Mitchell Baker | Women And Tech. Let’s see. Oh God. My name. My father was raised by his stepfather, whose last name was Mitchell, from the time my dad was ten or so. My parents thought it would be a nice way to recognize him, so they would call me Mitchell Baker. Then my mom says at the last minute, “Oh, if it’s a girl, maybe she should have a feminine name.” My mom was eccentric. Somewhere along the line I was writing a résumé or something and my mother saw a draft of it and said, “I don’t like Winifred as your name and I hope you won’t use it. I find, having a name that’s unusual, that when I meet people if I’m not careful they don’t talk to me directly. Funny thing — I have a Chinese name too and it is also unusual and requires explanation.
IEEE ISTAS 2015 - Culture, Ethics and the Knowledge Society. Paper submissions are invited for IEEE ISTAS2015. The conference language is English. Papers can focus on sharing Research results, Case studies or Challenges within the scope of the Conference. Papers (5,000 - 6,000 words) using the ISTAS2015 Template must be registered on the conference portal by the deadline of 31 March 2015. Please refer to Paper Guidelines for more information. It is a condition of submitting a paper that (a) authors act on feedback and comments provided by the International Programme Committee (IPC) to ensure high quality conference proceedings, (b) presenters act on feedback provided by their Session Chair to ensure high quality presentations, and (c) presenters register and pay the participant's fee by June 2015, before the publication of the Final Programme.
Workshop & Panel Submissions Workshop and panel proposals for sessions are invited for the ISTAS2015 Conference. . - Summary of problem domain (and Thematic Priority/Priorities) addressed. The Bower sur Twitter : "UK #tech / #architecture startup @WikiHouse creates customisable digitally manufactured houses wikihouse.cc. Share Your Ideas About Immigration. High-skilled immigration reform matters to the tech community. Yet in the nationwide debate that often spirals into partisan bickering over border patrol, we’re often drowned out. In both 2013 and earlier this year, we saw chances of high-skilled immigration reform die in congress. In 2013 the senate passed a bill that never gained any traction in the House. This year, House Speaker John Boehner told the president the house would not vote on immigration reform in 2014. Silicon Valley innovators aren’t swayed by the same political pressures that result in Washington’s gridlock and inaction. TechCrunch has partnered with deliberative polling firm ReframeIt under its donation from the Knight Foundation Grant.
“If only a small group of people have the opportunity to de-bug our pending legislation and public policies, then any preventable bugs they don’t find are likely to cause real problems for our society,” ReFrameIt founder Bobby Fishkin wrote. Looking forward to reading your input! How To Move The Women In Technology Conversation To The Mainstream. While most companies recognize that gender diversity is needed to build a stronger workforce and more innovative organizations, they mostly do not include it as a core business priority. Tech companies and executives generally believe that gender diversity is good for business, and that teams that bring together people with different backgrounds, skills, and perspectives, are better at solving problems. There is a growing body of research that supports this. In his book The Difference, University of Michigan Economics Professor Scott Page showed that diversity of thought trumps individual ability for problems at the cutting-edge.
Pepperdine University Professor Roy Adler demonstrated, through 18 different measures, greater profitability in Fortune 500 companies with a strong record of promoting women to the executive suite. And sociologist Cedric Herring studied 251 companies and found that gender diversity is associated with greater relative revenues and profits. 1. 2. 3. —Dr. South Africa’s own Silicon Valley? What once was a cluster of five derelict buildings in Juta Street, Braamfontein, and Inc, a popular night club which closed its doors in 2010, will soon get a new lease of technological life. Braamfontein is to host the first large-scale tech hubs in Johannesburg. The Joburg Centre for Software engineering (JSCE) at the University of Witwatersrand is driving the transformation of Braamfontein into a cutting edge technology precinct. The idea of the tech hubs is to establish co-working spaces which will offer skills development opportunities, software and hardware design.
“People can come to create and collaborate in technology innovations. Coming out of those collaborations are ideas for new businesses and startups. JSCE plans to repurpose existing buildings that are owned by the University of Witwatersrand to host the tech hubs to save costs and “show what can be done with inner city Joburg buildings”. “Braamfontein is very connected with transport; it’s easy to get to. Tech hub Deadlines. News Challenge - How can we harness data and information for the health of communities? - OpenQRS: Open Source Tools to Assure the Quality, Reliability and Safety of Health Care Devices. OpenQRS harnesses new tech- sensors, wifi, mobile- to develop an open data system to assure quality, reliability, safety (QRS) of health care devices with the goal to make it easy, effective and affordable to monitor QRS data for devices anywhere.
