Featured Archives - Page 13 of 29

January 15, 2015January 15, 2015

Starting With the Youth: iUrban Teen Tackles Tech’s Diversity Problem at Its Core

As the tech industry continues to battle a serious diversity problem, one program has emerged as a leader in getting Black youths interested in, exposed to and engaged in STEM careers.

iUrban Teen has garnered attention on a national scale and has been a front-runner when it comes to not only exposing young people of color to STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) careers, but also getting them actively engaged in the field at a young age.

“What truly motivated me to create iUrban Teen was the fact that a lot of folks in diverse communities don’t know about the opportunities that are available in STEM careers,” said Deena Pierott, iUrban Teen founder and chief innovator. “This is powerful information to share and I wanted to create a vehicle where we not only told them, we also showed them.”

Many of today’s tech giants are dishing out millions of dollars to create diversity boards, hire new advisers and find other ways to boost diversity within their company walls, but iUrban Teen is attacking Silicon Valley’s diversity issue at its very core.

While unusually high barriers to entry have been plaguing Black people who are interested in STEM careers, there are also far fewer applicants interested in breaking through those walls.

Several studies and successful tech entrepreneurs have pointed to the fact that many Black children are not exposed to the wonders of technology due to insufficient funding in school or a lack of access to mentors.

Thanks to iUrban Teen, that problem may not persist much longer.

“We’re solving the digital divide,” Pierott, who is also the CEO of Mosaic Blueprint, continued. “We’re solving the problem of exclusion by sharing information with parents and teens about avenues of opportunities and how to get there.”

The program focuses on educating young Black males between the ages of 13 and 18 about STEM careers and giving them the skills they need to have a solid foundation to build on if they want to pursue such a career path.

The program is also unique for its integration of the arts with STEM, proving to the Black youth that the opportunities in the STEM field are far more diverse than just coding and number crunching.

It also equips the teens with “new perspectives” of the STEM field that could make them truly valuable to the biggest tech giants of the future.

From Teen Tech Summits to STEM+Art Tours, the program hosts a variety of ways to get students of color to dive head first into the tech space and take the first step toward creating a successful future.

That, Pierott says, is more rewarding than any of the major coveted awards that iUrban Teen has earned in the past.

“I could say [my greatest achievement] was the White House honor or the Rockefeller Foundation nomination, or any of the other honors,” she said, but instead there were simpler moments that truly meant the world to Pierott. “My greatest achievement was to receive an email from a mother who said, ‘Thank you for what you do, it was always so difficult trying to get my sons to talk about school, careers, etc., however, every time we attend an iUrban Teen event we talk for hours about the possibilities.’ That’s my greatest achievement — that we make a difference.”

While many Black youth can learn a lot from the programs, there is also a lot they can learn from Pierott herself.

In today’s job market and economy, only the daring, the bold and the strong have the ability to take a leap of faith to become the head of their own companies.

It’s an accomplishment that not many get to boast, but Pierott certainly has more than enough bragging rights.

Even as she stands as a successful businesswoman today, however, she reminds people that the road there wasn’t free of obstacles.

The key was to embrace those obstacles and “fail forward.”

“I’m pretty flexible and I know how to fail forward,” she said. “Meaning, I’m not afraid of failing on a project. I just try a different approach.”

The hard work paid off and Pierott achieved great things while her mother was still alive to witness it.

Pierott’s mother died just one day after she received her first major award in October of 2010.

“I was extremely close to my mother and was also her caregiver,” she said. “She was diagnosed with dementia in 2007 and that’s when I decided to leave my job and start my own business at home so that I could take care of her. It was important for me to allow her to see me be successful with my business while she still knew who I was. So I worked and worked and worked on my business model. Receiving the MED Week Minority Business of the Year for Mosaic Blueprint was a highpoint for me and for my mother who was there to see it.”

January 14, 2015January 14, 2015

This Innovative Use of Nanotechnology Could Change the Way You View a ‘Low Battery’ Signal on Your Smartphone

StoreDot introduces 30-second charging of your smartphone

Source: Doron Myersdorf

January 13, 2015January 13, 2015

The Last Frontier: Education Technology Finally Sees Surge in Investments as the Industry Plays ‘Catch-Up’

Investors are showing clear signs of interest in education technology after investments in the field jumped 55 percent in just one year.

Venture and equity financing for educational tech companies soared to roughly $1.87 billion last year, a report from CB Insights revealed.

From the medical industry to the financing industry, technology is constantly being heavily integrated in both major and emerging businesses today, but education always seemed to stand as the last frontier for technological advancements.

While tech entrepreneurs have introduced many great tools and apps that could revolutionize classrooms across the globe and possibly improve the overall quality of the time spent in the classroom, education technology has not been a very profitable business.

Many argue that it also hasn’t been proven to be as effective as some entrepreneurs would boast.

The opposing side to that argument would say that it’s hard to prove technologies are effective if it seems nearly impossible to get them widely implemented.

Whatever the reason may be, investors are continuing to pour money into the tech education space regardless of concerns about how profitable the industry really is.

