Category: Tech

Kids design prosthetics in “Superhero Cyborgs” workshop

February 9, 2016 Joyce Varghese Leave a comment Tech

Superhero Cyborgs is a workshop by a Bay area based organization called KIDmob. This workshop is place where kids with or without disabilities design devices that mirror the form of upper limb prosthetics. With wearable devices it’s universally known as a “one-size-fits-all” product. This workshops seek to disprove that.

From January 15-19 KIDmob and Autodesk teamed up for “Superhero Cyborgs 2.0” at Autodesk’s Pier 9 design space. With the help of professional designers and engineers, kids created their own “superpowers” through personalized wearable devices. In addition, they learned about 3D modeling and digital fabrication.

Some of the finished work included:

  • “Project Unicorn”, a 5-nozzle glitter shooter for 10-year-old Jordan Reeve’s arm.
  • “Sport Splint”, a purple splint with modular attachments for a Nerf gun device and a horse-riding attachment that allows 13-year-old David Botana to hold on to the reins.
  • 12-year-old Sydney Howard created a dual-water-gun arm activated by elbow movement.
  • “Nubinator”, an e-NABLE hand that 13-year-old Kieran Blue Coffee tricked out with LED lights and an aluminum attachment that allows him to carry heavier loads.
  • 10-year-old Riley Gonzalez augmented an e-NABLE prosthetic with a detachable bow and arrow.

Kate Ganim, KIDMob co-founder and co-director, told GOOD: “One of the main motivations for the work we do is exposing kids (and adults) to ‘21st-century skills’ in a meaningful way. Design is creative problem solving—it is bringing ideas to reality. Our workshops are very active, with lots of improv, hands-on making, discussion and sharing, and playful discovery.”

Autodesk, the other benefactor of this workshop, is a company that builds computer-aided drafting software. Sarah O’Rourke, Autodesk’s senior product marketing manager for consumer and 3D printing, says that the decision to get involved was a “no-brainer.” Autodesk provided monetary support to the families for travel and housing and made their Pier 9 space available for the workshop. O’Rouke hopes this workshop is just the start of a partnership with KIDMob and wants to incorporate this into the classroom through a project called Project Ignite, Autodesk’s open learning platform.

“If we can inspire any of the participants to start thinking like a designer and empower them to create their own devices, then that is successful,” says O’Rourke.

Article via GOOD, February 1, 2016

Photo: Neural interfaces for prosthetics via Sandla Labs [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs]

Yahoo sued for gender bias by male employee

February 5, 2016 Astrid Countee Leave a comment Business, Criminal Law, Legal News, Tech

Yahoo is being sued by a former employee that claims that he was discriminated against for being male.

Gregory Anderson, who was employed in Yahoo’s media division was fired in November 2014.  He filed a lawsuit against the tech giant, alleging the company’s performance management system was arbitrary and unfair. Anderson “alleges that Mayer encouraged and fostered the use of the QPR Program to accommodate management’s subjective biases and personal opinions, to the detriment of Yahoo’s male employees.”

The QPR Program at Yahoo is the controversial quarterly performance review program that ranks employees and then fires the lowest ranking ones. In the Media division, where Anderson was an editor, the complaint says that when male and female employees got equally low scores (anything under 3), the women were favored and the men were fired. What’s worse, in the case that both male and female employees got the same score, the men were fired and the female employee took over the male employees job.

This isn’t the first discrimination lawsuit to be tied to a stack ranking system. In the early 2000s, a cascade of cases against Ford, Goodyear, and Capital One, alleged that such systems led to age discrimination against older employees

The lawsuit also alleges that in addition to discriminating against men, Yahoo fires people without just cause and did not give 60 days’ notice to staff affected in mass layoffs. In California, layoffs are defined as terminating more than 50 people at one time, therefore not providing notice violates California law. In addition to the complaint about the way that people were fired, Anderson’s complaint also alleges that there was unfair gender based biased for hiring.  Former Chief Marketing Officer Kathy Savitt, almost exclusively hired women into management positions in Yahoo’s media division.

