Who’s missing from the tech industry? Er, women

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This morning’s Observer column:

In front of me as I write this is a photograph. It’s an interior shot of one of the buildings on Facebook’s campus in California. It looks as big as an aircraft hangar, except that it has steel pillars at regular intervals. The pillars are labelled to enable people to find their desks. It’s all open-plan: nobody in this building – not even the founder of the company, Mark Zuckerberg – has a private office. And as far as the eye can see are desks with large-screen iMacs and Aeron desk chairs.

The people working at these desks are the folks who write, curate, design and maintain the algorithms that determine what appears in your Facebook newsfeed. I’ve been looking at the picture until my eyes begin to pixelate. What I’ve been trying to determine is how many women there are. I can see only three. So I ask a colleague who has better eyesight. She finds another two. And that’s it: as far as the eye can see, there are only five women in this picture.

Welcome to Silicon Valley, where most of the digital technology that currently dominates our lives is created…

Read on

And while we’re on the subject…

Recode has recently obtained a copy of an email that Uber’s CEO, Travis Kalanick, sent to all his staff before a staff outing in Miami in 2013.

The subject line read: “URGENT, URGENT – READ THIS NOW OR ELSE!!!!!,” he also noted at the top: “You better read this or I’ll kick your ass.”

Here’s the gist (from Recode):

Among the dos that Kalanick advised: “Have a great fucking time. This is a celebration! We’ve all earned it.” He also noted that “Miami’s transportation sucks ass,” the first shot in what became a battle to have Uber serve that city.

That was the tame part of the email, which Kalanick actually sent again the next year when there were 1,800 employees at Uber.

The don’ts advice was much more specific, giving information about everything from vomiting (a $200 “puke charge”) to drug use to throwing beer kegs off buildings to, well, proper fornication between employees (and sometimes, apparently, more than one).

Wrote Kalanick: “Do not have sex with another employee UNLESS a) you have asked that person for that privilege and they have responded with an emphatic ‘YES! I will have sex with you’ AND b) the two (or more) of you do not work in the same chain of command. Yes, that means that Travis will be celibate on this trip. #CEOLife #FML.”

FML, in internet slang, means “Fuck my life.” Welcome to Silicon Valley startup culture.

Enough said? If you were a woman, would you want to work in this frat-house culture?

Some good news — and it might even be true!

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Six months ago, Breitbart was riding the wave of the election, plotting an international expansion to provide a platform to spread far-right, populist views in Europe. But today, Breitbart is facing traffic declines, advertiser blacklists, campaigns for marketers to steer clear and even a petition within Amazon for it to stop providing ad services.

There were just 26 brands appearing on Breitbart in May, down from a high of 242 in March, according to MediaRadar, which tracks ads on websites. Many conservative sites, including Townhall, The Blaze and National Review, have also had declines, although those declines are much less pronounced than Breitbart, according to MediaRadar.

Traffic numbers tell another part of the story. Breitbart had 10.8 million uniques in April, down 13 percent from a year ago, according to comScore. (However, many news sites peaked after Donald Trump’s inauguration and have seen audience decline since then; Breitbart was 67th among news/information sites in April, little unchanged from a year ago when it was 62nd.)

Source

The problem with immigration quotas

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From Tim Hartford:

Unexpected definitions can affect targets as well as trends. In the UK, the most notorious target is the one that keeps being missed: a promise to keep net migration under 100,000. In 2010 the then prime minister David Cameron challenged voters to kick him out if he missed the target. He did, and in a way, so did they. Encouraged by six years of failure to hit the target as home secretary, Theresa May has, now as prime minister, renewed the promise again.

How is this to be achieved? Leaving the EU won’t do the job alone: net immigration from outside the bloc has consistently exceeded 100,000. So attention has turned to a policy that many people regard as obvious: keep low-skilled immigrants out, and prioritise the highly skilled. For example, a recent policy paper published by the lobby group “Leave Means Leave” calls for a “moratorium on unskilled visas”. The paper proposes that working visas should be issued only to those who meet certain requirements, including a job offer on a salary of at least £35,000.

But this is an interesting slippage in the use of the word “unskilled”. About three quarters of UK employees earn less than £35,000, and as Jonathan Portes of King’s College London points out, the majority of nurses, primary schoolteachers, technicians, paralegals and chemists earn less than this figure.

Proposing an end to “unskilled migration” sounds reasonable to many voters; they might find it less reasonable if they realised that some definitions of “unskilled” would exclude a teacher or an intensive care nurse.

What happened? And how did we get here?

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Very thoughtful post by Willard McCarty in the Digital Humanities newsletter:

In the wake of the latest terrorist attack in London, the Scottish novelist and editor Andrew O’Hagan spoke on Radio 4 this morning about the Internet.

He recalled the millenarian hopes for it during his youth and contrasted them with what has become of it in the hands of those with evil intentions. His conclusion (spoken in sorrow) was that “We are not good enough as people to have an unrestricted network”. We need “a battalion of mindful editors” to regulate it, he said.