“Education is one of the last industries to be touched by Internet technology, and we’re seeing a lot of catch-up,” Betsy Corcoran, chief executive of EdSurge, an industry news service and research firm, told The New York Times.

It’s important to note that there is still a lot of catching up that needs to be done in the education technology space.

Notable education technology companies like Pluralsight and Remind garnered much attention after raising $135 million and $40 million respectively.

Other consumer technology companies, like Uber, blow those numbers out of the water with investments totaling up to $2.7 billion last year.

Reports indicate that the greatest problem for tech education is getting entire schools to implement new technologies and give unconventional methods of grading, teaching and issuing assignments a try.

Instead, many of these entrepreneurs are forced to contact individual teachers, and proving the technology’s effectiveness becomes even more difficult.

Investors also tend to shy away from dishing out larger checks in the industry because many emerging companies do not have a clear business model that explains where revenue will come from.

Since many educational technologies will need to be free for most students or teachers to even consider them, discussing profits can certainly be a tricky conversation for both investors and emerging entrepreneurs.

January 12, 2015January 13, 2015

Researchers Across the Globe May Have Moved Us One Step Closer to Direct Brain-to-Brain Communication

A team of researchers that are countries apart may have moved the world one small step closer to direct brain-to-brain communication, although some experts are skeptical about the alleged scientific breakthrough.

One of the main criticisms of the digitally obsessed generation is the inability for people to put down their cellphones and take a break from texting, sharing and otherwise communicating through their mobile devices.

Well, researchers may have unlocked the secret to direct brain communication that would allow people to “text” in a sense just by thinking and allowing that message to enter the intended receiver’s brain.

It’s an incredibly interesting concept that also comes with a reasonable share of concerns.

Giulio Ruffini, one of the researchers on the project and the CEO of Starlab in Barcelona, said the experiments were merely a proof of concept, but the implications of the research could be much greater.

While some reports indicated that the team of researchers managed to send actual words and thoughts from one person’s brain to the other, the researchers say that isn’t the case – although they hope their research has managed to lay the groundwork for such technologies in the future.

What their experiment did accomplish, however, was the ability to record brainwaves and send these brainwaves to another study participant in another country.

One subject in Kerala, India, was “fitted with a brain-computer interface that records brainwaves through the scalp,” the BBC reported.

The subject was then asked to imagine moving their hands or feet.

Depending on which body part the subject imagined moving, a zero or one would be recorded and the message would be transmitted using flashes of light.

The receiver, miles away in Strasbourg, France, was connected to a TMS robot and would then see flashes of light whenever the first participant imagined moving his hands.

Eventually, the researchers attempted to send more meaningful messages by associating certain strings of zeros and ones with actual words.

This was just as successful and an accomplishment that researchers said was extremely exciting.

Not everybody was as enthused by the study, however.

One scientist told IEEE Spectrum that the work seemed more like a “stunt” presenting no new observations or information.

This is a direct contradiction to Ruffini’s claim that the experiment was a “bit of a historical moment.”

It certainly isn’t the first successful experiment of its kind.

Last year, a team at Harvard managed to send messages from a man’s brain to a rat and another team at the University of Washington created a complex brain-to-brain interface where the sender was actually able to control some of the receiver’s motor cortex.

It is important to note, however, that Ruffini’s experiment was the first one to involve participants in two different countries.

Either way, Ruffini is just hopeful that such experiments can one day allow people to send “verbal communications” directly to another person’s brain.

Of course, with so many major hacks taking down huge companies and targeting millions of people, there are concerns that technology isn’t nearly secure enough to allow such an advancement to happen without major risks.

Being able to hack into someone’s bank account is dangerous enough, but the ability to hack into someone’s brain could be detrimental.

Researchers do remind consumers, however, that the ability to send direct brain-to-brain messages is still many decades away.

January 9, 2015January 12, 2015

8 Ways Blerds Can Have More of a Presence in Silicon Valley

Companies Acknowledge Biases in the Hiring Process and Do Something About It

Solving the problem could really be as simple as acknowledging that there is a problem and taking the proper steps to move forward. Studies indicate that some employers tend to bypass potential employees who are women or people of color because they assume they will not be competent in the technology field. While making the field more diverse is a goal that some companies are striving for now, years of hiring executives excluding women and people of color have left the tech space struggling to become more inclusive.

Hiring Staffs Stop Resorting to What’s Familiar

For some hiring executives, there is no blatant attempt to exclude certain races or genders. Instead, there is a subconscious bias that encourages them to connect with and hire people who look familiar or have similar backgrounds. Since the tech industry is already filled with white men, that comfort with familiarity often results in other white men being hired over their Black and female counterparts.

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January 9, 2015January 9, 2015

NASA’s Kepler Discovers 2 New Earth-Like Planets, Marking Major Milestone for the Spacecraft and Its Researchers

NASA has spent years searching for other Earth-like planets, and while several have already been found, the latest discoveries by Kepler could be the most Earth-like new worlds yet.