Under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and also California’s Fair Employment and Housing Act, discrimination on the basis of sex is illegal. It doesn’t matter which gender the person happens to be.

“The Anderson lawsuit raises the question of how to correct lingering gender discrimination against women and suggests that the answer is not yet more illegal discrimination,” wrote Anderson’s attorney Jon Parsons in a statement about the lawsuit.

Article via Huffington Post, 4 February 2016

Photo: Yahoo! by Eric Hayes [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs]

Alphabet, worlds most valuable company

February 3, 2016 Astrid Countee Leave a comment Business, Economy, Finance, Tech

On Monday, Alphabet, the company that owns Google, overtook Apple by becoming the most valuable company in the world.

The most valuable companies in America are nearly all tech companies. Google and Apple are leading the pack with market values of $543 billion and $535 billion respectively. Behind those two companies sits Microsoft at $433 billion. Facebook, at $328 billion, took fourth on Monday, surpassing Exxon Mobile at $318 billion. The revenues of the top leaders (Google and Apple) are higher than any other company in corporate history.

Just last quarter Alphabet reported revenues of more than $21.3 billion, blowing past estimates by roughly half a billion dollars. Traders are expecting Alphabet to keep the title of most valuable company for some time to come. Revenue for the company saw $74.5 billion in sales for all of 2015, up from $66 billion in 2014. The good news keeps coming as Monday their stock rose another 5 percent.

Colin Gillis, senior technology analyst for BGC Partners, believes that Alphabet will become the world’s first trillion dollar company. Why? Sheer numbers, for one, Gillis said in an interview. “Think about the number of services they have with a billion users: Google Search, YouTube, Maps. Some of those are used multiple times every single day,” he said.

Some also think that the deciding factor between Google and Apple is all about China. Apple reported the slowest-ever sales growth for the iPhone and revealed that its business in China is facing trouble. In contrast, Alphabet makes very little money off hardware and does almost no business in China. Now that China’s economy is slowing down, Apple and their stock seem to be following suit.

It could be that Alphabet knows exactly how to show investors its future promise. Google has been famous for its moonshots, like the self driving car. The reorganization of Google, including the creation of the parent company Alphabet, has allowed transparency into its many services and what they offer. All that adds up to a lot of success and the number one spot for the tech company.

Article via The Washington Post,1 Febraurary, 2016

Photo: iPhone Alphabet by schnaars [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs]

Oracle pulls plug on Java browser plug-in

February 1, 2016 Joyce Varghese Leave a comment Tech

Oracle announced earlier last week its decision to cut the Java browser plug-in. It will not be included in the next version of the kit for Java developers. This plug-in had been a frequent target of hackers and decision to remove was fueled by the browser maker’s withdrawal of support for the plug-in.

Oracle did realize that plug-ins have become unwanted in a tech world that has become increasingly mobile. In a release they stated “the rise of web usage on mobile device browsers, typically without support for plugins, increasingly led browser makers to want to restrict and remove standards based plugin support from their products, as they tried to unify the set of features available across desktop and mobile versions.”

Jim McGregor, lead analyst at Tirias Research, said that Google and Microsoft have already left out the Java plug-in. “It’s an evolution of the software environment,” he told TechNewsWorld. “Plug-ins were great when we were first trying to enable multimedia features at websites, but the way that things are programmed now, they’re more a security hazard than a benefit.”

Plug-ins are closely related to browser extensions. They were initially created to allow non-HTML content to be viewed from within the browser. Something like a PDF could be viewed right from the browser instead of a different program opening up.  This won’t affect many consumers but businesses could be impacted.

Overall, the purpose of this is to improve security. Simon Crosby, CTO at Bromium said this is “a good-step forward.” Craig Williams, senior technical leader at Cisco’s Talos Security Intelligence and Research Group told TechNewsWorld “by removing plug-ins from the browser, we remove this attack surface, making all users more safe from both known and unknown zero-day vulnerabilities.” Pulling the plug means developers will have to move any apps that use it to another technology.

