Jacked In

The most amazing thing I saw at MacWorld|iWorld wasn't an iPad or app. It wasn't a Mac or an iPhone. It was a young man who was so lost in the Metaverse that he didn't notice when I bounced balloons off his head. Let me explain...

On Friday night there was a great party at a bar on Broadway. There was a rock band, with Paul Kent, the organizer of MacWorld|iWorld, and others playing loud 1980s music, a circus act, free booze, lots of hooping and hollering, laser light shows. Mac fans gone wild!

At one point, a bag of balloons dropped from the ceiling, with hundreds of balloons in old-Apple rainbow colors. People started hitting the balloons every which way, and popping them. If we had been in New York, and not mellow San Francisco, people would have run to the door. (It sounded like gunfire).

In front of me, a young man was using Facebook on his iPhone. For an entire 10 minutes he stood in the midst of chaos, reading Facebook comments. (He wasn't even posting something new, just reading comments.) People dancing, laughing, taking pictures, stomping balloons. Women on stilts gyrating above our heads. A buxom blonde in a barely-there Octoberfest outfit, roller skating around the balloons. Guitar solos, drum solos, more balloon pops.

None of this fazed the young man. He was utterly still except for his scrolling finger. He looked like a Second Life avatar frozen in space as the user updates his appearance.

So I started bouncing balloons off his head. He didn't notice. He was jacked in, like in Snow Crash. I should have whipped out a Samurai sword and popped a balloon in front of his face. Would he have noticed? Probably not.

Artificial Intelligence Class

I just finished all the lectures and quizzes for the online Artificial Intelligence class I've been taking! Right now my thoughts are jumbled, as seen in the info-graphic that I did with this wonderful Wordle tool, so I'll write more later, but a few quick thoughts...

The AI class was an amazing experience. It was taught by a brilliant professor from Stanford, Sebastian Thrun, and a brilliant researcher at Google, Peter Norvig. Professor Norvig is the author of the AI book used in most AI college classes. Professor Thrun's claim to fame is his work on self-driving cars.

The AI class got a lot of press when it was first announced because

• It scaled to an enormous size (160,00 students signed up for it!)
• It's free (seriously, entirely free!)
• It will hopefully disrupt education delivery mechanisms. (Why should students pay $100,000 to listen to some windbag has-been drone on in a lecture hall when the premiere experts in the field want to share their expertise via the Web?)
• It's global. Most students are from the US, Europe, and India, but quite a few are from other parts of the world too.
• It's essentially realtime, with deadlines for homework, specific hours to do tests, etc. Note that this is different than just watching a set of videos from a past class.
• There are two discussion groups: a Q&A one, and a reddit one.
• There were office hours and Google+ hangouts.

The class taught the same material that is taught in the actual AI class at Stanford, except for no programming exercises. The professors said they couldn't figure out a good way to grade programming assignments for a class of this size.

At least 30,000 of us stuck with the class, perhaps more if you count those of us who did the Basic class. There were two versions:

• Advanced: video lectures, quizzes, homework, midterm, and final exam
• Basic: video lectures, quizzes

Well, I will write more about this fantastic experience later. So much to process! Mostly, I just want to say THANK YOU to the professors. And no, I'm not sucking up to them in hopes of getting a good grade. There are no grades. Yeah! :-)

The Makers of Cake

I usually blog about the makers of electronic things, but today I would like to celebrate the makers of yummy foods! The picture shows my sister presenting a Boston Cream Pie that she made for my twin brother and me when we celebrated our birthday a few years ago with another sister at her lovely home in Nashville, TN. (Yes, I had a relative who lived in Tennessee. She's a musician. She has since moved to a blue state (Vermont)).

I'm not much of a cook myself. If I had lived in New Testament times, I would have been a Mary, not a Martha. I would have sat at the wise one's feet and listened to every word while my sisters toiled in the kitchen with the loaves and the fishes, the hummus and the grape leaves and the olives and the pomegranates, preparing food for the holy one, his disciples, and possibly 5,000 unexpected guests. But I would have been glad to do the dishes, even though that might have involved many trips to the well, soap made of camel oil, and tripping over guests who got into the water (wine).

Bringing this back to our millennium, I am amazed at the ability of many cooks. They make complicated desserts like Boston Cream Pie and delicious family meals every day, despite our fast-paced, multitasked world. For many years I have been the beneficiary of loving cooks in my family, including sisters, brothers, nieces, nephews, and my husband, and I would like to say, THANK YOU. I love you! I'll do the dishes.