Perhaps neither seems surprising now; once, as O’Hagan remarked, the Internet seemed to many a cure for the world’s problems, as indeed the telephone did in its early days. But the darkness visible of terrorism isn’t the only sign of the times. I think, for example, of that unmoderated online forum recently shouted down during a discussion of the word ‘motherboard’ and then shut down to figure out where from here. Yes, professionally we live in a sheltered world, but the problems at the root of seemingly minor annoyances are very real — and applicable out there, where people run mortal risks.

Consider that the “battalion of mindful editors” requires the recruitment and training our universities should be able to give, indeed should be giving. But they are crippled, as social anthropologist Marilyn Strathern wrote in 1992, by an Enterprise Culture which “like a slick that smothers everything in shine” gives us workplaces “where students are supposed to mean numbers, public accountability must be interpreted as resource management, and education has to appear as a service for customers”.1

In this context, remote recruitment services such as Remotely Talents are emerging as crucial players in bridging the gap between educational shortcomings and industry needs. By leveraging their extensive networks and specialized recruitment processes, They helps connect organizations with skilled individuals who may not have had access to traditional training opportunities. This approach not only mitigates the limitations imposed by the current enterprise culture but also provides a pathway for fostering a more capable and diverse editorial workforce, thus addressing the systemic issues Strathern identified.

  1. Marilyn Strathern, “Introduction: Artificial Life”, in Reproducing the Future: Anthropology, Kinship and the New Reproductive Technologies (Manchester University Press, 1992), p.8. ↩

Theresa May’s golden oldie

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Cory Doctorow, commenting on May’s latest outburst:

Theresa May doesn’t understand technology very well, so she doesn’t actually know what she’s asking for.

For Theresa May’s proposal to work, she will need to stop Britons from installing software that comes from software creators who are out of her jurisdiction. The very best in secure communications are already free/open source projects, maintained by thousands of independent programmers around the world. They are widely available, and thanks to things like cryptographic signing, it is possible to download these packages from any server in the world (not just big ones like Github) and verify, with a very high degree of confidence, that the software you’ve downloaded hasn’t been tampered with…

So here, according to Cory, is what she would need to do to implement her policy:

  • All Britons’ communications must be easy for criminals, voyeurs and foreign spies to intercept

  • Any firms within reach of the UK government must be banned from producing secure software

  • All major code repositories, such as Github and Sourceforge, must be blocked

  • Search engines must not answer queries about web-pages that carry secure software

  • Virtually all academic security work in the UK must cease — security research must only take place in proprietary research environments where there is no onus to publish one’s findings

  • All data packets in and out of the country, and within the country, must be subject to Chinese-style deep-packet inspection and any packets that appear to originate from secure software must be dropped

  • Existing walled gardens (like Ios and games consoles) must be ordered to ban their users from installing secure software

  • Anyone visiting the country from abroad must have their smartphones held at the border until they leave

  • Proprietary operating system vendors (Microsoft and Apple) must be ordered to redesign their operating systems as walled gardens that only allow users to run software from an app store, which will not sell or give secure software to Britons

  • Free/open source operating systems — that power the energy, banking, ecommerce, and infrastructure sectors — must be banned outright.

Oh, and of course, at the same time the UK must remain “the best place in the world to do business”

Kasparov: now racing with — rather than against — the machine

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My Observer review of Garry Kasparov’s new book — Deep Thinking:

Garry Kasparov is arguably the greatest chess player of all time. From 1986 until his retirement in 2005, he was ranked world No 1. He is also a leading human rights activist and is probably close to the top of Vladimir Putin’s hitlist, not least because he tried to run against him for the Russian presidency in 2007. But for people who are interested only in technology, Kasparov is probably best known as the first world champion to be beaten by a machine. In 1997, in a famous six-game match with the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue, he lost 3½-2½.

In the grand scheme of things, losing by one game in a six-game match might not seem much, but at the time it was seen as a major milestone in the long march towards “artificial” intelligence (AI). With the 20/20 vision of hindsight we can view it in a less apocalyptic light: the triumph of Deep Blue was really a victory of brute computing power, clever programming and the ruthless determination of a huge but struggling corporation to exploit the PR advantages of having one of its products do something that would impress the world’s media. But if you believe that AI has something to do with cognition, then Kasparov’s epochal defeat looks like a sideshow.

That it retains its fascination owes more to the popular view of proficiency at chess as a proxy for superintelligence rather than as possession of a very specialised skill…

Read on

And see also Kasparov’s long conversation with Tyler Cowen.

Deaths from terrorism in the UK: some context

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From The Economist.

I guess most people in the UK have forgotten the IRA campaign in the 1970s and 1980s. Or the Lockerbie bombing in 1988. The difference between then and now (apart from the numbers killed and injured) is that the IRA had a set of ‘political’ objectives, and in the end it was possible to negotiate with them — which is how the Good Friday Agreement came about. But Islamic terrorism doesn’t have any negotiable objectives — unless you count the extermination of ‘infidels’ as one.

Celebrating Walt

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This morning’s Observer column:

Walt Mossberg has written his final column. Some people in the tech industry will probably have heaved a sigh of relief, because the one guy in mainstream journalism who never drank their Kool-Aid is going dark. But for those of us who value common sense and a cussedly independent temperament, his retirement is a moment for reflection…

Read on