Article via TechNewsWorld, January 30, 2016

Photo: oracle via Dave [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs]

Bitcoin is alive and well, many argue

January 31, 2016 Abby Shulman Leave a comment Business, Collaborative Economy, Tech

Mike Hearn’s recent declaration that Bitcoin is a failed experiment has been met with staunch opposition from many of the currency’s key developers. Hearn has been accused of hyperbolizing the situation because he personally disagreed with decisions made by other developers; many have also said that he is guilty of self-promotion for his new company R3CEV.

Throughout its years of operation, Bitcoin has alternately been considered the future of money and a wasted project. Hearn is the current voice behind the dissolution of Bitcoin, causing those like BitTorrent Founder Bram Cohen to tweet about Hearn’s farewell essay, “That was one whiny ragequit. He’s epically wrong on almost all technical points.” Greg Slepak published a point-by-point refutation of Hearn’s blog post; Sam Patterson similarly refuted a Washington Post article written from a pro-Hearn perspective.

The main controversy about Bitcoin’s demise stems from an original debate about block size. Blocks are virtual files that transaction data is permanently stored in, assembled in a linear sequence to form a “block chain.” The most recent block contains a very difficult mathematical puzzle that requires a correct answer in order to add a new block to the chain, thereby “unlocking” new Bitcoins. Currently, there’s a size limitation to the blocks, which limits the currency’s overall capacity.

Hearn and two others want to split the block chain in two, a move colloquially called the “hard fork,” whereas the other key developers have a different plan, alternatively titled “the roadmap.” The root of the issue, however, is more than technical jargon. Bitcoin is divided because it’s unclear as to who should govern the system. Hearn said that the virtual currency was “meant to be a new, decentralized form of money.” Yet without any centralization, Bitcoin remains a feud between opinionated elite software developers. Which out any form of governance, Bitcoin loses its opportunities at progress.

Then there are those who believe that without Hearn, a feud no longer exists. Mike Komaransky, an employee of the Bitcoin firm Cumberland Mining, tweeted, “Bitcoin Hearn Paradox- With him, consensus is hard to reach, [bitcoin] suffers. [Without] him, consensus is easy to reach, bitcoin prospers. he can’t win.”

Article via TechCrunch, 23 January 2016

Photo: Bitcoin by CoinDesk  [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs]

Will robots become the next speech writers?

January 28, 2016 Astrid Countee Leave a comment Government, Legal News, Tech

As this is an election year, the American public will be hearing many speeches from  politicians addressing the nation.  Phrases such as “My Fellow Americans”, “main street” and “small businesses” are staples that they average person can predict to hear from any politician. These political phrases are not only predicted by Americans, but now are being predicted by robots.

“Mr. Speaker, supporting this rule and supporting this bill is good for small business. It is great for American small business, for Main Street, for jobs creation. We have an economy that has created nearly 2 million jobs in the past couple of months: apparel, textiles, transportation and equipment, electronic components and equipment, chemicals, industrial and commercial equipment and computers, instruments, photographic equipment, metals, food, wood and wood products. Virtually every state in the union can claim at least one of these industrial sectors. In fact, one young girl, Lucy, wanted to make sure that the economy keeps growing. That should not be done on borrowed money, on borrowed time.”

This speech was written by a computer.

This comes from a research project at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The researchers created a predictive algorithm that laid down words based on the previous 5 words that came before them. In program analyzed 3800 speeches that were introduced in the House.

The program is not perfect. There were speeches produced that came out a bit non-sensical. One computer generated address had this to say:

“For example, I mean probably all of us have had a mom or a grandmom or an uncle to whom we say, hey, I noticed your legs are swelling again. Fluid retention. Fluid retention.”

What this project does show is that their artificial intelligence can be useful, and maybe be the starting place for speech writing. It is not unrealistic to assume that future State of the Union addresses may first start with an algorithm.

 

Article via The Washington Post, 25 January 2016

Photo: 01-27-11 at 14-34-48 bySpeaker John Boehner  [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs]