People have offered many potential explanations for this discrepancy, but this ad highlights the importance of the social cues that push girls away from math and science in their earliest childhood years.
Watch the powerful Verizon advertisement to really understand what a little girl hears when you tell her she’s pretty.
I’ve always loved science. I’ve wanted to be a dentist since I was 3. My cousin married a biochemistry professor and they bought me a microscope for being the flower girl in their wedding. I was bullied in grammar school for getting excited about science. In high school, people basically told me I wasn’t a good enough scientist so I should stop trying. I didn’t actually start believing in my abilities until 2 years ago when I dropped the last of my shit friends. I erased every bit of self doubt residue in the corner of my mind. I could never see myself doing anything besides science, but it sucked to have jerks telling you that you’re not smart enough to pursue what you love.
I actually ran into one of my grammar school bullies in the Shop Rite Liquor store. He tried to make a conversation with me. The entirety of it was: “So what are you up to now?” “I’m about to graduate college with a degree in biology. I’m contemplating med/dental/grad school. I can’t pick. I like all the opportunities I have.” “Oh, cool. I just work here.”
So I think it’s EXTREMELY imperative to encourage girls to do what they love, especially if it’s science. If they don’t like it in a few years that’s fine. They’ll find something else. At least they weren’t told not to. The world needs more people passionate about learning and helping others learn.
David Karp: “So you’ve made up your mind, it’s GIF?”
President Obama: “That is my official position. I pondered it a long time.”
Go behind the scenes of the President’s first Tumblr Q&A on education and college affordability, and find out what President Obama is doing to make college more accessible.
This exoskeleton, developed by UC Berkeley professor Homayoon Kazerooni and his team, helps people suffering from spinal cord injuries to walk again.
“Many paraplegics are not in a situation to afford a $100,000 device, and insurance companies don’t pay for these devices,” Kazerooni said. “Our job as engineers is to make something people can use.”
To make his exoskeleton affordable, he used the simplest possible technology: a computer and batteries in a backpack, actuators at the hips, and a pair of crutches with buttons that activate an exoskeleton that fits around the legs. The crutches provide stability, an important consideration for paraplegics navigating streets and sidewalks.
“The key is independence for these people,” he said. “I want them to get up in the morning and go to work, go to the bathroom, stand at a bar and have a beer.”
This is glorious and even thought it doesn’t fit in the range of all the paranormal, I MUST share
It works like this: You tell Kitestring that you’re in a dangerous place or situation, and give it a time frame of when to check in on you. If you don’t reply back when it checks your status, it’ll alert your emergency contacts with a custom message you set up.
It doesn’t require you to touch anything (like bSafe) or shake your phone (like Nirbhaya) to send the distress signal. Kitestring is smarter, because it doesn’t need an action to alert people, it needs inaction.
Cool GitHub projects normal people would like - Part 1
What is GitHub? Basically, it's a code repository that allows coders to collaborate on projects. A lot of them would probably bore the non-computer science major, but some are actually kinda cool. Here's four to get you interested (I'll try to post more later):
1. Trianglify by qrohlf
Essentially let's you make a dope wallpaper made of triangles by using the D3.js library. You don't really need to know what D3.js is to use this, and I'm not even going to try to explain it because I'm not an expert on it. Just have some fun making pretty triangle wallpapers for your computer! Here's the one I have right now. Make your own here!
Oh man, it looks like it came straight out of a Nexus 8!
2. 2048 by gabrielcirulli
You know this shit already. Here's a website with all of the documented mods of the original, if you're interested.
I also made my own version if you'd like to try it out. Anyone like Taylor Swift? (And for the record, I made it for my girlfriend, not myself)
3. Pysnap by martinp
This unfortunately requires some terminal / command line work to get going, but what it'll do is basically fetch your snaps from SnapChat directly to your computer! And no need to worry about the snaps self-destructing either; these snaps are saved for good. Look, I got some snaps from my brother!
There are some downsides to this, of course. It's all command line, so you don't really know when you have new snaps or new stories waiting for you. It's kind of a guess and check kind of thing. Also, it's all written in python, so unless you have a Mac, you're going to have to install some more software before you get to use it. Lastly, if you use this, it will automatically log you out of your current session on your phone/tablet, since SnapChat only allows one device at a time per account. Pretty fun to use though once you get it started!
4. Kittydar by harthur
Literally a javascript library that helps you detect cats faces in pictures. Here's the website to test this out on. Drag a picture with cats and it'll locate them all pretty accurately! It's amusing to see the code in action. It makes you wonder why anyone would actually use this, but hey! It's amusing nonetheless. Try it here.
And that's all I got for now. Github is a big place, so I'll always be on a constant lookout for projects that non-cs people would like. If you find one too, let me know because I'd like to play around with it as well.
So in the past 3 days, I've been trying to code a simple web app in an attempt to learn more about javascript, API calls, and the Facebook Open Graph API (which is, in my opinion, a badly documented API).
The end result was is an app that takes your top friends' pictures and names off of Facebook, and attaches a random one liner to it from the I Heart Quotes database. I like to call it: Humans Of Your Facebook, which is a direct parody of the extremely popular Humans of New York blog by Brandon Stanton.
