"gender" entries

One Short Link: 14 June 2012

One Short Link: 14 June 2012

Opening Doors

Etsy did something significant. I’m not talking about funding scholarships to Hacker School, though kudos to Etsy, 37Signals, and Yammer for putting money into it. And serious respect to Marc Hedlund for putting it together—he didn’t just submit a bug report on the world, he submitted a patch. Marc’s Ignite talk at Foo about this was incredibly moving: he accomplished something at scale, something beyond a single hiring decision.

What I find truly significant is the stark quantification of the untapped (previously uninvited) interest: 661 women applied where 7 had applied before. The number of scholarships and the size of the programming class were dwarfed by the number of women who wanted in, and jubilation at the success of the Etsy campaign has to be accompanied by serious thought about how to tackle the next order of magnitude in scale. And because it’s a problem worthy of your cleverness, I’ve made this the only short link today. Use the time you would have spent reading about Map/Reduce and devops to solve this scaling problem instead—you’ll truly be working on something that matters.

Four short links: 21 February 2011

Four short links: 21 February 2011

Data in Javascript, Artificial Empathy, Gender Comms, and Artificial Scarcity

  1. Amplify.jssimplify all forms of data handling by providing a unified [Javascript] API for various data sources. Amplify’s store component handles persistent client-side storage, using standards like localStorage and sessionStorage, but falling back on non-standard implementations for older browsers. Amplify’s request adds some additional features to jQuery’s ajax method while abstracting away the underlying data source.
  2. Artificial Empathy (Matt Jones) — we’ve evolved to broadcast and receive emotion, to infer intelligence and intent from the weakest of signals. Now we’re starting to use those communication channels in computer interactions. Matt Jones wonders what we can learn from animals about how this will play out.
  3. Communication Styles Make a Difference (NY Times) — Women were also more negative about the tone of the list. Whereas men tended to say that they found the “slings and arrows” that list members posted “entertaining” (as long as they weren’t directed at them), women reported that the antagonistic exchanges made them want to unsubscribe from the list. One women said it made her want to drop out of the field […] altogether. Also interesting: neutral point-of-view penalizes anyone who cautiously phrases contributions as opinion and rewards those who boldly claim facthood.
  4. Why Platforms Leak: The Impact of Artificial Scarcity (JP Rangaswami) — the best summary of the inevitable failure of artificial scarcity. When you make something digital and connect it to the web, it becomes available everywhere, it becomes available immediately […] As we’ve moved from the physical world to the digital world, incumbents in many industries have sought to preserve the historical structures and ways of doing business. Which, in effect, were attempts to create and exploit artificial scarcities. When it comes to digital assets, there are four primary ways to try and create artificial scarcity. […] All these have been attempted. All these have failed, and will continue to fail. You cannot make something that is essentially abundant artificially scarce.
Four short links: 4 October 2010

Four short links: 4 October 2010

Electronic Health Records, LilyPad Appeal, Time Management, and Locking Library

  1. Two Brothers Await Broad Use of Medical E-Records (New York Times) — The Doerrs’ software company is only one of many hoping to cash in on the national mandate for digital medical records. The companies range from giants like General Electric to specialists like Athenahealth that cater to small physician practices. They, like the Doerrs, are betting that the law will help create a turning point for the economics of digital health records, opening the door to rapid adoption by doctors and a thriving business at last. NZ-based Orion Health is expanding at a great rate in the US, doing electronic health records. The tide is beginning to turn away from paper, thank goodness. (via DrChrisPaton on Twitter)
  2. On Feminism and Microcontrollers (Benjamin Mako Hill) — We found evidence to support the suggestion that LilyPad is disproportionally appealing to women, as compared to Arduino (we estimated that about 9% of Arduino purchasers were female while 35% of LilyPad purchasers were). We found evidence that suggests that a very large proportion of people making high-visibility projects using LilyPad are female as compared to Arduino (65% for LilyPad, versus 2% for Arduino).
  3. Pomodoro Technique — time management system. (via auchmill on Twitter)
  4. Lock-free Data Structure Library in C — free library offering list, queue, ringbuffer, stack, ….

Being online: Group identities and social network identities

Groups take on their own identities online, and social networks
threaten to subsume individual identities into groups. This section
of the identity article explores grouping in all its online facets.