NASA’s Kepler spacecraft has been searching for new planets for years and the new discoveries, deemed Kepler 438 b and Kepler 442 b, appear to be incredibly similar to Earth.

The two planets were among several other planets that were discovered by the spacecraft and brought Kepler’s total discovered planets past the 1,000 mark milestone.

Both of the planets appear to have relatively similar temperatures to Earth and boast environments where liquid water is likely to be in abundance.

The planets are also rocky worlds and are comparable to Earth’s size and orbit.

While the planets are certainly pretty close to Earth in certain ways, the study’s co-author, David Kipping, warned that the planets still might not be habitable for humans.

“We can’t say for sure whether these planets are truly habitable — only that they are promising candidates for habitability,” Kipping, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said, according to Scientific American.

Another major catch is that the planets are extremely far away.

One is 500 light years away while the other is more than 1,000 light years away.

To put that in perspective, a light year is the equivalent to roughly 5.9 trillion miles.

The study’s lead author, Guillermo Torres, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, is excited about what the discoveries could mean for the search for extraterrestrial life.

“These planets do exist; we didn’t know that before,” Torres said in a phone interview with Fox News. “What we’re really looking for is signs of life eventually. We’re not there yet. It will take many years, but this is the first step.”

The addition of Kepler 438 b and Kepler 442 b brings the grand total of planets no larger than twice the size of Earth to eight or nine, depending on who you ask.

There are still debates over another recently discovered planet.

Either way, Torres says it’s just proof that the universe is full of Earth-like planets and the only challenge is finding them and reaching them.

Of course, there are some notable differences between Earth and the newly discovered worlds.

Kepler 438 b gets about 40 percent more energy from its sun-like star and makes a much tighter orbit around it.

This means the planet would have years that are no longer than about 35 Earth days and the red dwarf star would give the planet red rays of sunlight as opposed to the yellow sunlight we experience on Earth.

January 7, 2015January 7, 2015

10 Budding Tech Hubs Besides Silicon Valley You Should Know As An Entrepreneur

Utah

The state’s tech sector is growing primarily because of Google Fiber, a faster broadband provider, being moved and expanded there. Tech jobs are on the rise to feed Google Fiber’s work force.

Omaha, Nebraska

The city has five Fortune 500 companies that all require tech workers. Berkshire Hathaway, Conagra and Union Pacific are major players in the city. SmartAsset ranked the city as one of the top ten cities to be a tech worker.

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January 6, 2015January 6, 2015

8 Futuristic Features We Can’t Wait For Every Car To Have in a Matter of Years

Self-Parking

Parallel parking is difficult for a lot of people. In a few years, this feature will be offered in many cars. A feature like this could possibly solve urban parking issues. Self-parking cars may prevent traffic jams, allow the cars to park in smaller spaces and making parallel parking faster.

Medical Emergency Detection

In a few years, cars will have sensors that produce injury reports when car accidents occur. These reports will help doctors diagnose symptoms much quicker.

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January 5, 2015January 5, 2015

Apple Accused of Misrepresenting iOS 8 Update Space and iPhone Storage in New Class-Action Lawsuit

A new class-action lawsuit filed against Apple is accusing the tech giant of misrepresenting how much storage would be occupied by the iOS 8 update.

On Tuesday, a complaint filed in a California court took aim at Apple after it was revealed that the actual amount of space the iOS 8 update occupied was larger than the capacity represented by the company.

The plaintiffs, Paul Orshan and Christopher Endara, claimed that no “reasonable consumer” would have agreed to have so much space occupied on their device for the update.

For all Apple devices, the update occupied nearly 20 percent of the devices’ storage capacity.

For the iPhone 6 Plus, iPad Air and iPad, the update took up more than 20 percent of the user’s available storage.

The plaintiffs estimated that each gigabyte of capacity removed from the devices is the equivalent of as many as 500 high-resolution pictures.

The lawsuit also claims that Apple is limiting storage capacity for the sole purpose of pressuring consumers to purchase iCloud storage upgrades.

“To compound the harm to consumers, after Defendant [Apple] provides materially less than the advertised capacity on the Devices, Defendant aggressively markets a monthly-fee-based storage system called iCloud,” the lawsuit reads. “Using these sharp business tactics, Defendant gives less storage capacity than advertised, only to offer to sell that capacity in a desperate moment, e.g., when a consumer is trying to record or take photos at a child or grandchild’s recital, basketball game or wedding.”

Both of the plaintiffs own several Apple devices, including new iPhones and iPads.

In addition to allegedly misrepresenting the amount of space the iOS 8 update would occupy, the plaintiffs also found issue with the fact that none of the Apple devices actually came with the amount of promoted usable storage.

For example, the 16-gigabyte iPhone does not actually come with 16 gigabytes of usable storage due to preloaded apps and software.

The lawsuit says Apple is in violation of California’s Unfair Competition Law, False Advertising Law and the California Consumer Legal Remedies Act.

The plaintiffs are asking for the court to force Apple to “engage in a corrective notice campaign” and actually pay restitution to consumers who were impacted by the alleged misrepresentation.