Here are some pictures:
The method was the following:
Figure out how to get quotes: Getting the quotes, as a novice programmer, took a day in itself. The API I used for this was the I Heart Quotes one liner database, but the problem was I had no idea what http GET requests were, or even how to utilize them in JavaScript (which was the primary method of communicating with servers here). The API itself was also poorly documented, which made it all more confusing. In the end, however, after fumbling around for a couple of hours, I found out that when I inputted the request into Chrome, it could potentially return a piece of JSON data (which is a JS object, essentially the quote with a bunch of other values I didn't really need), which is perfect for what I was trying to do. However, the tricky part is when you do an HTTP request using javascript, an error pops up called the same-origin policy.
Now, coming in this fresh, I had no idea what the hell the same-origin policy was, but the gist of it was that somehow, the data wasn't being sent back from my GET request (which I found is the primary method of "getting" data from a remote server). The reason is because making a http request to a remote server isn't safe for a lot of security reasons.
So how do you get around this? With JSONP, which is essentially wrapping the data in a function itself, which isn't against the same-origin policy. Another problem that arose from this was that the I Heart Quotes API didn't support JSONP, so I ended up having to use YQL as kind of a medium to translate the JSON into a JSONP that I could use. (YQL, by the way, is the Yahoo Query Language. I'm sending the quote JSON to Yahoo's servers, which will help me translate it back into JSONP). From this point on, it was smooth sailing with pure JavaScript and JQuery.
Now was there an easier way to do this? Probably. But I think that as something I figured out on my own, it's definitely something worth being proud of. However, I had even more trouble using Facebook's API. It took at least twice as long... See below.
Figure out how to get friends: Using the SDK for Facebook isn't that hard if you spend a couple of hours playing around with it, and like the I Heart Quotes API, it used http requests as well. However, it also came with dedicated JavaScript functions that allowed communication with servers to be much smoother in my opinion.
But my next problem wasn't really a not-knowing-how-to-do-something problem, but more like a how-to-do-something problem. First let me explain what Facebook calls nodes, edges, and fields.
Nodes: Essentially an object on Facebook. It can be a user, a photo, a page, a comment, a group, etc.
Edges: An object within an object. For example, a photo's comments, a page's photos, etc.
Fields: Essentially the value of any object. For example, a user's id, name, birthday, etc.
So those are nodes, edges, and fields in the Facebook API. However for this application, I didn't want to just get the user's friends like this:
/me/friends
because what this does is send back every single friend of a user, but in a jumbled kind of order through the me node and the friends edge. Obviously, the application is more fun if you see the friends you contact most more frequently right? So that's the million dollar question: how do we get only the friends you care about from Facebook?
Well, after a bit of sniffing around on Google, I found the answer on StackOverflow. Here's the methodology:
The friends you are likely to care about are the ones who care about you, and vice versa.
If a friend cares about you, he or she cares about what you do and the things you have to say.
If someone cares about what you do and the things you have to say, they are likely to show it on Facebook somehow through likes and comments, or even tags in photos.
So, in the end, to get all the friends you care about from Facebook, you need to scrape off the likes and comments and tags from the posts of a user. However, because I didn't want to go hard as a motherfucker, I only scraped off likes and comments from statuses.
This requires using the following node and edge:
/me/statuses
which is why when you start using the application, it asks for you for permission to look at your statuses. Trust me, as the developer, I could care less about the content of what you say. I only care about the people you care about (not sure if that came across as jerky or sweet).
Anyway, after scraping off the likes and comments, I just needed to strip the user data from each one in a for-each loop, and store it in an array. Easy peasy, right?
But this probably comes off as a glaring problem for some of you. Let's say my friend Julie liked my status, and also commented (like she usually does). Wouldn't she be put into the array twice? I thought about this, but ended up tossing it to the side as an issue that didn't really matter. I decided that even if Julie is put into the array 100 times, it kind of gives her more weight as my friend in the array. If Julie comments and likes 100 times, statistically speaking, doesn't that mean she's a better friend than someone like Victor who comments only one time?
I mean, unless Julie's a jerk and likes to cyber bully.
Anyway, What I end up is with a 300-400 person array including duplicates. I then used a random number generator to pick a random person from the array, and since the array includes duplicates, this "random" generator is more likely to choose someone who frequently contacts me through Facebook, rather than someone who infrequently contacts me through Facebook.
Finally! I got the user, and all I need to do is get the name and the user id for the profile picture, both which were simple to do after Googling a bit. Now that I had the data, it was finally time to style the app.
Figuring out aesthetics: I didn't want this application to look too loaded, so I used the styler of my choice: Bootstrap by Twitter. It was easy enough configuring what things would look like on a desktop, but I ended up deciding that I wanted HOYF to look nice on your phone too.
As it turns out, Bootstrap (for those of you who don't know) is mobile first, which means that if you choose to use it to style your webpages, it designs it so it looks nice on a phone BEFORE making it look nice on a desktop. Looking through the documentation allowed me to resize and change the layout of things based on the size of the screen.
