfaces, MIDI controllers, and other devices that can plug into the 30–pin or Lightning connector port on an iOS device and control music apps or turn the iPad into part of a full–blown studio environment.
What's different about the SynthStation and its counterparts is primarily in its design: Instead of plugging into the iPad, the iPad plugs into it. Something about docking the iPad into the device makes it feel less like an accessory and more like an actual instrument, with the iPad acting as the sonic brains of the operation, slanted at a angle convenient for as–needed multi–touch interaction.
For music hardware developers, teaming up with the iPad is a smart move. It allows them to focus on building a physical interface for playing music while effectively outsourcing the software smarts to Apple and its distributed team of iOS developers. It reduces the costs of production while giving consumers a versatile, virtually limitless musical instrument. The SynthStation is a solid example of this concept for keyboard–based instruments. The same idea has been applied to effects pedal boards for guitarists and DJ turntable setups. By the end of the year, Starr Labs expects to start shipping the iTar, a MIDI guitar controller for the iPad that debuted on Kickstarter in 2011.
We have yet to reach a point at which phones and tablets are a mainstay of onstage set ups for musicians, but mobile music creation is becoming more common and a growing selection of third–party hardware is helping to push the practice toward normalcy.
Starring in a comic is cool enough, especially with the large variety of layout options, but the Manga Generator uses adaptive "shader" software to create a completely custom comic based on movement. Using the Kinect, the software gauges the "mood" of the subject's pose and changes the scene accordingly, adding visual effects (like the motion–indicative "dash" marks), background images, and character props on the fly.
The shader software, particularly the image quality, could still be improved, the team notes. But the layout software that automatically places word bubbles and narrative boxes around the subject is what they're most excited about. The Manga Generator team hopes that their research will eventually be applied to e–books and interactive stories. For now, however, advertisers are already excited about attaching their name to custom comics. So if you've always wanted to channel your emotion and awesome poses into a comic of your very own, you may not have to wait much longer.