Goodbye to the Bye for Men in Technology

Being a weekend in Fall, when football is on many people's minds, I got to thinking about "byes". A bye, in sports and other competitive activities, is the practice of allowing a player or team to advance to the next level without playing. In my career (though rarely at my current company where diversity is valued as a business advantage), I've seen numerous men get jobs because of who they know, not what they know. They're given a bye. They are allowed to advance despite marginal skills, education, or experience simply because they are on the right team, the mostly male team. I call for an end to this practice, and I'm not alone!

Last week I joined approximately 3,000 people (mostly women) from 34 countries in Portland, OR for the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. It was a wonderful celebration with terrific speeches, panel discussions, and opportunities to hobnob with women of all ages. I was especially impressed by the college students and recent graduates. The young women I met are brilliant, poised, easy to talk to, and interesting. Their knowledge of hard-core computer science astounded me. Their college studies result in skills that are very much in demand: computer programming, software engineering, data mining, statistics, hardware design, bioinformatics, medical informatics, computer networking, etc.

Every major company was at this conference interviewing for new talent (Facebook, Google, Amazon, Adobe, Apple, Pixar, Cisco, Intuit, Symantec, State Farm, Bloomburg). Numerous universities were also interviewing for professors and for PhD students. These organizations aren't waiting for privileged men to waltz into a position after getting a bye. By the time men schmooze the old boys club, the jobs will be gone, taken by brilliant young women who earned their way into the interview. Good bye to the bye for men in technology. It's time for technology to be a meritocracy and for men and women to compete on equal footing. OK, back to your regularly scheduled program. (Go 49ers!)

Not the end of an era

In the last month both Steve Jobs and Dennis Ritchie died. Is this the end of an era? Does it mean that innovation is dead? I don't think so. Have you seen kids with computers? The other day I watched a girl try over and over again to take a picture with her mother's digital camera. The girl appeared to be less than a year old! Granted she didn't succeed in taking a picture, but that didn't stop her from continuing to try!

According to Ray Kurzweil, "An analysis of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential, contrary to the common-sense 'intuitive linear' view. So we won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century — it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today’s rate)." He calls this the law of accelerating returns. I'm excited for the future. I just wish somebody would figure out this death thing so I can be around for it! :-)

I drew the picture by the way, which is a self-portrait, on my first Mac in 1984. One of the more amazing things about it is that my husband still had a copy of it in a format that we could still read, and on a medium that we could still read, on our modern-day Macs.

The Next Steve Jobs Could Be Female!

I'm sad that Steve Jobs is stepping down as Apple's CEO, mainly because I think it means that he will be leaving this earthly reality distortion field soon. When that time comes, my blog will be all about him. In the meantime, there's still time for hope and joy. I find myself hopeful that, despite Steve's unique genius, another genius will arise, and I think she'll be a she!

Think about what Steve gave to the computer industry:

• An uncompromising insistence that products must be beautifully designed
• A vision of how computers can help people enjoy life and make a difference in their local and global communities
• Empathy for "the rest of us" that results in easy-to-use computers, cellphones, tablets
• Collaboration skills that help tekkies and artists work together, for example to make blockbuster animated movies
• Advertising genius
• Fantastic online and in-store shopping experiences

He sounds female! Those are all capabilities that people cite as reasons that we need more women in the computer field. Sure, I know that many men have those qualities too. But most men in the computer field are better implementors than designers. They tend to jump right into coding and to ship products that are not fully debugged or easy to use.

In addition, in theory I agree with many post-feminists who say that the sex of a genius shouldn't matter. But girls and women need role models. (If you don't understand the importance of having role models that look like you, I bet you've never needed to consider it. You are probably white, male, straight, and from the middle or upper classes. Please develop some empathy. You're going to need it.)

But back to my main point, another reason I think that the next Steve Jobs could be female is that there are so many programs to encourage girls and women to go into the computer field. There's the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology, the National Center for Women & Information Technology, AAUW, CompuGirls, and my new favorite, Dot Diva. We women are coming back!

The next Steve Jobs is going to be brilliant, dynamic, collaborative, empathetic, and able to think different. I can't wait to meet her.

Lift Off!

It's sad that the last space shuttle launched today. I find myself remembering the class I taught at Kennedy Space Center in the 1990s. Everyday I drove past the shuttle on its launch pad. What a commute! They put me up at a beach hotel where the door to my room was only a few feet from the ocean. I worked at Network General at the time, the makers of the Sniffer. The class was "Ethernet Network Analysis and Troubleshooting."

I kept telling my students, "It's not rocket science." Finally one student said, "Priscilla, will you stop saying that? If the network's not working, the shuttle won't launch. It is rocket science." Good reminder that we IT folks serve the organization's mission, not the other way around, whether the mission is selling widgets, governing citizens, educating students, or exploring space!