The Country's First AI Summer Camp for Girls

Title of this post speaks for itself:

http://www.wired.com/2015/08/stanford-artificial-intelligence-laboratorys-outreach-summer-program/

- Svetty

The Growing Need for More Women Cybersleuths

Cybersecurity is yet just one of the many majors out there for students to consider, and it is needed now more than ever before (consider the numerous instances of major hacking stories that have made the news in the last two years alone - Target, Home Depot, Sony, the IRS, and on and on).

And yet the trend in cybersecurity continues:  only 11% of all professionals employed in cybersecurity are female.  Increasing the gender balance here can only serve to help provide more perspective in solving cybercrimes.

This article goes further into detail on this topic:

http://www.cnbc.com/2015/08/26/the-growing-need-for-more-women-cybersleuths.html

- Svetty



 

STEM Majors Continue to Dominate Ranking of College Majors

Continued evidence that STEM majors dominate ranking of college majors.

http://www.networkworld.com/article/2976030/careers/stem-fields-dominate-ranking-of-college-majors.html

- Svetty

For Mac users: Adding Jeliot and custom templates to BlueJ

Hi Mac'ers.

For those who aren't completely comfortable with the file structure system on Macs, see below for how to complete steps [3c] and [3e] in the directions for installing the course software:

In steps 3c and 3e of the installation directions, there are directions for adding custom templates and for adding the Jeliot extension to BlueJ.  Many of you might not be familiar with how to find the specific subdirectories on your Mac, so if you are having any trouble in finding them, here’s what you can do.

Once you’ve expanded the zip file for BlueJ, control-click on the BlueJ icon in the folder you’ve created and select “Show Package Contents”, and then “Resources”.

Once there, to complete step [3c], open the “Extensions” folder, and you can add the jeliotExtension jar file mentioned in the directions there.

To complete step [3e], open “Resources” again, followed by “templates”-> “newclass”.  You can copy all the template files into that folder.

This should help you in being able to complete these two steps.

I will also post this on my blog (see bottom of my e-mail signature).

Please let me know if you have any other issues.

Mr. Svetlik

Programming and Prejudice

An excellent and short piece illustrative of the social impact of computing, and why it is essential that all people (including our students) understand how computing plays a substantial role in our lives, sometimes to the detriment of some groups compared to others. In particular, this explores the impact of software used to make large-impact decisions such as loan approvals and resume filtering on different groups of people, and how one researcher is examining strategies for how to address this at the algorithmic level.

As mentioned in the article, it's particularly noteworthy given how there may exist the perception that because software is implemented through code (rooted in seemingly rigid mathematics and logic), that it handles all cases evenly, fairly, and (effectively) without regard to race, culture, gender, or other status classifications.  As is explained here, this might not necessarily be the case...

http://unews.utah.edu/programming-and-prejudice/

- Svetty

A Programming Tool that Can "Transplant" Code From One Program to Another ?!?

This could revolutionize industry-level programming

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-07/30/code-organ-transplant-software-myscalpel

- Svetty

A Startup for Youth of Color to Focus on Tech Solutions for Social Issues

See below for an article on a startup focusing on empowering youth of color to build tech solutions to solve social issues.

http://techcrunch.com/2015/08/05/this-startup-empowers-youth-of-color-to-tackle-social-issues-with-technology/

- Svetty