Idea OpenQRS engages health care product designers passionate to harness new technology, such as sensors, wireless, mobile - to develop an open data system that informs the public about the quality, reliability and safety (QRS) of health care devices with the goal to make it easy, effective and affordable to monitor QRS data for devices deployed anywhere in the world. OpenQRS aims to enhance the design and development process of health care devices by encouraging collaboration among hardware/software developers, fostering cocreation with end users, and providing the public with useful data about health care devices.
Problem Every year new health care devices are designed to solve crippling global health challenges by university students. Approach. China Launching National OS. White House Announces National Day Of Civic Hacking To Liberate Data From NASA And More Govt Agencies. The White House wants you to hack for a better America. Today it announced the National Day Of Civic Hacking on June 1-2 where many government agencies will liberate data for citizens across the U.S. to use to build tech that helps their communities. Twenty-seven cities have planned events where hackers will have access to data from The Department of Labor, The Census Bureau, and even NASA’s space stats. The National Day Of Civic Hacking is a joint project from the U.S. government, Code For America, Random Hacks Of Kindness, and Eric Schmidt’s early-stage venture fund Innovation Endeavors.
Part of a growing initiative to increase government transparency and civic engagement, the group explains that: Participants could create apps that visualize government data sets or combine them across agencies. For example, Census and Department Of Labor data could be mashed up to examine what demographic and industry factors combine to reduce unemployment. Going For “Pretty First” Is Wrong: A Designer’s Take On App Development. Editor’s note: Chloë Bregman is a product designer working on a new communications startup. Most recently, Chloë designed DrawChat, a drawing based messaging iphone app which is currently being auctioned off, and helped ignite Changemakrs, an inspirational quote site meant to help people inspire and be inspired to change themselves and the world.
Follow her on Twitter. Startup founders often ask me to take their app ideas and make them pretty. They feel that they need a beautiful product in order to get funding. This newfound emphasis on pretty first is, in part, a response to the increased importance being placed on visual design within tech products. First, let’s look at products that have been successful: Uber is hardly a revolution in visual styles, but it makes a black car appear within minutes that you can track on a map and reduces transaction friction in the payment system. Not all startups, however, are realizing this kind of success.
How To Design A Product. The Entrepreneur's Guide to Hospital Partnerships by @Rock_Health. Danny Hillis talks Proteomics & Personalized Medicine. Sure, We Can Build a Better Toilet. But Will People Use It? | Wired Science. A latrine over water in Cap-Haitien, Haiti. Photo: Remik Kaupp/Flickr The Gates Foundation’s plan to build a better toilet has inspired optimism for the future of sanitation in the developing world. But if history is any guide, good intentions and clever engineering aren’t enough. Would-be designers of post-porcelain thrones won’t just need to account for water use and material costs, but sociology and psychology — the human factors that, as much as any tech spec set, determine whether an innovation takes root.
“You need a good engineering solution, but there’s also this behavioral and social science problem,” said Mushfiq Mobarak, an environmental economist at Yale University. Mobarak is supported by the Gates Foundation in studying how best to promote the new toilets. The problem was, and still is, dirty cookstoves: the open fires and smoke-billowing stoves, fueled by wood or coal or dung, used by nearly half the world’s population. 'Designing a new cool gadget is neat and fun.
The Ethox Blog — Ethox. The case of Vincent Lambert: The first landmark court decision on treatment withdrawal in France Who should decide when life ends? Physicians, judges (or patients)? Ruth Horn (Ethox Centre) 18th February 2014 In January 2014 the case of Vincent Lambert, a patient in a minimally consciousness state, received public attention in the French media.
The case had already been in the media early 2013 when the medical staff withdrew artificial nutrition and hydration. Similar to the previous cases of Hervé Pierra (Le Monde, 18.3.2008) and Chantal Sébire (Liberation, 20.3.2008), the case of Vincent Lambert raises questions about the sufficiency of the law of 2005 aiming to regulate decisions to withdraw life-sustaining treatment. Vincent Lambert is the first French case regarding the withdrawal of life-sustaining treatments that has been brought before the court. As in the first judgment, the tribunal objected to the withdrawal of artificial nutrition and hydration. References Respond to this blog. Perma Cryo Technology. Phnom Penh Lab Blog: Creating Tools that Locals Can Shape. Since most of our work is in low resource settings, most of the people who use our technologies have very little education. We call these people "low level users".
