Note to Self

Only 12 percent of computer science majors are women. That's appalling. It's a shame, a waste and many other nasty words. But it is not hopeless.  Harvey Mudd College turned around its computer science gender problem with a concerted effort to quash what they call "the macho effect." A few vocal students who learned programming in high school can dominate and derail a class for everyone else. Those students tend to be male.  But as the college found out, it is not a zero sum game to serve those coding naturals and also lure in newbies, who tend to be female as often as male. There's more to it, of course, and it's a nuanced game to cut down on the macho without cutting out the well-meaning enthusiasm that causes it. This episode is about how they did it, and what it teaches us about gender and learning. One sample lesson: when computational thinking is framed broadly, about solving problems, about helping society, then just as many women enroll as men.  If you like these stories, subscribe to our podcast for more. (iTunes / RSS)

Three award-winning stories packed into one episode. This week New Tech City is bringing you updates on three short shows we did in the past year that won NY Press Club awards.  Story 1: Know Thy @Neighbor It’s not always so easy to make friends with your neighbors. Can technology help? Not for our intrepid host Manoush Zomorodi as she tries to grow her own social network for neighbors on her block. We find out what brings people together online and IRL. Plus, you get to meet Joanne, the gravel-voiced mayor of Manoush's street with all kinds of hot tips for the hood. (Original story) Story 2: Kids Are Like Software Author Bruce Feiler experiments on his family, running his household according to the Agile programming method. For those who don't know Agile, you'll get a intimate peak into how coders are so productive. For those who do know Agile, you'll chuckle at what a family meeting sounds like when run like a software scrum. And parents, you might just pick up a discipline tip or two. (Original story) Story 3: Can Mike Bloomberg Take Credit for NYC's Tech Boom?  This winner in the business reporting category chases down the real genesis of New York City's boom in tech talent and startups. The mayor at the time, billionaire Mike Bloomberg, likes to take credit for presiding over a tidal shift in NYC's economy. But as we find out, what might have mattered more than any policy was a talented programmer who just didn't want to live in Silicon Valley anymore. (Original story) If you like these stories and want to hear more, please subscribe to New Tech City on iTunes or anywhere else. 

There is a perfect tone of voice according to Dan Emodi. And he believes his technology can pinpoint it for you.  This is the second of two episodes about technology that dissects our voices, pulls them apart, and analyzes them digitally to understand our emotions. Hear how Emodi's company, called Beyond Verbal, is applying 20 years of "emotion analytics" to help us understand ourselves better. These products claim to be able to determine true emotions just from listening to you speak for 20 seconds. It could also determine if a salesperson is using the "perfect sales intonation" or if a given customer calling up is 'exasperated and furious' or 'exasperated and ready to listen'. Market research and call centers may be the early testing ground of emotion detection software, but the applications could end up working as a wellness tool or even a dating aide (humorously demonstrated in this video).    Listen to part 1 on tech and the human voice: mental health and medical research.  If you like these stories, please subscribe to New Tech City on iTunes or RSS. 

Amber Smith's voice is a symptom of illness and an alarm for looming danger, even if she doesn't always hear it herself. Amber has bipolar disorder and her mood swings are a risk: high highs can lead to massive spending sprees and low lows have dipped into suicidal territory. She's managing it now with medication. She's also testing out a new technology to try to catch a mood swing before it starts by using her cell phone to analyze the acoustics of her voice. Tiny variations in how she speaks, or you speak, can be clues to shifting mental states.  "Speech is incredibly rich it encodes so much of our behavior, it encodes information about gender, about our age, about our identity, and in this case about mood," explains computer engineering professor Emily Mower Provost of the University of Michigan. She and her colleague psychiatrist Melvin McInnis are testing out how to plumb the hidden signals and codes of a human voice to enable early action and better care for people with mental health issues.  It gets touching, it gets ambitious, and it's all pretty hopeful. Have a listen.  This is Part 1 of a two part series on voices and how computers and new technology can hear hidden meaning in how we speak. Next week: how this is being used to make products and profits. Subscribe to New Tech City here to make sure you don't miss it. 

This plan went way beyond email. The small startup Outbox had done its homework on the role mail plays in our lives, on the value people place on a letter and a catalog, and they imagined what mail could become. The plan to reinvent postal delivery for the digital age had real promise, the founders thought. So did investors and many customers. It was a new age of mail. And then... well, the Postal Service didn't want to play nice. In this episode:  The story of Outbox, a dream crushed.  What it takes to innovate at the post office. How other countries from Sweden to Namibia have more digital-forward mail services than the U.S. The proposals for postal innovation that have a chance at happening.  