At the end, it was definitely an experience that taught me a lot about webapps and design. I think next I need to brush up on php and relearn Django, now that I have a better idea of what's going on. I'm kind of looking into making games now, but we'll see what lies ahead.
Links:
I Heart Quotes API
Facebook Graph API
Bootstrap
Humans of New York
This weekend, I went to the "largest hackathon in history," held at the ever prestigious University of California, Los Angeles. I'm going to talk about everything that happened in this post ^.^
The Project: I basically worked with my friend Lucy to create a "social media website for food porn," and only after did I realize how fucking hard it was to make a social media website out of scratch, with absolutely no experience at all. Lucy and I kept on trying to brainstorm what to make, and since we were both interested in food, this seemed to be the most unique idea since it would generate a lot of unique "food porn" for the internet to see. But it kind of fell flat at the end, although we did our best to learn what we could.
The weapon of choice was Django, which is a web framework made from Python, and with me having no real Python experience, coding what we had was a pain. I had to at least watch 15 YouTube tutorials on how to install and use Django, and even now, we still only have sign ups as the only real functionality of our website. Well, that and a small piece of js that generates random ingredients. Go figure.
But the front end wasn't actually not that bad. We used BootStrap by Twitter to basically style every single page generated by the Django framework, and in the end, it started kind of coming together. We didn't end up finishing the hack, so Lucy and I decided to just work on it outside of class when we could.
Other parts: This is the second real hackathon that I've gone to, and I have to admit that it was a great deal of fun even though I only had one other person on my team. It was really interesting and awesome to see companies like Robinhood, SnapChat, Tinder, Microsoft, and etcetera endorsing their products and letting us use their APIs (which to those of you who don't know are basically pieces of code that allow you to use a company's service) for free, although my team didn't really take that opportunity.
It was also great seeing old friends, some who I haven't seen since the end of high school. Not a lot has changed, to be honest, and it's great that we were able to come back together and hang out like old times (although I was really never part of this clique in the first place, but they're friendly so it didn't really matter to be honest).
Last but not least, visiting my girlfriend was probably the only non-hacking highlight of my trip. I'm glad that I'm able to visit her amidst all the coding stuff I have to do, and I'm glad she tolerates my nerdiness (even I think it's over the top sometimes). We spent saturday night just talking about everything and anything, I love it when I can do that with someone I love and trust. This is getting a little cheesy so I'm gonna stop LOL
Anyway, it was an all encompassing weekend filled with junk food, coding, old friends, and freebies. Gonna try to attend more hackathons now, especially the big ones.
Bad news. A major vulnerability, known as “Heartbleed,” has been disclosed for the technology that powers encryption across the majority of the internet. That includes Tumblr.
We have no evidence of any breach and, like most networks, our team took immediate action to fix the issue.
To be honest, all the signs starting from elementary school pointed to everything but engineering. As a kid, I dreamed of being an archeologist and exploring the crypts of dead kings, and as a teen I aspired to spark change using newspapers and other forms of media. But somehow, I ended majoring in computer science.
It was a decision I made during my senior year of high school. At that point, I played a pretty big role in my journalism program at my school and I joined a LOT of humanities related clubs – FBLA, United Nations, and even occasionally CSF (even though I didn't really pay any of my dues for that one), but nothing engineering related. And for some reason, I was satisfied with what I was doing mainly because I had so many of my old friends around me.
But then, it was time for college applications, and I looked at what I had, and I looked at the list of majors provided for me by the Common Application and the UC Application. It hit me like a rock.
Business. Communications. Journalism. If I majored in these things, I would have to do them for the rest of my life. And then I thought about it some more. Did I really like these things, or did I just do them because of the people that were in them?
After examining my high school career, I noticed that at almost every point when I had to do some kind of humanities related work, I absolutely dreaded it. I didn't like reading things I thought were uninteresting, I didn't like writing articles about things I didn't particularly care for, I didn't like organizing social events, and essentially, I didn't like doing the usual things humanities work has taught me over the years.
Now don't get me wrong: I will do anything that I will have to do to get a job done, even if it includes everything I just said I didn't like doing. But did I really want to do a major that required mostly all of those things on a daily basis? No, of course I didn't. When it came down to it, all I wanted to do was to sit down, challenge myself, and be creative. And that's when it hit me again: I'm a maker, and I like making cool stuff. I thought of all the hours I put into designing newspapers and pushing for aesthetics rather than content, and I knew that I just enjoyed the process of making more than anything else.
It was a vibe that I always got from my AP Computer Science class. Just the wonder of being able to use programming in creative ways that solve relevant problems was a marvel to me, but I was reluctant to actually major in the subject because everyone in my class seemed a lot better than me. But as I stared at the long list of majors thinking about my epiphanies, I basically just said fuck it, everyone starts somewhere and I'm not going to major in something that I know I'll end up hating.
Well, to be honest, the years of humanities and no engineering didn't exactly help my application, and somehow (miraculously) I got accepted at UCSD despite having no hardcore engineering experiences in high school. But since then, I've learned a lot about this major and why it affects almost every single aspect of any field imaginable. I've now made it my mission to again be a maker, but this time in a way that will both involve computers and be useful to the rest of mankind.