Even though these users have little to no education, we still find that using technologies to help them share information is incredibly helpful. The most important thing to remember when designing tools for them is to build on the skills and resources that they are already familiar with.In order to create tools that are useful, they must be context appropriate. Here's our process: First Step: User Evaluation Before we develop any type of software, we always travel and meet the people who we will be creating tools for.
During this user evaluation, we try not to explain too much about how to use it. Second Step: Developing Training Material We take what we've learned from the first step and create custom training material to support the users. Third Step: Training the Trainers. Hacking Health: Bottom-up Innovation for Healthcare. Introduction In many countries, healthcare services are not currently provided in a sustainable manner. Healthcare systems and institutions are still largely based on providing acute and reactionary care; this approach is not well suited to the increasing burden of chronic disease in an aging population that requires more preventative and long-term care (World Health Organization, 2002).
Thus far, the response to growing demand has been dramatic increases in health spending. Over the past 50 years, health spending has outstripped overall growth in GDP for OECD countries (OECD, 2011). In Canada, health spending in the last decade has grown at double of the rate of revenue growth (CIHI, 2011). However, as health spending reaches almost 40% of government budgets, the affordability of health has become a major economic and social issue (OECD, 2011). There is an urgent and dire need to innovate both the practice and delivery of healthcare. Top-down Failures An Incomplete Bottom-up Approach. Papers in Mobile Devices in Health Care. Frugal Innovation: Lessons from Carlos Ghosn, CEO, Renault-Nissan - Navi Radjou, Jaideep Prabhu, Simone Ahuja. Carlos Ghosn, Chairman and CEO of the Renault-Nissan Alliance, famously coined the term “frugal engineering” in 2006.
He was impressed by Indian engineers’ ability to innovate cost-effectively and quickly under severe resource constraints. And under Ghosn’s leadership , Renault-Nissan has proactively embraced frugal engineering and become one of the world’s leading producers of both electric cars as well as low-cost vehicles — two of the fastest growing and most promising market segments in the global automotive sector. Recently, in New York, we participated in a panel discussion organized by the Asia Society called “Jugaad Innovation: Reigniting American Ingenuity” (you can watch a video here). We were honored to have Ghosn as our key panelist. In today’s resource-constrained environment, Western firms are feeling the growing pressure to “do more with less” — that is, deliver more value to customers at less cost.
Riff. InSTEDD has created an evolving platform of technology tools and services based on years of collaboration with our partners around the world. Our systems conform to a set of architectural principles that allow them to be used either as-is or as building blocks for larger solutions. All of our tools meet or exceed the relevant standards for their domain and allow the sharing of data with other systems in a reliable and secure way. These tools are completely free and open source, and available for anyone wanting to use them to improve the social impact and scale of their work. All our tools can be tailored to individual needs and integrated with other existing tools. We are actively engaged with our user communities to further apply and enhance our tools and increase their impact. Verboice lets you create and run applications via voice, thereby overcoming literacy and geographical barriers.
Remindem helps you keep people informed of important things going on in their life and work. Four College Students Take On Tuberculosis Using the Power Of the Internet. By Greg Kumparak On April 19, 2012 You know what’s terrible? Tuberculosis. I was tempted to start an online petition to change the name to “Terriberculosis”, but then I remembered that online petitions don’t actually, you know, do anything. Fortunately, a group of students out of Tufts University have come up with a way to use the Internet to fight Tuberculosis in a way that actually would help. While Tuberculosis infects upwards of eight million people per year, it’s generally quite treatable with the help of antibiotics. Lots… and lots… and lots of antibiotics. When you’re taking something for 6+ months, it’s almost certain you’ll miss a few doses. In 1990, the World Health Organization introduced a strategy they call DOTS (Directly Observed Therapy – Short Course) to help in their battle against Tuberculosis.
Thats where the students from Tufts come in. Here’s how it works: [Original Doctor image via Shutterstock] India, Africa to collaborate in social entreprenership, innovation. Do Great Things.