The 'get girls interested in coding' push is growing from techie pet project to mainstream movement. Now it has a celebrity spokesperson. A very girly spokeswoman to be precise.  "For someone like me who does identify as traditionally girly, it’s a good way to trick girls into thinking its fun and colorful and then they stay because they can do other stuff with it." Actress and TV producer Mindy Kaling of The Office and the Mindy Project is a spokesperson for Google's new Made With Code initiative. And she says, meeting girls where they are is definitely the way to go.  And if you look at the Initiatives and after school projects popping up left and right with names like Girls Who Code, Girl Develop It, Girls Teaching Girls to Code, Black Girls Who Code... well, there's a lot of pink mixed in with the computer science.  We want to know why? And if it is really necessary to embrace gender norms on the path to bridging the gender divide in tech.  (Listen to our episode 'The Way We Teach Computer Science Hurts Women' for a sense of why this is so urgent).   In this episode:   Mindy Kaling, actress, TV producer, first Indian-American to create and star in her own sitcom Jocelyn Leavitt, creator of Hopscotch (and best friend of Mindy Kaling) Reshma Saujani, founder of Girls Who Code Carol Colatrella, author of Toys and Tools in Pink And some 14 year old girls explaining code to host Manoush Zomorodi.   

Our brains are wired to forget. The internet, not so much. That mismatch is a risk to our humanity.  Now that the the European Court has ruled that there is a so-called 'right to be forgotten' online, Google must consider requests to remove some search results in the name of privacy. American commentators went nuts over this. Free speech would be lost, went the outcry. A right to know would be buried, echoed the refrain. But maybe Americans are seeing it wrong. This week New Tech City hears from a man with a heart-wrenching plea for Google to forget one macabre photo, from a German lawyer inundated with new clients trying to jump on the forgetting bandwagon, and we talk to the philosopher Viktor Mayer-Schönberger who wrote the book that started the whole conversation about who should own your online identity and search results.  Forgetting, he says, "enables us human beings to evolve, to learn, to move forward, and if we undo that capacity to forget because our digital tools remember, then we are undoing a very important element of what makes us human."  We get thoughtful, personal, and a little European in this episode. Click play above to listen.  For more stories like this one, subscribe to our podcast via iTunes or RSS. And follow us on Twitter, won't you?   

Matt George runs a new bus company that doesn't own buses. And he's making some big promises.  He says his company Bridj is going to "rethink the way mass transportation works for the first time, really, since 1897 when the first subway tracks were laid" in Boston, where Bridj just launched its first data-driven routes. George thinks that by crunching enough mobility data he can figure out where people need to go in almost real-time, and create or alter bus routes so there's always one when you need it, and they all go pretty much express. As for the not owning buses thing. Bridj will make the schedules and routes then contract actual bus companies for the wheels, much like the way Uber and other taxi apps use private drivers but don't employ any of them directly.  If George is right, his technology could fundamentally change the way people get around cities with something between a taxi shuttle and the subway. It could also become an elitist alternative public transit for the smartphone crowd. To find out — and to test out a few other transpo tech promises — New Tech City producer Alex Goldmark takes a road trip from New York to Boston using every possible means of high-tech-enhanced transportation and trip planning tools he could possibly find. Listen to this episode to hear how the future of transportation rolls... and lurches, and crashes. 

Fear of math is real. In fact, psychologists now use the term “math anxiety” to describe the panic many people — particularly girls and women — have about doing math. On this week’s New Tech City, host Manoush Zomorodi plays a new video game that is being developed to alleviate math anxiety by getting physical in front of a screen. Players move into so-called 'power poses.' It's all based on the incredibly popular TED talk below. The game Scoops! from NYU-Poly's Game Innovation Lab turns fractions into fun and attempts to put research about the mind-body connection to use all by making kids stand strong. Can it heal Manoush’s own math PTSD?   VIDEOS:   

Computer programmers are injecting machines with consciousness and the power of thought. It's time we stop and ask, 'which thoughts?' In this episode we hear how robots can become self-aware and teach themselves new behaviors in the same way a baby might learn to wiggle his toes and learn to crawl. Though this is happening now, Hod Lipson, Cornell researcher, tells us that uttering the word consciousness to roboticists is like saying the "C" word. It could get you fired. We say, it's time to start talking about robot morals.  However you look at it, Google's self-driving car is a robot and it will be entering our lives soon. So we talk with psychologist Adam Waytz of Northwestern University about his experiments measuring how people form bonds with robots, and how we naturally project human characteristics onto machines — for better or worse — including a friendly driver-less car named Iris.   By the end of this episode, we raise a lot of questions and offer a few answers about the ethics of living in a robot world. Please consider this the start of a conversation and let us know what else you want us to ask, answer, cover or investigate, including who you want us to interview next.  You can get in touch with us through Twitter, @NewTechCity or email us at newtechcity (at) wnyc.org. And if you like this episode, please subscribe on iTunes, or via RSS. It's easier than finding your toes.    VIDEOS: We mention a few videos in the podcast. Here they are in the order they appear in the show.    Watch the full event with Hod Lipson showing off his thinking robots. He shows off his "Evil Starfish" starting around 14 minutes in. It "gimps along" best at 28 minutes in.     And here is Google's promotional video for it's first fully driver-less car.